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Extreme weather may be pushing Texans to care about climate change
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Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
Genre: Science & Nature
Price: $15.99
Publish Date: December 15, 2009
Publisher: Scribner
Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC
A Harvard psychiatrist, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder , presents accounts of alien abduction taken from the more than sixty cases he has investigated and examines the implications for our identity as a species.
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This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
WASHINGTON — Greta Thunberg, the famous 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist who kicked off a global movement of students leaving school to demand action on the climate crisis, joined other youth activists at a rally outside the White House on Friday.
A few hundred people, mostly teenagers and young children, gathered on the Ellipse south of the White House carrying signs that read “I want you to panic!” and “Why are we studying for a future we won’t have?” They chanted, “This is a crisis, act like it!” and “No more coal, no more oil, keep that carbon in the soil.” When someone mentioned President Donald Trump, the crowd booed and yelled “Shame!”
After marching a short distance toward the White House, numerous protesters lay down on the ground for an 11-minute “die-in” ― what one speaker called a “mass extinction.” The protest represented the 11 years that scientists say world governments have to rein in greenhouse gas emissions to stave off potentially cataclysmic climate change.
“We are striking today to save tomorrow!” Nadia Nazar, the 17-year-old co-founder of the Zero Hour movement.
Trump has a long history of denying the threat of climate change, often arguing that spells of cold weather somehow disprove the long-term warming trend. His administration has taken an ax to a slew of environmental regulations meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions — all part of its so-called “energy dominance” agenda. Thunberg told CBS in an interview last month that she wouldn’t “waste time” talking to Trump if given the opportunity.
Thunberg spent most of the rally surrounded by peers and a throng of reporters wielding cameras. She quietly joined a series of chants, and when finally given a chance to speak, simply expressed her gratitude for such a large turnout.
“This is very overwhelming,” she said. “Never give up. We will continue.”
Jeff Hunt, a 28-year-old resident of Washington, D.C., was among those participating in Friday’s rally. He carried a sign that read, “When I grow up I want to be Greta Thunberg,” and told HuffPost that like Thunberg, he thinks Trump is a lost cause.
Instead, Hunt hopes the event helps sends a message to the rest of the country and world that we are nearing a dangerous tipping point and it is time to make radical, economy-wide changes that will protect future generations.
“I have high hopes that the generation beneath me will be much more plugged in,” he said. “I feel like my generation has kind of dropped the ball, if you look at our voting habits and our dedication to actually change our lifestyle.”
Thunberg rose to fame last year when she went on strike from school following Sweden’s hottest summer on record. For weeks, she sat outside her country’s Parliament, holding a “School strike for climate” sign and demanding that local politicians enact policies in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate action.
School strikes quickly popped up in other countries. And in March, an estimated 1.4 million young people in more than 100 countries mobilized for a global strike, part of what has come to be known as the Fridays for Future movement. Tuesday’s gathering outside the White House comes ahead of a weeklong global strike slated for the week of September 20.
Thunberg traveled to the United States by sailboat to reduce her carbon footprint. While in the United States, she’s expected to testify before Congress, speak outside the U.S. Supreme Court alongside youth suing the government over climate change, and attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York.
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‘Never give up’: Greta Thunberg takes climate strike to the White House
President Trump’s ongoing war on migrants and refugees has extended to the Bahamas, where some residents say they’ve received little to no help from their own government after Hurricane Dorian absolutely devastated the area less than two weeks ago. The storm, which hit the islands as a Category 5 hurricane, killed at least 50 people (though that number is expected to rise, as more than 1,000 people are still missing).
While the United States has granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to natural disaster victims in the past, the Trump administration has decided not to extend the designation to Bahamas residents who were displaced by the monster storm. That means Bahamians can still travel to the U.S. temporarily if they have a travel visa, but they will not be granted work permits.
TPS is a form of humanitarian relief intended for people from designated countries where war, famine, natural disaster, or other crises make it difficult for people to return home safely. People with TPS can generally stay in the U.S. for a period ranging from six and 18 months, but the Department of Homeland Security can extend this time if conditions in their home country remain unstable. Those protected under TPS are granted work permits, allowing them to support themselves while living in the U.S. Created by the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS has protected immigrants from 22 countries at various times.
