[TheClimate.Vote] December18 , 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 18, 2019*/

[news release - Friends of the Earth]
*Democrats fail to fight for livable climate in year-end bills*
December 17, 2019
WASHINGTON - Congressional negotiators released a spending package to 
fund the government for the coming year. The proposal promotes dangerous 
fossil fuel investments in Europe, leaves intact numerous 
anti-environment legacy riders and funds Trump's racist border wall.

In addition, a separate tax extenders package released in the early 
hours of the morning included a biodiesel credit sought by Senator Chuck 
Grassley (R-Iowa) but excluded incentives for solar, storage and 
electric vehicles.

In response, Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, issued the 
following statement:

    This will be remembered as the week House leadership gave away the
    store for a corporate trade deal but balked at fighting for the
    climate. It's almost 2020 and Democrats are still passing dangerous
    and short-sighted year-end deals that promote dirty fossil fuels and
    harm our environment.

    Instead of negotiating for a livable climate, House leadership
    traded away their leverage and failed to secure any incentives for
    solar, energy storage and electric vehicles. It's shameful that the
    tax extenders package includes credits for dirty biodiesel while
    actual clean, alternative energies got next to nothing. This is a
    monumental failure of leadership. We call upon progressives to
    oppose this deal.

Contact: Erin Jensen, ejensen at foe.org
https://foe.org/news/democrats-fail-fight-livable-climate-year-end-bills/


[Follow the money]
*Investment Bankers Are Now Waging the War on Coal*
As UN climate negotiations faltered, bankers on Wall Street brought good 
news for the climate. What's even happening?
Robinson Meyer
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/goldman-sachs-fighting-climate-change-un/603760/



[she gets it -- eloquent and very well-informed - and 82 years]
*Jane Fonda speaks at The National Press Club*
Archive - streamed live Dec 17, 2019
National Press Club Live
Actor and activist Jane Fonda spoke at a National Press Club Headliners 
luncheon Dec. 17, 2019 on her movement to push for political action on 
climate change.
https://youtu.be/cjcD9C3yO7U full video
https://youtu.be/cjcD9C3yO7U?t=316 starts with Jane Fonda



[and he advertises lots]
*Mike Bloomberg has a plan to clean up electricity and it doesn't need 
Congress*
Bloomberg would supercharge the EPA to get rid of coal and block new 
natural gas.
By David Roberts - Dec 17, 2019
When it comes to climate change, however, Bloomberg's record is almost 
entirely positive. He was instrumental in standing up and funding the 
Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, which has been one of the most 
ruthlessly effective activist campaigns of my lifetime. Recently, the 
Associated Press, in a "fact check," rebutted the notion that Bloomberg 
is single-handedly responsible for all recent coal-plant closures -- and 
it's true, market forces helped, as did government policy. But everyone 
who has paid attention to the power sector knows that the kind of 
activist pressure he has supported frequently makes the difference at 
the margin...
- -
Which brings us to the Bloomberg presidential campaign's first policy 
proposal on climate change, released on Friday. It is worth noting for 
just this reason: It explicitly targets natural gas...
- - -
Bloomberg would supercharge the EPA to get rid of coal and block new 
natural gas...
- - -
*All executive actions will face court challenge*
Of course any new rules from a Bloomberg EPA would immediately face 
legal challenge, many of them would end up in the Supreme Court, and the 
Supreme Court shows every sign of being hostile to environmental and 
climate change rules. There is a decent chance a Roberts Court would 
kill some or all of any activist EPA's efforts.

However, there are some countervailing considerations.

