[TheClimate.Vote] July 23, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/July 23 , 2019/

[weather forecast, climate forecast]
JULY 22, 2019
*Paris braces for record heat as Europe scorched again*
by Amelie Bottollier-Depois And Stuart Williams
Parisians were on Monday bracing for potentially the hottest ever 
temperature in the French capital this week as a new heatwave blasted 
into northern Europe that could set records in several countries.

Temperatures were already topping 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees 
Fahrenheit) on Monday in Paris, but the mercury could soar beyond 40C on 
Thursday and topple a record dating back to 1947.

The severe heat, which forecasters say will only last a few days but 
will be exceptionally intense, is also expected to affect parts of 
Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

"It's likely that these three countries will see temperatures at or 
above 40C for the first time," Francois Jobard, a forecaster from the 
French Meteo France weather office, told AFP.

The new blast of hot air comes less than a month after a heatwave 
scorched Europe at the end of June, forcing new attention on the issue 
of climate change.

"The heatwave that is too much," declared the headline in Le Parisien 
newspaper, highlighting that "Act II" of this summer's severe weather 
would further hurt production of crops from potatoes to grapes.

'Historically hot'

Jobard from Meteo France said that Thursday was shaping up to be "a 
potentially historically hot day".
"We are forecasting 41 or 42 degrees in Paris on Thursday and there is 
the strong chance of beating the record," he added.

The highest ever temperature recorded in Paris was 40.4 degrees Celsius 
(104.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in 1947. Since records began in 1873, this 
was the only time a plus-40 temperature was recorded in the French 
capital, he said.

With climbing, only vehicles with a special clean air certificate will 
be allowed into central Paris on Tuesday, the local authorities said.

Britain will also see high temperatures, but will still be significantly 
cooler than countries on the continent.

Germany was already experiencing several forest fires and drying river 
beds while farmers fear another bad crop after last year's low yield 
which was also caused by an unusually hot summer.

The French government has warned that wine production will be down by 
between six to 13 percent over 2018, notably because of the ongoing 
heatwave.

French Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume has said that the 
government will ask the EU to bring forward the payment some one billion 
euros in aid to farmers to help them through the dry spell.
He said farmers in around three dozen departments (regions) in France 
are being allowed to cut fallow fields as there was no food left to feed 
animals in the regular pastures.

Huge wildfires that have ravaged the mountainous Castelo Branco region 
of central Portugal and left dozens injured have been "90 percent" 
controlled, firefighters said Monday, but warned that strong winds could 
cause the flames to spread.
'Prophetess in shorts'
- - -
Scientists are increasingly confident that man-made climate change is 
driving up the length and intensity of heatwaves.

The three-day temperature peak from June 26-28 in France was four 
degrees Celsius (7.2 Farenheit) hotter than an equally rare June 
heatwave would have been in 1900, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) 
team said this month.
One study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology also said the 
deadly, weeks-long heatwave across northern Europe in 2018 would have 
been statistically impossible without climate change.

France saw its highest ever temperature on June 28--46.0 degrees Celsius 
(114.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Verargues in the Herault department of 
southern France.

Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, who highlighted the 
problem of global warming through school strikes, is due to visit the 
French parliament on Tuesday.

Some right-wing MPs have said her visit is needless, with Julien Aubert 
of the Republicans describing her as a "prophetess in shorts, a Nobel 
Prize for Fear" in comments denounced by green activists.
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-paris-braces-europe.html



[Common sense notion]
*The Risk of Conflict Rises as the World Heats Up*
Ignoring the connections between climate and security poses risks for 
the U.S.
By Annie Sneed on July 22, 2019