“Generally, under circumstances like this really catastrophic hurricane … TPS would be granted,” the Migration Policy Institute’s Doris Meissner told the Washington Post. The U.S. has over the years offered TPS to residents of Haiti and Nepal after earthquakes devastated those countries in 2010 and 2015 respectively, as well as in South Sudan and Venezuela following armed conflicts in those countries. In the late 1990s, Honduras and Nicaragua were designated for TPS after Hurricane Mitch killed more than 11,000 people in Central America.
One of the Trump administration’s main immigration goals has been to overhaul how the U.S. grants legal immigration status. It envisions a “merit-based” immigration system in which individual immigrants are selected based on their education level, relevant professional skills, and financial self-sufficiency. But critics say the administration is setting the bar so high that many Americans couldn’t pass it.
Trump’s goal of limiting legal immigration has run afoul of many longstanding U.S. immigration policies, but TPS might be the biggest affront to his vision of merit-based entry. Not only does the program extend legal protections to people who want to enter the U.S. based entirely on what’s happening in their home countries, but it also applies to people, whether they are tourists or undocumented immigrants, who are already in the U.S. when TPS is granted. As such, it came as no surprise to some humanitarian workers in Washington that this administration would not be continuing the tradition of offering a temporary home to Bahamians fleeing the storm.
The impacts of Trump’s new TPS approach will likely extend far beyond the hurricane season. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, it’s likely that ever-larger numbers of environmental refugees will be forced to leave their homes behind in search of safety. According to a new report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, for example, 7 million people worldwide were displaced by natural disasters in the first six months of 2019 — “the highest mid-year figure ever reported for displacements associated with disasters.” But with the White House closing off avenues for migrants hoping for respite in the U.S., those climate refugees will see their options shrink just as they need help the most.
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U.S. won’t take climate refugees displaced by Hurricane Dorian
Every story in this week’s edition of TIME is about the climate crisis — one of only five times the magazine has devoted an entire issue to a single topic. “2050: The Fight for Earth” comes 30 years after TIME’s first climate issue, when they put “Endangered Earth” on the cover instead of their usual Person of the Year in 1989.
The threat to our planet posed by climate change, the TIME editorial staff decided, was “the most important story of the year.” Unfortunately, life on Earth is still in pretty imminent danger — even more than they realized it was back in 1989 — but the stories and articles just released detail how much our ability to address the climate has grown since then. We read it, of course, so you don’t have to — but we still hope you do. It’s well worth your time.
I know, reading an entire magazine’s worth of news about our heating planet probably seems like a good way to ensure that you spend the rest of your day steeped in extreme existential dread. But reading these stories actually made me feel … hopeful? Or at least, like doom isn’t necessarily inevitable (which might be the closest a climate reporter gets to hope these days).
To be sure, “2050: The Fight for Earth” is not filled with light reading material. A long multimedia piece viscerally documents the deforestation occurring in the Amazon right now. The piece is unequivocal about just how high the stakes are: “The Amazon tipping point could also lead to a cascade of other potential climate tipping points,” writes journalist Matt Sandy. “Scientists believe that these changes combined could result in runaway global warming that humans would find impossible to reverse.”
As you read more stories, a clear trend emerges: We aren’t doing enough, whether that means stopping deforestation and ocean warming, reforming manufacturing practices, or adapting to the changes already set in motion.
You’re probably thinking, that doesn’t sound hopeful at all. But the clear-eyed presentation of the severity of the problem makes me believe TIME’s writers and editors when they put forward solutions and reasons for hope. They don’t say it’ll be easy — in fact, they acknowledge it will be quite hard — and so I trust them when they say it is possible to avert the worst outcomes of global warming.
