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The world is hot, on fire, and flooding. Climate change is here.

by richroth622007 Posted on July 24, 2018

The worst ravages of climate change are on display around the world.

Wildfires have ripped through towns in Greece, floods have submerged parts of Laos, and heat waves have overwhelmed Japan. These are striking examples of climate change playing out in its deadliest forms, and they’re making  the term “natural disaster” an outdated concept.

People in Greece were jumping into the Aegean to escape advancing wildfires, according to a report in the New York Times. More than 70 are confirmed dead so far, and some scenes are horrific. 

“Greece is going through an unspeakable tragedy,” said Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, in a televised address to declare three days of national mourning.

This is already Greece’s hottest year on record. Although the last few weeks have been mild and wet, it’s nearly certain that warm weather has played a role in drying out forests throughout Europe, where the number of fires this year is 43 percent above normal. Longer summers, more intense drought, and higher temperatures are all linked to greater fire risk.

We’ve known enough about meteorology to link extreme events to their increased likelihood as they are happening for years now. Recent advances in extreme weather attribution can often tell us exactly how much.

Ample evidence links worsening fires with human activity. Greece and much of the Mediterranean region is projected to turn into desert over the next several decades, and there are signs that this shift has already begun. As the region’s native trees die off and urban areas expand into neglected forests, firefighting resources are becoming woefully overmatched. Regardless of ignition source — arson or lightning or human carelessness — massive wildfires will become more common as droughts intensify and heat waves get more common. Extreme winds, like those blamed for fanning the flames this week in Greece and during megafires in Portugal last year, can make an already dire situation uncontrollable.

It’s the hottest month of one of the hottest years in the history of human civilization, and unusual wildfires are sprouting up all over the map. Sweden has called for emergency assistance from the rest of the European Union to help battle massive wildfires burning north of the Arctic Circle. Across the western United States, 50 major wildfires are burning in parts of 14 states, fueled by severe drought. The wildfires burning in Siberia earlier this month sent smoke plumes from across the Arctic all the way to New England, four thousand miles away. Last year, big wildfires burned in Greenland for the first time in recorded history.

And then there are the rains. In Laos, after days of downpours, a hydropower dam that was under construction collapsed on Tuesday. Hundreds of people have been reported missing. Higher global temperatures increase the evaporation rate, putting more water vapor in the atmosphere and making extreme downpours more common.

In recent weeks, high temperature records have been set on nearly every continent. On Monday, Japan had its hottest temperature in recorded history — 106 degrees Fahrenheit — just days after one of the worst flooding disasters the country has ever seen.

Algeria has recorded the highest reliably measured temperature in Africa, 124 degrees Fahrenheit. In late June, the temperature never dropped below 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Oman — the highest overnight low temperature anywhere in the world.

Even in normally temperate places the air has been sweltering: Temperatures approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit hit parts of Canada, overwhelming hospitals in Montreal — where another heat wave is imminent this week.

According to calculations from climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, this year will likely be the world’s fourth warmest year on record globally, behind 2015, 2016, and 2017. With another El Niño on the way, next year could be even hotter.

All over the world, heatwaves are getting longer and more intense, the most well-documented and deadliest consequence of our failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

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The world is hot, on fire, and flooding. Climate change is here.

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Ophelia is the strongest storm to hit Ireland in at least 50 years.

by SteffenLindrum Posted on October 16, 2017

In parts of the United Kingdom Monday morning, people woke up to a blood-red sun — a phenomenon seen around the globe this year.

The color was caused by smoke that blew in from wildfires across Portugal and Spain. Hurricane Ophelia deepened the reddish hue by dragging up dust from the Sahara.

Red skies have haunted the western U.S. recently as wildfires burned in Montana and ash rained down in Seattle. This month in Northern California, 20,000 people evacuated from massive wildfires under a red-orange sky.

Anadolu Agency / Contributor / Getty Images

On the other side of the world, wildfires burned in Siberia all summer long, covering the sun with enormous clouds of smoke and ash.

REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

To understand why this happens, you need to know a bit of optics. Sun rays contain light from the whole visible spectrum. As the sun’s white light beams into the atmosphere, it collides with molecules that diffuse some of the wavelengths. On a normal day, short wavelength colors, like purple and blue, are filtered out, making the sun look yellow.

But high concentrations of light-scattering molecules in the air (like smoke particles from a wildfire) crowd out more of those short-wavelength colors, leaving behind that hellish red color.

Since climate change makes wildfires worse, we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.

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Ophelia is the strongest storm to hit Ireland in at least 50 years.

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The sun keeps turning an apocalyptic shade of red. Here’s why.

by marekso65 Posted on October 16, 2017

In parts of the United Kingdom Monday morning, people woke up to a blood-red sun — a phenomenon seen around the globe this year.

The color was caused by smoke that blew in from wildfires across Portugal and Spain. Hurricane Ophelia deepened the reddish hue by dragging up dust from the Sahara.

Red skies have haunted the western U.S. recently as wildfires burned in Montana and ash rained down in Seattle. This month in Northern California, 20,000 people evacuated from massive wildfires under a red-orange sky.

Anadolu Agency / Contributor / Getty Images

On the other side of the world, wildfires burned in Siberia all summer long, covering the sun with enormous clouds of smoke and ash.

REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

To understand why this happens, you need to know a bit of optics. Sun rays contain light from the whole visible spectrum. As the sun’s white light beams into the atmosphere, it collides with molecules that diffuse some of the wavelengths. On a normal day, short wavelength colors, like purple and blue, are filtered out, making the sun look yellow.

But high concentrations of light-scattering molecules in the air (like smoke particles from a wildfire) crowd out more of those short-wavelength colors, leaving behind that hellish red color.

Since climate change makes wildfires worse, we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.

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The sun keeps turning an apocalyptic shade of red. Here’s why.

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

by JoeannCoghlan Posted on July 28, 2017

The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.

The summer heat is partly to blame for the water shortage. Much of Western Europe has been sweltering, with heatwaves stoking fires in Portugal and setting record temperatures in France. Italy is suffering through one of its hottest, driest, wildfiriest times in history. Several regions have declared a state of emergency or asked for relief from the climate change–fueled drought, which has already taken a $2.3 billion toll on the country’s farming industry.

Rome’s other problems are making things worse. The city’s aqueducts are chronically leaking. Diminished snowpack on nearby mountains means less meltwater to replenish its aquifers. Rome had planned to stop drawing from one of its big sources of fresh water, Lake Bracciano, which has sunk nearly six feet in the last two years.

City officials have switched off iconic fountains and lowered water pressure, causing residents to lug buckets up the stairs to their apartments. Nearby small towns have already resorted to rationing, the New York Times reports.

Minus a drought in the Dark Ages, clean drinking water has been constantly flowing through Rome for millennia. Now, it looks like things are changing (the climate certainly is).

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

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After a threatening call from Trump admin, Lisa Murkowski’s got backup.

by CollettFulmer Posted on July 28, 2017

The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.

The summer heat is partly to blame for the water shortage. Much of Western Europe has been sweltering, with heatwaves stoking fires in Portugal and setting record temperatures in France. Italy is suffering through one of its hottest, driest, wildfiriest times in history. Several regions have declared a state of emergency or asked for relief from the climate change–fueled drought, which has already taken a $2.3 billion toll on the country’s farming industry.

Rome’s other problems are making things worse. The city’s aqueducts are chronically leaking. Diminished snowpack on nearby mountains means less meltwater to replenish its aquifers. Rome had planned to stop drawing from one of its big sources of fresh water, Lake Bracciano, which has sunk nearly six feet in the last two years.

City officials have switched off iconic fountains and lowered water pressure, causing residents to lug buckets up the stairs to their apartments. Nearby small towns have already resorted to rationing, the New York Times reports.

