Women Are The Ones Fighting The Tough Environmental Battles Around The World

ThinkProgress - Marlene Cimons*


Three women, three stories.
In Papua New Guinea, the Carteret islands are drowning in the rising sea. The people who live there traditionally have relied on taro for food, but the plant has become increasingly difficult to grow as salt water floods the fields. "Our shorelines are eroding so fast, and there are frequent storm surges," says Ursula Rakova via Global Greengrants Fund, an international environment fund that supports grassroots environmental actions. "The rising sea levels have gotten so bad that one of the islands is disappearing really fast…We can't hold back the sea. It will do its part. It's already doing its part. It's displacing us."
In response, Rakova initiated a process that relocated 86 people — comprising seven families — to higher ground on the mainland, in Bougainville, on four parcels of land donated by the Catholic Church. But the elders don't want to leave the island. So Rakova and others from the community are finding ways to grow crops in their new location and bring it back to those still living on the atoll.
* * * Her name is Aleta Baun, but they call her "Mama" Aleta. She lives on Indonesia's Timor Island, where the forests and the mountains are rich in natural resources, including oil, gas, gold and marble. For years, mining companies had taken the marble without consent, polluting rivers, destroying forests, and eroding the very identity of the community.
Finally, when they tried to plunder Mutis Mountain, which lies at the intersection of the island's major rivers, which supply water to the indigenous Mollo people, Mama Aleta decided enough was enough.
With the tribal elders' approval, she organized more than 150 women in the region to sit at the mine's entrance with their looms. They stayed, peacefully weaving their traditional tapestries, blocking entry. During the year-long protest, their men took on the domestic chores, including cooking, cleaning and caring for the children. The youngsters served as "runners" and brought the women food from home.
Ultimately, the miners gave up and left.
"The philosophy of our people is that we regard the Earth as our human body," she explains in a video provided by Global Greengrants, which is supporting Mama Aleta's campaign. "That stone is our bone. Water is our blood. Land is our flesh and forest is our hair. If one of them is taken away, we are paralyzed."
* * * Sasolburg, in South Africa's Vaal Triangle, home to Caroline Npaotane, is a city long dominated by the large petrochemical company Sasol. It is an economic mainstay for the town, supporting many facets of its infrastructure. Yet it also is polluter that emits carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and benzene, among others — a noxious stew that has caused widespread health problems for residents who live nearby, including Npaotane's daughter. When her child began suffering repeated nosebleeds and breathing issues, Npaotane became an activist, with Global Greengrants support, leading a successful campaign to enact new air quality standards.
"You feel intimidated, because you're just a community member,'' she told Parliament when testifying in favor of the new law. "You're not a doctor or a scientist. But you don't need to be a doctor or scientist to know when you know your kids are suffering."
* * *

Ursula Rakova, left. CREDIT: Global Greengrants Fund

Three women, three stories. But these three represent thousands of other women globally who are engaged in local battles against climate change and other environmental conflicts, often at significant personal risk and with great courage. These women understand that the struggle for environmental justice also is a fight for gender equality, land rights, economic and cultural rights, and food security, among other things, and that local activism can be a critical portal to the political process and policy decision-making.
It seems fitting to recognize them on International Women's Day.
"Climate change is a women's issue largely because the current world economic framework puts women at a disadvantage," says Osprey Orielle Lake, co-founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), an international climate justice-based organization that involves women in sustainability issues, social and economic justice and policy advocacy. "There is a clear link between poverty and who gets impacted by climate change."
"Women make up the greatest percentage of the world's poor," she adds. "Indigenous women and those in developing countries have a direct reliance on nature, so when we have droughts, and heat waves and flooding, this increases the stress on millions of women world-wide, often due to gender roles — the responsibility to provide food, water and firewood for their families."

Climate change is a women's issue largely because the current world economic framework puts women at a disadvantage.

These women don't necessarily self-identify as feminists or activists; rather, they are fighting for the survival of their communities and their people, and to preserve their heritage. They may not be as high-profile as other women who speak out and work visibly in the climate change policy movement, but they are no less important in effecting change.
"When I hear about grass roots climate activism, it reminds me of the Civil Rights movement," says Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian climate scientist who directs the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. "We had Martin Luther King Jr. who gave inspirational speeches — and we had Rosa Parks. We need both. We need the Martin Luther Kings to give us the vision, the overall picture. And we need the Rosa Parks of the world to refuse to give up their seat on the bus."
Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian who often speaks about the realities of climate change to Christian groups, stresses that climate change is an issue that affects women disproportionately, particularly at the local level, often in matters related to food, water and health. "How climate change affects us depends on the ways we are vulnerable, which are specific to the location where we live," she says. "We see a large number of engaged women on the local scale, whether it's in Africa, the Philippines — or Texas."

