[TheClimate.Vote] January 11, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Jan 11 11:06:03 EST 2018
/January 11, 2018/
[BBC]
*Climate change: Trump says US 'could conceivably' rejoin Paris deal
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42642331>*
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42642331
[Divestment]
*New York City vs. Big Oil
<https://www.thenation.com/article/new-york-city-vs-big-oil/>*
Flanked by Nation contributors Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, Bill de
Blasio announced that New York City would divest from and sue fossil
fuel companies.
By Mark Hertsgaard
The odds that the oil industry will have to pay billions of dollars in
legal damages soared today when New York City's mayor Bill DeBlasio
announced a one-two punch that positions the city at the front of the
global fight against climate change. The city is suing five of the
industry's biggest companies - ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron and Conoco
Phillips - both for past climate-change damages and for the city's
ongoing investments in climate resilience, said DeBlasio, who estimated
the total costs at well above $20 billion. The city's pension funds will
also divest all of their holdings in oil and gas companies, estimated at
$5.5 billion, DeBlasio told a press conference at the Manhattan Youth
Downtown Community Center in Tribeca, where flooding from Hurricane
Sandy in 2012 put 20 feet of salt water in the sub-basement, knocking
the center out of commission for months. ..
[ video of press conference
<https://www.facebook.com/NYCMayor/videos/10155832687561166/>]
https://www.facebook.com/NYCMayor/videos/10155832687561166/
"This is one of a handful of the most important moments in the 30-year
fight against climate change," said Bill McKibben, the 350.org activist
and Nation contributor, who joined de Blasio in addressing the press
conference. "Today, the mightiest city on our planet takes on its
richest, most powerful, and most irresponsible industry. Science and
economics and morality are on the side of the city, and so eventually it
will win. We hope it will win in time."...
New York City's lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York
federal court, makes the city by far the largest entity yet to sue oil
and gas companies for climate damages. The lawsuit includes an exhibit
of evidence - a letter sent on November 12, 1982 to Exxon's management
and personnel by M. B. Glaser, the company's manager of environmental
affairs programs, which projects average global temperatures rising by
as much as 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, a level climate
scientists today say would be catastrophic...
Such David versus Goliath bravery becomes easier now that an entity as
rich and powerful as New York City has joined the fight. "We understand
what climate change does, we've been victims of it," ...
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas company's trade
association, did not respond to The Nation's request for comment.
https://www.thenation.com/article/new-york-city-vs-big-oil/
-
[Climate Liability News]
*New York City to Announce Climate Lawsuit Against Oil Companies
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/01/10/new-york-city-climate-lawsuit-liability-bill-de-blasio/>*
New York City is suing five major oil companies, becoming the latest in
a growing number of municipalities attempting to hold the industry
accountable for damages caused by climate change...
...de Blasio underscored the urgency of addressing climate change...
"It's important that we feel that we are fighting this crisis like our
lives depend on it, because in fact they do. It's a life or death
matter," said de Blasio.
"The next storm is out there - it's not a matter of if, but when."
The initial reaction from industry backers was to criticize de Blasio's
"politicization" of climate change.
"Mayor de Blasio is just the latest mayor to lead his city into
misguided litigation against America's energy manufacturers," Linda
Kelly of the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement.
"The mayor's decision to play politics with underfunded pension plans
and sue U.S. energy manufacturers is the same divisive approach we've
seen fail time and again. Similar to recent lawsuits in California, this
headline-seeking stunt is an absurd attempt to politicize natural
disasters, rather than a good-faith effort at securing meaningful change."
Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute did not immediately respond
to requests for comment.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/01/10/new-york-city-climate-lawsuit-liability-bill-de-blasio/
-
[Retaliation]
*Exxon Launches Legal Retaliation Against California Climate Suits
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/01/10/exxon-california-climate-lawsuits/>*
ExxonMobil is pushing back
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2017/10/19/climate-liability-oil-industry-intimidation/>
against a wave of climate liability lawsuits in California seeking to
hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change impacts. In a
petition
<https://www.scribd.com/document/368760851/Rule-202-Petition-Re-CA>filed
Monday in a Texas district court, the company claims the suits amount to
a conspiracy aimed to undermine the company's First Amendment rights and
coerce it into shifting its stance on climate change.
"It is clearly part of the larger strategy of pushing back against
climate litigation by attacking government officials and environmental
advocates in court," said Michael Burger, executive director of the
Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Exxon's petition comes in response to a batch of suits filed in
California
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2017/12/18/climate-lawsuits-liability-california/>
state court over the past six months, but its fight is going to get a
lot wider after New York City announced on Wednesday
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/01/10/new-york-city-climate-lawsuit-liability-bill-de-blasio/>
it has also filed suit against major oil companies to hold them
accountable for climate impacts....
