[TheClimate.Vote] April 27, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Apr 27 11:14:00 EDT 2019
/April 27, 2019/
[from the phrase 'fourteen nights']
*A fortnight with Extinction Rebellion - in pictures*
The Guardian photographer Sean Smith has spent every day with the
climate change group Extinction Rebellion during their two weeks of
protests in central London
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2019/apr/26/a-fortnight-with-extinction-rebellion-in-pictures
- - -
[Handbook for the foremost]
*Extinction Rebellion rushes activists' handbook _This Is Not a Drill_
into print*
The activists in the book write:
"This is our last chance to do anything about the global climate and
ecological emergency. Our last chance to save the world as we know
it. Now or never, we need to be radical. We need to rise up. And we
need to rebel. This is a book of truth and action."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/26/extinction-rebellion-rushes-activists-handbook-this-is-not-a-drill-into-print
- - -
[Because they drive on the other side of the road?]
*Why the climate protests that disrupted London were different*
Extinction Rebellion skillfully used civil disobedience to sound the
alarm on the climate emergency.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/24/18511491/climate-change-protests-london-extinction-rebellion
[BuzzFeed.News]
*Can You Work Out How To Spend Your Money To Slow Global Warming?*
It's easy to feel helpless in the face of climate change, but how you
spend your money can make a difference.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/companies-climate-friendly-quiz
[Not allowed in a few states]*
**Ethanol Train Derails and Burns in Texas, Killing Horses and Spurring
Evacuation
*By Justin Mikulka - Thursday, April 25, 2019*
*Early in the morning on April 24, an ethanol train derailed, exploded,
and burned near Fort Worth, Texas, reportedly destroying a horse stable,
killing three horses, and causing the evacuation of nearby homes.
According to early reports, 20 tank cars left the tracks, with at least
five rupturing and burning.
While specific details have not yet been released, it appears to be a
unit train of ethanol using the federally mandated DOT-117R tank cars,
based on the images showing tank car markings. This is now the third
accident in North America involving the upgraded DOT-117R tank cars, all
resulting in major spills of either oil or ethanol.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/25/ethanol-train-derails-fire-fort-worth-texas-killing-horses-evacuation*
*
*
*
[Wide ranging discussion]*
**John Conger on Climate Change and National Security
CCS Director Talks Climate Threats to the Military on C-SPAN
*John Conger, Director of the Center for Climate and Security, appeared
on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on Thursday morning (April 25) to talk
about the impacts of climate change on the military.
During the program, Conger highlighted the impacts of extreme weather on
Tyndall Air Force Base, Camp Lejeune and Offutt Air Force Base, and the
$8 billion combined cost of recovery. He also spoke to the DoD focus on
resilience to current impacts such as sea level rise, flooding and
extreme weather, and how that has continued during the current
administration.
Of note, Washington Journal is a call-in program, and there were callers
that asserted climate change was a hoax and some that called it an
existential crisis. Conger noted that they weren't going to come to any
great revelations when non-climate scientists tried to argue with
non-climate scientists about climate science - that the climate science
experts had already made their view clear through the National Climate
Assessment released by the Trump Administration. Later, he was asked
about the proposed Presidential Committee on Climate and Security,
crafted to conduct an adversarial review of climate science, and noted
they would suffer the same challenges. The way to challenge the
scientific consensus isn't to debate the fine points of research you
disagree with, but rather to generate more peer-reviewed research
yourself and to drive the scientific consensus.
Fundamentally, though, the military's drive toward climate resilience is
based on the impacts it is already experiencing - impacts from flooding,
from wildfires, from extreme weather. They see the Arctic ice receding,
the Chinese procurement of icebreakers and the Russian troop movements
in the region and know there is something new to which they must
respond. Combatant commanders see how drought, food insecurity and
migration drive instability that could lead to conflict in their areas
of responsibility.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/04/26/ccs-director-talks-climate-threats-to-the-military-on-c-span/
https://www.c-span.org/video/?460025-3/washington-journal-john-conger-discusses-national-security-impacts-climate-change*
*
*
*
[hear the podcast audio or read edited transcript below:]
*Bill McKibben: The 'Debate' Over Global Warming Was Always Phony*
But now we have a small window to stave off the worst-case
climate-change scenario.
