A City In Oman Just Posted The World’s Hottest Low Temperature Ever Recorded: 109 Degrees

Washington Post - Jason Samenow

MODIS satellite image from June 26, 2018 shows clear weather over Oman on the day the 24-hour world high-minimum temperature record was set at Quriyat, Oman. Image credit: NASA.

Over a period of 24 hours, the temperature in the coastal city of Quriyat, Oman, never dropped below 108.7 degrees (42.6 Celsius) Tuesday, most likely the highest minimum temperature ever observed on Earth.
For a location to remain no lower than 109 degrees around the clock is mind-boggling. In many locations, a temperature of 109 degrees even during the heat of the afternoon would be unprecedented. For example, in nearly  150 years of weather records, Washington, D.C.’s high temperature has never exceeded 106 degrees.
Quriyat’s suffocating low temperature, first reported by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, breaks the world’s previous hottest minimum temperature of 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), also set in Oman, on June 27, 2011.
Masters received word of the exceptional temperature from weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera. Incredibly, the temperature in Quriyat, Masters said, remained above 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius) for 51 straight hours. Its blistering afternoon high temperature of 121.6 degrees (49.8 Celsius) Tuesday was just about two degrees shy of Oman’s all-time heat record and its highest June temperature, Masters reported.

Temperature difference from normal at 10 p.m. local time Tuesday in Oman analyzed by American (GFS) model. (TropicalTidBits.com) LARGE IMAGE

Over a period of 24 hours, the temperature in the coastal city of Quriyat, Oman, never dropped below 108.7 degrees (42.6 Celsius) Tuesday, most likely the highest minimum temperature ever observed on Earth.
For a location to remain no lower than 109 degrees around the clock is mind-boggling. In many locations, a temperature of 109 degrees even during the heat of the afternoon would be unprecedented. For example, in nearly  150 years of weather records, Washington, D.C.’s high temperature has never exceeded 106 degrees.
Quriyat’s suffocating low temperature, first reported by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, breaks the world’s previous hottest minimum temperature of 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), also set in Oman, on June 27, 2011.
Masters received word of the exceptional temperature from weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera. Incredibly, the temperature in Quriyat, Masters said, remained above 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius) for 51 straight hours. Its blistering afternoon high temperature of 121.6 degrees (49.8 Celsius) Tuesday was just about two degrees shy of Oman’s all-time heat record and its highest June temperature, Masters reported.
Quriyat, sometimes also spelled Qurayyat, is a small fishing village in northeast Oman adjacent to the Sea of Oman that spills into the Arabian Sea. The city’s population is just over 50,000, and it is about an hour southeast of Muscat, Oman’s capital.
This sweltering episode marked the second exceptional weather event to affect Oman in as many months. In May, Category 3 Tropical Cyclone Mekunu slammed into its southwest coast, making landfall near Salalah. It was the most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall on the Arabian Peninsula on record.
Tuesday’s record-breaking heat resulted from a strong high-altitude, high-pressure system or heat dome anchored over the region, which pumped air temperatures up to 15 degrees above normal. Masters said sea surface temperatures in the adjacent waters were about 90 degrees, keeping air temperatures elevated even through the night and offering no reprieve from the oppressive conditions.
Tuesday’s 109-degree low, while the highest known, is not official and remains unverified. Although the World Meteorological Organization validates and maintains records for the hottest maximum world temperature, it does not do so for minimum temperatures.
Nevertheless, assuming it is legitimate, this weather extreme adds to a tremendous number of hot-weather milestones established around the world in just over the past year, which include:

• In April, Pakistan posted the hottest temperature ever observed on Earth during the month of 122.4 degrees (50.2 Celsius).
• Dallas had never hit 90 degrees in November before, but it did so three times in four days in 2017.
• In late October 2017, temperatures soared to 108 degrees in Southern California, the hottest weather on record so late in the season in the entire U.S.
• On Sept. 1, 2017, San Francisco hit 106 degrees, smashing its all-time hottest temperature.
• In late July 2017, Shanghai registered its highest temperature in recorded history, 105.6 degrees (40.9 Celsius).
• In mid-July, Spain posted its highest temperature recorded when Córdoba Airport (in the south) hit 116.4 degrees (46.9 Celsius).
• In July 2017, Death Valley, Calif., endured the hottest month recorded on Earth.
• In late June 2017, Ahvaz, Iran, soared to 128.7 degrees Fahrenheit (53.7 Celsius) — that country’s all-time hottest temperature.
• In late May 2017, the western town of Turbat in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees (53.5 Celsius), tying the all-time highest temperature in that country and the world-record temperature for May, according to Masters.

