[TheClimate.Vote] March 8, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/March 8, 2019/

[E&E News - Politics]
*Climate change pervades Congress after years of quiet*
Mark K. Matthews, E&E News reporter Climatewire: Thursday, March 7, 2019
All of a sudden, it's gotten really hard to escape climate change.

Not the problem itself -- that threat has been looming for a while now. 
But discussions about global warming have hit a fever pitch in recent 
months, often overwhelming other issues in Congress, on television and 
on the campaign trail.

How long it will last is anyone's guess, but several lawmakers and 
activists said the buzz has reached a level unmatched since 
congressional Democrats tried to pass cap-and-trade legislation 10 years 
ago.

"For the first time in a long time, the Senate is finally debating the 
issue of climate change, and it's about time, if you ask me," said 
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a floor speech yesterday...
- - -
Overhanging all the discussion, however, are two central questions -- 
how long the momentum will last and whether the discussion will lead to 
a significant change in U.S. policy.

For now, both Democrats and Republicans are debating global warming with 
the belief they can gain politically by highlighting climate change and 
the Green New Deal.

To that end, several Senate Democrats and Republicans took to the floor 
yesterday to debate the issues, often heatedly.

But given President Trump's dismissiveness of climate change, it's 
highly unlikely he and Congress will agree to an aggressive answer to 
global warming.

That means much of the issue's fate will rest with the outcome of the 
2020 elections, both for Congress and the White House.

And for some activists, that's a fine enough reason to keep talking.

"In 2016, climate change was barely discussed in the presidential 
debates," wrote activists with the Sunrise Movement, who have championed 
the Green New Deal, in a Twitter post last week. "In 2020, it's going to 
be a top issue."
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060123363


[get to know what we don't know]
*How brain biases prevent climate action*
Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival now make it difficult 
to address long-term challenges that threaten our existence, like 
climate change. But they can help us too...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change


[a little science]
*Rainfall Is Triggering More Melting on the Greenland Ice Sheet, Study 
Finds*
Increasing rainfall -- including in winter -- could help explain the 
rise in Greenland's meltwater runoff, which is contributing to sea level 
rise.
BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS - MAR 7, 2019
When a frozen snowflake falls on the Greenland Ice Sheet, it lands with 
a whisper and stays frozen, sometimes for months.

But raindrops splat down, making little craters and melting some of the 
adjacent snow crystals. Multiplied across thousands of square miles, 
they can trigger widespread melting and runoff, which can lead to more 
sea level rise.

A new analysis of satellite and weather data shows that melting 
associated with rain in Greenland doubled in the summers and tripled in 
the winters from 1988 to 2012 as temperatures rose , scientists write in 
a study published Thursday in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European 
Geosciences Union.

The total precipitation over the ice sheet didn't change over the study 
period, but more of it fell as rain, the study found. The scientists 
estimated that almost a third of the total runoff measured was triggered 
by rainfall.

They also found that melting events triggered by rain lasted longer, 
lengthening from an average of two days to three in the summer, and from 
two days to five in the winter...
- -
Mike MacFerrin, a University of Colorado, Boulder glaciologist who 
studies ice sheet meltwater feedbacks, said the study reinforces some of 
his own ongoing research showing that both rain and melting are 
increasing, and that the rate of melting is increasing 10 times faster 
than rainfall.

"These cyclones come in bringing rain and start melt events that persist 
long beyond the time of initial melting," he said. "A little less snow, 
a little more rain can have a significant impact on a given area, and an 
early spring melt event makes the summer melt season longer."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07032019/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-rain-increase-climate-change-sea-level-rise-feedback-loop




[From the New Yorker]
*The Other Kind of Climate Denialism*
By Rachel RiedererMarch 6, 2019
As uncertainty and denial about climate change have diminished, they 
have been replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, 
and resignation.

"The Uninhabitable Earth," David Wallace-Wells's new book about how 
climate change will affect human life, begins, "It is worse, much worse, 
than you think." In superhot cities, roads will melt and train tracks 
will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet would be in 
constant drought. With just six metres of sea-level rise--an optimistic 
projection--land where three hundred and seventy-five million people 
currently live will be underwater. Some of the apocalyptic stories 
aren't from the future but our recent past: in the Paradise Camp Fire of 
late 2018, people fleeing the flames "found themselves sprinting past 
exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran."

