[TheClimate.Vote] March 15, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/March 15, 2019/

[Greta the Deserving]
*Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel peace prize*
Climate strike founder put up for award ahead of global strikes planned 
in more than 105 countries
video https://youtu.be/VDBJMqZ6lWI Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg 
speaks at four school strikes in a week
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/14/greta-thunberg-nominated-nobel-peace-prize 



[Now is the early Spring]
*Students worldwide are striking to demand action on climate change*
List of strikes by country 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate#List_of_school_climate_strikes_by_country
Global: https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/join
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/1994180377345229/
Australia https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/support-us
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/students-worldwide-are-striking-demand-action-climate-change


[7 min video summary ]
*Earth at 2 degrees hotter will be horrific. Now here's what 4 degrees 
will look like. - David Wallace-Wells*
Big Think
Published on Mar 14, 2019
This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change.

- The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2C 
hotter, which scientists call the "threshold of catastrophe".

- Why is that the good news? Because if humans don't change course now, 
the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4C at the end of this century, 
which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the 
warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus.

- David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8C and even 13C 
increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into 
complacency. "It should make us focus on them more intently," he says.

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation 
and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was 
previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York 
City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming 
(https://goo.gl/ih35YX)
Read more at BigThink.com: https://bigthink.com/videos/earth-at-...


[video satire from Australia -- NSFW language ]
*Honest Government Ad - Climate Change Policy*
thejuicemedia
Published on Mar 14, 2019
The Australien Government has made an ad about its Climate Change Policy 
and it's surprisingly honest and informative!
Join a student strike in your city today. Click below to find out the 
closest student strike near you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL8a1YEhk_o


[Duty of sovereign]
*French Government Sued for Inadequate Climate Action*
By Karen Savage
Four environmental organizations filed suit against the French 
government for failing to live up to its commitments to the Paris 
Climate Agreement and other national and international agreements.

The suit, which was filed in the Administrative Court of Paris on 
Thursday, alleges that France has violated its duty by failing to taking 
action to limit global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius.

The organizations--Oxfam, Greenpeace, Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la 
Nature et l'Homme and Notre Affair à Tous--also say the French 
government has repeatedly postponed implementing policies to curb 
emissions, as required by its national climate policy,  and has failed 
to respect international commitments.

The organizations are asking the French government to fully implement 
its policies and to abide by its climate agreements. They are also 
asking for compensation for harm done to their members and the environment.

"The state is not living up to commitments it has made itself, 
especially in the context of the Paris agreement of 2015," said Cecile 
Duflot, a former minister and current Executive Director of Oxfam France.

"The state is a litigant like any other, our goal is for it to be 
condemned to act," she told France Inter radio.

France, like countries around the world, is already feeling the impacts 
of climate change, including intense heat waves and increased rainfall 
events.

According to the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index, France is the 
most vulnerable of all Europe countries to climate change and the 18th 
most affected in the world.

Plaintiff organization Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l'Homme 
was founded by Nicolas Hulot, a former environment minister who resigned 
last year due to what he considered France's failure to implement 
climate and other environmental policies. The organization has gathered 
more than 2 million signatures in a petition supporting the litigation.

The litigation was denounced by French President Emmanuel Macron, who is 
currently in Nairobi for the One Planet Summit, a gathering of 
high-level officials, CEO's and young people working to put forward 
initiatives designed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

"The solution is in all of us. On this issue, it is not the People vs. 
The Government. This nonsense should stop," Macron said. "We all must 
act--governments must act, major enterprises must act, investors must 
act, citizens must act--all together."

The plaintiffs say Macron and the French government are all talk, but 
little action. They also say putting the onus on individual citizens is 
a distraction from the government's failure to adequately regulate 
carbon emitters.

"We are not reducing greenhouse gas emissions in this country, but 
they're going up by 6 percent more than it should be between 2015 and 
2018," said Paul Mougeolle, an attorney for Notre Affair à Tous.

