[TheClimate.Vote] May 7, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/May 7, 2018/

[warming up fire season]
National Interagency Fire Center 
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCodL0nH66KW-hD__WQocYww>
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCodL0nH66KW-hD__WQocYww
- - - -
Wildfire Today <http://wildfiretoday.com>
http://wildfiretoday.com


[Paid Astroturfing is unsporting]
"What's my motivation?"- For these "Grassroots protesters", it's Just 
Another Acting Job 
<https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/07/whats-my-motivation-for-these-grassroots-protesters-its-just-another-acting-job/>
May 7, 2018
Acting is a tough business. But there’s one growth area.

    "They paid us to sit through the meeting and clap every time someone
    said something against wind and solar power," Keith Keough told The
    Lens, saying he was not political and just needed the money."

"Grass Roots" activists for hire. New story from New Orleans is 
consistent with other incidents in recent years.

*New Orleans Times Picayune:*
Local actors were paid to attend New Orleans City Council meetings last 
year in a show of support for a proposed Entergy power plant, collecting 
$60 to $200 for performances that at times included prewritten speeches 
with talking points favoring the plant - in other words, "speaking 
roles," The Lens reports.
"I'm an excellent speaker," an actor told the news site. "I was their 
best choice. Of course I had a speaking role, are you kidding?"
It's not clear who fueled the paid lobbying effort but paying people to 
"create the illusion of grassroots support," a practice known as 
"astroturfing," is apparently legal, according to The Lens report.
Still, attorneys for a coalition of organizations in opposition to the 
power plant say they want state and local officials to investigate 
whether this particular instance of astroturfing broke any laws.
The same coalition has filed a lawsuit alleging that the city council 
broke state open-meetings law by keeping some citizens out of meetings 
that involved the proposed power plant.
With the paid actors in attendance, an October public hearing was so 
packed that some citizens had to wait until the crowd shrank before they 
were allowed inside council chambers.
In a statement emailed Friday night, Entergy New Orleans President and 
CEO Charles Rice said the company did not pay anyone to attend the 
council meetings or direct anyone to attend public meetings.
"Instead, we worked tirelessly to encourage our supporters to take time 
from their busy workday schedules to testify on behalf of this project," 
Rice said.
https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/07/whats-my-motivation-for-these-grassroots-protesters-its-just-another-acting-job/


[Bering ice melt]
*Almost all the ice covering the Bering Sea has melted, throwing Alaska 
communities into disarray 
<https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bering-sea-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change-alaska-a8338656.html>*
'We've fallen off a cliff: very little sea ice remains in the Bering Sea'
Josh Gabbatiss
Almost all the ice covering the Bering Sea has melted, scientists have 
confirmed, throwing communities living around its shores into disarray.
The region's ice cover normally persists for at least another month, and 
this year it has vanished earlier than any other year except 2017.
Located in the northern Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Russia, the 
Bering Sea is experiencing the brunt of climate change and has already 
drawn attention this year for unprecedented levels of winter melting.
In February, soaring Arctic temperatures led to around half the region's 
ice disappearing in the space of two weeks.
This trend has continued into spring, and scientists have confirmed that 
by the end of April just 10 per cent of normal ice levels remained.
"We've fallen off a cliff: very little sea ice remains in the Bering 
Sea," tweeted Dr Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration, who is based in Alaska.
- - --
In their report, the International Arctic Research Centre scientists 
wrote that while not every year will be as bad as this one, ice 
formation is likely to remain low if the Bering Sea's waters remain warm.
They also warn that communities will need to "prepare for more winters 
with low sea ice and stormy conditions".
"Fellow Americans are suffering from a natural disaster," said Dr 
Thoman. "While low sea ice is not as dramatic as a wildfire or an 
Interstate 95 snowstorm, the impacts and hardships it produces are just 
as real."
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/bering-sea-ice-melt-global-warming-climate-change-alaska-a8338656.html


