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It’s time for climate change communicators to listen to social science

by FrancisHaber Posted on March 17, 2019

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

David Wallace-Wells’ recent climate change essay in the New York Times, published as part of the publicity for his new book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” is, sadly, like a lot of writing on climate change these days: It’s right about the risk, but wrong about how it tries to accomplish the critical goal of raising public concern. Like other essays that have sounded the alarms on global warming — pieces by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and George Monbiot come to mind — Wallace-Wells’ offers a simple message: I’m scared. People should be scared. Here are the facts. You should be scared too.

To be sure, Wallace-Wells and these other writers are thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people. And that is precisely how they try to raise concern: with thought, intelligence, and information, couched in the most dramatic terms at the grandest possible scale. Wallace-Wells invokes sweeping concepts like “planet-warming,” “human history,” and global emissions; remote places like the Arctic; broad geographical and geopolitical terms like “coral reefs,” “ice sheet,” and “climate refugees;” and distant timeframes like 2030, 2050, and 2100.

It’s a common approach to communicating risk issues, known as the deficit model. Proceeding from the assumption that your audience lacks facts —that is, that they have a deficit —all you need to do it give them the facts, in clear and eloquent and dramatic enough terms, and you can make them feel like you want them to feel, how they ought to feel, how you feel. But research on the practice of risk communication has found that this approach usually fails, and often backfires. The deficit model may work fine in physics class, but it’s an ineffective way to try to change people’s attitudes. That’s because it appeals to reason, and reason is not what drives human behavior.

For more than 50 years, the cognitive sciences have amassed a mountainous body of insight into why we think and choose and act as we do. And what they have found is that facts alone are literally meaningless. We interpret every bit of cold objective information through a thick set of affective filters that determine how those facts feel — and how they feel is what determines what those facts mean and how we behave. As 17th century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal observed, “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.”

Yet a large segment of the climate change commentariat dismisses these social science findings. In his piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells mentions a few cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of behavioral economics, including optimism bias (things will go better for me than the next guy) and status quo bias (it’s easier just to keep things as they are). But he describes them in language that drips with condescension and frustration:

How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless. And they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases, and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.

Moreover, behavioral economics is only one part of what shapes how we feel about risk. Another component of our cognition that has gotten far too little attention, but plays a more important part in how we feel about climate change, is the psychology of risk perception. Pioneering research by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and many others has identified more than a dozen discrete psychological characteristics that cause us to worry more than we need to about some threats and less than we need to about others, like climate change.

For example, we don’t worry as much about risks that don’t feel personally threatening. Surveys suggest that even people who are alarmed about climate change aren’t particularly alarmed about the threat to themselves. The most recent poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 70 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, only around 40 percent think “it will harm me personally.”

We also worry more about risks that threaten us soon than risks that threaten us later. Evolution has endowed us with a risk-alert system designed to get us to tomorrow first — and only then, maybe, do we worry about what comes later. So even those who think climate change is already happening believe, accurately, that the worst is yet to come. Risk communication that talks about the havoc that climate change will wreak in 2030, in 2050, or “during this century” contributes to that “we don’t really have to worry about it now” feeling.

Risk perception research also suggests that we worry less about risky behaviors if those behaviors also carry tangible benefits. So far, that’s been the case for climate change: For many people living in the developed world, the harms of climate change are more than offset by the modern comforts of a carbon-intensive lifestyle. Even those who put solar panels on their roofs or make lifestyle changes in the name of reducing their carbon footprint often continue with other bad behaviors: shopping and buying unsustainably, flying, having their regular hamburger.

Interestingly Wallace-Wells admits this is even true for him:

I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades from now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now.

Yet he writes that “the age of climate panic is here,” and he expects that delivering all the facts and evidence in alarmist language will somehow move others to see things differently. This is perhaps Wallace-Wells’ biggest failure: By dramatizing the facts and suggesting that people who don’t share his level of concern are irrational and delusional, he is far more likely to offend readers than to convince them. Adopting the attitude that “my feelings are right and yours are wrong” — that “I can see the problem and something’s wrong with you if you can’t” — is a surefire way to turn a reader off, not on, to what you want them to believe.

