[TheClimate.Vote] April 10, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Apr 10 09:55:10 EDT 2019
/April 10, 2019/
[NOAA Storm Prediction Center]
*An Enhanced Risk of Severe Thunderstorms is Forecast Today and/or Tonight*
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/
- - -
[text forecasts]
*NOAA Hazardous Weather Outlooks*
https://www.weather.gov/mrx/outlooks
[flood videos show a big mess]
*Real Footage, After Nebraska Floods 2019 ... people, farm animals*
Real Footage -Published on Apr 1, 2019
Billions in damages in Midwest after floods.
Nebraska flooding biggest disaster in state's history.
Farmers salvaging what they can after floods.
From farms to wedding plans, neighbors offer help amidst Midwest floods.
Volunteers start work in flooded Nebraska.
Billions in damages in US Midwest after Missouri River overflows.
Nebraska farmers and ranchers are in the process of putting their lives
back together after recent storms and flooding caused more than $1
billion in damage to the agricultural industry.
Flooding is a big concern for large parts of central U.S. The rising
Missouri River in particular has already claimed at least three lives.
The flooding has also destroyed hundreds of homes and caused billions of
dollars in damage. Weather experts have warned the danger from flooding
could persist into May.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvrRLlb-dH4
- -
[more footage]
*Mind Blowing Footage of Unprecedented Floods (SPECIAL REPORT)*
SHUTTERSHOT45 - Published on Apr 7, 2019
At least 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of U.S. farmland were
flooded after the "bomb cyclone" storm left wide swaths of nine major
grain producing states under water this month, satellite data analyzed
by Gro Intelligence for Reuters showed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p81lS4bPkU8
[Potholer54- video]
*How accurate are scientific predictions about climate?*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugwqXKHLrGk
[video- Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes]
*Is Climate Change the End? And if so, the End of What?*
Published on Mar 28, 2019
Naomi Oreskes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc7RNrh8i-A
[two goofy guys do some climate shucking and jiving]
*Greenland's Largest Glacier is GROWING (and why that's bad) with
climate scientist Josh Willis*
Hotpocalypse
Published on Apr 8, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMKCH0eGmk
[classic, academic, philosophical interview applies to how we evaluate
weather and climate]
*Noam Chomsky - Understanding Reality*
Chomsky's Philosophy
Published on Jul 28, 2016
Chomsky on folk science, ethnoscience, metaphysics, events etc. Source:
https://youtu.be/cQd6QGQIxmQ
[This lecture might help us understand how humans perceive and process
climate change]
[CO2 levels]
*Why the Guardian is putting global CO2 levels in the weather forecast*
As CO2 levels climb, the carbon count is a daily reminder we must tackle
climate change now
The simplest measure of how the mass burning of fossil fuels is
disrupting the stable climate in which human civilisation developed is
the number of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere.
Today, the CO2 level is the highest it has been for several million
years. Back then, temperatures were 3-4C hotter, sea level was 15-20
metres higher and trees grew at the south pole. Worse, billions of
tonnes of carbon pollution continues to pour into the air every year and
at a rate 10 times faster than for 66m years.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, CO2 was at 280 parts per
million (ppm) in the atmosphere. By 1958, when the first measurements
were made at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, it had reached 315ppm. It raced past
350ppm in 1986 and 400ppm in 2013.
The Guardian will now publish the Mauna Loa carbon count, the global
benchmark, on the weather page of the paper every day.
"When I read the letter from Guardian reader Daniel Scharf encouraging
us to include information on climate change in our weather forecasts, we
thought it was a fantastic idea," said the Guardian's editor-in-chief,
Katharine Viner.
"Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen so dramatically,
and including a measure of that in our daily weather report is symbolic
of what human activity is doing to our climate. People need reminding
that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem - we need to
tackle it now, and every day matters."
While weather changes daily, climate changes over years and decades. So
alongside the daily carbon count, we will publish the level in previous
years for comparison, as well as the pre-industrial baseline of 280ppm,
and the level seen as manageable in the long term of 350ppm.
Year-on-year comparisons are important because each year there is a
natural rise and fall of CO2 levels, rather like the planet breathing.
Trees and plants absorb carbon and release oxygen as they grow, lowering
atmospheric CO2.
As most plants are in the northern hemisphere, CO2 reaches its lowest
level each year at the end of the growing season in October. Then it
begins to rise as dying plants decay, reaching a peak in May or June.
