[TheClimate.Vote] September 19, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Sep 19 11:24:44 EDT 2019
/September 19, 2019/
[interactive maps online - geography of opinions]
*Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2019*
These maps show how Americans' climate change beliefs, risk perceptions,
and policy support vary at the state, congressional district, metro
area, and county levels.
*Estimated % of adults who think global warming is happening (67%), 2019*
In support of #CoveringClimateNow, which is engaging more than 250 media
outlets worldwide, we are pleased to release a new version of the Yale
Climate Opinion Maps. Our interactive tool provides access to state and
local data about how Americans view climate change causes, risks, and
solutions in all 50 states, 435 Congressional Districts, and 3,142
counties nationwide. We hope these new maps provide helpful context and
insight about Americans' climate views as you work to engage your own
audiences on this vital issue over the coming weeks and months.
Climate Opinion Map Highlights
While only 20% of Americans in March 2018 had heard about global warming
in the media "at least once a week," the new 2019 maps shows that number
jumped 12 percentage points nationally to 32%. In some states, like
Colorado, 40% now report hearing about the issue in the media at least
once a week. Yet other states, particularly in the southeast, lag
behind. In North Carolina, for example, despite continued battering from
hurricanes made bigger, stronger, slower, and deadlier by global
warming, only 29% of residents say they hear about the issue in the
media at least once a week.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/
[Phys.org]
*Earth warming more quickly than thought, new climate models show*
By 2100, average temperatures could rise 7.0 degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial levels if carbon emissions continue unabated, separate
models from two leading research centres in France showed...
- -
A core finding of the new models is that increased levels of CO2 in the
atmosphere will warm Earth's surface more--and more easily--than earlier
calculations had suggested.
If confirmed, this higher "equilibrium climate sensitivity", or ECS,
means humanity's carbon budget--our total emissions allowance--is likely
to shrink...
- - -
"The most respected ones--from the United States, and Britain's Met
Office--also show a higher ECS" than the previous generation of models,
he said.
This is bad news for the fight against global warming, which continues
to face strong political headwinds and institutional inertia despite a
rapid crescendo of public awareness and concern.
"A higher ECS means a greater likelihood of reaching higher levels of
global warming, even with deeper emissions cuts," Boucher and two
British scientists--Stephen Belcher from the UK Met Office and Rowan
Sutton from the UK National Centre for Atmospheric Science--wrote in a
blog earlier this year, tiptoeing around the implications of the new models.
- -
"Higher warming would allow less time to adapt and mean a greater
likelihood of passing climate 'tipping points' such as thawing of
permafrost, which would further accelerate warming."
A third to 99 percent of top-layer permafrost could melt by 2100 if
carbon pollution is not abated, releasing billions of tonnes of
greenhouse gases into the air, according to a draft IPCC special report
on oceans and Earth's frozen zones obtained by AFP.
"Unfortunately, our global failure to implement meaningful action on
climate change over recent decades has put us in a situation where what
we need to do to keep warming to safe levels is extremely simple," said
Rogelj.
"Global greenhouse gas emissions need to decline today rather than
tomorrow, and global CO2 emissions should be brought to net zero."
The 2014 basket of climate models show Earth warming on current trends
an additional 3C by 2100, and at least 2C even if national carbon
cutting pledges are all met...
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-earth-quickly-climate.html
-- -
[closer to source materials]
*Two French climate models consistently predict a pronounced global warming*
17/09/2019 CNRS (Delegation Paris Michel-Ange)
The international climate science community is undertaking an extensive
programme of numerical simulations of past and future climates. Its
conclusions will contribute significantly to part one of the IPCC1 Sixth
Assessment Report, which is expected to be published in 2021. The French
scientists involved in the work, in particular at the CNRS, the CEA and
Meteo-France, were the first to submit their contributions, and they
have now revealed the broad outlines of their findings. Specifically,
their new models predict that warming by 2100 will be more severe than
forecast in earlier versions. They are also making progress in
describing climate at the regional level.
- - -
Simulations with the two new French models, as well as with models from
other countries that are already available, predict that by 2100 warming
will be more severe than that forecast in previous versions in 2012,
especially for the most pessimistic emission scenarios. This could be
explained by a more pronounced climate response to the increase in
human-induced greenhouse gases than in the 2012 simulations. However,
the reasons for this increased sensitivity and the degree of confidence
to be attributed have yet to be assessed.