Aleta Baun, center. CREDIT: Goldman Environmental Prize

Mama Aleta's community, for example, had fought the miners for decades, unsuccessfully. "The traditional ways of defending their land were not working," says Ursula Miniszewski, Global Greengrants' gender and environment officer. "They had marches. They tried negotiating with the companies, but the companies weren't interested in engaging with the communities at all."
As it always has been for those involved in controversial movements, her activism put her in constant danger. "Mama Aleta was targeted — she was attacked with a machete, but escaped," Miniszewski says. "None of this deterred her. She is unrelenting."
Not everyone, however, has been so fortunate. Last week, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran woman who organized the indigenous Lenca people in a successful grassroots battle against construction of the Agua Zarca Dam — and winner of last year's prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize — was murdered by unknown assassins who snuck into her home after she had fallen asleep.

Berta Caceres at the banks of the Gualcarque River in the Rio Blanco region of western Honduras where she, COPINH (the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) and the people of Rio Blanco have maintained a two year struggle to halt construction on the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric project, that poses grave threats to local environment, river and indigenous Lenca people from the region. CREDIT: Goldman Environmental Prize

The dam project she opposed would have cut off the water supply, as well as access to food and medicine, to hundreds of Lenca people, effectively ending their ability to sustainably manage and live off of their land. In 2013, she initiated a road blockade to prevent access to the dam site which lasted more than a year and ultimately ended the dam company's construction efforts. One of her colleagues was killed during the protest, and she had been the recipient of countless death threats.
"I have an advantage in regards to other women in the fight. I come from women, my mother, my grandmother, very revolutionary, feisty," she said in a Global Greengrants audio interview. "My children were raised with that…. For them, it is very important, the environmental cause…" She also spoke poignantly of the intimidation, calling it an affront "to my physical integrity, emotional integrity…and to the organization I work for."
Undaunted by her own narrow escape from death, Indonesia's Mama Aleta fights on. She now is working with communities across West Timor to map their traditional forests in order to protect their indigenous territorial rights from future development, according to the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which awarded her its prize in 2013. She also is seeking economic opportunities for the villagers through sustainable farming, and through initiatives that can produce income from weaving and other activities.
It is not unusual for women in these communities to develop approaches that are unique to the problems within their own communities. "I visited a women's farming collective in Tanzania, and they talked about how weather changes were messing with their crop rotation, and their seasonal calendar," Miniszewski says. "They got together with another women's collective nearby to exchange information, and decided to try alternative ways of food storage."
Worried that their food sources would disappear, they learned to preserve their food through drying. "This was something they hadn't had to do before," says Miniszewski. "They didn't have access to information about climate change, or even call it climate change. It was more 'OK, we're going to adjust and adapt to this.' There are women all over the world who are adjusting and adapting on a daily basis."

Caroline Npaotane. CREDIT: Global Greengrants Fund

Elsewhere in Africa, WoMin (African Women United Against Destructive Resource Extraction), has aligned itself with more than 60 organizations committed to bringing a gender perspective to issues related to fossil fuel extraction and climate change, and is working in nine countries to mobilize women to challenge coal development and promote alternatives. This past week, they have been holding a women's rights activist "building" school in Johannesburg to teach women from seven African countries about women-led campaigns against coal extraction, as well as issues related to energy and climate justice.
"The climate justice question, linked to the fight against fossil fuels and for energy justice, is a critical one for African women," says Samantha Hargreaves, the director of WoMin. "This is because they bear the immediate impacts of fossil fuels extraction and combustion on land and water, the major communal resources from which women create livelihoods for families and communities."
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, WECAN, in collaboration with SAFECO (Synergy of Association of Women in Congo), has been training Pygmy women of the Itombwe forest (a rainforest in the Congo Basin) since 2014 to create conservation projects and reforest land that has been damaged as a result of clear cutting.
"In the last six months, they have planted over 7,000 trees," Lake says. "The goal is to plant 20,000 trees." WECAN, which is providing funding for the trees, nurseries and training, also has supplied small, hand-held solar-powered light devices "to replace the need for cutting trees for light," Lake says, adding:

These women are thrilled. The pygmy women have become empowered. They're gone from seeing no way out of their poverty to planting these trees, which, among other things, are providing fruit – and it's been revitalizing and renewing for them.

Also, today in Puyo, Ecuador, women climate leaders organized by WECAN and Amazon Watch, will stand with the Sápara and Kichwa indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon to protest the government's decision to sign a contract with the Chinese oil corporation Andes Petroleum. The agreement gives the company rights for oil exploration and extraction in two areas that overlap the traditional lands of the Sápara and Kichwa. The people there — led by local women — have been fighting for decades to preserve their land.
"We thought it was perfect on International Women's Day to uplift these brave women who literally put their bodies on the line to protect these rainforests," Lake says.
The protestors have asked citizens around the world to support their efforts by signing a petition to the government of Ecuador.
On International Women's Day last year, Global Greengrants introduced a resource for philanthropies and other organizations to understand the importance of local environmental activism on the part of women which includes case studies and practical tips.
Thus, despite disproportionate suffering from the impacts of climate change, as well as life-threatening attacks for their environmental activism, these women are at the forefront of global efforts to combat the effects of global warming and environmental destruction. "They are on the frontlines trying to heal our world," Lake says. "So many of the women we work with will tell you: 'We are not the victims. We are the solutions.'"

