One Year After Declaring Climate Emergency, Scientists Push for 'Massive-Scale Mobilization'

By Jessica Corbett
One year after over 11,000 scientists from 153 countries came together to declare a climate emergency and urge ambitious action, the Oregon State University researchers who launched that effort said on Wednesday that an urgent massive-scale mobilization is necessary to address the human-caused global crisis.
Scientists' renewed call for bold climate policies came just days after a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change warned existing carbon pollution will cause global temperatures to rise about 2.3 degrees Celsius or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels—with devastating consequences worldwide.
As Common Dreams reported last year, William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in OSU's College of Forestry, and postdoctoral scholar Christopher Wolf co-authored a paper in BioScience. Backed by thousands of scientists, they wrote that greenhouse gas missions "are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate" and "an immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
Ripple and Wolf—along with William R. Moomaw of Tufts University, Thomas M. Newsome of the University of Sydney, and Phoebe Barnard of the University of Cape Town—reiterated those messages in The Climate Emergency: 2020 in Review, published Wednesday in Scientific American. As they put it:
The climate emergency has arrived and is accelerating more rapidly than most scientists anticipated, and many of them are deeply concerned. The adverse effects of climate change are much more severe than expected, and now threaten both the biosphere and humanity. There is mounting evidence linking increases in extreme weather frequency and intensity to climate change...
Every effort must be made to reduce emissions and increase removals of atmospheric carbon in order to restore the melting Arctic and end the deadly cycle of damage that the current climate is delivering. Scientists now find that catastrophic climate change could render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable consequent to continued high emissions, self-reinforcing climate feedback loops and looming tipping points.
"As we move into 2021 and beyond, we need a massive-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis, including much more progress on the six steps of climate change mitigation," the five experts argued, detailing various priorities for energy, short-lived pollutants, nature, food, economy, and population.
Echoing messages from the new review, Ripple said in a statement Wednesday that "young people in more than 3,500 locations around the world have organized to push for urgent action... And the Black Lives Matter movement has elevated social injustice and equality to the top of our consciousness."
"Rapid progress in each of the climate action steps we outline is possible if framed from the outset in the context of climate justice—climate change is a deeply moral issue," added Ripple, director of the Alliance of World Scientists. "We desperately need those who face the most severe climate risks to help shape the response."
Alongside the written review, the scientists put out a video about their "six steps":
Ripple noted that "the year 2020, one of the hottest years on record, also saw extraordinary fire activity in the western United States and Australia, a Siberian heatwave with record high temperatures exceeding 100 degrees within the Arctic circle, an Atlantic hurricane season resulting in more than $46 billion in damages, and deadly floods and landslides in South Asia that displaced more than 12 million people."
Last year also featured the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which as of Thursday morning has killed nearly 1.9 million people worldwide. As the pandemic has raged on, experts around the globe have warned that humanity must heal its broken relationship with nature to prevent similar public health crises in the future.
"Lockdowns associated with the pandemic resulted in a decrease in CO2 emissions of 7% in 2020 but this reduction is probably not going to be long-lived because there has been no major concurrent shift in the way we produce energy," Ripple pointed out. "This drop in emissions is a tiny blip compared to the overall buildup of greenhouse gases, which has resulted in all five of the hottest years on record occurring since 2015."
Group of scientists in 2020: "We are in a climate emergency." Same scientists in 2021: "We are concerned that no ma… https://t.co/LN63a2wH92— Andrew Freedman (@Andrew Freedman)1609952922.0
Faced with concurrent crises, communities and governments of various sizes around the world have made climate emergency declarations—often as a first step to start taking whatever action they can to limit future emissions and deal with the pollution that's already driving up temperatures.
"People are frightened—an illustration of that is the more than 1,800 climate emergency declarations issued around the world, by jurisdictions encompassing more than 820 million people," said Wolf. "We're at the point of needing a massive-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis."
"A year ago, we were worried about poor progress on mitigating climate change. Now we are alarmed by the failure of sufficient progress in 2020," he added. "But aggressive, transformative change, framed against the backdrop of social justice, can ignite an enormous deployment that will let us avert the worst of the climate emergency."
Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.
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Wisdom the mōlī, or Laysan albatross, is the oldest wild bird known to science at the age of at least 70. She is also, as of February 1, a new mother.
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The Science Behind Frozen Wind Turbines – and How to Keep Them Spinning Through the Winter
By Hui Hu
Winter is supposed to be the best season for wind power – the winds are stronger, and since air density increases as the temperature drops, more force is pushing on the blades. But winter also comes with a problem: freezing weather.
