[TheClimate.Vote] August 21, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Aug 21 10:19:39 EDT 2018
/August 21, 2018/
[Dramatic video 1:47 fire drive - father/son got out OK - see this video]
*Raw video: Hikers escape wildfire by driving through it
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3tEsnJcCTU>*
"The wildifre (sp) was between us and the only way out," he wrote.
"After we reached the downed, burning tree seen at the end of the
video, I had to reverse all the way back to the trailhead, where we
were lucky to flag down a boat. We were rescued by two park
employees and taken to safety. The car burned in the fire."
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/19/father-son-speed-through-hell-to-escape-montana-wildfire.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3tEsnJcCTU
[Minnesota]
*Meteorologists: Increase in air quality alerts linked to climate change
<https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/08/20/air-quality-alerts-minnesota-climate-change>*
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/08/20/air-quality-alerts-minnesota-climate-change
[time to talk about everything]
*Capitalism alone cannot reverse climate change
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/capitalism-alone-cannot-reverse-climate-change>*
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/20/capitalism-alone-cannot-reverse-climate-change
[as good as the filter material]
*Build a do-it-yourself air purifier for about $25
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU>* (less if you already have
a fan)
Michigan Medicine
Dr. Jeffrey E. Terrell, director of the Michigan Sinus Center,
demonstrates how to build an air purifier with a HEPA filter for about
$25 with parts from your local hardware store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU
- - - -
[local state info]
*Washington Smoke Information <http://wasmoke.blogspot.com/>*
This site is an effort by county, state, and Federal agencies and Indian
Tribes to coordinate and aggregate information for Washington
communities affected by smoke from wildland fires. The information is
posted here by the agencies themselves while volunteers built and
maintain the page.
http://wasmoke.blogspot.com/
[Defense - unofficial discussion]
*NATIONAL SECURITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE
<https://climateone.org/audio/national-security-and-climate-change>*
Audio and Transcript
https://climateone.org/audio/national-security-and-climate-change
What's the connection between climate change and national security?
"Military commanders don't operate on the basis of fiction," says Leon
Panetta, who served as Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA
under President Obama. "Understanding climate change and what was
happening had to be part and parcel of our effort to protect our
security." The military has long seen climate as critical to readiness,
as Rear Admiral David Titley (Ret) explains. "If you're directly
connecting renewable energy to increasing our combat effectiveness,"
explains Titley, "the military is all in."
https://climateone.org/audio/national-security-and-climate-change
- - - -
[very large number of citations]
*Climate and Security Week(s) In Review: June 26 - August 20
<https://climateandsecurity.org/2018/08/20/climate-and-security-weeks-in-review-june-26-august-20/>*
a list of notable headlines and comments on climate and security matters
from the past several weeks.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2018/08/20/climate-and-security-weeks-in-review-june-26-august-20/
- - - -
"No country is fully insulated from climate risk outside its border."
*Climate risks without borders
<http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2018-08-14-climate-risks-without-borders.html>*
New index reveals how climate risks are reinforced by global
connectivity, leaving no country shielded from impact
Despite the Paris Agreement being a remarkable multilateral achievement,
it comes with a certain irony. While being able to mobilise almost all
countries on the planet to curb emissions and mitigate climate change,
there is little focus on how climate-induced events in one country
affects another. Instead, most measures are largely confined to national
or local legislations.