*Marlene Cimons is a freelance writer who specializes in science, health and the environment.

Links

• Utilities cut coal use amid clean power plan fight | Climate Central
• How broadcast networks covered climate change in 2015 | Media Matters
• Oil and gas industry has pumped millions into Republican campaigns | …
• After COP21: 7 key tasks to implement the Paris Agreement | WRI

What's the Answer to Climate Change?

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

It's not enough to let the market handle it or depend on geo-engineering.

There is one convenient thing about climate change: The problem of global warming poses so many threats, and emerges from so many causes, that there's not one single solution for it.
This is convenient because it means you can work on a lot of different angles and still help the underlying problem. If every American stopped eating meat tomorrow, the situation would immediately begin to improve but it wouldn't be solved; ditto if every coal plant worldwide was shut down tomorrow. Even in that crazy-go-nuts mitigation scenario, we'd immediately be a lot better off, but there would still be work to do.
So thinking about climate change requires a two-mindedness among those who want to pitch in to work against it—or who just want to be educated voters on their city, country, or planet. On the one hand, we have reached the point where climate change will arrive regardless of what we do. Climate change is vast, hopeless, horrifying, anxiety-inducing, and imagination-staggering. On the other, it's a challenge without parallel in human history: a vast, fascinating, thrilling, inspiring, mind-bending opportunity.
Many revere the Enlightenment thinkers for turning the high ideals of equality and justice into concrete political institutions (even as they and their contemporaries invented race and justified chattel slavery). But if converting ideals into institutions is an admirable challenge, don't worry: Now we have to do it too. On a global scale. Inventing as we go. No biggie.

How big is the problem? Here is the basic climate-change mechanism: Cars, trucks, planes, power plants, factories, and farming techniques release certain gases into the atmosphere; these gases build up over time and trap more heat
than other kinds of gases would; this extra warmth forces the climate—the sum of weather everywhere—to change, making it more energetic (since heat is just energy) and wily and destructive.
Now, some scientists disagree over how bad climate change has already gotten, and some claim that pre-2100 global warming will be much worse than predicated, but neither of those disagreements are about the general principle—and the general principle is what matters when it comes to addressing climate change with policy.
So that's the problem. How might we solve it?

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ANSWER
Climate change is finally getting solved. Last year, 189 nations adopted the Paris Agreement, the first treaty to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that includes not only the rich West but the rapidly industrializing East (namely China and India). It's not perfect, but it will send a "a critical message to the global marketplace," to quote Secretary of State John Kerry, that it's time to pull out long-term investment in fossil fuel companies.

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QUESTION
That first part is unmistakably true: We are living the first hopeful years for climate change in memory. But maybe the Paris Agreement only seems optimistic when it's compared to the recent past, when the world—and especially the United States—did almost nothing to stop the warming atmosphere. Examine the details of this recent progress and it still looks pretty paltry.
The Paris Agreement talks an ambitious game, but it has no mechanism to force anyone to do anything. And given the fragility of the domestic politics here in America, where the EPA's signature climate-change regulation was just stopped, what's to keep the United States from reneging on its larger Paris promise? And if the United States backs out, won't China and India follow?

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ANSWER

But it doesn't even matter if the United States fulfills its plan, though. The cost of clean power is plunging. Soon, solar could be as cheap or cheaper than natural gas—it already is in some places.

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QUESTION
Sure, but there's no rule preventing clean power and dirty fossil fuels from co-existing. Check the situation in Texas, where wind generated more than 10 percent of the energy mix last year—but coal constituted 36 percent. And even when the news on climate seems wholly good, it somewhat relies on White House-supported policies. For instance, lots of Americans are building rooftop solar panels on their houses with the help of the recently extended federal solar-tax credit. Yet Nevada once had a friendly solar policy too—until earlier this year, when it reversed them and literally made solar taxes retroactive.
Will future administrations help bring clean energy into the world as much as the current one has? Some of the cost reductions in solar and wind power

have come from government-research funding, after all. If the United States stops implementing its climate policies, will the cost of solar and wind creep up again?

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ANSWER
The problem isn't just climate change—it's ceaseless growth. If people ever want to live in symbiosis with the environment, they have to kick our 200-year addiction to growth and also probably capitalism. In the short term, they'll also have to cut back steeply to keep places like Bangladesh from drowning.

