Global warming

[pbrower2a]

Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).

It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-scien...a2cd4b6e34

[Eric the Green]

A study shows climate change made India and Pakistan’s record heat in March and April at least 30 times as likely to occur and about 1.8 degrees hotter
By Kasha Patel, May 23, 2022 at 2:12 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2...te-change/

The punishing heat experienced by India and Pakistan in March and April was the most intense, widespread and persistent in the region’s history. A study released Monday finds that human-caused climate change had made this historic event at least 30 times as likely. It determined that climate change elevated temperatures by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Celsius).

"What was particularly exceptional and particularly unusual was how early it started," Friederike Otto, co-author of the study, said in a news conference on Monday.

India experienced its highest March temperatures in 122 years, and Pakistan and northwestern and central India endured their hottest April. Numerous all-time and monthly temperature records were broken across both countries. Over the two months, extreme heat affected nearly 70 percent of India and 30 percent of Pakistan.

This heat event would have been "highly, highly unlikely" in a world without climate change, said Arpita Mondal, a co-author and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

The heat took an enormous toll on people throughout the region. Workers were no longer able to work full days outside, putting a strain on their livelihoods and the economy. Key farming areas in India are expected to see a 10 to 35 percent decrease in crop yields due to the heat wave, driving up local market prices and reducing global wheat supplies at a time when supplies are already under stress because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of forest fires also burned across India. In Pakistan, snowmelt caused a glacial lake to flood and wipe out a key bridge....

My note: I also saw that similar conditions occured in Iraq this Spring.

[Eric the Green]

"Earth Emergency" film shows the scientific data on the tipping points and feedback loops that are accelerating global warming now. We can reverse these loops too, if we act soon. Watch for the film later on youtube, or watch for it on PBS.

Interview with Richard Gere about this Earth Emergency PBS film not yet available:

[Eric the Green]

Supreme Court Sharply Limits Regulation Of Carbon Emissions
The court just made it much harder for the federal government to respond to climate change.
By Paul Blumenthal and Alexander C. Kaufman
Jun 30, 2022, 10:07 AM EDT | Updated 5 hours ago

The Supreme Court just made it much harder for the U.S. government to respond to climate change in a 6-3 decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA.

The Thursday decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the other five conservative justices, preemptively strikes down any regulations the Biden administration might consider issuing under a provision of the Clean Air Act to limit carbon emissions at power plants.

The court ruled that EPA regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions under a specific provision of the 1970 Clean Air Act are not permissible because Congress did not specifically authorize the EPA to regulate CO2.

Carbon functions differently from other air pollutants power plants spew, such as mercury or acid gasses, in that it harms human health primarily by accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the planet. As such, the EPA tried under the Obama administration to regulate power plant emissions by encouraging plant operators to limit emissions across the board, not just from individual facilities.

According to the court, the EPA has the authority to regulate individual plans, but not to make more sweeping efforts to regulate carbon emissions – that has to come from Congress.

The court’s decision follows the expanding logic of its so-called “major questions doctrine.” The doctrine states that the Supreme Court can strike down regulatory action of “vast economic and political significance” if Congress did not specifically delegate a rule-issuing agency to issue that regulation.

“This is a major questions case,” Roberts writes. “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself. Given these circumstances, there is every reason to ‘hesitate before concluding that Congress’ meant to confer on EPA the authority it claims.”

Capping carbon emissions from power plants “may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Roberts writes. But, he continues, “it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.” Instead, a regulation of “such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself.”

The Supreme Court sided with the state of West Virginia and coal companies to stop the EPA from issuing new rules to limit carbon emissions.

This expansive use of the major questions doctrine threatens to resurrect the court’s rarely invoked “nondelegation doctrine.” The nondelegation doctrine claims that executive branch agencies cannot update and write new regulations unless Congress specifically delegates that authority to them. The court most famously invoked this doctrine to strike down two New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the court has long relied on other interpretations of law and its own precedents to let Congress delegate rule-writing authority to executive branch agencies without the kind of precise delegation that the doctrine would require.

While not fully resurrecting nondelegation, the court will now no longer just assume that Congress has delegated authority to the agencies. Instead, the major questions doctrine allows the court to pick-and-choose for itself which regulations rise to questions of “vast economic and political significance.” This could have significant implications for many executive branch agency regulations, including any that further regulate carbon emissions.

