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Trump’s North America Trade Deal Is Poised to Worsen Climate Change

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speaks about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, known as the USMCA, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on December 10, 2019.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speaks about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, known as the USMCA, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on December 10, 2019.
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In These Times
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While Congressional Democrats made clear that they would not bring the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to a vote until it had the backing of the AFL-CIO, support they finally secured last week, Democrats appear comfortable voting on the replacement trade deal that has virtually no support from leading environmental groups.

A House vote could come in the next few days and on Friday December 13, ten environmental organizations, representing 12 million members, sent a letter urging Congressional representatives to vote against the proposed deal, which will replace the 25-year-old North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“This final deal poses very real threats to our climate and communities and ignores nearly all of the fundamental environmental fixes consistently outlined by the environmental community,” the letter stated. The groups — which include the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and 350.org — noted that “the deal does not even mention climate change, fails to adequately address toxic pollution, includes weak environmental standards and an even weaker enforcement mechanism, supports fossil fuels, and allows oil and gas corporations to challenge climate and environmental protections.” The groups link to a two-page analysis produced by the Sierra Club that goes into greater detail about what the group sees as the deal’s environmental shortcomings.

According to the environmental news organization E&E News, at a Politico event last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the USMCA as “substantially better” than NAFTA and said “we are very pleased with the environment [provisions].” While she conceded “we want more,” she stressed, “but we don’t have to do it all in that bill” and praised it for “talk[ing] about the environment in a very strong way.”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), who co-led the House working group focused on environmental trade issues, told reporters at a press conference last week that “this is going to be the best trade agreement for the environment” and cheered its monitoring and enforcement provisions. Rep. Bonamici did not return In These Times’s request for comment.

Back in May, every Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), sent a letter to President Trump criticizing the draft agreement for its language around the environment, including its lack of “any apparent provisions directed at mitigating the effects of climate change.” Now the Committee is championing its work to shape the final text, saying the “revised version will serve as a model for future U.S. trade agreements.”

Having so many members of Congress support this agreement is especially frustrating for climate advocates because, in September, more than 110 House Democrats, including 18 full committee chairs, sent a letter to the president urging the new trade deal to “meaningfully address climate change” and to “include binding climate standards and be paired with a decision for the United States to remain in the Paris Climate Agreement.”

“While Democrats claim this deal improves on some environmental provisions, they have yet to explain how it meaningfully addresses climate change,” said Jake Schmidt, the managing director for the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Climate advocates point to the growing problem of “outsourced” pollution — where wealthier countries like the United States and Japan take credit for improving their own domestic environmental standards, while then importing more goods from heavy-polluting countries. Critics say the current draft of USMCA does nothing meaningful to address this problem.

The trade agreement is being hailed for rolling back the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, controversial private tribunals that have enabled corporations to extract huge payments for government policies that may infringe on their profits. But Ben Beachy, a trade expert with the Sierra Club, says the agreement includes a major loophole for Mexico, where oil and gas companies will still be able to sue in those private tribunals.

“The approach the NAFTA 2.0 deal takes is recognizing there’s a problem but then allowing some of the worst offenders to perpetuate it,” he told In These Times. “It’s an unabashed handout to Exxon and Chevron: It’s like saying we’ll protect the hen house by keeping all animals out, except for foxes.”

Beachy says the deal overall “dramatically undercuts” the ability of the U.S. to tackle the climate crisis. “By failing to even mention climate change, it’ll help more corporations move to Mexico, and this is not a hypothetical concern,” he said. “We cannot simultaneously claim to fight climate change on one hand and enact climate-denying trade deals on the other. Do we really want to lock ourselves into a trade deal for another 25 years that encourages corporations to shift their pollution from one country to another?”

Karen Hansen-Kuhn, the program director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told In These Times the final agreement represents an even worse situation for farmers than under NAFTA. “On food and farm issues it’s definitely several steps back,” she said, pointing as an example to how USMCA will make it easier for companies to limit the information they provide to consumers about health and nutrition.