He said for the suit to succeed, the plaintiffs must convince the court 
that the state has a duty to combat climate change...
- - -
Mougeolle said the new case differs from other suits because there are 
no individual plaintiffs, only non-governmental organizations, which in 
France have the right to demand an end to the ecological harms.

"We are demanding not only repair of the ecological damage, but also the 
prevention of future harm," said Mougeolle.

The suit is anticipated to take about two years to work its way through 
the court. If the claims are rejected, the organizations will be allowed 
to appeal to a higher court.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/14/france-government-sued-climate-greenpeace-oxfam/ 



[Artists]
*The Climate Mobilization and Art Not War...with Act.TV to raise 
awareness, chart solutions & activate a regenerative tomorrow*
It's time to tell the truth: we are experiencing a cascading breakdown 
of the climate system due to unsustainable extractive economic and 
social forces, posing an existential risk to humanity and life on earth.
David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Margaret Klein-Salamon, executive director of The Climate Mobilization
DJ Spooky with DJ Alkimist
Tribal Member of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, Lehman A. Mann
Sunrise Movement co-founder Sara Blazevic
NRDC Publications Director, Mary Annaïse Heglar
https://artnotwar.com/zeroby2030event/


[Bill McKibben reviews 2 reports in The New York Review of Books]
*A Future Without Fossil Fuels?*
Bill McKibben APRIL 4, 2019 ISSUE
*2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming*
a report by Kingsmill Bond
41 pp., September 2018, available at carbontracker.org
*A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation*
a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy 
Transformation
88 pp., January 2019, available at irena.org
"Kingsmill Bond" certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of 
London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly 
trimmed, well-cut suit. He's lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked 
for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and 
Citibank. He's currently "new energy strategist" for a small British 
think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short 
paper called "2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak 
Coming." It asks an interesting question: At what point does a new 
technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?

This may turn out to be the most important economic and political 
question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us 
much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without 
completely destroying the planet. Based on earlier technological 
transitions--horses to cars, sails to steam, land lines to cell 
phones--it seems possible that the fossil fuel industry may begin to 
weaken much sooner than you'd think. The British-Venezuelan scholar 
Carlota Perez has observed that over a period of twenty years, trains 
made redundant a four-thousand-mile network of canals and dredged rivers 
across the UK: "The canal builders…fought hard and even finished a 
couple of major canals in the 1830s, but defeat was inevitable," as it 
later was for American railroads (and horses) when they were replaced by 
trucks and cars.

Major technological transitions often take a while. The Czech-Canadian 
academic Vaclav Smil has pointed out that although James Watt developed 
the coal-powered steam engine in 1776, coal supplied less than 5 percent 
of the planet's energy until 1840, and it didn't reach 50 percent until 
1900. But the economic effect of those transitions can happen much 
earlier, Bond writes, as soon as it becomes clear to investors that a 
new technology is accounting for all the growth in a particular sector....
Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of 
solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store 
energy. This has led to rapid expansion of these technologies, even 
though they are still used much less than fossil fuels: in 2017, for 
instance, sun and wind produced just 6 percent of the world's electric 
supply, but they made up 45 percent of the growth in supply, and the 
cost of sun and wind power continues to fall by about 20 percent with 
each doubling of capacity. Bond's analysis suggests that in the next few 
years, they will represent all the growth. We will then reach peak use 
of fossil fuels, not because we're running out of them but because 
renewables will have become so cheap that anyone needing a new energy 
supply will likely turn to solar or wind power.

Bond writes that in the 2020s--probably the early 2020s--the demand for 
fossil fuels will stop growing. The turning point in such transitions 
"is typically the moment when the impact is felt in financial 
markets"--when stock prices tumble and never recover. Who is going to 
invest in an industry that is clearly destined to shrink? Though we'll 
still be using lots of oil, its price should fall if it has to compete 
with the price of sunshine. Hence the huge investments in pipelines and 
tankers and undersea exploration will be increasingly unrecoverable. 
Precisely how long it will take is impossible to predict, but the 
outcome seems clear...
- - -
Yet overall the benefits would be immeasurable. Imagine a world in which 
the tortured politics of the Middle East weren't magnified in importance 
by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world 
in which the greatest driver of climate change--the unrelenting 
political power of the fossil-fuel industry--had begun to shrink. The 
question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/04/future-without-fossil-fuels/
- - -
[Here it is]
*2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming*
Watch the video interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj3MSgqxJTg
The peak in fossil fuel demand will have a dramatic impact on financial 
markets in the 2020s.

