[TheClimate.Vote] October 25, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Oct 25 09:25:36 EDT 2018
/October 25, 2018/
[New York State Attorney General sues Exxon]
*A.G. Underwood Files Lawsuit Against Exxonmobil For Defrauding
Investors Regarding Financial Risk The Company Faces From Climate Change
Regulations
<https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-lawsuit-against-exxonmobil-defrauding-investors-regarding-financial>*
Investigation into Exxon's Business Practices Uncovered an Alleged
Fraudulent Scheme to Systematically and Repeatedly Deceive Investors
About the Significant Impact That Future Climate Change Regulations
Could Have on the Company's Assets and Value
Alleged Fraud Reached Highest Levels, as former Chairman and CEO Rex
Tillerson Knew of Misrepresentations for Years
NEW YORK - Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood today announced a
lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corporation ("Exxon"), alleging that the
company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change
regulations posed to its business...
- - --
Exxon continued to present that analysis to investors even after being
warned by the author of a study upon which it purported to rely that the
analysis was "misleading."
The impact of Exxon's alleged fraud on the company's value is
significant in scale and scope. For example:
- For 14 of Exxon's oil sands projects in Alberta, Canada, Exxon's
failure to apply its publicly represented proxy costs resulted in
undercounting of projected greenhouse-gas related expenses by more
than $25 billion over the projected lifetime of the projects.
- Exxon undercounted projected greenhouse gas-related costs by as
much as 94% - equal to about $11 billion - in an economic forecast
for its Kearl oil sands asset in Alberta.
- Exxon failed to apply the proxy costs it represented to the public
in estimating company reserves at Cold Lake, a major oil sands asset
in Alberta, resulting in an overestimation of its projected economic
life by 28 years, and an overestimation of company reserves volumes
by more than 300 million oil-equivalent barrels, representing
billions of dollars of revenues.
The lawsuit announced today was filed in New York Supreme Court, New
York County. The suit seeks an order prohibiting Exxon from continuing
to misrepresent its practices in this area, and requiring it to correct
its past misrepresentations; in other words, to tell investors the
truth. The suit also asks the court to award damages, a disgorgement of
all monies obtained in connection with the alleged fraud, and
restitution. Additionally, the complaint requests the court to direct a
comprehensive review of Exxon's failure to apply a proxy cost consistent
with its representations, and the economic and financial consequences of
that failure.
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-lawsuit-against-exxonmobil-defrauding-investors-regarding-financial
- - -
AG tweets: https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1055145833593794561
AG statement:
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-underwood-files-lawsuit-against-exxonmobil-defrauding-investors-regarding-financial
NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/climate/exxon-lawsuit-climate-change.html
My quick take, summing up what AG seems to be alleging:
https://twitter.com/GeoffreySupran/status/1055152188039798785
- - -
[NYT Opinion from Supran and Oreskes]
*What Exxon Mobil Didn't Say About Climate Change
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/exxon-climate-change-.html>*
By Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes
Aug. 22, 2017
- - - -
*"Read the documents," the company said, "and make up your own mind."*
A year ago we took up this challenge. We have read all of the documents,
analyzed them according to established social science methods, and made
up our minds. Today, we are publishing the results of our peer-reviewed
analysis in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
<http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f> To our
knowledge, this is the first academic, empirical analysis of Exxon
Mobil's 40-year history of climate change communications. (Our research
was funded by Harvard University Faculty Development Funds and by the
Rockefeller Family Fund, which also helped finance the reporting by
Inside Climate News and the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism, which published its examination of Exxon Mobil with The Los
Angeles Times.)
Our findings are clear: Exxon Mobil misled the public about the state of
climate science and its implications. Available documents show a
systematic, quantifiable discrepancy between what Exxon Mobil's
scientists and executives discussed about climate change in private and
in academic circles, and what it presented to the general public.
We applied an empirical method known as content analysis to all
relevant, publicly available internal company files that have led to
allegations against Exxon Mobil, as well as all peer-reviewed and
non-peer-reviewed publications offered by the company in response. We
also analyzed 36 of the company's paid "advertorials" about climate
change that appeared as editorial-style advertisements on the Op-Ed
pages of The New York Times between 1989 and 2004.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/exxon-climate-change-.html
- - - -
[Research Letter]
Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communication
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f
[Opinion from the top climate scientist]
*How Scientists Cracked the Climate Change Case
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/climate-change-global-warming-trump.html>*
The biggest crime scene on the planet is the planet. We know the earth
is warming, but who or what is causing it?