Comparing rime ice and glaze ice shows how each changes the texture of the blade. Gao, Liu and Hu, 2021, CC BY-ND
Ice buildup changes air flow around the turbine blade, which can slow it down. The top photos show ice forming after 10 minutes at different temperatures in the Wind Research Tunnel. The lower measurements show airflow separation as ice accumulates. Icing Research Tunnel of Iowa State University, CC BY-ND
How ice builds up on the tips of turbine blades. Gao, Liu and Hu, 2021, CC BY-ND
While traditional investment in the ocean technology sector has been tentative, growth in Israeli maritime innovations has been exponential in the last few years, and environmental concern has come to the forefront.
theDOCK aims to innovate the Israeli maritime sector. Pexels
<p>The UN hopes that new investments in ocean science and technology will help turn the tide for the oceans. As such, this year kicked off the <a href="https://www.oceandecade.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030)</a> to galvanize massive support for the blue economy.</p><p>According to the World Bank, the blue economy is the "sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of ocean ecosystem," <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019338255#b0245" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Science Direct</a> reported. It represents this new sector for investments and innovations that work in tandem with the oceans rather than in exploitation of them.</p><p>As recently as Aug. 2020, <a href="https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/esg-investors-slow-make-waves-25tn-ocean-economy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reuters</a> noted that ESG Investors, those looking to invest in opportunities that have a positive impact in environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, have been interested in "blue finance" but slow to invest.</p><p>"It is a hugely under-invested economic opportunity that is crucial to the way we have to address living on one planet," Simon Dent, director of blue investments at Mirova Natural Capital, told Reuters.</p><p>Even with slow investment, the blue economy is still expected to expand at twice the rate of the mainstream economy by 2030, Reuters reported. It already contributes $2.5tn a year in economic output, the report noted.</p><p>Current, upward <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/-innovation-blue-economy-2646147405.html" target="_self">shifts in blue economy investments are being driven by innovation</a>, a trend the UN hopes will continue globally for the benefit of all oceans and people.</p><p>In Israel, this push has successfully translated into investment in and innovation of global ports, shipping, logistics and offshore sectors. The "Startup Nation," as Israel is often called, has seen its maritime tech ecosystem grow "significantly" in recent years and expects that growth to "accelerate dramatically," <a href="https://itrade.gov.il/belgium-english/how-israel-is-becoming-a-port-of-call-for-maritime-innovation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">iTrade</a> reported.</p><p>Driving this wave of momentum has been rising Israeli venture capital hub <a href="https://www.thedockinnovation.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">theDOCK</a>. Founded by Israeli Navy veterans in 2017, theDOCK works with early-stage companies in the maritime space to bring their solutions to market. The hub's pioneering efforts ignited Israel's maritime technology sector, and now, with their new fund, theDOCK is motivating these high-tech solutions to also address ESG criteria.</p><p>"While ESG has always been on theDOCK's agenda, this theme has become even more of a priority," Nir Gartzman, theDOCK's managing partner, told EcoWatch. "80 percent of the startups in our portfolio (for theDOCK's Navigator II fund) will have a primary or secondary contribution to environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria."</p><p>In a company presentation, theDOCK called contribution to the ESG agenda a "hot discussion topic" for traditional players in the space and their boards, many of whom are looking to adopt new technologies with a positive impact on the planet. The focus is on reducing carbon emissions and protecting the environment, the presentation outlines. As such, theDOCK also explicitly screens candidate investments by ESG criteria as well.</p><p>Within the maritime space, environmental innovations could include measures like increased fuel and energy efficiency, better monitoring of potential pollution sources, improved waste and air emissions management and processing of marine debris/trash into reusable materials, theDOCK's presentation noted.</p>theDOCK team includes (left to right) Michal Hendel-Sufa, Head of Alliances, Noa Schuman, CMO, Nir Gartzman, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, and Hannan Carmeli, Co-Founder & Managing Partner. Dudu Koren
<p>theDOCK's own portfolio includes companies like Orca AI, which uses an intelligent collision avoidance system to reduce the probability of oil or fuel spills, AiDock, which eliminates the use of paper by automating the customs clearance process, and DockTech, which uses depth "crowdsourcing" data to map riverbeds in real-time and optimize cargo loading, thereby reducing trips and fuel usage while also avoiding groundings.</p><p>"Oceans are a big opportunity primarily because they are just that – big!" theDOCK's Chief Marketing Officer Noa Schuman summarized. "As such, the magnitude of their criticality to the global ecosystem, the magnitude of pollution risk and the steps needed to overcome those challenges – are all huge."</p><p>There is hope that this wave of interest and investment in environmentally-positive maritime technologies will accelerate the blue economy and ESG investing even further, in Israel and beyond.</p>- 14 Countries Commit to Ocean Sustainability Initiative - EcoWatch ›
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