In a study recently published in Global Environmental Change
<Despite%20the%20Paris%20Agreement%20being%20a%20remarkable%20multilateral%20achievement,%20it%20comes%20with%20a%20certain%20irony.%20While%20being%20able%20to%20mobilise%20almost%20all%20countries%20on%20the%20planet%20to%20curb%20emissions%20and%20mitigate%20climate%20change,%20there%20is%20little%20focus%20on%20how%20climate-induced%20events%20in%20one%20country%20affects%20another.%20Instead,%20most%20measures%20are%20largely%20confined%20to%20national%20or%20local%20legislations.,,In%20a%20study%20recently%20published%20in%20Global%20Environmental%20Change,%20centre%20PhD%20student%20Johanna%20Hedlund%20together%20with%20colleagues%20from%20the%20Stockholm%20Environment%20Institute,+has+made+a+first+attempt+at+developing+a+global+index+of+how+climate+change+affects+one+country+%E2%80%93+and+requires+adaptation+there+as+a+result+of+climate+change+impacts+in+another+country.+Despite+previous+attempts+there+is+no+widely+accepted+terminology+to+describe+this+phenomenon.,,As%20a%20consequence,%20it%20remains%20to%20a%20large%20degree%20ignored%20both%20in%20research%20and%20adaptation%20planning.%20In%20their%20study,%20Hedlund%20and%20her%20co-authors%20introduce%20the%20Transnational%20Climate%20Impacts%20%28TCI%29%20Index,%20a%20new%20perspective%20on%20the%20complexity%20of%20exposure%20to%20climate%20change%20impacts%20in%20a%20globalised%20world.%20The%20study%20provides%20further%20support%20for%20demands%20that%20trade,+migration+and+investments+policies+make+more+extensive+climate+considerations.>,
centre PhD student Johanna Hedlund together with colleagues from the
Stockholm Environment Institute, has made a first attempt at developing
a global index of how climate change affects one country - and requires
adaptation there as a result of climate change impacts in another
country. Despite previous attempts there is no widely accepted
terminology to describe this phenomenon.
As a consequence, it remains to a large degree ignored both in research
and adaptation planning. In their study, Hedlund and her co-authors
introduce theTransnational Climate Impacts (TCI) Index
<https://www.sei.org/featured/inescapably-intertwined/>, a new
perspective on the complexity of exposure to climate change impacts in a
globalised world. The study provides further support for demands that
trade, migration and investments policies make more extensive climate
considerations.
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2018-08-14-climate-risks-without-borders.html
- - - -
[visual indexing]
*Inescapably intertwined: the reality of globalisation and borderless
climate risks <https://www.sei.org/featured/inescapably-intertwined/>*
Living in an era of growing interconnectedness, it is time to admit:
climate adaptation isn't only a matter of national policy. Climate
change does not respect national borders and adaptation efforts are
unlikely to succeed if done in geographic isolation. The Transnational
Climate Impacts Index (TCI Index) examines country exposure to climate
change from an international perspective.
https://www.sei.org/featured/inescapably-intertwined/
[Book review - fundamentally defines danger]
*Take unprecedented action or bear the consequences, says eminent
scientist and advisor
<http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/08/take-unprecedented-action-or-bear.html>*
By David Spratt and Ian Dunlop
"Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity
must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it
has been left too late and bear the consequences."
Those are the challenging words from Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
<https://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/john/shortbio>, for twenty years the
head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a senior
advisor to Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the
European Union. In the foreword to a new report, Schellnhuber says the
issue now "is the very survival of our civilisation, where conventional
means of analysis may become useless".
The report,*What Lies Beneath: The understatement of existential climate
risk <https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/>*, is released today by the
Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration.
Schellnhuber describes climate warming as an "existential risk", and
says the report highlights crucial insights which may lurk at the
fringes of conventional policy analysis but which have a new resonance
in today's circumstances, "a unique situation with no precise historic
analogue" in which "the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is
now greater, and the Earth warmer, than human beings have ever
experienced"...
- - - -
Strictly speaking, we would have to redo the Industrial Revolution and
the greenhouse-gas emissions it triggered a thousand times or so, always
starting with the Earth system in its 1750 pre-industrial state. Then
calculate the averaged observed outcome of that planetary experiment in
terms of mean surface-temperature rise, global biological productivity,
total number of climate refugees, and many other variables. This is a
nonsensical notion...
http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/08/take-unprecedented-action-or-bear.html
[book review]
*Searching for Language to Capture How Climate Change Has Altered Our
World
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/books/review/rising-elizabeth-rush.html>*
RISING
Dispatches from the New American Shore
By Elizabeth Rush
Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26.
