23/05/2017

Let’s Change The Conversation From Climate Change To ‘Shared Benefits’

Huffington PostMax Guinn

How do we talk about climate change and the need for action without turning people off?
Most people would agree that a world with elephants is a shared benefit. Getty Images
Last September, I emailed President Obama. His response helped me to focus on what matters. He wrote,
“Progress doesn’t come easily, and it hasn’t always followed a straight line. Keeping our world’s air, water, and land clean and safe takes work from all of us, and voices like yours are sparking the conversations that will help us get to where we need to be. I will continue pushing to protect the environment as long as I am President and beyond, and I encourage you to stay engaged as well.”
But I worry that adults will never agree on climate change. The issue has become too political. The words “climate change” have even been scrubbed from government websites! Our current President refers to climate change as “a hoax.” Most people have no interest in discussing it. Try talking about C02 levels or climate science and see how far you get. The reality is that climate change has become a matter of opinion, rather than a matter of scientific fact. It has made the opinion of the ordinary person with no scientific background equal to the findings of eminent scientists who have devoted their lives and education to the study of the problem.
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Only 27 percent of Americans surveyed in a 2016 Pew study agreed with the statement that, “almost all” climate scientists believe climate change is real and primarily caused by humans. Contrast this to multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that 97 percent of climate scientists believe climate change is real and that humans are the main contributor. In an age of alternative facts and a distrust of science, how do we talk about climate change and the need for action without turning people off?
Stanford Professor Rob Jackson thinks we should stop arguing over climate change and start talking about the shared benefits of addressing problems, like health, green energy jobs, and safety. My experience tells me that he is right.
Renewable Energy Jobs. theguardian.com
 Six years ago, just before I turned 10, I started a non-profit called Kids Eco Club to inspire kids to care for the planet, its wildlife and each other. It starts and supports environmental clubs in K-12 schools. Over 100,000 kids now participate annually in Kids Eco Club activities, learning the skills necessary to lead, and to understand the issues facing our world, including climate change. Kids Eco Club is successful because we focus on shared values rather than C02 levels. Take a class snorkeling, and everyone becomes interested in protecting coral reefs. Bring local wildlife into the classroom, and kids will fight for green energy and clean water to protect their habitat. Passion drives us.
Porcupine classroom visit. kidsecoclub.org
 My generation does not have the luxury of addressing human-caused climate change as callously or as passively as the generations before us ― because we are running out of time. Agriculture, deforestation, and dependence on fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere, trapping heat, making the Earth warmer. The hottest year on record? Last year, 2016. A warmer Earth creates major impacts everywhere: on ecosystems, oceans, weather. Sea levels are rising because the polar ice caps are melting, and the oceans are warming, which causes them to expand. Severe weather events are created from warmer oceans – warmer water, more evaporation, clouds, and rain―causing greater storm damage, more flooding, and, ironically, larger wildfires and more severe droughts since weather patterns are also changing.
The morning Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. graphics.latimes.com
Imagine three out of every four animal species you know disappearing off the face of the Earth. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, we are currently experiencing the worst species die-off since dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. Species are vanishing at a rate roughly 100 times higher than normal. While things like asteroids and volcanoes caused past extinctions, humans almost entirely cause the current crisis. Global warming caused by climate change, habitat loss from development and agriculture, pesticide use, poaching, unsustainable fishing practices, pollution and disease spread by the introduction of exotic species, are driving the crisis beyond the tipping point. Can you picture a world without butterflies, penguins, elephants, rhinos, sea turtles, honeybees, orangutans, salamanders, or sharks?
Mother orangutan and baby. Getty Images
 The oceans provide 50% of the earth’s oxygen and 97% of its livable habitat. The health of our oceans is vital to our survival and the survival of the over one million types of plants and animals living there. Climate change and fossil fuel reliance raise ocean temperatures, causing extreme weather, coastal flooding, and ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is beginning to cause the die-off of calcium-rich species at the base of the ocean’s food chain, like coral, shellfish, and plankton. This die-off would trigger a spiral of decline in all sea life – from fish to seabirds to whales – and negatively impact hundreds of millions of people who rely on the oceans for food. Other human threats include overfishing, pollution, oil drilling and development. We need to act now to create change in our own communities by protecting ocean habitats, promoting conservation, and creating sustainable solutions to nurse our oceans back to health.
Dead sperm whales found with plastic in their stomachs. mintpressnews.com
In a world with over 7 billion people, we cannot continue to divide ourselves into categories like believers and climate change deniers, or Republicans and Democrats. The best chance we have of ensuring a world with clean water and clean air is to engage all of us. If this takes changing the conversation from “climate change,” to “shared benefits,” then change the conversation. Together all things are possible.

