Category Archives: alo

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes tech companies to task for conference promoting climate denial

by Reinald0150 Posted on January 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) and Representative Chellie Pingree (a Democrat from Maine) sent a letter to three of the nation’s biggest tech companies on Monday decrying their sponsorship of a conference this month that promoted climate change denial.

As Mother Jones reported last week, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all sponsored LibertyCon, a libertarian student conference held in Washington, D.C. The event featured a group called the CO2 Coalition, which handed out brochures in the exhibit hall that said its goal is to “explain how our lives and our planet Earth will be improved by additional atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

One brochure claimed that “more carbon dioxide will help everyone, including future generations of our families” and that the “recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life,” apparently because the greenhouse gas will make plants grow faster. The group also sponsored the conference and a talk titled: “Let’s Talk About Not Talking: Should There Be ‘No Debate’ that Industrial Carbon Dioxide is Causing Climate Catastrophe?”

Ocasio-Cortez and Pingree, who are both making climate change a priority in the new Congress, were not pleased by the news. On Monday, they sent a letter to the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft expressing their concern that the tech companies are contributing to the spread of misinformation about the reality of climate change despite their public commitment to reducing carbon emissions in their own operations.

Pingree says one of the reasons she and Ocasio-Cortez wrote this letter is that “climate change is clearly an all-hands-on-deck situation.” She adds, “Where I live in Maine, sea-level rise and warming is happening at a rate much faster than anyone ever anticipated.”

She says that the tech companies “claim by policy that they’re on board” with efforts to combat climate change, making their sponsorship of the conference all the more troubling. “The idea that they’re secretly working against it makes our job that much harder,” she says.

Pingree and Ocasio-Cortez wrote in their letter:

We understand that sponsorship of an event or conference is a common occurrence and that these sponsorships do not automatically indicate that the company endorses the variety of political viewpoints that may be presented at these events. However, given the magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis that we are now facing, we find it imperative to ensure that the climate-related views espoused at LibertyCon do not reflect the values of your companies going forward.

As you are well aware, the spreading of misinformation can be dangerous to our society. Today’s coordinated campaign to deny climate change, or to put a positive spin on its effects, is not unlike that of the tobacco companies which once sought to discredit their product’s link to cancer. Their propaganda kept the nation from addressing a public health crisis for years, leading to many preventable deaths. We cannot afford to make the same mistake again with climate change.

From:  

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes tech companies to task for conference promoting climate denial

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes tech companies to task for conference promoting climate denial

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

by Myrna Posted on January 28, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: June 6, 2011

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

Originally from:  

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

Ryan Zinke’s new gig could be a disaster for the environment too

by ClaribelOwx Posted on January 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

Trump’s former secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, departed Washington in January amid a barrage of ethics investigations. It didn’t take long, but Zinke has managed to find a new gig that sees him going from one controversial enterprise (the Trump administration) to another: He’s now a cryptocurrency guy (yes, really).

In an interview with Vice News, Zinke, sporting MAGA socks, made his post-government business debut as the managing director of Artillery One, a little-known blockchain and cryptocurrency investment company based out of North Carolina. He said he’s hoping to make the private crypto company “great again.”

But making something great again implies it was great at some point in the past.

It’s no secret that cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is the first and most valuable, have a huge environmental toll. Most are maintained by a network of specialized computers that crunch mathematical puzzles, or “mine” to log transactions and make new coins. All those computations take a massive amount of energy: At its peak, Bitcoin was consuming the same amount of energy every year as nearly 7 million U.S. homes.

But the libertarian fantasy currency had a wild year in 2018, with more than $480 billion of value wiped off the entire market. With a lower financial worth, Bitcoin only demands the same amount of energy as powering 4 million US households. (Which, you know, is still not ideal.)

Somehow evaluating power-sucking cryptocurrencies in a swanky hotel in Switzerland, as he’s doing in the Vice News clip, seems all too appropriate for Zinke. After all, his legacy at the Interior Department is putting 13 million acres of public lands in private hands for dirty fuel development, rescinding environmental protections, shrinking national monuments, and … an extensive hat collection.

More: 

Ryan Zinke’s new gig could be a disaster for the environment too

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, OXO, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ryan Zinke’s new gig could be a disaster for the environment too

Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

by SeleneWBGV Posted on January 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent nonprofit news organization.

While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields.

When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.

In October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency extended its approval of the weed killer for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, mostly in the South and Midwest, for two more years. At the time, the EPA said: “We expect there will be no adverse impacts to bees or other pollinators.”