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QUESTION
Some (but not all) environmentalists are beginning to argue a line like this. It's a line with little partisan shading, at least here in the U.S.: Neither Democrats nor Republicans support contracting the economy. It's also a view with many advocates but without a consistent policy. You can find de-growthism in many forms: Naomi Klein advocates for a kind of global socialism, while others imply that drastic, short-term cuts are the only way will curtail carbon emissions fast enough.
In today's populist political climate, are such cuts possible—even on the multi-decade level? Will Americans be able to live with the consequences of such cuts, much less accept or sustain them?
Even anti-growth advocates are honest about their fall-out: "Not only will our standards of living almost certainly drop, but it's likely that the very quality of our society—equality, safety, and trust—will decline, too," writes Daniel Immerwahr, in an article calling for the abandonment of growth. In a country with both entrenched, institutional racism and a nuclear-armed military, who will suffer most from that decline?

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ANSWER
The market will solve this problem, just like it solved expensive air travel, pre-Internet communication, and the sleeveless blanket.

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QUESTION
As Republicans try to criticize climate regulation while accepting climate science, they turn to some variant of this line. I think there are two knocks against it—one more facile than the other.

The first is that, you know, if private industry was going to step up and address the climate crisis, it maybe should have done it already. Greenland's ice sheet is sliding toward the sea, and Miami Beach is a lost cause: Where is the market?

But worse, I think, is that this is more or less the tack that governments have chosen to take. Governments have incentivized some pathways to green energy more than others, but the world's approach is to move some assets around—to send that "critical message to the global marketplace"—and then tell business to figure the rest out. Is that process working fast enough? Should the residents of small Pacific islands, vulnerable to sea-level rise, be satisfied with the progress of the markets?
Would the market move faster if it didn't get these signals? The evidence so far, by the way, seems to prove the opposite. When the Obama administration set new fuel-efficiency standards for cars in 2012, manufacturers welcomed the move. A single, shared standard let all companies compete on the same framework and gave them investment targets to plan on. Would they have made the same improvements—which have resulted in greenhouse-gas savings equal to the Clean Power Plan—if they weren't pressed?

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ANSWER
We shouldn't even worry about these questions now. Geo-engineering will fix this for us: Using negative emissions technologies, we'll suck carbon out of the atmosphere; and until we perfect that technique, we'll depress global temperatures by seeding the atmosphere with sulfate aerosols.

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QUESTION
Let's look at sulfates first: They're chemicals that would depress global temperatures for about 10 years and, in the meantime, reflect enough sunlight away to stave off some warming. Who should get to decide it's time to release them? How should we geo-engineer the planet in ways that are democratic? Which percentage of countries should get to decide how weather in all countries works? What if some countries declare that they can never support such a technology? Oliver Morton, an Economist editor who wrote a book on geo-engineering, has told The Atlantic that he worries far more about politics than the techniques themselves:

What I really worry about with geoengineering is that conflict over its use will lead to a greater conflict that leads to a nuclear war […] because we don't even know if anyone's going to try geoengineering, but we know the wherewithal to have a nuclear war is out there in the world already.

And what about carbon-scrubbing the troposphere? In some ways, it's easier than sulfate deployment, as more countries and companies might get behind returning the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. But the most promising method—carbon capture and storage—isn't ready for industrial deployment yet. How much should we risk the health of the planet for an unproven commercial technique?
Indeed, an Oxford University study found that the most efficient way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in the next 50 years isn't some fancy technology. It's trees.

* * * 

This is only a tour of some of the solutions to climate change floating around. None is both adequate and likely. So maybe it's better to think in terms of management: How can the crisis be slowed, halted, and reversed as soon as possible? And how can you use your time and attention to help humanity along that path?
What's the role of individuals in fighting climate change? Should they change their own routines to reduce their emissions, cutting red meat and dairy—however small those consequent savings may be—or is that kind of activism meaningless compared to political involvement?
"Growth" is now a mandate for American politicians, even as the country's natural rate of growth seems to be slowing. But is the improvement of quality-of-life for most people best measured through gross domestic product? As the climate warms, should we find aims other than constant growth in order to sustain a healthy society and livable planet?
What kind of society and democratic government will be best positioned to handle resource scarcity and the sequential emergencies associated with the now-inevitable consequences of climate change? How can we bring about that society? What kind of global governance will be needed?
And most important of all: Can the world both manage climate change and avoid its worst cataclysms, like hideous famines, mass migrations, surveillance-powered authoritarians, and World War III?

