How Bad Is Global Warming?

[DrEvil]

Also, we're extra super special boned:

Two degrees decimated Puerto Rico's insect populations

While temperatures in the tropical forests of northeastern Puerto Rico have climbed two degrees Celsius since the mid-1970s, the biomass of arthropods—invertebrate animals such as insects, millipedes, and sowbugs—has declined by as much as 60-fold, according to new findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding supports the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warnings of severe environmental threats given a 2.0 degree Celsius elevation in global temperature. Like some other tropical locations, the study area in the Luquillo rainforest has already reached or exceeded a 2.0 degree Celsius rise in average temperature, and the study finds that the consequences are potentially catastrophic.

"Our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated" said Brad Lister lead author of the study and a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing, and once that begins the animals that eat the insects have insufficient food, which results in decreased reproduction and survivorship and consequent declines in abundance."

"Climate Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web" is based on data collected between 1976 and 2013 by the authors and the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research program at three mid-elevation habitats in Puerto Rico's protected Luquillo rainforest. During this time, mean maximum temperatures have risen by 2.0 degrees Celsius.

Major findings include:

- Sticky traps used to sample arthropods on the ground and in the forest canopy were indicative of a collapse in forest arthropods, with biomass catch rates falling up to 60-fold between 1976 and 2013.
- The biomass of arthropods collected by ground-level sweep netting also declined as much as eight-fold from 1976 to 2013.
- As arthropods declined, simultaneous decreases occurred in Luquillo's insectivorous lizards, frogs, and birds.
- The authors also compared estimates of arthropod abundance they made in the 1980s in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve in western Mexico with estimates from 2014. Over this time period mean temperature increased 2.4 Celsius and arthropod biomass declined eightfold.

Cold blooded animals living in tropical climates are particularly vulnerable to climate warming since that they are adapted to relatively stable year-round temperatures. Given their analyses of the data, which included new techniques to assess causality, the authors conclude that climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance in the Luquillo forest. These reductions have precipitated a major bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.

Given that tropical forests harbor two thirds of the Earth's species, these results have profound implications for the future stability and biodiversity of rainforest ecosystems, as well as conservation efforts aimed at mitigating the effects of climate forcing.

Andres Garcia, of the Universidad Nacional Autònoma de Mèxico, was co-author on the study which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Research into the effects of climate change is an exciting aspect of The New Polytechnic, an emerging paradigm for teaching, learning, and research at Rensselaer. The foundation for this vision is the recognition that global challenges and opportunities are so great they cannot be adequately addressed by even the most talented person working alone. The New Polytechnic is transformative in the global impact of research, in its innovative pedagogy, and in the lives of students at Rensselaer.

More information: Bradford C. Lister el al., "Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web," PNAS (2018). http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722477115

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-degrees-d ... nsect.html

[JackRiddler]

.

In another year it will be ten years of this thread.

Ten years that (if I'm not wrong about one or two things in the following list) will exceed or tie (plus or minus 10% in some categories) any other recorded 10-year period for species die-off, global decline in non-livestock vertebrate-to-insectoid and arboreal biomass, habitat destruction -- but hey, no worries, so many trees planted! -- trash and cowshit produced, ocean plastic, coral reefs killed, emissions, water pollution, uncontrolled urban growth, growth of dead patches at river deltas, rise in temperatures, ice sheet melt, production of new billionaires, hurricane activity, forest fires, methane release, water consumption, absolute hydrocarbon consumption, electronics thrown away, rivers lowered, new desert, and pharmaceuticals consumed and pissed into the fresh water supply. The population is up, another billion poor people have been redefined statistically as no longer extremely poor, the people shown on television have never been as diverse, the death rate from war hostilities and epidemics is at a low, 60-80% of everyone carries and fondles a powerful hand computer at all times, the dollar is still king. What can go wrong? Dr. Pangloss and Dr. Pinker rule!

.

[DrEvil]

It's fucking depressing is what it is. We're destroying the life support system of our species with eyes wide open.

[DrEvil]

Continuing on with the good news:

2018 was the ocean's hottest year. We'll feel it a long time.

The ocean soaks up 93 percent of the heat of climate change. But that heat has a big and long-lasting impact.
By Alejandra Borunda
PUBLISHED January 16, 2019


Earth’s oceans are warmer now than at any point since humans started systematically tracking their temperatures, according to research published on January 16 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The oceans have sopped up more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, slowing the warming of the atmosphere—but causing many other unwelcome changes to the planet’s climate.

Even a slightly warmer ocean can have dramatic impacts. Other new research shows that warmer oceans make waves stronger. Warmer waters fuel stronger storms, increasing the damage that hurricanes and tropical storms inflict. The added warmth hurts coral habitats and stresses fisheries. Around Antarctica, yet another new study suggests, ice is melting about six times faster than it was in the 1980s—an increase due in part to the warmer waters lapping at the continent’s edge.

“The oceans are the best thermometer we have for the planet,” says Zeke Hausfather, an energy and climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the ocean heat data published today in an analysis published last week in Science. “We can really see global warming loud and clear in the ocean record.”

Missing heat is now found

As early as the 1800s, scientists suspected that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause air temperatures around the planet to rise. By the 1960s, once they started keeping careful track of both air temperatures and carbon dioxide levels around the world, their predictions were borne out.

The atmosphere didn’t seem to be warming quite as much as model calculations indicated it should, however. Where could the extra heat be going?

