[TheClimate.Vote] July 14, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News

[Richard Pauli]

/July 14, 2017

/*Trump Wants to Steer UN Climate Cash Toward Building Coal Plants 
<http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wants-to-steer-un-climate-cash-toward-building-coal-plants/ar-BBEmNlF?li=BBnb7Kz>*
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. will seek to use a United Nations fund designed 
to aid nations hard hit by climate change to promote the construction of 
coal-fired power plants around the world.
The U.S. already donated $1 billion to the so-called Green Climate Fund, 
and it can now use its seat on that board to advance American-energy 
interests globally, a White House official said.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe climate 
negotiations at the just-concluded summit of Group of 20 leaders in 
Germany. A U.S. commitment to "work closely with other countries to help 
them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently" was 
highlighted in a statement issued by the group last week.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wants-to-steer-un-climate-cash-toward-building-coal-plants/ar-BBEmNlF?li=BBnb7Kz


*The Problem With Climate Doomsday Reporting, And How To Move Beyond It 
<https://www.desmog.ca/2017/07/12/problem-climate-doomsday-reporting-and-how-move-beyond-it>*
by James Wilt, DeSmog Canada, July 12, 2017
It's not often that an article about climate change becomes one of the 
most hotly debated issues on the internet - especially in the midst of a 
controversial G20 summit.
But that exact thing happened following the publication of a lengthy 
essay in New York Magazine titled "SubmitThe Uninhabitable Earth: 
Famine, Economic Collapse, a Sun that Cooks Us: What Climate Change 
Could Wreak - Sooner Than You Think 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html>./"/
In the course of 7,200 words, author David Wallace-Wells chronicled the 
possible impacts of catastrophic climate change if current emissions 
trends are maintained, including, but certainly not limited to: mass 
permafrost melt and methane leaks, mass extinctions, fatal heat waves, 
drought and food insecurity, diseases and viruses, "rolling death smog," 
global conflict and war, economic collapse and ocean acidification...
Slate political writer Jamelle Bouie described the essay ... as 
"something that will haunt your nightmares."
It's a fair assessment. Reading it feels like a series of punches in the 
gut, triggering emotions like despair, hopelessness and resignation.
But here's the thing: many climate psychologists and communicators 
consider those feelings to be the very opposite of what will compel 
people to action.
"Based on my research on climate communications, this article is exactly 
what we don't need," says Per Espen Stoknes, Norwegian psychologist and 
author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global 
Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action, in an interview with 
DeSmog Canada.
*Climate Psychologists Recommends 'Positivity Ratio' of 3:1*
Let's get one thing out of the way.
Critics of the New York Magazine article - and other instances of 
doomsday journalism - are not anti-science. These are all people who 
firmly recognize the severity of catastrophic climate change, and are 
certainly not petitioning for a bury-your-head-in-the-sand approach, 
shielding the public from the potential horrors.
Rather, they suggest that most people will only process such facts about 
climate change if it's framed in an appropriate way that acknowledges 
how individuals and societies respond to potentially traumatic threats.
...there's a well-known "positivity ratio" for optimal engagement of a 
3:1 ratio of opportunities to threats. He says the New York Magazine 
piece was around nine threats to every one proposed solution.
In other words, a tripling of the ratio in the wrong direction.
*Article Sticks to Hard Science, Ignoring Role of Social Sciences*
The author of the New York Magazine article has already responded to a 
series of criticisms on Twitter, including on the scientific merit of 
some of his claims.
A rather revealing moment was when Wallace-Wells replied to a critique 
from renowned futurist Alex Steffen - who had described the article as 
"one long council of despair" - by suggesting that "my own feeling is 
that ignorance about what's at stake is a much bigger problem."...
But Daniel Aldana Cohen - assistant professor of sociology at the 
University of Pennsylvania and author of the response piece in Jacobin 
titled "New York Mag's Climate Disaster Porn Gets It Painfully Wrong" - 
suggests in an interview with DeSmog Canada that Wallace-Well's approach 
indicates a failure to engage with any questions about broader 
sociopolitical systems.
"I think in the politics of climate change, a narrow idea of climate 
science is fetishized," says Cohen, adding that even the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change largely fails to include 
social sciences in working group reports.
... Wallace-Wells' article sketches out a narrative of catastrophic 
climate change that assumes people don't act on the knowledge of the 
situation.
*But in a cruel twist, by only focusing on the science without any 
attempt to contextualize it in society or political systems, it could 
well have the reverse effect by making readers feel even more powerless.*
This isn't a new problem: Stoknes notes that as identified by James 
Painter of Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of 
Journalism, about 80 per cent of media coverage on the last 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report used 
"catastrophe framing," with less than 10 per cent using "opportunity 
framing."
"It's not just about pointing your fingers at the climate skeptics and 
saying that's the problem," Norgaard says.
Of course, it's a major problem. But the apathy or acquiescence of the 
majority of people who are aware and do care is a larger problem. It's 
about how we mobilize those people."
*If Framed Correctly, Idea of Apocalypse Can Help PeopleImagine 
Alternatives*
Stoknes argues that thinking about such a sobering subject as apocalypse 
or death, if done correctly, can actually help people conceptualize new 
ways of thinking and being.