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Contrast all this deficit-model climate punditry with the effective messaging of the rising youth revolt against climate change. Last August, 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg skipped school and held a one-person protest outside her country’s parliament to demand action on climate change. In the six months since, there have been nationwide #FridaysforFuture school walkouts in at least nine countries, and more are planned.

Thunberg has spoken to the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in Davos, with an in-your-face and from-the-heart message that’s about not just facts but her very real and personal fear:

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope… I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

By speaking to our hearts and not just our heads — and by framing the issue in terms of personal and immediate fear of a future that promises more harm than benefit — Thunberg has started an international protest movement.

The lesson is clear. Wallace-Wells’ New York Times essay will get lots of attention among the intelligentsia, but he is not likely to arouse serious new support for action against climate change. Risk communication that acknowledges and respects the emotions and psychology of the people it tries to reach is likely to have far greater impact — and that’s exactly what the effort to combat climate change needs right now.

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It’s time for climate change communicators to listen to social science

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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

by IsmaelWicks Posted on March 16, 2019

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

President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “loyalty freak,” found a loyal friend and unwavering supporter in former Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah.

So when Hatch’s office sent a letter in mid-March 2017 requesting that the Interior Department shrink the boundary of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to free up fossil fuel-rich lands, as the New York Times revealed, the Trump administration sprang into action.

A little more than a month later, Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of more than two dozen recent national monument designations. It was clear that Bears Ears was the primary target. At the signing ceremony, Trump said he’d “heard a lot about” the 1.35 million-acre site in southeastern Utah and how “beautiful” the area is. He painted the Obama administration designation as a massive federal land grab. And he boasted that it “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of the state’s citizens, and that he was opening the land up to “tremendously positive things.”

He made no mention of the five Native American tribes that consider the area sacred and jointly petitioned for the monument’s creation. Instead, he thanked Hatch for his “never-ending prodding.”

“[Hatch] would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this,’” Trump said. “Is that right, Orrin? You didn’t stop. He doesn’t give up. He’s shocked that I’m doing it, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Again, this was before former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched what he promised would be an objective, thorough review of recent monument designations; one he said would give all stakeholders a voice. In the end, Trump signed a pair of proclamations to cut more than 2 million acres from Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history. Seemingly every action leading to that decision suggested the outcome was predetermined.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing to examine what they described in a news release as Trump’s “illegal decision to shrink” the Utah sites. The event, titled “Forgotten Voices: The Inadequate Review and Improper Alteration of Our National Monuments,” featured testimony from several tribal leaders, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management and other stakeholders. Zinke turned down an invitation to testify through his attorney, according to a committee spokesperson.

Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the committee’s chair, told HuffPost in a recent interview that Zinke created a culture at the Department of the Interior centered on “making life easier” for oil, gas, and mining interests at the expense of conservation and environmental stewardship. The monument rollbacks, he added, “epitomizes” that culture.

Grijalva echoed that sentiment during the committee’s hearing. He said the administration’s review was “hollow and improper” and gave industry “special consideration.”

“It is my firm belief that this was a predestined outcome and that everything that has occurred since then has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva said. “I don’t think it’s justifiable.”

BLM directed to free up coal deposits

One of the biggest revelations about the administration’s motives came during Wednesday’s hearing, when Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, cited testimony from a BLM employee who said he was directed to redraw the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante to exclude coal-rich areas and to be no more than 1 million acres.

“The first area I was told to exclude from the boundary, with no discussion, was the coal leases from 1996,” the BLM mapping specialist told investigators at Interior’s Office of Inspector General, according to Huffman.

Huffman went on to reveal that the expert was told to carve out areas rich in fossils, the very resources the monument was established to protect.

“The big one was the paleontological resources — huge dinosaur area,” the BLM expert told investigators, according to Huffman. “These coal areas are all pretty high dinosaur resources areas. We were told they are out regardless.”

This testimony is included in an unredacted version of an OIG report release in January that concluded there is “no evidence” that Zinke gave retired Utah state Representative Mike Noel preferential treatment when he redrew the monument’s boundary.

Ed Roberson, BLM’s Utah state director, told lawmakers Wednesday that the review was open, fair, and thorough. Huffman told Roberson that the order given to the BLM mapping specialist “does not sound like an honest and exhausted process,” but rather “a pre-cooked decision to allow coal companies to mine this coal.”

