The effects of “climate change” are many and varied

Letter to Editor by Larry Harris, Morgantown Dominion Post, June 2, 2019

The news has been full of stories of disastrous weather events of late: Heavy rainfall followed by floods in the Midwest; increased numbers of tornados, high temperatures, melting ice packs and so on.

A Washington Post article pointed out that it was 84 degrees in the Arctic last week. Eighteen of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. These are all indications that our climate is changing.

What is causing the extremes of temperature? Climate scientists point to increased greenhouse gases such as CO2, which reached 415 ppm (parts per million) this week — the highest in human history. In fact, CO2 levels are rising in an exponential manner due to our continued burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Most countries in the world recognize the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels, but our country, the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is denying there is a problem.

This week it was announced that the EPA was told to change the way it reports climate information. No more reports will be allowed that show how bad things will be after 2040 if we do not limit our use of fossil fuels.

Our current administration in Washington is interfering with the reporting of science, thereby allowing politics and money interests to trump the scientific method. It has become difficult to know what is true in our society, due to the increased occurrence of fake news.

But real science is based on truth, on studies that correlate physical data to events. If our president can step into the scientific world and tell scientists what they can and can’t report, then we have slipped to a dangerous place for the future. This has to change.

We are fortunate to be able to vote for better leadership, and 2020 is the time to do so.

>>> Larry Harris, Retired Professor of Biochemistry at WVU, has served on the Environmental Protection Advisory Council for the WV-DEP

The “Extinction Rebellion” is wide-spread demanding action to prevent climate change

Essay by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, May 21, 2019

VIDEO: ‘We don’t have any choice’: Protesters participate in Earth Day demonstrations (Extinction Rebellion, the group behind the ongoing demonstrations in London, has mobilized thousands across the globe to protest climate change)

Amid the daily infamies of Donald Trump’s presidency, his greatest dereliction of duty is his decision not to confront but to accelerate the greatest threat facing this country: the clear, present and growing danger of catastrophic climate change.

Trump is called a climate denier. He is actually a warrior for climate calamity. In many ways, Trump is the first president of the climate catastrophe era. We’ve already witnessed the undeniable first terrors: the fires that erased Paradise, Calif., in a day, the storms that savaged Houston and Puerto Rico, floods in the Midwest, droughts that forced millions to migrate from what used to be called the Fertile Crescent. In the face of this and more, Trump has chosen to go all in on the side of this direct security threat to our people, our country and our world.

Last week in Hackberry, La., Trump celebrated his collusion with the furies that threaten us, hailing the United States as the “energy superpower of the world.” Trump’s speech consisted of his stale stew of lies, exaggerations, boasts and insults, claiming credit for transformations that began long before his presidency, and scorning alternative views and opponents. Yet in the midst, he made it clear: He is proud to contribute to the horrors that now threaten us.

The reality is no longer in dispute by anyone willing to be honest about the science. We are on a path that has already begun to take casualties and rack up staggering costs. A recent U.N. report warns of the extinction of a million species — and the imperiling of humanity itself — in the next few decades.

The conservative scientific consensus is that we have about 12 years to transform how we produce energy to avoid unimaginable destruction. Continuing the current course will cost trillions over the next decades (more than the Green New Deal) and, more importantly, displace hundreds of millions in forced migrations, and spread disease, starvation and death at levels far beyond any war yet witnessed. No wall Trump succeeds in building would be able to deal with the 140 million climate refugees that the World Bank predicts by mid-century.

In Louisiana, Trump bragged that “American energy independence” would make our nation “wealthier” and “safer.” “We have an America First energy policy,” he brayed. “We don’t need anybody. And we don’t need to be ripped off by the rest of the world, either, because those days are over.” He boasted about getting out of the Paris climate accord, “replacing the EPA,” torpedoing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, “unlocking” the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, and more.

And, of course, Trump repeated his mockery of the Green New Deal, calling it a “hoax, like the hoax I just went through.” He continued, “We will never let radical activists, special interests, and out-of-control bureaucrats wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, or destroy your future.” In fact, that is exactly what Trump is doing. Lining up with the radical fossil-fuel activists and special interests, installing energy lobbyists and lawyers into government, and empowering them to make decisions that will — if not reversed rapidly in the next years — “wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, [and] destroy your future,” to say nothing of your children’s lives and possibilities.

