Sierra Club Climate Change Committee Meeting

Join us on Zoom! https://zoom.us/j/5133069449

In-person events have been cancelled for all Sierra Club activities through February 2021. Dang.
You can also join our Zoom video conference here: https://zoom.us/j/5133069449 .

6:30-7:15 Climate Change Committee Meeting – Discuss Action on the 1,000 Schools Initiative by Bob Hendricks and team, and allow people to sign up to continue the work to stop climate change, an imperative if we want our current civilization to survive. We’ve formed Action Teams on Austin Energy, the Permian Pipeline, Rio Grande Valley Support, Carbon Fee & Dividend, People Power, Data Entry, and Presentations and more. We have identified additional action teams we’d like to form, including Transportation, Climate Justice, Partner Organizations, School Education, and Social Media. Whether you have only minutes a month or hours a day, join us to build a mass movement to stop climate change. Or join another group fighting this vital cause.

Bruce Melton will present A Climate Emergency Response. This is A report invited by the Austin Climate Program, to enhance the 5-year revision to the Austin Climate Plan that will go before City Council this summer. It was prepared by a stakeholder group to address the need for a lower warming target of “less than 1.0 degrees C above normal,” as has been adopted by national Sierra Club in March 2020.

Fundamentally, impacts are happening up to a century ahead of projections because of poor modeling and assumptions, scientific reticence, and non-stationary data, but there is something being missed by our climate change culture. When systems are forced beyond their evolutionary boundary conditions they collapse. This is classic forced ecologic and systems evolution. Once boundary conditions are exceeded, collapse is not reversible unless boundary conditions are restored. Because the maximum natural variability of our old climate –the boundary conditions of Earth systems evolution– was about 0.5 C warming above normal, the tipping we see now activated in more than half of known tipping systems is directly related to systems collapse and reevolution. This means degradation, elimination, or reversal of environmental services like CO2 sequestration. Because tipping cannot be reversed unless we cool Earth to below the tipping threshold, and the time frame to achieve climate restoration is before mid-century, this emergency must be addressed immediately with the tools at hand to save lives. This presentation lays out the science and solutions to save lives with the tools at hand with a true emergency response.

Melton is founder and cochair of the Austin Sierra Club Climate Change Committee, founder and director of the Climate Change Now Initiative (ClimateDiscovery.org, est. 2005), a 37-year civil engineer and environmental researcher, author, and climate change impact filmmaker working across North America. He was instrumental in establishing the Sierra Club’s new “less than 1.0 degree C above normal” climate policy.