This is a book for those who mourn the changing climate and coast as
well as, perhaps, America's diminishing literary culture; sadness
benefits from lyrical prose. Rush's faith in the power of words is real
and touching and I obviously share it, or I wouldn't be a writer myself.
Elegies like this one will play an important role as people continue to
confront a transformed, perhaps unnatural world, and grieve for the
doomed or already lost. And then there will be a need for new tales, new
songs, new speeches in perhaps the most important language in this
crisis: the language of politics. To cope with the rising waters, we
will need as many options - as many stories, especially ones of hope -
as we can muster.
- - - - -
David Biello is the science curator for TED Talks and the author of "The
Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/books/review/rising-elizabeth-rush.html
[Complexity]
*The Department of Defense wants to protect itself from climate change
threats it's helping to spur
<https://grist.org/article/the-department-of-defense-wants-to-protect-itself-from-climate-change-threats-its-helping-to-spur/>*
"When you're pumping money into the military, you're not just
pumping money into an institution that burns a lot of fossil fuels
and emits a lot of greenhouse gases," Sen says, adding that funds
also go to providing armed protection to the fossil fuel industry
under the guise of national security. "That is really, really
disturbing."
https://grist.org/article/the-department-of-defense-wants-to-protect-itself-from-climate-change-threats-its-helping-to-spur/
[Ethics and Climate]
*What Americans Urgently Need to Understand About Climate Change In
Light of an Alarming New Report Published By US Academy of Sciences
<https://ethicsandclimate.org/2018/08/20/what-americans-urgently-need-to-understand-about-climate-change-in-light-of-an-alarming-new-report-published-by-us-academy-of-sciences/>*
Given that human-induced climate change is now widely understood to be
an existential threat to life on Earth unless all nations rapidly reduce
their greenhouse gas (GHG) to net zero as fast as possible, Americans
urgently need to understand certain features of the problem which have
been infrequently mentioned in the US national climate change
conversation including the following:
There is growing evidence that even if global ghg emissions could be
reduced to near zero rapidly, there is enough carbon already in the
atmosphere that limiting warming to the then 2 degrees C warming
limit goal by the end of this Century has only a 5% chance (Mooney,
2017).
Every day that nations fail to reduce their GHG emissions to levels
required of them to achieve a warming limit goal such as 2 degrees C
makes the problem worse because budgets available for the whole
world that must constrain global emissions to achieve any warming
limit goal shrink as emissions continue.
Therefore, the speed that nations reduce their GHG emissions
reductions is as important as the magnitude of reductions identified
by any national GHG reduction commitment. For this reason, any
national commitment on climate change should not only identify the
amount of ghg emissions that will be reduced by a certain date, but
the reduction pathway by which these reductions will be achieved,
For reasons stated in the Seffen et.al. paper, climate change is an
existential threat to life on Earth that requires the international
community to rapidly take extraordinarily aggressive coordinated
steps not only sufficient to prevent global temperatures from rising
no than more than 2 degrees C, the upper warming limit agreed to by
the international community in the 2015 Paris Agreement, but to
minimize any additional warming as quickly as possible,
Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) which the US ratified in 1992, the US has a legal duty
under the concept of "equity" to reduce its GHG emissions more
rapidly than most other nations, and although there is reasonable
disagreement among nations about what "equity" requires of them, any
reasonable interpretation of equity would require the US to make
much larger and more rapid GHG reductions than almost all other
nations given that the United States emitted 5,011,687 metric kilo
tons (kt) of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2016, second only to
China's 10,432,741 kt CO2. (Netherlands Environmental Agency). The
US also has an equitable duty to more aggressively reduce its
emissions than most other countries because it has emitted a greater
amount of cumulative CO2 emissions, that is 29.3% of global CO2
emissions between 1850 and 2002, while China emitted 7.6% during the
same period, (WRI, Cumulative Emissions) making the US much more
responsible for raising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to the
current level of 406 ppm than any country. Also given the US is
responsible for 15.56 metric tons per capita CO2 emissions which is
