[TheClimate.Vote] March 3, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Mar 3 09:35:16 EST 2019
/March 3, 2019/
[PBS NewsHour 7 minute segment video]
*Why climate change is an 'all-encompassing threat'*
PBS NewsHour - Published on Mar 1, 2019
Although a candidate just entered the 2020 presidential race with a
platform centered on climate change, some experts say Americans aren't
fully aware of the scope and seriousness of global warming. Among them
is David Wallace-Wells, who argues in a new book that the severity of
the climate crisis has not yet been acknowledged, let alone addressed.
He sits down with William Brangham to discuss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_wF3_Y5a9E
[so far]
*Rising Seas Soaked Home Owners for $16 Billion over 12 Years*
The threat of flooding has driven some buyers away and caused losses in
property values
Analysts at the nonprofit First Street Foundation in Brooklyn studied
millions of residential home sales in 17 states from Maine to Alabama
and found that coastal property values were rising at a slower rate in
flood-prone areas than in areas that did not flood.
"The market is already reacting," First Street Executive Director
Matthew Eby said. "There's no longer a conversation of what
sea-level rise will do in 2050 or 2100."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rising-seas-soaked-home-owners-for-16-billion-over-12-years/
- -
[Well, that's one way]
*Navy considers 14-foot wall in Navy Yard to fight rising sea levels*
https://wtop.com/dc/2019/02/navy-considers-14-foot-wall-in-navy-yard-to-fight-rising-sea-levels/
[with help from a compliant, complicit mass media]
*How the Weather Gets Weaponized in Climate Change Messaging*
By Brad Plumer - March 1, 2019
"Weather, and especially extreme weather, is how most people will
experience climate change," said Susan Joy Hassol, director of the
science outreach nonprofit group Climate Communication. "You don't
experience the slow change in average temperature. What you experience
are the changes in extreme weather that are brought about. So how we
talk about that is really important."
- -
"It might be that climate has become so wrapped up in one's identity and
worldview that it's not the sort of thing that's susceptible to better
messaging,"
- -
...year after year of increasing summer heat, for instance -- does start
to chip away even at conservative doubt about global warming.
"For some people, it takes more time," she said. "But eventually people
start trusting their own experiences."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/climate/weather-climate-change.html
- -
[YouTube as information battleground for opinion manipulation]
*Can YouTube Solve Its Serious Climate Science Denial Problem?*
By Graham Readfearn - February 24, 2019
What are we in for next?" asks the narrator on the YouTube video.
"Will the temperature resume an upward trend? Will it remain flat for a
lengthy period? Or will it begin to drop? No one knows, not even the
biggest, fastest computers."
The video -- with the clickbait title "What They Haven't Told You about
Climate Change" -- has been watched more than 2.5 million times on the
Google-owned video platform...
- -
*Recommending Denial*
When I viewed YouTube without signing in, almost all the videos
suggested by the algorithm would sit firmly in the climate science
denial folder. There's so much of this material on YouTube that it's not
hard to find once the algorithm opens the door.
There's a Nobel Laureate who apparently "Smashes the Global Warming
Hoax" -- just don't mention the 76 other laureates asking for "rapid
progress towards lowering current and future greenhouse gas emissions."
Then there are two other videos, both titled "The Truth About Global
Warming," and both delivering the opposite to what its title claims.
Before you know it, you're in a world of "climate cults," "global
warming hysteria," and claims of failed predictions and Al Gore getting
"slammed."
For an unsuspecting viewer, watching just one video can lead you quickly
into an alternate universe where facts, physics, and real-world
experiences are replaced by conspiracies, cherry-picking, and fossil
fuel-backed propaganda.
All of this exists after YouTube declared in January 2019 that it had
been working on its recommendations algorithm and making "hundreds of
changes to improve the quality of recommendations for users on YouTube."
*Google White Paper*
But could YouTube and its parent company Google finally be getting to
grips with misinformation to marginalize, rather than ban,
counter-factual content?
YouTube says it's making changes with an eye on content that "comes
close to -- but doesn't quite cross the line of -- violating our
Community Guidelines."
"To that end," the official blog post explained, "we'll begin reducing
recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform
users in harmful ways -- such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure
for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly
false claims about historic events like 9/11."
At a conference in Munich on February 16, 2019, YouTube's owner Google
released a "white paper" in which it defended its record in tackling
disinformation on the video site, listing a series of steps it was
taking to weed out disinformation. "We aim to provide content that lets
users dive into topics they care about, broaden their perspective, and
connect them to the current zeitgeist," the paper said.
But when it comes to factual claims, Google said: "But as we describe in
our Search section, in verticals where veracity and credibility are key,
including news, politics, medical, and scientific domains, we work hard
to ensure our search and recommendation systems provide content from
more authoritative sources."
This included "information panels that contain additional contextual
information and links to authoritative third-party sites" on topical
content "that tends to be accompanied by disinformation online."...
- -
*Echo Chambers*
"YouTube and other social media platforms have exacerbated the
misinformation problem in a number of ways -- whether it's creating echo
chambers for science denial, making it easy for misinformers to
micro-target audiences, or funneling its users to extremist content,"
says Dr. John Cook of George Mason University's Center for Climate
Change Communication.
