Lethal Heating: 04/26/19

26/04/2019

The Uncanny Power Of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric

New Yorker - Sam Knight

Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. Photograph by Facundo Arrizabalaga / Shutterstock

During the week of Easter, Britain enjoyed—if that is the right word—a break from the intricate torment of Brexit.
The country’s politicians disappeared on vacation and, in their absence, genuine public problems, the kinds of things that should be occupying their attention, rushed into view.
In Northern Ireland, where political violence is worsening sharply, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist and L.G.B.T. campaigner named Lyra McKee was shot and killed while reporting on a riot in Londonderry. In London, thousands of climate-change protesters blocked Waterloo Bridge, over the River Thames, and Oxford Circus, in the West End, affixing themselves to the undersides of trucks and to a pink boat named for Berta Cáceres, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, who was murdered in Honduras.
Slightly more than a thousand Extinction Rebellion activists, between the ages of nineteen and seventy-four, were arrested in eight days. On Easter Monday, a crowd performed a mass die-in at the Natural History Museum, under the skeleton of a blue whale. In a country whose politics have been entirely consumed by the maddening minutiae of leaving the European Union, it was cathartic to see citizens demanding action for a greater cause.
In a video message, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, compared the civil disobedience in London to the civil-rights movement of the sixties and the suffragettes of a century ago. “It is not the first time in history we have seen angry people take to the streets when the injustice has been great enough,” she said.
On Tuesday, as members of Parliament returned to work, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmental activist, was in Westminster to address them.
Last August, Thunberg stopped attending school in Stockholm and began a protest outside the Swedish Parliament to draw political attention to climate change. Since then, Thunberg’s tactic of going on strike from school—inspired by the response to the Parkland shooting in Florida last year—has been taken up by children in a hundred countries around the world.
In deference to her international celebrity, Thunberg was given a nauseatingly polite welcome in England. John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, briefly held up proceedings to mark her arrival in the viewing gallery. Some M.P.s applauded, breaching the custom of not clapping in the chamber.
When Thunberg spoke to a meeting of some hundred and fifty journalists, activists, and political staffers, in Portcullis House, where M.P.s have their offices, she was flanked by Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary and a prominent Brexiteer; and Caroline Lucas, Britain’s sole Green Party M.P., who had invited her.
Thunberg, who wore purple jeans, blue sneakers, and a pale plaid shirt, did not seem remotely fazed. Carefully unsmiling, she checked that her microphone was on. “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Around the year 2030, ten years, two hundred and fifty-two days, and ten hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen.
In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice, which is young and Scandinavian, has a discordant, analytical clarity. Since 2006, when David Cameron, as a reforming Conservative Party-leadership contender, visited the Arctic Circle, Britain’s political establishment has congratulated itself on its commitment to combatting climate change.
Thunberg challenged this record, pointing out that, while the United Kingdom’s carbon-dioxide emissions have fallen by thirty-seven per cent since 1990, this figure does not include the effects of aviation, shipping, or trade. “If these numbers are included, the reduction is around ten per cent since 1990—or an average of 0.4 per cent a year,” she said.
She described Britain’s eagerness to frack for shale gas, to expand its airports, and to search for dwindling oil and gas reserves in the North Sea as absurd. “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before,” she said. “Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.”
The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians—not the people gluing themselves to trucks—who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us. But the impact of her message does not come only from her regard for the facts. Thunberg is an uncanny, gifted orator. Last week, the day after the fire at Notre-Dame, she told the European Parliament that “cathedral thinking” would be necessary to confront climate change.
Yesterday, Thunberg repeated the phrase. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking,” she said. “We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” In Westminster, Thunberg’s words were shaming. Brexit is pretty much the opposite of cathedral thinking.
It is a process in which a formerly great country is tearing itself apart over the best way to belittle itself.
No one knew what to say to Thunberg, or how to respond to her exhortations.
Her microphone check was another rhetorical device.
“Did you hear what I just said?” she asked, in the middle of her speech. The room bellowed, “Yes!” “Is my English O.K.?” The audience laughed.
Thunberg’s face flickered, but she did not smile. “Because I’m beginning to wonder."

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Analysis: $130 Billion Per Year Benefit To Australia's GDP By Avoiding Climate Change

Australia Institute

The Australia Institute 2019 Budget Wrap: Cuts to the climate and energy budget

Unless national action is taken to meet the Paris Target to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees, Australia’s GDP faces a hit of an average of $130 billion per year according to a new briefing note by The Australia Institute.
The analysis released today by the Canberra-based think tank shows that the current climate debate is largely missing three key points:

The cost of inaction on climate change is huge – Australia’s GDP would average $130 billion per year lower if the Paris Agreement is not achieved according to a prominent study.
Under the carbon price period, Australia successfully reduced emissions by 2% while the economy grew by 5%.
Economic literature suggests the economic impacts of climate policy will be minor.

