[TheClimate.Vote] October 19, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/October 19, 2019/

[Beckwith discusses nuclear winter]
*How a Limited Nuclear War (Pakistan v. India) Would Cause Global Food 
Shortages and Mass Starvation*
Oct 18, 2019
Paul Beckwith
Since the Cold War between the world's major superpowers ended, people 
have become very complacent about the threats of nuclear war. A new 
research paper shatters this illusion by showing that even a relatively 
small and limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, apart from 
killing more people in those countries (50-125 million) in less than one 
week than all World War II fatalities, would block 20 to 35% of surface 
sunlight and cool the surface 2C to 5C causing global crop failures; 
thus causing mass starvation and additional worldwide mayhem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QtPuayYAG0
- - -
[part 2]
*pt 2 How "Nuclear Winter" Halts Global Plant Growth Causing Crop 
Failure and Worldwide Mass Starvation*
The unthinkable "nuclear winter" scenario occurs when detonations of 
many nuclear bombs over cities create intense fireballs which loft black 
carbon high into the stratosphere (upper atmosphere), blocking the Sun 
and thus halting global plant growth thus causing mass starvation. A 
Pakistan - India nuclear war (or US - Russia nuclear war) would block 
surface sunlight 20-35% (75%), cool global surfaces 2-5C (10C), reduce 
precipitation 15-30% (60%), reduce Net Primary Productivity 15-30% 
(100%) on land;  5-15% (50%) in the oceans, and take 10-15 years to 
recover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHV7vc7vMME


[Sierra Club Limnology]
*Warming Lakes Worldwide Could Mean More Toxic Algal Blooms*
A first-ever global survey of lakes links climate change to increased blooms
- - -
A new study of algal bloom activity in dozens of freshwater lakes around 
the world provides an answer: For the past 30 years, lakes nearly 
everywhere have been experiencing more frequent and severe toxic algal 
blooms--and a changing climate is one reason why...

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science used satellite data 
collected over the past three decades to examine large freshwater lakes 
across six continents. They searched through more than 72 billion data 
points to identify statistically significant patterns in algal bloom 
intensity and found that the severity of algal blooms has increased in 
over two-thirds of the 71 large lakes studied across 33 countries...
- - -
As algal blooms become more common and widespread, the impacts to the 
environment and public health will become more severe. According to the 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, exposure to algal blooms can 
cause skin, eye, and throat irritation, headaches, diarrhea, and flulike 
and neurological symptoms. Toxic algal blooms can dramatically affect 
the availability of drinking water--in 2014, an algal bloom in Lake Erie 
contaminated the entire water supply for Toledo, Ohio, leaving half a 
million people without water. Water for irrigation, fishing, recreation, 
and tourism can also be impacted. According to the Carnegie study, 
freshwater algal blooms in the United States result in a loss of $4 
billion each year.

The study makes clear that in addition to warming, changing rainfall 
patterns influence water quality. Climate change will make the 
hydrological cycle more intense, with wet places getting wetter and dry 
places getting drier. The report identifies global hotspots like India 
and China, where intensive land use combined with intensifying rainfall 
make algal blooms much more likely to occur...
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/warming-lakes-worldwide-could-mean-more-toxic-algal-blooms



[Some true cost accounting]
*Animal Agriculture is the Leading Cause of Climate Change - A White Paper*
Sailesh Krishna Rao - October, 18- 2019
Climate Healers
Abstract
In this paper, we present the results of a Global Sensitivity Analysis 
(GSA) proving that Animal Agriculture is the leading cause of climate 
change. The burning of fossil fuels is currently the leading source of 
human-made Carbon diOxide (CO2) emissions. However, climate change is 
caused by cumulative human-made greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions and 
not just current CO2 emissions alone. While humans have been burning 
fossil fuels for a little over 200 years, we have been burning down 
forests for Animal Agriculture for well over 8,000 years! For the GSA 
analysis, we use factual data from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of 
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other 
peer-reviewed scientific sources. We further show that a global 
transition to a plant-based economy has the potential to sequester over 
2000 Giga tons (Gt) of CO2 in regenerating soils and vegetation, 
returning atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to the "safe zone" of under 
350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 equivalent, while restoring the 
biodiversity of the planet and healing its climate. This paper clearly 
illustrates why the scientific community, government institutions, 
corporations and news media, who vastly underestimate the role of Animal 
Agriculture and focus primarily on reducing fossil fuel use, need to 
urgently change their priorities in order to be effective.
- - -
Conclusions
In this paper, we established that Animal Agriculture is the leading 
cause of climate change accounting for an estimated 87% of annual 
greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, a global transition to a 
plant-based economy is the most effective response to climate change and 
this can be achieved through concerted, grassroots action, with or 
without the active cooperation of governments, scientific institutions, 
corporations and the news media.
https://www.climatehealers.org/animal-agriculture-white-paper


