[TheClimate.Vote] June 16, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Jun 16 12:29:27 EDT 2018
/June 16, 2018/
[Leaked draft of UN report]
*Exclusive: Global warming set to exceed 1.5C, slow growth - U.N. draft
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHxNjKW9omE>*
Global warming is on course to exceed the most stringent goal set in the
Paris Agreement by around 2040, according to a leaked final draft of the
Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change's (IPCC) special report on 1.5C. Governments can still
cap temperatures below the 1.5C limit agreed in 2015, the draft says,
but only with "rapid and far-reaching" transitions in the world economy.
There is no sign that the latest draft has been watered down by Donald
Trump's scepticism about climate change, notes Reuters. Climate
scientist and Climate Analytics director Bill Hare told the Guardian
that the draft shows with greater clarity how much faster countries need
to move towards decarbonisation: "This IPCC report shows anyone drawing
from published papers that there are big differences between 1.5C and 2C
[of] warming in both natural and human systems". Responding to the leak,
the IPCC said in a statement that "out of respect for the authors and to
give them the time and space to finish writing before making the work
public…the IPCC does not comment on the contents of draft reports while
work is still ongoing". The final report is due for publication in
October in South Korea after revisions and approval by governments.
BusinessGreen and E&E News also have the story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHxNjKW9omE
[Declaration of War]
*An Unusual Grant Fuels a Push to Start Treating Climate Change as a
Real Emergency
<https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/6/14/an-unusual-grant-fuels-a-push-to-start-treating-climate-change-as-a-real-emergency>*
Tate Williams
A major challenge to organizing and advocacy around climate change is
how even to approach a problem so large, complex, and gradually
advancing (although it feels less gradual with every year, to be honest).
An advocacy group that launched in 2014 has one answer - we respond like
we're at war.
For the Climate Mobilization Project, the climate crisis demands not
incremental changes or gradual reductions in emissions, but an emergency
response led by government that is on the scale of the response to World
War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The group just picked up a
grant from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Shelter Rock of
$100,000, an amount they say is the "country's single largest
philanthropic investment in emergency climate action."
This modest grant from a local funder to a little-known climate outfit
is worth a closer look, with an eye to takeaways for other players in
this space. We've been saying for a while now that if climate change is
really the time-urgent, existential threat that so many, including top
funders, say it is, then civil society and philanthropy needs to start
acting on that belief. Nonprofits need to hit harder and foundations
need to give more - a lot more - while there's still time.
- - - -
For its part, the Climate Mobilization Project is following a
city-by-city strategy to move the country into emergency mode. It's
campaigning to get governments to declare a climate emergency, initiate
aggressive carbon reduction commitments, and become advocates for
further emergency mobilization. The campaign cites some political
advances, including the Los Angeles City Council voting to explore what
would be the country's first Climate Emergency Mobilization Department.
And just this week, Berkeley, California, declared a climate emergency.
- - - - -
The compelling thing about the Climate Mobilization Project is that,
while arguably unrealistic in its goals - since there's no political
consensus on this issue, as Rockoff's paper notes - it is unflinching in
its diagnosis of the level of response that climate change warrants.
Much of its goal is to build a movement around how we should
collectively think about climate change - mainly that the status quo of
the approach to date is unacceptable. And from the standpoint of a
funder like UUCSR, it's a status quo that's certainly unjust.
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/6/14/an-unusual-grant-fuels-a-push-to-start-treating-climate-change-as-a-real-emergency
[Kate Schapira says to just talk about it]
*Climate Anxiety Counseling in ThinkProgress
<https://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com/>*
JUNE 15, 2018
*CLIMATEANXIETYCOUNSELING**
**Let's talk together about the changing world. The doctor is in.*
Jeremy Deaton wrote about me, but not just me, and the climate booth,
but not just the climate booth, forThinkProgress
<https://thinkprogress.org/uncovering-the-mental-health-crisis-of-climate-change-dab21697ea49/>.
One reason I really like this article is that it puts the booth into
context, and shows how the kind of thinking and feeling that I want it
to make possible - livable - is underway. It cites work done, and truths
spoken, by many people and connects readers to that work and those
truths; it is open about the relationships among material and emotional
suffering.
I'll have more of an articulate response soon (right after I…type up all
the notes from two weeks of booth sessions) but I want to thank Jeremy
for our conversation and all the other people, named and unnamed, whose
articulated reality this article includes.
https://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com/
[Book Review - July release]
*WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT?
<https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roy-scranton/were-doomed-now-what/>*
Essays on War and Climate Change
by Roy Scranton
KIRKUS REVIEW
Essays on war and the "eve of what may be the human world's greatest
catastrophe."
