Renewable Revolution

Posted on November 16, 2016, by Radio Ecoshock

SNIPPET:

It’s not that we are being lied to on a massive scale. We are, but that’s not the point. We are lying to ourselves on a massive scale. The agreement reached by our political leaders in Paris reflects our own unwillingness to make deep changes now to save the climate. As we see in this paper, it also marks our very human way of answering a real threat with procrastination and fantasy.

But first of course, we fell into talking about the climate impact of the election of Donald Trump. Kevin suggests we get out of the fixation with 320 million people in the United States, and look toward the almost 7 billion other humans on the planet. According to the Paris accord, and countless national and local actions, they believe climate change is real.

http://www.ecoshock.org/2016/11/will-fantasy-anger-sink-the-climate.html

 By Tom Yulsman | November 20, 2016 7:22 pm 



http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2016/11/20/something-really-crazy-is-happening-in-the-arctic/#.WDNCFuTrthh

Nov. 2, 2016

SNIPPET:

After a quick initial freeze-up during the second half of September, ice growth slowed substantially during early October. On October 20, 2016, Arctic sea ice extent began to set new daily record lows for this time of year. After mid-October, ice growth returned to near-average rates, but extent remained at record low levels through late October.


High sea surface temperatures in open water areas were important in limiting ice growth. October air temperatures were also unusually high, and this warmth extended from the surface through a considerable depth of the atmosphere.



http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Agelbert REMINDER to those who will be "offended" (because they are supporters of the President Elect) by the hard truths stated in the article below:
 


TOPICS: Democracy & Government

TAGS: 2016 election, donald trump, hillary clinton, media criticism
Democracy & Government


No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently.

By Neal Gabler | November 10, 2016


America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.

Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:



I hunt for that affirming flame.

This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.


We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.


The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.

Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.

Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt , but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so that they could fill the vacuum.


Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood that they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.

With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information – a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.

With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president.


Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.

What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the alt-right. For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.


This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.

For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.

But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.

We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.

Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.

http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/

Agelbert NOTE: Great article, but, unlike the author, many millions of Americans, like myself, KNEW about this suicidal trajectory, of which the ubiquitous racism is but one symptom of America's moral decay.

Neal Gabler is a good man of principle. He is clear on what is right and what is wrong. However, as the reality of the WAY things REALLY are in the USA struck him like a kick in the groin, Neal Gabler's surprise is evidence that he was a victim of white privileged liberal wishful thinking. None of the following was a surprise to me and millions of other Americans of mixed ancestry that know the score.

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.

I have been warning about it to deaf ears for over a decade.   


Also, unlike Neal Gabler, I dated the final nail in the coffin of American Democracy much earlier than this election.

I dated it to when THIS GUY had the nomination for VP stolen from him so the Truman party hack could do the bidding of the M.I.C. when Roosevelt died.
But, you know what? The abysmally stupid and morally corruptive embrace of greed, xenophobia and racism is the LEAST of our worries as a people in this perfect storm of Wall Street 'dial a reality' that so many fools and knaves wish to celebrate.

Below please find, America TODAY:

BUT, THIS is America in the NEAR FUTURE:

November 24, 2016



 
Freakishly high temperatures in the Arctic driven by heat-packed oceans and northward winds have been reinforced by a "vicious circle" of climate change, scientists said Thursday.

Air above the Polar ice cap has been 9-12 degrees Celsius (16.2 to 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above average during the last four weeks, according the data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), which tracks hourly changes in Arctic weather.

And during several days last week, temperatures above the North Pole were a balmy zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), a full 20C (36F) above the levels typical for mid-November, said Martin Stendel, a DMI climate researcher based in Copenhagen.

"This is by far the highest recorded" in the era of satellite data, starting in 1979, he told AFP.

"What we are observing is very unusual."

At this time of year, open Arctic ocean exposed by sea ice melted away in summer should be freezing again, with thousands of square kilometres icing over every day.

