Amazon Fires: Satellite Images Show What’s Happening In Brazil

Grist - Rhett A. Butler

High-resolution images from satellite company Planet are revealing glimpses of some of the fires currently devastating the Amazon rainforest.

While many of the images currently being shared on social media and by news outlets are from past fires — some from as long as 15 years ago — satellites can provide a near real-time view of what’s unfolding in the Amazon. With near-daily overflights and high-resolution imagery, Planet’s constellation of satellites is providing a clear look at some of the fires now burning in the Brazilian Amazon.
Beyond dramatic snapshots, those images also provide data that can be mined for critical insights into what’s happening in the Amazon on a basin-wide scale, according to Greg Asner, the director of the Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science at Arizona State University, whose team is using Planet’s data to assess the impact of the fires on carbon emissions.
“Planet data provides unprecedented detail in mapping forest change down to individual trees which allows us to assess the damage from these kinds of large scale disturbances,” Asner said. “Our Planet Incubator Program is currently tracking forest carbon emissions all over the world — including the Amazon — using Planet Dove and SkySat imagery.”
“If you took all of the carbon stored in every tropical forest on Earth and burned it up, you would emit about five times the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that is already there,” he said. “The Amazon rainforest represents about half of this forest carbon, to give you an idea of how serious this current situation is and the kind of impact it will have on climate change.”

Fires burning in the state of Pará, Brazil. Planet Labs Inc.

Planet wouldn’t comment what the images show specifically, but there are strong indications from other sources that many fires are burning near areas of recent deforestation. Analysis released this week by IPAM Amazônia, a Brazilian research group, shows that the 10 Amazonian municipalities that had the most fire outbreaks this year were also the ones that had the highest deforestation rates.“These municipalities are responsible for 37 percent of the hotbeds in 2019 and 43 percent of recorded deforestation through July,” states the IPAM report. “This concentration of forest fires in newly deforested areas with mild drought represents a strong indication of the intentional character of the fires.”
In other words, fires are being set to clear lands for agriculture, most likely cattle pasture, which accounts for 70 to 80 percent of forest conversion in the Brazilian Amazon. Typically a landowner will cut and harvest valuable timber trees before slashing and burning the remaining trees. The resulting ash provides a temporary source of nutrients for pasture grass, but the soil degrades quickly without careful management.
While old-growth Amazon rainforest doesn’t typically burn naturally outside droughts and El Niño years, fires set intentionally in degraded forests and agricultural lands can burn hot enough to spread deep into otherwise untouched forests. That seems to be what’s happening this year, which, as IPAM noted, isn’t especially dry.
However that may soon change — for the worse.
With climate models forecasting a much hotter Amazon due to rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, a growing chorus of scientists are warning that the combination of continued deforestation and climate change could tip the wet Amazon rainforest toward a much drier, savanna-like ecosystem. Since the trees of the Amazon generate much of region’s precipitation, such a shift could be devastating for the region’s water supplies. The agricultural heartland of South America is predicted to be particularly hard hit by water scarcity, but diminished rainfall would also affect cities’ electricity supplies, which are disproportionately dependent on hydropower. Drier conditions would exacerbate fire and air pollution risk as well.

Planet images showing Nova Bandeirantes in Mato Grosso before and after a fire. Planet Labs Inc.

Fires and deforestation up in 2019
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been trending upward since bottoming out in 2012 at 4,571 square kilometers (1,765 square miles), but the issue didn’t get a lot of public attention until this week, when the skies of São Paulo, one the world’s largest cities, were blackened midday by smoke from the fires. The shocking descent into darkness prompted an outpouring of concern across social media, with the #PrayforAmazonas hashtag garnering more than 300,000 tweets in two days.
But while the fires in the Amazon have indeed increased significantly over last year, they aren’t off the charts relative to the past 20 years.