The administration has not articulated a clear-cut view on climate and 
security. But in 2017 President Donald Trump dropped the Obama 
administration's previous inclusion of climate change as a chief threat 
in his first National Security Strategy (a congressionally mandated 
document stating what the White House sees as the U.S.'s biggest 
security concerns and how it intends to address them). Earlier this year 
The Washington Post reported the administration was working to create a 
panel that would likely attempt to undercut expert findings on the 
dangers climate change poses to national security.
A country's security can encompass a range of elements, from 
cybersecurity to food production, but conflict is among the most basic. 
"The classic definition [of state security] has been around 
conflict--threats to human life from armed aggression--which includes 
intrastate components such as dissident groups and civil war, and then, 
of course, when states go to war with each other," says David Victor, a 
professor of international relations at the University of California, 
San Diego. In the past decade scientists have looked at what climate 
change might mean for conflict and security, finding some significant 
connections--and denying them, they say, is a grave mistake...
- - -
Experts note there are various tools the U.S. and other powerful nations 
could use to help break the link between climate and conflict, such as 
established international aid efforts. "These are interventions like 
social safety nets or insurance programs that help buffer people's 
incomes and livelihoods against changes in climate," Burke says.

Given the scientific research and the conclusions of the U.S. military, 
Burke and other experts say the Trump administration's position on 
climate change is worrying. The U.S. government has a long history of 
stalling on climate action, but those who monitor the issue say the 
Trump administration is worsening the problem. "Even a few years' delay 
on meaningful action here could have a huge influence on where we are," 
Burke says. "We're in a much, much worse place with regard to these 
outcomes--conflict and otherwise--than we would have been if we had done 
something about it."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risk-of-conflict-rises-as-the-world-heats-up/


[Malaria - a disease of warmer regions, is spreading into warming areas]
*Study: Malaria Drugs Are Failing At An 'Alarming' Rate In Southeast Asia*
Jason Beaubien - July 22, 2019

Malaria drugs are failing at an "alarming" rate in Southeast Asia as 
drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasite emerge.
That's the conclusion of researchers in two new reports -- one based on 
a randomized trial and the other on a genetic study -- that have just 
been released in the medical journal The Lancet. And there's concern 
that this drug resistance could spread around the globe.

Global health officials get nervous when new strains of drug-resistant 
malaria turn up in Southeast Asia, because it's a dreaded pattern that 
they've seen before.

Resistance that has hatched in this region has doomed previous malaria 
medications since the middle of the 20th century.

"Somehow antimalarial drug resistance always starts in that part of the 
world," says Arjen Dondorp, who leads malaria research at the Mahidol 
Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok and who was a lead 
author of the report about the randomized trial.

"In the past, chloroquine resistance originated there. 
Sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, the next generation of antimalarials -- 
resistance to that originated there. And now the artemisinin resistance 
also was first detected in western Cambodia."

And it's hard to underscore the significance of this. In modern times, 
the death spiral for malaria drug after malaria drug has begun in the 
Mekong Delta. The reasons for this are complicated. Some scientists say 
that one reason could have something to do with the relatively low 
levels of malaria there. When resistant parasites emerge, they are not 
competing against a dominant nonresistant strain of malaria and are 
possibly able to spread easier.

Currently, the World Health Organization recommends treating the 
majority of malaria cases with artemisinin-based combination therapies, 
or ACTs. These are usually single pills that combine fast-acting 
artemisinin with another longer-acting antimalarial drug. Currently one 
of the most widely used ACTs globally is dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine. 
And this is the artemisinin combo that Dondorp found to be failing in 
Southeast Asia.

These drugs have been highly effective at treating malaria, one of the 
world's most burdensome diseases. According to the World Health 
Organization, each year there are more than 200 million cases of malaria 
and 400,000 people die from the disease. Those deaths are primarily 
among children in Africa.

The two-drug artemisinin combos continue to be the first-line drugs for 
treating most malaria cases around the world, including in Africa. And 
they have been credited with helping to bring global malaria deaths down 
to an all-time low. But now it looks like their future effectiveness is 
in question.

Dondorp, in the midst of a study in the greater Mekong region, was 
comparing a new three-drug malaria regimen against the conventional 
two-drug artemisinin combo. And it was in the middle of that study that 
he and his colleagues saw that the current antimalarial drugs weren't 
fully wiping out the potentially deadly parasites.

"We noticed incredible high failure rates with the first-line treatment, 
and that was the reason to publish this first before we can publish the 
results of the efficacy of the triple combinations," he says. Basically, 
the current drugs were performing so badly that the researchers felt it 
imperative to sound the alarm about what was the control side of the study.