All of these heat records are part and parcel of a planet that is trending hotter as greenhouse gas concentrations increase due to human activity. The past four years have been the hottest four years on record.

Links

• April was Earth’s 400th warmer-than-normal month in a row
• The U.S. just observed its warmest 3-, 4-, and 5-year spans on record
• The U.S. just had its warmest May in history, blowing past 1934 Dust Bowl record
• For a contrast: The planet’s most frigid region is even colder than scientists thought
• Assessing The Global Climate In May 2018
• Pakistani City Breaks April Record With Day Of 50c Heat
• April 2018 Australia’s Hottest On Record Courtesy Of “Exceptional Heat”
• Sydney Smashes April Records With A Month Of Summer-Like Heat
• One Of Six Warmest Marches On Record
• Climate Change: 1.5°C Is Closer Than We Imagine
• The Temperature Is Rising ... And So Is The Death Toll

Could Climate Change Lead To The Extinction Of Bees?

Newsweek - Lisa Spear

A mason bee pollinates a flower. Scientists found that when they heated up the bees' environments, up to 70 percent of them died. Getty Images 

The survival of bees is hanging in the balance. Some species are dying off at a record pace, and toxic agricultural chemicals might be to blame. There seem to be many threats to these winged creatures, but climate change may be the final straw for some bee species. If the Earth continues to warm and bees don’t find a way to adapt, some populations could face extinction, according to new research.
A team of scientists found that 30 to 70 percent of mason bees died when they heated up the bees' environments. This reveals that if temperatures continue to climb, bee populations could begin to die off at faster rates, disrupting ecosystems worldwide, said Paul CaraDonna, an ecologist at Northwestern University.
“It was a pretty sobering result. This is not good news for this bee,” CaraDonna told Newsweek.
Over two years, CaraDonna led a team of researchers in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains to simulate the impact of climate change on bees. They built 90 nest boxes, housing up to 15 bees each. The scientists painted some boxes with white reflective paint to simulate a cooler environment, similar to that of the 1950s. A second set of boxes were painted with a clear coating to act as a control for the experiment.
And a final set of boxes were painted black to simulate the future climate predicted for the years 2040 to 2099. By simply painting the boxes black, they absorbed more radiant energy, heating the box and the bees inside. The bees lived in the altered environments from early in larval development all the way through metamorphosis and into adulthood. The findings were published Thursday in Functional Ecology, the British Ecological Society’s journal.
“Almost no bees die when you have cool conditions or regular conditions, and quite a bit more die when you warm things up a couple of degrees on average,” CaraDonna said. “I was quite surprised in those years there were many bees that didn’t make it.”


The bees that survived the heat became smaller, lost much of their body fat and suffered from disruptions to their hibernation. These results suggest bees that survived were not healthy and might struggle to find food or a mate.
“Local bee populations could possibly go extinct in the future because of climate change,” said CaraDonna, who also works as a research scientist for the Chicago Botanic Garden, a conservation science center.
This species of mason bee, Osmia ribifloris, also called the “blueberry mason bee,” is native to the western United States and northern Mexico. This particular bee constructs nests inside of holes and cracks in dead tree stumps. As a primary pollinator of the flowering desert manzanita shrubs, this bee may have a big impact on its ecosystem.
“Native pollinators are a really important part of what makes nature run smoothly,” said CaraDonna. “It's estimated that close to 90 percent of all flowering plants benefit from animal pollination. That ends up at around more than 300,000 plant species worldwide.”
While the specific mason bees used in the experiment do not pollinate agricultural crops, it’s possible that the rising temperatures could also hurt other bee populations. Through a trickle-down effect, the die-off of bees could eventually disrupt human life by hurting our agricultural systems, said CaraDonna.
“You start tinkering with all these pieces, and there are many consequences that can start disrupting the function of natural ecosystems, and eventually that can cascade to affect humans as well,” he said.

