[TheClimate.Vote] January 22, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 22, 2018/

[TheGuardian]
*Lloyd's of London to divest from coal over climate change 
<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/21/lloyds-of-london-to-divest-from-coal-over-climate-change>*
Firm follows other big UK and European insurers by excluding coal 
companies from 1 April
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/21/lloyds-of-london-to-divest-from-coal-over-climate-change


[Union of Concerned Scientists]
*Abandoning Science Advice 
<https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2018/01/abandoning-science-advice-full-report.pdf>*
One Year in, the Trump Administration Is Sidelining Science Advisory 
Committees
At several federal agencies, political appointees have misrepresented 
scientific information, overruled the recommendations of scientific 
experts, scrubbed scientific content from websites,
and even forbidden some staff from describing their work as 
"science-based" in budget documents.
These actions are well documented, but less attention has been paid to a 
related challenge: the state
of science advice that the White House and federal agencies need on an 
ongoing basis...
The neglect of independent scientific advice seriously endangers the 
nation. Such advice is crucial to the federal
government's ability to make informed decisions on matters that have 
enormous consequences for public health and safety. Policymakers 
regularly turn to science to help them determine government responses to 
complex challenges, from the outbreak of deadly diseases to 
environmental and national security threats.
The UCS investigation of federal advisory committees finds that the 
Trump administration systematically sidelines
science to an unprecedented extent by neglecting valuable input from the 
nation's established network of federal science advisory committees....
In response to the documented indications of a science advisory system 
in serious decline, the Union of Concerned Scientists makes three 
recommendations for immediate action:

    Current and former science advisors should speak out
    when they discover that federal agencies and others
    in the government are sidelining important scientific
    work and findings.

    The Government Accountability Office should ascertain
    whether federal agencies are appropriately carrying
    out the Federal Advisory Committee Act, especially
    given EPA Administrator Pruitt's directive on advisory
    committee eligibility.

    Congress should hold hearings on the status of science
    advisory committees tthroughout the government to
    investigate whether they are serving the public interest
    by functioning as directed by law.

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2018/01/abandoning-science-advice-full-report.pdf


[Charlotte Business Journal]
*Duke Energy will prepare climate-risk report demanded by shareholders 
<https://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/news/2018/01/19/duke-energy-will-prepare-climate-risk-report.html>*
Duke Energy Corp. will publish by March 30 its climate-risk assessment 
that analyzes the impact the carbon-reduction goals in the Paris Accords 
will have on its business.
That bows to a shareholder proposal that narrowly missed winning 
approval at Duke's 2017 shareholder meeting.
Thomas DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller whose retirement funds hold 
1.76 million shares of Duke stock, filed the shareholder proposal last 
year. It won approval from 46% of the shares voted at the meeting 
despite a board recommendation that shareholders reject it...
The proposal referred to the goal of the Paris agreement, which 
President Donald Trump has said the United States will withdraw from, to 
work to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius in the coming decades.
It called on Duke to prepare a report assessing what meeting that goal 
would mean for Duke's generation portfolio and capital spending through 
2040. The proposal says the report could include how Duke could adjust 
its capital spending to get it in line with the "two degree scenario" 
and the technological, regulatory and business model innovations that 
could help it get there.
Duke has not said publicly whether all of those issues will be addressed 
in the report.
https://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/news/2018/01/19/duke-energy-will-prepare-climate-risk-report.html


[Reuters]
*CONCERN OVER CLIMATE CHANGE LINKED TO DEPRESSION, ANXIETY: Study... 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-depression/concern-over-climate-change-linked-to-depression-anxiety-study-idUSKBN1F738X>*
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Depression and anxiety afflict 
Americans who are concerned with the fate of the environment, according 
to a study of the mental health effects of climate change.
Most hard-hit are women and people with low incomes who worry about the 
planet's long-term health, said the study published this week in the 
journal Global Environmental Change.
Symptoms include restless nights, feelings of loneliness and lethargy.
"Climate change is a persistent global stressor," said Sabrina Helm, 
lead author of the paper and professor of family and consumer sciences 
at the University of Arizona.
Risks to mental health from climate change are a "creeping development," 
she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Due to climate change, scientists predict sea levels are on track to 
surge as temperatures rise, posing threats such as deadly heat, extreme 
weather and land swallowed by rising water.
World leaders mobilized to curb man-made greenhouse gas emissions to 
fight global warming in a 2015 agreement, although the United States has 
since said it would withdraw from the landmark deal.
Signs of depression do not appear in people concerned about climate 
change's risks to humanity but do appear in people worried about its 
impact on other species, plants and nature overall, the research said.
The study pulled from 342 online surveys of respondents whose views 
broadly reflect the wider U.S. population, it said.
Experts have looked at ways extreme weather such as hurricanes and 
floods, whose intensity has increased due to climate change, can cause 
mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, it said.
But little research has looked into anxiety arising from climate change 
as an everyday concern, the study said.
Reporting by Sebastien Malo @sebastienmalo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-depression/concern-over-climate-change-linked-to-depression-anxiety-study-idUSKBN1F738X


