[TheClimate.Vote] October 21, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/October 21, 2019/

[just sit and spin]
*'Stalled' Hurricanes Could Grow More Common*
Oct 20, 2019
YaleClimateConnections
In a warming climate, hurricanes could linger longer, causing extreme 
rainfall and wind damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5RkjYjyVC8


[video 11 mins]*Carbon Pricing : Kill or Cure?*
Oct 20, 2019
Just Have a Think
Carbon Pricing. Carbon Tax. Emissions Trading. Call it what you will, 
economists all over the world overwhelmingly agree that some sort of 
stringent pricing mechanism causing a strong disincentive to emit excess 
carbon dioxide from industrial or energy related processes, including 
driving our gas guzzling vehicles, is now absolutely cruical if we're to 
meet even the upper limit of 2 degrees Celsius of atmospheric warming 
set out in the 2018 IPCC report. But there is hot debate over whether 
such policies would inflict yet more economic hardship on those least 
able to adapt. This week we take a look at the pros and cons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PlQbnxOuyw


[New book - October 18, 2019]
*Why Trust Science?, by Naomi Oreskes, is published next week by 
Princeton University Press.*
Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us 
vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when 
they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust 
science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi 
Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why 
the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest 
strength--and the greatest reason we can trust it.

Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth 
century to today, Oreskes explains that, contrary to popular belief, 
there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of 
scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are 
rigorously vetted. This process is not perfect--nothing ever is when 
humans are involved--but she draws vital lessons from cases where 
scientists got it wrong. Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial 
indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the 
knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy.

Based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, 
this timely and provocative book features critical responses by climate 
experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon 
Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan 
Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179001/why-trust-science
- - -
[Wise woman interviewed]
*'I Can't Just Stand on the Sidelines': An Interview with Naomi Oreskes*
Claudia Dreifus
This year's Climate Week is past. But Naomi Oreskes is extending an 
important part of the political debate with her new book Why Trust 
Science...
- - -
This wasn't the first time Naomi Oreskes, sixty, had given herself a 
tough assignment. About fifteen years ago, she began to wonder why there 
was widely thought to be no scientific agreement on the causes of 
climate change. Oreskes went over the peer-reviewed literature and saw 
that, contrary to popular belief, the matter had long been settled by a 
decisive consensus: the culprit wasn't sun-spots or natural weather 
cycles; it was human activity and the gases it had caused to be released 
into the atmosphere.

In December 2004, the result of her investigation was printed in 
Science, one of the most influential of journals in the scientific 
world. Her paper, titled "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," 
was crucial in helping to expand public awareness of what climate 
scientists were saying...
- - -
*How does this relate to the ideas you put forward in your new book?*
One of the points I make is that we should trust science because it is 
based on evidence. In this case, the jury isn't ordinary citizens, but 
highly trained and credentialed specialists. I further argue that we 
shouldn't trust scientists as individuals, no matter how famous or smart 
they are. Scientific knowledge isn't about the behavior or opinion of 
any one person--it's about a consensus based on the evidence.
Consensus is key because it's how we sort out the difference between one 
person's opinion versus a body of information that has been supported by 
evidence. Science is about marshalling evidence, evaluating evidence, 
generating evidence.

I think scientists should do more to talk about that. We shouldn't be 
saying, "Trust us--we're the experts." Instead, we ought to be 
explaining, "Here's how we know that vaccines don't cause autism, that 
climate change isn't caused by the sun." These are things that ordinary 
people can understand if scientists make some modicum of effort.
When you wrote that paper for Science, you were working on a book on the 
history of oceanography during the cold war. Whatever happened to that 
project?

It's finally done. I sent the manuscript to the University of Chicago 
Press this past July. It's to be called Science on a Mission.

*How does this just completed work relate to your earlier books?*
It's another piece of the puzzle. I don't want to oversimplify, but 
during the cold war, and even earlier, during World War II, science made 
a pact with the military. In doing so, the community gave up on 
communication as part of the job. Before that, you saw much more effort 
on the part of scientists to reach out. Once World War II and the cold 
war hit, you see a very clear change to "loose lips sink ships."

