[TheClimate.Vote] March 2, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sat Mar 2 10:22:52 EST 2019

/March 2, 2019/

[Buzzfeed - a single-issue candidate]
*Jay Inslee Is Running For President As The Climate Candidate*
"We're the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And 
we're the last who can do something about it," Inslee said in a video 
announcing his candidacy.
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee announced on Friday he's running for 
president, pitching himself as the best candidate to tackle the 
worsening climate crisis.

"I'm Jay Inslee and I'm running for president because I'm the only 
candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation's number one 
priority," the governor said in an announcement video that is 
exclusively about climate change, running through comments he's made on 
the issue going back years.

Inslee will kick off a "Climate Mission Tour" in Iowa next Tuesday.
Inslee is joining a crowded field of 2020 Democratic presidential 
contenders, but he's the only candidate to join the race so far with 
such a tight focus on a single issue. Other Democratic hopefuls have 
made preventing the worst impacts of man-made climate change a goal of 
their campaigns -- and one that sharply contrasts President Donald 
Trump's denial of the science -- but Inslee is trying to differentiate 
himself by making it his primary focus.

The governor's campaign may be well timed. More Americans are concerned 
about climate change than ever, with about 7 in 10 of people saying they 
are "somewhat worried" about global warming, according to a polling 
results released January by climate communication experts at Yale 
University and George Mason University.

The poll found nearly half of Americans believe climate change is 
harming the US right now. A major federal climate report released last 
November, called the Fourth National Climate Assessment, concluded 
climate impacts are playing out across the US, from damaging wildfires 
to increased heavy rain and flooding to rising seas.

"We're the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And 
we're the last who can do something about it," Inslee said in his launch 
video. "This crisis isn't just a chart or graph anymore. The impacts are 
being felt everywhere."
During his latest state-of-the-state speech, he called for Washington 
state to transition from fossil fuels to running on 100% clean 
electricity, retrofitting buildings to more energy efficient, and more.

His presidential campaign laid out four principles of its "Climate 
Mission" on its new site: "Powering our economy with clean energy," 
"investing in good jobs, infrastructure & innovation," "fighting for 
environmental justice &economic inclusion," and "ending fossil fuel 
giveaways."
more at: - 
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/jay-inslee-2020-president-climate-change 

- -
[video- Jay Inslee announces candidacy and the one issue for his campaign]
*Our Moment*
Jay Inslee
Published on Mar 1, 2019
This is our moment, our climate, our mission. Together, we can defeat 
climate change. That's why I'm running for president...
https://youtu.be/mlgdlWO-4yI

[Here's the Congressional resolution on climate change: ]
*JOINT RESOLUTION Calling on the United States and Congress to take 
immediate action to address the challenge of climate change.* Resolved 
by the Senate and House of Representatives1of the United States of 
America in Congress assembled, That it is the sense of Congress that--
(1) climate change is real;
(2) human activity during the last century is 1the dominant cause of the 
climate crisis; and
(3) the United States and Congress should take immediate action to 
address the challenge of climate change.
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/9/5/958b200b-20ed-4c76-ba76-45b0b34882ba/7543F1F197F80F8181DE8BB1E94CCC86.climate-res-attachment-1.pdf
- - -
[opinion]
*Schumer-Carper resolution fails the laugh test*
February 28, 2019
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A resolution on climate change was introduced today 
in the Senate by Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) and Ranking Member 
Carper (D-Del.). It simply asserts that climate change is real and that 
Congress should address it.
Nicole Ghio, Fossil Fuel Program Manager at Friends of the Earth, issued 
the following statement in response:

    This resolution is wasting time while our climate burns. The window
    for moderate action on climate change has closed. A symbolic
    critique of Republicans for having no plan rings hollow if centrist
    Democrats lack the courage to press for real solutions. This
    resolution sets a low bar at a time when the fundamental
    transformation of our economy that delivers on the promise of a
    Green New Deal is the only real climate solution worth discussing.

