Liberal philanthropy is dooming the planet to climate disaster

EXCLUSIVE: Liberal philanthropy is dooming the planet to climate disaster, documents reveal

A 2017 paper in Science lead authored by Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, concluded that global carbon emissions would have to be cut in half by 2020, then cut in half again by 2030, and then cut in half again each decade out to 2050.
This entails that emissions should be slashed by about 75 percent by 2030, and by nearly 95 percent by 2050 to stay within a safe climate.
A Nature Geoscience study similarly found that “limiting warming to 1.5C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation.” Read More

Credit Rating Agency Issues Warning On Climate Change To Cities

One of the largest credit rating agencies in the country is warning U.S. cities and states to prepare for the effects of climate change or risk being downgraded.

In a new report, Moody's Investor Services Inc. explains how it assesses the credit risks to a city or state that's being impacted by climate change — whether that impact be a short-term "climate shock" like a wildfire, hurricane or drought, or a longer-term "incremental climate trend" like rising sea levels or increased temperatures.

Also taken into consideration: "[communities] preparedness for such shocks and their activities in respect of adapting to climate trends," the report says.

"If you have a place that simply throws up its hands in the face of changes to climate trends, then we have to sort of evaluate it on an ongoing basis to see how that abdication of response actually translates to changes in its credit profile," says Michael Wertz, a Moody's vice president.

(https://www.npr.org/2017/12/01/567843604/credit-rating-agency-issues-warning-on-climate-change-to-cities?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Coral Reef Building and Energy Generation Protect Coast Lines

CCell - Turning waves into rock

We use energy from the waves to power underwater electrolysis to form limestone rock around steel mesh placed on the seabed. This technique was pioneered by BioRock to create artificial reefs, accelerating the accretion of limestone from 100s of years to less than 5.

CCell is an innovative technology that moves with the waves to simultaneously harness and dampen energy within the waves.

CCell and BioRock together, form a natural synergy, with an independent renewable energy source that enables large scale application of the BioRock technique. Read More

A lesson from Hurricane Irma: capitalism can’t save the planet – it can only destroy it

But there’s a flaw. Hurricanes do not respond to market signals. The plastic fibres in our oceans, food and drinking water do not respond to market signals. Nor does the collapse of insect populations, or coral reefs, or the extirpation of orangutans from Borneo.

The unregulated market is as powerless in the face of these forces as the people in Florida who resolved to fight Hurricane Irma by shooting it. It is the wrong tool, the wrong approach, the wrong system.

There are two inherent problems with the pricing of the living world and its destruction. The first is that it depends on attaching a financial value to items – such as human life, species and ecosystems – that cannot be redeemed for money. The second is that it seeks to quantify events and processes that cannot be reliably predicted.

Environmental collapse does not progress by neat increments. You can estimate the money you might make from building an airport: this is likely to be linear and fairly predictable. But you cannot reasonably estimate the environmental cost the airport might incur. Climate breakdown will behave like a tectonic plate in an earthquake zone: periods of comparative stasis followed by sudden jolts. Any attempt to compare economic benefit with economic cost in such cases is an exercise in false precision. https://goo.gl/1uBm3E

Seas could rise up to 1.6 meters by 2100: study

May 3 2011 - Quickening climate change in the Arctic including a thaw of Greenland's ice could raise world sea levels by up to 1.6 meters by 2100, an international report showed on Tuesday. 

Such a rise -- above most past scientific estimates -- would add to threats to coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai. It would also, for instance, raise costs of building tsunami barriers in Japan.

"The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic," according to the Oslo-based Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), which is backed by the eight-nation Arctic Council.

"In the future, global sea level is projected to rise by 0.9 meters (2ft 11in) to 1.6 meters (5ft 3in) by 2100 and the loss of ice from Arctic glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet will make a substantial contribution," it said. The rises were projected from 1990 levels. More >>>