12/11/2018

Climate Change Will Make QLD’s Ecosystems Unrecognisable – It’s Up To Us If We Want To Stop That

The Conversation - 

It’s not just about the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland’s rainforests - particularly in the mountains - will also change thanks to a warming climate. Shutterstock
Climate change and those whose job it is to talk about current and future climate impacts are often classed as the “harbingers of doom”. For the world’s biodiversity, the predictions are grim - loss of species, loss of pollination, dying coral reefs.
The reality is that without human intervention, ecosystems will reshape themselves in response to climate change, what we can think of as “autonomous adaptation”. For us humans - we need to decide if we need or want to change that course.
For those who look after natural systems, our job description has changed. Until now we have scrambled to protect or restore what we could fairly confidently consider to be “natural”. Under climate change knowing what that should look like is hard to decide.
If the Great Barrier Reef still has a few pretty fish and coral in the future, and only scientists know they are different species to the past, does that matter? It’s an extreme example, but it is a good analogy for the types of decisions we might need to make.
In Queensland, the government has just launched the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Climate Adaptation Plan for Queensland focused on what is considered important for making these decisions. The plan is high level, but is an important first step toward preparing the sector for the future.

Changing ecosystems
For the rest of Queensland’s ecosystems the story is much the same as the Great Barrier Reef. There are the obvious regions at risk. Our coastal floodplains and wetlands are potentially under threat from both sides, with housing and development making a landward march and the sea pushing in from the other side. These ecosystems literally have nowhere to go in the crush.
It’s a similar story for species and ecosystems that specialise on cool, high altitude mountaintops. These small, isolated populations rely on cool conditions. As the temperature warms, if they can’t change their behaviour (for instance, by taking refuge in cool spots or crevices during hot times), then it is unlikely they will survive without human intervention such as translocation.
We are all too familiar with the risk of coral reefs dying and becoming a habitat for algae, but some of our less high profile ecosystems face similar transformations. Our tropical savannah woodlands cover much of the top third of Queensland. An iconic ecosystem of the north, massive weed invasions and highly altered fire regimes might threaten to make them unrecognisable.
Changing fire patterns and invasive species could see dramatic changes in Queensland’s savannah woodlands. Shutterstock
So where to from here?
From the grim predictions we must rally to find a way forward. Critically for those who must manage our natural areas it’s about thinking about what we want to get out of our efforts.
Conservation property owners, both public (for instance, national parks) and private (for instance, not-for-profit conservation groups), must decide what their resources can achieve. Throwing money at a species we cannot save under climate change may be better replaced by focusing on making sure we have species diversity or water quality. It’s a hard reality to swallow, but pragmatism is part of the climate change equation.
We led the development of the Queensland plan, and were encouraged to discover a sector that had a great deal of knowledge, experience and willingness. The challenge for the Queensland government is to usefully channel that energy into tackling the problem.

Valuing biodiversity
One of the clearest messages from many of the people we spoke to was about how biodiversity and ecosystems are valued by the wider community. Or not. There was a clear sense that we need to make biodiversity and ecosystems a priority.
The Great Barrier Reef is already seeing major climate impacts, particularly bleaching. Shutterstock
It’s easy to categorise biodiversity and conservation as a “green” issue. But aside from the intrinsic value or personal health and recreation value that most of us place on natural areas, without biodiversity we risk losing things other than a good fishing spot.
Every farmer knows the importance of clean water and fertile soil to their economic prosperity. But when our cities bulge, or property is in danger from fire, we prioritise short-term economic returns, more houses or reducing fire risk over biodiversity almost every time.
Of course, this is not to say the balance should be flipped, but climate change is challenging our politicians, planners and us as the Queensland community to take responsibility for the effects our choices have on our biodiversity and ecosystems. As the pressure increases to adapt in other sectors, we should seek options that could help – rather than hinder – adaptation in natural systems.
Coastal residences may feel that investing in a seawall to protect their homes from rising sea levels is worthwhile even if it means sacrificing a scrap of coastal wetland, but there are opportunities to satisfy both human needs and biodiversity needs. We hope the Queensland plan can help promote those opportunities.