Links

• Climate Change Could Drive Bees in Warmer Regions to Extinction
• Study Shows Future Climate Change Could Decrease Bee Population
• Bees are dying. What can we do about it?
• How Climate Change is Messing with Bees
• The buzz on climate change: It's bad for bees
• Save the Bees: EU to Ban World’s Most Common Pesticides

Responding To Economic Climate Risk In Australia

Four Twenty Seven - Natalie Ambrosio

Regulatory pressure and financial damage are necessitating an increase in physical climate risk disclosure in Australia.
In exercising their own due diligence and assessing the exposure to physical climate risks in their portfolios, investors arm themselves with valuable information on corporate risk exposure which they can leverage to engage with companies around resilience.
This report explores the connection between climate hazards and financial risks and shares examples of corporate adaptation and investor engagement to build resilience.

LARGE IMAGE

The global tide of interest in the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has hit the shores of Australian financial markets, steered by regulators concerned about the systemic risk climate change poses to the economy.
In 2017 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Geoff Summerhayes was the first Australian regulator to formally endorse the TCFD.
“Some climate risks are distinctly ‘financial’ in nature. Many of these risks are foreseeable, material and actionable now,” he said.
This sentiment was echoed by John Price of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2018 and reflects growing regulatory concern over climate risk disclosure internationally, as shown by Article 173 of France’s Law on Energy Transition and Green Growth and the 2018 European Commission Action Plan.

LARGE IMAGE

This Four Twenty Seven Report, Responding to Economic Climate Risk in Australia, explores the drivers of financial risk in Australia and discusses approaches to addressing this risk.
The nation’s dominant industries are particularly threatened by the prevalent climate hazards.
For investors, understanding a company’s risk to climate change is an essential first step to mitigating portfolio risk, but must be followed by corporate engagement to build resilience.
Institutional investors are increasingly leveraging shareholder resolutions and direct engagement to prompt companies to disclose their climate risks and adapt.

Key Findings

• Australia’s “Angry Summer” of extreme weather in 2013 cost the economy $8 billion and was followed by another summer of extremes in 2016-2017.
• Construction, mining and manufacturing constitute almost 20 percent of Australia’s economy and are highly vulnerable to heat stress and water stress, which threaten large swaths of the nation.
• Boral Limited and Rio Tinto are both Materials companies exposed to water and heat stress in their operations, but they have different risk scores stemming from differing vulnerabilities in their markets and supply chains.
• Engagement on climate is relatively new for Australian shareholders, but is gaining momentum, with institutional asset managers voting on several climate risk disclosure resolutions in 2018.
• Investors can address physical climate risk by reviewing their asset allocations, disclosing their own risks, investing in new opportunities and engaging with corporations.

Links

• Report: Responding to Economic Climate Risk in Australia (pdf)
• Task  Force  on  Climate-related  Financial  Disclosures  (TCFD)
• Australia's new horizon: Climate change challenges and prudential risk
• ASIC recommends voluntary disclosure of climate risks
• Climate Council - Angry Summer 2016/17: Climate Change Super-Charging Extreme Weather (pdf)

A Landmark Climate Change Ruling Could Go Up In Smoke After Justice Kennedy Retires

Mashable - Mark Kaufman

Exhaust and steam rising from a steel mill. Image: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images

After 30 years on the Supreme Court bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy will leave the nation's highest courthouse at the end of July.
With Kennedy's departure comes much uneasiness. One cause for concern is over the paramount climate decision Massachusetts v. EPA, in which Kennedy proved to be the deciding swing vote, as he often was. The worry is that with him gone, the ruling will be left imperiled.
The case occurred after the EPA decided, in 2003, that it could not regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Twelve states, including Massachusetts, sued the agency. They argued that these gases were pollutants and a danger to the public. Eventually, the case found its way to the Supreme Court.
Settled by a five to four vote in 2007, Massachusetts v. EPA ruled for the first time that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are pollutants, and that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate them, just as the agency reins in pollution emitted by cars and trucks.
"I think Massachusetts v. EPA is the most important environmental decision the Supreme Court has ever decided," Ann Carlson, the director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law, said in an interview.
President Donald Trump will select the next Supreme Court nominee, and it's almost certain this individual will, at minimum, find Massachusetts v. EPA flawed or bad law. Trump is openly hostile to widely accepted climate science, and appears not to have even an elementary understanding of how climate works.

