[TheClimate.Vote] April 30, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Apr 30 11:10:35 EDT 2019
/April 30, 2019/
[Beto's climate position can be found here:
https://betoorourke.com/climate-change/]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 29, 2019
CONTACT: David Turnbull, david [at] priceofoil.org
*Oil Change U.S. Response to Beto O'Rourke's climate platform*
This morning, presidential contender Beto O'Rourke released his plan to
combat climate change, committing to ban new fossil fuel leases on
public lands, end billions in fossil fuel subsidies, and account for the
full climate and community costs in federal permitting decisions. In
response, David Turnbull, Strategic Communications Director at Oil
Change U.S., issued the following statement:
"Given his voting record and continued resistance to signing the No
Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, we were pleasantly surprised to see Beto's
plan released today. It seems to be moving in the right direction when
it comes to actions on the scale necessary to tackle our climate crisis.
But as ever the devil is in the details. We're happy to see a commitment
to end tens of billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies, stop
leasing of fossil fuel development on federal lands, and accounting for
the full climate and community costs in federal permitting decisions.
"But we need to hear more - we know that any new fossil fuel
infrastructure will have an untenable impact on our efforts to address
the climate crisis, so we expect the next President to be unwavering in
saying no to new dirty pipelines, export terminals and other
infrastructure our climate and communities can't afford.
"Beto's rhetoric in resisting the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge has
suggested he's still expecting the fossil fuel industry to have a seat
at the table on climate policy decisions, but after decades of Big Oil
blocking progress and continuing to push for continued dangerous
extraction, we need leaders who are willing to stand up to the industry
rather than cater to them. We hope this plan from Beto is an indication
that he's beginning to understand that, and that he will show that even
further by signing the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge as well."- - - ###
http://oilchangeusa.org/oil-change-u-s-response-to-beto-orourkes-climate-platform/
[Deliberate choice]
*Why your brain doesn't register the words 'climate change'*
By Kate Yoder on Apr 29, 2019
Which phrase does a better job of grabbing people's attention: "global
warming" or "climate change"? According to recent neuroscience research,
the answer is neither.
If you want to get people to care, try "climate crisis," suggests new
research from an advertising consulting agency in New York. That phrase
got a 60 percent greater emotional response from listeners than our old
pal climate change. (It must be music to the ears of Al Gore, who uses
the phrase in just about every other tweet.)
SPARK Neuro measures brain activity and sweaty palms to gauge people's
emotional reactions and attention to stimuli. The company is backed by a
wildly diverse range of investors, including Peter Thiel, founder of
PayPal and famous libertarian, and Will Smith, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Netflix, NBC, and Paramount have used its services to gauge interest in
ads and movie trailers. And now SPARK Neuro is turning its attention to
climate change.
For the experiment this spring, SPARK Neuro brought in 120 people --
divided evenly among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents -- and sat
them down at the lab. Participants wore electroencephalography (EEG)
devices on their heads so the researchers could measure the electrical
activity coming from their brains every fraction of a second.
While a webcam tracked their facial expressions, little straps on their
fingers measured the sweat that accompanies heightened emotions through
galvanic skin response -- the main technology that's used in lie
detector tests. SPARK Neuro takes the tornado of data from all of those
sources and runs it through algorithms to quantify their subjects'
reactions to whatever they heard.
In this case, they listened to audio recordings of six particular
phrases. "Global warming" and "climate change" performed the worst of
all in terms of emotional engagement and audience attention. They were
trumped by a batch of less familiar phrases: climate crisis,
environmental destruction, weather destabilization, and environmental
collapse.
It's the latest sign that climate change communicators have a whole lot
to learn from cognitive science. "People understand that something is
not working about climate change and that some change needs to be made,"
said Spencer Gerrol, SPARK Neuro's CEO.
It's been an open secret that "global warming" and "climate change"
might not be the best phrases to get the public engaged. Most people,
after all, think that warm weather sounds pretty nice. And "climate
change" naturally lends itself to confusion; after all, deniers say,
hasn't the climate always been changing? (It has, but nowhere near this
dramatically!)
