[TheClimate.Vote] April 4, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Apr 4 10:37:54 EDT 2019
/April 4, 2019/
[9 AM Thursday morning streaming video]
*Juliana v. United States youth plaintiff Aji Piper will testify at the
inaugural hearing of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis*.
The hearing is entitled: "Generation Climate: Young Leaders Urge Climate
Action Now." Aji was personally invited to testify by the Select
Committee, and will be one of three youth activists to testify tomorrow,
demonstrating the momentum that this youth-led movement to secure
fundamental constitutional climate rights has gained over the past ten
years.
Representative Kathy Castor, Chair of the House Select Committee on the
Climate Crisis said in a statement:
"This is the first generation to grow up seeing the effects of the
climate crisis in their own backyards. Now they're demanding the
opportunity to solve it. Climate change creates generational scale
injustices. It's a daunting challenge, but this generation is ready
to meet it."
The hearing will be available for livestream here at 9am EST/6am PST.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86tkFbWgDEU&fbclid=IwAR2k0iW-neHntHnRXedU7gqWzH605_DtAuU4csUPSaosyteyYWTJdnhZ_IQ
Scheduled for Apr 4, 2019
The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will hold its first
hearing on Thursday, April 4th. In contrast to a typical Congressional
hearing, the committee will hear from young leaders who are urging
policymakers to take climate action now and finally address the climate
crisis.
Recorded testimony should be on the committee page
https://congress.gov/committees/video/house-select-committee-on-the-climate-crisis/hlcn00
twitter page https://twitter.com/youthvgov
Live video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86tkFbWgDEU&fbclid=IwAR2k0iW-neHntHnRXedU7gqWzH605_DtAuU4csUPSaosyteyYWTJdnhZ_IQ
[This is a warning not alarmism]
*7 American cities that could disappear by 2100*
Rising sea levels threaten to submerge entire cities by 2100.
The cities most vulnerable to flooding in the US are low-lying coastal
areas.
If the worst projections of sea-level rise wind up being correct, cities
like Miami and New Orleans could find themselves underwater.
No city is immune to the effects of a warming world, but a few are more
vulnerable than the rest.
As sea levels continue to rise, low-lying coastal cities can expect more
devastating floods that ruin buildings, destroy infrastructure, and
claim lives.
By conservative estimates, cities around the world could witness more
than 6 feet of flooding by the year 2100. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted that sea levels could
rise by 10 to 12 feet if global emissions continue unabated.
*1. New Orleans, Louisiana is already sinking...*
*2. In Miami, Florida, sea levels are rising faster than those in other
areas of the world...*
*3. Houston, Texas could be inundated by another storm like Hurricane
Harvey...*
*4. Most of Atlantic City, New Jersey was underwater during Hurricane
Sandy, but the next disaster could be worse...*
*5. Most neighborhoods in Charleston, South Carolina, could be
underwater by 2100...*
*6. One in six homes in Boston, Massachusetts could be flooded regularly
by the turn of the century...*
*7. Virginia Beach, Virginia is already witnessing one of the fastest
rates of sea-level rise on the East Coast...*
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-cities-disappear-sea-level-rise-2100-2019-3
[a nicely detailed report]
*The Green New Deal is pushing climate change into the mainstream media*
By Lisa Hymas on Apr 3, 2019
Climate change coverage in much of the mainstream media was abysmally
low in 2018. It's been tilting upward in the first quarter of 2019,
thanks in large part to the Green New Deal. The ascending trend is a
positive development overall -- it's about time media started paying
more attention to the existential crisis of our time! -- and yet some of
the coverage has been weak, and some has been a total mess.
Climate change was pitifully undercovered last year
Climate coverage in 2018 plunged 45 percent from 2017 levels on the
national broadcast TV networks, we at Media Matters found -- and it's
not like coverage in 2017 was anything to brag about. In 2018, the major
nightly news and Sunday morning political shows on the national
broadcast networks spent a combined total of just 142 minutes on climate
change, and almost a third of that came from a single climate-focused
episode of Meet the Press on December 30.
Without that one show, 2018's coverage would have fallen 64 percent from
the previous year -- an astonishing decline when you consider the
horrific extreme weather last year, the harrowing climate science
reports released by the United Nations and 13 U.S. government agencies,
the Trump administration's ongoing assault on climate protections, and
the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis.
