New Michael Moore-Backed Documentary On YouTube Reveals Massive Ecological Impacts Of Renewables

Forbes - Michael Shellenberger

Michael Moore produced "Planet of the Humans" about the eco-impacts of renewables. Getty Editorial and Jeff Gibbs, Planet of the Humans

Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.

But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.



“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore told Reuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.”

Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.

In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.

But the apocalyptic rhetoric detracts little from the heart of the documentary, which exposes the complicity of climate activists in promoting pollution-intensive biomass and natural gas.

The film unearths a great deal of information I had never seen before. It shows Apple’s head of sustainability, former EPA head Lisa Jackson, claiming on-stage at an Apple event, “We now run Apple on 100% renewable energy,” to loud applause.

But Gibbs interviews a scientist who researched corporate renewables programs who said, “I haven’t found a single entity anywhere in the world running on 100% solar and wind alone.” The film shows a forest being cut down to build an Apple solar farm.

After Earth Day Founder Denis Hayes claims at a 2015 Earth Day concert that the event was being powered by solar, Gibbs goes behind the stage to find out the truth. “The concert is run by a diesel generation system,” the solar vendor said. “That right there could run a toaster,” said another vendor.

The film also debunks the claim made by Elon Musk that his “Gigafactory” to make batteries is powered by renewables. In fact, it is hooked up to the electric grid.

“Some solar panels are built to only last 10 years,” said a man selling materials for solar manufacturing at a corporate expo. “It’s not like you get this magic free energy. I don’t know that it’s the solution and here I am selling the materials that go in photovoltaics.”

“What powers a learning community?” said MicKibben at the unveiling of a wood-burning power plant at Middlebury College in Vermont. “As of this afternoon, the easy answer to this is wood chips. It’s incredibly beautiful to look at the bunker of wood chips. Anything that burns we can throw in there! This shows that this could happen everywhere, should happen everywhere, and must happen everywhere!”

The film reveals that McKibben and Sierra Club supported a Michigan ballot initiative that would have required the state get 25% of its electricity from renewables by 2025, and that the initiative was backed by biomass industrial interests, and that efforts to build a biomass plant at Michigan State University were hotly opposed by climate activists — including ones from 350.org.

In reality, scientists have for over a decade raised the alarm about biomass and biofuels causing rainforest destruction around the world including Brazil and Malaysia, and have documented that, when one takes into account their landscape impacts, the fuels produce significantly higher carbon emissions than oil and gas and may produce more than coal.

In 2016, McKibben wrote an article for Grist.org where he argued against burning biomass to produce electricity.

The film shows Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla telling Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” that his biofuels plant made “Clean green gasoline.” After Stahl asked what the downside was, Khosla said, “There is no downside.”

One year later, Khosla’s company filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on a $75 million loan it received from the state of Mississippi. It produced biofuels for $5 to $10 a gallon — “even without counting the cost of building the plant,” noted Washington Post’s Steve Mufson in 2014. Two earlier Khosla biofuel ventures had already gone bankrupt after receiving hundreds of millions of federal government subsidies. Shareholders sued Khosla’s company for fraud.

“Planet of the Humans” notes that Al Gore personally accepted fossil fuel money in 2013 when he and a co-owner sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, which is state-funded by Qatar, the gas-exporting nation whose citizens have the largest per capita carbon footprint in the world.

One year earlier, Gore had said the goal of “reducing our dependence on expensive dirty oil” was “to save the future of civilization.”

The film shows Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” asking Gore, “You couldn’t find, for your business, a more sustainable choice?”

“What is not sustainable about it?” responded Gore.

“Because it is backed by fossil fuel money?” said Stewart.

As part of the agreement, Gore reportedly received $100 million. Climate activists weren’t bothered by it. “I don’t think the community is too upset,” a politically active environmentalist told The Washington Post about Gore’s deal with Qatar. “My personal sense is he got a good deal.”

Gore’s business partner, David Blood, “turns forests into profits,” notes Gibbs.

The main problem with biofuels—the land required—stems from their low power density. If the United States were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.

Even the most efficient biofuels, like those made from soybeans, require 450 to 750 times more land than petroleum. The best performing biofuel, sugarcane ethanol, widely used in Brazil, requires 400 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as petroleum.

Publicly, Kennedy, McKibben, and Brune promoted solar panels as an alternative to fossil fuels. “There were days where Germany was generating 80 percent of its power from solar,” said Mckibben. In reality, wind and solar provided just 34 percent of German electricity in 2019, and Germany relies upon burning natural gas, coal, and biogas from corn.

“In the Green Century Fund, recommended by 350.org,” reports Gibbs, “I found less than one percent solar and wind and 99% things like mining, oil and gas infrastructure, a tar sands exploiter, McDonald’s, Archer Daniels... Coca-Cola… and lots of banks, including Black Rock, the largest financer of deforestation on earth.”

