[TheClimate.Vote] Oct 20, 2016 - Daily Global Warming News for voters, candidates and officials
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That's 4 straight debates without a single question on*climate
change*. Good job, everyone.
<http://www.vox.com/2016/10/19/13342250/presidential-debates-climate-change>
Vox -1 hour ago
It finally happened. After three straight debates without a single
moderator asking about*climate change*, Fox News's Chris Wallace
wanted to focus the final presidential showdown on an issue that
would greatly affect future generations...He wasn’t going to let
Trump or Clinton avoid the topic, either. He pulled out facts and
figures and demanded to know why the two candidates were ignoring
the issue....*Wait, sorry, I’m just kidding.* Wallace didn’t ask
about climate change at all. He wanted to talk about the national
debt...The national debt is an odd, recurring fixation in
Washington. The fact that the US government borrows a lot of money
each year just isn’t a problem right now. Interest rates are
incredibly low. The US Treasury never misses a payment. The one
thing that might be worth fretting about is that someday in the
future, our children and grandchildren could have to pay higher
taxes to pay down the debt if it gets unmanageable....But if you’re
that worried about the future, why not talk about global warming?
It’s an issue that’s not just affecting us today — it will shape the
next 10,000 years of life on this entire planet. And it’s not just a
question of whether our grandchildren might have to pay somewhat
higher taxes, it’s a question of whether multi-century droughts will
ravage the Southwest, of whether the city of Miami will drown
beneath the rising seas, of whether vital coral reefs will vanish
forever. Quibbling over the payroll tax seems quaint by comparison.
Full transcript: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s final
presidential debate
<http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/19/13336894/third-presidential-debate-live-transcript-clinton-trump>
*Climate change*took a backseat to scandal at the presidential
debates
<https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/20/climate-change-took-a-backseat-to-scandal-at-the-presidential-de/>
While the third and final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton covered national debt, gun control -- and whether or not to
accept the results come election day --*climate change*barely got a
look in. In fact, environment was hardly on the*...*
Exposed: The*Climate*Fallacy of 2100
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/exposed-the-climate-fallacy-of-2100/>
Scientific American (blog) -18 hours ago
If we do not plan, now, to limit carbon emissions beyond this
century, we will foolishly raise the oceans dramatically for
thousands of years. ..and fondly looked forward to passing on the
land to hoped-for-grandchildren, and theirs, and so on...That idea,
however, now seems flawed to both of us writing this article.
Strong, new research indicates that anyone or anything tens of feet
above the sea today may one day face an unbeatable force, whether a
country home near San Diego or a skyscraping condo in Miami.
Although shorelines are forever evolving, these changes can be
predicted directly, and are due to needlessly excessive carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions from a relatively brief, recent period of
time.....As a result, public discussions have been mostly about “X
degrees of warming” or “Y feet of*sea level rise*” to the end of
this century.... people discount staggering losses...beyond 2100.
That’s wrong, and immoral too....That’s because a crucial fraction
of airborne carbon from the industrial revolution, plus that coming
this century and next, will persist for tens to hundreds of
thousands of years.... The mere sliver (in geologic time) of climate
stability in the last 10 or so millennia has dearly helped human
societies and cultures to flourish. But the lesson is that seas are
acutely sensitive to CO2 and temperatures, and they can have inertia
lagging the carbon cycle and climate system. That means today’s
oceans could go on rising very long after CO2 might be steadied—even
if humanity takes determined action to slow rises in CO2 worldwide,
or even decrease emissions. This thorny fact is not widely
appreciated....one-fifth to half of the airborne CO2 released by
human industry so far and in the next 100 years will still be
present in the atmosphere by the year 3000....The point here is that
2100 shouldn’t be regarded as a terminal year. To do so is folly, a
fallacy in thinking. Life goes on, people do not end there, and seas
will not suddenly halt their rise then....The paleoclimate record
indicates that in periods of meltwater, or termination of the last
glacial period, seas possibly might have risen at an astounding rate
of a foot per decade, or 10 feet per century. There is no reason to
say it can’t happen again, or rise by faster rates. Given aggressive
CO2 trends, it must be considered...perhaps most importantly the
formal goal of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) for an “upper
limit” on “allowable” warming is in truth a legal fiction, a mere
balm for present leaders, since the planet is on a clear path to
blow right past it....
