Russ Vernon-Jones

love, justice, and climate change … I know you can make a difference.

Science

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“The New Denialism” – What’s That?

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For many years one of the biggest obstacles to the United States taking meaningful climate action was widespread climate denial. PR campaigns, often funded by the fossil fuel industry, promoted the idea that climate change was not actually happening, and if it was, it was not caused by human activity. These campaigns were remarkably successful in creating widespread doubt about climate change. The Republican Party in the United States became the only major political party in the democratic world denying the legitimacy of climate science.

More recently, as the effects of climate change around the world and in the U.S. have become more extreme and obvious, outright denial of the existence of climate change has decreased. Polling of public beliefs in 2023 shows 72% of adults in the U.S. believe that climate change is happening. Polling shows 62% of the public in the U.S. thinks Congress should do more to address global warming.

In response, the advocates of climate denial have not gone silent, they have simply shifted their tactics to what is being termed, “New Denialism.” A recent report shows this new denialism is growing on social media and having an impact, especially on younger people.

The new tactics of the climate deniers focus in three major claims:

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What Climate “Doomers” Get Wrong

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Before I mention anything else, I want to acknowledge the horrors of the war in Israel and Gaza. I believe that every human life is precious. I’m deeply grieved by what is happening there, as well as in other wars around the world. Regardless of your political views, I want to invite you to join me in seeking to keep our hearts open toward both Palestinians and Israeli Jews and the suffering and loss they are experiencing. Each of us can contribute to reaching for greater human unity– an essential part of humanity successfully addressing both warfare and climate change.

Turning to climate change, 10 years ago climate denial was still common and a major obstacle to widespread public engagement with the issue. Outright climate denial is now relatively rare. I would say that climate discouragement is a bigger obstacle today. I’ve run into quite a few folks who admit that they are too discouraged to get involved in climate action. It’s natural for any of us to feel discouraged at times, but to let your discouragement keep you from engaging in climate action is to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Some folks believe that it’s simply too late and we are all doomed. A survey of 10,000 young people from 10 different countries found that more than half of them said that humanity is doomed. So when I encountered an interview with distinguished climate scientist Michael Mann with “what ‘doomers’ get wrong” in the title, I was eager for his answer.

He describes doomism as the view that we lack agency– that “It’s too late to prevent catastrophic, runaway warming and the extinction of all life.” He says, “There are a lot of people who think the science supports this view, but it doesn’t.”

He insists that we can and must have both agency and urgency. “The impacts of climate change, no doubt, constitute an existential threat if we fail to act,” Mann concludes.” But we can act. Our fragile moment can still be preserved.”

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What’s Wrong with Carbon Capture

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After lying to us for decades and continuing to expand the extraction, use, and export of fossil fuels when we need to be eliminating them altogether, the oil and gas industry has come up with yet another way to confuse the public and persist in their climate destroying practices–“carbon capture.” It would be great, of course, if we could pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, but current proposals to rely on the feeble, inefficient, expensive, existing technology for carbon removal as a key climate strategy, are disastrous and intentionally deceptive.

Forests do an excellent job of removing carbon from the atmosphere and we should preserve and expand them everywhere. On the other hand, current industrial carbon capture methods are “wildly expensive,” use a great deal of energy, and remove only “pathetically small” amounts of carbon. They are no where near to being a meaningful strategy for addressing the climate crisis.

The most rapid way to deal with climate change, and we do need to act rapidly, is to cut emissions by abandoning fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy generation, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing overall energy use. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is using the idea of industrial carbon capture as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, in increasing amounts.

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We Are Going Over 1.5°C. Now What?

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When the nations of the world met at the UN climate Conference in Paris in 2015, they seemed ready to settle on a goal of keeping global temperature rise below 2.0°C , but the poor and small island nations kept pushing for a goal of 1.5°C. Countries like Maldives said that 2.0°C was a death sentence for their island nation and many others. Just before the end of the conference the nations committed to keeping global warming “well below 2°C” and “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Ever since then, the 1.5°C goal has been “a symbol of mobilization and hope.” “1.5° has become central to both activist campaigns and scientific analysis,” as Tom Athanasiou, of EcoEquity puts it.

In 2018 the UN scientific body, the IPCC, published a special report comparing the effects of global temperatures increasing 1.5°C versus them increasing 2.0°C. Compared to 1.5°C, at 2.0°C we would see close to three times as many people regularly exposed to extreme heat; we would lose twice as many plant and vertebrate species and three times more insects; the marine fishing yield loss would be two times worse and crop loss more than two times worse, leading to vastly greater food insecurity. Permafrost melting would be 38% worse (emitting more methane) and ice-free arctic summers would be ten times worse. The increases in poverty and climate refugees at 2.0°C would be severe.

1.5°C was a goal that scientists repeatedly said was technologically possible to achieve, but that would require an unprecedented rate of change and political will. A tremendous amount of work on the part of activists, scientists, engineers, politicians, and people everywhere has gone into trying to keep global warming from exceeding that limit.

