Climate Change News & Discussions

User avatar
Time_Traveller
Posts: 2090
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:49 pm
Location: Clermont, Indiana, USA, October 7th 2019 B.C.E

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by Time_Traveller »

E.U. Set to Unveil First-Ever Carbon Border Tax
July 13, 2021

Europe is about to shake up the global trade network—all in the name of climate change.

The European Union is scheduled this week to release its plan for a carbon border adjustment—basically a fee on planet-warming carbon embedded in goods produced outside the 27-member bloc.

The E.U. border tax—which would be the first of its kind in the world—is part of a package of 13 different climate policies set to be unveiled tomorrow.

Its intent is twofold. The tax is designed to help the E.U. meet emissions targets enshrined in a new climate law. And it’s supposed to protect E.U. industries from overseas competitors less constrained by climate regulations.

Not surprisingly, the plan has attracted global interest since a draft was leaked early last month. The E.U.’s trading partners will be watching closely to see if the border tax is designed to reduce emissions and can survive accusations of protectionism, which could rub up against the World Trade Organization’s regulations.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... order-tax/
"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

-H.G Wells.
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by caltrek »

"Time for Incrementalism Is Over," Says Climate Movement as Extreme Weather Hits U.S.
by Jessica Corbett
July 12, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... er-hits-us

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) With hundreds of thousands of acres burning across swaths of the U.S. West that have already endured record-breaking heat this summer—and mounting concerns about the GOP and centrist Democrats watering down federal infrastructure legislation—the climate movement on Monday reiterated demands for ambitious government action and investment.

Progressives that called President Joe Biden's initial physical and human infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs and Families Plans, inadequate have ramped up their criticism in the wake of a bipartisan deal Democrats want to pass alongside a reconciliation bill, a flooded New York City subway system, a collapsed condo in Florida, a pipeline-related fire in the Gulf of Mexico, and a firenado in California.

"Buildings are collapsing into the sea. Infrastructure is melting. Hundreds are dying from extreme heat. Millions are without power. The ocean is literally on fire.* The climate crisis is here," said Ellen Sciales, communications director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, in a statement Monday.

"And yet, some Democratic politicians like Joe Biden are still pushing for a compromise on climate under the guise of 'bipartisanship'—though it's actually just doing the bidding of Exxon lobbyists," she added, pointing to an exposé that provided insight on the company's lobbying efforts targeting key senators who are working on the infrastructure package.

Sciales highlighted that the movement's demands aren't just focused on infrastructure legislation; activists also want the president to use his executive power to deliver on his broad campaign promises to combat the climate emergency.
*I believe Ms. Sciales is here referring to this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gulf-of-me ... -pipeline/
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
wjfox
Site Admin
Posts: 8730
Joined: Sat May 15, 2021 6:09 pm
Location: London, UK
Contact:

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by wjfox »

User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

Merkel calls for climate change action as she surveys flood damage
The train station has been reduced to rubble, wrecked cars lie on the tracks and uprooted trees line the riverbank.

Hundreds of people in the village of Heimersheim were still without power Sunday as police combed the wreckage left by receded water to look for bodies and potentially flammable material.

There were similar scenes across western Germany and other parts of Europe where the cleanup from last week's disastrous flooding continued. At least 180 people have died, officials confirmed Sunday; thousands more are missing.

As the waters rose from the Ahr river, Zinat Hamsoro, 41, who lives in normally tranquil Heimersheim, said she had been forced to climb and spend the night on a hill near the village.

"It happened so fast, and we weren't warned," she said Sunday. "The city council posted a warning message on its Facebook page, but by then it was too late."
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by caltrek »

Republicans Declare War on Biden’s Nonexistent Plan to Grab Farmland

Here is an article in Mother Jones by Leah Douglas related to the quoted topic:
The USDA Wants to Make Farms Climate-Friendly. Will It Work?
July 19, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/environment ... e-program/

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) What if all it took to make a dent in agriculture’s contribution to climate change was to pay farmers not to farm?
That’s the theory behind the recent expansion of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a decades-old initiative that has emerged as a central tool in the Biden administration’s effort to achieve net-zero emissions in the agriculture sector.

CRP spends nearly $2 billion annually on payments to farmers who have taken some or all of their acres out of crop cultivation and planted grasses or trees instead. The Farm Service Agency, which administers the program, boasts of a range of benefits for air, water, soil, and wildlife, including reportedly sequestering as much as half of the carbon dioxide emitted in the farming sector each year. Since 2000, the USDA has spent more than $35 billion on the program.

Yet the USDA only contracts CRP land for 10 to 15 years. After that, the vast majority of the land is tilled again for crop production, causing carbon that was stored in the soil to be released back into the atmosphere. The agency doesn’t take this rather significant flaw into account when calculating the program’s carbon benefits.