Just how important has Massachusetts v. EPA been?
Before the decision, the EPA did not consider greenhouse gases — notably the invisible, potent gas carbon dioxide — an air pollutant. So it wasn't regulated as one.
Kennedy's swing vote changed that.
"I think it’s a highly significant case because it opened what had been a locked door," Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard University's environmental and energy law program, said in an interview.
"The case was tantamount to the opening gun in a race."

Justice Anthony Kennedy (on right) administers the judicial oath to Judge Neil Gorsuch in April 2017. Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Specifically, the case enabled the EPA to use a powerful law, the Clean Air Act, to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks, power plants, and industry. This same law had already proven hugely effective in limiting other air pollutants, like the nitrous and sulfur oxides expelled from cars.
"The Clean Air Act has been exceptionally successful as law in making huge changes in public health," said Goffman. "All you have to do is look at L.A. in the 1970s, and then look at it today."
"I remember visiting L.A. in the '70s, and after a day or two, having a sore throat because of smog," he added.
Following the Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the Obama Administration could use the power of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, which didn't cause sore throats and coughing fits, but stoked accelerated warming and disruption of the global climate.
Cars, trucks, power plants, and fossil fuel operations all became regulated. In 2012, for example, the Obama Administration finalized ambitious gas efficiency standards for cars in the U.S. The goal was to slash fuel use in half by 2025, and accordingly, greenhouse gas emissions, too.
President Obama, though, chose to focus on something all Americans could get behind.
"By the middle of the next decade our cars will get nearly 55 miles per gallon, almost double what they get today," Obama said.
But the most far-reaching effort was the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan, which finalized EPA standards that intended to slash the carbon dioxide produced by U.S. power plants (notably from coal burning) substantially, to less than 30 percent of 2005 levels by the year 2030.

Smog-filled Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Image: Nick Ut/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The Trump administration now seeks to overturn both the historic Clean Power Plan and fuel efficiency standards.

Will a new court overturn Massachusetts v. EPA?
Instead of simply overturning the verdict, it's possible that a new court could take it apart piece by piece.
"I think they’d chip away at it instead of overturning it outright," said Carlson.
For instance, in 2014 the Supreme Court ruled, following conservative Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion, that the EPA couldn't regulate greenhouse gas emissions from some smaller sources of air pollution.
If Kennedy's replacement proves wary or opposed to Massachusetts v. EPA, each time an EPA greenhouse gas regulation is brought to court, the conservative majority may find another way to narrow the scope of when these gases can be reined in.
"This is really where I think people who view the Clean Air Act as the ongoing tool for limiting green gases in the future should be focusing their anxiety," said Goffman.
It's also still plausible that the court could overturn the decision completely.

The Sago coal mine in West Virginia. Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

"It’s unlikely, but not impossible," said Carlson, noting that just this week the court overturned a 40-year-old labor union decision.
Two current justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, already believe the decision should be overturned, said Carlson.

Massachusetts v. EPA embraced climate science
The landmark case didn't just allow the federal government to mitigate greenhouse gases, it also signaled an early embrace of climate science.
"It recognized that the science of climate change is strong and indisputable," said Carlson.
"Massachusetts v. EPA needed to determine if greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare,"  just like other pollutants, said Carlson.
The court found it did. These risks included "increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, increases in food- and water-borne pathogens" and were supported by evidence from both the U.S. Global Climate Research Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Clean Air Act, on which the decision rests, certainly didn't always regulate gases like carbon dioxide, but it left ample room for the sciences to progress and reveal new threats to the public.
"It's hard to overstate how much the Clean Air Act was driven by science and an understanding of how science works," said Goffman, noting that Congress overhauled the law in 1977 and 1990 to account for advances in environmental and public health sciences.
"It’s almost as if Congress knew there would be a new class of pollutants," he said.