    "This psychological approach to the apocalypse is very important,
    and I found it completely absent in the article...It is not about
    predicting a certain year in the future of linear time, when
    everything will be collapsing. Maybe this notion is more like a call
    in the here and now, calling attention to the urgent need for a deep
    rethink of where we are and letting go of some cherished Western
    notions that we've been stuck in over the last century."

Such a sentiment is echoed by climate psychologist Renee Lertzman and 
author of Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of 
Engagement, who emphasizes in an interview with DeSmog Canada that 
predictable fault lines have formed in the wake of the New York Magazine 
piece.
A key factor for her is how humans actually process information that may 
be challenging and bring up difficult feelings. She says the consensus 
is that we can become "cognitively impaired" when the brain's limbic 
system becomes activated, resulting in reduced capacity to have 
functions for strategy, foresight, collaboration and tolerance.
"That goes out the window when your limbic system is activated, which 
arguably articles like this are going to do," she says. "The best way to 
deal with that reality is to address how we can soothe and disarm our 
defences."
*'We Need to Also Be Engaged in Collective Political Action and Solutions'*
That's certainly not going to be an easy feat. But there are plenty of 
initiatives out there that are embracing a bit more nuance.
Lertzman points to Project Drawdown - an attempt to compile the 100 top 
solutions to climate change - as a powerful initiative, although she 
suggests "even that is missing the emotional taking stock of where we 
are." Cohen shouted out the work of the Yale Program on Climate Change 
Communication and Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
But central to progressing beyond the gridlock of current climate 
discourse is likely via bringing it closer to the local level, where 
people feel they can actually influence things.
CBC's new podcast 2050: Degrees of Change 
<http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/2050-degrees-of-change> is a good 
example of this. While it paints a dramatic picture of life in B.C. 
under climate change, it also uses a scenario under which the world has 
drastically decreased greenhouse gas emissions.
"We wanted listeners to end off realizing this is a middle of the road 
scenario and things could be worse and they could be better depending on 
what we choose to do now," Johanna Wagstaffe, podcast host and CBC 
senior meteorologist, told DeSmog Canada 
<https://www.desmog.ca/2017/07/04/qa-host-cbc-s-badass-new-podcast-about-climate-change>.
Norgaard says engaging with issues on a local level can give people a 
leverage point into even greater engagement.
"We really need to on the one hand be aware that it's something we need 
to respond to as a collective," she says. "Riding your bike is great, 
but we need to also be engaged in collective political action and 
solutions. That's part of what helps people to do something proactive 
that's real."
https://www.desmog.ca/2017/07/12/problem-climate-doomsday-reporting-and-how-move-beyond-it