In the most pessimistic scenario (SSP5 8.5 – rapid economic growth
driven by fossil fuels), the rise in mean global temperature7 is likely
to reach 6 to 7 C by 2100, which is 1 C higher than in previous
estimates. Only one of the socio-economic scenarios (SSP1 1.9 - marked
by strong international cooperation and giving priority to sustainable
development) enables temperatures to remain below the 2C global warming
target, at the cost of very significant mitigation efforts and of
temporarily exceeding this target during the course of the century.
The climate models are also being used as a basis for higher-resolution
climate modelling for mainland France and its overseas territories. For
instance, several simulations carried out as part of CMIP6 'zoomed in'
on Europe and the Indian Ocean. At these resolutions, the scientists
successfully reproduced phenomena such as heat waves, tropical cyclones
and dust transport more realistically than ever before...
- - -
The work carried out by the French community involved some 100
scientists from a number of different disciplines (climatologists,
oceanographers, glaciologists, specialists in the atmosphere, vegetation
and soils, experts in intensive computing), and required significant
computer resources, namely 500 million computing hours on GENCI8 and
Météo-France's supercomputers, with 20 petabytes of data generated.
more at -
https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/182921?returnurl=https://www.alphagalileo.org/en-gb/Item-Display/ItemId/182921
[Activism]
*Friday Strike*
If you didn't know, the Sept 20-27 Global #ClimateStrike has everything.
Students, parents workers, and now? There's even a music video with The
Peace Poets.
RSVP to #StrikeWithUs: globalclimatestrike.net
https://www.facebook.com/350.org/videos/495832824311358/
[Following the money]
*Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns*
Bill McKibben
September 17, 2019
The New Yorker
What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved
away from fossil fuels?
I'm skilled at eluding the fetal crouch of despair--because I've been
working on climate change for thirty years, I've learned to parcel out
my angst, to keep my distress under control. But, in the past few
months, I've more often found myself awake at night with true
fear-for-your-kids anguish...
- - -
There's good news, too: as the crisis grows more obvious, far more
people are joining in the fight. In the year since the scientists
imposed that deadline, we've seen the rise of the Green New Deal, the
cheeky exploits of Extinction Rebellion, and the global spread of the
school strikes started by the Swedish teen-ager Greta Thunberg. It seems
that there are finally enough people to make an impact. The question is,
what levers can we pull that might possibly create change within the
time that we need it to happen?..
- - -
Climate change is a timed test, one of the first that our civilization
has faced, and with each scientific report the window narrows. By
contrast, cultural change--what we eat, how we live--often comes
generationally. Political change usually involves slow compromise, and
that's in a working system, not a dysfunctional gridlock such as the one
we now have in Washington. And, since we face a planetary crisis,
cultural and political change would have to happen in every other major
country, too.
But what if there were an additional lever to pull, one that could work
both quickly and globally? One possibility relies on the idea that
political leaders are not the only powerful actors on the planet--that
those who hold most of the money also have enormous power, and that
their power could be exercised in a matter of months or even hours, not
years or decades. I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of
carbon into the atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to
coal and oil and gas...
- - -
The director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, Lee Wasserman, says that
it's time to take on the reputations of the bankers, in much the same
way that the Sackler family has increasingly been shunned for its role
in the opioid crisis. "When the neighborhood tavern serves up several
rounds to an already drunken patron, and the inebriated person rams into
a minivan loaded with Little Leaguers, it's not only a tragedy--the bar
may be sued out of business, and the bartender could face jail time," he
said. "How much morally worse is it to enable the expansion of a deadly
fossil-fuel industry, whose business model is certain to cause the death
and suffering of millions of people and the loss of much of the earth's
diversity? Big, sophisticated banks such as Chase and Wells Fargo
understand climate science and know that our current path is leading
towards climate catastrophe. Yet their machine of finance cranks along."...
- - -
"We worried at first that it might be a cognitive leap for people,"
Connon said. "That it wouldn't be as clear to people as going directly
at the fossil-fuel companies. But that's not been my experience on the
ground. It's pretty clear. You can tell the story in one sentence:
they're funding the fossil-fuel industry, which is wrecking the planet."
In fact, he says, it's easier to take on the whole issue than small
parts of it: "We've found it much easier to talk about fossil fuels in
general, not coal or particular projects." Could the idea scale? "Every
town has a bank," he pointed out, not to mention an insurance agent and
a stockbroker. "If you could protest at forty-four Chase branches, you
could do it at all five thousand across the country."...
- - -
...victory is far from guaranteed. Persuading giant financial firms to
give up even small parts of their business would be close to
unprecedented. And inertia is a powerful force--there are whole teams of
people in each of these firms who have spent years learning the
fossil-fuel industry inside and out, so that they can lend, trade, and
underwrite efficiently and profitably. Those people would have to learn
about solar power, or electric cars. That would be hard, in the same way
that it's hard for coal miners to retrain to become solar-panel installers.