By Gavin Schmidt
Dr. Schmidt is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Oct. 24, 2018
- - - -
For the past 100 years we have documented good, independently confirmed
observations of change at the surface of the planet, and for the past 40
years satellites and comprehensive measuring efforts have provided a
much fuller view of changes throughout the earth system. These
observations show clearly that among other things, the surface of the
planet has warmed, the upper atmosphere has cooled, the oceans are
gaining an enormous amount of heat, sea level is rising, Arctic ice has
greatly receded and glaciers around the world are in retreat.
- - -
Like forensic detectives, climate scientists have developed a new array
of tools in recent decades designed to skillfully calculate what the
fingerprints of these changes look like, and more important, how they
differ from one another. It turns out that increases in solar activity
produce warming throughout the atmosphere, while carbon dioxide
increases cooling in the upper atmosphere and warms the surface.
Variations in ocean circulation distribute heat, while changes in the
sun or in greenhouse gases change the total heat amount in the system.
Air pollution, volcanoes and irrigation all cool the climate, while
rising greenhouse gases warm it. Ozone depletion has increased the speed
of the winds around Antarctica, affecting ocean circulation and sea ice.
But even taking into account uncertainties in the amount of air
pollution in the 19th century or in estimating global temperatures
through time, scientists have concluded that the current warmth is
impossible to explain without human contributions. It is on a par with
the likelihood that a DNA match at a crime scene is purely coincidental.
Moreover, when we include the multiplicity of human effects, we match
them with the observed trends at the surface, in the Arctic, in the
ocean and aloft. The dominant factor that emerges is the rise in
greenhouse gases, which we know comes mainly from the burning of fossil
fuels and deforestation.
Even more convincingly, these trends aren't just being attributed in
hindsight. The rate of surface warming was predicted
<https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming>
in the 1980s, the cooling in the upper atmosphere was forecast in a 1967
scientific paper
<https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281967%29024%3C0241%3ATEOTAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2>,
and specific measurements <https://www.nature.com/articles/35066553>
from space indicate that the total greenhouse effect has been enhanced
exactly as theory would predict.
When this is all put together, the conclusions are inescapable: Without
human activities the planet would not have warmed over the past century.
When scientists include all of the effects that humans have had on the
climate system, they can match them with these many independent and
varied observations. Our best assessment is therefore that humans, at
least the ones responsible for the bulk of carbon dioxide emissions,
have been responsible for all of the recent trends in global temperatures.
The forensics have spoken, and we are to blame.
more at
-https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/climate-change-global-warming-trump.html
[Hot winter in the Pacific NW]
Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair
*Kelp Forests Collapse as The Blob Returns
<https://climatecrocks.com/2018/10/24/kelp-forests-collapse-as-the-blob-returns/>*
October 24, 2018
A large area of warm water in the northern Pacific, nicknamed "the
Blob", hung around for a few years, exacerbating the California drought
of the past decade. I covered it in this 2015 video.
Now it's back - and we're just starting to appreciate the damage it's doing.
- - -
[video explanation from 2015 still correct]
*California's Drought: Beware of the Blob <https://youtu.be/R6RaAYA9OMA>*
YaleClimateConnections
Published on May 5, 2015
California's drought is part of a larger pattern that has brought
consecutive cold winters to Eastern North America, and formed an area of
warm water in the Northeastern Pacific, that scientists call "the Blob".
https://youtu.be/R6RaAYA9OMA
- - -
The trouble began with the starfish. Sunflower starfish, whose
appendages can span more than three feet, normally eat purple urchins,
helping to limit their numbers.
But in 2013, the starfish mysteriously began dying. There isn't
scientific consensus on why, but Drew Harvell, a professor of ecology
and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, said she thought that a
virus was at least partly to blame and that warmer waters had
exacerbated its effects.
Sea otters, another predator of purple urchins, were hunted to near
extinction in Northern California by 19th-century fur traders. Their
numbers have not rebounded.
Around the same time as the starfish began dying, a mass of warm water
appeared hundreds of miles off Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and
Oregon. By 2014 that warm water had moved toward land, stretching from
Southeastern Alaska down to Mexico.