Ever wonder how the universe might end?

Links

• The Energy 202: Kennedy's retirement could bring a seismic shift to environmental law
• Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency - Wikipedia
• The Post-Kennedy Supreme Court: What 2 Dissents on Climate Rules Tell Us
• SUPREME COURT: Is Massachusetts v. EPA a goner?

The World Loses Tree Cover The Size Of Bangladesh In 2017

SBS - Reuters

A new report says the world lost tree cover equivalent to the size of Bangladesh or Italy in 2017.

Image by Global Forest Watch

 An independent forest monitoring network said much of the tree cover was lost as forests were cleared using fire to make way for farms from the Amazon to the Congo Basin.
Tree cover loss, mostly in the tropics, totalled 294,000 square kilometres last year, just short of a record 297,000 square kilometres in 2016, according to Global Forest Watch.
The group is run by the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI).
Frances Seymour from the WRI said the rate of tree coverage being lost is startling.
“Tropical forests were lost at a rate equivalent to 40 football (soccer) fields per minute” in 2017, he told a news conference at a June 27-28 Oslo Tropical Forest Forum of 500 experts.

Global Forest Watch has mapped the loss of tree coverage. Supplied

The loss in tree coverage is comparable to the land size of Bangladesh or Italy, WRI said in its report.
"In total, the tropics experienced 15.8 million hectares of tree cover loss in 2017, an area the size of Bangladesh," the report stated.
Norwegian Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen said the pace of forest losses was “catastrophic” and threatened efforts to slow global warming. Trees soak up carbon dioxide from the air as they grow and release it when they burn or rot.
“Forest destruction is driving climate change,” he said. Norway has invested about $2.8 billion to safeguard tropical forests in the past decade - more than any other rich nation.
Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Madagascar and Malaysia suffered the biggest losses in 2017, Global Forest Watch said, based on satellite data back to 2001.
The study omits, however, how far tree plantings or new growth offset the losses.
“Vast areas continue to be cleared for soy, beef, palm oil and other globally traded commodities. Much of this clearing is illegal,” Seymour said.
Brazil alone lost 45,000 sq km of tree cover, down 16 percent from a record in 2016. Fires raged in the southern Amazon region of Brazil.
Justin Adams, of the the Nature Conservancy environmental group, said only three percent of public finance for slowing climate change went to natural solutions like forests.
Well-managed forests can be a source of jobs and economic growth, he said.
Tree cover, however, is just one measure of the state of the world’s forests.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says the loss of forests worldwide slowed to just a net 33,000 sq kms a year from 2010-15, with annual losses of 76,000 sq kms offset by annual gains of 43,000.
Among differences, the FAO says that a forest where trees are deliberately felled to make way for new plantings is still a forest. Global Forest Watch registers the felling as tree cover loss.
Anssi Pekkarinen, a senior forestry officer of the FAO, said that the FAO method of identifying the underlying land use “gives a much more comprehensive picture on the world’s forests.”

Links

• Deforestation - Wikipedia
• Tropical forest tree-cover losses put at 39 million acres in 2017
• One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals
• Our Beef Addiction Has Contributed To Shocking New Deforestation Figures
• Forests are supposed to help stop climate change. These forests didn’t 

