[TheClimate.Vote] December 24, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 24, 2019*/

[Xmas Down Under]
*'Burnt Christmas tree' is a perfect symbol for Australia's fire-ravaged 
holiday season*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/GCSLCZBBQUI6VMBU3Z64FNIZTM.jpg&w=1440
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/12/21/burnt-christmas-tree-is-perfect-symbol-this-smoke-filled-season-australia/ 



[Helpful words for conversations]
*How to talk to your family about climate change*
20.DEC 2019
Answer by Rosemary Randall, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Carbon 
Conversations Project
With the climate crisis making more headlines than ever, difficult 
conversations about climate change will be hard to avoid this holiday 
season. So we asked a therapist, a scientist, a policy expert, and a 
psychologist about how to navigate these conversations with relatives 
who might not share your point of view...
- - -
*"I'm worried about climate change, but I don't know what to do. The 
whole thing just distresses me. Isn't it too late anyway?"*
Answer by Rosemary Randall, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Carbon 
Conversations Project‌‌:
There's no template for replying to someone's climate distress. It's all 
about listening, empathy and understanding:

Acknowledge that they're right to be worried. ("I can see why you're
concerned.")

Listen. Encourage them to talk. ("It sounds like this has really
shaken you…")

Recognise that painful feelings are appropriate. ("It's normal to be
upset/the news about climate change is devastating…")

Empathize. Help find words for the distress. Welcome their tears,
grief or anger. ("I want to hear what you have to say./You sound
overwhelmed by this./There's a lot to feel sad about…")

Be curious. Ask for the story of how they woke up to this issue.
("When did this first hit you…?")

Explore. Ask what climate change may mean for them personally. ("How
do you think this is going to impact on your life? [On] your
generation? your family? your work?")

Share. If you've gone on a similar journey, share it. ("I've
struggled with this too"…) If you haven't, be truthful about the
fact that perhaps you should. ("Listening to you, I realize that
perhaps there are things I've been refusing to face…")

Encourage action. Help them think about what they can do -
politically, in their community, at work and about their own impact.
("Action often helps you feel better/ Working with others can
restore a sense of control and efficacy.")

Challenge despair and apocalyptic thinking. ("We don't know exactly
what will happen. Act because it's the right thing to do. Everything
you do stops it being worse.")

Don't offer false reassurances or try to close the conversation.
Do offer your love, support and solidarity.

more at - 
https://blog.ecosia.org/how-to-talk-to-your-family-about-climate-change/


[Follow the Money]
*Fossil Fuel Companies Begin to Acknowledge Climate Litigation Threatens 
Their Bottom Line*
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/12/23/climate-litigation-threat-financial-filings/


[Opinion]
*In 2019 the public woke up to the climate crisis. When will the 
politicians?*
Stephen Buranyi
Poll after poll shows that people now want action. But at the 
international level progress is being deliberately stymied.
n 1988, Time magazine selected "The Endangered Earth" as its person of 
the year. This December, 31 years later, the honour went to Greta 
Thunberg. The point of the Time exercise is to take a complex issue and 
locate a person through whom we can better understand it. Twenty years 
ago the magazine's search for a human environmental story stalled in 
orbit; now it is easy to locate.

That wouldn't have been possible even this time last year. The biggest 
story in climate in 2019 is the way in which, after years of languishing 
outside the mainstream, climate activism has finally broken through. It 
seems obvious in retrospect that the kids were the key. Self-organised, 
serious, heartbreakingly frank about their anger at seeing their futures 
foreclosed by politicians who won't even live to see the consequences, 
they have lent a powerful moral drive to the entire movement.

Climate protests are not new, but they acquired a new urgency this year. 
Extinction Rebellion looks a lot like green groups of years past, but 
where those earlier protests were perhaps too polite, ER has 
enthusiastically embraced disruption. Like the school protesters, it has 
been emboldened by what now seem to be the obvious immediate effects of 
the climate crisis: deadly heatwaves across Europe, wildfires in the US, 
cyclones in the Pacific and record-breaking high temperatures across the 
world. For several years scientists have been speaking in more concrete 
terms about the consequences of climate change, and have been willing to 
connect it directly to current events. The link between the climate 
emergency and our own lives has never seemed clearer. Finally, after 
decades of activists struggling to push the crisis into the larger 
consciousness, poll after poll shows that public concern, and desire for 
action, is at an all-time high.

