Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation:  Donald Trump’s Withdrawal From the Paris Accords Is a Crime Against Humanity

This is murder—even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it as such.

by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, June 1, 2017

President Donald Trump confirmed his status as climate denier in chief today, guaranteeing his place in history as an enemy of both science and humanity.

Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change will not stop the rest of the world from continuing to advance toward a clean-energy future. Solar, wind, batteries, and other technologies are growing tremendously fast, rewarding investors and employing far more people than the heat-trapping fuels of the past. Three million Americans now work in the clean-energy sector, more than the oil, gas, and coal industries combined. California Governor Jerry Brown, who heads the world’s sixth-largest economy and a hot spot of green-energy innovation, insisted that Trump’s efforts are doomed to failure. “The momentum is all the other way,” Brown said, “and I think Trump, paradoxically, is giving climate denial such a bad name that he’s actually building the very [climate action] movement that he is [purporting] to undermine.”

But no one should pretend that it does not matter when the world’s biggest economy rejects an agreement that put unprecedented international support behind ambitious climate action. By removing rules and regulations that require polluters in the United States to change their ways, Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Accord will slow progress at the very time when humanity’s survival requires faster action than ever.

“Crimes against humanity” is a phrase to use with caution, but it fits Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Accord and indeed his entire climate policy. Timothy Wirth, who as the under secretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that sought to limit global warming, has said that those who deny the well-established science of climate change “ought to be tried for crimes against humanity.” Wirth told The Nation after Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord that he stood by his remark, adding that the president’s action was “a stunning moral abdication of responsibility to future generations.” To refuse to act against global warming is to condemn thousands of people to death and suffering today and millions more tomorrow. This is murder, even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it. History will not be so blind.

Of course, the Paris Accord is far from perfect: Its emissions reductions are voluntary and do not go far enough, at least not yet. Nevertheless, the accord commits the world’s governments to leave behind oil, gas, and coal by mid-century—a historic shift. It commits them to limit global temperature rise to the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the maximum compatible with civilization as we know it, and to aim for the 1.5 Celsius limit that poor and island nations rightfully regard as essential to their survival. Thus the accord provides citizens, activists, and the rest of civil society worldwide with a strong mandate they can use to hold governments and corporations to account.

Thanks largely to such pressure from civil society, reinforced by the growing recognition of global elites that the climate crisis is indeed dire, the Paris Accord has already accelerated real climate progress. Some of the greatest change is underway in China, which is rapidly shutting down coal plants and mines and adding solar and wind plants, notwithstanding Trump’s shameless lies at the White House about China’s supposedly doing nothing. Meanwhile, the leaders of China and the European Union announced that they remain committed to the Paris Accord and plan to intensify cooperation on clean energy, a huge and growing global market that US businesses will now find harder to navigate. So much for America First.

Of course, the Paris Accord is far from perfect: Its emissions reductions are voluntary and do not go far enough, at least not yet. Nevertheless, the accord commits the world’s governments to leave behind oil, gas, and coal by mid-century—a historic shift. It commits them to limit global temperature rise to the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the maximum compatible with civilization as we know it, and to aim for the 1.5 Celsius limit that poor and island nations rightfully regard as essential to their survival. Thus the accord provides citizens, activists, and the rest of civil society worldwide with a strong mandate they can use to hold governments and corporations to account.

Thanks largely to such pressure from civil society, reinforced by the growing recognition of global elites that the climate crisis is indeed dire, the Paris Accord has already accelerated real climate progress. Some of the greatest change is underway in China, which is rapidly shutting down coal plants and mines and adding solar and wind plants, notwithstanding Trump’s shameless lies at the White House about China’s supposedly doing nothing. Meanwhile, the leaders of China and the European Union announced that they remain committed to the Paris Accord and plan to intensify cooperation on clean energy, a huge and growing global market that US businesses will now find harder to navigate. So much for America First.

Remarkably, Trump did not deny climate science outright in his remarks in the Rose Garden. Reading from a prepared text, he refrained from repeating his favorite falsehood about climate change—that it is “a hoax” invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy. Perhaps his aides have learned this much: Although fooled for decades by the disinformation campaigns funded by such polluters as ExxonMobil and voiced by Republicans in Congress, a majority of Americans now realize that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous. Trump instead portrayed his withdrawal from the Paris Accord as a matter of economic fairness and patriotism, of standing up for American workers, businesses, and taxpayers who, he said, are being taken advantage of and, worst of all, laughed at by foreigners who foisted a “very unfair” deal on the hapless negotiators of the Obama administration.