Emily Samsel, a spokesperson with the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), told In These Times that her organization informed members of Congress “that [they] are strongly considering scoring their USMCA vote when it comes to the House floor on LCV’s Congressional scorecard.” LCV was one of the ten environmental groups to sign the letter opposing the trade deal last week.

USMCA does include language requiring parties to adopt and implement seven multilateral environmental agreements, but the 2015 Paris Agreement is not among them. Getting the president to agree to putting anything about climate change or the Paris Agreement was always going to be a tough sell, considering Trump has promised to withdraw from the landmark climate pact. Still, environmental advocates insist House Democrats have real leverage that they should use more aggressively, particularly since getting the trade deal through Congress is Trump’s top legislative priority for 2019.

Democratic supporters of USMCA say the existing language is good enough for now, and that it will position the government well for when Trump is out of office. A spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi told The Washington Post that “the changes Democrats secured in USMCA put us on a firm footing for action when we have a President who brings us back into the Paris accord.” Earlier this year 228 House Democrats voted for a bill to keep the U.S. in the Paris Agreement.

U.S. labor groups have thus far remained mostly silent on the concerns raised by environmental organizations.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which opposes the deal on labor grounds, did not return request for comment on the USMCA’s environmental provisions. The Communications Workers of America released a statement on Friday saying the deal includes some “modest improvements” for workers over NAFTA, but a spokesperson for the union told In These Times, “We don’t have any comment on the environmental provisions.” The BlueGreen Alliance, a national coalition which includes eight large labor unions and six influential environmental groups, has issued no statement on the trade deal, and did not return request for comment.

And the AFL-CIO issued a statement last week praising the deal, though noted “it alone is not a solution for outsourcing, inequality or climate change.” A spokesperson for the labor federation did not return request for comment.

Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists

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UNIVERSITY OF EXETER NEWS RELEASE 27-NOV-2019

 
Authors Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
 
 
Full press release

More than half of the climate tipping points identified a decade ago are now “active”, a group of leading scientists have warned.

This threatens the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected.

This “cascade” of changes sparked by global warming could threaten the existence of human civilisations.

Evidence is mounting that these events are more likely and more interconnected than was previously thought, leading to a possible domino effect.

In an article in the journal Nature <<https://www.nature.com/magazine-assets/d41586-019-03595-0/d41586-019-03595-0.pdf>>, the scientists call for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent key tipping points, warning of a worst-case scenario of a “hothouse”, less habitable planet.

“A decade ago we identified a suite of potential tipping points in the Earth system, now we see evidence that over half of them have been activated,” said lead author Professor Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.

“The growing threat of rapid, irreversible changes means it is no longer responsible to wait and see. The situation is urgent and we need an emergency response.”

Co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “It is not only human pressures on Earth that continue rising to unprecedented levels.

“It is also that as science advances, we must admit that we have underestimated the risks of unleashing irreversible changes, where the planet self-amplifies global warming.

“This is what we now start seeing, already at 1°C global warming.

“Scientifically, this provides strong evidence for declaring a state of planetary emergency, to unleash world action that accelerates the path towards a world that can continue evolving on a stable planet.”

In the commentary, the authors propose a formal way to calculate a planetary emergency as risk multiplied by urgency.

Tipping point risks are now much higher than earlier estimates, while urgency relates to how fast it takes to act to reduce risk.

Exiting the fossil fuel economy is unlikely before 2050, but with temperature already at 1.1°C above pre-industrial temperature, it is likely Earth will cross the 1.5°C guardrail by 2040. The authors conclude this alone defines an emergency.

Nine active tipping points:

  1. Arctic sea ice
  2. Greenland ice sheet
  3. Boreal forests
  4. Permafrost
  5. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
  6. Amazon rainforest
  7. Warm-water corals
  8. West Antarctic Ice Sheet
  9. Parts of East Antarctica

The collapse of major ice sheets on Greenland, West Antarctica and part of East Antarctica would commit the world to around 10 metres of irreversible sea-level rise.

Reducing emissions could slow this process, allowing more time for low-lying populations to move.