But scientists warned the EPA years ago that dicamba would drift off fields and kill weeds that are vital to honeybees. The consequences of the EPA’s decisions now are rippling through the food system.

Dicamba already has destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of non-genetically modified soybeans and specialty crops, such as tomatoes and wine grapes. And now it appears to be a major factor in large financial losses for beekeepers. Hive losses don’t affect just the nation’s honey supply: Honeybees pollinate more than $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts, and vegetables a year, largely in California, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It seems like everybody’s been affected,” said Bret Adee, whose family runs the nation’s largest beekeeping outfit, in South Dakota. He thinks 2018 might be “the smallest crop in the history of the United States for honey production.”

From 2016 to 2017, U.S. honey production dropped 9 percent. Official statistics for 2018 have not been released.

Beekeepers long have struggled to protect their hives from parasites, viruses, insecticides, and other colony-destroying threats. All these factors, as well as climate change, have been linked to colony collapse disorder, which emerged more than a decade ago and destroyed 30 to 90 percent of some beekeepers’ hives. Now with dicamba, beekeepers must contend with a scourge that can wipe out the food and habitat bees need to thrive.

Nine years ago, agricultural ecologist David Mortensen had told EPA officials that allowing dicamba use on genetically modified crops would pose serious risks to wild plants and the pollinators they sustain. In 2011, the EPA’s own scientists cited Mortensen’s work to conclude that increased use of dicamba could affect pollinators.

But the agency registered dicamba in 2016 despite the warnings, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Food & Environment Reporting Network reported in November. Last fall, the agency extended approval through 2020.

EPA officials declined to comment, citing the government shutdown.

‘Pretty damning’ evidence

No one factor can explain what’s driving hive losses. But the evidence is “pretty damning” that dicamba affects both pollinator forage and the bees themselves, said Mortensen, chair of University of New Hampshire’s Department of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Food Systems.

Dicamba damaged nearly 5 million acres of soybeans in the Midwest over the past two years, and “you know that all the field edges anywhere near the damaged crops were hammered by the herbicide,” Mortensen said, “which would mean the broadleaf plants the bees go to were hammered.” Dicamba has little effect on grasses, including corn and wheat, but even tiny doses can injure soybeans, wildflowers, and other broadleaf plants.

Dicamba was a hot topic at the annual American Honey Producers Association meeting earlier this month, said Darren Cox, a Utah beekeeper who stepped down as head of the association last year.

“We’re very concerned about dicamba and the impacts it’s having on the honey industry and the health of bees,” Cox said.

This year’s honey crop was “very poor” in several regions, he said. Drought in several top honey-producing states not only depleted bees’ forage, but also led to more herbicide use because stressed plants don’t easily absorb the chemicals. As a result, Cox said, “you tend to have weaker hive strength because of lack of forage and nutrition.”

South Dakota, where Adee Honey Farms is based, reported about 250,000 acres of dicamba-injured soybeans since 2017. The Adees typically manage 80,000 to 90,000 hives, “but our numbers have been so destroyed the last couple of years, we’ve started using other people’s bees,” Adee said.

More than 70 percent of the nation’s commercial honeybees are shipped to pollinate California’s million acres of almond orchards every winter. But this season, beekeepers have been struggling to fill their trucks with hives and are facing massive cuts to what is typically their biggest paycheck of the year.

Lyle Johnston, president of the Colorado Professional Beekeeping Association, typically sends almond farmers 75,000 hives, including about 7,000 of his own. Johnston hasn’t had trouble with his bees, which he raises far from agricultural fields. (Colorado is among 34 states where it’s legal to spray dicamba on genetically modified crops, though few acres are planted with soybeans.) But in three decades of running bees to California, he says he’s never had so many beekeepers tell him they’ve come up short. Coy and several other beekeepers who typically send him as many as 10 truckloads of bees are sending half that this season.

California almond orchard.Barbara Rich / Getty Images

“It’s going to be a train wreck come the 5th of February, when the bloom starts,” Johnston said.

Many beekeepers near soybean fields said they are losing half their hives — losses similar to those attributed to colony collapse disorder.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

“We can’t breed bees fast enough to keep up with the losses and maintain healthy colonies,” Adee said.

Gary Mackrill of North Dakota’s Mackrill Honey Farms thinks dicamba sprayed near his hives might be making bees more vulnerable to pathogens, cold, and other stressors. Mackrill lost nearly 40 percent of his hives last fall. The year before was even worse, he said.

“Our bee outfit has been devastated,” he said.

Over the last two years, when hundreds of thousands of acres of North Dakota soybeans were damaged by dicamba, Mackrill lost some 3,000 hives and more than a quarter-million dollars in pollination contracts. Last year, North Dakota banned dicamba applications after June 30, but it was too late.