A Warming World Creates Desperate People

New York Times - Lauren Markham*

Maggie Chiang

Last year I traveled to southern Guatemala, the source of one of the largest migrations of unauthorized immigrants to the United States in recent years. It’s clear why people are leaving: Guatemala is a country rife with political conflict, endemic racism against indigenous people, poverty and, increasingly, gang violence.
But there’s another, lesser-known dimension to this migration. Drought and rising temperatures in Guatemala are making it harder for people to make a living or even survive, thus compounding the already tenuous political situation for the 16.6 million people who live there.
In the town of Jumaytepeque, which is in Central America’s dry corridor, a group of farmers took me to see their coffee crops. Coffee was responsible for the majority of the community’s income but had been decimated by a plague known as coffee rust, or la roya. Plagues like these aren’t necessarily caused by climate change, but it exacerbates them, and roya is now infecting plants at higher elevations as those heights become warmer. Making matters worse, stress from the drought has made these plants more vulnerable to the plague.
“We can’t make a living purely off coffee anymore,” one young farmer told me in the dappled shade of his coffee plantation, pointing to the limp, yellow roya-pocked leaves all around us. Young people like him, he explained, either move to the cities and try to make a go of it amid the gang violence, “or they go north,” he said, to the United States.
Long before the unconscionable family-separation catastrophe at our southern border, President Trump had made the battle against illegal immigrants the rallying cry of his campaign and administration. He wants to lock up more immigrants — including toddlers — as a deterrent while casting all new unauthorized immigrants as potential, if not probable, violent criminals. Simultaneously, the president’s team has taken on the environment, doing nearly everything it can to walk back decades of regulation intended to protect our air, water and land. Last June, Mr. Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord. Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is doggedly eviscerating the agency he runs.
Today, according to global relief agencies, over 68 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes, often because of war, poverty and political persecution. As a writer, I focus largely on issues of forced migration. The hundreds of migrants I’ve interviewed in the past few years — whether from Gambia, Pakistan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Yemen or Eritrea — are most often leaving because of some acute political problem at home. But I’ve also noticed something else in my years of reporting. If you talk to these migrants long enough, you’ll hear about another, more subtle but still profound dimension to the problems they are leaving behind: environmental degradation or climate change.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that since 2008, 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate-related or extreme weather events. This includes tragedies like the widespread famine in Darfur, monsoons and flooding in Bangladesh and the catastrophic hurricane in Puerto Rico. The more out of whack our climate becomes, the more people up and leave their homes. As our world heats up and sea levels rise, the problem of forced migration around the world is projected to become far worse.
And in refusing to take climate change or responsibility for our planet seriously, the Trump administration is encouraging the conditions that will increase unauthorized migrations to the United States and elsewhere.
Outside a youth refugee facility in Sicily, a group of teenagers from Gambia who had crossed the Mediterranean from Libya told me that farming had become too difficult to sustain in their country as the semiarid Sahel region spreads ever wider across the continent, drying up people’s land. In Yemen, years of water scarcity helped lead to the country’s brutal conflict.
El Salvador, one of the world’s most murderous countries, is just now recovering from a devastating drought, which only heightens the stakes and scope of the violence. In my book about youth migration from El Salvador, “The Far Away Brothers,” I write about a family that ended up on the wrong side of a gang-protected man in town. The family’s teenage twin brothers left because there was a price on their heads, but the challenges persisted for those who remained behind. The family’s fields produced less and less. The tomatoes took on a pallid, sickly color; other crops failed to grow at all. The family couldn’t survive from farming anymore, so more of the children considered going north. They haven’t yet, but nearly every day, one of the daughters tell me, she considers making arrangements to leave.
Many things are exacerbating the effects of the drought in Central America, including pervasive deforestation and farmers overtaxing their land. But according to Climatelinks, a project of the United States Agency for International Development, the average temperature in El Salvador has risen 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, and droughts have become longer and more intense. The sea has risen by three inches since the 1950s, and is projected to rise seven more by 2050. Between 2000 and 2009, 39 hurricanes hit El Salvador, compared with 15 in the 1980s. This, too, is predicted to get worse.
When reporting a story among migrants living in the shadows of a Kenyan slum, I asked a group of men why they left their homes in rural Ethiopia. They were farmers there, like many generations before them, but they told me they could no longer make a living off their crops or even adequately feed their families. The rains had changed — it wasn’t just that they had lessened but that they had become more erratic; no rain when the crops needed it to grow, and then, when it was time for harvest, it would rain suddenly and terribly, ruining the crops. The men had left for Kenya to find work and send money back to feed their families.
Like El Salvador, Gambia, Bangladesh and Guatemala, Ethiopia has been hit hard by climate change, though it is not even in the top 100 emitters of greenhouse gases. But the problem with climate change, of course, is that it is a problem that crosses borders.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump administration has made for elaborate and bombastic theater — but with real, and sometimes deadly, human consequences (see again the children separated from their parents at the border). But Mr. Trump means what he says: He wants immigration from poor countries to stop. He sees the problems in those countries as theirs, not ours — never mind the centuries of catastrophic foreign intervention in places like El Salvador and the rest of the Americas, the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa, or the growing menace of the changing climate.
If President Trump really wants to curb “illegal” migration to the United States for the long haul, he’d better get serious about climate change. The Trump administration can continue to eviscerate the E.P.A. and thumb its nose at global efforts to protect the climate. Or he can work responsibly to try to curb international migration by addressing the challenges of a warming planet.
He can’t have it both ways.

