[TheClimate.Vote] August 15, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/August 15, 2019/

[National Geographic reports]
*Lightning struck near the North Pole 48 times. It's not normal.*
A warmer Arctic in general provided the fuel for lightning-producing 
thunderheads to move north.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/lightning-struck-near-north-pole-why-strange/
- - -
**Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.*
As the frozen ground warms much faster than expected, it's reshaping the 
landscape--and releasing carbon gases that fuel global warming.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/arctic-permafrost-is-thawing-it-could-speed-up-climate-change-feature/



[Story of the Kings of disinformation]
*The 'Secret History' Of Koch Industries*
49 min (44.6MB)
Fresh Air
In his new book, 'Kochland,' journalist Christopher Leonard chronicles 
how Koch Industries and Charles and David Koch acquired huge businesses, 
limited their liability and created a political influence network to 
remake the Republican Party. Leonard says President Trump is a threat to 
that vision.
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9MzgxNDQ0OTA4&episode=OTQ3ZWRmOGUtZDcxYi00YTY3LWE4YjQtMGE1ODBmYmNkYWJj&hl=en&ep=6&at=1565746340942
- - -
[New book]
new book KochLand by Chris Leonard hit bookstores today. Seven year 
project by Leonard.
*"Kochland" Examines the Koch Brothers' Early, Crucial Role in 
Climate-Change Denial*
By Jane Mayer
If there is any lingering uncertainty that the Koch brothers are the 
primary sponsors of climate-change doubt in the United States, it ought 
to be put to rest by the publication of "Kochland: The Secret History of 
Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America," by the business 
reporter Christopher Leonard. This seven-hundred-and-four-page tome 
doesn't break much new political ground, but it shows the extraordinary 
behind-the-scenes influence that Charles and David Koch have exerted to 
cripple government action on climate change...
- - -
Scientists who worked for Koch Industries adopted the company line; 
Leonard quotes a former company scientist, who embraced the conspiracy 
theory that elites invented a global-warming "hoax" as a way to unite 
Americans against a common enemy after the Cold War. Leonard also quotes 
Philip Ellender, Koch Industries' top lobbyist, as claiming, in 2014, 
that the Earth had gotten cooler in the previous eighteen years. In 
fact, according to nasa, eighteen of the nineteen hottest years on 
record have occurred in the past two decades. Yet the Koch machine 
bought its way into Congress and turned climate-change denial into an 
unchallengeable Republican talking point. Meanwhile, after the 
cap-and-trade bill died, the planet continued heating, and the Kochs' 
net worth doubled...
- - -
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought
- - -
Fresh Air interview
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9MzgxNDQ0OTA4&episode=OTQ3ZWRmOGUtZDcxYi00YTY3LWE4YjQtMGE1ODBmYmNkYWJj&hl=en&ep=6&at=1565746340942
- - -
New project
www.KochDocs.org
launched last Thursday


[Oh, OK...]
*The Barrage of Bad News About Climate Change Is Triggering 
'Eco-Anxiety,' Psychologists Say*
By Isobel Whitcomb July 02, 2019
- - -
"[Ecoanxiety] is often hidden somewhat under the surface," Thomas 
Doherty, a clinical psychologist based in Portland, Oregon, told Live 
Science, "people aren't taught how to talk about it."

Still, over the past decade, eco-anxiety has gained increasing 
recognition from scientists and non-scientists alike. It's not listed in 
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, psychology's list of official 
diagnoses. That's partially because its symptoms are poorly defined, 
said David Austern, a clinical psychologist at NYU Langone Health. The 
American Psychological Association defines it as "a chronic fear of 
environmental doom." Eco-anxiety can range from day-to-day worry about 
the fate of the world, to Amabella's outright panic attack. Depending on 
whom you ask, it can even include the fear and panic attacks some 
natural disaster victims experience after the fact, Austern said. Its 
symptoms are largely the same as any other kind of anxiety; its only 
distinguishing factor is its cause, Austern said.
https://www.livescience.com/65843-climate-change-anxiety-is-real.html
- - -
*Climate Disruption and the Psychiatric Patient: Page 3 of 4*
[from a document for practicing mental health professionals]
While symptoms of climate-related despair overlap with those of 
depression, the distinction is worth making, since treatment may differ. 
DSM-5 provides some guidance in a footnote about the differences between 
grief and depression. Extrapolating from this to climate-related 
dysphoria generates several distinguishing features, which are 
summarized in the Table...
- - -
Affect in climate-related despair comprises feelings of emptiness, loss, 
and meaninglessness, while clinically depressed patients are depressed 
and anhedonic. Climate- related despair may be limited in scope: 
patients may still experience humor and joy about other subjects. 
Depression, on the other hand, tends to be persistent and pervasive. 
Individuals suffering from climate-related despair are preoccupied with 
climate issues and ideas of a diminished future, while in depression 
thoughts tend toward guilt and hopelessness about one's own life. 
Self-critical thoughts in climate-related despair usually involve 
failure to achieve climate-related goals (eg, passing a carbon tax 
bill). Self-esteem is generally preserved in climate-related despair, 
while depressed patients experience self-loathing and worthlessness.