As part of this secrecy, the scientists began living in a closed world 
where they never had to communicate with the general public. They didn't 
even have to communicate with each other. In fact, they were often told 
not to. "Don't talk about this! Do not share this, even with colleagues 
in your own department who don't have clearances."

One of the consequences of those decades of military secrecy was a loss 
of scientists' capacity to communicate. We're seeing the consequences of 
that today in the climate change debate
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/10/18/i-cant-just-stand-on-the-sidelines-an-interview-with-naomi-oreskes/



[From Morocco World News]
*Climate Change and Forced Migration: A Complex Interplay*
Did you know that climate change is a growing cause for migration and 
that millions of people are displaced because of it?
By Hamza Guessous - Oct 13, 2019
Rabat – As the earth's climate challenges increase, many communities 
have started to suffer consequences, forced to leave their lands and 
homes for a better future...
- - -
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed 
out that "the greatest single impact of climate change might be human 
migration, with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, 
coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption."

The mass displacement of people can put a heavy burden on new host 
territories and requires a migration policy for refugees, including 
accommodation and integration programs...
- - -
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) defines environmental 
migrants as "persons or groups of persons who, predominantly for reasons 
of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely 
affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their 
habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, 
and who move within their country or abroad."

Climate change-related migration is sometimes referred to as 
climigration. The new term defines the mass relocation of people because 
of extreme weather conditions.

There are few cases where climate change is the direct factor for 
migration, such as for island states. More broadly, climate change is 
recognized as an exacerbating factor that increases migration.

Although it is hard to determine the exact number of environmental 
migrants globally, the IOM estimated that by 2050 between 25 million and 
1 billion environmental migrants.

Climate change exacerbates resource shortages which may prompt 
displacement. In Africa, 64% of the population depends on agriculture to 
earn their living. Due to the effects of climate change, the challenge 
of shortage of natural resources, causing agricultural disruption, has 
led many Africans to migrate into the north or internally, according to 
a report from the World Economic Forum.

Mass displacement from rural to urban areas pressures governments to 
provide aid to the struggling agriculture-dependent population. In this 
sense, resource shortage may also act as a threat multiplier for 
conflict, making room for the rise of non-state armed groups. Conflict, 
in return, further drives displacement.

Understandably, climate change and migration are linked. As shifting 
climate patterns become more severe, the migration flow rises. World 
leaders seek to address the two issues jointly. If they do not, a new 
migration crisis may arise and become uncontrollable.
- - -
Global Footprint Network pointed out that people are currently consuming 
1.75 times faster than the earth can regenerate. People are now 
exploiting the natural resources of the next generations.

The overconsumption of natural resources will only exacerbate climate 
change and reduce capacity for resilience

To combat the early depletion of natural resources, the Global Footprint 
Network launched a campaign called "#MoveTheDate," proposing solutions 
to limit consumption to one year of natural resources annually.

It suggested that cutting by in half carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from 
burning fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming, the date could 
move 93 days later in the year.

In Africa, Morocco and Gambia are the only countries currently meeting 
the CO2 emissions standards set in the Paris Climate Convention.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/10/284463/climate-change-and-forced-migration-a-complex-interplay/



[Authors demonstrating change]
*For Some Horror Writers, Nothing Is Scarier Than a Changing Planet*
By Naomi Booth - Oct. 19, 2019

"Why does climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than 
it does on the world?" asked the novelist Amitav Ghosh, writing in The 
Guardian in 2016. "Is it perhaps too wild a stream to be navigated in 
the accustomed barques of narration?" Ghosh cited just a handful of 
prominent climate-change novels by authors like Barbara Kingsolver, 
Margaret Atwood and T. Coraghessan Boyle, lamenting what he perceived as 
a general failure of literary imagination. We could add to his list more 
recent work by John Lanchester ("The Wall") and Richard Powers ("The 
Overstory"), but Ghosh's larger point remains: A world in climate 
free-fall, marked by the outlandish and the improbable -- freakish 
hurricanes, droughts, fires, heat waves and flash floods -- is "not 
easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose 
fiction."

