[TheClimate.Vote] April 6, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/April 6, 2019/


[Wildfire Today - April 5, 2019]
*Wildfire in South Korea forces thousands to evacuate*
The fire burned approximately 135 homes
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/04/05/wildfire-in-south-korea-forces-thousands-to-evacuate/
- - -
[Asia news NPR]
*Wildfire Rips Along South Korea's Eastern Coast, Prompting National 
Emergency*
South Korea is using its military to contain a large forest fire that 
spread quickly after igniting in Gangwon Province, along the country's 
east coast. Strong winds moved the blaze from city to city, prompting 
President Moon Jae-in to declare a national emergency.

It's being called the worst wildfire to hit South Korea in years, 
forcing thousands to evacuate and ravaging rural towns. Fire officials 
are reporting two deaths, according to the Associated Press.

The main fire is now nearly under control according to Moon, who visited 
the area Friday. Taking note of the hundreds of homes and buildings that 
have reportedly been destroyed, Moon urged government officials to "take 
extra care of displaced victims who -- after having lost their homes in 
an instant -- may now find time to catch their breath."

The fire started early Thursday night in Goseong, a mountainous county 
just below the border with North Korea...
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710197740/wildfire-rips-along-south-koreas-eastern-coast-prompting-national-emergency


[Opinion 21 youth letdown before Congress]
*The First Meeting of the House 'Climate Crisis' Committee Did Not Go So 
Well*
After months of build up, the new House Select Committee on the Climate 
Crisis held its first hearing on Thursday. The witnesses were all young 
adults who will live with the choices members of Congress, and indeed 
policymakers around the world, make today for the rest of their lives.

Their opening testimonies appealed strongly to committee members to 
start addressing carbon emissions and help communities adapt to the 
changes they're dealing with. But the hearing that followed was a 
decidedly mixed bag, much like premise of the committee itself. The six 
Republicans on the committee, many of whom are not exactly staunch 
climate advocates, spent a lot of time talking up fossil fuels and 
repeating climate denial talking points. If the committee is to meet the 
goal in its charter of finding solutions to the crisis, this hearing 
didn't inspire confidence...
- - -
I have faith Democratic members are invested in doing something. Nobody 
wants to be window dressing while the world burns, but members of the 
committee--hell, the entire world--need to do a lot more.

Earther has reached out to the committee to see how it plans to deal 
with clear divisions and the climate denial espoused in today's hearing, 
and we'll update this post if we hear back.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-first-meeting-of-the-house-climate-crisis-committ-1833812915


[Youth speaks out]
*A 23-Year-Old Just Schooled Fox News On The Costs Of The Green New Deal*
"How did we pay for World War II? At the end of the day when something 
is this important our economy is going to suffer if we don't pay for it."
headshot
By Alexander C. Kaufman
- - -
In a series of rapid-fire responses, the 23-year-old library worker from 
Kansas succinctly laid out the scope of the climate crisis. When Fox 
News' Todd Piro pressed him repeatedly on the cost of a Green New Deal ― 
a favorite Republican talking point ― Vandeleuv's sober, confident 
replies seemed to catch the host off guard. A researcher with Media 
Matters for America tweeted the clip that went viral Thursday night. It 
drew praise from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the Green New 
Deal's lead proponent in the House, who called Vandeleuv an "MVP."
"How did we pay for World War II?" Vandeleuv asked. "At the end of the 
day when something is this important our economy is going to suffer if 
we don't pay for it."

Piro, incredulous, asked if he agreed "with the sentiment that this is 
as big a deal" as the deadliest war in history.

"A little over 400,000 Americans died in World War II," Vandeleuv said, 
then cited a World Health Organization estimate of the number of people 
killed globally from warming-linked extreme weather, drought and 
disease: "Climate change is killing 150,000 people per year, at least."

Piro again returned to the cost: "Let's talk about the money, because 
that's a huge part of this. How are we going to pay for it?"

"During World War II, for one thing, the government just pushed some of 
the cash up front and raised some taxes on some folks," Vandeleuv said. 
"But at the end of the day, it stimulated the economy so much everyone 
benefited."

"To review," Piro asked once more, "you are in favor of raising taxes in 
order to support the Green New Deal?"

"If that's the optimal solutions economists sort out, I'll go with 
that," Vandeleuv said.

