[TheClimate.Vote] December 3, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Dec 3 08:20:27 EST 2019

/*December 3, 2019*/

[COP25 news service]
*The Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB)* is a balanced, timely and 
independent reporting service on United Nations environment and 
development negotiations...
The Earth Negotiations Bulletin provides daily coverage at selected UN 
environment and development negotiations. We distribute our daily 
1900-word reports in hard copy at meeting venues, on our website 
(enb.iisd.org), by email, Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/IISDRS) and 
Twitter (@IISDRS). At the conclusion of each meeting, the Earth 
Negotiations Bulletin publishes a 10,000-30,000-word summary and 
analysis of the meeting.The Bulletin reaches a wide range of people 
interested in environment and development negotiations.
http://enb.iisd.org/

[15 min video report from the Guardian]
*Inside the mission to create an army of Greta Thunbergs*
Dec 2, 2019
The Guardian
Melanie Harwood is an education entrepreneur and self-styled 
'disruptor', who has partnered with the United Nations to educate 
teachers about climate change. The Guardian's Richard Sprenger joined 
her on a trip to Dubai, to witness her unorthodox approach first hand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_owNfcUrkY

[BBC News]
*Climate change: Study underpins key idea in Antarctic ice loss*
It's long been suspected but scientists can now show conclusively that 
thinning in the ring of floating ice around Antarctica is driving mass 
loss from the interior of the continent.

A new study finds the diminishing thickness of ice shelves is matched 
almost exactly by an acceleration in the glaciers feeding in behind them.

What's more, the linkage is immediate.

It means we can't rely on a lag in the system to delay the rise in 
sea-levels as shelves melt in a warmer world.

The glaciers will speed up in tandem, dumping their mass in the ocean.

"The response is essentially instantaneous," said Prof Hilmar 
Gudmundsson from Northumbria University, UK.

"If you thin the ice shelves today, the increase in flow of the ice 
upstream will increase today - not tomorrow, not in 10 or 100 years from 
now; it will happen immediately," he told BBC News...
[also audio report]
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50625396

[15 min video talk]
*Climate Restoration Vital to Restore a Healthy Climate: 3 of 3*
Dec 2, 2019
Paul Beckwith
This is my third video of three on climate restoration, filmed just 
before I left Ottawa for COP25 in Madrid. I have had a bad cold or virus 
for the last few days that has tapped my energy; hopefully it wasn't the 
Spanish Influenza although it sure felt like that to me the last few 
days. I am on the mend (not 100% yet) and will start uploading videos on 
the climate conference, hopefully starting tomorrow. Thanks again for 
following my videos and supporting my efforts...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy-FSMfzV78

- - -

[more information links]
https://www.ice911.org/
https://www.businessclimateleaders.org/climate-restoration
https://foundationforclimaterestoration.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/20190916b_f4cr4_white-paper.pdf
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/09/17/1916736/0/en/New-Coalition-Launches-at-First-Annual-Global-Climate-Restoration-Forum-with-Call-for-Global-Action-to-Restore-Our-Climate-by-2050.html

[Solar power for your Solar Tesla]
*The Truth About Tesla Solar Roof*
Oct 28, 2019
FrontSeatGamer
Version 3 of Tesla's Solar Roof is about to hit the market, but for the 
first time the solar glass shingles will be mass produced by the 
Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo, New York. What new changes have been made 
since the first version of the Solar Roof?

Elon Musk first announced Solar Roof in 2016 - a strengthened glass roof 
with built-in solar panels that would last longer than the house it was 
sheltering. However due to challenges with cost, materials, and 
installation, the solar roof was never released to the public in mass, 
just in limited quantities.

V3 aims to improve on efficiency and installation time of the Solarglass 
Roof to make it competitive with a shingle-based roof plus solar 
retrofit. Tesla aims to begin producing the new Solarglass roof at 1000 
units per week.  Will Tesla be able to achieve this goal and bring solar 
energy to the wide public?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_P7JIDWYTY

[Where diaspora?]
*Climate refugees: why we can't yet predict where millions of displaced 
people will go*
November 28, 2019 4.41am EST
In the near future, global warming is expected to create millions of 
climate refugees, and individuals and organisations are already 
searching for ways to help them. Some ideas are obvious, such as 
improving conditions in refugee camps.

