Ecoshock Show Notes

Dark Climate - Now and Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 11 May 2016 15:42:00 -0700

Seas rising much faster, super storms in the coming decades, doubling and re-doubling of polar ice melt - new Hansen paper. We talk with co-author Isabella Velicogna, and with Ottawa climate scientist Paul Beckwith. Also: the Canadian super fire at Fort McMurray: can the tar sands burn? Radio Ecoshock 160511

WELCOME

It's about 90 degrees, or 29 Celsius, outside my door, in the early Canadian spring. Crazy weather, the same super heat that set northern Alberta on fire. We'll talk about the the climate connection, and ask the question: "can the tar sands burn?" - later in this program.

First, though it seems less exciting, we're going to begin a series about the most important scientific paper of this new century. Dr. James Hansen led a team of international scientists who completely revise the science of climate change. Seas rising much faster, super storms in the coming decades, doubling and re-doubling of polar ice melt. It's a climate thriller, and we all get to live in the new disturbed world. I'm Alex. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on soundcloud right now!

Angels arrested photo courtesy of fossilfreemu.org - at a Blockade of the coal facility at Newcastle Harbour, Australia May 8, 2016.

PAUL BECKWITH ON THE PAPER BY HANSEN ET AL

The scientist who warned the U.S. Congress about dangerous climate change in 1988 is back. Dr. James Hansen, who recently retired as head of NASA's Goddard Institute, says we're going to be hit much sooner and harder than we've been told by mainstream science. Hansen says the two degree Centigrade upper limit to human-induced global warming, as agreed at the Paris climate summit in December 2015 - is not just unsafe. It is plainly very dangerous for humans and all life as we know it.

James Hansen and more than a dozen other world scientists published a monumental 66 page scientific paper in March. The full title is: "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 o C global warming could be dangerous". Find the abstract (very informative) here, or read the full text version here.

A transcript of Hansen's "Video Abstract" can be found here at Columbia University,

The public has hardly heard the news, and there's a lot to hear.

I've called up a regular Radio Ecoshock correspondent to help us sort out what this new Hansen paper says. Paul Beckwith teaches climate science at the University of Ottawa. He has two Masters degrees and is developing his PhD thesis on abrupt climate change.

So James Hansen, perhaps the world's foremost climate scientist, leads this new and shocking intrepretation of recent science - and the political and public reaction is... crickets basically. Why is it taking so long for people to get this?

The paper covers so much - polar ice melt, sea level, super storms, ocean mixing. It's so long, that few people have read it all. Maybe this master paper is a response by Dr. Hansen and his co-authors to the obvious short-comings of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's like an alternative climate report.

I come away with one big place to start: it's not global heating like one or two degrees, but the big changes in the ocean we don't hear about. Jim Hansen suggests we worry less about the temperature outside, and more about the ocean energy imbalance. I hope to have more on that in a coming show.

There's a pattern at both Poles where the surface water may actually be getting cooler, and it's warmer down below. Paul explains that stratification, and how the warmer water can get under the grounding lip of glaciers, moving more ice toward the sea. The new Hansen paper suggests that warmer water at the ice grounding lines matters more in Antarctica, and less on Greenland.

The more conventional modelling scientists are still suggesting 1 to 2 meters of sea level rise by the end of this century. This new paper finds there could be 1 meter of sea level rise by 2050, and several meters by 2100. That means the end of many major coastal cities around the world. Paul Beckwith goes further. If we just compute the doubling time of ice melt, he says that adds up to 7 meters of sea level rise by 2070. Beckwith has a video on You tube where he explains how that could be possible. Watch that original video here, and his update here.

THE COMING SUPER STORMS

Let's get to one of James Hansen's favorite topics, the coming super storms. To understand this, we have to go back about 130,00 years. That's a time when, Hansen says, differences in ocean temperatures led to the formation of giant waves that swept boulders weighing over a thousand tons high up on Caribbean islands. The paper features photos of these sea-tossed rocks. Some other scientists disagree that these storms will happen. I'll cover that in a coming show.

Right in this new paper, the authors say that what happened in the Eemian period, 130,00 years ago, may not be a good predictor for what is coming for us. But that isn't a good reason to calm down and worry less. At one point in the Eemian, it was only about 1 degree C warmer than today (a level we are approaching rapidly) - and yet sea levels were tens of meters higher than now.

Paul finds two things missing in this paper by Hansen. First: there is no mention of disturbance of the Jet Stream, and all the changes that makes to our weather, seen even now. The link to melting of Arctic sea ice is not part of the calculations. Second, and this is close to Paul Beckwith and the AMEG group (Arctic Methane Emergency Group) -Hansen doesn't factor in methane coming up in the Arctic, as a jolt to warming, and a positive feedback.

Listen to or download this interview with Paul Beckwith on the Hansen paper in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

A SUMMARY OF PAUL BECKWITH'S 9 PART REVIEW OF THE HANSEN-LED PAPER

If you are looking for my interview with Hansen co-author Isabella Velicogna, please scroll down a few pages in this blog. My review of the Fort McMurray fires, asking what happens if they burn the tar sands operations - follows that.

Paul did a 9-part series of You tube videos on this paper. Here are my notes on that 9-part Beckwith series, with Paul's text and links to each.

PART 1: Two degree Celsius Global Temperature Rise is Highly Dangerous

Published on Jul 23, 2015

"My first of a series of videos examine highlights of Hansen et al., a landmark 66 page paper with 16 authors titled "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2 oC Global Warming is Highly Dangerous"

A previous warm period about 130,00 years ago, is the Eemian - sea level 5-9 meters higher than today, and enormous storms, not seen in the Holocene. Temp was up to 1 deg higher - may have been less "we're almost there". But our drivers and rates of change are higher than ever seen in paleologic record.

Key finding is non-linear ice sheet disintegration is happening now. (Paul has looked at doubling period and asks if there could be 7 meter sea level rise by 2070).

The ocean is warming, especially 1-2 kilometers down. In the Arctic and Antarctic this is the grounding level of massive ice shelves. When ice shelves go, it's like removing a cork, which will speed up movement of ice sheets toward the sea.

The vertical ventilation in Antarctica is reducing - ocean stratification.

Another key finding is that increased ice melting decreases the surface temp of ocean. Which could explain the cold blob south of Greenland. That can create a pressure difference (baroclinicity) that can lead to extremely high winds, and thus changes to ocean circulation pattern. The high winds can generate high waves over very large distances. Geologic evidence shows them rolling from southeast to southwest, arriving in the Bahamas, 30 meters high, 20 meters in Bermuda. (30 meters is about 100 feet). These waves are big enough to sink ships, possibly ending ship traffic at that time and place.

Another key finding, during late Emian sea level rose 2-3 meters in a few decades. It's an "enormous catastrophic rise" Paul says.

Another key: in ocean circulation over 500 to a thousands years or more, these natural time frames no longer apply to rates of change today.

In summary 2 degrees C warming is highly dangerous.

BECKWITH VIDEO TWO ON THE HANSEN PAPER

Part 2: Humanity at a Crossroads. Today...

Published on Jul 23, 2015

"In the classic movie "A Christmas Carol" miser Scrooge was visited by 3 ghosts, of past, present and future. Humanity is Scrooge, and Paleoclimate is the past ghost, while extreme weather events increasing in frequency, severity and duration, extensive fires, methane emissions and ocean acidification are the parent ghost. The ghost of the future that will be if we continue our present fossil fuel combustion pathway is very dire..."

If the oceans become more stratified, with less circulation, then the "sink" ability of the ocean to capture our excess CO2 is reduced.

BECKWITH VIDEO THREE ON THE HANSEN PAPER

Part 3: Sea Level 5 to 9 meters Higher Than Now

Published on Jul 23, 2015

"In the last warm interval on Earth (called the Eemian), global temperatures were likely only +0.2 or +0.3 degrees Celsius warmer than today (+1 degrees maximum), and sea level was +5 to +9 meters higher. Are we rapidly heading there NOW?"

BECKWITH VIDEO FOUR ON THE HANSEN PAPER

Part 4: An Ocean Full of 30 meter Tall Waves.

Published on Jul 23, 2015

"Near the end of the previous warm period (Late-Eemian) when the sea level was +5 to +9 meters higher than today, persistent long period long wavelength waves 30 meters high battered the Bahamas coastline. Will we see these massive storm generated waves soon? No ship could survive this..."

PART 5

Part 5: Evidence for Ocean Circulation Disruption

Published on Jul 24, 2015

"North Atlantic Ocean sediment cores from the sea floor provide age information on ocean temperature, ocean circulation and ice sheet destabilization inferred from ice rafted debris (IRD - rocks carried by icebergs then dropped to sea floor when ice melts). Following Hansen et al. I discuss the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) and the SMOC (Southern Meridional Overturning Circulation) changes and connections."

PART 6

Part 6: Climate Simulations for Ice Sheet Melt Water into Oceans

Published on Jul 24, 2015

"I discuss Hansen et al. climate modelling methods and results. Main results show that ice cap melt on Greenland and/or Antarctica injects fresh water into oceans near respective continents causing rapid sea level rise and shuts down AMOC and/or SMOC leading to enormous global climate disruption, including massive storms."

At 10:30 mintues, Beckwith discusses how changing ocean currents can affect storms in the North Atlantic. Winds from N.E. to S.W. can create super storms. If you increase winds speed 10 or 20 percent it can increase storm power up to twice. "Enormous waves across the North Atlantic would eliminate ship traffic" because no ship is built to withstand 30 meter waves (100 feet high).

It sounds like terrible news for the Caribbean, but what does it mean for Europe? or North America?

PART 7

Part 7: Earth Energy Imbalance and Southern Ocean Controls

Published on Jul 24, 2015

"Earth system Energy Imbalance causes warming when more heat is trapped than released. Forcing from orbital changes, albedo changes and greenhouse gas changes are discussed per Hansen et al. The vital role of the Southern Oceans on CO2 and temperature, as well as subsurface ocean temperature and ice sheet destabilization leading to rapid nonlinear sea level rise is also discussed."

The Southern Ocean is the "gateway to the global deep ocean". It also controls S. Ant meltwater rate and global sea level rise.

PART 8

Part 8: Modern Evidence of Abrupt Melt in Greenland and Antarctica and Ocean Changes

Published on Jul 24, 2015

"Modern data on ocean circulation changes in AMOC-Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and SMOC-Southern MOC are examined. Abrupt changes are occurring today."

Circulation has already changed since the 1980's. Talks about the "Polynyas" which create pools that raise the heat. They have become more rare in Antarctica, saying that heat is staying in the deeper ocean.

Ice core data from Antarc. from ocean sediments show 8 episodes of very large ice flux - largest 14,600 yrs ago, meltwater pulse 1a - 1-3 meters sea level rise per century for several centuries. We have less ice to start with now, but the forcing is much more rapid.

Seasonal sea ice is growing in Antarctica.

At 8:20 minutes Paul discusses the problem of "doubling rate" vs a linear projection as the reason why IPCC projections are always so low, compared to reality.

He describes the regions of Antarctic most at risk.

PART 9

Part 9: Summary: Ice Cap Melt and Sea Level Rise in our Anthropocene

Published on Jul 24, 2015

"With BAU (Business As Usual) humanity faces a very abrupt future of misery; including rapid 5 to 9 meter sea level rise taking out coastal cities around the planet. I analyze findings from the landmark Hansen et al. paper titled "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2 degree Celsius Global Warming is Highly Dangerous".

Paul begins by discussing at what point global warming really began - 8,000 years ago, the 1960's or what?

Rapid sea level rise may begin sooners than predicted by mainstream climate science so far. This could be do to changes in ocean circulation, and warming waters reaching the grounding lines for ice shelves in Arctic and Antarctica, leading to non-linear increase in melting and sea level rise, impossible to avoid on our current path.

Greenland, Hansen says, does not slope toward the sea, and so may not melt as fast as Antarctica. Paul disagrees, partly due to loss of sea ice, and so no latent heat/cooling, leading to non-linear melting.

With more melting, stronger winds, and long wave trains, we can expect huge waves on top of higher sea level, as happened before.

6:20 "in real life things are happening faster than in the models"

The 2 degree "safe" guard-rail is not safe at all. It leads to sea level rise of several meters, changes in ocean circulation, slow-down of AMOC etc.

Global temperature change is not the best metric. "It gives a false sense of security", because it hides heat going into the ocean. What is key is the energy imbalance. Hansen says CO2 needs to be reduced to 350 ppm, not just a slash in emissions. Various methods are possible.

According to Hansen we have to reduce emissions by about 6% a year, to reach 350 ppm by 2100. Paul calls it a "landmark paper".

That video series by Paul Beckwith operates like a mini-course in climate change. Of course, Paul has created several videos to teach climate change to all of us. Find his series at paulbeckwith.net, or by searching You tube for "Beckwith".

On radio, we discussed what might be the biggest scientific paper of this decade, if not this century. It's from a team of scientists led by the famous Dr. James Hansen. The title is "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ?C global warming could be dangerous". I'll be doing more interviews and analysis as we go along. Dr. Hansen agreed to do an interview for Radio Ecoshock, but at this writing, he has not shown up yet.

HANSEN CO-AUTHOR AND ICE EXPERT ISABELLA VELICOGNA

Yes, Isabella Velicogna is a co-author on the new paper led by James Hansen. She's also a power researcher in her own right. Educated in Italy, Isabella has a collection of roles with NASA'S Jet Propulsion Lab, the CIRES Institute at the University of Colorado - and she's an Associate Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.

On Radio Ecoshock, you've heard me talk about the pair of satellites called GRACE. These twins in space can measure changes of gravity in land, sub-surface waters, and ice at the poles. Isabella Veligogna can use that information to "study the mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and glaciers worldwide, in response to climate warming."

That's just part of her expertise, including research on the high Arctic water cycle, and projections of sea level rise due to climate change. All this fits perfectly into the new publication that is rocking the science world. It's a long paper with a long title: "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 oC global warming could be dangerous".

Dr. Isabella Velicogna

I ask many questions about the process of ice melt in Antarctica, rather than the more popularly reported loss of ice in the Arctic. That is because several scientists have told me what happens in Antarctica will determine the long time geography and fate of the world. There is so much ice there, just one glacier like the Totten glacier can raise global mean sea level by over one meter. NASA has already said the melting of the Totten glacier is "unstoppable".

Isabella explains the total ice loss at the South Pole, and the most at-risk areas. Frankly, I got yet another education just talking with her. You can too.

Listen to or download this interview with Isabella Velicogna in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

COULD THE TAR SANDS OPERATIONS CATCH FIRE, EXPLODE, OR BURN FOR YEARS?

In the Radio show, I do an off-the-cuff talk with Paul Beckwith on the climate ties to the Fort McMurray fires. I took some heat myself for posting a You tube video, in the early days of the fire, suggesting the tar sands themselves make super fires more dangerous. That's just scientific fact, but some posters called me bad names.

Watch my short controversial You tube video here. Or just listen to the audio here.

Here is a list of the best articles about the fires, in my opinion:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2087214-canadas-huge-wildfires-may-release-carbon-locked-in-permafrost/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-08/alberta-s-vicious-wildfires-spread-to-suncor-oil-sands-site

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/catastrophic-canadian-wildfire-is-a-sign-of-destruction-to-come/

http://thetyee.ca/News/2016/05/07/Brace-New-Era-Infernos/

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/the-fort-mcmurray-disaster-getting-beyond-is-it-climate-change

I'll be having meteorologist Jeff Masters on in a future show, helping me to imagine what the Hansen-type superstorms could look like.

BREAKING NEWS!!!! (irony alert)

=================================

Bloomberg reports smoke from the fire complex has reached the tar sands operations of SunCor, just north of Fort McMurray. Already the size of Luxembourg, the fire is expected to double in size in 24 hours. It may burn for months, since only prolonged rain can stop it. The Canadian Bank of Montreal has revised Canada's economic prospects downward, as more tar sands production facilities close. Millions of barrels of oil per day have stopped flowing. As a world-class superfire, this will be Canada's most expensive natural disaster, with expected costs over 7 billion dollars U.S. and counting.

=================================

That sounds exciting doesn't it? I said we must avoid seeing the climate crisis as entertainment. The news knows how to show us striking video, with music that makes us feel part of great events. They know we will flock to the news coverage, and then see their advertising, to buy more products that are part of the problem. It's our human nature to be fascinated with catastrophe, and so climate disaster sells. Even greens become glued to extreme weather porn generated by an unstable atmosphere.

We are also drawn to something new. Here is a new question for you: can the tar sands operations burn, and what happens if they do?

Robert Scribbler writes: "Smoke plume analysis indicates that the northern extent of this monstrous fire is just 3 miles to the south of the nearest tar sands facility."

Now the big blotches of tar sands production lands have been mostly deforested, which is part of their massive environmental damage. So there are fewer trees to burn there. But my question is: can the tar sands lands themselves burn? The industry says the bitumen is too dispersed in sand to burn. But I wonder if anyone knows what happens when such super-heated fire storms arrive. Dr. Michael Flannigan of the University of Alberta told us such hot fires can burn several feet into the ground. What happens when that arrivesin the pits of exposed bitumen? No one really knows.

Plus the tar sands operations have gigantic tailings and wastewater ponds which are loaded with various types of petrochemicals. They have storage tanks full of flammable stuff.

Along those lines, I heard a television interview with a fire chief who worried that a gas storage plant near the fire could explode. If it did, he said, the blast zone would be 14 kilometers, or 8 and a half miles wide. Emergency workers are justifiably terrified it could blow, and this is just one of a thousand reasons why the people evacuated from Fort McMurray won't be going home any time soon. That was at the Nexen site, north east of Fort McMurray.

The Canadian magazine "Macleans" asked this question. In their article "Could the oil sands catch fire" they write:

"A 2004 article in the U.S. National Fire Protection Association Journal offered a list of the potential fire risks faced by Suncor Energy, one of the oil sands’ biggest producers. It included: 'hydrocarbon spill and pressure fires; storage tank fires; vapour cloud explosions; flammable gas fires; runaway exothermic reactions; and coke and sulfur fires.'"

The article quotes Chelsie Klassen, from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers saying the toxic tailings ponds are not flammable. I'm not so sure. Maybe we'll find out.

What about the giant extraction and processing facilities? Presumably there are pits the size of cities where the tarry bitumen has been exposed by skimming off up to 75 feet of the soil. If those catch fire, is it possible that like peat fires, they could burn for years? Just consider the amount of carbon this would add to the atmosphere, and the lasting smoke which would pour across Western Canada for how long... years? A decade? Is it possible? We don't know, this situation has never happened before. I hope we don't find out, but we might experience a new kind of fire event in Canada, a kind of fire Fukushima.

Beyond strip-mining bitumen, the other type of extraction, called "in situ", involves sinking pipes and literally melting the ground below, to make the sticky tar more mobile, so it can be pumped to the surface. That requires unbelievable amounts of natural gas, which has often been fracked in Northern Alberta and British Columbia. That fracking, and the transmission of gas releases very potent methane in amounts that can be measured by airplanes or even satellites. So there's lots of greenhouse gases before the extraction process even begins.

Then the gas is burned, with more emissions. There must be gigantic gas storage facilities and feeder pipelines all through that area just north of Fort McMurray. We are talking about land the size of smaller European countries. If the fire reaches all that, the explosions and greenhouse emissions would be off the charts, things not seen before on this planet. What if the tar sands operations catch fire and blow? Maybe it didn't happen, this time. It's a huge risk.

WHAT IT TAKES TO CONVERT GOO TO OIL

Tonight while walking, I met a local citizen who told me the tar sands are a clean source of fuel, because Canada has regulations, while there are no environmental regulations in Middle Eastern countries. He obviously doesn't know the highly polluting energy train required to get sticky bitumen out of the ground, whether you mine it or melt it. Even then, it isn't oil. It's a kind of pre-oil.

That bitumen has to be treated with hydrogen, at very high temperatures, blast furnace temperatures, again using tremendous energy with tremendous emissions, to get a heavy prequel to oil. Transport that oil prequel, using more energy, to specialized refineries that can deal with heavy oil, which is again a more intensive process with more emissions, and you get products like diesel fuel.

That's all there is to it, compared to light oil that can be easily pumped out of the ground in the Middle East, or from the sea-bed off Norway. That is why oil from wells requires about 1 barrel of oil to produce up to100 barrels of oil, while the tar sands require the equivalent of about 1 barrel of oil to produce at best about 5 barrels of fuel. The ratio is so low, that if all we had was tar sands oil, civilization as we know it would collapse. There isn't enough return on energy investment to have all the energy left over that we depend on.

That is why the tar sands oil is among the dirtiest energy sources, from an emissions perspective, of any fuel in the world. Even most Canadians don't know this. The people whose paychecks depend directly on the Alberta energy industry don't want to know. In fact, many react with surprising anger when you tell them. And they can say with a straight face that black is white, that tar sands oil is cleaner than oil from Venezuela or Norway.

As American author Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

THEY ALWAYS SAY "WE WILL REBUILD" - EVEN WHEN WE SHOULDN'T

Here the Fort McMurray tragedy becomes another repetition of classic human error. After evey disaster, every politician, local to national, promises "we will rebuild". That's what they said after Hurricane Sandy, or Hurricane Katrina. That's what they always say.

Fort McMurray was already entering a stage of collapse when the fire hit. Rebuilding everything is the bridge to nowhere.

Look, I have family who evacuated from Fort McMurray, with nothing but their car, their kids and their dog. The harsh truth is that many, many people in Fort McMurray were one credit card payment away from utter bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost as expensive oil was crushed by cheap Middle Eastern oil, and cheap fracking oil.

The sad truth is that most Canadians, who used to be great savers, instead became addicted to debt. They built mini-mansions in the northern wilderness at inflated prices. They bought monster pickup trucks for $70,000 dollars, on 8 year payment schemes. They bought off-road vehicles, boats, clothes, the lot, mostly on credit. Because a person with a high school education could make over $100,000 a year, Fort McMurray became a party that could never end. Drug use and drug crime was phenmomenal for the size of the city. It was all ripe for a fall, and it fell.

Countless evacuees are showing up on the news with absolutely nothing, after ten years or more working in the gold mine that was the tar sands. They were on the edge of bankruptcy, with no savings. And now they are climate evacuees who don't know they are climate evacuees. The heart-ache is just beginning. The bill to the taxpayer is just beginning. This will take years to sort out, and some people will never recover. The people of Fort McMurray will fade out of the headlines, perhaps pushed out by the next extreme weather event, or giant storm. But the blow to Alberta and Canada will go on and on.

It's come to the point where trees are now a threat to any city. My own home could be next, or yours. There is practically nowhere that cannot burn out of control. Ask people in Australia, California, or the Himilayas, Indonesia, almost anywhere. I'm sure some cities will try to cut down the forest around them, maybe even limit tree planting within city limits. That just releases more carbon, and reduces the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide.

As Paul Beckwith says, we have entered the age of the climate casino. You could be the next climate evacuee. No city is safe, from some sort of climate extreme. Nobody is immune.

THE ONLY SOLUTION

The only solution is to recognize reality and tackle the root of the problem. That means converting away from the fossil fuel-based civilization. That process begins with closing down the worst and most polluting forms of fossil fuels. At the top of that list are two fuels: coal and tar sands.

Coal in Western countries is going bankrupt. It still fuels most of India, China, and much of the developing world. The tar sands could shut down tomorrow, and the oil glut would still continue. We don't need them. Canada must stop promising to rebuild that deadly infrastructure, stop subsidizing the dirtiest oil, and adopt a plan to close down these facilities entirely within five years, if not immediately. That's what it takes.

The alternative is to keep on suffering, if we can keep on at all.

I'm Alex Smith. This is Radio Ecoshock, for the world.

CLIMATE MYTHS

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 4 May 2016 18:01:00 -0700

This week: why knowing more about climate change could help you stall doing anything about it. Decision expert Joe Arvai joins us. We'll end with a voice from the first refugees from rising seas. But first, an industry insider says recycling is a myth that just postpones the inevitable collapse.

Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

HOT NEWS (not in this show) FORT MCMURRAY FIRE REACTION: WHAT DID THEY THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

Canada's Tar Sand city, Fort Mac, had to be completely evacuated today due to the sudden arrival of intense fires. At over 70,000 people, it's the largest evacuation in the history of the Canadian province of Alberta. Some homes and businesses have burned for sure. At least one gas station exploded. Gas supplies ran out as panicked residents tried to fill their big trucks and SUV's.

My gut reaction is simple: what the heck did they think was going to happen? If we pump out the world's most polluting energy source, the result is a changed atmosphere. Nothing stays the same, and bad things happen.

The temperature that third day of May in Fort Mac was 32 degrees, about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. That's at least 30 degrees F. above normal, and way past any record heat for the day. The whole Arctic is heating wildly, and guess what, that includes the sub-Arctic where we find Fort Mac and the tar sands operations. This fire is no surprise event.

The humitidy rating was 14 percent. If the humidity and temperature were the same, it would be extreme fire risk. This was worse than that. The Jet Stream entered one of it's blocking phases which locks in this strangely hot May weather. That's partly due to another record low set for the extent of Arctic sea ice last winter. New science is just out, from Jennifer Francis and others, explaining how this works.

Large parts of the Boreal forest, in Canada, Scandinvia and Russia will burn. That will add even more carbon to the skies, and reduce forest cover. The forest "sink" is gone.

The same sort of blocking mechanism in the Jet Stream held a steady rain over Houston Texas last month. The floods were monumental. Houston is another oil capital. And again we have to ask: What did they think was going to happen?

As we saw with a flooded Calgary Alberta a couple of years ago, the self-styled "oil capital of Canada" - guess what: oil production facilities and the cities that support that industry are not immune to climate change. That whole extended system, on which we all still depend, is exposed to continuous interruptions and damage from climate disruption.

NO, I'M NOT HAPPY ABOUT THE FIRE AT FORT MCMURRAY

Don't get me wrong. I don't gloat about the troubles of others. My own village was home to hundreds of fire-fighters last summer. We couldn't go outside for two weeks because of the smoke. We housed three fire refugees. These are real people, with real lives, and I feel for them, for the worry their kids feel, all of it.

I also know I filled up my tank with gas today. It wasn't likely from the tar sands, or maybe it was. Nobody tells us where it come from, and we have not consumer choice. Anyway, I'm guilty too, although I try, and keep trying, to reduce my greenhouse footprint.

Even so, I know the people working in the tar sands need to stop working there. They are directly helping to wreck the world. If the fires burned over the production facilities of the Canadian tar sands, that would be a gift to our grandchildren. Maybe it will help prevent the even worse fire storms, and severe storms of all kinds, developing in the coming decades. One of the world's top climate scientists has just published a monumental paper warning of the coming super-storms. I'll be covering that in coming shows.

The fires at Fort Mac are another desperate sign of the times. We need to wake up before the nightmare becomes the only reality. The evacuated residents should never go back. They will. Some will hate me for saying it. But the future will judge whether we can react to reality, or just go down with the burning ship.

THE MYTH OF RECYCLING - JACK BUFFINGTON

The truth can be difficult to hear. It's even harder when somebody kicks a sacred green cow like recycling. When John Buffington wrote to me about his new book saying recycling is a myth standing in the way to a greener world, I got defensive. When he told me he was a corporate exec for a major American beer company, I told him "no".

But Jack, as he's called, is also a post doctoral researcher at one of the premier universities in Sweden, the country with the lowest landfill rate in the world. Add that to my own doubts that what I "recycle" is actually heading anywhere useful, and here we go, with the new book "The Recycling Myth: Disruptive Innovation to Improve the Environment".

Jack Buffington

In the old days, a person could see the local dump, and maybe pluck out a few things that could be used by someone. Now waste hauling is a huge industry, and you say it's so efficient we don't have to think about the problem, even as much as we did in the 1970's. Is the "success" of the waste industry part of the problem?

Some European countries cut their landfilling by incinerating up to 50% of the waste stream. As someone who has looked into the chlorinated bits and heavy metal particles coming out of those incinerator stacks, this scares the heck out of me. However Buffington says the Swedes at least have some tech to capture those emissions.

These allegedly "green" bottles, like "NatureWorks" from Cargill, do they just naturally biograde? No! It takes an industry process, with few facilities, consumer don't know the difference between PET and PLA. In a landfill it takes up to 1,000 years for these "organic" bottles to decompose.

Why are consumers not told about this really strange industrial process required to "compost" so-called bio-plastics?The city of San Francisco gave up on them.

I loved Buffington's Chapter sub-head tilted "EU SUSTAINABILITY: SLOWING DOWN PLANETARY COLLAPSE". The real deal is: food and drink containers, with a few exceptions, are not designed for recycling at all. Our confidence in the recycling game may be preventing us from going all the way to really natural containers.

We compare recycling in Sweden, Germany, the UK and Japan, and of course America.

In the village where I live, everything except glass is dumped into a single big metal bin. That is hauled "away" and I've heard it is shipped all the way to China to be separated and processed. That sounds insane, and it must be hard on China. What really happens to that trash in China? Buffington says the Chinese have just passed new laws to limit the garbage (literally) coming into that country.

I'm told the last paper recycling mills in Canada are at risk of closing, because these single use "recycling" bins produce paper and carboard soaked in so much food waste they can't be used for quality paper.

For now, the actual value of the materials recycled is less than the cost to grab it out of the waste stream. So what, should we just landfill everything? Buffington dreams of containers that actually help nature. He imagines real solutions involving supercomputers, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing. I worry that's a bunch of cool tech into the mix, hoping that will solve our waste problems.

The other problem with changing current recycling, while we wait for a big solution, is that big solution may never come, just as the problem of nuclear waste disposal was always promised but never came, despite 50 years of high tech.

My final complaint is this statement in his book: "A model of consumer austerity is not only un-american, and anti-evolution, but also unnecessary" I couldn't agree less. I think we need a complete reorganization of civilization to live within the planetary means. Do you really believe we can just tweak the consumer model of society?

John or Jack Buffington does research for the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He's also a specialist in supply chain management for MillerCoors Brewing in Colorado. Buffington has written several books including "Progress, Technology and Seven Billion People: A New Solution for Capitalism".

I think his newset book "The Recycling Myth: Disruptive Innovation to Improve the Environment" is definitely worth the read, whether it's for business people, politicians, - but especially for greens who need to get real about the greenwashing going on about our waste.

Download or listen to this 26 minute interview with Jack Buffington in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

CLIMATE - WHY DO WE CARE? - JOSEPH ARVAI

Does concern about climate change depend on the culture where you live? If you know more about it, will you be more likely to support action? New research has some answers which may surprise you.

Our guest Joseph Arvai is an expert in how humans make decisions. He's the Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. Joe is also co-author of a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Joseph Arvai

"Knowledge as a driver of public perceptions about climate change reassessed" in the journal Nature Climate Change, was published online April 25, 2016. Joseph Arvai is a co-author. Other authors are from the Institute for Environmental Decisions in Zurich, Switzerland.

The group studied cultural attitutudes toward climate change in Canada, China, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Essentially they found people care more about climate change when the human causes are identified. But their interest becomes less when they are told the details about the physics, CO2 levels, and all that.

This is serious for me, as a science broadcaster. I spend a lot of time talking with experts about the details of how Earth systems respond to greenhouse gases. Am I actually "dampening" public concern, and if so, what should I be doing to raise demand for action?

In a presentation Joe Arvai made while at the University of Calgary, you suggested an ethical oil station, with a menu of choices, based on sources, carbon emissions and more. That's a fascinating idea. What if we had informed choice about the fossil fuel products we buy? You can see his talk on You tube here.

IS CALGARY THE NEXT DETROIT?

While he was in Calgary, Arvai startled people by suggesting the oil-dependent economy of Calgary could go downhill fast as Detroit did. That was published in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper - just before the oil prices crashed along with the Calgary employment and real estate scene. In 2013, his argument seemed crazy. Now it seems too plausible.

Download or listen to this 23 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Joe Arvai in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

FIRST CLIMATE REFUGEES - EARTH MATTERS RADIO

The first voices of refugees from rising seas are trickling in. I play you an 8 minute introduction from a half hour program from "Earth Matters" radio in Melbourne, Australia. The people of the remote Cartaret Islands off Papau New Guinea find the sea has turned against them.

Find the rest of the half hour program on refugees from rising seas at Earth Matters, 3CR radio, Australia. The web address is for Earth Matters is www.3cr.org.au/earthmatters. You can find that climate refugee show here.

The Pacific Islanders are running out of time. We did it, nobody helps them, nobody takes responsibility. It's just the start of pulling back from rising seas, first in distant places, then in your own country.

Radio Ecoshock is also out of time for this week. I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

We go out with a bit from my new climate song "Change This Thing".

Earthquake Time Bombs!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 12:50:00 -0700

UK Geo-hazards expert Dr. Bill McGuire ("Waking the Giants") on recent quakes & links to climate change. Oregon Professor Robert Yeats new book "Earthquake Time Bombs" - most cities at risk from quakes or mega-tsunamis.

About 12,000 years ago there was a period of "volcanic storms", so many erupted. The Earth was unstable, rocking and rolling with Earthquakes. Geologists know climate change destabilized the Earth's crust. Bill McGuire wrote an influential article in the Guardian newspaper about this in 2012.

Does that sound too fantastic? The weight of ice miles thick poured into the sea as that latest ice age ended. Released from that weight, land rose. Long-standing pressure points reacted, and the world shook. As the article in Live Science says:

"McGuire conducted a study that was published in the journal Nature in 1997 that looked at the connection between the change in the rate of sea level rise and volcanic activity in the Mediterranean for the past 80,000 years and found that when sea level rose quickly, more volcanic eruptions occurred, increasing by a whopping 300 percent."

Now, after recent big quakes in Japan and Ecuador, with more under-reported quakes around the world, some scientists are beginning to wonder if climate is starting to destabilize geology again. We talk with one of the world's best geophysical hazards experts, Britain's Dr. Bill McGuire, author of "Waking the Giants".

Even if that time of extra volcanoes and quakes is farther into our future, the threat of everyday earthquakes and tsunamis is larger now. That is because so much of the doubled and tripled human population lives near the sea. We've built our mega-cities - and nuclear power plants - within tsunami range. Eight thousand years ago, an earthquake caused an undersea land-slide off Norway. The tsunami raced around the whole North Atlantic, reaching up to 30 meters high - that's well over 90 feet.

Adding to it all: we've globalized the economy based on a network of mega-cities. Several of them sit on well-known faults that are bound to blow, with quakes well above 8 on the Richter scale. The most precarious is the financial hub of Tokyo Japan. We'll talk about what happened the last time Tokyo was nearyl levelled, and the next time, which Japanese scientists say is over 90% likely within the next couple of decades.