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/01/10/exxon-california-climate-lawsuits/
[election opinion]
*Climate Voters Could Swing Congress, But They Might Not Be Who You
Think They Are
<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-voters-could-swing-congress-but-they-might_us_5a56720be4b024fa0543b650>*
Racial Minorities, Lower Income Voters Prioritize Environmental Issues Most
Voters anxious about climate change could thus hold the key to both the
Senate and House this November, but only if campaigns can properly
target them. Right now, that's a big "if."..
...young people do tend to care deeply about climate change and the
environment; here, the stereotype holds true. Yet a closer look reveals
a more interesting picture. Environmental Voter Project research shows
that 18-34 year olds are twice as likely to care deeply about climate
change/environment as older age groups. But within the 18-34 year-old
age group, those over 25 are twice as likely to prioritize climate
change/environment as their 18 to 24-year-old peers.
We have also found surprisingly large populations of older Americans
focused on climate change and the environment. Parents with 13-15
year-old children are just as likely as 18 to 24-year-olds to care about
climate change, and grandmothers between the ages of 55-65 aren't too
far behind.
So what does all of this mean? Candidates who want to win in many 2018
battleground states should get real about who environmentalists are,
find them, and get them to the polls.
Moreover, the environmental movement can no longer afford to treat
inclusivity and intersectional organizing as convenient tactics or
talking points. They are now absolutely necessary. Make no mistake: the
environmental voters who could decide the 2018 midterms are just as
likely to be Latina grandmothers as white college students. Candidates
ignore them at their peril.
Nathaniel Stinnett, Contributor
Founder and Executive Director of the Environmental Voter Project
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-voters-could-swing-congress-but-they-might_us_5a56720be4b024fa0543b650
[video]
*Montecito Mudslides after storms across #Montecit*o
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ncBckVD7pE>
/16 minutes voice-over drone video/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ncBckVD7pE
The deluge that washed over Santa Barbara County early Tuesday was
devastating for a community that was ravaged by the Thomas fire only a
few weeks earlier. In just a matter of minutes, pounding rain
overwhelmed the south-facing slopes above Montecito and flooded a creek
that leads to the ocean, sending mud and massive boulders rolling into
residential neighborhoods, according to Santa Barbara County Fire
Department spokesman Mike Eliason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQuT_t5xlPc
-
[landslides research - /thnx goes to Brad Johnson/]
*The Increasing Wildfire and Post-Fire Debris-Flow Threat in Western
USA, and Implications for Consequences of Climate Change
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X08005527>*
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-69970-5_9
*Landslides in a changing climate
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X08005527>*
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825216302458
*Climate Change and Forest Disturbances
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X08005527>*
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1641/0006-3568%282001%29051%5B0723%3ACCAFD%5D2.0.CO%3B2?journalCode=bisi
*Climate change effects on landslides along the southwest coast of
British Columbia
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X08005527>*
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X08005527
*Fire-induced erosion and millennial-scale climate change in northern
ponderosa pine forests <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03058>*
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03058
[Stricken words]
*How Much Has 'Climate Change' Been Scrubbed From Federal Websites? A
Lot. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/climate/climate-change-trump.html>*
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/climate/climate-change-trump.html
-
[official report - pdf]
*Changing the Digital Climate
<https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Part-3-Changing-the-Digital-Climate.pdf>*
*How Climate Change Web Content is Being Censored Under the Trump
Administration**
*Although there is no evidence of any removals of climate data, we have
documented
overhauls and removals of documents, webpages, and entire websites,
as well as significant language shifts.
*Key Findings :*
- The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) removal and subsequent
ongoing overhaul of its climate change website raises strong concerns about
loss of access to valuable information for state, local, and tribal
governments,
and for educators, policymakers, and the general public.
- Several agencies removed or significantly reduced the prominence of
climate
change Web content, such as webpages, documents, and entire websites,
and the White House omitted climate change as an issue highlighted on its
website.
- The Department of State, Department of Energy (DOE), and the EPA removed
information about the federal government's international obligations
regarding climate change, downplaying U.S. involvement.
- Descriptions of agency priorities shifted to emphasize job creation and
downplay renewable fuels as replacements for fossil fuels. At the DOE,
mentions of "clean energy" and explanations of harmful environmental
impacts of fossil fuels were also removed .
- Language about climate change has been systematically changed across
multiple agency and program websites. In many cases, explicit mentions of
"climate change" and "greenhouse gases" have been replaced by vaguer
terms such as "sustainability" and "emissions".
While we cannot determine the reasons for these changes from monitoring
websites alone, our work reveals shifts in stated priorities and
governance and an
overall reduction in access to climate change information, particularly
at the EPA...
