[TheClimate.Vote] March 23, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/March 23, 2019/


[author reading, top selling book]
*David Wallace-Wells, "The Uninhabitable Earth"*
Politics and Prose - Published on Mar 19, 2019
David Wallace-Wells discusses his book, "The Uninhabitable Earth", at 
Politics and Prose on 3/12/19.
Expanding on his July 2017 New York magazine article--called "the Silent 
Spring of our time" and the most-read piece in the magazine's 
history--Wallace-Wells's new book is an unsparing look at the realities 
of climate change and the consequences of our continuing failure to face 
them. Pointing to the increase in storms of unprecedented magnitude, the 
now year-round wildfires, and the rising oceans, Wallace-Wells argues 
that climate change is well under way, and that its impact will be more 
severe than even our worst-case scenarios indicate. Writing with passion 
and urgency, Wallace-Wells, a national fellow at the New America 
foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York, goes beyond 
the science of climate change to show that it's an existential crisis so 
severe that it will reshape every aspect of human life.
https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525576709
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.
Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose 
Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and 
cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and 
discussing books.
https://youtu.be/N82_b_n4HCQ


[more video Scientists tell personal stories]
*The Story Collider: AGU Fall Meeting 2018*
13, December 2018 - Published March 21, 2019
Washington, DC
https://sharingscience.agu.org/
https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2018/
We in Sharing Science have been fortunate enough to host the science 
storytelling organization, The Story Collider, to bring in folks to tell 
true, personal stories about science. These were not the type of 
lectures that you'd hear at the conference, these were heartfelt, funny, 
inspiring stories about science. This show is from AGU's 2018 Fall Meeting.
https://www.storycollider.org/
Presenters:
8:13 - Janine Krippner
17:56 -  Ryan Haupt
28:44 - Carol Finn
39:33 - Katharine Hayhoe
49:26 - Asmeret Berhe
1:02:21 - Sarah Kaplan
Video Produced by AGU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYad8QmYv48



[Yale Climate Connections]
*Superheroes and aliens: Climate change in the movies in 2018 - with a 
preview of 2019*
Eight theatrical releases connected with climate change in some way in 
2018 - and none was a disaster movie. 2019 looks to continue the trend.
2018 was a remarkable year for cli-fi, both for the number and variety 
of fictional films that addressed climate change.

Global warming played a leading role in a comedy and in an art-house 
social drama. It played a supporting role in a superhero flick. And it 
could be glimpsed in cameos in two alien-creature features and in a 
holiday comic book blockbuster. Allusions to climate change were also 
seen, by some viewers, in two other films. That's a record-breaking 
eight theatrical releases, none of which was a disaster-film (think Into 
the Storm), apocalypse (The Day After Tomorrow) or dystopia (Mad Max: 
Fury Road). In 2018, cli-fi finally broke free of its early type-casting.

Here's how it all played out.
2018 in review
On the screen, climate change entered 2018 in the form of a miniaturized 
Matt Damon. Downsizing, a December 2017 release, was still in the 
theaters in January, drawing modest audiences, mixed reviews, and a 
Golden Globe nomination for supporting actress Hong Chau. (See YCC's 
review here.) Despite its limited success, Downsizing, in which 
Americans try to live large by being made small, remains noteworthy for 
two reasons. First, it offered a rare comic take on climate change. 
Second, it's one of only a handful of movies to have focused on reducing 
the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Roughly two months after Downsizing left America's cinemas, Avengers: 
Infinity War barreled in. The 19th film in the interconnected Marvel 
Cinematic Universe series, Infinity War would become the box office 
smash of the year, bringing in more than $2 billion worldwide and 
eclipsing even its immediate, and highly acclaimed, precursor, Black 
Panther. (See YCC's review here.)

Infinity War was one of three 2018 films to feature an 
environment-avenging protagonist. Convinced that life everywhere had 
surpassed the carrying capacities of the worlds it populated. Thanos, 
the supersized alien at the heart of the film, sought in six "Infinity 
Stones" the power to reduce life everywhere, instantaneously and 
painlessly, by half.

In the film's dramatic conclusion, Thanos, despite being wounded by the 
Avengers, succeeded in his mission. Along with half of humanity, half of 
the Avengers dissolved into dust on the battlefield. Those who remain 
now face a formidable challenge: Can they defeat Thanos and somehow 
reverse his terrible act? The sequel, scheduled for release at the end 
of April, will answer this question.

On a much smaller scale, the desire to avenge nature - and reclaim a 
broken life - is the motive force behind First Reformed. Loved by 
critics - First Reformed appeared on 12 "best" lists at the end of 2018 
- the film barely registered at the box office. Nevertheless, many 
critics expected it to receive several Oscar nominations, especially for 
Ethan Hawke's lead performance. It didn't.

For this snub, climate communicators should perhaps be relieved.

As psychotherapist Leslie Davenport explained in YCC's review of the 
film last summer, the dramatic arc of Hawke's Pastor Toll, from 
emotionally scarred alcoholic to eco-terrorist, could overwhelm those 
already alarmed by climate change while providing ammunition for cynics 
who argue that environmentalists are misanthropes. And in the wake of 
the #MeToo movement, the film's ending - Toll is dissuaded from blowing 
up his historic church, with a full congregation inside, by the love of 
a woman half his age - no longer feels so redemptive.

After playing a leading role in First Reformed, climate change in the 
second half of the year appeared on screen only in brief cameos.