First, what the hell else is a president going to do? While Congress 
mucks around, or just as likely does nothing, a president has to act on 
the priorities that got him or her elected. Using the powers of the 
presidency entails court review. The rules can be thoughtful and legally 
solid, but there's ultimately not much the president can do if federal 
or Supreme Court judges choose to act as a partisan enforcers. (There's 
no word on whether Bloomberg would support more radical measures like 
packing the Supreme Court or the federal courts.)
Second, if there's one thing to learn from Obama's experience, it's that 
deliberate, careful sequencing gets you nowhere. Obama didn't pull the 
trigger on EPA carbon regulations until it was beyond clear that there 
would be no climate change legislation. Many carbon-related rules didn't 
have time to go into effect or be upheld in court. In retrospect, Obama 
should have done what Trump has done: blitzed. Do everything at once. 
Overwhelm the capacity of opponents to focus.
- - -
*What to take away from Bloomberg's plan*
I don't personally think much of the idea of Bloomberg as president and 
I don't think he has much of a shot anyway -- he failed to qualify for 
the next debates -- but on climate policy, perhaps uniquely among policy 
issues (save gun control), it is worth listening to what he proposes. He 
is an unconventional face for an environmental campaign and has, for 
better or worse, brought attention and credibility to the fight against 
fossil fuels among audiences environmentalists can't always reach.

Having followed politics for years, I am intensely skeptical of claims 
that executive experience is any special preparation for the presidency. 
(Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump promised to "run the government 
like a business," so ...) But Bloomberg's executive experience really 
does seem to have helped the Beyond Coal campaign. As its leaders were 
the first to say, Bloomberg helped focus the campaign relentlessly on 
data and accountability, imposing a discipline that is, ahem, not always 
present in the nonprofit advocacy world. And it paid off -- almost 300 
plants, more than half the US fleet, have shut down.
The Bloomberg plan promises "incentives for innovations in data and 
technology to monitor and analyze sources of pollution, enabling 
stronger enforcement against polluters." This suggests he wants to bring 
that same data-focused accountability back to the EPA. If he, or any 
president, can do that successfully, it would make a huge difference.

Bloomberg has more climate policy on the way. The campaign has also 
pledged to target 50 percent economy-wide emission reductions by 2030, a 
more ambitious goal that will certainly require some help from Congress, 
especially in hard-to-reach sectors like industry and agriculture, but 
it hasn't released any policy details on that stuff yet.

Still, a practical but ambitious plan to use the EPA -- to prevent a 
rush to natural gas plants, to drive coal underground for good, and to 
accelerate a clean-energy transition in the power sector -- should be on 
the agenda of any new Democratic president. And it should get underway 
on day one, whatever broader legislative efforts may unfold alongside it.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/17/21023873/mike-bloomberg-climate-change-policy-power-natural-gas-coal 




[CNBC]
*3 things that keep Barack Obama up at night*
1. Global political polarization...
- -
*2. Climate change*
Another worrying trend is climate change.

"Those of you who still aren't convinced on the science," he said to the 
audience, "we can talk later."

He noted the "rapidity" of rising sea levels, melting polar caps, 
increases in the force and frequency of droughts, forest fires, 
hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding and the resulting population displacement.

"You're starting to see mass migrations resulting from things like 
that," he added. "There's fairly strong evidence that part of what 
precipitated the crisis in Syria had to do with this massive, 
longstanding drought that you're going to see repeated in other parts of 
the world."

He warned that extreme weather shifts could affect the lives of millions 
around the world.

"If you think about places like South Asia and the entire subcontinent, 
if monsoon season shifts rapidly or droughts or temperatures continue to 
rise in those areas, you're looking at hundreds of millions of people 
who potentially are unable to feed themselves."

"So I worry about that."...
- -
3. Social media...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/18/barack-obama-on-worrying-trends-political-polarization-climate-change-social-media.html



[bigger, stronger than ever before]
*Applying physics principle to meteorology yields grim prediction on 
hurricane destruction in an era of global warming*
by NYU Tandon School of Engineering
DECEMBER 17, 2019
Global warming could lead to hurricanes even more powerful than 
meteorologists currently forecast. That warning came from a physicist 
researching the behavior of tropical cyclones who noticed that one of 
the principles of physics-- phase transition--did not appear in the 
scientific literature of meteorology.