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Firefighters, Climate Scientist, Slam Trump For 'Shameful' And 'Ill-Informed' Wildfire Tweets

Newsweek - 



The leaders of two firefighters associations have blasted President Donald Trump’s tweet about California wildfires as “ill-informed” and “shameful,” arguing that the federal government is largely responsible for the ongoing problem.
At least 23 people have been killed and tens of thousands evacuated as a forest fire ravaged the Northern California city of Paradise over the weekend. In Southern California, two other bodies were recovered from a forest fire, bringing the state’s death toll to 25. Forest fires have been a constant problem in California for many years, regularly costing lives and billions in damages.
Addressing the disaster in a Saturday tweet, Trump lashed out at California’s management of forests as the cause of the fires, threatening to cut payments from the federal government.
IMAGE
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” he threatened.
Although Trump later sent out another tweet, saying “God bless them all,” referring to firefighters and those impacted by the devastation, the heads of the California Professional Firefighters (CPF) and the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) released statements slamming the the president’s remarks.
“To make crass suggestions such as cutting off funding during a time of crisis shows a troubling lack of real comprehension about the disaster at hand and the dangerous job our fire fighters do,” Harold Schaitberger, General President of IAFF, which represents paid full-time firefighters and emergency medical services personnel in the United States and Canada, said.
"His comments are reckless and insulting to the fire fighters and people being affected,” Schaitberger added.
CPF President Brian K. Rice shared similar sentiments, while also pointing out that Trump’s tweet demonstrates a misunderstanding of the reality of how forests are managed in California.
“The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines,” Rice said. “The president has chosen instead to issue an uninformed political threat aimed squarely at the innocent victims of these cataclysmic fires,” he added.
A CalFire firefighter sets up tape as Yuba and Butte County Sheriff officers recover a body at a burned out residence in Paradise, California on November 10 JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images 
Continuing, Rice explained that Trump’s “assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong.”
“Wildfires are sparked and spread not only in forested areas but in populated areas and open fields fueled by parched vegetation, high winds, low humidity and geography. Moreover, nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another one-third under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California,” he pointed out.
“We would encourage the president to offer support in word and deed, instead of recrimination and blame,” he concluded, pointing out that wildfires are not a partisan issue. “Families are in mourning, thousands have lost homes, and a quarter-million Americans have been forced to flee,” he said.
While Trump blamed forest management, experts have often pointed out that climate change is a leading factor behind an uptick in fires throughout California and other western states. As president, Trump has removed the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, which aimed to curb the impact of climate change globally. He has also expressed constant skepticism of the established science that demonstrates significant warming and change around the planet, while cutting regulations intended to curb pollution and emissions.
“As, frankly, someone that was evacuated and has visited burnt-out homes, that Trump tweet today blaming the state was an insult and so uninformed,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied climate change and the effects of wildfires for decades, told The Daily Beast. “There are no forests to manage here. Coastal fires and shrubs are part of what burnt. It was a statement made with insensitivity and ignorance.”
California elected several Democratic lawmakers in the recent midterms, defeating Republicans.

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Fire Chief: Climate Change Helped Make California Wildfires More Devastating

