[TheClimate.Vote] May 13, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 13, 2019*/

[NYMag stirs up another one]
By David Wallace-Wells
*Jared Diamond: There's a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will 
End by 2050*
Jared Diamond's new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very 
obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it 
from the distant past. In that way, it's not so different from all the 
other books that have made the UCLA geographer a sort of don of "big 
think" history and a perennial favorite of people like Steven Pinker and 
Bill Gates...
- - -
Today, the risk that we're facing is not of societies collapsing one by 
one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the 
collapse of the whole world...

*How likely do you think that is? That the whole network of civilization 
would collapse?*
I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we 
know it will collapse by about 2050. I'll be dead by then but my kids 
will be, what? Sixty-three years old in 2050. So this is a subject of 
much practical interest to me. At the rate we're going now, resources 
that are essential for complex societies are being managed 
unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being 
managed unsustainably, and they're getting depleted. Farms around the 
world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around 
the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. 
With all these things, at the rate we're going now, we can carry on with 
our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we 
won't be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either 
we've figured out a sustainable course, or it'll be too late.
*So let's talk about that sustainable course. What are the lessons in 
the new book that might help us adjust our course in that way?*
As far as national crises are concerned, the first step is acknowledge 
-- the country has to acknowledge that it's in a crisis. If the country 
denies that it's in a crisis, of course if you deny you're in a crisis, 
you're not going to solve the crisis, number one. In the United States 
today, lots of Americans don't acknowledge that we're in a crisis...
- -
Number two, once you acknowledge that you're in a crisis, you have to 
acknowledge that there's something you can do about it. You have 
responsibility. If instead you say that the crisis is the fault of 
somebody else, then you're not going to make any progress towards 
solving it. An example today are those, including our political leaders, 
who say that the problems of the United States are not caused by the 
United States, but they're caused by China and Canada and Mexico. But if 
we say that our problems are caused by other countries, that implies 
that it's not up to us to solve our problems. We're not causing them. 
So, that's an obvious second step

*On climate in particular, there seem to be a lot of countervailing 
impulses on the environmental left -- from those who believe the only 
solution to addressing climate is through individual action to those who 
are really focused on the villainy of particular corporate interests, 
the bad behavior of the Republican Party, et cetera. In that context, 
what does it mean to accept responsibility?*
My understanding is that, in contrast to five years ago, the majority of 
American citizens and voters recognize the reality of climate change. So 
there is, I'd say, recognition by the American public as a whole that 
there is quite a change in that we are responsible for it...
- -
Well, I understand psychic costs and I understand getting my head around 
it because I was born and grew up in Boston. The last straw for me was 
that in Boston I sang in the Handel and Haydn Society chorus, and we 
were going to perform in Boston Symphony Hall the last week in May and 
our concert was canceled by a snowstorm that closed Boston down. And for 
me that was the last straw. I do not want to live in a city where a 
concert in Symphony Hall is going to get closed down in the last week of 
May by a snowstorm...
That's just one event, but the fact is that Boston is and was miserable 
for five months of the year in the winter and then it's nice for two 
weeks in the spring and then it's miserable for four months in the 
summer, then it's nice for a few weeks in the fall. Similarly with New 
York. So when I moved here, my reaction is, "Yes, we have the fires and 
we have the earthquakes and we have the mudslide and we have the risk of 
flooding. But, thank God for all those things because they saved me from 
the psychic costs of living in the Northeast."
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/jared-diamond-on-his-new-book-upheaval.html



[New high that's 29 degrees Celsius]
*Arctic Ocean Coastal Temperatures Surge to 84.2 F Today*
Robert Fanney - Published on May 11, 2019
Temperatures near Archangel along the Arctic Ocean coast hit the mid 80s 
today. This is about 36 F above normal. The heat has been driven north 
by an extreme jet stream pattern that scientists associate with human 
caused climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk4sTnfsVcQ
- - -
[ New record low ]
*Global Sea Ice Plunges to New Record Lows*
Robert Fanney - Published on May 11, 2019
Global temperatures in the range of 1.1 C above 1880s averages are 
pushing sea ice values into new record low ranges. This warming is 
primarily driven by fossil fuel burning. And tackling the climate crisis 
will involve halting fossil fuel based emissions to the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukc7-OVMx_Q



[Paul Beckwith video talk]
*El Nino Disrupted By Abrupt Climate Change: Part 2 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on May 12, 2019
With ongoing abrupt climate change, El Nino events have undergone a 
profound shift in the past few decades. Over a 400 year time-span, the 
strongest ever, literally off-the-chart events were the Eastern Pacific 
(EP) El Nino in 1997-98, followed by the EP events in 1982-83, and then 
in 2015-16; occurring every 15 years, on average. However Central 
Pacific (CP) El Nino events that occurred about every 9 years over the 
last 400 years, have increased in occurrence frequency to every 3.3 
years; we have one now. Global consequences of ENSO - El Nino Southern 
Oscillation to humanity via teleconnections are now different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iModATGJoQM



[important report]
*The economic argument behind the Green New Deal*
Economist Mariana Mazzucato explains how rethinking industrial policy 
could be key to tackling climate change.
by David Rotman
The Green New Deal proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 
and other progressives has dramatically changed the US debate on climate 
change. It calls for decisive and deliberate public investments to 
tackle climate change and other social challenges, particularly inequality.