To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of "The 
Uninhabitable Earth" come as no surprise. We are racing toward--in fact 
have already entered--an era of water shortage, wildfire, sea-level 
rise, and extreme weather. To read the book is to ask hard questions 
about one's own future. When will the city where I live be flooded? 
Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live? 
Should I have children at all?

Yet Wallace-Wells has also stressed that there is no place for fatalism. 
In an interview with NPR, he said that "every inch of warming makes a 
difference"--we cannot stop the process of warming altogether, but we 
can control whether climate change yields a future that is apocalyptic 
or instead "merely grim." Several years ago, I asked the climate 
activist and writer Bill McKibben how he was able to keep from falling 
into depression, given how much time he devotes to thinking about 
climate change. He answered that fighting is the key--it's only 
despairing if you think that you can't take on the problem. "It's the 
greatest fight in human history, one whose outcome will reverberate for 
geologic time, and it has to happen right now," he said.

In 2008 and 2009, the American Psychological Association put together a 
task force to examine the relationship between psychology and climate 
change. It found that, although people said that climate change was 
important, they did not "feel a sense of urgency." The task force 
identified several mental barriers that contributed to this blase' 
stance. People were uncertain about climate change, mistrustful of the 
science, or denied that it was related to human activity. They tended to 
minimize the risks and believe that there was plenty of time to make 
changes before the real impacts were felt. Just ten years later, these 
attitudes about climate feel like ancient relics. But two key factors, 
which the task force identified as keeping people from taking action, 
have stood the test of time: one was habit, and the other was lack of 
control. "Ingrained behaviors are extremely resistant to permanent 
change," the group stated. "People believe their actions would be too 
small to make a difference and choose to do nothing."...
- - -
ohn Fraser is a conservation psychologist who has studied burnout and 
trauma among people doing environmental work. "We have to move beyond 
terrorizing people with disaster stories," he told me. Responses to 
climate change are often discussed as a spectrum, with denial and 
disengagement at one end and intense alarm on the other. We are getting 
more alarmed. In 2009, a Yale and George Mason study grouped Americans' 
responses to climate into six categories: alarmed, concerned, cautious, 
disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive. In 2009, eighteen per cent were 
alarmed; in 2018, that number had risen to twenty-nine per cent.

Fraser wants people to feel not alarmed but activated, and he takes a 
relentlessly positive, solutions-oriented attitude. "We got trains all 
the way across America in a few years, and people on the moon in a few 
years," he said. And ideas for climate moonshots abound: 
negative-carbon-emission plants are prohibitively expensive, but they do 
exist; some advocate for reviving nuclear power; proponents of a Green 
New Deal call for ending fossil-fuel extraction and subsidies, and 
radically expanding public transportation. In Silicon Valley, ideas are 
emerging that rely less on politics than on technology, like flooding 
some deserts to grow carbon-sucking algae beds, or using 
electrochemistry to get rocks to absorb carbon from the air. Fraser 
believes that the most productive way to communicate about environmental 
problems is to emphasize the positive solutions that exist. "What we 
need to promote is hope," he said. "The first step to a healthy response 
is feeling that the problem is solvable."

"Is it appropriate to feel terrified? No," Fraser said. "Because you 
just shut down."...
- - -
Margaret Klein Salamon, who trained as a clinical psychologist before 
founding a climate-advocacy organization, takes the opposite view. She 
doesn't see fear as paralyzing but as a necessary response that 
activates people to recognize danger and take action. What's more, given 
the state of the atmosphere, she argues that acute fear is rational. 
"It's important to feel afraid of things that will kill us--that is 
healthy and good," she said. She believes that reckoning with the scope 
of the emergency is required, both to activate responsible behavior and 
to reap the mental-health benefits of "living in climate truth." 
Salamon, who grew up in a family of psychoanalysts and considers therapy 
to be "something of a family business," is writing "Transform Yourself 
with Climate Truth," a self-help book on the subject...
- - -
One of the other panelists was the psychologist and communications 
expert Renee Lertzman, who argued that it was necessary to "blow up the 
dichotomy" between fear and hope, or truth and positivity. The problem 
with the horror-story narratives are not necessarily that they are 
frightening, she said, but that they are presented almost 
cinematically--placing people outside of the action in the "politically 
neutralizing" position of "titillated, excited, fearful spectators." In 
her book "Environmental Melancholia," Lertzman argues that unprocessed 
grief about ecological devastation is a big part of what prevents people 
from addressing environmental challenges. This "arrested, inchoate form 
of mourning" keeps people locked in a state of inaction, she writes.