In his first interview since the clip aired, Vandeleuv told HuffPost 
he's surprised by his sudden viral fame. A friend had tipped him off 
earlier that day, telling him a Fox News producer was camped out at the 
diner looking for subjects to interview ahead of a town-hall broadcast 
with billionaire Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who is considering a 
centrist run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-green-new-deal_n_5ca7a1c8e4b0a00f6d3f697b


[Power paradigm shift]
*Florida utility to close natural gas plants, build massive 
solar-powered battery*
On Thursday, Florida Power and Light (FPL) announced that it would 
retire two natural gas plants and replace those plants with what is 
likely to be the world's largest solar-powered battery bank when it's 
completed in 2021.
FPL, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, serves approximately 10 million 
customers in Florida. The utility says its plan, including additional 
efficiency upgrades and smaller battery installations throughout its 
service area, will save customers more than $100 million in aggregate 
through avoided fuel costs. FPL also says its battery and upgrade plan 
will help avoid 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
The plan calls for the construction of a 409 megawatt (MW) / 900 
megawatt-hour battery installation at what will be called the FPL 
Manatee Energy Storage Center. For context, the largest battery 
installation in the world was built by Tesla at a Hornsdale wind farm in 
South Australia; that has a capacity and power rating of 100 MW / 129 MWh.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/florida-utility-to-close-natural-gas-plants-build-massive-solar-powered-battery/?amp=1


[Beckwith rants on anomalous winter weather Ottawa]
*Chat on Persistent Cold Blob over North America*
Paul Beckwith - Published on Apr 5, 2019
Our destabilizing climate has many unpleasant surprises over our entire 
planet. The Arctic is warmer than normal by 5.7C; Antarctica is 2.4C 
colder than normal. A long-term, stuck Rossby wave trough of the jet 
stream gave North America a cold blob; basically a "global warming 
hole"while the rest of the planet baked. As the Arctic "center of cold" 
shifts from the North Pole to central Greenland (83 degrees N latitude) 
this cold blob could become a frequent feature as we near a Blue Ocean 
Event in the Arctic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMwrjxsE0Q


[classic cryo-science post]
*Guest post: How Arctic lakes accelerate permafrost carbon losses*
6 September 2018
As the climate warms, there is increasing concern around thawing of 
carbon-rich permafrost across the Arctic. Carbon emissions from this 
perennially frozen land have the potential to reinforce global warming.

Adding to this risk, the Arctic is also pockmarked by millions of small 
ponds and lakes, formed as the frozen soil thaws, collapses and fills 
with melted ice, snow and rain. These lakes accelerate thawing of the 
surrounding land, ramping up how much carbon the land emits.

In our recent study, published in Nature Communications, we have – for 
the first time – estimated the global carbon emissions from permafrost 
thaw beneath and around Arctic lakes...
- -
Not only do our findings reveal that rapid thaw will have a strong 
impact on carbon emissions from permafrost this century, in a high 
warming, business-as-usual scenario ("RCP8.5"), it more than doubles the 
previously estimated carbon release from gradual thaw alone.
Even under moderate-emission scenarios with a reduction of human-caused 
carbon emissions (known as "RCP4.5"), rapid thaw will play a major role 
in permafrost-related carbon cycling, outpacing emissions from gradual thaw.

The majority of the carbon released through rapid thaw would be in the 
form of methane. Taking these emissions into account, the 
permafrost-carbon feedback by the end of the century could become as 
strong as the second strongest human-caused source of greenhouse gases 
today – land use change.
Our findings show that the lack of understanding of Arctic lake dynamics 
and the neglect of implementing these aspects into global climate models 
can result in strongly underestimating greenhouse gas emissions from 
degrading permafrost landscapes.