Some oceanographers suspected that the “missing” heat was being absorbed into the oceans—but measuring that heat was much harder than measuring air temperatures. Although research ships crossing the ocean would occasionally dip a probe into the water to test the temperature, those data were tiny blips in the wide expanse of the sea.

So scientists pulled together all data they could find, from observations from commercial ships to naval data to historical records. And when all that was compiled, the scientists realized that the oceans were, in fact, acting as an enormous buffer for the climate system, like a giant pillow softening the hard landing of climate change.

In the last decade, measurements of the ocean's heat content have been improved dramatically by a new tool: Some 3,000 autonomous sensors, called Argo floats, have been scattered around the ocean. They regularly record temperatures in the top 6,500 feet of the water column and have immensely improved the quality of the data scientists have to work with for these estimates.

Thanks to those measurements, it's now clear that the oceans are absorbing some 90 percent of the heat our carbon emissions have trapped in the atmosphere—the most recent estimate, published last week, pegs that number at 93 percent. If all the heat the ocean absorbed from 1955 onward were suddenly added to the atmosphere, air temperatures would rocket by more than 60 degrees.

In other words, the oceans are acting as a giant thermal buffer, protecting us from feeling all the heat of climate change directly. But the heat isn't going away.

The warming is speeding up

In 2018, the entire top slice of the ocean, from the surface down 6,500 feet, was warmer than ever before, just over one tenth of a degree Celsius warmer overall than the long-term average. Even that tiny bump was enough to nudge sea levels about an eight of an inch higher, simply because warmer water takes up more space.

But 2018 caps off nearly three decades of smooth, consistent warming, the cumulative results of which can be felt more keenly.

“The warming seems small on a day-to-day basis, but it adds up over time,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and an author of today’s report. The extra energy pooling in the atmosphere slowly percolates into the ocean, and “and that’s why we keep breaking records year after year,” he says.

More alarmingly, over those last few decades, oceans warmed nearly 40 percent faster than they did in the middle of the last century, say the authors of the Science analysis from last week.

Since the Industrial Revolution, says Laure Zanna, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who recently inventoried the ocean's growing absorption of extra heat, the amount of extra energy trapped in the ocean as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions is about 1,000 times as great as the amount of the energy humans use each year, worldwide.

What happens now lasts centuries

There’s essentially no limit to how much more heat from the atmosphere the oceans can absorb: they’re huge and deep. But the ocean has a long memory, and the heat it sucks up now will be stuck in the system for hundreds or even thousands of years: The ghost of a cold phase from a few hundred years ago in the North Atlantic is still floating through the world’s oceans, a study published in Science in early January showed.

So the decisions we make now will affect us far into the future, says Susan Wijffels, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod. “The ability of the deep ocean to take up heat on that very long timescale is great. But it's also locking in a commitment in the system,” she says. So even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the ocean will continue to warm for centuries—and will take even longer to shed the extra heat.

The effects, say the authors of the new heat assessment, are likely to disrupt both marine physics and marine life. Warmer oceans hold less oxygen, which could hurt biota from plankton to whales. A warmer baseline temperature makes the likelihood of marine heat waves more likely, like the one that swept through the waters off northeast China last summer, ruining the sea cucumber harvest across the shallow seas. Zanna and her colleagues also see evidence that the major currents that carry heat and nutrients around the ocean are changing.

The full magnitude of the changes will take hundreds of years to play out, Wijffels says.

“Every molecule of CO2 that we don’t put into the atmosphere now is saving us from warming potential in the future,” she says. “This really drives home that we need to reduce emissions now, as much as we can.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envi ... than-ever/

Studies Show Ice Melting and Ocean Warming Both Happening Much Faster Than Previously Thought

"Just a reminder that behind each day's controversies, the biggest story is constantly playing out."
by Julia Conley, staff writer
Published on Wednesday, January 16, 2019 by Common Dreams

A multitude of new climate studies has painted a picture of the numerous factors that are simultaneously leading to rising sea levels, which could increase by more than 10 feet by the end of the century.

Scientists at University of California, Irvine found significant acceleration in the melting of ice across Antarctica, compared with how fast the ice was melting in the 1980s.

On social media, author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben was among those who issued a reminder that despite daily news regarding the Trump administration, the climate crisis remains "the biggest story" affecting the entire planet.

Just a reminder that behind each day's controversies, the biggest story is constantly playing outhttps://t.co/ccFTFXQc2E

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) January 15, 2019

Not that many seem to care but new NASA report says Antarctica is losing 6 times more ice mass annually now than 40 years ago

That's enormous and enormously newsworthy. Because it means
multi-meter sea level rise from Antarctica are on their way to youhttps://t.co/Yr7lopnFkY pic.twitter.com/styTOura7c

— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) January 16, 2019

The report, led by glaciologist Eric Rignot and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that the southernmost continent has lost 278 billion tons of ice per year since 2009—an enormous change from the 1980s, when about 44 billion tons of ice there melted annually.

Compared to just last year, the Antarctic ice is melting 15 percent faster, with East Antarctica—previously found to be relatively stable from year to year—now losing 56 billion tons of ice per year. Rignot told CNN that he had not expected ice in the eastern part of the continent to be melting at such an alarming rate.

"This region is probably more sensitive to climate [change] than has traditionally been assumed, and that's important to know, because it holds even more ice than West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula together," Rignot said in a statement.

Rignot examined 176 basins across the continent where ice drains into the ocean, and found that warm, salty water near the edge of the ice mass is "vigorously [melting] the ice shelves."

The newly accelerated melting of East Antarctica alone is expected to increase the risk of "multi-meter sea level rise from Antarctica in the coming centuries," Rignot added.