By early July, “the honey flow just turned off like you turned off a faucet,” Mackrill said. “And it never resumed.”

Then after a cold snap hit North Dakota in the fall, Mackrill’s bees started freezing to death. Even when the mercury dips below zero, you might see a couple of dead bees, he said, “but handfuls of dead bees? That’s abnormal.”

Whether dicamba is affecting bees’ ability to stay warm is unclear. Mackrill hopes to find out by sending samples of dead bees to Strong Microbials, run by microbiologist Slava Strogolov in Milwaukee. Strogolov will test for dicamba and other pesticides in the bees’ guts.

Strogolov thinks dicamba might be harming gut microbes critical for bee health.

“Whenever honeybees land on the flower that’s been sprayed, they will ingest that pollen and the gut microbes will be the first ones exposed to these chemicals,” he said.

Honeybees rely on gut bacteria to digest pollen. If they don’t get enough pollen, they can’t make the fat they need to handle the cold.

Losing wild pollen sources

Coy became convinced that plummeting honey production at Coy’s Honey Farm, which is Arkansas’ largest beekeeping operation, was due to dicamba after reading one of Mortensen’s studies. The research showed that doses of dicamba that mimicked the drift associated with spraying the weed killer delayed flowering and reduced by half the number of flowers that plants produced and the number of pollinator visits.

Coy first saw dicamba symptoms on a major bee food called redvine, a flowering plant that snakes through tree canopies along fence rows. In 2017, the vine’s shiny teardrop leaves looked warped and wilted. By last summer, he said, the vines were dead.

Bees depend on redvine for nectar and pollen, the protein source that helps hives survive freezing temperatures, parasites, and other stressors. If queens lack pollen, they won’t lay eggs and the population stagnates or declines.

When Coy inspected hives closer to Mississippi, at sites where farmers didn’t use dicamba, he found redvine bursting with seed pods and flowers. Nearby hives hummed with bees that produced a hundred pounds of honey and five to six frames of stored pollen.

But the majority of hives in Arkansas, where the Coys kept most of their 13,000 hives, were too anemic to ship to California almond growers. Last year, Coy said, “turned out to be a disaster for us.”

In years past, some commercial beekeepers tried moving their hives into Arkansas’ hill country to get away from pesticides, said Jon Zawislak, a University of Arkansas extension entomologist and apiary expert. But seasonal drought in July and August leaves wildflowers in the hills without much nectar and beehives without much honey. Historically, hives did better around agriculture, he said, because irrigated fields kept flowers blooming, and beekeepers would shift the bees around to avoid pesticides.

But moving hives doesn’t work with a weed killer like dicamba that can evaporate for days after spraying.

“The situation with dicamba is brand new,” Zawislak said. Beekeepers are trying to adapt, he added, “but they can’t maintain hundreds or thousands of colonies in areas that simply don’t produce anything.”

And although agricultural fields help bees weather drought, Zawislak’s recent research shows that bees get the lion’s share of their pollen from wild vegetation.

On New Year’s Day, after losing more than a million dollars’ worth of honey and pollination contracts over the past two years, the Coys closed Crooked Creek Bee Co., their retail honey business, and made plans to relocate to Mississippi.

“We can only produce about 50 percent of the honey that we’ve produced prior to in-crop use of dicamba,” Coy said. “We have no choice but to leave Arkansas.”

Follow this link: 

Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bees face yet another lethal threat in dicamba, a drift-prone pesticide

Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

by ElkeHinchcliffe Posted on January 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

Ryan Kennedy had never been on a cruise ship until two years ago when he embarked on four North American cruises armed with a P-TRAK Ultrafine Particle Counter. This device is a portable digital contraption. It measures minute particles of air pollution that, when inhaled, can cause harm to your heart and lungs.

Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, is the author of a new study, released Thursday, which details the findings of a two-year study exposing poor air quality on four Carnival Corporation ships — the largest cruise operator in the world — including one that left Vancouver for Los Angeles in October 2018.

The report, titled “An investigation of air pollution on the decks of four cruise ships,” found that air pollution on these ships was significantly worse than some of the world’s most polluted cities like Beijing, China or Santiago, Chile.

Kennedy measured air pollution every second for one minute and created an average for each minute for 20 minutes at time, during the day and night. His findings reveal that while all four ships were traveling at sea, average pollution particle counts were significantly higher at the stern — the area on a ship behind the smokestacks.

The lowest particle count across these four ships was 38,888 particles per cubic centimeter (pt/cc), while the highest was 157,716 pt/cc. Particle counts on the L.A.-bound ship got as high as 76,000 pt/cc while out at sea, the investigation found.