This narrative could be consistent, however, only by ignoring what is now a truism within the business press and financial class: The jobs, profits and market opportunities of the future are in clean energy—not oil, gas, and coal. Indeed, two days before Trump’s announcement, the shareholders of ExxonMobil delivered a stunning rebuke to the oil giant’s management: BBy a 62 percent majority, they voted to require the company to produce annual reports on how it will remain profitable in a future when governments and science will limit oil and gas production.

But make no mistake: Trump’s speech was climate denial with a vengeance. At this point in the climate crisis, the science is terrifyingly clear. Global emissions of heat-trapping gases must peak by 2020 if the 1.5C target is to remain feasible, by 2030 for the 2C target. Physics does not compromise; it does not do the deals so beloved by Trump. And that means that pledging to unleash America’s “abundant domestic energy” sources—by which Trump explained he meant oil, gas, and coal—will make it immensely more difficult to honor those temperature targets, even if the rest of the world continues galloping forward.

In human terms, this increase in US energy production will mean more of the killer cyclones that killed hundreds and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka this week. It will mean more of the massive storms such as Hurricane Sandy that leveled vast parts of New York and New Jersey days before the 2012 presidential election and inspired Businessweek’s cover headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” It will mean that the extinction crisis that has already claimed countless plant and animal species will intensify, furthering impoverishing the planet both ecologically and spiritually. All of this is a crime against humanity—and against Earth.

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trumps-withdrawal-paris-accords-crime-humanity/

James Hansen: ‘Emergency Cooperation Among Nations’ Is Needed to Prevent Catastrophic Sea Level Rise

“Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.” Photo credit: Woodbine

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, July 21, 2015

If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2 °C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.

According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world’s oceans.

A summarized draft of the full report was released to journalists on Monday, with the shocking warning that such glacial melting will “likely” occur this century and could cause as much as a 10 foot sea-level rise in as little as 50 years. Such a prediction is much more severe than current estimates contained in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN-sponsored body that represents the official global consensus of the scientific community.

“If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters,” the paper states.

Separately, the researchers conclude that “continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”

The Daily Beast‘s Mark Hertsgaard, who attended a press call with Dr. Hansen on Monday, reports that the work presented by the researchers is

"...warning that humanity could confront “sea level rise of several meters” before the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed much faster than currently contemplated.

This roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable. “Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water,” Hansen said, “but you couldn’t live there.”

This apocalyptic scenario illustrates why the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius is not the safe “guardrail” most politicians and media coverage imply it is, argue Hansen and 16 colleagues in a blockbuster study they are publishing this week in the peer-reviewed journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry. On the contrary, a 2C future would be “highly dangerous.”

If Hansen is right—and he has been right, sooner, about the big issues in climate science longer than anyone—the implications are vast and profound.

In the call with reporters, Hansen explained that time is of the essence, given the upcoming climate talks in Paris this year and the grave consequences the world faces if bold, collective action is not taken immediately. “We have a global crisis that calls for international cooperation to reduce emissions as rapidly as practical,” the paper states.

Hansen said he has long believed that many of the existing models were under-estimating the potential impacts of ice sheet melting, and told the Daily Beast: “Now we have evidence to make that statement based on much more than suspicion.”

Though he acknowledged the publication of the paper was unorthodox, Hansen told reporters that the research itself is “substantially more persuasive than anything previously published.”

For his part, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate, said the “bombshell” findings are both credible and terrifying. Holthaus writes:

To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but “the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model,” Hansen says.

[…] The implications are mindboggling: In the study’s likely scenario, New York City—and every other coastal city on the planet—may only have a few more decades of habitability left. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires “emergency cooperation among nations.”

In response to the paper, climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University affirmed: “If we cook the planet long enough at about two degrees warming, there is likely to be a staggering amount of sea level rise. Key questions are when would greenhouse-gas emissions lock in this sea level rise and how fast would it happen? The latter point is critical to understanding whether and how we would be able to deal with such a threat.”

The new research, Oppenheimer added, “takes a stab at answering the ‘how soon?’ question but we remain largely in the dark. Giving the state of uncertainty and the high risk, humanity better get its collective foot off the accelerator.”

And as the Daily Beast‘s Hertsgaard notes, Hansen’s track record on making climate predictions should command respect from people around the world. The larger question, however, is whether humanity has the capacity to act.

“The climate challenge has long amounted to a race between the imperatives of science and the contingencies of politics,” Hertsgaard concludes. “With Hansen’s paper, the science has gotten harsher, even as the Nature Climate Change study affirms that humanity can still choose life, if it will. The question now is how the politics will respond—now, at Paris in December, and beyond.”

