[TheClimate.Vote] February 19, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 19, 2019/


[video 5:28]
*Green New Deal - February 13, 2019 Act 1 - Full Frontal on TBS*
‏@FullFrontalSamB
The Green New Deal is the ambitious new non-binding resolution with the 
audacity to make sure you have a planet to live on in 2030.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaDIgmilIZs
https://twitter.com/i/topics/tweet/1097511063409516546?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjc18y&refsrc=email 



[The Intercept]
*THE BATTLE LINES HAVE BEEN DRAWN ON THE GREEN NEW DEAL*
Naomi Klein
February 13 2019, 6:00 a.m.
"I REALLY DON'T like their policies of taking away your car, taking away 
your airplane flights, of 'let's hop a train to California,' or 'you're 
not allowed to own cows anymore!'"

So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first 
campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed 
Markey's Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more.

It's worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last 
words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public 
appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: 
imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including 
the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy.

Or they could be the epitaph for a habitable climate, with Trump's lies 
and scare tactics succeeding in trampling this desperately needed 
framework. That could either help win him re-election, or land us with a 
timid Democrat in the White House with neither the courage nor the 
democratic mandate for this kind of deep change. Either scenario means 
blowing the handful of years left to roll out the transformations 
required to keep temperatures below catastrophic levels.
Back in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published 
a landmark report informing us that global emissions need to be slashed 
in half in less than 12 years, a target that simply cannot be met 
without the world's largest economy playing a game-changing leadership 
role. If there is a new administration ready to leap into that role in 
January 2021, meeting those targets would still be extraordinarily 
difficult, but it would be technically possible -- especially if large 
cities and states like California and New York escalate their ambitions 
right now. Losing another four years to a Republican or a corporate 
Democrat, and starting in 2026 is, quite simply, a joke.

So either Trump is right and the Green New Deal is a losing political 
issue, one he can smear out of existence. Or he is wrong and a candidate 
who makes the Green New Deal the centerpiece of their platform will take 
the Democratic primary and then kick Trump's ass in the general, with a 
clear democratic mandate to introduce wartime-levels of investment to 
battle our triple crises from day one. That would very likely inspire 
the rest of the world to finally follow suit on bold climate policy, 
giving us all a fighting chance.

Those are the stark options before us. And which outcome we end up with 
depends on the actions taken by social movements in the next two years. 
Because these are not questions that will be settled through elections 
alone. At their core, they are about building political power -- enough 
to change the calculus of what is possible.

That was the lesson of the original New Deal, one we would be wise to 
remember right now.
Ocasio-Cortez chose to model the Green New Deal after President Franklin 
D. Roosevelt's historic raft of programs understanding full well that a 
central task is to make sure that this mobilization does not repeat the 
ways in which its namesake excluded and further marginalized many 
vulnerable groups. For instance, New Deal-era programs and protections 
left out agricultural and domestic workers (many of them black), Mexican 
immigrants (some 1 million of whom faced deportation in the 1930s), and 
Indigenous people (who won some gains but whose land rights were also 
violated by both massive infrastructure projects and some conservation 
efforts).

Indeed, the resolution calls for these and other violations to be 
actively redressed, listing as one of its core goals "stopping current, 
preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous 
peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized 
communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income 
workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and 
youth."

I have written before about why the old New Deal, despite its failings, 
remains a useful touchstone for the kind of sweeping climate 
mobilization that is our only hope of lowering emissions in time. In 
large part, this is because there are so few historical precedents we 
can look to (other than top-down military mobilizations) that show how 
every sector of life, from forestry to education to the arts to housing 
to electrification, can be transformed under the umbrella of a single, 
society-wide mission.

Which is why it is so critical to remember that none of it would have 
happened without massive pressure from social movements. FDR rolled out 
the New Deal in the midst of a historic wave of labor unrest: There was 
the Teamsters' rebellion and Minneapolis general strike in 1934, the 
83-day shutdown of the West Coast by longshore workers that same year, 
and the Flint sit-down autoworkers strikes in 1936 and 1937. During this 
same period, mass movements, responding to the suffering of the Great 
Depression, demanded sweeping social programs, such as Social Security 
and unemployment insurance, while socialists argued that abandoned 
factories should be handed over to their workers and turned into 
cooperatives. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of "The Jungle," ran 
for governor of California in 1934 on a platform arguing that the key to 
ending poverty was full state funding of workers' cooperatives. He 
received nearly 900,000 votes, but having been viciously attacked by the 
right and undercut by the Democratic establishment, he fell just short 
of winning the governor's office.