In comparison, pollution measurements taken with the same equipment in Beijing, China in 2009 were 30,000 pt/cc on a busy street, and in Santiago, Chile in 2011-2012 were in the ranges of 8,000-30,100 pt/cc.

“It’s very compelling data,” Kennedy told reporters on a conference call from Baltimore, Maryland. “People who are predisposed with cardiovascular or pulmonary conditions are at greater risk.”

He continued: “It’s dangerous. It’s not a healthy thing for us to be exposed to.”

The study was commissioned by the international environmental organization Stand.earth, and is the first to measure air quality on cruise ships when docked at port and while moving at sea, during multi-day cruises. The research has not yet been submitted to a scientific journal for peer review, but Kennedy said he was considering this as a next step.

Ultrafine particulate pollution can be detrimental to human health because of increased toxicity. These particles are small enough to be inhaled into a person’s lungs and move into the bloodstream, where they can cause higher rates of cardiovascular disease and asthma, Kennedy explained.

Recent studies have suggested that the smallest ultrafine particles may be the most dangerous to human health, and that particulate matter from ship exhaust may be responsible for tens of thousands of annual deaths, according to the report.

In light of the study’s findings, Stand.earth is calling on Carnival Corporation, which holds 40 percent of the global market, to transition away from heavy fuel oil to power its ships, to help reduce ultrafine particulate pollution — and “to step up to the plate and clean up its act,” according to Kendra Ulrich, Stand.earth’s senior shipping campaigner.

Of the 26.6 million people that went on cruises last year, nearly half, about 12 million people, went on a Carnival or one of its 10 subsidiary cruise lines. Most of Carnival Corporation’s ships burn heavy fuel oil where allowable, according to the report. Heavy fuel oil is a toxic, “bottom of the barrel waste sludge leftover” from the refining process, Uldrich explained, and is often classified as hazardous waste.

Ulrich believes the findings have implications far beyond the passengers and workers on the cruise ships. It could impact those who live and work in port and coastal communities where the ship docks or passes. Some studies have shown approximately 70 percent of ship emissions occur within 250 miles of land, she explained.

More than 30 million people worldwide are expected to go on a cruise in 2019 — many of whom are expected to be senior citizens.

“What Dr. Kennedy found on board was shocking,” Ulrich told reporters on the same conference call, noting that the stern — where the highest pollution levels were found — is usually where running tracks, swimming pools, or lounge areas are located on a cruise ship, where people spend the most time. “But, this is a pervasive health concern that extends far beyond the short term acute health exposures on the ship.”

Ulrich is urging Carnival Corporation to switch to a cleaner-burning fuel while installing filters to help reduce ultrafine particulate pollution, and eventually transition away from fossil-fuel powered ships completely.

Kennedy told reporters that there were limitations to his study, in that he conducted it inconspicuously so as to not disrupt cruise passengers and workers. His study measured emissions aboard only four ships, over short intervals rather than extended periods. He told reporters that the potential health impacts from particulate matter can also differ depending on how long someone is exposed to it.

“There are physical models and human studies that can be linked to a physiological impact to even short-term exposure,” Kennedy said. “There would be people who are more vulnerable, there are people who would have asthma, people who would be more concerned.”

But, Kennedy said he “made every effort to be consistent with my methods across environments. But I wasn’t able to measure everything, everywhere, always.”

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

The report goes on to say that the size of the particulate matter measured by Kennedy’s device “aligns closely with the size of particles known to be generated by ship engines, and the ship’s exhaust system is located between the environments” in question in the study, “suggesting the particulate matter is likely, in part, the ship’s engine exhaust.”

But, the study also says that “there is not universal agreement on how to measure or report particulate matter,” and that there remain unknowns in the study, including which fuel types were used by the ships and how efficient the engines were. The report also notes that higher winds could play a factor in the disparity between measurements in the front and back of the ships, at port and at sea.

In an email statement to National Observer, a Carnival Corporation spokesperson responded to the study, saying “these so-called fly-by tests are completely ridiculous, inaccurate, and in no way represent reality.”

“We test the air quality of our ships and they meet or exceed every requirement,” the spokesperson said. “The air quality on our ship decks when in port compares favorably with a typical urban or suburban environment. Independent testing on our funnels — which is the area where the exhaust originates — further validates our claims.”

The company declined to answer questions about how they test the air quality.

The spokesperson told National Observer that they have installed Advanced Air Quality Systems on nearly 80 percent of its global fleet, as required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, “so these systems are environmentally friendly, in addition to rolling out new ships powered by LNG, the cleanest burning fuel available, so their study is misleading and inaccurate.”