Justice Elena Kagan pointed out the potentially arbitrary nature of the major questions doctrine in her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“Courts should be modest,” Kagan writes. “Today, the Court is not. ... In rewriting that text, the Court substitutes its own ideas about delegations for Congress’s. And that means the Court substitutes its own ideas about policymaking for Congress’s.”

That the case revolves around efforts to combat climate change is “all the more troubling,” according to Kagan. The court, she writes, “does not have a clue about how to address climate change.”

“The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening,” Kagan states.

The Supreme Court decision results from years of litigation over the issue of carbon emission regulation across three different administrations, all centered on an obscure clause of the Clean Air Act.

The Obama administration used the law’s Section 111D to justify rules in the Clean Power Plan, its signature plan to cut carbon from electricity-generating stations, spurring utilities to shift production from high-emitting plants to more efficient ones. But opponents of regulation accused the White House of misinterpreting legal language they said only gave the EPA the right to dictate what power station owners could do within the facility’s “fenceline.” The Clean Power Plan gave companies options “beyond the fenceline” to comply with the rule by building renewable energy farms or running lower-emitting plants to offset dirtier coal-fired stations.

The Obama EPA’s interpretation was “a reach,” said Brendan Collins, a partner at the Philadelphia-based environmental law firm Ballard Spahr. But the policy was really meant to be a stopgap that would give utilities more flexibility until carbon capture technology — hardware that can be retrofitted onto the smokestacks of a plant to collect and store carbon gas before it enters the atmosphere — became feasible enough to mandate.

“At the end of the day, if EPA isn’t ready to say carbon capture is a technology that’s sufficiently feasible from a technical and financial standpoint that it can impose that obligation, then the best thing you can do is use less coal to make the same amount of electricity,” said Collins, whose firm’s clients are not involved in the case.

Whereas the Clean Power Plan gave multiple options for achieving that outcome, including by giving utilities the right to shift generation from dirtier to cleaner plants, the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE, rule narrowed the regulation’s scope, requiring power station operators to make coal-fired units more efficient. The rule actually gave plant owners an incentive to burn more coal, as long as the generators in use were more efficient.

Had the Trump administration stopped at just withdrawing and replacing the Clean Power Plan, there might not be a case here today. But the Trump-era EPA specifically argued that its interpretation of Section 111D as limiting federal authority to the area “within the fenceline” was correct.

“The political reason was to lock in the victory,” Collins said. “But the Trump administration did not hedge. They did not say, ‘We can only do this, and even if we could do more and had the discretion to make that choice, we exercise discretion to only do this because we think that’s the most technically feasible choice.’ No. They went for it all by saying, ‘We must do no more than this, and we cannot do more than this.’”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the ACE rule on those grounds, ruling that Section 111D does, in fact, grant the EPA authority beyond a facility’s fenceline.

In disagreeing with the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court has largely left the EPA where it started. The Clean Power Plan was already rescinded, and the Biden administration has said it would not revive the regulation. The ACE rule was already struck down, and the Biden administration said it would not reinstate the regulation. And the EPA has yet to announce what it plans to propose in place of the ACE rule.

Given how much legal doubt the Obama administration’s use of Section 111D caused, few policy observers expected rulemakers at Biden’s EPA to rely on that same statute this time around.

“There isn’t going to be any effect on power plants from this case, win, lose or draw,” Collins said ahead of the decision.

But Collins said to expect that the Biden administration’s forthcoming power plant plan will be far more aggressive as a result of West Virginia v. EPA. Stripped of its ability to offer a similar menu of compliance options, the agency will likely have to rely more heavily on emissions cuts directly at facilities. In other words, new solar panels or more use of a gas plant won’t bail out a coal-fired power station; the plant would have to either capture its emissions or shut down.

That, he said, is why the plaintiffs in West Virginia v. EPA were primarily a coal-mining company and Republican states.

“Westmoreland Coal? They’re in the business of selling coal. Red states? They’re in the business of getting elected. So you don’t have anybody who has to deal with the consequences of what this outcome will be,” Collins said. “And the consequences would be a more ironfisted approach. … It’ll be an uncomfortable world for power generators.”

In a footnote on the conservative majority’s opinion, the decision stated that EPA does not have the authority to “direct existing sources to effectively cease to exist,” and thus “we doubt it could” enact measures “simply requiring coal plants to become natural gas plants.”

