[TheClimate.Vote] October17, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/October 17, 2019/

[Ellen edges out extinction]
*CNN and the New York Times skip climate change in the fourth Democratic 
debate*
https://grist.org/article/cnn-and-the-new-york-times-skip-climate-change-in-the-fourth-democratic-debate/


[Breastfeeding Moms nurse-in] *
**Extinction Rebellion protesters barricade Google and YouTube's offices 
James Hockaday - Wednesday 16 Oct 2019*
Breastfeeding mothers and their babies blockaded Google's London HQ 
today, calling for the tech giant to stop funding climate change deniers.
Extinction Rebellion activists also stood outside YouTube's nearby Kings 
Cross offices in protest against them giving a platform to people who 
reject science on global warming.
Meanwhile some 1,000 protesters sat down in Trafalgar Square in defiance 
of controversial Metropolitan Police ban on all of the group's 
demonstrations in the capital.
Activists have turned their sights on Google over donations to 
organisations who have campaigned against environmental legislation and 
question the science of climate change.
The group of around 100 mums taking part in the 'nurse-in' wore white 
sashes emblazoned with the words 'their future' and held up a banner 
with the company's motto 'do the right thing'...
more - 
https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/16/extinction-rebellion-protesters-barricade-google-youtubes-offices-10930257/?ito=cbshare
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/



[The Guardian Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington - Wed 16 Oct 2019]
*Democrat calls on Google to stop funding climate crisis deniers*
A Democratic lawmaker has called on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to stop 
investing in organizations that deny the existence of the climate 
crisis, saying it was hard to overstate how detrimental the impact of 
such groups had been on the US climate debate.

Kathy Castor's letter to Pichai followed a report in the Guardian last 
week that revealed Google had made “substantial” contributions to some 
of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington, despite the 
internet giant's insistence it supports political action to combat the 
crisis.

The groups included the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has 
actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections and 
helped convince Donald Trump, the US president, to abandon the Paris 
Agreement.

Google has said it supported the climate accord, but continued to offer 
financial backing to CEI and similarly-minded groups.

“It is hard to overstate the detrimental impact groups like CEI have had 
on the climate debate in the United States since the early days of the 
Kyoto Protocol,” Castor, a Democratic representative from Florida, said. 
“Because of their public and behind-the-scenes efforts to obfuscate and 
obstruct, we have lost critical time to cut greenhouse gas pollution and 
now face a shrinking window of opportunity to avert the worst impacts of 
climate change.”
- - -
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/democrat-letter-google-stop-funding-climate-change-deniers
- - -
[Study released 2 months ago]
ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Frontiers in Communication, 25 July 2019 | 
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036
*Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube: Strategically 
Distorted Communications in Online Videos on Climate Change and Climate 
Engineering*
Joachim Allgaier

    The online video-sharing website YouTube is extremely popular
    globally, also as a tool for information on science and
    environmental topics. However, only little is known about what kind
    of information users find when they are searching for information
    about climate science, climate change, and climate engineering on
    YouTube. This contribution presents results from an exploratory
    research project that investigates whether videos found on YouTube
    adhere to or challenge scientific consensus views. Ten search terms
    were employed to search for and analyze 200 videos about climate and
    climate modification topics, which are contested topics in online
    media. The online anonymization tool Tor has been used for the
    randomization of the sample and to avoid personalization of the
    results. A heuristic qualitative classification tool was set up to
    categorize the videos in the sample. Eighty-nine videos of the 200
    videos in the sample are supporting scientific consensus views about
    anthropogenic climate change, and climate scientists are discussing
    climate topics with deniers of climate change in four videos in the
    sample. Unexpectedly, the majority of the videos in the sample (107
    videos) supports worldviews that are opposing scientific consensus
    views: 16 videos deny anthropogenic climate change and 91 videos in
    the sample propagate straightforward conspiracy theories about
    climate engineering and climate change. Videos supporting the
    scientific mainstream view received only slightly more views
    (16,941,949 views in total) than those opposing the mainstream
    scientific position (16,939,655 views in total). Consequences for
    the public communication of climate change and climate engineering
    are discussed in the second part of the article. The research
    presented in this contribution is particularly interested in finding
    out more about strategically distorted communications about climate
    change and climate engineering in online environments and in
    critically analyzing them.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036/full



[XR makes its own video news reports]
*XR TV 16 October 2019*
Extinction Rebellion
Day 10 round up of London's Extinction Rebellion. Journalist George 
Monbiot arrest, XR Youth telling YouTube what's what, and a glimpse into 
the emotional rollercoaster that Rebels are experiencing.
Can't get enough of XR.TV? We can help. Check out Monday's broadcast (14 
October) https://youtu.be/JXMxLeF63-Y
https://youtu.be/ILBHx-rAXfk?t=121


[follow the money]
*As The Climate Warms, Companies Scramble To Calculate The Risk To Their 
Profits*
Audio and TRANSCRIPT
October 16, 2019
- -
The tool they've built is called HazAtlas. Kaity Lieschke, a consultant 
at Ramboll who helped create it, says their sales pitch is pretty 
simple. "It's really easy to make the point that as our climate changes, 
we're getting increased damages from events like flooding and wildfire," 
she says. "This tool helps people prepare for that future."