[Essay]
*The Apocalypse and the Alienated Man*
The threat of climate change challenges ideas at the very heart of 
western masculinity. That's a good thing.
- - -
I'm angry that my future has been stolen from me, and as a man I've been 
allowed that anger. Flare ups have been an acceptable, even encouraged, 
part of my person: playing on sports teams, watching TV, reading the 
news-- my daily life gives me unfettered opportunity to express that 
anger. I have a right to be angry at the fossil fuel executives and the 
oil and gas CEOs that are letting the planet melt for profit.

It isn't enough, though, for me to be just another angry man. I have to 
be empathetic for the victims of the climate crisis. I have to be caring 
for the earth and all the people engaged in this fight for survival. I 
have to be joyous that I am a part of nature, and acknowledge my 
vulnerability. To fight the climate crisis, I have to be a better man.

Ismail Ibrahim is a freelance writer, landscaper, and a host of the 
podcast Holocene Nostalgia. He tweets @Ish_Ibrahim_1.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2019/10/16/the-apocalypse-and-the-alienated-man



[Two books reviewed by The New Yorker]
*The Stark Inequality of Climate Change*
By Rachel Riederer
As Hurricane Florence moved across the Atlantic in early September of 
2018, state officials issued evacuation orders for communities along the 
Virginia and Carolina coasts. The writer and law professor Jedediah 
Purdy, who was teaching at Duke at the time, was situated well inland, 
where the Atlantic coastal plain meets the Piedmont, and in his new 
book, "This Land Is Our Land," he writes about his own surge of disaster 
preparation. Stocking up on canned goods and candles, he was also 
cataloguing his dependencies, contemplating how his household might get 
along without stocked shops and available gasoline. Could he make a cup 
of coffee if the electricity went out or remember loved ones' phone 
numbers without the use of a smartphone? Human beings, at least we 
modern ones, are "an infrastructure species," he writes, dependent on 
elaborate systems for shelter, electricity, and water. Purdy 
contemplates the potential devastation--the friendliest, nearest-term 
end of the the disaster-scenario spectrum laid out by David 
Wallace-Wells in "The Uninhabitable Earth," but still no picnic--and 
thinks of the fate of what King Lear calls "unaccommodated man," 
defenseless and soggy, "like an oyster ripped from its shell."

_This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth_
by Jedediah Purdy
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691195641/

The accelerating climate crisis is a Rorschach test, with everyone 
responding differently to the inkblot of planetary trauma. Hard deniers 
(a shrinking group) believe, or convince themselves, that established 
science is not real; softer deniers may understand the problem on some 
osmotic level but choose not to engage. Others react with outrage, 
terror, or gallows humor, or settle in somewhere on the spectrum between 
anxious resignation and outright nihilism. Some get to work securing a 
bunker and a disaster-preparedness plan, wishing to insulate at least 
their own homes and families from the wider risk. Others metabolize 
their anxiety into demonstrations, like the marchers who filled streets 
around the world in September's global climate strike, or into 
direct-action protest, like the two women, indicted last month, who are 
now facing decades in prison for sabotaging the Dakota Access Pipeline's 
progress in Iowa. (They are awaiting trial.) Purdy's response, a 
scholarly kind of action, is to break down the politics that created the 
climate crisis, identifying the extractive practices and competitive 
ways of thinking that brought on the Anthropocene and imagining a system 
that could help us get out of it.