The rainforests, permafrost and boreal forests are examples of biosphere tipping points that if crossed result in the release of additional greenhouse gases amplifying warming.

Despite most countries having signed the Paris Agreement, pledging to keep global warming well below 2°C, current national emissions pledges – even if they are met – would lead to 3°C of warming.

Although future tipping points and the interplay between them is difficult to predict, the scientists argue: “If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization.

“No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.”

Professor Lenton added: “We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of inter-related tipping points.

“However, the rate at which they progress, and therefore the risk they pose, can be reduced by cutting our emissions.”

Though global temperatures have fluctuated over millions of years, the authors say humans are now “forcing the system”, with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global temperature increasing at rates that are an order of magnitude higher than at the end of the last ice age.

Groups inspired by Greta Thunberg plan Black Friday climate strikes

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By Darran Simon, CNN

Updated 12:01 AM ET, Fri November 29, 2019

Greta Thunberg to Congress: Listen to the scientists

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Greta Thunberg to Congress: Listen to the scientists 00:51

(CNN)People in cities across the US are expected to take part in strikes on Black Friday to call attention to the global climate crisis.

Climate strikes are also scheduled to take place around the world on Friday.
The protests are part of Fridays for Future, a youth-driven movement that started after teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg skipped school and staged sit-ins on Fridays outside the Swedish Parliament. Supporters hope to build off of the momentum of the Fridays for Future global climate strikes that took place in September.
“In September, 7.5 million people around the world took to the streets. Tomorrow we’re doing it again. Everyone’s needed. Everyone’s welcome,” Thunberg posted on social media.

Climate change will most directly impact young people, organizers have said. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be an issue on everyone’s minds. They want allies.
close dialog
Strikers have demanded “climate justice” to cast the climate crisis as not just an environmental issue, but also an ethical obligation.
They hope the strikes will show world leaders that it’s not just young people who want climate change to be addressed.
Organizers have encouraged would-be shoppers on Black Friday to boycott the holiday and focus on the degeneration of the planet by joining the climate strikes.
“Consumerism is destroying our planet,” Extinction Rebellion, an environmental group, said on social media. “We do not have infinite resources, yet the system continues to persuade us all that we need to constantly buy more of everything. We are continuously sold cheap products at the expense of our environment, but enough is enough.”
One group said it plans to silently push empty shopping carts through a New York city store, forming a lengthy chain of non-shoppers who will weave through the store aisles, inviting customers to take a break from shopping.
Another climate strike is planned for December 6.

December’s demonstrations will coincide with the COP25 environmental summit that will take place in Madrid from December 2 to December 13.

CNN’s Dakin Andone contributed to this report.

Jeremy Clarkson Says 16-Year-Old Activist Has ‘Killed The Car Show’

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NOV 28, 2019 at 5:17AM
By: Anthony Karr

Greta Thunberg is “an idiot,” adds Jezza.

Ex-Top Gear lead host Jeremy Clarkson likes for his opinion to be heard. He often speaks about various automotive-related topics, including the best and worst cars on the planet, cyclists, autonomous machines, and many more. His latest observation is now making the news, accusing 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg of basically killing car shows on TV.

Thunberg is a Swedish environmental mover and shaker whose opinions have gained international recognition to the point where Clarkson publicly called her “an idiot” in his recent interview with The Sun. The 59-year-old TV host and journalist also expressed his belief that Thunberg is the reason why young people generally hate cars, which is a big reason why motoring shows are not that popular anymore.

“Everyone I know under 25 isn’t the slightest bit interested in cars — Greta Thunberg has killed the car show,” he told The Sun. “They’re taught at school, before they say ‘Mummy and Daddy’, that cars are evil, and it’s in their heads.”

Clarkson’s Opinion:

⠀clarkson answers questions at pub Jeremy Clarkson Thinks Lexus LFA Is Best Car He’s Ever Driven
the grand tour axes celebrity guests Jeremy Clarkson Reveals Why The Grand Tour Axed Celebrity Guests

Richard Hammond seems to finally agree with Clarkson about something. “I hate to say it, but I think Jeremy is right. Young people don’t care about cars. How many kids now are growing up with posters of cars on their bedroom wall?”

