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The Brave New World of Ecomodernism by Josh Halpern (who blogs and tweets as Eli Rabett) garnered the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Tracking the 2C Limit - September 2015 by Rob Honeycutt drew the scond highest number of comments.
It has choked Singapore with smoke, triggered Pacific typhoons and left Vietnamese coffee growers staring nervously at dwindling reservoirs. In Africa, cocoa farmers are blaming it for bad harvests, and in the Americas, it has Argentines bracing for lower milk production and Californians believing that rain is finally, mercifully on the way.
El Nino is back and in a big way.
A huge El Nino spreads wide range of mayhem around the world, Bloomberg/The Japan Times, Oct 23, 2015
"Climate change negotiations cannot only focus on targets, on billions. They must focus on people and entitle people to have their voices heard and taken into account," said Marine Franck, a climate change officer with the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR).
Migration needs a home in global climate deal - UN experts by Megan Rowling, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Oct 23, 2015
4. Rubio* does not show a very clear understanding of how renewable energy works. He praises fossil fuels on the grounds that we’re sitting on all this energy, so we might as well use it. In the very next sentence, he dismisses solar and wind energy:
The $100 billion dollars of natural gas and $550 billion of oil beneath our feet are doing the people of Ohio no good pent up in shale rock. Yet Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to argue it’s more important for us to subsidize wind turbines and solar panels than to expand access to our extraordinary reserves. In June, he committed America to generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, which would triple our wind- and solar-generated power.
It’s true that America has a lot of fossil fuels. It also has a lot of wind and sun. You could turn Rubio’s logic completely around: All that solar and wind energy does the people no good if we don’t harness it. The disconnect between these thoughts does not seem to occur to him.
*Sen Mark Rubio (R-FL) and candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. President.
Marco Rubio’s Ideas About Climate and Energy Are Terrifyingly Stupid by Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, Oct 19, 2015
Rebecca Leber begins her New Republic article, Meet the 97 Percent Climate Truthers with:
Two years ago, a group of international researchers led by University of Queensland's John Cook surveyed 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate change since the 1990s. Out of the 4,000 papers that took a position one way or another on the causes of global warming, 97 percent of them were in agreement: Humans are the primary cause. By putting a number on the scientific consensus, the study provided everyone from President Barack Obama to comedian John Oliver with a tidy talking point.
She goes on to critique the unfounded attacks on the TCP made by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. President.
The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and CARE International have launched a new online campaign #1o5C to gather more support to the global call to keep warming below 1.5°C. The campaign kick off took place at the sidelines of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Bonn, the last preparatory meeting before the COP21 UN climate change conference in Paris this December.
“We need to limit warming to a strict minimum to safeguard communities and the world. Less than 1°C of warming has already triggered scores of dangerous and unmanageable impacts. Raising ambition is a question of survival. It’s also feasible and an opportunity for communities to thrive. We hope this campaign will help to convince other countries to call for a sensible decision on the temperature goal at the Paris climate change conference.” – Emmanuel de Guzman, Climate Change Commissioner of the Philippines
“Countries are supporting the 1.5°C goal because climate change has already proved dangerous and in some cases unmanageable. Costa Rica has also committed to truly ambitious climate action, including a rapid transition to carbon neutrality because we believe in the benefits this will bring for people, the environment and the economy. We see 1.5°C as an opportunity to work together towards enhanced global prosperity and we’re encouraging others to join us.” – Pascal Girot, Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica
“It is crucial that the 1.5°C goal, and the means to make it happen, are part of the new UN climate agreement due to be signed in Paris. We must come together to rally all countries to support this goal. CARE International is already seeing how the poorest and most vulnerable communities are being hit the hardest by increasingly severe climate change impacts.” – Sven Harmeling, CARE International’s Climate Change Advocacy Coordinator
“It’s significant that 103 nations and hundreds of civil society groups already support the ambitious 1.5°C temperature goal, because numbers do matter in the UN climate talks. Paris provides a rare opportunity to increase our collective ambition to combat climate change including by strengthening the 2°C goal that the vulnerable countries rightly view as totally inadequate. And support for 1.5°C is steadily growing – this campaign will only add to that momentum.” – Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and Chair, Advisory Group of the Climate Vulnerable Forum
The Intermediate-level rebuttal article, CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician was updated by Howard Lee, a member of the all-volunteer SkS author team.
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Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 25 October, 2015
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