No longer taken seriously, we're seeing the last gasp
of*climate*denial groups
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/oct/19/no-longer-taken-seriously-were-seeing-the-last-gasp-of-climate-denial-groups>
The Guardian -13 hours ago
The*Global Warming*Policy Foundation (GWPF) is an
anti-*climate*policy advocacy group in the UK that often releases
misleading scientific “reports...Ridley and GWPF want to risk
humanity’s future on their belief that climate change isn’t
dangerous. The problem is that their belief is premised on
misleading, cherry picked, faulty, and conspiratorial arguments. As
the Royal Society noted, by misrepresenting the scientific evidence,
GWPF undermined the legitimacy of its policy views.....We should be
have a climate debate about the best policies to solve the problem.
Groups that deny the problem by misrepresenting science only serve
to distract from that much-needed debate, and outside of Donald
Trump’s Republican Party, they’re no longer being listened to.
Conventional thinking will not solve the*climate*crisis
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/19/conventional-thinking-will-not-solve-the-climate-crisis>
The Guardian -11 hours ago
Choosing the best possible future means considering radical
scenarios that align energy use and industry with climate
action...The bad news is that under the scenarios drawn up by the
WEC, even keeping to the upper target agreed in Paris of*global
warming*no greater than 2C will require an “exceptional and enduring
effort” that goes beyond any current commitments and needs a*...*
*After Lean Years, Big Oil May Emerge Stronger Than Ever*
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/business/energy-environment/after-lean-years-big-oil-may-emerge-stronger-than-ever.html?_r=0>
Big Oil is clawing its way back....After a heart-stopping plunge in
the price of crude over the last two years, along with slashed
dividends and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, the
biggest oil companies are proving surprisingly adept at again
pumping profits, as well as oil, out of the ground...Indeed, with
oil trading in a range of $40 to $50 barrel for most of the 2016,
experts say the biggest energy producers are poised to rebound if
prices remain stable.......
Research: Who's Lobbying Congress on Climate Change
<https://hbr.org/2016/10/research-whos-lobbying-congress-on-climate-change?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20harvardbusiness%20%28HBR.org%29>
Harvard Business Review -9 hours ago
To many, political lobbying is seen as a way to advance special
interests at the expense of the greater good. So when it comes to
lobbying on climate change, ...We should note that one serious
deficiency with Lobbying Disclosure Act data is that it doesn’t
include whether a company lobbied for or against a specific
regulation. So we only know how much was spent..We found a U-shaped
relationship between greenhouse gases emissions and lobbying, which
means that the highest and the lowest greenhouse gas emitters spent
the most on lobbying related to climate change. Meanwhile, companies
that had average levels of emissions spent the least on lobbying,
perhaps due to having less to gain or lose from potential changes in
laws........http://amd.aom.org/content/2/2/175.abstract...Between
2006 and 2009, firms spent over a billion dollars lobbying on
climate-related bills and issues. Such spending is largely perceived
as a strategy by industry to oppose regulation. Research has barely
begun to investigate how firm-level performance on salient political
issues affects corporate political strategy. In this article, we
address this issue in the context of the recent climate change
policy debate in the United States. We propose a U-shaped
relationship between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lobbying
expenditures. To test our proposition, our study leverages novel
data on firm-level GHG emissions and lobbying expenses aimed
specifically at climate change legislation. Our results, based on
1,141 firms from 2006 to 2009, suggest that both dirty and clean
firms are active in lobbying, which challenges the view of
adversarial corporate strategy.
(ethics opinion) Why is it Wrong to Wreck the World?
<http://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/wrong-to-wreck-the-world-ze0z1610zfis>
Utne Reader Online -Oct 18, 2016
When my colleagues and I do public events about*climate ethics*, we
gather people in small groups and ask them to address these
questions: “What do you care about most? What would you die for?
What would you be willing to spend your whole life taking care of?”
Then we ask, “What follows from the fact that you hold these values?
Values have consequences in the real world. If you value this more
than anything else, what will you do — or never do? How might you
make that value evident and real and powerful in your life?” That’s
the morality of affirmation....No one says that moral affirmation is
a sufficient condition for change, but I believe it is a necessary
one....Ethics is a trump card, so it has a strong strategic value in
social change — a value higher than that of the economic-gain card.