Novelist and journalist Scranton (English/Notre Dame Univ.; War Porn,
2016, etc.) collects essays and talks, most previously published, that
primarily cover climate change, serving with the Army in the Middle
East, race, and contemporary war literature. The author is clearly
frustrated and angry, and he is doing his level best to face the doom
and gloom. As he writes in the title essay, "we stand today on a
precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined."
In fact, he admits, "it's probably already too late to stop apocalyptic
planetary warming." At this moment of crisis, we must use our "human
drive to make meaning…[it's] our "only salvation." In "Arctic Ghosts,"
Scranton recounts a 2015 cruise he took in Canada. He writes about John
Franklin's 1845 failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Today,
his cruise succeeded: "I was overtaken by the realization that what I'd
come to see was already gone." Our planet had warmed "beyond anything
civilization has ever seen." In "Rock Scissors Paper," which he
describes as a "Borgesian bastard," the author riffs about our new
geological epoch, the Anthropocene, "characterized by the advent of the
human species as a geological force." No one, he writes, "intended this,
and we seem to be incapable of preventing it." In "Anthropocene City,"
Scranton chronicles his tour of heavily polluted Galveston Bay, "so full
of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely
restricted." When he writes about his personal involvement in war, it
comes almost as a relief. In the book's longest essay, the powerful
"Back to Baghdad," he returned as a journalist: "They stayed, I left.
But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn't left me."
Despite the inevitable repetitions, Scranton's warnings must be
heeded…again and again.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roy-scranton/were-doomed-now-what/
[publisher]
https://sohopress.com/books/were-doomed-now-what/
Roy Scranton video reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgx-yFczGjU
*Why It Matters If Fracking Companies Are Overestimating Their 'Proved'
Oil and Gas Reserves
<https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/06/14/proved-undeveloped-reserves-sec-rule-change-risks-shale-fracking-pipelines>*
By Sharon Kelly - Thursday, June 14, 2018
Under the updated SEC rules, which went into effect in 2009, drillers
can count oil and gas from wells that won't be drilled or fracked for up
to five years as part of their proved reserves. Those as-yet-untapped
wells can be put on a company's books as a subset of their "proved"
reserves, listed under the label "proved undeveloped" reserves.
And drillers can count all of the oil and gas they expect to pump out
over the well's entire lifetime - before they've found out how fast
that well flows or seen a single drop of oil from it.
Those "proved undeveloped reserves" (PUDs) now make up an average of
just over half of the proved oil reserves at 40 drilling companies
active in shale gas basins nationwide, according to SEC filings reviewed
by DeSmog. For drilling companies that are less heavily involved in
shale drilling, the average mix is roughly 30 percent PUDs - similar
to the industry's average before the SEC rule change..
- - -
For years, the problem of reserves overbooking has been known in the oil
industry as "the problem no one wants to talk about."
Oil companies have plenty of reasons to present the rosiest possible
picture of their future prospects, while Wall Street investment analysts
often focus on short-term prospects or compare companies against their
peers rather than scouting for industry-wide issues. And once a loan is
made, lenders have little incentive to question whether collateral is as
valuable as it was expected to be...
- - - -
When oil prices collapsed from over $90 per barrel (of West Texas
Intermediate crude) in 2014 to less than $50 in 2015, drillers had to
write down billions of barrels of proved reserves in what Bloomberg
called "a puff of accounting smoke."
At that point, lenders faced an expensive dilemma - if they foreclosed
on loans to drillers, they would have to shoulder the burden of actually
drilling that oil or selling the acreage to someone who could, all in a
market where oil prices had plunged...
- -- - - -
She gave the example of Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation's largest
oil and gas drillers, which was heavily involved in the shale rush.
"In plain terms, in 2016 Chesapeake no longer had sufficient collateral
to back its loans … but the losses associated with foreclosing were so
high that the lenders cut the interest rate coverage in half" and took
other steps to bail Chesapeake out. "Unfortunately, they are only one
example of many in the industry and many others have a much higher draw
on borrowing bases that are now not sufficiently collateralized."
The oil and gas sector currently owes over $833 billion to lenders, a
May 31 analysis by Reuters found, and nearly half of that - roughly $400
billion - is due to be paid off or refinanced by the end of 2019.
That means banks and drillers will be re-negotiating hundreds of
billions of dollars in loans relatively soon.
Shale plays are notorious for having concentrated sweet spots, where the
best wells can be drilled, surrounded by larger areas that give less
bang for drillers' buck....