But the HazAtlas team still has to convince businesses that the tool can 
deliver information that's specific and accurate enough to help those 
companies make decisions -- and that might be more difficult.

The problem is, climate models paint the future with a very broad brush. 
They show general trends for the future planet, but they're not very 
good with specifics. Some models, for instance, show rainfall increasing 
in parts of the Midwestern corn belt; others show rainfall decreasing in 
the same areas.

Ingredion, the Illinois-based company that turns corn into food 
ingredients, worked with Ramboll to see what the models might reveal 
about risks to its supply of corn. So far, Ingredion says it hasn't 
found the information very useful.

But Ingredion's executives also say that if these tools for predicting 
climate risk become more specific and reliable, there will be a huge 
demand for them.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/16/770066763/as-the-climate-warms-companies-are-scrambling-to-calculate-the-risk-to-their-pro



[Changes baselined]
*Scientists Want to Make a 3D Map of the Entire World Before Climate 
Change Ruins It*
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 18 hours ago Planet Earth

To record the world's most vulnerable places before they disappear, 
we're going to need a lot of lasers.

Earth is changing faster than anyone can comprehend. Every day, more 
forests burn, more glaciers melt and more evidence of the world's 
ancient cultures slips away. Change of some kind is, of course, 
inevitable -- but it is happening more quickly and more severely because 
of the effects of human-caused climate change. And that has some 
scientists worried: The quicker Earth changes,the less time there is to 
learn from its past and understand its mysteries.

Recently, two researchers proposed a way to preserve a record of our 
planet in its present state: use lasers to create a high-resolution, 3D 
map of the entire world. It's now the mission of a new nonprofit project 
called The Earth Archive, which is spearheaded by archaeologist Chris 
Fisher and geographer Steve Leisz, both of Colorado State University.

"The climate crisis threatens to destroy our cultural and ecological 
patrimony within decades," Fisher said earlier this year in a TEDx talk. 
"How can we document everything before it's too late?"

The answer, Fisher said, is light detection and ranging, or lidar -- a 
method of remote scanning that uses aircraft to shower a landscape with 
a dense net of laser beams. From this bombardment of light, researchers 
can create high-resolution, 3D maps of a given area and then digitally 
edit out foliage and other features that might be concealing 
hard-to-spot secrets near Earth's surface.

The technique has become more prominent in archaeological surveys in the 
past decade, helping researchers uncover lost cities in heavily forested 
parts of Africa and South America, buried roads in ancient Rome and 
previously undiscovered cityscapes in Cambodia. In 2007, Fisher was part 
of a team that used lidar to uncover traces of a lost metropolis in the 
Honduran rainforest. These scans, Fisher said in his TEDx talk, revealed 
more details about the city's ruins in 10 minutes than he and his 
colleagues could have found in 10 years of research on the ground.

The experience convinced Fisher that scientists need to "scan, scan, 
scan" to capture the world's most vulnerable places before they 
disappear. The Earth Archive's efforts would focus on scanning the 
planet's entire land area, which encompasses about 29% of the planet's 
surface, beginning with the most threatened regions, such as the Amazon 
rainforest and coastal regions at risk of being washed away by rising 
sea levels. The project would likely take decades, Fisher said, but the 
resulting snapshot of Earth would be "the ultimate gift to future 
generations."

Doing this, of course, will require lots of funding; the project needs 
about $10 million just to scan most of the Amazon within the next three 
years, Fisher told The Guardian. That price tag has some other 
researchers worried about The Earth Archive's tenability. Mat Disney, a 
professor in the University College London Department of Geography, told 
The Guardian that such a project would inevitably draw funding away from 
other research projects. Even with proper funding, he added, getting 
permission to fly a research aircraft over restricted airspaces would 
prove to be a logistical hurdle.

"Who is going to give them permission to fly over Brazil? The Brazilian 
government aren't," Disney said, referring to Brazilian President Jair 
Bolsonaro's ongoing efforts to undermine science and open parts of the 
protected rainforest to commercial interests.

To learn more about the project or to donate, visit The Earth Archive's 
website. https://www.theeartharchive.com/donate
https://www.livescience.com/map-the-earth-with-lasers.html




[Susan Moser is great]
*Hope in the face of climate change - Dr. Susanne Moser*
Sep 7, 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPp2jVlsSg8
Those about to watch this video are unique people, willing to 
unflinchingly consider the portends of climate change eyeball to 
eyeball. But this subculture has developed a severe aversion to the term 
'hope' which could used to be rectified.  This talk by Dr. Susanne 
Moser, presented on June 12, 2015, takes a look at climate and hope 
different than usually.  The word has a diverse meaning and integral 
relationship with the human psyche.  To 'abandon all hope' we risk 
painting ourselves into a dark, dark corner when in fact we need to be 
coming from the light more now than ever.  Hope is more complex than 
that.  There is no doubt we live at an apocalyptic moment in time. 
Remaining intent upon making personal and political change within our 
sphere is a self-reinforcing function coupled with hope.  We cannot 
afford to bar 'hope' as one of the many responses upon which we can draw.