Monumental Hands Emerge From Venice's Grand Canal To Highlight The Effects Of Climate Change

ABC News

The hands can be seen as supporting or pulling down on the historic Ca' Sagredo Hotel. (Supplied: Lorenzo Quinn)
A pair of giant hands rising from the water have been unveiled on Venice's Grand Canal — a sculpture by contemporary artist Lorenzo Quinn intended to highlight the devastation of climate change.
The artwork, titled Support, shows two huge hands emerging from the canal to "support" the historic Ca' Sagredo Hotel in such a way that they appear to be preventing the 14th-century building from sinking into the water.
But the hands can also be seen as powerful enough to dismantle and drag down the building, should they choose to — a dual representation intended to represent the power of human beings "to love, to hate, to create, to destroy," Quinn said.
"At once, the sculpture has both a noble air as well as an alarming one … the hands symbolise tools that can both destroy the world, but also have the capacity to save it," a statement on his website reads.
Support was unveiled to coincide with the opening of the 2017 Venice Biennale, a major art show held in locations across the city.
But the choice of city was intentional for Quinn.
Earlier this year scientists warned that Venice could disappear underwater within a century if sea levels continue to rise.
"The work generates an instinctive and immediate understanding of the environmental impact for places such as Venice," the statement reads.
"The hands symbolise the role people must play in supporting Venice's unique world heritage."
Scientists warn Venice could disappear underwater within a century. (Supplied: Lorenzo Quinn)
 The hands in Support were modelled on those of Quinn's son, Anthony.
"This sculpture … wants to speak to the people in a clear, simple and direct way through the innocent hands of a child," Quinn wrote on Instagram.
"It evokes a powerful message which is that united we can make a stand to curb the climate change that affects us all.
"We must all collectively think of how we can protect our planet."
Quinn made the hands — which each weigh more than 2,200 kilograms — in his Barcelona studio before they were brought to Venice to be installed in the Grand Canal.
Support will be on display until November 26.
The hands were modelled on those of Quinn's son, Anthony. (Supplied: Lorenzo Quinn)
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Experts Fear ‘Quiet Springs’ As Songbirds Can’t Keep Up With Climate Change