The question that became clearer as the year went on was, having 
achieved what the climate movement always wanted - prominent and 
positive media coverage, widespread public support, audiences with world 
leaders - was it possible to effect any actual political change? The 
spectacle of Thunberg and the larger youth climate movement arriving at 
international meetings and parliaments and accusing heads of state of 
hypocrisy to their faces is undoubtedly thrilling. But climate politics 
itself still seems far from any genuine watershed moment.

There has been little concrete progress. What the protests have sparked, 
instead, is a rush by governments to declare a "climate emergency" and 
to set or retrench future emissions targets. In previous years this 
alone would have seemed radical enough, generating enormous goodwill; 
now, however, the gap between words and actions has widened too far, and 
credulity is in short supply. The climate researcher Rebecca Willis put 
the new standard succinctly earlier this month: "Targets don't reduce 
carbon. Policies do."

There has been some hope on that front. Parties in the UK and candidates 
in the US Democratic primaries took on comprehensive climate platforms 
for the first time. These either directly or indirectly reference the 
concept of a "green new deal" - pairing increased spending on climate 
with a larger social transformation, and breaking down the wall that 
separates climate policy from the rest of national politics. But 
crucially, nothing similar has been brought forward by a government 
actually in power.

What hasn't changed is the intractable nature of international climate 
negotiations. The UN's climate change conference, COP, falls at the end 
of the calendar year, and, being the place where countries affirm their 
climate commitments under the UN framework convention on climate change, 
rarely produces a hopeful coda to the previous 12 months. "Good" COPs 
are rare. This year's iteration in Madrid wasn't the worst, but it 
seemed strangely removed from the rest of the year's events, as if the 
delegates had been bussed directly across space and time from last 
December's meeting in Katowice, bypassing entirely the wave of protest 
and the titanic shift in public opinion.

And so, in the same week that Time honoured the climate movement, a 
loose coalition of rightwing governments - including administrations in 
Brazil and Australia - effectively stymied the conference's goal of 
strengthening the Paris agreement. Despite warnings that current plans 
are totally inadequate, and 11,000 researchers stating "the climate 
crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists 
expected", little was agreed, and hope for action was - again - punted 
to next year.

It's a depressing story, and it isn't the biggest climate story of the 
year because it's effectively the same news we've heard nearly every 
year since the conference began a quarter of a century ago. The rise of 
a broadly popular climate movement and the stirrings of national-level 
climate politics puts the continued failure of the negotiations into 
stark relief. The international effort was always meant to lead the way, 
but it feels increasingly remote from the rest of the climate struggle - 
as if it's taking place on a different planet.

- Stephen Buranyi is a writer specialising in science and the environment
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/23/climate-crisis-action-2019-politicians-public-poll 




[A plain talk explanation by - physicist Johan Rockstrom warns of a 
threshold beyond which Earth flips from a 'self-cooling' to a 
'self-warming' system]
*Don't push 'on' button of irreversible change: top climate scientist*
by Marlowe Hood

Johan Rockstrom, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact 
Research (PIK), is a Big Picture scientist who strives to see how all 
the pieces of our planet's complex climate system fit together.

In 2009 he co-authored the "planetary boundaries" concept, which has 
since become a central paradigm for evaluating Earth's capacity to 
absorb the impact of human activity.

Rockstrom spoke with AFP at the COP25 UN climate conference in Madrid. 
Answers have been edited for concision and clarity.
*
**Q: Is a viable solution to global warming compatible with consumer 
capitalism?*
There's a simple way to answer that question: we don't have a choice. On 
climate, the time is running out so fast that there's no other pathway. 
Either we make this work within the existing economic paradigm, or we fail.

It's naive to say 'Let's go for de-growth, let's completely divest, or 
let's think of post-capitalist model and throw GDP in the waste bin'. We 
have to work with the economic machinery that we have in our engine room.

*Q: Why are fossil fuel companies reaching out to you, an Earth system 
scientist, for advice?*
The European-based oil companies--such as Shell, BP and Equinor--have 
not come to the point where they see the beginning-of-the-end of their 
business, but I'm sure that they recognise that we have a serious problem.