In his final report to the White House, Zinke acknowledged the potential for mining coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante, noting that the site contains “an estimated several billion tons of coal.” Downey Magallanes, the daughter of a former executive of coal giant Peabody Energy, was a top Interior official who oversaw the Trump administration’s monument review. She left the agency last year for a job at oil giant BP.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during a visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Zinke cozied up to monument opponents

In the week after Trump signed the orders threatening the future of 27 national monuments, Zinke met with Utah’s Republican delegation and the San Juan County Commission — staunch critics of Bears Ears — to discuss next steps. He sat down with members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five area tribes that petitioned for monument status, only after they traveled to Washington to demand a meeting, claiming that neither Trump nor anyone on his team had consulted with them.

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A week later, Zinke traveled to Utah as part of a monuments “listening tour,” when he spent four days visiting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Monument opponents, including Utah Governor Gary Herbert (a Republican) and members of the San Juan County Commission, joined him on the tour of Bears Ears. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition were given a one-hour meeting with the agency chief.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the coalition, one of several groups now suing the administration, called Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears “devastating” and said the administration “failed to meaningfully engage our sovereign nations.”

“The upcoming hearing will uncover the bias, the outsized influence of the mining and drilling industries and the political motivations of the administration that led them to their illegal decision,” the coalition wrote.

Cherry-picked data

In launching its review, the Interior Department claimed that the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906 “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” early on and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”

The figure formed the foundation of the administration’s argument that Trump’s predecessors abused the century-old law. But a look at early monument designations upends the agency’s math. In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Only a few Obama-era land monuments are larger. Roosevelt also designated the 610,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument and the 20,629-acre Chaco Canyon National Monument. Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both designated monuments of over a million acres. Coolidge set aside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1925, and Hoover designated California’s Death Valley in 1933.

The Interior Department has never substantiated the 422-acre figure, despite HuffPost’s numerous requests.

Not about extraction, they said

Throughout the process, Zinke maintained that the review and subsequent rollbacks were not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development on once-protected lands.

“I’m a geologist,” Zinke, who is not a geologist, said at a congressional budget hearing last year. “I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix.”

Media reporting over the last year suggests otherwise. The New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision. The Washington Post uncovered a lobbying campaign from uranium company Energy Fuels to shrink Bears Ears. And Roll Call reported this month that Energy Fuels, which owns a uranium mill adjacent to the original Bears Ears boundary, met with a top Interior Department official to discuss Bears Ears even before the agency launched its review.

The Washington Post also reported on agency emails that show Interior Department officials dismissed information about the benefits of establishing protected monuments, including increased tourism and archeological discoveries, instead choosing to play up the value of energy development, logging, and ranching.

A man holds a sign in protest, during Ryan Zinke’s visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Nothing to learn from the public

Early in the review process, Interior announced a comment period to give the public a chance to weigh in. It was a move that Zinke said “finally gives a voice to local communities and states” that the Trump administration claimed previous administrations had ignored.

That invitation appears to have mostly been for show. As HuffPost first reported, the agency conducted its review of Bears Ears assuming it had nothing to learn from the public.

“Essentially, barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted,” Randal Bowman, an agency official who played a key role in the review, told colleagues during a May 2017 webinar to train a dozen agency staffers on how to read and catalog public comments. And in a May 2017 email exchange with Downey Magallanes, a former top aide of Zinke’s who played a key role in the review, Bowman said he expected the comments to be “99-1 against any changes.”

The support for keeping monuments intact was indeed overwhelming. An analysis by the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities found that 99 percent of the more than 685,000 public comments submitted during a 15-day comment period voiced support for Bears Ears.

In a report summary made public in August 2017, Zinke acknowledged that the vast majority of the 2.8 million public comments the department received as part of its sweeping review favored maintaining national monuments, which he chalked up to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

He didn’t appear to consider that the comments were the honest opinions of individual Americans.

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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

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Breaking: Across the globe, students go on strike to demand climate action

by AshleeStricklin Posted on March 15, 2019

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It’s Friday, March 15, and hundreds of thousands of students are expected to walk out of school to protest global leaders’ inaction on climate change. Young climate activists across the globe have been anticipating this day like Christmas without the consumerism. Inspired by newly minted teenage Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg, Gen-Zers are rallying to send adults a clear message — you need to take our future seriously.