*Lauren Markham is a freelance writer and the author of “The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life.”

Links

• The Refugees The World Barely Pays Attention To
• A Storm Of Climate Change Migration Is Brewing In South Asia
• Number Of African Migrants Will Double By 2050 And Climate Change Will Make It Worse
• Don't Turn To The Military To Solve The Climate-Change Crisis
• The Coming Wave Of Climate Displacement
• Climate Change Soon To Cause Movement Of 140m People, World Bank Warns
• Climate Change Is Not A Key Cause Of Conflict, Finds New Study
• More Than 75 Percent Of Earth’s Land Areas Are ‘Broken,’ Major Report Finds
• Biggest Threat To Humanity? Climate Change, U.N. Chief Says
• Climate Change Soon To Cause Mass Movement, World Bank Warns

Climate Change Is A Top Spiritual Priority For These Religious Leaders

Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin

Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople releases a falcon rehabilitated by Anima in Spetses, Greece. (Sean Hawkey)

ABOARD THE SHIP MORE SPACIOUS THAN THE HEAVENS — Off the island of Spetses, the leader of 300 million Christians worldwide told a group of nearly 200 religious leaders, academics and activists that they needed to move beyond intellectualism when it came to the environment.
“What remains for us is to preach what we practice,” said Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. “Now we must begin the long and difficult way from the mind to the heart . . . May God guide you in your service to his people and the care of his creation.”
The environment has defined 78-year-old Bartholomew’s tenure for more than a quarter-century: The gathering at sea this month was the ninth he has organized since the ­mid-1990s. This one focused on Attica, the peninsula surrounding Athens that juts out into the Aegean Sea, and Bartholomew brought together scientists and clergy to examine the state of bodies of water including the Danube and Amazon rivers, the Baltic and Adriatic seas, and the Arctic Ocean.
In November 1997, he had delivered an address in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he officially classified crimes against the natural world as sins.
“For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for humans to injure other humans with disease, for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances,” he told a crowd that included ­then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. “These are sins.”
Pope Francis has likewise drawn global attention to environmental activism: On the same day Bartholomew was concluding his conference in Greece, the pope brought the leaders of multinational energy and investment firms to the Vatican to discuss the path forward on climate change.
At a time when some political leaders have become more cautious about — or have outright rejected — policies aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, several major faith leaders are making environmental care a top spiritual priority.
But they have also struggled to inspire some of their congregants to action.
“Even when there’s a will, there is not always a willingness to act,” said Ni­ger­ian Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, one of two cardinals who traveled to the patriarch’s conference. “The spirit is willing, but very often, the flesh is weak.”
Still, Onaiyekan and others who had journeyed to Greece for the three-day “Green Attica” conference emphasized that they would persist in raising the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change.
In Nigeria, Onaiyekan said in an interview that “there is a kind of ambiguity about climate change” because it is “a nation largely dependent on oil revenue.” But those living on the Niger Delta have experienced the damage associated with oil production firsthand, he said. It would be naive, he said, to expect oil companies and governments to shift their practices on their own.
“If you are waiting for them to change, you will wait till Jesus comes back again,” he said. “We feel the only area where we can actually make an impact is to constantly keep challenging our leaders to stop killing us. Stop killing your people.”
Francis — who issued the first papal encyclical focused solely on the environment, “Laudato Sì,” in 2015 — pressed this message during his private audience this month with executives from ExxonMobil, Eni, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Equinor and Pemex.
Calling climate change “a challenge of epochal proportions,” the pope said that the private sector had taken modest steps toward incorporating climate risks into its business models and funding renewable energy.
“Progress has indeed been made,” he told the group as he wrapped up the two-day session. “But is it enough?”
Former energy secretary Ernest Moniz, who attended the meeting, said in an interview that participants discussed “the moral and ethical dimensions” of climate change, as well as ways to shift to a low-carbon path.
“Everybody was there trying to find a way to go forward,” Moniz said.
