[TheClimate.Vote] August 9, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Aug 9 10:08:03 EDT 2019
/August 9, 2019/
*IPCC report: The world gets hungrier, but the land is exhausted - from
us and from climate change*
The UN's scientific body on climate change highlights in a new report
the strong connection between land use and climate change. A radical
change in the food system is key to people's livelihoods and health
worldwide.
The earth's population is growing and, with it, consumption. This trend
will only increase in the near future, but the planet's resources are
limited, and land isn't an exception.
The stark connection between how land is used and its effect on climate
change is the focus of thelatest report by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), published on August 8. At the center of the
report is how, in a sort of vicious circle, unhealthy soils and forests
exacerbate climate change, while climate change, in turn, negatively
impacts the forests and soils' health...
https://www.dw.com/en/ipcc-report-the-world-gets-hungrier-but-the-land-is-exhausted-from-us-and-from-climate-change/a-49783271
- - -
[IPCC report - Summary for Policymakers]
*Climate Change and Land*
An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land
degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and
greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/4.-SPM_Approved_Microsite_FINAL.pdf
[Candidate Cory Booker]
*With FDR's New Deal as Blueprint, Booker Releases Climate Change Bill
Focused on Investing in Farm Conservation Programs, Reforestation, and
Wetlands Restoration*
Proposal calls for funding voluntary farm stewardship on >100 million
acres, planting >15 billion trees, restoring >2 million acres of coastal
wetlands
https://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=973
[History of climate ethics - about Frank Luntz - opinions explain why]
*Reformed Climate Deniers Don't Deserve Redemption*
Democrats are seeking advice from people who once opposed action on
global warming. They should be seeking accountability.
By Dave Levitan - August 8, 2019
Last month, Republican pollster and messaging guru Frank Luntz sat down
in front of a small committee of Senate Democrats and told a personal
story about how wildfire almost consumed his California home. "The
courageous firefighters of Los Angeles, they saved my home," he said.
"But others aren't so lucky. Rising sea levels, melting ice caps,
tornadoes, and hurricanes more ferocious than ever. It is happening."The
statement isn't particularly controversial until you consider the
source. Luntz is a former influential climate change denier who authored
the now-infamous 2002 memo advising the Republican Party to sow
confusion about global warming. Republicans should "continue to make the
lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate," Luntz
wrote, or else the public might start supporting aggressive clean energy
legislation. The party followed Luntz's advice faithfully and with
remarkable success for the next two decades.
But at last month's hearing--titled "The Right Thing To Do:
Conservatives for Climate Action"--Luntz said the public should move on.
"That was a lifetime ago," he said. "I've changed." And now, instead of
helping Republicans come up with messaging to avoid climate policy,
Luntz said he wants to help Democrats come up with effective messaging
to enact it. "But in return, you have to put policies ahead of
politics," Luntz said. "You have to make the commitment not to make it
partisan."
There will undoubtedly be more of these turns to the light in the
future--pleas for forgiveness from Republicans and others who once
denied the crisis unfolding before their eyes. The Arctic is on fire,
storms are churning menacingly in the Atlantic, heat records are falling
like dominos. Denial, though never particularly tenable, becomes more of
a high-wire act every day.
[Read "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America," memo
written in 2002 by Republican political consultant Frank Luntz. A
photocopy of the Luntz memo posted in 2007 by SourceWatch
https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/4/45/LuntzResearch.Memo.pdf]
Most converts should feel welcome in the political discussion about
climate change; it's a virtue to admit fault, after all. But those like
Luntz--who actively furthered the climate crisis and continues to refuse
to admit it--should be shunned. They have no practical use in the
extremely urgent effort to solve global warming. They helped to break
the world, and thus can't be trusted to help fix it.