The global energy system is transitioning from a system mainly based on 
fossil fuels to one mainly based on renewable energy sources. The shift 
will involve near-term peaking of fossil fuel demand, an S curve of 
renewable growth, and the endgame for fossil fuel demand.
- - -
At the tipping point when total fossil fuel demand peaks in the 2020s, 
the challenging technologies of solar PV and wind will be around 6% of 
total energy supply and 14% of electricity supply.

Electricity is key to the transition. In 2017 energy to make electricity 
was 43% of total energy supply. Because other sectors have been 
electrifying, the share of electricity is growing at around 3.6 
percentage points per decade. The net result of this is that energy 
required for electricity has made up 71% of global energy demand growth 
over the last 5 years.

It is key to understand the timing of the peak. The conventional 
bottom-up approach is less useful at times of systemic change because of 
modelling uncertainty, regulatory pressure and rising inter-fuel 
competition.- -
https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/2020-vision-why-you-should-see-the-fossil-fuel-peak-coming/


[Sea Level Rise has always been the worst]
*Destruction from sea level rise in California could exceed worst 
wildfires and earthquakes, new research shows*
By ROSANNA XIA - MAR 13, 2019
In the most extensive study to date on sea level rise in California, 
researchers say damage by the end of the century could be far more 
devastating than the worst earthquakes and wildfires in state history.

A team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists concluded that even a modest 
amount of sea level rise -- often dismissed as a creeping, slow-moving 
disaster -- could overwhelm communities when a storm hits at the same time.
The study combines sea level rise and storms for the first time, as well 
as wave action, cliff erosion, beach loss and other coastal threats 
across California. These factors have been studied extensively but 
rarely together in the same model.
The results are sobering. More than half a million Californians and $150 
billion in property are at risk of flooding along the coast by 2100 -- 
equivalent to 6% of the state's GDP, the study found, and on par with 
Hurricane Katrina and some of the world's costliest disasters. The 
number of people exposed is three times greater than previous models 
that considered only sea level rise.

And at a time when marshes are drowning, cliffs eroding, beaches 
disappearing and severe storms likely to become more frequent, 
scientists say even a small shift in sea level rise could launch a new 
range of extremes that Californians would have to confront every single 
year.

"It's not just some nuisance that's going to pop its head up once in a 
while," said Patrick Barnard, research director of the USGS Climate 
Impacts and Coastal Processes Team and lead author of the study. "These 
are significant events that are going to recur and be ten times the 
scale of the worst wildfires and earthquakes that we've experienced in 
modern California history."
The stakes are high for the millions of Californians who have chosen to 
build and live along the edge of the Pacific. In recent months, winter 
storms eroded Capistrano Beach so much that a boardwalk collapsed and 
crews had to haul in tons of boulders to form a barrier that could 
protect the basketball courts from disappearing into the ocean.

In Imperial Beach, large waves coupled with some of the highest tides of 
the season sent water crashing past seawalls -- flooding roads and 
garages and much of the Tijuana River Estuary. From San Diego County to 
Humboldt County, coastal officials continue to grapple with increasing 
erosion, cliff collapses and emergency permits.

The new USGS study underscores how these events will continue along the 
coast -- and amplify each other as the sea continues to rise.

"This sort of science is absolutely critical to our planning," said Jack 
Ainsworth, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, 
which has used the USGS coastal modeling to plan for sea level rise. "It 
may seem like a slow-moving disaster, but we see how the fires amped up 
really quickly and destroyed communities… We really need to work with a 
sense of urgency."