Meanwhile, a separate study published in Science last week showed that the planet's oceans are warming about 40 percent faster than scientists indicated in 2013 in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The oceans have absorbed about 90 percent of the energy created by fossil fuel extraction over the last century, keeping the planet's land from warming more than it already has.

"The ocean is saving us from massive warming right now," Malin L. Pinsky, an associate professor at Rutgers University, told the New York Times.

But with the rate of warming accelerating rapidly just in the past few years, and 2018 expected to be the warmest year yet for oceans, humans can expect to see increasingly destructive hurricanes; the ruination of ecosystems, affecting food security for people in many parts of the world; and rising sea levels.

The new studies offer "further proof that climate science—and knowledge about the risks we face in the future—are getting better, more accurate, and more sophisticated."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... previously

[Elvis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOmdkN6MOwU

[Iamwhomiam]

Understand her outrage.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYqtXR8iPlE

We need to redesign waste producing systems to become zero waste production enterprises and if that is not possible, we need to eliminate the product from being manufactured, all towards the goal of attaining a sustainable, circular economy.

Adopting the wingspread statement's definition of the precautionary principle would put the onus upon manufacturers to prove the safety of their products before being permitted to be released for sale to the public. Vaccines and medicines, pesticides, chemicals, foods, cosmetics, etc., all products, regardless whether they're dedicated for the only common or corporate consumer.

We need to learn to not be concerned with accumulating individual wealth, but rather to focus our concerns and wealth upon creating a sustainable society for future generations.

A vastly better world is possible, if we join together to create it.

[Iamwhomiam]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2QxFM9y0tY

[chump]

https://youtu.be/rRLwV2xafpk
-

[Iamwhomiam]

Always quick to demonstrate for us all that endearing assholes endure.

[chump]

Indeed...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gret ... -9blhz9mjv

Greta Thunberg and the plot to forge a climate warrior
The teenage activist Greta Thunberg wants nothing more than to change the world. The shadowy cabal behind her has other goals

Dominic Green
August 18 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

Greta Thunberg’s great American adventure has begun. Last Wednesday, she set sail from Plymouth like the pilgrims did, her Mayflower a zero-carbon but very expensive racing yacht; her goal not religious liberty but a camera-rich turn at the UN’s climate change conference in New York.

Meanwhile, on dry land, GQ magazine recently appointed Greta its “game changer of the year”, with a cover image in which the teenager, whether she realises it or not, strikes a stern, finger-pointing pose reminiscent of Lord Kitchener’s First World War recruiting poster and tells Britain’s feckless carbon-emitters: “To do your best is no longer good enough.”

Greta is just an ordinary 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl whose fiery visions have convinced the parliaments of Britain and Ireland to declare a “climate…

[… con’d (Pay to read the rest, I guess)]

https://journal-neo.org/2019/09/25/clim ... ney-trail/

Climate and the Money Trail
William Engdahl

Climate. Now who wudda thought. The very mega-corporations and mega-billionaires behind the globalization of the world economy over recent decades, whose pursuit of shareholder value and cost reduction who have wreaked so much damage to our environment both in the industrial world and in the under-developed economies of Africa, Asia, Latin America, are the leading backers of the “grass roots” decarbonization movement from Sweden to Germany to the USA and beyond. Is it pangs of guilty conscience, or could it be a deeper agenda of the financialization of the very air we breathe and more?

Whatever one may believe about the dangers of CO2 and risks of global warming creating a global catastrophe of 1.5 to 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise in the next roughly 12 years, it is worth noting who is promoting the current flood of propaganda and climate activism.

Green Finance

Several years before Al Gore and others decided to use a young Swedish school girl to be the poster child for climate action urgency, or in the USA the call of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a complete reorganization of the economy around a Green New Deal, the giants of finance began devising schemes for steering hundreds of billions of future funds to investments in often worthless “climate” companies.

In 2013 after years of careful preparation, a Swedish real estate company, Vasakronan, issued the first corporate “Green Bond.” They were followed by others including Apple, SNCF and the major French bank Credit Agricole. In November 2013 Elon Musk’s problem-riddled Tesla Energy issued the first solar asset-backed security. Today according to something called the Climate Bonds Initiative, more than $500 billion in such Green Bonds are outstanding. The creators of the bond idea state their aim is to win over a major share of the $45 trillion of assets under management globally which have made nominal commitment to invest in “climate friendly” projects.

Bonnie Prince Charles, future UK Monarch, along with the Bank of England and City of London finance have promoted “green financial instruments,” led by Green Bonds, to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects. A key player in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015, the Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Board (FSB), chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), to advise “investors, lenders and insurance about climate related risks.” That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.

In 2016 the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation and the UK Government initiated the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars to “green” investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg of the financial wire, it includes key people from JP MorganChase; from BlackRock–one of the world’s biggest asset managers with almost $7 trillion; Barclays Bank; HSBC, the London-Hong Kong bank repeatedly fined for laundering drug and other black funds; Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance; China’s ICBC bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP Billington and David Blood of Al Gore’s Generation Investment LLC. In effect it seems the foxes are writing the rules for the new Green Hen House.