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/21/james-hansen-climate-report/

Mark Hertsgaard: The Military Takes on Climate Change Deniers

by Mark Hertsgaard, Business Week, October 22, 2014

Photograph by Robert Stolarik/The New York Times/Redux

On patrol in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012

The idea that climate change poses serious risks to U.S. national security, long contested in conservative circles, is now an integral part of Pentagon planning. On Oct. 13, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it official with the release of the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, a 16-page document that lays out the effects of extreme weather events and rising temperatures on military training, operations, acquisitions, and infrastructure. Two previous editions, issued in 2012 and 2013, treated climate change as a future threat, but this year’s cast it as a reality that must be dealt with quickly. “Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks,” the document begins.

The Pentagon’s move sets up a showdown between the military, a cautious institution run by some of the most conservative people in the U.S. government, and congressional Republicans, who continue to deny that climate change is real, let alone that it requires action. In May, House Republicans passed an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act forbidding the Defense Department from spending money on any climate-related initiatives, including planning programs. “This amendment will ensure we maximize our military might without diverting funds for a politically motivated agenda,” Representative David McKinley of West Virginia, who sponsored the amendment, wrote in a letter to members of Congress asking for a yes vote. The amendment failed in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Climate change is a threat multiplier because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we already confront.”—Chuck Hagel

Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, moved to counter that argument in his foreword to the new road map. “Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning,” he wrote. Hagel is backed by 16 retired generals and admirals who sit on the military advisory board of the CNA Corp., a government-funded nonprofit military research organization. A CNA report issued in May called climate change a “catalyst for conflict,” arguing that the civil war in Syria was rooted in part in a record drought that drove peasants off the land and into cities, where they were susceptible to being recruited by extremist groups. “People are going to have less water, less food,” says Ron Keys, a retired four-star general who commanded all Air Force aircraft and personnel worldwide and now serves on CNA’s military advisory board. “There are going to be huge regional wars around those issues.”

STORY: How Climate Change Is Fueling the Miami Real Estate Boom

Pentagon planners have sounded alarms about their climate concerns for at least a decade. In 2004, Fortune reported the existence of a secret document that warned climate change could push powers such as China, India, and Pakistan into nuclear war over fresh water supplies. Until now the military has been relatively quiet about its climate concerns, partly “because the Department of Defense gets its money from Congress, and we know where the House is on this issue,” says David Titley, a retired rear admiral and member of CNA’s military advisory board. Hagel’s personal involvement in releasing the 2014 road map suggests the Pentagon has decided it can’t wait any longer.

Photograph by Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times/ReduxChuck Hagel

Not all Republicans are as wedded to climate-change denial as their public statements suggest, according to retired military officials and Republican Hill staff. “If you talk with them privately, without any media around, the vast majority of congressional Republicans know perfectly well that climate change is real,” Titley says. “But they won’t say so publicly because they don’t want to end up like Bob Inglis.”

Inglis, a Republican, represented South Carolina’s 4th congressional district for six terms, amassing a perfect voting record in the eyes of the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups. In 2010, a Tea Party challenger ousted him after seizing on what Inglis has half-jokingly referred to in the press as his “heresy”: insisting that climate change is real. He’s now executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit based at George Mason University that advocates a free-market approach to addressing climate change. “A lot of people on Capitol Hill are down in their foxholes” on the climate issue, Inglis says. “They’re afraid of getting their heads blown off if they head up the hill.”

STORY: Shell's Jekyll and Hyde Approach to Climate Change

To provide political cover, Keys, Titley, and other retired military brass have been traveling the country to explain to ordinary Americans why the military cares about climate change and what extreme weather will mean for their communities. The goal is to shift the political conversation in Washington by changing what voters are willing to hear their leaders say. Since August, Keys has visited Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, and North Carolina to take his message to local Rotary Clubs and businesses, such as a solar electrical co-op run out of a hog house in Dubuque, Iowa. Keys, who says he is “politically very conservative, just to the right of Genghis Khan,” meets with state legislators, mayors, business leaders, civic groups, and “mom and pop on Main Street.” His pitch is simple: Ignoring climate change means leaving Americans exposed to danger. “If I were a bad guy,” Keys says, “I’d look at a moment like Hurricane Katrina as a good time to sneak into the U.S. and try something.”

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe, a leading denier of climate change, has dismissed CNA’s effort. “There is no one more in pursuit of publicity than a retired military officer,” Inhofe told the New York Times after CNA issued its report in May. Keys says he won’t be deterred. “I spent 40 years as a fighter pilot,” he says. “You’re going to have to come at me with facts.”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-23/the-military-takes-on-climate-change-deniers/

Mark Hertsgaard: The People’s Climate March Was Huge, but Will It Change Everything?

Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of New York and cities around the world on Sunday, but the fight for climate justice is only beginning

by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation, September 21, 2014

The People’s Climate March winds through midtown Manhattan on Sunday, September 21, 2014. (AP Images/John Minchillo)

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of New York City on Sunday calling for “climate justice” in the largest mass protest to date against government and corporate inaction to limit the overheating of the planet. Organizers of the People’s Climate March claimed that in addition to the New York march some 2,676 other demonstrations were held in 146 countries, including a march of 30,000 people in London that was televised to the New York crowd on a giant screen set up on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street. “We said it would take everyone to change everything, and everyone showed up,” said Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, one of the central groups that organized the march.

The march featured an unprecedented diversity of participants, including many thousands of union members as well as representatives from indigenous people’s organizations, students and faith groups, and even a contingent of business types marching behind an “Investors for Climate Solutions” banner. Proceeding without any violence under a muggy, cloudy sky, the demonstration kicked off Climate Week in New York City. World leaders, including President Obama, will gather at the United Nations on Tuesday for a one-day climate summit intended to build momentum toward signing an ambitious global agreement at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015. On Monday, protesters plan to “Flood Wall Street” to demand that investors shift assets from climate-destructive fossil fuels to solar, wind and other forms of clean energy.

Some big investors will beat “Flood Wall Street” to the punch: on Monday, a collection of institutional investors that manage $50 billion among themselves will announce that they will divest entirely from fossil fuels. Prominent among the group is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose assets were accumulated by the Rockefeller family’s many decades of producing petroleum, first under the Standard Oil brand and later under Exxon. “John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, moved America out of whale oil and into petroleum,” explained Stephen Heintz, President of the Fund. “We are quite convinced that if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy.”

“One announcement alone isn’t going to tip the balance, but when one announcement is followed by another and then another, that gets CEOs to pay attention,” Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist who has funded numerous electoral campaigns on behalf of climate action, told The Nation. “CEOs pay a lot of attention to their shareholders, just like everyone pays attention to what their boss thinks. So actions like this send a powerful message.”

Visually, the most striking aspect of the People’s Climate March was its racial diversity and preponderance of young people. The first line of marchers to head south from Columbus Circle were fifteen high school and college age youths, nearly all of them African-American or Latino, wearing orange T-shirts that announced they represented the Rockaway Youth Task Force. Rockaway, a peninsula in Queens that borders the Atlantic Ocean, was brutalized by Hurricane Sandy in November 2012; some residents at the march carried signs asserting that they had been left without electricity for fifteen days after the storm, even as Wall Street was back up and running in seventy-two hours. The highlighting of so-called “front-line communities” was international: later in the march, protesters carried blue umbrellas, two storeys high, with the names of other people and places that have been displaced by climate violence: “Island Nations,” “Public Housing,” “People of Color,” “Renters.”

Labor union members were also an unmistakable presence, perhaps the largest single contingent in the march. “Today we make history. This is your Woodstock. This is the day our children will remember us for,” Chris Erikson, the business manager of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, told a labor rally at 58th and Broadway, standing beneath a banner proclaiming, “Healthy Planet and Good Jobs.” Separately, Erikson told The Nation, “The free market can work but it needs to be regulated. We want our politicians to figure out how to transition to a clean energy economy. You can’t just shut down coal mines and power plants without knowing where the green jobs to replace them will come from. And we’re going to hold them accountable on that.”

Mike Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, reminded the union rally that labor and environmentalists weren’t always on opposite sides. “I’m proud to be here today because we know it was the labor movement that put up the bail money to get Martin Luther King Jr. out of the Birmingham jail,” said Brune, whose organization was the first to attempt to revive, in the 1990s, ties between environmental and labor activism. “And it was the labor movement that provided money to organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and to build the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. And we know that the same companies that are poisoning our air and water are also poisoning our democracy. So we at the Sierra Club stand with you for a clean energy economy that puts millions of people to work.”

Many veteran activists of the climate movement expressed the same overjoyed reaction to this march as did Annie Leonard, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA, who recently returned to the organization after eighteen years away: finally, the climate movement is getting serious about building political power. “The organizing for this march looks very different than most environmental organizing twenty years ago did,” she told The Nation. “This march is led by environmental justice groups and includes nurses, farmers, labor organizers, young people and activists working on immigrant rights, economic equality and indigenous rights. The movement is more broad and inclusive than ever. If we environmentalists had done real power-building work like this twenty years ago, we wouldn’t be in this climate mess we’re in now. The window for action is closing, but a day like this gives me hope that we’ll make it.”

“Today is enormously exciting, not just the size of the march but how many young people are here,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said. “It shows that young people are not turned off to politics. And given the power of corporations in our country, the only way we’ll get the change we need on climate change or any other issue is if millions of people take to the streets and demand change.”

