[TheClimate.Vote] July 12, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News

[Richard Pauli]

/July  12, 2017/

*[BBC News]  Giant iceberg splits from Antarctic 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40321674>*
One of the biggest icebergs ever recorded has just broken away from 
Antarctica.
The giant block is estimated to cover an area of roughly 6,000 sq km; 
that's about a quarter the size of Wales. /(Delaware)/
An US satellite observed the berg on Wednesday while passing over a 
region known as the Larsen C Ice Shelf.
Scientists were expecting it. They'd been following the development of a 
large crack in Larsen's ice for more than a decade...
The more than 200m-thick tabular berg will not move very far, very fast 
in the short term. But it will need to be monitored. Currents and winds 
might eventually push it north of the Antarctic where it could become a 
hazard to shipping.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40321674

*(CBS video)  Will global warming lead to Earth's demise? 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/will-global-warming-lead-to-earths-demise/>*
JULY 11, 2017, 3:39 PM| In the scientific community there is a strong 
consensus that global temperatures have increased in recent decades and 
that this trend is largely caused by human-induced emissions of 
greenhouse gases. But just how bad could things get? New York Magazine 
deputy editor David Wallace-Wells joins CBSN to discuss his cover story 
on climate change, which describes an apocalyptic scenario.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/will-global-warming-lead-to-earths-demise/
*
**How bad can it be? ...and when?* <http://localsteps.org/howbad.html>*
*The chart has linked hotspots to temps. In the lower right corner 
notice the temperature line for the current year.   There are seven 
future projections plotted.
The graphic IPCC Chart uses data from special report emissions scenario 
for the IPCC 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Emissions_Scenarios>.   
Links below in blue are summarized projections for each degree change 
taken from the book "Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter Planet 
<https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/142620213X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1>" 
- Mark Lynas and videos segments from National Geographics.   For an 
excellent video introduction to the global warming problem see the 
National Geographic video of Global Warming 101 
<http://youtu.be/0F3QPY83NZQ>*
*http://localsteps.org/howbad.html*


Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good. 
<https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/11/15950966/climate-change-doom-journalism>*
*It's okay to talk about how scary climate change is. Really.*
Updated by David Roberts
David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York 
magazine 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html> 
that has kicked up quite a discussion.
It's about worst-case scenarios, i.e., what is likely to happen if we do 
nothing to change our current greenhouse-gas emissions trajectory. It 
answers the question: How bad could it get?
Turns out, it could get pretty bad. The dystopian future the piece 
describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most 
people - even people fairly well-versed in climate change - understand...
The theme of all these critiques is that bad, scary news doesn't help. 
It terrifies and paralyzes people....
that doesn't mean that every single instance of fear has to be 
accompanied by a serving of hope. Not every article has to be about 
everything. In fact, if you ask me, the "[two paragraphs of fear], BUT 
[12 paragraphs of happy news]" format has gotten to be a predictable 
snooze. Some pieces can just be about the terrible risks we face. That's 
okay.
Finally, fear+hope requires fear. Wallace-Wells himself has the best 
defense, in a (fascinating) interview with Gothamist: 
<http://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/climate_change_ny_mag.php>

    It just so happens that people seem much less aware of those sort of
    [negative-end] tail risks than they are of the positive-end tail
    risks, which are namely that life will continue much like it is now.
    And so I thought even just as a kind of experiment in psychological
    anchoring, it was useful to say, here's really the worst case
    outcome that you should be thinking about probably as often as you
    think about the best case outcome, which is the world that you walk
    through every day. There's been a sort of general failure of
    imagination that means we've accepted what's the median-likely
    outcome as a worst-case scenario. As a result we've been a bit
    handicapped in thinking about how much action needs to be taken.
    This sounds exactly right to me. "Things stay roughly as they are"
    is just as improbable as the worst-case scenario he lays out, yet
    I'd venture to guess it is believed (or more importantly,
    envisioned) by vastly more people.

