Author: vandy

An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate

Published 10/29/2021

[Nakate is a Ugandan climate-justice activist and founder of the Rise Up Movement. Thunberg is a Swedish climate activist and co-founder of the Fridays for Future movement.]

Dear media editors around the world,

Melting glaciers, wildfires, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, loss of biodiversity. These are all symptoms of a destabilizing planet, which are happening around us all the time.

Those are the kind of things you report about. Sometimes. The climate crisis, however, is much more than just this. If you want to truly cover the climate crisis, you must also report on the fundamental issues of time, holistic thinking and justice.

So what does that mean? Let’s look at these issues one by one.

First, the notion of time. If your stories do not include the notion of a ticking clock, then the climate crisis is just a political topic among other topics, something we can just buy, build or invest our way out of. Leave out the aspect of time and we can continue pretty much like today and ”solve the problems” later on. 2030, 2050 or 2060. The best available science shows that with our current rate of emissions, our remaining carbon budget for staying below 1.5°C will run out before the end of this decade.

Second, holistic thinking. When considering our remaining carbon budget we need to count all the numbers and include all of our emissions. Currently, you are letting high income nations and big polluters off the hook, allowing them to hide behind the incomplete statistics, loopholes and rhetoric they have fought so hard to create during the last 30 years.

Third, and most important of all, justice. The climate crisis isn’t just about extreme weather. It’s about people. Real people. And the very people who have done the least to create the climate crisis are suffering the most. And while the Global South is on the frontlines of the climate crisis, it’s almost never on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. As Western media focuses on wildfires in California or Australia or flooding in Europe, climate-related catastrophes are ravaging communities across the Global South, but receive very little coverage.

To include the element of justice, you cannot ignore the Global North’s moral responsibility to move much faster in reducing their emissions. By the end of this year, the world will have collectively burned through 89% of the carbon budget that gives us a 66% chance of staying below 1.5°C.

That’s why historic emissions not only count, but are in fact at the very heart of the debate over climate justice. And yet historical emissions are still being almost completely ignored by the media and people in power.

To stay below the targets set in the Paris Agreement, and thereby minimize the risks of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control, we need immediate, drastic, annual emission reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen. And as we don’t have the technological solutions that alone will do anything close to that in the foreseeable future, it means we have to make fundamental changes in our society. This is the uncomfortable result of our leaders’ failure to address this crisis.

Your responsibility to help correct this failure cannot be overstated. We are social animals and if our leaders, and our media, don’t act as if we were in a crisis then of course we won’t understand that we are. One of the essential elements of a functioning democracy is a free press that objectively informs the citizens of the great challenges our society faces. And the media must hold the people in power accountable for their actions, or inactions.

You are among our last hopes. No one else has the possibility and the opportunity to reach as many people in the extremely short timeframe we have. We cannot do this without you. The climate crisis is only going to become more urgent. We can still avoid the worst consequences, we can still turn this around. But not if we continue like today. You have the resources and possibilities to change the story overnight.

Whether or not you choose to rise to that challenge is up to you. Either way, history will judge you.

Greta and Vanessa

We are living through the last years still left to prevent a future of permanent and catastrophic climate change. The planet’s future – humanity’s future – is in our hands.

That’s the inescapable conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
(IPCC) “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” report, which was released in August 2021.

Our world is warming faster than any point in recorded history – and the report details the many and far-reaching consequences. More and worse drought. Seas rising. Greater extremes in temperatures. Ever-stronger hurricanes. And on and on.

Did you know that just talking about the climate crisis is one of the most effective ways you can make a difference? To download the 15-page e-book, register at: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/world

Sleeping Bear LLC Managing Member Vandy Johnson attended the “Minnesota Forest Carbon Series: Carbon Markets” event hosted by the University of Minnesota Sustainable Forests Education Cooperative.

The three-day event was designed to review the why, who, and how of forest-based carbon markets. We heard from representatives of forest carbon credit programs serving large and small-acreage owners and public and private landowners who are actively involved in carbon markets on their land.