Bank of England’s Carney was also a key actor in efforts to make the City of London into the financial center of global Green Finance. The outgoing UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, in July 2019 released a White Paper, “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a Greener Future.” The paper states, “One of the most influential initiatives to emerge is the Financial Stability Board’s private sector Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), supported by Mark Carney and chaired by Michael Bloomberg. This has been endorsed by institutions representing $118 trillion of assets globally.” There seems to be a plan here. The plan is the financialization of the entire world economy using fear of an end of world scenario to reach arbitrary aims such as “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”

Goldman Sachs Key Actor

The omnipresent Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, which spawned among others ECB outgoing President Mario Draghi and Bank of England head Carney, has just unveiled the first global index of top-ranking environmental stocks, done along with the London-based CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project. The CDP, notably, is financed by investors such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, American International Group, and State Street Corp.

The new index, called CDP Environment EW and CDP Eurozone EW, aims to lure investment funds, state pension systems such as the CalPERS (the California Public Employees’ Retirement System) and CalSTRS (the California State Teachers’ Retirement System) with a combined $600+ billion in assets, to invest in their carefully chosen targets. Top rated companies in the index include Alphabet which owns Google, Microsoft, ING Group, Diageo, Philips, Danone and, conveniently, Goldman Sachs.

Enter Greta, AOC and Co.

At this point events take on a cynical turn as we are confronted with wildly popular, heavily promoted climate activists such as Sweden’s Greta Thunberg or New York’s 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal. However sincere these activists may be, there is a well-oiled financial machine behind promoting them for gain.

Greta Thunberg is part of a well-connected network tied to the organization of Al Gore who is being cynically and professionally marketed and used by such agencies as the UN, the EU Commission and the financial interests behind the present climate agenda. As Canadian researcher and climate activist, Cory Morningstar, documents in an excellent series of posts, young Greta is working with a well-knit network that is tied to US climate investor and enormously wealthy climate profiteer, Al Gore, chairman of Generation Investment group. Gore’s partner, ex-Goldman Sachs official David Blood as noted earlier, is a member of the BIS-created TCFD. Greta Thunberg along with her 17-year-old US climate friend, Jamie Margolin, were both listed as “special youth advisor and trustee” of the Swedish We Don’t Have Time NGO, founded by its CEO Ingmar Rentzhog. Rentzhog is a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Organization Leaders, and part of the European Climate Policy Task Force. He was trained in March 2017 by Al Gore in Denver, and again in June 2018, in Berlin. Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project is a partner of We Don’t Have Time.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who made a huge splash in her first days in the US Congress for unveiling a “Green New Deal” to completely reorganize the US economy at a cost of perhaps $100 trillion, is also not without skilled guidance. AOC has openly admitted that she ran for Congress at the urging of a group called Justice Democrats. She told one interviewer, “I wouldn’t be running if it wasn’t for the support of Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Umm, in fact it was it was these organizations, it was JD and it was Brand New Congress as well, that both, that asked me to run in the first place. They’re the ones that called me a year and a half ago…” Now, as Congresswoman, AOC’s advisers include Justice Democrats co-founder, Zack Exley. Exley was an Open Society Fellow and got funds from among others the Open Society Foundations and Ford Foundation to create a predecessor to Justice Democrats to recruit select candidates for office.

The Real Agenda is Economic

The links between the world’s largest financial groups, central banks and global corporations to the current push for a radical climate strategy to abandon the fossil fuel economy in favor of a vague, unexplained Green economy, it seems, is less about genuine concern to make our planet a clean and healthy environment to live. Rather it is an agenda, intimately tied to the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable” economy, and to developing literally trillions of dollars in new wealth for the global banks and financial giants who constitute the real powers that be.

In February 2019 following a speech to the EU Commission in Brussels by Greta Thunberg, then-EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, after gallantly kissing Greta’s hand, appeared to be moved to real action. He told Greta and the press that the EU should spend hundreds of billions of euros combating climate change during the next 10 years. Juncker proposed that between 2021 to 2027, “every fourth euro spent within the EU budget go toward action to mitigate climate change.” What the sly Juncker did not say was that the decision had nothing to do with the young Swedish activist’s plea. It had been made in conjunction with the World Bank a full year before in September 26, 2018 at the One Planet Summit, along with the World Bank, Bloomberg Foundations, the World Economic Forum and others. Juncker had cleverly used the media attention given the young Swede to promote his climate agenda.

On October 17, 2018, days following the EU agreement at the One Planet Summit, Juncker’s EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Breakthrough Energy-Europe in which member corporations of Breakthrough Energy-Europe will have preferential access to any funding.

The members of Breakthrough Energy include Virgin Air’s Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, HRH Prince Al-waleed bin Talal, Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio; Julian Robertson of hedge fund giant, Tiger Management; David Rubenstein, founder Carlyle Group; George Soros, Chairman Soros Fund Management LLC; Masayoshi Son, founder Softbank, Japan. 

Make no mistake. When the most influential multinational corporations, the world’s largest institutional investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, the UN, the World Bank, the Bank of England and other central banks of the BIS line up behind the financing of a so-called green Agenda, call it Green New Deal or what, it is time to look behind the surface of public climate activist campaigns to the actual agenda. The picture that emerges is the attempted financial reorganization of the world economy using climate, something the sun and its energy have orders of magnitude more to do with than mankind ever could—to try to convince us ordinary folk to make untold sacrifice to “save our planet.”

Back in 2010 the head of Working Group 3 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Otmar Edenhofer, told an interviewer, “…one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.” Since then the economic policy strategy has become far more developed.

SURPRISE! The Official Escort for 16-Year-Old Warming ‘Expert’ Greta Thunberg Is a Leftist Hack Funded by George Soros Org.