Analyses of other media trends in 2018 also pinpointed shortcomings. The
watchdog group Public Citizen examined coverage of extreme weather
events in a number of U.S. newspapers, online sources, and cable and
broadcast TV networks last year and found that "the proportion of pieces
that mentioned climate change was disappointingly low." Just 7 percent
of stories about hurricanes incorporated climate change, while the
figures were higher for other kinds of weather disasters -- but still
not as high as we need them to be.
Many of the journalists who served as moderators in 2018 midterm
election debates neglected climate change too (just as they had in
2016). Only 29 percent of key debates last year in competitive Senate
and gubernatorial races included a question about climate change.
But the 2018 election ultimately triggered a change in climate coverage
and in the broader national conversation about the need for climate
action -- because it brought us AOC.
Hey, look: The media is paying a little more attention to climate change
this year
President Donald Trump drove climate coverage (or the lack of it,
rather) in the last couple of years, but so far in 2019, Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, has taken over the
driver's seat.
When she and Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts,
introduced their Green New Deal resolution on February 7, they kicked
off a firestorm of climate coverage. Whether you love the Green New
Deal, hate it, or want to quibble over its specifics, you can't deny
that it's spurring more discussion of climate policy than the U.S. has
ever seen.
The Green New Deal inspired the Washington Post to dedicate five
consecutive days of editorials to substantive discussion of a
comprehensive climate plan (handily compiled into one online piece). It
got the major Sunday morning political shows talking about climate
change with more fervor than they did during most of last year. It
prompted an unusual amount of prime-time cable climate coverage. It
sparked MSNBC's Chris Hayes to host a special event with Ocasio-Cortez
-- after he said last year that climate coverage was a "palpable ratings
killer." And it propelled young Americans to march in the streets and
confront their senators, thereby pushing their messages into the press.
The Green New Deal has even spurred a handful of Republican members of
Congress to cough up some of their own milquetoast ideas for addressing
aspects of the climate crisis -- like Senator Lamar Alexander from
Tennessee, who went on NPR's All Things Considered to tout his climate
plan, and Representative Matt Gaetz from Florida, who gave an interview
to Vice to promote his.
Presidential hopeful Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington
state, is helping too by making climate change the central issue in his
campaign and discussing it on ABC's This Week, CNN's State of the
Nation, and even Fox & Friends, Trump's favorite show. The other
Democratic presidential candidates are also talking about climate change
and the Green New Deal.
So the quantity of coverage is up, but how about the quality?
Some of the climate coverage we've seen so far this year been
informative and constructive. See: the Washington Post's editorial
series and Chris Hayes' AOC special. Some of it has been superficial.
See: TV talking heads. And some of it has been a mess of lies, mockery,
and fearmongering. See: Almost everything on Fox News.
When the major networks' Sunday morning political shows discussed the
Green New Deal the weekend after the resolution was unveiled, "most of
the discussion was superficial and narrowly focused on whether the Green
New Deal will cause intra-party fighting among Democrats or end up
benefiting Republicans, not on whether its policy ideas are good
approaches for fighting climate change," as Media Matters' Evlondo
Cooper pointed out.
Carlos Maza at Vox looked at a broader selection of TV coverage and
found the same thing, as he described in a video:
I have watched hours of segments about the Green New Deal and none of
them actually explained how it might work. Instead, they focus on the
politics. Is it gonna pass? Does Pelosi like it? What did Trump tweet
about it? Everything except: Is it a good idea?
This kind of narrow, horse race-style coverage of policy proposals is
one of the climate-coverage pitfalls we need to be on the watch for in 2019.
Another problem is that some coverage of the Green New Deal doesn't even
mention climate change. More than half of Fox News' segments on the plan
in the days after it was released didn't include any discussion of
climate change. Fox personalities and guests often talked about the
proposal as though it were a pointless scheme to oppress the masses, not
a plan to address a major looming threat. CNN and MSNBC weren't nearly
that bad, of course, but they also ran segments that failed to bring up
climate change and often discussed the Green New Deal as a political
football.
One of the biggest problems with coverage of the Green New Deal is that
there's a lot more of it on Fox and other right-wing outlets than on
mainstream and left-leaning outlets -- and in many cases, Fox and its
ilk are straight-up lying. Fox aired more than three times as many
segments about the Green New Deal from February 7 to 11 as did CNN and
MSNBC combined. With their heavy coverage and repetition of
misinformation -- like completely bogus claims about sky-high costs --
right-wing media are distorting the national dialogue just as it's
getting going.