Interestingly, Clarkson, together with colleagues May and Hammond, take global climate changes as the main topic in the upcoming The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen special, which was teased earlier this month. While Clarkson admits that “for the first time ever, we’ve had global warming rammed down our throats — and we’ve not been idiotic,” he insists that “going round saying we’re all going to die” is not going to help us.

The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen is slated for a December 13 launch on Amazon Prime.

Source: The Sun

We’ll see an ice-free Arctic this century, latest research says

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New paper from University of California narrows window for Arctic melting

Walter Strong · CBC News · 

A polar bear stands on an ice floe in Baffin Bay above the Arctic Circle, as seen from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent in July 2008. New research has narrowed the window on when we can expect a functionally ice-free September in the Arctic. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)
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We can expect to see an ice-free Arctic Ocean within 50 years, according to researchers at the University of California’s Center for Climate Science, who say they’ve improved and narrowed past projections of when the Arctic might be free of sea ice.

Projections have varied from as early as 2026 to as distant as 2132. Now, according to research published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the Arctic could be “functionally ice-free” by September 2044 — and no later than 2067 — assuming no changes to global carbon emissions.

September is when the Arctic sea ice pack is at its thinnest. That’s when the effect of summer’s heat shows up in the ice pack.

Functionally ice free is like basically broke — it doesn’t mean there won’t be a shard of ice anywhere, but there would be fewer than one million square kilometres of it. That’s compared with the current minimum six million square kilometres of Arctic sea ice that exists today, even at its lowest point after summer’s heat.

The important thing about one million square kilometres of Arctic sea ice is that it mostly represents thick, multi-year ice close to coastal areas of Greenland and in the Arctic archipelago. The Arctic Ocean itself would be essentially ice free. Declining sea ice hurts the ability of the Arctic to perform its important albedo function.

The sea ice albedo effect refers to the reflective capacity of sea ice to deflect sunlight. Where there is no sea ice, darker open water absorbs up to approximately 90 per cent of incoming solar energy (heat). Sea ice absorbs just 20 per cent of that energy, with the rest reflected away, according to research published by the University of California.

It’s the Earth’s freezer malfunctioning. This quickens global warming.

“Essentially, when we’re losing that ice, the ocean is taking up much more heat than it would be say if we had an ice-covered Arctic,” said Chad Thackeray, the article’s lead author and research scientist on climate change at the University of California Los Angeles.

“So that change has big implications for the climate system; not just changes in the Arctic.”

Declining Arctic sea ice will quicken global warming. (UCLA Center for Climate Science)

Accurate modelling of when we could see an ice-free Arctic is an important piece of data in global climate models, Thackeray said.

“This is one … quantity or metric where a model disagreement is particularly large. A lot of our work is about trying to reduce this uncertainty … so that we’re better prepared for the changes that are to come.”

Consistent modelling of Arctic sea ice changes will improve global projections that rely on that data.

“If models have more consistent simulations of sea ice, then it’s likely that they’ll have a better consistency in projecting future changes in temperature — especially in the Arctic region,” he said.

New method

Thackeray and co-author Alex Hall used a new method to build their model. They took 30 years of satellite data on seasonal ice melt as a benchmark. Next, they compared 23 existing models to the data, rejecting those that failed to match the benchmark. The idea is that if a model can’t accurately ‘predict’ what did happen, it shouldn’t be relied on to predict what will happen.

Chad Thackeray is an assistant researcher at UCLA, in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. (Submitted by Chad Thackeray)

Once the weak models were rejected, they were left with six models that, taken together, give what they believe is the most accurate timeframe a functionally ice-free Arctic, and how soon the best science tells us we should expect it.

There are some caveats to the research. Data was limited to sea ice between 70 and 90 degrees North latitude. That leaves out much of the Canadian archipelago — that mass of land and islands that defines Canada’s North on a map.

Sea ice in that area is affected by nearby land masses. Regional sea ice forecasts would be a different, and more complicated, data set to work with.