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Via my faavorite aangiry faanatic:

https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/june ... s-crusade/

Greta’s very corporate children’s crusade

Behind the schoolgirl climate warrior lies a shadowy cabal of lobbyists, investors and energy companies seeking to profit from a green bonanza

Dominic Green
30/05/2019

Greta Thunberg is just an ordinary 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl whose fiery visions have convinced the parliaments of Britain and Ireland to declare a “climate emergency”. Greta’s parents, actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman, are just an ordinary pair of parent-managers who want to save the planet. Query their motives, and you risk being accused of “climate denial”, or of bullying a vulnerable child with Asperger’s. But the Greta phenomenon has also involved green lobbyists, PR hustlers, eco-academics, and a think-tank founded by a wealthy ex-minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies. These companies are preparing for the biggest bonanza of government contracts in history: the greening of the Western economies. Greta, whether she and her parents know it or not, is the face of their political strategy.

The family’s story is that Greta launched a one-girl “school strike” at the Swedish parliament on the morning of August 20, 2018. Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of the social media platform We Have No Time, happened to be passing. Inspired, Rentzhog posted Greta’s photograph on his personal Facebook page. By late afternoon, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter had Greta’s story and face on its website. The rest is viral.

But this isn’t the full story. In emails, media entrepeneur Rentzhog told me that he “met Greta for the first time” at the parliament, and that he “did not know Greta or Greta’s parents” before then. Yet in the same emails, Rentzhog admitted to meeting Greta’s mother Malena Ernman “3-4 months before everything started”—in early May 2018, when he and Malena had shared a stage at a conference called the Climate Parliament. Nor did Rentzhog stumble on Greta’s protest by accident. He now admits to having been informed “the week before” by “a mailing list from a climate activist” named Bo Thorén, leader of the Fossil Free Dalsland group.

Independent journalist Rebecca Weidmo Uvell has obtained an earlier email from Bo Thorén’s search for fresh green faces. In February 2018, Thorén invited a group of environmental activists, academics and politicians to plan “how we can involve and get help from young people to increase the pace of the transition to a sustainable society”. In May, after Greta won second prize in an environmental op-ed writing competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Thorén approached all the competition winners with a plan for a “school strike”, modelled on the student walk-outs after the shootings at Parkland, Florida. “But no one was interested,” Greta’s mother claims, “so Greta decided to do it for herself.”

Fortunately, Greta’s decision coincided with the publication of Scenes from the Heart, Svante and Malena’s memoir of how saving the planet had saved their family. Unfortunately, Malena omitted to tell her publisher that Ingmar Rentzhog had commandeered Greta’s stunt.

“We had a problem,” says Malena’s editor, Jonas Axelsson. “Journalists asked if it was promotion for the book. It wasn’t at all. It was a nightmare.”

It was, however, a dream for Ingmar Rentzhog. When Rentzhog combined Thorén’s plan and Malena Ernman’s musical fame with Greta’s uncanny charisma and We Have No Time’s mailing list, he turned Greta into a viral celebrity.

“I have not invented Greta,” Rentzhog insists, “but I helped to spread her action to an international audience.”

Trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, Rentzhog set up We Don’t Have Time in late 2017 to “hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change” by leveraging “the power of social media”. Rentzhog and his CEO David Olsson have backgrounds in finance, not environmental activism, Rentzhog as the founder of Laika, an investment relations company, and Olsson with Svenska Bostadsfonden, one of Sweden’s biggest real estate funds, whose board Rentzhog joined in June 2017. We Don’t Have Time’s investors included Gustav Stenbeck, whose family control Kinnevik, one of Sweden’s largest investment corporations.

In May 2018, Rentzhog and Olsson of We Don’t Have Time became chairman and board member of a think-tank called Global Utmaning (Global Challenge). Its founder, Kristina Persson, is an heir to an industrial fortune. She is a career trade unionist and a Social Democrat politician going back to the party’s golden age under Olof Palme. She is also an ex-deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank and a New Ager who has discussed her reincarnations and communication with the dead. Between 2014 and 2016, Persson served as “Minister for the Future” in the Social Democratic government of Stefan Lofven.

Petter Skogar, president of Sweden’s biggest employer’s association, is on Global Challenge’s ten-person board. So is Johan Lindholm, chairman of the Union of Construction Workers and member of the Social Democrats’ executive board. So is Anders Wijkman, president of the Club of Rome, chair of the Environmental Objectives Council, and a recipient in February 2018 of Bo Thorén’s call for youth mobilisation. So is Catherina Nystedt Ringborg, former CEO of Swedish Water, advisor at the International Energy Agency, and former vice-president at Swedish-Swiss energy giant ABB.

Catherina Ringborg is also a member of green energy venture capital firm Sustainable Energy Angels. Its members are a who’s who of the Swedish energy sector. Sustainable Energy Angels’ president and chair of investment committee are ex-ABB personnel, and so are four of its 17 members.

When Greta met Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think-tank owned by an ex-Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector. His board was stacked with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrats, major union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his board’s vice-chair was a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful green energy investment groups.

Greta and her parents probably did not know this. Rentzhog seems to have wanted to keep it that way. On September 2, 2018, a week after Rentzhog claimed to have stumbled on Greta, Dagens Nyheter ran a long op-ed on the need to force the greening of the global economy by “bottom-up” action against national governments, including “broad social mobilisation . . . reminiscent of what takes place in communities threatened by war”. Greta’s mother was one of the nine signatories. Ex-Minister for the Future Kristina Persson and three other Global Challenge board members signed the op-ed but cited other affiliations. Only Rentzhog admitted that he was associated with Global Challenge.