All of this is a reminder that the New Deal was adopted by Roosevelt at 
a time of such progressive and left militancy that its programs -- which 
seem radical by today's standards -- appeared at the time to be the only 
way to hold back a full-scale revolution.

It's also a reminder that the New Deal was a process as much as a 
project, one that was constantly changing and expanding in response to 
social pressure from both the right and the left. For example, a program 
like the Civilian Conservation Corps started with 200,000 workers, but 
when it proved popular eventually expanded to 2 million. That's why the 
fact that there are weaknesses in Ocasio-Cortez and Markey's resolution 
-- and there are a few -- is far less compelling than the fact that it 
gets so much exactly right. There is plenty of time to improve and 
correct a Green New Deal once it starts rolling out (it needs to be more 
explicit about keeping carbon in the ground, for instance, and about 
nuclear and coal never being "clean"). But we have only one chance to 
get this thing charged up and moving forward.

THE MORE SOBERING lesson is that the kind of mass power that delivered 
the victories of the New Deal era is far beyond anything possessed by 
current progressive movements, even if they all combined efforts. That's 
why it is so urgent to use the Green New Deal framework as a potent tool 
to build that power -- a vision to both unite movements and dramatically 
expand them.

Part of that involves turning what is being derided as a left-wing 
"laundry list" or "wish list" into an irresistible story of the future, 
connecting the dots between the many parts of daily life that stand to 
be transformed -- from health care to employment, day care to jail cell, 
clean air to leisure time.

Right now, the Green New Deal reads like a list because House 
resolutions have to be formatted as lists -- lettered and numbered 
sequences of "whereases" and "resolveds." It's also being characterized 
as an unrelated grab bag because most of us have been trained to avoid a 
systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much 
every crisis our system produces -- from economic inequality to violence 
against women to white supremacy to unending wars to ecological 
unraveling -- in walled-off silos. From within that rigid mindset, it's 
easy to dismiss a sweeping and intersectional vision like the Green New 
Deal as a green-tinted "laundry list" of everything the left has ever 
wanted.

Now that the resolution is out there, however, the onus is on all of us 
who support it to help make the case for how our overlapping crises are 
indeed inextricably linked -- and can only be overcome with a holistic 
vision for social and economic transformation. This is already beginning 
to happen. For example, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who is heading up policy for 
a new think tank largely focused on the Green New Deal, recently pointed 
out that just as thousands of people moved for jobs during the World War 
II-era economic mobilization, we should expect a great many to move 
again to be part of a renewables revolution. And when they do, 
"unlinking employment from health care means people can move for better 
jobs, to escape the worst effects of climate, AND re-enter the labor mkt 
without losing" (her whole Twitter thread is worth reading).
Investing big in public health care is also critical in light of the 
fact that no matter how fast we move to lower emissions, it is going to 
get hotter and storms are going to get fiercer. When those storms bash 
up against health care systems and electricity grids that have been 
starved by decades of austerity, thousands pay the price with their 
lives, as they so tragically did in post-Maria Puerto Rico.

And there are many more connections to be drawn. Those complaining about 
climate policy being weighed down by supposedly unrelated demands for 
access to health care and education would do well to remember that the 
caring professions -- most of them dominated by women -- are relatively 
low carbon and can be made even more so. In other words, they deserve to 
be seen as "green jobs," with the same protections, the same 
investments, and the same living wages as male-dominated workforces in 
the renewables, efficiency, and public-transit sectors. Meanwhile, as 
Gunn-Wright points out, to make those sectors less male-dominated, 
family leave and pay equity are a must, which is part of the reason both 
are included in the resolution.

Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public 
imagination will take a massive exercise in participatory democracy. A 
first step is for every sector touched by the Green New Deal -- 
hospitals, schools, universities, and more -- to make their own plans 
for how to rapidly decarbonize while furthering the Green New Deal's 
mission to eliminate poverty, create good jobs, and close the racial and 
gender wealth divides.

My favorite example of what this could look like comes from the Canadian 
Union of Postal Workers, which has developed a bold plan to turn every 
post office in Canada into a hub for a just green transition. Think 
solar panels on the roof, charging stations out front, a fleet of 
domestically manufactured electric vehicles from which union members 
don't just deliver mail, but also local produce and medicine, and check 
in on seniors -- all supported by the proceeds of postal banking.

TO MAKE THE case for a Green New Deal -- which explicitly calls for this 
kind of democratic, decentralized leadership -- every sector in the 
United States should be developing similar visionary plans for their 
workplaces right now. And if that doesn't motivate their members to rush 
the polls come 2020, I don't know what will.

We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged 
there. In fact, the impact of climate change on every part of our lives 
is far too expansive and extensive to begin to cover here. But I do need 
to mention a few more glaring links that many are missing.

A job guarantee, far from an opportunistic socialist addendum, is a 
critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition. It would 
immediately lower the intense pressure on workers to take the kinds of 
jobs that destabilize our planet because all would be free to take the 
time needed to retrain and find work in one of the many sectors that 
will be dramatically expanding.

This in turn will reduce the power of bad actors like the Laborers' 
International Union of North America who are determined to split the 
labor movement and sabotage the prospects for this historic effort. 
Right out of the gate, LIUNA came out swinging against the Green New 
Deal. Never mind that it contains stronger protections for trade unions 
and the right to organize than anything we have seen out of Washington 
in three decades, including the right of workers in high-carbon sectors 
to democratically participate in their transition and to have jobs in 
clean sectors at the same salary and benefits levels as before.
There is absolutely no rational reason for a union representing 
construction workers to oppose what would be the biggest infrastructure 
project in a century, unless LIUNA actually is what it appears to be: a 
fossil fuel astroturf group disguised as a trade union, or at best a 
company union. These are the same labor leaders, let us recall, who 
sided with the tanks and attack dogs at Standing Rock; who fought 
relentlessly for the construction of the planet-destabilizing Keystone 
XL pipeline; and who (along with several other building trade union 
heads) aligned themselves with Trump on his first day in office, smiling 
for a White House photo op and declaring his inauguration "a great 
moment for working men and women."

LIUNA's leaders have loudly demanded unquestioning "solidarity" from the 
rest of the trade union movement. But again and again, they have offered 
nothing but the narrowest self-interest in return, indifferent to the 
suffering of immigrant workers whose lives are being torn apart under 
Trump and to the Indigenous workers who saw their homeland turned into a 
war zone. The time has come for the rest of the labor movement to 
confront and isolate them before they can do more damage. That could 
take the form of LIUNA members, confident that the Green New Deal will 
not leave them behind, voting out their pro-boss leaders. Or it could 
end with LIUNA being tossed out of the AFL-CIO for planetary malpractice.

The more unionized sectors like teaching, nursing, and manufacturing 
make the Green New Deal their own by showing how it can transform their 
workplaces for the better, and the more all union leaders embrace the 
growth in membership they would see under the Green New Deal, the 
stronger they will be for this unavoidable confrontation.

ONE LAST CONNECTION I will mention has to do with the concept of 
"repair." The resolution calls for creating well-paying jobs "restoring 
and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems," as well 
as "cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring 
economic development and sustainability on those sites."
There are many such sites across the United States, entire landscapes 
that have been left to waste after they were no longer useful to 
frackers, miners, and drillers. It's a lot like how this culture treats 
people. It's what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal 
period, using them up and then abandoning them to addiction and despair. 
It's what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of 
the population who are more economically useful as prison laborers and 
numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free 
workers. And the old New Deal did it too, by choosing to exclude and 
discard so many black and brown and women workers.
There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair -- to 
repair our relationship with the earth and with one another, to heal the 
deep wounds dating back to the founding of the country. Because while it 
is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of 
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound 
sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mindset -- a way of viewing 
both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources 
to use up and then discard. I call it the "gig and dig" economy and 
firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift 
in worldview, a transformation from "gig and dig" to an ethos of care 
and repair.