Sean McElwee of the progressive think tank Data for Progress explained
how this is playing out in a recent New York Times op-ed:
According to data shared with The Times from Navigator, a progressive
polling project, 37 percent of Republican viewers of Fox News had heard
"a lot" about the Green New Deal, compared with 14 percent of all
registered voters.
…
When asked simply, "Based on what you know, do you support or oppose the
Green New Deal?," 22 percent of respondents are in support, 29 percent
are opposed and 49 percent are not sure. But 74 percent of Fox-viewing
Republicans oppose the Green New Deal (65 percent strongly), and only 21
percent have not formed an opinion.
He concludes that "the Republican propaganda machine has already
reshaped the narrative."
We don't expect Fox to improve (some news outlets are beyond
redemption), but mainstream and progressive news organizations can do
better. They need to cover the Green New Deal and climate change more
often, to provide a counterweight to the bunk coming from the right. And
they should cover it not as a political story (who "won" the day when
Mitch McConnell held a stunt vote on the Green New Deal?), but with
substantive reporting and discussion about how to implement climate
policies that are fair, effective, and commensurate with the enormous
size of the problem.
Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media
Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.
https://grist.org/article/the-green-new-deal-is-pushing-climate-change-into-the-mainstream-media/
[The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)]
*Ecomedia in the Anthropocene*
ASLE 2018 Symposium Collection
A troubling paradox lies at the heart of ecomedia studies: those of us
who study and teach about the intersection of ecological issues and
non-print media also recognize that the production, consumption, and
circulation of media texts take a massive toll on the Earth's
environment, an issue well documented by media scholars. In other words,
as ecomedia scholars and environmental filmmakers, we must admit that
our own media production, consumption, and research practices -- which
are felt disproportionately across communities and cultures -- make us
complicit in the ever-escalating global environmental crisis. Yet if we
are to better understand the vital role that film and media play in
reflecting, responding to, and shaping public attitudes about the
relationships between the human and non-human worlds, as well as
different human communities, we must embrace this paradox. This special
collection from Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
explores this challenge in conjunction with The Association for the
Study of Literature and Environment's first ever virtual symposium.
Academic Values: Why Environmentalists Loathe the Media
by John Parham
Ecocinema Theory and Practice
review by Nicole Seymour
Ecohorror Special Cluster: "Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon
We'll All Be Dead"
by Stephen A. Rust & Carter Soles
Encountering the Sahara: Embodiment, Emotion, and Material Agency in
Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky
by Alexa Weik von Mossner
Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television
review by Stephen Rust
Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film
review by Nicole Seymour
Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in
Mira Grant's Parasite
by Christy Tidwell
Regarding Things in Nashville and The Exterminating Angel: Another Path
for Eco-Film Criticism
by Adam O'Brien
That's All Folks?: Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features
review by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi
Virtually There: "Aesthetic Pleasure of the First Order," Ecomedia,
Activist Engagement
by Simon C. Estok
https://academic.oup.com/isle/pages/ecomedia_in_the_anthropocene
- - -
[June 26-30]
[BIENNIAL CONFERENCE]
*2019 ASLE Conference- "Paradise on Fire"*
http://conferences.ucdavis.edu/asle
https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/
[CBC video Climate Changing Climate Report]
*The National for April 1, 2019 - Climate Change Report, Carbon Tax, Brexit*
CBC News: The National
Published on Apr 1, 2019
Welcome to The National, the flagship nightly newscast of CBC News
https://youtu.be/n7H_4oxsEP4?t=59
[Wise Woman speaks]
*Climate change denial is evil, says Mary Robinson*
Exclusive: chair of Elders group also says fossil fuel firms have lost
their social license
The denial of climate change is not just ignorant, but "malign and
evil", according to Mary Robinson, because it denies the human rights of
the most vulnerable people on the planet.
The former UN high commissioner for human rights and special envoy for
climate change also says fossil fuel companies have lost their social
licence to explore for more coal, oil and gas and must switch to become
part of the transition to clean energy.
Robinson will make the outspoken attack on Tuesday, in a speech to the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, which has awarded her the Kew
International Medal for her "integral work on climate justice".
She also told the Guardian she supports climate protests, including the
school strikes for climate founded by "superstar" Greta Thunberg, and
that "there is room for civil disobedience as a way of communicating,
though we also need hope".
Robinson is chair of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders
founded by Nelson Mandela that works for human rights. She will say in
her speech: "I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant,
it is malign, it is evil, and it amounts to an attempt to deny human
rights to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet."
"The evidence about the effects of climate change is incontrovertible,
and the moral case for urgent action indisputable," she will say.
