[TheClimate.Vote] October 1, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Oct 1 10:15:59 EDT 2019 

/October 1, 2019/


[a big calving]
*315 billion-tonne iceberg breaks off Antarctica*
Satellite image: 
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/B48F/production/_109032264_body-nc.png
The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg 
in more than 50 years.

The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area - a little smaller than 
Scotland's Isle of Skye - and is called D28.

The scale of the berg means it will have to be monitored and tracked 
because it could in future pose a hazard to shipping...
- - -
Amery is the third largest ice shelf in Antarctica, and is a key 
drainage channel for the east of the continent.

The shelf is essentially the floating extension of a number of glaciers 
that flow off the land into the sea. Losing bergs to the ocean is how 
these ice streams maintain equilibrium, balancing the input of snow 
upstream.

So, scientists knew this calving event was coming...
- - -
D28 is calculated to be about 210m thick and contains some 315 billion 
tonnes of ice.

The name comes from a classification system run by the US National Ice 
Center, which divides the Antarctic into quadrants...
- - -
Nearshore currents and winds will carry D28 westwards. It's likely to 
take several years for it to break apart and melt completely.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49885450


[PBS points to an important resource]
*How to talk to your kids about climate change*
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-climate-change
- - -
[from HealthyChildren.org]
*Talking to Children About Tragedies & Other News Events*
​​After any disaster, parents and other adults struggle with what they 
should say and share with children and what not to say or share with them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) encourages parents, teachers, 
child care providers, and others who work closely with children to 
filter information about the crisis and present it in a way that their 
child can accommodate, adjust to, and cope with...
- - -
*Where to Start - All Ages*
No matter what age or developmental stage the child is, parents can 
start by asking a child what they've already heard. Most children will 
have heard something, no matter how old they are. After you ask them 
what they've heard, ask what questions they have.

Older children, teens, and young adults might ask more questions and may 
request and benefit more from additional information. But no matter what 
age the child is, it's best to keep the dialogue straightforward and 
direct...
[more at] 
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/Media/Pages/Talking-To-Children-About-Tragedies-and-Other-News-Events.aspx
- - -
[brief video from the American Academy of Pediatric]
*AAP Tips on Talking to a Child after a Disaster*
May 22, 2018
American Academy of Pediatrics
Dr. David Hill, spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, 
offers some simple tips on how to talk to children after a disaster. 
Children as young as age 4 will be exposed to information and news 
programs about a disaster, like a natural event or a school shooting, so 
parents should be equipped to talk to their children to help them cope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=KANprqSTX2k
more at -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClR8YIQX5Fb8J2wmsUKLhvQ



[Food Business News]
*Climate change may bring drought to 60% of wheat-growing areas*
- - -
Severe water scarcity by the middle of this century likely is to occur 
in an almost continuous belt from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to 
Anatolia and Pakistan in the east, according to the study. Significant 
increases in severe water scarcity is likely to affect southeastern 
Ukraine, southern regions of Russia, western parts of the United States 
and Mexico, southwestern Australia and South Africa. Wheat-growing areas 
in South America will be affected marginally.
- - -
The study examined strategies to reduce the impacts of water shortages.

Shifting the harvest date to earlier or later in the season may reduce 
yield losses, but it could have a limited scope on regions that have the 
highest risk of increasing water scarcity within the wheat season.

Using drought- and heat-adapted wheat varieties is an option. This 
approach should exploit not only genetic variation that provides 
productivity gains but also quality traits. Dwindling water resources in 
some regions cast doubt on how irrigation, another option, will increase 
wheat yield on a global scale without "massive" investment programs.

Managing soil in a way that builds up soil water for the next crop 
should be considered. Water may be conserved by minimizing tillage and 
reducing non-productive water loss, with evaporation being an example, 
from the unshaded soil surface. Covering the soil surface with a mulch 
of plant residues reduces water loss caused by evaporation.
https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/14596-climate-change-may-bring-drought-to-60-of-wheat-growing-areas



[Young students in Tibet]
*Tibetan students march for global climate strike*
[image 
https://media.tibetsun.com/images/news/2019/09/tibetan-students-march-for-global-climate-strike-pg.jpg]
Chanting slogans and carrying placards, exile Tibetan students joined 
the global climate crisis protests taking place around the world, in the 
capital of Tibetan Diaspora, McLeod Ganj.

