[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

halfwaywrong wrote:

Those are two different countries though, but I get your point and I don't think I disagree. It's fairly applicable here too.

Ah, I misunderstood your post.

I think it's safe to say that "conservative" (given that the word has different meanings in different context) leaderships in most Western countries are all drawing from the same racist, classist playbook.

halfwaywrong wrote:
Prederick wrote:

The 10 Countries Most Vulnerable to Climate Change Will Experience Population Booms in the Coming Decades

I posted an article about that referenced this before, but if you think the migrant crisis is bad now, wait until CC really kicks in in 20 years.

This article came out earlier this week about the Australian Defence Force identifying climate migrants as a huge problem for the country in the future, among other climate related issues putting huge strain on the military. Meanwhile, our government continues to steer the whole thing off the cliff. You might think they'd at least listen to the military, but nope.

They are listening to the military, they are just going in a different direction with those warnings. You or I take those warnings and say "well ok, we need to aggressively combat emissions so that the changes are only "bad" not "terrible" so their is less migration. In addition we need to work on other practices to mitigate local damages and make those available to regions that are the worst effected! Etc. etc.

Conservative politicians see those warnings and think "ok, we are going to have to create conditions that redirect refugees and migrants to other locations, make sure that others die enroute, and be ready to jail and exile anyone that survives, and shoot anyone that objects."

They are energetically working in that direction as we speak! It's not that they are ignorant or indecisive, they are just choosing evil, which can make it confusing to see the logic.

I think it is more likely they are wanting to show immigration as a problem so they can whip up the populace to vote for them.

Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months

Welp. It's been fun!

Do you remember the good old days when we had "12 years to save the planet"?

Now it seems, there's a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C this century, emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut by 45% by 2030.

But today, observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.

The idea that 2020 is a firm deadline was eloquently addressed by one of the world's top climate scientists, speaking back in 2017.

"The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020," said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.

"I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival," said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.

The Y by 20XX has always been a bad way to sell it imo. So easy push it aside until later. It has always been more like 'reduce by Y each year until 20XX'.
Neither is gong to happen anyway. It will be a question of how little damage above 1.5C there will be.

Climate Change Threatens World's Food Supply

I've said it here before, but I'll say it again, if you're seriously concerned with mass migration, you should be super concerned with climate change, because if the ability of countries near the equator to feed their populations collapses, there will be an enormous dislocation of people who aren't just going to sit home and starve.

This also speaks to another article I posted here, which is that when this stuff becomes unavoidable, I fully expect most of Climate change's biggest opponents to slide neatly into acknowledging it with a heaping helping of "we can't share, climate change has badly limited our resources".

And this is before we address potential water crises as well.

Prederick wrote:

I've said it here before, but I'll say it again, if you're seriously concerned with mass migration, you should be super concerned with climate change, because if the ability of countries near the equator to feed their populations collapses, there will be an enormous dislocation of people who aren't just going to sit home and starve.

This also speaks to another article I posted here, which is that when this stuff becomes unavoidable, I fully expect most of Climate change's biggest opponents to slide neatly into acknowledging it with a heaping helping of "we can't share, climate change has badly limited our resources".

*coughs*

Clouds of dust rose behind the wheels of the pickup truck as we hurtled over the back road in Palo Verde, El Salvador. When we got to the stone-paved part of the road, the driver slowed as the truck heaved up and down with the uneven terrain. Riding in the back bed of the truck, Ruben (not his real name) and I talked while we held on tight, sitting on sacks of dried beans that he was taking to market.

“It doesn’t come out right,” he said, “it just doesn’t pay anymore to work the land. I take out a loan for seed, and then I can’t count on making it back to pay off my debt.”

Ruben told me then, for the first time, that he planned to save up his money to migrate out of El Salvador. His story is playing out across Central America among many migrants and would-be migrants.

When I spoke with Ruben, it was 2017, nearly 20 years after I had first spent time in his community, a coffee cooperative in El Salvador’s central highlands founded in the 1990s. Over those two decades, the cooperative’s hopes and dreams of a sustainable livelihood producing coffee for a global market have been dashed.

Rising global temperatures, the spread of crop disease and extreme weather events have made coffee harvests unreliable in places like El Salvador. On top of that, market prices are unpredictable.

In the back of the pickup truck that day, we talked about gangs too. There was increasing criminal activity in the town nearby, and some young people in the town were being harassed and recruited. But this was a relatively new issue for the community, layered on top of the persistent problem of the ecological crisis.

As a cultural anthropologist who studies factors of displacement in El Salvador, I see how Ruben’s situation is reflective of a much broader global phenomenon of people leaving their homes, directly or indirectly due to climate change and the degradation of their local ecosystem. And as environmental conditions are projected to get worse under current trends, this raises unresolved legal questions on the status and security of people like Ruben and his family.

Wasn't quite sure where to put this piece, or even if as a white dude I should be posting a piece that was clearly written by Black people for Black people, but I thought it was really good. I am happy to pull it if anyone asks:

Capitalism Has Failed, and Jay-Z’s Streaming Scandal Is Proof

Hip-hop is about hustling and faking it ’til you make it. Entrepreneurship undergirds the culture, as does flaunting your success through conspicuous consumption and over-the-top displays of wealth. Hip-hop has evolved from talking about street-level drug deals and buying rope chains to discussing real estate investments, purchasing high-brow art, and travel by private jet. The culture has always been about “getting money,” but along the way, hip-hop became hyper-capitalist. In this way, it may be the most quintessentially American art form.
I know I just killed Santa Claus for some of you, so let me be clear: I’m not saying Black-owned businesses are destined for failure. I’m saying that touting entrepreneurship as the path for Black economic opportunity is relying on individualized solutions to address massive collective problems. So many programs for Black youth — from organizations as varied as the NAACP to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp — seem to have entrepreneurship at or near the center of their strategy to facilitate economic advancement for Black people. That scares me. And here’s why:
Capitalism has failed.