Several Grist reporters are in the field today covering the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. We will update this post throughout the day as the strikes unfold worldwide. For more news on the student walkouts, follow @grist on Twitter.

Here’s the latest on the Youth Climate Strikes:

Some of our favorite signs yet

As Seattle strikes wrap up, kids are laser-focusing their message at politicians

“To all those politicians who can’t imagine my and many other futures in a ruined climate, imagine being out of a job in 2020, 2022, 2024, or 2026 when I personally get to vote.” — Taro Moore, 12-year-old climate striker from Kenmore Middle School

“I really can’t conceptualize an idea where people wouldn’t believe this is a real issue. The way the environment has changed over past decade, droughts from America to Africa to Australia, it’s just preposterous that some people in the Republican party are opposed to this.” — Kevin, 17-year-old climate striker from Bellevue High School

“Anybody who wants to run for president, who wants to run this country, they’ve got to pay attention.” — Athena Fain, 15-year-old organizer from Ingraham High School

Police respond in New York as protestors block roads

Per 350.org, the protests surpassed 1 million participants worldwide

Strikes get going in the Pacific North West (Grist’s backyard)

California groups join in the fray

Spotted in San Francisco!

The pace picks up across the country

Strikes get underway in other East Coast cities

New York City is up and at ’em

International Youth Climate Strikes kick off

The night before the strike, youth across the country prepare for protest

At Columbia University in New York, students worked late into the night to make signs for the protest.

Grist / Rachel Ramirez

Ahead of the strike, student leaders across the country share their motivations for participating.

Image courtesy of Shania Hurtado

As united as Friday’s protests will be in their call for meaningful climate action, the reasons young people have for participating are also grounded in their regions’ unique climate concerns.

“Hurricane Harvey devastated our city,” said Shania Hurtado, 16, who lives in Houston, Texas. “It was a time when my family and my friends were in a state of fear. It was terrible. This is truly why I’m striking. It’s why I’m organizing the strike. It’s something that affects me personally and we have the power to prevent and we should do something about it.”

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

by CheryleKaufmann Posted on March 15, 2019

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When the EPA and the Department of Interior announced plans to scrap Obama-era regulations to curb methane leaks last year, they were transparent about their rationale — they wanted to help the oil and gas industry. The EPA estimated that its revised regulation for new wells would save companies $380 million every year. The Department of Interior touted that its updated rule would “reduce unnecessary burdens on the private sector.”

Now at least one member of the Big Oil club is balking at the Trump administration’s efforts.

At a conference in Houston earlier this week, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell’s U.S. division, told Reuters that methane leaks are “a big part of the climate problem” and that she wants the EPA to establish more aggressive regulations that plug leaks. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, packs more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. (And leaks mean Shell “has less product to sell,” Watkins wrote in a LinkedIn post).

“We don’t usually tell governments how to do their job,” Watkins reportedly said, “but we’re ready to break with that and say, ‘Actually, we want to tell you how to do your job.’”

Watkins’ comments reflect shifting attitudes in the oil and gas industry. Shell, for instance, has fracking and refining operations in more than 70 countries. But Shell wants to invest up to $2 billion in “New Energies”, and it announced plans to become the world’s biggest power company by 2030 as part of a move, away from its core oil and gas business. An executive at ExxonMobil also said this week that methane regulation has “an important role to play” in “helping industry as a whole rise to the challenge” of producing energy while minimizing the effect on the planet.

“The big oil and gas companies see the writing on the wall in terms of climate change,” said Lauren Pagel, interim executive director at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “They spent so many years denying climate change is happening, denying that they caused climate change, they spent a lot of years in denial, and this is their new tactic — that they can be part of the solution.”

The two regulations in the Trump administration’s crosshairs are aimed at curbing methane leaks from wells on public lands and new oil and gas sites on private land. The Department of Interior published the final rule rescinding methane leaks on public lands in September, and the EPA is in the process of rolling back regulations for new drilling.

Methane leaks from well sites and pipelines undermine the industry’s argument that natural gas can help the country shift to a cleaner economy. A recent study estimated that 13 million metric tons of natural gas — enough to fuel 10 million homes — is lost through leaks each year. That’s roughly 2 percent of all natural gas produced in the country.