The overall failure rate was 50%. But in some parts of the region, the 
drugs weren't working nine times out of 10.

Dondorp says the resistance was even worse than they'd expected.

"We knew already [resistance] was in Cambodia and it had increased 
dramatically over the years," he says. "What was new was that it was 
also present in northeastern Thailand and southern Vietnam."

Health officials in Cambodia were aware that the drugs were failing and 
had switched back to an older medicine in 2014. Now Vietnam and Thailand 
are also moving away from the World Health Organization's recommended 
first-line malaria treatment.

So far this drug resistance has been mainly found in the areas around 
the Mekong Delta, but there's no reason these parasites couldn't spread 
to India or other parts of Asia or even Africa.

And if that happens with the latest line of artemisinin combination 
treatments, it could be a major setback to global efforts to control the 
mosquito-borne disease.

"It is really worrying," says Shunmay Yeung, an associate professor at 
the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Yeung studies malaria 
and malaria drug resistance, though she wasn't involved in these new 
studies in The Lancet. She says there has been incredible progress 
against malaria over the past 15 years. "We've halved the number of 
deaths due to malaria globally," she says.

And artemisinin-based antimalarials, along with increased distribution 
of mosquito bed nets, have been a major force in achieving that. They 
are "wonderfully effective drugs," she says.

"It's three days of treatment and you're better." They work quickly. 
They have few side effects. "To lose these first-line drugs, the 
artemisinin combination therapies, would be disastrous," Yeung says. "If 
this [resistance] emerged or spread to Africa, it would be a disaster."

Globally the majority of malaria cases occur in Africa.

So far, however, the mutant malaria parasites that have built up a 
resistance to artemisinin-based drugs haven't taken hold on the continent.
But if the histories of other antimalarial drugs are any guide to the 
future, they eventually will.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/07/22/742674941/study-malaria-drugs-are-failing-at-an-alarming-rate-in-southeast-asia
- - -
[Opinion, 10 years ago, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation criticized 
for approaching malaria with drugs instead of curtailing geographic 
range of malaria by fighting climate change]
Seattle Post Intelligencer
*First Person: Prodding the sacred cow*
By RICHARD PAULI, GUEST COLUMNIST Published, March 1, 2009
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy, 
has overlooked the biggest threat to human health and human future -- 
the increasing rate of climate destabilization from global warming.

Last year the foundation co-chairman said about global warming: "The 
fact of the matter is we don't think about it." I urge that immediately 
be changed to: "Every individual, organization and state should be 
thinking about climate change now."

For too long the Gates Foundation ignored extensive research that 
concludes global warming and climate destabilization has extended and 
amplified disease and other human health problems. Foundation science 
advisers can report that global warming is caused, enhanced and 
accelerated by carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industrial 
civilization. The biggest danger to our future is that we may fail to 
regulate CO2 output. Continued global warming causes sea levels to rise, 
which will increase disease vector populations...
- - -
At the very least, the foundation should accept climate change as a real 
cause of suffering and include it when evaluating the global health 
metrics that underlie its good works. With such an honest view, others 
can share in its objective: for all people to have healthy and 
productive lives.

Failure to act is the biggest sin. Knowledgeable people of wealth and 
power should take a stand -- because it is right, because it is needed 
and because inaction brings harm to us all.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/opinion/article/First-Person-Prodding-the-sacred-cow-1301367.php



[Mother Jones asks: WWJD?]
*What Would Jesus Do About Climate Change?*
"Preserve and restore God's great gift of creation."
Alexander C. Kaufman
The Green New Deal has picked up endorsements from two major Christian 
groups, signaling a growing base of support among the faithful as 
climate change projections look increasingly apocalyptic.

The Unitarian Universalist Association passed a resolution at its 
general assembly in late June endorsing the Green New Deal resolution 
that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) 
introduced in Congress five months ago. The main national organization 
for the egalitarian spiritual movement, which has over 1,000 churches in 
the U.S., vowed to "actively support the development of federal 
legislation to implement" the deal.