“There are some areas … just north of the archipelago and off northwestern Greenland, where the ice is very thick, multiyear ice that doesn’t really melt every summer,” Thackeray, who is from the Toronto area, said.

“That ice will stick around a bit longer. There will still be flows that find their way through the Canadian archipelago. That’ll be pretty thick even in this mid-century timeframe.”

Reflective sea ice helps regulate climate. It’s absence encourages warming. (UCLA Center for Climate Science)

But the trend is toward ice-free, assuming nothing is done to curb carbon emissions.

Thackeray said they did not consider how reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could effect the timeframe. Different models or “pathways” could significantly delay, halt, or even ultimately reverse Arctic sea ice thaw.

“This process can be delayed by several decades or even completely halted if we were to limit ourselves to say 1.5 degrees of warming,” Thackeray said. “It’s just a matter of what pathway we choose … and how quickly we choose.”

Helpful, if not groundbreaking

Walt Meier, senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, said that Thackeray’s paper does not necessarily point to something new. Other attempts to cull the data of extreme outliers have given similar results. But he said the method itself is new and it’s reassuring to see different approaches yielding similar results.

“In one sense, many people are reluctant to give a date or range of dates because of uncertainties,” Meier stated in an email. “This paper does provide the range and a reasonable justification.”

Meier’s research focuses on satellite data, not modelling, so he doesn’t expect the paper to directly inform his work.

“But I am on a couple projects that focus on sea ice projections, including from models, and I think this paper makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge.”

This Nov. 12, 2019, photo shows a view from the research vessel Sikuliaq near Jones Island in the Beaufort Sea. (John Guillote via Associated Press)

Scientists Have Detected a Rapid Spike of a Widely Overlooked Greenhouse Gas

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CARLY CASSELLA
19 NOV 2019

Carbon dioxide and methane aren’t the only greenhouse gases the world needs to worry about. The rapid rise of nitrous oxide (N2O), colloquially known as ‘laughing gas’, is no joke either.

This little-known greenhouse gas may not be as prevalent nor as long-lasting as carbon dioxide, but it is hundreds of times more potent and can stick around in the atmosphere for more than a century.

Today, it’s released mainly through human agricultural practices, such as using cheap nitrogen fertiliser. And, as you’ve no doubt guessed, it’s also a main contributor to ozone depletion and global warming.

To make matters worse, we’ve seriously underestimated its use. Since the turn of the century, new measurements reveal atmospheric N2O has risen much faster than experts at the United Nations once predicted.

“We see that the N2O emissions have increased considerably during the past two decades, but especially from 2009 onwards,” says climate scientist Rona Thompson from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU).

“Our estimates show that the emission of N2O has increased faster over the last decade than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission factor approach.”

Instead of basing their calculations on human emissions, which are usually gathered from indirect sources, the researchers used a ‘top-down’ approach, based on dozens of atmospheric measurements from around the world. These data were then used to predict N2O dynamics on land and in the ocean between 1998 and 2016.

Between 2000 and 2005, and 2010 and 2015, N2O emissions were found to increase by roughly 10 percent. This is more than twice the rate estimated from fertiliser use, which was reported to the United Nations.

And this isn’t due to natural changes, the authors say, but rather our growing reliance on nitrogen fertilisers for agricultural crops. Producing nitric acid and burning fossil fuels and biomass certainly doesn’t help.

“This increase is significantly larger than prior estimates,” the authors write, adding that “a change of this magnitude cannot be explained by any known mechanism through the [N2O] sink, as it would require an increase in atmospheric lifetime of ~20 years, and such a change is unrealistic over this timescale.”

Screen Shot 2019 11 18 at 4.37.25 pm(Thompson et al., Nature Climate Change, 2019)

The vast majority of the excess nitrogen is coming from the land, and while emissions in the United States and Europe have remained fairly stable, N2O has shot up in China and to a lesser extent in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Brazil.

The authors found these regions are responsible for roughly half the increase in global emissions over the past two decades, with Africa contributing a further 20 percent. For both China and Brazil, the IPCC projections were way off.