You can find video and photos of the People’s Climate March, and its sister demonstrations around the world, at the march website: peoplesclimate.org. But for additional flavor of what it was like on the street, here is a baker’s dozen of some of the signs and banners on display:

“If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved.”

“If it’s melted, it’s ruined,” displayed next to a huge Mother Earth float, courtesy of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.

“Got Kids?”

“Compost Capitalism”

“Climate Change Affects Us Most” and “We Didn’t Cause This Mess,” carried by children marching with the Kids and Families contingent.

“Our Demands Are Not Radical”

“Act Like You Live Here”

“Dumbledore Wouldn’t Let This Happen”

“Rising Tides, Rising Rents, Rising People”

“Another Teamster for Green Jobs”

“Teach Our Youth Science, They Will Need It”

“It’s Sunday, I’m Missing Football, This Shit Is Important”

“Tax Carbon, Pay People”

Read Next: Naomi Klein explains how climate change can be a people’s shock.

http://www.thenation.com/article/181696/peoples-climate-march-was-huge-will-it-change-everything/#

Can Generation Hot Avoid Its Fate?

by Mark Hertsgaard, The Daily Beast, April 5, 2014

The new report released by the IPCC has provoked a host of emotions for one journalist and father with the exception of one: despair. Only hope for his daughter and the rest of Generation Hot can deliver us from crisis and into recovery and rejuvenation.

We can’t say they didn’t warn us. 

The report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week is only the latest and most dire in a string of scientific declarations leading back to 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen’s landmark testimony to the United States Senate put man-made global warming on the public agenda. 

As a journalist who has reported on climate change from dozens of countries since then, I can’t say I was surprised by the IPCC’s report. Most of its findings were familiar to anyone following the subject; I mentioned many of them in my 2011 book, HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years On Earth. But the report did provoke other emotions, because I read it not only as a journalist, but also as a father. And as a father, I felt grief, fear, rage, frustration and, finally, a determination to resist. One emotion I never permit myself, however, is despair. For despair only paralyzes at a time when action is urgently needed.

My daughter Chiara, the central character in HOT, is turning nine this weekend. Her current obsession is Harry Potter, so the guest of honor at her birthday party will be a make believe Hermione Granger. I sometimes wish Chiara had Harry and Hermione’s magic skills; they’d come in mighty handy in the future the IPCC is projecting.

The grief and fear the IPCC report triggered in me stems from a central fact of our climate future: Everyone on earth below the age of 25 is already fated to spend much of their lifetime coping with the hottest temperatures our civilization has ever encountered. The laws of physics and chemistry—above all, the fact that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many decades after being emitted—mean that even if humans stopped all carbon emissions overnight, global temperatures would nevertheless keep rising for at least 30 more years.

Now apply that calculation to the first great human disaster with a scientifically attributable climate fingerprint: the record heat wave that scorched Europe in 2003. It caused 71,499 excess deaths, considerably more than the number of U.S. casualties in the Vietnam war. But thanks to the physical momentum of climate change, the record heat of 2003 will be routine before Chiara is my age. By 2050, Europeans will experience summers as hot as 2003 one year out of every two.

The higher temperatures locked in for the forthcoming decades will, in turn, unleash climate impacts that will affect every person on earth. IPCC reports are written in conservative scientific language, so let me translate some of these projected impacts into plain English.

Among the most worrisome impacts are what the IPCC calls the “breakdown of food systems,” as heat waves, droughts and downpours slash crop yields. In short, there will be less food to feed more mouths, which promises to increase hunger, poverty and social unrest.

In California, where Chiara and I live, we are now in the midst of a historic drought. Farmers in the Central Valley—the source of most of the fruits, nuts and vegetables the rest of the US consumes—are short of irrigation water and predicting crippled harvests. And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This kind of severe drought will become the norm across the western third of North America by 2050.  Higher temperatures will shrink the snowpack atop the Sierra Nevada mountains, the source of one-quarter of California’s water supply, by 25 to 40 percent by 2050.

In Asia, an estimated 500 million people obtain some of their drinking and irrigation water from the Himalayan snowpack, which is projected to largely disappear by 2050. The Chinese government has forecast that climate change could cut yields of wheat, corn and rice by a staggering 37 percent in the next few decades if adaptation measures are not taken. This would push food prices up internationally, raising the incidence of hunger, disease and political instability.  Recall how soaring food prices in 2008 led to street riots in over a dozen countries, including Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt and Haiti. As the IPCC report emphasized, no one will suffer more from climate change than the global poor, though they did almost nothing to cause it.