The Guardian - 

Firefighters hose down hot spots on a wildfire-ravaged property in Malibu, California. Photograph: Marcio José Sánchez/AP 
As fire officials from across Ventura and Los Angeles county gathered to speak to reporters on Sunday, beyond the charred and smoldering hills where the Woolsey fire burned through the weekend, the wind was already starting to pick up.
As Los Angeles fire chief Daryl Osby took the podium, strong gusts swirled smoke, ash and dust through grey skies. Along with updates on progress in fighting the fire, he said this blaze signified a shift: fire crews are now facing the most erratic and challenging fight of their lives.
Climate change, Osby said, was undeniably a part of why the fires burning in northern and southern California were more devastating and destructive than in years past.
The death toll stood at 25: two in the LA-area fires, 23 around the destroyed town of Paradise 500 miles to the north. The total was expected to rise.
“The fact of the matter is if you look at the state of California, climate challenge is happening statewide,” Osby said, adding that “it is going to be here for the foreseeable future”.
The Camp Fire burns in the hills 2018 near Big Bend, California, on Saturday. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Drought conditions have increasingly affected the state over the past decade, causing erratic fire behavior and making efforts to contain the flames much more difficult. The Woolsey fire, which was only 10% contained on Sunday, has burned more than 87,000 acres in three days. More than 177 homes have been lost and officials said that number was expected to rise rapidly.
The fire season, which started in early summer, is poised to break records for a second year in a row. In July California’s outgoing governor, Jerry Brown, referred to megafires as the “new normal”.
After the press conference, Osby told the Guardian environmental changes had expanded fire season across the state. Crucially, this has put a crunch on resources. For an immediate example, the Camp fire in the north, which devastated Paradise, has diverted resources that drier areas of southern California could once rely on for backup.
Typically we would rely on our partners to the north to come. But they are fighting a major fire up there
Daryl Osby, LA fire chief
“It did have an affect on our strategy,” he said. “Typically we would rely on our partners to the north to come. But they are fighting a major fire up there.”
Southern California fire crews therefore only had capacity to focus on saving lives and structures as the fire moved and were unable to work on containing the flames for three days.
According to Cal Fire chief Scott Jalbert, there was a window on Saturday when the winds died down and firefighters were able to make some progress. But with strong winds projected through the beginning of the new week, containing the fire will be more difficult.
“They took as much advantage as they could,” he said but “with these winds, 30-40mph, it is going to cause a lot of problems”. He added that aircraft will be less affective at aiming retardant. “You can imagine dropping a cup of water into these winds. It goes all over the place.”
With help coming from Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Washington, Osby said fire crews would have the support they need to stop the flames from spreading.
“What really hampered our ability to combat this fire is we didn’t have enough resources for containment,” he said. “Normally we would do all three things simultaneously but now we have to do it in sequential order. Lives are first.”

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11/11/2018

Exclusive Photos: A Giant Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica

National Geographic - Brian Clark Howard | Photographs Thomas Prior

NASA scientists just got their first close look at a new iceberg three times the size of Manhattan. Our team was on the plane.
Curving ice canyons mark the edge of the new iceberg, dubbed B-46, as it breaks off the thick, floating ice shelf of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. In the foreground lies broken sea ice on the dark surface of the Amundsen Sea. LARGE IMAGE
Above the Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica - As the plane approached low over the enormous expanse of white, excited scientists crowded to the windows, cameras in hand. Their instruments had warned them that something special was about to emerge from the bleak expanse of West Antarctica.
“We’re coming up on B-46,” a pilot’s voice crackled in their headsets.
Flying at 1,500 feet, the NASA plane circled over the new B-46 iceberg, getting a good view here of its front, seaward edge.
LARGE IMAGE		 B-46 is essentially a long slice cut from the front of the Pine Island ice shelf—the floating end of a glacier that is flowing toward the sea. The berg is already cracking into sections that will become separate icebergs. LARGE IMAGE

Moments later, the cracks appeared. Huge, blocky fissures sliced across the giant white layer cake of the Pine Island Glacier, a fast-moving part of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The sound of clicking shutters filled the noisy, drafty cabin of the DC-8. There were broad smiles and exclamations. “It’s so big,” someone said. “It’s incredible,” said another.
Another giant chunk of ice had just broken off the glacier.
As the jet continued its auto-controlled transect line, 1,500 feet over the ice, it crossed the main break—a huge white canyon that marked a detachment point of what was now an iceberg from the rest of the glacier’s floating ice shelf. The new iceberg, named B-46 by scientists, is estimated to cover about 71 square miles, more than three times the size of Manhattan. The cliffs at its edges are 160 to 230 feet high.
“This is a brand new feature,” said Brooke Medley, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “I’m 99 percent sure we are the first people to ever see this with our own eyes.”
Pine Island Glacier sits along the Amundsen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Remote as it is, it’s one of the most famous and studied glaciers in the world—because it’s one of the fastest changing. As the glacier melts, largely due to warm seawater that’s being driven under its floating shelf by changing winds and currents, it contributes significantly to global sea level rise. (Read more about Antarctic melting and sea level rise.)
In September, scientists studying satellite photographs had discovered a crack in the ice shelf. “It’s possible it started before that, but it was in the polar winter then and we don’t have a record of it,” said Medley.
The fissure that separates the B-46 iceberg from the shelf of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. 
The B-46 iceberg is thought to have broken off just a few weeks later, on or around October 27, again according to satellite imagery, said Medley, who is also the deputy project scientist for NASA’s Operation IceBridge. Since 2009, the program has flown highly sensitive instruments over both poles in a variety of aircraft—including the vintage DC-8 used this week—to study how the ice-covered regions are changing as the planet warms.