But there are also more high-tech projects such as using algorithms to 
forecast where displaced people will travel to. Such forecasts are 
crucial. They can help support organisations prepare in the right 
places, they can evaluate current policy (by assessing a counterfactual 
"what if" scenario) and they can also help predict refugee populations 
in remote or dangerous areas where there is little empirical data.

So we can predict where climate refugees will go, right?

No. Despite bold and excitable claims that refugee forecasting is 
largely resolved, we are not convinced. As computer scientists who work 
on this exact problem, such claims seem like a painful example of 
running before we can walk.

Almost four years ago, we started to research how people fled from armed 
conflicts. Many people were displaced due to the Arab Spring and the 
Syrian War, but little work had been done to predict where they could 
end up.
With our colleague David Bell, we created a tool that could help, and 
published our work in Nature Scientific Reports. Our tool represents 
every person as an independent agent, and then uses simple 
rules-of-thumb derived from scientific insights - for instance "people 
tend to avoid travelling through mountains when it is raining" - to 
determine when they will move next, and to where.

This is different from "machine learning" approaches, which use 
historical data to "train" the algorithm to generate rules and thus 
predictions. So, for example, machine learning might be given this sort 
of data: "the number of people that arrived in a refugee camp close to a 
mountainous area in a conflict that occurred perhaps many years ago, or 
more recently but in a different country." The main issue is that 
historical data used for machine learning is always quantitative, and 
never is about the conflict that the simulation is directly developed for.
To see how our method worked in practice, we tested our tool against 
UNHCR data from three recent conflicts in Burundi, the Central African 
Republic and Mali. Our tool correctly predicted where more than 75% of 
the refugees would go...
- - -
We found there was indeed a link - closing the Uganda border in our 
model causes 40% fewer "agents" to arrive in camps after 300 days, and 
that effect lingers even after we reopened the border on day 301. Our 
tool correctly predicted where 75% of the refugees would actually go in 
real life.

But doing a correct "retrodiction" in these historical cases does not 
mean that you can do a forecast. Forecasting where people will go is 
much harder than predicting a historical situation, for three reasons.
- - -
So it pays to be suspicious of the idea that refugee forecasting is 
already solved, especially if linked to claims that the "next frontier" 
for computer scientists is in (controversially) extracting data from 
vulnerable refugees who are often unaware of the privacy and security 
risks. Given how hard it remains to predict where the millions of 
climate refugees will go, the "next frontier" is still the last frontier.
https://theconversation.com/climate-refugees-why-we-cant-yet-predict-where-millions-of-displaced-people-will-go-119414

- - -

[Source material]
*A generalized simulation development approach for predicting refugee 
destinations*
Diana Suleimenova, David Bell & Derek Groen
Scientific Reports volume 7, Article number: 13377
Abstract
In recent years, global forced displacement has reached record levels, 
with 22.5 million refugees worldwide. Forecasting refugee movements is 
important, as accurate predictions can help save refugee lives by 
allowing governments and NGOs to conduct a better informed allocation of 
humanitarian resources. Here, we propose a generalized simulation 
development approach to predict the destinations of refugee movements in 
conflict regions. In this approach, we synthesize data from UNHCR, ACLED 
and Bing Maps to construct agent-based simulations of refugee movements. 
We apply our approach to develop, run and validate refugee movement 
simulations set in three major African conflicts, estimating the 
distribution of incoming refugees across destination camps, given the 
expected total number of refugees in the conflict. Our simulations 
consistently predict more than 75% of the refugee destinations correctly 
after the first 12 days, and consistently outperform alternative naive 
forecasting techniques. Using our approach, we are also able to 
reproduce key trends in refugee arrival rates found in the UNHCR data.

Introduction
Global forced displacement has reached record levels. In 2017, 65.6 
million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, a number which 
includes 22.5 million refugees. Common causes of forced migration 
include push and pull characteristics, such as the present social, 
political, and economic conditions of migrants' origin and potential 
destination, as well as intervening characteristics between these two 
locations. Migration is a complex phenomenon and the push-pull 
characteristics can be insufficient to explain forced migration. Several 
groups identified sets of other causal factors that lead to forced 
displacement, including conflicts, ethnic or religious differences, and 
existential obstacles such as severe ecological decline.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13828-9

[The Guardian does the math]
*Scientist's theory of climate's Titanic moment the 'tip of a 
mathematical iceberg'*
Formula for climate emergency shows if 'reaction time is longer than 
intervention time left' then 'we have lost control'
Graham Readfearn - 1 Dec 2019
When is an emergency really an emergency?