Minus a drought in the Dark Ages, clean drinking water has been constantly flowing through Rome for millennia. Now, it looks like things are changing (the climate certainly is).

View article:  

After a threatening call from Trump admin, Lisa Murkowski’s got backup.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Ringer, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After a threatening call from Trump admin, Lisa Murkowski’s got backup.

Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

by WadeHardwick864 Posted on March 4, 2016

Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

It’s usually best to avoid listicles. No one needs to know the top 10 popsicle flavors from 1997 or the 25 worst celebrity tweets about peanuts. But a ranking of how well countries are doing to protect the environment? Now that’s a listicle we can get behind here at Grist.

Yale’s 15th annual Environmental Performance Index comparing 180 countries’ performance on “high priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems” just came out, and it’s mostly what you’d expect: Countries up top tend to be heavily Nordic; countries at the bottom tend to be heavily unstable.

The top five are Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia. Finland already gets two-thirds of its electricity from renewables or nuclear power and plans to get 38 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020. Iceland gets 85 percent of its energy from renewables and has great air quality. Sweden has great water quality and plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. And Denmark has great water quality, as well as high marks for biodiversity.

But Slovenia? The central European nation might seem out of place in the top five, but it’s apparently kind of a boss when it comes to biodiversity. And with the third largest forest-to-land ration in the European Union, it’s doing a bang-up job of forest preservation.

The next five on the list are Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Malta, and France. The U.S. is way down at 26 — right below Canada, which is precisely where we like to be.

The bottom five countries are Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar, Eritrea, and Somalia for a lot of the reasons you might expect: illegal hunting and poaching, poor air and water quality, deforestation, failure to protect biodiversity, over-fishing.

Check out this write-up by some of the researchers over at Scientific American for more details on the best and worst performing countries. Or go watch this nice little video. Then, I promise, you can go read that listicle about whether or not your relationship is doomed.

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Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

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Run The Jewels’ Surprising New Video Tackles Police Brutality

by AdelaidRolston Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Three men silently stalk an abandoned neighborhood. A train whistle sounds in the distance and suddenly, we see another man. He is panting, exhausted, dirty. Sun shines through open windows as he tries to catch his breath. Slowly, he looks up, and appears to have an epiphany. Music starts to play as the story starts to unfold: A white cop and a black man are caught in an equally matched, endless struggle against one another.

The latest music video from the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels presents a new perspective on racially-based police brutality. “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck),” features former Rage Against The Machine singer Zack De La Rocha, who joins Run The Jewels members El-P and Killer Mike in the beginning of the video. The song pairs an infectious beat with catchy, politically charged rhymes.

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Run The Jewels’ Surprising New Video Tackles Police Brutality

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

by ToddBainerry Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the dust cleared and the war formally ended in 2002, Angolans looked back on their previous 40 years and saw little more than violence and bloodshed. After 350 years of Portuguese rule, the country fell into a war of independence followed by a civil war. Factions became Cold War players. Armed with Western and Soviet weapons, the warring sides destroyed the little infrastructure the Portuguese had built, sowed the countryside with land mines, and displaced and killed people by the thousands.

Filmmaker Jeremy Xido’s new documentary, Death Metal Angola, is about what happens after those years of destruction. The film follows one woman, Sónia Ferreira, the mother figure behind an orphanage for boys, and her boyfriend, Wilker Flores, as they launch Angola’s first-ever metal festival in Huambo, Angola’s second-largest city. I asked Xido about his experiences with Angolan metal musicians, and how they are rebuilding a scene in a country whose culture was virtually lost amid the fighting.

Mother Jones: How did you first get interested in Angola?

Jeremy Xido: I was invited to Lisbon to work on a performance project, and the thing I was most struck by was the African presence in the city. It was very different than other cities in Europe. There was something intimate about it, so I just found myself talking to a lot of Africans. I was interviewing a young law student, and I asked her what she was going to end up doing when she was done with her degree. Would she stay in Europe? And she just looked at me like I was just insane. She said, “Europe’s dead. The future is Angola.”