“As an economist, it is hard to understand why policymakers are ignoring Australia’s own recent history in climate policy and the clear costs imposed by climate change,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
“Australians have seen firsthand how emissions reduction and economic growth are possible at the same time – as a nation Australia experienced this very phenomenon five years ago.
“For political leaders to suggest we now need economic modelling to tell us whether this is indeed possible after all is a furphy.
“In just two years Australia reduced emissions by 2% and grew the economy by 5% under a carbon price and the sky did not fall in. In fact, employment grew by 200,000 jobs.
“Analysts cannot claim to base their work on the likes of Lord Nicholas Stern or Professor Joseph Stiglitz and then ignore the conclusions drawn by those very same pieces of research.
“Nicholas Stern’s own conclusion was that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting [on climate change].”
“Similarly, consultant Brian Fisher cites a study that estimates climate costs to Australia of $130 billion per year, but ignores the conclusion of that very same study.
“Analysis that ignores the economic benefits of acting on climate and only focuses on costs is misleading and does a disservice to this year’s voters and future generations.”

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To Solve Climate Change And Biodiversity Loss, We Need A Global Deal For Nature

The Conversation - Greg Asner

An aerial photo of Borneo shows deforestation and patches of remaining forest. Greg Asner, CC BY-ND

Earth’s cornucopia of life has evolved over 550 million years. Along the way, five mass extinction events have caused serious setbacks to life on our planet. The fifth, which was caused by a gargantuan meteorite impact along Mexico’s Yucatan coast, changed Earth’s climate, took out the dinosaurs and altered the course of biological evolution.
Today nature is suffering accelerating losses so great that many scientists say a sixth mass extinction is underway. Unlike past mass extinctions, this event is driven by human actions that are dismantling and disrupting natural ecosystems and changing Earth’s climate.
My research focuses on ecosystems and climate change from regional to global scales. In a new study titled “A Global Deal for Nature,” led by conservation biologist and strategist Eric Dinerstein, 17 colleagues and I lay out a road map for simultaneously averting a sixth mass extinction and reducing climate change.
We chart a course for immediately protecting at least 30% of Earth’s surface to put the brakes on rapid biodiversity loss, and then add another 20% comprising ecosystems that can suck disproportionately large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. In our view, biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed as one interconnected problem with linked solutions.

International Union for the Conservation of Nature status ratings for assessed species (EW – extinct in the wild; CR – critically endangered; EN – endangered; VU – vulnerable; NT – near threatened; DD – data deficient; LC – least concern). Many species have not yet been assessed. IUCN, CC BY-ND

Let’s make a deal
Our Global Deal for Nature is based on a map of about a thousand “ecoregions” on land and sea, which we delineated based on an internationally growing body of research. Each of them contains a unique ensemble of species and ecosystems, and they play complementary roles in curbing climate change.
Natural ecosystems are like mutual funds in an otherwise volatile stock market. They contain self-regulating webs of organisms that interact. For example, tropical forests contain a kaleidoscope of tree species that are packed together, maximizing carbon storage in wood and soils.
Forests can weather natural disasters and catastrophic disease outbreaks because they are diverse portfolios of biological responses, self-managed by and among co-existing species. It’s hard to crash them if they are left alone to do their thing.
Man-made ecosystems are poor substitutes for their natural counterparts. For example, tree plantations are not forest ecosystems – they are crops of trees that store far less carbon than natural forests, and require much more upkeep. Plantations are also ghost towns compared to the complex biodiversity found in natural forests.
Another important feature of natural ecosystems is that they are connected and influence one another. Consider coral reefs, which are central to the Global Deal for Nature because they store carbon and are hotspots for biodiversity. But that’s not their only value: They also protect coasts from storm surge, supporting inland mangroves and coastal grasslands that are mega-storage vaults for carbon and homes for large numbers of species. If one ecosystem is lost, risk to the others rises dramatically. Connectivity matters.

Reef-scale coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands, 2016. Warming oceans are causing repeated coral bleaching events, threatening reefs worldwide. Greg Asner, CC BY-ND

The idea of conserving large swaths of the planet to preserve biodiversity is not new. Many distinguished experts have endorsed the idea of setting aside half the surface of the Earth to protect biodiversity. The Global Deal for Nature greatly advances this idea by specifying the amounts, places and types of protections needed to get this effort moving in the right direction.

Building on the Paris Agreement
We designed our study to serve as guidance that governments can use in a planning process, similar to the climate change negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Paris accord, which 197 nations have signed, sets global targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, provides a model for financial assistance to low-income countries and supports local and grassroots efforts worldwide.
But the Paris Agreement does not safeguard the diversity of life on Earth. Without a companion plan, we will lose the wealth of species that have taken millions of years to evolve and accumulate.
In fact, my colleagues and I believe the Paris Agreement cannot be met without simultaneously saving biodiversity. Here’s why: The most logical and cost-effective way to curb greenhouse gas emissions and remove gases from the atmosphere is by storing carbon in natural ecosystems.
Forests, grasslands, peatlands, mangroves and a few other types of ecosystems pull the most carbon from the air per acre of land. Protecting and expanding their range is far more scalable and far less expensive than engineering the climate to slow the pace of warming. And there is no time to lose.