An English edition of the article identifies Rentzhog and Wijkman as its authors. Rentzhog claims that “many of us involved in Global Challenge were also involved” in writing it. He admits that he showed Malena Ernman “the article and the other signatures, but not their titles for Global Challenge”.

Greta’s father Svante, who now devotes himself to managing her career, declined my interview requests and refused to reply to a detailed list of written questions about Ingmar Rentzhog and Global Challenge. Instead, Svante issued an evasive three-paragraph statement through an intermediary. He says that “neither I nor Greta feel qualified to answer” questions about Rentzhog’s business connections, and when the family might have known about them. Svante also claims that “we have never worked with” We Have No Time or Global Challenge. Yet Greta served on We Have No Time’s advisory board between November 2018 and January 2019, and Malena Ernman signed a letter with four Global Challenge board members.

When I asked Rentzhog if he had introduced Greta and her parents to other Global Challenge board members, he replied, “I don’t know, maybe I did, but if Svante says no, maybe it was not connected.” Svante refuses to answer my questions about whether he and Greta have met members of the Global Challenge board. But Global Challenge board member Anders Wijkman remembers.

Wijkman leads the anti-growth Club of Rome. Its alarmist 1972 report, A Limit to Growth?, has become a cornerstone of the “climate emergency” campaign. In December 2018, We Have No Time and Global Challenge launched the Club of Rome’s latest vision of apocalypse, the Climate Emergency Plan. Greta, Rentzhog told me, was invited to the launch event, but was unable to attend as she was already booked to deliver a TED Talk. 

The Climate Emergency Plan’s talking points are Greta’s talking points. “Around the year 2030, in ten years, 250 days, and ten hours,” the Scandinavian Cassandra told British parliamentarians, “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it.” The only way to save ourselves is to follow the Climate Emergency Plan, and instantly green the global energy business through massive government investment and emergency legislation. Wijkman of the Club of Rome sees Greta as vital to pushing the “climate emergency” strategy on Europe’s political class.

“We had many scientist and climate researchers who’ve been speaking in terms of emergency for a number of years,” he told me, “but it’s only now, in the last couple of months, that the concept of emergency has been more or less accepted.”

Greta, Wijkman says, has been “instrumental” to this breakthrough. “Young people seemed not to pay much attention only half a year ago, but now obviously they do. So she has been a lightning rod or catalyst of this.”

Has Ingmar Rentzhog been essential to Greta’s rise?

“Yes, yes,” Wijkman agrees, though he finds it hard to quantify. “I don’t know how much he’s been influential. I think that Greta and her father and mother are quite skilled.”

Greta’s father Svante claims she “acts independently of any organisation or individual”. But Wijkman says Greta has “good advisers”, such as climate change professor Kevin Anderson. Anderson claims only to “discuss” Greta’s ideas and “correct” her manuscripts.“I know that he has given her a lot of advice in terms of substance,” Wijkman says.

In January, Rentzhog and We Have No Time used Greta’s face and story in promotional materials for a share issue for a new venture. Rentzhog claimed that the family knew, but Greta and her parents parents insisted that they did not. They announced that their association with Rentzhog was over—a curious statement, considering that Svante claims they had never associated with him in the first place. Greta’s new press agent, Daniel Donner, works from the office of a Brussels lobby group, the European Climate Foundation. Still, We Don’t Have Time retweet Greta as if nothing has changed. In a way, nothing has.

Whatever Greta or her parents know or think, her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for people like Global Challenge, We Don’t Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels. For Sweden’s energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being used to ease the transition to green corporatism.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-a ... ge/5689923

Climate Action Protests and “Extinction Rebellion” versus 5G Microwave Radiation

By Julian Rose
Global Research, September 23, 2019

On 20 September, hundreds of thousands stepped out onto the streets of the world’s cities to call for ‘Climate Action’. The great majority doing so, no doubt based upon genuine feelings of concern for the future of the planet and the stability of the climate. A concern that has its origins in a proclamation issued at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Out of which conference emerged ‘Agenda 21’, now updated to ‘Agenda 2030’, which declares the need to ‘transform the world by fully embracing sustainable development’.

In turn, Agenda 2030 forms the foundation for current Climate Action/ Extinction Rebellion calls for A Green New Deal to replace fossil fuel powered industries by renewable resource based energy providers that will lead to a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ and the lowering of CO2 emissions to levels arrived at by United Nations backed Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

To get to grips with how and why the present large scale actions are being fomented, by just a small number of very well prepared leaders, we need to go back to the first ever meeting of the Bilderberg Group in 1954 and particularly the subsequent 1968 meeting of Club of Rome organised by Aurelio Peccei, the prominent Italian industrialist and senior executive of Fiat.

Here the ground was laid for a plan to wrest control of world affairs into the hands of a small elite group of industrialists, bankers, lawyers, military strategists and royalty, who saw their role as being ‘keepers of the world’s environment’ and stewards of economic growth, coupled to a depopulation scenario and planetary management agenda involving a perpetuation of the hierarchical pyramid structure that would maintain  a controlling influence over the wealth of all mankind.

Justin Walker, a British Green, whose uncle was closely associated with Aurelio Peccei, recounts how, in 1972,  Peccei invited him to work in his office in Rome, stating that ‘it would be at a very exciting and challenging time’. Justin, editor of ‘New Chartist’, states in the present edition “His words were, and I remember them very well

“We are creating a huge global environmental problem that will frighten people into wanting a World Government run by us.”

