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For years, presidents and prime ministers have been the public face of the fight against climate change, gathering at United Nations summit meetings and pressuring each other to reduce emissions.
The results have often been lackluster.
A climate conference in California this week tried something different. The meeting, organized by the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, had far fewer national leaders present. Instead, an array of governors, mayors and business executives from around the globe met to promote their successes in cutting greenhouse gas emissions locally and to encourage one another to do more.
A key premise of the conference was that if a handful of leading-edge states, cities and businesses can demonstrate that it’s feasible — and even lucrative — to go green in their own backyards, they might inspire others to follow suit. That, in turn, could make it easier for national leaders to act more forcefully.
“If a researcher does an experiment, and you find out they’ve got a medicine that works, it spreads,” Governor Brown said.
California Had Its Own Climate Summit. Now What? by Brad Plumer, Climate, New York Times, Sep 15, 2018
More than a million people are fleeing the Carolina coast ahead of Hurricane Florence’s impending landfall. When they return, the region they call home will likely be forever changed.
Hurricane Florence is an almost impossibly rare threat. A storm this powerful is exceedingly rare this far north on the East Coast. Never before has a hurricane threatened the East Coast with nearly four feet of rainfall. In just two cases since our records began in 1851 — Hazel in 1954 and Hugo in 1989 — has a Carolina hurricane provoked an 18-foot rise in the ocean tide.
In my two decades as a meteorologist, I can’t recall a single storm that threatened new all-time records in all three of these, simultaneously, anywhere in the world. Despite what some of my more hesitant colleagues might say, you can connect individual weather events to climate change in this day and age. Quite simply, Hurricane Florence is a storm made worse by climate change.
Climate change wrought this freak of nature, Opinion by Eric Holthaus, Washington Post, Sep 12, 2018
Hat tip to Stop Climate Science Denial
Even Democrats this year rarely advertised on climate, running campaigns dominated instead by more immediate concerns about health care, immigration and jobs.
“It’s too remote. It’s not today. It’s not conflict,” California Gov. Jerry Brown, one of the nation’s leading advocates of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said in an interview. “So that’s where we are, and climate change is not jobs, not taxes, it’s not violent crime. It’s not sex. And it’s not immigration.”
Still, Brown added, “The fact that politicians don’t take out ads on climate change says more about the state of the political imagination than about the state of the world. And the state of the world is — I say it with absolute confidence — we are headed to perdition if we don’t pull back. And we don’t have that many years left.”
Democrats struggle to make voters care about climate change by David Siders, Energy & Environment, Politico, Sep 14, 2018
Hurricane Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut Photo: NOAA/himawari8
'Massive damage': monster storms to slam into east coasts of US, China by Peter Hannam, Environment, Sydney Morning Herald, Sep 12, 2018
Earth Documentary Resistance
https://www.earthdocumentaryresistance.org/
Radio Ecoshock
https://www.ecoshock.org/
PBS NewsHour: How Climate Loads the Hurricane Dice, Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair, Sep 15, 2018
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 16 September, 2018
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