When I spoke to Lertzman, she talked about the need to have 
conversations about climate change that allow space for people to 
process--or at least acknowledge--their feelings. A gesture as simple as 
beginning a conversation by allowing a few moments to say, " 'Damn, this 
is intense,' " she told me, "frees up a lot of energy to move into 
problem-solving mode." This recognition is a familiar move in 
psychology: first acknowledging that a topic is difficult and then 
wading in. It reminded me of the way that a doctor with a good bedside 
manner might approach delivering a difficult diagnosis, but Lertzman 
said that it's more complicated than that: because of our culpability in 
the climate crisis, discussing it is like getting news about a health 
issue that's directly related to one's own habits. You not only have to 
face a scary future but reckon with how you helped to create it. "We 
have to come to terms with the fact that what we're doing is no longer 
sustainable, and the onus is on us to rise to the occasion," she said.

"What works really well is when people feel that they are invited and 
inspired to be part of something constructive, combined with having the 
safety to grapple with the magnitude of things," Lertzman told me. This 
way of thinking loops back to Bill McKibben's advice, that the only cure 
for climate agita is activism. Susan Clayton, a professor of social 
psychology and environmental studies (and a member of the A.P.A.'s 
climate-change task force, a decade ago), made a similar point, telling 
me that what's good for the climate--in the form of participation in a 
community effort--is also good for the psyche. "It's similar to the 
civil-rights movement," she said. "The act of coming together is 
empowering and validating."...
- - -
Wallace-Wells writes that the last century of fossil-fuel extraction and 
industrial capitalism has enabled a life style I enjoy--that this very 
process "made middle-class-ness possible" for billions of people." Yet, 
at the same time, it is a system that must be radically overhauled. 
Modern people have a tendency, he writes, to see human systems as more 
inviolable than natural ones. And so, "renovating capitalism so that it 
doesn't reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than 
suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off 
by a degree or two." It's why creating global factories to suck carbon 
out of the atmosphere might appear to be easier than simply ending 
fossil-fuel subsidies, he writes. These are the competing truths we have 
to integrate: a livable world is incompatible with fossil fuels, and 
fossil fuels made the world we live in.

Decarbonizing the economy will be difficult, but it must be done. It 
will be hard--but not as hard as surviving the catalogue of disasters 
that will befall us if we don't. This is, to my mind, the great strength 
of Wallace-Wells's approach to storytelling. The thing to grieve, then, 
is not the Earth's habitable climate but, instead, the century of 
carefree car-driving and reckless deforestation, the years of eating 
meat with abandon and inexpensively flying around the world--and the 
massive economic growth that this system has enabled. Overhauling the 
fossil-fuel economy will represent a true loss, but its sacrifices will 
be nowhere near the alternative. The process is subject to all matter of 
difficulties: the problem of collective action, scientific uncertainty, 
technological challenges, political mobilization, and many others. But 
to do anything less is to go insane.