Communications contact: Erin Jensen, (202) 222-0722, ejensen at foe.org
https://foe.org/news/schumer-carper-resolution-fails-laugh-test/

[meanwhile, hard news]
*Photos Show California Residents Paddling Around As Catastrophic Floods 
Turn Towns Into Islands*
An intense atmospheric river event sparked catastrophic floods, 
stranding Northern California communities and damaging thousands of homes.
Days of unrelenting heavy rains have transformed Northern California 
communities into islands, stranding thousands of residents and 
submerging their homes, shops, and schools under several feet of brown 
water.

The now-inundated towns were caught in what meteorologists call an 
atmospheric river -- a long stretch of water vapor that transports and 
dumps heaps of moisture like a "river in the sky." The phenomenon can 
carry roughly the equivalent to "the average flow of water at the mouth 
of the Mississippi River," US scientists say, and when combined with 
strong winds, can lead to incredible rainfall and flooding.
The incessant storms warped Sonoma County's Russian River, swelling it 
to nearly 46 feet -- 14 feet above flood stage -- and turning the towns 
of Guerneville and Monte Rio into islands, authorities said. It was the 
worst flooding the area has seen in more than two decades.
More than 4,500 residents were stranded, muddy water encircling their 
roofs, apartment complexes, mini-golf courses, and markets. Photos 
captured people loading supplies into kayaks and canoes, navigating 
submerged streets on long paddle boards, in row boats...and trash cans...
more at: - 
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/california-flooding-russian-river-weather-storm-climate

[Cryo-limnology]
*Lakes Beneath Antarctic Ice: Deep Dark and Mysterious*
University of California Television (UCTV)
Published on Feb 28, 2019
2:52 - Start of Presentation - Helen Fricker
44:07 - Q & A
In 2006, Helen Amanda Fricker was sitting at her desk studying new 
satellite data when she made a starting discovery - a set of active 
lakes that exist underneath the ice in Antarctica. Join Helen, a 25-year 
veteran of Antarctic ice sheet research, and learn about the discovery, 
exploration and drilling of these mysterious phenomena at the southern 
reaches of our planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpAd9XNF3F0

[*Uninhabitable Earth - Author's comment*]
"The book does two big things: it surveys the science projecting what 
will happen at temperatures between 2 and 4 degrees (quite harrowing, as 
you all know), and tries to get beyond the science, to something like a 
humanities of climate change, considering what it would mean for our 
politics and geopolitics, our culture and relationship to technology and 
to capitalism (among other things), to be living on a world warmed that 
much.

I hope also, in taking a big-picture view of the state of the situation, 
it inspires some people--perhaps even many people--to take engage more 
deeply and take more aggressive action."    - David Wallace-Wells
- - -
[Book review]
*The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells review - our terrifying 
future*
Enough to induce a panic attack...a brutal portrait of climate change 
and our future lives on Earth. But we have the tools to avoid it.

You already know it's bad. You already know the weather has gone weird, 
the ice caps are melting, the insects are disappearing from the Earth. 
You already know that your children, and your children's children, if 
they are reckless or brave enough to reproduce, face a vista of rising 
seas, vanishing coastal cities, storms, wildfires, biblical floods. As 
someone who reads the news and is sensitive to the general mood of the 
times, you have a general sense of what we're looking at. But do you 
truly understand the scale of the tribulations we face? David 
Wallace-Wells, author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable 
Earth, is here to tell you that you do not. "It is," as he puts it in 
the book's first line, "worse, much worse, than you think."
- - -
This all makes for relentlessly grim reading, particularly in that first 
section. As is generally the case in any sustained exposure to the 
subject of climate change - a subject that can seem increasingly like 
the only subject - a kind of apocalyptic glaze descends over even the 
most conscientious eyes, a peculiarly contemporary compound of boredom 
and horror. ("Human kind," as the bird in TS Eliot's Four Quartets 
sagely points out, "cannot bear very much reality.") It's a problem of 
which Wallace-Wells is clearly aware. "If you have made it this far, you 
are a brave reader," as he puts it, somewhere past the halfway point, 
acknowledging the likelihood of the material he's sifting through 
causing despondency in anyone considering it. "But you are not merely 
considering it," he clarifies, "you are about to embark on living it. In 
many cases, in many places, we already are."