The aftershocks would be in the world's shaky financial system. Would a big quake in Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Tokyo be the trigger for a massive collapse in the global economy?

That's why our second guest, Dr. Robert Yeats from Oregon wrote his book "Earthquake Time Bombs". We'll go into that risk in depth.

I'm Alex Smith, as we shake up the world with Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

IS CLIMATE WAKING THE GIANT? DR. BILL MCGUIRE

First Japan and then Ecuador. When major earthquakes strike, the media rush to Dr. William McGuire. He's a Volcanologist and world-known specialist in extreme geologic events. McGuire is Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London. Bill has advised the UK government on global threats, and appears often on TV.

McGuire was also an author of the 2011 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regarding extreme events. His latest book is "Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes."

Dr. Bill McGuire

How could climate change affect earthquakes or volcanic action? One simple way is that in places like Iceland, a thick ice crust has covered over active volcanoes, like the Eyjafjalla Glacier. As that ice melts, it will enable the volcano to explode into the air. As we found out when the Eyjafjallajökull volcanoe erupted in 2010, the shroud of ash can shut down air travel over most of Europe. Research published in Geophysical Research letters tells us about a complicated process when the weight of ice allows land to rise, changing the melting temperature of Earth's crust. That could lead to more volcanoes in Iceland, and perhaps in other currently frozen places.

But that's the simple stuff. We know from geologic research that in previous times of mass ice loss, during global heating, the Earth started to rock and roll. Bill McGuire explains how in his book "Waking the Giant" in this Radio Ecoshock interview.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock 19 minute interview with Bill McGuire in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

So is climate change causing more quakes right now? We don't know, says McGuire. It's still early days for ice melt, despite the billions of tons lost from Greenland and Antarctica each year. There isn't enough signal among the noise to tell, given that there are always some earthquakes every year around the world. We don't yet know exactly when climate change will kick in. The largest impacts, the days of "volcanic storms" could be 5,000 or 50,000 years away. We don't know, and Earth has never had such a rapid trigger as human burning of fossil fuels. Until we know more, this expert says we should be careful about attributing each and every earthquake to climate change.

The deadly 2015 earthquake in Nepal could have a different climate angle. McGuire tells us that a heavier than normal monsoon season (which can be influenced by climate change) - can make the plains below Nepal heavier. This extra mass weighs on the great pressure point as the continent of India crashes into Eurasia. That might increase the quake risk in Nepal.

The only good news, McGuire tells us, is that a heavier ocean (with more meltwater in it) might actually calm the kind of deep ocean tectonic movement that caused the giant tsunami in Japan in 2011 (the one the knocked out the Fukushima nuclear plant). BUT those changes is sea levels and mass may increase the risk of undersea landslides that can create tsunamis, huge waves, around a whole ocean basin.

I hope our east coast North American listeners noticed that on-going threat from a collapse in the Canary Islands. There have been sea-slides before which created massive tsunamis all around the North Atlantic basin, from the United Kingdom to Canada, America, and right over Carribean islands. We really don't have to live on a fault line to be part of Earth's geologic pageant. Or course not everyone agrees that a mega-tsunami is likely. You can find out what a mega-tsunami is here on Wikipedia.

On April 20th, the Seismological Society of America (SSA) began it's 2016 Annual Meeting in Reno, Nevada. High on their list is the Cascadia subduction zone which runs just off the west coast of North America, from northern Vancouver Island in Canada to southern Oregon in the U.S.

There's been enough science to know this pressure point between two massive tectonic plates of the earth moves in a jolt every 400 to 600 years. That last one was in the year 1700. We don't know when the next one will be, but it's due. Aside from possible wreckage in Vancouver, Seattle and other coastal cities - the resulting tsunami would sweep clean the coasts of California and Hawaii. It would probably reach Japan, as it did in 1700.

The really huge threat, not just to the citizens but to the whole financial world, is a big quake - larger than 8 points - in Tokyo.

I read this at the Infowars site (not usually a reliable source):

"Scientists at Tokyo University estimate there is a 98 percent chance that, in the next 30 years, Japan will be hit by an earthquake equivalent to the “Great Kanto” of 1923, which measured 8.9 and killed an estimated 142,800 people. Seismologists at the Japan Meteorological Agency, however, put the odds of this happening at 70 percent."

So I checked those numbers with Bill McGuire. He says the numbers sound right. In any case, when the odds are so great, you can expect a quake relatively soon. Yes modern buildings in Tokyo are better designed for quakes, but McGuire says there are at least 80,000 wooden homes in Tokyo that could burn. In the past, he has called Tokyo "a city waiting to die".

Maybe that's extreme, but considering Japan is already in big financial trouble, still the second or third largest holder of U.S.Treasury bonds (which they could have to cash in), and still one of the top three financial centers of the global economy - a quake there just might trigger the next Great Depression.

Bill McGuire appears in this You tube video where he introduces four major threats. That's for another of his books "Global Catastrophe: A Very Short Introduction".

You can also read Bill's new short story about climate change and mass migration, called "Incoming" - at his web site billmcguire.co.uk.

AUTHOR OF "EARTHQUAKE TIME BOMBS" DR. ROBERT YEATS

You can divide the human population into two kinds of people: those who have experienced a major earthquake, and those who have not. Each thinks differently.

Robert S. Yeats says we don't think about quakes nearly enough. Sooner or later, and likely sooner, a mega-city will be hit with something that makes the 911 terrorist attack in New York look small. His new book is "Earthquake Time Bombs" and he should know: Bob Yeats is a professor emeritus in geology from Oregon State University, author of the book "Living with Earthquakes in California" and co-author of "The Geology of Earthquakes".

Professor Emeritus Robert Yeats

Five years ago, Bob Yeats was interviewed by Scientific American. He told them Port au Prince in Haiti was in jeopardy due to a major fault line and lack of money to prepare. A week later, 100,000 people died in a catastrophic quake. Was that just chance? Yeats says "yes" because no one can predict an earthquake with exact timing. We do talk about new technology which can pick up the advance waves of a quake and give folks a very short warning.

We begin by looking at what we can learn from the deadly earthquake in Kathmandu Nepal - not the smaller one that hit in February 2016, but the big one in April 2015. Aside from the thousands killed, and hundred thousands homeless, some world heritage sites were destroyed, while modern buildings stood. What are we supposed to do to preserve the treasured past?

SHOULD YOU RUN OUTSIDE?

Reading this book, and it's a good read, I was surprised to learn that it's a mistake to go outside. When I was young, I was in the deadly 1971 earthquake in Los Angeles. Everyone ran outside, in their underwear in some cases. We had to look out for teetering palm trees - they have small roots - and power poles, but it seemed better than being crushed in the house. Why stay inside when an earthquake starts to rock and roll?

Yeats tells us about the bartender in a California quake who refused to let his patrons out the door when a quake struck. They would all have been killed by the pile of falling bricks. Certainly downtown in a modern city you might be killed by falling glass from tall buildings. It's a tough question, whether to say in or run out - but Yeats says you have better odds by remaining inside.

The second lesson of the Los Angles quake is that the first three days can be the test of surviving well, or not at all. Gas lines blew up into fires, electricity went out. In a worse quake, food deliveries would stop, and likely food stores would be looted and then empty. Meanwhile there are frightening aftershocks, so you may have to camp outdoors.

Right now Turkey is almost in civil war. Buildings collapse there just because of poor building standards. We talk about the risk in Turkey, and also in giant Mexico City.

Bob and I also discuss quake preparedness, both at the government level and personally.

I spoke to Robert Yeats at his home in Corvalis, Oregon.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock 33 minute interview with Robert Yeats in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

In an email, Bob writes:

"Be sure to tell your listeners about my online book, Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, available at http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/oer/earthquake/index.html. It is available free since the book is used by emergency management. Canadians might legitimately take issue with the gringo-centric term "Pacific Northwest". The subduction zone goes about halfway up the continental margin off Vancouver Island. The tsunami chapter includes a description of the 1962 tsunami off Vancouver Island.

You can track quake activity now from a new mapping system from the US Geological Survey here. It was announced that for the first time, this map also includes human-induced earthquakes from fracking, although I didn't see that on their main map today.

You can monitor world earthquakes daily here.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Will we see a new wave of volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis as climate heating melts the ice caps? Even without that, our just-in-time globally linked financial system is not suited to large-scale disasters. Add in the shaky economic times with unsupportable debt everywhere, mix in dwindling resources and the hits from extreme weather - it might not take much to darken our future.

Meanwhile, where I live in Canada, food prices went up 14% in just the last month. When I talked with our mega-hazards expert Bill McGuire, he had just come in from planting potatoes in their home in the highlands. His family moved out of London. I'm heading out tomorrow to plant my own potatoes in our little village plot. I moved out of Vancouver. Coincidence? Maybe.

I'm Alex Smith. If you can contribute to Radio Ecoshock, please do it here.

Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

WAKING UP TO ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 15:30:00 -0700

Signs climate has entered abrupt shift. Includes Dr. James Hansen's video abstract of new science. Special report on smoke pollution from Indonesian peat fires by correspondent Yew Jin Lee, with 3 experts. Sample from "Unwelcome Guests" #726 "The Flight from Death". Radio Ecoshock 160420

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

You can watch this 3 minute video summary of this program.

Or listen to the program right now on Soundcloud!

BECOMING AWARE OF ABRUPT CHANGE (again)

It's funny how things build up, how they leak out, finally reaching us. A couple returned to my village from their winter in the Philippines. She grew up there. They had never been so hot, and so dry. They are religious, and they prayed for at least a cloud, to get relief from the relentless sun.

Then I get an email from a radio friend abroad. He's Robin Upton, the producer who revived the deep alternative show "Unwelcome Guests" when Lynn Gary retired. Google it, or go to unwelcomeguests.net. As an aside, Robin said the heat was in the unbearable range. Heat laced with humidity - over 35 degrees C, or 95 Fahrenheit became the daily normal, flaring up above that at times. Upton was writing from his adopted home in Bangladesh.

A headline flickered in my brain, a one-off story asking if India was experiencing the worst drought ever. Or maybe the worst since 2002. Hundreds are dying of the heat. Fields have burned off dry. The only hope for millions, maybe hundreds of millions, is an above-average monsoon season, this June to September. In the meantime, in parts of the State of Maharashtra, a Criminal law forbids more than five people at a time at any water supply. The authorities fear conflict, maybe violence.

By the way, the super hot weather is melting snow and ice on Mount Everest faster. Changes in the cryosphere in the Himalayas may even create more heatwaves in Europe! Everybody is included in climate change.

Temp of 44C (111.2F) at VIDP (New Delhi, India) only 1.3C (2.3F) away from all-time April record of 45.3C (113.5F). pic.twitter.com/GDQAbsqWfd
— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) April 16, 2016

One of highest temps in world today was Wardha, India with high of 45C (113F). Heat wave warnings much of India. pic.twitter.com/CL9XW2qv2y
— Anthony Sagliani (@anthonywx) April 16, 2016

Vietnam flashes up in my news and Twitter feed. Along with India and Bangladesh, Vietnam is going through a hot punishing dry period. Vietnam is normally a major exporter of rice. This year, not. A band of suffering has taken over south Asia. Yes, its partly because of El Nino, but a super El Nino adding it's might to the upward pace of global warming. That is one of the world emergencies being blotted out of our minds and screens by endless celebrity trivia, and fake political choices.

Drought in Vietnam

READY FOR EXTREME SOLUTIONS? PAUL BECKWITH ON COOLING WITH NUKES

During this past week, climate scientist Paul Beckwith ventured into our darker places. Paul is frustrated with scientists who are constantly surprise the climate beast is roaring already, in so many ways. The global community has had 21 COP meetings, the Conference of the Parties to a Treaty that has done nothing to stop escalating emissions and committment to a climate-damaged future.

Maybe, Paul wonders, a regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would stir up enough dust, to block enough sun, to cool us down for a few years. The dust of a decent sized nuclear explosion would spread throughout the northern hemisphere, likely cooling the planet an astounding one to one and a half degrees, within weeks. It might put a halt to the wildly growing melting of Greenland. The cooling might save the last of the reflective Arctic Ice cap.

Paul's second video on local nuclear war, explaining further, is here.

It's not just Paul talking about this. You can find a 2010 article on the same subject by respected scientist Alan Robock (and Brian Toon) as published in Scientific American here.

Paul explains we have lots of nuclear weapons. Just one big one from Russia or America would do the job. The cooling would last at least five years, maybe ten. Of course then the world would jump to new heat levels, because we've just hidden another ten years of huge greenhouse gas emissions under the nuclear cloud. Maybe we'd have to blow off two the next time.

As Beckwith stands in front of a screen explaining nuclear winter, I spy in the right hand corner another graphic explaining the nuclear explosion would also demolish most of the protective ozone in the Northern Hemisphere. Those who go outside without wearing a protective bag would ratchet up their risk of cancer. Everyone would have to wear eye protection to prevent blindness - at least everyone who could afford the special sun glasses. I suppose that didn't happen during nuclear tests in the 1960's, but then many seniors are getting multiple skin cancers. I just had one removed.

The whole project goes crazy, and Paul knows that. I think he's just telling us how serious this climate shift is, how we We are deluding ourselves about climate action, and the fact that we are not ready to cool the planet in this emergency.

JAMES HANSEN EXPLAINS WHY THE NEAR FUTURE WILL BE MORE EXTREME

Which brings me to James Hansen. Many of you know Dr. Hansen, the former Director of the Goddard Space Center of NASA - as the man who warned the U.S. Congress about dangerous climate change in 1988. He's struggled with this threat ever since. Last summer, Hansen and a collection of prestigious academics around the world, broke scientific protocol by publicly speaking about their research.

Paul Beckwith did a series of nine videos to explore and explain what Hansen and his co-scientists were saying. Find that video series on You tube, or at paulbeckwith.net.

This March, they officially published their study. It got some press. It's huge. Why haven't I said anything about it on Radio Ecoshock?

There are problems. First, of course I invited Dr. Hansen to appear on this program. I got no reply. I have no inside track to reach him. Hansen can pick his world media for appearances.

Second, there has been a fairly strong chorus of criticism of this paper. Of course a few complained that the process was broken. But Hansen says this scientific warning is much too important to wait a year before telling the population what is coming.

Other scientists simply disagree with either his conclusions, or his method of reaching them. A few have said, for example, that Hansen and team did not reach their vision of an ultra-stormy future in a ruined atmosphere by using models.

The paper refers to evidence of super storms, that could move 1,000 ton boulders inland from the shore. We can see these mysterious boulders on Caribbean islands. This is part of the paleoclimate record, but there are questions about how the Hansen team connected those time to these times. It is possible that the vision of dangerous and damaged decades to come was assumed, rather than proven. At that point, and really before then, I am not skilled enough to judge.

Plus, I think Hansen can be mistaken. I believe his promotion of nuclear energy as a solution for climate change is mistaken. I hope to have more on that in a future show.

That is partly why I haven't covered this story. Another part is a deep feeling that I might not be able to bear knowing what Hansen knows. You see, we've all been sold a picture of slowly developing climate change. In countless interviews scientists have cautioned that melting glaciers like Greenland and Antarctica will take hundred of years at least. The global mean temperature has only been going up slowly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is discussing how we can still burn more fossil fuels, peak in a decade or two, and gradually come down, with quite survivable impacts. The seas will only rise slowly. It's the mantra of changes in geologic time.

If James Hansen is right, all this is wrong. The stakes are enormous, far larger than anything humans have experienced, bigger than the Earth has seen in more than 50 million years. The speed of change may be absolutely new.

I'm slowly collecting my files and links on the Hansen paper. He's gone to the press saying James Hansen is not an extremist. The science is what it is, the rapid changes we are seeing speak loudly. On March 21st, Hansen put out a video on You tube, explaining the work. It's 15 minutes long. If I can't interview the man, we still need to hear him speak. Here is James Hansen with "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms Video Abstract."

In a way, Hansen spoke partly to other scientists. The full impact of what could happen is not explained, although I suppose for a scientist of his calibre to warn "all Hell will break loose in the North Atlantic" is pretty clear. Losing most of our coastal cities by the end of this century is clear enough. The time of the great storms is left to our imagination.

I'm going to re-read this paper, watch another dozen videos, listen to the scientific back talk. I'll come back to this paper when I know more. I'm also in touch with some of the co-authors of the paper, to get their views in coming programs.

MORE RECORD RECORDS IN ABRUPT CLIMATE SHIFT

Meanwhile the recording of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at Manu Loa Hawaii hit another frightening record of 409 parts per million. We started at 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution. During most of my life it has climbed slowly but surely. Now it's peaking, so that the new lows will be the old highs, and the new highs have never been seen on Earth for many millions of years.

Greenland has begun its summer melt season in early April. That's another record. Worrying news is pouring in from a wave of scientific papers around the world. My jaw drops, my nerves tingle, at least a dozen times a week. No one can keep up. All we know is that it's coming, and we are sleepwalking into a new more dangerous world. Sometime soon, or maybe yesterday, we reach the damage that can never be undone in thousands of years.

We are writing our wills for our descendants. Through our actions and inactions, we promise them a damaged atmosphere, with unstable weather and strange seas. The bugs, the plants and the other animals will move and change as they can. The future of our species cannot yet be written, even by the most imaginative science fiction writers, or poets of tragedy. Unless we can pull off a miracle of collective action, the future will be distorted beyond recognition. That is the only certainty.

INDONESIA IS BURNING AGAIN, COVERING EAST ASIA WITH SMOKE - A SPECIAL REPORT

We talked about the dry heat in East Asia, and the possibility of creating dust to cool the world in an emergency. But there is already a long season of smoky haze hanging over a lot of Asia, especially over Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Unfortunately, that smoky is unlikely to cool anything. It comes from burning tropical forests in the islands of Indonesia. There is black carbon in it, which will soak up sunlight and heat. Even worse, a lot of the fires are actually burning peat, that compact vegetative matter just one step below coal for carbon pollution. When the biggest peat fires erupted in Indonesia in a previous El Nino of 1997-98, it launched that country into the top three greenhouse gas polluters in the world. The peat fires continue, as big corporations and small land holders clear and drain the tropical forests, transforming them into palm oil plantations.

Check out this image of smoke from Indonesian fires covering Thailand and beyond

I got an email from listener Yew Jin Lee, offering to ask the experts why haze was covering Malaysia and Singapore yet again. Yew Jin is a Master's student studying Environmental Sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. He carefully crafted this report for Radio Ecoshock.

For Radio Ecoshock, Yew Jin Lee interviews Dr. Helena Varkkey, senior lecturer at the University of Malaya; Alan Tan, professor of the National University of Singapore Law School; and Dr. Rachel Carmenta, Post-Doctoral Fellow at CIFOR " the centre for international forestry research in Indonesia.

Under the smoke, endangered creatures like the Orangutan, and tropical plants, are disappearing as the forests are cut, and peatlands burn. My thanks to Yew Jin for digging into this, with original radio for Ecoshock listeners. Don't forget, you can download this radio report, or share it with others, using thesse permanent links:

Asian haze interview (17 minutes) in CD Quality.

In "Lo-Fi" (lower quality mono, suitable for those with low bandwidth or listening/downloading via mobile phones)

If you want to Tweet or share this on Facebook, here is a shorter URL for the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/jnpwxz8

CLIMATE DENIAL AND OUR DENIAL OF DEATH... UNWELCOME GUESTS

Near the beginning of this program, I mentioned Robin Upton, now a resident of Bangladesh. Robin rescued one of the most popular underground radio shows, called Unwelcome Guests. It was founded by New York State resident Lynn Gary, who ran produced the show for years and years. Unwelcome Guests covers alternative speeches and ideas in depth, with a two hour show each week. You can get it at radio4all.net, or at unwelcomeguests.net.

As we play out this week, you will hear just the start of a full program #726 on the work of Ernest Becker. His book "The Denial of Death" won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1974, just before Ernest died. Only the Western culture struggles so hard to deny the reality of death, and I think that is directly connect to our parallel denial of abrupt climate change.

Good bye from me, Alex Smith for this week.

GREEN SEX OR HOT WORLD

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 16:46:00 -0700

With what we know about climate change, should anyone add another child into that future? We'll get two points of view from women who write about it: Madeline Ostrander and Alisha Graves. Then we hear recent science from Dr. Marcus Donat proving extreme rainfall events, and extreme drought will continue and get worse as the planet warms.

I'm Alex Smith. Buckle up, and off we go, in this week's Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

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MADELINE OSTRANDER - SHOULD WE HAVE MORE CHILDREN?

When we talk about "The Conversation" it is usually the far-too-late talk about sex by parents with their kids, who already know all that. Today, we are going to re-label "the conversation". It's an inner talk you have with yourself, and and a careful dialog you might share with close friends. The question is touchy and heavy: knowing the climate is going to be wrecked, with huge consequences for humans and nature - should I bring a child into that world?

As Madeline Ostrander put's it: "How do you decide to have a baby when climate change is remaking life on earth?" That's the title of her latest article in The Nation magazine. Ostrander is also a contributing editor at Yes! Magazine.

Journalist Madeline Ostrander

Beyond the personal decision to have a child, there is often an indirect pressure, in one direction or another, by the previous generation, by the grand-parents. I am an example. We had two children, and they revolutionized my life in many good ways. But now I worry a little too much about our grandchild and his future. Part of me is quietly glad our other child has not had kids. But then I am sad for what that grown-up will miss that I had.

Most North Americans and Europeans can never again experience what I had, in community, but more especially with nature. There were empty lots and it was safe to play in them without adults watching. There were woods within easy walking distance. We spent two months of every summer on an island in a Canadian lake. Nature and I are siblings. For millions of people, who think they are well off, their children can probably never experience this. Perhaps we can say, even without climate change, there are reasons not to have children in this civilization, in the state it's in.

There are a few pockets left of natural sanity in all countries. So the question becomes not only "should I/we have this baby" but also: WHERE should this baby grow up? Am I willing to move to a place with space, clean air, clean water, with much more safety and outdoors? I'm sure women from Beijing to Berlin are troubled by this question: "Is this is a place to have a baby?"

I think that politics, and mainstream media that makes politics entertainment, is hopelessly distant from this conversation we are having, about to baby or not to baby. This whole conversation, and the fears behind it, are driven underground. It's pretty well impolite to mention at dinner, at parties, at work, at school - anywhere.

Madeline tells us about a group in New England called Conceivable Future. They host meetings for young people to discuss this dilemma. The banner on their web site says "The climate crisis is a reproductive crisis".

Part of the problem in tackling this of course, was the early prediction (1970's) by Paul and Anne Ehrlich about "the population bomb". It was supposed to have exploded by now in mass death and famine, that never happened - partly due to advances in agriculture. The group they founded, Zerio Population Growth, has now been renamed as Population Connection.

Judging by emails I've received from listeners, this issue is far, far from solved. Some folks think I haven't given the population issue enough coverage, or even suggest I'm afraid to cover it. This show answers that, I hope.

Download or listen to this 21 minute interview with Madeline Ostrander in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Or if you would like to share the phone-friendly Lo-Fi version (please do) - you can use this shorter URL: http://tinyurl.com/j6nxfq4

My thanks to Caitlin Graf at The Nation magazine for her help arranging this interview.

And how about this: ABC Australia is writing about how hot weather can reduce women's desire for sex...the article is "Climate change and your sex life".

Even if we say a minority of men and women are concerned enough about climate change to seriously question having a child, two things: first, knowledge about the uber-threat from climate disruption is growing rapidly in the general population, despite the Koch Brothers. That means what is now the minority may be the cutting edge who define a whole new movement or current among humans.

Second: whether it's just you, or a hundred million people, this question is one of the most important decisions made in a person's lifetime.

ALISHA GRAVES - GREEN SEX

The old saying about the circus: "There's a sucker born every minute". But hundreds of new humans are born every minute, as the human population continues to multiply. Many will be Western-style super consumers, the ones who drain resources and fill the skies with greenhouse gases. If we can't control that urge, a major climate disruption may do it for us.

"Green sex" - Do it for the climate. We'll find out what that means with Alisha Graves. She has a Masters in Public Health from the University of California. She's co-founded and leads a group called the Oasis Initiative, which stands for Organizing to Advance Solutions in the Sahel.

Alisha Graves is also a research fellow for Project Drawdown, a group of scientists and other experts working to create a livable climate future, led by Paul Hawken.

Public health expert Alisha Graves

To hear some environmental groups tell it, all we have to do is install solar energy and drive electric cars - problem solved. But can we really tackle the climate issue without talking about population?

Our instant mental defense is to tell ourselves it's those billions of peasants "over there" somewhere who are responsible for the population impact. What's wrong with that idea? Think of it this way: if you decide not to have a child, you have done far more to reduce greenhouse gases than buying an electric car or installing solar panels. That is because every new consumer born is a heat engine.

We talk about the IPAT formula: I = P × A × T

As Wikipedia explains it, "Human Impact on the environment equals the product of Population, Affluence, and Technology. This shows how the population, affluence and technology produce an impact. The equation was developed in the 1970s during the course of a debate between Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich and John Holdren."

Sex is such a powerful urge. It can drive our lives even when our brains are barely involved, maybe especially when our brains are weak. Do you believe that rational debate can change sexual behavior? It's interesting to discover that half the babies born in the United States were unintended. So fifty percent of the time, there was no conversation like "should we do this?" Meanwhile, states like Texas are making it harder and harder for a woman to access a safe and legal abortion. At times I'm sure we are going backward in population control, not forward.

Then Alisha gives us a quick snapshot of conditions in the Sahel. That's the region in Africa just south of the Sahara Desert. The Sahel country of Niger has the highest fertility rate in the world: huge families born into utter poverty and lack of health care. Studies show that half the children of Niger are stunted, both physically and mentally. The Oasis Initiative is seeking solutions.

Alisha links to the paper titled "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals" by Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax as being useful in this whole debate on climate and population. You can read the full text as an online .pdf here.

Of course, you should also check out the Project Drawdown web site.

You or anyone can listen to or download just this 23 minute interview with Alisha Graves using these permanent links (in either CD Quality, or the faster loading but lower quality Lo-Fi)

If you would like to Tweet or Facebook this interview (please) here is a shorter URL for the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/gnovaun

MARKUS DONAT - SCIENCE OF EXTREME PRECIPITATION

News about record rains, or sometimes snow, has become so frequent, I could report on it every week. Just recently, a half dozen people died in recent floods of Louisiana. Parts of Brazil were hit with half their average monthly rainfall in one day. In the desert, the United Arab Emirates recently recorded their highest single day rainfall ever, 50 times normal for March.

New research says this is only going to get worse as the world warms, but with an unexpected twist. A letter published in the journal Nature Climate Change is titled: "More extreme precipitation in the world’s dry and wet regions." In Sydney Australia, we've reached the lead author, Markus G. Donat, a research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Dr. Markus Donat

This is important research. Along with journalists around the world, Joe Romm quotes Markus Donat in this article on Climate Progress. But if you listen to my Radio Ecoshock interview, you'll be surprised to find that Joe got Donat's research a little bit wrong. It's all about the long-held slogan "the wet areas get wetter, and the dry areas get drier". Markus says that was true of a global model where the oceans are included, but not necessarily true on land (where it matters most to us). Yes will get more extreme droughts and super rainfall events, but like everything else about climate change, it's not quite as simple as that.

You or anyone can listen to or download this 16 minute interview using these permanent links (in either CD Quality, or the faster loading but lower quality Lo-Fi)

If you would like to Tweet or Facebook this interview (please) here is a shorter URL for the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/h7dqgom

RADIO ECOSHOCK NET PRESENCE STILL IN DEVELOPMENT

We are out of time - in this radio show at least.

Of course you can still download all our past programs (ten years' worth!) for free from our web site, thanks to the on-going support of listener donations. This blog has been going steady every week since 2006.

My team is working on the new web site/blog connection tool. I've seen the working model and it looks great. Radio Ecoshock will enter the modern world. This blog will also be revamped. And it will all work on phones too!

As you can see, I'm slowly learning new software purchased to produce videos, starting with the short "This week on Radio Ecoshock" series. If I have time, this may morph into a kind of video blog.

I can still use your financial support to keep this development going. If you can afford $10 a month, or wish to make a one time donation of any size, please do it here.

I'm Alex. Thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

By the way, I wrote the bits of music you hear in this program. You can hear the whole piece here on Soundcloud.

CLIMATE: IS REVOLUTION JUSTIFIED?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 6 Apr 2016 16:52:00 -0700

From the Netherlands, green lawyer Roger Cox: "Is Revolution Justified?" From UK, Glacier specialist Thomas Bauska on the last big temperature jump in a warm world like ours. Plus, scientist Paul Beckwith warns we are in a climate emergency. Radio Ecoshock 160406

NEW! SHOW PREVIEW - 3 MINUTE VIDEO

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

ROGER COX - IS REVOLUTION JUSTIFIED?

Despite the spring misery in Eastern North America - world heat records continue to tumble. Ice is melting faster at both poles. We're in trouble, but world leaders are preoccupied with getting elected - or hiding money in Panamanian corporations.

If governments fail our children's future, is revolution justified? That's the question raised by Roger Cox, a prominent green lawyer in the Netherlands. He's not calling for crowds in the street, but real justice. Cox sued the Dutch government for failing to protect the future, and won. That's spreading all over Europe, Canada, New Zealand, and into the United States. Hear Roger Cox explain how it's done.

Who is this revolutionary? In the Netherlands, Roger Cox is partner at the law firm Paulussen Advocaten. He is the power-house lawyer who sued the Dutch government, demanding a 25% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. He won, setting a precedent for people around the world, and we'll talk about that. He founded the "Planet Prosperity Foundation" promoting a circular economy. And Roger is known in Europe as a leader in sustainable real estate development, something almost unknown in North America.

Award-winning lawyer Roger Cox

Roger Cox is also a CIGI senior fellow with the International Law Research Program. The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent, non-partisan think tank on international governance. My thanks to CIGI for helping to arrange this interview.

Roger's book is called "Revolution Justified."

Download or listen to this 24 minute interview with Roger Cox in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you wish to Tweet out the Lo-Fi version of this Roger Cox interview, here is shorter URL for that: http://tinyurl.com/hujnyzh

THE PRECEDENT-SETTING DUTCH COURT VICTORY FOR THE CLIMATE

Roger was central to a lawsuit against the government of the Netherlands. The Plaintiffs were the environmental advocacy group Urgenda Foundation, and 900 individuals. Essentially they argued that the poor legislation for emissions reductions by the Dutch government endangered future generations. They won the lawsuit and the government had to enact requirements for bigger emissions cuts, much sooner. The Dutch government agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020 (compared with 1990 levels).

This set an international precedent which is growing into a movement.

A similar lawsuit has been launched in Belgium, and another is pending in New Zealand. Other lawsuits are being considered in Canada, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France. The French action follows one legal victory there in June 2015.

CLIMATE JUSTICE IN AMERICA?

The idea begun by Roger, that citizens can sue their governments on behalf of the children, is now being tested in a U.S. Court. See this article on Alternet, and this piece from Australia.

The Oregon-based "Our Childrens' Trust Foundation" has launched a climate lawsuit in the United States. That suit is led by none other than Dr. James Hansen, along with 21 young people, many of them teens.

In another case, launched by the State of Massachusetts versus the EPA, the Supreme Court has already "in effect" ruled that climate change is real and dangerous, Cox tells us.

IS A "REVOLUTION" IN THE COURTS ENOUGH?

Of course, waiting for a break in the U.S. Supreme Court (depending on who gets nominated) might take too long to avert disaster. I have to ask Roger, and you as listeners, would a violent overthrow ever be justified? Let's say the Arctic sea ice disappears, and the northern Hemisphere is hit by years of unrelenting storms and heat waves. Crops fail. If governments fail to respond, should we go down quietly? I doubt people will just go along with business as usual, once they see the impacts of an abrupt climate shift.

We're not quite there yet, maybe (see the next interview with Paul Beckwith). It can't hurt to have all lawyers, judges - the whole legal community - become aware of the threats posed by climate change. Roger tells us that local judges, and some state courts, are already moving in the direction of taking climate safety as a real legal issue.

INTERNATIONAL LAW

Roger tells us all industrialized countries signed into an international law to protect the climate at the 2010 Climate summit in Cancun Mexico. A few countries, including Germany and Denmark, have followed up, enshrining this protection into law.

Knowlingly breaching the 2 degree C "safe limit" would also be an infringement of human rights, as laid out in various United Nations binding agreements. More legal safeguards were added at the COP-21 climate summit in December, 2015, Paris. There are a lot of international laws, which your government likely agreed to, that lawyers can use to push the government to act on greenhouse gas emissions.

PAUL BECKWITH - CLIMATE EMERGENCY

One of our regular guests, scientitst Paul Beckwith from the University of Ottawa, is warning anyone who will listen that we are in a global climate emergency. Forget 2050 or even 2030. Abrupt climate change has arrived, Beckwith says.

Paul has two Masters Degrees. He teaches climate science at the University of Ottawa, while working on his own Doctorate - on the subject of abrupt climate change. Paul is a scientists-activist, with a busy You tube channel, Facebook community, and more - all found on his new web site, paulbeckwith.net.

When I checked last, his new video and article is titled "My Condolences to Australia's Great Barrier Reef" (April 3rd).

In this program, I run a slighly edited audio version from Paul's important You tube video "Chat on our ABRUPT climate change EMERGENCY". This just has to get out there, and I'm happy to offer Radio Ecoshock as another way to express how serious our situation really is.

As Paul explains, the shift in climate is coming much faster than most scientists expected. If you want proof, just try this Google experiment:

"Google "climate change” and “faster than expected”, “unprecedented”, etc. and you get gazillions of science articles. Google “climate change” and “slower than expected”, etc. and you get squat."

- from Paul Beckwith's web site.

Download or listen to this 11 minute compact version of Paul Beckwith's warning in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Here is a tiny url for the Lo-Fi version (which works best for people listening on phones, or slow bandwidth) for Tweeting purposes: http://tinyurl.com/ju7o94x

THOMAS BAUSKA - CLIMATE LESSONS FROM THE DEEP PAST

We wrap up with an intriguing visit with a specialist in the story of glaciers and ancient climates. Before the 10,000 years of stable climate our civilization grew up in, the great glaciers came and went. The climate shifted with them, sometimes warming as much as 5 degrees Centigrade within 50 years. It's a tough field to understand, and harder still to figure out what applies to climate change today, and what does not. Some climate deniers have played on that confusion.

But the science of past deglaciation is getting better and better. A new paper out from a team of scientists from the United States, Britain, and New Zealand almost crushed my skull with problems. I wrote the lead author, Thomas K. Bauska with my beginner's questions, and he patiently schooled me in patterns of climate change I did not know.

