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climate scientists
Death and Destruction From Helene Show Climate Crisis Isn't in a Bargaining Mood
We’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals.
Sep 30, 2024
If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:
Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.
But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain).
I know how this works, because my home state of Vermont is mostly steep mountains and narrow valleys. Once the rain drops, it’s funneled very quickly down the saturated hillsides; placid streams become raging torrents that fill up those bottomlands, covering farm fields with soil; when the water starts to drain, everything is coated with mud. These towns are going to be cut off for a while—our mountain hamlet in Vermont was effectively isolated for a couple of weeks last summer. And these are places where cellphones don’t work in the best of times. Things get pre-modern very fast.
Were it happening just in one place, a compassionate world could figure out how to offer effective relief. But it’s happening in so many places. The same day that Helene slammed into the Gulf, Hurricane John crashed into the Mexican state of Guerrero, dropping nearly 40 inches of rain and causing deadly and devastating floods in many places including Acapulco, which is still a shambles from Hurricane Otis last year. In Nepal this afternoon at least 148 people are deadare dead and many still missing in the Kathmandu Valley. Just this month, as one comprehensive twitter thread documented, we’ve seen massive flooding in Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, with the Danube hitting new heights across Central Europe. It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power.
But all that water has to come from somewhere—the extra vapor in the air implies that in some places water is disappearing skyward, and those stories are at least as dangerous, if not as dramatic in a daily way. (How do we know that drought is on the increase? That’s easy—a new “drought emoji” of a dead tree is about to be approved).
Brazilian president Lula traveled to the Amazon last week to highlight the intense drought gripping the region; it’s fueled fires that have covered as much as 60 percent of the county with smoke. It used to be that Amazon fires were mostly the work of prospectors and would-be farmers, using the dry season to get rid of the forest; now, though, many of the fires are burning in pristine areas far from active attempts at deforestation. It just gets dry enough that the rainforest can catch fire. As Manuela Andreoni reported in the Times, Lula’s new environment minister, the highly credible Marina Silva, has cracked down on the bad guys, but it hasn’t been enough to stop the burning
“Maybe 2024 is the best year of the ones that are coming, as incredible as it may seem,” said Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. “The climate models show a big share of the biome is going to become drier.”
In essence, the Amazon rainforest is an exquisite mechanism for passing moisture from the ocean to the interior, but as more of the forest disappears that mechanism is quickly breaking down—and with implications for regions as far away as California.
All of this is a way of saying something I’ve said too many times before: we’re out of margin.We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day. (117 Fahrenheit in Phoenix yesterday, the hottest September temperature ever recorded there, smashing the old daily mark by…eight degrees).
This means that our political leaders are finally going to have to make hard choices (or not, which is its own way of choosing). Brazil, for instance, is hoping to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon—which at least, given Brazil’s relative poverty, is somewhat understandable, if still insane. America’s politicians, under much less economic pressure, are facing similar choices, some of them as soon as the lame duck session after the November elections. Expect, for instance, a renewed push to open up new permits for LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast. Pausing those permits was the most important step the Biden administration took to rein in Big Oil, and Houston’s been outraged ever since; it’s why they’re pouring money into the Trump campaign. And it’s why they have their errand boys in the Congress—outgoing Senator Joe Manchin, Wyoming’s John Barrasso—proposing a trade: permitting reform that would make it easier to build renewable energy in America, in exchange for ramping up LNG exports that would undercut renewable energy in Asia.
The numbers on whether this trade “makes sense” are complicated and contentious. Here’s a report from Third Way arguing yes, here’s a set of charts from the veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons arguing that it will dramatically raise gas prices for those American consumers still tied to propane. New peer-reviewed numbers from the gold-standard methane scientist Bob Howarth at Cornell make it clear that these LNG exports are worse than coal; that prompted 125 climate scientists to write to the administration asking them to “follow the science.”
In the end, this decision will likely come down to politics. It’s not just Big Oil that’s willing to make such a trade—New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, in line to be Democratic leader on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when Manchin yachts back to West Virginia, has come out for the trade, assuredly because New Mexico gets a large share of its government revenues from taxing the natural gas under its part of the Permian basin. Northeastern Democrats will vote against, fearing not just climate destruction but the rise in gas prices as we send the commodity abroad. Meanwhile, the good people of the Gulf suffer from the grievous local environmental impacts of these giant plants, and the amount of methane in the atmosphere keeps rocketing up.
