[TheClimate.Vote] July 29, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Mon Jul 29 10:34:51 EDT 2019
/July 29, 2019/
[Poll]
**Two-fifths of Americans say climate change will influence their vote
in 2020 election, according to poll**
Global warming a 'top-tier' issue for Democrats but only 12 per cent of
Republicans say it is 'very important'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/2020-us-election-trump-climate-change-joe-biden-a8918351.html
[Opinion]
*Jay Inslee: Climate Change Is a Winning Campaign Issue -- and President
Trump Knows It
*We need a president who will make it a priority before it is too late.
Jay Inslee, The New York Times
"I've heard it my whole career, from pundits, special interests and even
political consultants: Just shut up about climate change if you want to
be elected," writes Jay Inslee - governor of Washington and a Democratic
candidate for president - in the New York Times. "That was bad advice
then, and it's even worse advice now," he says: "There is a change
happening: Americans really feel climate change in their daily lives -
and they are demanding leadership from their politicians like never
before." President Trump is "scared" of the topic because "he knows that
climate change is his weak spot", Inslee argues. "More than ever,
Americans want bold solutions to the climate crisis. Democrats can beat
Donald Trump if we elect a nominee who will challenge him on this issue."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/opinion/jay-inslee-donald-trump-climate-democratic-primary.html
[Reuters reports bigger changes ahead]
*Think the heatwave was bad? Climate already hitting key tipping points*
Matthew Green
LONDON (Reuters) - "Shall we all just kill ourselves?"
It was an odd title for a comedy night, but British stand-up Carl
Donnelly turned out to have chosen an environmental theme with
impeccable timing.
With temperature records tumbling daily in last week's European
heatwave, a crowd in an east London bar seemed uniquely primed to
appreciate his darkly humorous riffs on the existential threat posed by
climate change.
That foretaste of a radically hotter world underscored what is at stake
in a decisive phase of talks to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement, a
collective shot at avoiding climate breakdown.
With study-after-study showing climate impacts from extreme weather to
polar melt and sea level rise outstripping initial forecasts,
negotiators have a fast-closing window to try to turn the aspirations
agreed in Paris into meaningful outcomes.
"There's so much on the line in the next 18 months or so," said Sue
Reid, vice-president of climate and energy at Ceres, a U.S. non-profit
group that works to steer companies and investors onto a more
sustainable path.
"This is a crucial period of time both for public officials and the
private sector to really reverse the curve on emissions," Reid told Reuters.
In October, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) warned emissions must start falling next year at the latest to
stand a chance of achieving the deal's goal of holding the global
temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
With emissions currently on track to push temperatures more than three
degrees higher, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is working to
wrest bigger commitments from governments ahead of a summit in New York
in September.
Telling world leaders that failing to cut emissions would be "suicidal,"
the Portuguese diplomat wants to build momentum ahead of a fresh round
of climate talks in Chile in December.
By the time Britain convenes a major follow-up summit in late 2020,
plans are supposed to be underway - in theory at least - to almost halve
global emissions over the next decade.
"In the next year-and-a-half we will witness an intensity of climate
diplomacy not seen since the Paris Agreement was signed," said Tessa
Khan, an international climate change lawyer and co-director of the
Climate Litigation Network.
"REVOLUTION OR COLLAPSE"
As the diplomatic offensive intensifies, the latest scientific studies
have offered negotiators scant comfort.
U.S climatologist Michael Mann believes emissions need to fall even more
drastically than the IPCC assumes since the panel may be underestimating
how far temperatures have already risen since pre-industrial times.
"Our work on this indicates that we might have as much as 40% less
carbon left to burn than IPCC implies, if we are to avert the 1.5
Celsius warming limit," said Mann, director of the Earth System Science
Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Mann has urged governments to treat the transition to renewable energy
with the equivalent urgency that drove the U.S. industrial mobilization
in World War Two.
So far, no major economy has taken heed.
Although Britain boosted the Paris Agreement in June by committing to
net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the country, preoccupied by Brexit,
is far from on a climate war footing.
Likewise, a push led by France and Germany for the European Union to
adopt a similar target was relegated to a footnote at a summit in
Brussels after opposition from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
U.S. President Donald Trump remains committed to pulling the world's
second biggest emitter out of the Paris deal altogether.
Given the uncertain prospects for international cooperation to stabilize
the climate on which life on earth depends, some are starting to steel
themselves for the unraveling of the world they once knew.
"Either we radically transform human collective life by abandoning the
use of fossil fuels or, more likely, climate change will bring about the
end of global fossil-fuelled capitalist civilization," wrote U.S. author
Roy Scranton, in an April essay in MIT Technology Review.
"Revolution or collapse -- in either case, the good life as we know it
is no longer viable."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-heatwaves/think-the-heatwave-was-bad-climate-already-hitting-key-tipping-points-idUSKCN1UN065
[Not surprising]
*US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries -
shrinking this war machine is a must*
June 24, 2019 Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger
The US military's carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply
chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships,
trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from
bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study
calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.
Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy
and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that
the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming
more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most
medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel
usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases
in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and
emitted more than 25,000 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide by burning those
fuels. The US Air Force purchased US$4.9 billion worth of fuel, and the
navy US$2.8 billion, followed by the army at US$947m and the Marines at
US$36m.
https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269
- - -
*Hidden carbon costs of the "everywhere war": Logistics, geopolitical
ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military*
https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12319
[Arctic Sea ice video talk]
*How Much Longer Will Arctic Sea-Ice Last?? 1 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEtAqYQWp8
*Arctic Sea-Ice is in a Death Spiral, and on it's Last Legs: 2 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPG0WcTaLMQ
Paul Beckwith
Published on Jul 27, 2019
The most important question on the minds of many people paying attention
to abrupt climate system change is: When will we have the first BOE:
Blue Ocean Event? It is just a matter of time before the entire Arctic
Ocean becomes devoid of summer sea-ice, but we don't know exactly when.
In this video and the next I show many plots and maps of Arctic sea ice
extent, area, thickness, volume, regional variations, albedo, etc. to
come up with some picture (or guess) as to what will happen as this
destruction of Arctic sea-ice unfolds. Ice loss momentum is enormous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEtAqYQWp8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPG0WcTaLMQ
- - -
[Dreaming designers without considering energy required to build]
*Iceberg-making submarine aims to tackle global warming by re-freezing
the Arctic*
A team of designers led by Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha proposes re-freezing
sea water in the Arctic to create miniature modular icebergs using a
submarine-like vessel, in a bid to combat climate change.
The Indonesian designer worked on the prototype with collaborators Denny
Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa for an international competition organised
by the Association of Siamese Architects.
The team was awarded second prize in the contest for its geoengineering
proposal to re-freeze the Arctic and transform sea water into new ice
fields.
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/27/refreezing-the-arctic-geoengineering-design-climate-change/
[video interview of Wallace-Wells]
*Climate Change: Are You Scared Enough? feat. David Wallace-Wells*
Hot Mess
Published on Jul 18, 2019
Maybe if you're not scared, you're not paying attention…
Climate change is scary, because it will negatively impact just about
every part of our lives. But the conventional wisdom on how to talk
about climate change and inspire people to do something about it has
always been "don't scare people". At least until recently. In the past
couple years climate scientists and climate journalists have started
talking in scarier and more worst case terms than ever before. Why? And
is this a good thing? I talked to author David Wallace-Wells, author of
"The Uninhabitable Earth" to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXw8EEIXKk0
- - -- - -
[New Yorker article Wallace-Wells finds a GOP]
*A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change*
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Garret Graves is a forty-seven-year-old Republican congressman from
Louisiana who, earlier this year, bet his considerable political future
on the proposition that the age of conservative climate denial is over.
Graves had come to the point of view, he told me recently, "that those
who were denying were taking an unsustainable position...
- - -
"I actually don't think that it's all that our ideology is wrong, and I
don't think it's all that people are being miseducated. I think it's a
combination of the two."
Graves's position depends on his ability to persuade people in both
parties of two ideas that are generally thought to be contradictory:
that the environment urgently needs to be saved, and that the
fossil-fuel industry can ultimately be a hero of our climate story,
rather than the villain. So he talks in a liberal way about ends and a
conservative way about means, making it seem that he wants to change the
world by allowing it to stay exactly as it is. The more idealistic he is
about both causes, the more credible, and therefore the more useful, he
is. Once we had walked back down the levee, I asked Graves why he didn't
seem spooked by the increasingly catastrophic predictions of the U.N.'s
climate panel, the I.P.C.C. "Those predictions are accurate based on our
understanding of science, with all its caveats and brackets--if our
technology remains static," Graves said. With great confidence, he
added, "And there's zero-per-cent chance that happens."
more at -
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/a-louisiana-republican-reckons-with-climate-change
[Radio podcast -- version I heard was sponsored by ExxonMobile]
*Facts Aren't Enough: The Psychology Of False Beliefs*
Hidden Brain
July 22, 20195:00 AM ET
This week on Hidden Brain, we look at how we rely on the people we trust
to shape our beliefs, and why facts aren't always enough to change our
minds.
Additional Resources:
The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change
Others by Tali Sharot
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Cailin O'Connor and
James Owen Weatherall
Do as I Say, Not as I Do, or, Conformity in Scientific Networks by James
Owen Weatherall and Cailin O'Connor
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/18/743195213/facts-arent-enough-the-psychology-of-false-beliefs
- - -
[information bias]
*Most YouTube climate change videos 'oppose the consensus view'*
Scientist behind study urges platform to tweak algorithms to 'prioritise
factual information'
The majority of YouTube videos about the climate crisis oppose the
scientific consensus and "hijack" technical terms to make them appear
credible, a new study has found. Researchers have warned that users
searching the video site to learn about climate science may be exposed
to content that goes against mainstream scientific belief.
Dr Joachim Allgaier of RWTH Aachen University in Germany analysed 200
YouTube videos to see if they adhered to or challenged the scientific
consensus...
The videos were then assessed to judge how closely they adhered to the
scientific consensus, as represented by the findings of reports by UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2013 onwards.