By Jon Wiener
Bill McKibben was one of the first people to warn of the dangers of
global warming 30 years ago with his book The End of Nature. He is a
founder of the environmental organization 350.org and the author of 15
books and hundreds of articles and essays, many of them for The New
Yorker and some for The Nation. He's also been teaching at Middlebury
College in Vermont, where he's the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in
Environmental Studies. Now he has published a new book, Falter: Has the
Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? This interview has been edited and
condensed.
JW:*You wrote your first book 30 years ago on pretty much the same topic
as your new one, Falter. I guess this one could've been called I Told
You So. But you decided not to take that course. It is striking that for
30 years we knew that climate change was coming, and a lot of people
will tell you, 'We did nothing.' I'd like to look a little more closely
at the "we" in that sentence. There's you and me, and then there's the
people who ran Exxon.*
BM: Yes. If you asked me 30 years ago, one of the things I would not
have expected is how slow we would be to react as civilizations. And for
a while, that really perplexed me. But it's come into focus much more
clearly in recent years. Great investigative reporting at places like
the LA Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website InsideClimate News, and
the Columbia journalism school revealed over the last few years that the
fossil-fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate
change back in the 1980s. And they believed what their scientists were
telling them. Exxon started building all its drilling rigs to compensate
for the rise in sea level it knew was coming.
But of course the thing they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us.
Just the opposite. They've spent billions of dollars building the
architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that has spread
with relentless efficiency the lie that science was unsure about climate
change. And you can measure the results of that lie by the fact that the
man in the White House right now believes that climate change is a hoax
manufactured by the Chinese. That's a view so delusional that, if
someone started muttering it to you seated on a public bus, you'd get up
and change seats.
So that's where we are. We've had a 30-year completely phony debate
about whether global warming was real, a debate that both sides knew the
answer to when it began. It's just that one of them was content to lie
about it in an effort to preserve its business model.
JW: *Your new book, Falter, says things are looking pretty bad for
humans right now. But of course there's an opposing school of thought,
which you can find in a dozen books and a hundred TED Talks, that says
things are getting better. There's less infant mortality today, people
are living longer, more people are literate now than ever before. Of the
55 million people who died around the world in 2012, only 120,000 of
them died in wars. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says people like
you (and me) nevertheless just seem to "bitch, moan, whine, carp and
kvetch." He's optimistic about our future, he says, because "so far,
humanity has made a lot of progress solving what seemed like intractable
problems." What do you say to Steven Pinker?*
BM: It's not that he's completely wrong. We have made enormous progress
on certain things over the last 30 or 40 years, and that makes it all
the more tragic that we're now seeing that progress begin to disappear
in the wake of very rapid physical deterioration. In fact, after more
than a decade of steady decline in the number of hungry people on earth,
that number went up last year--because of climate change and associated
natural catastrophes. After a decade of fairly steady decline, the
incidents of child labor went up again last year because of climate
change and similar shocks that inevitably end up with impoverished
families putting kids to work.
Of course, if we keep on current trends, this is only going to get
worse--much worse. Look what happened when 2 million migrants left Syria
as a result of the civil war there--a civil war that, by the way, was
triggered at least in part by the worst drought in the history of what
we once called the Fertile Crescent. Two million migrants leaving was
enough to discombobulate the politics of Western Europe, just as a
smaller number of migrants leaving the drought-stricken highlands of
Honduras and Guatemala have been enough to help discombobulate the
politics of our country. Now figure that the UN's low prediction for
climate migrants by midcentury is 200 million--and their high prediction
is a billion. Ask yourself how much development, how much progress, how
much anything we're going to be getting in a world like that.
JW: *Let's talk about what is to be done now to slow the pace of climate
change.*
BM: We're in a climate moment now, and you can see it coming from all
directions: whether it's the Extinction Rebellion that brought traffic
to a crawl in London in recent days, whether it's the millions of school
kids who are walking out of school following the lead of Greta Thunberg
in Sweden, whether it's the young people pushing the Green New Deal here
in this country with increasing success, whether it's the divestment
movement now cresting.