This sounds exactly right to me. "Things stay roughly as they are" is 
just as improbable as the worst-case scenario he lays out, yet I'd 
venture to guess it is believed (or more importantly, envisioned) by 
vastly more people.
Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy - it 
looks just like now! - while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very 
difficult. It's especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is 
treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden 
occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. 
Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.
This kind of forced cheerfulness has been around in environmental 
circles for a long time, but it seems to have spread to the press. It 
wasn't 24 hours after Trump was elected that the first "Trump can't stop 
climate progress!" pieces started appearing online. After he announced 
he was scrapping the Clean Power Plan: "Trump can't stop climate 
progress!" After he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement: "Trump 
can't stop climate progress!" Do Not Accept Any Bad News.
It's fine for activists to be congenitally positive - that's their job. 
But I'm with Slate's Susan Matthews: it's just weird for journalists and 
analysts to worry about overly alarming people regarding the biggest, 
scariest problem humanity has ever faced. By any sane accounting, the 
ranks the under-alarmed outnumber the over-alarmed by many multiples. 
The vast majority of people do not have an accurate understanding of how 
bad climate change has already gotten or how bad it is likely to get, 
much less how bad it could get if we keep electing crazy people...
When there are important things that people don't understand, 
journalists should explain those things. Attempts at dime-store social 
psychology are unlikely to lead to better journalism.
Over my 407 years in the climate-o-sphere, I've cycled through just 
about every school of thought on the right way to communicate climate 
change. What I've come to believe is that on this, as on most matters, 
nobody really knows anything. Even if there are accurate statements 
about how people in general respond to messages in general, they won't 
tell you much about how you ought to communicate with the people you 
want to reach.
Writing that is consciously pitched to reach and inspire some mythical 
average reader (as encountered in social science studies filtered 
through popular journalism) tends to be flavorless and dull.
Similarly, the dry, hedged language of science is not the only serious 
or legitimate way to communicate, though climate scientists often 
mistake it as such. WW's piece is full of florid language like this:
However sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already 
ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing 
entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, 
engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that 
will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.
That is a humdinger of a sentence! I wish I had written it. However much 
climate scolds may harumph at this kind of language, it is visceral, 
visual, and memorable in a way that probability functions and error bars 
never will be.
For my part, I've given up on speculating about how audiences will 
react. I just try to communicate like I would like to be communicated 
to, frankly and clearly, as though I'm talking to a friend in a bar. 
There are plenty of ways to communicate accurately - through hortatory 
rhetoric, poetry, painting, dance, "disaster porn," whatever. Scientific 
data are not the only medium of communication or its only currency. 
Narrative and emotion matter too.
Most people simply have no idea how scary climate change is. However 
that terrible urgency is communicated, the world is better for it.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/11/15950966/climate-change-doom-journalism


*We aren't doomed by climate change.  Right now we are choosing to be 
doomed.* 
<https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-doomsday-scenario-80d28affef2e>
We could prevent New York Magazine's climate change doomsday scenario, 
but keep voting not to.
Joe Romm
New York Magazine has stirred up a firestorm of debate by publishing a 
worst-case scenario for climate change this week, "The Uninhabitable 
Earth 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>" 
by David Wallace-Wells.
Responses range from Mashable's 
<http://mashable.com/2017/07/10/new-york-mag-climate-story-inaccurate-doomsday-scenario/#w1Wun_bzfPqk> 
"Do not accept New York Mag's climate change doomsday scenario," to 
climatologist Michael Mann's critical Facebook post 
<https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/1470539096335621>, 
to Slate's 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/07/we_are_not_alarmed_enough_about_climate_change.html> 
"New York Magazine's global-warming horror story isn't too scary. It's 
not scary enough."
The first point to be made is that if you aren't hair-on-fire alarmed 
about climate change and America's suicidal GOP-driven climate and 
energy policies, then you are uninformed (or misinformed).
"It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced 
society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself," as Elizabeth 
Kolbert wrote way back in 2005 in a New Yorker series every bit as 
alarming as the NY Magazine piece, "but that is what we are now in the 
process of doing."
We have been choosing to destroy ourselves for quite some time now. 
Climate silence and climate ignorance are literally destroying us....
...we are not doomed. We are simply choosing to be doomed...
What makes the worst-case scenario so difficult to imagine is that it 
involves multiple ever-worsening catastrophic impacts happening 
everywhere in the world at the same time - impacts that are irreversible 
for centuries.
The true worst-case scenario is so bad that scientists simply assume 
humanity is too rational and moral to let that happen.
That's a key reason the overwhelming majority of scientific research on 
climate change is not about the worst-case scenario.
In 2010, the Royal Society devoted a special issue of Philosophical 
Transactions <http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/4> 
A to look at this 4°C (7°F) scenario...this 4°C world is not the 
plausible worst-case, it is close to the expected outcome of our current 
emissions pathway.
As we go past 4°C warming, we put ourselves at greater and greater risk 
of making large parts of the planet's currently arable and populated 
land virtually uninhabitable for much of the year and irreversibly so 
for hundreds of years....
The very worst-case scenario for climate change is unimaginably 
horrific. The plausible worst-case scenario is imaginably horrific - and 
it's not much different from the world we end up with if the climate 
policies of Trump and the GOP leadership continue to prevail in this 
country past 2020.
So while the NY Magazine piece isn't framed perfectly, and has a few 
errors of fact that others have identified, I would urge everyone to 
read it. The piece is one of the few recent discussions in a popular 
magazine to try to spell out just how bad things could get.
https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-doomsday-scenario-80d28affef2e