Yet the idea of a world in crisis is fundamental to horror, a genre 
historically devalued by the gatekeepers of high culture as, well, 
outlandish and unserious. Horror has always sought to amplify fear. It 
works against false comfort, complacency and euphemism, against attempts 
to repress or sanitize that which disturbs us. Inevitably, the climate 
crisis has given rise to a burgeoning horror subgenre: eco-horror. 
Eco-horror reworks horror in order to portray the damage done to the 
world by people, and the ways the world might damage or even destroy us 
in turn. In eco-horror, the "natural" world is both under threat and 
threatening.

The best-known work of eco-horror might be Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern 
Reach" trilogy (2014), about a beautiful and deadly exclusion zone known 
as Area X. The first book, "Annihilation," which was made into a 
Hollywood film last year, is narrated by a biologist on a mission to 
explore the area. She records her initial impressions of the abandoned 
landscape, including a "low, powerful moaning" audible at dusk. Her team 
discovers a structure in the earth, an inverted tower. The biologist is 
lowered into it. There is a smell like rotting honey. The walls are 
covered with words, the writing system of some kind of fruiting body. 
She hears a heartbeat. The structure turns out to be a living organism, 
a "horror show of … beauty and biodiversity." The biologist leans in 
close and is sprayed with golden spores -- infected.

"Annihilation" raises the possibility that from this point on, 
everything we read is a hallucination produced by these spores: a fungal 
narration. The biologist's body begins to glow. No one returns from Area 
X. It's a place that colonizes minds and ingests bodies. It's also 
repeatedly described as "pristine," in contrast to the polluted world 
around it. "I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad 
thing," the biologist declares about Area X at the end of the novel, 
"not when looking at … the world beyond, which we have altered so much."
- - -
VanderMeer has said that Area X was inspired in part by a 14-mile hike 
he makes regularly through the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, near his home 
in Florida. In Area X, such a hike would be lethal. As one critic put 
it, the place is "a perfect wilderness, deeply hostile to human life": 
It's nature in spectacular force against humanity -- it will not be 
destroyed by us, nor will it accommodate us. Horror has always played on 
the potential for beautiful landscapes to be deadly; eco-horror adds the 
sickening twist that we are implicated in the environmental degradation 
that is now imminently threatening.

In the most insidious eco-horror, contamination isn't somewhere out 
there. It's right here, inside your body, seeping under your skin. As 
Eula Biss writes in "On Immunity" (2014), a subtle work of nonfiction 
about the growing anxiety she experienced during pregnancy: "We are no 
cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all 
already polluted … we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of 
chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on 
earth." Pregnancy has long been a source for horror, from "Rosemary's 
Baby" to Helen Phillips's recent novel "The Need," in which the birth of 
a child marks the beginning of an intense disturbance for the mother. 
Convinced that she hears an intruder intent on harming her infant and 
toddler, she moves through her home hypervigilant, on the brink of 
panic, "acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering 
within each second." Maternity, and the possibilities for profound loss 
it introduces, are the real sources of terror here, as they are in 
"Future Home of the Living God" (2017), by Louise Erdrich, in which a 
pregnant Native American woman confronts a world in climate crisis where 
evolution has run amok -- or, more precisely, has begun to run backward. 
The terrors of a world out of control coalesce around pregnancy, the 
embodiment of an uncertain, and foreboding, future.

