Moving in to emergency mode

Moving into emergency mode on climate change. Margaret Klein Salamon, The Hill. June 21, 2019.

No one is planning for the collapse of civilization, for food shortages, epidemics and mass displacement, but that could happen as the result of a major climate disaster. The vast majority of Americans move ahead with their daily lives as normal. Few actually consider the national, global and personal implications of the breakdown of our climate.

This is not something most of us want to pay attention to. It’s scary and overwhelming, so we leave it to scientists and politicians and focus on our careers, our families, or recreational pursuits. But the climate emergency is no longer a future threat; it’s here, and we underestimate it at our own peril. It’s devastating the Midwest, our bread basket, with flooding and tornadoes. It’s causing wildfires and melting Arctic ice at an unprecedented rate. A recent paper by Australians David Spratt and Ian Dunlop demonstrates how warming could cause the collapse of civilization by 2050. 

This is not easy information to process. Feeling overwhelmed and helpless can paralyze us or force us into denial. I get that. As a former clinical psychologist, I know that many of us want to do something — anything — to stop the climate crisis, but don’t know how.

This week, The Climate Mobilization joined a number of climate justice, environmental groups, professors, activists and celebrities to call on Congress to declare #ClimateEmergency. We’ve launched a petition asking Congress to wake up and move into emergency mode.

We need to eliminate emissions as quickly as possible — in 10 years or less, as some experts including Harvard University Professor James Anderson, believe. Andersen’s research demonstrates that the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting four times faster than originally assumed, alone could raise sea levels by 23 feet. Anderson emphasizes that we need to eliminate — not reduce — emissions at emergency speed and draw down excess greenhouse gasses to restore a safe climate.

The only possible way we could achieve this is through a mobilization of national resources, of our top minds and industry on the scale of our mobilization during World War II. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called for a mobilization on this scale as part of the Green New Deal, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently supported the Green New Deal with a call for a WWII-scale climate mobilization.

During WWII, we faced the existential threat of fascism and mobilized together, and we transformed our economy incredibly quickly in order to protect ourselves. All hands were on deck. Women flooded into factories, and millions of Americans moved to a new state to work a “war job.” Families including children were also mobilized — and 40 percent of vegetables were grown at home, in “victory gardens.” The government laid down strong regulations, such as a ban on the production of new consumer cars. More than 37 percent of our gross domestic product was spent on the war effort. 

If the United States rises to the challenge of confronting the climate emergency, we can still “cancel the apocalypse” and begin restoring a safe climate and healthy society. The first step is telling the truth. We need a national acknowledgement that we face a climate emergency.

Our petition launches ahead of the first Democratic National Committee (DNC) debates, in which we are asking candidates to acknowledge the emergency. Some already have, though their proposed policies don’t necessarily demonstrate that they have internalized the concept. Despite the incredible work done by groups such as Youth Climate Strike, the Sunrise Movement and others, the DNC has refused to hold a debate focused on climate change. They still don’t get it.

We don’t have time to dilute the truth, regardless of how harsh it may sound at times.

The Climate Mobilization is an organization based on telling the truth about the climate emergency and advocating for the only solution that could protect humanity and the living world: WWII-scale climate mobilization. We have been advocating for mobilization for five years, and pioneering and spreading #ClimateEmergency declarations for two years. We have ushered in ideas around zero emissions and a national mobilization to address the emergency that many have refused to take seriously.

Fortunately, some around the world are getting it.

Today, more than 600 cities in 13 countries have issued climate emergency declarations. In May, the United Kingdom as a whole declared a climate emergency, following an extended protest by our allies, Extinction Rebellion. Canada followed this week, though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s subsequent approval of the Transmountain pipeline makes it clear that the Canadian government is not ready to act in accordance with recognizing the emergency situation.

Last week, Pope Francis, in a meeting with major fossil fuel corporations, declared a climate emergency and warned them that failure to move swiftly against global warming would represent “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations.”

Critics will say “declaring a climate emergency is just words. It doesn’t actually solve anything.” And this is true — declaring an emergency won’t, on its own, decarbonize anything. Governments need to not only “declare” a climate emergency, but to act with emergency speed and focus. It is troubling to see the United Kingdom and Canada make action commitments, along with their declarations, that are insufficient and dangerously slow.