The patriarch, who resides in Istanbul, has spent years bringing together unlikely allies while also seeking to reorient the Orthodox Church. In 1989, his predecessor, Patriarch Dimitrios I, designated Sept. 1 as a day of prayer for the welfare of all creation, and Bartholomew has expanded upon this initiative.
Jane Lubchenco, who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Barack Obama’s administration and served as the scientific co-chair of most of these conferences, said the patriarch had worked to “position the Orthodox Church as a very stewardship-focused religion.”
Back in 1995, she recalled, he convened a meeting on the meaning of the apocalypse in the modern world, to commemorate the 1,900th anniversary of the Book of Revelation. In that context, Lubchenco said, Bartholomew warned that the apocalypse could be underway if humans did not reassess their impact on the Earth.
This month’s gathering — which included stops on the islands of Spetses and Hydra — included similarly dire warnings from researchers. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who directs the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, described the current changes arising from fossil-fuel burning as “disruption on a global scale.”
Without a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, Schellnhuber told the audience, large swaths of Nigeria, the Philippines and elsewhere “will become uninhabitable” because they will be too hot for humans to live in.
Some of the most fiery rhetoric came from Columbia University Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs, who spoke to the group in Greece before departing for the Vatican to participate in the papal climate conference. In an impassioned speech, Sachs charted the historic development of the global capitalist economy, arguing that its foundation upon the idea of “limited liability” has meant that corporations will not take responsibility for the economic damage they have caused.
“What we’ve proved is greed unleashed has no boundaries at all,” Sachs said. “That is the modern economy: Unleash the greed.”
The patriarch, who sat in the front row for the entirety of the conference, opened and closed the proceedings. Speaking in English, he framed conservation as a cause inextricably linked to both his faith and the broader cause of social justice.
“Any kind of alienation between human beings and nature is a distortion of Christian theology and anthropology,” he said.
Even small details of Bartholomew’s itinerary carried symbolic significance. His top environmental adviser, the Rev. John Chryssavgis, asked the conference hotels to avoid plastic straws and nixed a planned blessing for Hydra’s fishing fleet that was sponsored by an oil company.
With his free-flowing white beard and braided ponytail — high-ranking Orthodox officials eschew haircuts on the grounds that the practice smacks of vanity — the patriarch stirred an outpouring of affection as he visited two small islands during his tour. Church bells pealed as his yacht came into the islands’ harbors, and local residents thronged him as he made his way into town.
But it is unclear whether that reverence has translated into an embrace of his environmental mission, especially in the United States. The Rev. Terence Baz, an Orthodox priest in Clifton, N.J., said his parishioners are “blue-collar workers, mostly Republican.”
He added that many conservatives from the Episcopal Church and other Protestant sects have recently switched to the Orthodox Church in search of a more tradition-bound faith, “So there is a resistance against recognizing the reality of what is going to come.”
Chryssavgis said the patriarch has plans to “reach out to parishes in a more systematic fashion” on environmental issues through the church hierarchy but added that “it’s a real struggle.”
American religious conservatives such as E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, wrote in an email that “many Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants” share his skepticism of the idea that burning fossil fuels will cause major environmental damage.
“The abundant, affordable, reliable energy generated from fossil fuels has been indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty,” he said, adding that these benefits “far outweigh their costs, whether to individuals, to specific nations or regions, or to the entire world.”
But as the hydrofoil cruised toward Athens, the bishop of Salisbury, Nick Holtam, said leaders such as Bartholomew and Francis can bolster policymakers’ convictions.
“Churches don’t look like campaigning organizations,” Holtam said, but when it comes to politicians, “they do need the legitimacy of people who will support them in doing hard things.”

Links

• 10 key excerpts from the pope’s encyclical on the environment
• Scott Pruitt’s extended Vatican visit included little talk of climate change
• Climate change and hope: religion and ethics in the Anthropocene
• Roles of religion and ethics in addressing climate change
• Morality Of Climate Change
• Resetting the Political Moral Compass on Climate Change
• Religion, Ethics, and Environmental Change