That last point turns out to be one of the most crucial of the book's 
warnings. Because as dire as the projections are, if you are surveying 
the topic from a privileged western vantage, it's easy to overlook how 
bad things have already got, to accept the hurricanes and the heatstroke 
deaths as simply the unfortunate nature of things. In this way, 
Wallace-Wells raises the disquieting spectre of future normalisation - 
the prospect that we might raise, incrementally but inexorably, our 
baseline of acceptable human suffering. (This phenomenon is not without 
precedent. See, for example, the whole of human history.)
For a relatively short book, The Uninhabitable Earth covers a great deal 
of cursed ground - drought, floods, wildfires, economic crises, 
political instability, the collapse of the myth of progress - and 
reading it can feel like taking a hop-on hop-off tour of the future's 
sprawling hellscape. It's not without its hopeful notes: in a sense, 
none of this would even be worth talking about if there were nothing we 
could do about it. As Wallace-Wells points out, we already have all the 
tools we need to avoid the worst of what is to come: "a carbon tax and 
the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new 
approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy 
in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon 
capture". The fact that the route out of this hell is straightforward 
does not mean, of course, that it won't be incredibly arduous, or that 
we should be confident of making it.

The book, however, is less focused on solutions than on clarifying the 
scale of the problem, the horror of its effects. You could call it 
alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, 
Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as "fair enough, because I am 
alarmed".) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth - or to consider in any 
serious way the scale of the crisis we face - is to understand the 
collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail 
to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to 
think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells
- - -
{RadioEcoShock -Interview with David Wallace-Wells]
*Listen to or download 28 minute interview with my first guest David 
Wallace-Wells in CD Quality or LoFi*
https://www.ecoshock.net/downloads/ES_WallaceWells.mp3
https://www.ecoshock.net/downloads/ES_WallaceWells_LoFi.mp3*
*https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/02/uninhabitable-earth-david-wallace-wells.html

[But only if you read it, let it...and only if you go]
*The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy*
On average, three people read an academic paper. At least 100,000 have 
read this--and a lot of them haven't taken it very well.
That if I told you there was a paper on climate change that was so 
uniquely catastrophic, so perspective-altering, and so absolutely 
depressing that it's sent people to support groups and encouraged them 
to quit their jobs and move to the countryside?

Good news: there is. It's called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating 
Climate Tragedy." I was introduced to it via an unlikely source--a guy 
formerly in advertising who had left his job to become a full-time 
environmental campaigner. "We're fucked," he told me. "Climate change is 
going to fuck us over. I remember thinking, Should I just accept the 
deep adaptation paper and move to the Scottish countryside and wait out 
the apocalypse?"
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbwpdb/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy

[OK I believe you]
*Ken Nordlund: Cars are More the Culprit of Global Warming Than Cows*
Kenneth Nordlund, DVM, University Of Wisconsin
https://www.drovers.com/article/ken-nordlund-cars-are-more-culprit-global-warming-cows

[Comic relief, not redemption]
*Hotpocalypse Episdoe 8 - Oceanographer Kathy Kelly & the ocean conveyor 
belt*
Hotpocalypse
Published on Mar 1, 2019
Climate scientists are tired of "debating" deniers that don't even know 
how to use a thermometer. In this episode of Hotpocalypse, Oceanographer 
Kathie Kelly joins us to tell us about the ocean conveyor belt -and the 
satellite she used to study the data. Climate Change deniers, where's 
YOUR satellite??!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC81-HJQ2KI

*This Day in Climate History - March 2, 2005 - from D.R. Tucker*
Rick Piltz resigns from the US Climate Change Science Program after 
relentless, extensive efforts by Bush White House officials to censor 
scientific reports on climate change.
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=5316&method=full

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