Clear and chilly this Thursday morning on California’s north coast — sunshine way-bright. A long cycle of rain storms starts tomorrow, so I must enjoy the ‘shine.
Not bright is T-Rump and climate change — US Secretary of State John F. Kerry, speaking at the UN climate talks in Marrakesh, pleaded with the orange-tinted asshole to please not kill everybody on the planet (Washington Post):
“No one has a right to make decisions for billions of people based solely on ideology. Climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It isn’t a partisan issue for our military. It isn’t a partisan issue for our intelligence community…I ask you on behalf of billions of people around the world: Do your own due diligence before making irrevocable choices.”
(Illustration by Handoko Tjung, found here).
Right now there’s so much terrifying shit with T-Rump’s opening act, the environment is just a subject on a long list of nightmare scenarios. The transition operation has become a farce. Interesting to see how T-Rump handles his first face-to-face with foreign leaders when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe comes to New York today — Abe wants to “build trust” with the shithead.
Good luck with that, Abe.
Yet the climate doesn’t need trust — big, big action is required.
Via Bloomberg yesterday:
The earth has warmed barely a single degree Celsius, and yet virtually no place on the planet is unaffected by climate change.
That’s the conclusion of both a new study published in the journal Science and a popular-science book out this week, The Unnatural World, by David Biello, the science curator at TED and a Scientific American contributing editor.
“This new age is not just climate change,” Biello writes, “it is everything change: the sky, the sea, the land, the rocks, life itself.”
The Science article reviews dozens of field studies and assembles them into a mosaic of ubiquitous change, from the genes of organisms to entire regions.
More than 80 percent of the 94 biological and ecological systems surveyed show signs of the changing climate.
Led by Brett Scheffers of the University of Florida, a team of 17 scientists trawled academic journals and enumerated observed changes across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater environments.
The study’s seven pages are a dense catalog of pervasive, dynamic weirdness that paint a picture of changing ecosystems.
And deer reader — per NewScientist, also yesterday:
It’s not just polar bears that are suffering as Arctic sea ice retreats.
Tens of thousands of reindeer in Arctic Russia starved to death in 2006 and 2013 because of unusual weather linked to global warming.
The same conditions in the first half of November led to both famines, which killed 20,000 deer in 2006 and 61,000 in 2013.
Sea ice retreated and unseasonally warm temperatures contributed to heavy rains, which later froze the snow cover for months, cutting off the reindeer’s usual food supply of lichen and other vegetation.
“Reindeer are used to sporadic ice cover, and adult males can normally smash through ice around 2 centimetres thick,” says Bruce Forbes at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, who led the study.
“But in 2006 and 2013, the ice was several tens of centimetres thick.”
This September saw the second-lowest level of sea-ice cover on record in the Arctic, and there is fear of another famine.
“If we see such events again this year, it could mean that they’re becoming more frequent,” says Forbes.
“Now is the risk window, and if it happens again, it will be a major problem for traditional reindeer herders still suffering from losses in 2013.”
…
A repeat of such conditions this year could mean a double blow for reindeer and herders on the peninsula, because a huge cull of 250,00 reindeer is planned this Christmas to deal with claimed overgrazing issues and stamp out an anthrax outbreak in the animals.
At least one child died and 90 people were hospitalised in August after an anthrax outbreak blamed on the thawing of an anthrax-infected reindeer corpse.
In reflection of just those two articles, T-Rump, though, blames China, which in turn this week told him he was full of pure-nasty shit — per Bloomberg and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin’s rebuke:
Ministers and government officials from almost 200 countries gathered in Marrakech this week are awaiting a decision by President-elect Trump on whether he’ll pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.
The tycoon tweeted in 2012 that the concept of global warming “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
China’s envoy rejected that view.
“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu told reporters during an hour-long briefing.
While Reagan died in 2004, George Schulz, who served as his secretary of state, has become one of the most prominent Republicans voicing concern about climate change and urging action.
“The potential results are catastrophic,” said Schulz, 95, in an interview with Bloomberg in 2014.
“So let’s take out an insurance policy.”
Does Farmers cover ELE?