Days later, the national deliberative body of the United Church of 
Christ, a mainline Protestant sect with nearly 825,000 adherents and 
close to 4,900 congregations across the United States, also voted to 
endorse the Green New Deal. It called the policy framework "what is 
needed to preserve and restore God's great gift of creation."

Last week, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, a youth organization 
within one of Protestantism's most traditionally conservative 
denominations, praised what it called the Green New Deal's "biblical 
principles" and pledged to work "toward translating these…into viable, 
bipartisan bills."

The announcements bring new momentum to the effort to advance a sweeping 
national industrial plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions and 
provide millions of Americans with good-paying jobs that fortify 
infrastructure and build renewable energy--at a moment when that plan is 
facing fierce opposition. The religious endorsements could give the 
Green New Deal appeal in conservative districts as activists urge 2020 
candidates to adopt its framework.

"You've got everyone from the Unitarian Universalists to the young 
evangelicals," said Rev. Brooks Berndt, a 42-year-old United Church of 
Christ minister in the Cleveland area. "That's quite a spectrum."

Roughly 70% of the U.S. population identifies as Christian. Throughout 
American history, Christian clergy have taken leading roles in 
progressive social movements. They championed the rights of workers and 
immigrants amid the nation's chaotic 19th-century boom. During the civil 
rights era, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently cited the Bible 
to highlight the immorality of racism and spent his final years 
crusading against laws that preserved the poverty he saw as antithetical 
to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

When the so-called culture war shifted to fights over evolution, 
abortion and LGBTQ rights, a new generation of religious hardliners with 
national TV platforms forged a powerful conservative voting bloc. In the 
mid-2000s, as the oil industry's propaganda denying climate science 
became a main Republican Party line, those voters adopted a similar stance.

When the Pew Research Center polled different Christian sects in 2015 on 
climate change, white evangelicals were the least likely, at 28%, to 
recognize that the planet is warming due to human actions. That compared 
to 41% of white mainline Protestants, 45% of white Catholics, 56% of 
black Protestants and 77% of Hispanic Catholics.

Yet the number of actual Christian deniers has plummeted over the past 
four years as mounting natural disasters, increasingly grave scientific 
forecasts and a rapidly growing political movement erase doubt over the 
cause of planetary changes. And new research published last week shows 
that religious messaging on climate resonates with Christians who 
already understand the crisis.

Providing "a better life for our children and grandchildren" came out as 
the top motivation among Christians and non-Christians to reduce 
planet-warming emissions, according to the study published in the 
journal Science Communication. But Christian respondents said they were 
also inspired by a need to "protect God's creation."

"[T]his research suggests that moral, religious, and social normative 
frames can be effective ways to engage Christians in the issue of 
climate change," Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on 
Climate Change Communication and a co-author of the study, wrote in an 
email newsletter last week.

In 2015, Pope Francis, the leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic 
Church, released an encyclical― titled "Laudato si'," or "Be 
praised"―outlining the theological case for combating climate change. 
The pope has repeatedly sermonized against the inaction on what he last 
month declared a "climate emergency," calling the failure to reduce 
greenhouse gases "a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future 
generations." He has not, however, endorsed the Green New Deal, even as 
the idea is gaining traction in Europe, Canada and elsewhere.

Climate change, said evangelical Rev. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, is "first a 
biblical, moral and gospel issue, rather than first a political issue." 
As such, Young Evangelicals for Social Action decided not to endorse the 
Green New Deal resolution outright, lest the group alienate the 
conservative co-religionists it aims to influence.

"Rather than signaling which side of the tribal fight we're on, we 
wanted to rise above that and set a lot of that aside and reflect that 
the Green New Deal actually reflects biblical principles," said 
Meyaard-Schaap, 30, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. "We're leveraging within 
our community the disaffection among young people with … the way in 
which our faith has become weaponized as a political tool."

Yet, for others, the latest string of endorsements are less about the 
redirection of entrenched institutions than about the political 
diversity of American Christianity.