That's why we called on Thomas for Radio Ecoshock. Educated in Chicago, with a Ph.D in Geology from Oregon State, Dr. Bauska is currently a researcher with the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge in Britain. The paper that stimulated this discussion is titled "Carbon isotopes characterize rapid changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the last deglaciation." It was just published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS.

As a non-scientist, my first surprise reading this paper was that deglaciation can cause a rise in CO2, and not the other way around.

About ten years ago, people denied carbon dioxide was warming the planet. They jumped on the science of glaciology, to produce the argument summarized as "CO2 doesn't lead, it lags." Can carbon levels rise AFTER a warming, and if so, what caused the initial warming?

Talking about this, Thomas referred me to a 2012 paper published in the journal Nature by Shakun et al. The title is "Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation." You can read that full article (as an online .pdf) here.

As I understand it, the point is this: past climate shifts began with geophysical forces: things like the 100,000 year cycle where the Earth's orbit tilts toward or away from the Sun (a bit). That can start a warming, which then releases carbon dioxide (and methane!) - which becomes a positive feedback effect, increasing the warming much more.

Contrarians argue other forces, like a tilt of the Earth's axis, can cause warming, so carbon dioxide isn't causing warming today. That is so simplistic it's silly.

Regarding abrupt climate change, Bauska et all write in their paper:

"At least twice during the deglaciation a rapid release of 13C-depleted carbon to the atmosphere may have occurred over a few centuries, suggesting that abrupt and significant releases of CO2 to the atmosphere may be common nonlinear features of Earth’s carbon cycle."

A second discussion in this paper seemed familiar to me. That was about changes in ocean currents, as deglaciation developed. We have just seen a giant cold spot appear in the seas south of Greenland, big enough it is thought to be altering the winter weather in Britain.

I wouldn't want to leave listeners with the impression that abrupt climate changes only happened as ice ages ended, and cannot happen now. I have spoken with scientists like paleontologist Peter Ward and Ottawa's Paul Beckwith who assure me there are records of abrupt warming, even from relatively warm starting points.

ARE WE EXPERIENCING "DEGLACIATION" NOW?

Considering glaciers at both poles are melting rapidly, as well as all other land-based glaciers melting, can we say we are NOW in a period of deglaciation? In the interview, Thomas said "no" - based on the large-scale deglaciation he studied. Today's melting is comparatively small. However, after the interview, Thomas sent me one further email explanation:

"One interesting question that I wasn't able to answer fully is whether we are currently in a "deglaciation" or not. My gut reaction was to say "not really" because the projected sea level rise over the next century is an order of magnitude less than the last transition from the ice age.

However, this paper really changed my view of future sea level rise. The authors (colleagues from Oregon State) take a long view and project sea level and temperature changes over the next 10,000 years (rather than the next few hundred). For context the compare the past 20,000 years, essentially the last deglaciation and Holocene. This is perhaps the long-term, geologic perspective that the deglaciation that your audience might gain insight from.

As stated in the abstract: 'This long-term perspective illustrates that policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems, and human societies — not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.'"

Listen to or download this 24 minute interview with Dr. Thomas Bauska in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you wish to Tweet out the Lo-Fi version, here is shorter URL for that: http://tinyurl.com/j6xd9pl

GETTING RADIO ECOSHOCK OUT FURTHER

I'm still working with my team on a classy new web site and blog (combined) for Radio Ecoshock. It will have a much better search function, so you can find the scientist or author you want to hear from. Plus, the new design will really work for all the folks who reach out to Radio Ecoshock by phone or tablet. The new blog will also be compatible with Itunes, so we can raise the number of podcast listeners.

I'll let you know as soon as it arrives.

Also, to help get the message out through video, I'm experimenting with a short (3 minutes or less) series of videos with the working title "This week on Radio Ecoshock". I'm hoping people will share these with social media, to raise climate awareness. Please do.

If you feel you can afford to support my work on this program, please either make a one-time donation, or sign up for the $10 a month subscriber status, from this page.

Thank you for listening again this week, and caring about our world.

CLIMATE WAR

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 16:04:00 -0700

SUMMARY Humans pumping more carbon, faster, than in last 66 million years. Lead author Dr. Richard Zeebe from U of Hawaii. From The Center for Climate and Security, Shiloh Fetzek on origins of Syrian conflict, Ret. Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, on what the Pentagon knows about climate threats. Radio Ecoshock 160330.

Humans are tossing more carbon into the atmosphere ten times faster, and in much greater quantities, than at any time in the last 66 million years. We'll talk with the lead author of that study, Richard Zeebe.

Then, with the turmoil of the Middle East spreading into Europe, Africa and beyond, we ask two specialists on the driving role of drought, heat and climate change. Our guests are analyst Shiloh Fetzek and retired American Brigadier General Gerald Galloway.

I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to your world.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

RICHARD ZEEBE: MOST CARBON, AND FASTEST IN 66 MILLION YEARS

In the Guardian newspaper on the 21st of March, we find this headline: "Carbon emission release rate ‘unprecedented’ in past 66m[illion] years." It then says "Researchers calculate that humans are pumping out carbon 10 times faster than at any point since the extinction of the dinosaurs."

To understand what this staggering situation means, we go to a new paper published the same day in the journal Nature Geoscience. The title is "Anthropogenic carbon release rate unprecedented during the past 66 million years." The lead author is Dr. Richard E. Zeebe. He's published or co-authored about 75 scientific papers since the 1990's. Richard is a Professor at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii.

From Honolulu, we welcome Richard Zeebe to Radio Ecoshock.

We are looking for clues to our current fling with heating the world. I'll bet many listeners hear "66 million years" and think this will be all about an asteroid hit and the end of the dinosaurs. But really the focus of this paper is on a climate changed world about 10 million years closer to us, around 56 million years ago.

I've had a couple of scientific guests who describe relatively rapid global heating, say in 50 years or less, but always moving from a time of massive glaciation toward a warmer period. The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, is more useful for us, because there was a spike in global temperature even when the Earth was already ice-free.

One reading of this new paper is that perhaps we have been lulled to sleep by earlier paleoclimatology. We looked back at ice cores, for example, and decided climate change is a long drawn-out process, so we have time to change our energy systems and adapt. Zeebe and his co-authors say this research uncovers: "a fundamental challenge in constraining future climate projections."

Then finally, his team ends with this short statement: "future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM." It sounds like we are in a free-fall where conditions on Earth may become hotter and more changed than the hottest period known to science since the dinosaurs. That's frightening.

The stunning new research paper was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on March 21st, 2016. Here is a link to the abstract, But if you use the link provided in the Guardian newspaper article, and wait patiently for a few seconds, the full paper shows up in your browser as a .pdf file. It's one of the most important papers so far this year. This interview with Richard contains some stunning perspectives on where we stand, and where we are going.

Listen to or download this 15 minute interview with Richard Zeebe in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

SYRIA: THE CLIMATE CONNECTION WITH SHILOH FETZEK

A new kind of creeping war is developing in Europe. It constantly threatens to re-appear in the United States and Canada. Meanwhile bombed cities spread across the Middle East . We hear rumors that climate change is a hidden factor driving Middle East discontent. Is it true?

Our guest Shiloh Fetzek writes about deep connections hardly reported by the press. Shiloh provides research for a non-governmental organization called "The Center for Climate and Security" - where she is a Senior Fellow for International Affairs. She is also Senior Fellow for Environment, Climate Change and Security at International Alert in London.

Shiloh Fetzek

In an article about Syria with Jeffrey Mazo, Fetzek writes:

"More than 70% of the country’s freshwater resources come from transborder flows, the bulk from Turkey via the Euphrates River."

What is the over-all status of that regional river water system. Has Turkey taken more, and left less, via up-stream dams? Is precipitation lower? How much is "water politics" and how much real climate pressure? We talk that through.

It is fair to say the agricultural collapse in Syria was badly mishandled by the Assad regime. As Fezak tells us, the Assad government cut fertilizer subsidies, and subsidized prices for farm diesel, at the critical time, during the drought.

When rainfall is low, farmers all over the world try to pump up the difference from ground water. Why didn't that work in Syria? For one thing, as we've said, the subsidies for diesel fuel needed to run the pumps was cut. But the real problem developed over time. The Syrian government favored large scale agriculture of water-hungry crops. The irrigation system was often based on open canals, which lose far too much by evaporation in the hot desert sun.

All over the world, displaced peasants and farmers are moving toward cities that are not prepared to handle their numbers. One author described Earth as slum city. Why was this global movement so much more serious in Syria? That's because there were already over one million refugees from the Iraq war living in Syrian cities. That's added to hundreds of thousands of long-time refugees from Palestine. Even the slums were full when the Syrian families started pouring in from the countryside. They lived in tent camps on the outskirts with no services.

Do we know for certain that displaced Syrian farmers formed part of the opposition to Assad government, or added to attempted revolution? Those statistics are not available. We do know the farmers were very upset with the lack of aid, and the way most of the country's wealth was channelled toward an ethnic minority living near the coast. It was a tinder box of discontent. Some of those same families are now in tent camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. Some of them made it to Greece, and on to Europe. Some of them drowned trying to get out.

When I study climate projections for the Middle East during the second half of this century, most sources predict even fewer water resources, greater desertification, and longer periods of dangerous heat. That heat, linked with humidity in some Gulf regions, is projected to go beyond the tolerance of humans to go outdoors. I wonder if we will see an even greater exodus, even more migration - to anywhere cooler.

We've had several guests who explain the medical consequences of a high heat-humidity index. But hardly anyone can explain the social impacts of finding more days too hot to go out, too hot to work, and nights too hot to sleep. This is a hidden factor that can drive individuals crazy, and societies to the breaking point.

Listen to or download this 21 minute interview with Shiloh Fetzek in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

THE MOSUL DAM: THE NEXT MEGA-DISASTER IN THE MAKING

Before winding up, I would also like to point out this critical article at The Center for Climate and Security: "US Embassy in Iraq Issues Mosul Dam Failure Warning". It's incredible.

The dam in Mosul Iraq could break.

Here are some points from a Factsheet issued by the U.S. State Department, courtesy of the Climate and Security article: (any bold type is my addition)

"The State Department Factsheet lists a series of ways in which the failure of the Mosul Dam and the resulting floodwave will have catastrophic consequences in a region already facing significant threats, and gives new meaning to the concept of “cascading disasters.”

Here is a sampling of some of the potential consequences of a dam failure drawn from the factsheet:

The approximately 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis residing along the Tigris River in areas at highest risk from the projected floodwave probably would not survive its impact unless they evacuated the floodzone. A majority of Baghdad’s 6 million residents also probably would be adversely affected— experiencing dislocation, increased health hazards, limited to no mobility, and losses of homes, buildings, and services.

The flood will severely damage or destroy large swaths of infrastructure and is expected to knock offline all power plants in its path, causing a sudden shock to the Iraq electricity grid that could shut down the entire Iraqi system.

Two-thirds of Iraq’s high-yielding irrigated wheat farmland is in the Tigris River basin and probably would be heavily damaged.

Some parts of Baghdad would be flooded, which could include Baghdad International Airport.

Much of the territory projected to be damaged by a dam breach is contested or ISIL-controlled, suggesting an authority-directed evacuation is unlikely, and that some evacuees may not have freedom of movement sufficient to escape.

Evacuation warnings that occur in the narrow window between the detection of a breach and the impact of a flood wave would be subject to electrical blackouts, technical and bureaucratic delays, or rejections by communities that probably would not grasp the urgency and scope of the threat, suggesting that prior awareness of risk could improve mobilization time in the event of a breach..."

It's huge, and so far, no one is acting to prevent this catastrophe!

It's not just Iraq. Check out this article: Peter Gleick on Syria: Water, Climate and Conflict. Climate Change and Trouble with Pakistan's Reservoirs and Dams"

SURF AND LEARN RESOURCES ON SYRIA'S CLIMATE CONNECTION

Shiloh and her colleagues, including Francesco Femia, sent me a good list of articles for further research. Here are some of them. Surf and learn!

Syrian climate change, drought and social unrest. NOAA on climate change and Mediterranean droughts. April 2012: The Other Arab Spring: Tom Friedman writes an Op-Ed on the subject, citing the work of the Center for Climate and Security, and interviews with others.

February 2013: The Arab Spring and Climate Change: The Center for Climate and Security and partners release a multi-author volume on the subject, edited by Caitlin Werrell and myself and including a preface from Anne-Marie Slaughter. Our own piece in the volume includes a slight update of the 2012 article on Syria, as well as a look at Libya's post-conflict water and climate woes. Dr. Troy Sternberg writes about climate, China, Egypt and wheat prices, which builds on his previous journal article in Nature.

January 2015: Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought: Kelley et al publish a study in PNAS which makes an important contribution to the literature. While we had drawn a connection between the dramatic precipitation decline in the Middle East and Syria from 1971-2010, the drought in 2006/7-2010/11, natural resource mismanagement, and social unrest, this study demonstrated that the drought that lasted from 2007-2010 was "2-3 times more likely" because of anthropogenic climate change. Big deal.

February 2016: Spatiotemporal drought variability in the Mediterranean over the past 900 years. The recent study by Cook et al.

Still thirsty? Here are more key resources on Syria, and the climate change connection, from Shiloh:

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/sais_review/v035/35.1.werrell.html

http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2011/en/bgdocs/Erian_Katlan_&_Babah_2010.pdf

http://thebulletin.org/climate-change-and-syrian-uprising

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00263206.2013.850076#.VucBdZwrKUM

WHAT DOES THE PENTAGON KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE? GERALD GALLOWAY

There are institutes where top scientists regularly prepare projections of a world thrust into severe climate change. You can bet there are parallel "war-rooms" where the military plans out their role in a stressed-out warming world.

Here to tell us about preparations and planning in the American military is retired U.S. army Brigadier General Gerald Galloway. He is a Visiting Scholar at the US Army Corps of Engineers Institute for Water Resources. After 38 years in the U.S. Army, Galloway joined the faculty of the University of Maryland. He's worked at Westpoint and the White House, always with a focus on sustainable water use. Gerald has three Master's degrees, and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of North Carolina. He is also a member of the Security Advisory Board at The Center for Climate and Security.

Gerald Galloway

There are plenty of high-placed politicians who continue to question the importance of climate change to our security. Does the Pentagon think it's real? Yes indeed, says Galloway. The American Military has involved climate change in all their planning. There have been a series of reports for the Pentagon, including this one which found that climate disruption is a far greater threat than terrorism.

Dr. Galloway specialized in water resources for decades. And for decades we've heard about the coming water wars, especially in the Middle East. Have they arrived? Surprisingly, the answer is "no" and "not yet". Galloway says that so far nations have managed to negotiate reasonable water deals with each other, realizing that water supply is so vital, the only other option is war.

Here is a fascinating Al Jazeera article, with excellent coverage by Mansur Mirovalev, explaining why Uzbekistan may be the location of the first real water war. I'd love to have Mirovalev on this show, but so far I've been unable to reach him.

It doesn't take an expert to see that many millions of people in Bangladesh are going to be displaced by sea level rise in that low-lying country. When they move, there is no where to go, in a region already heavily populated and impoverished. Could that become a military situation?

I'm also thinking of China, and their war on terror with the Muslim Uyghur people on their Western flank. That's also part of a region expected to be hit harder by desertification, and temperatures too high for traditional crops. I'll bet that's a watch-point for the American military as well.

But the classic cases so far are in North Africa and the Middle East. Libya is constantly water stressed. Egypt is barely coping, and now has to import most of it's grain. The drought that hit Syria for several years also impacted southern Turkey, Iraq, and the list goes on. Gerald Galloway gives us a tour.

THE U.S. MILITARY - THE WORLD'S LARGEST SINGLE EMITTER OF GREENHOUSE GASES

On a tactical level, the armed forces have to work out how to power themselves in a world where fossil fuel use becomes constrained. I ask Gerald what the U.S. military doing to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. We are also told the United States military is the largest single user of fossil fuels in America. Is there an awareness that all those emissions are actually fuelling a more dangerous world, through climate change?

FYI, the US military was exempt from reporting on greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. They lost that exemption in the Paris climate talks of 2015.

It's fascinating to get Galloway's insider view of how the Pentagon is working to (a) adapt to a changing climate (b) reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and (c) think about how to protect America, it's allies, and American interests in the coming climate disruption. Despite the misgivings many of us have on all this, it's still true that when hurricanes or typhoons flatten a country, or millions of desperate people need aid, it's usually the U.S. military that shows up for large-scale food drops, evacuations, and medical aid. We expect the American military to be there to help.

Along those lines, the new Canadian government under Justin Trudeau has announced a return to Canada's long-term role of using their military for aid in emergencies, and peace keeping, instead of war. We'll see.

AMERICA: STILL NOT READY FOR ANOTHER GREAT FLOOD

In the 1990's, Gerald Galloway chaired a report for the White House on the Great Flood of 1993, along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Parts of the south have flooded again this year. In fact, we've seen more extreme rainfall events in many parts of the United States. Galloway says we are NOT prepared for flooding well beyond the ordinary, and could do a lot more to prepare for that aspect of climate change. You can read Galloway's 29 page report here. A lot of military planning is necessarily kept secret. But I think climate response is not a good candidate for secrecy, because we all face a global problem. Is there a way for the Pentagon to involve the American public more on this issue?

I would like to thank The Center for Climate and Security for helping to arrange this interview with Retired Brigadier General Gerald Galloway.

Listen to or download this 19 minute interview with Gerald Galloway in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

JUST A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE FIRST NUCLEAR TERRORIST ATTACK?

One final word: background news reports indicate the Belgian/French terrorists were planning an attack on a Belgian nuclear facility on the outskirts of Brussels, but felt too pressured by police searches to wait. Washington had already warned Belgium of lax security at privately run reactors there. Footage of a Belgian reactor official was found in a terror hide-out. A security guard for a Belgian reactor company was shot dead on Thursday. Two employees with complete clearance to the Belgian Doel nuclear power station left to join ISIS in Syria in 2012. What did they tell ISIS?

Belgium is about the size of the State of Maryland, or one and a half times the size of Wales in the UK. A plane crashing into poorly stored spent fuel there, or a bomb inside a reactor, could irradiate the entire country. Instead of confronting the mega-risk, the government of Belgium keeps extending the life of already old and unsafe reactors. That's a kind of self-terrorism.

A dirty radioactive bomb, or even blowing up a working reactor, remains the golden dream of those who hate. The United States, Canada, pretty well every European country, and even dear old Australia are always prime targets for nuclear terrorism.

In her weekly nuclear update, Australian campaigner Christina MacPherson reminds us of this:

"Nuclear terrorism a possibility in Belgium – and elsewhere. But oh no, not in Australia! Except – has everyone forgotten Willy Brigitte? Brigitte was sent to Sydney in 2007 as part of a cell that trained terrorists in Pakistan, with a plan to bomb the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, was convicted in France."

Keep up with Christina here on the Web, and here on Facebook.

We only have to slip up once, and they only have to win once, to illustrate why nuclear power is not safe for anyone. There is still time to shut down the nuclear industry.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

COMING UP

Assuming nothing too big blows up in the next week, our next program asks: in the face of government unwillingness to protect a safe climate, is revolution is justified? Stay tuned, and thank you for caring about our world.

I am fundraising partly to pay for a new web page and blog set up, which should communicate this important message better and farther. If you would like to help Radio Ecoshock keep going, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. Find out how here.

HEAT JOLT

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 18:53:00 -0700

SUMMARY: Global heat Jan & Feb hits hard, worries scientists. Bob Henson from Weather Underground explores the loss of normal. Australian scientist Ben Hankamer on new study: world will warm faster than you think. Radio Ecoshock 160323

The jolt. That's what scientists are calling the absolute heat records set around the world in January and February of 2016. Expert meteorologist and climate science writer Bob Henson takes us on a tour of the new normal.

But hang around too for our second interview, with Australian scientist Ben Hankamer. He's co-author of a new peer-reviewed paper that says warming will happen much faster than you think.

Hankamer tells us:

"If what the models suggest are correct, then by 2020 we might have to have about emissions reductions of 50% if we want to stay below a 1.5 degree climate change level. And if we want to stay below 2 [deg C] it might be 50% by 2030. And it really depends if you want to go with this pro-growth strategy or whether you want to carry on with business as usual... Of course you can say 'we're not going to do that' but then you have to also make the assumption that you will keep people in poverty."

A fifty percent cut in emissions needed by 2020! That's a call for crisis-level action. Sure, we can continue to splurge on fossil fuels in the developed world, but keep in mind (a) we need almost half the world's population to keep living in desperate poverty (less than $2.50, a day) and (b) we accept a rapid transition to a ruined state of nature for all coming generations.

That's coming up in our second half hour. First, let's get past the weather porn, to explore another step up the staircase to climate catastrophe.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

THE NEW HEAT JOLT - WHAT DOES IT MEAN? BOB HENSON

"February Smashes Earth's All-Time Global Heat Record by a Jaw-Dropping Margin" That's the headline at wunderground, the influential Weather Underground blog. What does it mean? Is the new carbon-loaded atmosphere stretching it's muscles? Is this the new normal, or the end of normal?

Joining us to talk about all this is a seasoned meteorologist, journalist, and one-time storm chaser, Colorado's Bob Henson. Bob co-wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks on weather, "Meteorology Today" - now out in it's 11th edition this year. For more than a decade Bob had a front row seat as writer and editor for AtmosNews, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His articles are published all over the world, and his latest book is "The Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change." Bob often teams up with Wunderground's Jeff Masters to bring out all the facts and figures about the strange changes we see today.

Bob Henson, Weather Underground

Let's be clear, we are talking about a global average temperature that in February almost reaches the 1.5 degrees C the supposed "safe" level raised at the Paris climate talks in December. Not in 2100, or 2050, but almost right now. NASA released their report forFebruary temperatures - the world is 1.35 degrees C above the baseline, which they choose as the period from 1951 to 1980.

But that's a recent baseline that minimizes real warming! There was at least a half degree warming from pre-industrial levels (say 1850). So we are already above the 1.5 deg temps agreed as really safe at the Paris climate talks.

Even taking the low-ball NASA starting point, as the Guardian newspaper reports, global temperatures in February 2016 broke all records not a little but, but by "a shocking amount".

The only good news is that we still have the rest of the year to go, which might cool down. Experts think the current El Nino is winding down over the next few months. For all we know, 2017 might be a La Nina year, and cooler. Henson says it takes a few years steady at 1.5 or 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels to qualify as permanent warming. He thinks we are several decades away from that point. I disagree.

It's also important to note that CO2 levels, as measured at the Mauna Loa lab in Hawaii, go up during an El Nino year, and never come back down. The reasons for that are complex. For example, drought during El Nino, coupled with climate-driven heat, causes more forest fires, which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere.

But the essential point is we are now well over 400 parts per million CO2, and much higher if we count the more realistic CO2 equivalent (which includes ever-increasing methane, plus rarer but more powerful greenhouse gases).

I remember the late Dr. Albert A. Bartlett of Colorado spent a lifetime teaching how important and threatening exponential math can be. That's where we get an increase on the increase. Is that happening now with greenhouse gas emissions? Sort of. Henson tells us CO2 was going up about 1 part per million a year during the 1960's. It became 2 parts per million annually during the early 2000's, and since 2015 has been hitting 3 parts per million increase. So yes, that is exponential, and ever-more dangerous.

Here's one of my worries. Every time the Earth takes another jump in temperature, a great number of irreversible feed-backs get a push. So we might be going up a stair-case, step-by-step, which only goes up. For example, what is the condition of the Arctic sea ice this winter? Yes, it is the lowest on record for February. The extent is low, and the ice is thin.

However, that does not necessarily mean we will hit a new record low sea ice level in the Arctic this summer, Henson says. The main factor that can break that record is whether it is cloudy in the Arctic during the key months of June and July, when the polar sun is strongest, or wide open and sunny. So we'll have to wait and see.

It's been just plain weird in the Arctic. It rained at the Pole in the December darkness, and there's been a lot of open ocean north of Scandinavia. Henson tells us about conditions around Svalbard for example. North of Norway, where the ice should be surrounding Svalbard, it the sea is open. And that northernmost city in the world (at 78 degrees latitude) has been strangely warm. Some days it was 20 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual. That's a huge jump!

Mark Sereze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center says this past winter is the strangest he's ever seen in the Arctic. For example, Anchorage Alaska had the warmest weather ever, with the least snow ever.

DID EL NINO BREAK THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT? YES AND NO.

Did this El Nino manage to break the long California drought, as advertised? It did not go as expected. The big deluges from El Nino tracked hundreds of miles north of California, hitting Oregon and Washington State. At least there has been some snow in California mountains, which should ease water supplies somewhat. Water supplies for Sacramento and San Francisco have half recovered.

But it's an "ominous sign" Henson says, that this El Nino did not fully break the California drought this year. That's partly because projections are for the U.S. Southwest states, including California and Arizona, to get drier and drier as this century rolls on.

HEAT RECORD IN LOWER ATMOSPHERE

We've talked about heat records set on land. But it's not just there. Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville has persistently talked down the threats of global warming. He often interprets satellite data to find the lowest estimates. But even he reports the lower atmosphere is hotter than ever.

SEVERE IMPACTS ALREADY THIS YEAR

As Bob and Jeff Masters picture in their blog, there have been severe impacts of this combined El Nino and a jolt in climate-induced heating. Extreme drought has cost Vietnam and Zimbabwe at least 10% of their Gross Domestic Product. That has not been reported in mainstream news at all. We did hear about the strongest typhoon ever recorded hitting the Pacific island of Fiji. That country has continued it's state of emergency for another month, as thousands of people remain in temporary shelters. Their homes and businesses were demolished.

As Henson blogs: "For comparison, nine nations had their most expensive weather-related natural disasters in history in all of 2015, and only one did so in 2014."

Henson tells us scientists predict with the warming of the Pacific Ocean, there is a better chance we will get more El Nino heat years in the coming decades. You can guess what that means, from what happened this year. Our guest predicts we will see dramatic rises in temperatures, and surprising extreme weather, in this coming decade.

On another front, Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority has just issued an alert about widespread coral bleaching. Coral guru Thomas J. Goreau has been privately warning this could be another huge coral die-off.

Bob Henson is that rare combination of meteorologist and journalist. He's been published all over the world, but my favorite spot to find him is at the Weather Underground blog, at wunderground.com. His Twitter handle is @bhensonweather.

PROFESSOR STEFAN RAMSTORF - "CLIMATE EMERGENCY"

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, told Australian newspapers "We are in a kind of climate emergency now." In the show, I run a few minutes from a short interview of Stefan Ramsdorf done by by Phil Stubbs of theenvironmentshow.com

FASTER AND SOONER - BEN HANKAMER

Look out. The world may warm much faster than we thought. That could create an energy-squeeze. It's all in new a big-picture study from Australian researchers. Let's peer into a real future, with Professor Ben Hankamer from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland, near Brisbane Australia.

Dr. Ben Hankamer

Now we know the choices. Let half the world's people live in poverty, and keep up our energy-intensive lifestyles for an extra ten years. Then we all struggle to survive with rising seas, heat waves, drought, fires, and weather so unstable crops and species are doubtful. OR the world's leaders and people somehow wake up from the fog, to begin the war on carbon emissions, to make the transition to a low-energy, all-renewable world. We have four years to cut our emissions in half. It's beyond the days of worry,now. It's do or die.

The title of this new paper suggests giant topics: "Trading Off Global Fuel Supply, CO2 Emissions and Sustainable Development". It was published in the open access journal PLOS one. Anyone can read the full paper, and please do.

In the interview, we look more deeply into this concept of personal energy use. Here in North America, we like to think personal energy use is going down, as cars become more fuel efficient, bike use increases, and things like LED light bulbs slash utility bills. Is that assumption wrong? Yes and no. It's true many appliances, cars and stuff are becoming more energy efficient. But it appear we are using the saved money to buy still more appliances, cars and stuff.

One of the paper authors, Dr. Wagner says "“Simply put, as we get more efficient at manufacturing, goods get cheaper and we buy more." That sounds to me like a restatement of the classic Jevons Paradox, which was originally applied to coal. So it's still true.

I'm also assuming that a huge portion of demand for personal energy use will come as billions of people in the "developing world" get motorbikes, electric appliances and all the things we take for granted.

So here is one thing new in this study: previous studies did not include the relationships between energy use, climate and poverty. Add in population, and the amount of carbon left to safely burn takes a nose-dive. In my opinion, we don't have much of a chance of staying below 2 degrees C warming in the next 20 years. So buckle up your seat belts for world-changing extreme weather, and the relentless rise of the seas.

But Ben Hankamer is much more positive. He thinks there is plenty of solar energy to power the world. If global leadership recognizes the crisis in time, and organizes us all to act, maybe we can pull out before a real climate catastrophe is inevitable.

Again, most of our fossil fuel use is in liquid form, especially for transportation, I wonder how much renewable energy can really replace that? That is exactly the question being investigated at the Solar Biofuels Research Centre in Queensland Australia. It's co-ordinated by the University of Queensland, with major corporate partners. They are testing algae that grows in the sun, which can then be converted to a number or widely recognized liquid fuels.

Large-scale projections by necessity assume a future economy similar to what we have now. But I worry that the economy will slide into a Depression, where wealth shrinks instead of grows. That may come from unsustainable debt levels, and all countries will be buffetted by increasing costs of replacing infrastructure and crops damaged by an unstable climate. Most studies do not include that possibility.

THE WORST PREDICTION: ALMOST 4 DEGREES OF WARMING (OR MORE!) BY 2026

The most dire prediction comes from Sam Carana.

The post in Arctic News is not a scientific paper, but a blog with some scientific contributors. This blog is sometimes too extreme, and sometimes spot on. I don't have the expertise to say what is right or wrong with Sam's calculation of 3.9 degrees C warming by 2026, shown in the graphic, part way down in this post. Sam Carana draws on a number of warming factors which I've seen listed separately in scientific papers, but which are too seldom brought together. I ask our guest Ben Hankamer if he thinks a warming of 3.9 degrees C by 2026 is possible. Ben says it could be possible!

Graphic by Sam Carana of Arctic News blog.

And that is Carana's low end number. His worst case scenario is so bad we can hardly conceive of it.

Mind you, one of the original climate change scientists, Dr. James Hansen, has just released a paper with a gang of other scientists warning that heating is coming, and seas rising, faster than anyone thought possible!

THANKS!

I'm Alex Smith. My thanks to everyone who has helped get this radio message out through social media, and especially the non-profit radio stations who tell the truth.

I also want to shout out my thanks to the supporters who donate $10 a month to keep this program going. You really do make it possible for me to continue doing these key interviews, and getting it out to a global audience.

And thank you for listening.

Do-It-Yourself God Power

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:54:00 -0700

Hey kids, let's go out to the garage and make some new life forms! Get ready, because it's already happening. We'll talk with Pat Mooney, founder of the ETCgroup about crazy new technology on the loose. Then well-known journalist Steven Kotler takes us on a tour of ecopsychology in ten easy steps. Is it a diversion for comfortable coffee shops or "the answer". Radio Ecoshock 160316

I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

ANOTHER YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY - PAT MOONEY OF ETC GROUP

You may be wearing clothes created with synthetic biology, and eating food laced with nanotubes. A weird future has arrived, without any warning labels. Our guest Pat Mooney will be your guide. Pat founded a group in 1977 looking into food, agriculture and commodities. In 2001 it was renamed the ETC Group, with offices in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Philippines. If it's controversial, the ETC Group probably has a report on it.

Pat Mooney

If you really want to know what this interview is about, and get the details on scary tech you've never heard of, be sure and check out this ETC Group newsletter "ETC's Irreverent Review of 2015... ...and (possibly) Irrelevant Preview of 2016".

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

From the ETC Group newsletter:

"SynBio: During 2015, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set to work monitoring and analysing biology and the panoply of new biotechniques. A multi-stakeholder working group met in Montreal at the end of the year and will report to the CBD’s scientific subcommittee this April. ETC’s Jim Thomas is a member of the committee. But, even as the UN inevitably concludes that CRISPR, synthetic biology, gene drives and everything else cry out for oversight, the EU Commission is expected to start 2016 giving a controversial legal opinion that at least some of the same techniques can enjoy a free pass – exempting so called ‘new breeding techniques’ from GMO legislation. (Incidentally, ETC together with Canada’s Bioeconomies media project and Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation published this year a video in several languages explaining SynBio).[xxxvii]

[xxxvii] ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, Video Animation on Synthetic Biology in 5 languages – French German, Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. "

Here's another good ETC Group source on synthetic biology.

EXTREME BIOTECH MEETS EXTREME ENERGY

ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, “Extreme Biotech meets Extreme Energy”, November 2015.

NANO TECH

I got an article from natural news saying "engineered nanomaterials or (ENMs)" are on the rise in food, including in allegedly "organic" food. Let me give you a paragraph from that article:

"A group called the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) established an inventory of consumer products [that]contain ENMs in 2005. After this list was presented by Mother Jones with over 1,000 entries, PEN ran too low on funds to continue by 2009. That list depended on food manufacturers' reporting ENM content. Nowb the food industry folks no longer report their ENMs at all because labeling ENMs is not required. Thus ENM food content remains shrouded in mystery even more than GMOs."

That's a quote from an article at naturalnews.com.

Here is more from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Nano NO More: Whatever happened to nanotechnology? ETC was the first CSO to take up the issue 15 years ago but, since then, dozens of other strong partners around the world have taken up the cudgels and are making progress (albeit belatedly) especially in the EU. But, nanotech is by no means gone away. The global market for nanomaterials is about 11 million tonnes projected to contribute to end products valued at €2 trillion in 2015.[xxxii] Six million factory workers will be handling nanoparticles by 2020. As we prepared for the Paris climate change negotiations, we learned that, for the first time, children in the city were found to have carbon nanotubes in their lungs.[xxxiii]

[xxxiii] Sam Wong, “Carbon nanotubes found in children’s lungs for the first time”, New Scientist, electronic edition, October 21, 2015."

Are there nano particles placed in our food, would Americans be told if there were, and will they migrate throughout our body? Is anyone testing them for safety, or do we just run the experiment on all humans and nature?

BLOCKCHAIN - WHAT IS IT?

ETC Group staff will vehemently deny that Pat Mooney, when he retires at the end of 2017, will be replaced by a blockchain…

CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGY - IS IT AN OXYMORON?

The ETC Group is working with the UN to set up a group to oversee and possibly control technology. But when have we ever met a technology we didn't try, and eventually release into the real world? We can't stop North Korea from developing nuclear technology, what makes anyone think they can stop humans somewhere in the world from making anything, especially at things like 3D printing and computers make even the most complex ideas easy in somebody's basement or jungle? Pat Mooney gives us an update on efforts by the international community.

