[TheClimate.Vote] June 27, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Jun 27 09:34:09 EDT 2019
/June 27, 2019/
[Comment from Nexus News summary of the first debate -
https://climatenexus.org/ ]
At Least They Talked About It? Democratic candidates spent more time
discussing climate change at the first 2020 debate on Wednesday than
in all the 2016 debates combined--and still clocked in at less than
10 minutes spent on the issue. When asked what the greatest
geopolitical threat to the United States is at the debate in Miami,
four of the 10 candidates mentioned climate change, while a New York
Times graph of time spent on each topic shows only half the debaters
touched on climate at length during their time after being asked a
climate question. Questions from moderators, which began an hour and
a half into the debate, included whether or not climate plans will
"save Miami" and how carbon pricing would play politically.
"Spending only seven minutes on climate questions was absurd,"
Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund's Cassie Siegel said in
a statement.
https://mailchi.mp/climatenexus/howd-the-debate-go-swampy-air-chief-out-more
for more check: Vox, HuffPost, NPR, The Guardian, New York Times $, E&E
- - -
[on Climate Change - just the facts checked by AP]
*AP FACT CHECK: Dems' missteps on climate, wages in debate*
By CHRISTOPHER RUBAGER, SETH BORENSTEIN and CALVIN WOODWARD
WASHINGTON (AP) -- This was no Trump rally. Ten Democrats kicked off the
presidential debate season with a sober rendering of policy that
featured a smattering of missteps on climate change, the economy and
more but no whoppers.
The Democrats spoke largely in generalities Wednesday night and when
they got into the nuts and bolts, their claims largely checked out. But
not always.
A look at the rhetoric from the first debate, with 10 more Democrats
taking the stage in Miami on Thursday:
*CLIMATE CHANGE*
JAY INSLEE, Washington's governor: "We are the first generation to feel
the sting of climate change and we are the last that can do something
about it. ... It is our last chance in an administration, next one, to
do something about it."
THE FACTS: Not quite. This answer implies that after 2025 or 2029,
when whoever is elected in 2020 leaves office, it will be too late
to fight or limit climate change.
That's a common misconception that stemmed from a U.N. scientific
report that came out last fall, which talked about 2030, mostly
because that's a key date in the Paris climate agreement. The report
states that with every half a degree Celsius and with every year,
global warming and its dangers get worse. However, it does not say
at some point it is too late.
"The hotter it gets the worse it gets but there is no cliff edge,"
James Skea, co-chairman of the report and professor of sustainable
energy at Imperial College London, told The Associated Press.
The report co-author, Swiss climate scientist Sonia I. Seneviratne
this month tweeted, "Many scientists point - rightfully - to the
fact that we cannot state with certainty that climate would suddenly
go berserk in 12 years if we weren't doing any climate mitigation.
But who can state with certainty that we would be safe beyond that
stage or even before that?"
___
BETO O'ROURKE, referring to the international climate goal: "If all of
us does all that we can, then we're going to be able to keep this planet
from warming another 2 degrees Celsius and ensure that we match what
this country can do and live up to our promise and our potential."
THE FACTS: O'Rourke gets the climate goal wrong.
Since 2009, international summits and the Paris climate agreement
list the overarching goal as limiting climate change to no more than
2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial
times. That's somewhere between 1850 and 1880, depending on who is
calculating.
There's a big difference because since pre-industrial times, Earth
has already warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). So the
world community is talking about 1 degree Celsius from now and
O'Rourke is talking about twice that.
Associated Press writers Hope Yen, Eric Tucker and Amanda Seitz
contributed to this report.
Find AP Fact Check http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd
more at - https://apnews.com/99cf0068a03f49a6898dfb0ae8a34ccf
[Increasingly common and more intense]
*Record temperatures amid heatwave around Europe | DW News*
DW News (video)
Published on Jun 26, 2019
Europe is being hit by an unprecedented heatwave. Temperatures are
forecast to reach ther highest level ever recorded in some countries
today. The extreme weather is expected to continue to the weekend.