*Alarmism Is the Argument  We Need to Fight Climate Change 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/07/we_are_not_alarmed_enough_about_climate_change.html>*
*New York magazine's global-warming horror story isn't too scary. It's 
not scary enough.*
By Susan Matthews
New York's David Wallace-Wells has a formidable cover story in the 
magazine this week, "The Uninhabitable Earth 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>," 
that dryly details just how bad things could get due to climate change. 
The answer? Very, very bad. The timeline? Sooner than you think. The 
instantly viral piece might be the Silent Spring 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0618249060/?tag=slatmaga-20> of our time, 
except it doesn't uncover shocking new information-it just collects all 
the terrifying things that were already sitting out there into one 
extremely terrifying list.
"No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed 
enough," Wallace-Wells writes, before running through the known science 
and stats that explain why rising seas, the focus of most of our climate 
panic, are just the tip of the iceberg-disease, famine, economic panic, 
and civil unrest are coming, too. An argument for freaking out, his 
piece has been decried for being too alarmist. Actually, it is not 
alarmist enough. As I read it in bed at midnight Sunday night, for the 
first time I started to realize just exactly why climate change might be 
a reason not to have children-because if those children have children, 
this could be their world. That's how close to the edge we are...
There's a contingency of people-good people, people with noble goals-who 
are responding to this piece in horror. 
<https://newrepublic.com/article/143788/power-peril-climate-disaster-porn> 
Not horror at the future, though that would be understandable. Instead, 
they are horrified by the rhetorical strategy of using alarmism to make 
a point about climate change. Horror at the fact that it could make 
readers like me pause over the idea of bringing children into the world....
Climate change is a uniquely difficult problem specifically because 
addressing it requires humans to be selflessly interested in the long 
term, which is neither natural nor easy. But, contrary to the belief 
perpetuated by a lot of the criticism of this piece, addressing climate 
change does not rely on people being psychologically self-possessed 
enough to freely give up meat and airplane rides for the greater good. 
There is no amount of individual good intention that can solve this 
massive, structural problem in enough time to have an impact. What we 
need is leaders who will take this problem seriously. We need it 
yesterday. And the right way to get there is to tell people the truth 
about the future and implore them to vote for and insist on a better one....
These days, you rarely see leaders argue that it isn't happening at 
all-that's become too gauche to defend. Even Trump, via surrogates, 
admits to "believing" in climate change. Instead, just as straight 
racism has become impolite but arguments that suggest alternatives to 
racism are too costly abound, climate change denialists now make 
arguments about degrees of certainty, about the improbability of staving 
it off, about the costs of attempting to do so. The new denialists don't 
deny climate change-they just refute the fact that it matters enough to 
require action....
We don't need to guard against alarmism, against depression, against 
anger, against despair when it comes to climate change. Sure, the 
hopelessness that accompanies pondering our fate might depress people 
out of recycling their water bottles or switching their light bulbs. 
That doesn't matter. If it also scares people into actually taking this 
issue seriously at the ballot box, the trade-off will be well worth it. 
Because the ballot box is where it matters. If we force the issue-if we 
elect people who care about the survival of all humans rather than just 
a few-then we might have a shot of preventing the hellscape 
Wallace-Wells has outlined.
If you don't want that outcome, we need to start by being more alarmed.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/07/we_are_not_alarmed_enough_about_climate_change.html

*
**Why a Warming Arctic May Be Causing Colder U.S. Winters 
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/global-warming-arctic-colder-winters-climate-change-spd/>*
A new study shows how a warming Arctic could negatively impact regions 
thousands of miles away.
By Sarah Gibbens
PUBLISHED JULY 11, 2017
When a U.S. Republican senator threw a snowball onto the Senate floor in 
late February of 2015, he used it to underscore his belief that 
humanmade climate change was an alarmist conclusion. The snowball had 
been rolled from the capital grounds in Washington D.C., which, at the 
time, was experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter.
If global warming was real, he postured, how could the nation's capital 
experience such severe cold?
Uncharacteristically cold winters, however, just might be one of the 
most hard felt effects of climate change, according to a study published 
in Nature Geoscience by a team of researchers.
The study found that unusually cold temperatures in northern North 
America and lower precipitation in the south central U.S. all coincided 
with periods of warmer Arctic weather.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/global-warming-arctic-colder-winters-climate-change-spd/


*Trump Navy secretary nominee: Climate change is real and poses a threat 
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/341447-trump-navy-secretary-nominee-climate-change-is-real-poses-a-threat>*
President Trump's Navy secretary nominee said Tuesday he is "totally 
aware" of the threat posed by climate change..."The Navy is totally 
aware of rising water issues, storm issues, etc." nominee Richard V. 
Spencer told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
"We must protect our infrastructure, and I will work hard to make sure 
we are keeping an eye on that because without the infrastructure, we 
lose readiness."
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/341447-trump-navy-secretary-nominee-climate-change-is-real-poses-a-threat