After a certain point, they explain, it appears as though plants can no longer fix nitrogen as effectively and this causes emissions to increase exponentially.

The idea is hardly new, but agricultural researcher Richard Eckard, who was not involved in the study, told ABC News Australia it’s never been studied at this global level before.

“When you exceed the [plant] system’s capacity to use that nitrogen fertiliser, the efficiency goes out the window, and the nitrogen can leak out of the cycle,” he told the ABC.

“That plays out in some industries where the recommended amount of fertiliser is exceeded, and you get exponential loss of nitrogen.”

In a Nature review of the study, environmental agronomist David Makowski agrees. He writes that the steady rise of nitrogen fertilisers in developing countries is most likely to blame for the recent spike in global emissions.

“This result reinforces the hypothesis of a nonlinear relationship between N2O emission and Nitrogen inputs and thus of a non-constant emission factor, as previously suggested by several experimental field studies and meta-analyses,” he writes.

“This implies that the IPCC’s default Tier 1 approach of a constant emission factor may both overestimate emissions when excess nitrogen is low and underestimate them when it is high.”

IPCC reports have been critiqued in the past for underestimating carbon emissions from thawing permafrost, tipping points and positive feedback loops. Now, it’s starting to look as though the same has occurred with N2O emissions.

Earlier this year, a study found that thawing permafrost in the Arctic may be releasing 12 times as much nitrous oxide as we previously thought. Even more recently, it’s been suggested that global warming and ocean acidification may simply make emissions of this potent gas worse.

“We will have to adjust our emission inventories in light of these results,” says Wilfried Winiwarter, a researcher at the IIASA Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases Program.

But more than that, the authors say we must reduce our emissions. In the USA and Europe, strong regulations have stopped nitrogen from building up in soils and in waterways, and more sustainable farming techniques in other parts of the world may help as well.

The authors suggest reducing the amount of soil tillage and waterlogging that occurs on farmed land – none of which come at the cost of agricultural output if done correctly.

“It’s not that they shouldn’t be using nitrogen fertiliser,” Eckard told the ABC, “but if we all used the right amount we’d have significantly less nitrous oxide going into the atmosphere.”

The study was published in Nature Climate Change.

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-another-rapidly-growing-greenhouse-gas-and-you-ve-probably-never-heard-of-it

Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/05/climate-crisis-11000-scientists-warn-of-untold-suffering

Statement sets out ‘vital signs’ as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency

A man uses a garden hose to try to save his home from wildfire in Granada Hills, California, on 11 October 2019.
 A man uses a garden hose to try to save his home from wildfire in Granada Hills, California, on 11 October 2019. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/AP

The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”

There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

The statement is published in the journal BioScience on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. The statement was a collaboration of dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and slashing meat eating.

Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University and the lead author of the statement, said he was driven to initiate it by the increase in extreme weather he was seeing. A key aim of the warning is to set out a full range of “vital sign” indicators of the causes and effects of climate breakdown, rather than only carbon emissions and surface temperature rise.

“A broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events,” said co-author Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney.

Other “profoundly troubling signs from human activities” selected by the scientists include booming air passenger numbers and world GDP growth. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle,” they said.

As a result of these human activities, there are “especially disturbing” trends of increasing land and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, the scientists said: “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have have largely failed to address this predicament. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

“We urge widespread use of the vital signs [to] allow policymakers and the public to understand the magnitude of the crisis, realign priorities and track progress,” the scientists said.

“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to look at the graphs and know things are going wrong,” said Newsome. “But it is not too late.” The scientists identify some encouraging signs, including decreasing global birth rates, increasing solar and wind power and fossil fuel divestment. Rates of forest destruction in the Amazon had also been falling until a recent increase under new president Jair Bolsonaro.

They set out a series of urgently needed actions:

  • Use energy far more efficiently and apply strong carbon taxes to cut fossil fuel use
  • Stabilise global population – currently growing by 200,000 people a day – using ethical approaches such as longer education for girls
  • End the destruction of nature and restore forests and mangroves to absorb CO2
  • Eat mostly plants and less meat, and reduce food waste
  • Shift economic goals away from GDP growth

“The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual,” the scientists said. The recent surge of concern was encouraging, they added, from the global school strikes to lawsuits against polluters and some nations and businesses starting to respond.