The teenagers shouted slogans like "Tibet is melting, climate justice 
now" and "Tibet's rivers, Asia's lifeline," as they marched from the 
nonoperational bus station of the Himalayan village to a parking lot for 
an event.

A week earlier millions of protesters took part in the Global Climate 
Strike in what is called "Fridays for Future", ... more at -
https://www.tibetsun.com/news/2019/09/27/tibetan-students-march-for-global-climate-strike



[NYTimes Opinion]
*What Kind of Problem Is Climate Change?*
Knowing the answer might force us toward a real solution.
By Alex Rosenberg
Mr. Rosenberg is a professor at Duke University and the author of "How 
History Gets Things Wrong."
- - -
The three kinds of problems are inextricably intertwined. That's one 
lesson taught by the relatively new discipline of politics, philosophy 
and economics (PPE).

PPE has been the name for this subject since it was first introduced at 
Oxford after World War I. Now it's taught at a hundred or more American 
universities, combining intellectual resources to come to grips with 
complex human issues.

To recognize the problems facing any attempt to mitigate climate change, 
we need to start with a technical term from economics: "public good."

Put aside the ordinary meaning of these two words. In economic theory, a 
public good is not a commodity like schools or roads provided to the 
public by the government. It's a good with two properties absent in 
other commodities, including schools and roads. First, a public good is 
consumed non-rivalrously: No matter how much of it one person consumes, 
there's always just as much left for others...
- - -
The Paris climate accord set a target of keeping global temperatures 
from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. That outcome would be a 
public good. I can't consume any of this good unless it's there for you 
too, and no matter how much of it I consume in personal benefit, that 
won't reduce the amount you can consume.

Of course, as with street lighting, some people will benefit more, maybe 
even much more from a public good, than others. It's regrettably true 
that women's lives are generally more improved by street lighting than 
men's lives are. Mitigating climate change isn't going to benefit 
everyone equally. But it can't benefit anyone without benefiting 
everyone, and no matter how much I benefit, there will be some benefit 
left for you.

This is where politics and philosophy come in. As with all other public 
goods, limiting climate change is subject to what is called a prisoner's 
dilemma: If the rest of the world's major polluters get together to curb 
emissions, the United States doesn't have to and will still benefit. On 
the other hand, if China, the European Union, India, Russia and South 
Korea do nothing, there's no point in the United States even trying. It 
can't solve the problem alone. It looks as if either way, the United 
States should do nothing to curb its own emissions. If leaders of these 
other governments reason the same way, the result is likely to be 
catastrophic weather extremes everywhere...
- - -
Is there any way to escape the prisoner's dilemma facing the provision 
of a public good?

The problem was first noticed by the 17th-century philosopher Thomas 
Hobbes, seeking the justification of political authority. Hobbes's 
question of how to escape anarchy poses a prisoner's dilemma. The rule 
of law, he recognized, is non-rivalrously and non-excludably consumed, 
even for the weakest, the poorest. It's obvious of course that some laws 
are better for some people than for others. But Hobbes argued that any 
laws, even the laws of a tyrannical dictator, no matter how harmful they 
may be, confer some minimal non-excludable benefit on everyone that we 
can consume non-rivalrously.

The enforced rule of law, any law, at least gets us out of the state of 
nature, where "the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and 
short." Hobbes argued that the only way to provide this public good is 
for each of us to surrender all power to the state so that it can compel 
obedience to the law. Hobbes's recipe for escaping the prisoner's 
dilemma of anarchy never attracted much support. The history of 
political philosophy from Locke to Rawls is a sequence of proposed 
alternatives to Hobbes's strategy. Each sought a basis on which people 
can credibly bind themselves voluntarily to provide the public good of 
"law and order."

Once the philosopher identifies the problem, the political scientist can 
approach it empirically: Try to identify the circumstances in real life 
where people have spontaneously solved the problem of providing 
themselves a public good, in their self-interest and without coercion.