The stakes could not be higher. As Bill McKibben, the climate expert who first warned of the climate change threat 30 years ago, noted, “The problem with climate change is that it’s a timed test. If you don’t solve it fast, then you don’t solve it. No one’s got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it’s melted. … We’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing — maybe — for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible.” And we are facing an opposition led by a president throwing in with powerful fossil-fuel interests and corporations that have pumped millions into disinformation and deception, and corrupted politics and politicians to preserve their profits while posing a direct threat to our lives.

The betrayal of Trump and the Republican Party is self-evident. Sadly, the leadership of the Democratic Party has also been AWOL, as have too many voices in media, particularly television. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), former vice president Joe Biden and too many other Democrats mistakenly seem to think that the best response to extremism is moderation. Rather than seeking a mandate for the change we need immediately, they choose to woo a mythic center with modest reforms.

Biden promises only to return to the Paris accord, a policy that might have been promising in the late 1980s, but simply represents inadequate moral signaling now.

In the end, as McKibben writes, the fossil fuel interests and their collaborators like Trump will lose this battle. Already insurance companies are refusing to guarantee against losses that are coming to coastal properties and elsewhere. The only question — and it is fundamental — is how long it takes for the climate destroyers to lose and how much damage is done in the interim. This is why Trump’s collusion is his greatest dereliction of duty.

The change we need will come — as it usually does — from independent citizen movements calling our compromised and corrupted leaders to account.

It’s the Extinction Rebellion that brought traffic to a crawl in London last month. It’s millions of children walking out of school. It’s the young activists of the Sunrise Movement vowing to force Democratic presidential contenders to take a position on the Green New Deal — and demanding that this debate be at the center of the next presidential election. These efforts would be amplified if the media stepped up with heightened urgency to report on the climate crisis and on the growing movements to address it. Toward that end, the Nation magazine, which I edit, and the Columbia Journalism Review are launching a new project — Covering Climate Now — to bring journalists together to try to find ways to dramatically improve media coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions.

Fifty years from now, McKibben says, we are going to run the world on sun and wind. The only question is whether the world will be completely broken, or whether we will have acted in time to avoid the worst. Trump has committed his administration to buttress the immensely rich and powerful fossil-fuel interests in accelerating the worst. Now we will see who has the courage and the conviction to stop them.

Drought & climate change are quite severe in Central America

From an Article by Will Bunch, Common Dreams, April 26, 2019

No issue has flummoxed our rage-prone 45th president more than the rise in unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border — even after promising his xenophobic base that his harsh immigration crackdown would make America great again.

When numbers came into the White House showing this decade’s biggest surge in refugees at the border — with Border Patrol agents detaining as many as 4,000 migrants, many of them women and children, in a single day. Then Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out of her job, partly because she wouldn’t buy into the president’s ideas to fight migration with moves that were probably illegal and unworkable and certainly immoral. Trump killed the nomination of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief who wasn’t “tough enough, fired other top Homeland Security officials, and flirted with ideas like sending detained children to Gitmo. The president was “increasingly unhinged” about border crossings.

The Trump administration needs to do something so far alien to them — Embrace science. The President must start accepting that climate change is real, that it’s occurring right now, and that responses like mass migration are an unavoidably human reaction to drought, floods and misery.

Experts believe that a sizable portion of the recent steep increase in migrants making the long and dangerous journey from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are doing so because record drought in the region — the result of a warming planet — has destroyed crops and left destitute farmers desperate to save their families.

“People have been displaced by climate for millennia, but we are now at a particular historical moment, facing a new type of environmentally driven migration that will be more fast and furious,” Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University professor publishing a book on climate-driven migration, said recently. “It will require incredible adaptability and political will to keep up with the changes that are forecasted to happen.”

Conor Walsh, who works for Catholic Family Services in Honduras, wrote recently in the Arizona Daily Star that severe drought in neighboring Guatemala in 2018 resulted in significant crop loss for as many as 300,000 subsistence farmers there. Indeed, the cycle of arid days without rain and severe floods has become so pronounced in the key growing regions of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras during the 2010s that the area is now called “the dry corridor.”

Experts note that the last big drought in 2014 matched up with the last big surge in U.S. border crossings. And the World Bank says climate change may cause as many as 1.4 million people to leave Central America and Mexico over the next 30 years.

But “incredible adaptability,” to steal professor Garcia’s phrase, is not a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. Imagine a world where the president sat at the Resolute Desk and listened to the story of Fredi Onan Vicen Peña, a 41-year-old Honduran coffee farmer who told the New York Times he’s seen a drought-fueled disease called coffee rust destroy 70 percent of his crop, while most of his family members have already left for the U.S. or elsewhere.