A warning of the dangers of pollution and a looming mass extinction of wildlife on Earth, also led by Ripple, was published in 2017. It was supported by more than 15,000 scientists and read out in parliaments from Canada to Israel. It came 25 years after the original “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992, which said: “A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”

Ripple said scientists have a moral obligation to issue warnings of catastrophic threats: “It is more important than ever that we speak out, based on evidence. It is time to go beyond just research and publishing, and to go directly to the citizens and policymakers.”

Who is holding up the war on global warming? You may be surprised

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BY RICHARD RICHELS, GARY YOHE AND HENRY JACOBY, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 11/02/19 06:00 PM EDT  830

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Who is holding up the war on global warming? You may be surprised
© Getty Images

The good news is that the American public finally appears to accept that global warming is a problem. The bad news is that a substantial percentage of the public is unwilling to pay much to do anything about it. At first glance these may seem to be contradictory messages. But the public may be reacting to the initial symptoms of a warming planet rather than the dire consequences envisioned by the scientific community if global warming remains unchecked.

This explanation is supported by recent findings that a majority of Americans believe that the weather-related disasters we have been experiencing are becoming more severe and that the main culprit is a warmer global climate. But what the public foresees for the future is unclear. The outlook may be unambiguous to climatologists. But does the public buy into what the science shows about the implications of failure to reduce greenhouse emissions?

If the answer to this question is “no,” then it may help explain why a substantial share of the public gives such low priority to efforts to address longer-term climate change risk. Many people simply do not yet believe that continued procrastination will likely have catastrophic consequences for society and the environment. Perhaps a well-paid opposition has been more successful in sowing doubt than we had feared.

But in any event, if the adage “to see is to believe” plays a dominant role in shaping public attitudes, we are in trouble. Due to lags in the climate system, it will take decades for many of the effects of today’s emissions to play themselves out. By then, we will likely have committed the planet to much of the damage we fear the most.

Most troublesome is that, if the public is fixated on what they can see on a given day, season or year, they will be vulnerable to the machinations of those who see cold snaps as confirming that global warming is a ruse. They argue that short-term deviations are explained by the natural variability in local weather.

For example, a U.S. senator once brought a snowball on to the Senate floor as proof that climate change is a hoax. That year (2015) turned out to be the hottest in recorded history until that time.

So, what has the public seen to date? The government provides an exhaustive accounting of deaths, direct economic losses and other impacts for natural disasters whose frequency and intensity are associated with climate warming. Those disasters include heat waves, severe storms, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, famines and sea level rise. Accounts of such events are also increasingly reaching the public eye, either when people look out their kitchen windows or when they turn on the evening news. What is stunning is how fast damages have risen over the past four decades.

So what can we do? Much has been written about the need for better communication and better education. Those are no-brainers. But there is other work to be done, including addressing this fundamental question: What is driving current public attitudes about climate change? That’s where we need to focus more of our resources. Good natural science is critical, but so is research into the behavioral science behind the public’s attitudes.

Public opinion isn’t the only barrier to action. Lawmakers need to play a far greater role in combatting this existential challenge. They naturally carefully judge the mood of the public, with eyes on polls that reflect their electability. When a sufficient fraction of their constituents tilt towards action, they will be happy to jump to the front of the parade. Hopefully, when that finally happens it will not be too late.

‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize

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The teen activist implored politicians and people in power to ‘listen to the best available science’ in an Instagram post

Agence France-Presse in Stockholm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/greta-thunberg-declines-award-climate-crisis
Greta Thunberg, teen climate activist, was honoured by the Nordic Council with an environmental award which she declined.
 Greta Thunberg, teen climate activist, was honoured by the Nordic Council with an environmental award which she declined. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has refused to accept an environmental award, saying the climate movement needed people in power to start to “listen” to “science” and not awards.