FORESTS DISCUSSION SOURCES:

Outside the sci-fi products now arriving, let's relax a little in the world's forests. Except that news is hardly relaxing. Apparently satellites have been misreading the amount of the Amazon rainforest lost to agriculture. We also found out from another paper published in 2015, that new growth in the Amazon is storing about half the carbon scientists have assumed in so many climate studies.

Selections from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Unfortunately, other satellites have been misreading the Amazon forest cover underestimating the incursion of cattle, cane and soya and exaggerating the trees and their biomass. Instead of a forest loss reduction rate of 25% last year, the loss accelerated by 62%.[ii]

[ii] Do-Hyung Kim, Joseph O. Sexton, John R. Towshend, “Accelerated deforestation in the humid tropics from the 1990s to the 2000s”, 7 May 2015, Geophysical Research Letters.

Worse still, the trees are growing faster but dying faster too – and storing barely half the CO2 scientists have assumed.[iii]

[iii] Gautam Naik, "Study: Amazon's forests sequester less carbon", Wall Street Journal, electronic edition, March, 21 2015.

Meanwhile, the boreal forests of North America may soon become net-emitters of carbon dioxide rather than capturing a third of the world’s atmospheric carbon. New estimates suggest that the Yukon Flats forest has been a source of GHG emissions for half a century.[iv] Where the Yukon goes, Alaska and Siberia are likely to follow.

[iv] Ryan Kelly, Melissa L. Chipman, Philip E. Higuera, Ivanka Stefanova, Linda B. Brubaker and Feng Sheng Hu, “Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years”, June 19 2013, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Climatologists – and the rest of us – also learned as we left Paris that perhaps as much as 40% of global deforestation comes through slave labor and that most of the world’s 35 million legally-defined slaves are either the victims of ecological destruction or are forced to contribute to one third of global annual GHG emissions through illegal mining, fishing, brick making and lumbering.[vii] We must all worry about what we don’t know we don’t know but a drastic reduction in GHG emissions is urgent – and not just for the climate.

[vii] Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Spiegel and Grau, 2016."

Pat Mooney has been looking into all this for decades. He's the Executive Director of the international Civil Society Organization ETC Group, based in Montreal, Canada, with branches in other countries, and co-conspirators all over the world. Keep up with latest developments at the web site, etcgroup.org.

Download or listen to this 26 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Pat Mooney in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can Tweet this interview out with this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/gogr3j4

ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN TEN EASY STEPS? JOURNALIST STEVEN KOTLER

We know the big problems threatening humanity and the natural world. We even have some affordable solutions. So why do we keep driving so hard toward the cliff of extinction? Maybe it's all in the mind. In this program, we'll add to my short-list of interviews on ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is one of those endangered species called a real journalist. He's been published in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and much more. His best-selling 2012 book, co-authored with Peter Diamandis, is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think".

From his dog rescue ranch in New Mexico, we welcome Steven Kotler to Radio Ecoshock.

Steven Kotler

I think the future is much worse than Steve thinks. But maybe that's my damaged mind-set. So we talk about the really fine article he published in Orion Magazine, "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons".

By all means, stop right here, and read Steve's article. It's entertaining, sure, Steven is a great writer. But it's deep, and well worth the time spent. I've been mulling it over ever since. And by the way, there's no question that climate change is wreaking havoc with people's mental health.

Steven tells us that's logical and real. For example, let's take James Lovelock's theory that all life is really one co-dependent organism, almost with a global mind. That is one interpretation of "Gaia". The late great Paul Shepard reasoned that when part of this great network is damaged, all feel it. Perhaps that's why we groan when another great swathe of the great coral reef die off, or an iconic animal is almost gone. Are we subconsciously attached to all of nature?

Steve puts it better than I can, writing:

"In 1982, the late ecologist Paul Shepard extended this theory into psychology, proposing that if there are innate links between the planet and the human species, then those links should extend to the human mind. Shepard feared that by wantonly destroying the former we are simultaneously ravaging the latter — quite literally driving ourselves mad one clearcut forest at a time."

For the record, paleontologist Peter Ward thinks the Gaia theory is dead wrong. The record shows life has barely stumbled along, surviving many of it's own suicidal tendencies. He calls it the "Medea Hypothesis". Even so, it's true we all feel nature's pain as though it was our own.

The idea that damage to nature is also damaging our mental health is gaining more and more ground. The U.S. National Wildlife Federation brought out an expert report on it in 2012. Maybe we are not as unfeeling about nature as we like to think, or at least, as corporate science has led us to believe? If human intelligence was developed over a very long time as hunters-gatherers, is it any wonder we have become so crazy living in concrete boxes where nature is more or less banned?

We also talk about Laura Sewell and her essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception.” We have to revive our senses, Laura tells us, in order to really conceive of nature at all.

Of course some readers in Orion Magazine questioned whether we really have to go to the ends of the Earth, as Kotler did in Patagonia, to find our ecological selves. Do you think it's become impossible for humans to recognize their true inner selves in a city?

Here's another paragraph from Steve's powerful writing that moved me (from his article "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons"):

"It all clicks into place — as I am watching the death throes of this iceberg. This is the real impact of industrial repression, the impact of our environmental arrogance. Once this meltdown is complete, it will not reverse. The freshly melted water will never become ice again, at least not in any time frame that is fathomable in human terms. What does it feel like to witness these end times? Awful. Like murder. Like I’m the one who is melting."

What about ecopsychology? There's no time to train a hundred million eco-counsellors. Is this marriage of psychology and ecology destined to remain a plaything of the inner circle? Will it be taught in schools? Will it ever reach the Republican Party. Where can it go?

Despite the title, there is nothing "easy" about ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is also co-founder and Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project, which trains athletes and others to reach their personal best. But as he talks (including explaining where the expression "Three dog night" comes from) - we realize his heart is in his New Mexico dog rescue project. It's called "A Small Furry Prayer" and Steve has a book out all about that.

Keep up with all things Kotler at his web site www.stevenkotler.com. You may also be interested in his book "Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact".

Download or listen to this 28 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Steven Kotler in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Or Tweet out this interview with this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/jr8dztr

WRAPPING UP WITH MORE CLIMATE NEWS

Last week's program on strange, record-breaking developments in the Arctic is still waving out into the Twittosphere, still heavily downloaded. You can listen for free at soundcloud.com/radioeochshock, or download any of our past programs from ecoshock.org.

This week's climate horror story was pretty predictable. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached new levels above 404 parts per million. Just ten years ago, in 2006, it was big news when CO2 hit a record high of 381 parts per million. Greenhouse gases are still climbing, and they are increasing faster than ever before. Scientists used to talk about 2 parts per million added every year. Now it's over 3 parts per million, for the second year in a row. From February 2015 to February 2016 CO2 levels jumped 3.76 parts per million.

The rate of carbon emissions increases is not constant. There is an increase on the increase every year. Unless we go into a crash program to save ourselves, catastrophe is right around the corner.

Despite the Paris peace agreement, government bragging, corporate propaganda and our own pride when we walking or turn off a light switch, humanity and all the species are hurtling ever-faster toward rising seas, an ocean more acid, crop-crushing droughts and extreme weather. Some plants and animals will not be able to adapt fast enough. Some humans won't either.

But climate change is just one face of a revolution in human interference in natural systems. Let's look into synthetic life, a plague of new nano-materials and the joys of gene-drives. We must not forget the dark side of technology, in our race to try everything.

RADIO ECOSHOCK!

Radio Ecoshock reaches out to you every week from over 90 non-profit radio stations in 4 countries, and countless Net stations. It ripples out to more to listeners in more than 100 countries weekly, via Soundcloud, archive.org and many other sites. Still, not enough humans know how dangerous these problems are, or how short our time to deal with them.

If you agree this program content is important, you can help. Please go ahead and forward the show widely, Tweet about it, get it on Facebook. Thank you for helping me get the word out, by extending the voice of our expert guests.

And thank you for caring about your world.

NATURE REALLY IS THE BEST MEDICINE...

Our fake ad for Nature, as the new pharmaceutical wonder-drug, was created by the folks at nature-rx.org. Find the video version on You tube here.

NATALIE MERCHANT "IT'S A COMIN'"

We go out with a tune by Natalie Merchant called "It's a Comin'". I first saw this posted on Guy McPherson's blog, Nature Bats Last. Find all her latest works at nataliemerchant.com.

Here are Natalie's opening words:

Wild fires, dying lakes,

landslides, hurricanes,

apocalypse in store

like nothing ever seen before.

It’s a-coming.

Third-generation refugees,

street mob burning effigies,

revolution, civil war

like nothing ever seen before.

EXTREME ARCTIC FEAR

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 9 Mar 2016 16:02:00 -0800

SUMMARY: Abrupt warming in Arctic could lead to catastrophic consequences says top scientist Dr. Peter Gleick, ICCI Director Pam Pearson, and the founder of Paleoceanography, Dr. James Kennett. Three must-listen interviews.

"What is happening in the Arctic now is unprecedented & possibly catastrophic."

That's the Tweet heard around the world at the end of February. It was picked up by the Independent newspaper in the UK, and many other places in the alternative and climate-savy media. Robert Hunziker did a strong piece about it in CounterPunch called "The Arctic Turns Ugly".

The Tweeter is a world-known scientist. Dr. Peter Gleick is a member of the US National Academy of Science, he's a MacArthur Fellow, and President of the Pacific Institute. He was a guest on Radio Ecoshock in March 2014 (find the blog and links for that audio here).

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

DR. PETER GLEICK WARNS OF POSSIBLE ARCTIC CATASTROPHE

Why is it warming so much - is it just "El Nino" or is it really climate change? Generally, scientists say El Nino affects the Pacific, but not the Arctic. Most of the strange warming in the Arctic this past winter (with record low sea ice) is due to our heating the atmosphere, and not El Nino.

I ask Peter Gleick, why he is alarmed about this, and is that concern shared by other scientists?

Dr. Peter Gleick

The United Kingdom has practically been buried by storm after record-breaking storm this winter. Peter Gleick thinks abnormal weather is directly connected to big changes in the Arctic. That's the new understanding, led by scientists like Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University. The Jet Stream has been altered by the fact that there is less temperature difference between the poles and the equatorial zones. The oceans are hotter. The land is hotter, and in some places drier. All these things change the weather.

I worry an abrupt shift in climate could happen, and the corporate media would still bury us in Donald Trump and the Kardashians. Do you think climate silence is a conspiracy by a few major media corporations - or is it possible that all of us are so addicted to fossil fuels, we really don't want to know?

To be honest, I can barely bring myself to read the latest news. Maybe the problems in the Arctic are just too big to comprehend, or just too scary to face? Is it worthwhile to keep fighting, if all we can do is slow down the loss - and the damage, for the next generation?

There is, says Gleick, a big difference between a civilization facing severe challenges as the Earth warms, and a planet where climate changes so far and so fast that civilization cannot cope or adapt. We'll have to make major efforts to adapt to what we have already done. We can't continue to make it worse. So "yes" it is worth keeping up the fight.

Let's say Greenland ice loss doubles or triples, and the Arctic sea ice disappears for most of the year. Gleick agrees nobody knows what would happen. When we change the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are running a giant experiment on the Earth. It's already out of control.

Gleick is a senior scientist, recognized around the world. When he suggests a "catastrophe" might be developing, is that language too extreme? He tells us that again, no one can say for sure, but our current path is taking us to climate changes so extreme it could easily become a catatastrophe.

Find out more about Dr. Peter Gleick, at the Pacific Institute. The web site is pacinst.org. Peter is author of many scientific papers and nine books, many of them reporting on world freshwater resources.

Download or listen to this 13 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Peter Gleick in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

You can Tweet out this interview with Peter Gleik using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/h53exrb

PAM PEARSON - CROSSING THRESHOLDS OF THE CRYOSPHERE

A surprising amount of Planet Earth is frozen. It's been that way for millions of years, all during our life and evolution. Last December, the world's leading experts on this frozen land and sea - warned Earth is heading into irreversible loss in the cryosphere. Nothing short of an ice age can avoid incredible changes that will re-arrange sea levels, cities, and life as we know it. Practically nobody heard them.

Scientists and civil servants who know this danger gathered into a largely volunteer group called the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, known as ICCI. They've issued a report called "Thresholds and Closing Windows, Risks of Irreversible Cryosphere Climate Change". We are joined by one of the co-ordinators of that report, Pam Pearson, the Director of ICCI. In fact, she founded this network of ice science specialists just as the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks failed.

Pam Pearson

Get an overview and link to download report "Thresholds and Closing Windows" here.

Here is what the ICCI says in a summary about this report:

"Policy makers and the general public alike now largely accept that the Arctic, Antarctica and many mountain regions already have warmed two-three times faster than the rest of the planet. What is less understood, outside the scientific community, is that the very nature of the cryosphere – regions of snow and ice – carries dynamics that once triggered, in some cases cannot be reversed, even with a return to lower temperatures or CO2 levels."

The Cryosphere breaks down into 4 important components, all acting differently on different time scales:

1. Ice sheets (polar land-based ice)

2. Mountain glaciers (retreating everywhere around the world)

3. Permafrost (up to 20% of the Earth's land mass is "permanently" frozen, except it's not. It's thawing.)

4. Arctic and Antarctic sea ice (floating on ice surface, does not add to rising seas, but does increase warming when melting back and exposing darker ocean water to sunlight.)

The report also covers Polar Ocean acidification.

I think the first thing to grasp is that politics and propaganda can't change a simple fact of physics: once the temperature goes over 0 degrees C, or 32 Fahrenheit, water changes state from ice or snow to a liquid. We can't talk our way out of that. The report says:

"Cryosphere climate change is not like air or water pollution, where the impacts remain local and when addressed, allow ecosystems largely to recover. Cryosphere climate change, driven by the physical laws of water’s response to the freezing point, is different. Slow to manifest itself, once triggered it inevitably forces the Earth’s climate system into a new state, one that most scientists believe has not existed for 35–50 million years."

The Arctic has been unbelievably hot this past winter. It rained in the dark of December, and I just read the Arctic February was more like the temperature expected in June.

But the ice-world is not just thawing at the Poles. I remember years ago the famous nature TV star Steve Irwin lamenting that tropical glaciers were disappearing. Now this report says that even if the Paris climate deal is carried out, we can still expect: "Complete loss of most mountain glaciers."

IRREVERSIBLE LOSS OF ICE

The Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, DID say that many aspects of climate change are "largely irreversible on human time scales." But they buried that on page one thousand and thirty three of a fat report that hardly anyone reads!

About two dozen scientists published an open letter in the Guardian newspaper last December, urging more action to protect the cryosphere, at the Paris climate talks.

I found it fascinating that this ICCI report devoted a chapter to acidification of the polar seas. We know oceans become more acidic due to a chemical reaction with the carbon dioxide we keep adding to the atmosphere. But I haven't seen much about this at the Poles. It's happening even worse there, as colder water can absorb more carbon, which becomes carbolic acid. Northern fisheries and all marine life are threatened by this change.

THAWING PERMAFROST

I've done several shows on thawing permafrost. Scientists in Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Alaska are most interested, but so are the people who live in those lands full-time. Is there a tipping point where once permafrost starts to go, it can fuel it's own further thawing? Apparently so.

The ICCI report says of permafrost thaw: "any carbon release [is] not reversible even with [a] new Ice Age, except on geologic time scales." I found that in a couple of places in the report. Even a new Ice Age may not be able to return Earth to the state known for millions of years! Most scientists say that the next possible date for an ice age, based on the tilt of the Earth's axis, - that ice age will not happen due to the warming gases we have already added to the atmosphere. So count that out.

You can find out more about melting permafrost as a driver to global climate change here.

WHAT ABOUT THE FROZEN METHANE - THE CLATHRATES?

One thing I found missing in this report is the threat of melting of frozen methane on the sea-bed, known as clathrates. Other scientists see clathrates as a likely driver in past extinction events. Why isn't it in this ICCI report? Pam tells us the science about clathrate melting is not yet sure. Some scientists say that for now, the methane released in Arctic waters is likely to be absorbed in the water column, before it reaches the surface and the atmosphere. Others, like Dr. Shahkova, say their research shows methane is already being released in the Arctic, more and more.

The authors of the ICCI report already had four irreversible certainties to report. They didn't want to add the clathrate problem until more finished science is in. Some of their scientists disagreed. It's not settled. See what our next guest, Dr. James Kennett has to say!

ABANDONING OUR COASTAL CITIES - IS THAT "ADAPTING"?

Here is one more paragraph from the stunning introduction to this report "Thresholds and Closing Windows":

"Adaptation to the levels of projected climate-related disruption, particularly sea-level rise that cannot be halted and accelerates over the centuries, simply will not be possible without massive migration and other changes to human centers of population and infrastructure, that will carry enormous economic and not least, historic and cultural costs."

Basically: humans will have to leave their coastal cities behind, and the some of the most fertile near-ocean river estuaries that now support many millions of people.

According to this ICCI report: "The only way fully to avoid these risks is never to let temperatures rise into these risk zones at all." After the climate is broken, and the cryosphere starts it's unstoppable melt, there is no way to "fix" it.

Find out more about the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative at iccinet.org.

Download or listen to this 27 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Pam Pearson in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can Tweet out this interview using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/hauvzt6

DR. JAMES KENNETT - ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE FOUND IN THE PAST

Just 10 years ago, scientists told me melting the world's ice system would take thousands of years. Since then, with the shocking ice loss at both poles, we're not so sure. Abrupt climate change is possible. We're about to explore what can happen within one lifetime - that has already happened in the ancient past.

To find the clues, we dig into the sea bed with a founding expert in the field. Our guest is recognized as the father of that science, called Paleoceanography. He started publishing in the 1960's. He wrote the standard college textbook "Marine Geology", and founded a journal on this subject.

Dr. James Kennett

Dr. James Kennett is Emeritus Professor of Marine Geology and Paleocoeanography, in the Earth Science Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For me, the startling results of this study, published October 2015 in the Journal Paleoceanography, is what could happen in just 50 years, easily within a single lifetime.

The paper name sounds very technical, but don't let that scare you off this interview. Kennett explains things very clearly, and it's one of the most important interviews I've done recently. The title is: "Abrupt termination of Marine Isotope Stage 16 (Termination VII) at 631.5?ka in Santa Barbara Basin, California".

You can read about this Santa Barbara Basin research in this helpful AGU article by Julie Cohen.

We learn in this paper that about 630,000 years ago, there was a relatively rapid shift out of a cold glacier period, to an interglacial period that was a lot warmer. The whole process took about 700 years - BUT it started with an abrupt temperature rise in only 50 years! Kennett tells Julie Cohen:

“Of the 13 degree Fahrenheit total change, a shift of 7 to 9 degrees occurred almost immediately right at the beginning.”

WHEN YELLOWSTONE BLEW UP

What do catastrophic events in Yellowstone Park have to do with all this? Well first of all, Kennett has studied and written papers on the Yellowstone Caldera, the giant hole in the ground blown out in an ancient explosion. He told science journalist Julie Cohen:

“Our tests showed that this particular ash was ejected from the Yellowstone volcanic caldera in Wyoming, which has exactly the same fingerprint. This huge caldera formed about 630,000 years ago, with most of the enormous volume of ash blown to the east. However, this eruption was so explosive that the ash reached the Santa Barbara Basin, forming a layer one to two inches thick. The discovery of this ash helped with dating the core.”

Kennett tells Radio Ecoshock listeners there were in fact two gigantic blasts at Yellowstone, about 200 years apart. The first was followed by a cloud that rolled around the Northern Hemisphere, blocking out the summer sun, and creating an instant cooling, similar to a "nuclear winter". The second created an even longer constant winter.

ANOTHER SCIENTIST WORRIED ABOUT CLATHRATES AND ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

Some of our listeners are deeply worried about much more global warming methane being released in our current climate shift. This paper talks about: "repeated discharges of methane from methane hydrates associated with both ocean warming and low sea level." Did that methane erupt from the West Coast of North America, or from the Arctic? Kennett says more methane has been measured all down the Canadian and American West Coast in recent years, bubbling up from the sea floor. Hotter oceans are already starting the first signs of clathrate melting. It's happening off the U.S. East Coast too.

This seasoned scientist is deeply concerned about the potential super warming effect of methane releases, as the oceans warm. He's not shy to tell us that, and you should listen. Dr. Kennett suggests that melting clathrates likely triggered the rapid 50 year warming found about 630,000 years ago. But we do not know for certain yet.

This paper did not speculate on a comparison of this 50-year shift a few hundred thousand years ago, and human-induced warming today. But personally, I wonder if we will see a similar deglaciation within a single human lifetime. Have we already entered this process?

I wonder what climate modellers like David Archer will think, after his book "The Long Thaw". Is there disagreement about how fast deglaciation can take place? Yes and no, says Kennett. Everyone who studies ice knows it can take hundreds to thousands of years for a giant glacier like the one covering Greenland to melt. On the other hand, he tells us, there is a big scientific consensus that quite rapid temperature changes have taken place many times in the past. It's both.

After the call, Jim told me that their research team wants to return to the Santa Barbara Basin to drill even deeper cores. These would tell us a lot about the history of Earth's climate and life, including methane releases, going back 1.2 million years. However, there is a lot of oil and gas drilling in that same basin, plus a very environmentally concerned community in California. So far, the scientists have not received permission to go back and open up this critical chapter in Earth's records.

Dr. James Kennett has published hundreds of papers, starting in 1962 right up to the present.

Download or listen to this 21 minute interview with Dr. James Kennett in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can Tweet out this Kennett interview using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/zd9mwrk

Here is a You tube video on abrupt climate change: "Expecting the Unexpected" with senior scientists like Richard Alley warning us all.

EARTH NOW WARMING FIFTY TIME FASTER

Here's an important article in the UK Guardian newspaper "Earth now warming 50X faster than coming out of last ice age".

That article says:

"What humans are in the process of doing to the climate makes the transition out of the last ice age look like a casual stroll through the park. We’re already warming the Earth about 20 times faster than during the ice age transition, and over the next century that rate could increase to 50 times faster or more. We’re in the process of destabilizing the global climate far more quickly than happens even in some of the most severe natural climate change events."

This paper, led by R.E. Kopp, is covered here in the Real Climate blog here.

The full citiation for the new science is:

R.E. Kopp, A.C. Kemp, K. Bittermann, B.P. Horton, J.P. Donnelly, W.R. Gehrels, C.C. Hay, J.X. Mitrovica, E.D. Morrow, and S. Rahmstorf, "Temperature-driven global sea-level variability in the Common Era", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pp. 201517056, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517056113

The actual paper abstract is here.

That was one fully loaded Ecoshock show. I hope you found it useful. You can download all our past programs as free .mp3 files from our web site at http://www.ecoshock.org/ You can also listen to our more recent programs, for free, using the player at our soundcloud page.

Alex Smith, your host and producer at Radio Ecoshock.

Food Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 2 Mar 2016 15:44:00 -0800

Summary: British & American scientists, including Joshua Elliot from Chicago, warn climate could bring "food shock" by hitting key crop areas. Will famine return? Maria Gillardin hosts reports from nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen from Fukushima Japan, site of world's worst nuclear accident.

Don't say you haven't been warned.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

If you can support this radio show, I can use your help now. Radio Ecoshock is developing new graphics, a new web site, and blog plus podcast feed - which should make these important themes more widely available. Check out ways to support the show here.

JOSHUA ELLIOT AND FOOD SHOCK

What if extreme weather events, made stronger by climate change, hit a couple of major world food-growing regions? We go into "food shock". Let's explore what that can mean.

On February 12th, 2016 in Washington DC, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancment of Science, a group of British and American scientists provided their latest report on the fragility, and resilience of the global food system. We are joined by one of the presenters, Dr. Joshua Elliot, from the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Joshua Elliot

You can find these reports at the Global Food Security blog, at foodsecurity.ac.uk. For example, here is the main report I used: "Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system" which comes as a handy .pdf file in your browser.

Try this blog entry on the program from Tim Benton.

And check out Tim Benton's blog post on UK food security here. I say that because (a) the UK government is a major sponsor of this study/report and (b) as Dr. Elliot tells us, the UK has only TEN DAYS worth of food supplies!

The long-time grain watcher Lester Brown warned for years that rice was within a half degree of it's upper growing limits already. What happens if the world rice zones become too hot for that crop? Joshua Elliot thinks the rice crop will be able to continue past heat limits, because it is generally underwater, which cools it.

This teleconference I recorded with Lester Brown, at the time head of the Earth Policy Institute is a good intro to his work, and continues to be heavily downloaded now 5 years later. Download full conference in CD quality (22 minutes) here.

Brown also warned that world grain stocks could only supply a few months of food at best. It appears we can't cover a whole year of bad crop losses. Should we be creating a long-term food reserve, as the ancient Egyptians did?

That turns out to be a very thorny idea. If there was a centralized food stock, maybe somone would use it to dictate political changes to a starving country? Anyway, most countries do not want to give up control of their own food sources. Remember when Russia experienced a huge crop loss in the heat wave of 2010, the Russians cut off food exports to make sure they could feed their own people. That was one driving factor in the "Arab Spring" revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, both of which import large amounts of grain, which is subsidized for the poor. When prices went up, the patience of the people went down.

So an international food bank seems unlikely at this time.

I AM NOT OPTIMISTIC ABOUT WORLD FOOD SUPPLIES

Unlike my guest, I am not a techno-optimist about our coming food supply. Just in: a new report says 75% of world crops depend on pollination. Yet 40% of pollinators like bees and butterlies are threatened by "total extinction". Bat and bird pollinators are also disappearing.

That is just one driver, not counting heat beyond crop limits, extreme weather events including floods and droughts, human encroachement on nature everywhere, expanding human population, the list goes on and on. Personally, I expect to witness mass famine again in my lifetime, as seen in the 1960's in China in 1959, and Ethiopia in 1984, but hitting more countries. Even in developed countries, it seems likely food will become a much larger part of our budget, and at times difficult to afford for millions.

I have food insurance in buckets in the basement which will last at least 30 years. We grow more of our own food every year. We are plugged into a network of local food producers and community gardens.

In the interview, Joshua Elliot mentioned the United Kingdom has a scant 10 days of food provisions. If the ships and planes stop for any reason, the country is in danger. Food backups in all countries have dropped dangerously low, just at a time of growing threats to agriculture as usual. I say: don't take food for granted.

FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR DISASTER - STILL DEVELOPING - ARNIE GUNDERSEN

We're coming to the fifth year after the start of the world's biggest nuclear disaster. In March 2011, three reactors at the sea-side complex at Fukushima blew up. I covered it extensively on Radio Ecoshock, and one of my best sources has been nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. Find my 2014 blog summary of continuing Fukushima threats here, and you can listen to or download that feature interview with Arnie here.

Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen

Now Arnie is back in Japan, checking out the radiation, the impacts, the human costs, and efforts by the operator TEPCO to stem continuing radiation running into the Pacific Ocean. His first telephone reports have been compiled by a hard-working California radio producer, Maria Gillardin. She hosts TUC Radio. Previously Maria was a leading producer at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, and was founding producer of the public affairs program "Making Contact".

Radio Producer Maria Gilardin

TUC Radio stands for "Time of Useful Consciousness". Be sure to support Maria as an independent radio maker, at tucradio.org. You can find still more telephone reports from Fukushima by Arnie Gundersen at fairewinds.org.

Remember, the nuclear accident at Fukushima was not an event in history. Even now, five years later, this horrible outpouring of radiation continues.

It took four years for the government of Japan to admit that ALL the plutonium-laced nuclear materials in Reactor Three were blown into the air in the first days. That went to Japan, to the Pacific Ocean, and around the world in the stratosphere.

As Arnie tells us in detail, the human health impacts of the Fukushima disaster are still not widely known, and still covered up by the Japanese government. It's proving impossible to handle all the radioactive materials. Look for the government to start incinerating even more, which just means dumping dangerous radioactive particles over a wider area.

Every day a throng of workers try to find more space to store still more highly radioactive water. Every day they fail, and some drains into the Pacific Ocean. We have no idea how this will end, or if it will ever end in this century, or the next. A nuclear melt-down is forever in human terms, and this was three melt-downs.

As Helen Caldicott wrote in her book, nuclear power is not the answer to global warming or anything else.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring what happens to this planet.

SCIENCE OF CATASTROPHE

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 14:41:00 -0800

SUMMARY: Coming up on Radio Ecoshock two heavy hitters. We have the expert on past mass extinctions, and maybe the present one, scientist Peter Ward. Then climate scientist Paul Beckwith joins me. There is serious news about plankton, the tiny ocean plants that feed the seas, and provide most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.

A NEW WEB SITE, BLOG AND PODCAST FEED FOR RADIO ECOSHOCK

The long-standing (since 2006) Radio Ecoshock podcast on Itunes has died. That is because this blog has become too complex for the Itunes system. I have to break apart the podcast feed and the blog. Plus, the web site is rather boring. It just doesn't reflect the excitement of our guests and the danger of these times.

I have a new site designer working on this. He's a long-time fan, in the online business, who is giving Radio Ecoshock a great low rate. Carl's been running the Radio Ecoshock web site for years, flawlessly. He's a big reason you can get Radio Ecoshock online. Plus, Russ, the original Ecoshock graphics designer, is coming back with a new logo and some screen graphics.

As you know I've been fundraising last fall and continuing. That's partly to save up for the cost of a new web site, blog - everything really. If you can add to that fund, we'll get even more online, helping more people find out about climate change and other serious problems facing this civilization. If you can help, use this page to see donation options.

A CALL FOR GRAPHICS OR PHOTOS

Do you have photos or other graphics or images you can contribute to our new web site and blog?

Photos of nature, or the wreckage of nature would be welcome for the new site and on-going use (like on Soundcloud). Or you may have drawing, art, or images suitable for Radio Ecoshock (burning Earth, fallen forests, nuclear stuff, you know what we cover).

You must own the rights to material you submit. If it is public domain, you must send proof (say a link) that shows it is public domain.

Send your submission, or a link to where I can get it, to: radio //at// ecoshock dot org. Thanks for helping out if you can! Let's get this science and news out further to more people.

DR. PETER WARD: PAST EXTINCTION, PRESENT DIRECTIONS

Is Earth designed by life for life? Or is this a casino of chance, where catastrophe decides the survivors? Those questions, and more this week with Dr. Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock. I can tell you Peter is a Professor at the University of Washington, and a paleontologist. He's a specialist in the long history of Earth, it's climate, and its periods of mass extinction.

In my opinion, Peter is also one of the most under-estimated minds in American science. His 11th book shook me. It's called "Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future." That books presents the best theory we have on the mechanism of great mass extinction. That was in 2007. Two years later he surprised us again with the Medea Hypothesis (Princeton University Press) which we'll touch on. His 2010 book "The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps." stands near my desk, as a standard for the public. In 2015, he published "A New History of Life: The radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on Earth" with Joe Kirschvink. It is radical science. We'll find out why.

It's my pleasure to welcome Peter Ward back to Radio Ecoshock.

Dr. Peter D. Ward

I saved up some serious questions for Peter, which touch on his string of books. We start by revisiting his now ten-year-old theory of how a massive extinction of land and sea creatures happened. That's in the classic book (read it!) "Under A Green Sky". I ask Peter to describe the organisms that created a poisonous atmosphere for a time on Earth.

These are bacteria that have a different metabolism than most life we know. They do not depend on oxygen, and breath out sulphur dioxide. That's the "rotten egg" chemical you may have smelled in a high school chemistry class. We instinctively run away from that smell, because it is poisonous to our lungs.

Ward theorizes that when oxygen ran to lower levels in great warming of the oceans in the distant past, these sulphur producing bacteria took over from oxygen producing plankton. Waves of poisonous gas would have washed over land, killing off most life forms there. Thus we have a period of ten million years (among several such times) where there is no record, or very little sign, of life in the fossil record of rocks.

These sulfur bacteria are very ancient. They were on Earth at least 3 billion years ago, and remain with us still. You can find them in the bad-smelling oxygen-deprived parts under a beach, if you dig down. If oxygen in the oceans become depleted beyond a certain point, these sulfur breathers will come roaring back!

All this relates to the possible collapse of oxygen-producing plankton, which I cover with Paul Beckwith in the second part of this program.

A few weeks ago I interviewed the Russian scientist Sergei Petrovskii, now working in the UK. His work suggests that phytoplankton, which produce the majority of the world's oxygen, could thrive as warming progresses, up to a point where many species go into extinction. The paper is called "Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change".

The full paper is here.

Or you can listen to my interview with Petrovskii here.

Sergei Petrovksii told us he had not yet checked his model against the record of the ancient past. So I ask Peter Ward, who know about such things, if there have been cases of a dip in world oxygen levels in the paleoclimatic record, since the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.3 billion years ago?

His answer is "yes" many of them. Ward tells us that each of the mass extinction events in the past 500 million years were accompanied by a reduction of oxygen. Listen to the interview for the full details, but this appears to further the concerns raised by Petrovskii - that extreme warming could lead to a plankton die-off and consequent loss of oxygen.

Download or listen to this 30 minute interview with Peter Ward in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

ARE SEA LEVELS RISING FASTER?

My next problem touches on Ward's book "The Flooded Earth". In Robert Scribbler's blog, Robert Marston Fanney says sea level rise has accelerated. He writes: "From 2009 Through October 2015, Global Oceans Have Risen by 5 Millimeters Per Year". He cites data and a graph from AVISO, the satellite altimetry data site.

On the other hand, very new science has come out suggesting a drier state of land is soaking up more moisture than before, limiting sea level rise. That comes from work led by J.T. Reager, a researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What does Ward see happening in this matter of short-term sea level rise? Actually, he prefers not to talk about short-term sea level at all. There isn't a consensus yet about it, as new science comes out. What we do know is that sea levels WILL rise, and Ward documents the impacts of that in his book "The Flooded Earth".

ON QUESTION OF SEA LEVEL RISE: BREAKING SCIENCE

Here is a quote from a press release February 22, 2016 from the Potsdam Institute:

"Sea-level rise past and future: Robust estimates for coastal planners

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

"Sea-levels worldwide will likely rise by 50 to 130 centimeters by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced rapidly. This is shown in a new study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that, for the first time, combines the two most important estimation methods for future sea-level rise and yields a more robust risk range. A second study, like the first one to be published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first global analysis of sea-level data for the past 3000 years. It confirms that during the past millennia sea-level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century."

And here is a news story about that second breaking science story - that sea levels are now rising faster than they have in the past 2800 years.