Can the United States — a.k.a. “the Colossus of the North” — do anything to help the struggling farmers of Honduras and Guatemala? The answer, not surprisingly, is “yes.” Sebastian Charchalac, a Guatemalan agronomist who was running a program with about $200,000 in U.S. aid — a mere pittance in the Land of Billion-Dollar Stealth Bombers — told the New Yorker he was seeing real success in helping farmers diversify crops, conserve water, and, as a result, save their land. Then in 2017 the Trump administration arrived and killed the program.

Indeed, one element of Trump’s rage-frenzied rampage over border crossings has been an announcement that the U.S. will end all foreign aid to the three key Central American nations — about $350 million to 400 million a year, already down sharply from the Obama years — as a spiteful punishment for the supposed failure to curb migration. That money goes not just for farm aid but also for programs that attack problems like urban gang violence — i.e., all of the horrible things that would cause people to abandon their native countries, undertake an arduous and dangerous long journey, and seek freedom and safety in the United States.

Ending foreign aid and covering our eyes and pretending that climate change doesn’t exist are all but guaranteed to drive the number of refugees from Central America even higher.

Meanwhile, climate change-driven migration — and the famines, wars and other crises created by this — are only going to get worse. In January, the Pentagon warned yet again that climate change is a major national security issue for this country. But Trump has not been listening!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

See also: Climate change a major factor in Central American migration, Univision, May 11, 2018

Donald Trump presidency a ‘disaster for the planet’, warn climate scientists

From an Article by Oliver Milman in New York, The Guardian, November 11, 2016

Trump say climate change is 'bullshit'

Leading scientists say the climate denier’s victory could mean ‘game over for the climate’ and any hope of warding off dangerous global warming. Trump has called global warming a ‘bullshit’ Chinese-invented hoax and wants the US to exit the Paris climate agreements.

The ripples from a new American president are far-reaching, but never before has the arrival of a White House administration placed the livability of Earth at stake. Beyond his bluster and crude taunts, Donald Trump’s climate denialism could prove to be the lasting imprint of his unexpected presidency.

“A Trump presidency might be game over for the climate,” said Michael Mann, a prominent climate researcher. “It might make it impossible to stabilize planetary warming below dangerous levels.”

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, added: “This is an unmitigated disaster for the planet.”

Trump has vowed to sweep away the climate framework painstakingly built over Barack Obama’s two terms. At risk is the Paris climate accord, which only came into force last week, and Obama’s linchpin emissions reduction policy, the Clean Power Plan.

At a pivotal moment when the planet’s nations have belatedly banded together to confront an existential threat, a political novice who calls global warming a “bullshit” Chinese-invented hoax is taking the helm at the world’s foremost superpower.

“Millions of Americans voted for a coal-loving climate denier willing to condemn people around the globe to poverty, famine and death from climate change,” said Benjamin Schreiber, climate director at Friends of the Earth US. “It seems undeniable that the United States will become a rogue state on climate change.”

US conservatives are already rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a bonfire of regulation. Trump wants the US to exit the Paris deal, which commits nations to keeping the global temperature rise below a 2C threshold, potentially setting off a cataclysmic domino effect where other countries also drop out or ease off efforts to decarbonize. The 2C limit, which was already a stern challenge, now appears perilous.

Why America elected Trump

The Clean Power Plan, the main tool to cut American emissions, is also targeted for elimination, along with billions of dollars in clean energy funding. Republicans will also turn off the tap of aid flowing to developing nations already struggling with climate change-driven sea level rise, heatwaves and drought.

Bitterly contested fossil fuel projects such as the Keystone development and the Dakota Access pipeline, which has caused unprecedented uproar among native American tribes, would likely be waved through, with Trump promising to “lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks to allow these vital energy infrastructure projects to go ahead”.

Environmentalists are already aghast at Trump’s presidential preparations. He has appointed Myron Ebell, director at a conservative thinktank, to oversee transition plans for the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump has casually earmarked for abolition. Ebell has said global warming is “nothing to worry about” and that the Clean Power Plan is “illegal”.

Shortlists drawn up for key Trump administration posts have also raised alarm. Oil billionaire Harold Hamm is being touted as energy secretary, while former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin could make a stunning comeback as interior secretary, putting her in charge of US public lands, including treasures such as Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks. Palin is an enthusiastic proponent of oil and gas drilling, describing the fossil fuels as “things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use”.

Republicans have already used Congressional committees to hound climate scientists and green groups and this badgering may escalate once climate denial is official White House doctrine. It’s understood that scientists at Nasa are already bracing themselves for cuts to climate research programs.

