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Tag Archives: Climate Change

Guest Post: “The State of the Earth 2022” by Pam Lazos

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Nature and the Environment, United States

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Climate Deniers, Documentary An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth – Documentary Film
Photo Credit: Green Life Blue Water Blog

In her article “The State of the Earth 2022,” published on her blog Green Life Blue Water, American environment lawyer and author Pam Lazos provides an unsettling critique of where humanity stands when it comes to dealing with the inconvenient truth of our climate crisis and the threat to life as we know it on Planet Earth.


Not your typical Earth Day post

There are only two roads in life, growing and dying. Tolbert McCarroll, Notes from the Song of Life

Earth Day 2022.  If you want to know how it all started, you can read last year’s post on the first Earth Day.  If you want to know how we’re doing (così così — so so in Italian), you can read Jeff Goodell’s article in Rolling Stone this week entitled, The Climate Fight Isn’t Lost. Here are 10 Ways to Win.  And if you want to know where to hide until it’s all over, read Paul Greenberg’s Is Anywhere Safe From Climate Change which is a solution for maybe less than one half of one percent of us, but I totally get the sentiment.  The real truth is,  Environmental Justice is critical as Adele Costa tells us in her article Hog Waste Plastic Petals, and Cancer in the Air:  The Intersection Between Environmental Justice and Women’s Health, and if we don’t take care of the most vulnerable among us, it will be lights out for all of us.


Read the complete article by Pam Lazos published on her blog Green Life Blue Water, April 22, 2022.

Daylight Come by Diana McCaulay

07 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Recommended Reading

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Climate Change, Daylight Come by Diana McCaulay, Jamaican Author Diana McCaulay, Net Zero Emissions by 2050, Speculative Fiction of Earth in 2084

Front Cover: Daylight Come by Diana McCaulay
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press

Around 120 world leaders and Heads of States, as well as about 25,000 delegates, are meeting at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow from November 1 to 12, 2021. COP26 is humanity’s “last, best chance” to secure global net zero emissions by 2050 and keep the average global temperature from rising 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. Failure to achieve this threshold will make extensive regions of our planet uninhabitable. Some areas are already facing famine, loss of coastlands to the sea, and other climate change disasters. Many of these areas are small-island nations where their cries for help have yet to be heard. Listen to what Barbados Prime Minister Mottley had to say at the Climate Summit.

In her latest book of speculative fiction, Daylight Come (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2020), Jamaican author and environmental activist Diana McCaulay envisages a future when daylight kills. In 2017, after reading about the impact of extreme heat on construction workers, farmers, and people without shelter in India, McCaulay began thinking what it would mean for a tropical country like Jamaica if it became too dangerous to be outside during the day.

“Suppose it got so hot that we all had to work at night and sleep in the day?” McCaulay asks in her Author’s Note (p.195). “And suppose there was a girl, a teenager, who simply couldn’t sleep during the day?”

Daylight Come begins in 2084 on the fictitious island country of Bajacu. Sorrel, the restless heroine, is fourteen years old. She lives in the dying city of Bana with her forty-five-year-old mother Bibi. Situated in the coastal Immersion Zone where the Domins rule with brutal force, the city faces daily threats from the encroaching sea.

Continue reading →

California Faces Extreme to Exceptional Drought…Yet Again

27 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in United States

≈ 52 Comments

Tags

California Agricultural Production, California Department of Water Resources (DWR), California Drought 2020-2021, California’s Drought State of Emergency 2021, Climate Change, Colorado River Basin, Los Angeles/California/USA, U.S. Drought Monitor California

U.S. Drought Monitor California – June 22, 2021

I was so consumed with the COVID-19 pandemic that I paid no attention to the lack of rainfall in the early months of 2020 and 2021. To tell the truth, I enjoyed the dry winter months. I got to spend more time gardening. Cold and damp days kill the joy of being outdoors. Then, on May 10, California Governor Newsom grabbed my attention when he placed 41 counties, 30 percent of our state’s population, under a drought state of emergency.

“With the reality of climate change abundantly clear in California, we’re taking urgent action to address acute water supply shortfalls in northern and central California while also building our water resilience to safeguard communities in the decades ahead,” said Governor Newsom. “We’re working with local officials and other partners to protect public health and safety and the environment, and call on all Californians to help meet this challenge by stepping up their efforts to save water.”

Learning that water storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell has now fallen to about 35 percent of their capacity is also alarming. America’s two largest reservoirs, created by dams along the Colorado River, provide water to 40 million Americans and irrigation for more than 4 million acres of farmland across California and six other states—Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Twenty-nine Native American Tribes also depend upon the Colorado River Basin for their water supply and preserving fish and wildlife habitats. The Bureau of Reclamation has forecast that the Lake Mead reservoir will hit a historic low of 1,065 feet by the end of 2021. The future of this reliable water resource is now at risk.