"Climate change undermines the enjoyment of the full range of human
rights - from the right to life, to food, to shelter and to health. It
is an injustice that the people who have contributed least to the causes
of the problem suffer the worst impacts of climate change."
Robinson, a former president of the Republic of Ireland, told the
Guardian her angry words were the result of seeing the impact on
people's lives. "In Africa, I saw the devastating impacts on poor
farmers, villagers and communities when they could not predict when the
rainy season was going to come."
She also attacks big oil, gas and coal companies in her speech. She is
expected to say: "We have entered a new reality where fossil fuel
companies have lost their legitimacy and social licence to operate." She
says exploration for new reserves must end, given that most of existing
reserves must be kept in the ground if global warming is to be tackled.
Robinson condemns the UK government for the £4.8bn support given by its
export finance body for fossil fuels from 2010-16. "It stirs painful
memories of past exploitative behaviour to see the UK and other rich,
industrialised countries proclaim their good intentions and act in a
progressive way at home, whilst effectively exporting their emissions to
poorer foreign countries and leaving them to pay the price socially and
environmentally."
The US president, Donald Trump, is also criticised by Robinson for his
"egregious act of climate irresponsibility" in withdrawing from the
Paris climate agreement. "Bad leadership has consequences now that are
really bad for the people in the poorest communities, including in the
US," she told the Guardian.
Robinson says as well as taking personal action - she has given up meat
- people need to get angry with those who have more power and are not
meeting their responsibilities, saying: "Just as the suffragettes needed
to embrace militant tactics to win the fight for female emancipation, so
today we need to be fiercely determined to challenge vested interests,
especially in the fossil fuel sector."
There have been several strong attacks on climate change denial in
recent months, with critics saying that proposals in the US for a new
national security council panel of climate change deniers are "Stalinist".
In November, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said: "Smoking
kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public
about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn't just
killing people; it may well kill civilisation. Trying to confuse the
public about that is evil on a whole different level. Don't some of
these people have children?"
The BBC accepted in September it gets coverage of climate change "wrong
too often" and told staff: "You do not need a 'denier' to balance the
debate."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/26/climate-change-denial-is-evil-says-mary-robinson
[Forbes delivers strong opinion]
*Climate Change And The De-Industrial Revolution*
Erik Kobayashi-Solomon - Contributor
- -
Climate change will necessitate a drastic modification in the
technologies we use and in the very structure of our society. The
closest parallel I could call to mind for the process on the verge of
which we find ourselves today was the drastic changes that occurred in
the mid-19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution radically reshaped society by concentrating
the means of production in specific geographical areas.
- - -
As the summers become hotter, the soil drier, and flooding more common -
all effects presently observed and forecast to worsen as climatic change
becomes more extreme - I believe we will see the model of the
centralized scale-based farm also break down in disastrous ways similar
to the way in which PG&E's centralized power generation model failed.
As this begins to happen - slowly at first and gaining speed and
momentum as the years pass - humans will begin to look for local
solutions. Strawberries grown at local vertical farms will more than
compete with those flown in from Argentina or shipped overland from
Southern California. Community mini-grids will be looking to connect to
grids only for catastrophic risk control and for a place to dump any
energy that has been produced locally in excess of local storage capacity.
Whereas the Industrial Revolution radically reshaped society by
concentrating resources, the Climate Change Revolution will radically
reshape society by distributing them.
*In effect, our civilization will need to reverse out the trends of the
last two centuries of economic development. *[my bold]
This process is likely to be painful for those operating according to
the prior paradigm in the same way that investors in buggy whips were
disappointed with the results of their investments early in the 20th
century.
For those who have the foresight to Invest In Reality, however, the
ongoing and intensifying paradigm shift will be a time during which
great fortunes - the types of fortunes that persist through generations
- will be made.
Intelligent Investors take note.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkobayashisolomon/2019/03/29/climate-change-and-the-de-industrial-revolution/#6f8a83cb6587
[cryo-geography sedimentology ]
*Climate change: Drilling in 'Iceberg Alley'*
By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
It sounds a bit like sitting in the middle of the road when there's a
queue of juggernauts coming straight at you.
This is a little overplayed but it's kind of what an international group
of scientists has just set out to do.
The researchers want to position themselves in the centre of "Iceberg
Alley" off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and drill into the seafloor.
Huge blocks of ice are likely to come drifting by in the process.
It's hoped the sediments the researchers recover will tell us something
of how the White Continent has changed in the past and how its
kilometres-thick ice sheet might react in the future in what's projected
to be a much warmer world.