If you're the captain of the Titanic, approaching a giant iceberg with 
the potential to sink your ship becomes an emergency only when you 
realise you might not have enough time to steer a safe course.

And so it is, says Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, when it comes to the 
climate emergency.

Knowing how long societies have to react to pull the brake on the 
Earth's climate and then how long it will take for the ship to slow down 
is the difference between a climate emergency and a manageable problem.

Rather than being something abstract and open to interpretation, 
Schellnhuber says the climate emergency is something with clear and 
calculable risks that you could put into a formula. And so he wrote one.

Emergency = R x U = p x D x /t/ / T

In a comment article in the journal Nature, Schellnhuber and colleagues 
explained that to understand the climate emergency we needed to quantify 
the relationship between risk (R) and urgency (U).

Borrowing from the insurance industry, the scientists define risk (R) as 
the probability of something happening (p) multiplied by damage (D).

For example, how likely is it that sea levels will rise by a metre and 
how much damage will that cause.

Urgency (U) is the time it takes you to react to an issue (/t/) "divided 
by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T)", they wrote.

Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in 
Germany, tells Guardian Australia the work on the formula was just the 
"tip of a mathematical iceberg" in defining the climate emergency.

"It can be illustrated by the Titanic disaster, but it applies to many 
severe risks where you can calculate the do-nothing/business-as-usual 
probability of a highly damaging event," he says. "Yet there are options 
to avoid the disaster.

"In other words, this a control problem."

There is a time lag between the rapid cuts to greenhouse gases and the 
climate system reacting. Knowing if you have enough time tells you if 
you're in an emergency or not.

Schellnhuber used "standard risk analysis and control theory" to come up 
with the formula, and he was already putting numbers to it.

"As a matter of fact, the intervention time left for limiting global 
warming to less than 2C is about 30 [years] at best. The reaction time - 
time needed for full global decarbonisation - is at least 20 [years]."

As the scientists write in Nature, if the "reaction time is longer than 
the intervention time left" then "we have lost control".

Schellnhuber says: "Beyond that critical point, only some sort of 
adaptation option is left, such as moving the Titanic passengers into 
rescue boats (if available)."

Earlier this month, Oxford Dictionaries announced "climate emergency" as 
the word of the year, defining it as "a situation in which urgent action 
is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially 
irreversible environmental damage resulting from it".
One website tracking climate emergency declarations says 1,195 
jurisdictions in 25 countries, representing 454 million people, have 
already voted on the emergency.

This week the European parliament joined them, as did Ballina shire 
council in northern New South Wales, the 76th local government authority 
in Australia to make the declaration.

Prof Will Steffen, of the Australian National University and the 
Stockholm Resilience Centre, and a co-author of the article, says: 
"Emergency can mean many things to many people. But there are some hard 
numbers behind why so many people are saying we are in a climate emergency.

"This formula sharpens our thinking. So we have 30 years to decarbonise 
and to stabilise our pressure on the climate system."

In the Nature article, the scientists highlight nine "tipping points" 
that, if crossed, become almost impossible to stop. At least five are 
already "active".

Some of them, like melting permafrost or forest degradation, can start 
to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, making the job of 
keeping global temperatures down even harder.

"There are a range of these intervention times left," Steffen says. "How 
long do we have before [the Greenland ice sheet] goes? Maybe we have 20 
to 25 years and then we might be committed to losing Greenland.

"But the time we have left to intervene to stabilise coral reefs, for 
example, is a lot less than 30 years.

"Our reaction time has to be fast and to decarbonise by 2050 we have to 
really move now. That's the point of [Schellnhuber's] maths.

"To err on the side of danger is a stupid thing to do."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/01/scientists-theory-of-climates-titanic-moment-the-tip-of-a-mathematical-iceberg?CMP=share_btn_link

*This Day in Climate History - December 3, 2009 - from D.R. Tucker*
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann calls out the hosts of the Fox News Channel 
program "Fox and Friends" for selectively editing a segment of Comedy 
Central's "The Daily Show" to imply that host Jon Stewart rejected the 
evidence of human-caused climate change.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/olbermann-names-fox-frien_n_380473

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