JW: *Harvard Heat Week started April 22. The goal of Harvard Heat Week
is to "put the heat on Harvard" to divest from fossil fuels.*
BM: We've reached a point where 8 trillion dollars' worth of endowments
and portfolios have divested in part or in whole from coal and oil and
gas. It's gotten to the point where it's really putting the hurt on the
industry. There was a big story in Politico a couple of weeks ago about
the heads of all the coal companies saying they could no longer raise
capital. There were no investment funds that were willing to give them
money, because they had divested. That's one powerful part of this. It
would, of course, be good if Harvard joined in, belated though it would
be at this point--but it's good to be raising the issue with the rich,
powerful, and out-of-touch people who run that institution.
JW: *Some people wonder why the big oil and gas corporations don't take
the lead in making money in alternative energy. Does Exxon have to hate
solar panels?*
BM: The answer to that is really interesting, I think. Yes there's money
to be made in the next energy future. People are going to get rich
putting up solar panels. But there's not Exxon-scale money to be made.
If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize why: Once you get the
solar panels up on the roof, the energy comes for free. The sun rises
every morning. From Exxon's point of view, that's the stupidest business
model you could imagine. They've spent 100 years charging people more
every month for what they get.
So they've tried everything they can to beat back the rise of renewable
energy and the utilities. Eventually they're going to lose. The price of
wind and sun just keeps dropping and dropping. It's now the cheapest way
in the world to generate an electron. And that's eroding the fossil-fuel
company's power slowly. "Slowly," however, is a problem--because we need
it now to go quickly. Fifty years from now we're going to run the world
on sun and wind. The question is, is it going to be a completely broken
world that we're running on sun and wind, or will we have made the
transition in time to avert the absolute-worst-possible outcomes? We're
already going to be in some trouble. There's no stopping global warming.
That's not one of the options on the menu. But there may be still some
opportunity to slow it down.
JW: *I know from everything you've written that you are not optimistic
about the human game. But you do have reasons for hope. How do you
balance these?*
BM: Well, I think that you've got to get up and fight every morning. And
I think the fact that there's this movement building is a very good
sign. It's what I and others have worked hard for many years to
build--and now we see it starting to come true. I worry sometimes that
we waited too long to get started, and that the momentum of climate
change is very, very grave indeed. But at least we're starting to engage
the question now.
And what option does one have but to hope and to work hard, until the
scientists tell us that there's no point in it anymore? We're not at
that point yet. The best science indicates we have a window, albeit a
fairly narrow one that's clearly closing rapidly, to make some
fundamental change. The IPCC in its report last September gave us a
12-year timeline--now 11--to have made fundamental transformations.
That's why we've got no more presidential elections to waste, no more
congressional cycles to waste, no more anything to waste. From now on we
better be making the right decisions in sharp time. Some places are
beginning to. New York City in just the last days passed the Green Deal
for New York, a really ambitious piece of climate legislation in the
world's financial capital. That's a good sign about where the smart
money is starting to point. Let's hope we can make it happen fast enough.
JW: *And we do have models of how to bring big changes when the
obstacles seem tremendous--in the nonviolent protest movements of the
20th century.*
BM: That's right. It's the other great technology along with solar
panels. That's the greatest tool that we have. Our job is to change the
zeitgeist. The job of the fossil-fuel industry is to keep everybody
thinking that burning rocks from underground is the normal and obvious
way to proceed. Our job is to make it so that people see that there is a
clear, better alternative, and that we can seize it--and seize it fast.
https://www.thenation.com/article/bill-mckibben-climate-change-global-warming/
[media influence, concerned, but not surprised]
*Facebook fact-checker has ties to climate doubt*
Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter
Climatewire: Thursday, April 25, 2019
Facebook's newest fact-checking partner is connected to an enterprise
that was founded by a conservative Fox News host and that routinely
promotes climate doubt.
The social media giant is partnering with CheckYourFact.com to provide
third-party oversight of news on its platform, Facebook announced last
week. Check Your Fact is an affiliate of The Daily Caller, the
right-leaning news outlet co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Climate scientists and advocates are worried that the new partnership
means climate articles will be downplayed on Facebook.
The climate stories published by The Daily Caller create a false
impression of the level of certainty about human-caused global warming
within the climate science field, said Susan Joy Hassol, director of the
science outreach nonprofit group Climate Communication.