Expedition 382 of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) left
Punta Arenas in Chile on Monday. Using the drill ship, the Joides
Resolution (JR), the team will core a number of seafloor locations right
in the middle of Iceberg Alley.
The scientists are looking for the "rafted debris" that's been dropped
by giant bergs as they head north from the Peninsula towards the South
Atlantic.
This detritus of dust, dirt, and rock was originally scraped off the
continent by the ice when it was part of a glacier, before it broke away
to become an iceberg.
And through the wonder of modern geochemistry, it's possible to date
this material and even to tie it to specific locations in Antarctica.
The really helpful thing from the scientists' point of view is that they
only need go to the alley to get a very broad view of past Antarctic
behaviour.
It works like this: Bergs when they calve will bump anti-clockwise
around the coast in the direction taken by near-shore currents. But when
they reach the Peninsula - that's when they encounter the big clockwise
flow of water known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
The bergs are then entrained and head north.
And just standing in the middle of this busy highway, as the JR now
intends to do, means you get to sample the widest range of material
dropped from historical bergs on their slow drift up into the South
Atlantic.
In very simple terms: the more ice blocks that passed through the alley
in any particular period in the past, the more unstable the Antarctic
was likely to have been during that time.
In other words, the thickest layers of dropped stones and dust deposited
on the ocean floor should relate to the warmest phases of ancient
Antarctica.
There's quite a bit of oversimplification in this story, not least the
recognition that the alley is dominated by bergs from the East of the
continent - but the general picture holds.
The JR expects to pull up hundreds of metres of sediment core covering
the past 20 million years.
"A key interval of interest will be the Late Pliocene Warm Period (about
3-4 million years ago)," said expedition co-lead investigator Prof
Maureen Raymo from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia
University, US.
"This was when carbon dioxide was 400 parts per million (ppm) in the
atmosphere - approximately similar to what it is today. I've spent a lot
of time trying to work out what global sea-level was doing at that time
because obviously that would speak directly to the question of whether
East Antarctica loses mass or gains mass in a slightly warmer climate."
The latter is possible if a warmer atmosphere triggers more snowfall.
Another period of keen interest is that of the Early Pleistocene - from
2.5 million to 800,000 years ago. It's a phase in Earth history when Ice
Ages on the planet are known to have come and gone on roughly
41,000-year cycles.
This had something to do with the shifting nature of the Earth's orbit
around the Sun, but has yet to be fully explained.
"I've proposed that Antarctica didn't transition to the ice sheet we see
today until about 800,000 years ago, and prior to that there were maybe
many sectors of the ice sheet that looked like modern Greenland with the
ice margin on land," Prof Raymo told BBC News. Today's Antarctica has
its glaciers terminating in the sea.
"We'll definitely get sediments from this time," she added.
If the current cruise is focussed on past behaviour in East Antarctica,
a complementary drilling effort should fill in much of the narrative in
the West of the continent.
The JR has only recently finished drilling sediment cores in the
Amundsen Sea area.
IODP Expedition 379 cored to a depth of 800m, which likely gets back to
the Late Miocene, or about 6 million year ago.
"This is the sector of the Antarctic Ice Sheet - more than any other
area - that is changing before our eyes," explained 379's co chief
scientist, Dr Julia Wellner from the University of Houston.
"While we have some ideas on why this is happening, it's not well
understood yet; we've only been watching it for a few decades.
"So that's why we need these longer-term records, to get a real insight
on what's occurring now and how things could change in the future.
"But it's not easy. There were times on our cruise when we thought we
were in Iceberg Alley because there were so many bergs about, and every
time one approaches you have to abandon your hole, wait for the berg to
pass, and then return to resume drilling."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47711600
*This Day in Climate History - April 4, 2002 - from D.R. Tucker*
April 4, 2002: The New York Times reports:
"President Bush signed an executive order last year that closely
resembles a written recommendation given to the administration two
months earlier by the American Gas Association, according to
documents released by the Bush administration.
"The executive order called for the creation of an interagency
energy task force to accelerate the time it takes for government
agencies to review corporations' applications for permits for
energy-related projects, like power plants and the exploration of
oil and natural gas on public lands. Mr. Bush signed the order last May.
"The language in Mr. Bush's executive order is similar to a passage
in a proposed energy bill sent in March 2001 to the Energy
Department by officials at the American Gas Association, the trade
group that represents large natural gas companies and has given more
than $500,000 to the Republican Party since 1999."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/04/politics/04ENER.html
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