Leaking natural gas also poses numerous health risks. It contains benzene and a slew of other hazardous pollutants and volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to increased cancer risk and respiratory illnesses. An Earthworks report found that some 750,000 asthma attacks in children are attributable to smog from oil and gas pollution nationally. It estimated that 12.6 million people live within a half mile of an oil and gas facility.

Pagel said that as long as oil and gas companies are in business, strict regulations, such as those to decrease methane emissions, are required to protect public health and the environment.

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

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Mozambique braces for ‘extremely dangerous’ Cyclone Idai

by GabrielBJQ Posted on March 14, 2019

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A major port city on the coast of southeast Africa is bracing for a direct hit from a powerful tropical cyclone — in a situation the World Meteorological Organization has called a “potential worst case scenario.”

Cyclone Idai is targeting Beira, Mozambique, a booming city of about 500,000 people. The storm packs sustained winds of 115 mph and threatens a month’s worth of rainfall for an already waterlogged region — the makings of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. Meteorologists have called the conditions “extremely dangerous.” So far, blurry social media videos during landfall convey eerie sounds of wind and rain and crashing metal.

In Mozambique and neighboring Malawi, 122 people have died in cyclone-related rains according to a U.N. briefing issued on Thursday, making Idai the deadliest extreme weather event on Earth so far in 2019. More than a million people have already been directly affected by the disaster.

U.N. officials have spent much of the week preparing communities for the worst, which may still be ahead. Government authorities in Mozambique have ordered a coastal evacuation and raised the national alert level to “institutional code red,” its highest state of emergency.

Idai is the strongest tropical cyclone — the generic meteorological term for a hurricane or typhoon — to approach Mozambique since 2000, and the strongest to affect Beira in at least 56 years.

In Beira, residents have been working for years to prepare for a storm like Idai, building retention ponds for floodwaters and trying to focus the city’s growth on higher elevation neighborhoods. But Mozambique is one of the most disaster-prone countries in Africa, and climate change is increasing the severity of flooding events there — as it is nearly everywhere.

That, in combination with the fact that 40 percent of the city lies just three feet or less above sea level, means that Idai could be a huge disaster. In the days before landfall, meteorologists predicted Idai’s storm surge could be as high as 26 feet.

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Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

by CiaraPikegestwd Posted on March 14, 2019

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After a handful of trips across the country, a few shaky Facebook live streams, 10 angst-ridden, stream-of-consciousness Medium posts, at least one trip to the dentist, and a Vanity Fair cover about wanting to be “in it,” Beto O’Rourke is now … in it.

Last night, the former congressman from Texas confirmed to an El Paso TV station that he is running for the White House, and then made the official announcement on Twitter this morning.

In the launch video, O’Rourke called voters “the last great hope of Earth” and said that we’re in a “moment of maximum peril and maximum potential.”

“Perhaps, most importantly of all, because our very existence depends on it, we can unleash the ingenuity and creativity of millions of Americans who want to ensure that we squarely confront the challenge of climate change before it’s too late,” he said.

So what does his presidential bid mean for the environment and tackling climate change? It’s complicated. First, the good news: O’Rourke is no climate denier. Even in deep-red Texas, O’Rourke, who had no name recognition nationally until he launched a grassroots, seat-of-your-pants campaign against Senator Ted Cruz in 2017, was clear from the get-go that climate change is real, that it’s happening now and humans are driving it. O’Rourke also sports a lifetime score of 95 from the League of Conservation Voters.

In his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Cruz, climate change was rarely part of the discussion. Over two debates, Cruz and O’Rourke clashed over energy and climate just once. In response to a question about ExxonMobil acknowledging climate change, O’Rourke said, “Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, we should be able to listen to the scientists.”

In Texas, campaigns are awash in money from Big Oil, and his campaign was no different. Last year, he was taken off a list of politicians who’d signed a “No Fossil Fuel Money” pledge, after he received $430,000 from people working in the oil and gas industry. Three-fourths of the donations were larger than $200 and 29 of them were from oil and gas executives.

When he traveled to parts of Texas dependant on fossil fuel extraction during his Senate campaign, O’Rourke promoted fracking as fundamental to national security. In the heart of the Permian Basin, for instance, he told the Midland Reporter-Telegram that he didn’t want the United States to be dependent on other countries for energy but that fracking should be done “in a responsible, safe way that does not jeopardize the environment.” At a debate with Cruz, he called the decision between renewables and fossil fuels “a false choice.”