The company added in their statement that Stand.Earth is creating “fake tests that really have no scientific basis,” to aid in their fundraising efforts. The organization, the statement said, “is constantly in search of a problem in our industry. The safety of our guests is our top priority and we undertake our cruises in close coordination with national and international regulatory bodies like the EPA to insure the utmost safety of our guests and crew.”

Some cruise ships and shipping lines began phasing out bunker fuel as the International Maritime Organization — a body of the United Nations — gears up to implement rules in 2020 that will require ships to either install expensive scrubbers or switch to different fuels.

Visit link:  

Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Reason No. 1,326 not to take a cruise: The air is putrid

For geoengineers, a scientific existential crisis

by JeanaLNLpec Posted on January 27, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

In mid-December, more than 28,000 people met in Washington, D.C., to discuss everything earth science-related at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. But amid the dry data and scientific acronyms at a session on solar geoengineering, the science had a patina of existentialist dread that you might not see in a similar forum. There were questions of public disclosure, talk of slippery slopes, and an inescapable nervousness, as if maybe this subject was only barely sitting on the respectable side of science.

It isn’t hard to understand why. Geoengineering refers to a controversial set of proposals centered around one basic idea: to use technology to help cool down a rapidly warming planet. The most prominent scheme is solar radiation management (SRM), whereby sunlight is reflected back into space to reduce global warming. Such a feat may be attempted through a variety of techniques including stratospheric aerosol injection, which acts much like a volcano does naturally by dumping tons of tiny sulfur particles 60,000 feet in the sky.

This is not, generally speaking, a popular idea. “SRM is only being considered because the world is broken,” says Simon Nicholson, director of American University’s Global Environmental Politics Program, who works on the politics and governance of geoengineering. The approach is a measure of last resort, a stopgap that might stave off some of the worst effects of warming in the face of plodding progress toward reducing carbon emissions. SRM also has plenty of potential downsides — such as regional changes to weather patterns and related effects on crop yields — and it would do nothing to address climate-adjacent issues like ocean acidification.

Though it remains divisive, solar geoengineering has started to gain traction both in climate science and with the broader public, thanks to the increasing direness of climate change. Still, most geoengineering researchers agree that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is by far the highest priority. If humanity somehow managed to switch off the CO2 spigot tomorrow, though, geoengineers’ field could disappear. The point of geoengineering today is to slow down climate change, and if we could do that through less controversial means, there might not be a need to study the concept at all.

So the geoengineers find themselves in the somewhat odd position of working in a field that they wish did not exist. What is that like?

Across the field, the reactions to this existential crisis are mixed. “SRM is peculiar, in the sense that most of those who study it do so with some amount of reluctance or ambivalence,” Nicholson says. Researchers studying geoengineering generally acknowledge the subject matter is “unpalatable,” he adds, which leads to an uncommon degree of self-reflection and caution.

This cautious approach is partially informed by sharp criticism from those who think that even studying SRM gives tacit permission to ignore the imperative of emissions reductions; there are plenty of angry responses from the public, as well as from climate scientists and those in other fields. But many geoengineering experts think this criticism is short-sighted. “Wishing it weren’t so won’t make it go away,” says Joshua Horton, a research director of geoengineering at Harvard University. “The world is full of things we wish didn’t exist but ignore at our peril. Climate change is one of those things, and so is solar geoengineering — ignoring the former will lead to catastrophe, but ignoring the latter is also likely to lead to unnecessary pain and suffering.”

While some scientists may still wish geoengineering was a fringe idea, there is no doubt that it is heading toward the mainstream. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which assesses and synthesizes the scientific research on climate change, as well as potential impacts and mitigation strategies, has increasingly included discussion of geoengineering in its publications. The IPCC’s most recent special climate report featured big chunks of a chapter on the topic, though it explicitly refrained from using the term geoengineering itself and separated SRM from carbon dioxide removal, which is much less controversial. One of the conveners of the AGU session, David Keith, a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard and among field’s most prominent academics, missed the D.C. meeting because he was in Poland, where he participated in a panel session on geoengineering at the United Nations climate meeting.

Some geoengineers have noticed the shift in perspective in their daily work. “The first time I ever mentioned that I was going to work on geoengineering, it was basically the end of my talk and I got yelled off the stage,” says Douglas MacMartin, an engineer and climate scientist at Cornell University. Today, he adds, no one he interacts with — other scientists or the general public — says the research is a bad idea.

