Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
Ben Blanchard , - Reuters
Stephan: By exiting and disparaging trade agreements Trump has opened up an opportunity door for the Chinese, and they are only to happy to step over the threshold into enhanced world stature. Here's one of the reasons I think this.
China’s President Xi Jinping during the official welcoming ceremony in front of the Presidential Palace, in Helsinki, Finland April 5, 2017.
Credit: Lehtikuva/Martti Kainulainen/via Reuters
BEIJING — China will gather its friends and allies together for its biggest diplomatic event of the year in May, a summit on its New Silk Road plan, with most Asian leaders due to attend but only one from a G7 nation, the Italian prime minister.
President Xi Jinping has championed what China formally calls the “One Belt, One Road” or OBOR, initiative to build a new Silk Road linking Asia, Africa and Europe, a landmark program to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure projects including railways, ports and power grids.
China has dedicated $40 billion to a Silk Road Fund and the idea was the driving force behind the establishment of the $50 billion China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced on Tuesday a list of those attending the conference, including some of China’s most reliable allies – Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Cambodian […]
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Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
Stephan: Here's some more bad news about what is happening in Greenland. The net result of this will be an increase in sea rise.
The massive Petermann Glacier looks like it is ready to calve
Something caught Stef Lhermitte’s eye last week as he pored over satellite images of Northwest Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, one of the largest glaciers in Greenland.
“I saw a small line and thought ‘that seems new,’ ” said Lhermitte as he described the discovery he made, almost by accident, as he was testing a methodology to detect melt that requires making animated GIFs from the black and blue grainy images of Greenland captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite.
Lhermitte, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, checked other satellite records and determined the crack showed up in July 2016, but to his knowledge, had not been noticed by anyone.
Greenland is responsible for about one-third of the sea-level rise the Earth is experiencing, so a new crack and potential breaking off of one its largest glaciers is concerning.
Perfect timing
Lhermitte took his findings directly to Twitter, tweeting several images of the crack and searching for help determining its significance.
“Several of my […]
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Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
Chris D’Angelo, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Finally someone, a Democrat, has had enough with the Republican climate change denial psychosis, and is separating the facts from the Rightist BS. Bravo Representative Don Beyer.
Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia’s 8th District
WASHINGTON — Fed up with the anti-science nonsense that now dominates hearings of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, vice ranking member Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) has launched a project to make it easier for scientists to set the record straight.
The appropriately named FactCheck Project was sparked in particular by last month’s hearing on climate change, which committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) stacked with three likeminded climate change skeptics. The panel’s Democratic minority got to name one witness: Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who advocates for urgently tackling human-caused climate change.
To no one’s surprise, the hearing’s main focus was not how to tackle […]
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Tuesday, April 18th, 2017
Stephan: If you have been reading SR for the past decade you know about my strong feelings that the U.S. will be facing three big migrations by the end of the century: 1) away from the coasts because of sea rise; 2) out of the southwest because of lack of water and high temperatures; 3) out of certain central states because of recurrent extreme weather events like tornadoes. It gives me no pleasure to be accurate. Here's how the trend is emerging in the media.
Nearly half of a million people were displaced from New Orleans and surrounding coastal communities by Hurricane Katrina.
Credit: UPI/Vincent Laforet/Pool
A handful of inland cities in the United States are likely to be significantly impacted by inland migration as people flee rising sea levels. According to new research out of the University of Georgia, cities like Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix could see large influxes of people in the coming decades.
“We typically think about sea level rise as a coastal issue, but if people are forced to move because their houses become inundated, the migration could affect many landlocked communities as well,” Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, said in a news release.
Researchers believe their study — published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change — is the first to look at the displacement and relocation patterns of large coastal populations.
Scientists believe sea-level rise will trigger movements similar to those observed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The movements […]
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Tuesday, April 18th, 2017
Joseph Nevins, - truthout
Stephan: The Trump administration is not going to do anything about climate change; it is busy deregulating so that industry can pollute more extensively, so that patients have less protections, and so more national resources can be compromised.
But there is a more powerful force: The collective intention of large numbers of people expressed through attitudes and their daily life-affirming choices -- the Quotidian Choice. We need to start thinking about this.
Activists display signs in the People’s Climate March in Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 21, 2014.
Credit: Chris Yakimov
During the negotiations over the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015, Sunita Narain, an environmental activist from India, argued for a focus on the ties between global inequality and consumption by the relatively wealthy. “An inconvenient truth is that we do not want to talk about consumption or lifestyle,” she asserted.
It may be difficult to recall following Donald Trump’s inauguration, but it was little more than a year ago when delegates representing the world’s governments approved the United Nations accord. They pledged to prevent a temperature increase “well below” two degrees Celsius, and to strive to limit it to 1.5 degrees, over the average global temperature before the Industrial Revolution.
If there was hope that the United States would take the steps needed to meet its commitments through decisive action by the federal government, it is now diluted markedly.
It’s not that the Obama administration was leading the United States on […]
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