The EPA is required to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act as a result of a doctrine known as the “endangerment finding.” The finding, which took effect in 2010, officially designated planet-heating gases as pollutants that reach the Clean Air Act’s threshold for harming human health.

Rescinding that finding would, experts say, require EPA lawyers to disprove the reality of climate science in court. The extreme unlikeliness of that outcome may be why the Trump administration resisted calls from allies to target the finding.

Legal recognition of the danger that greenhouse gases pose does not dictate a prescription for how to reduce them. That ambiguity gave the Trump-era EPA the authority to enact a power plant regulation that, according to models, would fail to cut emissions at the rate U.S. government scientists said was necessary to avoid catastrophic warming.

The systemic shifts in energy use required to keep global temperatures from rising to extreme levels under most mainstream climate models would already amount to an unprecedented economic overhaul. With each passing year, the degree of change that’s needed grows ever more drastic.

But based on the court’s logic in the West Virginia case, it may well find that any other regulation issued by the EPA to limit carbon emissions without specific instruction from Congress violates its major question doctrine. With Congress polarized on whether or not to even respond to climate change, let alone how, the court may well have cut off major avenues for regulation.

In the meantime, U.S. emissions are on pace to spike again this year.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-c...69caa14933

[beechnut79]

Just a few days ago I saw a post concerning gas prices, and despite record highs it was predicted that it will be like all the other times, where folks gripe for a while, then get used to it and willing pay the inflated price.

[pbrower2a]

(06-30-2022, 06:30 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Just a few days ago I saw a post concerning gas prices, and despite record highs it was predicted that it will be like all the other times, where folks gripe for a while, then get used to it and willing pay the inflated price.

Prices will adjust to accommodate higher fuel prices, and people will change their ways. Pleasure travel might completely drop off. People may do more shopping on the Web. Given a choice between ordering cat food on line and traveling seventy miles to buy it, I used the Big A twice in the last six months. Books, video, and compact disks? Sure, I can get those on line if they aren't in a local thrift shop. I never expected to buy cat food from the Big A!

People are more likely to rely upon local entertainments, which means that we may have more people watching high-school sports and band concerts. Live music might get a boost as more people of limited talent become the attraction for bars and restaurants. 

People may decide that gas prices are so high that a household improvement such as painting or remodeling makes more sense than does taking the usual cross-country trip. As I have found, one can take the dial-a-ride service to travel within town, My car gets about 10 mpg in stop-and-go traffic and perhaps 30 in freeway traffic. You would be surprised at how small-town driving eats gasoline. If I really did live in town I would use a bicycle for much of my travel in town (eschewing a bicycle only in bad weather). I need to use roads to get to town on which the speed limit is 55 mph (snicker, snicker if you believe that people observe that speed).

(An aside: I reported a second-tier highway to the State Police for having plenty of opportunity for picking up speeders who travel at freeway speeds because the road is low, straight, and flat when I was walking a dog nearby. Within a couple weeks I saw Michigan state police pulling people over on that road, one that they rarely patrolled. 

Electric cars will steadily supplant gas-buggies (they are much more efficient for stop-and-go driving because the motor can absorb engine power from braking, and those vehicles use much less power while idling. Having driven one, I have noticed that above 40 mpg, power consumption is a linear function of speed, which explains why my car uses little more power at 70 mph than at 30 mph. Hybrid vehicles may be the norm, but how common is your cross-country road-trip? Maybe with self-driven vehicles we could have roads on which travel is around 40 mph because one can sleep at the wheel while the car recharges much like an electrified train or trolley on such a road.   

Economic realities will more shape spending habits than will technology. If you are making $3200 a month and spending $2400 a month on rent, then you really are poor. I have said that there is no techno-fix for food shortages, but neither is there one for gouging, either.

[JasonBlack]

Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

[pbrower2a]

(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

Everyone will face higher prices; those prices will be starker for the poor. High prices change human behavior. I have known of people who got out of the climatic paradise of coastal California for the climatic Hell of Iowa.

Palm trees grow in San Francisco, which reflects not so much hot summers but the absence of a real winter. January in San Francisco is even warmer than January in Houston, and summers are around the temperatures ideal for outside activity. 