Continue reading →

Earth Day 2020: Climate Action

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Nature and the Environment, United States

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Digital Earth Day Event 2020, Earth Day 2020, Earth Day Climate Action, Earth Day Network (EDN), First Digital Earth Day 2020

Earth Day 2020 – 50 Years
Photo Credit: Earth Day Official Website

 

April 22, 2020 is Earth Day’s 50th anniversary. The theme this year is Climate Action with the aim of mobilizing all citizens of Earth “to call for greater global ambition to tackle our climate crisis. Unless every country in the world steps up with urgency and ambition, we are consigning current and future generations to a dangerous future.”

Fifty years ago, on April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans took to the streets, college campuses, and hundreds of cities to protest environmental degradation and demand a new way forward for our planet. With the launch of the environmental movement that year came two important developments: passing of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Act; and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Continue reading →

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Global Bipolar Disorder — Green Life Blue Water

25 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, United States

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Climate Change

Pam Lazos, writing at Green Life Blue Water, observes the signs of climate change around her in Central Pennsylvania. Troubled by the “unknown unknown,” using the  “tortured phraseology” of former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, she calls on us to face reality and cure our global bipolar disorder.

We all know the truth: it’s time for an intervention.  We can help Mother Nature deal with her issues because we are her issues.  The government is not going to save us and neither are the aliens, in case you were wondering.  The only ones who can save us are us.  It’s time to do what we do best as a country — solve problems, innovate, lead so others might follow.  The payoff — as if saving the planet and ourselves wasn’t enough — is that there’s a heck of a lot of money to be made in green technology, but first, we need to cure our global bipolar disorder and think things through in rational, logical terms.

Read her complete post at Global Bipolar Disorder — Green Life Blue Water

Earth’s Climate Emergency: Break down the walls!

14 Sunday Jul 2019

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 50 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, New York Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act 2019, Sunrise Movement, US Climate Emergency Resolution 2019

YouthStrike4Climate Student March – London, UK – April 12, 2019
Photo Credit: Common Dreams (Photo Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

 

To those people who are still in denial that humanity faces a climate crisis that would most likely lead to the extinction of our species, not to mention most other species, I say, wake up to reality. We cannot afford to wait until reality strikes you in the groin or chest for us to take evasive action as a united nation.

 

Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum 2019 – Davos, Switzerland
Watch Video: World Economic Forum, Published on January 25, 2019

 

Because we adults are asleep at the wheel, leadership in humanity’s existential crisis now falls upon our youth. After all, it’s their future that is at stake. Greta Thunberg, a fifteen-year-old Swedish student has had enough of the failure of world leaders to act. In her address to the ultra-rich gathered at the World Economic Forum in January 2019, she tells them:

“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

 

Senator Dianne Feinstein speaks with young activists of the Sunrise Movement
California Office, USA – February 22, 2019
Watch Video: Washington Post

 

Here in the world’s leading economy, our leadership is more concerned about preserving their self-interests, their political party, and the status quo. On February 22, 2019, when young activists of the Sunrise Movement visited the California office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to ask her to vote for the Green New Deal, she was firm in rejecting their petition.

“We have our own Green New Deal,” Feinstein tells them. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that… I just won a big election.”

 

Youth climate activists during sit-in at Washington DC office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – February 25, 2019
Photo Credit: Common Dreams (Photo Sunrise Movement)

 

The following Monday, February 25th, over 200 young members of the Sunrise Movement joined about twenty Kentucky high school students outside the Capitol Hill office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to demonstrate their support for the Green New Deal. They failed to meet him. Instead, the Capitol Police arrested more than forty of them.

While there is yet no consensus on the Green New Deal—which right-wing commentators view as a socialist takeover of our economy—lawmakers in Washington DC are busy undoing decades of environmental protection regulations. Then, on June 20th, the New York State Assembly passed its own Green New Deal at the state level. Their aggressive Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act calls for net zero carbon emissions statewide by 2050.

On July 9th, our young climate activists gained another victory in their call for action. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced the introduction of a resolution in Congress to declare that the climate emergency facing our planet demands a “national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States” in order to “restore the climate for future generations.”

Over two dozen lawmakers, including most of the senators currently running for president, signed on as co-sponsors.

Blumenauer calls for a reality check. “To address the climate crisis, we must tell the truth about the nature of this threat,” he said in his statement.

“What we need now is Congressional leadership to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of the planet,” Sanders said. “Climate change is a national emergency, and I am proud to be introducing this resolution with my House and Senate colleagues.”

Working to solve the climate crisis will create tens of millions of union jobs, empower communities, and improve the quality of life for people across the globe,” Ocasio-Cortez added. 

Read the full Climate Emergency Resolution.

Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, supports the resolution. “With an unhinged climate denier in the White House, it’s on Congress to steer us away from climate suicide,” he said in a statement. “This resolution is a sane recognition that science says we need a massive transition away from the production and consumption of dirty fossil fuels.”

The time is now to break down the walls of partisanship, the walls of fear, the walls of ignorance, the walls of hatred and divisiveness, the walls of exclusion, the walls of separateness, the walls of inequality.

“Our house is on fire!” alerts the high school student Greta Thunberg.
“Let it burn!” says The Bully, sitting at the top of the world. “The oil is mine! All mine!”