Translating sea level rise into economic risk and property loss advances 
a tricky issue that many communities have been reluctant to confront. A 
blockbuster study last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists 
analyzed Zillow data and found that hundreds of thousands of homes 
across the nation are at risk of chronic flooding in the coming decades. 
A Stanford study last month found that downtown Annapolis, Maryland's 
state capital, lost 3,000 visits in 2017 due to high-tide "sunny-day" 
flooding -- as much as $172,000 in revenue for local businesses.

The latest National Climate Assessment, a major scientific report by 13 
federal agencies, concluded $1 trillion in coastal real estate is 
threatened by rising sea levels, storm surges and high-tide flooding 
exacerbated by climate change.

"Scientists are getting more sophisticated in communicating this 
information to people so that they understand and care about the 
implications," said Heather Cooley, research director of the Pacific 
Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that has also studied how sea 
level rise puts communities and critical infrastructure at risk.

"You're seeing more and more communities grapple with these impacts -- 
what it's going to cost them, whether they should limit development in 
certain areas. Those are the real tough questions we need to be 
confronting."

Read more: *Climate change will harm the entire nation if the U.S. 
doesn't act now, federal report warns *
In the USGS study, published Wednesday in the Nature journal Scientific 
Reports, researchers brought together a number of models that examined 
wave action, tides, coastal erosion and flooding in California under sea 
level rise scenarios ranging from 0 to 2 meters (6.6 feet). On top of 
these projections, they added four different storm scenarios: average 
daily conditions, typical annual storm, 20-year storm, and 100-year storm.

They then overlaid these integrated projections, known as a dynamic 
model, with a sophisticated analysis of population data, property 
assessment values, as well as data from various state agencies, the U.S. 
Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Previous efforts to understand potential coastal impacts of climate 
change have mainly focused on long-term sea level rise, with little 
consideration of how these other elements could affect the overall flood 
risk -- in both the long and short term -- to a built-out community.
Emergency managers and planning officials, in turn, rarely incorporate 
100-year storm models in tandem with sea level projections -- vastly 
underestimating a city's risk.

For example, with only 0.25 meters of sea level rise projected to occur 
by about 2040, the number of Californians exposed to flooding might not 
seem too significant -- but add a 100-year storm, and almost seven times 
as many people are at risk.

All told, with a 2-meter rise by 2100 and a 100-year storm, the 
projected flood risks could represent 6.3% of the state's GDP -- despite 
only directly affecting 0.3% of the state's land area, according to the 
study, which did not speculate on future population growth or inflation 
rates.

Researchers noted these projections might even be on the conservative 
end, given that California policymakers are now considering 3 meters as 
the higher end of expected sea level rise.
- -
"If you have a major flood event that shuts down the port for three to 
five days, what kind of effect does that have on the economy?" Barnard 
said. "How does flooding affect lost jobs and loss of income and 
distribution of goods and services throughout the country?"

"The effects I think are far, far greater than even what I think these 
numbers suggest. And these numbers," he said, "are already massive."
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-california-coast-storm-damage-20190313-story.html
- - -
[easier to understand]
*Artists Illuminate the Catastrophic Future of Rising Sea Levels*
Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta activated three synchronized lines of 
light to illuminate the future's projected high tide if climate change 
progresses at its current pace.
"The installation explores the catastrophic impact of our relationship 
with nature and its long term effects," the artists said in a statement 
provided to Hyperallergic. "The work provokes a dialogue on how the 
rising sea levels will affect coastal areas, its inhabitants and land 
usage in the future."
https://hyperallergic.com/489076/artists-illuminate-the-catastrophic-future-of-rising-sea-levels/
- - -
[succinct version]
*Rising Sea Levels Are Bigger Threat to California Than Wildfires*
Scientists say more than half a million people could be impacted by 
rising sea levels and harsher storms by 2100.
By Casey Leins, Staff Writer March 13, 2019,
RESEARCHERS SAY THE combination of sea level rise and storms in 
California has the potential to displace more than half a million people 
and cost $150 billion by the end of the century, according to a study 
published Wednesday.