(Iowa)

Iowa has a humid continental climate throughout the state (Köppen climate classification Dfa) with extremes of both heat and cold. The average annual temperature at Des Moines is 50 °F (10 °C); for some locations in the north, such as Mason City, the figure is about 45 °F (7 °C), while Keokuk, on the Mississippi River, averages 52 °F (11 °C).[84] Snowfall is common, with Des Moines getting about 26 days of snowfall a year, and other places, such as Shenandoah getting about 11 days of snowfall in a year.[85]
Spring ushers in the beginning of the severe weather season. Iowa averages about 50 days of thunderstorm activity per year.[86] The 30-year annual average of tornadoes in Iowa is 47.[87] In 2008, twelve people were killed by tornadoes in Iowa, making it the deadliest year since 1968 and also the second most tornadoes in a year with 105, matching the total from 2001.[88]
Iowa summers are known for heat and humidity, with daytime temperatures sometimes near 90 °F (32 °C) and occasionally exceeding 100 °F (38 °C). Average winters in the state have been known to drop well below freezing, even dropping below −18 °F (−28 °C). Iowa's all-time hottest temperature of 118 °F (48 °C) was recorded at Keokuk on July 20, 1934, during a nationwide heat wave;[89] the all-time lowest temperature of −47 °F (−44 °C) was recorded in Washta on January 12, 1912.[90]

(from Wikipedia)

Nobody lives in Iowa for the fire-and-ice climate. One lives there for economic reasons or extreme sentimentality about kin and community. Why would anyone live in Iowa instead of San Francisco? The difference in rent can buy the air conditioning, heating oil, and winter clothes that one needs even if one takes a big pay cut with the move. If I were to design a Hell, then I would impose Iowa winters and Iowa summers with no transition between the two except for tornadoes. Waterloo has a record high of 100F and a record low of -4F... in April alone. You could get frostbite and heatstroke in the same month. Of course, shoveling snow is excellent exercise. (I live in Michigan, which is much the same, and I use the shovel as a plow)..  
   

Prices are signals. You are much more likely to eat hamburgers than lobster if you are poor. Poor people are the market for cars in the latter years of the operating range of those cars' lives. Poor people may have to share a slum apartment that even a middle-class person would find appalling. Poor people are more likely to neglect their health (which reflects that poverty is a contributing factor to early death in America). Poverty is misery in a society that demands mass poverty but ridicules those who endure it. 

Gas-buggies replaced horse-drawn vehicles not because the gas buggies were faster or more comfortable but instead because gasoline was much cheaper than oats. If motor fuels got expensive enough and oats remained at real costs as they were in the 1910's, then we would start to see horse-drawn vehicles outside of Amish country. 

Birth rates collapse in urban areas where space is expensive (middle-class parents want their ki8ds to have play areas and privacy in their bedrooms), but they either abandon middle-class values or have no kids. Such is so irrespective of ethnicity, national heritage, or religion. It is so in Munich and Mumbai, or Tokyo and Toronto alike. Peasant families raise lots of children (and those children endure hard lives).  Global warming will force population growth down -- way down -- but not fast enough. People won't catch on until their children become cannon fodder in wars that brutal, callous regimes wage after Trump-like demagogues become full-blown dictators. That will likely be when kids born in the 2060s who expected a paradise of mind-numbing entertainment find themselves in the worst of all combat situations as soldiers --  or committers of horrific war crimes and crimes against Humanity. A 20th-century gangster like Hitler won't seem so bad by contrast when the genocides go into the tens of millions, famines reach levels that Mao Zedong would consider personal failure, and wars are waged with complete disregard for the survival of soldiers until it is too late. World population might fall by a couple billion due to wars, atrocities, persecutions, famines, and plagues. Maybe people start to recognize that life is precious again around the end of the 21st century and when soils in what was recently boreal forest get the sorts of nutrients characteristic of the rich mid-latitude farm areas, and food scarcity abates. Maybe with lesser energy use due to a shrunken population global warming might abate some, and some desertified lands (like much of southeastern Europe) become fertile again and the oceans retreat to restore some rich alluvial plains to farming. Survivors will have learned some critical lessons the hard ways -- for which there is no preparation.

[Eric the Green]

(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

Which they will if neoliberalism requires that government support not be available to them.

[David Horn]

(07-10-2022, 04:01 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

Which they will if neoliberalism requires that government support not be available to them.

Yeah, he kinda walked right into thqt one. 

[Eric the Green]

(07-10-2022, 07:52 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-10-2022, 04:01 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

Which they will if neoliberalism requires that government support not be available to them.