We also spent a day in the woods at the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center, visiting stands to visually compare and contrast forest carbon inventory data and projections in a variety of stands. The goal of the program was to facilitate a strong understanding of key terms and concepts and how different carbon credit programs work, and which, if any, might be right for your land.

Thanks to Dr. Eli Sagor, SFEC Program Manager, and Dr. Matt Russell, UMN Extension and Department of Forest Resources, for leading the event.

If you are interested in Sustainable Forests and Minnesota Forest Carbon, visit the SFEC Home Page and sign up for email updates!

Susannah Meadows writes in today’s NY Times:

The evidence of our planet’s warming is all around us. But many of us have been able to comfort ourselves, if only slightly, with the knowledge that the more cataclysmic fallout is still a ways off, that it may be preventable. Perhaps the gradual nature of the worsening conditions we see everyday has lulled us into a sense of complacency.

What I saw in Yosemite feels like a wake-up call that’s come too late.

Sometimes it takes 20 years to see a drastic change.

Coming into the park from the south, up California 41, I looked out onto mountains that appeared studded with giant charred toothpicks. The 2018 Ferguson fire had decimated this once magnificent forest.

Other trees were dying off, victims of bug infestations abetted by warming temperatures and milder winters. The waterfalls were pathetic wisps in the wind, shadows of the lush, white horse-tails that spilled down the summer I lived there.

Wildfire, tree-death, and dwindling waterfalls are natural occurrences. But these problems are exacerbated by climate change, according to the National Park Service.

With the worsening heat — it hit 104 degrees in the valley this month — you can’t enjoy being there as much. The West Coast is being battered by those three awful cousins, drought, heat and wildfire. When will the hot weather leave certain unforgettable, vertical hikes, like to the top of Half Dome, out of reach?

Yosemite’s last two glaciers are rapidly retreating. They will most likely disappear in a few decades, threatening the summer and autumn water supply in these mountains. By the time I visited in the first week of July, some of the streams in the high country — relied upon by animals and backpackers alike — were already dry. The river that threads through the valley, the Merced, was low and listless. When I lived alongside it years ago, it was so swollen with melted snow and the rapids so loud, I would have to close my window before making a phone call.

Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/opinion/yosemite-west-coast-smoke.html

Here in northern Minnesota, the once Mighty Mississippi is down to a trickle. We can no longer kayak down the river. Climate change has Minnesota in a desperate drought and the air is choked with wildfire ash. We have the hottest summer temperatures on record.

We must stop climate change now. . Use the US House of Representatives website to contact your representative today! https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative Tell them now is the time to end climate change.

In today’s Washington Post, an article says that researchers are virtually certain that warming from human greenhouse gas emissions played a pivotal role in recent fatalities.

“The system was overwhelmed,” said Mary Tanski, chair of OHSU’s department of emergency medicine, of the towering heat dome that toppled temperature records across the Northwest this week.

Some patients didn’t survive. In Oregon, Washington, and western Canada, authorities are investigating more than 800 deaths potentially linked to the punishing heat.

The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for the landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts, and its worst drought in decades. In Verkhoyansk, Siberia — usually one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet — the land surface temperature was 118 degrees.

“It did not have to be this way,” Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California said. “We have known enough to take action for 20 years. And if we had taken action 20 years ago, it would be a lot easier.”

“But there’s no ‘I told you so,’ ” he continued. “I just feel bad. Just bad. I really wish we had been wrong. But we weren’t.”

The only comfort, said Hayhoe, is in knowing that action can still be taken. Though the world could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming within this decade, scientists say we can avoid crossing that threshold if we cut global greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.6 percent per year.

Such cuts would require an unprecedented transformation of human society. But look at the alternative, Hayhoe said.

“We have choices to make, she said. “And the quicker we make those choices, the better off we will all be. The future is in our hands.”

