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Tag: climate science
Touring Flood-Hit Areas, Biden Calls Climate Change 'Existential Threat'

Touring Flood-Hit Areas, Biden Calls Climate Change 'Existential Threat'

By Nandita Bose

NEW YORK (Reuters) -President Joe Biden on Tuesday toured sites of deadly floods in the Northeast and said Hurricane Ida demonstrated the ravages of climate change as he pressed for investments to boost infrastructure and fight global warming.

"Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here. It's not going to get any better," Biden said after touring neighborhoods in New Jersey and New York City's Queens borough that were hurt by the storm. "We can stop it from getting worse."

It was Biden's second trip in recent days to areas slammed by the storm, shifting his focus to domestic priorities after weeks of public attention to the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Biden made fighting climate change a key plank of his 2020 presidential campaign and a top priority of his administration, but some of his goals rely on getting the U.S. Congress to pass multitrillion-dollar legislation on infrastructure and other priorities.

Biden noted that wildfires, hurricanes and floods were hitting every part of the United States, with more than 100 million Americans affected this summer alone. The storms, he said, will only be getting worse.

"Folks, we got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red. The nation and the world are in peril. That's not hyperbole. That is a fact," Biden said.

On Friday he visited Louisiana, promising federal aid and urging national unity. Ida devastated parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast and unleashed even deadlier flooding in the Northeast.

Biden's flood damage trips revived his familiar role of consoler-in-chief, a shift from time spent in recent weeks defending his decision to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan following its deadly aftermath.

The United States is still working in Afghanistan to get Americans out while resettling tens of thousands of evacuees. Still, Biden is expected to focus in the coming days on domestic issues: a fight to protect women's reproductive rights in the wake of a new Texas anti-abortion law, the end of extended unemployment benefits for many Americans and new measures to fight COVID-19.

On Saturday, the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he will visit the three sites where hijacked U.S. domestic planes crashed. Next week, he plans to visit California to boost Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom's effort to stay in office amid a recall election and to highlight the damage done by wildfires, another sign of climate change. Vice President Kamala Harris plans to travel to California on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said it would take "months more likely than weeks" to complete cleanup, repairs, and rebuilding after his state was ravaged by flooding and a tornado from the remnants of Ida.

Dozens of people died during the hurricane and in its aftermath and some states are still grappling with widespread power outages and water-filled homes.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Peter Szekely; Writing by Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons and David Gregorio)

Dangerous Irrationality: Climate Deniers Jeopardize Humanity’s Survival

Dangerous Irrationality: Climate Deniers Jeopardize Humanity’s Survival

You don’t have to be a physicist or geologist to know that the Earth’s climate is changing in ways that are destined to make the landscape less hospitable for humans. Just look around. The dangers are evident.

In the final weeks of May, tornadoes ripped through the center of the United States day after day, destroying homes and schools, hurling trees as if they were mere matchsticks, inflicting countless injuries across communities and leaving some families to mourn their dead. This virulent tornado season is just one example of extreme weather: The past few months have also seen record cold, record heat and record flooding.

If human beings were rational, our top scientists and political leaders would be huddled together, hashing out plans and policies to try to mitigate the damage from greenhouse gases — with the goal of salvaging human life. Faced with an existential threat, a fierce peril that will alter the planet in significant ways, presidents and premiers and prime ministers would overcome their traditional enmities, as they do in the movies, and come together to save humanity.

Alas, that has not happened. Human beings, it turns out, are deeply irrational, tribal, ignorant, greedy and selfish. Sometimes, we are just plain crazy. President Donald Trump has reversed a series of steps taken by his predecessors to ameliorate climate change and has commenced initiatives that will further damage the environment. Moreover, the president has launched a war on the science of climate change and the experts who practice it, trying to create widespread doubts about their expertise.