CATASTROPHISM

Starting in the 1700's, scientists, especially geologists, described the world a gradual continuum, where "the present is the key to the past". The opposite theory, called catastrophism, was left for fringe writers like Immanuel Velikovksy.

Peter's newest book re-writes the history of life on Earth, not from the viewpoint of gradual evolution, but from the many catastrophes that have occurred on this planet. That's not just the impact of asteroids hitting, but gigantic and long-lasting eruption of volcanoes, the almost frozen times known as "snowball Earth", and of course the many periods of serious global heating.

This new book also originates from Ward's important earlier book the "Medea Hypothesis". That is an answer to James Lovelock's and the Gaia hypothesis. Instead of life arranging the best circumstances for its continued survival, Ward finds in the geologic record that life forms have often been suicidal, destroying the conditions required for survival. Does that sound familiar?

The new book is: "A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth" by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink.

If life bumbles along through long periods between catastrophes, often of it's own making, where do you think we are now? Are we on the edge of the next mass extinction, or could that be thousands of years from now?

GET THE RIGHT PETER WARD!

It's really strange. Peter when I talk with some of the world's top scientists, it's common for them to mention Peter's theories. Radio Ecoshock listeners ask about him. He's been on PBS, Coast to Coast AM, and helped Animal Planet. Yet if I Google Peter Ward and climate, the top couple of pages refer to a man who really is on the fringe of climate science.

Yes, Dr. Peter Langdon Ward is a vulcanologist with unorthodox views on the causes of climate change. Rather than fossil fuels, the other Peter Ward claims volcanic eruptions and depletion of ozone from chlorinated substances cause global warming. It's a different kind of denial, and yet the American Geophysical Union (AGU) continues to give this other Peter Ward top billing. Shame on them. The fossil fuel companies must love it - "we're not responsible, it's the volcanoes or something...." Yeah right.

Here are some links to the real Peter Ward - Peter D. Ward, from the University of Washington.

His academic bio, on the University of Washington site. The Peter Ward Paleontologist page in Wikipedia.

Here is Part 1 of my video interview with Peter Ward five years ago, but still valid.

Part 2 is here. Part 3 here.

Peter Ward on Earth's Mass Extinction, TED-Ed talk 3 years ago. Peter Ward You tube video "Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps".

PAUL BECKWITH ON THE PLANKTON THREAT

The world economy is teetering. The weather is nuts and dangerous. So let's talk about plankton! Those little critters in the ocean we never see, produce most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. They are the bottom of the food chain for ocean life. And they are in trouble.

Here to chat about all this is a regular Radio Ecoshock correspondent, climate scientist Paul Beckwith. By the way, there's a humorous album of photo-shopped Paul Beckwith here on Facebook.

Paul has two Masters Degrees, and is now working on his Ph.D. in climate science at the University of Ottawa. He's a prolific communicator on climate, with emphasis on his research into abrupt climate shifts.

Paul says we are entering an abrupt shift of climate now, and we will have to do some kind of geoengineering to save a livable climate. That might include feeding nutrients to plankton, whether by dumping iron into the sea, and the non-scientist Russ George tried, or even by placing tubes into the sea, to use wave power to bring up nutrients from the depths for plankton to feed on.

The latest studies found a very disturbing trend. Apparently we've lost almost 40% of plankton in world oceans already, at least according to a 2010 paper. Paul Beckwith, tells us about that study in his new video about plankton posted on You tube two weeks ago.

Then a newsletter from Jim Thomas of the ETC Group said the loss was not as great as thought. The disappearance of plankton may be partly due to satellite misreading. Jim cited the paper “Revaluating ocean warming impacts on global phytoplankton”, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on October 26, 2015.

Paul says this new study implies a loss of plankton at about 8%, instead of 40% since 1950. If true that would be good news. But there is more research needed. At the very least, this new paper in Nature Climate Change tells us more about plankton's response to warming oceans. Paul's comments are excellent, listen in.

Download or listen to this 29 minute interview with Paul Beckwith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Paul and I talk about many things, like the impact on fisheries and world food, declining Plankton in the Indian Ocean, super warming in the Arctic and what that means for plankton, and whether he thinks the die-off of mammals and sea birds on the West Coast is caused by Fukushima radiation (he doesn't).

Get all the latest from Paul Beckwith on his web site here. I also get a lot of good tips from Paul's Facebook page.

NEXT UP: FOOD SHOCK

Next week, Radio Ecoshock covers the coming phenomenon of food shock. This isn't about doomer fantasies. The warning comes from government-funded institutions and serious scientists. Be sure to tune in for our food shock show next week.

Sorry to nag about money, but if you can spare some, I'll need it for the new web page, blog, graphics and all that. The page to find out how is here.

We are out of time. I'm Alex. Thank you for listening again this week, and for caring about our world.

HARD NEWS, TROUBLED PLANET

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 16:55:00 -0800

Summary: Australia fires climate scientists while expanding coal. Ellen Roberts of GetUp! reports. From Netherlands, scientist Arjen Hoekstra finds 4 billion people in water scarcity. From Hong Kong, Stuart Heaver on nuclear fear next door. Radio Ecoshock 160217

A new paper by Australian scientists find that that the number of bushfires in Australia is up 40 percent just since 2007. Find that study here.

Another hot summer is just ending in Australia, with another round of fires. Meanwhile, Tasmania is burning, with fires so hot they create their own lightning - self-sustaining fires.

What does the government do? It hires a thug to fire 110 climate scientists who report on the growing impacts of climate disruption. The premier climate study agency CISRO, is being converted into a for-profit tech research agency with industry in mind. Why? The new boss says climate change has already been proven, so why keep all those climate scientists?

Over 3,000 scientists around the world have petitioned to stop the carnage at CISRO. No matter. The government has other fish to fry, literally, as the waters around Australia heat up beyond the survival limits of the famous Great Barrier Reef (just look at this recent example from Fiji). That doesn't matter anyway, as the Australian government just approved a massive new coal mine complex, and a coal shipping port just a few kilometers from that reef.

That's the real reason climate science has to go. It's the coal business, mate.

We'll get to the scientist who led a study showing billions of people experience "severe water scarcity", and listen to more nuclear fears about reactor mania in China. Welcome to your dose of world news and science, this week on Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

ELLEN ROBERTS, GETUP! AND AUSSIE COAL CRAZIES

There are crazy projects, and then there are plans so dangerous we can't believe any government or corporation would do it. Here is one of those. In Australia, just before Christmas, the government announced approval of a mega-coal shipping terminal just a few kilometers from the World Heritage Great Barrier reef. Australia is busy expanding production with absolutely giant mines, to ship more climate-wrecking coal to India. What could go wrong?

Here to tell us about it is Ellen Roberts of the Australian activist organization GetUp! The GetUp! group in Queensland covers a wide range of issues, from climate change to mistreatment of refugees. They help organize the public to get action, despite the current reactionary government in Australia.

Ellen Roberts. Photo credit: Australian Financial Review at afr.com

Here is part of a GetUp email to their members:

"Earlier this year, we helped the Mackay Conservation Group defeat the Carmichael mine in Federal Court. And in 2013 GetUp members funded two court cases that stopped the Abbot Point expansion in its tracks. They were historic cases that forced new laws banning dredge spoil from being dumped out at sea.

But, under huge pressure from the coal lobby and conservatives within his party, Greg Hunt has just re-approved Adani's destructive, unprofitable coal disaster.

This port will involve more than a million cubic metres of dredging in Great Barrier Reef World Heritage waters. It will make way for a company with a documented history of bribery, corruption and environmental destruction to build one of the biggest coal mines in the world.

The mine would create more carbon emissions than most countries. It will heat the oceans, bleach our coral and undermine international efforts to stop global warming. On every level, this is a disaster.

We've done it before. Now, we have no choice. To stop this project, we have to do it again."

If it makes you feel any better, the Adani Group in India have announced they will delay opening their super coal mines in Australia, and the new coal port. Perhaps they've noticed that stock in coal companies around the world have crashed so badly that many are going bankrupt. The Australian government is still optimistic though, hoping they can help crash the world climate with more coal. This adds to my conviction that only a major economic crash can possibly stop civilization from environmental suicide.

All along, the Aussie coal industry has foot tooth and nail against any subsidy for solar or wind power. Now that Asian coal demand has fallen, and Australia's mines running at a loss, here comes the coal industry looking for billions more in taxpayers dollars - aside from the multiple subisides they already get in public infrastructure.

More on falls in Asian coal demand lower down in this article.

By providing coal, Australia is helping India avoid the transition to clean fuel. India and that whole region is hard hit by climate change. Plus literally millions of Indians are killed every year by air pollution caused by burning coal. I think Australians need to take some responsibility for the impacts in India, but here we also have an Indian corporation using Australian coal to pollute their own people.

Here is the kicker. Coal companies in the United States and Europe are going bankrupt. Their stock is almost worthless. Nobody wants to invest in them. Why is Australia the last place to hear that the coal age is over?

Download or listen to this 17 minute interview with Ellen Roberts in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

WATER SCARCITY EXPERIENCED BY 4 BILLION PEOPLE - ARJEN HOEKSTRA

Word about this scary study is spreading around alternative media, even as it fades from it's 15 seconds of fame on mainstream outlets like the Guardian. Hardly anyone has a full interview with him. Radio Ecoshock does.

If you need water, just turn on a tap. Take as much as you want. Unless of course you are one of the four billion people on this planet who often can't.

You heard that right. A new study from the Netherlands is titled "Four billion people facing severe water scarcity." It's another jaw-dropping signal from the real world in trouble.

Dr. Arjen Hoekstra co-authored the paper with Mesfin Mekonnen. I think it's safe to say that Dr. Hoeskstra is a world authority on water use. His latest book "The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society" was translated into Chinese, with his other titles appearing in many languages.

He advises governments and international institutions like UNESCO and the World Bank. He founded the Water Footprint Network. And he's Professor in Water Management at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands.

Dr. Arjen Hoekstra

Essentially this study finds that 4 billion people experience at least 1 month of severe water scarcity a year. About half that number have to survive through many months of where water is hard to find, and some countries, like Libya, have severe water stress all year round.

To be accurate, here are the hard numbers from the Hoekstra paper:

""We find that about 71% of the global population (4.3 billion people) lives under conditions of moderate to severe water scarcity (WS > 1) at least 1 month of the year.

About 66% (4.0 billion people) lives under severe water scarcity (WS > 2.0) at least 1 month of the year.

Of these 4.0 billion people, 1.0 billion live in India and another 0.9 billion live in China. Significant populations facing severe water scarcity during at least part of the year further live in Bangladesh (130 million), the United States (130 million, mostly in western states such as California and southern states such as Texas and Florida), Pakistan (120 million, of which 85% are in the Indus basin), Nigeria (110 million), and Mexico (90 million)."

"The number of people facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9 billion.

Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round. Of those half-billion people, 180 million live in India, 73 million in Pakistan, 27 million in Egypt, 20 million in Mexico, 20 million in Saudi Arabia, and 18 million in Yemen. In the latter two countries, it concerns all people in the country, which puts those countries in an extremely vulnerable position.

Other countries in which a very large fraction of the population experiences severe water scarcity year-round are Libya and Somalia (80 to 90% of the population) and Pakistan, Morocco, Niger, and Jordan (50 to 55% of the population)."

Picture women walking a few miles, every day, with a jug of dirty river water on their heads, and you get the idea. Crops can't be watered. It's hard to wash dishes or keep kids clean. This is not a statistic, but a snapshot of very difficult lives that most of my listeners have never encountered.

I'm wondering about the possibility of more abrupt water shortages. For example, farmers in parts of India and China are drilling deeper and deeper to suck out groundwater. California is doing the same, and last year some of those wells ran dry. Is there a point where groundwater can no longer make up for rainfall losses - and could we reach that point soon?

Another comparatively abrupt cause of water shortage would be pollution of rivers and lakes. For example, many rivers in China that are now too toxic to drink or unfit for irrigation. Add in ever-growing populations, and the increased need for water to satisfy new demand for meat, and we have a mess.

This whole picture, as bad as it is, will change significantly with climate change.

In a previous paper, Hoekstra published with Wiedmann, in the journal Science June 2014, they found that humanity's total environmental imprint, not just water use, was "unsustainable". We all know this is true.

There are pressure points where countries are moving toward such extreme water stress that their economies, political systems or even survival are at stake. It's already happened in Libya and Syria, with many more to come.

Arjen's latest book is "The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society". We discuss his new paper, with co-author Mesfin Mekonnen, titled "Four billion people facing severe water scarcity." That was published in January 29 in the journal "Science Advances".

Download or listen to this 20 minute interview with Arjen Hoesktra in CD Quality or Lo-Fi Follow the work of Arjen Hoekstra though his web site here.

Here is a recent (January 2016) presentation by Arjen on You tube called "Breaking the Wall to Water Security."

Or try this You tube video: Prof. Arjen Hoekstra on Virtual Water: The Water Footprint of Modern Society.

DANGEROUS NUCLEAR NEIGHBORS IN CHINA - STUART HEAVER

Why am I back talking about the wave of nuclear plant construction in China? First of all, we all do care about other people, even on the other side of the world. A nuclear plant accident among tens of millions of people could be the greatest tragedy ever seen. It's bound to happen eventually.

When it does, there will be no place to go. Those millions will continue to live in radioactive hot zones. If you still don't care, remember that the plume of very radioactive dust spread from Fukushima in Japan all the way around the world. Uranium from Fukushima was found in New England, and radiation arrived in Europe and Scandinavia. A nuclear accident anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere pollutes the whole Northern Hemisphere, for thousands of years. Now maybe you care what happens in China, where dozens of reactors with new designs never successfully run anywhere else are being built right now.

Lately there have been riots on the streets of Hong Kong. It's about freedom of speech, about continuing a free market, about a way of life. Behind it all, there is a growing dark shadow of worry about the new reactors being build right next door on the mainland. Radio Ecoshock investigates.

Stuart Heaver is a journalist with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. His article in the Post Magazine, January 10, 2016, alerted me to this under-reported nuclear danger. The headline is: "Radiation fear in Hong Kong from China's unproven and possibly faulty nuclear reactors nearby."

Journalist Stuart Heaver from Hong Kong.

China is building and planning a wave of new nuclear reactors. There are eight under construction right now in Guangdong Province, all within 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the crowded super-city of Hong Kong. There are 120 million people in that small area. Trust me, there is absolutely no way to evacuate Hong Kong in any timely manner, should a nuclear accident like Fukushima occur.

There is a contingency evacuation plan for Hong Kong, Heaver tells us, but no one takes it seriously. The biggest and nearest fear is the multiple reactor complex at Daya Bay. There are at least two operators there. Suspicion abounds.

China is not famous for transparency. At least Western privately owned reactor companies have to file some information for their shareholders. The reactors being built by the Chinese government don't. Who knows if the public will even be told if there is a leak of radiation to the air or water? The Soviets didn't tell people in Kiev about the Ukranian nuclear blow-up at Chernobyl, until the Swedes outed them four days later!

One or the reactor complexes uses untested technology from AREVA, the French government controlled nuclear company. French regulators just revealed there is a serious flaw in the reactor core design. Chinese regulators did not inform the public. As we heard a few weeks ago in my interview with Mycle Schneider, this flaw is so serious, the current construction may have to be ripped down and start again.

China will also be the testing ground for the new Westinghouse AP-1000, so-called Third Generation reactors. It's almost like the government decided to try one or two of everything, to see what works and what doesn't. But it's a terrible thing when nuclear technology doesn't work!

Meanwhile, as Stuart Heaver tells us, Chinese industrial culture has a very bad record for safety. You may recall recent news footage of a major port in China blowing up. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Hong Kong media reports every week on deaths, explosions, leaks, and general accidents in industry on the Chinese mainland. The safety culture is not there, and that's terrible news when nuclear reactors are involved.

Even a government survey showed only 34% of Chinese people are confident nuclear power will be handled safely. Another reactor inland is built in an earthquake zone. The last big one was in 2012.

I don't want to pick on China. So far the nuclear record of other countries is worse. China is already a leader in alternative energy, and becoming pro-active on climate change. It's just that we now know nuclear power is literally a dead-end path. It's time to stop the construction and go for alternative energy all the way.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Stuart Heaver in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Follow Stuart Heaver through his blog here. His Twitter handle is @StuartHeaver.

I'm Alex Smith. Please support making and distributing this program if you can. Find out how here.

Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

IS OUR FUTURE POSSIBLE?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 16:06:00 -0800

SUMMARY: "Reality 101" with Nate Hagens, our minds, our world, the fossil trap. Scientists Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald of NOAA and Chris Clack of CIRES: yes we can power America with solar and wind power.

This week on Radio Ecoshock we'll see how hard it is, and how possible it is, to get out of the matrix. Resilience expert Dr. Nate Hagens talks about his college course "Reality 101".

Then we visit with two top American scientists whose recent study was published by the government-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A detailed study of sun and wind says yes we can replace fossil and nuclear power with renewable energy, and it won't cost any more than what we are doing now.

Thanks for joining us this week as we explore where we really are, and what we could do about it.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

NATE HAGENS: REALITY 101

I don't know about you, but I'm often stuck on Bob Dylan's words: "something is happening here, but you don't know what it is". Wouldn't it be great if we could take a course to understand reality?

The course exists. Dr. Nathan J. Hagens teaches "Reality 101 - A Survey of the Human Predicament" to graduate students at the University of Minnesota. Nate Hagens is a familiar name to anyone who tracks energy and resilience. Nate was a successful Wall Street trader. He left all that in 2003 to probe deeper. Nate is on the Board of Directors of the Post Carbon Institute, a Director of the Bottleneck Foundation, and he teaches. He's working on a book that he doesn't want to talk about yet. Hagens lives on a farm in Wisconsin with a collection of animals.

Dr. Nate Hagens

I first learned about Nate from speeches made at Peak Oil conferences. We talk about that a bit. But the bigger problem here is the big problem - the nexis of threatening developments that seem too large to grasp. We have guests that see everything in terms of energy. Others focus only on the environment. I've talked with a few eco-psychologists. Nate is one of the few who attempt to wrap them all up together.

The course begins with the real overview: the first photos of Earth from space. Then it gets into "Systems theory and complexity" with a combination of You tube videos and Nate's own unreleased writing.

A QUESTION OF EXTINCTION

There is a course section on geologic time, and paleclimatology. Dr. Peter Ward, a several-time guest on Radio Ecoshock, is twice featured in the syllabus. I've got Peter lined up for a return trip to Radio Ecoshock soon. He's one of the few scientist to crystalize a working theory of how mass extinctions in the past really worked. They all developed through climate change, except for the great asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico about 65 million years ago. And even there, the dying animals (including dinosaurs) and plants may have already been weakened by a planetary warming that began a few million years before the asteroid hit.

You can watch a video interview I did with Dr. Peter Ward on this page. Here are the two key interviews with Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock, as audio files: "Under a Green Sky" (2008) and "The Medea Hypothesis" (25 minutes)(2009). This are still very valid and powerful today.

In the course "Reality 101" there is a segment on mass extinction. I ask Nate Hagens where he stands on the idea of human extinction, either this century, as suggested by Dr. Guy McPherson, or in the near-coming centuries? If I can summarize Nate's reply, it would be that humans are very ingenious and adaptable. He doesn't think there is any basis for worrying about a near-term extinction, certainly not in this century. But please listen to the interview to get it in Nate's own words.

COPING WITH A STONE AGE MIND

I watched a "Reality 101" course video about evolutionary psychology. It is a You tube interview with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides on "Stone Age Minds". Contrary to some tenets of psychology, they say the human mind arrives not as a blank slate, but with structures designed to cope with problems of a hunter-gatherer society. Tooby and Cosmides talk about mismatches between our ancient mental capabilities and the newly-minted modern world. That could explain a lot. Find that video here on You tube, courtesy of Reason.tv

Nate also offers his students an unpublished (yet) article "The Psychological Roots of Resource Overconsumption". You won't find that anywhere online, but it may appear in Nate's upcoming book "Bottleneck".

Then we have to consider how many of our problems dealing with the world are based on sexuality and addiction.

A PROSPEROUS WAY DOWN?

On Resilience.org I found another text required in the course. It's called "A Prosperous Way Down" by Howard and Elisabeth Odum. Actually, that article is a short-form introduction to their book of the same name. Is there a prosperous way down, and why should we accept going "down" at all? Nate explains why we either throttle back consumer society by choice and plan - or we collapse into a very nasty chaos.

The students wrap up the "Reality 101" course with a group discussion "What to do as individuals". That's a big one. As Nate wrote in an email to me: "What does a rational, non-sociopathic human facing the multiple bottlenecks of the 21st century DO?" Talk among yourselves.

There seem to be only two doors: (1) we keep on going and trust the next generation will figure things out, or (2) we are so completely doomed we might as well enjoy the end of days. Some of us hope there is a third door, but is there really?

This interview is kind of a warm up, for a longer interview I hope to do with Nate Hagens, when he and his co-author bring out their new book "Bottleneck" later this year.

Download or listen to this 30 minute interview with Nate Hagens in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Nate has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He left Wall Street money to become an alternative social critic. His personal web site is called "The Monkey Trap" (which is seldom updated).

Here is a cool Nate Hagens You tube talk, given for the Worldwatch Institute. I also like "The Converging Economic and Environmental Crisis" July 2014 found here.

DR. ALEXANDER "SANDY" MACDONALD AND DR. CHRISTOPHER CLACK

Scientists say wind and solar CAN power America

Wouldn't it be great if most of the electricity generated in America came from wind and solar, instead of climate-wrecking fossil fuels? Of course it can't be done, except it can. Who says so? Hippies from California? Not quite.

It's all in a new paper by a former senior scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a physicist/math whiz from CIRES, The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Our guest are Dr. Alexander MacDonald, known as "Sandy", the recently retired director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab, and Dr. Christopher Clack from CIRES - all in Boulder Colorado.

Dr.Alexander MacDonald and Dr. Chris Clack

We talk about a new article titled "Future cost-competitive electricity systems and their impact on US CO2 emissions" published online in the journal "Nature" on January 25th, 2016.

Maybe the best way to begin is to give you the links sent to me by the Public Affairs Officer at NOAA Communications. My thanks to Theo Stein for getting me up to speed on this breaking paper.

The NOAA/CIRES press release is here.

"At the bottom of the CIRES release are animations of solar potential, wind potential and a power flow animation showing how a system dominated by renewables and supported by a HVDC grid might dispatch power around the country to meet demand."

The FAQ is here.

CIRES also put together this brief video explainer.

THE BIG NEWS ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IN AMERICA (and everywhere else)

So what is the big news?

(1) The United States could power at least 80% of it's energy needs, maybe more with just solar energy and wind power. That's amazing and encouraging but there's more.

(2) Electricity from this system would not cost any more than it does today.

(3) Nuclear plants could be shut down. All coal-fired power could be closed. Only a few gas generators to pick up occasional slack would be needed.

(4) massive power storage would NOT be needed. That's a huge break-through.

(5) no new technology is required. We have the tools and we know how.

This system would require the construction of nation-spanning DC High Voltage lines. Current AC transmission lines are incredibly wasteful, losing up to half of all power created. And because AC cannot transmit power efficiently, (a) you have to build nuclear plants dangerously close to cities and (b) AC line cannot bring wind power from the central plains to New England (for example).

High Voltage DC lines already exist. There is one in Alberta Canada, and one running from Oregon to California. It's not unknown or untested tech. We can do it.

The real breakthrough comes from studying weather, in great detail, on a very big scale (across the United States). NOAA and CIRES has all the weather data to do it. They did and this paper is the result. So if you study alternative energy just within one state, it won't work to replace what we have. But if you look at national resources, and have a way to transmit them, it's all possible.

Of course the sun only shines during the day. But it turns out that the wind is strong enough at night to keep things going (when demand is lower anyway). We don't need storage, these two scientists say.

Just check out their press release, the short video, and their great maps and you'll see the future of energy.

Download or listen to this 24 minute interview with Alexander MacDonald and Chris Clack in CD Quality or Lo-Fi. Please pass these links on to your friends and on social media.

GET THE WORD OUT!

Don't forget you can find all our past interviews with scientists, authors, experts and activists on our web site, at ecoshock.org. Those are free for download or listening, anywhere in the world.

This program is also available by podcast. Currently my Itunes podcast is down - because this blog is too long, with too many links, for Itunes to digest. I'm working on a solution. In the meanwhile, you can get this podcast through podbean. Here is the link for that:

http://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/nmdeq-3cceb/The-Radio-Ecoshock-Show

If you find this program useful, please tell your friends. I also welcome your financial support, if you are able. Find a link to donate on this blog, or other options here on my web site.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

Climate: Misunderstood Impacts

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 3 Feb 2016 16:56:00 -0800

We have three interviews this week, including 2 climate scientists. Andy Pitman: new science on how climate really hits us. Plus Johan Rockstrom, the Swedish leader of planetary boundaries, followed by Lynn Benander on community power in New England. Let's go.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

DR. ANDREW PITMAN: THE SCIENCE OF WHEN AND HOW MUCH

It may get hotter where you are, sooner than you think. New science reveals many parts of the world won't have to wait long to experience unsafe heating and disruptive changes in precipitation. Once again, we underestimate the climate threat.

Dr. Andy J. Pitman is a British atmospheric scientist. Now he's the Director of Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. [ARCCSS]

Dr. Andrew J. Pitman

Pitman is co-author of a new piece in the journal Nature, titled "Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets". The lead author is Professor Sonia Seneviratne from the Swiss Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science.

You can read an article/press release from the University of New South Wales, explaining this paper, here.

The title of the press release says a lot: "How a 2°C rise means even higher temperatures where we live. Land based temperatures rise much faster than global average temperatures".

I think one startling result in this paper is the timing of climate impacts. We are used to reports talking about things happening by 2100, after we are dead. Now science has shortened that fuse. Serious impacts are less than 15 years away, or, as Pitman points out, they are already happening.

Let's face it, the Arctic has already warmed well beyond the two degree C danger mark. We had reports that parts of Siberia were warmer in the last week of January than Taiwan, which is right on the edge of the tropics. North-Central Siberia reported temperatures 20 degrees Celsius above normal for this time of year. That's 36 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it should be!

According to lead author Prof Seneviratne:

"At 1.5°C we would still see temperature extremes in the Arctic rise by 4.4°C and a 2.2°C warming of extremes around the Mediterranean basin."

In our interview, Andy Pitman says two important things about the two degree C "safe" level of warming.

First of all, two degrees C warming is demonstrably not "safe". We are already experiencing extreme weather events, ocean acidification, coral die-off and much more. Pitman says the two degrees was accepted not because it was scientific, but because it was thought to be possible.

Secondly, the whole concept of a two degree global mean temperature as a goal is almost meaningless. We do not live in "average" climates. Their study found several parts of the world that will warm by two degrees (or more) as early as 2030. We're talking about the Mediterranean for example. That region will dry out and heat even more. You think you've seen mass migration now? It's only going to become worse, as more agriculture fails in North Africa, the Middle East, and places like Greece, Italy, and Spain.

Here is more from that University of New South Wales press release (and pay attention to the methane warning!)

"The extreme regional warming projected for Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, Russia and Greenland could have global impacts, accelerating the pace of sea-level rise and increasing the likelihood of methane releases prompted by the melting of ice and permafrost regions.

'The temperature difference between global average temperatures and regional temperature extremes over land not only has direct climate impacts, it also means we may have to reconsider the amount of carbon dioxide we can emit,' said co-author and Director of ARCCSS Prof Andy Pitman.

'For instance, to keep extreme temperature changes over the Mediterranean below a 2°C threshold, the cumulative emissions of CO2 would have to be restricted to 600 gigatonnes rather than the 850 gigatonnes currently estimated to keep global average temperatures increase below 2°C.'

According to the researchers, if global average temperatures warm by 2°C compared to preindustrial times this would equate to a 3°C warming of hot extremes in the Mediterranean region and between 5.5 -- 8°C warming for cold extremes over land around the Arctic. Most land-masses around the world will see an extreme temperature rise greater than 2°C."

From our Radio Ecoshock interview, Andy Pitman says:

"Two degrees isn't safe because a two degree warming is expressed over the land surface by warming of much more than two degrees. And it's not expressed as a regional average warming of two degrees. It's expressed for instance by earlier spring heat waves. Or the ability of a landscape to continue growing through winter because the winter is several degrees warmer than it used to be.

Or it's expressed by summer heat waves lasting longer. And as your listeners would know, if you have a heat wave that traditionally lasts three days, and it starts to last five days, the impacts that that has on ecosystems but also primarly on human health can be way out of proportion to only an extra day or two."

What Pitman doesn't say, but I know from previous interviews with scientists and doctors, is that extra day or two of extreme heat is when people can begin to die off in great numbers. It happened in Russia in 2010, in France during the great heat of 2003, where tens of thousands died, and now arrives too often in Australia during extended heat waves. We've been told that heat is now a greater killer in Australia than car accidents.

Talking about Canada (where some residents think they'd like to warm up a few degrees!) Pitman warns:

"If you manage to warm a region of Eastern or Western Canada by three degrees on the annual average, but all that warming happens in July, the amount it warms in July is vastly more than three degrees. You start to get serious heat wave conditions...."

It sounds attractive to have an average annual warming, but the actual impacts may be increased deaths, wrecked eco-systems, more forest fires, or perhaps a whole year's wheat crop wiped out (again, the wheat crop in Russia was devastated).

SCIENTISTS ARE MISTAKEN TO BE SO CONSERVATIVE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Andy Pitman on Radio Ecoshock:

"We have probably erred as a science community in being a little conservative in how fast climate can change. And we have also had our eye on the averages more so than the extremes.

Now that's a general statement. There have been some outstanding groups in North America and in Europe that have focussed on extremes. But in general the climate community has been really interested in how much will the global average warm.

I think what our paper says is: it doesn't matter, really, what the global average warms. It matters critically how climate warms spacially, by country, and how that warming is translated into days of heat or cold or days of extreme rainfall - because those are the things that can break a drainage system, break a health system, damage an ecosystem.

Most of what our paper is about is that we have been too generous on the scale of emissions that should be permitted, but if I was going to take the science further, I would encourage the research communities to be targeting the nature and statistics of extreme events into the future, over how much the planet as a whole will warm."

There's lots more in the interview. For me, this backs up people like Ottawa scientist Paul Beckwith, who is studying abrupt climate change, and extreme changes, rather than statistical averages.

Download, listen to, or share this 22 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Andrew Pitman in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

JOHAN ROCKSTROM: BIG WORLD, SMALL PLANET

There are limits to what humanity can do on this planet and still survive. Johan Rockstrom led a team that mapped out those Planetary Boundaries. Rockstrom is the Executive Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He teaches at Stockholm University, and holds many roles in the scientific community. We talk about his latest book, written wtih Mattias Klum, "Big World, Small Planet" - and many other questions we all have about climate change.

Dr. Johan Rockstrom

Here is one for example: At a TED talk, Rockstrom told an audience that climate change may actually not be our greatest challenge! I asked what he meant by that.

His answer makes sense. There are multiple crisis happening on Earth at this time. One very serious and long-lasting change is in the climate. But we are also going through a mass extinction event (assuming we make it through). We can do something about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Rockstrom tells us, but once a species goes extinct, it's gone. And all the species that might have interacted with it are also endangered. You can decide to drive an electric car, or travel less, or support carbon capture research - but you can't take any action to bring back species from extinction, or really restore wrecked ecosystems.

I take issue with Rockstrom, when he wrote: "we can trigger a new wave of sustainable technological inventions" to solve our ecological crisis. On Radio Ecoshock, I just talked with another well-known Swede, Alf Hornborg. Alf says there is no technological solution to the problems of technology. We need social and ideological change instead.

Or course Rockstrom is aware of Hornborg's work, and doesn't suggest that a technical fix is all we need. A change in human civilization will also be required. But in general, in this interview and in their new book, Johan Rockstrom takes the positive outlook. He sees grave dangers, but apparently believes humans are smart enough to solve the crisis we create. I'm not so sure, but you decide, after listening to this interview.

Johan explains what is meant by "the Fourth Industrial Revolution" - and his involvement in a project called "Future Earth".

Along the way, of course, you will learn more about our situation. Rockstrom is acknowledged as one of the world's top scientists. His leadership in the concept of Planetary Boundaries is absolutely important for us all. Don't under-estimate him.

Download, listen to, or share this 23 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Johan Rockstrom in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

CO-OP POWER: LYNN BENANDER

What is the answer to giant power companies with equally giant greenhouse gas emissions? Citizens doing it for themselves. One of the best examples is Co-op Power in New England. We'll find out what it is, and how this could work in your community, from Lynn Benander. She's the CEO of Co-op Power and Northeast Biodiesel.

My first reaction was to picture a group of middle-class white folks getting together to bypass the system and save money. But as Lynn tell us, this came up at the very first organizing meeting. Some people rent, and still want green power. That's why community-owned power can make more sense than just well-off people installing solar on their rooftops.

Lynn Benander

GREEN BIODIESEL

Biodiesel got a terrible name as a false climate solution, when industrialized agriculture switched off growing food to make heavily subsidized gas substitutes. How is Northeast Biodiesel different from that? The company is opening a new plant this month, designed to produce over a million gallons of diesel fuel a year. The source stock is waste cooking oil! This doesn't displace agricultural food crops. The carbon load is already in producing the cooking oil, so burning what would otherwise be waste makes green sense. As Benander points out, for now, we still run our trucks, tractors and buses on diesel fuel. Until we can do better, green diesel, produced in the community, is a better solution.

Even the financing for this biodiesel plant came from the community. Read all about that here.

Lynn and I talk about how communities can raise money for alternative energy co-ops. I want you to hear this interview, and dig further into it. We so often have hopeless news on Radio Ecoshock, without enough solutions. Here is a group of New England communities that are not waiting for the grand scheme from the federal or state government, but doing it for themselves. It's inspiring.

Check out this slide and photo explanation of co-op power here.

Download, listen to, or share this 14 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Lynn Benander in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Here are some more Lynn Benander/Co-op Power links, courtesy of my friend Erik Hoffner, who suggested this story.

Post Carbon Institute Interview with Co-op Power's Lynn Benander - "Community is Created by Filling the Cup" September 2, 2015

Center for Popular Economics - Presentation on Cooperative Paths to Fossil Fuel Freedom: Stories from Community Energy Co-ops in the Co-op Power Network with Lynn Benander and Temistoclese Blessed Ferreira from Co-op Power August 23, 2015

Grist article on Diego Angarita, "Meet the Food Justice and Clean Energy Advocate who Wants to Shake up the Nonprofit World", noting his work at Co-op Power August 14, 2015

We are out of time. My thanks to the listeners who support Radio Ecoshock with a monthly donation, or a one-time gift to keep this program going. Find out about that here.

Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

THE DEATH OF NUCLEAR POWER

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 26 Jan 2016 20:06:00 -0800

SUMMARY: Lead author of "World Nuclear Industry Status Reports" Mycle Schneider on new Nuclear Leap Forward in China. Famous activist Helen Caldicott on plan to make S. Australia a world nuclear dump; and dangerous nuke waste in St. Louis, Missouri. Radio Ecoshock 160127

A tiny but powerful number of scientists, applauded by a few famous greens, urge us to accept nuclear power. They see it as the salvation of our civilization, our climate, our future.

It isn't happening. As you'll hear, nuclear power is shrinking, not expanding. World-wide, major nuclear companies are going bankrupt, or soaking up billions more of your taxes, or both.

Expert Mycle Schneider looks into secrets of the Great Nuclear Leap Forward in China. Remember, after Chernobyl and Fukushima, an accident anywhere in the world can irradiate the Northern Hemisphere. China's new untested reactors are your reactors. Their radiation can land in your backyard.

All our lives, we've been told the problem of storing nuclear waste for a million years will be solved by science and technology. Instead, you will hear how hot waste from 70 years ago continues to threaten and poison a suburb of St. Louis Missouri. Dr. Helen Caldicott also reports on the mad rush to turn beautiful South Australia into a nuclear waste dump for the world.

Boiling water with reactors has become a time-bomb, a failed technology, a path better not taken, a threat and a burden to all succeeding generations.

This is Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB).

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

MYCLE SCHNEIDER: THE NEW NUCLEAR LEAP FORWARD IN CHINA

“Nuclear energy costs are cheap because we lower our standards.”

- He Zuoxiu, in the Guardian newspaper, May 25, 2015.

While our heads are filled with day-dreams of Hollywood stars and nightmares of financial collapse, China is taking another "Great Leap Forward". China is building to become the world's largest nuclear-powered economy. A Chinese nuclear expert says the burst of reactor construction brings, quote, "the 'most probable' period for a nuclear accident in China forward to between 2020 and 2030." [Hu Zuoxiu 19.03.2013]

In fact, He Zuoxiu, who has been a government supporter and well known scientist in the nuclear field, has called the current rush to nuclear expansion in China "insane". He's 88. He can get away with it.

The risks to very heavily populated parts of China are huge to unimaginable. As we learned from Fukushima, an accident anywhere can launch radiation around the Earth.

What is going on with nuclear power in China? From Paris, our guest Mycle Schneider makes it his business to know. He's the lead author of "The World Nuclear Industry Status Reports." Schneider has advised European governments and members of the European Parliament on energy issues.

China has become an experimental lab for untested nuclear reactor technology. All the dreams of nuclear scientists are either planned or already under construction in China. There are plans and hopes for "pebble reactors" and "thorium" plants. The experiment becomes even larger when we consider so many countries, all with their different technologies, are part of the new nuclear boom in China.

The Taishan reactor complex is just one example. There the French company Areva is providing 3 European Pressurized Reactors (EPR's). These are allegedly "3rd generation" designs (although Mycle says there are very few advances over current second generation models).

Mycle Schneider

Experience? They have never run one of these reactors for a single day, and their track record is atrocious. The EPR at Flamanville in the far north of France (just across the channel from Britain) was begun in 2007. It's completion date kept getting delayed and delayed, by years and years. Now they say it will be finished in 2017 - oops, now it's 2018.. But that's unlikely. Areva has recently admitted finding a serious design flaw in the inner reactor. It's so serious, Mycle suggests they might have to tear down and rebuild. The French regulator published information on this flaw, but it has not been communicated to the Chinese people.

The original cost of this single EPR reactor was supposed to be 3.3 billion euros. Now it's over 10 billion euros and who knows what the final cost will be, if it opens.

The situation of Areva's reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland is even worse. This is what Wiki says about it:

"According to Financial Times in December 2014 construction of unit 3 has descended into farce as it is currently expected to open nine years late and several billions of euros over budget."

China has also contracted to buy a couple of experimental, never-before-built "third generation" reactors from Westinghouse Nuclear, now majority owned by Toshiba corporation of Japan. It's the AP-1000. Who knows what it will cost, when it will be completed, and most importantly, if this design is safe?

Mycle Schneider also worries whether China can find the technical culture needed to run reactors flawlessly. Sure China turns out zillions of engineers every year, but none of them have been nuclear operators.

China joins other countries like France in having the builders, operators, and regulators all part of a government-owned structure. Very little is known about this industry in China. There is no transparency, and little room for citizen oversight or complaint. I'll have more to say about that in another program.

Schneider points out that the world has fewer operating reactors (supply power to the grid) now than existed in 2002, even with the construction boom in China. That's because old nuclear plants are being closed in many countries, and not replaced. It's a dying technology.

The few nuclear reactor makers are being killed off in the stock market. Nuclear shares are now at pennies on the original dollar. That's another serious worry. For example, the La Hague nuclear fuel reprocessing site, again in northern France, has the largest supply of high-level nuclear materials in the world. It's run by Areva. Areva stocks have been hammered so low, and their sales so poor, that the company has announced big job cuts. When hundreds of staff are sent home from La Hague, Mycle asks "what were they doing that will not be done now?" Is safety being cut as well? What happens to all the reactors being built or operated by financially failed companies?

That alone is one reason why nuclear power is not a solution for global warming. The economic costs are far too high, and not enough could be completed before lasting damage has been done by the carbon economy it means to partially replace. It's too late.

The big reactor makers were almost toast in the west, despite billions in government subsidies. But they counted on a "nuclear renaissance" in China to survive. Schneider points out the Chinese have been blunt about their game. They are "technology shopping". They buy a couple of reactors from everybody (including from Canada) - and then break down the engineering so they can do it all themselves. There is no big market for reactors in China for any western company.

The end-game of all this nuclear "business" is sadly predictable. Taxpayers, somewhere, will pay and pay to prop up existing reactors, and then pay more or less forever for whatever dismantling and storage can be done. The current players will long-since be bankrupt. The nuclear sales executives will have run away.

All of this comes as the nuclear industry tried desperately, including at the Paris climate talks, to promote their industry as the answer to global warming. They didn't even make the agenda. The public doesn't want it. It's not happening. It's a dead-end.

Be sure and check out Mycle's interview. It's an eye-opener into a nuclear business built on secrecy and incredible risks. He's been an advisor on nuclear and energy to the French, German, and Belgian governments. His reports and expertise are in demand. He knows.

Download, listen to, or share this 27 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Mycle Schneider in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Use this small URL to pass on the Lo-Fi version of this interview. Tweet on! http://tinyurl.com/z5288cx Here are a few links to follow up:

List of Mycle's publications here.

Check out the World Nuclear Industry Status Report web site.

You can find out more about nuclear energy in China with this January 2016 update "Mind the China Effect".

HELEN CALDICOTT ON EVERLASTING NUCLEAR WASTE

In a populated suburb of St. Louis Missouri, nuclear waste from American bomb-making is washing into surface water. Now all that radioactive mess is threatened by an underground fire just 1200 feet away.

If that's the best the United States can do, what chance does Australia have, with their grand plans to make South Australia a dumping ground for the world's nuclear waste? It's time for another round of nuclear madness, and the doctor is in. That's Doctor Helen Caldicott, the most famous anti-nuclear campaigner in the world.

Download, listen to, or share this 27 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Helen Caldicott in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Pass on this interview with Helen in Lo-Fi, using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/z2u9n8r

Dr. Helen Caldicott

Along the way, Helen tells us about her role in founding the anti-nuclear movement in Australia in the 1970's. Then she spent 20 years in Boston. There she revived a dead non-profit called "Physicians for Nuclear Responsibility" and built it into an anti-nuclear powerhouse.

Helen met for over an hour with President Ronald Reagan. Sensing he knew little about nuclear weapons, she explained not only was any nuclear exchange unwinnable, it would cause a catastrophe where medical treatment was not an option. Reagan after that began talks with the Soviets to reduce nuclear weapons, and reduce political stress points. We owe a part of our survival of that mad nuclear age to Helen Caldicott.

Not that we are safer now. Nuclear weapons continue to be built all over the world, some in very unstable countries and/or dictatorships. The tension between nuclear neighbors has spread from just Russia and the West to places like Pakistan and India. Just yesterday, January 26th, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced the "Doomsday Clock" would remain at 3 minutes to midnight.

Helen continues to warn the world about the danger of nuclear weapons, but that is not why we talked this week on Radio Ecoshock.

First the Australian state of South Australia has a mad idea to replace the car plant jobs they lost. The government is pushing to become the nuclear waste dump of the world. There is a complicated back story, but that's the bald fact.

How they would do this has not been announced. So far it looks like a shed in the desert is the likely plan! South Australia called their own Royal Commission to get submissions on the project. Most of the submissions came from pro-nuclear people. The aboriginal people - who still own the land! - could not make direct entries to the Commission, because they lacked the Justice of the Peace system that was required. Their voices were ruled out.

The Royal Commission is due to release it's predestined "report" on February 15th. On February 16th Helen Caldicott will make an answering speech in Adelaide. It's all very sad.

BACK TO OLD ST. LOUIS

We've been told and told that there will be a new technical solution for nuclear waste. Here is a situation in America which shows what a great lie that is. The original nuclear waste from constructing the atomic bombs dropped on Japan - that waste is still very potent and dangerous. A great deal of it was just dumping in the ground near the airport in St. Louis Missouri.

It was badly looked after. A few tarps cover the ground. Rainstorms wash radioactive waste into local streams, and from there into rivers. The wind blows radioactive materials around. A recent study by scientists, including nuclear scientist Bob Alvarez, checked out an area about 200 kilometers around the St. Louis site near Bridgeton, a suburb. They found lots of radiation. The title is: "Tracking legacy radionuclides in St. Louis, Missouri, via unsupported 210Pb "[Lead] You can read more about that study here.

Guess what. There is a higher incidence of many kinds of cancer around this West Lake landfill site. Our old un-friend Exelon is the allegedly responsible party for this nuclear mess.

Now the kicker. An underground fire has been burning for years in the regular landfill site right next to the nuclear dump. This fire is now burning less than 1200 feet from the nuclear waste! If the atomic materials burn, you can count on radiation spreading far and wide. The US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a wall be built underground to deflect the fire, but really nothing has been done.

You can hear a local resident and columnist Byron DeLear describe the St. Louis situation here in the Nuclear Hotseat #237 with Libbe HaLevy, from January 6, 2016, here on You tube. (You have to scroll well into the program, but don't! The whole show is very revealing about the U.S. nuclear industry.)

So like the good doctor going to where the sick patient is found, Helen Caldicott is going to St. Louis. She'll help bring the spotlight back where it belongs, on this utter failure to protect even the first nuclear waste created by humans.

Tune in to all things Helen at helencaldicott.com. Be sure to check out the latest book edited by Helen Caldicott: "Crisis Without End, The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe."

MY CONCLUSION

Any more money spent on nuclear power is a waste of the dwindling fuel, resources, and carbon space in the atmosphere. Humans will have to be very fortunate to care for the existing plants over dozens of generations. Given our history, our failed economics, and the magnitude of climate disruption developing, some reactors, somewhere, will blow out, one by one, or in concert.

I hope I am not one of the unlucky evacuees if the radioctive tanks blow up at Hanford in Washington State. I hope none of you are predestined to abandon a whole region of your country, with all the beloved places, experiences, and resources lost to humans. Accepting that risk is a betrayal of Nature. It is a betrayal of whatever or whoever initiated the possibility of ever-lasting evolution of life somewhere in space.

That's what I think. That's how I feel.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening to Radio Ecoshock again this week.

At the end of the program, I play a bit from "Talkin' End Game It's The Radioactive Song" by Michel Montecrossa.

More Stifle Than Drown

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:36:00 -0800

SUMMARY: Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg says economic crash could empower change to save climate. UK scientist Sergei Petrovskii on new paper: warming die-off of oxygen-making plankton. Robert Shirkey gets climate warning labels on Canadian gas pumps. Radio Ecoshock 160120

WELCOME TO RADIO ECOSHOCK THIS WEEK

It sounds impossible. An expert with decades of experience says global warming between 4 to 6 degrees could lead to mass die-off of the plankton that produces up to 70% of the world's oxygen. Forget rising seas Sergei Petrovskii says, we are more likely to stifle than drown.

I'll also be talking with Robert Shirkey, the Canadian campaigner who got climate warning stickers put on gas pumps, and his campaign to take it global.

But first, we're going to visit with an "economic anthropologist" - and one of Sweden's leading thinkers on the economy, money and climate change. Alf Hornborg is hoping the next economic crisis can help us change.

I'm Alex Smith, and this is Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

ALF HORNBORG - THE TRUE COST OF TECHNOLOGY

Imagine technology as a system that gathers up days of people's lives, mixes them with nature, physical and living things - and channels products toward a minority, in fact, to a dwindling number of the wealthy elite. All the while, the same technology reduces our chances for survival. I think that's how the Swedish author, and anthropologist Alf Hornborg sees it, but only he can say, in this Radio Ecoshock interview.

It seems everyone, from greens to super-capitalists, is looking for the next technology to save us. It's solar power, it's geoengineering, it new nuclear tech - but there are other options. It turns out that technology organizes humans to draw time and work from other people's lives, and channel it upward to a diminishing number of people at the top. We just learned that the top 1% in this world own more than the 99% rest of humans on the planet.

Hornborg says politics is really about the ways and means of money. Speaking in Paris a couple of years ago, he suggested only an economic crisis would open doorways for meaningful change. It looks like we are entering another crisis now. Should that give us hope? Our best hope may be for smaller disasters to come soon, rather larger ones later in this century.

"The moment we are suffering real problems in terms of food security, energy supply and so on - I mean the kinds of metabolic problems that strike civilization just before they collapse, historically - then maybe the politicians will be able to talk about more relevant things."

- Alf Hornborg, VIMEO "Thinking the Anthropocene"

He suggests that a country like France or Sweden could print a "complimentary currency which they distribute every month, to every household, in proportion to the size of those households, which can only be used to purchase local products and local services."

At 17 minutes of this video, he explains in concrete terms how this could work. It would drastically increase demand for goods and services that are locally produced. These are more likely to be equitable between people, and have a hope of being sustainable, without the ecological costs of long-range transport. "It would radically decrease the demand for long-distance imports". Fossil fuels used in global transport would be "radically reduced".

Alf Hornborg became more widely known after his 2001 book "The Power of the Machine". This year he will publish another, titled "Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street.". I ask Alf for a couple of examples of the way his thinking has evolved in the last 15 years.

Hornborg has compared social blindness to slavery in Rome, or in colonial America, to our current rationalization for lifestyles we know are changing not just the weather, but the climate for millennia to come. How does it work, and is there a cure?

We started talking about technology. People grudgingly admit money could be a root of evil, but surely not technology! Is Hornborg suggesting we can unplug, and walk away from the "technomass" we have created? Would not billions of people die in short order if we did?

Actually, Alf says, the fear that billions would die without technology is a myth. There is still enough land to return to, and by the way, if all humans gave up eating animals and animal bi-products, there may be enough to feed 30 billion human vegans.

One justification is the geographical locus of this collection machine has shown an ability to shift over time. We think of the rise of Japan, Korea, and now China as centers of not just technology, but the accumulation of capital. The wealth might appear anywhere, we say. Or does technology always need slums and poverty somewhere else? Hornborg says it does. Provocatively he says "The steam engine would not have been possible without the American slave plantations".

Technology, Hornborg says, is not the idea, or the blueprints. It is the system that keeps the machinery functioning over time - and that always, he says, demands appropriation of the time, resources, or spaces of others who are disadvantaged compared to the user of the technology.

"Technological progress can thus be reconceptualized as the saving or liberation of human time and natural space in core regions of the world-system at the expense of time and space lost in the periphery. I have called this time–space appropriation (Hornborg 2006, 2013)."

I reached Alf at the prestigious Lund University in Sweden, where he has been Professor of Human Ecology since 1993.

SOME ALF HORNBORG LINKS

Download this 27 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Alf Hornborg in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can find a wiki-style bio of Alf Hornborg here.

Here is a stimulating interview on the blog "Collapse of Industrial Civilization" about the way we have all been mystified by technology.

Watch this 2013 interview with Alf on Vimeo, from the Paris conference "Thinking the Anthropocene".

SERGEI PETROVSKII - THE OXYGEN THREAT

You have heard that a warming world will flood coastal cities. Hotter seas will drive more extreme weather events. All that may not matter, if a new paper on plankton is correct. The authors say: if the ocean life that creates more than half the oxygen in the atmosphere dies off, we are more likely to stifle than drown.

To understand this new threat, let's get to work. The paper is called ‘Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change’ as published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, with an abstract here.

From the Department of Mathematics at the University of Leicester in Britain, we've reached the co-author Sergei Petrovskii. We learn in the interview that Petrovksii was a senior scientist at the Russian Shirshov Institute of Oceanology for 15 years before moving to Britain. His work in Russia involved modelling plankton growth. So he is more than qualified.

Sergei Petrovskii

From the paper:

"Plankton consists of two different taxa: phytoplankton and zooplankton. Zooplankton are animals (e.g., krill), and phytoplankton are plants. As most plants do, phytoplankton can produce oxygen in photosynthesis when sufficient light is available, e.g., in the photic layer of the ocean during the daytime. The oxygen first comes to the water and eventually into the air through the sea surface, thus contributing to the total oxygen budget in the atmosphere. This contribution appears to be massive...

It is estimated that about 70% of the Earth atmospheric oxygen is produced by the ocean phytoplankton (Harris 1986; Moss 2009). Correspondingly, one can expect that a decrease in the rate of the oxygen production by phytoplankton may have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth, possibly resulting in mass extinction of animal species, including the mankind. Therefore, identification of potential threats to the oxygen production is literally an issue of vital importance."

THE BASICS

1. Most discussion on the impacts of global warming on the oceans focus on changes in global circulation or impacts on polar ice, with consequent sea level rising.

2. But the oceans are also the world's largest ecosystem of living things.

3. Plankton has been studied as the basis for the food chain, and consequently fisheries. It's also a good measure of the biomass in the seas.

4. Plankton also provide the majority of the world's oxygen.

5. Plankton production is well-known to be sensitive to ocean temperatures.

6. The plant type of plankton produces oxygen in the day, and consumes oxygen at night. The difference produced, and released into the atmosphere, is the "net oxygen production".

Scientists know this all-important net production of oxygen (and reduction of CO2) depends on ocean temperatures.

Studies of some plankton species find that oxygen production goes up as the oceans warm, Petrovskii and his co-author Yadigar Sekerci proceed with an abundance of caution. After all there are many, many different types of plankton, and perhaps not all will flourish with warmer water. So the authors make two models, one which assumes that plankton/oxygen will increase as the oceans warm, and one that assumes a decrease.

The amazing (and frightening) result is: whether plankton/oxygen increases or decreases as the oceans warm, IN BOTH CASES a tipping point develops where plankton, and the oxygen they make, crashes, possibly toward extinction levels.

"Our results have important implications. A lot has been said about detrimental consequences of the global warming such as possible extinction of some species (and the corresponding biodiversity loss) and the large-scale flooding resulting from melting Antarctic ice. In this paper, however, we have shown that the danger to bestifled is probably more real than to be drowned."

MY BIG TAKEAWAY - THE PLANKTON/OXYGEN TRAP IN OCEAN WARMING

If I take only one thing away from this interview with Sergei Petrovskii, it is this: reality is littered with traps. In hindsight we can see that a semi-intelligent species discovering mechanical power from stored carbon riches may well self-exterminate with them, due to the carbon/climate trap.

But consider this: if Petrovskii is right, we may advance into the future fooled by the response of plankton. As the world warms, plankton could appear to thrive, providing lots of oxygen, and sequestering more carbon dioxide. We all cheer. Apologists tell us our worries were overblown. But then, a limit beyond sustainable cycles is reached, and plankton world-wide could experience a mass die-off. That's another trap: it looks good, until, as Petrovskii and his colleagues call it, "catastrophe 2" occurs.

Maybe the model is wrong. Maybe our civilization is wrong. I hope the funding and the drive arrives to test out this plankton nightmare rather than waiting to find out the hard way.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Sergei Petrovskii in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT PLANKTON AND CLIMATE CHANGE

NASA's take on global warming and plankton:

"FINDINGS

Using NASA satellite data, Jorge Sarmiento of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., and colleagues have demonstrated the close links between ocean productivity and global trends in climate.

Surface warming increases the density difference, or vertical “stratification” of the ocean waters, leading to less mixing between the surface water layers, where phytoplankton live, and the deeper water layers, which contain the nutrients they need to flourish. This is bad news for phytoplankton that live in the tropics where nutrient supply will be reduced due to less mixing and a shallower “mixed layer”, but good news for phytoplankton that live in colder regions, where increasing temperature causes the growing season to start earlier in the year. Clearly, a changing global climate will have a different impact on ocean biology in different parts of the world. "

IMPACT OF WARMING ON PLANKTON, ANOTHER SOURCE:

Climate Change Effects on Marine Phytoplankton

CHAPTER · OCTOBER 2013

DOI: 10.1201/b16334-4

If you hit the Full Text button for this paper, it works without signing up or needing permission. The lead author is Valeria Guinder, marine biologist at UNS Argentina.

This paper agrees with the work of Petrovskii, saying:

"Temperature is a key parameter that directly affects physiological rates of marine biota at multiple scales, e.g., enzymatic reactions, respiration, body size, generation time, ecological interactions, community metabolism, etc. (Peters 1983). Phytoplankton experience an increase in enzymatic activity and growth rates over a moderate range of temperature rise with an average Q10= 1.88 (Eppley 1972), which suggest that an increase in SST from 18°C today to 21.5°C in 2100 (McNeil and Matear 2006), may lead to an increase of ~25% in growth rate assuming that there are no other factors (Finkel et al. 2010)."

SOME SPECIES OF PLANKTON ARE ALREADY THREATENED WITH EXTINCTION

"Research led by Deakin University (Warrnambool, Australia) and Swansea University (UK) has found that a species of cold water plankton in the North Atlantic, that is a vital food source for fish such as cod and hake, is in decline as the oceans warm. This will put pressure on the fisheries that rely on abundant supplies of these fish.

'There is overwhelming evidence that the oceans are warming and it will be the response of animals and plants to this warming that will shape how the oceans look in future years and the nature of global fisheries,' explained Deakin’s professor of marine science, Graeme Hays."

Find out more here.

According to Wikipedia, many species of plankton went extinct before, and this paleoclimatic record is something Petrovskii continues to study, as he further refines the model. Things like ocean acidification, and ocean stratification with warming also have to be factored in.

FINALLY: GAS PUMP WARNING STICKERS!

Cigarettes kill millions and we warn users right on the pack. Burning gasoline kills the future. In Canada, Robert Shirkey left his law practice to put us right into the climate changer driver's seat.

As Robert writes in the Huffington Post

"On Nov. 16, 2015, the City of North Vancouver made world history when its council unanimously voted to mandate climate change risk disclosures on gas pumps. It's an idea that my organization developed and launched in early 2013 and it has since been endorsed by over a hundred academics from a variety of disciplines at universities across North America, including some of the top climate change researchers in the world.

North Vancouver's vote was covered by the CBC, Global News, CTV, VICE, The Atlantic, Business Insider, and many more. These articles were shared via social media around the globe. While North Vancouver was the first to actually require the labels by law, numerous municipal councils across Canada have passed resolutions in support of the proposal. We're now working to share these examples of Canadian leadership with the world and we're asking for volunteers to help us make it happen."

Read that whole article here.

The essential point is: we all like to fight against pipelines, the tar sands and all that. Meanwhile, we feel pretty innocent about putting gas in our tanks, if we think about it at all. And yet, as Robert shows in a graph, most of the emissions come not from fossil fuel production, but from OUR TAILPIPES and other end uses. We should know that.

The colorful labels fit right on the gas pump handles, where gas stations conveniently places a square spot for advertising. Instead, you get a photo of a polar bear, or a flooded city, with a warning that using gasoline endangers the climate of the world.

Robert Shirkey is the leader of the new group ourhorizon.org. You can help support his campaign to get local governments to force climate warning stickers on all gas pumps, but contributing at his site. Right now he's running the whole thing on his VISA card, he tells us.

Watch Robert's video on gas pump labels here.

Download this 10 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Robert Shirkey in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

I totally support Robert's campaign, and expect to see warning labels on all gas pumps soon.

THANKS FOR LISTENING AGAIN THIS WEEK!

Alex

THROUGH A DARK PORTAL

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:02:00 -0800

Summary: Moving with top scientists & religious leaders, Stuart Scott: can we save the climate in time? Or will mass die-off come? Betsy Teutsch on low-tech to help women around the world. Song "2060" by Finian Makepeace.

Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE: MASS MURDER OR MASS SUICIDE?

"If we have the kind of climate future that many scientists are saying we are heading directly and quickly towards, then it's going to be a loss of easily half the population of Earth. And I say 'half the population', when I say that to many people I interact with they say 'Oh if we get off easy, it will be only half'. We're talking about very, very serious dimensions here."

- Stuart Scott on Radio Ecoshock

Think of it. There are experts, scientists and likely policy makers, even corporate heads, who have already considered a die-off of half the population of Earth and yet (a) are not telling the public their fears/predictions and (b) many of them are not trying to stop it.

Perhaps deep down, many humans already know this is coming. They just assume that it will hit only far-away countries and leave heir own area and loved-ones intact. Everyone has that fantasy. Is it fair to say all those who can entertain this future, without dedicating themselves to preventing it, are already part of pre-meditated mass murder? Who knows how many, are willing to sacrifice billions to keep driving and flying around, to keep consuming, to have a big house? Or should we call it mass suicide, to enable a giant shift in Earth's climate?

A month ago on Radio Ecoshock, I gave a heads-up that the economic system is teetering on the edge. Looking at the crashing markets around the world, desperate debt deals, bankruptcies and mass layoffs - our guest Michael T. Snyder nailed it.

The possibility of a serious crash and Depression is a hard quandary for climate-aware people. We don't want to suffer. We don't want our loved ones and neighbours to suffer. Yet if we keep going with this fossil-powered heat engine we call civilization, we WILL wreck the climate, if we haven't done it already. Do you think an economic crash may actually be the only real way to slash emissions quickly?

STUART SCOTT

Outside the official United Nations climate Press Conferences at Lima and Paris, we got the other voices, powerful voices, through a group I knew little about. It's called the "United Planet Faith & Science Initiative."

Is it reliable? Wait until you hear who's involved. Here are just a few of the many founding members: James Hansen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Kerry Emmanuel, Katherine Hayhoe, Rabbi David Rosen, Swami Saraswati, Michael Mann, Reverend Sally Bingham, Michael Oppenheimer, the list goes on.

Often chairing high-powered press conferences in different cities, all recorded as You tube videos, is Stuart Scott. He's the Founder and Director of Strategic Planning for the "United Planet Faith & Science Initiative."

Stuart Scott

In the interview, Stewart recommends a series of maps from NCAR, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. These 4 maps of the coming world show a widening band of deserts forming around both subtropical lands of the world. Like parts of Brazil. Like all of North Africa, of course, but also a new desert environment for Portugal, Spain, Southern Italy and Greece. Did I mention the mid-west of the United States? Where so much of the world's food is grown? Or another food producing region in China?

This is like the map of doom that I first saw in 2006. Dr. James Lovelock presented a similar map of Earth with wide belts of deserts in a speech to the Institution of Chemical Engineers November 28th, 2006. You can listen to or download that program again with this link.

Here is one link to the maps. The images are also at this address. Sadly, all the links to Lovelock's map of doom have disappeared over time. I can no longer find it on the Net. If you do, please let me know. You can always use the "Contact" button on my web site to reach me.

And of course, you can see these maps on Stuart's ClimateMatters TV YouTube, where the maps are shown and discussed at about the 16:30 time mark.

As Stuart Scott tells us, even relatively conservative international institutions, and the U.S. government say a huge portion of the current food-production land will become too hot, and especially too dry, to grow crops. That will happen as more billions of humans are added to the planet that does not yet adequately feed the current masses. Add in flooding of fertile lands near the sea, in places like India, Bangladesh, Africa, and South America - and you can see why Scott is so pessimistic about our ability to feed 10 billion people.

I won't go into the horrifying probability of hundreds of millions of climate migrants. That will make the current refugee crisis into Europe look like good times.

WHAT ABOUT CHINA?

We discuss the role of China. Dr. James Hansen has just been there. It sounds like Stuart Scott and Hansen agree that IF there is going to be a tipping point, where one nation takes real action to cut greenhouse gas emissions - it will not happen in a Western democracy. It is far more likely to happen in China, which is currently the world's number two (or number one) polluter of the atmosphere.

But China has a working central government with enough power to literally dictate rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Scott tells us that when China decided to outlaw plastic bags in retail and grocery stores, they hired 4500 inspectors to go into stores and fine anyone using plastic bags. Suddenly Chinese shoppers started bringing their own reusable bags. It was a quick revolution.

From what I've heard, and as Scott tells us, the top leadership in Beijing is very aware of the coming damage from climate change. That is why they concluded a separate agreement with the United States, on greenhouse gases, before the Paris climate talks.

China is already the world's largest producer, and user, of solar and wind energy. The country has also invested heavily in mass transit, including thousands of miles of high speed rail. Neither the United States or Canada has a single mile of high speed rail. North America seems stuck in a dark age, even as their oil-producing economies stagger and fall.

My one reservation is about China's decision to continue on a path of nuclear power. James Hansen is all behind this, as he talks about "Fourth Generation" commercial nuclear power plants which do not yet exist. Meanwhile I understand China is building at least 29 nuclear complexes. They will be "Third Generation" at best - one step better than the old GE reactors at Fukushima. But these are still reactors that can, and eventually will melt down somewhere, again. A large part of China could be devastated virtually forever. In my opinion, nothing is worth that risk.

It's a fruitful talk with Stuart Scott, on a wide range of topics, like the Arctic, geoengineering, abrupt climate shift, clathrates and more.

Stuart Scott's first action alert, where you can help during the month of January 2016 - is to get the Nobel Prize committee to create a prize for Sustainable Development. It's easy to add your voice, at this web site: http://np4sd.org/

Download or listen to this interview with Stuart Scott in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

CLIMATE MATTERS TV SHOWS FROM THE PARIS COP21 CLIMATE TALKS

Stuart Scott and his organization created a whole series of programs at the Paris COP21 conference in December 2015. He uses a more relaxed for of presentation, almost like a TV talk show, except it often features top-tier climate scientists and real thinkers. Feel free to watch and share some of the half-hour ClimateMatters.TV shows taped at COP-21 in Paris.

James Hansen Speaking Truth to Power

Moral Obligation, Scientific Imperative (with climate-rapper)

Abrupt Change, Ecological & Economic (with climate-rapper)

Our Challenge to Feed Ourselves

Acceptance & Avoidance Among Evangelicals

What Lies Ahead?

Kiribati, Tuvalu, Miami Beach

May the Force be With You

Emissions Zero Global

COP-21: Conference of Peace

Our Common Home

100 WAYS TO EMPOWER GLOBAL WOMEN: BETSY TEUTSCH

In the media, all we see or hear are relatively wealthy people talking among themselves. Billions of global poor are missing. Many of them are women. Our guest Betsty Teutsch has collected Earth-friendly ideas and technology to help them. Her new book is "One Hundred Under One Hundred Dollars: One Hundred Ideas for Empowering Global Women".

Betsy Teutsch (center) at work.

Betsy is a gem with really good ideas. Strangely, although she was talking about affordable ways that the lives of impoverished women (and their kids) around the world could be improved - I kept thinking how very useful these same ideas are for women in over-developed countries to go more low-tech (and help save the planet).

Tonight, I'm getting a bit tired as I put this blog together. It's always so long and loaded that I wonder how readers make out! Here is the bio from Betsy's site:

"Betsy Teutsch is an artist, blogger, community organizer, and environmentalist who has enjoyed a successful career as an Judaica artist and entrepreneur. As Communications Director of GreenMicrofinance, she wrote about affordable, sustainable paths out of rural poverty. She has also served as a board member for the dynamic Shining Hope for Communities and the Kibera School for Girls, and founded three chapters of Dining For Women, a national network of giving circles meeting monthly to support of women’s grassroots poverty alleviation initiatives. A Fargo, ND, native, she now lives with her husband in Philadelphia, PA."

Find Betsy on Facebook here.

Listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Betsy Teutsch in CD Quality or Lo-Fi. Pass the links on to people you think should hear it.

THE SONGS IN THIS SHOW

In this program you hear a clip from the "Climate Change Deniers' Anthem" created by the comedy group Funny Or Die. Watch the whole video at funnyordie.com.

FINIAN MAKEPEACE "2060"

From Ithica New York, and more lately Venice Beach California, comes Finian Makepeace. As a duo with his brother (taken from four musical brothers in the family) - Finian made it to the Quarter Finals of the TV show "America's Got Talent". And he does have talent. Now Finian is recording with "The Makes". He is also the co-founder and Policy Director for the group "Kiss the Ground" - a non-profit dedicated to restoring soil around the world.

I like this song called "2060" a lot. It's well crafted and performed in a very moving way. I thank Finian for sending it along for broadcast on Radio Ecoshock. He has also performed this song at climate rallies. His heart is in it.

THE END

... of this show and this blog. But I've already lined up a deep Swedish thinker on climate and the crash, plus a scientific study which could literally take your breath away. That's next week on Radio Ecoshock.

My super-thanks to those listeners who donated to Radio Ecoshock during January. Frankly, I thought donations would die out this time of year - but not at all. With your help I bought a giant new hard drive. It was needed because each Radio Ecoshock show, with all it's supporting files, occupies two to three gigabytes of space. I don't want to compress the original files, as that reduces sound quality. After ten years of doing this show (and counting on my old hard drive all that time, hoping it won't die today) - I now have a 4 terabyte drive.

I had a pre-amplifier die. That amp brings my microphone up to levels guests can hear on the phone. Thanks to listener donations, I ordered and received a new tube amp, just like the old one.

Seriously, thank you for helping me do this program. If you haven't supported Radio Ecoshock yet, you can do so at this page.

I appreciate your willingness to go "through the dark portal" if that's where the truth can be found. Thanks for listening!