Edward Wolf, professor emeritus at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, 
examined the most robust data sets on tropical hurricanes--compiled by 
noted atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel in 2006 on Atlantic storms 
dating as far back as the 1930s off the coast of Africa. In a paper 
published recently in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 
Wolf demonstrated that the destructive power of these tropical 
hurricanes increased linearly and rapidly as water temperature 
increased--in contrast to most meteorological calculations, which lead 
to more optimistic outcomes.

"This approach indicates the destructive power of Atlantic hurricanes 
off Africa could reach three times their current level if water 
temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius--well within the range that 
scientists predict is likely by the year 2100," Wolf said. "The same 
calculations would apply to any tropical basin on Earth, and I am 
working with Dr. Emanuel now to explore this new concept in the hope 
that it will advance scientists' predictive ability."

The journal paper showed how Wolf's calculations aligned with what has 
become accepted science: Hurricanes require a surface water temperature 
above 26.5 degrees Celsius (79.7 degrees Fahrenheit). And every plot of 
Emanuel's graph of his power dissipation index values-versus-ocean 
temperature substantiated Wolf's initial suspicion that phase 
transitions--such as the transition from water to vapor--indicate just 
how much kinetic energy is released as the water that was turned to 
vapor by a hurricane then cools and falls to Earth as liquid.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-physics-principle-meteorology-yields-grim.html



[Some science history]
*How 19th Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming*
Today's headlines make climate change seem like a recent discovery. But 
Eunice Newton Foote and others have been piecing it together for 
centuries...
- - -
The final advance in climate science arrived in 1896, when the Swedish 
physicist Svante Arrhenius created what was, in effect, the first model 
of climate change.
- - -
Nonetheless, Arrhenius and his peers did not actually worry about global 
warming, or fret about industrialization cooking the planet. Certainly, 
the industrial revolution was well underway, burning oodles of coal. But 
the scientists didn't imagine the consumption of fossil fuels could ever 
become huge enough to seriously alter the planet. They couldn't imagine 
what then next century would bring, with millions of automobiles on the 
road, coal-burning plants pumping out electricity, and deforestation 
ravaging the world's carbon-sinks. So Arrhenius predicted that climate 
change would happen, sure, but awfully slowly: He expected it would take 
3,000 years--fully 30 centuries--for CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise 
by 50%. Instead, we shot up by 30% in only one century.

When it came to disaster, he and his peers were rather more concerned by 
the possibility of volcanic eruptions disrupting the climate. Only a few 
years earlier, the island of Krakatoa had exploded in a volcanic fury, 
dumping so much sulphur dioxide into the sky that it cooled the Northern 
hemisphere for over a year and killed thousands. They understood that 
the lethal danger of sudden climate change. But they couldn't imagine 
the dangers of gradual heating. To be sure, the burning of so much coal 
seemed like a problem, because even back then people knew fossil fuels 
weren't renewable. What would happen when they're gone?, pondered 
pundits of the day. But they didn't foresee the far more wicked problems 
that a warming climate would bring--the challenges of migrating invasive 
species, say, or the complex feedback loops that emerge as glaciers vanish.

Actually, Arrhenius thought a warmer world would have big upsides. In 
his 1908 book Worlds in the Making (which was primarily about Arrhenius' 
passion for panspermism, the theory that life arrived on Earth via 
bacteria transported by solar winds), he wrote:

We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is 
wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and 
we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has 
followed the volcanic eruptions of our days. We may find a kind of 
consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, 
there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing 
percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages 
with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder 
regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more 
abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating 
mankind.

It was a nice idea at the time--but nature, as is now dangerously clear, 
had different ideas. We're now faced with the challenge of mitigating as 
much climate change as possible, while adapting to what's already set in 
place. The onset of a warmer planet can seem sudden, if you judge by 
today's panicked headlines. But the science predicting that it would 
occur? It is, alas, generations' old.
https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicted-global-warming/


*This Day in Climate History - December  18, 2009 - from D.R. Tucker*

President Obama addresses the UN Conference on Climate Change in 
Copenhagen, Denmark.

http://youtu.be/a6F8rGRN8rA

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