"There's no doubt that certain elements of Christianity have been 
hijacked by forces that are really antithetical to justice and the 
gospel," said Berndt, who serves as an environmental justice minister in 
the United Church of Christ. "There's a long history of Christianity, 
back to the Roman Empire, where there's faith that gets co-opted by 
empire and faith that forms resistance to empire."
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/07/what-would-jesus-do-about-climate-change/



[Climate changes the TV channel]
*How Do You Make Sure a Climate Debate Would Slay? A Former "Buffy" 
Writer Has Ideas.*
"They need a showrunner."
Rebecca Leber - July 19, 2019

For as long as I've reported on climate change, the conventional wisdom 
has been that my beat makes boring TV. A year ago MSNBC's Chris Hayes 
called it a "palpable ratings killer" as he attempted to explain why 
networks weren't doing more.

That conventional wisdom has always been amplified during campaign 
season, when the networks would pass on any questions during primetime 
debates because, as Grist reported in 2016, they always thought the 
audience wasn't interested. Or the politics were too complex to be 
compelling. Democrats might agree climate change is a problem, even if 
they have different ways of highlighting what the problem means for the 
country and what to do about it. But during the recent debates, less 
than 10 minutes were spent discussing it. There just isn't enough 
potential for conflict.

So what would someone who has nothing to do with covering climate but 
who makes her living creating hugely successful shows do to turn a 
climate debate into good television? Who better to talk to than Marti 
Noxon, who has spent more than two decades as a producer and writer for 
television hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, UnREAL, and Sharp 
Objects.

Writing fictional TV characters isn't exactly like politics or 
reporting. But I think the reason we say climate makes bad TV is how 
abstract and unemotional the discussion around it is. Noxon agreed and 
explained strategies for tugging at those heartstrings, and how she'd 
redo political television if she were suddenly given the power to be, as 
she calls it, a "benevolent dictator."

To kick off, what do you think about how these debates are formatted, 
the way the dialogue is structured? What could be done differently?

First of all, all of it reminds me of the last two seasons of Veep. The 
last two seasons of Veep are like a documentary-slash-nightmare version 
of the real world. My daughter and I just binged the whole series, and 
when we got to the end I thought this is almost too hard to watch. It's 
almost exactly what it's like. The debate is all so obvious in its 
manipulations. As an entertainment person it makes me cringe because it 
all looks like what we do for a living.

Could you tell me a bit more about that, what are the similarities 
between real politicians and characters on television?

They have to kind of cast themselves in a role, and they have to play 
that role to perfection.

How do you make something interesting that might on the surface seem 
boring to some people? Like I cover climate change, and have heard 
people call it boring, or abstract, or that there's nothing to debate.

That just means they have bad writers! A good writer can make anything 
interesting. If you take a micro issue and do sort of what Trump 
does--take a micro issue, come up with the most bombastic statement 
about it and just keep repeating it--I think that would penetrate.

When you say bombastic, is it--

I was listening to a podcast the other day where the scientists said if 
everyone in the world switched to a milk substitute, we would make a 
huge dent in what we did for climate change. To me it's not boring to 
talk about how much money people can make producing oats and oat milk 
instead of cow [milk]. There's got to be a way to talk about that to 
make it interesting--if farmers invest in oats, they are not only going 
to make a zillion dollars, they're also going to save the world. Our 
American farmers are going to save the world. We have the very best 
farmers and they're going to be billionaires.

That sounds a little more like Trump.

Doesn't that sound exciting though? Farmers can save the world, be 
billionaires, and be the best farmers everywhere.

You say these debates need better writers, who does that mean?

The reason that for so many of us comedy like John Oliver is becoming 
the news is because they're just better communicators. But the problem 
is, I've been to Washington in groups of writers trying to help impress 
upon candidates how much they need the help of seasoned writers, actual 
seasoned working writers. And then they don't test it.

The Democrats are terrible at it because they parse everything. I went 
with a group in Washington to talk about the simple declarative 
statements that are effective and are emotional. And you know they were 
like, "We're coming out with a great thing that's just like that." And 
then they revealed "A Better Deal" or something like that. It was none 
of the things they thought it was. It was a bad slogan, and it was an 
incomprehensible plan. It got no traction. And we kind of told them 
that. They focus group everything and they have to stop.

It sounds like you're saying fewer talking points and be more natural 
and off-the-cuff?