Worth the cost
What would it take to put a Global Deal for Nature into action? Land and marine protection costs money: Our plan would require a budget of some US$100 billion per year. This may sound like a lot, but for comparison, Silicon Valley companies earned nearly $60 billion in 2017 just from selling apps. And the distributed cost is well within international reach. Today, however, our global society is spending less than a tenth of that amount to save Earth’s biodiversity.
Nations will also need new technology to assess and monitor progress and put biodiversity-saving actions to the test. Some ingredients needed for a global biodiversity monitoring system are now deployed, such as basic satellites that describe the general locations of forests and reefs. Others are only up and running at regional scales, such as on-the-ground tracking systems to detect animals and the people who poach them, and airborne biodiversity and carbon mapping technologies.

AsnerLab’s airborne observatory is mapping and monitoring species and carbon storage to bring the problems of biodiversity loss and climate change into focus.

But key components are still missing at the global scale, including technology that can analyze target ecosystems and species from Earth orbit, on high-flying aircraft and in the field to generate real-time knowledge about the changing state of life on our planet. The good news is that this type of technology exists, and could be rapidly scaled up to create the first-ever global nature monitoring program.
Technology is the easier part of the challenge. Organizing human cooperation toward such a broad goal is much harder. But we believe the value of Earth’s biodiversity is far higher than the cost and effort needed to save it.

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The Guardian View On Greta Thunberg: Seizing The Future

The Guardian - Editorial

The Swedish teenager’s clarity and urgency have cut through layers of obfuscation and helplessness – and forced climate change up the agenda

Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday.

Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Nobody could have predicted that a Swedish teenager would shift the terms of the global climate debate in the way that Greta Thunberg has done.
Since she began her school strike in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, the European parliament and the UN climate talks in Poland. Last week she met the pope in Rome.
On Tuesday she met UK political leaders at the House of Commons. That Theresa May opted out of an encounter with one of the world’s foremost young activists is an embarrassing error of judgment.
By any rational calculus, Greta is in the process of doing humanity a huge favour.
That is because we struggle to give the global warming and wildlife crisis the attention they deserve. We have the science, with predictions of a manmade greenhouse effect dating back to the 1890s. (One of Greta’s distant relatives, Svante Arrhenius, was a pioneer in the field.)
We have the international structures to collate the experts’ findings: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first report in 1990. We have some, although not all, of the knowledge and technology we need to wean us off our addiction to fossil fuels: wind and solar energy; healthy alternatives to meat; bicycles and trains. Many nations have laws to help us transition to a low-carbon future. The world has the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the agreement struck in Paris in 2015.
But for reasons that are psychological as well as political, we seem mostly unable to concentrate on the existential threat we face as global warming gathers pace (20 of the hottest-ever years were in the last 22) and climate chaos unfolds. Something else is always more important – or more manageable. Even those who recognise that we must use all the tools at our disposal, to stop emitting greenhouse gases as soon as possible, struggle to be heard.

Greta Thunberg tells MPs: 'Our future was sold'

Thanks in no small part to the eye-catching tactic of the school strike, over the past nine months the movement spearheaded by Greta Thunberg has cut through. Green activists and scholars have spoken for years of the generational injustice of climate change.
The school strikers belong to a 21st-century generation who have either taken this idea on, or arrived at it through a process of deduction of their own.
Greta, who believes her outlook has been influenced by her autism, says she learned about climate change at school aged eight, and became depressed at 11. By 15, her angst had translated itself into a distinctive form of civil disobedience – the Friday school strikes which spread around the world.
Hints that Greta has been manipulated by adults appear to be unfounded. As a teenager, she is in any case entitled to advice. And while it is natural to focus on her as a figurehead, the movement does not depend on her. As she told the audience at a Guardian Live event on Monday, she does not see herself as a leader, but as a participant.
How the wave of demonstrations she helped start develops will be fascinating, as will the progress of the Extinction Rebellion protesters. Peaceful protest and activism are vital to democracy. The climate crisis makes them urgent and necessary. But decision-making requires processes and structures. This is not easy, and partly explains why so many of the successful civil disobedience campaigns of the past have been shaped by charismatic individuals.
The school strikers’ message, similar to the extinction rebels, is that we should panic. Our house, in Greta’s memorable phrase, is on fire. We must embrace “cathedral thinking” – laying the foundations for the carbon-free future without knowing how we are going to paint the roof.
This way of thinking does induce fear. But since doing nothing is not an option, except for nihilists and misanthropes, the rest of us have little choice but to battle through these darker emotions – and act with hope.
The IPCC said last year that the next 12 years are critical, a warning echoed on the BBC by David Attenborough in a landmark documentary last week. The film should have been made a decade ago.
We should have been alert to the dangers before children went on strike.
But we still have some time.

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