There is no research to support pharmacological treatment of 
climate-related despair. When clinical depression is present, 
antidepressants are likely to be useful, since they can be effective for 
depression in other situations of danger and loss, such as palliative care.

We have no treatment manuals or clinical trials to guide psychotherapy 
of climate-related despair, but a growing body of evidence supports 
meaning-based psychotherapy in other tragic situations.9 Such therapies 
typically combine various techniques, including mindfulness and 
cognitive-behavioral therapy, to help patients accept difficult 
situations and unpleasant emotions and to engage in activities that 
promote their personal values. One such approach, Transformational 
Resilience, addresses the psychosocial effects of climate disruption at 
both individual and community levels.10

The challenges for therapists include hearing, containing, and working 
through patients' despondency while monitoring for depression, which 
might require additional treatment. The goal is to convert such despair 
to what has been called tragic, or active, hope--a positive orientation 
toward the future despite ongoing recognition of danger and loss.

A key element in such psychotherapy may be the clinician's role in 
containing the patient's dysphoria, anxiety, and trauma symptoms during 
the search for a path toward meaning and hope. Moving beyond grief to 
behavior that furthers personal values is likely to promote healing. 
Some patients may progress from acknowledging danger and loss directly 
to action without explicit grieving, but therapists are wise to keep in 
mind their possible need to express unacknowledged dysphoria. Some 
patients may benefit further when they go beyond individual energy 
conservation and personal risk reduction to engage with others--by 
discussing climate issues, participating in community groups, advocating 
for governmental action, and supporting businesses and organizations 
that take constructive measures.
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/climate-change/climate-disruption-and-psychiatric-patient/page/0/2


[Even Vogue has something to say]
*If Climate Change Is Causing You Anxiety or Even Grief, Experts Say You 
Are Not Alone*
"Fear feeds on itself. When we refuse to confront the thing we're afraid 
of, it seems even more scary and powerful--like the monster under the 
bed,"... At least we've started looking under the bed.
https://www.vogue.com/article/eco-anxiety-grief-mental-health-climate-change



[Not a very funny joke though - just call it the 6th extinction]
*The Anthropocene Is a Joke*
On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.
Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the 
Anthropocene. Or so we're told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history 
stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 
years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the 
atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this 
year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons 
began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.

These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals 
with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of 
years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to 
nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock 
dates--single-frame snapshots from deep time--can come with 50,000-year 
error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human 
history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, 
well, so is the Anthropocene.

So what to make of this new "epoch" of geological time? Do we deserve 
it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, 
profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we're 
currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, 
and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried 
deep in Earth's history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much 
CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we're currently overseeing the 
biggest disruption to the planet's nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. 
But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our 
handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages. If 100 million 
years can easily wear the Himalayas flat, what chance will San Francisco 
or New York have?