These concluded that humans have been the "dominant cause" of global
warming since the 1950s. However, Allgaier found that the message of 120
of the top 200 search results went against this view.
To avoid personalised results, Allgaier used the anonymisation tool Tor,
which hides a computer's IP address and means YouTube treats each search
as coming from a different user.
The results for the search terms climate, climate change, climate
science and global warming mostly reflected the scientific consensus
view. Allgaier said this was because many contained excerpts from TV
news programmes or documentaries...
- - -
A YouTube spokesperson said: "YouTube is a platform for free speech
where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our
community guidelines.
"Over the last year we've worked to better surface credible news sources
across our site for people searching for news-related topics, begun
reducing recommendations of borderline content and videos that could
misinform users in harmful ways, and introduced information panels to
help give users more sources where they can fact-check information for
themselves."
Allgaier suggested more scientists should start taking YouTube seriously
as a platform for sharing information. "YouTube has an enormous reach as
an information channel, and some of the popular science YouTubers are
doing an excellent job at communicating complex subjects and reaching
new audiences," he said.
"Scientists could form alliances with science communicators, politicians
and those in popular culture in order to reach out to the widest
possible audience. They should speak out publicly about their research
and be transparent in order to keep established trustful relationships
with citizens and society."
The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Communication.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/25/most-youtube-climate-change-videos-oppose-the-consensus-view
- - -
ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Front. Commun., 25 July 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036
*Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube: Strategically
Distorted Communications in Online Videos on Climate Change and Climate
Engineering*
Joachim Allgaier
The online video-sharing website YouTube is extremely popular globally,
also as a tool for information on science and environmental topics.
However, only little is known about what kind of information users find
when they are searching for information about climate science, climate
change, and climate engineering on YouTube. This contribution presents
results from an exploratory research project that investigates whether
videos found on YouTube adhere to or challenge scientific consensus
views. Ten search terms were employed to search for and analyze 200
videos about climate and climate modification topics, which are
contested topics in online media. The online anonymization tool Tor has
been used for the randomization of the sample and to avoid
personalization of the results. A heuristic qualitative classification
tool was set up to categorize the videos in the sample. Eighty-nine
videos of the 200 videos in the sample are supporting scientific
consensus views about anthropogenic climate change, and climate
scientists are discussing climate topics with deniers of climate change
in four videos in the sample. Unexpectedly, the majority of the videos
in the sample (107 videos) supports worldviews that are opposing
scientific consensus views: 16 videos deny anthropogenic climate change
and 91 videos in the sample propagate straightforward conspiracy
theories about climate engineering and climate change. Videos supporting
the scientific mainstream view received only slightly more views
(16,941,949 views in total) than those opposing the mainstream
scientific position (16,939,655 views in total). Consequences for the
public communication of climate change and climate engineering are
discussed in the second part of the article. The research presented in
this contribution is particularly interested in finding out more about
strategically distorted communications about climate change and climate
engineering in online environments and in critically analyzing them.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036/full
[Institutionalizing deceit - 42 minutes]
*Greenwashing global logging | DW Documentary*
DW Documentary
Published on Jul 27, 2019
FSC eco-certification was established 25 years ago to stop the
deforestation of primeval forests by attesting that products are made
from "environmentally-friendly" wood. But does the FSC really prevent
illegal deforestation?
Primeval forests are shrinking at an increasing rate. Is exploitation of
the well-intentioned FSC system failing to prevent illegal deforestation
and thus deceiving consumers? The jungles of Cambodia have been all but
destroyed since 2000, and now just 25 square kilometers remain.
Deforestation is responsible for more CO2 emissions than all the world's
cars and trucks put together. The Bonn-based Forest Stewardship Council
(FSC) is responsible for the certification of sustainable forestry
worldwide and its certification is considered to be the most important
eco-label. It is supposed to help consumers to identify furniture,
paper, planks and other goods made from "environmentally friendly"
timber. The FSC has certified the management of more than 200 million
hectares of forest to date - an area about the size of Western Europe.
But what has the FSC achieved in 25 years? Manfred Ladwig and Thomas
Reutter spent months filming deforestation around the world and
discovered that companies accused of processing illegal timber do not
necessarily lose their FSC certification and even a company condemned
for illegal logging in the Brazilian rainforest can continue to use it.
The film investigates the connections between the FSC, illegal
deforestation and the displacement of indigenous peoples and throws an
unsparing light on the global timber industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMp0IFAV41Q
[Plague of Locusts to Sin City]
*What Happens In Vegas: Swarm Of Grasshoppers Take Over Sin City | NBC
Nightly News*
NBC News
Published on Jul 27, 2019
Millions of grasshoppers have descended upon Las Vegas, swarming the
city's sidewalks and chirping around its bright lights. Experts say a
soggy winter and mild spring made for perfect grasshopper conditions,
and they should be gone in a few weeks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLjndauWUg8
*This Day in Climate History - July 29, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
NBC's "Today Show" and "Nightly News" connect the climate dots in
reports on the economic toll of US wildfires.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/29/nbc-shows-how-to-report-on-the-economic-costs-o/200239
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/western-wildfires/yosemite-national-park-wildfire-swells-threatens-giant-sequoias-n168286
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