“The plants that we are building, the wind plants and solar plants, are gas plants,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told oil and gas investors. About another project, Ivanpah, he said, “It’s a turbine that we just take from a gas plant and suspend it from a big scaffolding, a tower and surround it with giant mirrors in the desert.”

Building the Ivanpah solar farm resulted in the deaths of hundreds of old desert tortoises. “Deserts are not dead,” said the filmmaker. “They are in fact full of ancient life.”

The film points to the massive materials requirements of renewables.

Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste. “You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” said one expert, “instead of just playing pretend. We’re basically just being fed a lie.”

The man noted that Koch Industries provide many of the materials used to build solar panels and industrial solar farms. “The funny part is that when you criticize solar plants like this you are accused of working for the Koch brothers,” he laughs. “That’s the idiocy. This relies on the most toxic industrial processes we’ve ever created.”

What drives people who believe they want to save the environment into destroying it? The filmmaker hints that the desire for “sustainability” is really a desire for a kind of immortality. “What differentiates people is that we know we’ll die someday,” says a sociologist. “We enveloped ourselves in belief systems and worldviews.”

“People on the left and the right who think we’re going to be able to solar panel ourselves into the future,” he says, “I think that’s delusional.”

The good news, the man says, is that “once you come to terms with death, anything is possible.”

Links

• New documentary 'Inner Climate Change' focuses on effects of Climate Change and Consciousness
• Pop Culture And Climate Change
• Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
• 2040
• Ice on Fire
• Chasing Coral

The Age Of Stability Is Over, And Coronavirus Is Just The Beginning

The Conversation - Wolfgang Knorr

Troutnut / shutterstock

Author Wolfgang Knorr Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University

Humanity has only recently become accustomed to a stable climate. For most of its history, long ice ages punctuated with hot spells alternated with short warm periods. Transitions from cold to warm climates were especially chaotic.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth suddenly entered into a period of climate stability modern humans had never seen before. But thanks to ever accelerating emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, humanity is now bringing this period to an end.

This loss of stability could be disastrous. If the coronavirus pandemic can teach us anything about the climate crisis it is this: our modern interconnected global economy is much more vulnerable than we thought, and we must urgently become more resilient and better prepared for the unknown.

After all, a stable climate underpins much of modern civilisation. About half of humanity depends on stable monsoon rains for food production. Many agricultural plants need certain temperature variations within a year to produce a stable crop, and heat stress can damage them greatly. We rely on intact glaciers or healthy forest soils to store water for the dry season. Heavy rains and storms can wipe out the infrastructure of whole regions.

These are the sorts of climate impacts that we know about, and have been extensively studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the biggest risk may yet come from climate-related chaos that we did not expect.

Impossible heatwaves – in consecutive years

In 2018, a prolonged heat wave and drought hit much of western and northern Europe and decimated much of the potato harvest in the region. Temperatures in my native Germany reached record highs in a summer that was drier and hotter than in many parts of the Mediterranean. Climate models had predicted Europe’s most extreme heat increases would occur in Greece, Turkey and Ukraine, so the odds of such a heatwave seemed impossibly low.

The Rhine dries up: Germany, July 2019. Friedemann Vogel / EPA

Only one year on, in 2019, western Europe was struck by another “impossible” heat wave. In Germany, with temperatures topping 40°C, the record of the previous year was broken twice. Even in the Netherlands, known for its cool sea breeze even at peak summer, peak temperatures exceeded a searing 39°C.

Huge wildfires arrived decades early

A large part of Australia’s forests are concentrated in the south-east of the country. This valuable ecosystem evolved with fire and thus is supposed to burn frequently. In these natural fires, typically 1-2% of the area is consumed by flames.

Massive bushfires arrived decades before the models predicted. Mick Tsikas / EPA

Wildfire and climate models – including one I worked on myself – did predict a large increase in bushfire activity in the forests of south-east Australia. But they predicted this would happen towards the end of this century. The models certainly did not foresee that megafires wiping out as much as 20% of these forests would strike as early as 2020.

Locusts are a climate crisis

In the long term, the IPCC predicts crop yields will decrease by around 10% or more, but to date it has ignored the possibility of large-scale pest outbreaks, which can wipe out entire harvests.

At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the Arabian peninsula experienced much wetter weather than normal, likely owed to ocean warming. This created conditions that enabled numbers of desert locusts to explode.

Fighting the locusts in Somaliland, March 2020. Daniel Irungu / EPA

This unusual event was followed by another, a storm that shifted most of this locust army, now several hundred billion strong, to East Africa. In Kenya, it became the worst such outbreak for more than 70 years. With the rainy season just arrived and seeds sown for the next cropping season, it is now feared that continued breeding of the locusts will create a second wave that will be far worse than the first one.