So what could we be doing? The issue includes an overview of much-needed technological innovations that are on the horizon. Profiles of 15 women leading the climate movement illustrate that many people, especially those who will bear more of the consequences of a hotter planet, are already doing incredible work to avert those outcomes. Al Gore chimes in (it’s the TIME climate issue — did you really think Al Gore wouldn’t be in this thing?) with a similar message: We need to support the work of young, frontline activists.
It’s easy for journalists to inspire despair when writing about something as dire as climate change or simply fall into the trap of oversimplifying the issue and making unrealistic promises about what options are still on the table. But especially given the dearth of climate coverage we’ve seen in past years, a whole issue that realistically, honestly examines how we may be able to move forward feels like a win worth celebrating.
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TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change AGAIN
Another month, another Democratic debate (Round 3, if you’re keeping count).
After the seven-hour marathon that was CNN ‘s Climate Town Hall last week, ABC’s return to the traditional debate format, in which candidates get one minute and 15 seconds to respond to questions, felt like the political equivalent of speed dating. The moderators didn’t exactly prioritize climate change (failing to ask about Houston’s chronic flooding when the debate was in, of all places, Houston), but candidates stepped up, in part, by segueing early and often to the greatest threat to the planet without getting asked.
Although Thursday night’s debate felt comparatively short on time and climate talk, it wasn’t short on drama. Julián Castro seemingly took a jab at Joe Biden’s age and memory, Pete Buttigieg called debate infighting “unwatchable,” and Andrew Yang announced he would give away $120,000 over the next year as part of a pilot program for his universal basic income plan. This debate also brought some fresh pairings: Biden and Elizabeth Warren were on the same stage for the first time, as were Warren and Kamala Harris, the two top-polling women in the field.
In terms of time spent discussing climate change, the third Democratic debate felt like a step back, if only because the candidates didn’t have the same 40 minutes CNN had given them last week to hash out the issue of our times. The longest stretch of conversation about the climate crisis came when one of the moderators, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, bounced a few global warming questions off the candidates in the second half of the debate. That resulted in a lot of reheated leftovers from CNN’s Climate Town Hall: Amy Klobuchar once again emphasized that she had a good vantage point as a Midwesterner to deal with climate change; when asked if American foreign policy should be based around climate change, Warren simply answered “yes.” Harris said that, as California’s attorney general, she’s already taken on Big Oil.
But it did seem as if, fresh off of CNN’s climate master class, the candidates had found their footing on how to integrate the topic into a myriad of issues.
A few candidates brought up the subject right off the bat. Castro, the first candidate up, mentioned the “clean energy economy” in his opening statement. Bernie Sanders was the first contender to actually utter the words “climate change” when he promised — in front of a Texas audience, no less — to end fossil fuels. He also said he would pass climate legislation “to save the planet.” Biden, the frontrunner, also brought up climate change in his opening statement: “I refuse to postpone any longer taking on climate change and leading the world in taking on climate change.”
Cory Booker touted his own $3 trillion climate plan by mentioning environmental injustice during a response to a question about racism. He also talked about the effects of factory farming on the environment. On trade, Warren said she wants ”environmentalists on the table” at future talks.
Sure, it wasn’t the jam-packed seven-hour marathon we had last week, but the candidates often seemed keen to bring it up. Could this be a sign that Democrats are recognizing how our overheating planet touches pretty much every political issue? Tune in for the next round.
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How did the fate of the planet fare at the third Democratic debate?
After ‘Oumuamua, the newly detected rock is just the second known object to visit from interstellar space
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Astronomers Spot a Comet That Likely Came From a Different Solar System
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Genesis and the Big Bang Theory
The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible
Genre: Physics
Price: $1.99
Publish Date: December 1, 1991
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Seller: Penguin Random House LLC
A ground-breaking book that takes on skeptics from both sides of the cosmological debate, arguing that science and the Bible are not at odds concerning the origin of the universe. The culmination of a physicist's thirty-five-year journey from MIT to Jerusalem, Genesis and the Big Bang presents a compelling argument that the events of the billions of years that cosmologists say followed the Big Bang and those of the first six days described in Genesis are, in fact, one and the same—identical realities described in vastly different terms. In engaging, accessible language, Dr. Schroeder reconciles the observable facts of science with the very essence of Western religion: the biblical account of Creation. Carefully reviewing and interpreting accepted scientific principles, analogous passages of Scripture, and biblical scholarship, Dr. Schroeder arrives at a conclusion so lucid that one wonders why it has taken this long in coming. The result for the reader—whether believer or skeptic, Jewish or Christian—is a totally fresh understanding of the key events in the life of the universe.
