24 August 2017, DESMOG, Retired General: ‘Our Bases and Stations on the Coast Are Going Underwater’. This past July, in a Congressional hearing on “The Status and Outlook for U.S. and North American Energy and Resource Security,” retired Marine Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney offered a dire warning for many current military bases in coastal locations.“From the tactical side our bases and stations on the coast are going underwater. Norfolk [in Virginia] is the prime example. It’s closed dozens of times a year now because of flooding both from rain and sea level rise,” Cheney explained. “We’re going to have to talk about relocation of our bases and stations that are on the coast.” Cheney also made it clear that he believes in climate change.“Climate change is already affecting security both at home and around the world, so we must make sure that we take the greenhouse gas emissions from energy into account, lest we trade increased energy security today for a warmer, more unstable world in the future.” General Cheney certainly isn’t the first to warn of the security implications of climate change. Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted as much in written testimony to Democratic Senators, writing, “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.” An article in Navy Times last year noted that 128 military bases are at risk from sea level rise. Sea level rise and coastal flooding represent a well-documented threat to national security. Yet less than a month after General Cheney’s testimony in Congress, the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era regulation designed to “improve the resilience of communities and federal assets against the impacts of flooding.” Rafael Lemaitre was the the public affairs director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the Obama administration and criticized this latest regulatory rollback in comments to The Hill. “Eliminating this requirement is self-defeating,” Lemaitre said. “We can either build smarter now, or put taxpayers on the hook to pay exponentially more when it floods. And it will.” Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
14 August 2017, ECOS, Mapping fire-prone areas before the fires. Two months after Portugal’s deadliest fire season in recent record, thousands of firefighters have again been deployed in the last few days to battle new wildfires. It’s a crisis Australia knows well from its own bushfire history which paints an equally bleak and devastating picture. Events such as Ash Wednesday in Victoria and South Australia in the 1980s, Black Saturday in Victoria in 2009 and the enduring 2001 Black Christmas in NSW, resulted in hundreds of lives lost and close to 5,000 homes destroyed. These are just three examples of a long list of major Australian bushfire events. As we head towards 2050, climate change is predicted to cause fire seasons to start earlier, end later and involve more frequent extremes of weather that support major loss events. More than ever before, planning and preparation is playing a significant role in mitigating major bushfires and their effects on lives, properties and infrastructure. Following a state-wide project that saw CSIRO develop mapping technology that identified bushfire prone areas in Queensland down to a 25 metre square area, our researchers have now stepped onto the international stage by mapping regions all over the world that have conditions susceptible to fire events. This latest global tool is a valuable resource for hazard analysts, financers, developers and even the general public, seeking bushfire information online. Read More here
9 August 2017 By Dr Haydn Washington for Dick Smith Fair Go,The Insanity of Endless Growth, . The world is faced with a predicament of grave enormity – yet one rarely spoken of. The United Nations (UN), almost all governments, business, and media and both the political Left and the Right are busy extolling (even praising) ‘endless growth’. Yet we live on a finite planet, so clearly endless physical growth is impossible, unsustainable and, in fact, insane. I often give public talks on sustainability and ask the audience: ‘On a finite planet who thinks we can keep growing physically forever?’ Nobody raises their hands. So why then is our economy and society based on what many individually know is impossible? An excellent question – but one hardly ever asked in mainstream economics (Daly, 2014). Even the UN forgets to ask the question – and to answer it. Read More here
7 August 2017, New York Times, Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report. The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. “Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote. Read More here