*87 Percent of Americans Unaware There's Scientific Consensus on Climate 
Change 
<https://weather.com/science/environment/news/americans-climate-change-scientific-consensus>*
Nearly 90 percent of Americans are unaware that there is a consensus 
within the scientific community that human-caused climate change is real 
and threatens the planet, a new report says.
According to the report published last week by the Yale Program on 
Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for 
Climate Change Communication, only 13 percent of Americans were able to 
correctly identify that more than 90 percent of all climate scientists 
have concluded that climate change is real.
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/americans-climate-change-scientific-consensus


*Earth's sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn* 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn>
Researchers talk of 'biological annihilation' as study reveals billions 
of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades...
The scientists conclude: "The resulting biological annihilation 
obviously will have serious ecological, economic and social 
consequences. Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the 
decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe."
They say, while action to halt the decline remains possible, the 
prospects do not look good: "All signs point to ever more powerful 
assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal 
picture of the future of life, including human life."...
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences, eschews the normally sober tone of 
scientific papers and calls the massive loss of wildlife a "biological 
annihilation" that represents a "frightening assault on the foundations 
of human civilisation".
Prof Gerardo Ceballos, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 
who led the work, said: "The situation has become so bad it would not be 
ethical not to use strong language."
Previous studies have shown species are becoming extinct at a 
significantly faster rate than for millions of years before, but even so 
extinctions remain relatively rare giving the impression of a gradual 
loss of biodiversity. The new work instead takes a broader view, 
assessing many common species which are losing populations all over the 
world as their ranges shrink, but remain present elsewhere.
The scientists found that a third of the thousands of species losing 
populations are not currently considered endangered and that up to 50% 
of all individual animals have been lost in recent decade..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn


*Climate change to deplete some US water basins, reduce irrigated crop 
yields* 
<http://news.mit.edu/2017/climate-change-deplete-us-water-basins-reduce-irrigated-crop-yields-0711>
By 2050, the Southwest will produce significantly less cotton and 
forage, researchers report.
Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
By 2050, the Southwest will produce significantly less cotton and 
forage, researchers report.
A new study by MIT climate scientists, economists, and agriculture 
experts finds that certain hotspots in the country will experience 
severe reductions in crop yields by 2050, due to climate change's impact 
on irrigation.
The most adversely affected region, according to the researchers, will 
be the Southwest. Already a water-stressed part of the country, this 
region is projected to experience reduced precipitation by midcentury. 
Less rainfall to the area will mean reduced runoff into water basins 
that feed irrigated fields.
Production of cotton, the primary irrigated crop in the Southwest and in 
southern Arizona in particular, will drop to less than 10 percent of the 
crop yield under optimal irrigation conditions, the study projects. 
Similarly, maize grown in Utah, now only yielding 40 percent of the 
optimal expected yield, will decrease to 10 percent with further 
climate-driven water deficits.
In the Northwest, water shortages to the Great Basin region will lead to 
large reductions in irrigated forage, such as hay, grasses, and other 
crops grown to feed livestock. In contrast, the researchers predict a 
decrease in water stress for irrigation in the the southern Plains, 
which will lead to greater yields of irrigated sorghum and soybean.
By 2050, the team projects that, under a business-as-usual scenario, in 
which no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, a number of water 
basins in the U.S. will start experiencing water shortages. Several 
basins, particularly in the Southwest, will see existing water shortages 
"severely accentuated," according to the study.
"It may not matter too much for the total crop production of the U.S., 
but if you're a farmer in that particular region that's going to be 
impacted, that matters to you," Monier says. "What we want to do is 
provide useful information that either farmers or land investors can use 
to look into the future and make decisions on where is the right region 
to expand irrigated agriculture, and where is it more risky. We also 
want to make clear that climate mitigation is better for U.S. irrigated 
agriculture than not doing anything."...
http://news.mit.edu/2017/climate-change-deplete-us-water-basins-reduce-irrigated-crop-yields-0711


*This Day in Climate History July 12, 2013 
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/11/climate-change-energy-disruptions/2508789/> 
-  from D.R. Tucker*
July 12, 2013: USA Today reports:
"U.S. energy supplies will likely face more severe disruptions because 
of climate change and extreme weather, which have already caused 
blackouts and lowered production at power plants, a government report 
warned Thursday.
"What's driving these vulnerabilities? Rising temperatures, up 1.5 
degrees Fahrenheit in the last century, and the resulting sea level 
rise, which are accompanied by drought, heat waves, storms and 
wildfires, according to the U.S. Department of Energy."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/11/climate-change-energy-disruptions/2508789/
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