Environmental advocates have also been troubled by a handful of votes in favor of the oil and gas industry during his time in Congress. O’Rourke was one of few Democrats in the House to vote to lift the ban on oil exports in 2015. And he backed a Republican bill to fast-track natural gas exports and opposed a bill to limit offshore drilling.

Maybe this campaign will be different. There’s the prominent mention of climate change in the launch video, along with his support for the Green New Deal. In an interview with BuzzFeed last month, O’Rourke said that it’s “the best proposal that I’ve seen to ensure that this planet does not warm another 2 degrees C, after which we may lose the ability to live in places like El Paso.”

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Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

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The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement

by MeridithShade5 Posted on March 13, 2019

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Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.

If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.

“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, with consequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.

This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.

Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom are indigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.

The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.

These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.

And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.

As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

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The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement

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New York City public schools will adopt ‘Meatless Mondays’

by cherihomer74079 Posted on March 13, 2019

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Bye-bye, sloppy joes. Hello, tofu! Earlier this week New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that starting next school year, New York City’s public school lunchrooms will not serve meat on Mondays.

“Cutting back on meat a little will improve New Yorkers’ health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement (which was released, naturally, on a Monday.) “We’re expanding Meatless Mondays to all public schools to keep our lunch and planet green for generations to come.”

The New York City school district is the nation’s largest and includes more than 1,800 schools and  1.1 million students. The city’s “Meatless Monday” effort started out as a pilot program in 15 Brooklyn schools, where it proved to be both cost-effective and popular with students.

The fact that kids in NYC are down to munch on vegetarian or vegan meals once per week isn’t really a shocker; plant-based diets are more common among young people. Plus, the younger generation is pretty riled up about climate change, and there is no shortage of evidence that large-scale meat production plays a significant role in greenhouse gas emissions.

“Reducing our appetite for meat is one of the single biggest ways individuals can reduce their environmental impact on our planet,” said Mark Chambers, Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, in a statement. “Meatless Mondays will introduce hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers to the idea that small changes in their diet can create larger changes for their health and the health of our planet.”

New York Public Schools is not the first district to adopt the policy — more than 100 other districts across the country have also signed on. So, so long, Monday mystery meat! You will not be missed.

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New York City public schools will adopt ‘Meatless Mondays’

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Ilhan Omar’s 16-year-old daughter is co-leading the Youth Climate Strike

by Marita9856 Posted on March 13, 2019

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Freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is championing one of the boldest climate policies in America. The Minnesota representative grew up in Somalia before immigrating to the United States as a refugee, so she was able to see firsthand the consequences of drought and make deep connections between climate change and all aspects of human society.

“I’m one who is urging my colleagues to really take this opportunity to not just issue resolutions and talking points, but for us to actually put a real bill on the table and to allow us to have a real conversation on this issue,” Omar recently told Minnesota Public Radio.

But Omar is not the only environmental influencer in her family — her daughter Isra Hirsi, 16, is one of the three youth leaders planning the U.S. component of Friday’s International Youth Climate Strike, in which young people will walk out of class in order to call for urgent climate action.

I had a chance to talk with Isra about how her efforts are already making a huge impact, and how her passion for the environment has influenced her family.

Update: In response to this piece, Omar wrote on Twitter: “Proud mom here! I hope other Members of Congress will join me in this strike. We need to listen to the wisdom of our kids!”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What’s it been like for you getting this all together?

A. It’s been a lot. There’s just a lot going on. Every 10 seconds there’s something else that pops up that you wouldn’t expect. It’s been crazy. There are so many people involved and so many things you have to do. It’s been really stressful. It definitely does interfere with school. I respond to texts and messages during the school day, and then I come home at four and that’s when I start doing all my calls. I have calls every single night. It’s kind of go-time. It’s all over the place. It’s a lot of work, more than I expected.

Q. How have you influenced your family by taking this on? Have you been able to teach them things about why you feel so strongly about this?

A. My parents are already kind of on top of it, a little bit less so my siblings. But my little sister is really young and so she kind of gets it. I told her that she should go to the strikes and she’s was like, “yeah I want to go.” So my dad is going to take her to the capital. She’s really interested. My parents definitely understand and are up with everything.