The marine heat wave was hotter than anything humans had recorded dating
back to the late 1800s. Researchers and locals called it "the Blob." It
would last into 2016.
"Human-caused global warming made it much more likely to get as extreme
as it did," said Nathan Mantua, a physical scientist at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and an author of a study linking
the Blob to climate change. Over 90 percent of the heat trapped on Earth
because of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans has been absorbed by
the ocean, increasing its temperature.
But kelp prefers cooler waters...
- - -
"We don't know very much about them because they're very mysterious,"
Dr. Hofmann said. "But we've done a little work on them and they do not
like high temperatures."...
https://climatecrocks.com/2018/10/24/kelp-forests-collapse-as-the-blob-returns/
[Changed reality too]
*Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/climate-change-damaging-american-democracy/573769/>*
Major disasters and challenging long-term weather conditions are
weakening local governments, increasing racial and class inequality, and
reducing trust in government.
VANN R. NEWKIRK II
- - -
Donald Trump is a character of the moment. He's a developer with famous
properties in New York, New Jersey, and Miami, during a time when
developers in flooding areas have been ceded more and more local
control. He's the culmination of a crisis of faith in government and
widening racial differences in opinion over the future, both of which
can possibly be traced back to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The
political polarization and gerrymandering that enabled both his ascent
and the strength of his party in Congress were most certainly aided by
the displacement of people of color from cities over the past few
decades. He's the natural political conclusion of widening class and
racial wealth gaps, and the heir of a system in which state and local
governments have more regularly faced budget shortfalls. And climate
change contributed to, contributes to, or will contribute to each of
these in due time.
"It's a crisis that we can still deal with if we wake up," Zaelke says.
But the awakening doesn't just mean accepting the science, and in the
American context doesn't just mean finally overcoming the grip of
climate denialism on politics. In the IPCC's reading, and in the telling
of several of the most vocal climate activists, the changes that the
world must undertake in order to rein in climate change will be
"unprecedented" and will require monumental shifts in governance and
economics.
By all accounts, the task ahead is a moonshot. But perhaps the
familiarity of the challenges before the country provide an opportunity.
The disasters predicted under even the worst-case scenarios aren't
supernatural; rather, they are macro-level disturbances created by
millions of local, often imperceptible perturbances. The cracks of
inequality that look likely to widen into chasms of autocracy in the
next century were all created by humans, and can all be conquered by
them, too.
more at -
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/climate-change-damaging-american-democracy/573769/
[Opinion]
*Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-the-first-demagogue-of-the-anthropocene/504134/>*
He won't be the last.
ROBINSON MEYER - OCT 19, 2016
- - -
Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and
authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate
agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate
and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury
goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict,
but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international
reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.
In effect, it could erode people's sense of security, pushing them
toward authoritarianism...
- - -
Schleussner and his colleagues also allude to a nightmare scenario in
the paper itself, though they couch it in clinical language: "Further
destabilization of Northern Africa and the Levant may have widespread
effects by triggering migration flows to neighboring countries and
remote migrant destinations such as the European Union."
In other words, a drought-and-flood-fueled armed conflict near the
Mediterranean Basin could send people toward Western Europe in the
hundreds of millions. This is the "1930s all over again" scenario that
Kerry mentioned, the one playing out in miniature right now, made all
the worse through the aggravation of a climate-changed world.
Never mind armed conflict. Could disastrous environmental upheaval
produce mass migration all by itself?...
- - -
Indeed, climate change may already be driving mass migrations. Last
year, the Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley was mocked
for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the
Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil
War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively
supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have
recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria's
cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal
divisions in the run-up to the war.
Scheffran underlined these climate connections but declined to emphasize
them. "The Syrian War has so many complex interrelated issues—and most
of them are political and economic—that the drought is just one
contributing factor to the instability in the region," he said...
- -
The only social or political act that most of these explainers will
propose is this: You should vote for candidates who understand climate
science and who will act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (In the
United States, and in no other developed country, that only describes
the candidates of one major political party.)
It makes sense to put voting in that list because, really, all those
technological actions resemble voting—they are all essentially just
types of harm reduction. At worst, skipping beef or buying carbon
credits is an ethically valuable but economically worthless gesture; at
best, it modestly helps avoid a much worse outcome.