This kind of directed investment is known as "industrial policy," and it 
has long been controversial among economists. But Mariana Mazzucato, an 
economist at University College London and founder of its newly created 
Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, has thought a lot about the 
need for such approaches--what she likes to call mission-oriented 
innovation policies.

Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State and more recently The 
Value of Everything, stresses that public funding has been crucial to 
key technological advances from the internet to biotech. We sat down 
with her to ask about the Green New Deal and how industrial policies 
might be used to take on climate change and other big societal challenges.
Industrial policy often gets a bad name among economists. Why are you so 
keen on it?

First of all, there are different types of industrial policies. There is 
the effective and there is the ineffective kind. The problematic 
industrial policies are ones that are just fueling growth in a limited 
part of the economy, and it doesn't become a systematic way to transform 
the economy. I think functional, effective industrial policies are ones 
that change behaviors across different industries--rather than those 
that "pick" a couple of industries to subsidize. They are about economic 
transformation.
Is the Green New Deal an example of industrial policy?

It depends on how it gets interpreted. I was speaking with Alexandria 
[Ocasio-Cortez] about that back in September.

The Green New Deal will be much more effective if it is economy wide. 
And that is very much the spirit that [Ocasio-Cortez] and others in the 
Democratic Party are arguing for. This isn't just about renewable 
energy. It's about greening the entire economy. A Green New Deal is not 
just about renewables but also about getting every part of the 
manufacturing sector to transform itself in a green direction.

Why reference the New Deal pushed by President Roosevelt to get us out 
of the Great Depression?

There are two bits to the Green New Deal. One is the direction-setting 
that Roosevelt provided in getting new projects and infrastructure off 
the ground. This is where it is important to move away from a sectoral 
approach toward an economy-wide transformation. Another important part 
regards the word "deal," or a new social contract between government, 
business, and citizens.

The greater the degree to which the Green New Deal can become a 
conversation about the direction of investment and innovation, but also 
the distribution of the rewards from a new public- private partnership, 
the more interesting it will be. What is the deal we want with these 
companies? What are the conditions we should be attaching?

Is it possible to address climate change while also achieving growth?

A Green New Deal should create new opportunities for investment, so that 
growth and sustainability move hand in hand. Growth has both a rate and 
a direction, and the GND is about the direction that can get us greener 
growth and that at the same time unlocks massively hoarded private 
investments. It should also put more pressure on profits being 
reinvested back into the economy rather than used for areas like share 
buybacks.
One of your books, Rethinking Capitalism, is critical of how many 
economists think about solving big problems like climate change. Why?

The mainstream economic framework sees policymaking as just fixing 
market failures. You're waiting for something to go wrong, and then you 
bandage it up. But a green transformation needs to be more ambitious. It 
should be about co-creating, co-sharing markets alongside the private 
sector.

Steering investment toward public missions can stimulate investment and 
innovation, but this should be done without micromanaging. Set a 
direction and then use the full array of government instruments to fuel 
the bottom-up experimentation and exploration.
And keep focusing on the objective-- in this case, reducing emissions.

Yes, keep your eye on the prize.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613341/the-economic-argument-behind-the-green-new-deal/


[Poet, activist, tells us what to do]
*Loving a vanishing world*
Emily Johnston - May 9
I want to talk about power -- how much we have, and how we can use it 
meaningfully.

But I'm going to start with despair. At a beach in British Columbia's 
Gulf Islands recently -- on my first real vacation in almost three 
years -- I felt much of the loosening that I often feel at the coast. 
The smell of the sea is home for me, the brush of the waves on the 
shore, the spark and flutter of sun on the water like innumerable 
languid butterflies. Breathing at the ocean, I feel different.

I've known for a long time that humans and other species are in profound 
trouble, and that the seas are rising. I've known for a long time how 
much is at risk. I went to BC specifically to have the time to develop 
my thoughts and write about these risks, and how we can move forward in 
a way that matters...
- - -
So I want to ask you the same question I ask myself every time I'm 
entranced by the beauty of this world: what does it mean to love this 
place? What does it mean to love anyone or anything, in a world whose 
vanishing is accelerating, perhaps beyond our capacity to save the 
things that we love most?