Here’s one example: James Reilly, whom Trump appointed to head the United States Geological Survey, has ordered his staff to produce computer-generated climate assessments that stop at the year 2040, rather than continuing through the end of the century, as the agency had done before, according to The New York Times. That’s because the most severe consequences of global warming will kick in after 2040.

And that’s only the beginning. Trump is toying with an idea pushed by 79-year-old William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, to create a special climate review board to denounce the work of respected climate scientists. Happer was a well-respected physicist at Princeton for many years, but he is also a climate quack with no expertise in climate science.

While even elementary schoolchildren now know that carbon dioxide is among the greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the Earth, Happer made this idiotic statement about carbon dioxide in an interview in 2014: “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” In a more sensible society, Happer would have been carted off to an asylum. Instead, he occupies an important post in the Trump administration.

The flat-earthers notwithstanding, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to wreak such havoc that the survival of humanity is in doubt. One million animal species are at risk of extinction, with climate change among the causes, according to a recent report from the United Nations. The polar ice caps have melted faster in the last 20 years than in the previous 10,000, raising the water level in the oceans, which will increase flooding. By the end of the century, some coastal cities will be uninhabitable, scientists predict.

Meanwhile, extreme weather events have become the norm. Climate scientists are not sure that increased tornado activity is caused by global warming — contrary to the nonsense spewed by the doubters, the experts are very cautious — but some are beginning to suspect a link.

Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann said recently there is growing evidence that “a warming atmosphere, with more moisture and turbulent energy, favors increasingly large outbreaks of tornadoes, like the outbreak we’ve witnessed in the last few days,” according to InsideClimateNews.

The tornadoes add to the destruction from more floods, more wildfires, hotter days, more droughts and, counterintuitively, more rain (because warmer air holds more moisture). The continental United States has just experienced the wettest year on record, according to the National Weather Service.

So, despite the blithe denials of the climate skeptics, the planet is undergoing fundamental shifts that will prove hostile to humankind. All the know-nothings have accomplished is to ensure that humanity won’t change its habits quickly enough to survive.

IMAGE: The wreckage of homes litters a playground adjacent to a neighborhood which was destroyed when a  huge tornado roared through an Oklahoma City suburb, flattening a wide swath of homes and businesses. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Fake Science: White House Will Name Panel To Dispute Climate Consensus

Fake Science: White House Will Name Panel To Dispute Climate Consensus

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

The White House intends to create a new panel of scientists with the intention of attacking the scientific consensus, both within and outside the federal government, that climate change poses a clear and severe threat to the world, a new report from The Washington Post revealed Sunday.

According to the report, officials in the National Security Council want to arrange the group so that it would be outside the normal scrutiny such advisory panels typically require.  When formal advisory committees are usually set up, they are subject to stringent regulations that require public meetings, accommodation of records requests, and membership standards.

Apparently, the White House doesn’t want the public to have clear insight into a committee designed to spread propaganda and disinformation about clearly established science.

The report said that President Donald Trump was unhappy with the fact that the law requires it to the publication of the National Climate Assessment. This review, compiled and rigorously reviewed by career scientists across the administration, stressed the serious threat posed to the United States and abroad by climate change and CO2 emissions. Since this contradicts GOP orthodoxy and conflicts with its anti-regulation agenda and the interests of corporate donors, Trump and his party are eager to combat these findings.

The Post noted that even within the military — the branch of government that Republicans most revere — the science of climate change has long been accepted as fact, even under GOP administrations.

“In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report to examine how an abrupt change in climate would affect America’s defense capabilities: Its authors concluded that it ‘should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern,’” the Post said.

IMAGE: A NASA satellite image showing the Tropical Storm Colin over Florida and the U.S. east coast.

Is This The ‘New Normal’ We Want?

Is This The ‘New Normal’ We Want?