"In the case of YouTube, their algorithms result in extremist content
like climate denial receiving millions of views. However, YouTube's
response has been entirely inadequate. Adding a generic link to
Wikipedia under denialist videos is like slapping a tiny bandaid on a
large, open wound."...
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/02/24/youtube-video-serious-climate-science-denial-problem
- -
[Google in Europe]
*Fighting disinformation across our products*
Today at the Munich Security Conference, we presented a white paper that
gives more detail about our work to tackle the intentional spread of
misinformation--across Google Search, Google News, YouTube and our
advertising systems. We have a significant effort dedicated to this work
throughout the company, based on three foundational pillars:
Improve our products so they continue to make quality count;
Counteract malicious actors seeking to spread disinformation;
Give people context about the information they see...
https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/fighting-disinformation-across-our-products/
See more at: --
https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines
[Military man speaks the metaphor - 90 seconds in]
*The Climate and Security Podcast: Episode 9 with Rear Admiral Jonathan
White, USN (Ret)*
Welcome back to The Climate and Security Podcast!
In this episode, Rear Admiral Jonathan White, US Navy (Retired),
President and CEO of the Ocean Leadership Consortium and member of the
Center for Climate and Security's Advisory Board, talks to host Dr.
Sweta Chakraborty about his 32-year career in the U.S. Navy and his
acute understanding and knowledge of the oceans. Since his retirement,
Jon's made it a point to apply his knowledge to inform short term and
long term decisions to address how oceans warming impact the rest of the
planet. His extensive knowledge on climate change impacts (e.g., sea
level rise, coral bleaching, depleting and changing aquatic ecosystems)
and manmade pollution (e.g., toxin and nutrient infusion into waters
resulting in red tides) informs his work across all government and at
all levels. This episode features all of this as well how the military
has predictive and gaming capabilities that can ultimately help to
mitigate threats and amplify necessary awareness and communications to
the public. Don't miss this one!
Podcast video https://youtu.be/FT_N9rImCWU
https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/03/01/the-climate-and-security-podcast-episode-9-with-rear-admiral-jonathan-white-usn-ret/#more-17000
[RadioEcoShock Interview with author 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
- - -
[*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
[NPR contortions of media fairness]
*Meet The White House's New Chief Climate Change Skeptic*
Dan Charles March1, 2019
...Happer, 79, joined the staff of President Trump's National Security
Council last fall. And according to documents first leaked to The
Washington Post, he appears to be pushing the White House to mount a
challenge to the government's official assessment of climate change,
which calls climate change a serious national security threat.
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/01/698073442/heres-the-white-houses-top-climate-change-skeptic
- - -
[a few YouTube videos of Happer]
**World In Midst of Carbon Drought (w/ Prof. William Happer, Princeton
University)**
**Conversations That Matter, with Stuart McNish - Published on Jun 22, 2015
We're in a carbon drought.
That is according to Professor William Happer of Princeton University.
The renowned physicist says when it comes to carbon dioxide, there's
more good than bad. He goes on to say most of carbon dioxide's effect
has already happened. He points to the logarithmic dependence of
temperature on carbon dioxide levels.
Happer says the unique properties of carbon dioxide mean that current
levels would need to double for another one-degree increase in
temperature and they'd have to double again for another one degree rise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-9UlF8hkhs
- - -
*Bill Nye on CNN oliberates Trump adviser William Happer*
Published on Apr 23, 2017
Climate State. On Earth Day, CNN hosted a talk with Bill Nye and Trump
adviser William Happer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf3I_7-NBpo
- -
*Princeton physicist: There's a 'cult' building around climate scientists*
Fox Business - Published on Feb 17, 2017
Princeton physics professor William Happer explains why he describes
some climate change scientists as a 'cult.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vro-yn59uso
- - -
*CNBC Guest: Criticizing Carbon Dioxide Is Like Hitler*
Secular Talk
Published on Jul 15, 2014
The cable business channel CNBC continued to push climate change denial
on its network, hosting a professor who compared the "demonization" of
carbon dioxide to the Holocaust.
Physics Professor William Happer has published no peer-reviewed research
on climate change, yet co-host Joe Kernen introduced him as an "industry
expert" on the July 14 edition of Squawk Box. After a softball interview
with Kernen, co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin challenged Happer for "not
believ[ing] in climate change" -- to which Happer responded by telling
Sorkin to "shut up."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZxyhLVaYuU
- -
*William Happer - Climate, an Extraordinary Popular Delusion*
1000frolly Published on Mar 29, 2017
12th ICCC 24th March, 2017 in Washington D.C.
William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University discusses
the Extraordinary Popular Delusion which is Man-Made Climate Change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKBwoO8DOPw
[A tangential bonus - post-global warming cosmology]
*10 Disconcerting Fermi Paradox Scenarios*
John Michael Godier
Published on Mar 1, 2019
An exploration of 10 disconcerting Fermi Paradox Scenarios reflecting
some recent papers that have changed the landscape of the question of
"are we alone".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbqLDmgRjbk
*This Day in Climate History - March 3, 2003 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 3, 2003: The Guardian reports on GOP operative Frank Luntz's
infamous memo urging Republicans to place renewed emphasis on alleged
"uncertainties" in climate science, to dull public support for efforts
to stem carbon pollution.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange
http://youtu.be/hPdCkUiHCg4
http://youtu.be/_WiTVL9iT1w
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