Governments have issued health warnings and are urging people to do
everything they can to stay cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO5t62ZEzp0
- - -
[Heat wave]
*France, Germany Temperatures Top 100 Degrees as Heatwave Scorches Europe*
TicToc by Bloomberg - video and transcript
Published on Jun 25, 2019
- -
Meteorologists placed more than half of France, including around the
capital, on alert for high temperatures Monday as a heatwave was
expected to spread across continental Europe this week.
- - -
France introduced a heat watch warning system after a long, deadly
heatwave in August 2003. The highest temperatures in more than half a
century eventually were estimated to have caused 15,000 heat-related
deaths, many of older people left in city apartments and retirement
homes without air conditioning.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that vigilance was the
watchword for the week.
"As you know, at times like these, sick people, pregnant women, infants
and elderly people are the most vulnerable. So we must be vigilant with
them and have prevention measures in place in order to intervene as
quickly as possible," Macron said.
French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said Monday that "everything is
ready" in retirement homes, hospitals and transportation systems.
"Yet when people are fragile, even when everything is organized, there's
always a higher mortality rate," she warned.
Meteorologists said hot winds from the Sahara Desert brought the
scorching weather to Europe. Similar heat is expected in Belgium,
Switzerland and Germany.
In Germany, temperatures above 40 degrees C are possible in some places
on Wednesday, topping the country's previous June record of 38.2 degrees
Celsius (nearly 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit) set in Frankfurt in 1947.
Rescue services urged people to look out for young children, the elderly
and those with compromised immune systems who are at particular risk in
high temperatures.
Parts of northeastern Germany are also at high risk for forest fires.
Authorities in the eastern state of Brandenburg, which circles Berlin,
say the risk of forest fires is at the highest level in the coming days.
Scientists say measurements show that heat waves in Europe are becoming
more frequent.
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
said "monthly heat records all over the globe occur five times as often
today as they would in a stable climate."
"This increase in heat extremes is just as predicted by climate science
as a consequence of global warming caused by the increasing greenhouse
gases from burning coal, oil and gas," he added.
Dim Coumou, a scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, said
melting Arctic sea ice is also affecting atmospheric circulation, which
in turn makes extreme heat more likely.
"Data analysis shows that the normally eastward travelling summer
circulation of the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes has slowed down,
including the Jet Stream," he said. "This favors the buildup of hot and
dry conditions over the continent, sometimes turning a few sunny days
into dangerous heat waves."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6c2k-Aqu-Y
- - -
[CBS forgot how to spell temperature, perhaps because it rarely appears
in news coverage]
*Record tempatures amid heat wave in Europe*
CBS Evening News (video)
Published on Jun 26, 2019
Five days into summer, much of the eastern U.S. is in a heatwave. But
it's even hotter in Europe. Roxana Saberi reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdRiUydi5CQ
[Ooops, mistaken count on leaking oil]
*New Estimate for an Oil Leak: A Thousand Times Worse Than Rig Owner Says*
Lisa Friedman - June 25, 2019
WASHINGTON -- A new federal study has found that an oil leak in the Gulf
of Mexico that began 14 years ago has been releasing as much as 4,500
gallons a day, not three or four gallons a day as the rig owner has claimed.
The leak, about 12 miles off the Louisiana coast, began in 2004 when a
Taylor Energy Company oil platform sank during Hurricane Ivan and a
bundle of undersea pipes ruptured. Oil and gas have been seeping from
the site ever since.
Taylor Energy, which sold its assets in 2008, is fighting a federal
order to stop the leak. The company asserts that the leaking has been
slight -- between 2.4 and four gallons per day. Oil plumes from the
seafloor, Taylor executives have said, are from oil-soaked sediment that
has formed around the platform, and any gas rising from the bottom is
the natural product of living organisms...
- - -
Using sonar technology and a newly developed method of analyzing oil and
gas bubbles rising through the water, scientists determined that the
plumes are the result of oil and gas released from multiple wells. They
also found that as many as 108 barrels of oil, or just over 4,500
gallons, have spilled into the Gulf each day as a result of the episode. ..
