03/10/2018

‘We Can’t Play When Our Fields Are Flooded’: How Climate Change Will Impact Sport In Australia

National Geographic - Angela Heathcote

Human-caused climate change could change the way we play and enjoy sport this century, experts are warning. 
IMAGE CREDIT: Marc Dalmulder/Flickr
THE DANGER OF extreme heat to athletes isn’t a new conversation. Earlier this year, during a test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground, temperatures reached a sizzling 57.6 degrees Celsius at one point – leaving both sportsmen and spectators sweltering.
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Seven of Australia’s 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005. As temperatures continue to rise, climate scientists are warning that this dangerous level of heat will make playing sport during some parts of the year a high-risk activity, or not even possible at all in the summertime.
In fact, athletes are already feeling the heat. In an article published in the New York Times in September 2018, journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis argued that human-caused global warming played a big part in world number two tennis player Roger Federer’s recent loss to John Millman, an Australian ranked 55th in the world. “It was hot,” Federer told a press conference after the match, adding that it “was just one of those nights where I guess I felt I couldn’t get air; there was no circulation at all”.
Dr Joelle Gergis, climate scientist from the University of Melbourne and author of Sunburnt Country: the history and future of climate change in Australia, says Australians will have to change the way they enjoy sports into the future. “Based on the recently observed increase in extreme temperatures, it’s very possible that future summers in Australia’s most densely populated cities will soar past the 50 degree mark in years to come.”
The idea of heat thresholds – halting play at a certain temperature – has been thrown around, but experts argue such mechanisms cannot be uniformly applied because of the amount of variation between sports. The worst affected sports are those played in summer, and those that require athletes to heavily exert themselves – although a report by Climate Coalition UK predicted that cricket would be the sport hardest hit.
“We might need to think about playing these games in the evening or during the transition seasons of spring or autumn to avoid the most intense summer temperatures,” Joelle says. But winter sports aren’t safe from the impacts of climate change either. A recent study led by researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada found that just eight out of the 21 cities that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics will be cold enough to host the Games by the end of the 21st century.

‘Heat policies, venue resilience and climate action’
According to a 2015 report by Australia’s Climate Institute, heat policies, venue resilience and climate action” will be necessary to secure the future of sport, on both an elite and community level.
The most significant findings from the report were that existing heat policies are ‘unclear’ or ‘inconsistent’, with heat thresholds ranging from 34 to 41 degrees Celsius. “In 2014, major international tennis and cycling competitions were prime examples of the impact of heat on players and spectators, and the uncertainty around application of heat policies,” the Institute found.
“As climate change continues, Australians will experience even more days of extreme heat and related health impacts. When a person’s core temperature rises above 39 degrees, their body hovers dangerously close to unconsciousness,” says Joelle. “If the core body temperature goes above 42 degrees – even for just a short period of time – death is a very real possibility.”

The future of local sport
The Climate Institute’s 2015 report also found drought had the potential to devastate community sport, while posing long-term consequences for sport at the elite level.
“Small communities rely on sport as their place of respite and connection to their neighbours, and when sport is unavailable to them researchers say that isolation leads to the deterioration of social and health conditions,” says Dr Sheila Nguyen, Executive Director of the Sport Environment Alliance (SEA). “Climate change impacts not only our natural environment, but also the health of our communities.”
The SEA, which works closely with the Climate Institute, formed in June 2015, and now has a total of 24 members, including the Australian Football League, Cricket Australia and Bowls Australia. “We believe in a clean future as part of our vision of a future where we can continue to do what we love, that is, watch and play sport,” says Sheila. “We are steadfastly popularising the importance of protecting our clean future.”
The SEA isn’t just concerned about the extreme heat that climate change will bring. “Consider flood, drought and rising sea levels. We can’t play when our fields are flooded, the grounds are unplayable when drought hardens surfaces, and those who play sport are struck by heat illnesses under the unrelenting sun,” Sheila says.
The architecture of stadiums and fields are changing rapidly, according to Sheila, future proofing them against climate change. “These changes include water capture and storage, energy efficient systems, use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, heating and cooling systems that are engineered to sever the reliance on traditional energy sources.” The most recent example of this was in early September when the Melbourne Cricket Ground went carbon neutral for the finals season, the facilities manager calling the move a “moral obligation”.
However the changes currently being made to elite venues may not be a viable option for more local facilities, according to the Climate Institute. “New stadiums and upgrades now often include retractable roofs, synthetic surfaces, raised flooring and flood proofing, and equipment, and energy efficiencies to compensate for increased cooling costs. Many if not all these changes are beyond local facilities.”

