[TheClimate.Vote] September 30, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/September 30, 2019/

[video summary on IPCC and melting]
*IPCC : Accelerating Ice Melt and Rapidly Warming Oceans*
Sep 29, 2019
Just Have a Think
The IPCC have just released the third of three special reports on the 
perilous state of our our climate. These were reports they pledged to 
produce back at the Paris COP meeting in 2015. Following the very 
alarming SR15 report last October and the more recent report on Climate 
Change and Land Use, this report focuses on our oceans and also on the 
mind boggling quantities of fresh water that up until recently have been 
safely locked away in our glaciers and ice sheets but that are now 
rapidly melting into the seas. This week we take a brief look at some of 
their headline findings and recommendations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJKfOdyT3Q
- - -
[IPCC - Ocean and Cryosphere - Summary for Policy Makers]
https://report.ipcc.ch/srocc/pdf/SROCC_SPM_Approved.pdf


[why not]
*Ecocide Should Be Recognized as a Crime Against Humanity, but We Can't 
Wait for The Hague to Judge*
Natasha Lennard - September 24 2019,
- - -
With the stakes of global heating intolerable, and the fanglessness of 
international climate agreements undeniable, it is little wonder that 
activists are calling for the major perpetrators of environmental 
decimation to be seen as guilty parties in mass atrocity, on a par with 
war crimes and genocide. The demand that ecocide -- the decimation of 
ecosystems, humanity and non-human life -- be prosecutable by The 
International Criminal Court has found renewed force in a climate 
movement increasingly unafraid to name its enemies.

The push to establish ecocide as an international crime aims to create 
criminal liability for chief executives and government ministers, while 
creating a legal duty of care for life on earth. Its strength, however, 
lies not in the practical or likely ability of The Hague -- a profoundly 
flawed judicial body -- to deliver climate justice. The demand that 
ecocide be recognized as a crime against humanity and non-human life is 
most powerful as a heuristic: a framework for insisting that 
environmental destruction has nameable guilty parties, perpetrators of 
mass atrocity, against whom climate struggle must be waged on numerous 
fronts.
- - -
Efforts around the recognition of ecocide, spearheaded for decades by 
environmentalist lawyers and advocates like the late British barrister 
Polly Higgins, reflect the desire to see environmental degradation 
formally recognized as the highest order of atrocity. Equally, appeals 
to the ICC suggest an understandable (if Sisyphean) scramble to find an 
authority, some authority, capable of holding the fossil fuel industry 
and its state partners accountable...
- - -
The ICC has jurisdiction over four categories of crime, collectively 
known as Crimes Against Peace, which are meant to constitute "the most 
serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole." 
Currently, these are: crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war 
crimes, and crimes of aggression (the latter, only added in 2017, 
narrowly covers military invasions and occupations in violation of the 
United Nations charter). Efforts to see ecocide recognized by the ICC 
are two-fold: either that ecocide be included under crimes against 
humanity, or established as its own separate Crime Against Peace. The 
strength of endowing ecocide with its own category would be that it 
covers the decimation of ecosystems, as well as the destruction of 
civilian populations, and thus recognizes the existential threat of 
climate change to life on earth. Ecocide is a crime against humanity, 
but also non-human life.

The moral grounds are clear for enumerating ecocide among the most 
serious international crimes. The latest alarming reports from the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear that climate 
change could produce a death toll of hundreds of millions in coming 
decades. A 2012 report commissioned by 20 governments determined that 
already 400,000 annual deaths are attributable to climate change related 
events; that figure is expected to reach 6 million per year by 2030 
without drastic shifts to global modes of production and fossil fuel 
reliance. And a fact that can not be emphasized enough: Just 100 fossil 
fuel producers have been responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas 
emissions released in the last 30 years...
- - -
When it comes to narratives about environmental degradation, the 
greatest lie of all is that people are not responsible. The second 
greatest lie is that people are equally responsible. Last year, the New 
York Times Magazine published an entire issue dedicated to one extended 
essay by novelist Nathaniel Rich. It was framed as a devastating and 
overdue exposure of how we could have prevented climate catastrophe in 
the 1980s, given available scientific understanding, but "we" did not. 
"All the facts were known, and nothing stood in our way," wrote Rich. 
"Nothing, that is, except ourselves." Rich's story conveniently ignores 
the ferocious capitalist hierarchies, which decimate natural resources 
for profit, while state militaries and police forces help quash 
environmentalist and indigenous resistance -- just think of the 
militarized police assaults and swathes of criminal charges faced by the 
Water Protectors who took a stand at Standing Rock.