Alex Smith

New Year NEW CLIMATE!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 6 Jan 2016 17:33:00 -0800

SUMMARY: Why the wild weather & floods across N. Hemisphere, rain at N. Pole? Then Alex talks with David Montgomery, author of "Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations", with co-author Anne Bikle, new book "The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health". Radio Ecoshock 160106

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock in this new year of 2016. In this program I'll talk with two guests who tell us about the erosion of civilizations, climate answers in the soil, and the danger of killing off your own ecology - of microbes in your body. But first in this new year of 2016, I need a little time to talk with you.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

Image courtesy endoftheamericandream.com

AWE AND DREAD

I suppose I knew it would come to this. We've just flashed past another awful marker toward a new climate age. At the end of 2015, the hottest year ever recorded, it rained, in the 24 hour darkness, at the North Pole.

Your remember where you were on September 11, 2001. You knew it was a giant wave, a marker where nothing would ever be the same. Scientists around the world felt the same dread and awe in 2007, when the Arctic ice melted back, revealing a dark sea to the sky for the first time in many thousands of years, maybe even in a million years. It wasn't supposed to happen in this century. We knew then, the Arctic would never recover. The pendulum swung toward the great melting. More heat from the sun would be absorbed by the planet, changing the energy balance not just in the Arctic, but everywhere.

We've run interviews with scientists like Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers, explaining how the loss of that white shield at the top of the world, and a warming Arctic, has changed the Jet Stream. With less difference between the polar cold and the tropics, those high atmospheric winds have morphed from a powerful West-to-East stream, to a meandering river. That river has bends that tend to freeze over regions, and extending the breadth of continents and beyond. As Paul Beckwith has told us, what you get on the ground depends on which side of the stream you are on. It can be extra hot in the West, and extra snowy in the East, or visa versa.

Lately in the northern Hemisphere, we have not had the record-breaking hurricanes that slammed into North America in 2005. We have had straight-running power winds, called "Derechos". Multiple massive hurricanes, called typhoons in the Southern Hemisphere, hit East Asia this year. The Philippines was raked over, time after time.

What the Northern Hemisphere experienced in late 2015 leads to this quote from Dr. James Hansen, in his book "Storms of My Grandchildren". He wrote about " ‘continent-sized frontal storms packing the strength of hurricanes.". Robert Scribbler reminded me of that.

Hansen writes about such mega-storms as coming in the future, in the next generation. I say we are seeing it now. In fact, we just experienced another transcontinental storm, stretching from California beyond Scandinavia, with waves reaching Russian Siberia.

HOT OCEANS DRIVE WEATHER WEIRDNESS

This story is written in heat maps of the ocean, as measured from satellites. Scientists say up to 90% of the excess heat created by a more carbon-rich atmosphere has been soaked up by the oceans. That's a slow process, slow to heat, and slow to release. With that buffer, there is at least a 30 year delay for the impacts of our carbon emissions. The climate disruption we are feeling now is from rising greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980's. We've poured in almost as much again since then.

[image: earth.nullschool.net]

The oceans of the world communicate, slowly, sometimes at great depth, using the system known as "the great conveyor belt". The seas have been hot, and getting hotter, around Australia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and in East Asia generally. That heat has been moving downward toward the depths for about 15 years, since the last great El Nino of 1997/98. It mixes with colder waters below, which rising, create the La Nina weather systems we've taken for granted in this new century.

That cycle has to break. It always does. Now we have El Nino, but with the hotter seas, it's El Nino on steroids. It's the strongest El Nino recorded since the development of science.

You will hear endless collection of weather people on television explaining the floods, and soon snow storms, and even the strange warming in Eastern North America, on El Nino. That's why the cherry blossoms bloomed all up the East Coast. That's why folks in Phildelphia wore shorts and tee shirts on Christmas Day.

I've seen a report that out of over 200 local and national news casts monitored, only one even talked about the possible role of global warming. The other suspect, and notice we are never the suspects, is called "changes in the Jet Stream". It's true, but why don't they ask, why don't we ask, WHY is this such a strong El Nino? WHY has the Jet Stream changed. Why is the weather so weird, and why is never going to be normal again?

Usually, scientists tell us El Nino has little impact on the Atlantic Ocean. It is an affair of the Pacific. And yet we now see storms that blow over Texas, Missouri, and eastwards, seeming to continue on. In just days there are record winds in Iceland, and still more flooding across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Scandinavia.

In those ocean heat maps, we can see raging heat in the seas off New England. It's been so hot, the species are changing. It's still relatively warmer this winter. But that warmer water is being pushed away from Greenland by a new phenomenon that will stay with us for centuries. We now realize that massive meltwater from Greenland has created a pond of cold water in the very North Atlantic. Like putting ice into a drink, the ocean there is colder than it was, even with global warming.

So where are the hot waters of the Gulf Stream to go? They are pushed lower, heading toward Europe. The clash of the Greenland cold blob, and these record-hot waters, create mega-storms, and a storm track that is battering the British Isles again this winter. Centuries-old towns, that have not flooded since the Middle Ages, are flooded now. Historic bridges have washed away. In England, they call this storm "Frank", but it stretches from Spain to the North Pole.

Yes the mania to contain everything in concrete has had an effect. All those new suburbs and their roads, all the moors drained to raise grouse for the rich - all our activities have disturbed nature's buffers for heavy rains. Does any of that really matter when more than a foot of rain drops down from the sky in just 24 hours? No one alive in Great Britain has seen anything like this.

CLIMATE INSANITY: SUMMER IN THE ARCTIC WINTER

It doesn't stop there, or even with the big floods in Norway. The heated waters are pouring up the Norwegian coast and into the Arctic, above Finland and Russia. There is a rural inhabited area in Central-Eastern Siberia called Khatanga. According to Wikipedia, the previous December hight for Khatanga was -.2 C (31.6 F), and the average high in December is -25.5 C, or -13 F. Blogger Robin Wenstra tells us that there, in the Arctic Circle, this December it was 79 degrees Fahrenheit, or 26 degrees Celsius. I can't begin to tell you how insane and how impossible that is.

Here I'm just going to quote from Robert Scribbler's blog. Nobody can say it better.

"Unprecedented doesn’t even begin to describe rain over Arctic sea ice above the 80 degree North Latitude line on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 2015. It’s something we’d rarely see during summer time. But this rain is falling through the black of polar night during the coldest time of the year.

There, over the Arctic sea ice today, the rains began in winter time.

As the first front of warm air proceeded over the ice pack to the north of Svalbard, the rains fell through 35-40 degree (F) air temperatures. It splattered upon Arctic Ocean ice that rarely even sees rain during summer-time. Its soft pitter-patter a whisper that may well be the sound to mark the end of a geological age.

For we just don’t see rain over Arctic sea ice north of Greenland during Winter time. Or we used to not. But the warmth that liquid water falling through the black of what should be a bone-cold polar night represents something ominous. Something ushered to our world by human fossil fuel industry’s tremendous emission of heat trapping gasses. Gasses that in the range of 400 ppm CO2 and 485 ppm CO2e are now strong enough to begin to roll back the grip of Winter. Gasses, that if they keep being burned until we hit a range between 550-650 ppm CO2 (or equivalent) will likely be powerful enough to wipe out Winter as we know it entirely over the course of long and tumultuous years of painful transition.

What does the beginning of the end of Winter sound like? It’s the soft splash of rain over Arctic Ocean sea ice during what should be its coldest season."

CLIMATE EVENTS GREATER THAN ANY TERRORISM

So you see, that is a 911 moment that hardly anyone sees. In fact, it's far greater than mere terrorism, or human wars over religion and oil. At Chrismas 2015, we saw "the beginning of the end of winter."

I also suspected the time would come when I could just rebroadcast old Radio Ecoshock shows, since the truth about climate change is already known, already told, and now already come. I said what we've just seen is another transcontinental storm. That's because I first noticed one in 2006, the year I began this radio show. I had to dig that out of the Radio Ecoshock archives on our web site. I think you'll agree it's eerily familiar, except now we've had another ten years of very driven science, to explain why these things are happening.

So here it is: a few minutes from the Radio Ecoshock show in late 2006, as I describe a transcontinental storm, that sounds so much like today.

Audio "Stormy Future" here. Blog here (posted in early 2007)

PAINFUL TO KNOW

In a way, it's painful to make this radio show. I hope it's not too painful to hear. For whatever strange reason, it hurts me to think of rain falling in the winter Arctic. I know that means more people flooded out of their peaceful homes, or blown out of them, further south. I know that means more millions of trees will die in California from the drought, including some of the ancient giants. I know that farmers will struggle, and we will pay more for what can be run through the weather gauntlet. I know it gets harder and worse. I know too much.

Over Christmas I played with my grandson. We made towers where marbles roll down through mazes. We read stories about lions and elephants. Will they still exist when he's grown? Will everything around him be tossed about by fires, strange frosts, weird rains?

What will I tell him if we give up, and stop trying to save what's left? What will you tell the children, that you did during the great climate crisis?

NEAR LOSS OF A CLIMATE WARRIOR

All this was driven deeper by the sudden news that over Christmas we nearly lost a powerful climate warrior. You may remember how Daphne Wysham organized the conference call of Mayors and activists against building more fossil fuel infrastructure. If you missed it, download or listen to this 14 minute report from Mayors and activists, as edited for Radio Ecoshock here.

For eight years Daphne hosted the syndicated radio show "Earthbeat". She recommended Radio Ecoshock to those stations, helping to make Ecoshock what it is today. Daphne has been fighting to save the climate from her new home in Portland Oregon.

Just before Christmas, Daphne and her partner suddenly found themselves plunging into a cold mountain river, their car sinking fast. She was in the water, gulping air from a tiny pocket, for long minutes, before a Sheriff's deputy managed to rescue her. Both Daphne and her partner were air-lifted to a Reno hospital. Both are going to recover. Daphne has already declared another year of continuing battle to prevent catastrophic climate change. We need her.

So life is short and tenuous. We have a few thousand years of human history behind us, and millenia yet to come. What changes will we leave, in our short visit here on Earth? I shudder to imagine what our descendants will think of us, as we rush to buy more new things, to fly off on vacations, to waste away the world. Or did we strive to localize food without petrochemicals? Did we walk or bike more than drive? Did we use social media and circles of friends to create allies? Is this the year, after the polar rain, after the emergence of transcontinental storms, that we break out of the deadly paradigm of the old fossil age?

You decide what you will do with your life and powers. I'll keep making radio, keep talking with scientists and activists. I'll wrap up this selfish little chat with a powerful comment left on the Radio Ecoshock blog, following last week's optimistic talk by scientist and author Tim Flannery.

NOT REALLY CHANGING ANYTHING...

Listener Wanda Harding wrote:

"I would like to be positive, but, it seems to me, that all these "solutions" are dreamed up to allow for the current, CAPITALISTIC SYSTEM TO CONTINUE... when ...and I am going to say it this way... WE KNOW THAT IS A REALLY BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM.... I do not see ANY ideas about REDUCING CONSUMPTION...ESPECIALLY FOR THE RICH... LESS FLYING, LESS BUYING... we just want to keep buying cars and stupid plastic stuff... that we DO NOT NEED... I do not hear anything about coming up with a whole new global culture that is not about consuming....especially things we do not need and activities we shouldn't be doing... LIKE PROFESSIONAL SPORTS... NASCAR...

Also, Tim brings up women in developing countries needing birth control... yes, they do and I am all for them having it and I bet they really want it...

However, why do we allow the upper classes, the rich to do what ever they want? Why do they not have to change their lifestyles? ... Oh,wait, gee they have to buy an electric car.... when someone says that there is a law passed that states that anyone making over maybe, 150,000 a year IS LEGALLY REQUIRED TO PUT SOME TYPE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM ON THEIR HOME ... THEN, WE WILL START TO MAKE SOME PROGRESS.. When the rich or even the business sector, is legally limited to how much they can fly or even IF hey can fly... then, I'll believe we are making progress...

when we start to REALLY go in the direction of small farmers...and use THAT AS A JOBS PROGRAM...and give out land grants for people to do so, and then, the do not have to travel to work in rural areas, negating the necessity of a car... at least not having to run one every day... then, I'll start to believe we are making progress... so far, all we do is come up with GADGETS... we STILL DO NOT BELIEVE WE HAVE TO CHANGE OUR BEHAVIORS AND LIFE STYLES.. "

Thank you Wanda Harding.

You see how it is? I know many of my listeners are powerful and articulate people. I appreciate so much all the emails you send me. In fact, without listener tips, ideas and criticism, I simply could not continue this program. Radio Ecoshock has become listener-powered. Thank you for giving me another year of opportunity, as hard as the news may be.

I've got some great guests lined up for you, including a top scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to explain this year's Arctic report card. Let's get to our first guests of 2016 now.

"DIRT", CLIMATE, AND HEALTH - DAVID MONTGOMERY AND ANNE BILKE

We're going to take a big journey, into time, and across the globe. Eventually, we will arrive right back at the center of your own body. Our tour guides are Dr. David Montgomery from the University of Washington, and biologist Anne Bikle.

I know this team just released a new book "The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health." That is a personal journey with a big message for us all.

But at the risk of being rude, I start with David. A recent guest, Benoit Lambert, and several listeners, asked for this interview, based on his previous book "Dirt The Erosion of Civilizations." That is coming back, not only because we may farm ourselves right out of soil in this century - but also because of the promise we could reverse the process of climate change, putting giant amounts of carbon back into the soil.

David is a "geomorphologist" at the University of Washington. He also won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 2008.

This is a deep interview. We talk about how formerly fertile places like Syria and Libya became soil poor, leading to the troubles we see today. It happened even in Colonial America, where tobacco farming stripped the south, forcing migration westward. Soil degradation is happening all over the world, but now there are few frontiers left with new soil to use up. "Dirt" as Montgomery wrote in his classic book, determines the course of civilizations, including the present one.

But the soil also holds promise as a place that can be enriched, rather than eroded with ploughing , agrichemicals and monocrops. The process of putting organic life, and life-supporting microbes back into the soil means enriched food possibilities, but also means carbon can be removed from the atmosphere on a large scale, helping to alleviate climate disruption. Montgomery says we could alleviate up to 15% of fossil fuel use by relatively simple changes to the way we farm.

Here is a fascinating talk by David Montgomery, on You tube. I took extensive notes for my own use, including this: "Agricultural soil loss is not because humanity farms but arises from how we farm." From Plato to Roosevelt, from his study of 1400 papers on soil loss, Montgomery gives the big picture.

In our Radio Ecoshock interview, we discuss how long carbon can stay in the soil, and the possible role of biochar, to keep it there longer.

Montgomery got a personal lesson on how to restore soil with his partner biologist Anne Bilke. They rejuvenated poor soil in their Seattle area yard for a garden, without using petrochemicals. That gave Montgomery more hope for the future of humans.

But as the two studied the astounding world of microbes in the soil, disaster struck. Anne was hit was a bad kind of cancer - which it turns out is also caused by microbes. There are life-giving microbes, and from a human perspective, life-threatening microbes.

Their second book "The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health" describes a new threat, and a new hope for the health of all of us. Not only is petro-industrial culture killing off life in the soil, it's killing off the essential balance of microbes in our own bodies. Over-use of antibiotics is just one facet, added to chemical-laden food. This is information you need to know.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with David Montgomery and Anne Bilke (31 minutes) in either CD Quality (30 MB) or Lo-Fi (8 MB).

Follow David and Anne at their web site: dig2grow.com. That is also their Twitter handle: @dig2grow. Here is their Facebook page.

Thanks for listening again this year! There's lots more Radio Ecoshock to come.

Alex

Tim Flannery - Atmosphere of Hope

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 12:30:00 -0800

Australian scientist & author of "The Weather Makers" on new book "Atmosphere of Hope". Despite what he knows, Tim Flannery explains new "natural" based tech that may prevent climate catastrophe.

“Can our desire to overcome [the climate crisis] drive humanity’s next great waves of positive technological economic and social revolutions, or will we be plunged into the dystopian collapses and terrors of civilizations past?”

That's the question asked by Dr. Tim Flannery in his new book "Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis".

Flannery rocked the world with his 2003 book "The Weather Makers". For a while, the Australian government hired him to coordinate climate communications. He left to form the Climate Council, with community funding. Flannery is also with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, at the University of Melbourne. He's trained as a specialist in mammals and palaeontology.

Dr. Tim Flannery

We're about to hear Tim Flannery speak about his new book, at the Town Hall in Seattle, on November 12, 2015. I thank Mike McCormack of talkingsticktv for this recording.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show, the full speech with question and answer period, in either CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB).

Or listen right now on Soundcloud.

Tim begins this talk with a climate reality check. He outlines an overview of climate science, and the huge challenges facing us. Flannery doesn't try to sugar-coat our situation, and admits that from about 2008 to 2013 he was somewhat depressed about the prospects of severe climate change, and our lack of appropriate response.

However, in 2007, following his publication of the Weathermakers, Tim was called to the Caribbean island owned by multi-billionaire Richard Branson. From that was born the $25 million dollar Virgin Climate Challenge for the best invention to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Flannery tells us Branson himself was doubtful humans will get themselves out of this civilization-wide problem.

During the following years, the Virgin Challenge received about 11,000 entries. Reading through many of these, Flannery tells us he began to see hopeful signs toward solutions to lower carbon in the atmosphere. In this talk he mentions several, including carbon-negative cement (it removes CO2 as it hardens); fibre and plastics that can be made directly from CO2.

There is also a type of rock (Serpentinite) that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Perhaps this fairly common rock could be crushed and used as beaches (as the seas rise) to capture more carbon dioxide. This is known as "carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation". Serpentinite has been used by a Dutch firm to make allegedly carbon neutral shingles for houses.

We need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The first way is to cut emissions drastically. That must be done, but it will not reduce carbon dioxide already there, and already too high.

The second way, Flannery says, is to use geoengineering techniques, like spraying sulfur into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight. But this has grave risks for weather systems, he says.

Flannery tells us there is a "third way": solutions to save nature without wrecking nature. Although these ideas mimic nature or use nature's tech, they do require some energy to deploy them. That energy would have to come from solar, wind, or perhaps burning biomass?

I recommend this talk as inspiring, and it will teach you new things. Personally, I did not find enough in the talk to convince me we have a way out, yet.

My thanks to Mike McCormick of talkingsticktv, and host of the Mind Over Matters radio show for this recording. Mike produces a lot of worthwhile original material.

CLIMATE HOPE & TRAGEDY

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 11:46:00 -0800

SUMMARY: First net-zero city fights off giant fracking leak in California.; Vancouver aims fossil free; 1st Nations vs. pipelines. Mayors & activists report. Scientist Paul Beckwith & RAN Exec Dir Lindsey Allen wrap up Paris climate talks. Carolyn Baker's seminar on how to cope.

WELCOME TO RADIO ECOSHOCK THIS WEEK

Reactions to the Paris climate agreement are all over the map. Unexpectedly, our correspondent Paul Beckwith suggests this may be a tipping point in human affairs, after extreme weather all over the planet. Lindsey Allen from RAN isn't so sure.

Before we talk with them, I want you to hear an extraordinary teleconference hosted by former Earthbeat radio host Daphne Wysham. We hear how West Coast cities are leading us out of the fossil age, even as they struggle with constant demand for more pipelines and ports. Oh by the way, one California mayor reports thousands are living under a toxic cloud, while fracking has poisoned the water system used for one quarter of North America's produce.

I'm Alex Smith, with all that and more, this week on Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

MAYORS' REPORT ON GREEN ACTION

Just when things look bleak for the climate, we discover city Mayors are way ahead of national leaders. Daphne Wysham leads this story. She's the former host of the syndicated radio program "Earth Beat", and now director of the climate and energy program at the Center for Sustainable Economy.

I know good radio when I hear it. This conference call organized by Daphne contains some startling news, both good and bad. In this abbreviated for radio version, the guests are (in order of appearance):

Andrea Rheimer, Deputy Mayor of Vancouver, Canada

Rex Parris, Mayor of Lancaster California

Winona LaDuke, former Vice-Presidential Candidate and head of Honor the Earth

The whole purpose of the call was to unite more local politicians in the fight against constant pressure to approve or allow more and more fossil fuel infrastructure. By that we mean incessant pressure to build more ports for oil, gas, or coal, more pipelines, more storage facilities - all the instruments by which we can commit to a bankrupt economic plan, and a ravaged planet.

Daphne Wysham was among many who fought off such a proposal in Portland Oregon. Companies wanted to build a propane shipment facilities, bringing the propane from Alberta in Canada, to ship to Asia or who knows where. This in Portland, which has prided itself in being the first city in America to develop a green plan, a way out of fossil fuel dependence. It clashed, and was defeated at the civic level - not in Washington, not in Paris, but stopped in Portland. On November 12, 2015, Portland passed the strongest legislation against more fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in America.

Activists realized they could not afford to fight off each and every such proposal, which are rampant on the West Coast, including in Canada, but also in the UK, in Australia, and around the world. The fossil fuel industry is still trying to grow, even as we know more must be left in the ground, even as we know humans must move AWAY from more fossil fuels, not toward them.

So a small non-profit web site was set up, simply named No More Fossil Fuel Infrastructure. As Daphne tells us in a preview interview, more than a dozen Mayors signed up almost overnight. In a surprising development, the Mayor of Richmond California, Tom Butts signed up from Paris- even though his city hosts a huge and polluting refinery owned by Chevron.

Andrea Rheimer, the Deputy Mayor of Vancouver, Canada, has some inspiring news. That city banned all new fossil fuel infrastructure in 2012. In 2013, Vancouver banned new coal ports. At the start of 2015, Vancouver was one of a handful of cities around the world declaring their intention to be fossil-free by 2050. Just this year, another 100 or more cities have said the same. The cities are far ahead of the politicians in Paris.

Mayor of Lancaster California, Rex Parris

I found Rex Parris's presentation loaded with ground-breaking and heart-breaking info. To mention just a little:

NORTH AMERICA'S FIRST NET ZERO CITY?

* His city of Lancaster passed a bylaw requiring all new homes to have installed solar power. As a result, the city now produces more electricity than it consumes. Lancaster California exports power to the grid, becoming a net-zero city (perhaps the world's first) as far as electricity goes. Mayor Parris expected complaints and push-back, but instead got a better economy and co-operation.

* The city is now engaged with a Chinese battery company, BYD, to install a 500 megawatt storage facility, to balance out the highs and lows of solar power. Again, this is a first for any city in North America.

THE PORTER RANCH BLOWOUT - CALIFORNIA'S BP

* Parris is a lawyer who now heads the class action suit against SoCal (Southern California Gas Company), and it's parent company, Sempra Energy, for a huge fracking well blow-out that has buried thousands of families under a toxic cloud. This one blow-out (still on-going, can't be stopped apparently) is thought to be emitting one quarter of all methane produced by the state of California. It's not just methane, but a toxic stew of cancer-causing chemicals like benzene. It's called the "Porter Ranch" disaster, or California's BP disaster.

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, SOURCE OF 25% OF NATION'S PRODUCE, POISONED?

In the teleconference, Mayor Parris says:

"Before the Porter Ranch blowout in the injection wells, what we discovered is that the water supply in the San Joaquin Valley that feeds 25% of our nation's food supply, grown food supply, comes from the San Joaquin Valley. And the aquifers appear to be poisoned. The cherry trees started to die, now the almond trees are dying. And the testing shows that in some cases we're getting benzene levels at a thousand times what what's acceptable. All kinds of hydrocarbon poisons are in there - and that's because the oil industry has been injecting directly into the drinking water of California.

The thing we should start recognizing is that this industry has no responsibility whatsoever. They have captive agencies regulating them, and as a result the impact they're having on the climate, the country and the citizens is beyond comprehension.

The Porter Ranch situation is an example of that. They used a 50 year old well, it was drilled in 1954, to pump oil, and they used that as an injection well to store natural gas under high pressures. The inevitable happened. It blew and now we have thousands of families living under this cloud, with very little we can do about it. We're trying to relocate them, the gas company is resisting. This is Sempra Energy which is responsible for this.

And we're going to have more and more of these situations develop as they take more and more risks in finding energy."

WINONA LADUKE - FIGHTING PIPELINES ON NATIVE LANDS

Winona LaDuke tells us the Ojibwe people are fighting no less than three new pipeline coming through their lands. The fossil fuel companies want to establish pipelines to a port on Lake Superior, to carry dangerous Bakken crude, or even-more polluting tar sands oil, out to the world by the East. They would bypass the barriers to the West in British Columbia, or Oregon, bypass the XL pipeline, and ship via the Great Lakes. Anything to make a buck.

Winona LaDuke

Find out more about Winona's activism here at Honor the Earth.

HOW TO FIND THE ORIGINAL TELECONFERENCE AUDIO

There isn't space here to tell it all. Please listen to this shorter report (edited for radio) on Radio Ecoshock, or listen to the whole press conference here.

Along with Mayor Parris, Andrea Rheimer and LaDuke, you will also hear from Patrick O'Herron from the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nia Rivak, an activist from Portland. Oh yeah, and Bill McKibben sent an introductory clip from Paris, for this teleconference.

It's well worth your time. And can you help organize or support a similar movement against more fossil fuel infrastructure in your own city, where democracy still has a hope? Then sign up at nonewffi.org.

Download or listen to this 14 minute report from Mayors and activists, as edited for Radio Ecoshock, in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

PAUL BECKWITH WRAPS UP PARIS CLIMATE TALKS

I thought Paul would trash the Paris climate talks as way too little too late. No, Paul tells us why this may be a turning point, even a tipping point in human affairs. Then he explains what needs to be done from here, to really save the climate. As always, a trip with this PHD student (with already two Masters degrees, and teaching climate science at the University of Ottawa) - is also well worth your time.

We talk about James Hansen, the new climate-aware billionaires, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, geoengineering, and much more.

I appreciate Paul taking the time to talk to us from Norway, where he is helping to found a new company, Gaia Engineering, which will provide climate-related technology. His two hour talk in Norway was recorded and will be found in a little while on the new web site being built.

Download or listen to this 21 minute interview with Paul Beckwith in Norway in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

LINDSEY ALLEN OF RAN ON PARIS CLIMATE TALKS

Lindsey Allen is the Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network. That's a group that has earned my respect. In addition to their campaigns to save the rainforests, for their own sake, and for the climate - RAN, as it's known, also dug furthest into who, exactly who, is funding the new coal plants that will kill off our hopes for a livable planet. That turned out to be big name banks, some of who also claim to be getting greener. Get some of the details here, and I hope to do an interview soon on coal financing.

Lindsey tells us about the non-profit organizations who were active in Paris, and the role that the people's voice plays in bringing politicians as far as we've come. She also reminds us that the "developed" world has a lot to learn from the people actually living in rainforests, the indigenous people on all continents. But we're not listening yet, she tells us - at our peril.

Download or listen to this 11 minute interview with Lindsey Allen of Rainforest Action Network in CD Quality.

CAROLYN BAKER'S NEW SEMINAR

Carolyn Baker is a life coach and certified in psychology. She's taught at the university level. Carolyn has specialized in helping people cope with the awful news about climate change, and our impact on the planet in general. What should we think and feel? How can we go on?

To that end, she's organized a seminar which will be live with some really intriguing guests, and then later available via recorded video. It's not free, because this sort of project costs money to organize. But it's not all that expensive either. Carolyn describes the guests, which include Andrew Harvey founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism, writer/teacher Stephen Jenkinson, deep green activist Derrick Jensen, Carolyn herself of course, Linda Buzzell, journalist Dahr Jamail, Janaia Donaldson from Peak Moment TV, Mick Collins from the University of East Anglia, and Becca Martenson, counsellor and life coach (and wife of Chris Martenson). If you don't recognize any of those names, perhaps you spend too much time with mainstream news?

The thing is - I've seen some great conferences with speakers like this where they expect you to drive across the country, or fly across part of the world, and pay a lot of money for the conference, plus lodgings, food and all that. I've been waiting for the alternative community to organize real online conferences, complete with feedback from us, the participants. It's starting.

The seminar is called "Living Your Passion & Purpose", and further "In the face of humanity's greatest challenge, an interactive online symposium." To find out more, listen to this 5 minute interview, or just go to her web site, carolynbaker.net. Then it's up to you, whether you want to participate, in what Carolyn hopes will become a new supportive community.

Download or listen to this 5 minute interview with Carolyn Baker in CD Quality.

Of course you can also listen to Carolyn and her guests every week on her radio show "The Lifeboat Hour" on the Progressive Radio Network.

Like the fossil age, we are out of time. If you can help support this program, find out how on this page. Radio Ecoshock is paid for entirely by listener support. We run no ads on this site, or in the program. We are not sponsored by guests or anyone else. Just you.

Thank you for listening. Be sure and join us next week on Radio Ecoshock, when I'll play a full-length talk about why a famous scientist who knows how serious the climate threat is, has finally begun to hope.

RETURN OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 17:57:00 -0800

Extreme rainfall events are cropping up around the world. In England, once in a thousand year floods have repeated 3 times now, in five years. Records are falling in many countries. In a warmer world, we've gained 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere. It has to come down somewhere.

The short news clips about extreme rainfall events around the world came courtesy of BBC, Reuters, Fox, ABC, CBS, Euronews.

WASDELL VINDICATED

A few weeks ago, our guest David Wasdell suggested the outcome of our current path of emissions would eventually be a world at least 8 degrees C hotter on average, maybe more. Some questioned that. It is now the most heavily downloaded interview I've posted on soundcloud. If you missed it, listen in here.

This week the University of Edinburgh released a paper echoing Wasdell's climate. Eight degrees is possible, according to Professor Roy Thompson, as published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Find the University press release here.

DARK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE

Climate change does not occur in a steady economy, or a peaceful time. This Fall we saw in Paris how terrorism empowered politicians to ban climate action, in the name of public safety. The terrorists knew they were attacking before the world flooded to the COP21 climate talks. They succeeded in disrupting the essential public voice.

But in this show, we ask two questions: will the fossil-based economy collapse just as extreme weather events punish property and infrastructure. What if we are too broke to rebuild or cope? There's a blog for that. It's theeconomiccollapse blog, with millions of readers. We'll look at frashing warning a new depression is forming, with blogger Michael T. Snyder.

Then, believe it or not, there are darker things to consider. If climate disrupts agriculture, as expected and already happening, social violence and wars may become worse. Our guest Professor Tim Snyder explains why climate change may open the door to more mass murder. It needs to be said.

Off we go, with black clouds hanging over economies around the world.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

RETURN TOWARD COLLAPSE - MICHAEL SNYDER

The Federal Reserve just said the U.S. economy is so rosy they can raise interest rates by .25%, the first rise in about 7 years. So why is this environment reporter covering just the opposite?

Remember Hurricane Sandy, all pumped up with rising seas and a hot ocean off the U.S. East Coast. The damages from that one storm were estimated at $60 billion dollars, or about 55 billion euros to "fix". That didn't include bolstering the shore-line, or the estimated $10 billion dollars our Radio Ecoshock guest Professor J. Court Stevenson recommended to create flood-gates to protect New York Harbor. Download that 21 minute interview here.

What about the billions lost in the California drought, or more tens of billions with Hurricane Katrina? Politicians, and we the public, always presume there will be money to rebuild. Except we're already in the total debt economy, nationally, regionally, and personally. If the massive global economic system experiences a crash, there will be no money to recover from recurring climate damage. We will get hit - that's pretty well guaranteed from rising seas, extreme rainfall events (I report on a few of those in this show), agricultural losses, record wild-fires - you know, a lot of bad things.

The good news could be that only a global economic crash can prevent us from terra-forming the planet into a dying world. Things like the tar sands won't be worth developing, and ditto for dangerous Arctic drilling. The history of the past few decades shows only an economic collapse, like the fall of the Soviet Union, has led to genuine reduction of emissions.

The bad news is a lot of bad news. For example, if there is no money to invest, we may not make the transition toward cleaner solar and wind energy, or electric cars. We may be stuck with whatever inefficient grid and coal power plants we've got, not to mention aging nuclear hulks run way past their best before date. We may get stuck in the 20th century.

Of course there's a lot more. Pension funds could go broke. Governments could go broke (some already are). People will lose jobs, the poor will get even less, some of us will lose hope. It's a Depression with a capital "D".

Ever since the last "recession" of 2008, when major institutions teetered on the brink of global ruin - Michael T. Snyder has been writing a blog saying nothing has been fixed from that time, and in fact, most things have become even more precarious. For the past few months he's been posting various warning from the internal workings of the macro economic system that tell us another crash is developing. In the past few weeks, a lot of what Michael warns about is coming to the surface, even in the mainstream popular press.

Michael T. Snyder

In our interview he gives a list of about ten big warning signs. For example, the junk bond market has already collapsed, as it did before stocks fell in 2008. "Junk bonds" are really higher risk loans to corporations, like Chrysler for example. Most big pension funds are based on a presumed rate of return much higher than "safe" guaranteed interest rates. These funds need money just to pay out retirees now on the roles, much less the baby-boomers hitting the decks. Pension funds were more or less forced into the junk bond market.

Just in the last week, a big junk bond company called Third Avenue had so many demands for payouts (people bailing) they had to deny requests. There wasn't enough money. This triggered a run on many other junk bonds. It's a run on the junk bond bank.

That's just one sign. The near death of international shipping and trade is another. In fact, there have been a series of major banks, well-known international banks, who have warned a "downturn" is just around the corner. Private investment banks are warning their clients about the same. Michael Snyder has lists of them in his blog!

THE "PROPAGANDA MATRIX"

So why isn't Fox News and the general mass media telling you how serious this is? Snyder reminds us that six major media corporations control about 90% of what we see, hear - and talk about. The average American now watches 293 minutes of TV a day. Add in all the other media, like the Internet, social media, radio, newspapers - and those six corporations fill up an astounding 10 hours of the average person's day! Snyder calles it "the propaganda matrix".

It's little wonder that whatever they are blaring out over multiple outlets gets talked about in the office, at home, and on the street. It could be the Kardashians, terrorism, refugees, Donald Trump, somebody to hate, some awful crime - but it's seldom, very seldom, the raw facts that our economy isn't working for 99% of the people.

The world's fifth largest economy, the big hope of the developing world, is officially in a "Depression" according to Goldman Sachs. Do you know what country that is? Probably not. A few dozen stock markets around the world have already crashed. Did you know that? That's why you, and anybody who cares about the future, should listen to this interview with Michael T. Snyder.

Download or listen this Radio Ecoshock interview with Michael T. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version (which downloads faster to phones...) http://tinyurl.com/gvnngae

WHO IS MICHAEL SNYDER?

Who is he? As we learn in this interview, Snyder was a practicing lawyer. He was one of the many working in Washington D.C. in the shadow of the Capitol buildings. When the last recession hit, Snyder got out. He's happily living now in the mountains of Idaho. Snyder's blog, theeconomiccollapse.com gets about a million views a month. But it doesn't stop there. I've seen his posts on dozens and dozens of other blogs, including the biggest, like Zero Hedge.