But, we are just getting started. A few years ago, emergency climate mobilization was a marginal idea, and within five years’ time a vigorous climate mobilization movement exists. Words have the power to shift the paradigm, connect us, educate and provide momentum for the emergency response needed by Congress to reverse climate change and protect humanity. We urge everyone to join us.

Margaret Klein Salamon, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization. Follow on Twitter @ClimatePsych and @MobilizeClimate

Climate Links 8/8/2017

Telling the Climate Truth. Gaius Publius, nakedcapitalism. July 21, 2017.

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they’ll never be believed.
—Richard Clarke (paraphrased) 

We aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency.
—Margaret Klein Salamon

excerpt from M.K. Salmon (also at Common Dreams): 

While I think both Mann and Holthaus are brilliant scientists who identified some factual problems in the article, I strongly disagree with their statements about the role of emotions — namely, fear — in climate communications and politics. I am also skeptical of whether climate scientists should be treated as national arbiters of psychological or political questions, in general. I would like to offer my thoughts as a clinical psychologist, and as the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization. 

Affect tolerance — the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings in oneself and others — is a critical psychological skill. On the other hand, affect phobia — the fear of certain feelings in oneself or others — is a major psychological problem, as it causes people to rely heavily on psychological defenses. 

Much of the climate movement seems to suffer from affect phobia, which is probably not surprising given that scientific culture aspires to be purely rational, free of emotional influence. Further, the feelings involved in processing the climate crisis—fear, grief, anger, guilt, and helplessness — can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we should try to avoid “making” people feel such things! Experiencing them is a normal, healthy, necessary part of coming to terms with the climate crisis. 

I agree with David Roberts that it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings. 

Holthaus writes of people feeling deep anxiety, losing sleep, re-considering their lives due to the article… but this is actually a good thing. Those people are coming out of the trance of denial and starting to confront the reality of our existential emergency. I hope that every single American, every single human experiences such a crisis of conscience. It is the first step to taking substantial action. Our job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that accompany it — it’s to protect them from the climate crisis!
I know many of you have been losing sleep and reconsidering your lives in light of the climate crisis for years. We at The Climate Mobilization sure have. TCM exists to make it possible for people to turn that fear into intense dedication and focused action towards a restoring a safe climate.

...

Columnist Joe Romm noted that we aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency, which would of course entail initiating a WWII-scale response to the climate emergency. Our Victory Plan lays out what policies would look like that, if implemented, would actually protect billions of people and millions of species from decimation. They include: 

1) An immediate ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a scheduled shut down of all fossil fuels in 10 years;
2) Massive government investment in renewables;
3) Overhauling our agricultural system to make it a huge carbon sink;
4) Fair-shares rationing to reduce demand;
5) A federally-financed job guarantee to eliminate unemployment;
6) A 100% marginal tax on income above $500,000.from

Gaius Publius: 

Why must we do this now? Because the climate crisis is starting now. Mass migration, in part due to climate change, is starting now. Deaths by weather extremes are increasing as we watch them. The three hottest years on record are the three immediately behind us. We’re so close to +2 degrees warming already, we can almost taste it. 

So what’s in the way? The answer is simple — we have ceded control of climate policy to the greedy and pathological, to climate sexagenarians and octogenarians like Charles and David Koch, who, through the politicians they control (looking at you, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump), are marching to their own graves in triumph, leaving a wrack behind.

'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord. Matt McGrath, BBC. Aug. 8, 2017.

Potent, climate-warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found.

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.

However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%.

These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon programme.

Bottom-up records

Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

...

Another rare warming gas, carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002.

But Dr Reimann told Counting Carbon: "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year."

"That is something that shouldn't be there.

"There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."

China's approach to reporting its overall output of warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions.

Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.

Back in 2007, China simply refused to accept, in official documents, that it had become the largest emitter of CO2.

"I was working in China in 2007," said Dr Angel Hsu, from Yale University.

"I would include a citation and statistics that made this claim of China's position as the number one emitter - these were just stricken out, and I was told the Chinese government doesn't yet recognise this particular statistic so we are not going to include it."

A report in 2015 suggested one error in China's statistics amounted to 10% of global emissions in 2013.

The BBC investigation also discovered vast uncertainties in carbon emissions inventories, particularly in developing countries.

Methane, the second most abundant greenhouse gas after CO2, is produced by microbe activity in marshlands, in rice cultivation, from landfill, from agriculture and in the production of fossil fuels.