“We can make a lot of money by enslaving our neighbor’s children,”
one might say. The sentence that is sure to end that conversation is
this: “But it would be wrong.” Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity
and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change
<https://www.amazon.com/Great-Tide-Rising-Towards-Planetary/dp/1619026996/ref=sr_1_1>
*Fortune Magazine: Here's How Global Warming Could Trigger the Next
Financial Crisis*
<http://fortune.com/2016/09/20/global-warming-financial-crisis/>
That’s the conclusion of a new report published recently by the Bank
of Canada
<http://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/swp2016-39.pdf>....The
report is mainly focused on the reinsurance industry, a shadowy
corner of the insurance business, and the fact that what the last
financial crisis showed us was that when insurance companies aren’t
properly regulated or the risks they take on are poorly understood,
the results can be disastrous. On top of that, the report’s authors
argue that in an era when climate change is causing natural
disasters to be more severe, the risks that reinsurance are taking
on could be larger than they appear....The authors argument focuses
on the role of retrocession, which are the risk-sharing arrangements
among reinsurers. They are often not fully detailed in insurers
accounting statements. “An important feature of the retrocession
market is its opacity to both to market participants and
regulators,” the report reads, adding that the big problem is that
reinsurers often don’t know how much risk or what kinds of risks
other insurers or reinsurers are taking on. “It is possible for
contagion . . . to occur, in which the losses of one party cascade
to others in the network.” Report
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/swp2016-39.pdf
Bank of Canada staff working papers provide a forum for staff to
publish work
Scientists find 500 US seabed vents of powerful*greenhouse gas*
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-methane-idUSKCN12J2MG>
Reuters -2 hours ago
COPENHAGEN Scientists have found 500 seabed vents bubbling methane
into the Pacific Ocean off the United States, roughly doubling the
number of known U.S. seeps of the powerful greenhouse gas, a study
showed on Wednesday....Methane naturally escapes from the sea floor
in many places around the world and can stoke global warming if it
reaches the atmosphere. Worldwide, scientists are trying to see if
rising ocean temperatures cause more leaks...."It appears that the
entire coast off Washington, Oregon and California is a giant
methane seep," Robert Ballard, who is famed for finding the wreck of
the Titanic and has now discovered the 500 new seeps, ..."The
discoveries double to about 1,000 the number of such vents now known
to exist along the continental margins of the USA," ...And when
seeps are found "it's most likely that they've been occurring for a
long time," he told Reuters. No one has had technology to map seeps
until recent decades.
*Oklahoma Governor Wants You to Pray for the Oil Industry (No Joke)
<http://www.ecowatch.com/oklahoma-oilfield-prayer-day-2032610976.html>*
This is not us trying to be The Onion. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has
officially proclaimed Oct. 13 "Oilfield Prayer Day" to raise
awareness for the state's declining oil industry.... "The oil field
is hurting right now," Beddow told The Oklahoman. "We're asking
churches all over Oklahoma to open their doors, put on a pot of
coffee and pray for the oil field, and not only for the oil field
but the state, because the economy of our state is so connected to
the oil field.".....Here's her official signed proclamation....The
document states:
"*Whereas* Oklahoma is blessed with an abundance of oil
and natural gas; and ... Christians acknowledge such natural
resources are created by God ... Christians are invited to thank God
for the blessings created by the oil and natural gas industry and to
seek His wisdom and ask for protection.".....A series of "Praying
for the Patch" breakfasts will take place in other cities before
culminating at the sixth annual Oilfield Prayer Breakfast on Oct. 13
in downtown Oklahoma City, an event that Fallin has made preliminary
plans to attend. ...Last month, a record-breaking 5.8-magnitude
earthquake rattled the the city of Pawnee. Geologists are
investigating whether the earthquake—which occurred 25 miles north
of the world's largest oil-storage complex in Cushing—was triggered
by wastewater fluid injection from oil and gas production in the area.
(video)*This day in Climate History **October 20, 2012,*
<http://youtu.be/BUBbLbMbvfc> From D.R. Tucker -------------------------
October 20, 2012: On MSNBC's "Up," Chris Hayes condemns President
Obama, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and CNN's Candy
Crowley for remaining silent on climate in the most recent
presidential debate. Referring to the 2008 election Hayes said,
"That moment in 2008 seems like something excavated from the ruins
of a destroyed civilization" http://youtu.be/BUBbLbMbvfc
<http://youtu.be/BUBbLbMbvfc>
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