Gerrol came up with the idea to run a messaging experiment about how to
frame the subject while talking to a colleague about the importance of
language and how the right phrase can change policy. He pointed to the
"estate tax," which normal people didn't care much about until
Republicans started rebranding it as the "death tax" in the 1990s. Frank
Luntz, a well-known messaging consultant for Republicans, further
popularized the phrase in the early 2000s.
"As soon as they started calling it the death tax, people started
caring," Gerrol said. "Regardless of how you feel about the estate tax,
that language changed people's emotional perceptions, and ultimately
that changed behavior and policy." Since 2001, Congress has weakened the
federal estate tax, temporarily repealing it in 2010. It returned in a
weakened state in 2011 and took another blow under the 2017 tax bill.
Gerrol suspects that there are two reasons "global warming" and "climate
change" performed so poorly. For one, they're both neutral phrases.
"There's nothing inherently negative or positive" about the words
themselves, Gerrol points out. (Luntz, as it happens, once encouraged
Republicans to use the benign-sounding "climate change.")
Then there's the problem of overexposure. Both global warming and
climate change are "incredibly worn out," he said. There's a reason why
advertising companies aren't using their ad campaigns from the 1980s --
sometimes you need to shake things up to get people to pay attention. If
a term doesn't evoke a strong emotional response in the first place,
it's even more likely to wear out quickly, Gerrol said.
People who care about our warming planet are starting to realize the
power of words. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New
Deal," for example, has helped push the conversation around climate
policy into the mainstream. And George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist,
has argued for replacing "cold and alienating" environmental terms like
"nature reserves" with warmer and poetic phrases -- say, "places of
natural wonder."
There's no shortage of alternatives. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus
recommends "climate breakdown." The New York Times recently used
"climate chaos." Some scientists suggest "global heating." But to know
what really resonates, you have to study the brain.
Before the emerging field of neuroscience-based analytics, researchers
relied on focus groups and surveys to learn how people felt. But those
self-reporting methods are subject to a lot of biases that can distort
results. People play for the audience. "You want to seem smart, seem
caring, and you want to get the right answers," Gerrol said.
Unlike those more traditional approaches, SPARK Neuro scans your brain
activity and parts of your nervous system -- because physiological
activity doesn't fib. The company's work has been called a "lie detector
on steroids."
For the messaging experiment, participants were first shown neutral
stimuli to establish a baseline. Then, they listened to recordings of
the six phrases played at random. The phrases were either in isolation
or in a sentence.
In both cases, the results were consistent, Gerrol said. The two phrases
that caused the strongest emotional reaction overall were "climate
crisis" and "environmental destruction."
But a strong emotional response isn't always a good thing, especially
when it comes to a polarized subject like climate change. "Environmental
destruction" actually evoked too much emotion from Republicans: a 55
percent stronger reaction than that group's average response for all
terms. That spike in emotion would likely have a "backfiring effect,"
Gerrol said. They'd get so riled up that they'd likely experience
cognitive dissonance -- that uncomfortable feeling when something you
learn conflicts with your values -- and come up with counterarguments to
get out of that mental pain.
"Climate crisis," on the other hand, was the Goldilocks of the study --
not too weak, not too strong. Among Democrats, Republicans, and
independents, it caused a strong emotional reaction without going
overboard. That kind of response leads people to pay more attention and
encourages a sense of urgency, Gerrol said.
And that urgency is key. Much like retirement planning, another
messaging problem SPARK Neuro is tackling, climate change requires
planning for the future -- not exactly a strength for the human brain.
Present bias (valuing today more than tomorrow) is just one of many
cognitive biases that inhibit us from taking climate change head-on.
To be sure, this initial research only looked into six terms, so there's
a lot more testing to do before settling on "climate crisis." How would
"climate chaos," "climate breakdown," or "global heating" measure up?