more than twice as much as China's 7.45 metric tons per capita in
2016 (World Bank), as a matter of equity the US must reduce its GHG
emissions much more rapidly and steeply than almost all countries,
The US duty to formulate its ghg emissions reduction target on the
basis of equity is not only required by its legal obligations under
the UNFCCC, practically the US and other high emitting nations must
reduce their GHG emissions by much greater amounts and faster than
poor developing nations because if they don't the poorer nations
will have to reduce their GHG emissions almost immediately to near
zero CO2 so that global emissions don't exceed the carbon budget
available to prevent a warming limit such as 2 degrees C from being
exceeded,
Any US policy response to climate change such as a carbon tax must
be structured to reduce US ghg emissions to levels and speeds
required of the US to achieve its responsibilities to the rest of
the world to prevent dangerous climate change. Thus, if the US were
to pass a carbon tax, the imposition of a tax must either reduce US
GHG emissions to the level and the speed required of it by its
obligations or be supplemented by other policy responses such as,
for instance, mandatory conversions of electric power generation
from fossil fuel combustion to renewable energy by a date certain or
mandatory requirements for electric vehicles,
Because GHG emissions from every country mix rapidly in the
atmosphere, all nations emissions are contributing to rising
atmospheric GHG concentrations thus harming people and ecological
systems on which life depends all over the world. Thus, the US may
not formulate its climate change policies only on the basis of costs
and benefits to itself alone, it must acknowledge and respond to the
devastating climate change harms the United States is already
contributing to that are being experienced around the world and
particularly by poor people and nations that are most vulnerable to
climate change impacts. For this reason, the Trump administration's
justification for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on the basis
of "putting US interests first" is deeply morally indefensible and
tragic because of the damage it will likely cause to the world,
Because of the rapid speed required of the US to reduce its ghg
emissions to net zero carbon emissions, the US urgently needs to put
ghg emissions reductions on the equivalent of a wartime footing by
not only adopting policy responses that can achieve ghg emission
reduction goals required of it, but also by investing in research
and development in new technologies that can facilitate and achieve
the its ghg emission reduction obligations and increase carbon sinks
that could reduce the rise in atmospheric ghg concentrations,
The United States needs to develop a strategy to achieve these
objectives in the next two years and begin implementing the strategy
immediately as quickly as possible.
By: Donald A. Brown, Scholar in Residence and Professor
Widener University Commonwealth Law School
dabrown57 at gmail.com
https://ethicsandclimate.org/2018/08/20/what-americans-urgently-need-to-understand-about-climate-change-in-light-of-an-alarming-new-report-published-by-us-academy-of-sciences/
[Trump Trope Talk]
The Energy 202: When's a good time to talk climate change? Trump
officials say: Not during a natural disaster
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/>
One of President Trump's Cabinet members is taking heat this week over
his comments about California's wildfires and climate change.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
[Musical Satire from the Parody Project]
*Part 2 of CONFOUNDS THE SCIENCE (SEQUEL) | Don Caron
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgTi1IXDYA>*
Parody Project
Published on Aug 16, 2018
[Music video with subtitles]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgTi1IXDYA
*This Day in Climate History - August 21, 2008
<http://web.archive.org/web/20080705212954/http://www.usda.gov/oce/global_change/sap_2007_FinalReport.htm>
- from D.R. Tucker*
August 21, 2007: U.S. District Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong rules that
the George W. Bush administration violated the 1990 Global Change
Research Act (signed into law, ironically enough, by Bush's father) by
not producing a legally required climate assessment report. The report
would finally be released in May 2008.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/08/22/court-rules-that-bush-admin-unlawfully-failed-to-produce-scientific-assessment-of-global-change/
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PRESS/global-warming-08-21-2007.html
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PROGRAMS/policy/energy/complaint-national-assessment.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20080705212954/http://www.usda.gov/oce/global_change/sap_2007_FinalReport.htm
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