Pregnancy may be eco-horror's most potent trope -- a claustrophobic, 
concentric rendering of humanity's predicament as both source and victim 
of harm. The recent HBO mini-series "Chernobyl" (based in part on 
witness accounts of the nuclear disaster collected by the Nobel laureate 
Svetlana Alexievich) unfolds as an eco-horror story, and a pregnant 
character is crucial to the plot. The radiation is depicted as uncanny; 
the fire at the nuclear plant emits an eerie light. "It's beautiful," a 
local resident says, watching ash fall like snow and the strange light 
on the horizon. "The air is glowing," another says. Then bodies begin to 
bleed, blister and vomit. A bird falls from the sky behind a group of 
schoolchildren; a deer lies dead in the forest as the wind spreading 
radiation crackles through the trees.

"Chernobyl" reminds us that environmental threats are distributed 
unequally: Powerful interests are protected, and the most vulnerable are 
the least culpable and least able to protect themselves -- another 
horrible twist. The camera returns repeatedly to a pregnant woman who 
has been exposed to radiation. In the final episode, her baby dies four 
hours after birth. "The radiation would have killed the mother," we are 
told, "but the baby absorbed it instead." The story is based on the 
real-life experience of Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a firefighter 
at Chernobyl who died of acute radiation syndrome, but it draws on the 
imagery of eco-horror in its evocation of the fetus receiving the 
mother's toxin and dying in her place.

In eco-horror, pregnancy is inherently compromised, a highly vulnerable 
and potentially deadly experience of interrelation. In "Sealed," my own 
recent eco-horror novel, a pregnant woman and her partner flee a 
pandemic that causes skin to seal over people's eyes, ears, noses -- 
every bodily orifice -- in an extreme reaction to environmental 
contamination. Through her pregnancy, the woman is herself sealed into a 
dangerous ecology -- a microcosm of her compromised world.
- - -
In "The Uninhabitable Earth" (2019), the journalist David Wallace-Wells 
criticizes stories of global warming that offer "escapist pleasure, even 
if that pleasure often comes in the form of horror." He cautions against 
treating the end of the world as entertainment for a privileged few. The 
aesthetics and ethics of eco-horror are complex, and the genre sometimes 
sits uneasily with environmental priorities ("Chernobyl," for instance, 
has been criticized for maligning nuclear energy, which is safer for the 
environment than fossil fuel). But at its most effective, eco-horror 
compels us not to look away. It attempts to close the distance between 
the reader and sufferers of environmental disaster, and when it really 
gets under the skin, eco-horror makes you feel the inescapable reality 
of climate catastrophe inside your body -- through panic, nausea, fear. 
In eco-horror, we witness acts of environmental violence currently 
hidden from sight; we might see who suffers most and who gains by that 
suffering.

"As with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us," Eula 
Biss writes. What we do with those fears, she argues, is a central 
question of citizenship. It's also the question that arises when 
eco-horror frightens us in ways we can't leave behind. Eco-horror 
deepens my dearest fears: of sickness, contamination, isolation and 
violence. That I might harm my child by my own hand. That I've already 
done so, sealing her into a dying world, a world I helped to poison.
- - Naomi Booth, a lecturer at Durham University in England, is the 
author of "Sealed."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/books/review/eco-horror-annihilation-jeff-vandermeer-chernobyl.html