While the CO2 level is an important and symbolic measure of the global
warming caused by humanity, it is a simple one. The increases in
temperature the world experiences, and the heatwaves, storms and
droughts that strike, also depend on how fast emissions rise or fall and
how long they remain at high levels. The 350ppm level was proposed in
2008 by Nasa's Prof James Hansen as a suitable target.
However we measure climate change, one thing is clear: to keep below
1.5C of warming, the aspiration of the world's nations, we need to halve
emissions by 2030 and reach zero by mid century. It is also likely we
will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps by the large-scale
restoration of nature.
It is a huge task, but we hope that tracking the daily rise of CO2 will
help to maintain attention on it. When the 400ppm milestone was passed,
Prof Ralph Keeling, who oversees the Mauna Loa measurements begun by his
father, said: "It is symbolic, a point to pause and think about where we
have been and where we are going."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/05/why-the-guardian-is-putting-global-co2-levels-in-the-weather-forecast
[Intevitable changes]
*The only way to halt climate change is to challenge the logic of
capitalism*
We need to break with a system in which the value of everything is
determined by how much money it can make for the wealthy.
Wast Saturday, as Brexit continued to dominate the headlines, Momentum
activists sought to draw the nation's attention to a slightly more
pressing issue. The group staged protests outside bank branches across
the UK to put pressure on financial institutions such as Barclays to
stop "financing climate chaos" after a report revealed that the bank is
the largest single lender to fossil fuel companies.
And chaos is exactly what we are facing. On current trends, the planet
is set to warm by at least 1.5 degrees by 2030. At such temperatures the
environmental systems that sustain human life would start to collapse.
Harvests would fail, water cycles would be disrupted, and extreme
weather events would become the norm. Huge swathes of the planet would
become uninhabitable, killing millions of people and displacing many more.
Historically, climate activists have often been fond of telling us that
"we're all in this together" and that only by working across political
and ideological boundaries can we hope to save the planet. They have
focused on grand, international summits where politicians, business
leaders and bureaucrats meet to decide the fate of humanity and return
to their nation states with plans for carbon taxes, emissions trading
schemes and nuclear power stations.
But climate change is, and always has been, a class issue. It has been
caused by the wealthy, and its effects will fall on the poor. Just 100
companies are responsible for 70 per cent of all carbon emissions.
Globally, the wealthiest 10 per cent are responsible for 50 per cent of
all lifestyle consumption emissions. In the UK, the top 10 per cent is
responsible for nearly 25 per cent of lifestyle consumption emissions,
with the bottom 50 per cent responsible for just five.
And it is the poorest parts of the world that will be most ravaged by
the effects of climate change. Low-lying states like Bangladesh are
incredibly vulnerable to flooding as sea levels rise. Africa's Sahel
region - home to nearly 200 million people - will become desertified as
temperatures increase. As brutally demonstrated by Cyclone Idai, the
poorest states are also those least able to protect their citizens from
extreme weather events.
And if climate change is a class issue, then decarbonisation should be a
class project. The only way to halt climate change is to challenge the
logic of capitalism itself: that the value of everything - land,
knowledge, and even human life - is determined by how much money it can
make for the wealthy.
Some argue that such a mission is impossible. Averting the apocalyptic
scenario laid out in the recent IPCC report requires reducing global
emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 - an incredibly ambitious target.
Others are slightly more optimistic, pointing out that the world is
currently experiencing something of a "solar revolution". Costs have
fallen by a factor of ten over the last decade and solar power
generation is increasing at a remarkable rate of 30-40 per cent per year.
Both the optimists and the pessimists have a point. We do have the
technology to prevent our planet from decaying into an uninhabitable
hothouse earth. But as long as corporations, banks, and even
governments, continue to profit from fossil fuels, decarbonisation will
remain a distant dream.
Saturday's protesters understand this point all too well. In targeting
major financial institutions like Barclays, they were attempting to
strike at the heart of modern, financialised capitalism. Without access
to financial markets, most fossil fuel firms would struggle to survive.
But given the scale of the challenge, we must be far more ambitious.
Dealing with the existential threat humanity is facing requires the kind
of radical state intervention that no liberal government would consider
and no international institution would allow: it requires a global green
new deal.
Citizens must pressure their political leaders into implementing a just
transition towards a zero-carbon economy. This would mean a huge
increase in state spending - in the area of 30 per cent of GDP per year
- to decarbonise energy and transport infrastructure and boost
investment in green technologies. The costs of such a project should be
imposed on the wealthy. This will require tax reform, constraints on
capital mobility, and the replacement of private financial institutions
with green, democratic, publicly-owned alternatives.
