Author Archives: IvanVelasquez1

Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

by IvanVelasquez1 Posted on January 25, 2019

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon became the first major international diplomat to throw his weight behind the so-called Green New Deal, a nascent effort by left-wing Democrats to zero out planet-warming emissions and end poverty over the next decade.

In an interview with HuffPost, Ban — now the co-chair of the newly launched Global Commission on Adaptation, a cadre of top world leaders slated to host a summit next year in the Netherlands — called the push “a very, very good initiative.”

“I would strongly support it,” Ban said by phone Wednesday afternoon from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “This kind of initiative is good.”

He held the movement in stark contrast to the climate agenda President Donald Trump has pursued, aggressively bolstering fossil fuel production and announcing a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. He called the Trump administration “very worrisome.”

“It is very important that the people should speak out,” he said. “I have always been urging that there should be the policies of a civil society heard loud and clearly all around the world.”

Ban, 74, made climate change a priority during his term as the United Nations’ eighth secretary-general from January 2007 to December 2016. In 2008, as much of the developed world slid into the Great Recession, the South Korean diplomat urged international leaders to enact a Green New Deal, which he defined as “an investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs, and spurs green growth.”

The concept caught on. Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, called for a Green New Deal on the campaign trail. Labour Party activists began laying the groundwork for a government-run green investment bank in the United Kingdom. By 2009, the United Nations drafted a report calling for a Global Green New Deal.

But in 2010, austerity politics swept across the Atlantic. In the United States, Democrats came close to passing a cap-and-trade bill — a conservative market mechanism for curbing climate-altering emissions — but ultimately backed down. The term “Green New Deal” remained core to the U.S. Green Party’s platform, but away from the political fringe it all but disappeared.

That is, until 2018. A spate of left-wing Democrats revived the term and imbued it with a new sense of urgency and a much broader scope, calling for a rapid transition to 100 percent renewable energy and a guarantee of union-wage jobs for the millions of Americans struggling to survive as income inequality worsened. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) became the most prominent supporter, and at least two top Senate Democrats are now working on legislation. At least half the declared 2020 candidates for president now say they support a Green New Deal in some form.

On Wednesday, Ban stopped short of critiquing the longstanding dogma, among both Democrats and the few Republicans who acknowledge the realities of climate change, that says market-based tweaks, such as putting a price on carbon, are the only politically feasible paths to cutting emissions in the United States.

“There have been many discussions on how to address climate — cap-and-trade, carbon trading, carbon taxes,” he said. “Any such ideas which merit some deep discussions … that should continue.”

The remark bucked with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, which determined in October the world has roughly a decade to halve global emissions or face cataclysmic warming of at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and likely much more. At a news conference, two authors of the IPCC report laughed when asked if market-based policies alone could deliver the cuts needed.

Asked whether the fossil fuel industry should be barred from future climate talks, Ban said no, despite widespread criticism of oil and gas companies’ deep-pocketed efforts to upend climate policies in the United States and elsewhere.

“I don’t think those people should not be allowed to participate,” Ban said. “They should listen to the voices of the people. These climate talks and climate conferences are open to everybody, so … we should welcome them.”

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Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

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Polar ice is lost at sea

by IvanVelasquez1 Posted on February 15, 2018

Our planet reached another miserable milestone earlier this week: Sea ice fell to its lowest level since human civilization began more than 12,000 years ago.

That worrying development is just the latest sign that rising temperatures are inflicting lasting changes on the coldest corners of the globe. The new record low comes as the planet’s climate system shifts further from the relatively stable period that helped give rise to cities, commerce, and the way we live now.

So far, the new year has been remarkably warm on both poles. The past 30 days have averaged more than 21 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal in Svalbard, Norway — the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. Last month, a tanker ship completed the first wintertime crossing of the Arctic Ocean without the assistance of an icebreaker. Down south in the Antarctic, sea ice is all but gone for the third straight year as summer winds to a close.

The loss of Earth’s polar sea ice has long been considered one of the most important tipping points as the planet warms. That’s because as the bright white ice melts, it exposes less-reflective ocean water, which more easily absorbs heat. And that, sorry to say, kicks off a new cycle of further warming.

According to research published last fall, that cycle appears to be the primary driver of ice melt in the Arctic, effectively marking the beginning of the end of permanent ice cover there. The wide-ranging consequences of this transition, such as more extreme weather and ecosystem shifts, are already being felt far beyond the Arctic.

Data from NSIDC and NASA

There is just 6.2 million square miles of sea ice on the planet right now, about a million square miles less than typical this time of year during the 1990s, and a few tens of thousands of square miles less than just last year, which had marked the previous record low. This level of detail about the remotest parts of the planet is available thanks to our relatively newfound vantage point from space. Satellites monitoring the poles gather sea-ice data, and records only go back to 1978. But it’s a near certainty that ice levels have not been this low in a long, long time.

Proxy evidence from microscopic fossils found on the floor of the Arctic Ocean provides proof that sea ice levels there are the lowest in centuries and perhaps much longer. There’s evidence from ancient plant material in far northern Canada that the Arctic has not been as warm as it currently is for at least 44,000 years. For the Antarctic, sea ice is more variable and no reliable ancient reconstructions currently exist — though there’s convincing evidence that there was less sea ice there about 128,000 years ago. For context, humans first mastered agriculture about 12,000 years ago in the Middle East, once temperatures stabilized near the end of the last ice age.

The middle of February is the usual time of the annual low for the planet’s sea ice (the Antarctic almost always has more ice than the Arctic, because there’s less land mass in the way); lately, however, the February lows have been much lower than normal on both poles. The Arctic and the Antarctic mostly operate as separate entities in the Earth’s climate system, but at the moment they’re in sync — a bit of a puzzle for researchers.

According to Zack Labe, a sea ice researcher at the University of California-Irvine, thinks there might be more than one cause. Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly for decades, which Labe and other scientists are sure is the result of human-caused warming.

Antarctic ice, by contrast, began falling in 2016, which suggests the drop could be connected to natural swings in the climate. “It is too early to say whether losses in the Antarctic are representing a new declining trend,” says Labe.

Although the loss of sea ice is troubling, the overall pace of change is even worse. Global temperatures are rising at a rate far in excess of anything seen in recent Earth history. That means, in all likelihood, these latest records were made to be broken.

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Polar ice is lost at sea

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