They are also very clever at engaging with the scientific community and 
allowing a high ceiling when it comes to entertaining different 
perspectives. But they still translate everything into their own 
conclusions, which are mostly aligned with Shell's "Sky Scenarios".
Their argument goes like this: 'We serve humanity by supplying modern 
energy. Economies need cheap energy because otherwise they just grind to 
a halt. Don't blame us, we're just providing exactly what you are asking 
for.'

The Sky Scenario says that even with a 50 percent reduction in global 
greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years, Shell can be aligned 
with science and the Paris Agreement without changing very much.

But this is an illusion that presumes the deployment of unrealistic 
levels of carbon capture and storage (CCS)--a technology that syphons 
off CO2 as gas or coal is burned and stores it underground--and tree 
planting. It is a feel-good strategy for the status quo.

Today we only have three, four, maybe five hundred billion tons of CO2 
in our 'carbon budge' left to emit -- about 10 years' worth. There is no 
more room for this type of posturing. And yet companies are still making 
major natural gas and oil investments in the Arctic and elsewhere. This 
won't take us to a net zero economy in time.
*
**Q: Could Earth flip from being a self-cooling to a self-warming system?*
We should humbly cherish the fact that the Earth system remains in net 
cooling mode. We are loading the planet with heat by burning fossil 
fuels. So far the Earth system has responded by dampening that heat.

First, land and oceans absorb 50 percent of emitted greenhouse gases. 
That's the biggest economic subsidy ever. Second, 90 percent of the 
excess heat we generate is taken up in the oceans. Third, ice sheets and 
the polar ice cap reflect 90 percent of solar radiation back into space.

So we have carbon sequestration, heat absorption and albedo--whereby the 
Sun's energy is reflected back into space by mirror-like snow and 
ice--as the three big cooling agents on Earth. This is what has kept the 
system so resilient during the Holocene interglacial period [over the 
last 12,000 years]. I call the planet's capacity to buffer abuse 'Earth 
resilience'.

The big nightmare is the moment when Earth can no longer cope and shifts 
from that self-cooling state to become a net-warmer. We don't know where 
that point is yet, but we see the mechanisms.

"We should humbly cherish the fact that Earth system remains in net 
cooling mode," says climate scientists Johan Rockstrom
The moment, for example, Greenland's ice sheet melts to such a large 
extent that it forms a film of liquid on the surface. We have already 
seen periods when it becomes a net absorber of heat rather than a net 
reflector of heat. Not for more than a few weeks at a time, but it's 
starting to happen.

We are also starting to see something similar with land-based 
ecosystems. We have had years when Earth's entire land surface is no 
longer a sink but a net source of greenhouse gases.

The point when the Earth system flips from being a net cooler to a net 
warmer is when you cross tipping points. You could end up in a state 
where that resilience is weakened so much that the climate system no 
longer reduces human disturbance, but rather reinforces it.

That will be the moment when we have lost control.

*Q: We often hear that there are only 'ten years left' to deal with 
climate change. What does that mean?*
We have to start educating humanity that there are two time-scales that 
matter when it comes to climate change.

One is the deployment time-scale--when we push the 'on' button of 
irreversible change, whether for the melting of ice sheets and the 
permafrost, or conversion of the Amazon from tropical forest to 
savannah. The other is the full impacts time frame, which unfolds over 
centuries.

We need to avoid the first one. We don't want to push the 'on' buttons 
of runaway global warming. The next decade is our window to avoid coming 
too close to those pressure points.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-dont-button-irreversible-climate-scientist.html
- --
*Johan Rockstrom warns of a threshold beyond which Earth flips from a 
'self-cooling' to a 'self-warming' system*
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-dont-button-irreversible-climate-scientist.htmlhttps://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800/2019/1-johanrockstr.jpg


*This Day in Climate History - December  24, 1988 - from D.R. Tucker*
TIME Magazine names "Endangered Earth" its "Planet of the Year" for 
1988, citing in part rising concerns over global warming.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/28176/TIME-MAGAZINE-PICKS-EARTH-IN-LIEU-OF-MAN-OF-THE-YEAR.html
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19890102,00.html

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