[TheClimate.Vote] July 21, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/July 21, 2018/

[BBC report]
*Japan heatwave: Warnings issued amid scorching temperatures 
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44910435>*
People across Japan have been urged to take precautions against a 
heatwave that has killed about 30 people.
Thousands more have sought hospital treatment for heat-related 
conditions over the past two weeks.
Temperatures reached 40.7C (105F) in central Japan earlier this week, a 
five-year nationwide peak.
In the city of Kyoto temperatures have stood above 38C (100.4F) for 
seven days in a row for the first time since records began in the 19th 
Century.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44910435


[ABC news video]
*27 reported tornadoes rip through Iowa, devastating town 
<https://abcnews.go.com/US/27-reported-tornadoes-rip-iowa-devastating-towns/story?id=56707568>*
Iowa, which usually averages about seven tornadoes in the month of July, 
saw 27 reported twisters rip through the state Thursday night, damaging 
buildings, overturning cars and rupturing gas lines.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/27-reported-tornadoes-rip-iowa-devastating-towns/story?id=56707568


[91 degrees to you and me]
*Record breaking heat across N Norway and Kola peninsula, July 19th 
<http://www.severe-weather.eu/recent-events/record-breaking-heat-across-n-norway-and-kola-peninsula-july-19th/>*
Extreme heat brought new all-time records into N Norway and Kola 
peninsula, Russia yesterday. Foehn winds pushed temps into 31-33 C.
The maximum temperatures yesterday, July 19th. While western Norway was 
refreshed by a frontal zone from the Norwegian sea, inland Fennoscandia 
was experiencing scorching heat – northern parts were extremely hot at 
Foehn winds from the south pushed temps up to 31-34 C before maritime 
airmass pushed in! The coastal station Slettnes Fyr, Norway (71.2N 
lattitude) peaked at 31.4 C!
http://www.severe-weather.eu/recent-events/record-breaking-heat-across-n-norway-and-kola-peninsula-july-19th/


[Bigger]
*Wildfires rage in Arctic Circle as Sweden calls for help 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires>*
Sweden worst hit as hot, dry summer sparks unusual number of fires, with 
at least 11 in the far north...
The European Forest Fire Information System warned fire danger 
conditions were likely to be extreme across much of central and northern 
Europe in the coming weeks.
EU officials said many of this year's fires are outside the traditional 
European fire zone of the Mediterranean, and are increasingly taking 
place at unexpected times of year. 2017 was the worst fire year in 
Europe's history, causing destruction to thousands of hectares of forest 
and cropland in Portugal, Spain and Italy, as late as November. "There 
are clear trends of longer fire seasons and frequent critical periods in 
Europe that are leading to dangerous fire situations," said a European 
commission official.*
*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires*


*[city and the lawsuit in battle with the future]*
Baltimore plans suit against oil and gas companies for their role in 
spurring climate change 
<http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-baltimore-climate-change-lawsuit-20180719-story.html>*
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-baltimore-climate-change-lawsuit-20180719-story.html


[Wired]
*TURNS OUT CITIES CAN'T SUE OIL COMPANIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE 
<https://www.wired.com/story/climate-lawsuits-dismissed/>*
YOU CAN'T SUE your way to a solution for global warming. So says the judge.
On Thursday, Judge John Keenan of New York's Southern District dismissed 
the City of New York's lawsuit against the international oil and gas 
companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell..
https://www.wired.com/story/climate-lawsuits-dismissed/


[Follow the money]
*Are we getting climate finance all wrong? 
<http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/20/getting-climate-finance-wrong/>*
Long term thinking about climate change challenges widely held 
assumptions about how we spend money today
By Jessica Brown and Ilmi Granoff
It's widely accepted that by the year 2050, the world needs to be 
approaching net-zero carbon if the goals of the Paris climate deal are 
to survive...
- - - -
In a mid-century timeframe, however, delayed investment in sectors with 
high emissions abatement costs, such as buildings or transport, at best 
delays and at worst radically increases those high costs.
This thinking is best argued by Vogt-Schlib, Meunier, and Hallegatte who 
make a compelling case that in many high-cost abatement sectors a late, 
rushed transformation will be more expensive than a progressive, slow 
shift towards decarbonisation. This is primarily due to "adjustment 
costs," such as the costs associated with abruptly diverting the labor 
force to retrofit buildings, or replacing infrastructure faster than its 
useful life.
The researchers show another reason to start with the higher cost 
interventions: Often, the more expensive options not only reduce 
emissions today but also help lock in emissions reductions for the 
future. Urban transport systems are a great example of this in practice.
These points complement an earlier, independent finding that investing 
early in costlier technologies allows for "learning-by-doing" over time, 
leading to reductions in the overall cost of those technologies. 
Investment drives down technology costs, which in turn helps achieve 
more investment...
- - - -
Typical models of maturing innovations tend to emphasise the role of 
public investment at early stages of technology development, with public 
efforts at later stages limited to setting the right policy conditions 
to attract private investment. However, research by Mariana Mazzucato 
and others suggests public investment can play a critical role even at 
later stages in the innovation chain, throughout commercialisation and 
deployment stages. Green investment banks, loan guarantee programmes, 
and other "industrial strategy" tools have helped accelerate the 
commercialisation of low-carbon innovations.
Moreover, other research shows that the return expectations of venture 
capital – which typically comes in at early stages of commercialisation 
– do not always match actual returns, and therefore the underlying 
investment needs, of clean technologies at that point in their development.
These trends buck traditional thinking on where what types of capital 
are best deployed, begging us to consider whether the climate finance 
community needs a new framework for financial actors along the 
technology development spectrum.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/20/getting-climate-finance-wrong/