Rachel Riederer is a member of The New Yorker's editorial staff.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-other-kind-of-climate-denialism


[Michael E Mann in Scientific American $]
*Droughts and Floods May Level Off until 2050, but Then Watch Out *
Strange waves in the jet stream foretell a future full of heat waves and 
floods
By Michael E. Mann
Consider the following summer extremes: In 2003 Europe's worst heat wave 
in history killed more than 30,000 citizens. In 2010 wildfires in Russia 
and floods in Pakistan caused unprecedented damage and death. The 2011 
U.S. heat wave and drought caused ranchers in Oklahoma to lose a quarter 
of their cattle. The 2016 Alberta wildfires constituted the costliest 
disaster in Canadian history. And the summer of 2018 that the U.S. 
experienced was notorious: temperatures flared above 100 degrees 
Fahrenheit for days on end across the desert Southwest, heavy rains and 
floods inundated the mid-Atlantic states, and California had a shocking 
wildfire season. Extreme heat waves, floods and wildfires raged across 
Europe and Asia, too...
(clip)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/droughts-and-floods-may-level-off-until-2050-but-then-watch-out/


[Opinion]
*Despite What Trump Says, Climate Change Threatens Our National Security*
The president is trying to subvert the science that informs the 
intelligence community.
By John R. Allen and David G. Victor
General Allen retired from the Marine Corps in 2013 after nearly four 
decades of service. Mr. Victor is a professor of international relations 
at the University of California, San Diego.
Once again, the Trump White House is publicly crossing swords with the 
intelligence community in ways that are likely to harm American security.

The latest salvo is an effort taking shape over the next few weeks to 
"red team" the science of climate change -- in effect, to challenge it 
and investigate it for uncertainties. The backdrop for the scheme is 
President Trump publicly questioning the accuracy of the nation's most 
extensive and scientifically robust assessment by 13 federal agencies 
that showed how stronger storms, higher sea levels, more heat waves and 
sundry other effects of climate change will harm the nation. This same 
science has also informed a new intelligence community report that 
identifies climate change as a significant threat to national security.

Impacts typical of a changing climate are already buffeting the front 
lines of America's military presence. Some are palpable and easily trace 
back to warming. For example, in Alaska, erosion from warmer weather is 
undermining the foundations at some radar facilities that are critical 
early-warning networks for attacks on the United States. They are among 
dozens of facilities the Pentagon has tagged as at risk from recurrent 
flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires or thawing permafrost 
resulting from shifts in climate that are happening much faster than 
expected. To some degree, better engineering -- although often at 
substantially higher cost -- will help reduce these impacts.

Much more insidious are the effects of warming on the social fabric and 
confidence in government in countries whose stability matters to 
American security. As commander of United States forces in Afghanistan 
and other locations, one of us (General Allen) dealt regularly with 
insurgencies and failed states that created direct dangers to American 
security. In Afghanistan, for example, the failure of the state is 
linked in part to weaker agriculture (the main source of income in most 
communities).

What makes climate change such a pernicious problem is that it increases 
the odds of those adverse conditions arising -- especially in places 
where government already does not function well. When the stress of 
climate change multiplies, so will the problems the military must handle.

While it's always a good idea to look at uncertainties in any scientific 
assessment, the White House red-teaming is poised to investigate the 
wrong questions. The scheme, anchored in the climate-denier community, 
is designed to generate talking points for a president who is skeptical 
of climate science and thus will focus on whether climate change is 
happening at all and whether a little warming is all bad news.

A useful red team would investigate uncertainties in the opposite way, 
by focusing on the evidence that the climate is changing much more 
rapidly than originally expected. Getting serious about the odds that 
global warming could be much more harmful than expected could amplify 
previous assessments for the nation's security.
- - - -
This is hardly the only place where the Trump White House is visibly 
undermining its own intelligence community. Recent examples abound -- 
North Korea, Russia and Iran, among many other locations -- of the White 
House taking issue with its own appointed intelligence officials on 
vital national security issues. With that as precedent, the White House 
warning shot across the intelligence agencies on climate change is 
hardly surprising yet still alarming.

Ignoring the anti-science noise in the White House is dangerous for the 
nation. Climate change is arguably America's and its allies' 
longest-term security crisis. But the immediate national security crisis 
is a White House browbeating our scientific and intelligence community 
into its political line or seeking to tamper with the science and 
intelligence itself.