- -
The study comes as the Trump administration works to roll back a key
offshore-drilling safety regulation that was put in place after the 2010
Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. That disaster, the
worst oil spill in United States history, killed 11 people and released
an estimated 4.9 million barrels...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/climate/taylor-energy-gulf-of-mexico.html
[radio report Guest: David Wallace-Wells - New York magazine -
@dwallacewells]
*Wildfires and climate change*
Hosted by Warren Olney Jun. 24, 2019
Climate change may be worse for the United States than the Great
Depression, according to journalist David Wallace Wells. The increasing
size of wildfires in California is current evidence of that grim prediction.
Consider Los Angeles, he says: a floodplain ringed by mountains that are
increasingly dry. Wells has a warning for Bel Air, Beverly HIlls and
Malibu up through Calabasas and Thousand Oaks. They may be "luxurious
and appealing" now but they're "really right in the line of wildfire…
making them incredibly dangerous."
In Northern California, the entire town of Paradise was destroyed in a
region where winds that once lasted a few days every season now often
last for two weeks. Wells says this "means that the fire damage can be
that much worse and that resources to respond are stretched that much
more thin."
From one end of the state to the other, Wells says, "everybody that
lives in the area called 'the wildland urban interface' is really
vulnerable. And the places they think of as their refuge their home, may
not be a refuge at all but quite the opposite--a source of power for
fire and therefore a target."
He warns against the "normalization" of the danger as it grows to
abnormal proportions. Inevitably, the conditions that once permitted
rebuilding and even expansion will never return. Host: Warren Olney
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/to-the-point/wildfires-and-climate-change
[HBO show advances discussion]
Yessenia Funes
*Big Little Lies Asks Whether Some Kids Are Too Young to Learn About
Climate Change*
Everyone learns about climate change eventually--even children. And
especially children in Monterey, California, home to one of the nation's
most incredible conservation-focused aquariums.
So it was fitting that the latest episode of Big Little Lies, HBO's hit
drama that takes place in Monterey, revolved around climate change.
Though topics like sustainable seafood and emissions came up, the most
interesting theme this episode delved into is how learning about climate
change can impact a child's mental health. And the show raised an
important question: Is there such a thing as "too soon" to talk to your
kid about climate change?
For those who don't watch the Emmy-award winning show, let me break it
down spoiler-free. The show revolves around five moms in Monterey--known
locally as the Monterey Five--juggling motherhood, marriage, and a
(literal) big little lie. These moms are played by the likes of Nicole
Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, and Reese Witherspoon.
In the latest episode that aired Sunday, a second-grade class (whose
students include the main characters' children) is talking about
sustainability and the impacts our choices have on the planet. After
dissecting Charlotte's Web, the famous children's book, the teacher asks
why Charlotte helps Wilbur, the pig. Though it feels like a stretch, the
teacher uses the pig's saved life as a moment to talk about how much
water it takes to support America's love of pork. A single pound of
sausage costs us a thousand gallons of water, according to the
second-grade teacher. The teacher doesn't explicitly mentions climate
change or anything too scary, but this is enough. Not long after, you
hear a thud. One of the students, Amabella, has passed out.
The poor thing was having a panic attack. Later, when Amabella is
talking to a therapist about the incident, she admits learning about
climate change in school is freaking her out. And while not every kid
will react this way, Amabella's reaction is a very real one, said Aleta
Angelosante, a clinical assistant professor at NYU Langone's Department
of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
"A child who's going to have a more extreme response is probably a child
who is more anxious generally," she told Earther. "Whereas other kids,
that's not really how their brain works. They don't get stuck in the
spirals, or they don't worry as intensely."
It makes sense that Amabella is the one to pass out in the show. Her
mom, Renata Klein (played by Laura Dern), is way too intense. The poor
girl is dealing with some serious stress at home and beyond climate
change. However her mom doesn't respond to the situation by trying to
acknowledge her role or figure out how to help her daughter deal with
reality. Instead, she bugs out on the teacher and principal instead. The
way she sees it, her daughter is too young to be learning about climate
change in school yet.
We know that climate change, in general, threatens our mental health. So
much so that the American Psychological Association addressed the topic
in a 2017 report. But I've never stopped to wonder how learning about it
could impact the mind of a child. After all, we've recently seen a wave
of activism and energy from some of society's youngest, and they seem to
be handling it just fine. Then again, could Amabella's mother be right?