Still others think of their work in terms of risk management. “If you know there’s some chance of catastrophic risk, then you need to know if you have options or not,” says Holly Buck, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA who works on the socio-political side of geoengineering. Buck thinks the anger over the need for the field is “a completely appropriate response,” but geoengineering researchers are not the right target. “People should be livid that elites and governments are presiding over a slow-motion apocalypse,” she says, “and have let global warming get to a point where some careful geoengineering research is warranted.”

MacMartin agrees, and compares geoengineering to putting an airbag in a car. “Yes we should take the foot off the gas, yes we should put the foot on the brakes,” he says, “but if you’re going to have an accident, we’d really actually like to reduce the impacts. We’d like to understand whether that’s possible.”

Despite some claims to the contrary, there have so far been almost no physical geoengineering experiments — it’s essentially all computer modeling. At the AGU meeting, though, one of the themes was exactly where to go next. Some experts, such as Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California, think the modeling has more or less run its course; others, including MacMartin, think there is plenty more that the computers have to offer, and that “we don’t know what experiments we need to do.” (One small but prominent outdoor experiment, dubbed SCoPEx, is planned, though it awaits the establishment of an external advisory board before it receives full approval.)

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

There was a hint of defensiveness in the room as well, a sense that they’re only studying this because the world has forced it upon them. Presenters mentioned the dramatic effects of unchecked climate change, and how the uncertain negative effects of SRM likely pale in comparison to the alternative.

But mostly, these scientists appear to like going to work every day, even though their chosen field is, to put it gently, a bit noisy. Nicholson calls the field “complex and intellectually enlivening,” and MacMartin enjoys the interdisciplinary nature of the work — you can’t separate the science from the sociopolitical angles, and that makes for a stimulating environment.

That’s not to say that there aren’t still discouragements along the way. Some research has suggested that actually explaining SRM to the public causes support for it to drop, so it remains an open question whether the brighter spotlight on the field will improve its reputation. Jadwiga Richter, a geoengineering scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, says while most of her colleagues support her research, she still sometimes gets a sense of disapproval from other scientists. “There are definitely people who, you walk down a hall, and they’re shaking their head,” she says. They feel that “this is not what you should be doing.”

Original article – 

For geoengineers, a scientific existential crisis

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For geoengineers, a scientific existential crisis

School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

by reenokabeeno2005 Posted on January 26, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

The 16-year-old activist behind the fast-growing School Strikes 4 Climate Action has taken her campaign to the streets of Davos, to confront world leaders and business chiefs about the global emissions crisis.

Greta Thunberg, whose solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament has snowballed across the globe, will join a strike by Swiss school children in the ski resort on Friday — the final day of the World Economic Forum.

Thunberg traveled by train for 32 hours to reach Davos, and spent Wednesday night camped with climate scientists on the mountain slopes — where temperatures plunged to -18 degrees C (-0.4 degrees F).

Having already addressed the U.N. Climate Change COP 24 conference, Thunberg is rapidly becoming the voice for a generation who are demanding urgent action to slow the rise in global temperatures.

As she traveled down Davos’s funicular railway from the Arctic Base Camp — while more than 30,000 students were striking in Belgium — Thunberg said the rapid growth of her movement was “incredible.”

“There have been climate strikes, involving students and also adults, on every continent except Antarctica. It has involved tens of thousands of children.”

Thunberg started her protest by striking for three weeks outside the Swedish parliament, lobbying MPs to comply with the Paris Agreement. After the Swedish election, she continued to strike every Friday, where she is now joined by hundreds of people.

“This Friday I can’t be there,” she told the Guardian. “So I will have to do it here in Davos, and send a message that this is the only thing that matters.”

Students around the world have been inspired by Thunberg, with thousands skipping school in Australia in November. Last Friday there were strikes in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, where more than 20,000 students skipped school.

Missing gym class, geography, and religion each Friday is something of a sacrifice for Thunberg, who says she loves school and can’t pick a favorite subject.

“I like all subjects. I love learning, which people maybe don’t think about me.”

She’s also been forced to give up her hobbies, as climate change activism has taken more of her time. “I used to play theatre, sing, dance, play an instrument, ride horses, lots of things.”

She’s sanguine, though, pointing out that climate activism is much more important: “You have to see the bigger perspective.”

Thunberg said she would like more students to join her strike. “That would have a huge impact, but I’m not going to force anyone to do this.”

In the U.K., only a small number of students have so far begun strikes, including 13-year-old Holly Gillibrand in Fort William. But plans are now being made for a big strike on February 15. Thunberg predicts there will be protests in many locations.

She believes parents should be supportive if their children tell them they’re striking on Friday. “Everyone keeps saying that the young people should be more active, and they’re so lazy, but once we do something we get criticized.”

