climate change

Tomorrowland

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Winter is the rainy season in California, but I knew the previous four months had been very dry all across the Golden State, making people nervous. Water is life in the arid West. A diminished snowpack in the High Sierras has a cascading effect for anything depending on a watercourse all the way down to the sea. A lack of rain meant the land in between was parched too. Friends warned me that the country that I planned to see during my visit “looked tough,” which is code for a bad drought. One quipped “Maybe we should be called the Toasty Brown State instead.”

An interview with Michael Mann: “There’s reason to be optimistic”…

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The publication of the Hockey Stick curve almost served as an exclamation point. It occurred in the wake of the warmest year we’d ever seen in recorded history, 1998. But that recorded history only went back a century or so. We were able to provide a longer term context. The curve told a simple story. You didn’t need to understand the physics or mathematics of how a theoretical climate model works to understand what it was telling you.

Activism and protest – Feb 6

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•Radical activism has a role in speeding up corporate change •Rebuilding optimism of will for effective climate activism•State of Fear •Exporting carbon: Canada’s new asbestos? •A chat with the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune about civil disobedience •The new weapon in the battle for Hastings – the ‘granny tree’

Charting a new course for the U.S. and the environment

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After more than four decades as a leading environmentalist, Gus Speth is disillusioned with what has been accomplished. What’s needed now, he says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, is a transformative change in America’s political economy that will benefit both society and the planet.

Climate – Jan 23

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•Can anyone defuse the ‘Carbon Bomb’? •Point of No Return: The massive climate threats we must avoid •Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone •Koch-Funded Study Finds 2.5°F Warming Of Land Since 1750 Is Manmade, ‘Solar Forcing Does Not Appear To Contribute’ •Climate Change Reaching Human and Geophysical Tipping Points •Has global warming ground to a halt?

Is MLK of Use to Us Now?

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The main talent of Martin Luther King Jr., among many, was an ability to lift into wide awareness brutality and unfairness that a majority had been willing to ignore. The struggle for racial justice is not over (for example, the same Supreme Court that proclaimed the personhood of corporations is about to consider a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965). But MLK helped lead the way to notable success.

Film review: ‘Chasing Ice’

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I hadn’t heard of James Balog, whose work is the subject of ‘Chasing Ice’, until I saw him give a presentation at TED Global in Oxford in 2008. It was in a session after supper, along with Nigeran novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an evening optional extra for anyone who still had any headspace after a day of back-to-back talks. I didn’t know anything about James’ project, the Extreme Ice Survey. What he shared that night was so powerful that I was unable to sleep. Unlike much that one might read about climate change, the debates, the research, the statistics which appeal to our rational mind, Balog’s work was visceral. You could feel it in your stomach. It haunted you, while at the same time stunning you with its breathtaking beauty. That’s a powerful combination, and it is that combination that makes ‘Chasing Ice’ such an extraordinary and vital film.