MODIS fire data presented by Global Forest Watch.
LARGE IMAGE

The difference this year is that weather conditions led the smoke from the fires to blanket densely populated urban areas. A similar phenomenon is seen in Southeast Asia: Indonesia’s peat fires get the most attention when winds blow the resulting haze over Singapore, the regional financial hub, as was the case in 2015.
However, to environmentalists worried about the anti-environment rhetoric from President Jair Bolsonaro, the Armageddon-like conditions in São Paulo and sharp rise in deforestation seem be playing out like a worst-case scenario for the Amazon.
According to the country’s national space research institute, INPE, forest loss in the world’s largest rainforest is already pacing 57 percent ahead of last year. And the region is only halfway through the peak deforestation season that runs from May to October. Data from Imazon, a Brazilian NGO that independently tracks deforestation in the Amazon, is expected to confirm the trend when it releases the latest numbers next week.
Stung by criticism over rising deforestation, Bolsonaro has asserted INPE is manipulating deforestation data and fired the agency’s director. INPE has not released any deforestation updates since the firing. Bolsonaro also claimed, without evidence, that NGOs are responsible for starting the fires as a fundraising strategy, although he backtracked on those remarks today.
Bolsonaro, however, hasn’t been able to effectively refute the satellite data coming from places like Planet and NASA. Scientists and civil society groups are now poring over that data to look for links between Bolsonaro’s policies — including weakened environmental laws, relaxed law enforcement, and amnesty for illegal deforesters — and what’s happening on the ground in the Amazon.
“While links between Brazilian government policy and these wildfires are unknown, the unprecedented data coming from Planet will allow us to help evaluate the extent to which their policies need to be reexamined,” Asner said.

Links

• Amazon Fires: Have We Reached The First Tipping Point For Runaway Climate Change?
• What's happening in the Amazon?
• Brazilian troops begin deploying to fight Amazon fires
• The blazes in the Amazon are so big they can be seen from space. One map shows the alarming scale of the fires.
• The ‘lungs of the planet’ are burning at a record rate. If too much of the Amazon disappears, that ‘dieback’ could turn the land into a savannah.
• Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil’s largest city, 2,000 miles away
• Brazil’s president is blaming farmers clearing land for the fires raging through the Amazon. Here’s how big Brazil’s farming industry really is.
• Brazil’s president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
• 99% of the fires in the Amazon rainforest were started by humans, one expert says – here’s why they have gotten so out of control
• Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
• Here’s what you can do to help the burning, ravaged Amazon rainforest
• The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields’ worth of rainforest per minute
• Brazil's Climate Change Sceptic Government Says Warnings About The Fires Consuming The Amazon Are 'Sensationalist,' 'Hysterical,' And 'Misleading'

How Should We Talk About What’s Happening To Our Planet?

Washington Post - Dan Zak

Barry Falls for The Washington Post)

In the middle of a winter’s night in 2017, Frank Luntz’s cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles.
Luntz — who specializes in how the public reacts to words — saw scary evidence of a threat that he once tried to neutralize with language.
In 2001, he’d written a memo of environmental talking points for Republican politicians and instructed them to scrub their vocabulary of “global warming,” because it had “catastrophic connotations,” and rely on another term: “climate change,” which suggested “a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
Last month, with a revised script, Luntz appeared before the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis.
“I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz said. Nearby was a colorful chart of vocabulary, developed since his polling in 2009 showed bipartisan support for climate legislation. He went on: “I’ve changed. And I will help you with messaging, if you wish to have it.”
Don’t talk about threats, he told the senators. Talk about consequences.
Don’t talk about new jobs created by green energy. Talk about new careers.
And sustainability?
“Stop,” Luntz said. “Sustainability is about the status quo.”
Even the committee’s name had a troublesome word in it: “crisis.” It’s flabby from overuse, Luntz thought. If everything is a crisis, then nothing is.
From a word standpoint, that’s true. And sometimes it feels true in the real world. The phone in your hand has become a police scanner of unfolding crises. The Kashmir crisis, the Hong Kong crisis, the border crisis, the trade crisis, the measles crisis. The crisis of mass shootings, of the national debt, of Puerto Rico, Brexit, the Amazon.
And, yes, the climate crisis, formerly climate change — somehow the least tangible but most alarming of the crises, which makes it trickier to talk about.
Those who are talking about it have ratcheted up their rhetoric. In May, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg ditched “climate change” for “climate breakdown” or “climate emergency.” The Guardian now uses “climate catastrophe” in its articles.
A resistance movement born in Europe last year named itself Extinction Rebellion, partly to normalize the notion of aggressive action in a life-or-death situation.
Luntz wants defter language. “The strongest advocates for a particular issue are often the worst communicators,” he says later by phone, because “they forget that the people they need to convince are not themselves or their friends.”
The climate problem is not just scientific. It’s linguistic. If we can agree how to talk and write about an issue that affects us all, maybe we can understand and fix it together.
But words can be clumsy tools. They can be too dull to puncture ignorance, or so sharp that people flinch and turn away.
Is “change” appropriately neutral, or unjustly neutered? Is an “emergency” still an “emergency” after months or years? Does “catastrophe” motivate people, or make them hide under the bed? How long before words such as “breakdown” and “extinction” lose their bite?
And if we keep returning to the dictionary for new words to replace them, will there eventually be any left?