Climate scientists tend to focus on slow changes with their climate predictions. But how much the weather becomes more chaotic is notoriously difficult to predict with climate models. We also have only a very superficial understanding of how vulnerable our modern society is to climate chaos and unexpected climate-related events.

Instead of seeing the climate problem as one felt by the next generations, we need to start focusing on what could happen tomorrow, or next year. To do that, we must better understand, appreciate and acknowledge the vulnerability of modern society – and address this vulnerability at its core.

Links

• Why the Indian Ocean is spawning strong and deadly tropical cyclones
• Coronavirus shows we are not at all prepared for the security threat of climate change
• Nature’s comeback? No, the coronavirus pandemic threatens the world’s wildlife
• We climate scientists won’t know exactly how the crisis will unfold until it’s too late
• Richer countries must do more to help those already experiencing the climate crisis
• Climate scientist: our profession is letting down humanity – we must change the way we approach the climate crisis
• Weathermen of Westeros: does the climate in Game of Thrones make sense?

There’s Less Than A Decade Left Before Climate Change Becomes Irreversible—Here’s What Activists Say We Can Do About It

Hello Giggles - Morgan Noll

Scott Heins, Getty Images

In recent years, the climate change conversation has advanced beyond the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” catchphrase.

Though individual lifestyle changes can have a positive impact over time, the youth activists at the forefront of the climate movement aren’t leading climate strikes in order to get the everyday individual to switch to reusable straws.

 They’re showing up with demands for government officials and policymakers to put people over profit, raise their voices to ask leaders to care about the future of the planet, and communicate a common message: We’re running out of time.

Zero Hour, an education-focused youth climate and environmental justice movement, has a running countdown on the homepage of its site. Less than nine years and 253 days remain on the clock.

That’s how much time is left before the worst impacts of climate change will be irreversible, according to a 2018 special report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though so much of the climate movement is made up of children and teenaged activists who may not even be eligible to vote yet, they’re pushing for immediate government action because of this sense of urgency.

“A lot of us feel like we have no choice, because we feel like unless we do it, who else is gonna do it?” says Ivy Jaguzny, the 18-year-old press lead for Zero Hour.

If you’re not immersed in the movement, however, the information can be daunting—and it can be hard to figure out exactly what you can do. So we asked climate activists to break down the most important climate justice policies, how to check candidates on their environmental agendas, and how to join the movement.

Their answers boiled down to two main initiatives: getting the Green New Deal worked into the country’s infrastructure and getting fossil fuels out.

So, what is the Green New Deal and why does it matter?

Mike Kemp, Getty Images

The idea of a “Green New Deal” has been around for a while. Investopedia reports that Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman coined the term in a New York Times column in January 2007, where he argued for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy through government action.

The name is a reference to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic programs—the New Deal—which he designed as a response to the Great Depression.

Since the idea was first conceived, the Green New Deal has become somewhat of an umbrella term for environmental policies, with various politicians adding interpretations of the deal to their platforms. In recent years,

 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has brought widespread attention to the Green New Deal by putting it at the center of her platform, introducing a policy package in Congress in February 2019.

The 14-page document calls for a “10-year national mobilization” plan that aims to rework current U.S. infrastructure in order to transition to 100% clean and renewable energy. Those 10 years weren’t selected at random: The plan is a direct response to that 2018 report mentioned above, and it’s a proposed answer for beating the clock—and avoiding the point of no return.

As The New York Times reports, the Green New Deal also “calls on the federal government to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions; create high-paying jobs; ensure that clean air, clean water, and healthy food are basic human rights; and end all forms of oppression.”

The Green New Deal is central to the platform of Sunrise Movement, a youth-powered organization dedicated to fighting climate change and creating “millions of good jobs in the process,” as its website reads.

Ritwik Tati, a 16-year-old coordinator for the South Jersey hub of Sunrise Movement, says the group is dedicated to both advocating for and educating people on the policy package.

He likes to explain, however, that the Green New Deal is a vision rather than a specific piece of legislation.

“[At Sunrise Movement,] we’re not necessarily having people unpack what the Green New Deal specifically is and what each climate policy is, but making them understand that we need an aggressive climate solution,” Tati says.

Any climate legislation that aligns with the values of the Green New Deal can be considered a part of it, Tati says. Those values include things like efforts to provide living wages for workers and protect marginalized communities, in addition to more climate-specific policies like bans on fossil fuels and fracking.

Climate activists like Tati also emphasize how important it is to understand climate change as an intersectional issue, one that is as connected to systemic racism as it is the environment.

At Zero Hour, Jaguzny says that they see the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as somewhat of a “dress rehearsal,” showing all of the issues the climate crisis will exacerbate if it’s not addressed.

When we talk about the climate crisis, Jaguzny says, “we don’t talk about the people [who] are actually being hurt by this, which is working people, Black and Brown people, Indigenous people, [and] the same people [who] are being [disproportionately] affected by COVID-19.”