The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For 
those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment 
in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also 
serve to inflate humanity's legacy on an ever-churning planet that will 
quickly destroy--or conceal forever--even our most awesome creations...
- - -
The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we 
cause. The first wave of human-driven extinctions, and the largest hit 
to terrestrial megafauna since the extinction of the dinosaurs, began 
tens of thousands of years ago, as people began to spread out into new 
continents and islands, wiping out everything we tend to think of as 
"Ice Age" fauna--mammoths, mastodons, giant wombats, giant ground 
sloths, giant armadillos, woolly rhinoceroses, giant beavers, etc. This 
early, staggered, human-driven extinction event is as reasonable a 
starting date as any for the Anthropocene and one that has, in fact, 
been proposed. However, a few thousand years--or even a few tens of 
thousands of years--will be virtually indistinguishable in the rocks a 
hundred million years hence. That is, it would not be obvious to the 
geologists of the far future that these prehistoric human-caused 
extinctions were not simultaneous with our own modern-day depredations 
on the environment. The clear-cutting of the rain forest to build roads 
and palm-oil plantations, the plowing of the seabed on a continental 
scale, the rapid changes to the ocean and atmosphere's chemistry, and 
all the rest would appear simultaneous with the extinction of the woolly 
mammoth. To future geologists, the modern debate about whether the 
Anthropocene started 10 minutes ago or 10,000 years ago will be a bit 
like arguing with your spouse on your 50th wedding anniversary about 
which nanosecond you got married.
What humans are doing on the planet, then, unless we endure for millions 
to tens of millions of years, is extremely transient. In fact, there 
exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the 
sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, 
rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history--wild 
climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global 
ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes. They appear as 
strange lines in the rock, but no one calls them epochs. Some reach the 
arbitrary threshold of "mass extinction," but many have no name. 
Moreover, lasting only a few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands 
of years in duration, they're all considered events. In our marathon of 
Earth history, the epochs would occasionally pass by on the side of the 
road like towns, while these point-like "events" would present 
themselves to us only fleetingly, like pebbles underfoot.

Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth belched 5,000 gigatons of carbon 
(the equivalent of burning all our fossil-fuel reserves) over roughly 
5,000 years into the oceans and atmosphere, and the planet warmed 5 to 8 
degrees Celsius. The warming set off megafloods and storms, and wiped 
out coral reefs globally. It took the planet more than 150,000 years to 
cool off. But this "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum" is considered an 
event.

Thirty-eight million years before that, buried in the backwaters of the 
late Cretaceous, CO2 jumped as many as 2,400 parts per million, the 
planet warmed perhaps 8 degrees Celsius, the ocean lost half its oxygen 
(in our own time, the ocean has lost a--still alarming--2 percent of its 
oxygen), and seawater reached 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) 
over much of the globe. Extinction swept through the seas. In all, it 
took more than half a million years. This was Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic 
Event 2. Though it was no epoch, if you had been born 200,000 years into 
this event, you'd die roughly 300,000 years before it was over.

A similar catastrophe struck 28 million years before, in the early 
Cretaceous, and again 60 million years earlier still in the Jurassic. 
And, again, 201 million years ago. And halfway through the Triassic, 234 
million years ago. And 250 million, 252 million, and 262 million years 
ago. The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place 
in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major 
mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 
years--400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo 
sapiens. These are transformative, planet-changing paroxysms that last 
on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, reroute the trajectory 
of life, and leave little more than strange black lines in the rocks, 
buried within giant stacks of rocks that make up the broader epochs. But 
none of them constitute epochs in and of themselves. All were events, 
and all--at only a few tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of 
years--were blisteringly short.

The idea that we're in a new epoch is a profoundly optimistic one, for 
it implies that we'll persist into the future as an industrial 
technological civilization on something like a geological timescale. It 
implies that we are at the dawning of the astrobiologist David 
Grinspoon's "Sapiezoic Eon"--that expansive, creative, open-ended future 
in which human technology represents a new and enduring feature of the 
planet on par with the biological innovations of the Cambrian 
Explosion--rather than heading for the impending, terminal consummation 
of a major mass extinction, ending with all the conclusive destruction 
of apocalypses past.

Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, 
perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth 
history that we're living through as we do the many other disruptive 
spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could 
call it the "Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum." After all, though the 
mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a 
few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or 
perhaps we're living through the "Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion," 
as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era 
of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we're even at the dawning of the 
"Quaternary Anoxic Event" or, God forbid, the "End-Pleistocene Mass 
Extinction" if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But 
please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn't stand next to a T. rex being 
vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning 
of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to 
settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.