Peccie then went on to elaborate as to how they were seeking to fund the research needed in order to unite the scientists who, in turn, would influence the national decision-makers into accepting this new scientific theory of increasing human-caused CO2 levels, triggering what has become known as Man-made or Anthropogenic Global Warming.” 

I believe that this makes it abundantly clear that Greens (I use the term very broadly) are now under the direct influence of this corporate deep state vision.

The scale of naivety of the vast majority of those marching through the streets with their various takes on ‘stop global warming’ , is seriously concerning. But we should be in little doubt that a few hand-picked leaders of Climate/Extinction Rebellion’s call to ‘break the law on behalf of saving the planet’ do at least know who their backers are.

Crimes Against the Earth

And when one joins the dots between the oft quoted ‘problem, reaction, solution’ agenda, favoured by the controlling hand of the deep state, it becomes clear that Aurelio Peccei and associates initially set-up the  ‘problem’ (already described above) which produced the anticipated ‘reaction’ – ‘Help, the World is warming!’  Followed by Al Gore’s ‘inconvenient truth’ (convenient untruth) ‘the Arctic is melting’ – ‘the world is cooking’ – ‘the future is dire’. And then the preplanned ‘solution’ arrived at by the United Nation’s IPCC, to prevent ‘a global disaster’ by holding atmospheric CO2  levels at less than 450 parts per million. A solution supposedly arrived at by consensus of government named climate scientists.

There is a further ingredient in the master plan for global control; the phased introduction of chaos. So that the Eye of Horus ‘order out of chaos’ story illustrated on the back of the green back dollar, can bring into reality The totalitarian New World Order. 

The master-minders of Extinction Rebellion are very keen on the widespread disruption of day to day life. Its leaders call upon ‘rebels’ to break the law, through non violent mass protest, leading to the break-down of democracy and the state. As the UK think tank Policy Exchange notes “Celebrities, politicians and members of the public have been seduced into believing that Extinction Rebellion’s methods and tactics are honourable and justified, which clearly they are not.”

Amongst those at the forefront of the Green New Deal ‘solution’ (in Europe) are Green MP Caroline Lucas, DiEM 25 leader Yanis Verufakis and Gail Bradbrook, co-leader of Extinction Rebellion. Joining them is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour Party and backers of the recently called ‘climate emergency declaration’ that activists have demanded authorities act upon.

Nowhere in the Green New Deal/Climate Action agenda is there any mention of the most blatantly human and environmentally destructive activities currently being fast forwarded on the planet:

▪ the illegal roll-out of 5G microwave radiation;
▪ the advancement of research, development and application of a new range of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and
▪ the ubiquitous application of atmospheric aerosol geoengineering on a global scale. 

All three of which, if allowed to proceed unhindered, will have achieved the ‘extinction’ of much of this world’s essential sentient life long before any heavily hyped IPCC invented climatic factors even enter the picture. 

In the photos that adorned the media mapping of the Climate Action Protests of 20 September, is one of a boy holding-up a placard reading ‘Save the Planet – End Capitalism’. The actions do, of course, particularly target the young, which includes children. Greta Thunberg’s massively media promoted appearance on the ‘quit school – save the climate’ scene, has assured this. 

Children, who know not what the meaning is of most of the statements they hold-up for the eager media, have been pushed into the front-lines of this vast indoctrination exercise. It is an especially devious act on the part of the organisers. Everyone knows how children ‘go straight to the heart’ of the great majority of those who who do not discern or research the contents of what they are witnessing. 

How many of those parents and children would ever guess that they are, tragically, being used by the inventors and protagonists of ‘sustainable development’, Agenda 2030 and Green New Deal, to usher-in a ‘zero carbon’ world of 5G driven treeless Smart Cities, driverless microwave-pulsed toxic cars and microwave irradiating satellite weaponry aimed at the blanket covering of every corner of the earth. 

Why would this all-too-real/actual agenda play no part in the mass protest movements dominating the headlines to day? 

The most successful means of achieving the ends one wishes to enforce in the 21st century, is via ‘silent weapons’ of mind control indoctrination – and the most successful weapons for achieving this are mobile phones, WiFi and an all powerful telecommunications system.

There can be no Extinction Rebellion without a smart phone over which to text the organising messages that drive the military like precision with which these events are conducted. No cool young ‘rebel’ is going to forsake their cancer causing cell phone for the future of the planet. Of that, the organisers are very sure. Yet, this is precisely what is called for. The ‘real extinction’ made possible by advanced microwave radiation weapons, constitutes the biggest threat to our survival at this point in the history of the planet.

It is this avenue – the one of non-ionising electro magnetic ‘control and conquer’ enacted upon all living beings 24/7 – that is set to bring into being the barren sterile world that climate change proponents see as the end scenario of the Global Warming/Climate Change event, so well devised and put into effect by the deep state cabal more than fifty tears ago.

We must all act together in ensuring this never happens.

*Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Julian Rose is author of  ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why humanity Must Come Through,   now available from Amazon and Dixi Books.

See www.julianrose.info for more information  http://www.julianrose.info. Julian is an international activist, writer, organic farming pioneer and actor.  In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi.

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Real Greens vs Fake Greens (Part One)

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Climate change cultists filling their followers with anxiety: How long before the suicides start?


---------------------

My Gift to Climate Alarmists

This is my most concise expose of climate fraud. Please pass it around to everyone you know and your elected officials. The video is short, but cuts right to the heart of the matter.

*Edited to remove the Kuwaiti girl video because it wasn't fair to compare Greta to that obvious actress. It is certainly plausible that a sincerely concerned sixteen year old girl's genuine idea was co-opted and sponsored by special interests.