Like the current pandemic, Jaguzny says the climate crisis is going to put pressure on our infrastructure and healthcare system and that, if we’re not prepared, “the people [who] are most vulnerable in this country are going to be really negatively impacted.”

She believes that implementing the Green New Deal is the way to be prepared because of how it addresses the underlying systems of oppression that cause and perpetuate the crisis.

One way the Green New Deal does this is in how it plans for a just transition. The plan acknowledges the fact that many workers will lose their jobs if fossil fuel industries are taken down.

So, a just transition makes sure that these workers—many of whom are from low-income, marginalized communities—aren’t simply laid off and ignored, but are supplied with the training and resources to access jobs in the clean energy industry. The plan also pushes for those jobs to offer benefits and living wages.

If implemented, climate activists believe the Green New Deal could provide a holistic approach to reversing the climate crisis. But there’s one major thing standing in its way.

Lukas Schulze, Getty Images

“The biggest thing blocking a Green New Deal is the investment in fossil fuels,” Jaguzny says.

The environmentalism movement has long advocated for a ban on fossil fuels due to their negative impact on the environment.

When fossil fuels are burned, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the environment, making them a primary contributor to global warming and climate change, according to National Geographic. To make matters worse, fossil fuel companies are significant stakeholders in the climate conversation, which can halt any large-scale progress.

Climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa has seen this dynamic play out firsthand. Siddiqa was one of the lead organizers of the September 20th New York City Climate Strike, which attracted 250,000 people, according to Vox. “We did all of our homework,” she says. “Me and my peers worked day in, day out for three entire months planning.”

At the age of 21, Siddiqa says she’s learned things that people usually learn in their late thirties, things like: how to get a permit for an event, how to write a press release, how to lobby. She and her peers put in tireless work to gain momentum for the protests and the climate movement. Then, a few days later, the U.N. Climate Action Summit happened.

“We came in with packets of information that we wanted to say, and we were met with Instagram influencers, people teaching us how to use Photoshop and Adobe Flash Player at the U.N. And policy was not even spoken about,” Siddiqa says.

The same thing happened a few months later at COP25, the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Climate activists showed up, ready to talk policy, and they were shut out from having serious conversations. And Siddiqa has a pretty a good idea for why this happened: COP25 was sponsored by some of Spain’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters and fossil fuel companies.

“If you can understand what’s happening, it’s actually very scary,” Siddiqa says. “The body of government, the place where decisions are supposed to be made, are being sponsored by fossil fuels. How in the world are you supposed to expect actual change if the same people responsible for causing the damage are [controlling the decision-making]?”

The short answer? You can’t. That’s why Siddiqa co-founded Polluters Out, an organization fighting for a conflict of interest policy that would remove the influence of the fossil fuel industry from the places where climate decisions are made.

So, what can you do to support these movements?

Brenton Geach, Getty Images

For starters, you can join them. Polluters Out, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour all have various options on their site for those who are interested in taking action to fight climate change. Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, and Fridays For Future are more groups with goals to fight the climate crisis.

Siddiqa also urges people to sign Polluters Out’s petition, which demands that “Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), refuse funding from fossil fuel corporations for COP26.”

On a more local level, Tati recommends that people focus on getting their elected officials to sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. The pledge is intended to get politicians to refuse to take any contributions over $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists, or PACs.

Jaguzny also wants to see a commitment from the government to stop bailing out fossil fuel companies when they’re in debt and to start holding them accountable.

“Stop giving these companies tax breaks. Stop allowing them to destroy communities and not pay for it,” she says. “The effects of fossil fuels are local, like there are local communities all over the United States that are being hurt by these companies and the companies don’t do anything. They just turn away.“
So Jaguzny’s advice for individuals is to help raise awareness about how these companies are affecting their local communities and to put the pressure on their local governments to divest from fossil fuels.

When it comes to selecting a candidate to endorse or vote for, Tati says that Sunrise Movement looks for “climate champions,” candidates who support the Green New Deal and have shown a commitment to climate legislation in the past.

This election cycle, the movement has endorsed Senate candidates like Kentucky State Representative Charles Booker, former Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Andrew Romanoff, and Senator Ed Markey (who sponsored the Green New Deal alongside AOC).

As far as the presidential election goes, with Bernie Sanders now out of the race, Tati says, “I think it’s important that we see that a [Joe] Biden presidency is exponentially better than a Trump presidency, even if it doesn’t align with the goals of the climate movement.”

Biden doesn’t see that as top priority, however./ “Focusing on congressional elections and state legislature elections [are] more important because we may have a Democratic president in office, but none of this progressive policy can be passed without a Congress that is more progressive and is majority Democrat,” Tati says.

Below is a checklist of what Tati and Jaguzny believe a climate champion candidate should look like.