The young climate activist, who has rallied millions to her “Fridays for Future” movement, was honoured at a Stockholm ceremony held by the Nordic Council, a regional body for inter-parliamentary cooperation.

She had been nominated for her efforts by both Sweden and Norway and won the organisation’s annual environment prize.

But after it was announced, a representative for Thunberg told the audience that she would not accept the award or the prize sum of 350,000 Danish kroner (about $52,000 or €46,800), the TT news agency reported.

She addressed the decision in a post on Instagram from the United States.

“The climate movement does not need any more awards,” she wrote.

“What we need is for our politicians and the people in power start to listen to the current, best available science.”

While thanking the Nordic Council for the “huge honour”, she also criticised Nordic countries for not living up to their “great reputation” on climate issues.

“There is no lack of bragging about this. There is no lack of beautiful words. But when it comes to our actual emissions and our ecological footprints per capita … then it’s a whole other story,” Thunberg said.

Still only 16 years old, Thunberg rose to prominence after she started spending her Fridays outside Sweden’s parliament in August 2018, holding a sign reading “School strike for climate”.

pledge 2019 Environment ‘It’s a crisis, not a change’: the six Guardian language changes on climate matters

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A short glossary of the changes we’ve made to the Guardian’s style guide, for use by our journalists and editors when writing about the environment

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November, 2018: a helicopter passes by the sun as it makes a water drop in the Feather River Canyon, east of Paradise, California.
 November, 2018: a helicopter passes by the sun as it makes a water drop in the Feather River Canyon, east of Paradise, California. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

In addition to providing updated guidelines on which images our editors should use to illustrate the climate emergency, we have updated our style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said: “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue”. These are the guidelines provided to our journalists and editors to be used in the production of all environment coverage across the Guardian’s website and paper:

1.) “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” to be used instead of “climate change”

Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead to describe the broader impact of climate change. However, use climate breakdown or climate change or global heating when describing it specifically in a scientific or geophysical sense eg “Scientists say climate breakdown has led to an increase in the intensity of hurricanes”.

2.) “climate science denier” or “climate denier” to be used instead of “climate sceptic”

The OED defines a sceptic as “a seeker of the truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite conclusions”. Most “climate sceptics”, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, deny climate change is happening, or is caused by human activity, so ‘denier’ is more accurate.ot “global warming”
‘Global heating’ is more scientifically accurate. Greenhouse gases form an atmospheric blanket that stops the sun’s heat escaping back to space.

4.) “greenhouse gas emissions” is preferred to “carbon emissions” or “carbon dioxide emissions”. Although carbon emissions is not inaccurate, if we’re talking about all gases that warm the atmosphere, this term recognises all of the climate-damaging gases, including methane, nitrogen oxides, CFCs etc.

5.) Use “wildlife”, not “biodiversity”
We felt that ‘wildlife’ is a much more accessible word and is fair to use in many stories, and is a bit less clinical when talking about all the creatures with whom we share the planet.

6.) Use “fish populations” instead of “fish stocks”

This change emphasises that fish do not exist solely to be harvested by humans – they play a vital role in the natural health of the oceans.

Since we announced these changes, they have been reported widely, shared across social media channels, and even prompted some other media outlets to reconsider the terms they use in their own coverage.

The update to the Guardian’s style guide, originally announced earlier this year, followed the addition of the global carbon dioxide level to the Guardian’s daily weather pages – the simplest measure of how the mass burning of fossil fuels is disrupting the stable climate. To put it simply, while weather changes daily, climate changes over years and decades. So alongside the daily carbon count, we publish the level in previous years for comparison, as well as the pre-industrial-era baseline of 280ppm, and the level seen as manageable in the long term of 350ppm.

In order to keep below 1.5C of warming, the aspiration of the world’s nations, we need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach zero by mid century. It is also likely we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps by the large-scale restoration of nature. It is a huge task, but we hope that tracking the daily rise of CO2 will help to maintain focus on it.

Viner said: “People need reminding that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem – we need to tackle it now, and every day matters.”