- - - -
"If we don't overbuild this time, it will be the first time in the
history of the industry. There's absolutely, we will overbuild, there's
no doubt about it," Wouter van Kempen, Chairman, President, and CEO of
DCP Midstream, said at an April 16 executive roundtable at the GPA
Midstream 2018 Convention...
- - -
"The question is when, and by how much, and I think what you heard
earlier from all of us here, none of us want to own that last gas
project, none of us want to own that last pipe because those are not the
ones you want to own."
"We don't know what we're doing."
Instead, the pipeline industry has sought to pass some of the risk back
to drillers through contracts that require payment even if pipes go
unused, explained Terry Spencer, President and CEO of ONEOK, a natural
gas infrastructure company.
That strategy puts the hot potato right back into the hands of shale
drillers - and it turns out the drilling industry may be far less
prepared to handle that risk than their proved reserves figures suggest.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/06/14/proved-undeveloped-reserves-sec-rule-change-risks-shale-fracking-pipelines
GUEST POSTS 15 June 2018
*Guest post: How global warming is causing ocean oxygen levels to fall
<https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-global-warming-is-causing-ocean-oxygen-levels-to-fall>*
Ocean oxygen loss is increasingly being recognised as a major threat to
marine ecosystems and shifting habitat conditions in many parts of the
global ocean.
Deoxygenation feedbacks on climate via the production of potent
greenhouse gases such as N2O and methane under low-oxygen conditions
become more likely in a warmer climate. Therefore, it is essential to
resolve the discrepancy between observations and models, which are
ultimately required for reliable projections into the future.
To close these gaps, we recommend more intensive and
internationally-coordinated ocean observations. We need
multidisciplinary process studies to better understand the delicate
balance of oxygenation and oxygen consumption in the dynamically
changing oceans.
Research projects like our Kiel-based Collaborative Research Centre SFB
754 Climate-Biogeochemistry Interactions in the Tropical Ocean and
international initiatives such as the Global Ocean Oxygen Network are
helpful in moving the field forward.
An improvement of the models in terms of the ocean oxygen budget would
have another advantage: oxygen is an ideal parameter for calibrating
models that calculate the uptake of CO2 by the ocean. Thus, at the same
time, we would improve our knowledge of the carbon cycle.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-global-warming-is-causing-ocean-oxygen-levels-to-fall
[Sargasso Sea weed shore sludge]
*The Eastern Caribbean Is Swamped by a Surge of Seaweed
<https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/the-eastern-caribbean-is-swamped-by-a-surge-of-seaweed/>*
Massive rafts of floating sargassum are killing wildlife and
preventing fishers from launching their boats.
by Ryan Schuessler
June 11th, 2018
Barbados's Long Beach, typically a picturesque vision of white sand and
blue water, is buried beneath a vast expanse of thick, rotting seaweed.
It's a stinking nuisance that has turned deadly.
"We have found three dolphins dead," says Carla Daniel, the director of
public awareness and education with the Barbados Sea Turtle Project.
Daniel and her colleagues believe the dolphins got caught on June 4 in
sargassum seaweed that has been washing up on Barbados and across the
eastern Caribbean in mounds up to two meters thick. A necropsy of one
dolphin revealed it died of stress.
Seven endangered green sea turtles have also died so far. "For the
majority of animals, the sargassum can be a problem because it traps
them," Daniel says.
Under normal conditions, floating sargassum is a thriving ecosystem. It
provides a vital habitat and food source in the open ocean for fish,
turtles, and crustaceans. There are even a handful of species found only
in floating sargassum mats, including the aptly-named sargassum fish.
But when it grows too thick, the seaweed clumps in dense, tangled mats
so expansive and impenetrable that sea turtles and other
surface-breathing animals can't break through.
The current losses are reminiscent of 2015, when the worst sargassum
influx to date killed more than 40 green and hawksbill sea turtles,
their bodies found in the thick rafts of seaweed. "For an endangered
species, that's unacceptable," says Hazel Oxenford, a biologist at the
University of the West Indies in Barbados.
But the current surge of seaweed is expected to be much worse than the
one in 2015. "You can see on the satellite that there's a lot more
coming," says Iris Monnereau, who works with the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations in Barbados. Satellite observations
show hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of sargassum floating in
the central Atlantic. The challenge is in predicting where it will go
next and where it might reach land, a situation that causes a whole
other set of challenges....
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/the-eastern-caribbean-is-swamped-by-a-surge-of-seaweed/
*This Day in Climate History - June 16, 2008
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmeJaKZwHI&sns=em> - from D.R. Tucker*
June 16, 2008: Former Vice President Al Gore endorses Illinois Senator
Barack Obama for president.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmeJaKZwHI&sns=em
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