*These documented changes matter because they:*
- Make it more difficult for the scientists, policymakers, historians,
and the
public to access the results of years of scientific and policy research
funded
by tax dollars.
- Make it harder for state, local, and tribal governments to access
resources
designed to help them adapt to and mitigate the harms of climate change.
For example, the EPA removed over 200 climate webpages for state, local,
and tribal governments .
- Diminish our democratic institutions, such as notice-and-comment
rulemaking, which depend on an informed public. The removal of the EPA's
Clean Power Plan website has broad implications.
- Can confuse the public if significant changes are not sufficiently
justified.
Alterations to the U.S. Geological Survey's search engine generated public
confusion.
- Contribute to broader climate denialist efforts that obscure and cast
doubt
on the scientific consensus on climate change, hampering critical efforts to
mitigate and adapt to climate change.
https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Part-3-Changing-the-Digital-Climate.pdf
[Speaking Notes #3]*
**OXFORD CHANGE AGENCY EVENT - REPORT*
*Agency in individual and collective change
<http://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/explorations/papers/257-oxford-change-agency-event-report>*
Climate Psychology Alliance with Living Witness
Written by Laurie Michaelis
A day for psychological and social practitioners to share our
experiences of enabling positive
responses to climate change. We'll explore how our different approaches
connect and complement
each other, hoping to form a stronger community of practitioners...
*Systemic change and action inquiry, Anna Birney*
(edited transcript)
I'm going to talk to you about the relationship between systemic
change and action inquiry. And I
think I'm going back to what Nadine said, and the premise of this,
it's a Meadows quote: "the world is
a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological, social psychological,
economic system, but we treat it as
if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple and
infinite. Our persistent, intractable global
problems such as climate change arise directly from this mismatch":
the idea that we solve and try to
look at these problems through linear thinking, through divisional
ideas and we do not take a systemic
view in how we address changes.
A lot of the work that I've been looking at is how you can take a
living systems view, because you can
take a systemic view that still creates reduction in the world.
There are three principles of that living
systems perspective:
- One, that we are embedded in nature and that we are subsystems,
including our
consciousness, through to individual people, to our society, to our
environment. We are all
part of the living world and we are nested systems.
- The second is that we are self-organising and we are ever-changing
and moving.
- And the third is that we are in dynamic relationships with each
other. That means that we
need to work with people and work together.
The underlying premise is that life is a continuum. It is constantly
changing. And if we are seeking to
address challenges such as climate change we need to be continually
learning, innovating, adapting,
and disrupting our environment until new systems emerge. That
emergence happens when you either
create the conditions for change or start disrupting the system. And
a system change is the emergence
of a new pattern of organisation or system structure. There are
multiple levels at which that can
happen. It can happen in structural change: renewable energy,
community energy. It can change in
organisations of flow of power. It can change in the relationships.
It also fundamentally changes in the
mindsets or the paradigms of the system. And when we want to look at
shifting and changing those, I
look at the processes of action inquiry as the way to start
addressing this systemic change,
predominantly because it encourages us to look at multiple levels.
It encourages us to look at both the
individual level, the inquiry we have with ourselves, it asks us to
look at inquiring together and to
explore change as a process together, but it also encourages us to
look at the overall narrative and
cultural structures that we live within but that also hold us.
So agency in this conversation happens at these multiple levels. At
the individual, the social and
collective as well as the cultural narrative level. Action inquiry
also on a second dimension encourages
us to look not only at single loop learning, that is learning that
evaluates what we've done, but it also
asks us to look at the strategies or the way in which we're
approaching change as double loop
learning, but importantly it also asks us to question our
assumptions, our perspectives, our mindsets
behind what we're doing at these different levels. So we can work at
different levels, first person,
second person, social collective and then third person, alongside
the first loop and second loop and
third loop learning. But the key I want to make here is systemic
change happens when we address all
these different places. We spend a lot of time as change agents
either thinking its an individual issue,
or thinking that we need to create collaborations together or we
look at advocacy and wider influence
in the bigger system. We don't look at it as a whole. We don't look
at how these different actions start
working together.
http://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/explorations/papers/257-oxford-change-agency-event-report
[propaganda]
*Polarizing Polar Bears: Unmasking a proxy war strategy by online
climate change denialists
<http://planetjh.com/2018/01/10/polarizing-polar-bears-unmasking-a-proxy-war-strategy-by-online-climate-change-denialists/>*
Paul Rosenberg,
In early December, a video of a dying, emaciated polar bear, foraging
for food on an iceless land, went viral on social media. The video
garnered millions of views on Facebook and YouTube. For most, it was a
vivid signal of the future in store for us all due to human-caused
(anthropogenic) global warming - rising temperatures due to increased
carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.