Q. How old is your sister?

A. She’s 6.

Q. Are you going to be speaking at the strike at the capital?

A. I’m going to D.C.

Q. Oh cool. With your mom?

A. Yeah.

Q. She just announced she’s going to be attending. (Editor’s note: so far, Omar is the only member of Congress who has confirmed she will be attending this Friday’s nationwide school strike for climate change)

A. Yeah, she’ll be speaking too.

Q. How do you feel about that?

A. I mean, I kind of got her to. It’s good. I kind of wanted to get people there. We invited some other people like [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Bernie Sanders and we’re just hoping they all come.

Q. How was that conversation with your mom to get her to speak there?

A. It was just a matter of, she wanted to go — she was probably speaking about it that weekend, and she said, “I’ll be in D.C., I’ll go speak.” So I’m going to fly out from Minneapolis and then fly back with her, so it’s just perfect.

Q. How has your family influenced you? You said both of your parents “get it.” Where do you feel most of your inspiration is coming from?

A. I wouldn’t say it would be my parents. I would say more of the spaces that I’m in. Learning more about climate change and what it does, all of the different things that impact it. I learned about things like Line 3, and wildfires in California. There are so many things that got me realizing how important this is. It’s important to talk about what climate change does to marginalized communities, what it could do to your community. I think that’s a really great way to get more people involved.

Q. And watching the whole national conversation over the past few months.

A. Especially Sunrise. They’re very big now. Reading about the Green New Deal, it’s inspiring. Learning about all these things is kind of interesting. And Sunrise has helped put women of color at the forefront.

Q. Why do you think it’s important to have women of color leading the climate change movement?

A. People of color are disproportionately affected by climate change and that kind of just gets ignored. People are living with these things right now. Accessibility, when it comes to fighting for climate change, also gets ignored. Every interview I have, they’re like, “Are you striking every Friday?” And I’m like, no, I can’t. There’s no way. People say, “Oh you’re not vegetarian!” And I say, “Well, my family is not from this country. They grew up as meat-eaters, I can’t control those things.”

It’s important for people to step back and realize that they’re not the only people. Environmental racism is a really big thing. The environmental movement is still predominantly white, how do we change that conversation? Having women of color leading is one way to do that.

Q. How is your school reacting? Is your school supporting you?

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A. I recently sent an email to my teachers explaining the climate strikes and what I was doing. A lot of them brushed past it and were kind of ignoring it. Some were really interested. It’s also awareness for them to understand that students won’t be in school on Friday and this is definitely a conversation we should be having. My peers and I are going around to science classes and talking about the climate strike and all the teachers are letting us. Some teachers are even giving kids extra credit if they go to the marches.

Q. There are some high schools that are actively supporting kids who go. Has your principal made any sort of announcement?

A. The problem isn’t my principal; it’s my district. They’ll definitely count it as unexcused. But my school is really supportive. A lot of the students are also apolitical, they don’t care. It’s not really a question of the teachers or the principal, it’s more like will the high school students actually attend.

Q. But if they see role models, if they see you up there …

A. That’s true, but last year I tried to get 1,000 kids from my high school to go to something and I only got 200.

Q. That’s pretty good.

A. Well, there are 2,000 kids at my school. We’re in the middle of Minneapolis, we’re super close to the light rail, we can easily go over to the state capitol building.

Q. So, what’s your strategy? Do you double down on the kids that get it?

A. Yeah, we’re really just focused on the students who actually care. We go into those classes and get the teachers to talk to those students who are actually interested. It’s easier. It’s still worth it to get the kids who care. The climate strikes are a great way for young people to get involved pretty easily. It’s also a way for politicians to understand that young people really care.

These strikes are happening all over the world. Getting young people out, going to state capitols, going to city halls, going to the nation’s capital and talking about these things, that says something. That’s what we’re trying to do: Change the conversation not only about things like the Green New Deal but so much more. Obviously, one strike isn’t going to change everything, but this isn’t the last strike.

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Ilhan Omar’s 16-year-old daughter is co-leading the Youth Climate Strike

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The world lost environmental leaders on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

by MaynardChristie Posted on March 12, 2019

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The world lost environmental leaders on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

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