Global levels have been rising in recent years, and scientists are unsure why.

For a country such as India, home to 15% of the world's livestock, methane is a very important gas in their inventory - but the amount produced is subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

"What they note is that methane emissions are about 50% uncertain for categories like ruminants, so what this means is that the emissions they submit could be plus or minus 50% of what's been submitted," said Dr Anita Ganesan, from the University of Bristol, who has overseen air monitoring research in the country.

"For nitrous oxide, that's 100%."

There are similar uncertainties with methane emissions in Russia, of between 30-40%, according to scientists who work there.

"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"In the air, we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."

The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.

But Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything.

"So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."




Burning fossil fuels almost ended all life on Earth. Peter Brannen, Atlantic.com. July 11, 2017.

A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.

Indonesian Borneo is Finished: They Also Sell Orangutans into Sex Slavery. Andre Vltchek, Counterpunch. June 2, 2017.

How destructive can man get, how ruthless, in his quest to secure maximum profit, even as he endangers the very survival of our planet? 

The tropical forests of Kalimantan (known as Borneo in Malaysia), the third largest island in the world, have almost totally disappeared. Coalmines are savagely scarring the hills; the rivers are polluted, and countless species are endangered or already extinct.

Feature Reference Articles #4

Living in Climate Truth, Sections I-V. Margaret Klein Salamon, The Climate Psychologist. Aug. 27, 2013.

Our society is living within a massive lie. The lie says, “Everything is fine and we should proceed with business as usual. We are not destroying our climate and, with it, our stability and our civilization. We are not committing passive suicide.” 

The lie says we are fine—that climate change isn’t real, or is uncertain, or is far away, or won’t be bad enough to threaten humanity. The lie says that small changes will solve the problem. That recycling, bicycling, or closing the Keystone Pipeline will solve the problem. The lie allows people to put climate change in the back of their minds. To view it as someone else’s issue—the domain of scientists or activists. The lie allows us to focus on other things. To proceed with business as usual. To be calm and complacent while our planet burns.

World Climate Change Conference Confirms Near Term Human Extinction. Mike Sliwa. Dec. 20, 2015.

Recently at COP21 (Paris Climate Conference) the leaders of the world sealed the deal on human history. I wasn’t under any illusion that any agreement would “save” humankind. I also realize that climate change isn’t just about those of us who live in the dominant industrial culture. What happened in Paris at the climate conference only confirms the insanity of a culture built upon infinite growth on a finite planet. It confirmed our predicament. Our current living arrangement is killing us and everything in its path and there’s little to nothing we can do about it.

A Global Temperature Rise Of More than Ten Degrees Celsius By 2026? Sam Carana, Arctic News. July 15, 2016.

The Politics and Science of Our Demise. Guy McPherson, Nature Bats Last. Aug. 1 2016.

In total, Carana ends up with 10.02 C above baseline by mid-2026, or about 23.5 C. That’d be the highest global-average temperature on this planet during the last 2,000,000,000 years. Taking a conservative approach at every step, I conclude “only” an 8.21-degree rise in temperature by mid-2026. As a result, I conclude global-average temperature at that time will be about 21.7 C (13.5 C + 8.21 C). This is barely below 22 C, the temperature at which Earth has most commonly found itself during the last 2,000,000,000 years. There is no reason to expect Earth to start cooling until the heat engine of civilization is turned off and dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops are inexplicably reversed. 

For context, the Great Dying wiped out nearly all complex life on Earth. It involved a global-average rise in temperature from about 12 C to about 23 C during a span of several tens of thousands of years. To conclude that humans will survive a similar rise in temperature within only a couple hundred years, with the vast majority of the heating occurring within a decade, is exceedingly — and probably insanely — optimistic. Considering Homo sapiens is strongly dependent upon myriad other species for our own survival, it’s difficult to imagine our favorite species will have the habitat requisite for survival as we barrel into 2026, only a decade from now. 

But perhaps we will survive. Perhaps the heat engine known as civilization will be repaired by soon-to-be-developed “tools that cool” created — of course — via the heat engine known as civilization. Perhaps we can bomb the deserts and roam the ocean in nuclear submarines while eating Soylent Green. And then, a few million years later, assuming the planet cools, perhaps we will pop out the other side of a substantial bottleneck in sufficient numbers to do it all over again

Looming Danger of Abrupt Climate Change. Robert Hunziker, counterpunch. Dec. 26, 2013.