Meanwhile, sea level rise will emerge as a huge, inexorable and massively expensive problem. There’s no stopping sea level rise at this point; again, physics and chemistry guarantee it will accelerate for many centuries to come. Most of the world’s biggest cities are located on coasts, where the cost of shielding—and in many cases relocating—airports, buildings, subways, railway lines, water treatment plants and other life-supporting infrastructure will climb into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

In our hometown of San Francisco, the sea is projected to rise 16 inches by 2050. That’s enough to put the runways and approach roads for both San Francisco and Oakland airports under water if nothing is done. Ditto with the eastern end of our gorgeous new, $6.4 billion dollar San Francisco Bay Bridge.

Equally unstoppable is the melting of the Arctic. Temperatures are rising there faster than anywhere on Earth. As I recently reported, the debate between scientists is now over whether the Arctic will become ice free in summer by the mid-2030s or—gulp!—as early as next year. That’s fatal news for polar bears, reindeer and indigenous people in the Arctic, but it also threatens catastrophic knock-on effects for the rest of us: more extreme weather; even faster sea level rise; and most worrisome of all, a higher chance of accelerating global warming to where it becomes irreversible. 

No one will suffer more from climate change than the global poor, though they did almost nothing to cause it.

Hence the lede of the terrific Associated Press story about the IPCC report:  “If the world doesn't cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral ‘out of control,’ the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.” 

So the grief and fear I feel as a father are understandable, don’t you think?

And they feed the rage and frustration that also grip me. Rage at the oil, coal and other giant corporations that have used their wealth and political power to discredit climate science, pressure governments and otherwise derail efforts to transition our society away from climate-destroying activities. Yeah, I’m looking at you, ExxonMobil—a company that has led the climate denier campaign and chose the day the IPCC report was released to announce that, global warming notwithstanding, ExxonMobil plans to extract and market all the oil and gas it can find for decades to come.

Matching my rage is the frustration I feel about the weakness of political leaders who are failing to stop our collective march toward catastrophe. Exhibit A is Barack Obama, a well-intentioned president who understands that climate change threatens to make this planet uninhabitable for his own daughters. President Obama has pledged not to let that happen and has taken some worthy steps in the right direction, but those steps are cancelled out by the boom in US oil and gas production he has encouraged under the banner of his “all of the above” energy policy.

Nevertheless, the feeling I insist upon having is hope—the chance of righting this sinking ship before it is too late. What other choice is there for a loving father?  Nor is my hope mere wishful thinking; it rests on firm grounds. For example, solar power is growing faster worldwide than cell phones did. In the US, new coal-fired power plants are history; a grassroots network of ordinary citizens, working under the banner of the Beyond Coal campaign, have helped block more than 160 proposed plants. Popular opposition has also stalled the Keystone XL pipeline, forcing Obama at last to choose whether he stands with Big Oil or the young people of Generation Hot.

Sadly, even these victories cannot alter the projections the IPCC has made for the next 30 to 40 years. The physical momentum of global warming means that our actions going forward can affect only how the second half of this century unfolds. Will the impacts described above be the peak of the climate crisis, to be followed by a period of recovery and rejuvenation? Or will they be merely the dark prelude to an even darker future? That choice remains ours to make, and for Generation Hot, it could make a world of difference.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/05/generation-hot-deserves-cooler-times.html

Mark Hertsgaard demolished Roy Spencer on Piers Morgan; calls out CNN for irresponsible journalistic malpractice on climate reporting

Goto this link, then to the middle of the page to see the amazing video:  http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/11/piers-morgan-opens-the-floor-for-a-feisty-debate-on-climate-change/

November 11th, 2013

10:33 PM ET

Piers Morgan opens the floor for a feisty debate on climate change

On the heels of a devastating typhoon which ravaged the Philippines, on Monday evening "Piers Morgan Live" asked Roy Spencer and Mark Hertsgaard to debate the impact that climate change has had in a series of recent natural disasters.

"The earth is a little warmer right now," said Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "We're not exactly sure whether it's 100 percent due to mankind, or 50 percent due to mankind, 50 percent due to nature and by chance."

Joining the program from California, Hertsgaard showed clear disagreement:

"Dr. Spencer, that is not true, sir. That is not true. You are misstating the facts," insisted the author and journalist. "To say that we don't know? Listen to what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] just said in its report: 'That humankinds' activities are now responsible for most of this.' Frankly, I don't know why, Dr. Spencer, I believe that you don't even agree that climate change is man made, last time I checked. If you've revised your position I'd love to hear about it. To listen to you talk about climate change, that man made climate change you reject that 99 ... so you stand against the 97 percent of scientists who say this?"