Read the full article at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/07/03/climate-change-heat-dome-death/

America’s forests and grasslands are integral to global efforts to address current and future impacts of climate change. Healthy forest and grassland ecosystems are vital to the well-being and livelihoods of all Americans. These ecosystems provide drinking water for millions of people, influence the global carbon balance, supply food, support rural and urban jobs, provide places to recreate, and are home to diverse fish and wildlife populations. Climate change is already having substantial impacts on these systems, which are increasingly stressed by severe wildfires, invasive species, diseases, drought, and other climate-driven disturbances.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Research and Development (R&D) helps the Department and the Nation move closer to achieving its climate and carbon goals. Specifically, Forest Service R&D contributes in the following areas:

Investing in Natural Climate Solutions on Working Lands. Carbon sequestration by forests
is a vital mitigation tool. The most cost-effective way to boost carbon storage is to enhance
reforestation efforts, which can increase carbon storage by as much as 20 percent. Forest Service research is the Nation’s authoritative source on practices for increasing and tracking forest and grassland carbon sequestration.

Wildfire Decision Support. Climate change has altered fire regimes, increasing the frequency and severity of wildfire. Forest Service R&D is a world leader in wildfire research. Scientists have pioneered fire behavior and prediction technology, improved firefighter safety, developed novel spatial planning and risk management tools, and worked with communities to improve protections against catastrophic fire.

Managing for Forest and Grassland Resilience to Climate Change. As the climate changes, many forests and grasslands are expected to shift in composition. Forest Service research identifies the key attributes of resilient natural systems that can withstand and recover from climate-caused disturbances. From landscape-scale experiments like the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Project, to forecasting drought and floods, to providing the scientific basis for fuels management and prescribed fires, Forest Service researchers are generating knowledge and solutions for managing and restoring climate-impacted landscapes.

Innovation in Science and Science Delivery. Over the last decade, Forest Service R&D assembled interdisciplinary teams to respond to the expected, accelerated, and unprecedented changes associated with climate change. As active leaders and participants in the USDA Climate Hubs, Forest Service researchers help create and deliver proactive, practical climate-informed knowledge and tools. Forest Service R&D wood products research delivers groundbreaking technologies and solutions for using forest-based products, such as cross-laminated timber, nanotechnology, biocomposites, biochar, and bioenergy.

Read the full paper at https://www.fs.fed.us/research/publications/fs/fs_1175.pdf

From The Washington Post:

The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.”

Using satellite data, researchers measured what is known as Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun, and how much it’s able to shed or radiate back out into space.

That imbalance roughly doubled between 2005 and 2019, the study found. “It is a massive amount of energy,” said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study. Johnson said the energy increase is equivalent to four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once. “It’s such a hard number to get your mind around.”

Read more about it

The Washington Post The amount of heat the Earth traps has doubled since 2005, NASA says – The Washington Post

NASA Research Letter Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth’s Heating Rate – Loeb – – Geophysical Research Letters – Wiley Online Library

Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner.

Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up.

“There is no small town, big city or rural community that is unaffected by the climate crisis,” Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said on Wednesday. “Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity.”

Scientists say the world needs to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.

As surface temperatures have risen, heat waves have become more common. Since the 1960s, the frequency of heat waves in large U.S. cities has tripled, according to the new data, to six each year from two. And nights are becoming hotter, making it harder for plants, animals and people to cool down.

Rising temperatures are affecting ice levels as well. The new data notes that the extent of Arctic sea ice cover in 2020 was the second-smallest on record. At the same time, oceans are becoming warmer, reaching a record in 2020.

That combination of melting polar ice and rising water temperatures is causing sea levels to rise along the East Coast and Gulf Coast. In some places, the sea level relative to the land rose more than eight inches between 1960 and 2020.

As seas rise, flooding is becoming more common. The number of days when water has inundated communities along the East and Gulf Coasts has increased and the rate of that flooding is quickening, the data show. At many locations, “floods are now at least five times more common than they were in the 1950s,” according to the E.P.A.

Read more about it at the EPA site: Climate Change Indicators in the United States | US EPA

Or the New York Times: Climate Change Is Making Big Problems Bigger – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Or the Washington Post: Revamped EPA website shows increased climate change risks – The Washington Post