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

I lived with a military version of the “new normal” when my husband came back from Iraq with severe combat trauma, and there was nothing normal about it. Those years were defined by fear, insecurity, lies, violence, and crystal meth. I shudder at the fact that much of this country has tacitly accepted the Trump era as the new normal. When I hear climate scientists say the heat records of recent years will become the new normal within a decade or so,  I realize just how bad it will be. Anyone who’s been told to normalize highly abnormal and potentially lethal conditions has a gut-level understanding that new normal is a dog whistle for hell.

“New normal” is the phrase society slaps on the horrific conditions we have created and now lack the courage and love to change. So we get used to things that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and most of us are okay with it, as long as it doesn’t happen to us. But eventually, it will. Truthfully, it’s happening to all of us right now, even if we’re too distracted by a shiny new news story to see it. A Google search of how miserable poor Don Jr. is with dad in the White House generated nearly seven million results. By comparison, a search for articles about how GOP leaders stripped Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-CA) amendment to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from the FY 2018 Appropriations Act at zero dark hundred produced 70,000 hits.

Since Congress refuses to raise war taxes or reinstate the draft, you probably believe you’ll never have to pay for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere that you don’t fight, don’t notice and may not even support. I’ve got bad news: you’re already paying for them. Those of you with children and grandchildren, or the dream that one day you’ll be parents? Be warned: the little ones will pay a whole lot more than you. They might just pay with their lives, even if they never wear the uniform.

The carbon footprint of military operations is massive, and in the war between combat and climate, combat is clearly winning. The Iraq War alone released at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e), according to figures from Oil Change International, a think tank on the cost of fossil fuels.

“That’s about the equivalent of adding 25 million cars to the road in the US in one year,” said climate activist and author Bill McKibben, in his testimony at the People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War in Washington, D.C. last December.

McKibben is the founder of 350.org, and I invited him to speak at the Tribunal, where I also testified. I knew what the war had cost me: my husband, my home and land, my job, my healthcare, and my security and identity (literally). I wanted to know what it was costing everyone, and the price that might be paid by the future. In his testimony, McKibben remarked, “This one war produce[d] more carbon each year than 60 percent of the world’s countries.”

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the main drivers of climate change, and in case you missed it, a recent report revealed that one of the consequences of that is an incipient “biological annihilation.” It is almost as if we’re waging war on ourselves. Professor Gerardo Ceballas, one of the report’s co-authors, said to CNN’s John Sutter, “What is at stake is really the state of humanity.”

Also at stake is the humanity of a nation that signs a blank check for endless war.  Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in Department of Defense spending; he plans to siphon some of the funds via brutal cuts to the EPA budget. Nearly 40 percent of Americans live in areas with frequently unhealthy levels of air pollution, and more than 600,000 children worldwide die every year because of it.

The recent calving of the so-called Exxon Knew iceberg from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf is going to accelerate rising sea levels, which will have a catastrophic casualty count. Cutting funds to agencies that support life in order to finance activities that do not is morally indefensible.

A Congress that would even contemplate spending $406.5 billion on a few F-35s for warfare while attempting to slash $800 billion from senior healthcare and revoke health insurance from 22 million poor and disabled Americans is actively redefining what it means to be morally bankrupt. Should the Affordable Care Act be repealed, an estimated 24,000 Americans will die each year. That’s triple the total number of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

We simply cannot afford any more unlimited funding of unlimited war. We’ve already paid far too much.

“The total U.S. spending on the Iraq war could have covered all the global investment in renewable power generation needed between now and 2030 in order to halt the rise in the planet’s temperature,” McKibben said.

With the $600 billion Congress put into military operations in Iraq, America could have helped protect the planet. We helped destroy it instead. Congress is poised to once again pledge allegiance to endless war and all the collateral damage it creates. Is this the “new normal” we want?

Stacy Bannerman is the author of Homefront 911: How Families of Veterans Are Wounded by Our Wars (2015) and When the War Came Home (2006). She was a charter board member of Military Families Speak Out, and is the author of the play, Homefront 911: Military Family Monologues. Her website is www.stacybannerman.com.