How Climate Change Killed The Dinosaurs' Underwater Cousins

The Conversation - Valentin Fischer

The last ichthyosaurs. Andrey Atuchin, Author provided

Imagine dolphins disappearing from the world's oceans as a result of prolonged climate change and slower evolution. As shocking and unlikely as such an event might be, it happened in the past to a group of marine animals: the ichthyosaurs.
These "fish-reptiles" were an iconic group of marine predators from the dinosaur era – and the ichthyosaurs underwent the most profound modifications to become fast, efficient swimmers. They evolved a shark-like body shape, their limbs transformed into muscular paddles, and they had some of the largest eyes in the entire animal kingdom, presumably to seek out and hunt prey in deep or turbid marine settings. About a hundred ichthyosaur species are currently known, covering a 157m-year reign in the ancient oceans that ended around 90m years ago.
But ichthyosaurs mysteriously met their demise long before the mass extinction of 66m years ago that claimed the lives of non-avian dinosaurs, ammonites and a series of other ancient creatures.
Two theories have previously been put forward to explain the out-of-the-blue extinction of the ichthyosaurs. First, increased competition from other marine predators, especially new, fast-moving and fast-reproducing fish. Second, that their food disappeared. The last ichthyosaurs were thought to rely only on one type of food – small belemnite cephalopods. And so when these underwent a partial extinction about 94m years ago, ichthyosaurs soon followed.

Diversity question
These two theories have one point in common. They are based on the idea that there wasn't enough diversity among ichthyosaurs for the group to respond to minor changes in competition and food. More diverse groups are more varied in their physical characteristics so can more easily survive changing circumstances and environments.
But we now know that the fossil record indicates the last ichthyosaurs actually were very diverse. To close this long-standing enigma, my colleagues and I at the University of Oxford studied ichthyosaur diversity during the last chapter of their history, which occurred during the Cretaceous period (145m to 66m years ago). We reconstructed the fluctuation in the number of ichthyosaur species and their feeding capabilities, as well as their evolutionary and extinction rates.

Ichthyosaur fossil. Zach Tirrell/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

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We found that ichthyosaurs were highly diversified in the Cretaceous, and that several species with distinct physical structures and ecological niches (ways of surviving in their environment) existed simultaneously. Some evidence even suggests that they had never been more diverse in the previous 120m years of their history.
But, at the same time, our analyses indicated that ichthyosaurs had never evolved more slowly. In fact, only a few novel species and body shapes evolved during this lenghty period. This possibly indicates that ichthyosaurs simply were well adapted to their Cretaceous environments and didn't need to evolve much further. The key point, however, is that the previous theories about ichthyosaur extinction can't explain this pattern of diversity.
We then looked at what we know was happening to the global environment by reviewing evidence of changes in things such as sea surface temperature and sea levels. And we found that increased ichthyosaur extinction rates coincided with higher sea level and sea temperature volatility (by how much they changed). This gave us the first evidence of global environment change driving ichthyosaur extinction. And this extinction happened in two phases, separated by about 5m to 6m years.

Global climate change
These events didn't happen in a void. A vast series of extinctions and accelerated evolutions in other marine groups took place precisely during the extinction of ichthyosaurs. These changes affected almost all of the marine ecosystems, from coral reefs to the homes of large predators.
On top of that, these events coincided with profound climatic changes: fast-moving continents, intense volcanism, ice-free poles and episodes of anoxia (absence of oxygen) on the sea floor. So the extinction of the ichthyosaurs appears to be part of a much larger event that was probably triggered by global environmental changes.
Our new work supports a growing body of evidence suggesting that a major, global series of events profoundly reorganised marine ecosystems at the beginning of the Late Cretaceous, about 94m to 100m years ago. This gave rise to the highly peculiar and geologically brief Late Cretaceous marine world. Not only did the ichthyosaurs disappear in the course of this change, but numerous lineages of bony fishes and sharks also evolved. We are currently expanding our research to many of these other marine groups, in order quantify these changes and their links with ancient global climate change.

Links

• Which species will survive the Earth's sixth mass extinction?
• Ancient 'dead seas' offer a stark warning for our own near future
• Found: the dinosaur that survived mass extinction
• How life on Earth recovers after a devastating mass extinction

NASA Study Shows Worst Drought In 900 Years May Be Behind Middle East Upheaval

news.com.au

The civil unrest behind the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, and the rise of Islamic State, may be rooted in the region’s worst drought in 900 years.

THE incredibly complex chaos of Islamic State and the upheavals of Syria and Iraq may have a very simple cause: The region’s worst drought in 900 years.

A NASA study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres shows the Middle East is in the grip of a mega-drought that began in 1998. It has taken hold in Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.
The water shortage has been taking a steadily increasing toll on farmers and the region’s ecology, with crop failures, dust storms and record-breaking heat now an annual event.
But the true extent of the drought is only now becoming clear.
“The range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the recent drought in the Levant region stands out as about 50 per cent drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10 to 20 per cent drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years,” a NASA statement reads.