Crews fight dozens of California wildfires amid July heatwave 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfire-idUSKBN19X1FQ>
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Crews battled dozens of wildfires raging across 
California on Wednesday, gaining ground on several of the more 
destructive blazes as forecasters warned that hot, dry, tinderbox 
conditions would persist across the U.S. West.
In Northern California, by late Wednesday afternoon firefighters had cut 
containment lines around more than half of the so-called Wall Fire, 
which has damaged or destroyed more than 100 structures, 44 of them 
homes, since it broke out last week...
*So far this year, more than twice as much land mass in California has 
been charred by flames compared to the same time last year, said Heather 
Williams, a Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman.*
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfire-idUSKBN19X1FQ


*Southern Europe swelters as heatwave sparks wildfires and closes 
tourist sites 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/13/southern-europe-swelters-heatwave-sparks-wildfires-spain-greece-italy>*
A heatwave is rolling across southern Europe, fuelling wildfires, 
exacerbating droughts in Italy and Spain and leading the Greek 
authorities to close some of the most popular tourist sites.
Blazes have broken out across southern Italy and Sicily, where the 
temperatures have climbed above 40C this week.
Wildfires near the Calampiso seaside resort west of Palermo, the 
Sicilian capital, forced the evacuation by boat of more than 700 
tourists on Wednesday night.
About 10 people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation but there 
were no reports of serious injuries. The resort will remain closed until 
the weekend.
High temperatures compounded by strong winds enabled the fires to spread 
after months of below-average rainfall. Farm animals perished while 
several farms and more than 150 hectares of pine forest were destroyed 
in a blaze in Sicily this month.
In Spain, where the drought has devastated cereal crops and could 
threaten the grape and olive harvests, seven southern provinces were on 
their highest heat alert with temperatures forecast to rise above 44C on 
Thursday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/13/southern-europe-swelters-heatwave-sparks-wildfires-spain-greece-italy


*Arks of the Apocalypse: All around the world, scientists are building 
repositories of everything from seeds to corals to mammal milk 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/magazine/seed-vault-extinction-banks-arks-of-the-apocalypse.html>*
...in multiple languages, with headlines like "World's 'Doomsday' Seed 
Vault Has Been Breached by Climate Change." It didn't matter that the 
flood happened seven months earlier, or that the seeds remained safe and 
dry. We had just lived through the third consecutive year of the highest 
global temperatures on record and the lowest levels of Arctic ice; vast 
swaths of permafrost were melting; scientists had recently announced 
that some 60 percent of primate species were threatened with extinction. 
All these facts felt like signposts to an increasingly hopeless future 
for the planet. And now, here was a mini-fable suggesting that our 
attempts to preserve even mere traces of the bounty around us might fall 
apart, too.
The seed vault is perhaps the best-known project in a growing global 
campaign to cache endangered phenomena for safekeeping. Fortunately - 
the leak snafu notwithstanding - scientists, governments and even 
private companies have become quite good over the last decade at these 
efforts to bank nature. The San Diego Zoo's Frozen Zoo cryogenically 
preserves living cell cultures, sperm, eggs and embryos for some 1,000 
species in liquid nitrogen. Inside the National Ice Core Laboratory, in 
Lakewood, Colo., a massive freezer contains roughly 62,000 feet's worth 
of rods of ice from rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets in 
Antarctica, Greenland and North America. The Smithsonian's National Zoo 
in Washington maintains the world's largest collection of frozen 
exotic-animal milk, from mammals large (orcas) and small (critically 
endangered fruit bats), in order to help researchers figure out how to 
nourish the most vulnerable members of any species: babies. An 
international project called Amphibian Ark engages in ex situ 
conservation by relocating amphibians, the most endangered class of 
animal, indoors for safekeeping and sperm collection...
But the world, as always, is changing - and now we're fomenting and 
accelerating that process in ways we don't fully understand. The banks 
themselves are vulnerable to that change. All manner of things can go 
wrong: power outages, faulty backup generators, fires, floods, 
earthquakes, contamination, liquid-nitrogen shortages, war, theft, 
neglect. In early April, a freezer failure at a University of Alberta 
cold-storage facility allowed some 590 feet of ice cores to melt, 
turning tens of thousands of years of frozen clues about the earth's 
climate into puddles that one glaciologist, surveying the sad aftermath, 
likened to a swimming-pool changing room. The associated data that 
indicates what's in these vaults - the genomes, the origin stories - 
could be hacked, corrupted, lost or just formatted in such a way as to 
be inscrutable to those who might try to decipher it later. These are 
the kind of anxieties that Oliver Ryder, a director at the San Diego 
Zoo's Global Institute for Conservation Research, turns over in his mind 
in the middle of the night. "It is not, 'Is something bad going to 
happen?'" he told me. "Over time, bad things will happen. They always 
do." […]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/magazine/seed-vault-extinction-banks-arks-of-the-apocalypse.html