A climate champion candidate:
 
1. Supports the Green New Deal
Though there is some room for interpretation with the Green New Deal, Tati says it’s important not to compromise for a less aggressive version.
This would be one that involves changes, like allowing for a more lenient timeline on reducing emissions, or one that compromises any of the fundamental values which prioritize people over profit.
For example, Tati explains that some Democrats (like Nancy Pelosi and Biden) are advocating for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which, according to the IPCC’s timeline, will be too late.

2. Supports a ban on fracking and divestment from fossil fuels
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting natural gas and oil by fracturing the earth with pressurized liquid.
Though some argue that fracking natural gas is a cleaner option than drilling for oil or coal, climate activists argue that the health risks far outweigh any comparative benefits.
According to Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organization, fracking can cause a serious threat to local water resources, and some of the chemicals used in the process have been identified as cancer-causing contaminants.
A 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances also found that infants born within about two miles of fracking sites are more likely to suffer from poor health.
As far as divestment from fossil fuels goes, Jaguzny wants to see candidates “acknowledging that the era of fossil fuels is ending and acknowledging that we really cannot get anywhere if we’re still hanging onto fossil fuels.”

3. Supports an economy that is driven by small businesses and localized production
“One thing that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear is that having these huge multinational corporations running the show isn’t economically sustainable, and as soon as any pressure is applied it totally falls apart in a crisis,” Jaguzny says.
She argues that an economy driven by local businesses is far more sustainable, since there’s no shipping overseas or exploitation of workers in other countries.

4. Supports universal healthcare
“Climate change is a healthcare issue,” Tati asserts. “And if we don’t have Medicare for all, the Green New Deal won’t be able to sustain itself.”
The Environmental Protection Agency put out an analysis in 2017 of the impacts of climate change on human health. The findings showed correlations with medical issues like heatstroke, respiratory illness, and an increased risk of the spread of disease.
“The severity of these health risks will depend on the ability of public health and safety systems to address or prepare for these changing threats, as well as factors such as an individual’s behavior, age, gender, and economic status,” the report reads.

5. Shows a willingness to pay for the demands of the Green New Deal
Jaguzny says she’s heard countless legislators tell her, “We can’t pay for your demands.” Based on things like the recent federal relief package and other ways she’s seen the government pull together resources, she says, “We see that and we kind of call bullshit.”
AOC has made it clear that the Green New Deal will be expensive, but she argues that the economic benefits will outweigh the costs. Though the specific costs of the policy package aren’t entirely clear, some evaluations have aligned with AOC’s argument.
For example, the Green New Deal advocates for a smart power grid for the entire country. A 2011 study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that this could cost as much as $476 billion, but it could lead to $2 trillion in benefits.

6. Uplifts marginalized voices
Tati emphasizes the importance of endorsing a candidate who gives voice to underrepresented communities, especially Indigenous communities.
“Not only did we steal land that wasn’t rightfully ours” from them, Tati says, but Indigenous communities have also historically shown a deeper connection with the environment.
“We need to make sure that their voices are represented and that they have a stake in this.”

Links

• These 7 women are the eco-warriors fighting for our future
• Going Green Without Going Mad
• Zero Hour
• IPCC - Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5 ºC
• Why young climate activists have captured the world’s attention
• Green New Deal (pdf)
• What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained
• Sunrise Movement

The First Three Months Of 2020 Are Already Nearing Temperature Records

Quartz - Michael J. Coren

Records keep on falling

Get ready for a hot one. The first three months of 2020 are now the second-hottest on record going back to 1880, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

That lines up with the last decade of warming. This March marks the 423rd consecutive month that temperatures have exceeded the 20th-century global average. Last year was the second hottest on record, according to NOAA, following 2016. All five of the warmest years have been recorded since 2015.

The first three months of 2020 are already nearing temperature records 

Monthly temperature anomalies above 20th-century global averages (2000-2020)

Quartz | qz.com Data: NOAA

The early heat makes it virtually certain that 2020 will place in the ranks of the hottest years. Global land and ocean surface temperatures were 2.09°F (1.16°C) above average. 

Records were set across the globe, particularly in eastern Europe and Asia, where temperatures were 5.4°F (3.0°C) above average.

How much hotter is it going to get? Global climate models have proved remarkably accurate, and the world is now running closer to those projected by Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 2015. 

Cities will feel the heat sooner: Temperatures in cities such as Moscow, London, Seattle are expected to shift from temperate to sub-tropical, rising 3.5° C to 6° C above normal, according to 2019 research in PLOS One.

Globally, research suggests we’ll see close to 2°C warming by the end of century, even in the most optimistic scenario. And that’s not the path we’re on.

In 2015, scientists introduced “shared socioeconomic pathways” reflecting different ways the world might evolve along key indices such as population, urbanization, and economic growth. 

We’re now far closer to what modelers refer to as the “regional rivalry — a rocky road” scenario, reflecting more nationalism and reduced cooperation. That scenario has global temperature rising more than 4 °C above pre-industrial averages.