Maybe one of these phrases would do a better job of helping people
realize that all those bad things they've been warned about are no
longer off in the distant future. That scary future has already arrived.
https://grist.org/article/why-your-brain-doesnt-register-the-words-climate-change/
[grasp this opinion: "progressively intensifying"]
*Climate Change Is a Chronic Condition*
And Policymakers Need to Respond to It Accordingly
By Kate Gordon and Julio Friedmann in FOREIGN AFFAIRS [$]
Last June, dozens of flights were canceled for multiple days at Phoenix
Sky Harbor International Airport. The culprit? Extreme heat, grounding
planes not able to operate at temperatures above 118 degrees Fahrenheit.
Two months later, trillions of gallons of rain fell on Houston in the
space of just a few days. The city's third "500-year flood" in just
three years, the storm damaged more than 200,000 homes. The estimated
damage is over $100 billion. Recovery from the flood, which displaced
nearly 40,000 people, is expected to last for years. Fast-forward to
last September, when Idaho battled 23 active wildfires, caused by dry
and hot conditions making lightning strikes exceptionally dangerous.
Smoke in the air kept children inside for days and cost the state over
$20 million in fire suppression. Nearby Washington and Oregon
experienced similar losses.
These incidents took place over a few months in the summer and fall of
2017. That's just one snapshot in time: one could easily point to more
recent developments, including Hurricane Florence's destructive and
deadly path through the Carolinas; the wildfires currently devastating
wide swaths of central California; or the fact that southern Japan just
suffered devastating flooding that drove two million people from their
homes and destroyed 10,000 houses.
Continuing shifts in climate around the United States and the world are
driving up current and future costs, putting new strains on short-term
emergency response but also on long-term investments and economic
growth. These are no longer one-off events but chronic problems, and
managing them requires a fundamentally different approach from the way
most policymakers currently think about climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE ACTS LOCAL
For many Americans, climate change still seems like an esoteric global
issue, too far removed from daily life to rise to the level of urgency.
But climate change is not someone else's problem--it's a profoundly
local issue, with both acute and chronic impacts being felt across the
country.
The brunt of costs falls on cities and states. Already, climate impacts
ranging from extreme heat (Phoenix, Los Angeles)...
- -
FUTURE FORECAST
Already some cities and leaders have begun to act. One example is Tulsa,
Oklahoma, where municipal leaders have taken steps to manage chronic
flooding, including construction of retention ponds, stringent
application of flood maps to development, and relocation of flood-prone
homes. This has led to a dramatic reduction in the city's flood
insurance rates. The U.S. Department of Defense has done the same. To
maintain readiness and avoid burdens to taxpayers, it assesses how
climate change affects not only future threat profiles but
infrastructure function and cost. At the Norfolk Naval Station,
headquarters of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, the Department of Defense and
U.S. Navy acknowledge the risks from chronic and increasing sea level
risk and have made plans to manage and adapt to tidewater risks over the
next ten years.
Judicious planning and proactive investments can and will minimize U.S.
costs and damages from long-term climate impacts. It's time to recognize
that this is a chronic illness, not a passing cold--and plan accordingly.
more at -
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-09-18/climate-change-chronic-condition
- -
[mentioned in the article above]
*Four Twenty Seven* offers data products with our award-winning climate
risk scores for listed instruments, portfolio analytics to support our
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governments.
Data Products
We provide climate risk scores for a wide range of listed instruments in
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climate data at the most granular level and scores assets based on their
precise geographic location.
http://427mt.com/our-solutions
- - -
[audio discussion on climate bonds]
*Bond Buyer Podcast: Facing up to Climate Change*
Posted on March 7, 2019
Do bond ratings reflect governments' and businesses' exposure to
physical climate change? Founder & CEO, Emilie Mazzacurati, joins the
Bond Buyer's Chip Barnett to discuss physical climate risk for
investors, businesses and governments. Emilie describes the financial
sector's growing awareness of material climate risk in their bond and
equity portfolios and shares efforts being taken to understand and
address these risk. Chip and Emilie also discuss the challenges cities
face when striving to adapt to climate impacts, the benefits of building
resilience and the interactions between corporate and community resilience.
http://427mt.com/2019/03/07/bond-buyer-podcast-facing-up-to-climate-change/
Audio -
https://soundcloud.com/four-twenty-seven/030419-bb-mazzacurati-double-podcast-v01-1
[Ooops! Wait, is that intentional?]
