Edmund Rice International- Care of Earth

Source: Global Efforts to Adapt to the Impacts of Climate Are Lagging as Much as Efforts to Slow Emissions – Inside Climate News

Source: An Ocean and Climate Agenda for the New Administration – Center for American Progress

Source: To Counter Climate Change, We Need to Stop Burning Things   by Bill McKibben

If one wanted a basic rule of thumb for dealing with the climate crisis, it would be: stop burning things. Human beings have made use of combustion for a very long time, ever since the first campfires cooked the first animals for dinner, allowing our brains to get larger. Now those large brains have come to understand that burning stuff is destroying the stable climate on which civilization depends.

Photograph by Liam McBurney / PA Wire / AP

By this point, it’s pretty clear to almost everyone that we’d be better off not burning coal, the first fossil fuel that we learned to set on fire in a big way. The explosions set off by a billion spark plugs every second around the world are—for serious motorheads—being replaced by the electric engines in the most admired cars on earth. Even natural gas, long heralded as the clean fossil fuel, is now widely understood to be climate-dangerous, spewing both CO₂ and methane. That leaves the original fuel for fires: wood.

Making it Stop Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful messages because they know that the worst possible outcome is avoidable.  Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago. There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the next major clima

Source: Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly After Emissions Go to Zero – Inside Climate News

…Making it Stop

Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful messages because they know that the worst possible outcome is avoidable. 

Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago.

There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.”

The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous IPCC reports, were based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.” 

Those models assumed that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would remain constant, that it would take centuries before they decline, said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who discussed the shifting consensus last October during a segment of 60 Minutes on CBS.

The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after emissions go to zero was described as a “game-changing new scientific understanding” by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of news organizations covering climate.

“This really is true,” he said. “It’s a dramatic change in the paradigm that has been lost on many who cover this issue, perhaps because it hasn’t been well explained by the scientific community. It’s an important development that is still under appreciated.”“It’s definitely the scientific consensus now that warming stabilizes quickly, within 10 years, of emissions going to zero,” he said.

Source: Cancel All the Pipelines | The New Republic

Without congressional action, the Biden administration’s planned Day One revocation of the Keystone XL permit will be an important but temporary victory.

JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Some good news can’t wait. On Sunday, the CBC reported that canceling federally issued permits for the Keystone XL pipeline will be part of President-elect Joe Biden’s Day One agenda. In theory, the pipeline could be dead by Wednesday afternoon, when prior presidents have been prepping for inaugural balls. (The balls have been canceled this year.)

Like the dissolution of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline last summer, Keystone XL’s imminent demise is a major victory for Native and environmentalist organizers, who’ve stood against the controversial pipeline extension since the beginning. But it’s also a symbol of a larger set of dilemmas. With Representative Deb Haaland soon to become secretary of the interior—the Laguna Pueblo citizen will be the first Native official to lead the department—there’s a good chance other permit-bearing projects will soon join Keystone XL on the chopping block. Yet for all of these, and the Keystone cancellation as well, the strange life cycle of the Keystone pipeline points to a need for broader and more long-term policies.

There is no shortage of other pipeline projects Biden and his Cabinet ought to consider canceling. In Minnesota, water protectors such as the Giniw Collective have spent the winter months risking arrest by physically blocking the Line 3 Pipeline, which is slated to cut through the reservation of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and narrowly miss the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s lands. In Oregon, the Jordan Cove Pipeline is currently mired in environmental-review limbo, no thanks to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which in May declined to review requests from tribes and the state that claimed the pipeline would disturb the local natural ecosystems as well as culturally important sites for the neighboring tribal nations. And in the Dakotas, the Dakota Access Pipeline—the project that incited the Standing Rock movement in 2016—continues to ferry close to half of all oil produced in North Dakota, even as further environmental impact reviews remain uncompleted.

Continue reading via link above.

Source: Court Voids a ‘Tortured’ Trump Climate Rollback – The New York Times

Source: Toxic Air Pollution is a Public Health Crisis — Tishman Environment and Design Center

As one of its last acts, the Trump administration has set in motion the transfer of sacred Native American lands to a pair of Anglo-Australian mining conglomerates. The 2,422-acre Arizona parcel called Oak Flat is of enormous significance to the Western Apache and is now on track for destruction by what is slated to be one of the largest copper mining operations in the United States.

Source: Outcry as Trump officials to transfer sacred Native American land to miners | Environment | The Guardian

Source: The Radical Case for Growing Huge Swaths of Bamboo in North America – Inside Climate News

Source: Peak Phosphorus is Worse Than Climate Change | Climate Conscious

Roger Sylvester-Bradley is on a mission. He’s a crop scientist for ADAS, “the UK’s largest independent provider of agricultural and environmental consultancy.” He’s growing barley and other crops using “legacy phosphorus” from previous harvests instead of industrial fertilizers rich with mined phosphate. He hopes to develop farming techniques that can meet increasing global demand for food while reducing the use of phosphorus reserves. So far, he’s met with promising results; he continues to raise healthy crops in defiance of expectations without adding a single new particle of phosphorus to his soil.

Unfortunately, however, Sylvester-Bradley’s experiments have not stopped business as usual on American industrial farms or their counterparts around the world. Phosphorous is a nutrient that is key to life, but the world has a finite supply, and that supply is running perilously short. Some studies estimate that global phosphorus reserves will run out within 50–100 years. And, as early as 2030, world phosphorus production will likely reach its peak. When that happens, food prices will steadily climb in conjunction with rising fertilizer costs. When the supply runs out, crops will fail and the food web will collapse. Phosphorus depletion is, therefore, an extinction level emergency more pressing than even global warming.