Watch the clip for more of Morgan's feisty interview with Spencer and Hertsgaard

http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/11/piers-morgan-opens-the-floor-for-a-feisty-debate-on-climate-change/

Mark Hertsgaard on Mary Pipher's new book "The Green Boat" on the psychology of climate change activism

The Keystone pipeline might be approved this year, but Mark Hertsgaard says an important new book shows what activists have to do to psychologically commit to fighting for the environment.

by Mark Hertsgaard, The Daily Beast, July 14, 2013 

When President Obama, to most observers’ surprise, addressed the Keystone XL pipeline in his landmark speech on climate change on June 25, 2013, it was partly because of Mary Pipher. Inside the Beltway, the conventional wisdom was that Obama would not mention Keystone, a pipeline that would carry particularly carbon-heavy tar sands oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries, because he was privately planning to approve the project later this year. In a speech designed to highlight his commitment to fighting climate change, what would be the point of talking about a pipeline that, if the president did approve it, would facilitate burning some of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet?

Yet activists like Pipher had made Keystone too big an issue to ignore. After years of living-room meetings that gave rise to statehouse rallies, mass demonstrations outside the White House, and the media coverage all this engendered, it was simply not credible for Obama to claim that he cared about climate change but not about Keystone. From her residence in Nebraska, Pipher had been one of countless grassroots activists who publicized what the pipeline would do—not only to the stability of the climate but the soil and water of the Midwestern states the pipeline would traverse—and rallied citizens to demand that this catastrophe in the making be prevented.

‘The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture’ by Mary Pipher. 240 pp. Riverhead. $16.

Judging from The Green Boat, Pipher never expected to have such an effect. A psychotherapist and writer by profession, Pipher got involved in the Keystone fight primarily as a way to save her own sanity. Author of the mega-best seller Reviving Ophelia — about the challenges contemporary U.S. culture imposes on adolescent girls—and seven other books, Pipher had been dispensing acute, healing insights for decades. By the summer of 2010, however, she found herself facing a world that “seemed almost too complicated and frightening for me to manage emotionally.” Knowing too much — about apparently endless war, financial collapse, and above all, the accelerating danger of climate change — sometimes made Pipher feel “like jumping out of my skin,” she confesses. The Green Boat
 

emerged from my attempt to understand myself and the people around me. I wrote it for the same reasons I wrote Reviving Ophelia. I sensed that individuals were struggling to deal with cultural problems. They felt alone, hopeless, and uniquely damaged and they didn’t realize that almost all of us felt the same way.

The book is part memoir, part psychological self-help guide, part political commentary. It’s a tricky combination, but Pipher pulls it off, writing with a homespun lyricism, quiet strength, and simple common sense that call to mind her beloved Nebraska prairies and the culturally conservative but far from one-dimensional people who reside there. By recounting her personal struggles against despair and the surprising affirmations she and a band of friends received when they decided to stop moping and start organizing, The Green Boat makes a persuasive case that both our individual well-being and our collective chances of averting disaster are best served not by trying to ignore scary truths but by facing them in the company of others and, fueled by the power of love, striving together to forge a new course.

“I just can’t go there,” says a mother I know about confronting the dangers climate change poses to her young son. Pipher sympathizes. Humans have to tune out a certain amount of reality or we couldn’t function. We all know we must die someday, she writes, but “for good reasons, we don’t think about this every waking moment.”

The psychological twist in the case of climate change is that we inflict the disaster ourselves.

Yet reality inevitably intrudes. Children learn soon enough that loved ones die, if only their beloved pets. Television is forever showing us—and who among us turns away?—how hurricanes, tornadoes, and other disasters can leave innocent people injured, dead, or economically ruined.

The psychological twist in the case of climate change is that we inflict the disaster ourselves. Hurricane Sandy was not simply one more instance of Nature unleashing its fearsome powers, just as it has done for millions of years on this planet. Humans are now helping to stir the pot.

                                                           

Wrong question, Pipher might say. As a therapist, she learned long ago that simply telling a client to “wake up” doesn’t work. The client must also believe that waking up can actually make things better. “Neuroscientists have discovered that the human mind functions best when it acts as if there is hope,” Pipher writes. Believing that change is possible helps to make change possible.

Pipher calls this process going from Trauma to Transcendence, and she illustrates its mechanisms by recounting her own involvement in the fight against the Keystone pipeline, which would cross Nebraska on its way to Gulf ports. Pipher had no idea how she might contribute to the fight, but she invited eight friends over for a pot-luck dinner one night to discuss it. That evening marked the beginning of her emotional healing, as she and her friends decided to do what they could to block the pipeline—which turned out to be plenty.