"The problem is that an ever-warmer future means polar bears will have
less and less access to their seal prey, so the rate at which bears die
from malnutrition/starvation will increase," said Dr. Steven Amstrup,
chief scientist for the nonprofit Polar Bears International. "So,
regardless of the proximate cause of this bear's condition, this
heart-wrenching footage provides us with a warning about the future."
These topics are used as "proxies" for [anthropogenic global warming] in
general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are
strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each
representing a separate line of evidence for anthropogenic global
warming. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences
targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled
in a form of "dismissal by association."
The paper, Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by
Proxy, by Jeffrey Harvey, a senior scientist at the Netherlands
Institute of Ecology, and 13 co-authors, looked at 90 blogs and 92 peer
reviewed papers. They analyzed them in terms of what they said about sea
ice (declining rapidly or not, or varying unpredictably over the long
run) and polar bears (threatened with extinction or not, or capable of
adapting to threats).
Another co-author, Bart Verheggen, a climate scientists at Amsterdam
University College, starkly described their findings:
"There is a clear separation amongst blogs, where approximately half of
the 90 blogs investigated agree with the majority of the scientific
literature, whereas other blogs took a position that is diametrically
opposed to the scientific conclusions. Most of the blogs in the latter
group [about 80%] based their opinions on one and the same source: Susan
Crockford."
Crockford is an unpaid adjunct professor at the University of Victoria
in British Columbia....
*Studying Climate Denialism: A Growing Subfield*
This began in 2004, when science historian Naomi Oreskes, a professor of
the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary
sciences at Harvard, produced the first of several studies establishing
the existence of a solid 97 percent consensus of scientists that humans
are responsible for ongoing global warming. It's also been shown that
increasing awareness of this consensus increases public acceptance. In
2015, Norwegian climate scientist Rasmus Benestad pioneered the study of
patterns of mistakes across dissenting papers in the remaining 3
percent. These were discovered by trying to replicate their results.
In 2012, Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of
Bristol, in the United Kingdom UK, another of Harvey's co-authors,
initiated another line of research. He explored patterns of reasoning in
the public at large. He first discovered that belief in a cluster of
conspiracy theories was associated with global warming denial. Then he
studied the online response of denialists to that study in a paper
called "Recursive Fury," in which he reported that many denialists
exhibited at least one of six previously identified characteristics of
conspiracist ideation.
The denialists reacted furiously again and the journal that published
the paper withdrew it, not because there was anything scientifically
wrong with it, but for fear of being sued. This was widely condemned for
encouraging scientifically unfounded attacks. Crockford also tried to
get Harvey's paper withdrawn and others tried to get Harvey condemned by
his employer, but both were firmly rebuffed...
Finally, in 2016, Yale sociologist Justin Farrell initiated another line
of research, using network science and text analysis to investigate the
overall structure and organizational power of the contrarian network,
including the role of elite corporate benefactors....
"Our paper is hardly surprising, but deniers are angry simply because
they have been formally exposed," Harvey summed up. "It is patently
obvious that denier blogs are master cherry pickers of quite dubious
sources. They know it too, but they just don't want to admit it."
Which is why the paper's call for scientists to become more engaged on
social media is so crucial. The more of them there are, the harder it
will be for the cherry pickers to win when the next viral video comes
around.
http://planetjh.com/2018/01/10/polarizing-polar-bears-unmasking-a-proxy-war-strategy-by-online-climate-change-denialists/
-
[background 2012]
*Heartland Payments to University of Victoria Professor Susan Crockford
Probed
<https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-payments-university-victoria-professor-susan-crockford-probed>*
https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-payments-university-victoria-professor-susan-crockford-probed
*This Day in Climate History January 11, 2017
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-want-to-fight-climate-change-but-fossil-fuel-bullies-wont-let-them/2017/01/10/177dbd4e-cc82-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html>
- from D.R. Tucker*
In a Washington Post op-ed, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says:
*Republicans want to fight climate change, but fossil-fuel bullies won’t
let them*
..the only obstacles to bipartisan action on climate in Congress is
a) thefossil-fuel industry's intimidation of Republicans and
b) the refusal of companies that profess support for climate action to
push back
against the fossil-fuel industry.
Republican friend approached me on the Senate floor and said: “What the
hell are you complaining about? They’re spending more against us than
they are against you!” I suspect they were at the time. The fossil-fuel
industry knew that if it could bring a political party to heel, it could
use that party to block progress.
A climate solution will require safe passage for Republicans through the
political kill zone. Democrats can’t help with that. Environmental
groups can’t help with that. Scientists can’t help either.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-want-to-fight-climate-change-but-fossil-fuel-bullies-wont-let-them/2017/01/10/177dbd4e-cc82-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html
/
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