If these kinds of deeper connections between fractured people and a 
fast-warming planet seem far beyond the scope of policymakers, it's 
worth thinking back to the absolutely central role of artists during the 
New Deal era. Playwrights, photographers, muralists, and novelists were 
all part of a renaissance of both realist and utopian art. Some held up 
a mirror to the wrenching misery that the New Deal sought to alleviate. 
Others opened up spaces for Depression-ravaged people to imagine a world 
beyond that misery. Both helped get the job done in ways that are 
impossible to quantify.

In a similar vein, there is much to learn from Indigenous-led movements 
in Bolivia and Ecuador that have placed at the center of their calls for 
ecological transformation the concept of buen vivir, a focus on the 
right to a good life as opposed to more and more and more life of 
endless consumption, an ethos that is so ably embodied by the current 
resident of the White House.

The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and 
pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower 
our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements 
that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate 
solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and 
storage, or carbon offsets.

But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the 
overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have 
a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for.

The young organizers in the Sunrise Movement, who have done so much to 
galvanize the Green New Deal momentum, talk about our collective moment 
as one filled with both "promise and peril." That is exactly right. And 
everything that happens from here on in should hold one in each hand.
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/13/green-new-deal-proposal/



Research Letter
*Pacific Ocean Variability Influences the Time of Emergence of a 
Seasonally Ice‐Free Arctic Ocean*
Plain Language Summary
Manmade climate change is causing a rapid loss of Arctic sea ice. Summer 
Arctic sea ice is predicted to disappear almost completely by the middle 
of this century, unless emissions of greenhouse gases are rapidly 
reduced. The speed of sea‐ice loss is not constant over time, however. 
Natural climate variability can add to the manmade decline, leading to 
faster sea‐ice loss, or can subtract from the manmade decline, leading 
to slower sea‐ice loss. In this study, we looked at how natural climate 
variability affects the timing of an ice‐free Arctic. We found that a 
natural cycle called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO for 
short, is particularly important. Arctic sea‐ice loss is faster when the 
IPO is moving from its cold to warm phase and slower when the IPO is 
moving from its warm to cold phase. This is because variations in the 
IPO cause changes in atmospheric wind patterns, which alter the amount 
of heat that is transported into the Arctic. Observations show that the 
IPO started to shift from its cold to warm phase in the past few years. 
If this shift continues, our results suggest that there is an increased 
chance of accelerated sea‐ice loss over the coming decades.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GL081393


[Life as a game]
*Civilization VI: Gathering Storm shows video games can make us think 
seriously about climate change*
A new expansion has added environmental challenges to Sid Meier's 
Civilization VI, the latest in a popular series of strategy video games 
that has been running since the 1990s. The expansion – called Gathering 
Storm – adds new features to the game, most notably anthropogenic 
climate change and natural disasters.

The game involves developing a civilisation from its humble beginnings 
in the Stone Age to nowadays and beyond, while choosing from a vast 
array of technologies and cultural policies. As the game and the ages 
progress, your energy choices become increasingly important. Indeed, 
Gathering Storm is based on a simple model of global warming wherein CO₂ 
emissions from energy sources induce sea level rise, as well as more 
frequent and intense extreme weather events such as droughts and storms. 
In turn, these can have potentially devastating effects on your cities 
and units, pushing the player to think about different adaptation 
strategies such as flood barriers for coastal cities.

The game even progresses into a "future era", where players are offered 
options like carbon capture and storage technologies or "seasteads" to 
house segments of the population. From early on, this new expansion 
compels players to think about some of the potential long-term 
consequences of actions that may offer short-term benefits. One example 
would be chopping down forests to accelerate production or convert land 
for other uses which, in the long run, renders a city more vulnerable to 
flooding and reduces the carbon sink capacity of your civilisation.
When asked about whether Gathering Storm was somewhat of a political 
statement, the lead developer, Dennis Shirk, remained largely agnostic: 
"No, I don't think that's about making a political statement. We just 
like to have our gameplay reflect current science." It is certainly true 
that the game does not coerce players into taking any particular 
pathway, yet it does include a "World Congress" in which climate or 
deforestation treaties and humanitarian aid can be ratified. We would 
also argue that the very inclusion of anthropogenic climate change and 
an associated system of incentives and punishments is inherently a 
political act. Moreover, in the social studies of science, what one 
considers to be "current science" has political ramifications.

