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Climate news and music by Levon Helm.

Act Now, Urges Study, or Planet Faces 10,000+ Years of Climate Doom
"The next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far."

The actions that policymakers take in the next couple of years will have "profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies" for the next 10,000 years and beyond, warns a new report that examines the long-term consequences of the so called "fossil fuel era."

The agreement hashed out at the COP21 Paris climate talks "leaves a lot of leeway" for countries to postpone making critical cuts to their emission outputs—"more than the climate system allows," said report co-author Patrik Pfister from the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change and last month in the open-access journal Environmental Research Letters, warns that delaying global carbon emission reductions by even ten years will have a profound impact on long-term "Earth system variables," such as peak atmospheric warming, sea level rise (SSLR), and ocean acidification.

"Most of the policy debate surrounding the actions needed to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change has been framed by observations of the past 150 years as well as climate and sea-level projections for the twenty-first century," the report states. "The focus on this 250-year window, however, obscures some of the most profound problems associated with climate change."

This is the only way to rein in the environmental recklessness of powerhouses like Exxon Mobil and BP
Air, water & land belong to us all. Despite right-wing cries of tyranny, feds are our best bet for protecting them

Dedicated capitalists may find the idea of natural resources belonging to all people and not corporations radical, but it’s nothing new. In 1217 King Henry III sealed the Charter of the Forest, a companion piece to the Magna Carta that recognized the importance of the woods to the livelihood of Englishmen. The Charter is seen as establishing a concept of the commons: Resources such as air, water, plants, game and land should be freely accessible to barons and peasants alike, rather than paying the crown for access.

Indigenous populations throughout the millennia have often had even more forceful versions of this philosophy. In 2011, Bolivia, a nation with one of the most politically active indigenous populations on the planet, passed the Law of Mother Earth. This law took the Charter of the Forest a few steps further, protecting nature from being “affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities.”

Assigning sacred value to the commons is the kind of wisdom that should be informing U.S. policymaking today. Instead our resources are in the hands of private concentrations of wealth, to the detriment of much of humanity. A model in which profit is the only consideration only works if every side effect – such as pollution or poisoning the groundwater, known in economics as an “externality” – is ignored.

Oceans Are Heating Up on the Double

LONDON—Ocean temperatures first collected during one of the great 19th-century voyages of exploration confirm one of the consequences of climate change: humans have managed to warm even the deepest parts of the ocean.

A new study in Nature Climate Change calculates that the amount of heat absorbed by the ocean has doubled in the last 18 years. A third of this heat has collected in the depths at least 700 metres below the waves—and the same region is rapidly getting hotter.

Peter Gleckler, a research scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, and colleagues started with data collected by the world’s first modern oceanographers aboard the British survey ship HMS Challenger in 1872-76.

Deep-sea soundings

Challenger circumnavigated the globe, sailed 70,000 nautical miles (130,000 kilometres), collected 4,700 new species, and made 492 deep-sea soundings and 283 sets of measurements of water temperatures.

How Do We Define Climate Pollution's Cost to Society?

In a 2007 ruling on a dispute concerning fuel economy standards for cars, a judge sent a clear message to federal agencies. They could no longer continue business as usual and fail to account for climate change when assessing the costs and benefits of regulations. "The value of carbon emissions reduction is certainly not zero," Judge Betty B. Fletcher wrote in her opinion for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. And by treating it as such, her opinion declared, the government was acting in an arbitrary and capricious fashion.

So, if the cost of polluting is not zero, what it is? Fletcher's ruling challenged government officials to come up with a dollar amount that represents how much a ton of carbon pollution will "cost" society over the long run. Economists refer to this as the social cost of carbon.

The concept is still evolving and will only become more important to understand as governments grapple with how to address climate change in the most effective and least costly manner.

It was in early 2009 that White House officials decided it was time to develop a unified way for agencies to estimate the social cost of carbon. They knew passing comprehensive climate legislation during the Great Recession would be difficult. They wanted a plan B that would help President Obama address global warming through regulations if legislation failed.

If There Are No New Farmers, Who Will Grow Our Food?

Against a backdrop of lush green mountains and swaying papaya trees, La'amea Lunn readies his crop of carrots, kale, and eggplants for the weekly farmers market. He carefully tends his one-third acre on Oahu, Hawai'i, preparing produce for a market stall he shares with friends - young farmers like himself, a few of whom he met when they worked neighboring plots on this land owned by the University of Hawai'i.