Rapid breakup
The speed of the iceberg’s break has surprised scientists. And when it calved, “it may have taken smaller bergs with it along the way,” Medley adds.
In fact, the iceberg is so large and fresh, and still so close to the adjacent glacier, that it is hard to take in whole from an altitude of 1,500 feet—imagine flying over Manhattan just a few feet above the tip of the Empire State Building’s antenna.
“It’s difficult to grasp the scale of what we are looking at,” Medley said from her workstation in the DC-8, behind a bank of monitors. “But it’s absolutely stunning. Spectacular.”
In addition to the main ice canyons that mark the berg’s outer boundaries, it’s also bisected by many smaller crevasses, indicating that it’s already breaking up into smaller pieces. Even more fissures can be seen cutting into the glacier itself.
B-46 will likely keep breaking up over the coming weeks, as it is buffeted by wind and currents in the Southern Ocean.
Large sections of B-46 float in front of the Pine Island ice shelf. Scientists worry that the entire ice shelf might one day disintegrate, unleashing the glacier behind it. LARGE IMAGE
Although it’s a large mass of ice, B-46 is hardly the largest in recent memory. In 2015, the Pine Island Glacier—or PIG, as scientists affectionately call it—calved a 225-square-mile iceberg. And in July 2017, an expanse of ice the size of Delaware, some 2,240 square miles, broke off the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. (Learn more about the impacts of warming on the peninsula.)

The global picture
Although such big ice calving events can be purely natural phenomena, they have increasingly drawn attention from the scientific community and public because of their possible links to global climate change. As the world’s land-based glaciers melt with warming temperatures—particularly in Greenland and Antarctica—global sea level is rising. That, in turn, threatens to drown low-lying areas from Florida to Bangladesh.
“Pine Island and the neighboring Thwaites Glacier contribute a large fraction of global sea-level rise, five to 10 percent, even though they only make up about three percent of Antarctica,” said John Sonntag, a NASA Goddard scientist and self-described “weather nerd”, who was also on the fight.
The glaciers that rim Antarctica are buttressed by their floating ice shelves. As those ice shelves melt and break into pieces, they relieve pressure on the vast amounts of inland ice behind them. If entire glaciers were to slough off into the sea, they could eventually raise sea level by tens of feet, with potentially catastrophic implications for human civilization.
In the early 2000s, Pine Island Glacier calved large icebergs roughly once every six years. But in the past five years there have now been four such events. Since the 1970s, the edge of the glacier has retreated tens of miles. Driving all this melting is water that in the Amundsen Sea has warmed by more than a degree Fahrenheit over the past few decades.
“It’s amazing the relevance to our species that this one area has,” Sonntag said.
Medley cautions that it’s difficult to link a specific calving event with long-term change. “That being said, you can look at the frequency of events.”
Glacier behavior is complex and there are significant gaps in understanding. In fact, collecting data to help close those gaps is the main purpose of the day’s flight over the bottom of the world, as part of NASA IceBridge’s austral spring and summer campaign. In particular, the scientists hope to better map the seafloor under the ice shelves (which influences the speed at which the ice retreats), and more precisely work out the densities and masses of the snow and ice (which can influence melt rates).
Preliminary data from the lasers and radar on board the DC-8 suggest B-46 had fractures that went at least 200 feet deep, said Jim Yungel, a NASA Goddard engineer overseeing the instruments on the flight.
For now, it’s hard to say how much the new iceberg may contribute to, or be a symptom of, the wider changes facing West Antarctica.
But, says Medley, “The fact that it broke off so rapidly is concerning.”