*(video) Science and Policy Perspectives: National Security Implications 
of Climate Change 
<http://democrats.science.house.gov/hearing/science-and-policy-perspectives-national-security-implications-climate-change>*
https://youtu.be/Vxpxgu-SrLk
Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson and Vice-Ranking Member Donald S. 
Beyer Jr. host a roundtable aimed at promoting an informed dialogue to 
help Members of Congress and the public better understand the effects of 
climate change on our military facilities and operations, and how 
climate may exacerbate conflicts and national security threats worldwide.
Witnesses:
RADM (Ret.) David Titley, Ph.D.,
RDML (Ret.) Ann C. Phillips,
Marcus D. King, Ph.D.,
Ms. Sherri Goodman,
http://democrats.science.house.gov/hearing/science-and-policy-perspectives-national-security-implications-climate-change


*National Security Implications of Climate Change 
<https://www.cfr.org/blog-post/national-security-implications-climate-change>*
Ambassador John Campbell participated in the "Science and Policy 
Perspectives: National Security Implications of Climate Change" 
<http://democrats.science.house.gov/hearing/science-and-policy-perspectives-national-security-implications-climate-change> 
roundtable, where he discussed climate change and its effect on Nigeria, 
a close strategic partner...
Consideration of the social and political consequences of climate change 
are often based on future projections. In the case of Nigeria, however, 
the effects of climate change are already visible. It is an important 
contributing factor in ethnic and religious conflict, quarrels over land 
use, and the disaffection of at least some Nigerians from their 
government. Moreover, because of our close partnership, the effects of 
climate change in Nigeria have important consequences for U.S. interests 
and security elsewhere in Africa.
https://www.cfr.org/blog-post/national-security-implications-climate-change


*Trump is jeopardizing Pentagon's efforts to fight climate change, 
retired military leaders fea*r 
<https://thinkprogress.org/former-defense-officials-see-climate-action-lagging-e550994d65>
Unlike Republicans in Congress, the Department of Defense does not view 
climate change as a partisan issue, said David Titley, a retired rear 
admiral in the U.S. Navy and director of the Center for Solutions to 
Weather and Climate Risk at Pennsylvania State University.
The Defense Department is studying how a changing physical environment 
caused by climate change will affect where the U.S. military operates. 
Even more important, though, is adopting measures that will reverse 
climate change so that climate-caused social instability in parts of the 
world can be avoided, thereby making it less likely U.S. policymakers 
will choose to intervene in those regions.
In his opening remarks, Beyer emphasized that "ignoring climate change 
is not a risk worth taking" for the military and society as a whole.
https://thinkprogress.org/former-defense-officials-see-climate-action-lagging-e550994d65