Yeah, he kinda walked right into thqt one. 

[pbrower2a]

(07-10-2022, 04:01 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-09-2022, 11:26 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Something I think we should all agree on: plans to curb global warming will never work if the poor end up with drastically higher prices.

Which they will if neoliberalism requires that government support not be available to them.

A cynical joke about an encounter between Brezhnev and Reagan in Hell:

Brezhnev related the old smear about the Soviet economy:

"Workers pretend to work and we pretend to pay them".

Reagan retorted:

"Our executives crack the whip, get real work, and don't even pretend to pay workers. They pay themselves instead".

[pbrower2a]

Off topic, but funny:

Cigarette packs in Ukraine tell people:

You should quit smoking so you get to see how Putin dies.

[Eric the Green]

If this is the way we are entering a first turning, leaving this crisis unsolved, what does a first turning mean anymore?

No, the 4T is just ramping up, and it's the time to initiate a new way of life, as it has always been. The time is now. Not the next 2T, or the 1T, but now. The new Manchin-Schumer bill must be passed, and it's a start, but it won't be enough. Coal planets are still open. We need to move fast on the needs we can already meet with the tools we already have, so that we have time to fix those things we haven't yet solved. It will take new attitudes and a new politics.

"The impacts of the Climate Crisis are terrifyingly large, but also exhilarating", says Wallace-Wells. It reminds me of JFK's inaugural speech. "I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it!" he said in the time of the Cold War and its nuclear threat (which we also have again now too).

The climate crisis is too vast and complicated to solve with a silver bullet, says author David Wallace-Wells. What we need is a shift in how we live. Follow along as he lays out some of the dramatic actions we could take to build a livable, prosperous world in the age of global warming.

[David Horn]

Eric,
I admire your enthusiasm, but doing too little for too long is simply inadequate to the task. Money and neoliberal philosophy still rule. I can't see that resolving soon enough to trigger a satisfactory solution to the mess we're facing today. That this will be resolved I have no doubt, but the path to get there may prove steep and long. If we fail in teh 4T, the 2T will pick up the slack -- and punish some offenders too, I think.

[Eric the Green]

10 years to transform the future of humanity -- or destabilize the planet
by Johan Rockström





Take action on climate change at http://countdown.ted.com.

"For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet," says climate impact scholar Johan Rockström. In a talk backed by vivid animations of the climate crisis, he shows how nine out of the 15 big biophysical systems that regulate the climate -- from the permafrost of Siberia to the great forests of the North to the Amazon rainforest -- are at risk of reaching tipping points, which could make Earth uninhabitable for humanity. Hear his plan for putting the planet back on the path of sustainability over the next 10 years -- and protecting the future of our children.

This talk was part of the Countdown Global Launch on 10.10.2020. (Watch the full event here: https://youtu.be/5dVcn8NjbwY.) Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get involved at https://countdown.ted.com/sign-up

[Eric the Green]

(08-01-2022, 03:17 PM)David Horn Wrote: Eric,
I admire your enthusiasm, but doing too little for too long is simply inadequate to the task.  Money and neoliberal philosophy still rule.  I can't see that resolving soon enough to trigger a satisfactory solution to the mess we're facing today.  That this will be resolved I have no doubt, but the path to get there may prove steep and long.  If we fail in the 4T, the 2T will pick up the slack -- and punish some offenders too, I think.

If we fail in the 4T, we will NOT be able to pick up the slack. 

This is not enthusiasm. What does that mean? No, this is reality. 4Ts are when institutions are changed. 2Ts mostly just change culture and bring more human rights, at least for a while. Now is the time. Democrats must win.

Instead of saying what you can't see, you need to focus your vision a bit more. Listen to Johan Rockström

If you and other Boomers think you are too old, remember that David Attenborough is 94, an early Silent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough

Don't forget the USA has now made a good start. I hope we can do more, but now the biggest question is China.