If Trump wins, there’s no need for a deal—the LNG projects will be approved, and permitting reform for renewables will be dead. If Harris wins and the Dems hold the Senate, at least there’s a chance that environmentalists can make it easier to build solar and wind without yielding on the massive carbon bomb and EJ disaster that is LNG export. That’s why I’m in Montana today, trying in my small way to help Jon Tester in his uphill fight to retain a Senate seat. And it’s why I’m in the swing states most of the time between now and November 5. Thousands of Third Act volunteers are deploying themselves far and wide to win this contest—you can join us on the Silver Wave tour in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. (Please join us, even if you haven’t reached sixty yet—we don’t check IDs and we love working with young people).
The bottom line is, we’re in a terrible corner now. That’s what all those pictures of floating cars really means. We don’t have room left to make tradeoffs and deals; physics isn’t in a bargaining mood. Every battle is dishearteningly existential now.
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UK Youth, Experts Occupy Coal-Sponsored Science Museum Gallery
"Why on Earth are we allowing a destructive industry to sponsor an educational exhibition whilst simultaneously setting fire to young people's futures?" asked Chris Packham.
Apr 14, 2024
A few dozen protesters from Youth Action for Climate Justice and Scientists for Extinction Rebellion this weekend occupied a new climate gallery at the Science Museum in London that is sponsored by the Indian coal and weapons giant Adani.
"To have a coal company sponsoring an exhibition on the future of energy is blatantly deceiving," Anya, a young person who occupied the Energy Revolution gallery, said in a statement. "Through this sponsorship deal, the Science Museum is helping Adani attach itself to the image of a positive and sustainable future when in reality it is a coal giant, weapons manufacturer, and genocide supporter. It's plain wrong for the Science Museum to be deceiving visitors, including young people like me, when it comes to the climate crisis."
The occupation came after over 150 people protested at the museum shortly before the gallery's opening last month. In response, an Adani representative claimed that the sponsorship—which has been condemned by climate action advocates since it was announced three years ago—was part of the company's effort to participate in the global energy transition. Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, defended the firm's involvement.
However, their comments didn't satisfy critics who participated in the weekend occupation. As Real Mediareported:
On Friday evening the activists smuggled in balloons and black paper which they used to create a large art piece—a mound of black coal—in the centre of the gallery. Their plan was to interact with the public on Saturday after their first night of occupation, including a People's Assembly to discuss the controversial sponsorship in the afternoon.
Police were called, but no arrests were made. However, perhaps embarrassed by the presence of the protest and their message about the climate-wrecking sponsors, the museum decided to prevent access to the gallery for the whole of Saturday, although supporters did come with more banners which they held near the entrance.
The protesters remained in the museum overnight on Saturday and ended their action on Sunday.
"It's not just Adani's brand that the Science Museum is greenwashing, they're also allowing the oil and gas giants BP and Equinor to sponsor their exhibits, disregarding the fact that these companies continue to expand fossil fuel production against the warnings of climate scientists," noted Aaron Thierry, one of the scientists who occupied the gallery.
"The latest science has shown we must leave the majority of fossil fuels unburned to prevent catastrophic changes to our climate," Thierry stressed. "That an institution like the Science Museum is working with such rouge companies is a disgrace. The museum's management needs to follow the example of Britain's other leading cultural institutions and drop all ties to the fossil fuel industry."
The young people and scientists were joined by naturalist and television presenter Chris Packham, who gave a speech Friday night.
"For me, science is the art of understanding truth and beauty and a lot of that beauty lies in the natural world. Science tells us that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for the accelerating destruction of our natural world," said Packham. "The Science Museum is a place to spark imagination, to provide answers but also to encourage us to ask questions."
"The question I'm asking today is a big one, 'Why on Earth are we allowing a destructive industry to sponsor an educational exhibition whilst simultaneously setting fire to young people's futures?'" he continued. "This is beyond greenwash—it's grotesque."
Packham emphasized that "we urgently need an 'Energy Revolution' to steer us away from the course of planetary destruction on which we are heading. We need a rapid, just transition to renewables—that revolution means an end to coal, and starts with the young people and scientists occupying this space this evening. Science tells us the truth, and the truth is that we must change."
