[TheClimate.Vote] November 26, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/November 26, 2017
/
Phys.Org
*Scientists develop artificial photosynthesis device for greener 
ethylene production 
<https://phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-artificial-photosynthesis-device-greener.html>*
A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has 
developed a prototype device that mimics natural photosynthesis to 
produce ethylene gas using only sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. The 
novel method, which produces ethylene at room temperature and pressure 
using benign chemicals, could be scaled up to provide a more 
eco-friendly and sustainable alternative to the current method of 
ethylene production.
The team first designed a copper catalyst in 2015 that could generate 
ethylene from readily available water and carbon dioxide when powered by 
electricity. This copper catalyst was subsequently introduced into an 
artificial photosynthesis system to convert carbon dioxide and water 
into ethylene using only solar energy. The prototype device designed to 
carry out the reaction achieved a 30 per cent faradaic efficiency of 
ethylene based on the amount of electrons generated from solar energy. 
The overall energy efficiency of solar-to-ethylene is also comparable to 
the level of energy efficiency of natural photosynthesis by plants.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-artificial-photosynthesis-device-greener.html


*Climate changes triggered immigration to America in the 19th century, 
study finds 
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171121095201.htm>*
 From Trump to Heinz, some of America's most famous family names and 
brands trace their origins back to Germans who emigrated to the country 
in the 19th century. Researchers have now found that climate was a major 
factor in driving migration from Southwest Germany to North America 
during the 19th century.
The team studied official migration statistics and population data from 
the 19th century, as well as weather data, harvest figures and 
cereal-price records. They focused on the region that is now the 
Baden-Wurttemberg state, where many of the migrants - such as Charles 
Pfizer of pharmaceutical fame - originated from. They started by 
identifying the major migration waves and then investigated to what 
extent climate played a role in driving people to North America during 
each of them.
The first wave followed the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia 
in 1815. The volcanic ash and gases spewed into the atmosphere caused 
temperatures to drop around the world for a few years after the 
eruption. The 'year without summer', 1816, was wet and cold causing 
widespread crop failures, famine and emigration.
"Another peak-migration year, 1846, had an extremely hot and dry summer 
leading to bad harvests and high food prices," says Annette Bosmeier, a 
researcher at the University of Freiburg who also involved in the study. 
"These two years of high migration numbers appear to be quite strongly 
influenced by climate changes, while for other migration waves other 
circumstances appeared to be more important," she adds.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171121095201.htm


*Damselflies in distress flee north to Britain 
<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/damselflies-in-distress-flee-north-to-britain-lwlgk6q7g>*
The Times
Record numbers of rare dragonflies were spotted across Britain this year 
because of changing weather patterns linked to global warming. A scarlet 
darter was found at Longham Lakes, in east Dorset, the first sighting in 
13 years and only the eighth time that the insect had been recorded in 
the UK.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/damselflies-in-distress-flee-north-to-britain-lwlgk6q7g