Expanding CRP is “a start, it’s a stepping stone” in addressing agriculture’s carbon emissions, says Jessica Kochick, a policy organizer with the Land Stewardship Project (LSP) in Minneapolis. But “on a broader scale, the way the government is investing in agriculture is broken,” she says. “It needs to be changed if we’re going to be serious about reducing agriculture’s role in producing greenhouse gases.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by caltrek »

What Climate Scientists Are Saying About This Catastrophic Summer
by Sofia Andrade
July 15, 2021

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... ummer.html

Introduction:
(Slate) By all accounts, the climate crisis is already here. Deadly heat domes across the Pacific Northwest, a petroleum pipeline leak in the middle of the ocean that set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, and the deadly floods in Germany and Belgium in the past few weeks alone have proved that the world is changing in response to how we have changed it.

No one should be surprised…For decades, scientists have been ringing the alarm bell about anthropogenic climate change. Over 30 years ago, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Congress that the “greenhouse effect is here.” And long before then, in the 1800s, scientists like Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling the amount of CO2 that was in the atmosphere in 1895 would lead to global warming of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius in average global temperatures. “That wasn’t too far off,” said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, speaking on his own behalf. It was just that Arrhenius’s timeframe for how quickly humans would emit those gasses was way off, Kalmus added: “It only took about 125 years for that increase in CO2 fraction that he thought would take 3000 years. He grossly underestimated the rate of emissions from burning fossil fuels that we actually did.”

Arrhenius’s original prediction represents a lot of the current problems faced by climate change models. Understanding where we are on the climate change timeline requires multiple steps—we need to know how much greenhouse gas has been emitted, how much those greenhouse gases have increased the global temperature, and then finally, we need to take one last step that even Arrhenius never took—we need to understand how those changes in global temperature will affect the climate we experience. It’s this last bit that is trickiest—we know the current proportion of carbon in our…what we don’t know is how to accurately predict all the consequences of the temperature increase caused by that extra carbon.

“The scientific community has done a really good job projecting when we would get to 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about where we are now,” Kalmus said. “The community hasn’t done as good of a job projecting how bad climate impacts would be at 1.2 degrees Celsius.”
caltrek: I think one factor is that scientists are really by nature mostly a conservative lot. Many were reluctant to predict dire consequences if there was a sufficient level of uncertainty in those predictions. Yet, political conservatives complained that they were being too alarmist in their predictions. This became part of the mechanism by which negative effects were chronically underestimated. At least IMHO.
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by raklian »

caltrek wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 2:54 pm
Here is an article in Mother Jones by Leah Douglas related to the quoted topic:
The USDA Wants to Make Farms Climate-Friendly. Will It Work?
July 19, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/environment ... e-program/
The only type of farming that can be climate or carbon-neutral is indoor vertical farming with a closed recycling system.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
User avatar
Time_Traveller
Posts: 2090
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:49 pm
Location: Clermont, Indiana, USA, October 7th 2019 B.C.E

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by Time_Traveller »

Earth's clouds are likely to increase global heating, scientists find
about 24 hours ago

While we see Earth getting warmer as the effects of climate change continue to escalate, our planet's clouds make our planet hotter than ever, scientists worry.

By using a new approach to analyzing data from satellites, scientists in a new study suggest that Earth's clouds could exacerbate global warming over time. This work, conducted by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of East Anglia in the U.K., provides evidence that suggests that it is very likely — with an approximately 97.5% probability — that clouds will amplify global heating.

"Over the last few years, there's been a growing amount of evidence that clouds probably have an amplifying effect on global warming," co-author Peer Nowack, a researcher at the University of East Anglia and Imperial's Grantham Institute and Data Science Institute, said in a statement. "However, our new approach allowed us for the first time to derive a global value for this feedback effect using only the highest quality satellite data as our preferred line of evidence."

Many countries have signed the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that pledges that they will limit global heating to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or ideally 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels.

However, according to this study, Earth's climate warming is unlikely to stay below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels and is more likely to rise more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), according to the same statement.
https://www.space.com/clouds-increase-g ... ate-change
"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

-H.G Wells.
User avatar
erowind
Posts: 544
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 5:42 am

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by erowind »

What’s the mechanism involved there? I thought clouds reflected sunlight?
User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Climate Change News & Discussions

Post by raklian »

erowind wrote: Thu Jul 22, 2021 8:16 pm What’s the mechanism involved there? I thought clouds reflected sunlight?
They also trap radiation that bounces off the surface due to the heat/radiation conduction differential between air and volumetric density of water/ice. Clouds are a double-edged sword.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
Post Reply