Knowledge is responsibility, isn't it? If we let this world die -- if we 
let it be slaughtered by the shockingly small number of villains who 
have lied to us for decades -- then we become complicit, because we are 
the only ones with the leverage to help it live again; those who come 
after us will have far less ability to do so, as we have far less 
ability than our parents would have (had they known the truth to the 
degree that we do). For better and for worse, we are the ones at the 
intersection of knowledge and agency. So how do we best use that 
leverage, and how do we find the heart to keep going when the realities 
of loss overwhelm us?

The stakes are unnervingly clear if we look at the Earth's five previous 
extinctions, particularly the end-Permian, in which as much as 90% of 
life on Earth was wiped out. In all of them, greenhouse gases from 
volcanic activity, and the ensuing temperature rise, were triggers of 
destabilization. All of them happened extremely suddenly in geologic 
terms -- but with temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations that 
were rising hundreds or thousands of times more slowly than we're 
causing them to now.

So it's not just our grandkids; it's not just low-lying or hot/dry 
places; it's not just humans; it's not just orcas or the Great Barrier 
Reef or monarch butterflies; it's not even "just" the oceans (upon which 
so many species, and people, depend). What's at risk now, as best we can 
tell, is life on Earth. Possibly all of it: scientists now know that 
runaway greenhouse gas scenarios can turn a pleasant, habitable, 
water-filled planet….into Venus.

The potential loss of all life is clarifying, because there is only one 
medicine for any of it -- for any of us -- and that is the restoration 
of a thriving natural world, beginning with the near-term end of fossil 
fuel use. If we're making real progress towards those goals, we can 
almost certainly tip the balance for some individuals and species -- at 
least for awhile. And that's surely a good thing: to help some people 
live longer lives with some stability is much better than not to do so, 
even if it doesn't last for millennia, and to save some species is far 
better than to save none. What could be a more meaningful way to spend 
our lives?

The word "sacrament" comes from the Latin for "solemn oath" -- used by 
early Christians, interestingly, as the translation for the Greek word 
for "mystery". This work is, in the deepest sense, both a solemn oath 
and a mystery; it is a sacrament. We are walking into great darkness, 
and the light that guides us must come from within...
- - -
But even if we do the right things, the understanding that we saved 
something is a consolation for our deathbeds. Our goal can and must be 
far more expansive than that: to use our leverage this week, this month, 
this year, this decade as best we possibly can. That gives the widest 
swath of life a chance, and it's also the only thing that gives humans a 
chance, because it's been a very long time since we've been nimble, 
cooperative, and knowledgeable enough about the natural world to survive 
the diminished Earth that we know is coming...
- - -
All of the work is critical in this moment, and we must do it with 
humility; learning as we go; taking on both the deeply satisfying and 
the unpleasant or routine tasks. We don't have to believe they're 
adequate -- we only have to understand that not doing them would mean 
we'd decided not to care for this world, and ceded the greatest power 
we've ever had…In order to what? Watch television? Do yoga? Make really 
cool apps? How will those choices look when you're dying, and you know 
the world is too? How do they look even now, when migrant children wash 
up on the beach?...
- -
  But at the deepest level, I need to invert time and shift metaphors, 
so that I can see not only loss, but gain. A world with millions of 
people vs. one with none, or a world where half of extant species 
survive, vs. one with, say, five percent -- these are worlds absolutely 
worth fighting for -- but from this relatively full moment in time, it's 
hard to celebrate those millions or that half, knowing what will have 
gone missing.

When we think about the accelerating extinction, we're looking at the 
terrifying narrows of an hourglass, where only a few will slide through. 
So sometimes, I imagine myself instead on the far side of something more 
like an ecological birth canal. How many of Earth's beauties can we help 
to survive the passage into the next era? Is each one not a gift we can 
safeguard to the world by our actions?..
More at - 
https://medium.com/@enjohnston/loving-a-vanishing-world-ace33c11fe0



[Water news]
*India's water crisis is already here. Climate change will compound it.*
Droughts and floods have pushed the nation's leaky, polluted, and 
half-done water systems to the brink.
by James Temple
Severe droughts have drained rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across 
vast parts of India in recent years, pushing the nation's leaky, 
polluted water systems to the brink.

More than 600 million Indians face "acute water shortages," according to 
a report last summer by NITI Aayog, a prominent government think tank. 
Seventy percent of the nation's water supply is contaminated, causing an 
estimated 200,000 deaths a year. Some 21 cities could run out of 
groundwater as early as next year, including Bangalore and New Delhi, 
the report found. Forty percent of the population, or more than 500 
million people, will have "no access to drinking water" by 2030.