*George Monbiot*
*Everything Must Go <http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/>*
Posted: 24 Nov 2017 01:58 AM PST
*Economic growth will destroy everything. There's no way of greening it 
– we need a new system.*
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  November 22, 2017
Everyone wants everything - how is that going to work? The promise of 
economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can 
live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the 
physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil 
loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, 
insectageddon 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations>: 
all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for 
everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space 
exists.
But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative. And 
we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy and 
choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to break down 
our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the Simple Lifers in 
/Brave New World/, be silenced – in this case by the media. With every 
generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years 
ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean 
and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a 
minute 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change>.
Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish festival 
of destruction <http://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/>. 
Among the snow saunas 
<https://www.thenational.ae/uae/snow-room-is-the-hot-new-thing-1.124716>, 
portable watermelon coolers 
<http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/portable-watermelon-cooler/> and smart 
phones for dogs 
<https://iheartdogs.com/new-device-lets-your-pet-call-you/> with which 
we are urged to fill our lives, my #extremecivilisation prize now goes 
to the PancakeBot <http://www.pancakebot.com/>: a 3-D batter printer 
that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal or your dog's 
bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your kitchen for a 
week until you decide you don't have room for it. For junk like this 
we're trashing the living planet, and our own prospects of survival. 
Everything must go.
The ancillary promise is that, through green consumerism, we can 
reconcile perpetual growth with planetary survival. But a series of 
research papers 
<http://www.erscp2012.eu/upload/doc/ERSCP_Full_Papers/CsutoraM_The_ecological_footprint_of_green_and_brown_consumers.pdf> 
reveal that there is no significant difference 
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513008537> 
between the ecological footprints of people who care about their impacts 
and people who don't. One recent article 
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916517710685>, 
published in the journal /Environment and Behaviour/, finds that those 
who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and 
carbon than those who do not.
  Why? Because, environmental awareness tends to be higher among wealthy 
people. It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but 
income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our 
good intentions. Those who see themselves as green consumers, the paper 
found, "mainly focus on behaviours that have relatively small benefits."
I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, 
carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays 
in the Caribbean, cancelling their environmental savings 100-fold. I've 
come to believe that the recycling licences their long-haul flights. It 
persuades people they've gone green, enabling them to overlook their 
greater impacts.
None of this means that we should not try to reduce our impacts, but we 
should be aware of the limits of the exercise. Our behaviour within the 
system cannot change the outcomes of the system. It is the system that 
needs to change.
Research by Oxfam 
<https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf> 
suggests that the world's richest 1% (if your household has an income of 
£70,000 or more, this means you 
<https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?country=GBR&income=70000&adults=2&children=0>) 
produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%. How, in a 
world in which everyone is supposed to aspire to high incomes, can we 
avoid turning the Earth, on which all prosperity depends, into a dust ball?
By decoupling, the economists tell us: detaching economic growth from 
our use of materials. So how well is this going?A paper in the journal 
PlosOne 
<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733> 
finds that while in some countries relative decoupling has occurred, "no 
country has achieved absolute decoupling during the past 50 years." What 
this means is that the amount of materials and energy associated with 
each increment of GDP might decline, but, as growth outpaces efficiency, 
the total use of resources keeps rising. More importantly, the paper 
reveals that, in the long term, both absolute and relative decoupling 
from the use of essential resources is impossible, because of the 
physical limits of efficiency.
A global growth rate of 3% means that the size of the world economy 
doubles every 24 years 
<https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/040104.asp>. This is why 
environmental crises are accelerating at such a rate. Yet the plan is to 
ensure that it doubles and doubles again, and keeps doubling in 
perpetuity. In seeking to defend the living world from the maelstrom of 
destruction, we might believe we are fighting corporations and 
governments and the general foolishness of humankind. But they are all 
proxies for the real issue: perpetual growth on a planet that is not 
growing.Those who justify this system 
<http://glineq.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-illusion-of-degrowth-in-poor-and.html> 
insist that economic growth is essential for the relief of poverty. But 
a paper in the World Economic Review 
<http://wer.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/WEA-WER-4-Woodward.pdf> 
finds that the poorest 60% of the world's people receive only 5% of the 
additional income generated by rising GDP. As a result, $111 of growth 
is required for every $1 reduction in poverty. This is why, on current 
trends, it would take 200 years to ensure that everyone receives $5 a 
day. By this point, average per capita income will have reached $1m a 
year, and the economy will be 175 times bigger than it is today. This is 
not a formula for poverty relief. It is a formula for the destruction 
<https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2017/11/19/why-branko-milanovic-is-wrong-about-de-growth> 
of everything and everyone.
  When you hear that something makes economic sense, this means it makes 
the opposite of common sense. Those sensible men and women who run the 
world's treasuries and central banks, who see an indefinite rise in 
consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers, smashing through the 
wonders of the living world, destroying the prosperity of future 
generations to sustain a set of figures that bear ever less relation to 
general welfare.
  Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth: all are 
illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us to 
catastrophe. The current system, based on private luxury and public 
squalor, will immiserate us all: under this model, luxury and 
deprivation are one beast with two heads.
We need a different system, rooted not in economic abstractions but in 
physical realities, that establish the parameters by which we judge its 
health. We need to build a world in which growth is unnecessary, a world 
of private sufficiency and public luxury 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/11/labour-global-economy-planet>. 
And we must do it before catastrophe forces our hand.
www.monbiot.com
http://www.monbiot.com/2017/11/24/everything-must-go/