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Why Aren’t We Talking More About Trump’s Nihilism?

Rolling Stone - 

The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable
President Donald Trump pauses while speaking at a campaign rally at WesBanco Arena, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock
While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) latest environmental impact statement.
The study predicts a rise in global temperatures of about four degrees Celsius, or seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. Worse, it asserts global warming is such an inevitable reality, there’s no point in reducing auto emissions, as we’re screwed anyway.
“The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet,” is how the report put it.
To make a real difference, it adds we’d have to “move away from the use of fossil fuels,” which is “not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.”
There’s been just a flutter of media attention about this, mostly focusing on the hypocrisy. Trump, as is his wont, has at one point or another occupied basically every inch of territory on the spectrum of global warming opinions.
He went from urging President Obama to act to prevent “catastrophic and irreversible consequences… for our planet” (2009), to calling global warming a Chinese conspiracy (2012), to calling it an “expensive hoax” (2013), and “bullshit” (2014), to switching up again during the election to concede the existence of “naturally occurring” (i.e., not man-made) climate change.
Now comes this Linda Blair-style head turn. The NHTSA report deftly leaps past standard wing-nut climate denial and lands on a new nihilistic construct, in which action is useless precisely because climate change exists and is caused by fossil fuels.
The more you read of this impact statement, the weirder it seems. After the document lays out its argument for doing nothing, it runs a series of bar graphs comparing the impact of various action plans with scenarios in which the entire world did nothing (labeled the “no action” alternative).
These absurd illustrations make Thomas Friedman’s time-traveling efforts to graph the future seem like the work of a Nobel laureate.
“A textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” is how MIT professor John Sterman described it to the Post.
There’s obviously a danger at overinterpreting this paper, which mostly seems like a desperate bureaucratic attempt to square science with Trump’s determination to roll back environmental policies for his business pals.
But even as accidental symbolism, it’s powerful stuff. A policy that not only recognizes but embraces inevitable global catastrophe is the ultimate expression of Trump’s somehow under-reported nihilism.
While the press has focused in the past two years either on the president’s daily lunacies or his various scandals, the really dangerous work of Trump’s administration has gone on behind the scenes, in his systematic wreckage of the state.
Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.
Remember, he appointed Mick Mulvaney, a man who had once inspired a downgrade of America’s credit rating by threatening to default on the debt, to be his budget director.
He later put Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he fired his own 25-person advisory board — after requesting a budget of $0 and promising to fulfill the bureau’s mission “no further.”
Trump’s original EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, was best known for having used his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general to sue the EPA repeatedly and zero out the environmental-enforcement budget. Trump made a robotization enthusiast his choice for labor secretary, chose a hockey-team owner to run the Army (he withdrew, thankfully), and so on.