*Global 5G wireless networks threaten weather forecasts*
Next-generation mobile technology could interfere with crucial
satellite-based Earth observations.
- - -
Unless regulators or telecommunications companies take steps to reduce
the risk of interference, Earth-observing satellites flying over areas
of the United States with 5G wireless coverage won't be able to detect
concentrations of water vapour in the atmosphere accurately.
Meteorologists in the United States and other countries rely on those
data to feed into their models; without that information, weather
forecasts worldwide are likely to suffer.
"This is a global problem," says Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA
are currently locked in a high-stakes negotiation with the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees US wireless networks.
NOAA and NASA have asked the FCC to work with them to protect
frequencies used for Earth observations from interference as 5G rolls
out. But the FCC auctioned off the first chunk of the 5G spectrum with
minimal protection. The sale ended on 17 April and reaped nearly US$2
billion...
- - -
The situation is akin to having a noisy neighbour next door, Gerth says.
If that person blasts music, a lot of the noise will probably bleed
through the wall into your apartment. But if you can persuade the person
to turn their music down, you'll be able to sleep more peacefully....
- - -
The FCC plans to begin its next 5G auction, which will be the country's
largest ever, in December. It will involve three more frequency bands --
some of which are used for satellite observations of precipitation, sea
ice and clouds.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01305-4
- - -
[See also]
*Mobile-phone expansion could disrupt key weather satellites*
The US government is considering a plan to allow wireless firms to share
radio frequencies used in weather forecasts.
https://www.nature.com/news/mobile-phone-expansion-could-disrupt-key-weather-satellites-1.20249
[Science summary, audio and text highlights]
*The Carbon Brief Interview: Prof Joanna Haigh *
29 April 2019
Prof Joanna Haigh is a professor of atmospheric physics and co-director
of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at
Imperial College London. Her research into solar influences on climate
has seen her awarded the Chree Medal and Prize of the Institute of
Physics in 2004 and the Adrian Gill Prize of the Royal Meteorological
Society in 2010. She was president of the Royal Meteorological Society
from 2012 to 2014. In 2013, she was awarded a CBE for services to
physics. Haigh will retire in May this year...
- - -
Haigh on her decision to study the climate: "To be honest, I didn't
really think of it as a career. When I was choosing A Levels I just
chose what I was good at."
On her awareness of climate change: "We were aware of it back in the
late 1970s. There was a lot of talk about the greenhouse effect."
On her early research: "My research was on stratospheric ozone, so
this is back in the late 1970s - before the discovery of the ozone
hole."
On studying the influence of the sun on the climate: "I'd got
interested in this whole issue about the sun's effect on climate. I
was really looking at it very much from a physics perspective, what
the sun can and can't do."
On being an IPCC lead author: "It's a lot of work because you have
to do a lot of writing, and you have to be very careful because
everything is reviewed, and re-reviewed, and re-reviewed again, and
again, and again."
On the format of IPCC assessment reports: "The IPCC has already
demonstrated that it can be more effective when it produced the 1.5C
report last year."
On expectations for the sixth IPCC assessment report: "From the
science perspective, I think there'll be quite a bit of work on
climate sensitivity, which remains a fairly controversial topic,
certainly something which has still got quite a wide range of
uncertainty on it."
On her career highlights: "In the Grantham Institute it's entirely
strategic and motivated by trying to get society to be low carbon
essentially."
On her career regrets: "It's a general perspective on my career is
that I should have been more assertive."
On advice for early-career scientists: "Don't just do things because
people tell you to do it, take a step back and say, 'Is this right
for me?'"
On coping with online harassment from climate sceptics: "I've had it
for many years. I think it got to a worst point after I did Radio 4
programme, The Life Scientific."