The second volume of the fourth National Climate Assessment is 1,515 pages long. The word "likely" appears 867 times, sometimes after "very" or "extremely." Last spring, as they distilled data into text, the scientists who wrote the report spent long hours debating the usage of "likely."
Without significant action to curb climate change, they wrote in the final chapter, “it is very likely that some physical and ecological impacts will be irreversible for thousands of years, while others will be permanent.”
When translated to conversational English, “very likely” becomes “this is something really bad and totally crazy and wild,” says one author of the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
“Why don’t we use plain language and say, ‘Yes, this is crazy and, yes, you should be freaking out’? Because that’s not fair. That’s not the role of the National Climate Assessment,” the author says. “But then we sort of fail as a community in actually getting people to understand the severity of it.”
The science community is supposed to interpret for the rest of us, but its dialect does not always pack rhetorical oomph. “I didn’t realize that pointing to a climate graph I think is the Rosetta stone — people don’t see it the way I see it,” says Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We as humans don’t experience an exponential curve viscerally, in our gut.”
In the industrial age, environmentalist writers have tried to access the brain via the gut. “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 19th century.
In the 1960s, Rachel Carson envisioned an ecosystem silenced by chemicals: “Everywhere was a shadow of death.” In the 1980s, as global warming was first debated widely, Bill McKibben pondered “the end of nature” itself.
But “there’s a point at which words like ‘climate change’ become part of your mental furniture,” McKibben says in an interview. “Like ‘urban violence’ — things that are horrible problems but you just repeat the thing so often that people’s minds kind of skip over them.”
Terms lose their power as they get used over many years, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and “come to accrete their own set of connotations.”
Such as: elitist, liberal, socialist. When thousands of pages of analysis become a two-word slogan, it passes from science to politics. Facts become less important than feelings. For some people, “climate change” is a wedge word synonymous with “hoax” and calls to mind former vice president Al Gore. For others, it summons the specter of ExxonMobil and is a rallying cry for restructuring the global economy.
“The facts do not speak for themselves,” says Richard Buttny, a professor in the department of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. “People make decisions based on values.”
And therein lies an opportunity, according to Kim Cobb, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech. Scientists observe and publish findings for the public, Cobb says, but then often fail to “recognize the emotional toll this takes on the recipient and the challenge to their core values.”
Cobb refrains from using words such as “crisis” and “emergency” on Twitter, where the character limit discourages context and nuance.
Instead, she elevates language about solutions, and about the emotions triggered by the science, in the hopes of widening the circle of understanding.
“We’re way behind creating these communities for shared values and shared goals,” Cobb says. “And from that comes shared language.”