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10/11/2018

The End Of The End Of The Earth By Jonathan Franzen Review – Hope In An Age Of Crisis

The Guardian - 

A writer at the top of his game considers climate change, what we can do and what keeps him from despair
Birds are the animat­ing spirits of Franzen’s collection. Photograph: Mihai Stanciu/Alamy 
How is it possible to live with despair? If, in the wake of last month’s horrifying UN report on global warming, you’ve been asking yourself this question, take some solace (or at least solidarity) from the knowledge that you’re not alone.
Jonathan Franzen has been grappling with it for years, and as the final-countdown title of his new volume of essays suggests, his despair at the state of the planet and our absolute inability (“political, psychological, ethical, economic”) to save it is, if anything, deepening.
“I don’t have any hope that we can stop the change from coming,” he says bluntly at the conclusion of his opening essay, and nothing in the following pages suggests he is anywhere close to changing his mind.
But by refusing to hope for the impossible, Franzen, improbably, manages to produce a volume that feels, if not hopeful, then at least not hopeless. There’s nothing he can do – there’s probably nothing any of us can do – to avert or even alleviate the coming catastrophe. But for now, he’s here and he’s alive, and over the course of these essays he offers us a series of partial, tentative answers to the question he poses himself at the beginning: “How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end?”
This is not a collection that wastes time attempting to persuade us of the reality of the climate crisis; frankly, we’re way past that. “Drastic planetary overheating,” Franzen assures us, “is a done deal” – and by the way, we need to revise significantly upward our definition of what “drastic” means. The notional two-degree figure widely cited by politicians as the upper limit of what we, and the planet, could possibly accommodate is a line we’re on course to gallop past in just a few years’ time. By 2100, we may well be looking at a five or six-degree temperature rise, and even then there’s a possibility we’re being lowballed. “The scientist who confidently predicts a five-degree warming by the end of the century,” Franzen suggests, towards the end of the collection, “might tell you in private, over beers, that she really expects it to be nine.” It’s a body blow moment in a book that declines to pull its punches, and Franzen acknowledges that many of his readers – “the people for whom the prospect of a hot, calamity-filled future is unbearably sad and frightening” – might be “forgiven for not wanting to think about it”. But over the course of these essays, he succeeds in demonstrating that resignation brings with it a curious intellectual freedom. His acknowledgment that the macro problem is beyond him allows him to start thinking more creatively about micro solutions: what can be achieved here, now, today.
Jonathan Franzen in Santa Cruz, California, where he birdwatches. Photograph: Talia Herman for the Guardian
Naturally, there’s another way to read his position. Viewed through the other end of the telescope, Franzen’s acceptance of the coming crisis could be seen as an abnegation of responsibility: resignation in terms of action, rather than comprehension; a ducking of the issue that’s just a left-liberal version of the US president’s fatuous claim that the climate will “change back”. It’s an accusation to which Franzen is acutely sensitive, not least because it has been levelled at him before. In the collection’s opening piece, “The Essay in Dark Times”, published as “Is it too Late to Save the World?”, what begins as a fascinating consideration of the role of the essay at a moment of objective peril evolves, via a circuitous route that takes in quitting smoking, birdwatching in Ghana and Trump’s election, into a critical rereading of another essay (“Save What You Love”, also collected here) that he wrote for the New Yorker, some two-and-a-half years earlier. That one was triggered by his fury at the actions of the National Audubon Society, the US’s foremost organisation for bird conservation.
Franzen’s passion for birdwatching is almost as well known as his novels, so to say the Audubon Society was an unlikely target is an understatement. But it was precisely “as a bird-lover” that it attracted his ire. In 2014, the Society had, “with much fanfare”, thrown all its resources into the climate change fight, declaring that global warming was “the number-one threat to the birds of North America”. There’s no question that climate change poses an existential threat in the medium-term, however, “in 2014, the most serious threats to American birds were habitat loss and outdoor cats”. In Franzen’s view, the society’s position was both “narrowly dishonest” and potentially harmful, in that it might discourage people “from tackling solvable environmental problems in the here and now”. He said as much in his essay, was duly denounced as a “climate-change denier”, and retreated in a mixture of shame and regret on the one hand, and injured self-justification on the other. The irony, of course, was that he wasn’t attempting to deny climate change at all: “In fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope for the ice caps.” Rather, he was denying that our current piecemeal, unserious attempts to mitigate it will have any consequential effect, and arguing that therefore we might better expend our efforts on conservation projects whose benefits “are immediate and tangible”.
Where Franzen perfectly strikes the balance between form, content and voice you know you’re in the presence of a master
It’s a complex position, both to articulate and to accept. But it is not, in the years since he first set it out, one that he has backed away from, because it represents the only hope he has left, and the central hope of this collection: that facing the future “honestly, however painful this may be, is better than denying it”. Rather, as these essays show, the conclusion he has come to is that it’s not his position that’s lacking, but his ability to put it across in a way that readers can accept. It’s a challenge to him as a writer: to think harder; to write more clearly and with more sympathy. It’s a question of what the essay, as a form and specifically in his hands, can do.
Sightings to live for … a king penguin. Photograph: Alamy
And it’s a challenge to which he rises. This isn’t a flawless collection: there are uneven moments, and occasional longueurs. There are also – and I say this as a bird-lover – a whole lot of birds. They are the animating spirits of the collection, flitting and rustling through the essays, and Franzen ably makes the case both for their hold over him and their symbolic significance (“If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world”). But as the pages turn and the feathers pile up, it becomes harder and harder to keep the murres, taikos and storm petrels straight in your head – or, finally, to invest too deeply in the differences. Yet there are essays in which the balance between form, content and voice is perfectly struck, and when you reach one of those, it’s clear that you’re in the presence of a master. The opening essay, in which the idea of the essay itself is held up to the light, is a thing of supple, compelling intelligence, and by placing “Save What You Love”, his piece on the Audubon Society, after his retrospective analysis of its weaknesses, he effectively contextualises it, and allows us to read it for what it is: a teasing-out of complex arguments that refuses to reach for satisfying but reductive conclusions.
Then there’s the title essay, which comes fittingly at the collection’s close, brings together all of its strands (climate change, humanity, thinking, writing, birds), and is simply a delight. In it, Franzen weaves together, lightly but tightly, two narrative threads: his expedition on a cruise ship to Antarctica, and the life of his uncle Walt, whose unlooked-for bequest paid for the trip. The timelines diverge wildly (the trip takes a couple of weeks; Walt lived to a ripe old age) but by combining them, Franzen expertly shows how they speak to each other. They’re both stories about death: Walt, we learn, “lost his daughter” (in a car crash in her 20s), “his war buddies, his wife, and my mother” before mortality caught up with him; the Antarctic is both a death zone, the literal and metaphorical end of the world, and, thanks to climate change, dying itself. But read on, and we find that the real resonance between the two tales is the urgent case they make for the worth and beauty of life. Walt survived his tragedies, kept faith with the world, and “never stopped improvising”; in Antarctica, Franzen comes face to face with a king penguin in the wild, and finds that it “seemed to me, in itself, sufficient reason not only to have made the journey; it seemed reason enough to have been born on this planet”. It’s the work of a writer at the top of his game – limber and lovely, delivering deep insights with delicacy and grace – and it poignantly makes the only case for climate action that has any chance of succeeding: that there is so much worth living for. “Even in a world of dying,” Franzen concludes, “new loves continue to be born.”