Though sea level rise is a gradual process (with a 2-meter rise expected 
by 2100), scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey explained that, 
when combined with storms, erosion and other consequences of climate 
change, the coastal impacts are greatly accelerated.

According to the study, published in the Nature journal Scientific 
Reports, 600,000 people and more than $150 billion in property could be 
impacted if a 100-year storm (a storm with a 1 percent chance of 
occuring) were to hit the state. This is seven times the exposed 
population and property cost when considering sea level rise alone, the 
researchers note.
Even a more likely recurring annual storm is estimated to cost $119 
billion and effect 483,000 residents by 2100, according to the study.

"This sort of science is absolutely critical to our planning," Jack 
Ainsworth, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, told 
the Los Angeles Times. "It may seem like a slow-moving disaster, but we 
see how the (wild)fires amped up really quickly and destroyed 
communities...We really need to work with a sense of urgency."

These costs far exceed the most costly natural disasters in California's 
history. In 1989, Loma Prieta Earthquake cost $10 billion in damage, 
while the 2017 wildfire season cost $18 billion.

The researchers also looked at the potential impacts of a hypothetical 
but possible megastorm, modeled after historic flooding in the 1800s. 
The storm, when combined with sea level rise, would cost more than $300 
billion in property damage. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina -- one of 
the costliest natural disasters in the world -- cost the U.S. $127 
billion in 2005.

"This comparison suggests to policy makers that future coastal flooding 
due to storms and sea level rise must be considered an economic threat 
on par with the state's and the world's most costly historical natural 
disasters," the researchers wrote.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2019-03-13/rising-sea-levels-are-bigger-threat-to-california-than-wildfires

- -

[source material from the Journal Nature]
*Dynamic flood modeling essential to assess the coastal impacts of 
climate change*
Abstract
Coastal inundation due to sea level rise (SLR) is projected to displace 
hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the next century, creating 
significant economic, humanitarian, and national-security challenges. 
However, the majority of previous efforts to characterize potential 
coastal impacts of climate change have focused primarily on long-term 
SLR with a static tide level, and have not comprehensively accounted for 
dynamic physical drivers such as tidal non-linearity, storms, short-term 
climate variability, erosion response and consequent flooding responses. 
Here we present a dynamic modeling approach that estimates 
climate-driven changes in flood-hazard exposure by integrating the 
effects of SLR, tides, waves, storms, and coastal change (i.e. beach 
erosion and cliff retreat). We show that for California, USA, the 
world's 5th largest economy, over $150 billion of property equating to 
more than 6% of the state's GDP and 600,000 people could be impacted by 
dynamic flooding by 2100; a three-fold increase in exposed population 
than if only SLR and a static coastline are considered. The potential 
for underestimating societal exposure to coastal flooding is greater for 
smaller SLR scenarios, up to a seven-fold increase in exposed population 
and economic interests when considering storm conditions in addition to 
SLR. These results highlight the importance of including climate-change 
driven dynamic coastal processes and impacts in both short-term hazard 
mitigation and long-term adaptation planning.
Over 600 million people worldwide live in the coastal zone (<10 m 
elevation) and migration trends forecast an increase to more than 1 
billion by 2050...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40742-z

- -

[Hawaii considers]
*As sea level rises, state considers the perils and opportunities of 
'managed retreat'*
By Mileka Lincoln - March 5
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Accelerating sea level rise brought on by 
climate change poses significant challenges to Hawaii's shorelines, 
according to geologists who have been studying the state's coastlines 
for decades.
The state recently commissioned a project to assess the feasibility and 
implication of managed retreat by looking at how other regions have 
successfully moved from coastlines.

And the biggest takeaway: Managed retreat is a difficult but necessary 
option to consider.

"Managed retreat is the idea that we move our communities out of the way 
because sea level is rising," said University of Hawaii earth sciences 
Professor Chip Fletcher.