Washington PostBen Guarino

Elecia Crumpton/University of Florida
In 1962, Rachel Carson warned that pesticides, particularly DDT, would lead to springs without birdsong, as she wrote in her book “Silent Spring.” Carson's forecast kick-started an environmental movement and was instrumental in the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to ban the pesticides 10 years later, so her descriptions of deathly quiet did not come to pass.
But the danger of a silent spring, according to ecologists who study birds, did not evaporate with DDT. The looming threat is not chemical but a changing climate, in which spring begins increasingly earlier — or in rare cases, later — each year.
“The rate at which birds are falling out of sync with their environment is almost certainly unsustainable,” ecologist Stephen J. Mayor told The Washington Post. Mayor, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History, echoed Carson: “We can end up with these increasingly quiet springs.”
Certain migratory songbirds can't keep pace with the shifting start of spring, Mayor and his colleagues wrote in a Scientific Reports study published Monday. Previous research noted that, in specific areas, some species can adjust to an earlier spring start, such as wood thrushes that breed sooner after arriving at Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands. But the new study was the first to survey songbirds across the entire North American continent. For 48 songbird species, the mismatch between arrival date and the onset of spring grew by an average of half a day per year between 2001 and 2012.
Of the species studied, nine fared the worst, with a yawning gap between their arrival date and the spring shift: blue-winged warblers, eastern wood-pewees, great crested flycatchers, indigo buntings, northern parulas, rose-breasted grosbeaks, scarlet tanagers, Townsend's warblers and yellow-billed cuckoos. In the case of the cuckoos, for instance, spring greenery started growing 1.2 days earlier per year, although the birds arrived on average 0.2 days early. Put another way, the timing mismatch increased by an average of one day annually.
The report combined satellite data with bird sightings all over North America, splitting the continent into 120-by-120 mile sections. “The novel thing about this paper is the scale at which they are showing the effect,” said Wesley M. Hochachka, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York who was not involved with this report.
Using satellite imagery, the study authors tracked the start of green-up, the sudden burst of photosynthetic activity that begins in early spring in North America. As seen from the sky, green-up is an explosion of leaves. This brings out droves of hungry caterpillars and other plant-eating insects. These bugs are a crucial food supply for songbirds, which travel northward to eat and breed after spending the winter in South or Central America.
This invertebrate buffet lasts for a limited time. In oak forests, for instance, insects find the young leaves quite tasty. But as the foliage ages, the oak trees deposit bitter tannin compounds in their leaves, making the plant matter difficult to digest or downright inedible. If birds' timing is off, they may arrive to find their habitats impoverished of food.
Songbirds leave Central or South America timed according to changes in daylight. Departure dates vary yearly, but not wildly. Meanwhile in the north, Mayor said, “time for green-up is shifting with climate change and becoming more unpredictable.” In the eastern United States, spring green-up started earlier and earlier.
In Townsend's warbler habitat and some other western regions, green-up was delayed later each year during the study period. The reasons for the lag are not yet fully understood, the scientists said, although Hochachka theorized that a lack of rainfall could play a role.
The study authors also tracked when birds arrived in the north using data from Cornell University's eBird project, a compendium of 400 million sightings submitted by birdwatchers since the early 2000s. (The citizen-science eBird program fuels North American bird research, Hochachka said, in a way no other continent can match.)
There was some good news from these sightings, Mayor said. “At least 80 percent of the species don't seem to be dramatically affected yet,” he said. Some songbird species may make up for lost springtime by flying north faster.
Mayor emphasized that the researchers selected the 48 songbird species to study because they were commonly spotted. It's harder to get reliable data on rare species that are threatened with extinction.
The fact that scientists found nine pronounced mismatches in a relatively short timespan was notable, Hochachka said. Most studies of this type focus on smaller regions but use time scales longer than a single decade. “They have identified the really blatant cases where species' arrivals are diverging,” he said.
It was too early for Mayor to speculate what characteristics separated the most-mismatched nine from the other 48 species, he said. But the ecologist said he expected these bird populations to decrease because of their poor timing. He was also worried that a lack of songbirds would go beyond silent habitats.
“If birds aren’t arriving when insects emerge in the spring, we could see things like insect outbreaks or defoliation,” he said. “There are many potential impacts that we don’t have a good handle on yet.”
And unlike the case of “Silent Spring,” any given EPA ban cannot curb this trend. Mayor recommended that bird fans continue to contribute data to eBird, given its scientific value. “Getting outside and observing these birds is important,” he said.
Likewise, Hochachka said, it would be difficult to directly ameliorate the impact of this mismatch. But it is still possible to make birds' lives easier in other ways, he said, such as planting native or bird-friendly plants in our back yards.
“There are things I think we can do in the northeast states to compensate somewhere else in the life cycle,” Hochachka said. As birds return to South and Central America along the East Coast, for instance, city lights may cause them to lose their way. Or worse, crash into windows. Reducing light pollution or installing non-reflective glass could help make the long trip a little easier.

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