John R. Allen, president of the Brookings Institution, is a retired 
four-star Marine Corps general who served as special presidential envoy 
to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (now ISIS) from 2014 to 2015. 
David G. Victor is a professor at the School of Global Policy and 
Strategy, University of California at San Diego, and is a co-chairman of 
the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/climate-change-national-security.html
- - -
[Here is the letter]

    March 5, 2019
    Dear Mr. President:
    We write to you as former US national security leaders to offer our
    support to our uniformed military,
    civilian national security professionals, and members of the
    scientific community, who across the past
    four Administrations have found that climate change is a threat to
    US national security.
    Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans,
    and it is accelerating. The
    overwhelming majority of scientists agree: less than 0.2% of
    peer-reviewed climate science papers
    dispute these facts. In this context, we are deeply concerned by
    reports that National Security Council
    officials are considering forming a committee to dispute and
    undermine military and intelligence
    judgments on the threat posed by climate change. This includes
    second-guessing the scientific sources
    used to assess the threat, such as the rigorously peer-reviewed
    National Climate Assessment, and
    applying that to national security policy. Imposing a political test
    on reports issued by the science
    agencies, and forcing a blind spot onto the national security
    assessments that depend on them, will erode
    our national security.
    It is dangerous to have national security analysis conform to
    politics. Our officials' job is to ensure that
    we are prepared for current threats and future contingencies. We
    cannot do that if the scientific studies
    that inform our threat assessments are undermined. Our national
    security community will not remain the
    best in the world if it cannot make decisions based on the best
    available evidence.
    When extreme weather hits the United States, it degrades the
    fighting force. Just last year, Hurricane
    Florence caused $3.6 billion in damages to Camp Lejeune, home of the
    Marines' expeditionary units on
    the East Coast. You called Florence "One of the biggest to ever hit
    our country." Stronger storms and
    storm surges have long featured in predictions about a changing
    climate. Around the world, climate
    change is a "threat multiplier" – making other security threats
    worse. Its effects are even used by our
    adversaries as a weapon of war; ISIS used water shortages in Iraq,
    in part driven by a changing climate,
    to cement their hold on the population during their reign of terror
    from 2014 to 2017.
    We support the science-driven patriots in our national security
    community who have rightly seen
    addressing climate change as a threat reduction issue, not a
    political one, since 1989. We support the
    bipartisan finding of the US Congress, which you signed into law on
    December 2017, stating that "climate
    change is a direct threat to the national security of the United
    States." We urge you to trust and heed the analysis
    of your own national security agencies and the science agencies on
    which their assessments depend,
    including the 21 senior defense officials that have identified
    climate change as a security threat during
    your Administration. A committee designed to undermine the many
    years of work they have done will
    weaken our ability to respond to real threats, putting American
    lives at risk.
    Our climate will continue to change, and the threats will continue
    to grow. We spent our careers pledged
    to protect the United States from all threats, including this one.
    Let's drop the politics, and allow our
    national security and science agencies to do their jobs.
    Sincerely,

https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/letter-to-the-president_senior-military-and-national-security-leaders-denounce-nsc-climate-panel_2019_3_05-1.pdf
https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/03/05/release-57-senior-military-and-national-security-leaders-denounce-nsc-climate-panel/



[naming names video interview]
Bill Blakemore - Nov. 20, 2011
*Climate Scientist Michael Mann Interview, Part 3*
http://video-cdn.abcnews.com/120706_ann_mann_3.mp4
http://video-cdn.abcnews.com/120706_ann_mann_5.mp4
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/11/what-if-greenhouse-gases-werent-invisible/


*This Day in Climate History - March 8, 2912 - from D.R. Tucker*
  In a syndicated column, former Delaware Republican Party official 
Michael Stafford notes:

    "The far-right's capture of the GOP has gone largely unchallenged by
    more responsible voices within the Party. Jon Huntsman, for example,
    was the sole presidential candidate willing to directly confront the
    prevailing [right-wing] orthodoxy on climate and evolution. Perhaps
    this isn't surprising, given the viciousness of the attacks directed
    at dissenters. The passion for purging and purity, and the primaries
    that resemble nothing so much as heresy trials, highlight a critical
    fact about the far-right. In Conservative Wonderland,
    dissent--thoughtcrime--is the political version of a capital offense."

http://themoderatevoice.com/140941/gop-stuck-in-a-conservative-wonderland/
http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/greenfront/2012/03/michael-stafford-gop-stuck-in-a-conservative-wonderland-.html
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