But that has not been happening, at least not at the same pace, said Stendel.

"Not only was the ice not growing as it would normally, there was further melting due to warm air coming in," he explained by phone.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice extent in October was the lowest on record, some 6.4 million square kilometres (2.5 million square miles).

Ice cover at the top of the globe shrank to its smallest area in 2016—some 4.14 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles)—on September 16.

Several factors have caused the Arctic to overheat since late October, say scientists.

The most immediate are warm winds sweeping up from western Europe and off the west coast of Africa.

"The winds carrying this heat is a temporary—and fairly unprecedented—weather phenomenon," said Valerie Masson Delmotte, a scientist at the Climate and Environment Sciences Laboratory in Paris.

Only since Thursday have they abated.

Mirror effect

A second contributor is the record-strong Pacific Ocean El Nino that tapered off earlier this year—after pumping a couple tenths of a degree of added warming into the atmosphere.

But reinforcing these periodic, if powerful, drivers is the biggest one of all: global warming, experts agreed.


"The long-term decline in sea ice in the Arctic can be attributed to climate change," said Ed Blockley, lead scientist at the UK Met Office's Polar Climate Group.     

Manmade climate change caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases has already pushed up Earth's average surface temperature by 1.0 C (1.8 F) since the pre-industrial era.

It the Arctic, however, the pace of warming has been twice as fast, caused in part by a vicious circle that scientists call "positive feedback".

About 80 percent of solar radiation from the Sun bounces back into space when it falls on white snow and ice, what Delmotte called a "mirror effect".

But when those same sunrays hit deep blue sea—far more of which is now exposed—80 percent of that warmth is absorbed into the water instead, and stored there.

"If you look at the extent of sea ice, then you can see the vicious circle right away, because there's a clear downward trend," said Stendel.

And in the short term, that exposed sea water is slowing the reformation of ice.

At just under zero degrees Celsius, the sea water is vastly warmer "compared to the ice that should be there", Stendel added.

Air temperatures above the thick layer if ice replaced by open sea "are generally minus 30 to minus 40 Celsius".

The loss of ice cover could have far reaching consequences.

"It amplifies global warming in general, and increases warming especially in nearby continents," Delmotte told AFP.

One of those neighbouring land masses Greenland, whose huge ice sheet—melting rapidly—contains enough water to lift global sea levels by several metres.

http://phys.org/news/2016-11-overheated-arctic-climate-vicious-circle.html

This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump. All of these Senate floor speeches have urged the same thing since 2012: Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island keeps warning his political peers of the perils of ignoring climate science.

SNIPPET:

While the president-elect mocked Republican politicians groveling before the Koch brothers at their “beg-a-thon,” as he called it, he is busy filling his staff with Koch operatives.  Donald Trump may have won the presidency. But with operatives like Myron Ebell, the Koch brothers are moving in to run it.

The new president will hear from our military, our national labs, and NASA (who, with a rover driving around on Mars, may actually know a little science) that this is deadly serious. I encourage President-elect Trump to listen to these voices of reason and expertise, not to the Swamp Things. Don’t be taken in by industry lobbyists and front groups, scratching and clawing to protect a $700 billion conflict of interest.

 http://grist.org/briefly/this-senator-has-given-150-pleas-for-climate-action-now-he-has-a-few-words-for-trump/

Trump Watch| Dec. 05, 2016 01:22PM EST

Union of Concerned Scientists

SNIPPET:

We Cannot Normalize Science Denial

Despite this pervasive record of science-slamming, the House Science Committee was still taken to task for the recent climate-denying tweet and this is a good thing. We cannot normalize science denial. It is entirely inappropriate for members of Congress to be peddling misinformation on climate science—especially when they are in charge of the House Science Committee. The world noticed this and called them on it.

http://www.ecowatch.com/house-science-committees-breitbart-tweet-2129501405.html