Despite these efforts, it is now clear that the global temperature increase is going to go over 1.5°C. I do not write this to discourage you or lead you to despair. I write it because I think we need to know the truth and start thinking about what it means. It does not mean the end of the world or that humanity is doomed. It does mean ….

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What is an “Acceleration Agenda”?

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António Guterres was born in Portugal in 1949. He studied physics and electrical engineering and then worked as an assistant professor. He left education to enter politics and in time became the Prime Minister of Portugal for 7 years. National public opinion polls later ranked him as the best prime minister of the previous 30 years. From 2002 – 2015 he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and in 2017 was elected the Secretary-General of the UN.

I’ve been fascinated by the power of his succinct statements on climate change. I am unaccustomed to hearing the truth and a positive vision stated so boldly by someone in a high-ranking official position. With the release of the latest IPCC report (March 20, 2023) he said,
“Humanity is on thin ice and that ice is melting fast.” He described the IPCC report as “a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

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Our Food and Climate Change

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I thought it might be interesting this week to return to a very personal topic that we all encounter daily — food. What we eat, and don’t eat, impacts climate change. The diets of people around the world affect climate change.

More people in the U.S. are eating diets that include more plant-based foods. A recent survey found 63% making efforts to eat less red meat. Many are eating more plant based foods because a plant-based diet is healthier–and the “best way to avoid heart disease.” Increasing numbers of people are turning to more plant-based foods to help the environment. A diet made up mostly of foods from plants is both healthier and better for the climate than the traditional family diet in the U.S.

What does this term “plant-based” mean?

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It’s Hot! – extreme heat, race, recommendations, and hope

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In a hospital bed in Jacobabad, Pakistan, Mohammed Musa was suffering from heat stroke. The 65-year old rice-farm worker had been brought in with a 102°F temperature, body aches, and exhaustion. Temperatures in Jacobabad reached over 100° for 51 straight days and hit 123.8° one day earlier this year. Above Musa’s bed was a banner detailing how to avoid heat strokes. “Stay indoors or under a shade during the hot hours of the day,” it advised. It’s an excellent recommendation, but not currently realistic for countless farm workers in many parts of the world. “If we stop working every time it gets too hot,” Musa said, “how will we eat?”

Musa recovered from his heat stroke, but in Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Britain, over 4,600 people, many of them elderly, died in a heat wave in June and July this year. Temperatures in Europe went over 104°F–more than 20 degrees higher than usual summer peak temperatures — impacting millions.

In the U.S. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) categorizes a “heat index” reading of over 103°F as in the “Danger” zone. The “heat index” takes humidity as well as temperature into account in order to measure how hot it feels. Heat index readings of 90° – 103° are in the “Extreme Caution” zone. This week the heat index in 40 major cities in the U.S. is expected to reach the Danger zone, with large areas of the country in the Extreme Caution zone.

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Problems with “Net-Zero by 2050”

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Many nations, corporations, municipalities, and other entities are setting goals to be “net-zero by 2050,” that is, to have zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. While this may seem like an admirable goal, there are significant and dangerous problems with this whole approach.

In 2018 the IPCC issued a report in which it emphasized that in order for humanity to keep global warming below 1.5°C it was necessary for the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and to “net-zero” by 2050. The “net-zero” in this statement was an acknowledgement that no matter how vigorously we cut emissions, there will likely still be small amounts of emissions (mostly in some industrial processes) that we can’t totally eliminate and these will have to be balanced by equivalent increases in carbon sequestration. This IPCC statement was accurate, but has been distorted and misused in multiple ways.

Problem #1 – Ignoring the 2030 goal
First the 2030 goal and the 2050 goal in the IPCC report are paired with each other and must be implemented together. Many of the current adoptions of the 2050 goal are ignoring, or failing to even come close, to the 2030 target. “Net-zero by 2050” is a recipe for disaster if we don’t first reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. Here’s why:

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Feedback Loops: Greta Thunberg Asks Us to “Educate Ourselves”

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When Greta Thunberg addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 she mentioned “feedback loops” as something most people were not taking into account. In January of this year, she and the Dali Lama had a public conversation online with some leading scientists to promote the launch of a series of five new short videos, “Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops.” These were created by a documentary film company collaborating with top-flight scientists, and are narrated by Richard Gere.

Thunberg said, “If I could ask one thing of you, it would be to educate yourself…spread that knowledge, spread the awareness to others…. Most people I know haven’t even heard of feedback loops or tipping points, chain reactions, and so on. But they are so crucial to understanding how the world works.”

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Eating As If Climate Change Is Real

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Years ago when I was teaching first and second grade, we had a charming little book in our classroom library that featured photographs of families from different cultures around the world, eating their traditional foods. I loved this book because it showed cultural differences appreciatively, while highlighting a key commonality of people around the world – we all need and eat food.

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