*
**Climate Change Investing: Momentum Building, Trump Notwithstanding 
<https://seekingalpha.com/article/4087216-climate-change-investing-momentum-building-trump-notwithstanding>*
Summary
We continue to be inundated with news about climate change containing 
items of actions that governments and businesses are taking to help 
address the situation.
With a couple of notable exceptions, overall during the last six months, 
the stocks in my climate change book kept pace with the major indexes 
including the S&P 500.
I have added two investments to the portfolio reflecting the European 
Union's commitment to lead in the race where President Trump has decided 
to withdraw.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4087216-climate-change-investing-momentum-building-trump-notwithstanding


*Here's How to Bribe Everyone Into Fighting Climate Change* 
<http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/heres-how-to-bribe-everyone-into-fighting-climate-change/>
KEVIN DRUM      JUL. 12, 2017
This is a list of various groups and why they resist the big changes 
necessary to halt climate change:
- Regular people: don't want to be constantly badgered and guilted about 
the car they drive or the meat they eat.
- Poor countries: don't want to be stuck forever in low-energy poverty 
compared to currently rich countries.
- Oil companies: don't want their businesses to crater because no one is 
buying fossil fuels anymore.
- Republicans: don't like the business regulations that would be 
necessary to truly address climate change.
- The rich: don't want to pay the taxes necessary to address climate change.
- OPEC countries: don't want to leave $10 trillion of wealth sitting in 
the ground.
- I've probably missed some, but you get the idea. The problem is that 
there are simply too many powerful groups who are fundamentally opposed 
to dramatic action on climate change. The odds that we'll get even half 
of them to see the light in time to make a difference is pretty small.
Like it or not, then, we have to bribe everybody. Here are the bribes we 
have to offer:
- We have stop guilting people about their personal choices. Instead, 
spend a ton of money putting them to work building and installing 
solar/wind infrastructure.
- We have to make sure poor countries can continue to grow. That means 
spending money on infrastructure for India, Malaysia, Bolivia, etc.
- We have to ensure that oil companies get a piece of the 
de-carbonization pie.
- We have to give up on trying to regulate our way to carbon reduction. 
Sure, a carbon tax would still help things along, but it doesn't have to 
be massive.
- We have to give the rich a piece of the de-carbonization pie. Frankly, 
this will probably happen automatically.
- We have to give OPEC-what? I'm not really sure what we can do for OPEC.
This is what leads me to think that our only real chance of success is 
to spend vast amounts of money on R&D and infrastructure buildout.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/heres-how-to-bribe-everyone-into-fighting-climate-change/

*
****When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of US 
Coastal Communities (2017) 
<http://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/global-warming-impacts/when-rising-seas-hit-home-chronic-inundation-from-sea-level-rise#.WWcAx4RuJpg>*
There comes a threshold of chronic flooding that makes normal routines 
impossible and forces communities to make difficult, often costly choices.
DOWNLOAD:
*Full report 
<http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/when-rising-seas-hit-home-full-report.pdf>*** 
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/when-rising-seas-hit-home-full-report.pdf
*Elementa research article* 
<http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/when-rising-seas-hit-home-elementa-research-article.pdf> 
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/when-rising-seas-hit-home-elementa-research-article.pdf
*Complete data by state* 
<http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/rising-seas-data-by-state.xlsx> 
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/rising-seas-data-by-state.xlsx
*Complete data by year 
<http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/rising-seas-data-by-year.xlsx>* 
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/07/rising-seas-data-by-year.xlsx
http://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/global-warming-impacts/when-rising-seas-hit-home-chronic-inundation-from-sea-level-rise


*This Day in Climate History July 14, 2009 
<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/sarah_palin_one_of_us.html>  
-  from D.R. Tucker*
July 14, 2009: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein subtly knocks his paper 
for running an op-ed by Sarah Palin that morning attacking the American 
Clean Energy and Security Act.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/sarah_palin_one_of_us.html

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