We are gradually building that language to talk about where we are, where we're going and about the emotions that accompany that knowledge.
The Germans have a word for feeling guilty about flying on airplanes: “flugscham,” or “flight shame.”
The biologist Edward O. Wilson has a word for a future epoch following a profound loss of species: “the Eremocine,” or “the Age of Loneliness.”
Karla Brollier, founder of the Climate Justice Initiative, is listening to her fellow indigenous Alaskans as their language evolves to include loss and adaptation, without relying on words such as “climate refugee” that connote victimhood.
Jennifer Atkinson’s students at the University of Washington at Bothell have used “blissonance” to describe the feeling of enjoying a record-hot day in winter — while recognizing that climate change might have something to do with it.
“Solastalgia,” coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, means distress over change in one’s home environment. Atkinson phrases it as a homesickness without ever having left home.
Her students “describe how the sound of frogs has slowly disappeared over time — these changes that destabilize connections to personal memories,” says Atkinson, a senior lecturer at Bothell. “Unlike with personal bereavement, we don’t have a vocabulary for the grief people have for the loss of the natural world.”
Her course is called “Environmental Anxiety and Climate Grief.” One of the goals is to search for ways of communicating outside the bounds of science and its “value-neutral” vocabulary — all those likelys and somewhat likelys.
“We’re moving into an age of great earnestness, because we’re trying to figure out, ‘How do we show up for each other?’ ” says Sarah Myhre, a climate and ocean scientist who has studied social and ecological decision-making. “And the language that’s being used in my spaces is all about heart-centered work.”
Whereas Frank Luntz once tried to strip the climate problem of emotional resonance, Atkinson, Myhre and others are acknowledging and amplifying it. Whereas science has traditionally been guided by dispassionate, male-centric authority, women are rewording climate conversations to honor the collective, connective nature of the problem.
And how we talk about the environment affects how we think about it. In the colonial and industrial ages, Myhre says, our language reflected an idea of the natural world as an inventory of useful commodities — separate from, and subservient to, humanity.
Trees became timber.
Animals became livestock.
Oil and coal became fuels.
And thus a cultural problem has given birth to an environmental one, says Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas.
“Think of how our worldview changes if we shift from thinking that we live in a world full of resources,” he says, “to a world where we live among relatives.”

Protesters block the street as they gather for a demonstration organized by Extinction Rebellion outside the Brazilian embassy in London on Aug. 23. (Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images)

In June, the White House slashed its red pen through certain labels in written congressional testimony from a State Department analyst.
When the analyst used "possibly catastrophic" to describe the future impacts of climate change, a member of the National Security Council typed a note in the margin: "not a science-based assessment but advocacy for the climate-alarm establishment."
The analyst listed “tipping point processes” on a page that was entirely crossed out. A note in the margin: “ ‘Tipping points’ is a propaganda slogan designed to frighten the scientifically illiterate.”
Some activists believe fright is appropriate, and they’re eager to use keener language than “tipping points” to do it.
“We’ve been told for years: ‘Don’t scare people, people don’t want to know the bad news’ — and all that’s meant is nothing’s changed,” says Charlie Waterhouse, founder of the company behind Extinction Rebellion’s branding. “We know that we have to up the ante, and we have to have a more extreme position because that opens that crack that lets other people follow.”
The word “extinction” is a blunt instrument that whacks at complacency.
The word “rebellion” invites enlistees and subverts established power structures.
But this “constant inflation” in terminology hampers rational discussion, says the Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, whose skeptical writings on the economics of climate action have riled scientists and activists.
Words such as “catastrophe” and “extinction” imply that we should either cower and do nothing, or overreact and do everything, says Lomborg, who is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
“The conversation we should have is: How do we make smart policies that cost less than the damage they reduce?” Lomborg writes in an email. “Climate policy shouldn’t be done with labels but with careful analysis.”
We don’t need labels as much as we used to, back when the effects of climate change were forecast instead of seen and felt.
“In a certain sense, words are no longer as necessary as they once were,” says McKibben, author of “The End of Nature.” “Twenty or 30 years ago we were describing things that hadn’t happened yet, so you couldn’t take a picture of them. Now every single day you can take 1,000 pictures around the world of the trauma of climate change.”
Nearly two decades after Frank Luntz recommended it, “climate change” may still be the closest thing to a shared language that Americans have for describing what’s happening to the planet. But we diverge from there.
Scientists speak about consequences. Activists speak about crises and catastrophes. Politicians speak about doubt and propaganda.
And if you’re paying attention, you’ll hear nature speaking loudly for itself.