[Haaretz]
*Endless Drought Predicted for the Mediterranean in a Warmer World 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-endless-drought-predicted-for-the-mediterranean-in-a-warmer-world-1.5747182>*
Dr. Yael Kiro of Columbia and her colleagues found evidence of historic 
Dead Sea levels as high as 160 meters and low as 500 meters below sea 
level...
Kiro found massive, sudden precipitation of salt onto the Dead Sea floor 
between 120,000 to 117,000 years ago and again, starting around 10,000 
years ago. She interprets this as a period of droughts - bad droughts 
that were worse than anything we have known.
These days the level of the Dead Sea is falling by more than a meter a 
year, though not because of drought. It's falling so quickly because the 
people living in its watershed - Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and 
Syrians - are overexploiting the freshwater sources feeding the lake, 
mainly the Jordan River and its tributaries.
The modern contraction of the Dead Sea, therefore, is mostly man-made. 
But in a warmer world, the east Mediterranean and Dead Sea watershed 
region are expected to get drier....
Israel sits at the northern edge of the Saharan-Arabian desert belt. 
While Israel's north is Mediterranean in weather - rainy in winter and 
dry in summer - the south is a desert, with less than 20 centimeters of 
rain a year. That's bountiful compared with the southern mountains by 
the Red Sea, the driest place on Earth: It has zero humidity on the 
surface and gets rainfall short of half an inch a year, says Stein. And 
that could be nothing compared with future aridity.
Israel gets rainfall chiefly from storms sweeping in from the west, when 
cold air from Europe slams into the Mediterranean, extracting water 
vapor from the sea. As global warming advances, these storms are likely 
to become rarer, though when they do arrive, they might be more intense.
Drought in the Middle East is already intensifying because global 
warming is causing cyclonic activity to move toward the North Pole and 
away from the Mediterranean, Stein explains. In fact, as storms move 
north, so are the temperate zones at the mid-latitudes, from Spain to 
Turkey to Morocco, and the whole Saharan desert belt is spreading north. 
Vast regions will get warmer and experience fewer storms in winter.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-endless-drought-predicted-for-the-mediterranean-in-a-warmer-world-1.5747182


[Worse?]
*WILL THE WEATHER GET WORSE IN 2018? WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY... 
<http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/will_the_weather_get_worse_in_2018_what_the_experts_say>*
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC 
<http://www.ipcc.ch/>, an international body set up to assess the 
science of climate change, we can continue to expect an increase 
<https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/> in the 
average global temperature. That means we will be experiencing warmer 
years in the future.
But at the same time, we may see changes to the extremes, which could 
become more frequent in the case of high temperature or heavy rainfall, 
or less frequent in the case of extreme cold. This means that the 
distribution, occurrence and expected averages of our weather (for 
example, temperature and rain) throughout the year may change, resulting 
in warmer years on average with more extreme hot days, and fewer extreme 
cold days in the future...
In terms of tropical cyclones, the effects of climate change on these 
phenomena is an active area of research as the processes are complex. 
For example, the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship which can be related to 
the water vapour-carrying capacity of the atmosphere, may have an impact 
on the strength and intensity of such storms.
The relationship states that for every degree rise in temperature, the 
water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases by 7%, so in a 
warming ocean, the air above the water has a much greater capacity to 
hold water and thus store more rain that can feed more powerful storms....
But sinking cold air from the upper atmosphere may prevent storms from 
rising in the first place. If this happens more frequently with climate 
change then we can expect fewer such storms. That means in the future 
there may be fewer tropical cyclones forming, but those that do will be 
stronger and more intense.
In a warming world, we can expect it to get wetter. The distribution of 
the rainfall throughout the year could change as we experience longer, 
drier spells, although when rain falls it may be in intense bursts. 
Recent research by Newcastle University analysed the results from finer 
scale GCMs climate projections and suggests we may expect more intense 
summer rainfall in the UK in future. New climate projections from GCMs 
are being prepared for the UK to help predict what the future climate 
may look like...
Governments need to recognise and absorb that extreme weather across the 
globe is likely to become more common and start to adapt accordingly, 
rather than treat it as shocking one-off events. Otherwise we risk 
increasing loss of life and environmental damage in the future.
Lindsay Beevers
Professor/Chair Futures Forum, Heriot-Watt University
https://theconversation.com/profiles/lindsay-beevers-435129
http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/will_the_weather_get_worse_in_2018_what_the_experts_say


*[Video Classics for the Citizen Scientist]*
[PBS video]
*Chaos Theory PBS <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJAs9Qr359o>*
Chaos is order out of disorder, and order out of non-linearity. When 
there is agreement within a system, the more complex a system, the 
better a bottom up/emergent organizational structure handles the diversity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJAs9Qr359o
-
[The Royal Institution]
*What We Cannot Know - with Marcus du Sautoy 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reeU09R4TIA>*
Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields 
of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human 
comprehension? Marcus du Sautoy investigates.
Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields 
of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human 
comprehension? Former Christmas Lecturer Marcus du Sautoy will lead us 
on a thought-provoking expedition to the furthest reaches of modern science.
Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician and popular science writer and 
speaker.  He delivered the 2006 CHRISTMAS LECTURES on mathematics, 
titled THE NUM8ER MY5TERIES. He is currently the Charles Simonyi 
Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the Oxford University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reeU09R4TIA


[video report]
*Sundance Film Festival shines spotlight on climate change 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/sundance-film-festival-shines-spotlight-climate-change-180121133838110.html>*
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/sundance-film-festival-shines-spotlight-climate-change-180121133838110.html


*This Day in Climate History January 22,1970 
<http://youtu.be/5LpspwT0ZwA>   -  from D.R. Tucker*
In his State of the Union address, President Nixon declares:

    "The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our
    surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make
    reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and
    to our water?

    "Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and
    beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of
    this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans,
    because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our
    failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent
    disaster later.

    "Clean air, clean water, open spaces - these should once again be the
    birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be.

    "We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither
    is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through
    our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now
    that debt is being called...

    "The automobile is our worst polluter of the air. Adequate control
    requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition. We
    shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards, and
    strengthen enforcement procedures - and we shall do it now.

    "We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property,
    free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences.
    Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which
    we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage
    into our neighbor's yard."

http://youtu.be/5LpspwT0ZwA

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