*The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired 
<https://gizmodo.com/the-switch-to-outdoor-led-lighting-has-completely-backf-1820652615>*
George Dvorsky
To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world are 
transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research shows, this 
solid-state solution hasn't yielded the expected energy savings, and 
potentially worse, it's resulted in more light pollution than ever before.
Using satellite-based sensors, an international team of scientists 
sought to understand if our planet's surface is getting brighter or 
darker at night, and to determine if LEDs are saving energy at the 
global scale. With the introduction of solid-state lighting - such as 
LEDs, OLEDs, and PLEDs - it was thought (and hoped) that the transition 
to it from conventional lighting - like electrical filaments, gas, and 
plasma - would result in big energy savings. According to the latest 
research, however, the use of LEDs has resulted in a "rebound" effect 
whereby many jurisdictions have opted to use even more light owing to 
the associated energy savings.
Indeed, as the new results show, the amount of outdoor lighting around 
the world has increased during the past several years. "As a result, the 
world has experienced widespread 'loss of the night,' with half of 
Europe and a quarter of North America experiencing substantially 
modified light-dark cycles," write the researchers in the new study, 
which was published today in Scientific Advances.
https://gizmodo.com/the-switch-to-outdoor-led-lighting-has-completely-backf-1820652615 
<http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528>
-
*Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and 
extent <http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528>*

    Abstract
    A central aim of the "lighting revolution" (the transition to
    solid-state lighting technology) is decreased energy consumption.
    This could be undermined by a rebound effect of increased use in
    response to lowered cost of light. We use the first-ever calibrated
    satellite radiometer designed for night lights to show that from
    2012 to 2016, Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew by 2.2% per
    year, with a total radiance growth of 1.8% per year. Continuously
    lit areas brightened at a rate of 2.2% per year. Large differences
    in national growth rates were observed, with lighting remaining
    stable or decreasing in only a few countries. These data are not
    consistent with global scale energy reductions but rather indicate
    increased light pollution, with corresponding negative consequences
    for flora, fauna, and human well-being.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/e1701528


Harvard Business Review
*How Bold Corporate Climate Change Goals Deteriorate Over Time 
<https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-bold-corporate-climate-change-goals-deteriorate-over-time>*
     Christopher Wright   Daniel Nyberg
One response to today's climate crisis has been a belief that markets 
and corporate innovation will provide the solution... But how much faith 
can we place in business to save us from climate change?
In a recently published paper in the /Academy of Management Journal/ 
<http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short>/, /we explore how major 
business corporations translate the grand challenge of climate change 
into strategies, policies, and practices over an extended period of 
time. Our research involved a detailed cross-case analysis of five major 
corporations operating in Australia over 10 years, from 2005 to 2015...
...we found a common pattern of response over time: initial statements 
of climate leadership degenerated into the more mundane concerns of 
conventional business activity. In other words, talk of addressing 
climate change because it was the right thing to do eventually became a 
conversation about how climate change initiatives affected the bottom 
line. A key factor in this deterioration of corporate environmental 
initiatives was ongoing criticism from shareholders, the media, 
governments, and other corporations and managers. This "market critique" 
continuously revealed the underlying tensions between the demands of 
radical decarbonization and more basic business imperatives of profit 
and shareholder value...
Our study highlights the policy limitations of relying solely on market 
responses to the climate crisis. Today, businesses often operate on 
short-term objectives of profit maximization and shareholder return.  
Avoiding dangerous climate change requires the radical decarbonization 
of energy, transportation, and manufacturing on a scale that is 
historically unprecedented. Because of these two facts, we need to 
imagine a future that goes beyond the comfortable assumptions of 
corporate self-regulation and "market solutions" and instead accept the 
need for regulatory restrictions on carbon emissions and fossil fuel 
extraction. We also must reconsider corporate purpose and the dominance 
of short-term shareholder value as the pre-eminent criteria in assessing 
business performance.
Our research highlights an inconvenient truth, if you will, for 
politicians and businesspeople alike: we can't simply depend on 
corporations and markets to address one of the gravest threats to our 
collective future.
https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-bold-corporate-climate-change-goals-deteriorate-over-time
-
*An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into 
Business as Usual <http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short>*
     Christopher Wright       Daniel Nyberg
Abstract

    Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing
    humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development,
    human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and
    oceans, with devastating consequences. Business organizations are
    central to this challenge, in that they support the production of
    escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways
    to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how
    businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case
    studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period
    (2005–2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate
    translation of climate change: framing, localizing, and normalizing.
    We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary
    import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and
    comfortable concerns of "business as usual." We find that critique
    is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the
    tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business
    imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and
    the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate
    environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically,
    we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on business and
    market responses to the climate crisis.

http://amj.aom.org/content/60/5/1633.short


*What does a sexy vampire have to do with climate change? 
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-24/what-does-sexy-vampire-have-do-climate-change>*
Stephen Snyder
A sexy vampire is on a mission to save humans and their blood - she is a 
vampire, after all. So what does that have to do with climate change? 
Not much in the first issue, but if you can wait for Dark Fang #2...
Take an oil spill and an undersea vampire with tremendous sex appeal. 
Mix them together and you get Dark Fang - the new comic book series by 
writer Miles Gunter and illustrator Kelsey Shannon. The series' 
publisher, Image Comics, puts the environmental out front in a press 
release that tells the backstory of the lead character, a curvaceous 
vampire named Valla.
"When Valla lived, she was a fisherwoman," the release says. "In death, 
she is a vampire, peacefully residing on the bottom of the ocean-until a 
mysterious dark plague descends upon her aquatic paradise. Searching for 
answers on the surface, Valla finds a world headed toward an 
environmental collapse that will ultimately wipe out her food supply. 
Now, to stay fed, she must take on the juggernaut that is the global 
fossil fuel industry."
As the series begins, though, she may appear less like an environmental 
crusader and more like a porn star. "I'm not sure that how she looks is 
related to the environment," says Shannon, "but it certainly helps ... 
for readers that, maybe, aren't interested in the subject, that are used 
to the typical comic book T&A fare."
"It is a piece of entertainment, and we definitely want to address the 
very serious theme of climate change," says Gunter, "but we also want to 
entertain people. And I think that when you can do that, you can maybe 
disarm people that may be resistant to the reality of what's going on 
with our planet right now."
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-24/what-does-sexy-vampire-have-do-climate-change


*This Day in Climate History November 26, 2006 
<http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA> -  from D.R. Tucker*
November 26, 2006: In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) notes that fellow Republican Sen. James
Inhofe of Oklahoma is someone who has his "thinking in the Stone Age"
on climate.
http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA


/------------------------------------------
//Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
//
/https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote//
///
Send email to subscribe <a%20href=%22mailto:contact at theClimate.Vote%22> 
to this mailing. /

        *** Privacy and Security: * This is a text-only mailing that
        carries no images which may originate from remote servers.
        Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
        sender.
        By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for
        democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
        commercial purposes.
        To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote with subject: 
        subscribe,  To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe
        Also youmay subscribe/unsubscribe at
        https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
        Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Paulifor
        http://TheClimate.Vote delivering succinct information for
        citizens and responsible governments of all levels.   List
        membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
        restricted to this mailing list.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20171126/60f7e2aa/attachment.html>