To survive the climate crisis, he argues, we will need to establish what 
he calls "commonwealth" values, which will animate a way of living and 
relating to one another that's not zero-sum, but where "my flourishing 
is the condition of your flourishing, and yours is reciprocally of 
mine." Key to that transformation is changing the way that we treat, 
value, and think about land. Purdy, a child of back-to-the-landers who 
was raised in West Virginia, where the landscape is being literally 
flattened by the especially aggressive coal-mining technique of 
mountain-top removal, chronicles the exploitative political history of 
American land: how it was seized from native people and then transformed 
by the labor of enslaved people. He offers counterexamples, 
too--surprising moments of solidarity when land brought people together. 
The radical labor organization Miners for Democracy, based in West 
Virginia and Pennsylvania, took control of the United Mine Workers of 
America in the early nineteen-seventies, pressing for workplace safety 
regulations and linking their own health to their local environment; 
their platform declared that if coal extraction was going to kill their 
mountains and streams, miners should refuse to do it. The city planner 
and forester Benton MacKaye proposed the idea for the Appalachian Trail 
in 1921, as part of his social goal to, as Purdy puts it, "make the 
human environment, from the workplace to the untouched woods, welcoming 
and stimulating." This is part of what he calls "the long environmental 
justice movement," as distinguished from the mainstream environmental 
movement, which Purdy contends has always been "susceptible to identity 
crisis." (Purdy stresses that conservation luminaries like John Muir and 
Theodore Roosevelt were interested in protecting nature that would be 
available only for certain types of people--mostly white, male, and 
upper-class.) The cornerstone of commonwealth values, he writes, will be 
to bridge this old, well-established gap between social and 
environmental concerns, and "to combine human and ecological caretaking."

When Florence made landfall, it didn't rage, as predicted, at the 
coast--instead it moved inland and stalled, dumping what the journalist 
Gilbert Gaul calls a "rain bomb" over the state. It killed more than 
fifty people, drowned thousands of hogs and millions of chickens, and 
left whole communities swamped in agricultural contaminants. Purdy 
writes that the damage "fell unequally on North Carolinians. It always 
does." The contamination disproportionately affected rural, poor people 
of color, showing the unnaturalness of "natural disasters." Similar 
contamination followed Hurricane Floyd, in 1999, Purdy points out. And 
despite these damages, and the increasing power of hurricanes as the sea 
warms and rises, the state legislature passed a statute in 2012 
prohibiting planners in North Carolina from taking rising sea levels 
into account until the law expired in 2016, not wanting to burden 
developers along the coast. Nature makes the storm, but people make the 
infrastructure, and people decide--wittingly or not--who will be 
vulnerable when the storm comes.

In "The Geography of Risk," the journalist Gaul writes about the same 
situation from an inverse angle: he focusses on coastal communities from 
Texas to New Jersey, where post-hurricane recovery efforts have brought 
floods of federal disaster funding and insurance money. This "seemingly 
endless loop of government payouts," he writes, keep developers and 
homeowners building, rebuilding, and expanding, in "one of the most 
ecologically fragile and dangerous places on earth." Gaul argues that 
the current illogical pattern of coastal building is not just "a 
peculiarly American expression of optimism, commerce, and defiance" but 
also one of the greatest and most expensive planning failures in the 
nation's history.

_The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of 
America's Coasts_
by Gilbert M Gaul
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374160805/

It wasn't always this way. Gaul traces the development of this 
situation--one that is replicated up and down the eastern 
seaboard--through the example of Long Beach Island, a barrier island 
north of Atlantic City. When the shoe-store owner Morris Shapiro first 
saw the section of the island that he later purchased and developed, it 
was empty of houses and overgrown with blackberry bushes; there were 
some fishermen's shacks and simple bungalows elsewhere on the island. He 
started building simple houses, aimed at blue-collar families. Other 
developers were doing the same, advertising seashore lots for forty 
dollars apiece with ads in the Camden and Philadelphia papers, reading, 
"They say money won't buy happiness. Well, they'd better guess again." 
As American purchasing power skyrocketed after the Second World War, 
sales of second homes did, too, and, by the end of the nineteen-fifties, 
Shapiro's section of the barrier island was blanketed with bungalows 
from ocean to bay. Over time, the houses got grander and more lavish. 
(Locals have long observed that Long Beach Island is divided between 
"the Haves" and "the Have Mores.") Today, Gaul notes, the tract of land 
that Shapiro bought for fifty-three thousand dollars is worth four 
hundred million dollars.

