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Climate change litigation + Japan's "D" grade + Philippines crisis + Arctic wildfires

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Climate Change Litigation Updates

The threat and implementation of legal proceedings has all but replaced the old armed insurrections that once gave social and political agendas their teeth for producing change. Mounting possibilities of litigation against sources, causes, and detractors of climate change imply that resistance against climate-correctness will soon not only be futile and potentially criminal, but catastrophically costly to everyone even after compliance by intimated businesses and general populations. Due to compensations for transgressions perpetrated years prior to litigated entrenchment of climate-correctness. This facet of the downturn in addition to consequences and effects of global warming itself to international economic health.

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Climate Change Could Wreck The Global Economy

EXCERPT: Temperature rise due to climate change may radically damage the global economy and slow growth in the coming decades if nothing is done to slow the pace of warming, according to new research. The researchers behind the study, published in the journal Nature, found that temperature change due to unmitigated global warming will leave global GDP per capita 23% lower in 2100 than it would be without any warming. “We’re basically throwing away money by not addressing the issue,” said Marshall Burke, an assistant professor at Stanford University. “We see our study as providing an estimate of the benefits of reducing emissions....”

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Why Japan's Climate Action Deserves a Failing Grade

EXCERPT: We have given a "climate grade" to key countries for their climate actions and new targets in the lead-in to the Paris climate agreement. Nobody is receiving top marks - an "A+" - but some countries are receiving failing grades. We gave Japan a failing grade - a "D" - for its climate actions because it is the biggest financer of overseas coal projects, its climate target is too weak, and it is a bit fuzzy on some of its methodologies....

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Phillipines to paris: Our Survival Is Not Negotiable

EXCERPT: [...] The ever increasing and ever intensifying storms that have wreaked havoc on the Philippines in the past decade are clear indications that the world has changed, and living with the spectre of extreme weather events has become a new normal for many people. Communities are starting to make the connection between extreme weather and climate justice. The Alliance for Disaster Survivors in the Philippines (People Surge), stands as the broadest organization of Haiyan survivors. Originally established on January 2014 in Tacloban City, it shows that many communities are now understanding the interconnection between disaster, environment, climate, politics and society....

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Parts of Philippines may submerge due to global warming

RELEASE: More than 167,000 hectares of coastland -- about 0.6% of the country's total area -- are projected to go underwater in the Philippines, especially in low-lying island communities, according to research by the University of the Philippines.

Low-lying countries with an abundance of coastlines are at significant risk from rising sea levels resulting from global warming. According to data by the World Meteorological Organisation, the water levels around the Philippines are rising at a rate almost three times the global average due partly to the influence of the trade winds pushing ocean currents.

On average, sea levels around the world rise 3.1 centimetres every ten years. Water levels in the Philippines are projected to rise between 7.6 and 10.2 centimetres each decade.

The Philippines government has been forced to take this into consideration. A number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations have sprung up in recent years to address the issue. The Department of Environment and National Resources has its own climate change office, which has set up various programs to educate communities in high-risk areas. One program, for example, teaches communities to adapt to rising sea levels by ensuring that public spaces, such as community halls and schools, are not built near the coast.

But soon, adaptation on a local level won't be enough. Policy makers need to convince governments to curb their emissions on a global level.

The earth's oceans were a hot topic at the Common Future Under Climate Change conference held in Paris in July.

According to J.P. Gattuso, senior research scientist at France's CNRS Laboratory of Oceanography in Villefranche, the discussion of warming oceans rarely featured in previous climate change discussions. "The ocean moderates climate change at the cost of profound alterations to its physics, chemistry, ecology and services," says Gattuso. "However, despite the ocean's critical role in global ecosystem processes and services, international climate negotiations have only minimally touched on ocean impacts. Any new climate regime that fails to minimize ocean impacts will be incomplete and inadequate," he says. But this is changing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report 2013 indicated that if emissions continue on their current trend, we could face a "significant increase" in sea level extremes with risks of coastal flooding.

A new study, published in October 2014 in Environmental Research Letters, paints an even scarier picture. Sea levels could rise by a maximum of 190 centimetres (higher than the average person) by the end of the century. Low-lying coastal communities, such as in Bangladesh, could be most at risk.

Research in the journal Science, which was released during the Climate Change conference in July, also emphasizes the importance that research addresses the effects of rising sea levels. In the Science study, researchers compared the fate of the oceans under two scenarios: one a business-as-usual approach and the other involving drastic cuts in emissions.

Their analyses showed that business-as-usual would have an enormous and effectively irreversible impact on ocean ecosystems and the services they provide, such as fisheries, by 2100.

"Our present climate is warming to a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past. Studies such as these that improve our understanding of magnitudes of global sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet loss are critical for society," states Anders Carlson, co-author and associate professor of geology and geophysics at Oregon State University in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report 2013.

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Measuring the impacts of severe wildfires in the Arctic

RELEASE: Based on the number of acres burned, 2015 is shaping up to be the second most extreme fire year during the past decade in North America's boreal region. Historically, the area has had one or fewer extreme fire years per decade.

This season, 15 million acres burned in Alaska and Canada, according Northern Arizona University's Michelle Mack, researcher and biological sciences professor, who is leading a NASA-funded project to measure the severe fire impacts in North America. "In the boreal region, there is a thick organic layer on the surface comprised of litter and soil, that in some cases is hundreds to thousands of years old," Mack said. "Will more fires and hotter fires burn that layer and release it to the atmosphere and how deep will it burn into the soil?"

These questions are part of NASA's $100 million dollar, 10 year project called Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, also known as ABoVE. The experiment seeks to understand the vulnerability and resilience in the Arctic, where climate change is most pronounced and rapidly unfolding. Mack serves on the project's international science team tasked with implementing the field campaign.

From an ecological perspective, Mack's work will focus on predicting when systems will be unable to recover following big disturbances, including wildfire, altering the function of ecosystems and resources that they provide to people. NASA awarded Mack's lab $1 million to study increasing fire activity in boreal forest and arctic tundra.

"Once fires in this region burn deeply, all these other things start to happen, affecting plants, animals and local people," Mack said. "Permafrost starts to thaw, different plant species get established, forest composition shifts and the ways that people use the landscape change."

Permafrost contains a legacy of past climate, storing organic carbon in frozen soil. Once thawed, the release of that carbon could accelerate a positive feedback cycle between arctic ecosystems and global climate. Increasing wildfire activity may rapidly increase the rate of permafrost thaw.

Researchers participating in related ABoVE projects will determine how much carbon is stored in Alaska's interior forests, measure rates of thawing permafrost and release of greenhouse gases, study the effects of wildfire and evaluate the socio-ecological impacts of these changes.
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