In the case of Gathering Storm, for example, in most scenarios a player 
could probably continue to be a "free rider" and rely solely on 
technological solutions. That is only possible because those 
technologies are known in advance and players are given virtually 
perfect information on the different stages of climate change and its 
effects. One of the consequences is that the game essentially eliminates 
the very uncertainty which is inherent to the "current science" on 
climate change and conveys a sense of technological optimism whereby 
innovations alone can sustain human prosperity.

We are not suggesting that the developers are necessarily liable or even 
responsible for promoting these views. Rather we wish to illustrate how 
different depictions of the future can restrict or encourage certain 
courses of action. The developers could have chosen to make the effects 
of climate change and access to mitigating technologies more random 
(although we do not know how difficult that would be to implement in 
practice nor its effects on gameplay)...
- -
In the academic journal Environmental Communication, we argue that 
science and the humanities (including the arts) need to work together in 
the case of complex issues such as climate change, so as to better 
communicate scientific thinking and its political ramifications. Video 
games – as interactive and playful products – offer truly exceptional 
opportunities to do just that. We welcome these initiatives with open 
arms, so long as they remain responsible and stimulate critical thinking.
more at - 
https://theconversation.com/civilization-vi-gathering-storm-shows-video-games-can-make-us-think-seriously-about-climate-change-111791/


[Comment on worth of video games]
*A Climate for Change: Millennials, Science and the Humanities*
Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda & Noam Obermeister
Published online: 31 Jul 2018
Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1500927
ABSTRACT
The rise and pervasiveness of post-truth and alternative facts posit 
fundamental questions for the current epistemic authority of scientific 
knowledge. In conjunction, complex and multi-scalar problems of the 
likes of climate change call for research that transcends traditional 
disciplinary silos, upon which much of that authority was built. As 
such, we call for a greater involvement of the humanities in 
environmental research and communication. We suggest that young 
researchers wishing to pursue academic careers (including ourselves) may 
be well-equipped to reconfigure and reconcile science and the humanities 
within the context of their PhDs and beyond – taking a frontline 
position in the constant struggle to overcome longstanding antagonisms 
between the scholarship of fact-finding and that of meaning-making. We 
do so by exploring examples – within academia and beyond – where those 
collisions have been successful, including the works of a millennial 
scientist/artist and a dystopian video game.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17524032.2018.1500927


[dystopian video game of hope - in a frozen world]
*FROSTPUNK - Debut Gameplay Trailer - "Heartbeats"*
https://youtu.be/UxTxUL_8VkA
http://www.frostpunkgame.com/
- - -
[tips from April 2018]
*Frostpunk - Efficient Early Game City & Tips*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st26pN26aIg
- - -
[before you play the game]
*8 Tips And Tricks To Survive Frostpunk - Beginner's Guide*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6hcB_g4r8
- - -
[entire video channel for Frost Punk]
*Frostpunk*
Auto-generated by YouTube
Frostpunk is a city-building survival game developed and published by 11 
bit studios.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOw-e8WIlpbkXFZ0aVj6zyA


[nurturing aspirationalism]
*How sci-fi could help solve climate change*
By Zoe Sayler on Feb 18, 2019 at 6:00 am
As early as 1905, nearly 50 years before the first photovoltaic cell was 
put to use, the women of "Ladyland" were thriving on solar energy.

I'm sure that Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain -- the Bengali feminist thinker 
who dreamt up the utopian setting of Sultana's Dream -- would hate to 
say "I told you so." But her seeming clairvoyance does beg the question: 
Is there science fiction out there right now, sitting on some library 
bookshelf, that could pave a yellow brick road to a better future? And, 
if there isn't, shouldn't there be?