Providing for green growth over the long term would also require
increasing public and collective ownership over the most important
economic assets. Pension funds must be reformed and democratised so
their members can put pressure on private corporations to take climate
change seriously. The state should also start to act as an activist
investor, using the funds from quantitative easing to buy up corporate
bonds and pressuring companies to reduce their emissions. And some
industries will need to be nationalised outright to deliver the levels
of investment required to make the green new deal a success.
The green new deal must be global - states must work together to achieve
these goals. But they will have to do so outside of existing
international institutions. The kind of state intervention required to
tackle climate change - democratic public ownership over most of the
economy, dramatic increases in state spending, and the controls on
capital mobility required to achieve this - are not merely frowned upon
by the World Bank and the IMF, they are actively prohibited.
Such a mass mobilisation of society's resources would be unprecedented
during peacetime. And it has to be undertaken alongside a fundamental
reorganisation of the international system. Were the planet not facing
an existential catastrophe, this vision would seem utterly utopian. But
the reality is that there is no alternative.
Grace Blakeley is the New Statesman's economics commentator and a
research fellow at IPPR.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2019/04/only-way-halt-climate-change-challenge-logic-capitalism
[discovery and interconnection]
*Systems thinking as a pathway to global warming beliefs and attitudes
through an ecological worldview*
Matthew T. Ballew, Matthew H. Goldberg, Seth A. Rosenthal, Abel
Gustafson, and Anthony Leiserowitz
PNAS published ahead of print April 8, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1819310116
Add to Cart ($10)
Edited by Arild Underdal, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, and approved
March 8, 2019 (received for review November 26, 2018)
Significance
Systems thinking is recognized as vital to understanding climate science
and addressing climate change. Understanding how systems thinking
influences the public's beliefs and attitudes about climate change has
important implications for climate change education and communication.
Our findings indicate that across the political spectrum, systems
thinking may facilitate an ecological ethic or value system that humans
should preserve and protect the natural world rather than exploit it.
This, in turn, may strengthen proclimate views and understanding of
climate change (e.g., that global warming is happening, is human-caused,
etc.). The findings contribute to systems thinking theory and indicate
the importance of promoting systems thinking to support proclimate
science beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors across political lines.
Abstract
Prior research has found that systems thinking, the tendency to perceive
phenomena as interconnected and dynamic, is associated with a general
proenvironmental orientation. However, less is known about its
relationship with public understanding of climate change and/or whether
this relationship varies across people with different political views.
Because climate change is a highly politicized issue, it is also
important to understand the extent to which systems thinking can foster
acceptance of climate science across political lines. Using an online
sample of US adults (n = 1,058), we tested the degree to which systems
thinking predicts global warming beliefs and attitudes (e.g., believing
that global warming is happening, that it is human-caused, etc.),
independent of an ecological worldview (i.e., the New Ecological
Paradigm). We found that although systems thinking is positively related
to global warming beliefs and attitudes, the relationships are almost
fully explained by an ecological worldview. Indirect effects of systems
thinking are consistently strong across political ideologies and party
affiliations, although slightly stronger for conservatives and
Republicans than for liberals and Democrats, respectively. We did not
find evidence of the converse: Systems thinking does not seem to mediate
the relationship between an ecological worldview and global warming
beliefs and attitudes. Together, these findings suggest that systems
thinking may support the adoption of global warming beliefs and
attitudes indirectly by helping to develop an ecological ethic that
people should take care of and not abuse the environment.
This article requires a subscription to view the full text. If you have
a subscription you may use the login form below to view the article.
Access to this article can also be purchased.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/04/02/1819310116
[How to check the news seen on the Internet]
*Why Your Newsfeed SUCKS - Smarter Every Day 212*
SmarterEveryDay
Published on Mar 17, 2019
Seriously, if you can't tell if something on the internet is fact or
fiction, tag @MediaWise and use the hashtag: *#IsThisLegit* and they'll
help you figure it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos
*This Day in Climate History - April 10, 2007- from D.R. Tucker*
April 10, 2007: In a debate with Senator John Kerry in Washington, DC,
Newt Gingrich acknowledges that climate change is real and largely
caused by human activity, though he insists that regulatory solutions
are not needed to stem emissions. By 2009, Gingrich would once again
suggest that the basic science of human-caused climate change was in
dispute.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/197538-1
https://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/02/19/gingrich-didnt-always-take-issue-with-john-kerr/198125
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