[true cost accounting - carbon cost is the most important number]
*Why is this group updating the "social cost of carbon"? 
<https://www.marketplace.org/2018/07/18/sustainability/why-group-updating-social-cost-carbon>*
By Jed Kim
July 18, 2018
"This is the first time where we're using large amounts of real-world 
data to compute what the cost of carbon is to society," said Solomon 
Hsiang, the lab's UC Berkeley lead.
This estimate won't be completely based on models, like the original 
was, but rather on historical data.
That's daunting because the researchers want to gather data at a super 
granular level. Earlier models divided the globe into 14 regions. This 
team is breaking it down into roughly 25,000 county-sized parcels. 
That'll give a much clearer picture of who climate change's winners and 
losers will be.
They're making a tool anyone can use, one that'll redefine scientific 
understanding. Everything else is just politics...
- - - -
The team is a few years away from releasing an overall estimate for the 
social cost of carbon, but they're just about ready to begin releasing 
initial results on mortality. Greenstone said one thing they've found is 
that climate change's impacts will be felt very differently even within 
the United States.*For instance, additional hot days will impact death 
rates in Seattle more than they will in Houston.*
"Precisely because people in Houston have taken preparations to protect 
themselves against hot temperatures that people in Seattle have not seen 
the need to," Greenstone said.
https://www.marketplace.org/2018/07/18/sustainability/why-group-updating-social-cost-carbon
- - - -
[Climate Impact Lab]
*Measuring the Real-World Costs of Climate Change 
<http://www.impactlab.org/>*
Climate Impact Map
http://www.impactlab.org/


[opinion]
*Survival of the Richest 
<https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1>*
The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind
douglas rushkoff - Jul 5
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a 
keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment 
bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a 
talk - about half my annual professor's salary - all to deliver some 
insight on the subject of "the future of technology."
  I've never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end 
up more like parlor games, where I'm asked to opine on the latest 
technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential 
investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely 
interested in learning about these technologies or their potential 
impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. 
But money talks, so I took the gig.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. 
But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just 
sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five 
super-wealthy guys - yes, all men - from the upper echelon of the hedge 
fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest 
in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They 
had come with questions of their own.
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum 
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into 
their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New 
Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his 
brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will 
it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage 
house explained that he had nearly completed building his own 
underground bunker system and asked, "How do I maintain authority over 
my security force after the event?"
For all their wealth and power, they don't believe they can affect the 
future.
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, 
social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack 
that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew 
armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry 
mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What 
would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires 
considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only 
they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in 
return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards 
and workers - if that technology could be developed in time.
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were 
concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their 
cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging 
process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into 
supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a 
whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did 
with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating 
themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising 
sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and 
resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about 
just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology 
might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human 
utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration 
of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that 
is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and 
complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, 
now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, 
concluding that "humans are nothing but information-processing objects."
It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by 
finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along 
for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These 
billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy - the 
same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fueling most of 
this speculation to begin with.
Of course, it wasn't always this way. There was a brief moment, in the 
early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our 
invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, 
who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, 
and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new 
potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were 
seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like 
stock futures or cotton futures - something to predict and make bets on. 
So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was 
seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The 
future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or 
hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our 
venture capital but arrive at passively.
This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. 
Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing 
than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of 
this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an 
anti-technology curmudgeon.
So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and 
exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, 
and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and 
fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? 
Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want 
autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of 
its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? 
Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?
Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is 
a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries 
associated with unbridled technological development in the name of 
corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already 
exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even 
more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of 
these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the 
demise of local retail.
The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices 
or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our 
venture capital but arrive at passively.
But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital 
capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of 
some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave 
labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called 
Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, 
learned it was impossible. (The company's founder now sadly refers to 
their products as "fairer" phones.)
Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly 
digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic 
waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their 
families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.
This "out of sight, out of mind" externalization of poverty and poison 
doesn't go away just because we've covered our eyes with VR goggles and 
immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we 
ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more 
of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, 
more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy - and more desperately 
concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.
The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to 
see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very 
essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than 
bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. 
Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own 
corrupted core. It's as if some innate human savagery is to blame for 
our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be 
"solved" with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing 
inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or 
genetic upgrade.
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human 
future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps 
better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. 
Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent 
phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, 
along with our sins and troubles.
Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie 
shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the 
undead - and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to 
imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, 
where one group's survival is dependent on another one's demise. Even 
Westworld - based on a science-fiction novel where robots run 
amok - ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings 
are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we 
create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few 
lines of code, and that we're incapable of making any willful choices. 
Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their 
bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.
The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a 
feature than bug.
The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between 
humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans 
suck. Let's either change them or get away from them, forever.
Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space - as 
if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire's capacity for 
corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and 
somehow survive in a bubble on Mars - despite our inability to maintain 
such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar 
Biosphere trials - the result will be less a continuation of the human 
diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.
When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over 
their security forces after "the event," I suggested that their best bet 
would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be 
engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own 
family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the 
rest of their business practices, supply chain management, 
sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there 
will be of an "event" in the first place. All this technological 
wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more 
collective interests right now.
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn't really buy it. They 
were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they're convinced we are 
too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don't believe they 
can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all 
scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can 
employ to insulate themselves - especially if they can't get a seat on 
the rocket to Mars.
Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own 
humanity have much better options available to us. We don't have to use 
technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the 
individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us 
to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn't go it alone.
Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team 
sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1


*This Day in Climate History - July 21, 2014 
<http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/23/on-the-hottest-june-on-record-most-media-missed/200183> 
- from D.R. Tucker*
July 21, 2014: "ABC World News Tonight" connects the climate dots in a 
report on recent extreme weather events.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/23/on-the-hottest-june-on-record-most-media-missed/200183


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