Good morning 99percenters!
Morning climate/weather dump and music by the late, great Vassar Clements.

Texas Storms, Tornadoes Leave at Least 11 Dead Around Dallas Area

A new line of storms was barreling through Texas on Sunday as officials worked to assess damage from a series of tornadoes and severe weather which left at least 11 people dead overnight.

Authorities said the full extent of the damage from Saturday's spate of storms was not yet known — but warned the region should get ready for another hit. Forecasters warned of more "severe" weather and heavy rain.

Next line of storms racing east toward DFW. Major winter storm also raging in TX Panhandle & South Plains. #txwx pic.twitter.com/mITgJYFcmH

— Brian James (@BrianJamesNBC5) December 27, 2015

The same storm system that spawned the deadly twisters in the Dallas area was expected to leave up to 16 inches of snow in west Texas through Sunday evening, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

The same storm system that spawned the deadly twisters in the Dallas area was expected to leave up to 16 inches of snow in west Texas through Sunday evening, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Texas tornadoes: Eleven killed in Dallas area

Eleven people are reported to have been killed in tornadoes in Texas, raising the death toll to 29 in a week of storms across several US states.

At least eight people died in Garland, near Dallas, five of them when their cars were blown off a motorway. Three bodies were found in other towns.

Officials also say west Texas and New Mexico could suffer major blizzards, bringing up to 16in (41cm) of snow.

The storms across the South have been unusually powerful for winter.

Reports from Texas said churches were destroyed, cars mangled and trees toppled across a 64km (20 mile) zone from south of Dallas up to suburbs in the north-east.

Glacial Melt Causing Subtle Slowing of Earth’s Rotation

The melting of glaciers caused by the world's rising temperatures appears to be causing a slight slowing of the Earth's rotation in another illustration of the far-reaching impact of global climate change, a study in the journal of Science Advances said.

The driving force behind the modest but discernible changes in the Earth's rotation measured by satellites and astronomical methods is a global sea level rise fueled by an influx of meltwater into the oceans from glaciers, the researchers said.

"Because glaciers are at high latitudes, when they melt they redistribute water from these high latitudes towards lower latitudes, and like a figure skater who moves his or her arms away from their body, this acts to slow the rotation rate of the Earth," Harvard University geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica said.

The movement of ice and meltwater is also causing a slight migration of the Earth's axis, or north pole, in a phenomenon known as "polar wander," the researchers said.

Russia Warming Over Two Times Faster Than Rest of Planet
Country's environment ministry issues climate change warning in annual report

Russia is warming at 2.5 times the global average and faces a dramatic rise in related threats—from floods to fires—the country's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection revealed Friday in its annual report.

"Growth of average temperatures in Russia in 1976-2014 was 0.42 degrees Celsius in 10 years, which is 2.5 times more than growth of global temperatures on Earth for the same period—0.17 degrees Celsius in 10 years," the ministry wrote, according to media reports.

"Climate change leads to growth of dangerous meteorological phenomena," the ministry continued, citing dramatic floods and severe forest fires last year. According to the agency's calculations, Russia faced 569 events in 2014—marking the greatest number since the ministry began keeping track.

The report charts temperature fluctuations affecting the climate, leading to ice melting, sea levels rising, floods, droughts and other phenomena.

There's A Way to Save Our Future. So Why Aren't More People Talking About It?
Transitioning to organic regenerative agriculture practices 'offers the best, and perhaps our only, hope for averting a global warming disaster.'

A critical tool in the fight against global warming is right below our feet.

So where is this "shovel-ready solution" amid all the talk of climate fixes in the wake of the COP21 summit in Paris?

An Associated Press article published Thursday, for example, professes to outline "methods to achieve negative emissions," wherein humans remove more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than they put in it. The AP quotes scientists who say "it's clear" that the goals laid out in Paris "cannot be reached without negative emissions in the future, because the atmosphere is filling up with greenhouse gases so fast that it may already be too late to keep the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees C."

Among the solutions mentioned in the piece: "fertilizing the oceans with iron to make them absorb more carbon," "planting more forests," and "carbon capture technologies."

Rich white people are ruining the planet: How the donor class prevents action on climate change
Research indicates wealthy white Republicans are less likely to support policy proposals to reduce carbon emissions

Although the Paris Climate Deal certainly represents a step forward for the international community, there are still many potential pitfalls to addressing climate change. New data suggest that the overwhelmingly white donor class may be one such obstacle.

Recently, political scientist Brian Schaffner and I wrote a piece in Mother Jones showing that the GOP donor class is both far more likely to deny the reality of climate change and far less likely to support policy proposals to reduce emissions. However, beyond being more conservative than the population in general, the data so far available suggest that the donor class is far whiter than the general population. CCES data suggest that that may well have a major impact on policy.