Luntz is not the first agent of climate denial to admit he was in the
wrong. Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a
libertarian-leaning think tank, has said that he was "a pretty good
warrior" for climate skeptics and deniers in the 1990s. But by the early
2000s he started to come around, and eventually grew to understand that
he had been misled. Jim Bridenstine, while a GOP member of Congress from
Oklahoma, once spouted some of the most tired of denier talking points
on the floor of the House of Representatives: He claimed global
temperatures had stopped rising in the early 2000s, that "sun output and
ocean cycles" were responsible for any changes, and talked about the
Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age as if they blew the lid off a
conspiracy. After Bridenstine's contentious confirmation last year as
the administrator of NASA, though, he has publicly accepted the
scientific consensus.
Richard Muller, a former physicist at Berkeley (now professor emeritus),
also once had serious doubts about what climate science was really
telling us. He even set up a research organization called Berkeley Earth
to essentially check the rest of the scientific community's work. But
through that work, he eventually concluded that human-caused warming was
real. "Call me a converted skeptic," he wrote in a 2012 New York Times
op-ed.
Democratic Senator Brian Schatz thinks converts like these could help
solve the climate crisis--which is why he invited Luntz to last month's
hearing. "There's not any one person that is going to change the minds
of Republican politicians," he told me in a phone call. "The object of
the game is to solve climate change, not to punish those who have gotten
us to this point." It's an understandable position. Schatz wants to
bring as many voices to the conversation as possible, in the hopes that
it might break the dam of Republican resistance and ease our collective
path forward.
But Luntz's messaging expertise is for public consumption, and the
relevant Republican resistance at this point is from politicians. The
public, for the most part, has come around on the dangerous reality of
climate change; Gallup polling from earlier this year found that for the
first time, more than half the country qualifies as "concerned
believers"--meaning they think climate change is a big, worrisome
problem. At the same time, what Gallup calls the "mixed middle" has
diminished. Those are the people who hold conflicting sets of views,
such as that warming is a problem but that humans aren't responsible, or
that humans are responsible but we don't need to do much to fix it.
But the "cool skeptics"--a.k.a., the deniers--have held steady, at or
just below 20 percent of the country, for the last half decade. There is
thus little chance of convincing them any time soon--and even less
reason to try. The most recent of the UN climate reports said humanity
has a bit more than a decade to enact aggressive carbon reduction
policies before irreversible catastrophic impacts begin.
Even if Republicans' come-to-Jesus moments swayed public opinion, they
would have to include an honest reckoning of the harm caused. Solving
climate change isn't only about transitioning away from fossil fuels;
that transition needs to be a fair and just one for everyone,
particularly those that have been, or will be, harmed by climate
change's effects. Embracing public figures who helped cause those harms,
without any gestures toward accountability, risks alienating those who
have long supported climate action.
Related
Fear and Loathing of the Green New DealWhat the backlash to the
emergency legislation reveals about the age-old pathologies of the right
Luntz has given no indication that he's up for such a reckoning. Indeed,
as he lamented that climate change had become a "partisan issue" and
urged Democrats to "put policies ahead of politics" (are they not?),
Luntz failed to acknowledge his own role in putting the lives of
millions of people at risk of death and disease. Luntz, in other words,
wants Democrats to forget about how he enabled Republicans to delay any
meaningful action on the issue until this very day. And he wants
Democrats to now take his advice on how to fix the problem he won't
admit he helped cause. He's doing this at the same time that he's
cozying up to the Trump administration through his longtime friend,
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
Thanks, but no thanks. Luntz's messaging ideas aren't exactly
groundbreaking anyway. He suggests avoiding the word "sustainability" in
favor of words like "cleaner" and "healthier," and talking about the
benefits of climate action instead of the consequences of inaction. It's
perhaps useful advice, but the best case to do something about climate
change is being made, unsurprisingly, by the climate itself. As the
effects continue to multiply, almost half the country now thinks global
warming will "pose a serious threat in their lifetime."