In particular, The Daily Caller has mastered a form of partial
truth-telling that isn't technically wrong but doesn't give the full
picture, either, she said.
"You can really mislead people without outright lying, and in a way
that's more dangerous," she said. "You can't prove it false; you can't
say what they've said is inaccurate, that it's a lie; you can't say any
of that. Then somebody would have to say it's true -- well, it's not
true because it's not the whole truth."
Carlson co-founded The Daily Caller with Neil Patel, former chief policy
adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Many of its stories are produced
by the staff of the Daily Caller News Foundation, which receives funding
from the Charles Koch Foundation, as well as a number of other
conservative foundations that fund groups that attack climate science.
Check Your Fact is wholly owned by The Daily Caller, and its work is
routinely promoted by the news organization. While it is editorially
independent and has its own staff, Check Your Fact receives funding from
both The Daily Caller, as well as the Daily Caller News Foundation,
according to the company...
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060213559
[Geo-Engineering]
*The real climate change controversy: Whether to engineer the planet in
order to fix it*
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-climate-change-geoengineering-debate-20190424-story.html
[Culpability]
*Global Climate Coalition: Documents Show How a Fossil Fuel Lobby Group
Manipulated UN Climate Negotiations*
By Karen Savage and Mat Hope
A fossil fuel-backed industry group was able to influence the process
behind the United Nations climate assessments for decades, using
lobbyists and industry-funded scientists to manipulate international
negotiations, a cache of recently discovered documents reveals.
The documents include hundreds of briefings, meeting minutes, notes, and
correspondence from the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). They were
released Thursday by the Climate Investigations Center in collaboration
with DeSmog and Climate Liability News. The documents date from 1989 and
continue through 2002, when the lobbying group disbanded as its fossil
fuel industry backers succumbed to public pressure to disavow its tactics.
The documents show how the GCC influenced international negotiations,
manipulated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC)
process, and undertook a disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt
on mainstream climate science.
The GCC was initially part of the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM), before becoming its own entity in 1995. NAM has a long history of
defending portions of its membership, including tobacco companies that
were facing an onslaught of liability litigation, with aggressive
tactics that include discrediting science, attacking scientists, and
misleading the public.
Founding members of the GCC were mainly fossil fuel producers and
utilities, including oil majors Shell, Texaco (now a part of Chevron),
and Amoco (now part of BP); oil refiner and retailers ARCO (now a
subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum) and Phillips Petroleum; coal miners
BHP-Utah International and Peabody; and utilities American Electric
Power and Pacific Gas and Electric.
Other companies, including Exxon, joined later -- and the international
oil giant would go on to be a key player in the group.
Revealed in the documents is a decades-long campaign that continued
until 2002, intended to protect its members' interests by denying and
casting doubt on climate science. Internally, the group acknowledged the
dangers of climate change and the scientific consensus that it is
overwhelmingly driven by the burning of fossil fuels as early as 1995.
The campaign reached the highest levels of U.S. government, with the
State Department giving the GCC credit for leading President George W.
Bush to reject the landmark Kyoto Protocol in 2001. An internal State
Department briefing, prepared for a meeting with the GCC later that year
and included in the documents published Thursday, shows officials were
instructed to tell coalition representatives that Bush's decision was
"in part, based on input from you."
The Kyoto Protocol, agreed upon in 1997, was the first large-scale
international agreement to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. was one of only three UN members that did not ratify the treaty
(Canada later withdrew).
*Influencing the UN's Panel of Climate Scientists*
The GCC took a particular interest in the operations of the UN's
official scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), which produces the international climate
assessments that form the basis for global climate policy and negotiations.
GCC representatives regularly met with IPCC scientists to lobby the
panel to accept industry language in its reports, the documents show.
Tax returns show tens of thousands of dollars spent on an "IPCC Tracker
Fund" to monitor and lobby the IPCC's meetings.
In one instance detailed in the documents, the GCC boasted its suggested
language was "accepted almost in its entirety" after intensive lobbying
by its representatives and after "assistance from several countries."
The GCC also publicly questioned the validity of the IPCC's peer-review
process and launched public attacks on its scientists, while
simultaneously using the IPCC's status as a respected scientific body to
promote the credentials of its own climate science denial research.
