Aug 01, · Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves Climate change is the greatest environmental challenge the world has ever faced, but we can do something about it. We are the last generation that can stop devastating climate change. We have the knowledge and the tools – we just need politicians to lead the way Sep 08, · New research reveals animals are changing their body shapes to cope with climate change. Last month's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed we have very little time to
How We Know Today's Climate Change Is Not Natural
The science of climate change was settled. The world was ready to act. This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the year period from to the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.
Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Centerthis two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews.
It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. Jake Silverstein. The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in — hoped to restrict warming to two we do to cope with climate change. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities.
Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable.
Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this? Because in the decade that ran from towe do to cope with climate change, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis.
During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.
Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, we do to cope with climate change, and as the s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences.
Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado.
An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism.
But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions. Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. But we do to cope with climate change the s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes.
Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.
It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.
More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later.
Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences.
We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us, we do to cope with climate change.
How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament we do to cope with climate change understanding why we we do to cope with climate change to solve this problem when we had the chance.
That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming.
Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours. Pomerance paused, startled, over the orphaned paragraph. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. He reread it. It made no sense to him, we do to cope with climate change.
Pomerance was not a scientist; he graduated from Cornell 11 years earlier with a degree in history. He had the tweedy appearance of an undernourished doctoral student emerging at dawn from the stacks. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thickish mustache that wilted disapprovingly over the corners of his mouth, though his defining characteristic was his gratuitous height, 6 feet 4 inches, which seemed to embarrass him; he stooped over to accommodate his interlocutors.
He had an active face prone to breaking out in wide, even maniacal grins, but in composure, as when he read the coal pamphlet, it projected concern.
He struggled with technical reports. He proceeded as a historian might: cautiously, scrutinizing the source material, reading between the lines.
When that failed, he made phone calls, often to the authors of the reports, who tended to be surprised to hear from him. Scientists, he had found, were not we do to cope with climate change the habit of fielding questions from political lobbyists.
They were not in the habit of thinking about politics. The reporting and photography for this project were supported by a major grant from the Pulitzer Center, which has also created lesson plans to bring the climate issue to students everywhere. Pomerance had one big question about the coal report. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas could invite global catastrophe, why had nobody told him about it?
If anyone in Washington — if anyone in the United States — should have been aware of such a danger, it was Pomerance. That he was as easily accepted in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building as at Earth Day rallies might have had something to do with the fact that he was a Morgenthau — the great-grandson of Henry Sr. Or perhaps it was just his charisma — voluble, energetic and obsessive, he seemed to be everywhere, speaking with everyone, in a very loud voice, at once.
His chief obsession was air. After working as an organizer for welfare rights, he spent the second half of his 20s laboring to protect and expand the Clean Air Act, the comprehensive law regulating air pollution.
That led him to the problem of acid rain, and the coal report. He showed the unsettling paragraph to his office mate, Betsy Agle. Was it really possible that human beings were overheating the planet? she asked. Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged.
They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C. A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.
There was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In the decade since then, MacDonald had been alarmed to see humankind begin in earnest to weaponize we do to cope with climate change — not out of malice, but unwittingly.
During the spring of and the summer ofthe Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by The ice sheet contained enough water we do to cope with climate change raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.
The Jasons sent the report to dozens of scientists in the United States and abroad; to industry groups like the National Coal Association and the Electric Power Research Institute; and within the government, to the National Academy of Sciences, the Commerce Department, the E.
Pomerance read about the atmospheric crisis in a state of shock that swelled briskly into outrage. Gordon MacDonald worked at the federally funded Mitre Corporation, a think tank that works with agencies throughout the government. His title was senior research analyst, which was another way of saying senior we do to cope with climate change adviser to the national-intelligence community.
After a single phone call, Pomerance, a former Vietnam War protester and conscientious objector, drove several miles on the Beltway to a group of anonymous white office buildings that more closely resembled the headquarters of a regional banking firm than the solar plexus of the American military-industrial complex. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D.
Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, we do to cope with climate change, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal, we do to cope with climate change. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm. MacDonald spoke for two hours.
Pomerance was appalled.
The Solution To Climate Change Is All Around Us
, time: 3:49Our Fight against Climate Change and Global Warming | WWF
Sep 08, · Animals are "shapeshifting" to cope with climate change Clive Thompson am Wed Sep 8, A new scientific paper finds that warm-blooded Sep 08, · Some change the timing of key life events such as breeding and migration, so they take place at cooler times. And others evolve to change their body size to cool down more quickly. Our new research examined another way animal species cope with climate change: by changing the size of their ears, tails, beaks and other appendages. We reviewed the Sep 08, · New research reveals animals are changing their body shapes to cope with climate change. Last month's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed we have very little time to
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