The accumulation of lavish property in vulnerable coastal areas, then, 
"amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal 
taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild." 
Highly subsidized flood insurance from the federal government, as well 
as federal disaster-recovery packages, mean that while the 
million-dollar views belong to the owners of the homes perched on the 
beaches, much of the risk of building there is carried by others. The 
cycles of destruction and rebuilding also have a psychological effect, 
Gaul writes. Each one "normalizes" the choice to build in such risky 
places, with the assumption that help will come. Coastal-development and 
federal-disaster funding have grown up together: in the 
nineteen-fifties, federal funds covered about five per cent of 
disaster-relief payouts; by 2012, it was over seventy per cent. The 
right to the beach house became so entrenched that when the governor of 
New Jersey proposed, in 1979, a bill to forbid the construction of new 
homes between the shore and the nearest paved road or the rebuilding of 
heavily storm-damaged ones, in order to preserve dunes, he was met with 
a campaign of remarkable vitriol.

Craig Fugate, the head of FEMA during the Obama Administration, told 
Gaul that he had proposed adding a deductible to disaster-aid packages, 
so that coastal communities would "have some skin in the game." No such 
policy has been adopted, and there is now at least three trillion 
dollars' worth of property at risk from catastrophic storms. As Gaul 
writes, "the U.S. Department of the Treasury is serving as the insurer 
of last resort." There is no current version of coastal disaster relief 
that apportions risk fairly, to say nothing of one that embodies Purdy's 
commonwealth values, which recognize that "remaking the economy and 
remaking our relation to ecology are two sides of the same change."

What's galling isn't just the stubborn rebuilding-in-place; it's that 
support gets funnelled along the same meridians as other kinds of 
privilege. Those with means get even more, while those who need the help 
most go without, so that natural disasters make inequality worse. In the 
age of climate change, "natural" disasters are especially stark 
illustrations of these patterns: they are exacerbated by atmospheric 
changes resulting, largely, from making the lives of the comfortable 
even more comfortable; and the burdens fall on people who are made more 
vulnerable by visible political choices, not just because of the 
accident of geography. A refrain of both Purdy and Gaul's books, in 
fact, is that geography is never an accident.

For decades, Orrin Pilkey, a coastal geologist in North Carolina, has 
been advocating for slow, planned retreat from the coasts. "Barrier 
islands are always moving. Beaches are always eroding. It's only a 
problem when you put a house there," he tells Gaul. Pilkey's message has 
made him a controversial figure--he has the clarity of purpose of a true 
evangelist, and his vision of coastal retreat seems almost mystical in 
its divergence from the status quo. Then again, coastal retreat is 
already happening. Earlier this year, Pilkey published an op-ed pointing 
to a beach community in France that, after sustaining major damage in a 
storm, was moved back from the shoreline. The lesson of both Purdy's and 
Gaul's books is processes of great change: in mind-sets, policies, 
landscapes. "The great power of a political species," Purdy writes, "is 
to change the architecture of its common world." Neither book has a 
checklist of policy recommendations, but both serve as reminders of just 
how capable human beings are of remaking the world, when it suits them.
Rachel Riederer is a member of The New Yorker's editorial staff.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-stark-inequality-of-climate-change



[Putin and oil and Rachael Maddow]
*Maddow Explains Why Putin's Russia Hacked The 2016 Election | The 11th 
Hour | MSNBC*
Oct 17, 2019
MSNBC
Rachel Maddow joins to discuss her new best-selling book 'Blowout' and 
what she uncovered about the facts surrounding Russia's attack on 
America's democracy. Aired on 10/17/19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo8OJVzbuxI



[Jane Fonda returns to the news cycle]
*Jane Fonda returns to civil disobedience for climate change*
Oct 18, 2019
Associated Press
Inspired by the climate activism of Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, Jane 
Fonda says she's returned to civil disobedience in support of a Green 
New Deal. (Oct. 18)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAh7fLf3hOA



*This Day in Climate History - October 19, 1992 - from D.R. Tucker*
In the third presidential debate, President George H. W. Bush accuses 
Democratic challenger Bill Clinton and his running mate, Senator Al 
Gore, of pandering to "the spotted owl crowd or the extremes in the 
environmental movement" by supporting an increase in fuel efficiency 
standards. Clinton defends the idea of raising fuel efficiency 
standards; in addition, he states, "We also ought to convert more 
vehicles to compressed natural gas. That's another way to improve the 
environment."

(26:30-29:00)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCGtHqIwKek
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