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How Climate-Change Fiction, Or “Cli-Fi,” Forces Us To Confront The Incipient Death Of The Planet

New Yorker - 

An online collection of speculative short stories explores and gently transfigures the incomprehensible realities of climate change. Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
Amazon
Warmer
Series

As part of its ongoing “Original Stories” series, Amazon has assembled a collection of climate-Warmer”—containing work from a Pulitzer Prize winner (Jane Smiley) and two National Book Award finalists (Lauren Groff and Jess Walter), among others—offers ways of thinking about something we desperately do not want to think about: the incipient death of the planet.
change fiction, or cli-fi, bringing a literary biodiversity to bear on the defining crisis of the era. This online compilation of seven short stories, called “
There is something counterintuitive about cli-fi, about the fictional representation of scientifically substantiated predictions that too many people discount as fictions. The genre, elsewhere exemplified by Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow,” brings disaster forcefully to life. But it is a shadowy mirror. Literature has always been a humanist endeavor: it intrinsically and helplessly affirms the value of the species; its intimations of meaning energize and comfort. But what if there is scant succor to be had, and our true natures are not noble but necrotic, pestilential? We have un-earthed ourselves. Yet we claim the right to gaze at our irresponsibility and greed through fiction’s tonic filter. The stories in “Warmer,” which possess the urgency of a last resort and the sorrow of an elegy, inhabit this contradiction. They both confront and gently transfigure the incomprehensible realities of climate change.
The collection starts in the near future and marches forward chronologically. The first two entries, “The Way the World Ends,” by Walter, and “Boca Raton,” by Groff, sketch our “before” or “before-ish” purgatory: weather systems in rebellion—a “swirling, greasy snow” in central Mississippi, rashes of hurricanes—but their effects pale in comparison to what characters dread is to come. (Catastrophes hinted at in some of the stories serve as backdrops for subsequent ones, as if to fold “now,” “soon,” and “after” into one continuous descent: an unhurried extinction-in-progress.) In Walter’s contribution, a hydrogeologist in her late thirties contemplates the idiocy of freezing her eggs when “one hundred percent of legitimate climate scientists believe the world to be on the verge of irreversible collapse.” In Groff’s story, a mother berates herself for having a daughter—a “terrible mistake she had made out of loneliness. The sheer selfish stupidity of bringing a child into the beginning of the end of the world as humans know it.” Both authors summon a sense of frustration and crashing despair, and an anguished appreciation for the beauty of life as it is, which proves inseparable from the beauty of the lie that life will stretch on forever. One must give up on such beauty—one must not have children—and yet the tranquilizing pleasure of the world forbids it. After a storm, a student in Walter’s story notices “the clarity and richness, the way the air is imbued with moisture and the colors—the sky a soft white-blue, like a thing forgiven.”
Groff’s and Walter’s pieces are present-day snapshots; the next several tales in “Warmer” plunge the reader into “during” and “after”—climate change has further distorted society, and the collection’s aura of literary realism veers toward the speculative. Here, work from Jesse Kellerman, Edan Lepucki, and Sonya Larson conjures the oppressiveness of the heat, the desperate thrill of opening a freezer at the store. (“It used to get chilly right before dawn, Daddy told me. . . . Shiver was a word you could use.”) There are economies in which water is replacing cash; the lone, brilliant apparition of a tree; school classrooms where teachers of an older generation pine for what they lost, preaching activism and environmental responsibility to dirt-poor students. The stories think through details. (What would the billionaires do? Start a space colony.) And they feel through specific emotional textures, asking us to empathize with the generations we are now cursing through inaction. (In an Op-Ed for the Times, Michelle Alexander wondered whether Americans would approach the climate crisis differently if they believed in reincarnation.) Several authors foresee deep demographic rifts; hardened young people regard adults with contempt, confusion, and bitterness. (This is presaged in Groff’s tale, when a toddler stands “in the middle of the room, sucking her finger and glaring at her mother with her dark eyes.”) The ranks of those who can live comfortably are profoundly thinned. On Larson’s Long Island, the prospect of owning a fur coat seems laughable: Where would the animal come from? Where would the money come from? Where would the cold weather come from?