*UN forest accounting loophole allows CO2 underreporting by EU, UK, US 
<https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/>*
By Justin Catanoso
2 May 2018
(Mongabay) - For the past ten years, Mary Booth, an ecologist with the 
Partnership for Policy Integrity in Pelham, Massachusetts, has immersed 
herself in the complex, nuanced, politically charged world of 
international carbon emissions accounting models as if the planet's fate 
depends on it.
In many ways, it does.
Booth studies how countries count and report their emissions. In 
particular, she evaluates whether generating energy via the burning of 
wood pellets, or biomass, puts less carbon into the atmosphere than 
burning coal. In a rising trend, countries, especially in the European 
Union and United Kingdom, are converting existing coal-fired power 
plants to burn wood - a renewable, albeit controversial, fuel source.
Emissions accounting helps determine whether or not nations are on 
target to achieve their voluntary Paris Agreement reduction goals. That 
agreement also represents the global community's pledge to keep the 
world from heating up by just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees 
Fahrenheit) by 2100 from a 1900 baseline (we've already warmed 1 degree 
Celsius).
Emissions tallies are reported regularly to the United Nations 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. But those figures 
aren't just numbers on paper or political aspirations. The data, if 
accurately calculated, tell us how much greenhouse gas nations are 
actually putting into the air, and those combined totals help us know 
whether we are on target to avert climate change catastrophe.
Booth is darkly pessimistic - a price she pays for knowing too much, she 
told me.
"This is a message that no one has said yet. It's what I believe to be 
true: there may not be a pathway to 1.5 [degrees] anymore - at all. 
Carbon capture and storage is a fantasy," Booth told me in a series of 
interviews for Mongabay. "Growing forests may not work fast enough. 
We're not reducing emissions fast enough. The sooner that story gets 
told, the sooner people understand what's really required to keep the 
earth from burning up." […]
Booth's research - Not carbon neutral: Assessing the net emissions 
impact of residues burned for bioenergy, published this February in the 
journal Environmental Research Letters - helps answer some thorny 
questions critical to our energy and carbon future.
Her study examines the net CO2 emissions of biomass burned to replace 
coal at the UK's massive Drax power stations and other EU power plants. 
Combined, those energy facilities consume tons of wood each year.
One major finding, right out of the gate: Booth reports that - contrary 
to a largely accepted view - wood pellets aren't sourced mainly from 
fallen limbs and lumber waste called residue, but rather from whole 
trees. However, she based her study on residue-derived wood pellets 
anyway because the biomass industry "so often claims residues are a main 
pellet source."
Even based on the false assumption that only wood waste, not whole 
trees, are being burnt, Booth found that "up to 95 percent of cumulative 
CO2 emitted [by the biomass burning power plants] represent a net 
addition to the atmosphere over decades." In other words, biomass is not 
carbon neutral.
More disturbing: Booth's research opens up the IPCC to charges that its 
policymaking decisions regarding emissions accounting have been 
politicized - crafted by negotiators to include built-in loopholes that 
allow nations to underreport certain emissions while appearing to 
achieve their carbon-reduction targets.
In particular, both the UK and EU appear to have slipped through a large 
loophole in order to "disappear" real emissions from their carbon 
accounting,..
more at: 
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/


[Video presentation]
*World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, 
Says Cornell Scientist 
<https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea>*
By Sharon Kelly
In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the 
groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas 
fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than 
coal.
In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team, Dr. 
Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell 
University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing in 
changing the world's climate.
The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to 
cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in 
just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled "Shale 
Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken," which 
was posted online on April 4...
- - - -
"We can easily see there is a loss of potential - large amounts of wind 
energy - because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy," 
Ingraffea explains in the lecture.
While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American 
energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have been almost 
exclusively aimed at just 5 percent of the world's population, North 
Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining 95 percent of the 
world as well.
It's an alarming message - even though the shale rush has stumbled 
somewhat as gas prices collapsed and many drillers went bankrupt, the 
cumulative impact of American fracking appears to have set the entire 
world on a collision course with climate change's most extreme effects.
The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might have 
otherwise, and - far from serving as a bridge fuel - fracking huge 
amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in pushing 
the world toward a vastly more difficult future.
Ingraffea's lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project's Bedrock Lectures 
on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewed below:
video https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4
Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken by 
Anthony Ingraffea
Spring Creek Project
Published on Apr 4, 2018

    In this lecture "Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not
    Have Been Taken," Anthony Ingraffea poses that the fracking boom has
    placed the world's population in grave risk for the supposed benefit
    of a few. Just because one can do something does not mean that one
    should, especially if the possible action is clearly a gamble. The
    wisdom of experience, and concern for unpredictable effects broader
    than the immediate outcome, should guide a decision to use a
    new-found capability. Early this century, gas and oil operators,
    regulators, and legislators collectively violated this precept
    across most of North America. Having discovered a way to extract gas
    and oil from a previously undevelopable source, shale, they forged
    ahead at unprecedented scale. This unwise boom led to three
    compounding results: the prolongation of the fossil fuel era for
    decades; the depression of the deployment of clean renewable energy;
    and the exacerbation of climate change. This lecture focuses on
    these three results of a risk that should never have been taken,
    incorporating data on natural gas production, the slowing of
    renewable energy development, and faster-than-predicted global warming.
    This talk is a part of the Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and
    Climate Change presented by the Spring Creek Project. Dr. Anthony
    Ingraffea is the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus at
    Cornell University. For his research achievements in hydraulic
    fracturing, he won the International Association for Computer
    Methods and Advances in Geomechanics "Significant Paper Award," and
    twice won the National Research Council Award for research in rock
    mechanics. In 2011, TIME Magazine named him one of its "People Who
    Mattered," and he became the first president of Physicians,
    Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy.