"It's hard to think of a problem more widely attributed to 'abstract 
entities' than global warming, allegedly the product of some 
unquenchable, ubiquitous human thirst for new stuff," wrote Kate Aronoff 
in a recent, convincing Jacobin essay, which argued for trying fossil 
fuel executives for crimes against humanity, starting with with Rex 
Tillerson and other ExxonMobil executives, who knowingly covered up 
evidence of climate change devastation and reaped the profits. "We do 
all create demand for fossil fuels. But supply creates demand," Aronoff 
wrote, adding, "In the case of the climate crisis, it's the industry 
itself that is driving crimes against humanity, and states that are 
complicit in issuing everything from drilling and infrastructure permits 
to generous subsidies -- $20 billion per year in the United States 
alone."...
- - -
Early drafts of the Rome Statute, the ICC's founding document, 
originally included a law of ecocide. In the 1980s, the United Nations 
International Law Commission (ILC) considered the inclusion of 
environmental crime in the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and 
Security of Mankind, which would later become the Rome Statute. Some 
versions of the Draft Code went as far as to assert that the crime of 
ecocide could be established without proving a perpetrator's intent to 
create environmental damage. A U.N. representative from Austria stated 
in 1993, "Since perpetrators of this crime are usually acting out of a 
profit motive, intent should not be a condition for liability to 
punishment." Yet, the article relating the the crime of environmental 
damage was removed from final Code adopted by the ILC in 1996. The Rome 
Statute's inclusion of environmental concerns was limited to cover only 
intentional acts of environmental degradation perpetrated as crimes of 
war. Peacetime ecocide, enacted by corporations and governments, "was 
removed completely, and somewhat mysteriously, from the Code" noted a 
2012 report from the University of London's Human Rights Consortium, 
which detailed the history of ecocide law.

- - -
The ICC is, of course, not the only judicial institution by which to 
challenge perpetrators of ecocide. Presently in the U.S. nine cities 
have ongoing civil suits against fossil fuel companies, two states have 
launched fraud investigations into Exxon specifically over climate 
change. And as Aronoff also noted, "in Juliana vs. U.S., young people 
have filed suit against the government for violating their 
constitutional rights by pursuing policies that intensify global 
warming, hitting the dense ties between Big Oil and the state." 
Invocations of international criminal law are an attempt to escalate the 
stakes for the most powerful perpetrators. Given the court's 
limitations, it may be that the demand that ecocide be recognized as a 
crime against humanity and non-human life matters more than putting 
stock in ICC action. The idea that the struggle for climate justice is a 
fight against powerful actors who have perpetrated atrocities offers a 
necessary framework and guiding principle for our climate actions...
- - -
Other terrains of social justice struggle, such as #MeToo, have also 
shown the potential uses of criminal justice lexicon and narrative, 
necessarily deployed outside of a problematic criminal justice 
apparatus. Those of us who believe that no lasting justice can come from 
carceral solutions (given the inherent violence of that system) see the 
intolerable risks of relying on, or bolstering, criminal justice as a 
path to social justice. The strength of #MeToo revelations lay not in 
their ability to convince a judge, but to build consensus around the 
need to unseat powerful perpetrators of sexual violence.

Legal norms and rights can and do take on political life through direct 
action, community consultation and protest. Even if the court's 
signatories resist adopting ecocide as a crime, or as is likely, the 
court fails to prosecute, let alone convict, the world's worst climate 
criminals, we can and must take justice into our own hands. Collective 
action -- like last week's mass climate strike, like voting for leaders 
pushing a Green New Deal, like fighting for our lives against capitalism 
-- must be pursued with vigor. This is how we take the fight against 
ecocide to its perpetrators.
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/24/climate-justice-ecocide-humanity-crime/



[statistics -- pour a glass of wine as you read of grapes and global 
warming]
*Climate Change: in Vino Veritas*
Posted on September 28, 2019
In truly fascinating new research, scientists have searched historical 
records to collect data about when the grape harvest began each year. 
Their research wasn't published in the Journal of French Wine (I don't 
know if there even is one), it was published in the journal Climate of 
the Past. That's because the date when the grape harvest begins is a 
clue to temperature.