India gets more water than it needs in a given year. But the vast 
majority of rain falls during the summer monsoon season, generally a 
four-month window. The country's other major source is melting snow and 
glaciers from the Himalayan plateau, which feeds rivers in the north.

Capturing and delivering the water to the right places at the right 
times across thousands of miles, without wasting or contaminating 
tremendous amounts along the way, is an enormous engineering challenge. 
India captures and uses only a fraction of its rainfall, allowing most 
of it to run off into the ocean.

Meanwhile, farmers without efficient irrigation systems employ heavily 
subsidized electricity to suck up as much groundwater as possible. 
Agriculture is the single largest drain on India's water supplies, using 
more than 80% of the water despite accounting for only around 15% of the 
country's GDP.

"This is as alarming as any crisis you can imagine," says Pankaj Vir 
Gupta, a Delhi-based architect and professor at the University of 
Virginia, who helped launch a research effort in 2013 to identify ways 
to rehabilitate the highly polluted Yamuna River, the primary source of 
Delhi's drinking water.
Force multiplier

Climate change will surely make the problem worse. It's uncertain what 
role higher temperatures have played in recent droughts, as the climate 
models have mainly predicted increasingly intense Indian monsoons. But 
the longer-term forecast is that the extremes will become more extreme, 
threatening more frequent flooding and longer droughts.

Most climate studies predict that India will get more rain on average in 
the decades to come, though regional and seasonal patterns will vary 
sharply. A paper published last year in Geophysical Research Letters 
found that flash flooding will significantly increase in 78 of the 89 
urban areas evaluated if global temperatures rise to 2 ˚C above 
preindustrial levels. The resulting catastrophes will disproportionately 
harm India's poor, who frequently settle along the low-lying floodplains 
of major cities.

Sea-level rise threatens to deluge villages and megacities, and poison 
the water tables, along the subcontinent's 7,500 kilometers (4,660 
miles) of coastline between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
- - -
The gap between what's needed and what's supplied is largely filled by 
hundreds of thousands of illegal, community-dug borewells around the 
city--and by what's known as the "water mafia." Depending on whom you 
ask, these are entrepreneurs filling the market void by tapping wells 
and delivering the resource in tankers to homes, apartment buildings, 
and businesses--or a cartel that sets exorbitant prices and occasionally 
resorts to strong-arm tactics to ensure demand.

What's left of the Yamuna, after the Wasirabad has siphoned off most of 
its remaining water, runs through Delhi in a 22-kilometer stretch that 
is more of a sewage line than a river, the catchment for thousands of 
drainage basins that wind through the city, channeling the toxic runoff 
from homes, slums, businesses, and factories.
- - -
On an early afternoon in late February, Gupta drives me to one of New 
Delhi's drains near the sprawling, manicured grounds of the Sunder 
Nursery, a historic park in the center of the city. He weaves between 
concrete barriers and noses into a pull-off at the edge of an overpass.

There's a sharp smell of sulfur in the air. Gupta steps out, walks up to 
a low wall, and points down into the Barapullah drain.

It's a body of black muck that traces the curve of the overpass. A 
cluster of wire-haired boars root through trash that climbs the 
embankment, where they feed on sewage and garbage.

"And somebody's going to slaughter and eat them," Gupta says.

A healthy drainage basin would carry rainwater throughout the city, 
recharging aquifers and feeding the river. But slums without pipes and 
businesses without scruples dump sewage, garbage, and chemicals that all 
funnel into these channels. The sludge and waste is so thick in places 
that it prevents water from percolating underground, or poisons the 
water table when it does.
- -
  "The scenario is not encouraging."

As Gupta drives past the slums of the Nizamuddin neighborhood, a 
collection of tents and shacks that dump waste directly into the 
Barapullah drain, I ask if, in his most honest moments, he really 
believes that Delhi will clean up the Yamuna.

"As an architect I have to be optimistic," says Gupta, who is 48. "But 
don't ask me for a time line. Because sometimes I don't think it will be 
in my lifetime."..
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613344/indias-water-crisis-is-already-here-climate-change-will-compound-it/



*This Day in Climate History - May 13, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
  On MSNBC's "Now with Alex Wagner," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 
discusses the demise of bipartisan energy-efficiency legislation in the 
Senate.
http://www.msnbc.com/now-with-alex-wagner/watch/senate-duels-over-energy-bill-255110723586
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/13/3437201/shaheen-portman-energy-efficiency-senate/
http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/energy-bill-killed-in-keystone-xl-attempt-255179331911#

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