https://youtu.be/PGfIjCG-zB4
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea


[Desdemona Despair]
WHO report: 90 per cent of world population breathes polluted air 
<http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/05/who-report-90-per-cent-of-world.html>
2 May 2018 (UN News) <https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1008732> - In 
a call for Member States to take action urgently, World Health 
Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, warned 
that air pollution "threatens us all, but the poorest and most 
marginalized people bear the brunt of the burden."
According to WHO's ambient air quality database, despite some 
improvements, pollution levels are "still dangerously high" in most 
parts of the world.
This includes "many of the world's megacities", according to Dr Maria 
Neira, WHO's Director of the Department of Public Health, Social and 
Environmental Determinants of Health, who added that air quality levels 
in those urban centres, exceed WHO guidelines "by more than five times".
Covering more than 4,300 cities in 108 countries, the data points to an 
estimated 4.2 million deaths each year caused by outdoor air pollution, 
with 3.8 million fatalities overall, owing to household pollutants, 
linked to cooking....
From: 
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/05/who-report-90-per-cent-of-world.html
https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1008732


[Controversial moral failings - video]
*Community or Commodity? Why Utah Fails the Moral Challenge of the 
Climate Crisis by Stephen Trimble 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQLQjfJp5Y>*
In this lecture, Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble 
investigates why his neighbors and elected officials stay so angry about 
the regulations and protections of the rich public lands within the 
state's borders. Trimble includes provocative interviews with Forrest 
Cuch, member of the Ute Indian Tribe and former Director of Indian 
Affairs for Utah, and Dr. Brian Moench, founder of Utah Physicians for a 
Healthy Environment. This talk is a part of the Bedrock Lectures on 
Human Rights and Climate change, organized by the Spring Creek Project.

An award-winning writer, photographer, and editor, Stephen Trimble has 
published 25 books, including Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the 
Last Open Spaces in America and Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of 
Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands. He has taught writing at 
the University of Utah, served as board chair of Utah Interfaith Power & 
Light, and currently serves on the advisory board of Utah Physicians for 
a Healthy Environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQLQjfJp5Y


[press release]
Dear all,
Here is a self-promotion to stick in our recent article published in the 
Journal of International Migration. Some of you, who are working on 
climate migrants and health issues might find it interesting.
Here is the abstract of this paper:
*Health Disorder of Climate Migrants in Khulna City: An Urban Slum 
Perspective <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12460>*

    Abstract: As the most vulnerable climatic region in the country,
    Khulna City is increasingly experiencing climate‐change‐induced
    urban problems. For instance, occupancy by climate migrants,
    drainage congestion, water logging and reduced fresh water
    availability are all increasing problems. In the last decade, the
    population in the city increased by more than 20 percent due to
    migration from nearby climate vulnerable districts. This study
    explores the health disorders of climate migrants occupying the
    urban slums and squats of the Khulna City area. This study found
    that these climate migrants settled in the urban slums and squats
    and, as such, they do not have access to urban amenities such as
    clean drinking water, hygiene services, and health facilities. This
    study noted that these displaced people are at increased risk of
    health issues from unhygienic and overcrowded living conditions and
    from water and sanitation problems. They often suffer from different
    waterborne diseases, under‐nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies.
    This study suggests that there is a need for better planning,
    preparation and training in Bangladesh to which migrants move,
    including better training in health and related services on how to
    recognize and respond to health problems that may be slow to
    manifest. Education and training also need to be provided for the
    migrants themselves, to help them adapt culturally and to enhance
    their skills and potential for employment.

Link to the article: 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.12460
Best wishes,
Md. Mahbubur Rahman
Research and Campaign Associate


*This Day in Climate History - May 7, 2010 
<http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/>  
   -  from D.R. Tucker*
May 7, 2010: Noting that the journal Science has published a letter from 
255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, calling for an end to 
the right wing's war on climate science, Rick Piltz of Climate Science 
Watch observes:

    "Apparently, a strongly worded statement from many of our most
    esteemed scientists, about climate science and a controversy that is
    very much in the news and fundamental to our future, is considered
    unworthy of space in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and
    the Wall Street Journal. All three rejected the 700-word, op-ed
    length letter before it was published [in] Science."

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/05/07/letter-from-255-national-academy-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
//
/https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote//
///
///To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
/to news digest. /

        *** Privacy and Security: * This is a text-only mailing that
        carries no images which may originate from remote servers.
        Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
        sender.
        By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for
        democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
        commercial purposes.
        To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote with subject: 
        subscribe,  To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe
        Also youmay subscribe/unsubscribe at
        https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
        Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Paulifor
        http://TheClimate.Vote delivering succinct information for
        citizens and responsible governments of all levels.   List
        membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
        restricted to this mailing list.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20180507/f9fafcb1/attachment.html>