[TheClimate.Vote] March 22, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/March 22, 2019/


[Video podcast - Shuck and Jive Climate science buddy show with serious 
report from Nebraska]
*Hotpocalypse #9: Jane Fleming Kleeb on Nebraska flooding, stopping KXL, 
& how to win back red states*
Hotpocalypse
Published on Mar 21, 2019
As Nebraska suffers intense climate change-related flooding, the GOP 
wastes time obsessing over cow farts and hamberders. Nebraska Dem Party 
Chair Jane Fleming Kleeb joins us LIVE to discuss the destruction. She 
also tells how she helped stop KXL, how a Green New Deal could help 
rural areas, and how Democrats can win back red states.
This was originally streamed to the Facebook page Being Liberal on 
3/21/2019.
Hosted by Josh Willis and Andy Cobb.
Produced by Mike Damanskis.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hotpocalypse/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hotpocalypse/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hotpocalypse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZdyqVLedHM


[Insurance against increasing risk]
*Climate change could make insurance too expensive for most people - report*
Munich Re, world's largest reinsurance firm, warns premium rises could 
become social issue
Insurers have warned that climate change could make cover for ordinary 
people unaffordable after the world's largest reinsurance firm blamed 
global warming for $24bn ... of losses in the Californian wildfires.
Ernst Rauch, Munich Re's chief climatologist, told the Guardian that the 
costs could soon be widely felt, with premium rises already under 
discussion with clients holding asset concentrations in vulnerable parts 
of the state.

"If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then 
the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices 
accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue," he said 
after Munich Re published a report into climate change's impact on 
wildfires. "Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low 
and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy 
insurance."

The lion's share of California's 20 worst forest blazes since the 1930s 
have occurred this millennium, in years characterised by abnormally high 
summer temperatures and "exceptional dryness" between May and October, 
according to a new analysis by Munich Re.

Wetter and more humid winters spurred new forest growth which became 
tinder dry in heatwave conditions that preceded the wildfires, the 
report's authors said.

After comparing observational data spanning several decades with climate 
models, the report concluded that the wildfires, which killed 85 people, 
were "broadly consistent with climate change"...
- - -
No insurer has linked wildfires to climate change before, although a 
Lloyds report into Superstorm Sandy in 2014 found that global 
warming-linked sea level rises had increased surge losses around 
Manhattan by 30%.

Climate scientists say that linking extreme weather events to climate 
change is akin to attributing the performance of a steroid-taking 
sportsman to drug use - the connections are clearer in patterns than in 
individual disasters.

Paul Fisher, the Bank of England's former coordinator on climate change, 
and a fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, 
said: "In general, one can't prove that a single event is the result of 
climate change but it is likely to cause more such events of greater 
severity."

"It is very interesting if insurers conclude that climate change was a 
significant contributory factor to the event and will make the insurance 
companies think carefully about the pricing and availability of similar 
insurance policies."

It may also influence several court cases testing the liability of 
fossil fuel companies for the effects of global warming.

Dr Ben Caldecott, the director of Oxford University's sustainable 
finance programme, said: "Company directors and fiduciaries will 
ultimately be held responsible for avoidable climate-related damages and 
losses and urgently need to up their game to avoid litigation and 
liability."

Munich Re has divested its large thermal coal holdings. However, it 
maintains some gas and oil investments...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/21/climate-change-could-make-insurance-too-expensive-for-ordinary-people-report


[Corporation as a person]
*EU Considers Banning Exxon Lobbying Because of Company's Climate Deception*
By Karen Savage
Exxon's history of publicly sowing doubt about climate science despite 
internally acknowledging the impacts of its products on climate change 
was the subject of a public hearing on climate denial held Thursday in 
the European Parliament in Brussels.

Thought to be the first-ever hearing by a major government body into 
Exxon's climate deception, a panel of experts was convened to explore 
climate denial communication used by Exxon and other fossil fuel 
companies. Experts also examined how that deception has influenced 
European climate policy.