But Trump's success in the primary among the civically disintegrated
suggests another way forward. Improving the United States's immune
response to authoritarian leadership—a response that could be repeatedly
tested in the century to come—can follow from weaving its civic fabric
ever tighter. I don't know what this will look like, exactly, for every
person. But here are some places to start: Volunteer. Run for local or
state office. Give to charity (whether due to religion or effective
altruism). Organize at work. Join a church or a community choir or the
local library staff. Make your hometown a better place for refugees to
settle. Raise a child well.
These may seem inconsequential, tasks unrelated to the final goal of
restricting how much carbon dioxide enters the environment. And,
admittedly, they are. But climate realists have always split their work
between mitigation—that is, trying to keep the climate from getting
worse—and adaptation—trying to protect what we already have. As more
warming gets baked into the biosphere, as seas rise and livelihoods
fall, these prosaic steps will become vital forms of adaptation.
Climate mitigation is a worthy goal in itself. It is all the more
important when understood as one more type of long-term anti-fascism.
ROBINSON MEYER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers
climate change and technology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/trump-the-first-demagogue-of-the-anthropocene/504134/
[Time to understand why]
Get Climate Minds Anthology FREE
<https://mailchi.mp/23b6533dbb97/unpsychology-magazine-4-climate-minds>
This bumper issue has over 160 pages of fiction, poetry, prose, essays
FREE, and you can download it below. Climate Minds is the fourth edition
of Unpsychology Magazine and includes essays, illustration, poetry,
prose and fiction from a wide range of writers, artists and activists -
all responding to the psychological implications of climate change for
human and non-human life, now and into the future. Sign up below, and
you'll also get a FREE copy of Unpsychology 1. To find out more about
the Unpsychology project go to www.unpsychology.org and
https://medium.com/soul-making
https://mailchi.mp/23b6533dbb97/unpsychology-magazine-4-climate-minds
- - - -
[classic essay]*
<https://medium.com/soul-making/the-destruction-of-experience-how-ecopsychology-has-failed-ccae9f36d7a4>**The
Destruction of Experience: How Ecopsychology Has Failed
<https://medium.com/soul-making/the-destruction-of-experience-how-ecopsychology-has-failed-ccae9f36d7a4>*
By Will Falk
- - -
But, civilization is not a mental event. Civilization is a global,
physical process that is destroying the planet. While it is producing
climate change, ocean acidification, massive deforestation and
desertification, there is nowhere to escape.
Unfortunately, too many students of ecopsychology who recognize this,
instead of facing the need to physically dismantle the systems causing
this collapse, too often retreat to the position that only personal
therapy is possible and that the planet can only be saved by curing one
mind at a time...
- - -
The answer is found in the strength of the very ideology ecopsychology
seeks to undermine. Planetary destruction is reduced to an ailment in
individual human minds. While ecopsychology wisely recognizes that the
human mind is formed by material relationships and that physical threats
to these material relationships are physical threats to the human mind,
when ecopsychologists concern themselves primarily with psychotherapy
they contribute very little to the effort to prevent psychopathology.
Ecological psychotherapy, as a practice to heal mentally ill
individuals, is merely a bandaid over a gunshot wound.
The natural world does not need more ecotherapists, it needs
ecomilitants. It needs strategic, organized resistance to civilization.
I say this as someone whose life has been saved by ecotherapy. My life
and the lives of those lucky few privileged enough to gain access to
ecotherapy are nothing compared to annihilation of life on Earth. If we
do not concentrate all our efforts at physically toppling the systems
destroying the planet, no amount of therapy is going to save us.
I recall the starlight on Thomas' peacefully sleeping face. I don't want
my nephew to experience the illnesses causing someone to seek the
services of a therapist — ecological or otherwise. I want him to live in
a world where the physical richness of his experience guarantees his
healthy psychological development.*I want him to live in a world that
isn't being destroyed.*
Will Falk is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist
https://medium.com/soul-making/the-destruction-of-experience-how-ecopsychology-has-failed-ccae9f36d7a4
*This Day in Climate History - October 25, 2013
<http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/hurricane-sandy-one-year-later-56848963789#>
- from D.R. Tucker*
October 25, 2013: On MSNBC's "The Cycle," writer David Gessner discusses
the grotesque legacy of Superstorm Sandy.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/hurricane-sandy-one-year-later-56848963789#
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