Links

• NOAA: March 2020 global temperature second warmest on record
• 2019 was 2nd hottest year on record for Earth say NOAA, NASA
• Should we expect each year in the next decade (2019-2028) to be ranked among the top 10 warmest years globally?
• Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming
• How hot will Earth get by 2100?

(US) The Western U.S. Is Locked In The Grips Of The First Human-Caused Megadrought, Study Finds

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman | Darryl Fears

Only one drought in the past 1,200 years comes close to the ongoing, global warming-driven event

Water levels at the Ward Creek Reservoir in Grand Mesa, Colo., have gone down in recent years because of persistent drought conditions. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

A vast region of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, is in the grips of the first climate change-induced megadrought observed in the past 1,200 years, a study shows.

The finding means the phenomenon is no longer a threat for millions to worry about in the future, but is already here.

The megadrought has emerged while thirsty, expanding cities are on a collision course with the water demands of farmers and with environmental interests, posing nightmare scenarios for water managers in fast-growing states.

A megadrought is broadly defined as a severe drought that occurs across a broad region for a long duration, typically multiple decades.

Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds.

Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, compares modern soil moisture data with historical records gleaned from tree rings, and finds that when compared with all droughts seen since the year 800 across western North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region.

The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense.

Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific.

“The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years.

“I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.”

The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one.

Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.”

That conclusion is a first, says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the new study.

“They are the first to show conclusively that we’re experiencing our nation’s first megadrought of the instrumental era,” he said via email.

“The real take home,” Overpeck said, “is that the Southwest is being baked by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, and the future implications are dire if we don’t stop climate change.”

Looking for a megadrought, only to find it’s already here

Fire crews look for remaining hot spots left over by the Getty Fire, which destroyed a dozen homes, during the early morning hours in Brentwood, Calif., in October. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post

In 2015, Cook took part in a study that predicted a megadrought would grip the American Southwest starting about 2050 and persist for 35 years, with a few wet years to break long dry spells.

At the time, California was experiencing a severe four-year drought. As it dragged past a fifth year, Cook and others asked a question: “Are these changes in drought patterns that we expected in the future already beginning to happen?”

They then set out to answer that question.

For the study, the authors started from scratch, analyzing tree-ring data rather than relying solely on archived information. They took apart calculations already in the record and modified them where needed. Not only was a megadrought happening, they concluded, it had been in progress since the turn of the century.

The same year that Cook and other researchers published their first study, a Stanford University scientist, Noah Diffenbaugh, led a separate study that said rising temperatures and significant declines in snow and rainfall will parch California for years to come.

Diffenbaugh, a professor and senior fellow who studies the Southwest, had also analyzed data showing that the region was becoming hotter and drier. He said Thursday’s study, which he was not involved with, is a breakthrough because of its comparison of droughts in the past two decades to those in the previous thousand years.

“Placing the two-decade period in the whole region in the context of the last millennium is very striking, very powerful,” Diffenbaugh said. “We can conclude that without the warming, this period would not have produced such a severe, regionwide drought.”

What this means for the West

Valerie Trouet, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, says that the megadroughts of the past brought about major societal impacts, particularly those that persisted for decades.

For example, the megadrought seen in the late 800s is thought to have instigated the downfall of the Mayan civilization. The severe drought in the 16th century may have contributed to the Chichimeca War in Mexico, during which Native Americans and European settlers fought for decades.

“All of these past megadroughts have had severe impacts,” Trouet said in an interview. “We can expect there to be societal impacts now, too.”

These effects may not be as devastating in the future, however. Modern humans have more ways to adapt, Cook said.

“There are a lot of things we can do about it. People in the West are dealing with this drought in a number of ways,” Cook said.

California has already provided a model for living in a warmer and drier region, although it has involved sacrifice at times. Amid its drought in 2015, the state took aggressive steps to preserve water and limit wildfires on thirsty land with varying success. Former governor Jerry Brown (D) imposed the first water restrictions in state history and declared that watering lawns was going to be “a thing of the past” in California.

Water utilities essentially rationed supply, telling residents to dramatically cut the minutes they showered to no longer than 12 and all but mandating more efficient machines for laundry and dish washing.

Utilities encouraged homeowners to purchase new appliances with rebates subsidized by the state, water bills spiked and penalties were imposed on any household that went over their limits. Neighbors spied on neighbors who washed cars, watered grass and sprayed driveways, all outlawed.

A swimming pool contrasts with the drought-dried landscape in East Porterville, Calif., in 2015. With access to water limited, the pool's owner doesn't drain it, instead using chemicals to keep it clean. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

East Porterville, Calif., in the Central Valley became a town without water. A church set up a shower trailer so residents whose wells went dry could wash. The state placed water tanks outside homes so their toilets would flush. Laundering clothes, washing hands and brushing teeth became luxuries.

