… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Tag: extreme weather events

  • Florida Meteorologist Breaks Down Reporting on Milton’s Growing Strength

    Spread the love

    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Florida meteorologist John Morales warns residents to evacuate and says the rapid intensifying of Hurricane Milton is due to the climate crisis and planetary heating in a news report on October 7, 2024. (Image: NBC6)

    “The warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay,” said John Morales. “Now I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently.”

    As NBC6 hurricane specialist John Morales in Miami reported on the rapid drop in barometric pressure as Hurricane Milton gained strength in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, the veteran meteorologist’s voice broke.

    “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours,” Morales said, becoming visibly emotional. “I apologize, this is just horrific.”

    The storm is expected to make landfall on the west coast of Florida on Wednesday as the state struggles to recover from Hurricane Helene.

    Morales spoke as the hurricane’s winds reached 160 miles per hour and climate experts noted that the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean’s waters have been abnormally warm.

    “The seas are just incredibly, incredibly hot, record hot, as you might imagine,” said Morales. “You know what’s driving that. I don’t need to tell you. Global warming, climate change [are] leading to this and becoming an increasing threat.”

    Morales posted the clip on social media later, saying he “debated whether to share” the emotional moment in which he reported on what is likely to be further catastrophic damage to his home state as well as parts of Mexico.

    “Frankly, you should be shaken too, and demand climate action now,” said Morales.

    A week ago, the meteorologist wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 230 people across six states, was “a harbinger of the future.”

    “For decades I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely,” wrote Morales. “Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay. Now I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently.”

    “No one can hide from the truth,” he added. “Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, are becoming more extreme. I must communicate the growing threats from the climate crisis come hell or high water—pun intended.”

    Former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), who is running for Senate, was among those who applauded Morales’ frank assessment of the crisis facing his state and the country.

    “I’ve never seen someone like John Morales get emotional about a storm before. He understands these systems better than most and it should be a warning for all of us to get ready now,” said Mucarsel-Powell. “We MUST have the courage to stand up to climate denialists and take action before it is too late.”

    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
    Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards

  • As Europe Reels From Flood Damage, Calls Grow for Big Oil to Pay for Climate Destruction

    Spread the love

    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Firefighters in a boat make their way past a car submerged by the floods in Rust im Tullnerfeld, Austria, on September 16, 2024. (Photo: Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images)

    “We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change,” said one campaigner.

    The international climate group Greenpeace on Friday called on European leaders to “reciprocate” the courage shown by first responders in several countries over the weekend by forcing fossil fuel giants to pay for climate damages.

    Calling out leaders including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, and Romania Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, Greenpeace campaigner Ian Duff said Central and Eastern European countries should end their “support for fossil fuels and [make] climate polluters pay for this disaster,” as emergency workers rescued people from catastrophic flooding.

    The death toll on Monday rose to at least 16, with many more people missing and hundreds of thousands of people displaced in countries including Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia after the low-pressure system Storm Boris dumped torrential rains on the region for days starting late last week.

    Two men, aged 70 and 80, drowned in their homes in northeastern Lower Austria after being trapped by rising floodwater, and confirmed deaths in Poland rose to six.

    About 70% of Litovel, about 140 miles east of the Czech capital of Prague, was underwater Monday, while a power plant servicing the country’s third-largest city was forced to shut down and leave residents without heat and hot water.

    “Greenpeace is horrified by damages brought by floods across Central and Eastern Europe, claiming lives, leaving homes without power and farmers with ruined fields, after being already ravaged by drought,” said Duff, head of Greenpeace’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “We are deeply worried such events will get worse until oil and gas giants like Shell, Total, Equinor, Exxon, OMV, and ENI are forced to stop drilling for fossil fuels driving climate change.”

    In the U.S., the notion of big polluters being required to pay for damages caused by the climate crisis has recently gained traction, with lawmakers introducing a bill in Congress last week.

    In Europe, a “polluter pays” principle is followed for many kinds of pollution, but advocates have called for it to be applied to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

    The flooding in Europe comes, as London-based meteorologist Scott Duncan explained on the social media platform X, after “an exceptional summer for the Mediterranean Sea,” with heat records broken—just as scientists have warned this year that record heat in the North Atlantic and other oceans around the globe would mean “a busy hurricane season.”

    “Warmer sea surface temperatures allow more moisture to evaporate, like fuel for a storm. The warmer the water, the greater the evaporation,” said Duncan.

    Liz Stephens, science lead for the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, noted that in Central and Eastern Europe, “climate change is known to be playing a role in increasing the risk of flooding,” with the World Weather Attribution saying in 2021 that disastrous flooding that hit Germany and Belgium was tied to “a rapidly warming climate.”

    Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stephens added, “have indicated that we have already observed an upward trend in heavy rainfall, surface water, and river flooding, and climate models show high confidence of further increases into the future.”

    “The flooding looks set to be the worst in the region since 2002,” she said. “Lessons will have been learned from previous big European floods, but forecasts for some locations are for flooding of unprecedented magnitude, and history tells us that people are often surprised by the seemingly unimaginable consequences of such events.”

    Journalist and climate advocate George Monbiot pointed out on Al Jazeera that storms previously described as “once-in-1,000-year occurrences [are] happening several times now in the past decade. We’re seeing a massive acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events, and unfortunately this is exactly what climate scientists were predicting.”

    Climate action group Friends of the Earth echoed Greenpeace’s demand to “leave fossil fuels in the ground and instead invest in a green future,” and Duff emphasized that communities across Central and Eastern Europe are far from the only ones “reeling from deadly floods and torrential rains,” with Typhoon Yagi causing flooding and landslides that killed at least 250 people in Southeast Asia in recent days and heavy rains across West and Central Africa leading to floods that killed more than 1,000 people.

    “The fossil fuel industry,” said Duff, “is worsening weather extremes everywhere.”

    Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

  • Big Oil Sold Stuff They Knew Was Dangerous. There’s a Law for That.

    Spread the love

    https://newrepublic.com/article/185468/big-oil-reckless-endangerment-climate-change

    David McNew/Getty Images

    Prosecuting fossil fuel executives for reckless endangerment could help millions of victims of climate change–related disasters get justice.

    Our world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place. One study recently found that extreme heat killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year. A single county in the United States—Maricopa County, in Arizona—reported 645 such deaths. Eye-popping sea surface temperatures are fueling a historically destructive hurricane season this summer, and lethal, record-breaking storms are lashing states from Texas to Vermont. In California, the climate-driven Park fire continues to burn a path of devastation that has left hundreds homeless, including numerous survivors of previous wildfires—people who have now lost their homes multiple times.

    These aren’t “natural” disasters. 2023’s summer heat waves, for example, would have been “virtually impossible,” in one research team’s words, without human-caused climate change. That means these disasters are being driven by particular corporate actors—and particularly Big Oil companies. These companies, by generating a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas emissions that have warmed the planet, while simultaneously deceiving the public about the dangers of those emissions, have created a crisis that is putting millions of Americans at risk.

    …

    Two weeks ago, over 1,000 survivors of climate disasters sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to “investigate the fossil fuel industry for climate-related crimes.” One of the signers, Allen Myers, said that the wildfire that burned down his family’s home “bore the fingerprints of the climate crisis” and stressed that the “fossil fuel industry knows that what they’re doing is dangerous.”

    …

    Big Oil remains the greatest obstacle to climate action. Earlier this month the United Nations warned that fossil fuel companies are still running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” to delay our transition to safer energy sources. In other words, these offenses are ongoing, and the prosecutors and public safety officials charged with protecting us from criminal harm have an obligation to prosecute Big Oil executives for their reckless endangerment of the public.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/185468/big-oil-reckless-endangerment-climate-change

  • Hottest day records falling daily …

    Spread the love

  • Morning Star Editorial: ‘Raise the watchword, Liberty’ — and wake up to today’s brutish, authoritarian Britain

    Spread the love
    UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/raise-watchword-liberty-and-wake-todays-brutish-authoritarian-britain

    …

    Silencing defendants is the courtroom parallel to the wider attack on protest rights by the last government, including the “public nuisance” offence the Just Stop Oil five have been found guilty of and other measures that allow the police to shut down demonstrations before they have even begun, or haul peaceful citizens off marches for carrying placards or wearing imagery they object to.

    Both reveal the collapse of ruling-class confidence in the people they rule. Grasping, after the shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn movement, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the system, their only answer is to ban protest and silence dissidents.

    We cannot be silenced. The stakes are too high: as the Just Stop Oil cause illustrates, climate change, in the form of erratic weather, increasingly severe droughts and floods and crop failure, is already upon us. British farms saw a 19 per cent income drop in the last year because of mass flooding. The disruption to our lives from upsets to food production and the water supply will outweigh that from halting traffic on a motorway. The five must be freed.

    Labour in power has a chance to change course from the crazy authoritarianism of the Tories. It is committed to restoring workers’ strike rights — but it must be made to restore protest rights too. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we must “raise the watchword, liberty,” defying a state that tramples on our freedoms.

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/raise-watchword-liberty-and-wake-todays-brutish-authoritarian-britain