Climate Change: I don't want to talk about it

John Gray on capitalism versus the climate:

http://gu.com/p/4xt3j/sbl

Europe's climate change goals need 'profound lifestyle changes':

http://gu.com/p/4gkdh/sbl

exploring.....

what is so remarkable about this reality depicted here, is the absolute absence of anything concrete or real about what must be done!
Remarkable! What then is the point? To continue the bs global powers game behind so called global warming, with all their inventory of bs solutions like cap and trade, carbon taxes ad nauseum...or how about more money for their global geoengineering schemes?

Perhaps the most remarkable prehistorical instance of Arctic polar meltdown, true enough led to the catastrophic 1000 year plus ice age which led to the near extinction of humanity.... 

Canada will feel climate extremes if emissions don't change:

http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/canada-will-feel-climate-extremes-if-emis...

Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as "astronomical," ''staggering" and "strange."  They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood. 

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/federal-scientists-call-february-tempe...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-will-the-world-really-be-2-degr...

Wind power to supply 500 Alberta schools

25 school boards have signed on for 25 years of renewable energy

Calgary's C-Train already runs on it and now 500 Alberta schools have signed up to be powered by the wind.

Across the province, 25 school boards have signed 25-year contracts with Calgary-based BluEarth Renewables, which built a 29-megawatt wind farm near the Saskatchewan border in order to power the schools. 

Yvan Beaubien manages operations for the FrancoSud school board, which has eight schools in Calgary and one in Airdrie.

"We're all kind of happy and proud here, teachers included, that we went that way," he said.

"Instead of just talking about how good green energy can be, we actually can do it right here in our own backyard."

‘And then we wept': Scientists say 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef now bleached

The conclusions are in from a series of scientific surveys of the Great Barrier Reef bleaching event — an environmental assault on the largest coral ecosystem on Earth — and scientists aren’t holding back about how devastating they find them.

Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Task Force has surveyed 911 coral reefs by air, and found at least some bleaching on 93 percent of them. The amount of damage varies from severe to light, but the bleaching was the worst in the reef’s remote northern sector — where virtually no reefs escaped it.

“Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef,” Prof. Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a statement to the news media. He led the research....

quote:

Tourism involving the Great Barrier Reef is worth $5 billion annually, and accounts for close to 70,000 jobs, according to the news release from the Australian National Coral Bleaching Taskforce.

More and More Extreme Weather

http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/2016/04/more-and-more-extreme-weather.html

"The weather is getting more and more extreme..."

Mark Gauti, Coast Salish Artist

Earth's Relentless Warming Just Hit a Terrible New Threshold

In an age of broken temperature records, this one is especially worrisome.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-18/earth-s-relentless-war...

..includes an 8 min video

India’s coal boom threatens rights of Adivasi communities

It’s been said that the battle against climate change will be won or lost in India, soon to be the world’s most populous country. If this is true, then solidarity with the Adivasi communities in India is of the utmost importance.

That’s because the state-owned Coal India Limited, already the world’s largest coal producer, is projected to nearly double its production by 2020, aiming for a billion tonnes of coal every year. Much of this coal will be burned to meet India’s growing demand for electricity, and this has dire implications for India and the world’s ability to meet its emissions reduction targets as part of the UN’s Paris Agreement.

Most of India’s coal is found in remote areas that traditionally belong to the Adivasis. In expanding their extraction operations, the Indian government and corporations continue to violate the rights of the indigenous communities to their lands.

A new report from Amnesty International India exposes a pattern of human rights violations in three open-cast mines run by different Coal India subsidiaries in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha.

Contrary to the requirements of international law, land acquisition laws in India exempt the authorities from properly consulting the affected communities. The new report details the complex legal framework and the means by which corporations and the state are failing to adequately seek the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples for expanded coal extraction....

https://www.google.ca/amp/amp.usatoday.com/story/87528944/?client=safari#

Climate Change

Capitalism is the culprit

Fossil Capital, which is the Swedish Marxist Andreas Malm’s first book in English, is a wide-ranging explanation of the manner in which capitalism tends toward climate crisis in the present era. Through his examination of the rise of English industry in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he provides a convincing rebuttal to antihumanist theories of the Anthropocene era and offers some key clues about how we can transcend the “fossil economy” as a species.

Malm situates the origins of climate change in the transition to the coal-powered steam engine from waterpower in Britain’s textile industry. Coal had been used for centuries in Britain, but only to heat and cook in the domestic sphere. (It was widely used in China under the Northern Song dynasty as well.) Even after James Watt invented the self-acting steam engine in the 1770s, it was not adopted on a mass scale until decades later....

Climate change momentum:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/20...

epaulo13 wrote:

It’s been said that the battle against climate change will be won or lost in India, soon to be the world’s most populous country. If this is true, then solidarity with the Adivasi communities in India is of the utmost importance.

... and this is why Canada's contribution to climate change is essentially meaningless.  Without the US, China or India's buy-in, we could shutter every greenhouse-gas emitter in the nation and it wouldn't make a popcorn fart's difference.  And guess what?  China and India (and the US under Trump) will never -- NEVER -- do anything that could potentially threaten their respective economies ... at least until Shanghai,  Mumbai or Miami is underwater.

Do you live at least 10 feet above sea level? You might soon wish you did!!!

How many people in Canada live within 10 feet of sea level? Lots and lots of us.

Maybe a life vest under your bed from now on, and if you don't already know how to swim, well, what can I say, except to suggest perhaps take some lessons.

Houston, do you think we have a problem?

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. 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."

Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."

Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-point-of-no-return-climate...

Rising ocean temperatures and their consequences:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/05/soaring-ocean-temper...

Ozone and climate: Restored by a world united

The theme for this year's International Ozone Day recognizes the collective efforts of the parties to the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol towards the restoration of the ozone layer over the past three decades and the global commitment to combat climate change. 

As a result of concerted international efforts, the ozone layer is healing itself and is expected to recover by the middle of this century. In addition, the Montreal Protocol has significantly contributed to the mitigation of climate change by averting the emission of more than 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere by simply phasing out ozone-depleting substances.

Additionally, as mandated by the "Dubai Pathway on Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)" adopted in 2015, parties are working within the Montreal Protocol to an HFC amendment in 2016 by first resolving challenges by generating solutions in the contact group on HFCs. According to scientific information, reducing HFCs under the Montreal Protocol can avoid 0.5°C of global warming by the end of the century, while continuing to protect the ozone layer

http://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/ozone-and-climate-restored-world-united