The drought and the drive to save water had environmental consequences, as well. It resulted in the death of trees that improved air quality, provided animal habitats and beautified urban areas across California. Urban trees joined about 12.5 million wild trees that died in dry California forests during 2015’s drought, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Such serious drought effects happened with only about 1 degree Celsius of warming since the industrial revolution, Diffenbaugh said. “The impacts we’ve already seen from one degree of warming really highlights the intensification of what’s coming,” he said.


Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Links

• Two degrees Celsius: Extreme climate change has arrived in America
• Climate change made a southwestern U.S. drought one of the worst in 1,200 years
• Climate change: US megadrought 'already under way'
• US Drought Could Last A Century As We Now Enter A Megadrought, Study Finds
• US megadrought is being made more intense by effects of climate change
• Southwest Drought Rivals Those of Centuries Ago, Thanks to Climate Change
• The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds

(US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming

New York Times - Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Addressing climate change is a big-enough idea to revive the economy.

A home in Baton Rouge, La., near an ExxonMobil oil refinery. Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute. She has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the creation of the Green New Deal. Gunn-Wright was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2013.

On the last Friday in March, I lost hope. I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness — I am too black for that — but in our sheer animal will to survive.

Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power.

But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in.

Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal — a proposal that I helped create — was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need.

I was furious. Of the nearly $2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, $500 billion went toward a business-relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty-eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas.

The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats — emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers — were modest.

The senators I saw did not mention those things. Nor did they mention that the airlines had requested $50 billion after spending $45 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years.

They did not mention that emissions reductions requested would not be required until 2025 or that when they were, the reductions would be less than 3 percent per year. And no one stood up and asked why corporations should be exempt from loan terms when the rest of us are not.

Why is it “opportunism” when we try to design policy that would address more than one problem at a time, but it’s “efficiency” when businesses do the same? (The final version of the CARES Act does not provide targeted funding for fossil fuels and reduced the aid for passenger airlines to $25 billion. None of the climate policies mentioned were included in the final version of the bill.)

Covid-19 and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected our problems are. Congress and the Federal Reserve are not going to lay out trillions of dollars, over and over, in perpetuity.

Refusing to include measures related to climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee of other opportunities to do so later.

We need to design the stimulus not only to help the U.S. economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.

Pandemics like the coronavirus may occur more often when climate change is unabated. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread of disease. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission.

 Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more virulent pathogens. The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.

Similarly, the same populations that are bearing the brunt of the health and economic effects of the coronavirus are the same populations that bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution — which, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to serious complications.

In three of the states with the highest number of Covid-19 cases — Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana — African-Americans made up 40 to 70 percent of deaths from the disease, far outpacing the percentage of black people in each state. Many of the black communities ravaged by Covid-19 are “front-line communities” — where residents live adjacent to heavily polluting industries.

If you’re black or Latinx — and especially if you’re poor — it is difficult not to live in a front-line community. Oil, gas and petrochemical industries have concentrated so heavily in low-income, majority-black-and-brown areas that black people are 75 percent more likely to live near industrial facilities than the average American.

Metro Detroit, the epicenter of Michigan’s Covid-19 outbreak, is home to steel mills, waste-processing plants and the only oil refinery in the state — all in or near low-income, black and Latinx neighborhoods.

The people most likely to die from toxic fumes are the same people most likely to die from Covid-19. It’s like we are watching a preview of the worst possible impacts of the climate crisis roll right before our eyes.

Emissions from the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit have been an ongoing concern for the neighborhoods within its range.  Credit...Erin Kirkland for The New York Times

Leaders on both sides of the aisle have argued that folding policies to address climate and environmental injustice into coronavirus-related legislative packages would distract from efforts to provide immediate relief.

But addressing climate change and environmental injustice will not diffuse efforts to address the virus and its economic fallout if we apply intersectional policies such as the Green New Deal.

They are designed to address connected issues in a way that protects the most vulnerable while building a more just and sustainable economy. Some states have already begun to connect the coronavirus to climate action. New York, for example, passed the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act on April 3.

The legislation comes on the heels of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — sometimes referred to as New York’s Green New Deal. And if New York’s response is any indication, none of this appears to have detracted from efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Addressing climate change doesn’t have to slow down the economic recovery, either. In fact, it can push it forward. No one knows the depth of the recession, but it is hard to see how we will put the 16 million people who have filed for unemployment back to work without significant public investment.

If history is any indication, rebounding from an economic disruption this large requires an equally large spike in demand and production.

Outside of war, climate change is the only issue large enough to provide such a spike. Now is the time to create policies that provide immediate relief to communities, such as federal assistance to transition homes and businesses to renewable energy; give “green” fiscal aid to states; and fuel economic recovery with the creation of federally funded green jobs. But none of this can happen so long as our leaders keep convincing themselves that the greatest country in the world cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

A climate-focused economic recovery — much less a coronavirus response that acknowledges the climate crisis — could require a new Congress and a new president, a tall order in an America this divided.