You can't do that in a debate with 20 people. You need a strong hand. 
You know, they need a showrunner, they really fucking need a showrunner, 
a really good one.

So they have a showrunner, or a lead producer who makes all the creative 
calls. What would you change if you were in charge?

I would politely tell all but five of the candidates that we were going 
fivesies, that the rest of them are done. And they could get mad, but 
they couldn't talk to me about it, the decision would be made. I would 
make them stay on message. That's what creating a show is: Why are we 
telling this story? What's the message of this story? What's the tone of 
this story? Then day after day after day you keep people on message. 
It's hard. It's exhausting but everyone has to agree it's a benevolent 
dictatorship. Can you imagine a bunch of politicians agreeing?

Say you hired me to be a showrunner, and my number one priority is 
climate change, I would look at four or our top five candidates. I say 
rule of five: Five top talking points, no more than five. After that 
people get confused and they get bored.

Five?

You can only retain so much nowadays, so give us five simple statements. 
Of those five, I try to make three of them covertly about climate 
change. One would be the impact of global warming on labor. And I would 
figure out a really snazzy way to say, you're going to be working harder 
and longer because of climate change. I would just be sneaky.

You are in the work of storytelling, what is the role personal stories 
can play?

I would talk about the fact that I was just down at Imperial Beach for 
the weekend with my kids. We entered a sandcastle-building contest, and 
the beaches eroded so much they had to bring in sand. The locals told me 
that when they were little, you had to walk about a half mile to get to 
the water. I think stories like that tell you so much. Do you relate it 
to childhood, people's memories, to their own summer vacations? And how 
those are going to go away.

A lot of the goal in debates is also to get some conflict or fireworks 
going.

It's really important to TV, but in politics you have to be really 
careful when you're talking about a female candidate. It makes me really 
sad that female candidates have to work so hard not to come across as 
"unlikable." In TV we've reached a new era where the unlikable female 
character is being celebrated. So I can write Camille in Sharp Objects 
as a really, really flawed character and people love her. Or Quinn King 
on UnREAL. If Constance Zimmer's Quinn ran for president she'd probably 
win. People like conflict in women when they're fictional, not if 
they're real. So it's tricky, tricky, tricky.

It sounds like some of the advice here is to cut down on the amount of 
noise and number of people on stage and to get people off their script 
and talking points to be more natural. And to take bigger risks, like 
what you said about being bombastic.

There's two different strategies, and I think you have to alternate 
between the two. The one strategy is to make it really simple and 
appealing to do things that will help the climate, and that's the kind 
of bombastic approach--best farmers ever. The second is find the story 
through your own child or your own family life. You find those really 
emotional stories from your actual childhood, you don't say, "I know a 
woman," you say "me" "I". And the second part is to alternate between 
those stories about the effects of climate change and bombastic 
statements. You know, alternate between love and tough love.

Sounds like there's a level of emotional manipulation here.

Yeah, totally.

There's a lot of debate over how to balance emotions. You know, making 
people hopeful for change or scared? How do you do both?

In television, I write my first draft without thinking about it at all. 
I just write it, and whatever comes out comes out. I take that first 
draft, and I work from there, and I get a lot of notes from a lot of 
different people. Then I sit back and go, what's the feeling of this?  
How does it feel? Is it giving me the feeling of hopefulness? Is it 
enough hope to make you watch it again?

But first I write it without thinking about it at all. You know, Joe 
Biden gut level. You keep fighting for the version that's going to 
resonate with people and make them want to do something, not just sink 
in a pile of ennui.

Any other advice?

It's the same rule I talk about with what I think my job is. You're 
trying to build something that makes empathy. That makes people actually 
care about something outside of their own concerns. And there are tricks 
to doing that and it might feel like you're being manipulative. But the 
goal is to make people walk away from the thing they watched and go, 
"Wow that's a lot harder than I thought it was, maybe I can help." So 
that's what my job is. And I feel like that's what politicians, if 
they're actually in it to help people should be doing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/07/would-a-climate-debate-make-good-tv-we-asked-the-creator-of-emmy-winning-sensation-unreal/



[Republished in Desdemona Despair - classic from 2009]
*14 Most Heinous Climate Villains*
By Mike Roddy and Ian Murphy
29 December 2009
(The Buffalo Beast) – The science of climate change is pretty basic: 
humans dig up fossilized carbon to fuel power plants and internal 
combustion machines, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Result: 
greenhouse effect global heating. Around 50% of all the species on the 
planet are predicted to become extinct by 2100 in the CO2-as-usual 
model. Our own species will face drought, famine, rising tides, soaring 
temperatures, calamity and chaos. Hundreds of millions will become 
climate refugees. Billions may die from starvation, genocide and war. We 
have precious little time to mitigate this looming global catastrophe.