The group could ban Exxon from lobbying European lawmakers on climate 
and energy issues, especially because the company declined to attend the 
hearing, which was dominated by evidence that Exxon has worked for 
decades to deceive the public.

"The more public ExxonMobil's climate change communications are, the 
more they communicate doubt," said panelist Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard 
University researcher who has published a study  comparing Exxon's 
internal corporate memos with the company's public communication...
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/21/eu-parliament-exxon-climate-deception/
- -
[tracking malfeasance]
*Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977-2014)*
Geoffrey Supran1 and Naomi Oreskes
Published 23 August 2017
Abstract
This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past 
misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical 
document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 
climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed 
and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and 
paid, editorial-style advertisements ('advertorials') in The New York 
Times. We examine whether these communications sent consistent messages 
about the state of climate science and its implications--specifically, 
we compare their positions on climate change as real, human-caused, 
serious, and solvable. In all four cases, we find that as documents 
become more publicly accessible, they increasingly communicate doubt. 
This discrepancy is most pronounced between advertorials and all other 
documents. For example, accounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 
83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal documents acknowledge 
that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of 
advertorials do so, with 81% instead expressing doubt. We conclude that 
ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science--by way of its 
scientists' academic publications--but promoted doubt about it in 
advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled 
the public. Our content analysis also examines ExxonMobil's discussion 
of the risks of stranded fossil fuel assets. We find the topic discussed 
and sometimes quantified in 24 documents of various types, but absent 
from advertorials. Finally, based on the available documents, we outline 
ExxonMobil's strategic approach to climate change research and 
communication, which helps to contextualize our findings.
download video 
https://cdn.iopscience.com/content/1748-9326/12/8/084019/Mmedia/abstract-video-cf74dcb5327d002a57119cb942e893de.converted.mp4
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f


[RollingStone visits Southern Ice]
*Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in 
Real Time?*
Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section 
of ice crumble into the sea
This is the latest dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who is aboard 
the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica, investigating the effect of 
climate change on Thwaites glacier...
- - -
  It's not just that Thwaites is big, although it is (imagine a glacier 
the size of Florida). But because of how the glacier terminates in deep 
water, as well as the reverse slope of the ground beneath it, Thwaites 
is vulnerable to particularly rapid collapse. Even more troubling, 
Thwaites is like the cork in the wine bottle for the rest of the West 
Antarctica ice sheet. If Thwaites were to fall apart, scientists fear 
the entire ice sheet could begin to collapse, eventually raising sea 
levels more than 10 feet...
- - -
In an email, Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory who has co-authored recent papers suggesting the collapse of 
Thwaites is already past the point of no return, told me that he 
wouldn't view the blowout as particularly alarming unless he saw retreat 
of the front of the glacier itself during the process (which, in the 
most recent satellite images, he hasn't). But Rignot ended his email to 
me with an important note: "This sort of event is a good reminder that 
changes can happen fast in these environments, even though it may seem 
that nothing much is happening when you are staring at the glacier from 
a ship deck, right?"

Richard Alley, a highly respected glaciologist at Penn State, had a more 
nuanced view of it all. Alley (who, like Rignot, is not on the ship) 
pointed out that because the ice shelf that blew out was already pretty 
chaotic, it was likely not providing much stability to the glacier. "So 
its loss is not a huge issue for the still-grounded ice," Alley emailed. 
"But the chaotic ice was still doing something." He compared Thwaites to 
glaciers in Greenland, where the blowout of similar mélanges are often 
followed by calving of ice from the glacier itself, which is far more 
troubling. Alley also pointed out that the loss of ice shelves leaves 
glaciers vulnerable to stress from what he called "remote forcing" -- 
storms across the Pacific, or tsunamis from an earthquake. "To stretch 
the analogy a little bit," Alley said, "if Thwaites were a car, you 
could say that it has lost part of its bumper. And, while that's not 
hugely important, it is part of a pattern that is pointing toward larger 
changes to come."