At 32, Lunn has an office job with a career in restaurant kitchens behind him. He hopes to own a farm of his own, to be part of the local food movement, and to help transform the industrial food system. But taking that on now is a substantial investment, so Lunn is starting out here, in an agricultural incubator program called GoFarm Hawai'i, where he can share resources, learn from experts, and, perhaps most importantly, join a community.

GoFarm Hawai'i and other programs, from California to Maine, aim to soften the start for young growers. By providing access to some or all of the farming fundamentals - capital, acreage, and training - these projects try not only to help the individual farmer, but also to sustain and grow a new generation that will allow the local food movement to flourish.

Weakening Ice Shelves Raise Sea Level Rise Concerns

All along Antarctica’s coast, tongues of floating ice act as a firewall. Any major breaks in the firewall could send inland ice flowing faster to the sea, raising ocean levels and threatening coastal communities around the globe.

In some ways, it’s a process already seen in some areas of Antarctica and it’s concerning enough that scientists have undertaken new research to identify where the weakest links in the firewall are.

The findings, published in Nature Climate Change on Monday, show that West Antarctica — long an area of scientific concern when it comes to sea level rise — has some of the weakest areas of defense protecting its ice.

Researchers analyzed the tongues of ice — known as ice shelves — to see how much ground each ice shelf could lose before processes began to speed up, sending more inland ice to the sea.

Climate Change Is Leaving Native Plants Behind

BERKELEY, Calif. — Willis Linn Jepson encountered a squat shrub while he was collecting botanical specimens on California’s Mount Tamalpais in the fall of 1936. He trimmed off a few branches and jotted down the location along the ridge trail where the manzanita grew, 2,255 feet above sea level.

The desiccated specimen is now part of an herbarium here that’s named for the famed botanist. It was among hundreds of thousands of specimens of thousands of different species that were used recently to track the movement of plant species up the state’s many hills.

The results of the analysis warn that native plants are struggling to keep up with changes around them as pollution from fuel burning and deforestation continues to warm the planet. Earlier research into the movement of Californian animals shows they’re shifting more quickly than the native plants.

“The big takeaway is that species are on the move, and they’re moving at different rates,” said Jon Christensen, a scientist and historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Which raises the concern that the ecosystems of California could be unraveling.”

Exposure to air pollution 30 years ago associated with increased risk of death
Exposure to air pollution more than 30 years ago may still affect an individual's mortality risk today

Exposure to air pollution more than 30 years ago may still affect an individual's mortality risk today, according to new research. The new report comes from one of the world's longest running air pollution studies, which included 368,000 people in England and Wales followed over a 38 year period. The team, from the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, estimated air pollution levels in the areas where the individuals lived in 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001, using measurements from Britain's extensive historic air pollution monitoring networks.

Highest risks were seen for respiratory disease, such as bronchitis, emphysema and for pneumonia. Air pollution also affected mortality risk from cardiovascular diseases, such as heart disease.

Dr Anna Hansell, lead author of the study, from the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health at Imperial, said: "Air pollution has well established impacts on health, especially on heart and lung disease. The novel aspects of our study are the very long follow-up time and the very detailed assessment of air pollution exposure, using air quality measurements going back to the 1970s.

To Protect Local Democracy, British Parliament Gets Fracked
'Ministers are pushing aside local democracy to bulldoze through their unpopular fracking plans,' says anti-drilling campaigners

As a way to "bring the local impacts of fracking to the heart of democracy" in the UK, Greenpeace volunteers opposed to the Conservative-led government's push for dangerous gas development erected a life-like ten-meter drilling rig at the footsteps of Westminster in the pre-dawn hours on Monday.

"We apologize for any inconvenience caused while we frack," read large billboard signs tied to chain-linked fencing placed around the established work site outside the parliament building. Designed for disruptive effect, Greenpeace says that the authentic-looking rig fires up every hour using bio ethanol to create a flare while flood lighting and the sound effects of drilling and large trucks were being blasted on loud speakers.

"We are here to fight for the future of the English countryside," declared Greenpeace campaigner Hannah Martin. "Ministers are pushing aside local democracy to bulldoze through their unpopular fracking plans. We have installed a life-like fracking rig and drill at Parliament Square to show them what people in Lancashire and beyond will have to endure if so-called Communities Minister Greg Clark forces fracking on a reluctant nation."

While Prime Minister David Cameron has made developing the fracking industry a centerpiece of his energy plan for the UK, local opponents across the country—and most noticeably in Lacanshire—have been intensifying their grassroots campaign to combat the increasingly aggressive policy proposals put forth by the industry and government.