Kellerman’s entry, “Controller,” takes the form of an experiment, with climate as the independent variable. The same story unfolds three times, on the same January day, but at different temperatures. The subtle gradient alters details, down to whether a dog is alive or dead, and determines the pitch of the characters’ rages and resentments. (“The air had changed, no longer a palliative billow but deafening and full of wrath. . . . He might yet bend her to his will.”) The mechanics of the piece gesture at one reason that climate change can prove so tricky a literary topic. We metaphorize nature endlessly, converting its phenomena into reflections of ourselves. This process feels as unconscious as translating oxygen into carbon dioxide; it is difficult to pry out the autonomous meaning of the sky and the ground, to fight environmental battles on their own terms. For Groff (whose ocean, an alien wakefulness “chewing darkly on the sand,” should defy human comprehension, and yet is readily understood as avarice or mortality), our epistemic failures echo a failure to act, to respond. They have the weight of a spiritual failure. “She knew that she could not save her daughter, that there would be no saving,” Groff writes, borrowing the language of doomsday cults. “She would be left behind among the disappointed.”
Taken together, the stories in “Warmer” raise the question of whether a poetics of climate change exists. As with gun violence, the crisis demands a form of literary expression that lifts it out of the realm of intellectual knowing and lodges it deep in readers’ bodies. Novels about mass shootings often incorporate black humor, the dispersal of meaning through repetition, and a flat or deadened tone. The works in this collection feel less consistent in mood or manner, but they are similarly occupied by a shared set of challenges: the bigness, the unknowability, of the looming transformations, and how surreal it all seems, and how the author or reader might chart a path between hope and hopelessness. (“It’s one thing to hear adults say there’s no Santa,” a college kid thinks, in Walter’s story. “But to hear there’s no Future?”) Walter offers encouragement in the form of a student who suggests that “you shouldn’t give up hope until you’ve done everything you can.” Groff seems to counter that all we can do is still not enough. As a whole, the collection clears a space between these two poles, in which the meaning of “enough” deforms like melting ice. Perhaps, after the elephants and the whales all die, it is enough to forestall the drowning of Hong Kong. Perhaps it is enough to see snow. “Enough,” as the stories progress, keeps contracting: into the ability to walk outside; into a bowl of mint-chip ice cream; into “oil floating on top” of a polluted lake, forming “little rainbows, swirling away in delicate circles.”
The irrepressibility of this “enough” is not surprising. Literature has long celebrated the flare of beauty in impoverished circumstances; it consoles us with echoes of our own resilience. Even Groff’s story cannot walk away from art. Rather, it achieves a wild, morose fineness, like an El Greco painting. To read “Warmer” is to remember that many people are kind and caring, and to see the last gasps of our life on Earth infused with tragic meaning. But one wonders whether fiction is capable of telling a different story, one in which an intelligent pandemic ravages a planet and destroys itself in the process. Such a tale—non-hominal, untellable—is an asymptote, but Jane Smiley’s “The Hillside” may inch closest. Smiley’s protagonist, a horse, befriends one of the last surviving humans in a lush equinocracy bounded by wasteland. The teen-age human is interesting and mischievous. She appears to plan ahead and to feel affection, but, during the winter, she disappears, and is found in springtime with her throat torn out. “The grass was thin but green,” Smiley writes, “and a few herbs were emerging here and there.” High Note, the horse, is preparing to have a foal. The human is lying at the base of a hill. “High Note stared at her and walked away.