Is second grade too soon to talk to your kind about climate change?
I asked Angelosante that question, and the short answer is no.
School-age children should be able to handle the topic if it's presented
to them in a way that they can make sense out of, Angelosante said.
Second grade feels totally reasonable for kids to learn a bit about it,
and that's really what's key: that kids receive bits and pieces
throughout childhood so that they have a fuller grasp of the issue by
the time they become adolescents. Some research suggests late childhood
or early adolescence may be the best time for adolescents to become
engaged on the issue, but going into that formative period with a little
extra knowledge doesn't necessarily hurt. Plus, when kids learn about
climate change, their parents can start to care, too.
"For all of us, but especially for young people, it is important to
understand the role we each can play so that the feeling of being
helpless and afraid can turn to action and hope for the future."
However, every child is different. Ultimately, parents (and educators!)
need to know their kids. Does your child stress easily? Do you have a
worrier on your hands? If so, be strategic about how you present this
doom-and-gloom topic to them. Don't talk to them about it at bedtime
because that could keep them up at night, which could cause further
stress. And don't overwhelm them with too much information too soon.
There's always tomorrow to give them a little more--if they ask."The way
we talk about any difficult topic with kids … is to meet them where they
are at," Angelosante said. "Don't give them more information than they
need or that they're asking for."
Maria Ghiso, who runs the Rainforest Alliance's education program,
suggests offering solutions to kids whenever you do bring up the topic
of climate change. That might not prevent every kid from getting
scared--after all, the teacher in Big Little Lies was essentially
telling his class that skipping the sausage would reduce their
environmental footprint--but it does show them "there is a way forward
and hope," Ghiso told me in an email.
"For all of us, but especially for young people," she wrote, "it is
important to understand the role we each can play so that the feeling of
being helpless and afraid can turn to action and hope for the future."
It's easy to feel hopeless about climate change. But we're not as doomed
as Amabella feels. Kids need to hear the truth--and they need support
when the truth is scary.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/big-little-lies-asks-whether-some-kids-are-too-young-to-1835870564
[Fossil Fuel Industry Documents]
A portal to millions of documents created by industries that influence
public health, hosted by the UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge
Management.
*UCSF Library Launches New Fossil Fuel Industry Documents Archive*
More than 1,000 internal documents from the fossil fuel industry
illustrating strategies to cast doubt on climate science and delay
policy action are now available for public research in UCSF's Industry
Documents Library. The documents, which were collected over two decades
by the Climate Investigations Center, include internal memos, reports,
correspondence and scientific studies from major fossil fuel
corporations and related organizations which detail the industry's
research and reaction to anthropogenic climate change beginning in the
1950s to the present.
"This inaugural Fossil Fuel Industry documents collection marks the
beginning of what we hope will grow into a comprehensive living archive
to aid us in making sense of drivers of climate change and its
unprecedented long-term threats to human and environmental health," says
Dr. Yogi Hendlin, Research Associate with the UCSF Environmental Health
Initiative, Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and
Core Faculty for the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative at
Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
The documents will be preserved for long-term public access and can be
searched alongside the Industry Documents Library's existing collections
of 15 million documents from the tobacco, drug, chemical, and food
industries, allowing users to examine information related to
industry-funded scientific research, marketing and public relations
strategies, and influence on policies and regulations affecting public
health.
The library collects internal documents made available through public
document disclosure in litigation, public records requests, archival
files, and research investigation. IDL worked with the Climate
Investigations Center to preserve and provide access to the documents
collected for the Center's online ClimateFiles database. "This
partnership with UCSF elevates our ClimateFiles project to the next
level," says Climate Investigations Center Director Kert Davies. "With
the Industry Documents Library's state of the art search engine and
unrivaled archival skills, expert researchers from far and wide will now
be able to dig into these documents we have been gathering for some 25
years."