Links

• Al Gore is near the end of his quest to save the Earth. Nina Barrett just got started.
• ‘Everything is not going to be okay’: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble
• Extreme climate change has arrived in America
• Transforming the media’s coverage of the climate crisis - Columbia Journalism Review
• Covering Climate Change in a 1.5-Degree World
• The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns
• Why Are ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ Producing Ads for Big Oil?
• The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters.
• Bill McKibben: The End of Nature
• The Royal Baby Is Cute And All, But Hello, The Planet Is On Fire
• Why The Guardian Is Changing The Language It Uses About The Environment
• The Climate Crisis Is A Story For Every Beat
• News Corp's Climate Campaign
• The Media Is Failing On Climate Change – Here's How They Can Do Better Ahead Of 2020
• The Media Has Failed Spectacularly On Climate Change
• Why Is The US News Media So Bad At Covering Climate Change?
• The world has just over a decade to get climate change under control, U.N. scientists say
• Australian Headlines Are Designed To Scare People Into Not Acting On Climate Change
• 11 Things Climate Change 'Dismissive' People Say On Social Media
• Why the Guardian is putting global CO2 levels in the weather forecast

What Does '12 Years To Act On Climate Change' (Now 11 Years) Really Mean?

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

It doesn't mean the world can wait until 2030 to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or that chaos will erupt in 2030. Here's what the science shows.

In some ways, the “12 years” narrative may set up a scenario that’s too lenient, because some key part of the climate system may already be at or past tipping points. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

We've been hearing variations of the phrase "the world only has 12 years to deal with climate change" a lot lately.

Sen. Bernie Sanders put a version of it front and center of his presidential campaign last week, saying we now have "less than 11 years left to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, if we are going to leave this planet healthy and habitable."

But where does the idea of having 11 or 12 years come from, and what does it actually mean? 

The number began drawing attention in 2018, when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report describing what it would take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the Paris climate agreement. The report explained that countries would have to cut their anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, such as from power plants and vehicles, to net zero by around 2050. To reach that goal, it said, CO2 emissions would have to start dropping "well before 2030" and be on a path to fall by about 45 percent by around 2030 (12 years away at that time).

Mid-century is actually the more significant target date in the report, but acting now is crucial to being able to meet that goal, said Duke University climate researcher Drew Shindell, a lead author on the mitigation chapter of the IPCC report.

"We need to get the world on a path to net zero CO2 emissions by mid-century," Shindell said. "That's a huge transformation, so that if we don't make a good start on it during the 2020s, we won't be able to get there at a reasonable cost."

How Do Scientists Know?
Basics physics and climate science allow scientists to calculate how much CO2 it takes to raise the global temperature—and how much CO2 can still be emitted before global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial times.
Scientists worked backward from that basic knowledge to come up with timelines for what would have to happen to stay under 1.5°C warming, said Scott Denning, who studies the warming atmosphere at Colorado State University.
"They figured out how much extra heat we can stand. They calculated how much CO2 would produce that much heat, then how much total fuel would produce that much CO2. Then they considered 'glide paths' for getting emissions to zero before we burn too much carbon to avoid catastrophe," he said.
"All this work gets summarized as 'in order to avoid really bad outcomes, we have to be on a realistic glide path toward a carbon-free global economy by 2030.' And that gets translated to something like 'emissions have to fall by half in a decade,' and that gets oversimplified to '12 years left.'
"There's certainly a grain of truth in the phrase, but it's so oversimplified that it leads to comically bad misconceptions about how to get there, conjuring up ridiculous cartoon imagery suggesting we just go on with life normally for the next 11 years and then the world ends," Denning said.
That's not what the IPCC writers envisioned, he said.
The science on the 2030 date is clear, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. The controversy stems from people mischaracterizing the carbon reduction timeline as a threshold for climate disaster. He noted that people promoting climate science denial and delay have also latched on to the phrase "to intentionally try to caricature the concern about climate change."

