[TheClimate.Vote] December 31, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Dec 31 11:08:23 EST 2019
/*December 31 , 2019*/
[Thousands flee to the sea says BBC]
*Australia fires: Thousands flee to beach to escape*
Thousands of people have fled to a beach in Victoria, Australia, to
escape bushfires racing towards the coast.
Locals in Mallacoota described a "terrifying experience" of camping on
wharves and boarding boats under blood-red skies.
Military aircraft and vessels are to be sent to help rescue efforts...
The fire swept through the town destroying numerous buildings, but was
kept back from the shore by the change in wind.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50952253
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50951043
[Greta report - video]
*'It's nice to meet you': Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough speak
over Skype - video*
Source: BBC Radio 4 Today - 30 Dec 2019
Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough thanked each other for their
climate activism when they spoke for the first time in a Skype call. The
discussion was part of the Swedish activist's guest-editing slot on BBC
Radio 4's Today programme. Attenborough praised the teenager for raising
awareness of the climate crisis, to which Greta said nature
documentaries inspired her to take on the cause
Greta Thunberg: climate activism has made her 'very happy', says father
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2019/dec/30/its-nice-to-meet-you-greta-thunberg-and-david-attenborough-speak-over-skype-video
- - -
[Greta choose not to ]
*Greta Thunberg 'wouldn't have wasted my time' talking to President
Trump about climate change*
The teen said speaking to the U.S. leader about climate change would be
futile.
Catherine Thorbecke - December 30, 2019
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg says she "wouldn't have wasted my
time" speaking to President Donald Trump about climate change.
The Swedish 16-year-old, who has been traveling the globe, speaking to
world leaders and organizing marches to raise awareness for the impacts
of climate change, told the BBC's Today radio program that she didn't
see the point of trying to talk to the U.S. leader about it.
While she almost bumped into him at the United Nations Climate Action
Summit in September, Thunberg told the BBC that if she did come
face-to-face with Trump, "I don't think I would have said anything
because he's obviously not listening to scientists and experts, why
would he listen to me?"
"I probably wouldn't have said anything, wouldn't have wasted my time,"
she added.
The teen said she thinks Trump may see the growing climate movement
among young people as a "threat."
"Me, myself alone am not much of a threat, but it's that I'm a part of a
big movement that they probably see as a threat," she said.
Trump has come after the teen before on social media, tweeting that it
is "so ridiculous" that Thunberg was selected as Time magazine's 2019
person of the year and telling her to "chill."
"Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old
fashioned movie with a friend!" the president wrote. "Chill Greta, Chill!"
Thunberg seemed to take it in stride. Shortly after, Thunberg changed
her Twitter bio to read: "A teenager working on her anger management
problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with
a friend."
While Thunberg has become a symbol of the youth-led climate change
movement calling for urgent action, the Trump administration in recent
years has taken steps to show it does not consider climate change a
priority, including withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Trump isn't the only world leader to have attacked the teen. President
Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil famously called her a "brat" earlier this month
after she expressed concern for the slaying of indigenous people in the
Amazon.
"Those attacks are just funny," Thunberg told the BBC of the personal
attacks. "It means they are terrified of young people bringing change,
which they don't want, but that is just a proof that we are actually
doing something and they see us as some kind of threat."Despite the
international attention, Thunberg said she hopes to return to school
soon after her gap year of activism and lead a "normal" life.
"I am really looking forward to going back to school and I just want to
be as everyone else," she said. "I want to just be a normal teenager,
but of course this isn't a normal situation."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/greta-thunberg-wouldnt-wasted-time-talking-president-trump/story?id=67983324
[news from Australia]
*Australia: Fires worsen and reach Melbourne suburbs*
Residents of three Melbourne suburbs were told it was too late to leave.
A volunteer firefighter in the eastern state of New South Wales also
died Monday amid the blazes...
