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

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Jan 19 08:57:14 EST 2019


/January 19, 2019/


[more students]
*Climate change: Belgium students skip school to demand action*
Thousands of students have skipped school in Belgium to join a march 
greater demanding action on climate change.
About 12,5000 young people took part in Thursday's protest in Brussels. 
They have vowed to return to demonstrate every week until world leaders 
take notice.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-46913247/climate-change-belgium-students-skip-school-to-demand-action


[future]
*Incompatible with Climate Limits*
Kelly Trout, January 16, 2019
*Drilling Towards Disaster:*

    Why U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Is Incompatible with Climate Limits
    A new study released by Oil Change International and 17 partner
    organizations examines the urgent need for U.S. leadership to manage
    a rapid and just decline of fossil fuel production.

The United States should be a global leader in winding down fossil fuel 
use and production. Instead, the U.S. oil and gas industry is gearing up 
to unleash the largest burst of new carbon emissions in the world 
between now and 2050. At precisely the time in which the world must 
begin rapidly decarbonizing to avoid runaway climate disaster, the 
United States is moving further and faster than any other country to 
expand oil and gas extraction.

*Key findings include:*

    Unprecedented Oil & Gas Expansion: Between 2018 and 2050, U.S.
    drilling into new oil and gas reserves could unlock 120 billion
    metric tons of new carbon pollution, which is equivalent to the
    lifetime CO2 emissions of nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants. If
    not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the rest of
    the world's ability to manage a climate-safe, equitable decline of
    oil and gas production.
    Expansion Hot Spots: Some 90% of U.S. drilling into new oil and gas
    reserves through 2050 would depend on fracking; nearly 60% of the
    carbon emissions enabled by new U.S. drilling would come from the
    epicenters of fracking - the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico
    and the Appalachian Basin across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio.
    Coal - Too Much Already: Given U.S. coal mining should be phased out
    by 2030 or sooner if the world is to equitably achieve the Paris
    Agreement goals, at least 70% of the coal in existing U.S. mines
    should stay in the ground.
    These findings show that leadership is urgently needed towards a
    U.S. fossil fuel phase-out that aligns with climate limits, takes
    care of workers and communities on its front lines, and builds a
    more healthy and just economy for all in the process.

*Key recommendations for what U.S. policymakers must do to show real 
climate leadership:*
Ban new leases or permits for new fossil fuel exploration, production, 
and infrastructure;
Plan for the phase-out of existing fossil fuel projects in a way that 
prioritizes environmental justice;
End subsidies and other public finance for the fossil fuel industry;
Champion a Green New Deal that ensures a just transition to 100 percent 
renewable energy; and
Reject the influence of fossil fuel money over U.S. energy policy.
Download the full report - 
http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2019/01/Drilling-Towards-Disaster-Web-v2.pdf
Download selected figures from the report - 
http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2019/01/drilling-down-figures.zip
http://priceofoil.org/2019/01/16/report-drilling-towards-disaster/


[CNN video report]
*America's oil boom is terrible for the climate*
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/business/climate-us-coal-mining/index.html


[A manifesto for climate politics]
*What Must We Do to Live?*
Climate collapse demands heroism from all of us, all the time. That's good.

"What do we do about it?" is a natural question that follows from one of 
the world's preeminent scientific bodies proclaiming we have a small 
number of years to thwart the collapse of everything we know.

"What do we do about climate change?" is a long-running question with no 
real consensus on the answer. There is broad consensus on what humanity 
has to do. It's clear that the world's collective governments, markets, 
companies, and institutions must do one thing: decarbonize. The 
world--all its economies, supply chains, industries, vehicles, 
households, and farms--has to stop emitting greenhouse gases, primarily 
carbon dioxide, immediately.
- - -
Perhaps most importantly, we have to wake up in the morning and love 
more fiercely. I don't mean that in a trite, perfume-advertisement way. 
It is simply necessary that we love other people more selflessly than we 
do now in order to address this crisis. That, above all, is what 
confronting climate disruption demands.