Carbon dioxide levels in Atmosphere hit record high in May

09 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 50 Comments

Tags

Carbon dioxide levels, Climate Change, Climate Data, Climate disruption, Global warming

Source: Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA

 

Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.

The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii’s largest volcano and the seventh consecutive year of steep global increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to data published June 4, 2019, by NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Learn more.

“Hothouse Earth”

12 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 59 Comments

Tags

2018 Report: Indicators of Climate Change in California, California fire season, California wildfires, Carr and Mendocino Comples Fires in Northern California, Climate Change, Heat stress, Hothouse Earth, Report Indicators of Climate Change in California May 2018, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene August 2018

Mendocino Complex Fire August 2018 - Northern California - USA

Mendocino Complex Fire now largest fire in California history – August 2018 – California/USA
Photo Credit: ABC News (Noah Berger/AFP)

 

In Southern California, we’re experiencing temperatures of 88 to 98 degrees Fahrenheit. At our local garden center two Saturdays ago, around ten o’clock, I had to seek shelter from the Sun. Heat stress aborted my fun-time outdoors while selecting succulent plants. Then, the following week, I suffered another episode of heat stress at the hair salon. The air-condition system in the one-story, flat-roof building wasn’t up to the task.

The danger is far greater in areas where firefighters battle to contain ferocious wildfires. The Carr and Mendocino Complex Fires in Northern California have together burned more than 486,000 acres of land and destroyed 1,828 structures. Hundreds more structures are damaged or under threat. Only 51 percent of the wildfires is contained. The California Fire Department expects to contain the Mendocino Complex Fire by September 1st. Continue reading →

Extreme Weather and the Climate Crisis: What You Need to Know

20 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, United States

≈ 58 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Climate Reality Project, Climate-related natural disasters, Extreme Weather & the Climate Crisis: What You Need to Know, Global warming, Jet Stream, NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS)

US 2017 Billion-Dollar Disaster Map - NOAA

U.S. 2017 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
Photo Credit: NOAA

 

Earlier this month, while the Trump administration quietly cancelled NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), concentrations of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory averaged above 410 parts per million (ppm) throughout April. With such irresponsible action, we-the-people must prepare ourselves for more extreme weather.

Extreme Weather & the Climate Crisis: What You Need to Know, published by the Climate Reality Project (March 2018), helps us to understand the challenges we now face. As the captioned NOAA chart shows, climate-related and other natural disasters are costly. Total damages in 2017 left the U.S. with a bill of $306 billion. Families who were hit are still recovering from their loss. Families in poor communities may never recover.

Here’s what we need to know about our extreme weather and the climate crisis. Bear in mind that weather refers to short-term atmospheric changes in temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind, cloud cover, and visibility. Climate is the average of weather patterns over a longer period of 30 or more years.

Hurricanes – With average global sea surface temperatures becoming warmer, hurricanes can become more powerful. A warmer ocean also means an increase in evaporation, thereby feeding hurricanes with much more water to dump on those of us who live in their path. It gets worse. As melting ice caps and glaciers raise sea levels, storm surges caused by hurricanes will be stronger and carry water farther and farther inland.

Flooding – As air temperatures increase, more water evaporates into the atmosphere. Because warmer air holds more water vapor, some places get more rain and snow than their average annual amounts; other places may experience intense rainstorms. At the same time, rising sea levels are worsening coastal flooding worldwide.

Drought – Soils dry out when evaporation increases over land. When the rain comes, the hard, cracked ground absorbs little water. The run-off carries pollutants in the dry soil into our streams, rivers, and lakes. Drought also worsens forest fires.

Wildfires – Droughts kill plant life. Dried out, dead vegetation can ignite with a spark. Once started, these fires are harder to contain. With warm weather arriving earlier and extending further into the fall, we now face longer fire seasons. To make matters worse, pests like the mountain pine beetle thrive in the warm, dry weather. The dead trees dry out, adding to the fury of our forest fires.

Extreme Heat – Of the 18 hottest years on record, 17 have occurred this century. If we don’t reduce the greenhouse gases heating up our atmosphere, more and more of us will face the deadly threshold of extreme heat on our fragile human bodies.

Extreme Cold – As global temperatures rise and the Arctic continues to warm, the jet stream is slowing and becoming more wavy. This causes bone-chilling Arctic air to linger longer in northern regions and spread much farther south than usual.

While we cannot prevent climate-related natural disasters from occurring, it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to prevent the worst of it. And it certainly could get much worse.

Climate Crisis Descending Series: Pacific Nation Kiribati on the Brink of Disappearing — JoAnn Chateau

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Pacific Island Nation Kiribati

Two weeks ago, we looked at the struggles the city of Venice endures as it slowly sinks into the surrounding waters. Today, we turn to the submerging Pacific Island nation of Kiribati. Without any mountains, low-lying Kiribati is sinking like the disastrous Titanic, under rising seal levels caused by global warming. Located exactly in the center…

via Climate Crisis Descending Series: Pacific Nation Kiribati on the Brink of Disappearing — JoAnn Chateau

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