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Hundreds of Scientists Urge Biden to Back Speedy 'Phaseout of All Fossil Fuels' at COP28
The joint letter arrives as a new UN analysis shows "baby steps" on climate action by nations won't suffice as planet suffers increasingly dire impacts from the burning of coal, oil, and gas.
Nov 14, 2023
Ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Dubai later this month, over 650 scientists issued a joint call on Tuesday demanding that U.S. President Joe Biden prove he recognizes the existential threat of the climate crisis by backing a "fast and fair phaseout of all fossil fuels"—meaning coal, oil, and gas—so that other nations can show equal ambition at the global summit.
With 2023 now on track to be the hottest year in over 125,000 years, and study after study showing that humanity is nowhere near meeting the emission reduction targets needed to keep temperatures below the 1.5°C target set forth in the Paris climate agreement, the hundreds of scientists argue that there is no better time for Biden to shift his leadership on the issue of global warming into a much higher gear.
"We write to you in a year during which the world has witnessed an unprecedented spate of devastating climate-fueled disasters, alongside record-breaking global average temperatures and record levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations," the academics and researchers wrote in their joint letter. "As scientists deeply concerned about the acceleration of climate change and the huge shortfall in efforts thus far to address it, we call on you to commit to more ambitious actions from the United States in the lead-up to and at the annual United Nations climate conference, COP28, in Dubai at the end of this year."
"As scientists across many disciplines who recognize the complex nature of climate impacts and solutions, we know for certain that solving this crisis requires significantly more ambitious action beyond what is being done."
In a new United Nations Climate Change report released Tuesday, the UNFCCC warns that the "baby steps" implemented by most nations of the world—and especially by the leading polluters—simply are not enough to address the planetary emergency and that COP28 in Dubai must serve as a "clear turning point" for world leaders and humanity.
Simon Stiell, the executive-secretary of UN Climate Change, said the woeful progress documented in the new report means world governments "must not only agree what stronger climate actions will be taken but also start showing exactly how to deliver them."
That message is very much in line with what the letter from scientists tells Biden.
In addition to vowing a rapid and just phaseout of fossil fuels, the letter calls on Biden to lay out specifically how the U.S. would implement such a plan and provide a concrete timeline for achieving it. The scientists say the administration must also "ramp up climate finance for low- and middle-income nations" to help them achieve a rapid energy transition; fully operationalize a loss and damage fund to mitigate the financial costs of extreme weather and other disasters fueled by warmer temperatures; and also act aggressively to minimize interference and deceitful greenwashing at COP28 by fossil fuel interests and other corporate actors opposed to progress.
Addressed directly to Biden, the letter concludes:
We call on you and your administration to make these commitments so that together, the global community can greatly improve the chances of preserving a safe and healthy future for people and the planet. The actions of the United States— as the world's wealthiest nation and the single largest contributor to historical heat-trapping emissions—matter greatly. And if our country acts boldly and fairly, we can unlock greater ambition from other nations. The world is watching, and this is a crucial moment for the United States to join with other world leaders and demonstrate genuine progress toward solving a crisis that is rapidly spiraling out of control.
The letter was signed by notable scientists in various fields, including Drs. Rose Abramoff, Rachel Cleetus, Belay B. Demoz, Peter Gleick, Katharine Hayhoe, Gregory S. Jenkins, Naomi Oreskes, Luis E. Ortiz, Ben Pauli, Nathan G. Phillips, Jorge Ramos, Geoffrey Supran, Lucky Tran, Aradhna Tripati, Sandra Whitehead, Sacoby Wilson, Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, Gary Yohe, and civil engineer Andrew Kricun.
"As scientists across many disciplines who recognize the complex nature of climate impacts and solutions, we know for certain that solving this crisis requires significantly more ambitious action beyond what is being done," said Dr. Rachel Cleetus, policy director and a lead economist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which helped initiate the letter.
The United States, Cleetus said, "is currently failing to live up to its responsibility as the wealthiest nation in the world and the largest emitter of historical heat-trapping emissions. As the climate crisis unfolds rapidly and with great inequity, world leaders must step up their domestic and global commitments to meet the moment and ensure a safer, more just future."
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