Formation and expansion of thermokarst lakes will accelerate the release 
of permafrost carbon. This means that the permafrost-carbon feedback 
will be globally important within several decades from now as opposed to 
centuries.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-arctic-lakes-accelerate-permafrost-carbon-losses



[Writing]
*Can the novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change?*
Writers are coming to appreciate the theme's urgency--and its narrative 
possibilities
The literary novel has a problem with scale. For centuries it has 
principally focused on the stuff of everyday life. It doesn't generally 
concern itself with the cataclysmic or tectonic. Compare Homer's 
"Odyssey" with James Joyce's "Ulysses": whereas the epic incorporates 
gods, slaughters and the fate of nations, the novel celebrates the 
intimate and quotidian.
The literary novel has a problem with time. Novels are one of the ways 
in which a culture thinks about the challenges it faces, but frequently 
the form looks to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into 
the future. The Victorian novel pondered the rapidly industrialising 
economy and shifting class structures of the age. Yet many of the great 
books of the period, from "Middlemarch" to "A Tale of Two Cities", 
employed historical settings. Today's novelists often turn to the two 
world wars, or even more remote eras, for their subjects...
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/04/06/can-the-novel-handle-a-subject-as-cataclysmic-as-climate-change



[Such a  ponderous pondering,  but important thinking]
*Can we truly think about climate change at all?*
Part one of a three-part series on how philosophy contends with our 
possible annihilation.
Tom Whyman - APR - 3 - 2019
Ian Butler's 2017 video installation, "On Exactitude in Science," is one 
of the most remarkable things I've seen in the last few months. The work 
consists of two screens. On the left plays Godfrey Reggio's 
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out Of Balance, the 1982 stoner classic of slow 
motion and time lapse footage of cities and landscapes; complete with 
pulsing, shimmering Philip Glass soundtrack. On the right: Butler's 
shot-by-shot remake, in which he has -- somehow, marvelously, 
painstakingly -- reproduced the film in its entirety by modding Grand 
Theft Auto V.

On paper, reproducing Koyannisqatsi in GTA form sounds like it would be 
an impressive technical feat -- surely nothing more. But when you 
actually sit down and watch the thing, it turns out to be utterly 
spellbinding. For long stretches, it can be hard to remember which 
screen is which: Butler's land- and city-spaces are so unerringly 
accurate that I found myself checking left and right to keep my 
bearings, miming writing with my dominant hand to confirm. But then 
every now and then -- and as the film develops, increasingly often -- a 
human face will enter, and the difference becomes bluntly, laughably 
obvious.

On the left, commuters walk briskly. People -- builders, waitresses, 
fighter pilots -- stand by machines, looking into the camera intently, 
often slightly uncomfortably. On the right, their doubles simply mill 
about, almost at random; their faces, at any rate generic, have nothing 
in them.

The difference is particularly apparent whenever the figures are engaged 
in any sort of intentional activity: walking or driving, working or 
playing. In Koyaanisqatsi, factory workers bustle busily at a conveyor 
belt assembling whatever it is they are producing: attentive to the task 
in the manner of workers who know they can get fired. In Butler's 
facsimile by contrast, his characters simply stare vacantly at a 
churning machine: some make a sort of vague effort to lean over it, as 
if miming doing something; one has clearly gone too far, and is slumped 
on the moving belt as if asleep.

In the following shot, we see on the left a machine churning out 
hundreds and hundreds of hot dogs -- they appear, clearly from 
somewhere, the result of a causal process which involved any number of 
people (who knows exactly how many?) doing something. On the right, hot 
dogs are also produced, but here they simply appear, mounting up almost 
at random one on top of the other, limited only (one assumes) by the 
speed at which Butler can click his mouse. In Reggio's film, a crowd of 
people sit in a multiplex cinema, munching popcorn, absorbed in a movie. 
In Butler's copy, a group of figures are similarly arranged, and go 
through similar motions -- but here they simply sit, their eyes trained 
on nothing.

Particularly in its most impressive moments -- the sped-up footage of 
commuters gushing out of metro stations; the glowing cityscapes of cars 
rushing into the night -- Koyaanisqatsi presents us with a world that is 
utterly, dauntingly alive with meaning, fecund with the hum and thrust 
of the activity of human life. Butler's copy takes this vision and 
presents us with its uncanny double: a future world, perhaps -- a world 
in which artificial intelligence has developed to the point that it is 
able to empty the world of the human entirely, a world where little 
copies of us are kept around but to no particular purpose, save perhaps 
the amusement of the machines.

The film is named for a Borges story, a fragment of a tale about a 1:1 
map. "In that Empire," the story goes, "the Art of Cartography attained 
such perfection that... the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the 
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for 
point with it." Later generations, however, decided that the Map was 
useless, and left it to decay in "the Deserts of the West." But who 
knows: if the Map really did coincide with the Empire "point for point," 
is it really so clear that it was the Map they discarded, and not the 
original Empire? At times, as I say, Butler's facsimile is entirely too 
convincing. Is it possible someone made a mistake?