Parents often love their children selflessly, sure. But that's not 
enough: they have to learn to love other children just as heartily. As 
climate refugees flee their homes, we'll have to take strangers into 
ours. We'll have to willingly spend tons of public money--that is, our 
own money--to experiment on technology that may fail, on projects that 
may weaken our country's strategic position in the world, on funding 
projects with benefits we may never see. We have to do the uneconomical 
thing, take less to give someone else more, pay more for electricity, or 
pool our resources to buy solar panels. We have to want a future for 
someone we've never met on the opposite side of the world.

We also have to hate more fiercely. There are men in power who are 
rapists and murderers, who want us and our children to die painful 
deaths, who are jeopardizing all life so they can jerk off into a 
jacuzzi in space. We have to hate these men in a way that is 
commensurate with their evil. We have to prepare ourselves 
psychologically to compel the state--or whomever--to take away 
everything they possess. We have to learn to turn off that human 
tendency to extend empathy to everything with a face, beautiful though 
it is, and be willing to put powerful men in prison forever.

Being motivated to do that means pouring our rage into the world, and 
suffering the pain of that. We have to confront the fact that real evil 
exists in the world, and it is the main obstacle to ensuring our 
survival on this planet. We have to realize that it's unimaginably 
difficult not to capitulate to that evil, but instead summon the will 
and courage to fight it.

In all the superhero and spy movies, somehow the world always finds 
itself about to be destroyed. To save the world from destruction, the 
heroes must do some acrobatics, punch some bad guys, and look really 
cool. Sometimes they make a sacrifice or two. Well, the real end of the 
world is now staring at us in the face. It's real. And no superhero is 
going to fly down and take care of it for us. Every one of us has to be 
heroic, and real heroics demand far more than what movies tell us they 
demand. Meeting this challenge will require an almost inhumanly selfless 
generosity and courage. That's just the nature and the scale of the 
problem.
But in finding our heroism to meet this challenge, we might find that 
how we live in the world becomes better than it is now, that we become 
better people. Perhaps the antidote to the selfishness running rampant 
in the world is a threat to our survival so immense that it demands an 
unprecedented selflessness. Summoning the love to take in strangers, or 
to sacrifice for wildlife, building the moral fortitude to fight evil 
men, forcing ourselves to expand our knowledge and our talents, finding 
the ambition to gain power in our societies, these are all necessary for 
avoiding climate collapse, and they can all make us superior to our 
current selves. This challenge can bring us together. It can build us 
up. We might find that it will conspire with our resilience to, finally, 
make us worthy of survival.

Samuel Miller McDonald is a writer and geography PhD student at 
University of Oxford studying the intersection of grassroots movements 
and energy transition.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2018/8/28/the-next-frontier-of-the-climate-movement-texas


[television weathercaster convention]
*Weather and Climate Summit*
January 15-18, 2018
Breckenridge, CO
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJbieZaCt1igu6WSRGRfSJQ
- - -
[Jim White, director of INSTAAR from the Summit]
*Weather and Climate Summit*
"climate change is a question of ethics, morals, economics,
and politics informed by science"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IySifbAOsh8



[Paul Beckwith video - huge weather disruptions]
*Status Report on our Abruptly Changing Climate: 1 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Jan 18, 2019
Here is an overdue chat on our abruptly changing climate. After a hiatus 
for chess study and competition and to recharge my internal batteries, I 
am refreshed and chomping at the bit, like the proverbial Energizer Bunny:)
I join-the-dots on extreme events like Australia’s heat waves (50 C; 122 
F), eastern North America and European deep freezes, torrential rains in 
Europe and California, accelerating ice melt from Greenland and 
Antarctica releasing methane, and huge insect kills in near-equator 
rainforests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygNuDYxquoc


[Scenarios derived from models]
*Are We Living Through Climate Change's Worst-Case Scenario?*
"We're a lot closer than we should be," one Stanford scientist warned.
"God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario," Jackson told 
me. Under RCP 8.5, the world's average temperature would rise by 4.9 
degrees Celsius, or nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit. "That's an 
inconceivable increase for global temperatures--especially when we think 
about them being global average temperatures," he said. "Temperatures 
will be even higher in the northern latitudes, and higher over land than 
over the ocean."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/rcp-85-the-climate-change-disaster-scenario/579700/ 



[a classic video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWYl3o3bWgg]
*Tim Rumage: The Shrinking Timeline for Global Warming*
[renamed to avoid alarmism]
Tim Rumage: The Transition from Fossil Energy to Solar Power
Climate State - Published on Jan 14, 2019
Tim Rumage (Coordinator Environmental Studies), speaks at the 
Sustainable Communities Workshop November 29, 2018, the talk is titled, 
"The Shrinking Timeline for Global Warming."
Source Sarasota County Government (Official)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG193b6FRJ8


[Some hard science 3 years ago Harvard informal talk on Climate]
[3 year old videos  - advanced, hard to understand Harvard presentations 
on the science - an overly academic summary]
*Harvard Climate Science Breakfast lectures* https://vimeo.com/huce
Release https://vimeo.com/126306925
https://youtu.be/E3iqncCSvFk


[important handbook from the Climate Psychology Alliance]
*INTRODUCTION TO THE HANDBOOK OF CLIMATE PSYCHOLOGY*
Last Updated: 17 December 2018
- -
The Handbook of Climate Psychology is a collective project that will, i) 
act as a vehicle for deepening our shared understanding of what we mean 
by 'climate psychology' and ii) provide a valuable online resource for 
users of our website. Hopefully, we might organise it along the lines of 
Wikipedia - a kind of work of 'the commons' that will unfold over time.

Entries will be approximately 500 words in length and include a 
definition, an explanation of its importance to climate psychology, and 
links to relevant literature. Wherever possible, examples of the concept 
will be drawn from politics/culture/media, from research data and from 
clinical material. One or two entries will also refer to pioneers in our 
field; people like Harold Searles for example.

The Handbook has a small editorial team, which will produce some of the 
entries, but our hope is that many more will be produced by other CPA 
members. Once an entry has been submitted, the usual editorial 'to and 
fro' would occur between the submitter of the entry and the editors, to 
produce the final draft that would then go 'live'...

So we see this as a collective project. There will be no individual 
authorship of entries or of the Handbook as a whole. It will be a CPA 
Handbook.
https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/handbook/302-introduction


[popular lesson on observing media deception]
*Mr. Flare Explains: The Virgin Mary*
CaptainDisillusion
Published on Dec 12, 2018
While Captain Disillusion recovered from world travels, Mr. Flare took 
it upon himself to thoroughly deconstruct a video on his own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc6pK_ouO1k


[A great little bit of science demonstrated]
*Oceanographer Josh Willis discusses the heat capacity of water, 
performs an experiment to demonstrate heat capacity using a water 
balloon and describes how water's ability to store heat affects Earth's 
climate.*
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/40/video-oceans-of-climate-change/


[more science - Space Weather] [ignore echo at the beginning]
*Weather and Climate Summit, Day 2 - Bob Rutledge*
StormCenter Communications
Published on Jan 30, 2018
Session 4: Bob Rutledge - Providing Impact-Based Decision Support 
Services for Space Weather Impacts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwPZkScOEr0


*This Day in Climate History - January 19, 1999 - from D.R. Tucker*
January 19, 1999: In his State of the Union address, President Clinton 
declares, "But our most fateful new challenge is the threat of global 
warming; 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. Last year’s heat 
waves, floods, and storms are but a hint of what future generations may 
endure if we do not act now."
http://youtu.be/v3bZwSXjtCM

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no 
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages 
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.



More information about the TheClimate.Vote mailing list