Democrats may see Luntz's expert messaging advice as valuable, but by
allowing him to testify in a Senate hearing without proper atonement,
they send their own message: that former agents of denial won't be held
accountable for the chaos they sowed. Surely, Luntz won't be the last
prominent denier to seek such validation. Hopefully, he'll be the last
to receive it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154649/reformed-climate-deniers-dont-deserve-redemption
- - -
[Luntz did all this in 2003]
*Memo exposes Bush's new green strategy *
Oliver Burkeman in Washington
"The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There
is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science," Mr Luntz
writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a
Washington-based campaigning organisation.
"Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within
the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the
scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will
change accordingly.
"Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific
certainty a primary issue in the debate."
The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate
change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as
"conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people"
think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty
bizarre behaviour... that turns off many voters".
Words such as "common sense" should be used, with pro-business arguments
avoided wherever possible.
The environment, the memo says, "is probably the single issue on which
Republicans in general - and President Bush in particular - are most
vulnerable".
A Republican source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said party
strategists agreed with Mr Luntz's conclusion that "many Americans
believe Republicans do not care about the environment".
The popular image is that they are "in the pockets of corporate fat cats
who rub their hands together and chuckle manically [sic] as they plot to
pollute America for fun and profit", Mr Luntz adds.
The phrase "global warming" appeared frequently in President Bush's
speeches in 2001, but decreased to almost nothing during 2002, when the
memo was produced.
Environmentalists have accused the party and oil companies of helping to
promulgate the view that serious doubt remains about the effects of
global warming.
- - -
Mr Luntz urges Republicans to "emphasise the importance of 'acting only
with all the facts in hand'", in line with the White House position that
mandatory restrictions on emissions, as required by the Kyoto protocol,
should not be countenanced until further research is undertaken.
The memo singles out as a major strategic failure the incoming Bush
administration's response to Bill Clinton's last-minute executive order
reducing the permitted level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts
per billion to 10 parts per billion.
The new administration put the plan on hold, prompting "the biggest
public relations misfire of President Bush's first year in office", Mr
Luntz writes. The perception was that Mr Bush "was actively putting in
more arsenic in the water".
"A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more
emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth," Mr Luntz
notes in the memo.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange
- -
[Read a photocopy of the Luntz memo posted in 2007 by SourceWatch
https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/4/45/LuntzResearch.Memo.pdf]
- - -
[From The Atlantic 2014]
*The Agony of Frank Luntz*
Molly Ball - Jan, 2014
What does it mean when America's top political wordsmith loses faith in
our ability to be persuaded?
- - -
Frank Luntz, the master political manipulator, a man who has always
evinced a cheery certainty about who's right and who's winning and how
it all works, is a mess.
And yet, over the hour and a half I spend talking with him--the first
time he has spoken publicly about his current state of mind--it's hard
to grasp what the crisis is about. Luntz hasn't renounced his
conservative worldview. His belief in unfettered capitalism and
individual self-reliance appears stronger than ever. He hasn't become
disillusioned with his very profitable career or his nomadic, solitary
lifestyle. His complaints--that America is too divided, President Obama
too partisan, and the country in the grip of an entitlement mentality
that is out of control--seem pretty run-of-the-mill. But his anguish is
too deeply felt not to be real. Frank Luntz is having some kind of
crisis. I just can't quite get my head around it...
- - -
"I'm not good enough," Luntz says. "And I hate that. I have come to the
extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I'm
pretty good. But not good enough." The old Frank Luntz was sure he could
invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal
responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears
that is no longer the case, and it's driving him crazy...
- - -
Luntz's work has always been predicated on a sort of populism--the idea
that politicians must figure out what voters want to hear, and speak to
them in language that comports with it. He proudly claims that his
famous catchphrases, like branding healthcare reform a "government
takeover" in 2010, are not his coinages but the organic product of his
focus groups. The disheveled appearance, the sardonic wit, all add up to
a sort of tilting against the establishment, an insistence that it
listen to the Real People.