But we're all going to have to change--that's the point. Farmers around
the world are leaving their land because the sea is rising; droughts are
already creating refugees by the millions. On the spectrum of shifts
that the climate crisis will require, bankers and investors and insurers
have it easy. A manageably small part of their business needs to
disappear, to be replaced by what comes next. No one should actually be
a master of the universe. But, for the moment, the financial giants are
the masters of our planet. Perhaps we can make them put that power to
use. Fast.
more at:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns
[Understanding the sudden warming]
*How Strong Antarctica Sudden Stratospheric Warming Leads to Very Weak
Tiny Ozone Hole*
Published on Sep 18, 2019
Paul Beckwith
Following up on my last 2 videos I chat consequences for ongoing
Antarctic Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW). Mid-stratospheric air
(pressure 10 hPa: altitude 26 km) that is very cold (-70C) is displaced
downward to the troposphere, and replaced by tropospheric air 83C
warmer, bringing temperature aloft to a balmy +13C. Since chemical
reactions that destroy ozone only occur at very cold temperatures, fewer
reactions occur thus far so the ozone hole is much smaller and weaker
this year; it will likely gain some strength back as the SSW tapers off
over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcigxNYJVZY
[Climate Aware Therapists]
*CALL **FOR MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS TO COMBAT CLIMATE STRESS*
The mental health effects of the climate crisis are steadily increasing
around the world. In ar-
eas devastated by climate disasters, survivors are experiencing
increasing incidences of de-
pression, anxiety related disorders, PTSD, suicidal ideation, violent
behavior and substance
use. A new class of climate specific mental health concerns, including
eco anxiety and pre
Traumatic Stress Syndrome, are also becoming more prevalent as
descriptors of the unique
impact of climate relate d distress on children and adults These
conditions appear to stem
from the ongoing loss of climate stability and beloved ecosystems, fear
s of impending natural
disasters and their connection with war, totalitarianism, group conflict
and other forms of vi o-
lence, and dread about large swaths of the planet becoming uninhabitable
in this century By
creating a network of climate aware therapists who are part of an online
public referral list,
CPA and CPA NA hope to provide a valuable resource for individuals and
communities suffer-
ing from multidimensional climate related distress. Assembling a
directory of MHPs capable
of address ing the needs of people and communities in a planet under
stress is critical because
so often the stress is compounded by not knowi ng where or how to get
help said Lise Van
Susteren MD, Director, CPA and CPA NA Mental health professional s
interested in becoming
a climate aware provider can register at
https://tinyurl.com/climateaware therapy
*Climate-Aware Therapist Referral List Form*
The Climate Psychiatry Alliance (www.climatepsychiatry.org) and the
Climate Psychology Alliance North America (www.climatepsychology.us) are
recruiting allied mental health professionals who can deliver
high-quality, climate-aware psychotherapy for inclusion in an online,
public referral list to connect with interested clients and meet the
proliferating needs of climate-stressed and climate-distressed
individuals and communities.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYb1OaBgxx6V4_1xKH1iiKB4zPBvQAat79_Axdfqn6Rz9fPA/viewform
https://climatepsychology.us/
[From the Climate Psychology Alliance - a young woman activist in
conversation with psychotherapist Caroline Hickman ]
*PODCAST: CLIMATE CHANGE: FINDING THE SILVER LINING, PART 1*
It is easy to forget that the majority of Environmental destruction has
taken place within just one human lifetime... So imagine: what might be
achieved in the next?
In this episode, part one, Martha and Caroline will explore the concept
of generational accountability and the power of shared guilt.
https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/podcasts/384-podcast-climate-change-finding-the-silver-lining-part-1
Overwhelm, grief and terror are the first emotions which come to mind
when young Environmentalist Martha Stringer discusses the future.
And yet, through discussion with psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, she
recognises the huge potential for unity, imagination and shared meaning
which the Climate Crisis brings.
In part two, Martha and Caroline will explore the concept of
generational accountability and the power of shared guilt.
*PODCAST: CLIMATE CHANGE: FINDING THE SILVER LINING, PART 2*
https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/podcasts/386-podcast-climate-change-finding-the-silver-lining-part-3
*This Day in Climate History - September 19, 2014 - from D.R. Tucker*
September 19, 2014:
MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Bold Nebraska's Jane Kleeb discuss the September
21 People's Climate March in New York City.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/marching-for-climate-change-331374147671#
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