There's a reason that science fiction can tend toward the dystopian: 
It's not hard to imagine things going to shit. But while dystopian 
fiction can be a jarring wake-up call -- it's one reason we're 
(rightfully) freaked out about nuclear war -- scholars and writers are 
increasingly calling for stories that help us rise above our most 
intimidating challenges. That's particularly true with the sci-fi 
subgenre called climate fiction, known by fans as "cli-fi."

"Climate fiction is sort of a virtual laboratory," says Lisa Yaszek, a 
professor of science fiction at Georgia Tech. "It can dramatize our 
hopes and offer us different visions of the future."

One example: "Better Worlds," The Verge's recent series of optimistic 
science fiction short stories and videos, several of which explore 
themes of climate and social justice. In one story, residents of a small 
island community work together to survive a worsening storm season; in 
another, a neighborhood bands together to ensure equitable escape from 
an uninhabitable planet.

"At a time when simply reading the news is an exercise in exhaustion, 
anxiety, and fear, it's no surprise that so many of our tales about the 
future are dark amplifications of the greatest terrors of the present," 
writes editor Laura Hudson in an intro to the series. "But now more than 
ever, we also need the reverse: stories that inspire hope."

Arizona State University is in on it, too. ASU's Center for Science and 
the Imagination has published anthologies spotlighting climate 
literature, optimistic sci-fi, or both, and is set to release a new 
anthology this spring called The Weight of Light, which pairs visions of 
a solar future with scientific essays that describe and analyze the 
premise behind the prose.

"A big part of our work is bringing together scientific and 
technological reality with storytelling that's vivid and relatable for 
people," says Joey Eschrich, who works at the center and edited several 
of the anthologies. "[Science fiction] gives you a sense that you can 
get your head around these complicated ideas, and maybe have a voice in 
them."

That has certainly been the case in the past: We have H.G. Wells to 
thank for the rocket. Star Trek inspired the first mobile phone. The 
idea for the taser came from an "electric rifle" in a young adult series 
from the 1900s (ok, maybe I'm not as jazzed about that one). Science 
fiction has predicted or inspired future technology so often that 
corporations now hire sci-fi writers to help dream up new products. (As 
we speak, one of them might be designing your next pair of shoes.)

The genre has influenced social movements, too: Detroit activist 
Adrienne Maree Brown gives credit to Patternist series author Octavia 
Butler for her vision of a just future, and Ernest Callenbach's 1970 
novel Ecotopia became the manifesto for multiple green parties, 
according to Yaszek.

Writers who are hard at work on present-day challenges include Kim 
Stanley Robinson, whose 2017 novel, New York 2140, imagines communal 
life in the half-drowned city.

Cadwell Turnbull's sci-fi addresses a problem that's close to home. In 
his short story for The Verge, Monsters Come Howling in their Season, 
Turnbull writes about a cooperative community in St. Thomas using 
artificial intelligence to coordinate resources in the face of 
increasingly frequent and devastating tropical storms. The story was 
inspired by the 2017 aftermath of Hurricane Irma, when Turnbull went a 
day without hearing news from his mother on the Caribbean island.

The AI that Turnbull envisions -- which goes by the name "Common" -- is 
smarter than Amazon's Alexa (and, unlike Microsoft's Cortana, the 
characters actually use it). But if you've ever asked Siri for 
directions, it's a future that doesn't feel too far off. Turnbull would 
know -- he once worked for Amazon on what he calls "Alexa's brain."

"I didn't want to write about things that we couldn't see and couldn't 
touch and couldn't think about using right now," Turnbull says. "I 
thought that would be in some ways more hopeful."

But some in the field argue that we need more big, risky, 
earth-shattering ideas from science fiction writers. Sci-fi author Neal 
Stephenson blames a dearth of forward-looking science fiction for what 
he calls "innovation starvation" -- "a general failure of our society to 
get big things done."

Stephenson can roast us all he wants. But does optimistic climate 
fiction sell?

Well, it's unlikely that our disaster obsession will go away anytime 
soon: George Orwell's famous dystopian novel, 1984, saw a 9,500 percent 
increase in sales in the month following President Trump's inauguration.