Perhaps more than anything, Butler's installation is a powerful 
aesthetic response to climate change. It raises all the problems that 
are of the most terrifying relevance to this series: confronting us with 
the naked, baffling, utterly decentering reality of the possibility of 
human extinction. Once we are all gone, so too will everything we ever 
thought we loved or valued or knew. The arc of history, which people 
once did (and some still do) conceive of as the story of "human 
progress," is revealed as what anyone with working critical faculties 
and basic empathy (at any rate, essential for critical thought) always 
suspected that it might be: a stupid and awful puppet show, a charade.

In his early essay "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense," written in 
1873 and unpublished until after the mental breakdown which rendered him 
an invalid from 1889 until his death, Friedrich Nietzsche tells us a 
fable in which, "in some remote corner of the universe... there was once 
a star on which some clever beasts invented knowledge." This, Nietzsche 
claims, "was the highest and most mendacious moment of 'world history' 
-- but it was only a moment." "After nature had drawn a few breaths the 
star grew cold, and the clever beasts had to die."

"One might invent such a fable," Nietzsche says, "and still not have 
illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how 
aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have 
been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, 
nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission 
that would lead beyond human life."

Nietzsche uses "On Truth and Lies" to indict our arrogance; he wants to 
shatter our pretensions to having access to any "real" knowledge; to the 
sort of eternal, ideal truth the philosophical tradition prior to 
Nietzsche had largely traded in. The intellect, Nietzsche tells us, is 
solely "a means for preserving the individual," and 'truth' as we 
understand it is merely a social convention, which aids 
self-preservation not only by maintaining a repository of fixed 
categories, broadly agreed-upon by all -- but also by enabling lying.

"Only through forgetfulness," Nietzsche tells us, can we ever "achieve 
the illusion" of possessing some "truth" beyond the finite perspective 
of humanity. But then again: it is only through this illusion, through 
this forgetfulness, that we can "live with any repose, security and 
consistency" at all. The vertiginous effects of recognizing how little 
our intellect really amounts to, would be enough to drive anyone to 
gibbering despair. All we have is the concepts and categories, the 
"mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" that we use 
to understand the world. "What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus 
in sounds." If Nietzsche were to have grown up in Borges' cartographical 
Empire, he would have concluded that its subjects, his fellow 
Empire-dwellers, had needed the Map in order to derive meaning from any 
aspect of their world at all. We have, he says, "an invincible 
inclination" to allow ourselves to be deceived.

AGAINST THE PROSPECT OF THE COLLAPSE AND OBSOLESCENCE OF EVERYTHING WE 
HOLD DEAR, WE NEED TO REAFFIRM THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE.
Nietzsche wants us to turn our thoughts to something, he wants us to 
consider: what would it really be, what could it be, for the world to be 
completely emptied, as it is in Butler's film, of the human? Would this 
mean anything? Could it possibly mean anything at all?

At our present moment, this question haunts us -- it is with us in 
almost everything we do, in even the slightest decision we make. AI 
(regardless of whether it in fact does this ) makes it possible to 
conceive of intelligence beyond human intelligence; still more 
seriously, the fact of climate change forces us to confront the 
possibility of the complete destruction of human life. If intellect 
evolved as a means for preserving the individual, it has now conspired 
to defeat its own original purpose: every feat of intellect now makes us 
stupider (literally so -- elevated temperatures and increased carbon 
emissions are strongly linked with diminished cognitive performance); 
every new technology, brought to us by the pampered tech-buffoons of 
Silicon Valley, only brings the end nearer. As a society, the people we 
reward most materially are the ones helping to bring about our 
destruction the fastest.

This brings us to a particular question: how can we even think about 
climate change at all? The possibility of human extinction threatens to 
invalidate all canons of knowledge, all established modes of thought: 
the old Map lies tattered and useless, disintegrating in some desert far 
away; in a bleached coral reef, in a drowned city. Can philosophy offer 
anything useful, in the face of our present crisis?