[a plausible, emerging theory]
*How Hurricanes (Typhoons, Cyclones) Trigger Earthquakes As They Cross 
Continental Shelves: 1 of 2*
Oct 20, 2019
Paul Beckwith
When Typhoon Hagibis hit Tokyo, Japan October 12th, 2019 there was a 5.7 
earthquake the same day. A new paper discusses “stormquakes”, as a new 
discovery connecting small magnitude 3.5 earthquakes to tropical storms 
or nor’easters crossing “ocean banks” on continental shelves, exciting 
vibrations in the rock that can then propagate across entire continents. 
However, this is not new stuff!! I discussed these connections with 
Hurricane Sandy in the fall of 2012, where the storm triggered three 
large earthquakes (magnitudes 7.8, 6.3, and 6.2) off Vancouver, Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdz6mShmh8U
- - -
[shows the geometry of the geology]
*Hurricanes Triggering Earthquakes: New Research on So-Called 
“StormQuakes”: 2 of 2*
Oct 20, 2019
Paul Beckwith
In the fall of 2012 I discussed how Hurricane Sandy lit up seismic 
sensors across the US while over North America’s eastern continental 
shelves, appearing to trigger 3 large earthquakes off the west coast 
near Vancouver, Canada. In Sept. 2017 I filmed a 3 video series 
including data on a Mexico quake of magnitude 8.1 coinciding with 
Hurricane Irma; and also of a 7.1 quake and volcano near Mexico City 
coinciding with Hurricane Maria (which trashed Puerto Rico). More 
recently, superstorm Typhoon Hagibis hit near Tokyo, Japan seemingly 
triggering a 5.7 earthquake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClTA-1dGPZ0



[term defined from 2018]
*Planning for climigration: a framework for effective action*
Abstract
The phenomenon of 'climigration' is an emerging and increasing challenge 
to human settlements. Climigration refers to community relocation 
undertaken in response to climate change impacts. This paper adds to 
early but critical scholarly discussions by providing a land-use 
planning framework for organising and responding to the governance, 
policy, institutional and cultural implications of climigration. This 
paper argues that land-use planning will be increasingly required to 
manage climigration events over the coming decades and will rely on 
input and guidance from other disciplines to do so effectively. 
Climigration is conceptualised as an end-point of climate change 
adaptation in this paper. Empirical content derives from a 
multidisciplinary systematic quantitative literature review of 
international case studies of community relocations. Planning factors 
with critical, moderate or negligible influences on relocation success 
are synthesised. These are linked to the roles and functions of land-use 
planning systems to provide a framework for approaching climigration. 
The paper provides three interlinked conclusions. The first is that 
spatial planning systems have potential and capacity to respond to 
climigration as an extreme form of climate change adaptation. The second 
is that anticipatory policy frameworks offer the greatest advantages for 
successful climigration planning. The third conclusion is that 
maladaptation is a potential but avoidable threat connected to 
climigration planning.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324824689_Planning_for_climigration_a_framework_for_effective_action
- - -
[terminology text and audio]
*Immigration attorneys warn against using the term 'climate refugee'*
- -
Many people and families are also being forced to relocate on their own, 
oftentimes in a hurry, unplanned, and not as part of a bigger community.
Bronen says international human rights principles need to be created to 
protect communities and individuals that may be forced to migrate due to 
climate change.

So, if we shouldn't call these displaced people climate refugees, what 
should we call them? How should we refer to the phenomenon of having to 
move because of climate change?

Mara Kimmel says, "I think that the terminology that is increasingly 
gaining a foothold is 'climigration.'" ...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-22/immigration-attorneys-warn-against-using-term-climate-refugee


[Shadow-show-time video]*
**El Gamma's Touching Tribute To Mother Nature | Asia's Got Talent Grand 
Final 1*
May 7, 2015
Asia's Got Talent
El Gamma Penumbra use the big stage to deliver a heart-warming tribute 
to Mother Nature. Prepare yourself for goosebumps!
https://youtu.be/1ReuOnKSi0s


*This Day in Climate History - October 21, 2001 - from D.R. Tucker*
In the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibben notes that in the aftermath of 
9/11, the George W. Bush administration might want to consider "[taking] 
the money now used to subsidize fossil fuels and nuclear power and 
[using] it instead to jump-start the conversion to renewable energy 
sources, which by their nature are decentralized, flexible and 
unappealing to terrorists. Take, for example, wind power. It is already 
the fastest-growing power source on Earth, mostly because it's 
environmentally benign. But now we know it's a security asset as well. 
An enemy could knock out one windmill, but it wouldn't spew 
radioactivity and it wouldn't damage all the other windmills. No one is 
standing guard around the clock on their rooftop solar panel."

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/oct/21/opinion/op-59754
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