The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising 
eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our 
species' peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism--from the animal kingdom, 
from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This 
illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed. We haven't earned an 
Anthropocene epoch yet. If someday in the distant future we have, it 
will be an astounding testament to a species that, after a colicky, 
globe-threatening infancy, learned that it was not separate from Earth 
history, but a contiguous part of the systems that have kept this 
miraculous marble world habitable for billions of years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/




[Young scientists in the field - audio]
*Special Release: Deviations from the Norm*
AGU
Published on Aug 12, 2019
One of the most alluring parts of Earth and space science is that much 
of the key research takes place in the field, in some of the most 
incredible – and inhospitable – environments on the planet: on 
treacherous polar ice sheets, aboard sea tossed ships, at the mouths of 
active volcanoes, beneath turbid ocean waters, and atop the highest 
windswept peaks. Under these often less than ideal conditions, 
instruments often fail, the weather can become uncooperative, and the 
best made scientific plans are undone.

In this special episode of Third Pod from the Sun, five scientists share 
their stories of "deviations from the mean" – when their fieldwork went 
awry on the account of everything from uncooperative arctic mollusks, 
inaccessible food supplies buried in snows of Greenland, overfilled 
stoves and flammable tents, wayward Turkish donkeys, and inoperative 
rifles in polar bear country. Mishaps, however, can sometimes lead to 
some surprising and unexpected insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQMm5ICKvWQ


[Ten year old document not widely shared should be updated]
*Trauma & Journalism: A Practical Guide*
March 24, 2009 by Mark Brayne
This thirty-one-page booklet gives  guidance to journalists, editors, 
managers and other media professionals on working with traumatic 
material.  It offers tips on interviewing, highlights common mistakes 
made in trauma reporting and suggests what individuals and media teams 
can do to look after themselves while working in challenging situations.

Traumatic events and their consequences lie at heart of much news 
reporting.  Covering it effectively requires care, skill and specialist 
knowledge. This thirty-one-page booklet, compiled by Mark Brayne,  
former director of Dart Centre Europe, gives guidance to journalists, 
editors, managers and other media professionals on working with 
traumatic material.  It offers tips on interviewing, highlights common 
mistakes made in trauma reporting and suggests what individuals and 
media teams can do to look after themselves while working in challenging 
situations.
https://dartcenter.org/content/trauma-journalism-handbook
[Find the PDF document] 
https://dartcenter.org/sites/default/files/DCE_JournoTraumaHandbook.pdf


[Ross Gelbspan is a great journalist]
*This Day in Climate History - August 15, 2004 - from D.R. Tucker*
August 15, 2004: In the New York Times, Al Gore reviews Ross Gelbspan's 
"Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and 
Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert 
Disaster," the follow-up to his seminal 1997 book "The Heat Is On: The 
Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription."

He writes that it has become ''an excruciating experience to watch
the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of persistent and
pathological denial.'' He describes how mountain glaciers around the
world are melting, most of them rapidly. And he cites early examples
of environmental refugees like those created in recent weeks in
Bangladesh, vulnerable to catastrophic flooding as sea levels rise...
Gelbspan has become a different kind of reporter, one who recalls
the great reforming journalists of the first decade of the 20th
century -- Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and others
-- who not only reported on political corruption and corporate
excesses but connected them to larger destructive patterns that had
developed in the economy and politics of their time. They agitated
for policy reforms, many of which were enacted into statutes when
they became part of the progressive movement's agenda: antitrust
laws, the Food and Drug Administration, railroad regulation, wage
and hour laws, workmen's compensation and child labor laws, to name
a few.
- - -
It is in that spirit that Gelbspan pursues solutions for climate
change that can ''also begin to reverse some very discouraging and
destructive political and economic dynamics as well.''

Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the
American news media's coverage of global warming for the past two
decades. Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States
is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to
recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the
news coverage is ''a large reason for that failure.''...
- - -
  Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have
been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign
organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for
example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was
reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous
story had ''triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global
Climate Coalition'' -- a fossil fuel industry lobbying group -- ''to
our top executives at the network.''

He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like
increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and
reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation -- and much
less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Politicians-Journalists-Crisis--And/dp/0465027628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936832&sr=8-1&keywords=boiling+point+ross+gelbspan
http://www.amazon.com/The-Heat-Is-On-Prescription/dp/0738200255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936855&sr=8-1&keywords=the+heat+is+on+ross+gelbspan
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/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.