Syrian refugees carrying what they can in search of a better life — and rain? Source: AFP

Fingerprints in the rain
NASA climate scientists have been mapping a database of the Mediterranean and Middle East’s tree rings — the pattern in which a plant’s new growth is laid upon itself each season — spanning several thousand years.
Tree rings are a kind of ecological fingerprint.
Each band reveals how much water the tree has been taking in, and how optimal conditions were for growth.

When a tree goes through a period of drought, the bands get thinner. The more thin bands, the longer the drought.

Mapping when — and where — these trees were suffering water starvation offers an opportunity to understand the natural variation in the areas weather.
“If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human caused climate change contribution,” says lead author of the study Ben Cook.
In the case of the Middle East, a wide-reaching drought spanning more than 15 years has not been seen for more than 900 years.
Historical documents dating from 1100AD were used to corroborate the accuracy of the tree-ring map.

Abnormally persistent drought, outlined by the dark brown and black spots in the top map, as compared with the averages for similar periods dating back over the past 1000 years. Source: Geophysical Research — Atmospheres

No rain, no escape
The flood of refugees out of the Middle East and into Europe is a natural consequence of the conditions, the study infers.
Historically, when there is drought in the Eastern Mediterranean, there is no escape to the west. Both ends tend to suffer at the same time.
Which generates cause for conflict.
“It’s not necessarily possible to rely on finding better climate conditions in one region than another, so you have the potential for large-scale disruption of food systems as well as potential conflict over water resources,” says co-author Kevin Anchukaitis.
But the patterns established over thousands of years do suggest refuge: To the north.
When eastern North Africa is dry, Greece, Italy, France and Spain tend to be wet. And vice-versa.

A Turkish tank looks across the border to the north Syrian city of Kobane during its siege by ISIS early last year. Source: AFP

Devil in the detail
From these patterns, the NASA scientists were able to identify the engines behind the Middle East’s weather: The North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic Pattern.
These regular wind patterns over the Atlantic are themselves driven by oceanic currents and temperatures.
Periodically they push rainstorms away from the Mediterranean, instead causing long dry winds to circulate in their place.
The NASA research shows that this time, however, the drought is different.
Its behaviour does not match the patterns clearly established over the past thousand of years.
“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” climate scientist Yochanan Kushnir states in the NASA release.

Even if Every Nation Meets Its Pledge to Fight Climate Change, We’re Still Fried

Motherboard - Brian Merchant

If every nation that has so far pledged to cut down on its carbon emissions made good on its promises, the global average temperature would still rise 3.5˚ Celsius by the end of the century. According to a new study from MIT Sloan and Climate Interactive, even with the hard-won commitments from nations around the world, we’re still on track for “catastrophic” levels of planetary heating. If, that is, the governmental targets aren’t stepped up, or paired with other aggressive efforts.
In advance of the upcoming climate talks in Paris this year, which many consider the world’s best shot at cementing an agreement to limit global warming, nations have begun submitting what are known in UN-speak as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).
These are basically declarations of intent for how a given country aims to reduce or mitigate its carbon emissions—Norway, for instance, is pledging to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. The US is aiming for a 28 percent CO2 reduction by 2025. China, meanwhile, again made waves when it announced it would match the US’s fuel efficiency standards and launch a new cap-and-trade system for reducing pollution as part of its plan.
It should speak to the scope of the climate problem that even with all those reduction commitments on the books, we’re headed for what scientists say are civilization-threatening levels of warming. To reach that conclusion, MIT rounded up all such pledges that are on the books, and analyzed the total impact they’d have on temperature rise.
The study concludes that the commitments, if fulfilled, will indeed make a serious difference—they will prevent an entire 1˚C of temperature rise—but that they won’t prevent the global thermostat from spiking past 2˚C; the benchmark that’s long been considered the threshold for dangerous warming.
The breakdown, according to MIT and CI, looks roughly like this:

 “Sea level rise of 1 meter or more would be expected by 2100, with the possibility of destabilization of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which would cause much more sea level rise and flooding of coastal communities.”
It’s a full-scale planetary disaster, basically.
Worst of all, of course, is business as usual. The talks fail, there’s no treaty, and we go on burning fossil fuels like it's 1999. That lands us at 4.5˚C, or 8.1˚F, worth of temperature rise by the end of the century, if we maintain the status quo trajectory. That’s also a nightmare scenario.
The World Bank, not exactly a liberal institution, did a report analyzing the outcome of a 4˚C+ world: “4°C scenarios are potentially devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher under and malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased intensity of tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.” More of the same, more of the worse.
Of course, some scientists say even 2˚C of warming would be a “disaster.”
But it’s worth honing in on the silver lining here—1˚C worth of reductions, the amount nations have already pledged to uphold—is a major achievement, and a serious step forward from what has in the past been a tortured, laborious, and unproductive negotiation process. There’s reason to believe, with the costs of renewable power falling fast, and a spirit of international cooperation slowly coalescing around the climate problem, that a 2˚C target isn’t out of reach.