The GCC went beyond targeting climate science. In 1995, Exxon gave a
presentation to the GCC on how to counter the evidence linking climate
change to human health impacts.
In 1997, the GCC wanted to expand its reach with a network of state and
local committees that would educate the public about their views on
climate change and serve as liaisons to other business and public
interest groups with similar views. This plan was implemented, the
documents show, with the help of Koch Industries, the U.S.'s largest
private energy company, which is an infamous funder of climate science
denial across the globe.
By the mid-1990s, however, the GCC's aggressive tactics and continuing
effort to cast doubt on accepted climate science had started to become a
problem for some of its members. Nine corporations left the GCC from
1996 to 2000: two automakers, one chemical manufacturer, one utility,
and five oil companies.
BP started the exodus in 1996, stating that "the time to consider the
policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between
greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven, but when the
possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society
of which we are part. We in BP have reached that point."
*What the Documents Show*
The documents published Thursday on the Climate Investigation Center's
Climate Files archive, also show:
- The GCC stacked UN meetings with its members. Some attended meetings
transparently, registering as GCC members, while others registered with
other NGOs. Often GCC members outnumbered delegates from developing
nations at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings.
- The GCC coordinated to monitor IPCC meetings. After IPCC meetings, GCC
notes reveal attendees met to discuss strategies for exploiting
scientific uncertainties in IPCC climate models and amplifying
scientific differences of opinion. On at least one occasion, a
contractor for the Electric Power Research Institute planned to keep
tabs on IPCC proceedings.
- The GCC internally refuted climate deniers, yet continued to publicly
cite their work: Exxon scientist Lenny Bernstein, who co-chaired the
GCC's committee on science and technology assessment, called the work of
climate deniers Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels "not convincing" in
a draft document in 1995. The final copy of that document included no
mention of Bernstein's comments and the GCC continued to cite the two --
as well as other known deniers -- through at least 1998.
- The GCC aggressively attempted to control media coverage of climate
change: Press releases were sent to reporters praising media coverage
featuring climate deniers and correcting those that did not. One
document encouraged reporters to contact the GCC for "balance in the
global climate change debate."...
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/04/25/global-climate-coalition-gcc-un-climate-change-ipcc/
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/25/global-climate-coalition-documents-secretive-fossil-fuel-lobby-un-programs
- - -
[See the documents]
*Global Climate Coalition Documents*
*Big Business Funds Climate Change Denial and Regulatory Delay*
https://climateinvestigations.org/global-climate-coalition-documents/
[Two distressing video lectures by Paul Beckwith]
*Ocean Surface Winds and Waves are Growing: Part 1 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfiF4kqWJRc
Paul Beckwith - Published on Apr 26, 2019
Often discussed is the fact that over 93% of global warming heat goes
into oceans. Not discussed are profound changes ongoing in ocean
dynamics, like increased wave heights, wave periods, and wave power.
Over the last 3 to 4 decades, winds at the ocean surface have increased
by up to 1.5 meters/second (about 8% of 20 m/s). Wave heights have
increased by up to 30 cm (about 5% of 6 meters). Increases are largest
in southern oceans just north of Antarctica; also at high northern
latitudes. Wave Power (Energy per unit time) has increased globally;
discussed in scientific paper that I discuss in detail.
*Why Winds and Waves are Increasing in the Oceans: Part 2 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W1OjqG7RkU
*This Day in Climate History - April 27, 2009 - from D.R. Tucker*
April 27, 2009: NPR reports:
"Sixteen nations are responsible for 80 percent of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions. Now those nations, dubbed the 'major
emitters,' are sending representatives to a conference beginning
Monday in Washington, D.C., to see if they can work together to slow
the pace of climate change.
"The Obama administration has moved quickly to deal with climate
change in the international arena. It has joined the United Nations
talks that will take place in Copenhagen later this year and are aimed
at developing a climate-change treaty. It is working one-on-one with
China -- which recently surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest
carbon emitter.
"And in the meetings that start Monday, the Obama administration is
convening the 16 nations that contribute most to climate change."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103465542
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html>
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request>
to news digest./
*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe,
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to
this mailing list.
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list