Using 2012 and 2014 CCES, we can examine divides between white and non-white donors. These divides are large and consistent: white donors are more likely to deny climate change and oppose action to remedy it. CCES asks a series of questions on climate change, and two of them (“Global Climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary” and “There is enough evidence that climate change is taking place and some action should be taken”) meet scientific muster. However, while 55% of white donors agree, a whopping 71% of non-white donors do. In addition, non-white donors are more supportive of the EPA strengthening enforcement, even it costs jobs (58% to 49%).

Will the Decline of Coal Solve the Climate Crisis?

Sharon Kelly says as coal companies face financial pressure, investors should be wary about shifting toward other fossil fuels if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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Climate Change 2015: The Latest Science

Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2 directly from the sky has been discredited by the perceived debate. Previously assumed stable ice sheets are disintegrating. It is warmer than any time in the last 120,000 years. The Gulf Stream appears to be shutting down. Nearly 100 submarine glacial valleys beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet tunnel warm subtropical Atlantic water 90 miles beneath the ice. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we need to remove more carbon dioxide from our atmosphere than we emit every year (negative emissions). Most importantly, new knowledge about global cooling smog shows that killing coal will create more warming than doing nothing in the most critical decades-long time frames.

The great delay in climate action has dramatically increased climate change impacts and the amount of carbon dioxide that we must now deal with to prevent even greater impacts. Delay has been caused by the debate casting doubt on climate science in ways that have proven to be effective in similar debates about smoking, acid rain and ozone-depleting chemicals. Because of doubt, fundamentally important new climate science has failed to escape the confines of academia and proceed into the public realm where it can move policy - literally - into the 21st century.

Number One: Direct Air Capture

Not new, very real, but often maligned in advocacy and policy discussions, direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide is an important aspect of the failure of traditional climate science education techniques. DAC costs as little as $20 per ton, and once fully industrialized, can remove 50 ppm CO2 from the atmosphere and allow us to approach a safe level of greenhouses gases for less than the $2.1 trillion Americans spent on health care in 2006. (1, 2)

Holiday Melancholy in Bayou Corne, Louisiana, Home of Giant Sinkhole Caused by an Industrial Accident

Hand-painted standing alligators holding signs that read "Noel" on Tim Brown's lawn in Bayou Corne, LA, offer holiday cheer in an area where most of his neighbors moved away. 

Bayou Corne, 77 miles west of New Orleans, has joined the growing list of communities destroyed by industrial accidents.

Once known as a sportsman's paradise, Bayou Corne is now famous for a giant sinkhole that opened up on August 3, 2012, after a salt dome cavern, owned by Occidental Chemical Corp. and operated by Texas Brine Co. LLC, collapsed.

How Oil Lobbyists Won the Fight to Drill in the Alaskan Wilderness

From his seat in the small plane flying over the largest remaining swath of American wilderness, Bruce Babbitt thought he could envision the legacy of one of his proudest achievements as Interior Secretary in the Clinton administration.

Babbitt was returning in the summer of 2013 from four sunlit nights in Alaska's western Arctic, where at one point his camp was nearly overrun by a herd of caribou that split around the tents at the last minute. Now, below him, Babbitt saw an oil field — one carefully built and operated to avoid permanent roads and other scars on the vast expanse of tundra and lakes.

Under the deal he'd negotiated just before leaving Interior in 2000, that would be the only kind of drilling he thought would be allowed in the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which, despite its name, is a pristine region home to one of the world's largest caribou herds and giant flocks of migratory birds. The compromise was fair and, he hoped, enduring — clear-eyed about the need for more domestic oil but resolute in defense of the wilderness.

The deal lasted barely 15 years.

Africa Could Lead World on Green Energy

Africa could be the first region in the world to power its economic development on renewable energy rather than fossil fuels such as coal, according to the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“I’m very excited about this,” said Fatih Birol as he launched the World Energy Outlook 2015 last month. “When we look at the history of energy – in Europe, the U.S., China – economic development was realized by a substantial amount of coal. But in Africa, we may well see, for the first time, a region [realizing] its economic growth using renewable energy.”

Birol said the big push from governments to get electricity to the two out of three people in Africa who don’t have access will help support this, as will falling costs of renewable energy. The price of solar panels fell by 75 percent from 2009 to 2014 and the costs of producing energy from the sun continues to fall.

Energy demand is growing in Africa, the Middle East and south-east Asia, said Birol, but India is “the engine of the global energy demand” now that China’s energy demand is plateauing.

This is Why Scientists Have Hope For the Climate

There’s no getting around the fact that climate change is a bummer. The planet is warming, ice is melting, oceans are acidifying and, well, you get the point.

While the bad news is important — it lets us know what we’re getting into with this whole climate change thing — it’s also worth remembering there’s reason for hope.

This year the world finally came together in Paris where a landmark climate pact was agreed to to try to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, and there are some fascinating innovations that could speed the world’s efforts to curb climate change. We asked climate experts for their top reason for climate hope in 2015 and what to look forward to in 2016. Below are their answers, edited slightly for clarity or length.