SA:  Our favorite president, to whom climate change is a hoax and thus there is no need for renewable energy, tells us what American’s really want: “When the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t watch television that night.”

Yep, if we cant count on watching TV every night, we have no country.

But he does care about birds. “You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime. You’ll see the saddest… you got every type of bird,” Trump insisted.”You know, in California you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. You go under a windmill, you see them all over the place,” he continued, calling it “not a good situation.”

Please think of the birds.

@PeterGleick: Atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached 415 ppm. 

from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

SA:  When a Trump Republican says this: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as twenty days.”

That’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday May 6, 2019.  He offered no explanation of why the reductions of sea ice are happening. But from the looks of it in the picture below, he’s pretty chuffed that it is.  Cause, you know, aint nothing more exciting than getting crap here from China twenty days sooner.  That will make everything all right.  (P.S., he knows why its happening…or else he wouldn’t have said “steady reductions” in ice – that means he’s listening to scientists)

Bill McKibben eloquently tells us the rest of the story: “As the fastest warming part of the planet, it offers a terrifying preview of what’s coming. Its white ice once deflected most of the sun’s incoming rays back out to space; now the blue water that’s replaced it absorbs the incoming solar radiation, amping up global warming. Meanwhile, the melting permafrost produces clouds of methane, itself a potent greenhouse gas. The newly open Arctic Ocean alters weather patterns, catching the jet stream in a way that makes for prolonged drought or flooding at lower latitudes. The rapid melting of Greenland’s great ice sheet seems to threaten the continued operation of the great ocean currents that warm northern Europe. And on and on—of all the scary spectacles on our Earth, none tops a fast-thawing north. But not to Pompeo, who looks to the Arctic and sees oil, gas, gold, and diamonds. It’s as if Gollum were Secretary of State.”

Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’
Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

from Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

How long did this stay in the news cycle? Did you even hear about it?  Spokane’s KREM 2 News on Monday May 6 gave it about 30 seconds at 6:42pm during the newscast.  No cause of this was reported – just that nature was in decline – and the solutions offered were to eat less meat and walk and bike more.  Anyone who was listening would have no understanding what this was about. And then it was gone and on to the next thing.

from The Guardian 

by @dpcarrington

(SA:  This is a start….but this report goes off the rails when it still envisions an increase in aviation by 2050….)

“Make no mistake, this report will change your life,” says Prof David Reay at the University of Edinburgh. “If the meticulous and robust expert advice here is heeded it will deliver a revolution in every facet of our lives, from how we power our homes and travel to work to the food we buy.”

The government’s official advisers the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said on Thursday that the UK’s net greenhouse gas emissions should fall to zero by 2050, emphasising that the transformation is necessary, affordable and desirable.

Setting the legally binding target, which has wide political support, will be the easy bit. But the scale of transformation needed to meet the target is enormous.

By 2050, petrol and diesel cars should be a distant memory, ideally banned from sale in favour of electric vehicles two decades earlier. “2030 would be my ideal switchover date, but we have said 2035 at the latest to be cautious,” said Chris Stark, the chief executive of the CCC. The current date is 2040, but switching sooner will save people money, he said, as electric cars are cheaperin the long run.

The cars will need a lot of electricity, meaning clean power generation must quadruple by 2050, the CCC said. That certainly means more offshore windfarms, but the cheapest option – onshore windfarms – are effectively banned in England. Big storage will also be needed, but battery costs are plummeting.

Homes heated by natural gas will also be long gone, with the CCC saying no new home should be connected to the gas grid after 2025. Electrified heating will be more common, but hydrogen could be an alternative to natural gas, if it can be produced cleanly at scale.

Meat has a heavy environmental impact, but the CCC envisages only a 20% cut in beef, lamb and dairy consumption in 2050, far lower than in other studies and the 86% cut needed to meet UK health guidelines. “We absolutely don’t think there would be support for that [huge cut], or that it is necessary,” said Stark. “A 20% cut seems cautious and prudent to us, but it is true that if you were to shift more to plant-based diets, the [net-zero] target would be easier overall.”

The UK landscape will also significantly change by 2050, if emissions are stopped. A fifth of all farmland – 15% of land – will have been converted to tree planting and growing biofuel crops.

This is essential because some activities, like cattle rearing and aviation, will still emit greenhouses gases in 2050. The CCC target is for “net zero”, with these residual emissions cancelled out by taking carbon out of the air.

New trees are the simplest solution but tree planting must triple from today’s rate, the CCC said, meaning more than 107 hectares (267 acres) a day of new forests from now until 2050. That would be 1.5bn trees, according to Beccy Speight, the chief executive of the Woodland Trust, who said new woods would also help reverse huge losses of wildlife in the UK: “There is a potential win-win here.” Guy Smith, at the National Farmers Union, said it was working towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by 2040.

Flying is included in the net zero target of the CCC, which said there could be a limited expansion of aviation if airlines can cut their emissions per flight, potentially with electric planes for short-haul flights. A few nuclear power stations may still be running, if they can compete on cost, though they are not necessary to meet the target, the CCC said.

read more here

SEE ALSO:  The Guardian’s editorial supporting this:

‘Do it now’: UK must set zero-carbon target for 2050, say official advisers

from The Guardian

by @jonathanwatts

The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken.

Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature.

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.

read more here

 

SA:  Cause what good is a wall on this planet without a roof too?

Or to put it another way, imagine the inhabitants of the spaceship below holding those kinds of signs.  The fact that all humans share exactly the same thing – a single spaceship – makes that thought kind of completely ridiculous.