Electric Vehicles

Vox - David Roberts

Within a decade, electric vehicles could be cheaper than gasoline vehicles. Then, watch out.

(Shutterstock)

To date, electric vehicles have mostly been a curiosity, a means for the wealthy to display their eco-credentials. In most big markets (the US, the EU, China), they amount to less than 1 percent of new vehicles sales. Consequently, most people, notably oil industry people, treat them as a sideshow.
But that's going to change, soon, according to a new research brief from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. (The report is accessible to clients only, but there's a write-up that draws on the research here.)

Electric cars are destined to climb the S curve
Technologies follow remarkably similar paths to broad adoption. They putter along until they hit that magic sweet spot of value and convenience — and then they take off. Adoption rapidly increases until the market is close to saturated, when it trails off.
It looks like an S.
This great graph from asset management firm BlackRock shows a bunch of S curves, for different technologies:

The exact shape is different for every technology, and recently the curves have been getting steeper (for a variety of reasons we won't get into). But you get the idea.
Right now, electric cars are still in the putter-along phase, as costs continue falling toward the sweet spot.
How fast are costs falling? BNEF did a bottom-up analysis of four variables: "regulatory support for EVs; the cost of battery packs; the total cost of ownership of EVs relative to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles; and EV consumer technology adoption forecasts."
Long story short, here's what they found: Assuming oil prices rise slowly back to $70 a barrel between now and 2040 (more on that later), battery electric vehicles (BEVs) will become cheaper than ICE vehicles, in terms of total cost of ownership, around 2022.
That, BNEF says, is when they'll start climbing the S curve.

Electric vehicles will spread quickly
Here's what BNEF projects for 2040:

There's a lot to take in here, but notice three things.
First, sales of EVs (BEVs + plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs) will grow to about 41 million in 2040. That will put total EV ownership at about a 25 percent of the global fleet.
Second, by 2040, EVs will account for 35 percent of new vehicle sales (and rising).
Third, look what happens to poor plug-in hybrids. They never rise above niche sales and are rather quickly rendered irrelevant by BEVs. I wonder if we'll even see much development in the PHEV space, with this kind of forecast floating around. Maybe for large commercial vehicles?
BNEF acknowledges that two things could substantially alter this forecast.
One is that oil prices could go even lower than expected. Note that BNEF's forecast is based on the Energy Information Administration's "low" reference case for oil prices, which has them rising to around $70 per barrel in 2040.
Theoretically, oil could keep falling, so BNEF modeled an extreme case in which oil falls to $20 a barrel and stays there. Under that scenario, EVs don't start rising up the S curve until about 2030, and are only 25 percent of new vehicles sales in 2040 and 14 percent of the total global fleet.

Will we all have Teslas someday? (Shutterstock)

The other is that EV adoption could be accelerated by widespread car-sharing and shared vehicle ownership enabled by self-driving cars. If adoption is faster, prices fall faster and EVs spread faster. BNEF modeled such a scenario and found that EVs would reach almost 50 percent of new vehicle sales in 2040.
So, between 25 and 50 percent of new vehicles sold in 2040 will be electric — that's the range.

The great mystery of how EVs interact with oil markets
The Bloomberg analysis by Tom Randall (drawing on the BNEF forecast) goes on to get into some pretty speculative territory, saying that EVs could cause an oil crisis by the 2020s.
The logic works like this: From 2011 to 2013, US oil production surged almost 50 percent, thanks to fracking of shale oil. Typically in that situation, OPEC countries would dial back their production, to keep prices high. But OPEC declined to do that. So there was a supply glut, and oil prices plunged.

After a brief recovery in 2015, prices kept going down, eventually under $34 a barrel. (Much more on the baffling story of recent oil prices is in this Brad Plumer post.)
What precipitated all this? About 2 million barrels a day of surplus supply, over and above demand.
So when, according to the BNEF forecast, will EVs begin displacing an equivalent amount of oil?
It depends on how fast EVs grow. Currently they're growing at 60 percent annually. That might slow, though. So here are three scenarios, showing 60, 45, and 30 percent growth:

Current growth in EVs would displace 2 million barrels a day by 2023, 45 percent growth by would displace that much by 2025, and 30 percent growth (BNEF's forecast) would hit the target by 2028.
Now, there's nothing magic about 2 million barrels a day. It's certainly no automatic trigger for an oil crisis. (Would that oil markets were so mechanistic and predictable!) But it is an amount that has been shown to be highly disruptive in the recent past.
And of course it won't stop there. As EVs head up the S curve, they'll displace millions more barrels. This clip, from Bloomberg's cool video, gives some sense of the scale. The little explosion is at 2 million barrels a day.

(Bloomberg)

Maybe displacing 2 million barrels a day won't precipitate another oil crisis. But how about 10 million a day? Or 15 million?
There's a reckoning coming — all that remains to be worked out is the timing.