The Industry Documents Library was created at the University of
California, San Francisco in 2002 to house millions of pages of
documents produced during litigation against the tobacco industry in the
1990s. Evidence found in the documents was used by dozens of state
Attorneys General to hold tobacco companies accountable for the public
health crisis caused by smoking, and to negotiate the Master Settlement
Agreement in 1998. More than seven million visitors have accessed the
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents since they were made publicly available
by the UCSF Library, and the collections have been instrumental in
furthering tobacco control research and education for over a generation.
The Industry Documents Library has expanded to include documents from
the drug, chemical, food, and now fossil fuel industries to preserve
open access to this information and to support research on the
commercial determinants of public health.
A variety of online research tools are available for navigating the
collections, including full-text searching, a detailed bibliography, and
access to the API for building and analyzing large data sets. The
Library is committed to preserving and providing long-term public access
to industry documents for the benefit of scientists, community
advocates, journalists, policymakers, attorneys, and others engaged in
improving and protecting the public's health.
For further information or to contribute documents please contact UCSF
Industry Documents Library staff at
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/help/ask-us/ or @industrydocs.
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/blog/
[Harsh message]*
**Report from Down Under: "Climate change now represents a near- to
mid-term existential threat to human civilisation"*
Australia's National Centre for Climate Restoration, also known as
Breakthrough, released a sobering report late last month titled
"Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach." The
policy paper, authored by David Spratt & Ian Dunlop, with a foreword by
Admiral Chris Barrie, AC RAN (Retired), former Chief of the Australian
Defence Force, explores a climate scenario thirty years in the future -
a method of risk anticipation often utilized by militaries. The scenario
exercise led to a striking conclusion:
Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat to
human civilisation.
This conclusion precipitated the authors to make a set of
recommendations, two of which are of particular note:
A new approach to climate-related security risk-management is thus
required, giving particular attention to the high-end and
difficult-to-quantify "fat-tail" possibilities.
And:
Urgently examine the role that the national security sector can play
in providing leadership and capacity for a near-term, society-wide,
emergency mobilisation of labour and resources, of a scale
unprecedented in peacetime, to build a zero-emissions industrial
system and draw down carbon to protect human civilisation.
No nibbling around the edges of the problem for Breakthrough. They cut
right to the existential heart of the matter. To read the full paper -
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/06/24/report-from-down-under-climate-change-now-represents-a-near-to-mid-term-existential-threat-to-human-civilisation/
[Time now for sarcasm from the Onion]
*Report: Doing Your Part To Stop Climate Change Now Requires Planting
30,000 New Trees, Getting 40,000 Cars Off The Road, Reviving 20 Square
Miles Of Coral Reef*
PROVIDENCE, RI--Redefining the necessary adjustments required to
address the accelerated pace of the growing global environmental
crisis, a report published Wednesday by researchers at Brown
University concluded that a single individual who wishes to do their
part to stop climate change must remove 40,000 cars from public
roadways and revive 20 square miles of coral reef. "As long as
everyone on the planet intensifies their efforts by personally
clearing 6.5 tons of plastic from the ocean, installing 7,000 solar
panels in their community, and cutting back their use of fresh water
by 300 million gallons, the human race may still have a shot at
slowing climate change," said atmospheric scientist Dr. Lauren
Moffat, who further noted that each person on the planet would also
ideally commit to saving at least three species from extinction
every month while simultaneously working to reduce the world's
population by 1.3 billion in order to forestall global environmental
collapse. "Some believe it may be too late to reverse the damage
humans have done to our planet, but individual change can start with
something as small as picking up four tons of garbage every day. At
this point, it's a cultural imperative for everyone to pitch in by
performing small but measurable tasks--such as replacing 150
hectares of industrial buildings with hardwood forests in every U.S.
city--if we want to stall the meteoric rise in global temperatures
for a few more years." Moffat added that reversing climate change
can be as simple as removing every single car from the road or
perfecting cold fusion.
https://www.theonion.com/report-doing-your-part-to-stop-climate-change-now-requ-1835870092
*This Day in Climate History - June 27, 2006 - from D.R. Tucker*
June 27, 2006: On MSNBC's "Countdown," Keith Olbermann interviews
Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker on the Supreme Court's decision to
hear the Massachusetts v. EPA case.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9354636/ns/msnbc-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/t/countdown-keith-olbermann-june/
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