In The Predator, a ruthless federal agent trying to commandeer the 
technology of two aliens he is tracking across the American northwest 
speculates that they like the warmer climate humans are creating with 
their greenhouse gas emissions:

"How long before climate change renders this planet unlivable? Two 
generations? One?"

"That's why their visits are increasing," realizes the scientist he is 
interrogating. "They're trying to snap up all of our best DNA before 
we're gone."

"Adapt themselves with it. And then move in. … They thrive in a hothouse 
environment. Maybe they'll want to move into ours."

By contrast, the Elon-Musk-like entrepreneur who plays the heavy in 
Venom seeks alien DNA to enhance humans' chances of surviving on the new 
worlds they must find after they ruin this one.

"Overpopulation and climate change: These are two things he can't 
control," explains his chief scientist to the reporter who will 
involuntarily become the human-alien hybrid known as Venom. "We are 
literally a generation away from an uninhabitable Earth. Mr. Drake is 
using his personal rockets to scout real estate. On its way back, one 
came across a comet on which sensors registered life forms."

Both of these late fall films are now available on blu-ray. Venom, which 
grossed $855 million at the box office worldwide, will definitely return 
in a sequel.

Environmental issues, including climate change, got slightly more screen 
time in the holiday blockbuster Aquaman. Based on the DC comic book, the 
world of Aquaman is derived from the myth of Atlantis. Several different 
kingdoms of water-breathing humanoids thrive in the depths of Earth's 
oceans, undetected by humans. But these ocean dwellers are all too aware 
of humanity's presence - and its global environmental footprint.

The king of one ocean kingdom, the half-brother of the half-human 
Aquaman, aspires to rule over all the others as "Ocean Master." And with 
this massed power, King Orm plans to avenge the environmental insults 
and injuries the oceans have suffered at the hands of humans, with their 
plastic litter, their poisonous chemicals, and, yes, their greenhouse 
gas emissions, which have overheated the oceans' nurseries. (Aquaman's 
screenwriters perhaps deemed ocean acidification too complex for their 
viewers. It is never mentioned.)

Aquaman ultimately foils his half-brother's plan to destroy human 
civilization. Nevertheless, one conservative critic immediately equated 
King Orm with Infinity War's Thanos, explaining that "environmentalists 
make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse."

Despite its rambling plot and overwrought visuals, Aquaman did well at 
the box office, grossing more than $1 billion worldwide. A sequel is 
already planned. Given humanity's accumulating impacts on the oceans, 
it's hard to imagine that environmentalism wouldn't play a role, but the 
bonus scene at the end of the credits suggests a more conventional plot: 
revenge.

Two other films deserve brief notices, even though neither explicitly 
mentions "climate change" or "global warming."

Annihilation is based on a book by Jeff Vandermeer that many classified 
as "cli-fi." Well worth seeing for its dazzling visualizations of the 
alien being that possesses the landscape and drives the plot, this late 
summer release is now out in blu-ray.

In the holiday release Vice, a political satire written and directed by 
Adam McKay about the life of Vice-President Dick Cheney, Penn State 
climate scientist Michael Mann detected a brief nod to climate change in 
the video clip of California's wildfires near the film's end.
Eight films in one year - and not a disaster flick among them.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/03/climate-change-in-the-movies-in-2018/



[Climate change in Afghanistan]
*Christian Parenti: Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New 
Geography of Violence*
Earth101 video - Published on Jun 28, 2018
In his lecture Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of 
Violence Dr. Christian Parenti talks about our new climate reality. From 
Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. 
Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state 
failure.

The academic and  investigative journalist Christian Parenti traveled 
along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of 
economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones 
girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he found failed states amid 
climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of 
Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the 
crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency.

Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political 
hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of 
the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take 
other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge 
of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable 
economic and development policies.

Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist, academic, and 
author. His books include: Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the 
Age of Crisis (2000), a survey of the rise of the prison-industrial 
complex from the Nixon through Reagan Eras and into the present; The 
Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror 
(2003), a study of surveillance and control in modern society. The 
Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004), is an 
account of the US occupation of Iraq. In Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change 
and the New Geography of Violence (2011), Parenti links the implications 
of climate change with social and political unrest in mid-latitude 
regions of the world. Parenti has also reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, 
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ivory Coast and China.
He is now Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl0K4-IBIFY



[Really, this from 2013?]
*The Scientific Case for Urgent Action to Limit Climate Change*
University of California Television (UCTV)
Published on May 2, 2013
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/) Distinguished Professor Emeritus Richard 
Somerville, a world-renowned climate scientist and author of "The 
Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change," discusses the 
scientific case for urgent action to limit climate change. Series: 
"Perspectives on Ocean Science" [5/2013] [Science] [Show ID: 24910]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Q271UaNPo


*This Day in Climate History - March 23, 2006 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 23, 2006: In a CBSNews.com interview,  "60 Minutes" correspondent 
Scott Pelley explains why he doesn't cite the views of climate-change 
deniers in his stories:

"'If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel,' he asks, 'am I required as
a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?' He says his team tried
hard to find a respected scientist who contradicted the prevailing
opinion in the scientific community, but there was no one out there
who fit that description. 'This isn't about politics or
pseudo-science or conspiracy theory blogs,' he says. 'This is about
sound science...'There becomes a point in journalism where striving
for balance becomes irresponsible.'"

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/scott-pelley-and-catherine-herrick-on-global-warming-coverage/ 

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