The world’s scientists warned in October that, without a dramatic ramping up of action to cut emissions, global temperatures would rise by more than 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, with severe consequences for humanity.

Thunberg believes the older generations need to acknowledge that they have failed to protect the environment.

“We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused,” she says.

Thunberg has also called on business leaders and politicians to commit to “real and bold climate action,” and focus on the “future living conditions of mankind” rather than economic goals and profits.

In a video address for leaders attending Davos, she says: “I ask you to stand on the right side of history. I ask you to pledge to do everything in your power to push your own business or government in line with a 1.5 C world.”

Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which she believes helps her see the problem of climate change clearly.

“My brain works a bit different and so I see things in black and white. Either we start a chain reaction with events beyond our control, or we don’t. Either we stop the emissions or we don’t. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.”

The school strikes last Friday were by far the biggest to date. In Germany, an estimated 30,000 students left their schools in more than 50 cities to protest, carrying banners including: “Why learn without a future?” and “Grandpa, what is a snowman?” One 17-year-old student in Kiel, Moritz, told Deutsche Welle: “We want to help shape and secure our future so that there will be another world for us to live in in 60 years.”

In Belgium, 12,500 students went on strike last Thursday and plan to strike weekly until the E.U. elections in May. Some teachers were tolerant of the truancy. Patrick Lancksweerdt, in Brussels, said: “Education has to turn youngsters into mature citizens. By their actions, they proved that they are.”

School strikes also took place in 15 cities and towns in Switzerland. In Geneva, 12-year-old Selma Joly said: “Frankly, I would rather demand climate action than go to school. Otherwise, years from now, we may no longer be here.”

Janine O’Keeffe, who helps coordinate and keep track of the school strikes from her home in Stockholm, Sweden, was surprised at the scale of last week’s actions: “I am still in shock, actually — a nice kind of shock.”

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace, says youth activism on climate change gives her hope. “The 15-year-olds just speak truth to power.”

More – 

School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

The melting Arctic is revealing caveman-era landscapes

by LorenzoNixon Posted on January 26, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

Parts of the Arctic have now melted enough to expose landscapes that had been entombed in ice for 40,000 to 115,000 years.

Scientists studying Baffin Island, Canada — a snowy mountain range rising from the Arctic Sea — have found land that was last ice free when our ancestors were dallying with Neanderthals, according to a paper published Friday in Nature Communications.

The researchers went to these newly exposed spots looking for plants frozen thousands of years ago. If this were a B-movie, they would have discovered a reanimated ice worm, or some contagion that transformed humans into mewling armadillo-people. But, because real life isn’t always so exciting, they found the remnants of frozen moss. They determined that these plants were at least 40,000 years old, suggesting that glaciers last retreated there when humans were first making their way into Europe, sketching animals and tracing their hands on cave walls.

The newly-exposed landscapes are… pretty much fields of rocks.Pendleton et al.

The scientists wrote that current temperatures are now high enough to “remove all ice from Baffin Island within the next few centuries, even in the absence of additional summer warming.”

Simon Pendleton, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, noted that these northern glaciers are on the front line of climate change. The consequences are easy to see.

“The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, so naturally, glaciers and ice caps are going to react faster,” he said in a statement.

Excerpt from: 

The melting Arctic is revealing caveman-era landscapes

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The melting Arctic is revealing caveman-era landscapes

Greta Thunberg dresses down more global elites for climate inaction

by CarltonFng Posted on January 25, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

Young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is continuing her tour of speaking truth to power. Last December, she accused the delegates to the U.N. climate talks in Poland of “stealing” their children’s futures. And on Friday, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, she delivered another powerful speech, calling for quick and bold progress on climate change.

“At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories,” Thunberg told the audience. “But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag.”

Climate change became a hot topic of discussion at the 2019 meeting of the global elite. Sixteen-year-old Thunberg joined the ranks of Prince William and British naturalist and TV personality Sir David Attenborough, who also urged decisive action on climate change. National leaders, like Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, unveiled plans and goals for tackling warming at the forum.

Although Thunberg’s message was dire, she stopped short of saying the world is doomed. “Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around — we can still fix this,” Thunberg said. “I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”

View original article: 

Greta Thunberg dresses down more global elites for climate inaction

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Greta Thunberg dresses down more global elites for climate inaction

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft sponsored a conference that promoted climate change denial

by jayklug95681337 Posted on January 25, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have publicly acknowledged the dangers of global warming, but last week they all sponsored a conference that promoted climate change denial to young libertarians.