- - -
Nine people have died and more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed
since the early start of Australia's bushfire season in September. New
South Wales has been the hardest hit by the fires, with the blazes
continuing to spread across the country.
https://www.dw.com/en/australia-fires-worsen-and-reach-melbourne-suburbs/a-51832236
[video end-of-year academic overview]
*Webinar: Climate Findings from a 40-Year Satellite Record of Arctic and
Antarctic Sea Ice*
Dec 30, 2019
AGU
A few weeks after the Arctic sea ice reached its minimum coverage for
2019, Dr. Claire L. Parkinson shares the story of Arctic and Antarctic
sea ice as revealed from a 40-year satellite record and how the sea ice
relates to the rest of the climate system.
This webinar was sponsored by AGU's Global Environmental Change section.
It was originally presented on 23 October 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfRN6MeACLQ
[Scientific American opinion]
*This Was the Decade We Knew We Were Right*
Everything is connected, and everything is changing
By Kate Marvel on December 30, 2019
It rains in the Amazon because the trees want it to. There is plenty of
moisture in the oceans that surround the continent, but there is also a
hidden reservoir on the land feeding an invisible river that flows
upward to the sky. The water held in the soil is lifted up by the bodies
of the trees and lost through the surfaces of their leaves to the
atmosphere. The local sky plumps with moisture, primed for the arrival
of the seasonal rains driven by the annual back-and-forth march of the
sun’s rays. As climate scientist Alex Hall puts it, the trees are
co-conspiring with the sky to attract an earlier monsoon.
This is the decade we knew we were right. It began with the warmest year
on record; it then broke that record at least five times. Carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere reached levels unprecedented since humans were
hominins. There were droughts and floods and brutal heat waves. Coral
reefs turned white and gave up. Australia is in drought. The Amazon is
on fire.
Nothing is eternal and nothing is infinite. There were once forests in
the Sahara--if not quite the Amazon, still lush and tropical, clustered
around the largest freshwater lake on the planet. In geologic time, this
was practically yesterday: less than ten thousand years ago. The lake is
mostly gone now, vanished in the span of a few hundred years. In its
place there is nothing but dust.
The changes now are different. We expected most of them, and they are
occurring with a terrifying rapidity that is no more reassuring because
it is easily understood. We have known that carbon dioxide traps heat
for over a hundred years. We have known that we are changing the planet
for decades now. There is no consolation in being right.
The climate always changes. It is dry in the Sahara because the planet
wobbled slightly in its orbit, weakening the monsoon rains in the west
of Africa. The plants sucked the moisture from the soil; it was not
replaced. They died, and no more moisture entered the atmosphere: a
vicious cycle of dying and drying that led to the dusty, depopulated
desert we know today. This was climate change; it was likely not the
fault of humans. But the existence of past climate change does not mean
we are not responsible for it this time. There have always been gentle
and natural deaths. This does not make murder impossible.
The decade began with lies and ended with evasions. Hackers, probably
Russian, stole the emails of a few scientists and offered single
sentences, taken wildly out of context, to an eager and credulous media.
We heard both sides: the truth, and the not-truth, and were encouraged
to draw our own conclusions. The temperature rose; physics was not
watching the debate. We learned nothing from the experience.
The winds over the Sahara come from the East, dense, sinking forced
sideways as the Earth rotates away underneath it. The dust is carried
across the Atlantic, enlarging the beaches of the Caribbean, scattering
low-angle sunlight into brilliant purple-orange sunsets, and landing
gently on the forests of the Amazon. But the air over the Sahara has
arrived from the tropics, rising and shedding its moisture on a journey
toward the poles. When it can go no further, it cools and sinks. There
are no deserts without the tropics.
Everything is connected. Children were murdered in their schools, and
were angry about it. Children saw their futures bargained away for
short-term profit, and were angry about it. Children saw the changing
world, and were angry about it. The streets swelled with angry children
and heartbroken parents, a chorus of hurt that would have echoed through
the halls of power had they been able to hear. Nothing was done, and the
anger grew louder. This was the decade we saw that history was
renewable. We promised to make more of it.