The Art of Understanding Climate Change

Through murals, drawings, and augmented-reality pieces, artists are raising awareness of the imminent threat that climate change poses to the survival of Miami.

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African Islands Call For Help As Climate Change Worsens Health

Reuters - Nellie Peyton

Dakar: African island states say they need more help to cope with the health impacts of climate change, from worsening nutrition to a resurgence in mosquito-borne disease.
Droughts and unpredictable weather patterns are resulting in tough times for African farmers. Credit: New York Times
At least 23 per cent of deaths in Africa are linked to the environment, the highest of any region worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
This figure is expected to rise as global warming disrupts food supply, water sources and weather patterns, said Magaran Bagayoko, WHO's director of communicable diseases in Africa.
Access to clean water is an ongoing – and growing – problem in many parts of Africa. Credit: Bloomberg
Island nations in particular are already struggling to deal with the consequences, he said, speaking from a conference in Gabon on health and the environment where delegates from across Africa will devise an action plan.
"There is a very direct link between the impact of climate change and the cost of healthcare," said Jean Paul Adam, health minister of Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
The island paradise of the Seychelles has joined the call for climate help. Credit: Shutterstock
A disruption in rainfall patterns over the last 10 years has raised the costs of preventing dengue fever, a mosquito-borne virus endemic to Seychelles, he said.
Dengue outbreaks used to happen only during the rainy season, which lasted a few months a year. Now, rain is unpredictable and comes year round, as does the disease, he said.
"With the disruption of rainfall, dengue is now persistent and continuous," Adam said. "Resources are being diverted towards having to be in a constant state of readiness."
Mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and zika are expected to become more common, since the mosquitoes that spread them thrive in warmer climates, scientists say.
But mosquitoes are not the only problem.
Climate change causes floods and storms, which can lead to water-borne diseases such as cholera, and diet-related problems through drought and declining food stocks, experts said.
Cape Verde, a group of islands off the west coast of Africa, has struggled with severe drought in recent years and has worked hard to stave off hunger, said health minister Arlindo Rosario.
As local agriculture suffers, people are eating more imported food, which brings a variety of other health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, he said.
"Climate change hits small countries in a lot of ways," Rosario said.
"I think that when we talk about the impacts of climate change, there should be an international fund for health."

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative