Astronomers warn "There's no planet B"

Astronomers usually look to the stars and think about time in terms of billion of years, but recently thousands of them joined together to call for climate action now to preserve the habitability of our one and only Planet Earth.

Last July, under the aegis of Astronomers for Planet Earth, more than 2750 astronomers and astrophysicists from 87 countries signed an open letter focusing attention on and urging immediate and substantial steps to address our current climate crisis.

Earth from Space (Credit: NASA)

"Comprehensive scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that we are living in a climate emergency that calls for urgent action," they warn. If we fail to significantly and continuously reduce global carbon emissions "... we will face both a biodiversity crisis through mass extinctions, and a humanitarian crisis from increasingly inhospitable living conditions."

They add that "... at our current rate of emissions... we are failing to prevent this disaster."

The astronomers also point out that while there may be billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, not one is within our reach, and even if one were, we have no way to move Earth's 7.75 billion people to it. As one of the signatories, Travis Rector, at the University of Alaska Anchorage explains, "Unfortunately the term 'habitable zone' does not necessarily mean that a planet in this zone is habitable. It simply means that it could in principle have the right conditions for liquid water to be on its surface. It doesn't mean that there actually is water, or that there is life, or that we could actually live there. And even if we could, these exoplanets are so far away we couldn't possibly relocate to them. Mars at its closest is about four light minutes away from us. The nearest star is over four light years. Compare four minutes to four years and you'll get a sense of how much bigger that is. And we can't even yet get one human to Mars, much less all of humanity! It is clear that there truly is 'no Planet B'."

To lead by example, the signatories, who read like a Who's Who of researchers in the field, urge astronomers and their institutions to reduce their own carbon footprint, for example by minimizing the large amount of energy used in computation, and to make environmental sustainability an immediate and primary goal.

Beyond setting an example in their own field and institutions, the astronomers warn that similar steps to reduce carbon emissions and move towards sustainability are urgently needed worldwide. "The climate crisis reaches beyond country borders and individual communities," they point out.

Perhaps nobody has said this more eloquently than the late Carl Sagan, who wrote, "When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It's like living in a lifeboat. We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, they key question, the central question, in a certain sense the only question, is, will we?"

Who better to urge us to act now to preserve our only home, Earth, than those who study the stars?

CLIMATE CHANGE "FINGERPRINTS" NOW VISIBLE IN GLOBAL WEATHER EVERY DAY

Talk about thinking outside the box--

For decades now, climate scientists have worked to detect and measure the signal of human-caused climate change over time. They've revealed and warned us about changes in important variables such as atmospheric CO2, sea level and global average temperature; profound changes, but ones that take place over decades.

Climate change deniers, up to and including President Trump, have jumped on the fact that these incremental changes are swamped by much larger local daily and seasonal variability, making it difficult to link climate change to the weather people actually experience--with the fairly recent exception of super-storms or other extreme weather events that would have been extremely unlikely in the absence of global warming.

Now, a team of Swiss and Norweigian researchers has broken the mold. What would they see, they wondered, if they looked at variables such as temperature and humidity across space--the whole Earth--rather than over time. They were prompted to pursue this question by one of Trump's tweets using a major cold spell that hit much of the US to try to ridicule global warming.

"This lead to a lively debate about whether a single day could be informative at all about climate change," says climate scientist Reto Knutti, part of the Swiss-Norwegian research team. "Weather is not climate, yet we are seeing the imprint of climate change now in some single events, e.g. in the frequency of strong heatwaves. But what about the weather on an average day? Could we detect climate change in a single year, a month, a day?"

The answer they found is astonishing. Just by analyzing weather patterns across the globe they were able to detect the fingerprints of climate change on every day's weather since 2012.

Climate scientists can now detect signals of global warming in any day's weather

Image credit: NASA/MODIS

"Global weather is now in uncharted territory," says Knutti. "While locally of course we need a few decades for a signal to emerge from variability, the global information allows us to now detect climate change for any single day since early 2012."

The team used artificial intelligence (AI) to extract indicative patterns from the enormous mass of daily weather data around the globe. They could then test for the probability that the pattern for any given day could have appeared in the absence of climate change.

The daily weather patterns that most powerfully reveal the impact of climate change involve the global distribution of air temperature and humidity. Both variables were more pronounced over oceans than over land masses, and in the tropics compared to higher latitudes.

In retrospect, it may not be surprising that the cumulative heating effect of many decades of climate change is visible in the day-to-day distribution of temperatures across the globe. However, the researchers also found that they could still detect a strong climate change fingerprint in any given day's weather even without looking at temperature--simply from the pattern of atmospheric moisture around the world. "If we include humidity," says Knutti, "we can even detect climate change when we remove the global mean [temperature] signal for every single day, i.e. just by looking at the patterns."

If there was still any legitimate doubt that we humans have changed and are continuing to change the climate and the weather, this new way of charting the relationship between climate and weather should erase it.

Knutti writes, "In the last full IPCC report in 2013 we have shown that humans are the dominant cause of the long-term warming." We now demonstrate that since then we haven't had a single day of 'normal' weather globally. Yesterday was climate change, today is climate change, and tomorrow will be as well. We think this is a powerful message."

We couldn't agree more. The question is, is it powerful enough to get through to the deliberately deaf ears of our leaders?

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You can access the Nature Climate Change article describing this research here.

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REA

ONE MORE DEGREE COULD TRIGGER A COLLAPSE OF GREENLAND'S ICE SHEET

The latest and best reconstruction of temperatures near Greenland over that last 450,000 years shows that much of Greenland's vast ice sheet could melt from sustained warming of less than one degree. That means that the world risks triggering a devastating 7 meters (23 feet) of sea-level rise before the end of this century.

 Greenland Ice Sheet at Risk

Credit: cake@cake0

Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, analyze 450,000 years of sea surface temperatures off the coast of Greenland. They were able to track four interglacial (warm) periods, during one of which Greenland's southern ice sheet completely disappeared. During that 30,000-year-long warm period centered around 400,000 years ago, temperatures were only slightly higher than they are today--within one degree C--and well within the projections of climate models for the end of this century--if we continue on a business-as-usual trajectory.

Comparing the four warm periods it became clear that the amount of warming was not the only factor impacting how much of Greenland's ice melted. The other key was the duration of the warming. Even with temperatures just 0.8 degrees C warmer than today, the longer duration of the warm period centered around 400,000 years ago led to almost complete melting of Greenland's southern ice sheet.

According to the authors, their findings support climate models that find a tipping point somewhere between 0.8 and 3.2 degrees C warmer than today, beyond which melting of Greenland's ice sheet is inevitable even if temperatures go back down. Paleoclimatologist Nil Irvali, at the University of Bergen, explains that the tipping point occurs when melting reduces the altitude of the ice surface to the point where the even-warmer temperatures at the lower elevation guarantees runaway melting. "The elevation effect becomes dominant over time," she says, "melting accelerates, and may even continue even though the climate cools again."

The risk, she clarifies, is not that the Greenland Ice Sheet will melt before the end of the century, but that by the end of the century atmospheric warming caused by a continuation of current policies and emissions could easily trigger irreversible melting and an eventual, and devastating, 7-meter sea-level rise.

Actually, Irvali points out, it's even worse than that, since both atmospheric carbon dioxide and warmer ocean waters have extremely long lifetimes. "It is also important to note that CO2 we put into the atmosphere will have a long lifetime even if we cut emissions, and as more and more heat accumulates in the ocean it commits us to a longer timescale of warming," she says, "So our current activities will impact climate for millennia to come."

The authors conclude, "Notably, the critical temperature threshold for past [Greenland Ice Sheet] decay will likely be surpassed this century. The duration for which this threshold is exceeded will determine Greenland's fate."

To which we must add, and the fate of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide.**

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**In case this paleo-historical study seems too theoretical, recent observations by a completely different set of researchers show that Greenland is losing ice 7 times faster than it was two decades ago, in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenario, putting some 400 million people at risk of coastal flooding by 2100.

REA

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RENEWABLES BEAT COAL IN US FOR THE FIRST TIME

Every so often there's a bit of good news about the race to replace fossil fuels with renewables before time runs out for a habitable planet Earth. Today's ray of light is the news that renewable energy capacity--the amount of power that can be generated from solar, wind and water--beat out the combined capacity of all the coal-fired power plants in the US for the first time.

We need more windmills and less CO2!

This milestone appears in the latest Energy Infrastructure Update from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was a photo finish, with renewable generating capacity now 21.56 percent of the total while coal dropped to 21.55 percent. Not a huge difference, but with renewables rapidly growing and coal shrinking, it's a moment worth noting.

Of course, if we are to maintain a livable climate, we need a lot more of such wins, and soon, and not just in the US, but worldwide.

A MUST-READ ARTICLE ABOUT CLIMATE AND OUR FUTURE

A friend alerted me to a superb and extremely sobering article by Bill McKibben in the November 26, 2018 edition of the New Yorker. Entitled "How Extreme Weather is Shrinking the Planet," the piece lays out in detail the depth of the climate crisis we're in, and how we got here with the help of Exxon, the Koch brothers, Rex Tillerson and decades of dithering or deluded politicians. 

McKibben offers a ray of hope, if we the people, worldwide, can come together and fight against disinformation and special interests for our own survival and the survival of the biosphere that supports us.

The future is here--Southern California wildfire

Credit: FEMA

CALIFORNIA POWERS AHEAD IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

We need all the good news we can find these days, and California has just handed us a climate-change bouquet.

On August 28, 2018, the legislature passed a bill that requires 100 percent carbon-free electricity in the state by 2045. This massive change in the way power is produced in or imported to California will keep 70 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from being spewed into the atmosphere every year, equivalent to taking 12 million cars off the road.

California Wind Farm
a rapidly growing source of clean power

Credit: Creative Commons Zero; Max Pixel

If Governor Brown signs the bill into law, as expected, California will become the largest economy in the world to commit to 100% carbon neutral electricity before mid-century. (Yes! Governor Brown signed the bill into law on September 10, 2018).

Of course, much more than this is needed for the world to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and keep global temperatures no more than 1.5 or at most 2.0 degrees C (2.7/3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels. Still, it's a giant step in the right direction, and one that we hope many more states, cities, countries, companies and industries will follow--and the sooner the better.

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You can find the text of California Senate Bill 100 here.

SCIENTISTS CAN NOW LINK WEATHER EXTREMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Climatologists have traditionally been leery of linking a specific event--an extended drought, an exceptional run of hurricanes, massive flooding--to climate change. The most they could be coaxed to say was something along the lines that climate change might have increased the odds of the extreme event, often with a comparison to rolling loaded dice or to an athlete on steroids.

Recently, however, some researchers have started to be more specific. For example, Frederika Otto, a climate scientist at Oxford University, and her colleagues recently reported that South Africa's three-year mega-drought, during which Cape Town came nerve-wrackingly close to running out of water, was demonstrably three times as likely as it would have been without human-caused climate change.

This new capability goes beyond just pinning down the increased odds of an extreme event. In three cases recently, researchers have felt confident enough to say that certain events simply could not have happened without human climate forcing. These included devastating heatwaves in Asia in 2016, the global heat record set the same year, and shockingly high sea temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea between 2014 and 2016. 

A review of 170 similar attribution studies between 2004 and 2018 found that two-thirds of the extreme weather events studied were more likely or more intense because of human caused climate forcing.

 South Africa's Theewaterskloof Reservoir, nearly empty on March 11, 2018

Credit: Zaian

So the question is, what's changed? Why are climate scientists now able to make such specific attributions of the impacts of human-caused climate change?

In principle, the answer is remarkably simple. Researchers use multiple state-of-the-art computerized climate models to run thousands of simulations with slightly different initial conditions. Some of the simulations run with current levels of greenhouse gas levels while others use pre-industrial levels. The researchers can then see how many times a comparable event shows up in each scenario. A drought as long and intense as the one that drained Cape Town's reservoirs to the brink of catastrophe happened three times more often under current atmospheric greenhouse gas levels than in models using pre-industrial levels.

In practice, it's a bit more challenging. The multiple computer simulations that are needed are costly and need a lot of time even on the fastest supercomputers. Otto and her colleagues got around this by tapping into weather@home, a network of thousands of volunteers who offer up time on their computer to help perform these massive calculations. In addition, current climate models are not fine-grained enough to model smaller events, such as a crop-destroying hailstorm or an outburst of tornadoes.

Still, scientists now have what it takes to specify to what extent many extreme events, such as a drought, massive flooding or a killer heat wave, can reliably be attributed to human-caused climate change. We can expect much more frequent, accurate and meaningful reports of this kind in the near future.

These attribution studies are not likely to convince dyed-in-the-wool climate change deniers, but they are already proving helpful to planners at all levels. For example, Helen Davies, with the Western Cape's Department of Economic Development and Tourism, now knows that the devastating drought was not a once-in-a-lifetime event. "This is an incredibly strong message which we cannot afford to ignore. We may need to work on a radically new approach to water management."

Otto hopes that this approach will soon be fast and accurate enough to be linked to extreme weather events in real time. Germany may become one of the first countries to do this on a regular basis. 'It’s part of our mission to illuminate the links between climate and weather,” says Paul Becker, Vice President of the German Weather Agency. “There is demand for that information, there is science to provide it, and we are happy to spread it.”

One example of real-time attribution is the assessment by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that Hurricane Florence is 50 miles wider and will inundate the Atlantic Coast with 50 percent more rain than a comparable hurricane before human-caused climate change.

And a new study using the supercomputers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was able to detail the additional rainfall provoked by global warming in 15 hurricanes that took place in the last ten years, and predict even more rainfall and more intense winds if warming continues.

Let's hope that the entrenched climate change denial on the part of the current US president and congress does not keep this important emerging science from being used here at home.

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The Nature article from which most of this information comes can be found here.

The article summarizing 170 different studies, including a useful interactive map, can be found at this URL.

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SOME GOOD (CLIMATE) NEWS TO FINISH THE YEAR

AUSTRALIA CAN MEET ITS 2030 PARIS CLIMATE PLEDGE FOR FREE

Australia made a bold pledge when it signed the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement -- to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 - 28 percent by 3030. A new study by the Australian National University (ANU) shows that because of the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy, Australia can meet that goal at zero net cost.

 Sundrop Farms, Port Augusta, South Australia

Credit: Sundrop Farms

As anyone who has spent time in Australia knows, the country has abundant solar and wind potential. The ANU researchers note that these renewable energy sources will reach grid parity -- that is, they'll be no more costly than electricity on Australia's current national grid -- by 2020 (and cheaper soon after that). As a result, phasing out existing coal- and gas-fired generating plants and replacing them with renewable sources will actually save money.

Even when the researchers added in the costs of new pumped hydro storage and new long-distance power lines to ensure adequate electricity at night or during low-wind periods, the net cost still turns out to be zero.

Lower level of Tumut 3 Pumped Hydropower Station, NSW, Australia/Credit: CMH at English Wikipedia

“The cost of renewables includes stabilising the electricity grid with energy storage and stronger interstate powerlines to ensure that the grid continues to be reliable,” says Andrew Blakers, at the ANU Research School of Engineering. "Our study shows that we can make the switch to affordable and reliable clean power."

Kudos to Australia for its vision and willingness to move rapidly in this vitally necessary direction. With the cost of renewable energy plummeting worldwide, Australia can serve as a bellwether for the rest of the world.

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WHEN CATASTROPHE COMES HOME

I live in Santa Rosa, California. As you know, Santa Rosa, along with many other parts of California, is still reeling from the impact of raging wildfires.

A barn goes up in flames in Glen Ellen, California

Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

My wife and I are lucky--our house happens to be located a mile or two from where the firestorm stopped. We've spent several sleepless nights, bags packed and in our car, monitoring whether or not we would need to flee. But other than that, we have not been directly impacted by the fires.

Many people were not so lucky. This morning's paper lists 50,000 residents of our county--that's one out of every ten--under evacuation orders, 35 confirmed deaths, 235 people still missing, 5700 homes and businesses destroyed, and more than $1.2 billion in economic damage in Santa Rosa alone. Many of our friends and people we know have lost their homes, businesses or jobs.

We're all-too-used to reading about or seeing images of catastrophes somewhere else--floods in Bangladesh, drought in Australia, hurricanes battering Puerto Rico, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Perhaps we've been moved to a moment's empathy or pity, perhaps we make a donation to some aid agency, or perhaps we just shake our heads and move on.

It's different when it's here rather than there, in our home town rather than someone else's, harming our family or friends rather than strangers.

Our natural disaster, our catastrophe has brought several realizations home to me:

--It can happen here. None of us is immune. Here in Santa Rosa, it wasn't just the Journey's End mobile home park that was destroyed, it was also the middle-class Coffey Park neighborhood and the idyllic Fountaingrove neighborhood, home to many doctors, lawyers and other well-off citizens. Like the residents of Journey's End and Coffey Park, the residents of Fountaingrove had to desert their homes with little or no warning in the middle of the night as the unexpected firestorm blasted through, driven by 70 miles-per-hour winds. Some, many of them elderly or disabled, simply could not get out in time.

--It's real, and it hurts.  It's one thing to see struggling people on TV. It's very different when it's you spending hours hosing down your house and yard while hot embers fall from the sky, when it's you trying to decide what necessities to throw into the car, looking around your house wondering if you'll see it again, or you helping a desperate friend rescue a few precious things before the fire strikes again. It's different when the store you shopped in yesterday is gone today and the neighborhood you've visited a hundred times is a blackened wasteland.

--Ordinary, daily life is precious. It's trite to repeat that "you don't really know what you've got 'till it's gone," but it's also a profound truth. We may all strive to do or experience something extraordinary, have a peak experience, change the world, but in the end what's truly valuable is the everyday life of everyday people. When that's disrupted or lost, you suddenly realizes how precious it was.

We've experienced just one corner of one natural disaster. The dozens who have died, the thousands who've been displaced, represent just a tiny fraction of the estimated 65 million displaced persons and refugees in the world today. But even that enormous number pales in comparison to the number of people--people just like you and me--who are at risk from two existential threats--climate disruption and nuclear war.

I'm not going to argue the reality of either threat. I'll only point out that common sense should tell us that the number and intensity of the extreme climatic events that we're experiencing is far from normal, and that further destabilization of the climate could threaten any or all of us. And a moment's thought should be more than enough to remind us that even a "limited nuclear exchange" could result in misery or death for hundreds of millions of people.

The limited, local disaster I'm living through has brought home to me the preciousness--and fragility--of each of our lives. Multiplying the losses experienced here by millions is no longer unthinkable, but it is unacceptable.

I've been extremely impressed by the local leaders who have come to the fore in this disaster--the local and state fire officials, the sheriff and police officers, mayors and other elected officials. They have all been clear, direct, factual, and focused on responding to and resolving the crisis, step by step. Their efforts to protect lives, contain the fires, begin to bring them under control and now, line up the resources needed to rebuild, seem to be well coordinated and, as more resources have been marshaled, increasingly effective. I've been similarly impressed by how ordinary people have responded--rescuing and helping others, giving time, goods and money to help people who've had to evacuate or who have lost their homes, and showing great dignity and resilience in the face of disaster.

Unfortunately, the contrast with how our national leaders are dealing with the existential threats of climate disruption and nuclear war could not be greater. In both cases, actions by President Trump, his advisers and appointees, and Congress are making things worse rather than  better. Pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement is just the most blatant of the many steps Trump has taken to reverse global progress on the climate. And undermining the nuclear accord with Iran, and the belly-thumping battle between Trump and Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un are dramatically increasing the risk of a nuclear war.

The point of this commentary is to remind everyone that when it comes to the global risks from climate disruption or nuclear war, there is actually here, and they are actually us. People here in Santa Rosa took action as the flames approached, and most were able to save their lives and those of their loved ones. Government officials and agencies took coordinated action to limit the scope of the disaster. People at all levels did what what needed. We need our nation's leaders to act equally well.

We all need to take action now with respect to the threats of runaway climate change and nuclear war. Now, with every tool at our disposal, because when those fires come roaring out of the skies, it will simply be too late.

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CLIMATE CHANGE: AS TEMPERATURES SOAR, AIRPLANES CAN'T

On June 19th, the Arizona Republic published this headline:

Nearly 50 flights cancelled Tuesday as Phoenix nears 120-degree day

My first thought was that the tarmac had melted, but of course a modern international airport is paved with concrete, not asphalt. The problem turns out to be basic physics--hot air is less dense than cold air. That's what gives a hot-air balloon lift, but it steals lift from a plane. Every plane has a rated temperature beyond which it can't take off if fully loaded--it can't pick up enough speed to get airborne before running out of runway. 

As the world warms, we can expect more planes stuck at gates

Photo credit: AP

At 120 degrees, smaller commuter aircraft were stuck in Phoenix until the heat abated, while larger, more powerful planes, like the Airbus or the Boeing 747 still had 6 or 7 degrees to spare.

Don't expect this to be an isolated incident, a new study warns. Researchers at Columbia University examined the impact rising temperatures due to global warming will have on 20 major airports worldwide, including Phoenix, Denver, LaGuardia and Ronald Reagan, in Washington, DC. As reported in the journal Climatic Change, under a "business as usual" scenario, on hot days, 10 to 30 percent of flights could be affected and airlines on average would lose about four percent of capacity.

That may not sound like a lot, but since more than 8 million people fly every day, that could mean 320,000 hot and unhappy passengers. In addition, given the slim profit margins of most airlines, that kind of loss could have serious financial implications.

And, the authors point out, those unbearably hot days may come around much more frequently as the atmosphere continues to warm. Daily maximum temperatures at major airports may rise by 4 to 8 degrees C (7.2 to 14.4 F) by 2080 under many scenarios. That would mean far more frequent and intense heat waves and far more delayed, cancelled or weight-restricted flights.

"Our results suggest that weight restriction may impose a non-trivial cost on airline and impact aviation operations around the world," writes lead author Ethan Coffel, at Columbia University.

One more non-trivial reason to take climate change seriously, and do everything we can to slow it down.

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COULD $82 MILLION HELP EXPLAIN WHY THE US CONGRESS IS FULL OF CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIERS?

American author Upton Sinclair once quipped, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Pump "salary" up to $82 million in contributions from the fossil fuel industry to climate-change deniers in the US Senate and House of Representatives, and you can start to understand why so many of the people we've elected to represent us spout so much nonsense about climate change.

$ 1 Million on display in Las Vegas

(multiply this by 82 and give to your favorite politicians)

Credit: mmarchin/CreativeCommons

According to Ryan Koronowsky at ThinkProgress, there are 180 climate deniers in the US Congress, not to mention the one in the oval office. Of those, 142 are in the House and 38 in the Senate. That represents a hefty 59 percent of the Republicans in the House, and a truly impressive 73 percent of the Republicans in the Senate. Remarkable figures given that the American public overwhelmingly recognizes that human-caused climate change is real and supports government action to mitigate it.

It appears that something is causing our senators and representatives to oppose not just the scientific consensus on climate change but the desires of their own constituents. It could be superior intelligence, greater knowledge or perhaps a more highly developed sense of responsibility and stewardship.

Or it could be money. Money that pays for the market research and ads that keep getting them elected.

What do you think?

Me, I'm betting on the money.

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Here's a list of who and how much.

You can read Koronowsky's detailed article, with maps and charts, here.

You can read an interesting piece about parallels between the Soviet embrace of Lysenkoism under Stalin and the Republican embrace of climate change denial here.

Note: To be fair, Democrats are probably just as likely to be "influenced" by contributions. This essay by Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams presents data showing that for a mere $100,000, the odds of a Democrat representative flipping on a key financial regulation issue rose by 14 percent. With millions or billions of dollars of profits at stake, political contributions are clearly a terrific investment.

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CLIMATE SCIENTISTS TAKE TO THE STREETS TO PROTEST TRUMP AND HIS CABINET

When hundreds of scientists leave their labs and take to the streets to protest, you can bet that something serious is going on.

Scientists rally for climateSan Francisco, 12/13/16/Credit: ClimateTruth.org

What led hundreds of scientists to rally in the streets of San Francisco on December 13 was the realization that president-elect Trump is filling his cabinet with climate-change deniers and fossil-fuel advocates. 

For the scientists, the risks of inaction, or worse yet, backward steps with respect to global climate change are simply to great to ignore. Floods, fire, famine, food shortages, forced migration and increased political instability loom if the US and the rest of the world fail to move aggressively away from our current carbon-based economy.

The technology is already available, it's the political will that's lacking. These courageous scientists went way beyond their comfort zone to alert us. Take a look at what they did and why they did it at this link:

https://act.climatetruth.org/sign/standupforscience_rallyvideo/?t=2&akid=5553.97426.1jsCnq

THE PHONEY WAR

Everything seems the same. Thanksgiving has come and gone; tables were set, friends and family gathered, turkeys carved and served. Weddings are being planned, babies are being born, children play in the schoolyard. People rush to work, friends chat over lunch, lovers embrace. Life goes on. But, for the 64 million of us who voted for Hillary Clinton—actually for all of us--nothing is the same, or will be.

Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943

Credit: Normal Rockwell Museum

Gandalf's Gallery

I think I know now what people across Europe must have felt during the eight months of the Phoney War. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and on September 3 the UK and France declared war. But between then and May 10, 1940, when the Nazi blitzkrieg blasted into France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, life went on as if nothing had changed. A second world war was looming, there were weighty conclaves and the pondering of plans in London, Paris and Berlin, forces were marshaled and moved, but during those strange, tense months, nothing much happened. And then, as Winston Churchill had prophesied to a wary America a year before in his brilliant speech "The Defence of Freedom and Peace," the lights went out.

German troops, Paris, June, 1940

Credit: Bundesarchiv

Like then, things appear normal. But in New York and Washington, angry, arrogant men and women are circling like wolves, salivating as their time draws near. For them, life is a zero-sum game that they have won. That makes the rest of us losers, and in their world losers deserve no more than scorn. Women and children, Muslims and Mexicans, journalists and Jews--and who knows who else--beware, because the knives are out.

The newly empowered threaten that undesirables will be registered and tracked, millions deported and the press whipped to heel. People will need to watch what they say. Torture-lovers will be re-empowered; drillers, extractors and polluters will run free, climate and environment be damned. Schools must be privatized. Obamacare must go, along with Medicare, Planned Parenthood and women's right to choose. Discrimination by Christians against the LGBTQ community or others will be legalized along with discrimination against Muslims. NASA will be ordered not to monitor the Earth, but the NSA will monitor us all. The rich will have their tax cuts and sooner or later the deficit hawks will have theirs. We know who will bleed; it will not be the billionaires.

The die was cast on November 8. This strange, tense time--our phoney war--will end with the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20. The event will be celebrated and reported as if he were just another president. If you believe that, then you'd best hope that God does protect the innocent.

Never have Benjamin Franklin's words on leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 rung truer. "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a republic or a monarchy?" a woman asked. "A republic," Franklin replied, "If you can keep it."

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For another commentary on what to expect after Trump's inauguration, click here.

The Lysenko Affair

Truthout has just published an op-ed by us, entitled The Lysenko Affair. 

Here's the summary:

The Republican Party's embrace of climate-change denial is reminiscent of the Soviet Union's three-decade-long endorsement of Lysenkoism, which likewise was based on denial of basic science. Both represent politically convenient untruths with dangerous real-world consequences.

You can read the piece at: http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/25078-the-lysenko-affair