I grew up in Detroit. I was the only white kid in my neighborhood. Everyone always talked about going “back to Africa,” even though no one actually knew where Africa was. And to hear this moment in which Angola wasn’t mythological in the sense of being a safe haven, or rife with clichés about the suffering of Africa—it was the first glimpse that I got of the continent being at the forefront of 21st century power and politics. I was like, “Okay, I have to go.”

MJ: Your film takes place not in the capital, Luanda, where Angola’s new oil wealth is concentrated, but in Huambo, a battleground during the war and still a really burnt-out city.

JX: That’s where the story was taking place. In the aftermath of the war, money started flowing into Luanda to turn it into a sort of Miami Beach poster child of “New Africa.” Huambo had been largely left alone. These were people who had experienced unimaginable things and survived, and the power of this particular music is that it can go to those deep places of human experience and allow people to touch them and express them collectively in such a way that’s permissible—people can tell the story of what happened, as opposed to that sort of Economist Angola: “Well, war is behind us, and now we’re marching to the future.” Huambo is a place that defies that approach, a place where the ghosts still exist and people are wrestling with them. It was interesting for me to juxtapose the glittering Luanda that people in the West hear about and this story that these people who had been fighters all their lives were telling. That tension became the real focus of the film.

MJ: Angola’s war is unique among African wars in that it employed so many modern weapons. There seems to be a parallel in this music—Angola destroys itself with Western bombs, and then Angola’s youth rebuild an identity with Western music.

JX: Angola is trying to figure out what the roots are, because people don’t fully know. Rock hit Portugal later than other parts of Europe. War was raging in Angola, and anybody who had enough money or enough luck sent their kids to live with relatives in Portugal—in the middle of this rock youth culture that was emerging as Portugal was coming out of a dictatorship. I think some of those guys came back and started their bands. And people like Sónia watched all of that music and fell in love with it. But because the war was raging, it was never possible to really connect all the different parts of the country. In the aftermath of the war, the young guys suddenly had access to the internet and technologies which could link different parts of the country. Even if you couldn’t drive from Luanda to Huambo, these technologies allowed people to know about each other, and those who knew about rock started to play it.

MJ: Is the music more a subject of conversation between Angolans, or just the means to have a conversation?

JX: I think it’s both. Socially it’s just really hard. You have to practice, you have to learn stuff, you have to seek out people, you have to teach each other. And you have to have band practice, which is, like, insane, because you have to mediate and negotiate between personalities. In and of itself, that’s rebuilding things that were lost in the years of the war: basic education, basic principles of conflict resolution.

Also, there’s a history of rock talking about things that authority doesn’t want you to talk about. So, in and of itself, to play the music is justice, an act of self-definition and release. Metal musicians, particularly death-metal musicians are some of the most erudite and curious, and also soft-spoken people I’ve met. I’ve always wondered about that since the thing they do on stage is so tough and the iconography is so bombastic. And then you realize there’s something unbelievable about getting together with a group of people and getting up in front of others and going to this very primal place—a primal place that requires an extreme technical capacity. But you go there together, and by permitting each other to go there, there’s the kind of release that exists anytime people tell what they believe to be the truth. That itself is an act, and that is the conversation.

MJ: You mentioned that the history of rock in the West is one of rebellion. Do they see it that way?

JX: We filmed this a couple years ago. At that time, there was a revolutionary act to just getting up on stage and doing this thing that people don’t understand and not getting shut down by the police. They couldn’t, at that moment, actively talk against the government, because they weren’t strong enough yet. Since then, they’ve continued to have concerts and festivals and different things that are growing exponentially. I really see the rock movement as the revolution that happens in the aftermath of destruction. It’s the thing that people don’t talk about. Media always talks about war, but nobody really talks about the day after, and the year after, and the five years after—what it means to rebuild. It’s that hidden story that’s less sensationalist, and less sexy. It’s much more complex, and much more human. You are confronted with your own inadequacies when you start thinking about the difficult things, the work of what it is to be human.