For answering this question, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom won 
the Nobel Prize that was supposed to go only to economists. She spent a 
career identifying the conditions, all over the world, including the 
developing world, under which groups manage to solve the prisoner's 
dilemma by voluntarily creating institutions -- rules, norms, practices 
-- that every member benefits from, non-rivalrously and non-excludably. 
In doing so, Ostrom provided a recipe for how to avoid the prisoner's 
dilemma that a public good presents.

The ingredients needed are clear: The participants have to agree on 
who's in the group; there's a single set of rules all participants can 
actually obey; compliance is monitored effectively, with graduated 
punishments for violation; enforcement and adjudication is affordable; 
and outside authorities have to allow the participants to obey the 
rules. Finally, in the long term, the group providing the public good to 
its members has to be nested in, authorized by higher-level groups. 
These in turn persist when they can provide themselves a different set 
of nonexcludable, nonrivalrously consumed, mutually beneficial rules, 
norms, laws and institutions.

It's not rocket science to see how hard it would be for the 200 or so 
nations of the world to satisfy these conditions. The Paris agreement is 
a far cry from Ostrom's recipe. The main obstacle to carrying it out 
will be the unwillingness to surrender national sovereignty.

But now at least we have a good idea of what we are up against, and even 
some tools to get closer to a solution. For example, citizens and nested 
groups of citizens can employ Ostrom's recipe to build increasingly more 
global responses to climate change, thereby providing at least some of 
this public good to many people.

PPE approaches climate change with the economist's concept of a public 
good, the philosophical project of grounding the political authority 
that provides these goods in our rational self-interest and the 
political scientist's discoveries about the conditions under which 
people actually provide themselves these goods.

This analysis of how hard it is solve the problem of climate change 
makes clear that the United States needs to take seriously the search 
for a technological solution to the challenge it poses.

Consider the problem of street lighting in the 19th century. Suppose you 
are so much wealthier than everyone else that you have more to lose 
walking city streets at night than anyone else. You've got so much to 
lose that it's worth it to you to pay for street lighting all by 
yourself, even if everyone else will also be able to enjoy it, free. In 
that case it would be economically irrational of you to refuse to pony 
up for the full cost of the public good.

What if there is no good street lighting? If you're so much richer than 
everyone else, what should you do? Subsidize Thomas Edison's research of 
course. He's searching for a technological fix -- good, cheap, reliable 
street lighting -- maybe cheap enough that you'd be willing to pay for 
it all.

Countries and corporations convinced that their gains from mitigating 
climate change can outweigh the costs to them will provide the public 
good to everyone as a byproduct, a side effect, of what they buy for 
themselves. The catch is that the costs to the individual country or 
corporation will have to be low enough to be swamped by its benefit to 
that country or company.

This is where science and its technological spinoff comes in. Solar 
panels, wind turbines, safe nuclear energy, geoengineering the 
atmosphere or the oceans or the rain forests -- any of these, all of 
them or something no one has thought of yet might become cost effective 
for one or more countries or corporations. The public good of climate 
change mitigation would become so valuable for at least one consumer -- 
a country or corporation -- that it would buy it for itself. The rest of 
us could free ride.

Will it happen? Can it happen? Could its arrival be hastened? 
Philosophers have spent a lot of time studying science. They've come 
very firmly to the conclusion that there is no logic of scientific 
discovery, no recipe for the next breakthrough and so no algorithm for 
improving our technology. Scientific discovery is serendipity. All we 
can do is enhance science's chances of getting us out of this mess: 
Educate scientists, support pure research, disseminate it freely and 
reward it with immortality, not just money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/climate-change.html



[Some science clouds]
*Clouds and Climate by Prof Tapio Schneider​*
Streamed live on Sep 5, 2019
Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford
www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlnGQkT0rQs


*This Day in Climate History - October 1, - from D.R. Tucker*
October 1, 2013: Syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson writes:

"Skeptics and deniers can make all the noise they want, but a
landmark new report is unequivocal: There is a 95 percent chance
that human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases are changing the climate in ways that court disaster.

"That's the bottom line from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which Monday released the latest of its comprehensive,
every-six-years assessments of the scientific consensus about
climate change. According to the IPCC, there is only a 1-in-20
chance that human activity is not causing dangerous warming.

"You may like those betting odds. If so, let's get together for a
friendly game of poker, and please don't forget to bring cash."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/01/warm_enough_for_you_120159.html
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