On not being on social media: "I think if I went on social media I'd
spend all day doing that and not focus on the day job."
On advice on how to deal with online harassment: "Just remember
these are very sad people that haven't got anything better in their
lives to do."
On unanswered climate science questions: "If we knew much more
precisely how the climate responded to increased greenhouse gases we
would be in a much stronger position to state that and push some
action on it."
On early CMIP6 results suggesting high climate sensitivity: "It
seems that the values of sensitivity that you get out are larger
when you have a more highly resolved model."
On meeting the Paris warming limits: "I think it's going to be very,
very, very difficult to get to 1.5C."
On the impact of Trump on climate policy: "Within the US you've got
the individual cities and states that are going for it more strongly
than ever, almost because they've been revitalised, invigorated by
Trump saying such stupid things."
On what mitigation might look like by 2050: "There'll be a lot more
wind and solar, maybe there'll be other exciting things, more local
smart grids and things for sharing out electricity once the
renewables have gained it."
On what impacts might look like by 2050: "That's the scary bit,
isn't it? That is the scary bit if you think of the coastal
inundation to start with and the millions of people who live by the
coast."
On negative emissions and solar geoengineering: "Solar
geoengineering, I'm afraid I think it's a fool's paradise, and I've
been saying the same thing for many years."
On fluctuating interest in solar geoengineering: "It's not that new,
but certainly it's got some proponents now who have ears in high
places and, indeed, big funding to investigate it further, so it's
not going to go away."
On a net-zero goal for the UK: "I think in all these things you have
to be pragmatic, you have to be ambitious, but you have to be
pragmatic, there's no point trying to force something to fit a curve
that it's not going to fit."
On the UK's influence on global climate policy: "We're not going to
look as a good international example on how to do it if we set up a
load of policies and then don't act on them."
On Brexit's potential impact on climate and energy policy: "If we
got a very extreme Brexit - and we're chucking out all the
environmental legislation and the extreme right-wing is just doing
what it likes and raping and pillaging the environment - it's very
bad news."
On Brexit's potential impact on scientific research: "I think we'd
be definitely losing out in terms of the expertise in the universities."
On whether Brexit already having an impact: "A number of academics -
young academics from Europe - have gone home."
On Brexit affecting research funding: "I do think that scientists by
nature, and particularly in climate science, are very collaborative,
and we just couldn't do things really, or not as well, without
talking to people across the world and working on projects together."
On Extinction Rebellion and the youth climate strikes: "Absolutely.
Yes. I think they're doing a great job, and I know they're
disrupting people's lives and it's a bit irritating if you want to
get somewhere and you can't, but they're making a point. And it's on
the front of the newspapers and it's on the first item on the BBC.
Good on you, kids.... No, I absolutely support them. Not in any
violent and extreme way, but just shouting about it, absolutely.
Causing people to sit up and take notice."
CB: Brilliant. Thank you very much for your time.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-interview-prof-joanna-haigh
[Some history of science, Antarctica]
*Can Antarctica remain a refuge for science and peace?*
PBS NewsHour
Published on Apr 24, 2019
Antarctica is virtually uninhabited by people. There are no roads, no
cities, no government. But thanks to a remarkable Cold War diplomatic
breakthrough, the last continent ever discovered remains a place devoted
almost exclusively to science. William Brangham reports on how humans
first found Antarctica, and how it proves that occasionally, even rivals
can become partners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbHHK9Ka8Vo
*This Day in Climate History - April 30, - from D.R. Tucker*
April 30, 2015: The Guardian reports:
"The Church of England has pulled its money out of two of the most
polluting fossil fuels as part of what it called its moral
responsibility to protect the world's poor from the impact of global
warming.
"In a move approved by the church's board on Thursday, it divested
12m Pounds from tar sands oil and thermal coal - the first time it
has ever imposed investment restrictions because of climate change."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/30/church-of-england-ends-investments-in-heavily-polluting-fossil-fuels?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it
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