Still, cli-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, who Eschrich calls "a keeper 
of the utopian impulse," is one of contemporary science fiction's most 
recognizable names. Afrofuturism, which draws from sci-fi and African 
traditions to envision black people at the center of a powerful, 
innovative future, featured heavily in Marvel's 2018 blockbuster Black 
Panther. Even WALL-E can be interpreted as optimistic cli-fi -- at least 
some life finds a way to survive on a trash-covered Earth. As Margaret 
Atwood said, "every dystopia contains a little utopia, or at least a 
better world."

Journalist Dan Bloom, who coined the term cli-fi in 2008 (and is pretty 
good-natured when people confuse it for "clit-fic") hopes that Hollywood 
will soon take a crack at portraying more hopeful visions of humanity's 
future. We haven't had the cli-fi Star Wars yet, although Interstellar 
may have come close. Maybe a new hope is all we need to restore freedom 
to the galaxy.

Yaszek thinks that sci-fi video games could have a positive impact, too: 
They help us visualize ourselves as changemakers (rather than just 
letting people in shiny spandex with weird hair do it).

In Thunderbird Strike, a 2017 game by Elizabeth LaPensée, users play a 
thunderbird flying around Turtle Island hurling lightning bolts at oil 
rigs. The game is mostly symbolic -- its website calls attention to the 
impact of oil drilling on indigenous lands -- but Yaszek says that it 
makes you feel in control in a unique and powerful way. And it makes an 
overwhelming problem feel like a game that anyone can win.
https://grist.org/article/how-sci-fi-could-help-solve-climate-change/


[games for grown-ups]
*Surge in US economists' support for carbon tax to tackle emissions*
Leslie Hook, Financial Times
US economists are uniting in record numbers to back the idea of a carbon 
tax as the most effective and immediate way of tackling climate change, 
says the Financial Times. Former US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, 
who is leading the grouping, told the FT the "green new deal" programme 
was costly, whereas the carbon tax would be the "most efficient way" to 
reduce emissions. Meanwhile, Axios reports on plans from senate 
Democrats to push an amendment on a green new deal resolution on 
acknowledgement of human-driven global warming. The moves aim to put 
Republicans on the record on whether they support the scientific 
consensus on human-caused climate change, says Axios. Vox has an article 
on how a California "coalition" is moving to begin the "tedious, but oh 
so necessary" work of decarbonising buildings. "As the green new deal 
acknowledges, any plan to tackle climate change has to tackle the 
building sector, even if it won't get headlines," it says. Think 
Progress, meanwhile, looks at the "20-year-old playbook that explains 
Republicans' attacks on the green new deal."
https://www.ft.com/content/fa0815fe-3299-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5


[AGU Podcast audio]
DECEMBER 13, 2018
*Centennial E1 – How the Cold War advanced atmospheric science*
Tensions escalated between the United States and Soviet Union in the 
wake of World War II as the two countries stockpiled nuclear weapons and 
detonated hundreds of test bombs in the atmosphere. But this arms race 
had an unexpected side effect: scientists learned for the first time how 
air behaves in Earth's upper atmosphere and how pollution, volcanic ash, 
and radioactive fallout travel around the globe.

In this inaugural episode of Third Pod from the Sun's Centennial Series, 
researchers from NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory discuss how scientists' 
understanding of Earth's atmosphere changed as a result of the Cold War. 
Listen to one meteorologist describe witnessing nuclear bomb tests in on 
a remote Pacific Island and hear how scientists used their newfound 
knowledge of the atmosphere to trace radioactivity from Chernobyl, the 
most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history.
https://thirdpodfromthesun.com/2018/12/13/centennial-e1-how-the-cold-war-advanced-atmospheric-science/
- - -
[subscribe]
*Third Pod from the Sun* is the American Geophysical Union's podcast 
about the scientists and methods behind the science. These are stories 
that you won't read in a manuscript or hear in a lecture.
https://thirdpodfromthesun.com/


*This Day in Climate History - February 19, 2006 - from D.R. Tucker*
February 19, 2006: The CBS program "60 Minutes" reports on the effects 
of human-caused climate change in the Arctic.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-global-warning/

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