This is, in short, what makes climate change so alarming, and so unlike 
other threats that humans have faced. By loading the atmosphere with 
carbon, we are messing with a system that even the best scientists in 
the world don't fully understand. Individual events are hard to 
interpret in real time. "In the history of human civilization, we've 
never seen the rapid collapse of a glacier like Thwaites," Larter points 
out. "So we don't know how exactly it starts, or what it looks like 
while it's happening."

But in the long run, the arc of uncertainty bends toward catastrophe. It 
may be that this blowout at Thwaites was driven by wind or a shift in 
ocean temperature that, in the big picture, means little. Or it may be 
further evidence that the collapse of Thwaites is already underway, and 
it's only a matter of time -- perhaps even during the lifetimes of kids 
alive today -- before virtually every coastal city from Miami to Jakarta 
is under six, seven, eight or more feet of water.

If that's the case, then big parts of the world we live in today may 
already be doomed. We just don't know yet.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/journey-to-antarctica-is-this-what-a-climate-catastrophe-looks-like-in-real-time-810392/


[Bangladesh video documentary from DW]
*Climate refugees in Bangladesh - DW Documentary*
Published on Mar 20, 2019
Within the next 30 years, up to 20% of Bangladesh will disappear beneath 
the water as rivers and sea levels rise. This will put as many as 30 
million people on the move.
Climate researchers say it's just the first manifestation of a process 
that will soon be happening all over the world. This film takes us on a 
journey to the Bangladesh of the future, a country that's set to suffer 
terribly from climate change. The Meghna River has already turned into a 
torrent that's nine kilometers wide in places, a mass of moving water 
that flows ten times faster than the Rhine. "It demolished the house I 
moved into as a bride," Momtaj Begum says. "It's where I gave birth to 
my four children. It breaks my heart." She and her son are saving what 
they can before the river sweeps everything relentlessly into the sea. 
Her village looks like a battlefield. The Meghna has cut deep into the 
ground, and is literally ripping the soil away beneath the residents' feet.

Momtaj Begum and her family of eight have already been turned into 
climate refugees. Her village was swallowed by the river, along with 
many others. Around 2,000 displaced people like her arrive in the 
Bangladeshi capital Dhaka every day. With a population topping 20 
million and a crumbling infrastructure, the city is on the verge of 
collapse. The climate refugees that arrive here are now forcibly moved 
on again, this time by the government. Shantytowns are destroyed by 
police raids and bulldozers. And what's happening in Bangladesh is only 
the beginning. Before long, every country in the world will begin to 
notice the effects of rising sea levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co5uywe-1Z8



[Montana Public Radio - audio and text]
*Climate Change Is Hurting Regrowth In Forests, UM Researchers Say*
By MAXINE SPEIER
Scientists at the University of Montana have found that climate change 
is already reducing the ability of some forests in the western U.S. to 
bounce back after wildfire. Their findings are confirming a 
long-suspected change.

For the past three years, UM post-doc Kimberly Davis has looked at how 
ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests regenerate after fire, and she's 
made an eye-opening discovery.

Some forests just won't be coming back.

Davis says she found that once conditions get hot and dry enough, 
there's a dramatic reduction in those trees ability to regenerate.

"So we call these thresholds, where all of a sudden, you cross a certain 
temperature, and then you see this big decline," says Davis.

Climate change in the West is crossing a perilous threshold, Davis says, 
and some of Montana's iconic pine and fir forests might not be able to 
regenerate if they get hit by wildfire.

In her lab in Missoula, Davis shows me some of the work researchers do 
that's led to their conclusions.

"So if you look in there you'll be able to see all the cells, so all 
those little circles," Davis says as she squints through a microscope at 
a tiny tree trunk the size of a fingernail.

"They can be really little because they're young or they can be really 
little just because they're supressed from competition and shade," she 
explains.

For her study, Davis and a small team painstakingly counted the growth 
rings of 3,000 young trees and analyzed the climate conditions from the 
exact date each tree started growing.

She determined precisely when and under what climate conditions trees 
were able to regenerate at 90 burn sites across six states including 
Montana, California and Colorado.