Desdemona is mirroring this piece by Mike Roddy and Ian Murphy for 
safekeeping. It first appeared in The Buffalo Beast in 2009.

Those of us still denying the depressing facts are either tragically 
stupid or profoundly corrupt or both. If there's anyone alive to write 
the history of corporate funded climate science denial, the following 
list of 14 Heinous Climate Villains will, by the sheer magnitude of 
death their lies wrought, make the infamous dictatorial monsters of the 
20th century seem like incompetent children. Enjoy!
[names listed - details at 
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/07/14-most-heinous-climate-villains.html]
1) Don Blankenship, CEO Massey Energy...
2) George Will, Columnist...
3) James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma...
4) Steve Milloy, Fake Scientist...
5) Fred Singer, University of Virginia...
6) Myron Ebell,  Competitive Enterprise Institute...
7) Patrick Michaels, Cato...
8) Sallie Baliunas,  George C. Marshall Institute...
9) Stephen McIntyre, Mathematician...
10) Marc Morano, Professional Douchebag...
11) Professor Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville...
12) Richard Lindzen, MIT...
13) Bjorn Lomborg, Economist...
14) Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley...
Michael Roddy graduated with honors from Berkeley, and has written 
numerous magazine articles and Congressional testimonies on 
environmental and construction issues. He currently owns and operates a 
small hotel energy management company, with offices in Seattle, Napa, 
and Yucca Valley, California. Mike can be reached at 
mike.greenframe at gmail.com.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100316211454/http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=1237
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/07/14-most-heinous-climate-villains.html


[Warning - dark sarcasm from The Onion]
*Bye!*
By The Animal Kingdom
So you've probably heard about the new report saying human-caused 
climate change is putting about a million different species of animals 
and plants at risk of extinction, and we just wanted to pop on over and 
say that it's true, a lot of us are on our way out the door.

Bye!

Seriously, look at the time! We can't believe it's been hundreds of 
thousands of years already! That's a pretty long time, when you think 
about it, and you can't go on coexisting as humans and animals on the 
same planet forever. And you know what they say: It's better to burn out 
than to fade away. We're gonna take our cue here and get out of your 
hair pretty soon. So arrivederci, and adios!

We've had some really good times, us and you humans. Who can forget the 
crazy days of the Pleistocene epoch? Sure, the Ice Age was no picnic, 
but it was honestly pretty great later on hanging out and watching y'all 
evolve. We've had this whole symbiotic thing going where animals and 
Homo erectus could live side by side. Over the years, we've gotten to 
migrate with you as you've moved around and really had a chance to find 
ourselves and flourish in new places. It was paradise. It would've been 
awesome if life could've stayed that way forever, you know?

We're not trying to flake or anything, believe us. Look, you guys are 
obviously busy with your machines and your wars and your relentless 
pursuit of profit. Sometimes, people and animals grow apart. And that's 
okay. We've always been pretty chill with what you guys are doing, so 
don't worry, it's totally cool. A flourishing ecosystem that supports 
all of Earth's creatures isn't going to be everyone's thing. It's your 
habitat now, after all, and you've been gracious hosts to us for a long 
time. So thanks!

Since we've got you here, we do want to mention that it hasn't been all 
fun and games. If we're being honest, we're still not totally keen on 
poaching, pollution, zoos, deforestation, or raising us in terrible 
conditions for the express purpose of slaughtering and eating us. Those 
things are kind of a buzzkill. Don't get us wrong, we're not trying to 
be overly critical, since you obviously have your reasons. We just 
wanted to get that off our chests before we get going.