Predicting Trump’s plans, however, largely relies upon reading the runes from his discursive policy speeches, which regularly dissolved into vituperative diatribes while on the campaign trail.

At the heart of his energy and climate thinking is an “America first” policy where “draconian climate rules” are repealed and the US escalates its production of coal, oil and natural gas. In May, Trump sported a coal miner’s helmet at a rally in West Virginia, a state with a long history of mining, to underscore his message that the “war on coal” is over and that jobs will flow back to the stricken industry.

Trump want to repeal ‘draconian climate rules’ and increase US production of coal, oil and natural gas.

“Under my administration,” Trump said, “we’ll accomplish complete American energy independence. Complete. Imagine a world in which our foes, and the oil cartels, can no longer use energy as a weapon. It will happen. We’re going to win.”

These bromides to American industrial strength helped propel Trump to the White House but aren’t tethered to reality. US coal production slumped 10% last year, with mining jobs shrinking by 12%. Over the same 12-month period, the US oil industry lost $67bn. These woes have been caused by market forces, rather than onerous regulation, and even Trump’s authoritarianism doesn’t extend far enough to change that.

“As president, Donald Trump will pretend climate change does not exist,” said Prof Tom Lyon of the University of Michigan’s business school. “This is an increasingly untenable position, even for committed climate skeptics.

“His energy policy will encourage investment in high-carbon energy sources that will look foolish in retrospect. And he will anger much of the rest of the world by reneging on policies designed to address global challenges.”

US greenhouse gas emissions have started to taper off in recent years but a Trump presidency would see a resurgence, with an analysis by Lux Research finding that carbon dioxide output would be 16% higher than the current trajectory should the real estate magnate complete a second term.

This would give the world a hefty shove towards climate disaster and fatally wound the US’s reputation as a global leader. Should other major emitters such as China, India and the European Union fail to make compensatory emissions cuts the planet will likely spiral into runaway climate change where tens of millions of people are displaced by rising seas, food insecurity and conflict, leading to an unprecedented international humanitarian disaster.

Major US cities including New York, Miami and Boston would face inundation. California, already suffering its worst dry spell in 1,200 years, may stage ‘megadroughts’ that last 20 or even 30 years. The Pentagon has warned climate change poses a “threat multiplier” to US national security, to hoots of derision from Republicans.

The shift to a low-carbon economy already has its own momentum, however, with the cost of solar and wind power tumbling in recent years. Nearly 100 coal power plants were retired in 2015, with renewables accounting for two-thirds of all new electricity generation.

New York and California both have their own ambitious emission reduction plans, conservative states such as Iowa are embracing wind energy, and innovations from companies such as Tesla, in solar panels and battery storage, are being snapped up by homeowners.

Trumpian interference can only do so much to slow this trend, although plodding progress isn’t enough to stave off climate catastrophe. The UN has warned that global emissions must peak by 2020 and then be sharply reduced in order to avoid the worst. This shrinking window risks being clouded entirely if the US is to choke itself, and the rest of the world, on its fumes.

[[Artificial turf is rolled out after digging up a lawn due to California suffering its worst dry spell in 1,200 years. If climate action fails under Trump, the US state may experience ‘megadroughts’ that last 20 or 30 years.]]

Stunned environment groups, faced with triumphant climate denialism in all branches of government, are trying to muster defiance. “This could be devastating for our climate and our future,” admitted Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “But Trump must choose wisely or we guarantee him the hardest fight of his political life. We won’t be in a defensive crouch for the next four years, licking our wounds.

“If he tries to go backwards on climate change he’ll run headlong into an organized mass of people who will fight him in the courts, in Congress and on the streets.”

Others are more conciliatory, with former vice president Al Gore proffering an olive branch along with an enormous dollop of optimism. “Last night President-elect Trump said he wanted to be a president for all Americans,” Gore said on Wednesday. “In that spirit, I hope that he will work with the overwhelming majority of us who believe that the climate crisis is the greatest threat we face as a nation.”

Whether or not Trump becomes a belated convert to the reality of climate change, the physics of global warming remain unchanged.

2016 will be the warmest year on record, beating a mark set only last year. These extremes, where India experiences a temperature of 51C (123F) and the Arctic is robbed of almost all of its winter snowfall, are set to become the norm within a decade. American citizens, from Alaska to Louisiana, are already being uprooted due to the rising seas, a situation that will become commonplace.

Trump knows enough of the gargantuan shifts underway to build a seawall for his golf course in County Clare, Ireland. His Mar-a-Lago club in Florida may have to be next. Whether he extends his concern from beyond his own business interests to the rest of the world remains to be seen.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net