What Would Success Look Like?
It would be helpful if people looked at the 2030 target in terms of what success looks like rather than what failure means, Denning said.
"Solving the problem by 2030, 2040 or 2050 requires a new global energy infrastructure, which is arguably easier and less expensive than past infrastructure shifts like indoor plumbing, rural electrification, the automobile and paved roads, telecommunications, computers, mobile phones or the internet.
"All of these past changes cost tens of trillions of dollars, adjusted for inflation. All of them were hugely disruptive. All of them took a decade or more, completely changed the industrial and economic and social landscape, and created bursts of growth and productivity and jobs. And arguably, all of them made life better for huge numbers of people."
This time, the shift is from heavy reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources, like wind power. And even with a speedy energy transition, the IPCC says keeping temperatures from warming more than 1.5°C will also likely require removing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale.
Missing the target doesn't imply the onset of cataclysmic climate change in 2030, Denning said.
"Things just keep getting worse and worse until we stop making them worse, and then they never get better," he said. "But no matter what, the world has to move on from fossil fuels just as we moved on from tallow candles and outhouses and land lines."

What Would Exceeding 1.5°C Warming Mean?
The IPCC report described how increasing greenhouse gas emissions will result in more dangerous and costly disruptions to global societies and ecosystems, including longer, hotter heat waves and more frequent crop-killing droughts.
Mountain glaciers will melt faster as the planet warms, creating new risks for settlements in the valleys below. The meltdown of polar ice sheets is also projected to accelerate, intensifying flooding and speeding up sea level rise to a rate that will be hard to adapt to. More Arctic permafrost will thaw, releasing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Despite the rising risks, it's important to understand that, "in the physical climate system, there are no scientists claiming that there is a magical threshold that we breach or don't breach that determines whether we have a habitable climate system," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Center for Climate and Weather Extremes.
The 2030 target is useful because it shows how the "next decade is incredibly consequential for what we do." Swain said. "But I think the emphasis that's being placed on this specific 12-year window as a differentiator between existential crisis or not is problematic.
"First of all, it negates some of the risks that already exist and that will continue to build no matter what. And it also potentially suggests that anything short of complete victory in the next 12 years is pointless, which is exactly the opposite of the truth. At any point along the spectrum, more progress is always going to be better than less progress, less warming is always going to be better than more warming."

Have We Passed Tipping Points Already?
In some ways, the "12 years" narrative may set up a deadline that's too lenient, because some key part of the climate system may already be at or past tipping points, Swain said.
It creates the false illusion that there is some sort of guardrail moving forward, that if we just get in under the deadline we'll be OK, he said. But "twelve years from now, it could be too late for some of these things, like the ice sheets."
Research in the past few years reinforces the idea that some climate tipping points have already been breached. Studies show some parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet are unlikely to recover, and parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may also be at or very near a tipping point to rapid disintegration.
A study published in June suggested that the rate of permafrost thawing is progressing much faster than climate models projected. And scientists studying the link between global warming and European heat waves said those recent extremes are also outside the scope of what they expected at current levels of warming.
The world will still exist if we breach 1.5°C and 2°C, but "the climate impacts and risks will be higher and the temperature will be higher," said Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO climate research center in Oslo. That all seems to be sinking in to public awareness, he said.
"But in terms of deadlines, we have already missed the deadline," he said. "We should have started mitigating decades ago, then we would have the problem solved."

Links

• Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
• Medications Can Raise Heat Stroke Risk. Are Doctors Prepared to Respond as the Planet Warms?
• Amazon Fires Spark Growing International Criticism of Brazil
• IPCC: Radical Energy Transformation Needed to Avoid 1.5 Degrees Global Warming
• Capturing CO2 From Air: To Keep Global Warming Under 1.5°C, Emissions Must Go Negative, IPCC Says
• That $3 Trillion-a-Year Clean Energy Transformation? It’s Already Underway.
• Not Just CO2: These Climate Pollutants Also Must Be Cut to Keep Global Warming to 1.5 Degrees