If you want to see the future of the Amazon, you must use physics and
assumptions and know that you are almost certainly wrong. All models are
wrong, but all climate models strive to be useful, to show a plausible
future that may still be avoidable. If the future atmosphere is larded
with even more carbon dioxide, the plants of the Amazon will not need to
open the pores on their leaves quite so much to take in the gases they
need. They will expel less water from these shrunken pores into the
atmosphere. The trees will lose their ability to summon the monsoon.
There will be fire and drought. Where there was once forest will be only
dust.
Here is one thing worth remembering in the dark days of the northern
mid-latitude winter. The rainforest is so lush that it cannot fertilize
itself. Every nutrient is seized by the greedy vegetation, locked up in
the bodies of plants before it can leach into the soil. But the forest
is fertilized, given life by the dead lake in the Sahara. There is
phosphorus in the lakebed, turned into dust and swept across the
Atlantic by the prevailing winds.
From the old comes the new, a fragile phoenix borne upward from the
tropics on the rising updrafts of thick convective cloud. The Amazon
exists because the Sahara does, the desert is there because the tropics
are here. None of this was ever going to stand alone.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/this-was-the-decade-we-knew-we-were-right/
[internal climate refugees - indigenous peoples displaced from their own
land]
*Too hot for humans? First Nations people fear becoming Australia's
first climate refugees*
- Aboriginal people in Alice Springs say global heating threatens their
survival
- The town had 55 days above 40C in the year to July 2019
- Central Australian outstations are running out of water
- Poor quality housing in town camps cannot be cooled effectively
Indigenous leaders fear extreme heat will cause influx of internal refugees
Audio full story:
https://flex.acast.com/audio.guim.co.uk/2019/12/17-41001-FS_HEATWAVE.mp3
or download and https://audio.guim.co.uk/2019/12/17-41001-FS_HEATWAVE.mp3
full text at -
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/18/too-hot-for-humans-first-nations-people-fear-becoming-australias-first-climate-refugees
[from the dept of sarcastic irony]
*BP boss reveals some of his daughter's friends in California are taking
antidepressants because they are so worried about climate change*
Bob Dudley, 64, said he hated seeing 'young people so unhappy, so anxious'
He revealed his daughter asked him how he could work for a fossil fuel
company
BP produces the equivalent of 3.7 million barrels of oil a day, and is
directly and indirectly responsible for up to 491 million tonnes of
carbon emissions a year
By ROD ARDEHALI FOR MAILONLINE
29 December 2019
The outgoing boss of BP has revealed some of his daughter's friends in
California are on antidepressants because of their worries over climate
change. Bob Dudley, who is to step down as chief executive in February,
admitted he hated seeing 'young people so unhappy, so anxious' about the
impact of global warming from increasing carbon emissions...
- - -
The fossil fuel giant has been targetted by Extinction Rebellion
protesters and was dropped as a sponsor by the Royal Shakespeare Company
and National Galleries Scotland.
Mr Dudley, 64, said his daughter, a social worker in California,
demanded of him: 'How you can work for a company that in five years
won't be selling petrol?'
He said: 'I wish the young people today would get more involved in
energy -- actually getting involved, whether it's renewables or not.
'Because it's the easiest job to throw rocks. It is just such fun. But
you have to have some responsibility for these things and that's not
what everybody's doing.'
Mr Dudley added that he hated seeing young people so anxious, and that
his daughter told him people around her are on antidepressants.
Despite investing green energies, such as biofuels and solar power, BP
has been criticised for putting only 3 percent of its annual spending
budget into renewables.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7834937/BP-boss-reveals-daughters-friends-California-taking-antidepressants.html
[Thanks goes to Devone Tucker for years of devotion to delivering the
climate history]
*This Day in Climate History - December 31, 2013 - from D.R. Tucker*
The Guardian reports:
"Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be
at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific
study.
"The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of
greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of
4C by 2100, twice the level the world's governments deem dangerous.
"The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms,
meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving
temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming
has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/31/planet-will-warm-4c-2100-climate?view=desktop
http://youtu.be/1YytqEeS6f4
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