Page 50 - June 23, 2017

Groton Daily Independent
Friday, June 23, 2017 ~ Vol. 24 - No. 344 ~ 50 of 54
achieved,” said Kenrick Leslie, executive director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre . Trump’s Paris pull-out, he said, has “thrown it right out the window.”
Small islands “are the most vulnerable parts of the world,” said scientist Jim Skea of the Imperial College in London, who chairs another UN climate panel. Exceeding 1.5 degrees “really makes the vulnerability threat for them more acute. It’s kind of existential.”
Scientists and carbon emissions computer modelers at Climate Analytics helped the small islands in their campaign called “1.5 to stay alive”, and they say it is still possible, though unlikely, to limit the warming to that much.
That scenario involves overshooting the 1.5 degree goal and then eventually allowing no new carbon dioxide emissions into the air. But even that isn’t enough so the world would have to somehow pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air, which is technically feasible but not practical at the moment, said Climate Analytics scienti c adviser Carl-Friedrich Schleussner.
Recent studies have shown that the sea level rise in the past decade or so has accelerated compared to previous decades, said University of Colorado sea level expert Steve Nerem. He estimates a meter of sea level rise by the end of this century and emphasizes it could be worse with ice sheet melts in Greenland and Antarctica.
“Anything over a meter (a yard) is catastrophic for these small islands,” Nerem said.
And the islands don’t have to be underwater to become uninhabitable, he said, because sea level rise will make them more vulnerable to high tides and extreme storms.
Warming over 1.5 degrees also is likely to be devastating for coral reefs — which many of these small islands rely on for their shing and tourism economies, Schleussner said.
Between rising seas that could swamp population centers and infrastructure like airports and seaports all over the Caribbean, the damage to reefs and shing with increased warming will hurt Caribbean people in the pocketbooks and in their stomachs, several Caribbean climate of cials said.
Ahmed Sareer, the Maldives ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States, said the 1.5 goal is harder to achieve without the United States but not yet impossible.
“The island spirit is to never give up,” Sareer said. “We are always a resilient people.”
___
Perry reported from Wellington, New Zealand. Edith Lederer in New York and Josh Lederman in Wash-
ington contributed to this report. ___
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears. His work can be found here. Follow Nick Perry on Twitter at @nickgperry and his work can be found here .
Kids today: They don’t work summer jobs the way they used to By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, later known as a setting in the horror movie “The Shining,” where Patrick Doyle earned his rst real paycheck.
He was a busboy. The job didn’t pay much. But Doyle quickly learned lessons that served him for years as he rose to become the CEO of Domino’s, the pizza delivery giant:
Show up on time, dress properly, treat customers well.
“I grew up a lot that summer,” he says.
As summer 2017 begins, America’s teenagers are far less likely to be acquiring the kinds of experiences
Doyle found so useful. Once a teenage rite of passage, the summer job is vanishing.
Instead of baling hay, scooping ice cream or stocking supermarket shelves in July and August, today’s teens are more likely to be enrolled in summer school, doing volunteer work to burnish their college cre-
dentials or just hanging out with friends.
For many, not working is a choice. For some others, it re ects a lack of opportunities where they live,
often in lower-income urban areas: They sometimes nd that older workers hold the low-skill jobs that