There are still hundreds of top federal jobs left unmanned, and some of the non-appointments seem like Nero-level acts of madness. Trump asked for 25 percent cuts to the whole State Department on the grounds that they were “prioritizing the efficient use of taxpayer resources.” But what country goes without ambassadors for years? Trump fired dozens upon inauguration and to this day still has 34 vacancies. We have no ambassador in South Africa, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, even Mexico. We’re a ghost state with nukes.
All of this is part and parcel of Trump’s doomsday message. He’s been a textbook example of Richard Hofstadter’s famed theory of paranoid politics. See if any of this (especially the line about “barricades”) sounds familiar:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… Like religious millennialists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…
From Day One of Trump’s campaign, pundits have reached for traditional political explanations to describe both his behavior and his appeal. Because we’re trained to talk in terms of left and right, progress and reaction, we tried to understand him in those terms.
But Trump sold something more primal. His core message was relentless, hounding negativity, lambasting audiences with images of death and disaster.
His first campaign speech was basically a non-denominational end-times sermon, in which America was either kaput or close to it, surrounded on all sides by bloodthirsty enemies. “They kill us,” he preached. “They beat us all the time… We have nothing…”
He ranted about a system befouled by false prophets. “Politicians are all talk, no action,” he howled. “They will not bring us— believe me — to the promised land.”
The “What have you got to lose?” line he pulled out later was supposedly just a pitch to African-American voters, but all of Trump’s audiences picked up on the “it just doesn’t matter” theme. (If you want to be wigged out, check out the similarities between Trump speeches and the famed Bill Murray speech from Meatballs. Just substitute “China” for “Mohawk.”)
Obese and rotting, close enough to the physical end himself (and long ago spiritually dead), Trump essentially told his frustrated, pessimistic crowds that America was doomed anyway, so we might as well stop worrying and floor it to the end.
If that meant a trade war, environmental catastrophe, broken alliances, so be it. “Let’s just get this shit over with,” is how Trump’s unofficial campaign slogan was described in the show Horace and Pete, one of the few outlets to pick up on Trump’s Freudian death-wish rhetoric.
Trump made lots of loony promises to bring us back to the joyous Fifties (literally to Happy Days, if you go by his choice of Scott Baio as a convention speaker). But even his audiences didn’t seem to believe this fable.
The more credible promise of his campaign was a teardown of the international order, which he’s actually begun as president. Trade deals, environmental accords, the EU, NATO, he’s undercut all of them, while ripping government in half like a phone book.
He keeps inviting destruction like it’s a desirable outcome. He even pushed through legislation for “low-yield” nuclear weapons, whose only purpose is to be more theoretically usable than the other kind (although he’s wrong about this, too).
His fans even cheered when he played nuclear chicken with Kim Jong-un, tweeting that his “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” than Kim’s (and “my Button works!”).
It’s easy to understand the nationalist sentiment behind reversing trade deals or backing Brexit. But what’s the populist angle on burning the planet, or nuclear war? How does hating elites explain cheering a guy on for turning nuclear diplomacy into a penis-measuring contest?
On a policy level, this apocalypse politics is pure corporate cynicism, with Trump’s big-business buddies showing a willingness to kill us all for a few dollars now.
The broader electoral pitch is just an evil version of every nuclear-age dance tune ever, “99 Luftballoons” or “1999.” The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it. Trump’s turning America into a death cult, with us as involuntary members.