MJ: What is the future of metal in Angola? The musicians want to talk about the government, but Angola is an incredibly repressive country.

JX: They’re on a very thin line. It’s easy for me to travel around in the world and say whatever I want to say, but I have to be very careful about representing them in any way that might cause them trouble. Sónia and I have actually had moments where she’s read some interview and she’s like, “You can’t say these things. Think about where we are.”

MJ: How does one survive as a metal musician in Angola?

JX: A lot of the musicians from the bigger bands have jobs. There are a bunch who work at banks or in internet technology or satellite installation. Some of the big singers work for the military, in the air force. The younger guys, some of them don’t have work, and they struggle. They’ve also decided to have the concerts be free events so they can build an audience, so this is a moment of sweat equity for all of them. Sónia struggles day to day to keep 75 boys alive and healthy and to organize all this stuff. But I think it’s as much of a struggle to be a musician pretty much anywhere. The amount of love and passion at the core of this, and the amount of good that it brings to people is off the charts.

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

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US Ranks 43rd on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Recently, there’s been some good news when it comes to US greenhouse gas emissions: They’re actually going down. The bad news, though, is that despite this progress, we still only rank 43rd in the world for the overall effectiveness of our climate policies.

That’s the upshot of a new report by the Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch, a public policy think tank with offices in Bonn and Berlin. The two groups release an annual Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) to assess how much individual countries are contributing to the global carbon problem, and how much they’re trying to do about it. The rankings include the globe’s 58 leading countries for greenhouse gas emissions—countries that, together, account for 90 percent of the globe’s carbon emissions from fossil energy use. Each country is assessed based its emissions trends, its energy efficiency, its progress on renewable energy, and its overall climate policies.

The US ranked 43rd last year and ranks 43rd this year as well, right between New Zealand and Croatia. We get particularly good marks for our 8-percent decrease in carbon emissions from energy sources in the last half decade, but we still fall well short of a stance that could be considered truly progressive or proactive on climate and energy. Still, if we want to gloat then it’s easy to compare ourselves to our northern neighbor, Canada, which was “the worst performer of all industrialised countries” and only fared better than Iran, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia. (For more on Canada’s recent dismal climate performance see here.)

Here are the Climate Change Performance Index rankings for the top ten biggest emitters (most of which have declined in rank since last year):

CCPI ranking and data for the ten largest greenhouse gas emitting countries. CAN Europe/Germanwatch

Based on the new report, here are some other surprising and intriguing facts about the nations of the world and how they’re performing in the uphill battle to save the globe from humans and their energy habits:

* Europe is one of the best performing regions overall, but there’s wide variability, especially among countries hit hard by the Eurozone debt crisis. On the one hand, bailed-out Portugal ranks sixth in the world on the CCPI index, suggesting economic hardship does not necessarily entail regression on climate policy. But on the other hand, bailed-out Greece ranks 47th, having “almost totally abandoned all climate policies” in the wake of its economic crisis.

* Morocco is a surprising success story, ranking 15th overall thanks to its “national solar plan” as well as a “national action plan against global warming.”

* Industrialized countries in the Pacific region have a lot to answer for. Japan slipped to 50th overall from 44th last year. Korea dropped to 53rd from 50th. And Australia plummeted to 57th thanks to its recent change in government.

* Large developing nations (the BRICs) are also lagging. India declined to 30th and Brazil slipped to 36th. Perhaps most important for the planet, China climbed to 46th in the rankings, a turnaround due to the fact that its dramatic rate of emissions growth is slowing somewhat, even as renewable energy investment continues apace. The Russian Federation is the worst of the BRICs, coming in at 56th.

Overall, there isn’t a ton of good news around the world this year when it comes to climate policy. No wonder, then, that the CCPI doesn’t put any country in positions 1, 2, or 3 of its rankings, noting that “no country is doing enough to prevent dangerous climate change.”

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US Ranks 43rd on Climate Policy (and Canada is Even Worse)

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