But what if the Real People are wrong? That is the possibility Luntz now
grapples with. What if the things people want to hear from their leaders
are ideas that would lead the country down a dangerous road?...[more]
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-agony-of-frank-luntz/282766/
[Drill Trumpy Drill]
Emily Holden in Washington
*Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does
in a year*
US has offered close to 378m acres of public lands and waters for oil
and gas leasing since Trump took office through April 2019
Donald Trump's leases of public lands and waters for oil and gas
drilling could lead to the production of more climate-warming pollution
than the entire European Union contributes in a year, according to a new
report.
The Wilderness Society estimates heat-trapping emissions from extracting
and burning those fossil fuels could range between 854m and 4.7bn metric
tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, depending on how much development
companies pursue.
The 28 nations in the European Union produced about 4bn metric tons of
CO2 equivalent in 2014, the last year reported.
"These leasing decisions have significant and long-term ramifications
for our climate and our ability to stave off the worst impacts of global
warming," the group said.
"Emissions from public lands are expected to fall well short of the
reductions target suggested by leading climate science, and this
administration's leasing decisions are making that problem much worse."
- - -
Republicans on the subcommittee holding the House hearing called a
witness from the conservative Heritage Foundation to argue that
"negligible climate benefits" would come from banning oil and gas
production on federal lands.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/16/trump-drilling-leases-pollution-eu-climate-change
[New weather term: Fujiwhara Effect]
When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to
each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center. If
one hurricane is a lot stronger than the other, the smaller one will
orbit it and eventually come crashing into its vortex to be absorbed.
Two storms closer in strength can gravitate towards each other until
they reach a common point and merge, or merely spin each other around
for a while before shooting off on their own paths. But often, the
effect is additive when hurricanes come together -- we usually end up
with one massive storm instead of two smaller ones.
https://www.weather.gov/news/fujiwhara-effect
- -
*Twin Typhoons Approach East Asia With Terrifying Force*
Super Typhoon Lekima is the scary one here, but both storms began
forming earlier this week in the Western Pacific Ocean. By Tuesday,
Lekima was gaining strength and evolved into the equivalent of a
Category 2 hurricane with winds reaching 100 miles an hour. Now, the
storm's winds are charged up to at least 150 miles per hour, according
to the Weather Channel.
With both Lekima and Typhoon Krosa, now with the power of a Category 3
hurricane, raging alongside each other, the season appears to be
catching up to its usual force, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with
the Weather Company, in an email to Earther...
https://earther.gizmodo.com/twin-typhoons-approach-east-asia-with-terrifying-force-1837068811
[BBC irony]
*Australia weather: Fierce winds batter southern states and snap pier*
Destructive winds have battered Australia's south-eastern states,
causing road accidents, power cuts and snapping the end off a popular pier.
Dozens of flights from airports in Sydney and Melbourne were also
cancelled on Friday as winds gusted up to 120km/h (75mph) in some areas.
Authorities said part of the Frankston Pier in Melbourne had broken off
as gales whipped up rough seas.
Meteorologists called it the region's coldest weather system of the year.
"The last time south-eastern Australia saw a system of this intensity
was in 2014," a spokesman from the Bureau of Meteorology told the BBC.
The bureau said the icy conditions made it feel like the temperature was
below 0C in areas of Victoria, the worst-affected state on Friday.
In the Melbourne suburb of Frankston, locals shared images online of the
section of pier drifting in Port Phillip Bay before washing up on the
beach...
- - -
The severe weather on Friday came as thousands of university students
across the country planned to skip lectures to hold protests against
inaction on climate change, inspired by similar actions involving school
students.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49288103
[Boston as an urban model for adaptation]
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/boston-adapting-rising-sea-level-coastal-flooding
Explorer
http://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=7a599ab2ebad43d68adabc9a9ebea0e6&extent=-71.1583,42.2897,-70.9309,42.4060
*This Day in Climate History - August 9, 2010 - from D.R. Tucker*
August 9, 2010: NASA scientist Jay Zwally appears on MSNBC's "Countdown
with Keith Olbermann" to discuss Greenland's ice melt and the political
dysfunction that has prevented legislative action on climate change in
the US.
http://youtu.be/5vmupjRkgmU
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