Maybe you think Michael Snyder isn't qualified, or he's over-zealous. Go ahead, but first argue with the facts he packs into his blog posts - all with links to the original source, which you can check for yourself. Eventually you'll find his blog is a definite worthwhile watching post, as I did.

Snyder isn't adamant about everything. He'll ask the question, and wants you to check things out. Plus, Snyder doesn't say we'll wake up one morning to find everything closed, and start a new civilization from scratch. Rather he sees a downward staircase, where things fall apart, maybe over years. That was the reality of the last Great Depression in the 1930's. But this collapse would be global, and maybe the end of the fossil fuel civilization as we've known it.

I'd like to have Michael back again next spring, when we'll see whether Janet Yellen's official optimism, or Michael Snyder's deep suspicion, turn out to be reality.

During the interview we also discover Michael has a new novel out. It's kind of a thriller, but contains all sorts of projections into the future, from what he sees now. The title is "The Beginning of the End".

Michael also has two other online projects: a blog "End of the American Dream" and his new news web site "The Most Important News".

PROFESSOR TIM SNYDER: THE NEXT "HOLOCAUST" MAY BE DRIVEN BY CLIMATE CHANGE

I heard about the work of Professor Timothy Snyder in a controversial op-ed in the New York Times. It was published September 12th, 2015 under the title "The Next Genocide". He says climate change could drive us again towards mass murder.

The idea that rampant climate change will take hundreds of millions of lives was not new to me. For example, when the major delta of Bangladesh, where hundreds of millions live, becomes too salty for agriculture, due to invading seas - millions of environmental refugees will stream north. The only places they could go are already over-populated and very undeveloped, like Eastern India. It's not going to end well.

But Snyder has thought deeper about the possible consequences of climate change. First of all, he is an internationally-known scholar of the mass murders that happened during the mid-20th century in Eastern Europe. We call it "the Holocaust", but it turns out most of us still don't understand what happened there.

For example, most people were killed by the Nazis in the infamous death camps right? Wrong, says Snyder. While the death camp toll was horrendous, even more millions died outside the camps, slaughtered wherever they were. I ask Snyder why we don't know this. One major reason was that Eastern Europe was behind the iron curtain of communism, where people couldn't travel or speak freely.

Professor Snyder is fluent in at least 10 languages. Most of us couldn't read the original documents, even if we could find them. In 2010, Snyder, a Yale historian, published a book on his research, "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin". The two dictators supervised the death of about 14 million people in the Eastern European lands between them.

Professor Timothy D. Snyder

I know from my own reading, the Holocaust was also the first case of turning advanced technology into machines for mass murder. Hitler's death camps used a punch-card system designed, provided (and maintained during the war!) by the American company IBM. Ford trucks carried the victims and troops around. Radio transmitted hate propaganda.

So where does climate change come in? I can't do justice to Snyder's arguments. You can find them in the New York Times article, or this one in the Guardian. But news articles just scratch the surface. The real juice comes from Snyder's new book "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning".

In the interview, we talk about how Hitler and his cronies viewed the environment. In some senses, the Nazi's had a tinge of "green". They wanted to restore some natural species (so they could hunt them), and used "nature" in their propaganda. But like modern climate denialists, Hitler also had a phobia, bordering on hatred, for real science. In some cases, like Einstein's theories, he denounced it as "Jewish science". That may be one reason why the Nazi's never developed the atomic bomb.

Tim Snyder tells us Hitler sold the Germans a fear that they could never feed themselves, so they needed "living space" - to be taken by force from others (like the Poles) who would be eradicated. Germans would run out of food, he thought, because fertilizers, hydridization, and other promises of science were false. It turns out he was totally wrong, and after the war Europe became a major exporter of food, using scientific methods.

MY INTERPRETATION OF THIS INTERVIEW

One of my key take-aways of talking with Tim Snyder is that mass murder does not require a state where people are at or near starvation. All it requires is that people fear it COULD happen, to justify terrible things.

In fact, it may not require a food shortage. Part of Hitler's argument was that the Germans, as a superior "race", should have the highest lifestyles. He specifically pointed to the developing riches of America. Tim Snyder thinks that someone, or some nation, could justify mass murder solely because people thought their lifestyle was threatened (not just their food). Does that raise any thoughts in you? What if there is an economic crash, or fear of one, and Americans, or Brits, think their lifestyle is going downhill? Could we turn that into an excuse to bomb the hell out of some other people far away? Or justify mass-murder at home?

The worst fear is that a national government will purposefully plan, over time, the mass murder of another population, as happened in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. We're not talking about murderous riots in the street, although those can be arranged. We're talking about applying computer tech, advanced weapons, money, and administration to depopulate some part of the world, or a sub-set of a national population.

That kind of mass-murder as policy could develop in times stressed beyond imagination by climate disruption. Timothy Snyder explains how. As Snyder writes in the New York Times:

"Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past."

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Professor Timothy D. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/hal24ey

THANKS FOR GIVING ME THIS OPPORTUNITY

We're pushing the end of our time - at least for Radio Ecoshock this week.

My special thanks to those who reached out with financial support for this program, without much prodding from me. Aside from the help, it also makes me feel appreciated. Find out how you can help here.

I put in about 40 hours a week to produce this program. It's my "job" but I don't get paid for it. As I hope you can tell, each guest sends me on an adventure of research in preparation, plus time spent distributing the program, answering listener emails (write me radio //at// ecoshock.org), staying abreast of global news feeds, this blog, the web site, and all that. It's a life work, and I'm just glad you encourage me to do it.

I'm Alex Smith. As always, thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

Paris Climate Vs. A Real Future

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 9 Dec 2015 14:52:00 -0800

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. I have lots for you in this program. Two reports direct from Paris, plus an interview on the best, maybe the only, way to really save the future.

But first I want you to hear 10 minutes from the former NASA scientist who warned us all about climate change, back in 1988. Here is Dr. James Hansen speaking December 2nd, at a press conference at COP21, the big climate summit in Paris, as posted on You tube by envirobeat.com

Dr. James Hansen

Statement by Dr. James Hansen, at a COP21 Paris press conference, December 2, 2015. Video on You tube. Transcript by Alex Smith, with bold face and sub-titles added by Smith.

"The problem is that fossil fuels appear to the consumer to be the cheapest energy. They're not really cheapest because they don't include their full cost to society. They're partly subsidized, but mainly they don't include the effects of air pollution and water pollution on human health. If you child gets asthma, you have to pay the bill. The fossil fuel company doesn't. And the climate effects, which are beginning to be significant and will be much larger in the future are also not included in the price of the fossil fuels.

So the solution would be fairly straight-forward. Let's add in to the price of fossil fuels the total cost - which you can't do suddenly but you can do it gradually over time, so that you can... people have time to adjust.

So I argue this should be done - and it has to be across the board, across all fossil fuels - coal, oil, and gas, at the source, at the domestic mine or the port of entry. And I also argue that that money should be given to the public, given equal amount to all legal residents of the country. That way the person who does better than average in limiting their carbon footprint will actually make money. In fact two thirds of the people would come out ahead. And it would also address the growing income inequality in the world, which is occurring in almost all countries, because low income people would tend to have a lower carbon footprint. People who fly around the world and have big houses would pay more, but they can afford to do that.

That's a transparent, market-based solution, a conservative solution which stimulates the economy. The economic studies in the United States show that after ten years, if you had a ten dollars a ton of CO2 carbon fee, distributed the money to the public - after ten years if would reduce emissions thirty percent. And after twenty years, more than fifty percent. And it would spur the economy, creating more than three million new jobs.

[SOLVING THE INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM]

Furthermore, this is the only viable international approach. You cannot ask each of 190 countries to individually limit their emissions. What we have to do is have the price of fossil fuels honest. That requires only a few of the major players to agree 'Let's have a rising common carbon fee'. And those countries that don't want to have that fee, we'll put a border duty on those countries and furthermore we will rebate to our manufacturers that carbon fee when they export to a non-participating nation. This, economists agree, is a fair way to do it, and it could rapidly move us off of fossil fuels.

But what we are hearing, is that although Christiana Figueres says many have said we need a carbon price, and investment would be so much easier with a carbon price, but life is much more complex than that. So what we are talking about instead is the same old thing. The same old thing that was tried in Kyoto asking each country to promise 'oh I'll reduce my emissions, I will cap my emissions, I'll reduce them twenty percent' or whatever they decide they can do.

You know, in science when you do a well-controlled experiment, and get a well-documented result, you expect that if you do the experiment again, you are going to get the same result. So why are we talking about doing the same thing again? I don't like to use crude language, but I learned this from my mother, so I'll use it anyway. This is 'half-assed' and it's 'half-baked'.

"HALF-ASSED AND HALF-BAKED"

It's half-assed because there's no way to make it global. You have to beg each nation. So I went to Germany to speak with... I was hoping to speak to Merkl but I got cut off at Sigmar Garbriel, the Minister. He said 'Oh, we're gonna do cap and trade, cap and trade with offsets.' And I said 'But that won't work, we've tried that.' So I said 'What's the cap on India?' And he said 'We'll tighten our carbon cap.' Well Germany is now two percent of the world emissions. So him tightening the German carbon cap is not going to solve the problem. You've got to have something that will work globally.

And it's half-baked, because there's no enforcement mechanism.... You know what I hear is all the Ministers are coming here, the heads of state, and they are planning to clap each other on the back, and say 'Oh we're really doing great. This is a very successful conference, and we're going to address the climate problem.' Well if that's what happens then we're screwing the next generation, and the following ones. Because we're being stupid and doing the same thing again that we did eighteen years ago.

"WE CAN'T PRETEND WE DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN"

So what's the effect? You know you try very hard and you reduce our nation's emissions. Or an individual reduces their emissions. One effect of that is to reduce the demand for the product, and keep the price low. As long as fossil fuels are dirt cheap, they will keep being used. Burning coal is like burning dirt. You just take a bulldozer and you can bulldoze it out of the ground. It's very cheap but it does not include it's cost to society. It's a very dirty fuel with some negative effects which we now understand very well. We can't pretend that we don't know what's going to happen, if we stay on this path.

This is the path we're on, you know. To pretend that what we're doing is having any effect... It might slow down the rate of growth, but that's not what's needed. Science tells us we have to reduce emissions rapidly. And furthermore, the economic studies show that if you put an honest price on carbon emissions, you would reduce emissions rapidly. But if you don't have that price on there, you are not going to reduce emissions. You will reduce emissions some place, but then it keeps the price low, so somebody else will burn it.

[Another panelist asks: And that economic study you are refering to also found that if you put ten dollars per ton, and increased it ten dollars per ton over ten years, what was the effect in jobs?]

James Hansen: Well in the case of the United States economy, that's where the study was done in detail, it was three million new jobs in ten years and a significant increased in GNP [Gross National Product]. We need energy. But people thinking 'Oh, we have to do less...' - yeah we should have energy efficiency, but that would be encouraged by a rising price.

[ENERGY SHIFT]

We do need energy. We need energy to raise the poor people out of poverty. That's the best way to keep population under control. Those countries that have become wealthy now have fertility rates that are below the replenishment level. And the reason these countries became wealthy is because they had energy, and that energy was fossil fuels. Unfortunately we can't continue to use that as the mechanism to get out of poverty.

We need clean energies. And the way to make that happen... You know, I've met with 'Captains of Industry' I call them - leaders of not only utilities but even oil companies. These people have children and grandchildren. They would like to be part of the solution. If the government would give them the right incentive, by putting this across-the-board rising carbon fee, they say they would change their investments and they could do it rapidly.

It's not that the problem can't be solved. But it's not being solved. And nothing that I've heard so far indicates that we're intending to ... it's not too complex. It's the simplest approach you could have: an honest, simple rising carbon fee."

End of transcript of James Hansen in a Paris press conference, Dec 2nd, 2015.

GRAB THIS RADIO ECOSHOCK SHOW NOW

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LINDSEY ALLEN, RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK, REPORTS FROM PARIS

Lindsey Allen, Executive Director of RAN

Next up, Lindsey Allen, the Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, or RAN, dials in from Paris.

I was glad to talk to Lindsey, partly because world media has failed to report non-governmental actions and voices in Paris (giving us the impression the NGO's and aboriginal people are not even there - they are). And partly because the Rainforest Action Network has done some great climate work.

For example, RAN has led the pack in exposing which big banks are loaning out billions to fund the construction of new coal plants around the world. They are profiting from the destruction of the climate. Check out that campaign here.

During our phone interview, Lindsey reveals that the very bank that is funding so much of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP21) meeting in Paris - the French giant BNP Paribas - is one of the top funders for coal expansion around the world! Lindsey Allen says BNP Paribas has invested about 17 billion dollars in coal. That tells you a lot about the world we live in, and the UN Climate talks.

But yes, climate activists are in Paris, and they are speaking out, despite clamp-downs by French police in the name of anti-terrorism. I notice crowds are allowed to gather for memorials, and for sports events, but not to call for real climate action...Naomi Klein agrees, and calls for a big march in Paris anyway.

Listen to this interim report from Paris with Lindey Allen here.

A PARIS REPORT FROM SCIENTIST PAUL BECKWITH

Paul Beckwith has been a regular on Radio Ecoshock. He's the scientist with two Masters degrees, working on his PHD in climate science at the University of Ottawa, in Canada. Paul takes the late Stephen Schneider's call for activism by scientists very seriously. Paul has his own You tube channel with lots of great videos, a new web page, and an active Facebook following.

Don't miss some fine videos Paul took in Paris. These include a financial panel with UK Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and American billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Paul was encouraged to hear some billionaires and financial heavyweights are prepared for serious action on climate change. We talk about that.

Beckwith also recorded a Paris keynote presentation by Al Gore, found here.

One thing we briefly discuss is the effort by climate deniers to look like legitimate participants in the climate "debate". The Heartland Institute, which is partly funded by the infamous Koch Brothers, has organized a press event in Paris, with the usual suspects - scientists and others, some of whom are known to accept funding from fossil fuel companies in order to say carbon dioxide is great for us! See this hot Greenpeace expose of climate deniers admitting they get paid by Peabody coal and other fossil fuel interests.

Paul, and other at the hostel where he is staying, debated whether to go and expose the false science being presented - or would that just add the conflict that media is always looking for, and thus spread these falsehoods? My opinion is go ignore the extremists. Most of the world knows them for what they are - while climate damage is becoming much too obvious to ignore any longer.

Download or listen to this report from Paris by Paul Beckwith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Use this tiny url to share Paul's talk in Twitter or other social media: http://tinyurl.com/hs94gfc

BENOIT LAMBERT - THE BIOCHAR SOLUTION

Now it's time to talk about real solutions in the real world. This is part of my continuing coverage of ways to stuff carbon back into the soil, with nature-based agriculture and biochar.

After interviewing many guests and scientists, I've come to the conclusion that our best way out of the climate mess is to use different agricultural methods to sequester carbon back into the soil.

It's just common sense. We have too much carbon in the atmosphere already (at least 430 parts per million carbon equivalent, when we need to be below 350 parts per million to keep our current climate.) Where will be put the extra carbon from the atmosphere? We don't have the technology to put it into the oceans. We do know how to put it back into the soil, and into the deeper ground as biochar.

Benoit Lambert lived in Europe for a couple of decades, returning to Quebec Canada to found a company which advises on biochar, and related carbon capture technology. It's called Biochar Generation.

Benoit Lambert

As world politicians and their experts meet in Paris for the COP21 climate summit, most will seek industrial answers for what they see as an industrial problem. Perhaps, they'll hear about machines to capture carbon and feed it back through a maze of new pipelines to old wells. Dangerous geonengineering will be on the menu.

But they almost didn't hear about the least known source of greenhouse gases, and the single best solution to reducing carbon in the atmosphere. I'm talking about clearing land for food, industrial agriculture, and ways to put carbon back in the soil. All that wasn't even on the menu, until a recent move by France to put it there.

I didn't know the role of the French Agriculture Minister, Stefane Le Foll, or the special ambassador for France at COP21, Laurence Tubiana - until I heard it from Benoit.

Just to be clear, our current industrial farming uses loads of fossil fuel products, including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. It is a major SOURCE of greenhouse gas emissions, not a help. How big a factor is food production to the overall burden of greenhouse gases?

According to Wikipedia: "Food systems contribute 19%–29% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, releasing 9,800–16,900 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2008. Agricultural production, including indirect emissions associated with land-cover change, contributes 80%–86% of total food system emissions, with significant regional variation."

So we need a huge turnaround in our food systems. First of all, we need to get to zero emissions farming. But that's just the start! Then we need to turn the food system into a carbon capture mechanism.

We discuss how long carbon stays in the soil, the carbon cycle, and the truly amazing role played by biochar. Benoit thinks Canada is the perfect country to start the biochar industry on a huge scale, with all the forest waste in the country.

Lambert also explains the French "4 out of 1000" campaign. Get more on that here. It could really save the world climate.

Others have already called this one of the most important Radio Ecoshock interviews.

Download or listen to this interview with Benoit Lambert in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Use this tiny url to share the Benoit Lambert interview on social media, including Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/omrtuzf

My thanks to everyone who Tweeted about last week's show with Dr. Kevin Anderson. It literally went around the world. I also appreciate the listeners who continue to donate money to keep this show going. If you think you can help, find out how on this page.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and let's get together again next week.

KEVIN ANDERSON: Untold Climate Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 2 Dec 2015 14:24:00 -0800

"The future will be radically different from the present. It will either be radically different because we have significantly - we've grasped the nettle and we'd be prepared to make the sorts of changes that would initially be quite challenging socially and politically, to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.

Or...

A little bit further down the line, we will be faced with huge social and political repercussions because of a very significantly changing climate."

-Dr. Kevin Anderson

That is Dr. Kevin Anderson. As one of the world's top climate scientists, he says the hard facts about climate change are not getting out, and never made it to the Paris climate talks. It's a shocking, revealing interview. Then we travel to Australia, where host Vivien Langford of the Beyond Zero Emissions show talks in studio with David Spratt, author of Code Red, plus a union icon and psychologist - on the eve of the Paris talks. More frank talk.

I'm Alex Smith. Buckle up, this is Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

KEVIN ANDERSON: CLIMATE SCIENCE M.I.A.

During the Paris climate talks, one leading scientist says the fundamentals of the whole process is "wildly optimistic". It starts with climate models that assume too much, spills into unreal scientific advice, and ends with rosy media reports saying we can keep on growing without wrecking the climate. Our Western lifestyles won't be greatly inconvenienced, they say.

The odd-man out at the party is Kevin Anderson. He's a well-known Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester. Anderson is also the Deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a leading scientific institute not only in Britain, but in the world.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Kevin Anderson in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

My previous show on Kevin Anderson, July 22nd 2015, "What they won't tell you about the climate catastrophe" is blogged with links here.

But I call Kevin this time about a new article he published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The title is "Duality in Climate Science". The paper is available here, in free full-text. A useful article form phys.org is here.

Here’s the link to a great piece in Skeptical Science on Kevin's new paper.

THE FAMOUS PICKETTY WEIGHS IN ON WHO THE BIG EMITTERS ARE

During our interview, Kevin mentioned a new paper by Chancel and Picketty, on how a few million top consumers are responsible for the majority of climate change emissions. Find that here.

The full title and citation on the Chancel/Picketty climate paper is:

Carbon and inequality: from Kyoto to Paris

Trends in the global inequality of carbon emissions (1998-2013) & prospects for an equitable adaptation fund

Lucas Chancel, Iddri & Paris School of Economics

Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics

3rd, November 2015.

PARDON MY RANT

After reports from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, the assembled government leaders gather in Paris. Their stated goal is to keep global mean temperature rise below 2 degrees Centigrade, from pre-industrial levels. Dr. James Hansen says it's "crazy" to say 2 degrees C would be safe.

Kevin Anderson agrees with Hanson. As I wrote in my blog about Anderson's 2012 speech:

"In fact, says Anderson, we are almost guaranteed to reach 4 degrees of warming, as early as 2050, and may soar far beyond that - beyond the point which agriculture, the ecosystem, and industrial civilization can survive."

Here is another thing that drives me crazy, and Anderson describes it in this new paper. The question set to be answered is: "what do we need to do to have a 66% chance or better of staying below 2 degrees C". Imagine we are playing Russian Roulette. We have a pistol with three chambers, one of which contains a bullet. The stakes are not just our own lives, but those of all our descendants, and possibly most life on Earth. Who in their right mind would pull the trigger with only a 66% chance of surviving?

Is it unreasonable for us to expect a GUARANTEE the climate will not be wrecked, rather than the kind of casino odds being offered by international negotiations?

It's no surprise that major media provides a version of reality that allows advertisers, stockholders, and the public, to continue playing the fossil fuel game as long as possible. The surprise is that scientists who know better, do not work harder to correct obvious "mistakes" and outright fairy-tales about our predicament. I ask Anderson: Why aren't more scientists speaking up?

I say the Paris talks are already set up for failure, depending on they do on voluntary goals, set a long time into the future, and without even the courage to talk about the remaining carbon budget. By the way, another blog, at theclimatecolation.org, uses Kevin's paper to calculate the carbon budget would be all used up by 2034. Would you agree?

So I ask Kevin if the whole Conference of the Parties (COP) approach should be abandoned, having failed for decades to even reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

His answer surprised me. The COP meetings should go on, he says, but they should not be the only game in town, with such huge stakes looming over us. Anderson has said for some time that the rest of the world, all the willing, should forget about trying to get the United States onboard. The retro anti-science crowd in Congress is never going to approve the moves that are needed.

The European Union should go it alone, with whatever trading partners it can bring along. If we say the Europe is involved in about one third of all world trade, if the EU insisted on climate-safe products and production, perhaps with side deals with countries like China, the United States would have to come on board, to protect trade. We can't wait for the last countries to join the movement to save the world climate.

There has never been a greater tragedy than today. We know, based on hard science, what is coming. We can see it coming. Everyone keeps on dancing, with the drugs of consumption, the many energy slaves at our command, as though this party can keep going forever. For the dinosaurs, there was a time of tragedy, and even that time lasted some millions of years. Only the birds survived. Our time of tragedy looks to be very short, a few hundred years at best, just a few generations.

The greatest tragedy is that some of us can see what must be done. We cannot communicate that into action, so deluded are the other players. Even when they know, they will not act to end the addiction. We need greatness from our artists - poets, musicians, authors, film-makers, to express this tragic dream, before it hardens into unstoppable reality (if it has not already).

Kevin says a lot, a lot better than I do. Be sure and listen to this key interview.

HOT CLIMATE RADIO FROM AUSTRALIA

I know cutting edge radio when I hear it. I play you part of the Beyond Zero Emissions radio show, on 3CR Community radio in Melbourne Australia. 3CR also broadcasts Radio Ecoshock, as one of our international partners.

Following discussion of the climate action march in Melbourne November 27th, host Vivien Langford starts in-depth with David Spratt, co-author of the book Climate Code Red, and host of the influential climate code red blog. Then you'll hear from Dr Colin Long, leader in the National Tertiary Education Union, who champions workers in the transition away from carbon. Vivien's third guest is psychologist Lyn Bender, from the group Psychology for a Safe Climate.

The groups starts off talking about the climate movement in Melbourne, which I find exciting.. By the way, that was Australia's biggest climate action ever, with 60,000 people showing up in the streets of Melbourne! But trust me, it's not long before these three guests dive into issues that affect us all.

You can listen to this show, and all the programs from Beyond Zero Emissions, here.

Radio host Vivien Langford.

Or to get a taste, you can download this 26 minute segment, as broadcast on Radio Ecoshock, in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

I'm Alex Smith. Please help support this radio show. And as always, thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

CLIMATE MUSIC: I finish off the show with a quick bit of music from the group Eclectic Sparks, in Yorkshire UK, as played at the Yorkshire Climate Festival 2015. "Whatya gonna do with your CO2".. Find that on You tube here. Thanks for the tip Dana!

TRUE VOICES

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Smith) — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 17:50:00 -0800

Welcome back to Radio Ecoshock. Last week's program "Facing the Harsh Realities of Now" with David Wasdell set records for radio and listeners on soundcloud. If you missed it - don't. David Wasdell makes his case that we are already committed to at least 6 degrees of global warming, plus dozens of meters higher seas. Grab it from my web site at ecoshock.org, or listen at souncloud.com/radioecoshock.

This week I've got a broad mix for you. Courtney White says we can capture carbon back into the soil, even if only 2 percent of the population act. I'll talk new science with Justin Mankin - how disappearing snow cover will impact people around the world. We wrap with octogenarian activist and author Peter Seidel, saying we still have time.

CLIMATE - LET'S NOT GIVE UP YET

Before we get to our guests, dozens of listeners wrote in, saying they were dismayed by the damning climate revelations by David Wasdell. While I agree with David, that our true situation has been downplayed by governments, media, and misplaced scientific caution, I also try to keep balance.

You may want to consider three more ideas. First:

The very high temperatures and sea level rise David describes would likely only be attained in a few hundred years from now. That might give us time to develop ways and technologies to drastically reduce greenhouse gases. We might manage to reduce greenhouse gas levels, say to 280 ppm as was the case in pre-industrial days.

Some glaciers would still melt (once they start they are hard to stop). So we would still get sea level rise. The oceans would continue to give off residual heat. However, temperatures could start to decline, decade by decade. By then of course, the world, and all living creatures would be greatly changed, I think.

Second: In the coming week or two, I hope to present some other points of view, and possible reasons to hope. You'll hear some of those voices in this program.

Third: Keep in mind some scientists, including climate scientists, disagree with David's conclusions. Wise as he is, David is not officially a climate scientist. His high sensitivity figures can be disputed. I'm still looking into that.

But yes, I found Wasdell's interview convincing and rather crushing. I'm still mulling it over, as we all must. The Wasdell show takes the record on Souncloud for the most Radio Ecoshock listeners ever.

Meanwhile, thanks for joining us, and on with the show!

Download or listen to this new Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!

Photo courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, UK.

COURTNEY WHITE: PUT DANGEROUS CARBON BACK IN THE SOIL!

You know carbon is already too high in the atmosphere for our own climate safety. Perhaps you've heard the biggest and best solution is to put carbon back in the soil. But what are we supposed to do - go shovel carbon into the lawn after work? Our next guest says organic carbon capture is not a job for most of us, although we can help.

In June of 2014, I asked author and activist Courtney White about his book "Soil, Grass and Hope". You can download or play that interview here, or read the blog about it here.

Now Courtney is back with a collection of inspiring stories which point to fundamental answers. It's called "Two Percent Solutions for the Planet".

From Santa Fe New Mexico, we welcome Courtney Whiteback to Radio Ecoshock. Courtney founded and runs a non-profit called the Quivira Coalition. I ask Courtney what "quivira" means: it is a Spanish word found on the old maps of the rough country now known as "New Mexico". I suppose it could literally mean "who has been there" - but essentially it means "an unknown country". What a handy word and concept. With humans dumping eons worth of carbon into the air in just 2 centuries, we are all headed into "unknown country".

When Courtney left the Sierra Club in the late 1990's, he was heading into unknown country for sure. He wanted to find common ground between environmentalism, ranchers, and farmers - a group formerly not known for deep friendship and working together. Instead of conflict, Courtney literally was searching for common ground, a place to move forward.

Now of course, it turns out both ranchers and farmers may hold the key to preventing the very worst of climate change. Even though this small group forms only two percent of the population of the United States, they could drag all of America's carbon emissions back into the soil.

We learned from our Ecoshock guest Alan Savory that changes in livestock management can turn practices from desertification into enrichment of nature, and particularly add more carbon to the soil. You can download or listen to that 24 minute Allan Savory interview here. Or read the blog about it, with more links, here.

Likewise, farmers who stop plowing the soil, to use cover crops and no-till agriculture, can capture carbon into the soil by mimicking nature. We are not talking about insignificant amounts. Various experts have worked out we can reduce carbon in the atmosphere well below our current levels in just a couple of decades. It would take a multi-billion-dollar public works program, with support from every level of society, but it can be done. Combined with a big bio-char program, It's a climate solution that doesn't make the problem worse, and leaves our soil stronger for every generation that follows.

We end up talking about "Farm Hacking" and all sorts of resources.

Find the Quivira Coalition web site here. A vimeo video for the new book "Two Percent Solutions for the Planet" is here. The subtitle is: "50 Low-Cost, Low-Tech, Nature-Based Practices for Combatting Hunger, Drought, and Climate Change."

Download or listen to this 24 minute interview with Courtney White in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

JUSTIN MANKIN: DISAPPEARING SNOW, AS WORLD WARMS, CHANGES EVERYTHING

This is Radio Ecoshock, beaming the real eco-truth out to the world. Now it's time to talk with a leading climate scientist.

Last summer, the river in my little valley displayed it's bottom for the first time. No one living can remember seeing it. It wasn't really lack of rain. It was the thin, thin covering of snow in the mountain head-waters. On a warming planet we will get less snow. But few of us have really worked out what that means, around the world.

A multinational team of crack scientists just released the paper "The potential for snow to supply human water demand in the present and future”. It's not looking good.

From the Columbia University Earth Institute, and affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we talk with Dr. Justin Mankin.

Scientist Justin Mankin

Justin is lead author of the paper that stimulated this call: “The potential for snow to supply human water demand in the present and future.” As the Columbia U press release says: "The other authors of the study are Daniel Viviroli of the University of Zurich; Lamont-Doherty postdoctoral researcher Deepti Singh; Arjen Y. Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University."

You can read the full text of that paper, as a .pdf file, here. Or read it online as an open access full text paper in the Journal "Environmental Research Letters" here.

It's probably best and easiest if I just reprint the paper abstract here:

"Runoff from snowmelt is regarded as a vital water source for people and ecosystems throughout the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Numerous studies point to the threat global warming poses to the timing and magnitude of snow accumulation and melt. But analyses focused on snow supply do not show where changes to snowmelt runoff are likely to present the most pressing adaptation challenges, given sub-annual patterns of human water consumption and water availability from rainfall.

We identify the NH basins where present spring and summer snowmelt has the greatest potential to supply the human water demand that would otherwise be unmet by instantaneous rainfall runoff. Using a multi-model ensemble of climate change projections, we find that these basins—which together have a present population of ~2 billion people—are exposed to a 67% risk of decreased snow supply this coming century. Further, in the multi-model mean, 68 basins (with a present population of >300 million people) transition from having sufficient rainfall runoff to meet all present human water demand to having insufficient rainfall runoff.

However, internal climate variability creates irreducible uncertainty in the projected future trends in snow resource potential, with about 90% of snow-sensitive basins showing potential for either increases or decreases over the near-term decades. Our results emphasize the importance of snow for fulfilling human water demand in many NH basins, and highlight the need to account for the full range of internal climate variability in developing robust climate risk management decisions."

In the interview, we flesh that out for the rest of us. There are a lot of uncertainties. Some places will receive more rainfall, even enough rainfall to cover the losses from disappearing snow cover. The Indus Valley (Northern India and Pakistan) is such a case, Mankin tells us.

Other regions, including California, will not make up for lost snow with rain. As you can tell from the abstract, around 300 million people will find themselves with insufficient water. They can pump from the underground water table for a while, but then that gets exhausted, because it is not being recharged. Richer countries may be able to build more reservoirs - although that option may already be tapped out in the Western United States.

At that point, assuming desalinization of sea water can't scale up fast enough, I presume disappearing snow will become another driver of vast climate migrations. You heard it here first.

Download or listen to this 18 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Justin Mankin in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

PETER SEIDEL SAYS: "THERE IS STILL TIME"

Our next guest was an architect who published designs for ecologically sound cities starting in 1968, and for a model eco-city in the Cinncinati area in the 1970's. Like many who offer technical solutions, over the years Peter Seidel's books began to ask "what is wrong with us?" Why can't we adopt obvious answers to serious problems.

Author Peter Seidel

His 1998 book was "Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet ...and Ourselves."

Apparently Peter hasn't given up yet. His latest book is titled "There Is Still Time".

This is how our conversation began:

"ALEX: Just the other day, I considered giving up on this Radio Show. I thought "Humans are not capable of solving the problems we create.

Let me tell you the story of Jack Alpert. Working at General Motors in the 1960's, he found the major cause of death in car accidents was people being thrown through the windshield. As an engineer, Jack invented seat belts and they worked. But he was horrified when people wouldn't wear them, until decades of tickets and fines later. Peter, what is it about human nature that we won't act to save our own lives?"

We talk about the probability that our inability to solve problems may be institutional. For example, can corporations and capitalism really prevent a climate catastrophe? I also ask Peter about his earlier work. For example, in 2009, in the journal "Futures", he published a piece called "Is it inevitable that evolution self-destruct?" Then Seidel took another route to painting our predicament, in his science fiction book "2045: A Story of Our Future". That takes current trends, including climate change and corporate conglomeration, and extends them forward to 2045.

I know some Radio Ecoshock listeners feel deep in their hearts that there isn't still time. The infrastructure for a 5 degree hotter world is built, and we don't show any signs of changing. Major ice sheets at the poles seem committed to melting. I ask Seidel why he thinks "there is still time"? Despite the title of his book, Peter admits like most of us, he isn't sure. Maybe we have passed key tipping points. But despite trying to communicate these mega-problems for decades - Peter just can't give up trying. Looking into the faces of our descendants, and the innocent creatures around us, none of us can.

Even as he approaches 90, Peter Seidel tries to stimulate action to save the ecosphere and the future. I admire that.

Download or listen to this 14 minute interview with Peter Seidel in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

IS THERE A FUTURE?

In my opinion: humans have a couple of unfortunate psychological traits that can interfere with our ability to see eco-truth, especially about climate change. First of all, I've noticed a tendency among older men to confuse their realization of their own mortality, with the death of everything. If I'm going, it's all going to end with me, they think.

Related to that, and proven by at least two thousand years of history, we have an in-bred cultural expectation that we will live to see the end of days, at least for humanity, if not all existence. It's sad to think that many people left lives well-lived in disappointment, because they did not see the apocalypse, or the return of the Savior.

Both these ideas, or drives really, can lead us to demand the most extreme interpretations of reality. At Radio Ecoshock, I know we are in for difficult struggles ahead, but I hope we all know the last chapter has not yet been written, if there is a "last chapter". The story of natural life on Earth is composed almost entirely of twists and surprises.

I remain convinced there is a future, and we should try, and try again, to make it the best possible for all those who come after us.

I'm Alex Smith. My special thanks to all the wonderful people who supported the continuing production of this program, during our brief fundraising drive this fall. If you missed it, and want to help out Radio Ecoshock, please check out this page for details.

Next week, I've got some special guests to discuss the problems with the Paris climate talks, and real solutions.

Thank you for listening, and caring about your world.