[Eric the Green]

Watch the Countdown Global Launch, a call to action on climate change






Learn how you can take action on climate change and join the race to a zero-carbon world:
#JoinTheCountdown
Website: https://countdown.ted.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TEDCountdown
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedcountdown
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED

Countdown Global Launch agenda and speaker list:

Session 1: Urgency (0:00:00)
Hosted by Mark Ruffalo and Don Cheadle
Featuring: Johan Rockström, Angel Hsu, António Guterres, Prince Royce, David Lammy and Christiana Figueres

Session 2: Leadership (1:08:48)
Hosted by Al Gore and Jaden Smith
Featuring: Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Ursula von der Leyen, Olafur Eliasson, Rebecca Henderson, Elif Shafak, Jesper Brodin, Pia Heidenmark Cook, Dave Clark, Kara Hurst, Aparna Nancherla, Carlos Moreno, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr and Yemi Alade

Session 3: Transformation (2:18:29)
Hosted by Jane Fonda and Xiye Bastida
Featuring: Varun Sivaram, Myles Allen, Rose M. Mutiso, Raye Zaragoza, Monica Araya, Al Gore, Gloria Kasang Bulus, Nana Firman, Ximena Loría, Tim Guinee, Stephen Wilkes and Yemi Alade

Session 4: Breakthroughs (3:26:25)
Hosted by Prajakta Koli and Hannah Stocking
Featuring: Thomas Crowther, Ernestine Leikeki Sevidzem, Brent Loken, John Doerr, Hal Harvey, Sigrid, Karen Scrivener, Tom Schuler, Rahwa Ghirmatzion, Zelalem Adefris and Prince William

Session 5: Action (4:34:02)
Hosted by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Chris Hemsworth
Featuring: Amanda Gorman, Roman Krznaric, Sophie Howe, Miao Wang, Alok Sharma, Nigel Topping, Lisa Jackson, Liz Ogbu, Ava DuVernay, His Holiness Pope Francis, Andri Snær Magnason, Cynthia Erivo and Gary Motley

[pbrower2a]

Today, as a result of one of the severest droughts ever in the Danubian Plain, hulks of sunken German warships from WWII, some still containing live munitions, have been exposed as the waterline shrinks.

This of course is weather and not a definitive result of AGW, but it is consistent with a pattern that some projections have for 50 to 75 years from now. At the least , warmer temperatures will require heavier rains just to offset evaporation in temperate zones. Europe is the region most likely to face ecological change from climate change.

East of Vienna, the countries in the Danubian plain are big producers of wheat, the grain crop most tolerant of low rainfall in the middle latitudes. Should climates in the Danubian basin get appreciably drier and hotter, then even the wheat crop will fail. Combining higher temperatures and lesser rains, the Danubian basin will go from something like eastern Nebraska to eastern New Mexico. Ranching would have to take over from wheat growing.

[pbrower2a]

The Hungarian plain is already on the margin between cropland and steppe, and BBC Travel has a story on cowboy-like life in Hungary. This is not dude ranches for rich tourists from richer countries to the west. You almost might expect to see John Wayne in some of these places had Hungary not been a Communist country when he was making his post-WWII movies. 

BBC Travel has a story on this:



The costumes and the buildings would be out of place on the Ponderosa. These are real cowboys. 


The Great Hungarian Plain is Europe’s answer to the American West – complete with rough-and-tumble herdsmen, horses trained to lie flat on command and a history of highwaymen.

Great Hungarian Plain, hortobagy, Hungary


For more than 2,000 years, the Great Hungarian Plain (known as the Alföld in Hungarian) has been home to a rich cultural tradition of pastoral living and animal husbandry techniques – from ancient nomadic tribes who left behind stone burial mounds known as kurgans, to the fierce Magyar warriors who arrived in the late 9th Century and founded a network of settlements along the Tisza River. The plain covers 52,000sqkm in eastern and southern Hungary alone, encompassing 56% of the country. But its full area measures nearly twice that amount, including parts of Romania, Serbia and Croatia. (De Agostini/Getty)

Great Hungarian Plain, Hungary, Hortobagy


Founded in 1973, [Hortobágy National Park](http://www.hnp.hu/index_en.php) is situated within eastern Hungary’s section of the Great Hungarian Plain. At 800sqkm, the park is both the country’s largest protected area and the largest continuous natural grassland in all of Europe. The region is especially well known for the semi-nomadic mounted herdsmen (or csikósok) who once roamed Hortobágy’s expansive alkaline pastures and steppes, collectively called the puszta. Pictured here, in traditional dress (a blue or white linen shirt and trousers with a black, wide-brimmed hat and feather), the herdsmen hold a similar place in the country’s cultural memory as cowboys do in the western United States. (Candace Rose Rardon)

More here.