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Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery
Genre: History
Price: $1.99
Publish Date: September 13, 2005
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Seller: Penguin Random House LLC
The vivid, often gruesome portrait of the 18th-century pioneering surgeon and father of modern medicine, John Hunter. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his gothic horror story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he based the house of the genial doctor-turned-fiend on the home of John Hunter. The choice was understandable, for Hunter was both widely acclaimed and greatly feared.   From humble origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful, and often fatal, he rejected medieval traditions to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge he gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known figures of the era—including Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.   An insatiable student of all life-forms, Hunter was also an expert naturalist. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.   Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers and even plotted successfully to steal the body of Charles Byrne, famous in his day as the “Irish giant.”   In The Knife Man , Wendy Moore unveils John Hunter’s murky and macabre world—a world characterized by public hangings, secret expeditions to dank churchyards, and gruesome human dissections in pungent attic rooms. This is a fascinating portrait of a remarkable pioneer and his determined struggle to haul surgery out of the realms of meaningless superstitious ritual and into the dawn of modern medicine.
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To avoid the worst consequences of global warming, report after report has stressed the importance of cutting emissions. But with unusually intense weather events wreaking havoc all over the world — from Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas to heat waves in Europe — new findings suggest that the world needs to devote an equally urgent effort to adapt to the changes that are already on the horizon.
The 81-page report, released Tuesday by the Global Commission on Adaptation, argues that big investments in adaptation measures will not only avert environmental catastrophe but also reap significant returns: Researchers found an investment of $1.8 trillion from 2020 to 2030 could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits.
“Mitigation and adaptation are actually two sides of the very same coin,” Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a member of the adaptation commission, told the AP. “If we delay mitigation any further we will never be able to adapt sufficiently to keep humanity safe. And if we delay adaptation we will pay such a high price that we would never be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.”
So what kind of adaptation measures are we talking about? The new report recommends five specific areas in which to invest.
Early warning systems
Early warning systems are technologies that can accurately forecast when a storm, heatwave, or other adverse weather event is incoming. According to the report, just 24 hours’ warning can reduce the resulting damage by 30 percent, and investing $800 million in such systems in developing countries would prevent $3–16 billion per year in losses.
Climate-resilient infrastructure
The report’s authors suggest that upgrading living conditions in vulnerable communities — which might mean improving housing, water, sanitation, drainage, and waste management — will build resilience and strengthen their adaptive capacity. More climate-resilient infrastructure adds about 3 percent to upfront costs but provides $4 in benefits for every $1 of cost.
Improved dryland agriculture
Investing in drought-resistant crops and modernizing irrigation systems could help protect small-scale farms from rising temperatures. If nothing is done, the report says, global crop yields could shrink by 30 percent by mid-century.
Mangrove protection
Mangroves — trees that grow in coastal swamps — reduce the impact of storm surges that threaten coastal communities. According to the report, mangrove forests prevent more than $80 billion per year in losses from coastal flooding and protect 18 million people. They also contribute just over $40 billion annually to sustain local fisheries. (Incidentally, mangrove forests are also an incredible natural carbon sink.)
Making water resources more resilient
Investing in water infrastructure and natural watersheds could expand access to clean water. Today, 3.6 billion people don’t have enough water for at least one month out of the year. Failing to act could expose an additional 1.4 billion people to water shortages by 2050.
Who’s gonna foot the bill for all this, you may ask? The report recommends a combination of public sector, private sector, and international financial support in developing countries, though it adds that “money is not flowing at the pace or scale needed.”
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5 ways we need to adapt to climate change — or pay the price
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