Dr. Moser gave this keynote speech about the importance of 'active hope' 
in the face of climate disruption at the 2015 Conference on 
Communication and Environment (COCE) in Boulder, Colorado on June 12th, 
2015 .  We are republishing the presentation here with her permission.

You can read in depth about Dr. Moser at 
http://www.susannemoser.com/about.php. This is the draft of her paper 
underlying this presentation: "Hope in the face of climate change: A 
bridge without railing" https://bit.ly/2JMPXgA

She will also be appearing in the movie "Once You Know" by Emmanuel 
Cappellin, which is currently in post-production. You can see a trailer 
here: https://vimeo.com/238828549
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPp2jVlsSg8



[Activism: Thursday beforeFriday]
*Fire Drill Fridays*
In this Thursday Teach-In, our focus will be a Green New Deal. There's a 
lot of talk today about a Green New Deal (GND) and that's because this 
exciting and ambitious idea is the first attempt we've seen to address 
the climate crisis in a big way - commensurate with the scale of the 
problem. A GND can offer us a path to build a more fair, inclusive, 
prosperous and sustainable economy and society powered by clean 
renewable energy with good union jobs. It invests in public 
infrastructure, ensures a just transition for communities and workers, 
protects our environment and promotes environmental health and justice. 
That's exactly what we need! It's the most ambitious and transformative 
national project taken on since Franklin Roosevelt's original New Deal 
and World War II economic mobilizations - but it has learned from those 
past experiences which exacerbated inequality in the U.S. and has put 
equity at its core. To make a GND real, we need government, businesses, 
workers, and communities to all join in. And we need all of you to 
demand that candidates and elected officials  - from local electeds all 
the way to the President - support and work to advance this bold and 
promising vision by saying “YES” to a Green New Deal an “NO” to 
continued investment in fossil fuels.
For more information on the GND, see: 
https://newconsensus.com/green-new-deal/
Join Jane Fonda, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, and Sam Waterston to talk about why 
a Green New Deal is so critical if we stand any chance to protect our 
climate.
- - -
[Activism: Tomorrow is Friday]
https://firedrillfridays.com/events/green-new-deal
*Jane Fonda is launching an exciting new project, Fire Drill Fridays, 
inspired by, and in collaboration with, the youth climate strikers. *
Here's the FDF website: https://firedrillfridays.com/ (not quite done - 
we'll be adding much much more content to it in the coming days)
All of the handles are @FireDrillFriday and use #FireDrillFriday. Please 
follow and share if you're up for it.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/firedrillfriday/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firedrillfriday/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FireDrillFriday


*This Day in Climate History - October 17, 2000 - from D.R. Tucker*
October 17, 2000: In the third presidential debate, Vice President Al 
Gore declares:

    "I spend a good deal of time talking to young people, and in my
    standard speech out there on the stump, I usually end my speech by
    saying, 'I want to ask you for something, and I want to direct it
    especially to the young people in the audience,' and I want to tell
    you what I tell them. Sometimes people who are very idealistic and
    have great dreams, as young people do, are apt to stay at arm's
    length from the political process, because they think their good
    hearts might be brittle, and if they invest their hopes and allow
    themselves to believe, then they're going to be let down and
    disappointed. But thank goodness, we've always had enough people who
    have been willing in every generation to push past the fear of a
    broken heart and become deeply involved in forming a more perfect
    union. We're America, and -- and we believe in our future, and we
    know we have the ability to shape our future.

    "Now, we've got to address one of the biggest threats to our
    democracy, and that is the current campaign financing system. And I
    know they say it doesn't rank anywhere on the polls. I don't believe
    -- I don't believe that's a fair measure. I'm telling you, I will
    make it -- I will make the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform
    bill the very first measure that I send to the Congress as
    president. Governor Bush opposes it. I wish that he would consider
    changing his mind on that, because I think that the special
    interests have too much power and we need to give our democracy back
    to the American people.

    "Let me tell you why. Those issues you mentioned, Social Security,
    prescription drugs--the big drug companies are against the
    prescription drug proposal that I've made. The HMOs are against the
    patients' rights bill, the Dingell-Norwood bill, that I support and
    that Governor Bush does not support. The big oil companies are
    against the measures to get more energy independence and renewable
    fuels. They ought to have their voices heard, but they shouldn't
    have a big megaphone that drowns out the American people. We need
    campaign finance reform, and we need to shoot straight with young
    and old alike and tell them what the real choices are. And we can
    renew and rekindle the American spirit and make our future what our
    founders dreamed it could be. We can."

(64:40--67:22)
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PresidentialCandidatesDebate
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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