When Davis looked at recent climate records from those same locations, 
she realized that a lot of the low-elevation forests she was studying 
were already crossing that climate threshold.

"What that means is that the climate at many of the sites that we 
studied is not really suitable for these trees to regenerate anymore," 
says Davis.

One of those sites is in the Bitterroot Valley, where low-elevation 
forest butts up against grassland. Davis says when a fire passes through 
there in the future, she expects the burned forest edge will become more 
grassland. The seedling-friendly conditions that would allow pine and 
fir trees to regenerate are just getting too rare.

Ecologists have been predicting this kind of climate-linked tree 
regeneration failure for years, says Forest Ecologist Andrew Larson. He 
wasn't involved in Davis' research project, but says Davis is the first 
person to go beyond just hypotheticals.

"Nobody else has managed to find this sort of evidence yet," says 
Larson. "So it's right on the cutting edge of ecosystem change across 
the West."

Larson says Davis' work reveals that changes in forest regeneration that 
scientists had been predicting would happen by 2040 or 2050 are already 
happening.

"So 25 to 30 years ahead of the schedule that I was expecting. So to me, 
that's a surprise," says Larson. "That's saying that climate change 
impacts are not something that's coming in the future. They're here now, 
all across the West."

It's not all bad news, though.

Knowing where forests won't be coming back means forest managers can 
focus their restoration efforts in other places where they'll have a 
greater chance of success.

That can be a big help to forest managers who don't often have the 
budgets for widespread restoration and don't want their efforts to go to 
waste.

"It's a scarce resource that we need to make careful decisions about 
where we're going to spend those person-hours and dollars," Larson says.

Larson says that even without new seedlings taking root in these hot, 
dry, low-elevation forests, there are still plenty of big adult trees 
with lots of life left in them, and forest managers can use strategies 
like fuel reduction and prescribed fires to make sure these remaining 
trees aren't taken out by a severe blaze.

Still, Larson concedes that for many residents in the West, Davis's 
findings are going to be a hard pill to swallow.

"Wow, in my lifetime, this place that has been forest -- in my lifetime, 
my parents', my grandparents' -- that's gonna change to a grassland or 
some other non-forest community."
Davis's study was published March 11 in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences.
https://www.mtpr.org/post/climate-change-hurting-regrowth-forests-um-researchers-say


[Spring Solistalgia]
But on the subject of climate scientists expression - there is much more 
-more still images and written word:
https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/this-is-how-scientists-feel.html but 
this was for 2015
https://newrepublic.com/article/144056/its-never-harder-climate-scientist
More still portraits that are haunting 
https://www.lostateminor.com/2014/08/20/portraits-scared-scientists-reveal-truth-climate-change/
Also a Vimeo version https://vimeo.com/317861366
copy of https://youtu.be/jIy0t5P0CUQ



[MIT launches podcast demystifying climate change]
**TILclimate* (Today I Learned: Climate)*
https://tilclimate.mit.edu, MIT's new podcast demystifying climate 
science and solutions.
In each 10-ish minute (jargon-free) episode, we break down topics like 
planes, clouds, geoengineering, carbon pricing and more for a 
climate-curious, non-technical audience.
We've released the 2-min teaser and first two episodes, which you can 
find at http://tilclimate.mit.edu
You can also listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, YouTube, or 
wherever you get your podcasts.
Get episode announcements on Twitter @tilclimate - and please share widely!
Comments, feedback, and topic suggestions can be sent @tilclimate or to 
tilclimate at mit.edu.  We hope you enjoy the show!
http://tilclimate.mit.edu



[water, water, everywhere, but not forever]
*England could run short of water within 25 years*
Exclusive: Environment Agency chief calls for use to be cut by a third
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/18/england-to-run-short-of-water-within-25-years-environment-agency


*This Day in Climate History - March 22, 2017 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 22, 2017: The New York Times reports:

"President Trump is poised in the coming days to announce his plans
to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's climate
change legacy, while also gutting several smaller but significant
policies aimed at curbing global warming."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/climate/trump-climate-change.html
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