All three tech companies were sponsors of LibertyCon, the annual convention of the libertarian group Students for Liberty, which took place in Washington, D.C. Google was a platinum sponsor, ponying up $25,000, and Facebook and Microsoft each contributed $10,000 as gold sponsors. The donations put the tech companies in the top tier of the event’s backers. But the donations also put the firms in company with some of the event’s other sponsors, which included three groups known for their work attacking climate change science and trying to undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Among the most notable was the CO2 Coalition, a group founded in 2015 to spread the “good news” about a greenhouse gas whose increase in the atmosphere is linked to potentially catastrophic climate change. The coalition is funded by conservative foundations that have backed other climate change denial efforts. These include the Mercer Family Foundation, which in recent years has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to right-wing think tanks engaged in climate change denialism, and the Charles Koch Institute, the charitable arm of one of the brothers behind Koch Industries, the oil and gas behemoth.

In the LibertyCon exhibit hall, the CO2 Coalition handed out brochures that said its goal is to “explain how our lives and our planet Earth will be improved by additional atmospheric carbon dioxide.” One brochure claimed that “more carbon dioxide will help everyone, including future generations of our families” and that the “recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life,” apparently because the greenhouse gas will make plants grow faster.

In a Saturday presentation, Caleb Rossiter, a retired statistics professor and a member of the coalition, gave a presentation titled “Let’s Talk About Not Talking: Should There Be ‘No Debate’ that Industrial Carbon Dioxide is Causing Climate Catastrophe?” In his presentation, Rossiter told the assembled students that the impact of climate change on weather patterns has been vastly exaggerated. “There has been no increase in storms, in intensity or frequency,” he said. “The data don’t show a worrisome trend.”

He insisted that when he hears the news that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising, “I’m cheering!” That’s because, he said, carbon dioxide “is a fertilizer” that has made Africa greener and increased food production there, reducing human misery.

Rossiter also claimed that carbon dioxide emissions correlate with wealth and that the greenhouse gas “improves life expectancy” because poor countries that start burning fossil fuels have a more consistent power supply and can then clean up their water. “I’m happy when carbon dioxide is up, because it means poverty is down,” he declared.

“I come not to bury your carbon but to praise it,” he concluded.

Rossiter’s presentation puts him on the far fringes of the climate denial world. Not even Exxon is trying to make such arguments anymore. And it’s a long way from what Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have said about the dangers of carbon dioxide; all three companies have committed to reducing their own carbon footprints. Microsoft has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030. Google claims to be committed to a “zero carbon” future and is aggressively pursuing renewable energy sources for its operations to reduce its carbon footprint and help combat climate change. And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg criticized President Donald Trump after he announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, writing: “Stopping climate change is something we can only do as a global community, and we have to act together before it’s too late.”

The presence of the tech sponsors at a libertarian conference is not itself unusual, as governments around the globe move to try to regulate social media and online privacy. Tech companies see libertarians as natural allies in the fight against regulation. Indeed, Google sponsored two different sessions at the conference, one on why “permissionless innovation” needs to be defended and another on whether the government will “continue to let the Internet be awesome.” But the companies’ underwriting of a conference with a climate denier on the schedule shows the hazards of trying to advance a policy agenda through interest groups without also supporting their fringe elements.

The CO2 Coalition wasn’t the only group sponsoring LibertyCon that is known for its work undermining efforts to combat climate change. Along with Facebook and Microsoft, the Heartland Institute was also a gold sponsor of the event. Heartland is a longtime player in industry-funded efforts to undermine climate science and fend off efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which pushed the Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris climate accords and has long featured experts who argue that global warming is a myth, was also a sponsor.

A Facebook spokesperson responded to questions about its sponsorship of LibertyCon by sending a link to its political engagement page, which says: “Sometimes we support events that highlight Internet and social media issues,” and features a long list of third-party groups it has worked with in the past. He noted that LibertyCon met its criteria for support and cited the number of sessions unrelated to climate change.

A spokesperson from Google defended the company’s LibertyCon sponsorship, saying: “Every year, we sponsor organizations from across the political spectrum to promote strong technology laws. As we make clear in our public policy transparency report, Google’s sponsorship or collaboration with a third party organization doesn’t mean that we endorse the organization’s entire agenda or agree with other speakers or sponsors.”

On Wednesday, Microsoft said in a statement: “Our commitment to sustainability is not altered or affected by our membership or sponsorship of an organization. We work with many groups on technology policy issues and do not expect or anticipate that any organization’s agenda will align to ours in all policy areas.”

Source: 

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft sponsored a conference that promoted climate change denial

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Google, Facebook, and Microsoft sponsored a conference that promoted climate change denial