The details are hazy but the direction is clear
There are a million and one caveats about predictions like this. Above all, they rely on oil-price forecasts that have a dismal record.
The Energy Information Administration scenario this research is based on shows oil steadily recovering to $70 by 2040. But EIA itself stresses "heightened volatility and high uncertainty in the price outlook." And oil doesn't steadily do anything. Here are prices since 1980:

Oil prices lurch and swing. Guess how often oil industry analysts accurately predict those lurches and swings? Hint: rarely.
Given that the price of oil is a key determinant of EVs' competitiveness, making predictions about the exact trajectory of EV sales is just as futile as trying to predict the future price of oil.
What's more, the influence doesn't only run in one direction. When analysts forecast EV sales, they tend to treat oil prices as exogenous, i.e., an external variable. That makes things more computationally tractable, but it's a bit of a fudge.
The fact is, by displacing demand for oil, EVs will exert downward pressure on oil prices. EV prices will affect oil prices, and vice versa. (If anyone is aware of EV forecasts that treat oil prices as endogenous, let me know.)
Anyway, as with most models, it is difficult to make local, short-term predictions with any great confidence; however, it is still possible to make long-term, directional predictions.

The future, yo. (Shutterstock)

EV costs are declining rapidly. In the reasonably near future — maybe within a decade, maybe two — EVs are going to become cheaper and better than comparable ICE vehicles. When that happens, adoption is likely to accelerate, driving economies of scale that accelerate it even further.
When that happens, a whole bunch of oil is going to go unused. And long before global oil use declines in large absolute terms, it will decline enough to substantially affect prices.
Remember that a lot of today's more extreme oil extraction projects — shale, tar sands, deepwater — are only economical with relatively high oil prices. If EVs suppress the price of oil in decades to come, they could spark serious retrenchment in the industry.
The exact timing can't be predicted, but the transition of EVs from curiosity to destabilizing force is coming. The oil industry would do well to wake up to it.

Nerdy addendum:
Two other results from the BNEF research are worth highlighting.
First, the rise in EVs will also boost electricity demand: "Electricity demand from EVs will rise to 1,900TWh by 2040, from 2.5TWh in 2015, contributing the equivalent of almost 10% of global electricity demand in 2015." That's a lot!

As I've written many times, the increasing penetration of battery storage will help stabilize electricity grids and enable the penetration of much more wind and solar power.
Second, the oft-voiced worry that EV batteries will use up all the earth's rare minerals is apparently misplaced.
BNEF's forecast does mean that by 2030, production of lithium and cobalt, in particular, will increase substantially. But even in 2030, EV batteries will require less than 1 percent of known lithium, nickel, manganese, and copper reserves (4 percent of known cobalt reserves).
And after 2030, BNEF says, new battery chemistries are likely to take over, obviating the need for these minerals.

Links

The real war against coal is happening in China right now

Senate moves closer to blocking state GMO labeling

How cheap oil is undermining Obama's fuel-economy rules

Rich climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio lives a carbon-intensive lifestyle, and that's (mostly) fine

Why America abandoned nuclear power (and what we can learn from South Korea)

New study: fully automating self-driving cars could actually be worse for carbon emissions

The Middle East Just Suffered Its Worst Drought In 900 Years

Washington Post - Ishaan Tharoor

A pigeon sits on a wire during a sandstorm in Beirut, Lebanon September 8, 2015. (Reuters/Alia Haju)

A NASA study has found that a drought that affected the Middle East over the past decade was perhaps the worst in the region's history for nearly a millennium.
The scientists, who published their study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, examined the tree-ring record of the Eastern Mediterranean — countries ranging from Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Syria — to determine when water was most scarce. A thinner ring signifies drier years, whereas thicker ones indicate when water was in greater abundance.
"The magnitude and significance of human climate change requires us to really understand the full range of natural climate variability," said Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gesturing at the need to take a larger look at the forces at play.
From NASA's press release:

Between the years 1100 and 2012, the team found droughts in the tree-ring record that corresponded to those described in historical documents written at the time. According to Cook, the range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the recent drought in the Levant region, from 1998 to 2012, stands out as about 50 percent drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10 to 20 percent drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years.

This points to the impact humans potentially have had on the climate over the past century. And a changing climate has, in turn, impacted societies living in the arid Levant.
Other research has suggested severe drought conditions in the Middle East over the past decade had a "catalytic effect" for the upheaval and conflict that eventually gripped Syria.
"There is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria," stated an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. "It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to the urban centers. ... For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest."
Amid the turbulence of the war last year, an epic dust storm, kicked up from the Syrian deserts, cloaked a large swath of the region and led to a number of deaths. Scientists suggested then that the collapse of agriculture in the country was in part to blame for the magnitude of the event -- yet another sign of the ways in which human activity can both affect nature and get subdued by it.