Hawaii's shorelines are unique environments characterized by a number of 
natural hazards, including sea level rise, tsunami, storm surge, high 
winds and coastal erosion.
Experts all agree that building on eroding coasts increases 
vulnerability to these hazards, but finding a solution that everyone 
agrees on is much more challenging, especially when you start talking 
about managed retreat.
- - -
Managed retreat is one of three main adaptation strategies to sea level 
rise and other coastal hazards. The other two are accommodation and 
protection.

According to coastal geologists, managed retreat essentially means 
shifting development inland from the coast either through the physical 
movement of structures or through legislation or policy that changes the 
restrictions and management of Hawaii's shorelines.

Accommodation involves adapting existing structures and systems to allow 
them to better withstand changing conditions, like elevating a structure 
to hold up to wave inundation.

Protection efforts include both hard and soft solutions.
An example of a hard method is the construction of a seawall, while a 
soft method is considered beach replenishment or installation of 
something similar to the sand burritos that have popped up across Oahu's 
North Shore.

Managed retreat is much more individualized approach that takes into 
consideration the coastline's current conditions and existing hazards or 
impending threats. In some situations it could mean not only physically 
relocating existing buildings or shifting the placement of 
infrastructure, but also creating new regulations that restrict future 
development of vulnerable areas.

Ultimately, what the Office of Planning Coastal Zone Management Program 
determined in its report was that it is "currently not possible to 
develop a step-by-step plan to implement managed retreat for areas in 
Hawaii threatened by sea level rise and/or other coastal hazards given 
the various unknowns and competing priorities identified throughout the 
course of the assessment."
Experts and state officials say they will continue researching the best 
possible solutions to ensure the Hawaii's most prized and truly 
priceless natural resources remain protected for future generations.
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/03/05/sea-level-rise-threatens-coastal-communities-hawaii-state-struggles-find-solutions/


[since the latter part of the last century]
*What Oil Companies Knew About Climate Change and When: A Timeline*
By Ucilia Wang
Oil companies are facing an increasing number of lawsuits that aim to 
hold them responsible for the impacts of climate change. What the 
companies knew about their contributions to global warming will answer 
some key legal questions, including whether they have sold products 
while knowing they would cause public harm.

A new group of documents was revealed on Thursday, detailing Shell's 
history of studying climate change and its impacts. The documents show 
that not only did the company understand its role in climate change for 
the past several decades, but also predicted that legal liability 
awaited. The documents were found by Jelmer Mommers, a journalist for De 
Correspondent, and are available at the Climate Files website. 
[http://www.climatefiles.com/]

They are similar to the documents that the nonprofit news organization 
InsideClimate News unearthed in 2015 about Exxon's decades of climate 
science knowledge.

Here is a timeline that shows internal research and discussions by some 
of the biggest oil companies over the past 40 years and how their public 
statements and campaigns often included very different messages. It 
begins to draw the picture of what the fossil fuel industry knew about 
climate change and when and how it contrasted with their public stance:

July 1977: James Black, a scientist at Exxon, told the company's top 
management that scientific evidence showed burning fossil fuels was 
causing climate change.

May 1981: In a paper written for Exxon's head of research, the company 
scientist Henry Shaw estimated that global temperatures will increase by 
3 degrees Celsius with the doubling of the carbon dioxide emissions in 
the atmosphere, which could cause catastrophic impacts as early as the 
first half of the 21st century.

November 1982: Exxon distributed a paper internally on climate change 
that advised "major reductions in fossil fuel combustion" for limiting 
global warming.

June 1988: James Hansen, a NASA scientist, testified during a 
congressional hearing that human activities were causing global warming. 
It was the first major public warning of a looming climate crisis.

1988: Shell prepared an internal report called "The Greenhouse Effect" 
that analyzed the impacts of climate change. It noted that fossil fuel 
burning was driving climate change and quantified the carbon emissions 
from its products (oil, gas, coal) made up 4 percent of global emissions 
in 1984.
1989: In a move to coordinate a public response to the growing attention 
on climate change, a group of big businesses, including Exxon, BP and 
Shell, formed the Global Climate Coalition. It set out to cast doubt on 
climate science and lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions.