“We had all come into the meeting feeling isolated, hopeless, and disempowered,” Pipher recalls. “But despite the grim content of our discussion, as the night went on, we became increasingly hopeful.” Why? Because, she explains, they were no longer just complaining, they were taking action. “And we had shipmates.”

The Trauma to Transcendence formula is straightforward enough, but putting it into practice requires some courage. You begin by facing your despair, even though “coming out of the trance of denial is painful.” In step two, Acceptance, you acknowledge the realities that brought you to despair. It’s critical to take this step with the help of others; the best way for humans to deal with emotional pain, writes Pipher, “is to turn toward other people.” You share your feelings, including your fears but above all your love—for the grandchild you want to see grow up, for a prairie untrammeled by pipelines, for the right of all creatures to share the bounties of this earth. It is love that propels you toward the final stage, Transcendence, for love leads humans to take action for the sake of their beloved, despite one’s fears and the undeniable possibility of failure.

“When I figured out what I could do, I stopped being scared,” Pipher writes. And when one person sees others taking action, that person is more likely to take action herself. When working together, people experience what Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid hero, called “the multiplication of courage.”

None of this guarantees success; hope is not a magic wand; the Keystone pipeline may well still be approved. But without the efforts of Mary Pipher and thousands of others who have spoken out, rallied and gotten arrested, the pipeline surely would have been approved by now. And as Mandela’s quote suggests, these activists’ example has attracted many others to the fight. 

Last month, 22 former Obama campaign staff members were arrested after occupying State Department premises to call on the president they helped elect in 2008 to live up to his promises on climate change. And those 22 are but a tiny fraction of the 69,000 people who have pledged to commit civil disobedience to prevent the construction of Keystone.

This is how most of the great struggles for justice have been won, from the defeat of apartheid in South Africa to the winning of the right to vote for women and blacks in the United States. In the face of what appear to be impossible odds often backed by a ruthless status quo, a small number of people start talking among themselves about things they can no longer ignore. Their talk leads to action. Their actions, like twigs unexpectedly bursting into flame, kindle others to join them. The fire grows, and with luck and hard work becomes strong enough to pose a threat to the established order. Some fires overturn that order, some burn out before that. All that’s certain is that without a fire, nothing much changes. And whatever the outcome, it is the fire that warms our souls along the way.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/14/mark-hertsgaard-analyzes-the-psychology-of-climate-change-activism.html

                                                            *******

Two new books bulge with the kind of grave tidings that were tempting Pipher to despair. (And, full disclosure, this reviewer has written more than his share of books and journalism about disheartening environmental, human rights, and economic injustices.)  In The Attacking Ocean, Brian Fagan provides—miraculously in a mere six paragraphs—the best description yet of Hurricane Sandy, the super-storm that blasted coastal New Jersey and New York last October. Most of the book, however, digs deep into the distant geological past to describe how Earth has arrived at its current configuration of land and sea. Fagan’s chief focus is the last 15,000 years, during which time sea levels have risen due to natural causes by 122 meters—roughly the length of a football field including end zones.

‘The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present and Future of Rising Sea Levels’ by Brian Fagan. 288 pp. Bloomsbury. $28.

But now, by overheating the planet, humans are accelerating this trend, in two ways. Warm water expands, so hotter oceans rise. Higher temperatures also thaw land-bound ice. Meanwhile, global warming also powers stronger storms. When those storms surge towards land, the higher sea levels in effect put coastal settlements—the roads, buildings, people—at a lower elevation, intensifying the damage. Humanity’s exponential population growth compounds the danger. Sea-level rise posed no insuperable dangers for most of our species’ history; the rise was gradual, and our numbers were so small that humans simply retreated inland. Now, dense settlements crowd coastlines, and inland areas are no longer empty. Fagan writes that millions of coastal residents will soon have to move to higher ground, “to become climatic refugees,” as he calls them. But where will they move to, and how? It’s a recipe for chaos. Not only are we unprepared for this future, Fagan argues, “it’s questionable just how much most of us think about it.” Which is why people like Fagan write what they write and environmentalists issue the warnings they do:  they want us to wake up and take action.

‘State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?’ by The Worldwatch Institute. 464 pp. Island Press. $22.

The Worldwatch Institute has been ringing this bell for nearly 40 years now, diligently describing the decline of natural systems, warning of the consequences and spotlighting positive alternatives. Its annual State of the World report, which has been published in 36 languages, has broadened and deepened environmental consciousness the world over. Yet who would claim that this and countless other worthy efforts have defused the juggernaut of destruction wrought by a civilization of seemingly limitless appetites—for more money, more growth, more stuff?  By now, environmental indicators have been heading the wrong way for so long that this year’s State of the World asks plaintively, “Is Sustainability Still Possible?”