The National Research Council of the National Academies (NRCNA) has pre-published an extensive 200-pg study: “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, Anticipating Surprises.”

The goal of the report is to prepare society to anticipate the ‘otherwise unanticipated’ before it occurs, including abrupt changes to the ocean, atmosphere, ecosystems and high latitude regions. The NRCNA timescale for “abrupt climate change” is defined as years-to-decades. 

“The history of climate on the planet— as read in archives such as tree rings, ocean sediments, and ice cores— is punctuated with large changes that occurred rapidly, over the course of decades to as little as a few years,”

.... 

Once again, in the ocean, as well as on the land, excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) is the problem. 

Reiteratively, there is no worldwide plan on how to move forward to avoid an extinction event. 

As a consequence, except for a few scientists, the world community will be shocked by the carnage because nobody anticipates it really happening. Otherwise, the governments of the world would be furiously working on solutions, but they are not. 

Scientists have been publishing ominous reports for years in vain because they have not been taken seriously enough to prompt corrective action, as for example, a wholesale switching from fossil fuels to renewables, like wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, wave, and hydro.

Democratic Party Platform 7/1/16 Draft Would Lock In Catastrophic Climate Change. Michael Hoexter, Ph.D, New Economic Perspectives. Jul. 8, 2016. 

The Brexit vote is being taken by some commentators as a sign that the basic competence of leadership groups throughout Western countries is in question. Unfortunately not enough media attention has been paid, public concern raised, and action taken about the most massive and long-standing failure of the political leadership classes, a failure to protect by governments that threatens humanity itself. Governments and government leaders have failed to lead on climate change, even as most recently in Paris, they have sworn to hold Earth’s surface temperature below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels and target 1.5 degrees as the “optimal” goal.  This failure of leadership both in governments and also in the nongovernmental organizations that nominally address environment and climate is almost absolute and is terrifying to behold.

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What is required now of government leaders is a full-scale, society-wide mobilization of economic, social and political resources to rapidly (within a decade) change the energy basis of civilizations, all of this led and supervised by governments.  A government-organized and –financed multi-year mobilization has always been the option that was necessary at some point to transform our societies away from our increasingly deadly dependence on fossil fuels.  Yet in the fog of neoliberal economic and political reasoning, government leaders and non-governmental organizations have not been able to conceive of, let alone undertake the transition away from a fossil-fueled to a largely or completely renewable energy powered society. 

... 

With the emergence of what is to be a full-scale climate emergency, the embrace of half-measures whether out of ignorance, out of fealty to misbegotten neoliberal ideology/neoclassical economics or out of fear of rabid climate deniers, is itself a form of climate and science denial.  This fashionable form of “green” climate denial that can be spoken in liberal salons and party meetings, wrings its hands about “Republican Congressional gridlock” and climate denial and holds up the meager climate-related achievements of the current and previous Presidential Administrations as holy writ.  Talk is limited to various measures that do not suggest a leading role for government office-holders and government in pointing the way to the post-fossil fuel future.  Nothing that inconveniences the consumer or corporations is discussed at any length out of fear or a thoughtless repetition of tired received wisdom.

A US Climate Platform: Anchoring Climate Policy in Reality (1/3). Michael Hoexter, New Economic Perspectives. Sep. 17, 2015. 

(Part 2 of 3)

(Part 3 of 3)

COP21 and Beyond: Outlines of an Actually-Effective International Climate Policy Architecture. Michael Hoexter, New Economic Perspectives. Dec. 4, 2015. 

Outline of an Actually-Effective International Climate Policy Framework

1. Declare a Climate Emergency

2. Guard & Enhance Human & Political Rights During the Long Emergency

3. Target 1.5 °C Warming or Less

4. Net-Zero Worldwide GHG Emissions by 2035

5. Commit to (Aggressive) Mechanisms First

6. Primary Mechanism: National Climate Mobilizations Led by National Governments

7. Secondary Mechanism: Ascending Carbon Tax & Tariff Regime

8. Tertiary Mechanism: Coordinated Treaty on Emergency Global Cooling

9. Remove Fossil Fuel Economic Interests from UNFCCC

10. Reinforce National Sovereignty via the UN Against Treaties that Undermine Climate Regulation