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The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding A New Kind Of Politics

New Yorker - *

Greta Thunberg’s protest outside of Sweden’s parliament building has made climate change a topic of that country’s daily conversation. Photograph by Anders Hellberg
Sometimes the world makes so little sense that the only thing to do is engage in civil disobedience—even in a country as attached to its rules and regulations as Sweden is. Fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg has been protesting for more than a month. Before the country’s parliamentary election on September 9th, she went on strike and sat on the steps of the parliament building, in Stockholm, every day during school hours for three weeks. Since the election, she has returned to school for four days a week; she now spends her Fridays on the steps of parliament. She is demanding that the government undertake a radical response to climate change. She told me that a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school, though she is right to protest.
Thunberg’s parents are Svante Thunberg, an actor, and Malena Ernman, a very well-known opera singer. Ernman has published a book in which she described her family’s struggle with her two daughters’ special needs: both Greta and her younger sister, Beata, have been diagnosed with autism, A.D.H.D., and other conditions. In part because of her mother’s fame and the publicity that surrounded the publication of her book, Greta’s protest serves a dual purpose. It not only calls attention to climate policy, as she intended, but it also showcases the political potential of neurological difference. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she explained to me, in English. “I have a special interest. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.”
Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade. “They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food,” she told me. “I asked why and they explained about climate change. And I thought this was very strange. If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn’t be talking about anything else. But this wasn’t happening.” Turnberg has an uncanny ability to concentrate, which she also attributes to her autism. “I can do the same thing for hours,” she said. Or, as it turns out, for years. She began researching climate change and has stayed on the topic for six years. She has stopped eating meat and buying anything that is not absolutely necessary. In 2015, she stopped flying on airplanes, and a year later, her mother followed suit, giving up an international performing career. The family has installed solar batteries and has started growing their own vegetables on an allotment outside the city. To meet me in central Stockholm, Thunberg and her father rode their bikes for about half an hour; the family has an electric car that they use only when necessary.
Sweden prides itself on having some of the most progressive climate legislation in the world: policies adopted over the last couple of years aim to make Sweden “the first fossil-free welfare state in the world.” But there was relatively little discussion of climate policy in the lead-up to the September election, even after Sweden was hit with an unprecedented heat wave and catastrophic fires in July. Karin Bäckstrand, a climate-policy researcher at Stockholm University, told me that climate policy wasn’t an election issue precisely because a broad national consensus exists. “Everyone except the [far right] Swedish Democrats agree that we should become fossil-free,” she said.
Thunberg calls bullshit on the consensus. In our conversation, she pointed out that, despite Sweden’s progressive legislation and the scientific consensus that rich countries must cut their emissions by fifteen per cent a year, in Sweden actual emissions had gone up 3.6 per cent in the first quarter of this year. She has written a piece called “Sweden is not a role model,” in which she points out that even the best-laid plans to address climate change make no attempt to look beyond the year 2050. “By then I will, in the best case, not even have lived half my life,” she wrote. “What happens next?”
It’s true that emissions have risen this year, Bäckstrand said, because Sweden is experiencing an economic boom. On the other hand, the country has cut its emissions by twenty-six per cent since 1990, even while its economy has grown. In just ten years, Sweden has increased its use of renewable sources of energy by twelve per cent. The country is building the world’s first fossil-free steel plants. (To put this in context, Bäckstrand noted that she had just returned from San Francisco, where more than twenty thousand people, including the representatives of dozens of national governments, attended the Global Climate Action Summit, but no one from the Trump Administration attended; “Trump didn’t even tweet about it!” Bäckstrand said. Bäckstrand added that Thunberg’s “voice is needed, because until the fires and the drought, climate change was priority number eight for Swedes. She is arguing that it should be at the top, and she is right.” Thunberg’s strike has received extensive coverage in Sweden; for the time being, she is a household name, and climate change is a topic of daily conversation.
Thunberg’s is a voice of unaccommodating clarity that reminds me of Soviet-era dissidents. I suspect that some of them were also on the spectrum, which in their case meant acting irrationally in the framework of the Soviet system—risking their lives to make the doomed demand that the country act in accordance with its written laws and declared ideals. Thunberg smiled in recognition when I told her this. “I can become very angry when I see things that are wrong,” she said. On a recent class trip to a museum exhibit on climate change, for example, she noticed that some figures in the show—statistics on the carbon footprint of meat production, for example—were wrong. “I became very angry, but I’m quiet, so I just went to the exit and sat there by the doors. I didn’t say anything until people asked me.” In general she prefers action to conversation. In undertaking her school strike, she was inspired by the protests staged by American high-school students in response to the Parkland shooting this year—Thunberg’s sit-in is also a walkout.
When Thunberg is at her now-famous post outside of parliament, people come by to talk to her and bring her food. This has had an unexpected effect: Thunberg, who generally eats the same things every day, has tried new food. She surprised herself by doing this, and by finding that she likes falafel and noodles.
In the weeks since the election, the Swedish political conversation has centered on topics far from climate change: the main centrist parties finished in a dead heat, making a far-right party, the Swedish Democrats, which came in third, a potential power broker. Formerly rote procedures such as choosing the speaker of parliament and appointing cabinet members have come to overshadow any policy discussion. Thunberg is peculiarly uninterested in this, though. “I think the election didn’t matter,” she told me. “The climate is not going to collapse because some party got the most votes. The politics that’s needed to prevent the climate catastrophe—it doesn’t exist today. We need to change the system, as if we were in crisis, as if there were a war going on.”