Also, it's sort of weird you breed some of us as pets. Just saying.

Do we wish we could stick around longer? Sure, a little. When the dodo 
peaced out back in the late 1600s, we were like, really? Already? The 
party's just getting started! But now when we look around--the oceans 
are heating up, the food's running out, and most of our natural 
environments are gone--we wonder if maybe the dodo was right to take off 
when it did. The vibe is getting kinda weird in here. Not that the last 
couple hundred years of rapid industrialization have been all bad for 
us, but let's just say the Earth's not quite as fun for us as it used to be.

We don't want to belabor our departure--no one likes a guest who 
overstays their welcome--so we'll just do a quick soundoff of who's 
heading out soon so you can say a quick toodle-oo: the Bengal tiger, 
Amur leopard, hawksbill sea turtle, Chinese giant salamander, Javan 
rhinoceros, Sumatran rhinoceros, black rhinoceros, giant panda, vaquita, 
eastern gorilla, Sumatran orangutan, Borean orangutan, saola, gharial, 
Asian elephant, Philippine crocodile, Chinese pangolin, Malayan tiger, 
mountain pygmy possum, Andaman shrew, western swamp turtle, Philippine 
forest turtle, Ploughshare tortoise, Cross River gorilla, eastern 
lowland gorilla, saola, South China tiger, pika, giant otter, red wolf, 
Tasmanian devil, peppered tree frog, northern tinker frog, mountain mist 
frog, armored frog, Eungella torrent frog, Sumatran elephant, African 
wild donkey, Saiga antelope, giant muntjac, addax, bowhead whale, beluga 
whale, Balkan lynx, Asiatic cheetah, gloomy tube-nosed bat, Armenian 
whiskered bat, Hill's horseshoe bat, Thongaree's disc-nosed bat, Aru 
flying fox, central rock rat, pygmy hog, Gilbert's potoroo, Allan's 
lerista, Carpentarian rock rat, Kangaroo Island dunnart, Darwin's fox, 
Peruvian black spider monkey, the red wolf, spoon-billed sandpiper, 
Siberian crane, Bengal florican, regent honeyeater, orange-bellied 
parrot, great Indian bustard, sociable lapwing, white-billed heron, 
whooping crane, red-vented cockatoo, Himalayan quail, Hainan 
black-crested gibbon, Bulmer's fruit bat, Philippine naked-backed fruit 
bat, Fijian monkey-faced bat, Northern white-cheeked gibbon, indri, 
Andohahela sportive lemur, Manombo sportive lemur, Sahamalaza sportive 
lemur, all the other sportive lemurs, Celebes crested macaque, Pagai 
Island macaque, Sarawak surili, kipunji, hirola, tamaraw, wild Bactrian 
camel, white-rumped vulture, red-headed vulture, Indian vulture, 
slender-billed vulture, longcomb sawfish, Ganges shark, red-finned 
blue-eye, finless porpoise, squatina, northern river shark, Pondicherry 
shark humphead wrasse, orphan salamander, cloud forest salamander, Monte 
Escondido salamander, El Cusuco salamander, Zarciadero web-footed 
salamander, Cerro Pital salamander, blue whale, black-footed ferret, 
Yangtze finless porpoise, Zapotec salamander, and basically everyone 
from the wetlands.

We're definitely missing a bunch who are just slipping out really 
quickly without saying farewell. We hope that's okay. You probably won't 
even notice they're gone! We're not all leaving yet. Just a lot of us.

But we don't want to go out on a bad note. We have so many wonderful 
memories of the pre-Anthropocene era, and we don't want those fond 
recollections of vibrant, life-sustaining forests and jungles and 
prairies to be forgotten. But it's time for us to mosey on out down the 
dusty trail. Sayonara!

Oh, and we hope you don't mind, we're taking most of the plants with us 
too.
https://www.theonion.com/bye-1834589656



*This Day in Climate History - July 23, 1979 - from D.R. Tucker*
July 23, 1979: The National Academy of Sciences begins work on a 
groundbreaking report regarding the risks of carbon pollution. The 
report makes it clear that the consequences of a warming world will be 
severe.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf
http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/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.