Noam Chomsky on “The So-Called Rise of China” (2017)

Noam Chomsky on Manufacturing Consent

Thought Monkey
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Published on Jul 31, 2017

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures): Amitav Ghosh

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Noam Chomsky Climate Change Speech 2017

trustylimbs

Published on Apr 12, 2017

Noam Chomsky Climate Change Speech 2017

Pulling Drinkable Water Out of Dry Air

NASA | Taking Earth’s Temperature

NASA Goddard

Published on Nov 24, 2009

For more information visit http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ClimateEssen…

Next month, world leaders will gather in Copenhagen at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to negotiate a new global climate treaty. In anticipation of this event, NASA has compiled a multimedia resource collection for editors and producers developing climate-related stories. Taking Earths Temperature, a short film explaining how researchers use computer models to study climate change, is one of the many resources included in the gallery.

Organized by topic, the videos, data visualizations, conceptual animations, and print-resolution images illustrate key concepts and discoveries in climate science. The compilation also features ten of NASAs most popular climate visualizations.

The gallery can be found at NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ClimateEssen…) and NASA’s Global Climate Change site (http://climate.nasa.gov/ClimateReel). Images and videos can be downloaded directly from those pages and may also be available by request.

Want more? Subscribe to NASA on iTunes!
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZ…

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http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard

Earth’s Long-Term Warming Trend, 1880-2015

NASA.gov Video

Published on Jan 20, 2016

This visualization illustrates Earth’s long-term warming trend, showing temperature changes from 1880 to 2015 as a rolling five-year average. Orange colors represent temperatures that are warmer than the 1951-80 baseline average, and blues represent temperatures cooler than the baseline.

Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nas…

This video is public domain and may be downloaded at:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/deta…

Richmond, California: 2 Arrested Protesting Kinder Morgan Pipeline + Warming from Climate Change Very Likely to Exceed 2 Degrees Celsius by 2100

Aug 01, 2017

Back in the U.S., two protesters in Richmond, California, were arrested Monday outside the gates of a Kinder Morgan oil terminal, as they locked themselves to oil barrels in a nonviolent protest against the company’s plans to build a new Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada. The project would triple the capacity of an existing tar sands pipeline in British Columbia to 890,000 barrels per day. Opponents also want the company to halt shipments of tar sands oil to refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is Richmond activist Andrés Soto of Communities for a Better Environment.

Andrés Soto: “The higher sulfur content leads to faster corrosion of steel, that led to things like the explosion on August 6, 2012, here at the Chevron Richmond refinery. But also it creates more greenhouse gases and more particulate pollution. The greenhouse gases are destroying our atmosphere. And the particulate pollution is creating death and disease in our fenceline communities, like Richmond, California.”

Warming from Climate Change Very Likely to Exceed 2 Degrees Celsius by 2100
Aug 01, 2017

Tonday’s protest came as a new study found there’s only a 1-in-20 chance the planet will avoid warming by at least 2 degrees Celsius—or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—by the end of the century. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, finds it’s extremely unlikely countries will meet the goals set out by the Paris climate accord in 2015—especially since the Trump administration has promised to withdraw the U.S. from the deal. Meanwhile, a separate study published Monday by the University of North Carolina estimates climate change will cause 60,000 deaths globally in 2030 and 260,000 deaths by 2100.

Iceberg size of Delaware breaks off from ice shelf in Antarctica, could raise sea levels – TomoNews

TomoNews US

Published on Jul 18, 2017

ANTARCTICA — NASA reported that an iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf between July 10 and July 12. Scientists warn that the breakoff can trigger new ice cracks and cause even more icebergs to break off.

Ice shelves are the floating parts of glaciers which act as a support mechanism. In a stable glacier-ice shelf system, the glacier’s downhill movement is offset by the buoyant force of the water at the ice shelf front.

The system is destabilized when warmer temperatures melt both the surface and underside of the ice shelves, this eventually leads to calving. However, collapsed ice shelves do not directly contribute to sea level rise because they are floating.

Once the ice shelves are calved, the buoyant force that previously offset glacier flow is gone, and then glacier can then slide into the ocean, which would rapidly affect sea levels.

“The Antarctic Peninsula has been one of the fastest warming places on the planet throughout the latter half of the 20th century. This warming has driven really profound environmental changes, including the collapse of Larsen A and B. But with the rift on Larsen C, we haven’t made a direct connection with the warming climate. Still, there are definitely mechanisms by which this rift could be linked to climate change, most notably through warmer ocean waters eating away at the base of the shelf, ” Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University who has been studying the Larsen C ice shelf since 2008 said in a NASA article.

Experts say the remaining 90 percent of the Larsen C ice shelf is held in place by the Bawden Ice Rise to the north of the rift and Gipps Ice Rise to the south, therefore the ice shelf is unlikely to collapse in the near term.

President Xi leads PLA’s 90th anniversary celebrations

CGTN Africa

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Published on Aug 1, 2017

Beijing has hosted a massive celebration to mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. President Xi Jinping, who is also the Chairperson of the Central Military Commission, delivered the keynote address.