But maybe it is time to stop acting as though politics is a force of nature when we are facing actual and deadly forces of nature. It’s past time to elect leaders who are fit to handle the crises we face, instead of hoping for problems small enough to fit the leaders we have.

The Americans I know would like to survive, even if it means our country has to evolve — which many of us have been ready for long before the pandemic.

Links

• How Climate Change Increases Our Risk For Pandemics
• U.S. airlines want a $50 billion bailout. They spent $45 billion buying back their stock.
• House Democrats would give airlines, contractors $40 billion bailout
• How might climate change affect the spread of viruses?
• Climate change and health: Impacts and risks
• Unpacking New York's Big New Climate Bill: A Primer

(AU) We Just Spent Two Weeks Surveying The Great Barrier Reef. What We Saw Was An Utter Tragedy

The Conversation - Terry Hughes | Morgan Pratchett

Author supplied

Authors Terry Hughes Distinguished Professor, James Cook University Morgan Pratchett Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – the third in just five years.

Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.

Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record.

Since then we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events – and more temperature records broken – in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.

This year, February had the highest monthly sea surface temperatures ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since the Bureau of Meteorology’s records began in 1900.

Source: Australian Academy of Science.

Not a pretty picture

We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef region. Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.

The accuracy of the aerial scores is verified by underwater surveys on reefs that are lightly and heavily bleached. While underwater, we also measure how bleaching changes between shallow and deeper reefs.

Of the reefs we surveyed from the air, 39.8% had little or no bleaching (the green reefs in the map). However, 25.1% of reefs were severely affected (red reefs) – that is, on each reef more than 60% of corals were bleached. A further 35% had more modest levels of bleaching.

Bleaching isn’t necessarily fatal for coral, and it affects some species more than others. A pale or lightly bleached coral typically regains its colour within a few weeks or months and survives.

The 2020 coral bleaching event was the second-worst in more than two decades. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

But when bleaching is severe, many corals die. In 2016, half of the shallow water corals died on the northern region of the Great Barrier Reef between March and November. Later this year, we’ll go underwater to assess the losses of corals during this most recent event.

Compared to the four previous bleaching events, there are fewer unbleached or lightly bleached reefs in 2020 than in 1998, 2002 and 2017, but more than in 2016. Similarly, the proportion of severely bleached reefs in 2020 is exceeded only by 2016. By both of these metrics, 2020 is the second-worst mass bleaching event of the five experienced by the Great Barrier Reef since 1998.

The unbleached and lightly bleached (green) reefs in 2020 are predominantly offshore, mostly close to the edge of the continental shelf in the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef. However, offshore reefs in the central region were severely bleached again. Coastal reefs are also badly bleached at almost all locations, stretching from the Torres Strait in the north to the southern boundary of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

CC BY-ND

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors. The north was the worst affected region in 2016, followed by the centre in 2017.

In 2020, the cumulative footprint of bleaching has expanded further, to include the south. The distinctive footprint of each bleaching event closely matches the location of hotter and cooler conditions in different years.

Poor prognosis

Of the five mass bleaching events we’ve seen so far, only 1998 and 2016 occurred during an El Niño – a weather pattern that spurs warmer air temperatures in Australia.

But as summers grow hotter under climate change, we no longer need an El Niño to trigger mass bleaching at the scale of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve already seen the first example of back-to-back bleaching, in the consecutive summers of 2016 and 2017. The gap between recurrent bleaching events is shrinking, hindering a full recovery.

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

After five bleaching events, the number of reefs that have escaped severe bleaching continues to dwindle. Those reefs are located offshore, in the far north and in remote parts of the south.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to lose corals from heat stress, until global emissions of greenhouse gasses are reduced to net zero, and sea temperatures stabilise. Without urgent action to achieve this outcome, it’s clear our coral reefs will not survive business-as-usual emissions.

Links

• I studied what happens to reef fish after coral bleaching. What I saw still makes me nauseous
• 'This situation brings me to despair': two reef scientists share their climate grief
• Attention United Nations: don't be fooled by Australia's latest report on the Great Barrier Reef
• (AU) Scientists Trial Cloud Brightening Equipment To Shade And Cool Great Barrier Reef
• Big Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef Are Dying
• More Than Half Of Remote Reefs In Coral Sea Marine Park Suffered Extreme Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef Found To Be Coral Bleached From North To South For First Time
• Rescuing The Great Barrier Reef: How Much Can Be Saved, And How Can We Do It?
• Climate Crisis May Have Pushed World's Tropical Coral Reefs To Tipping Point Of 'Near-Annual' Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef’s Latest Bleaching Confirmed By Marine Park Authority
• (AU) Climate Change The Biggest Threat To Great Barrier Reef: Ley