Definitely not in climate change

Climate change was a major part of the piece, it didn't fit in TV and Race and it wasn't news!

Ah ok, not in the blurbs you quoted. I didnt look at the article.

The wrong quotes got pulled.

TLDR:
- Hip hop is capitalism on steroids
- since capitalism is morally bankrupt, what will this mean for an original African American art form?
- evidence of capitalism's demise is everywhere, most potently in the environment

Viewpoint: How half a degree could change the world

I have very little faith that we won't get that half a degree.

Climate Change Is Already Killing Americans and Costing Billions in Medical Bills, Report Finds

Climate change will make our lives worse in the years to come, but a new report out this week highlights the stark costs people are already paying in the U.S. In 2012 alone, it found 10 major climate-related events likely led to nearly 1,000 extra deaths, almost 21,000 hospitalizations, and an added $10 billion in healthcare costs.

Researchers from Columbia University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) looked at the fallout of extreme weather events strongly linked to a warmer climate that took place in 2012. These included extreme heat days in Wisconsin, outbreaks of tick-borne Lyme disease in Michigan and the mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Texas, wildfires in Colorado and Washington, and the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Using various sources of data, including medical records and earlier studies, they then came up with their estimates.

Overall, they found that these events directly contributed to 917 deaths, 20,568 hospitalizations, and 17,857 emergency department visits. In 2018 dollars, they also estimated the financial costs of these medical cases amounted to $10 billion, though the costs could have ranged from $2.7 billion to as high as $24.6 billion. The single most impactful event was Hurricane Sandy, which led to nearly 300 deaths and $3.1 billion in medical-related losses, though the overall costs created by wildfires were slightly higher. These costs are on top of the billion in damages and lost property caused by the storms and wildfires the researchers looked at.

Echoing other research elsewhere, they also found that the more vulnerable segments of the country were most affected by climate. Two-thirds of the costs related to illness were paid by Medicare and Medicaid, the government-ran health care programs that predominantly cover the elderly and poor.

Even the damn birds?

(This isn't Climate Change specifically, but i'm putting it here under 'General Environmental Concerns')

WASHINGTON (AP) — North America’s skies are lonelier and quieter as nearly 3 billion fewer wild birds soar in the air than in 1970, a comprehensive study shows.

The new study focuses on the drop in sheer numbers of birds, not extinctions. The bird population in the United States and Canada was probably around 10.1 billion nearly half a century ago and has fallen 29% to about 7.2 billion birds, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science .

“People need to pay attention to the birds around them because they are slowly disappearing,” said study lead author Kenneth Rosenberg, a Cornell University conservation scientist. “One of the scary things about the results is that it is happening right under our eyes. We might not even notice it until it’s too late.”

Rosenberg and colleagues projected population data using weather radar, 13 different bird surveys going back to 1970 and computer modeling to come up with trends for 529 species of North American birds. That’s not all species, but more than three-quarters of them and most of the missed species are quite rare, Rosenberg said.

Using weather radar data, which captures flocks of migrating birds, is a new method, he said.

“This is a landmark paper. It’s put numbers to everyone’s fears about what’s going on,” said Joel Cracraft, curator-in-charge for ornithology of the American Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t part of the study.

“It’s even more stark than what many of us might have guessed,” Cracraft said.

What about insects? Is it just me or are there fewer of them (especially during Spring/Summer)?

I certainly think so but I haven't seen any facts to back that up.

farley3k wrote:

Climate Change Is Already Killing Americans and Costing Billions in Medical Bills, Report Finds

Climate change will make our lives worse in the years to come, but a new report out this week highlights the stark costs people are already paying in the U.S. In 2012 alone, it found 10 major climate-related events likely led to nearly 1,000 extra deaths, almost 21,000 hospitalizations, and an added $10 billion in healthcare costs.

Researchers from Columbia University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) looked at the fallout of extreme weather events strongly linked to a warmer climate that took place in 2012. These included extreme heat days in Wisconsin, outbreaks of tick-borne Lyme disease in Michigan and the mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Texas, wildfires in Colorado and Washington, and the landfall of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Using various sources of data, including medical records and earlier studies, they then came up with their estimates.

Overall, they found that these events directly contributed to 917 deaths, 20,568 hospitalizations, and 17,857 emergency department visits. In 2018 dollars, they also estimated the financial costs of these medical cases amounted to $10 billion, though the costs could have ranged from $2.7 billion to as high as $24.6 billion. The single most impactful event was Hurricane Sandy, which led to nearly 300 deaths and $3.1 billion in medical-related losses, though the overall costs created by wildfires were slightly higher. These costs are on top of the billion in damages and lost property caused by the storms and wildfires the researchers looked at.

Echoing other research elsewhere, they also found that the more vulnerable segments of the country were most affected by climate. Two-thirds of the costs related to illness were paid by Medicare and Medicaid, the government-ran health care programs that predominantly cover the elderly and poor.

But at least the Koch brothers and the libertarians will have lots of money to burn to keep themselves warm when as things collapse.

Senior citizen with limited impulse control easily triggered by teenager.

Attacks on Greta Thunberg Come from a Coordinated Network of Climate Change Deniers

If you can't fight the message - fight the messenger. Sick but certainly classic.

“Freak yachting accidents do happen…”

That was how British businessman, Trump ally, and Brexit bankroller Arron Banks responded to the news that Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who inspired the school climate strikes movement, was sailing to America to attend the UN Climate Action Summit. His scorn was not unique.

Someone should remind these fools about the guillotine.

Someone should bring back the guillotine.