[thrulookingglass]

I hope you all feel great for shitting on some brave activist girl whom you've chose to tar and feather because coal plants couldn't possibly cause environmental harm. Enjoy you electric tooth brushes, gas guzzling SUVs, oil tankers named after Condoleezza Rice. This is the shittiest excoriation I've witnessed on RI especially given that she's a beautiful, valiant, intelligent fucking sixteen year old! You find me one college/university professor of biology, ecology or any of the earth sciences that believes human's lust for industry hasn't brought great harm to the natural world and I'll show you a complete bullshit artist. Greta has done more than most of you will ever do for ecological concerns.

Pizzagate, Satanist, The Clintons are the bane of existance. You've all lost you minds! Disgusted. Comparing Greta to the babies in incubators bullshit?!? She ain't advocated for war! Fuck y'all.

[Iamwhomiam]

Thank you, thrulookingglass. Thank you very much.

[Iamwhomiam]

*Edited to remove the Kuwaiti girl video because it wasn't fair to compare Greta to that obvious actress. It is certainly plausible that a sincerely concerned sixteen year old girl's genuine idea was co-opted and sponsored by special interests.

Yes, spontaneously and only after young Grete began her school strike was when special interest NGOs saw for the very first time a new issue to co-opt to use to fight corporate global expansionists destroying all life on earth.

I tell you, those guys living on a flat earth sure have strange thoughts. I bet BIll McKibben's one of the them, too.

[Iamwhomiam]

Audio of private meeting shows oil industry ripping into Trump administration

By BEN LEFEBVRE

09/27/2019 01:12 PM EDT

Updated: 09/27/2019 02:08 PM EDT

At a closed-door meeting this summer, oil and gas industry lawyers criticized the Trump administration's failure to recruit enough qualified people to secure policy victories that would outlast this presidency, according to a recording of the gathering.

The audio from an Independent Petroleum Producers of America meeting in Colorado Springs, Colo., obtained by the Western Values Project and shared with POLITICO, contains some of the most unvarnished opinion coming from an industry that has been happy with the administration’s talk on oil and gas but frustrated with its results.

“Two and a half years later, I don’t see the agencies getting better,” Mark Barron, head of energy litigation in the Denver office of BakerHostetler, told the group. “I don’t see that leadership or competence in the administration.”

The June meeting came amid mounting frustration over the slow pace of the Trump administration’s major energy policies, including regulatory rollbacks at EPA and efforts from the Interior Department to spur new production. A commitment to open up more federal waters to offshore drilling has stalled amid legal and political pushback, the administration's move to expedite permitting of pipelines, including for Keystone XL and the Mountain Valley Pipeline has been challenged in court, and states have sued over a rollback on methane emissions rules that even some oil companies have complained is too broad.

During the meeting, Wayne D’Angelo, head of energy litigation at D.C.-based Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, noted that EarthJustice, Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups had sued the administration more than three hundred times over its rollbacks of Obama-era rules, including those on methane emissions and hydraulic fracturing.

“There is a metric buttload of litigation going on in respect to the regulatory agenda,” D’Angelo said, adding that there were “a lot of early wins for environmental lawsuits.”

“I think you’ll see the agencies focusing on fewer high impact rules” as the 2020 election nears, D’Angelo added. “Maybe continue to do stuff with guidance, in full knowledge that’s easy-come, easy-go. Whatever you do through guidance can be taken away through guidance.”

Barron said the agenda was struggling because of a talent deficit at federal agencies, which he attributed to an unwillingness among many experts to work for President Donald Trump.

"For some, the reticence that comes out of the administration on non-energy components, some of the things he may say about some other issues or you may read tweets about, may suggest to yourself that you don’t want to have speeches like this for the next 25 years or get introduced as such-and-such from the Trump administration," he said. "There’s a real reluctance for some real competent people to serve in this administration, apart from the fact they weren’t going to invite you in if you weren’t supporting him from the beginning."

Barron singled out Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as a rare "competent technocrat," among a mostly inexperienced staff. "They may want to implement policy, but at some point you need people who are familiar with Washington, who know how to draft a regulatory rule, have experience doing that at a big level," he said.

The trade association did not dispute the recording's authenticity. "It seems to be from that meeting," IPAA spokesperson Jennifer Pett said in an email. "However, it was off-the-record, so we did not transcribe or record the conversation; so this document cannot be verified as 100 percent accurate."

In the audio, Katie Schroder, a partner at Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP in Denver who focuses on energy development on federal lands, noted that government lawyers could drop defense of the ongoing lawsuits if Trump loses in 2020.

“At this point, we have to look at the shot clock,” Schroder said at the meeting. “We’re not far from 2020, we’re not far from the next election. Will some of this litigation be resolved by the time the next administration comes in? That’s always part of the calculus."

She said the industry wanted to see more than guidance documents and executive orders from the administration.

"The real win is to get some regulatory changes in place. ... I don’t know if there’s enough energy and drive at Interior to do those things,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/09/27/in-private-oil-industry-laments-few-wins-under-trump-006173

Of course, politico omitted a link to the audio file. From its source:
https://soundcloud.com/user-688949701/2-fight-for-legal-ground/s-hMbiJ

[Sounder]

Thanks for the 'My Gift to Climate Alarmists' vid Chump.

It is impressive at how baldfaced the manipulation of the statistics and graphs that were put up as examples. Just start where convenient, knowing that the faithful will never confront their beliefs with something so messy as rationality or god forbid a longer time-line.