February 1995: An internal report by Shell warned that fossil fuel 
burning was the main source of manmade emissions that was driving global 
warming, and this fact "could have major business implications for the 
fossil fuel industry."

1991: A 30-minute video produced by Shell included dire predictions and 
images of fires, floods and food shortages. A narrator included this 
ominous warning: "Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that 
to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as 
the only safe insurance."

1996: Exxon solidified its public stance on dealing with climate change 
when chief executive Lee Raymond wrote an article for a company 
publication saying that scientific evidence was "inconclusive" on 
whether humans were contributing to climate change.

1997: Exxon took out an ad in the New York Times that was titled, "Reset 
the Alarm," which said: "Let's face it: The science of climate change is 
too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies 
into turmoil."  It also read, "We still don't know what role man-made 
greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet."

1998: In a speech to employees, Lucio Noto, chief executive of Mobil Oil 
(before its merger with Exxon) told employees who were apparently  were 
upset about "what they think is Mobil's negative attitude on the Kyoto 
so-called climate agreement." His speech was captured on video. He said 
while there's a connection between greenhouse gases and climate change, 
"we are also not prepared to admit that the science is a closed fact, 
and that we should take draconian steps tomorrow to reduce CO2 gases." 
He also said the company should try to reduce its operational emissions 
as well as those produced by customers.

1998:  Shell produced a document called the Shell Internal TINA Group 
Scenarios 1998-2020 Report, which included modeling a future that 
included oil companies and governments being held liable for climate 
impacts. Its scenario eerily described the U.S. being hit with fierce 
storms in 2010, followed by activist groups initiating legal liability 
cases. (In reality, the biggest storm him the East Coast in 
2012--Superstorm Sandy--and liability cases began to stir after that.)

2009: In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 
Exxon acknowledged  that humans were causing climate change.

2013: A study by Richard Heede published in the journal Climatic Change 
showed that 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of the carbon 
emissions since the start of the industrial age in the mid-18th century.

August 2017: A Harvard study that analyzed Exxon's internal papers and 
public statements and campaigns showed the company misled the public 
about what it knew about the risk of climate change. The peer-reviewed 
study concluded that Exxon emphasized doubts about the scientific 
evidence that blamed fossil fuel burning for global warming when 
communicating with the public while acknowledging the issue more 
forthrightly in internal communications.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/04/05/climate-change-oil-companies-knew-shell-exxon/
- - -
[Another timeline]
*The Discovery of Global Warming*
Timeline (Milestones)
Here are gathered in chronological sequence the most important events in 
the history of climate change science. (For a narrative see the 
Introduction: summary history.) This list of milestones includes major 
influences external to the science itself. Following it is a list of 
other external influences.
https://history.aip.org/climate/timeline.htm



[Key concepts on Migration due to climate change]
*Session 2: Climate change and migration: predictions, politics and policy*
Climate & Migration Coalition
This lecture provides grounding in both climate change and migration. 
These are two vital building blocks in our exploration of how climate 
change is reshaping migration. We'll delve into the history of climate 
change and explore how (some) humans have radically altered the 
atmosphere. We will then explore some key episodes of human migration in 
history and examine some of the key concepts that help us analyze 
existing migration patterns. Having done this we will explore how 
climate change is going alter migration, and the kind of migratory 
patterns it will create.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAKw8V4ojC8


*This Day in Climate History - March 15, 1999 & 2912 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 15, 1999: The paper "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the 
Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations," by Michael 
E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, is published in the 
journal Geophysical Research Letters. The paper features the "hockey 
stick" graph that makes Mann a target of unrelenting rhetorical and 
legal assaults by supporters and representatives of the fossil fuel 
industry.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/research/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/Millennium/mbh99.pdf 


March 15, 2012: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviews Senator James Inhofe 
about his bizarre insistence that climate change is some sort of hoax.
http://youtu.be/Nrwem8waEx8  (Part 1)
http://youtu.be/TdaZ5zIWB-M  (Part 2)
http://youtu.be/9kbxIa4LGUs  (Part 3)

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