*Masha Gessen, a staff writer, has written several books, including, most recently, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.

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The Trump Administration Knows The Planet Is Going To Boil. It Doesn't Care

The Guardian - 

Trump’s team used last week to sneak in disastrous, linked policies on climate change and child refugee camps
The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute electric SUVs for our gas guzzlers. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
In the cloud of toxic dust thrown up by the Kavanaugh hearings last week, two new Trump initiatives slipped by with less notice than they deserve. Both are ugly, stupid – and they are linked, though in ways not immediately apparent.
In the first, the administration provided the rationale for scrapping President Obama’s automobile mileage standards: because Trump’s crew now officially expects the planet to warm by 4C . In the environmental impact statement they say it wouldn’t make much difference to the destruction of the planet if we all keep driving SUVs.
The news in that statement is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them. But that’s now our policy, and it apparently rules out any of the actions that might, in fact, limit that warming. You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.
Meanwhile, reporters also discovered that the administration has set up what can only be described as a concentration camp near the Mexican border for detained migrant children, spiriting them under cover of darkness from the foster homes and small shelters across the nation where they had been staying.
Not an extermination camp – these aren’t Nazis – but a camp that literally concentrates this “problem” in one place: a tent city in the middle of the desert. Schooling is not available there, as it was in the shelters they came from; instead the kids are given “workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.”
That camp is linked to climate change because, first, it’s in a desert. If you searched high and low across the North American continent, you could barely find a place hotter and drier than Tornillo, Texas, where in June the average high is 96F and where, as one climate data source succinctly puts it, “there is virtually no rainfall during the year”.
But the link goes much deeper. Most of those migrants are from Central America and Mexico, and they might as easily be described as refugees fleeing gang violence (much of it rooted originally in the US) and a changing climate. Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras first saw an outbreak of coffee rust linked to higher nighttime temperatures; the El Niño that began in 2015 led to years of unprecedented drought. Deep new droughts this summer wiped out more harvests: “total or partial loss of crops means that subsistence farmers and their families will not have enough food to eat or sell in coming months,” the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned. The author Todd Miller, writing in the Nation, described meeting men trying to jump a train in Guatemala headed north toward the border. “When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”)
This will, of course, get steadily worse in the years ahead – every climate forecast shows deserts spreading and water evaporating across the region. And of course more migration will follow, in every corner of the world. The World Bank predicts we may see 140 million climate migrants before long, and given the chaos that even a million people fleeing the (partially drought-fueled) crisis in Syria created, we better come to grips. Some of that migration will be internal – perhaps six million people will abandon their coastal property in Florida alone, according to recent reports. And much of it will be international, as people flee because their lives depend on it.
Telling people to stay home is not an option – when there’s no water, or when the floods come each year, or when the sea rises into your kitchen, people have to leave. Period.
And telling people to stay home is not a moral option, either. Because the climate chaos setting off waves of refugees is born above all from the unconstrained migration of carbon dioxide molecules from America over the last century. No wall can prevent the exhaust from our armada of oversized cars from raising the temperature in Mexico; if Guatemala could ship its changed climate back north it doubtless would, but it can’t. We have to realize that global warming stems from the fact that we are a world without atmospheric borders, where the people who have done the least to cause the problem feel its horrors first and hardest. That’s why, over the last half-decade, the environmental and migrant-rights movement have grown ever closer.
The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute electric SUVs for our gas guzzlers, and able to somehow insist that the rest of the world stay locked in place as well. It’s impractical, it’s unfair, and when it ends up with camps for kids in the desert it’s downright evil.

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