Arguably, philosophy has its power in its ability to look beyond what is 
merely present to us right now. As Adorno tells us in his Lectures of 
Negative Dialectics, "Philosophy consists in the effort to say what 
cannot be said, to think what we cannot yet think." And yet, as "Western 
thought" philosophy is nothing if not complicit in our present 
situation; in most institutions where philosophy is taught, climate 
change occupies a far less prominent place in the thinking of the 
professionals than, say, the question of whether or not a group of 
particles arranged "table-wise" is really a table, or how professionally 
acceptable it is to stand up for the rights of trans women. Should we 
even bother trying to think our way out of the complete destruction of 
human life? Or should we simply give up on thinking altogether -- crack 
each other's heads open, and feast on the sweet, sweet goo within?

A second aesthetic response to climate change can serve as a reminder of 
the dangers of such nihilism. The other week, Grimes -- whose recent 
developmental arc is its own argument for the inseparability of art and 
politics -- announced via Instagram that her new album, 
Miss_Anthropocene, would be "a concept album about the anthropomorphic 
goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling 
demon/beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world." "I love Godly 
personifications of abstract/horrific concepts," the singer continued, 
"so I wanted to update the list to include our modern issues...Climate 
change is something I'm only confronted with in a sad/guilty way.... 
Reading news and what not... so my goal is to make climate change fun... 
everybody loves a good villain." Her recent single, the ploddingly nu 
metal-ish "We Appreciate Power," was apparently our introduction to "the 
pro-AI-propaganda girl group who embody our potential 
enslavement/destruction at the hands of Artificial General 
Intelligence." (Frankly, I prefer Elon Musk's Harambe rap ).

Grimes' stance on climate change is willfully and almost shockingly 
affirmative, leaning in to the version of accelerationism preached by 
"Dark Enlightenment" guru (and erstwhile academic philosopher) Nick 
Land, celebrating an image of the future in which everything loving and 
kind and good and makes our species worthy of redemption is dominated by 
everything destructive and bad, in which the only people afforded 
anything even resembling security and comfort would be a neo-feudal 
class of billionaires kept safe from the climate in bunkers, shielded 
from their dying, desperate public by the private armies in their pay. 
But perhaps this is unsurprising. If you're dating (or rumored to still 
be dating) a man whose main plan for tackling climate change is 
"probably I have enough money to realistically colonize Mars," then 
maybe it really is possible to see climate change as fertile material 
for dancefloor bangers, a bit of safe cyberpunk fun.

Indeed, Grimes and Musk are said to have met after they both made the 
same joke about Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment originating on 
pro-"rationality" forum Less Wrong in which an all-powerful artificial 
intelligence, originally designed to optimize the human good, goes 
haywire by deciding (quite in accordance with its own logic) to punish 
anyone who didn't dedicate their lives to helping to create it. Roko's 
Basilisk has been described as "the world's most dangerous thought 
experiment": just by considering the possibility of Roko's Basilisk 
existing, you risk finding yourself one day resurrected in a future 
totally dominated by this entity, where it will now proceed to torture 
you forever.

So, should you dedicate your life to helping create the Basilisk? Of 
course fucking not. If anything, the possibility of something like 
Roko's Basilisk existing (and let's face it: giving the way technology 
is going, it hardly seems too far-fetched to suppose that an ostensibly 
benevolent AI would end up torturing us) ought to be a reason (yet 
another reason!) to fight against it. Against the prospect of the 
collapse and obsolescence of everything we hold dear, we need to 
reaffirm the value of human life -- human life as it loves, suffers, 
needs, dies, is born. We need to think in a way that is aligned with 
human life.

This might be taken as the deepest point of Nietzsche's essay. Perhaps 
he is not taunting us with the fleetingness and insignificance of human 
life and thought; perhaps what he is saying is that the truth simply is 
human, and nothing more. But if that reading is right, the possibility 
of our total extinction just invites us to reflect still more urgently 
on what human life and human thought means. It is time to re-draw the 
Map with this in mind.
https://theoutline.com/post/7268/how-to-think-about-climate-change?zd=1&zi=yvokzv3b



*This Day in Climate History - April**//**6, 2000 - from D.R. Tucker*
April 6, 2000: Predicting the controversies that would define the George 
W. Bush administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert observes, 
"Mr. Bush's relationship to the environment is roughly that of a doctor 
to a patient -- when the doctor's name is Kevorkian."
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/06/opinion/in-america-bush-goes-green.html?pagewanted=print 

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