The importance of clues like this is that they extend farther back in 
time than thermometer records. The grape harvest dates (GHD) start in 
the year 1354 -- centuries before the thermometer was even invented. 
Also quite important: they are all for the same location: Beaune, France.

When the temperature is hotter, the grapes are ready to harvest earlier. 
When it's colder, they harvest later. If climate is really heating up, 
the grape harvest should be getting earlier. And what did they find? This:

[view the graph https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/ghd.jpg]

There's no doubt about it: since about 1980, the grape harvest has been 
getting earlier in Beaune, France. I don't say so simply based on 
"eyeballing" the graph -- I've run the numbers, done the statistical 
tests, and there is no doubt about it.

Visually, the change seems to start right around 1980, so I used 
changepoint analysis to estimate when it really started to heat up (when 
the grape harvest really started getting earlier). It suggests that it 
actually began around the year 1978:

[View the graph https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/ghd_plf.jpg]

Before 1978, the harvest was getting earlier by about -0.007 +/- 0.007 
d/yr (days per year. That means the real rate is most likely between 
-0.014 d/yr and 0 d/yr. It certainly wasn't changing much, if at all.

But since 1978, the trend is a whopping -0.53 +/- 0.23 d/yr. It's 
definitely trending earlier, and at a half day a year, since 1978 it has 
gotten earlier by about 20 days. Here's a close-up on the data since the 
year 1800:

[view the graph https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/ghd_plf2.jpg]

Interestingly, the earliest GHD (Grape Harvest Day) in Beaune, France 
was in the year 2003 when France suffered through its worst heat wave ever.

I can also estimate the trend with a smoothing function, and regular 
readers know I'm fond of the lowess smooth (but different methods give 
essentially the same result):

[view the graph https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/ghd_low.jpg]

It fluctuated before 1978 -- real data does that -- but since 1978 it 
has been declining precipitously. This is not natural. It's because of 
man-made climate change.

We can get an "image" of how this indicates temperature has changed 
throughout the years, simply by turning the graph upside down:

[view the graph https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/hockeystick.jpg ]

That is one steep rise since 1978. Just as obvious as the recent steep 
rise, is the lack of such things in the previous 600 years. This is not 
natural. It's man-made climate change. Does the shape of this graph 
remind you of anything? Maybe… something like… a hockey stick?

Whenever new evidence of climate change emerges, climate deniers try to 
dispute it by any means necessary. They especially hate anything that 
looks like a hockey stick because it shows so clearly how what's 
happening today is not like what we've seen before. It's not natural. 
Perhaps they'll claim that French wine-grapes are communists who want to 
destroy our freedom and impose world government.

I'm looking forward to seeing their response. This is such a wonderful 
opportunity for them to embarrass themselves! I'm sure they're up to the 
task.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/climate-change-in-vino-veritas/


[We are only TABs - Temporarily Able Bodied]
*Disabled People Cannot Be "Expected Losses" in the Climate Crisis*
Julia Watts Belser, Truthout
PUBLISHED - September 20, 2019
Disabled people face disproportionate risks from climate change. 
Consider the impact of floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather 
events that are intensified by the climate crisis. The structural 
barriers that disability communities face every day -- inaccessible 
infrastructure, subpar public transportation systems, refusals to 
provide communication access, endemic poverty and a limited voice in 
civic governance -- become a matter of life or death during disaster.

Public failures to address disability during disaster are getting more 
attention, thanks to the work of leaders like Marcie Roth at the 
Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, who has built a coalition 
of disability leaders, emergency management professionals and public 
health experts committed to disability inclusive disaster response. 
Among them? Germán Parodi, a disability activist, regional 
representative to the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, 
and the first person with a significant spinal cord injury to deploy to 
an area directly impacted by disaster. Shortly after Hurricane Maria, 
Parodi led a team to Puerto Rico to provide support and aid for disabled 
and elderly residents, many of whom were without power, supplies or 
essential medical equipment.

Meanwhile recent media accounts have laid bare the risks: stories of New 
Yorkers who were trapped in high-rise apartment buildings for days after 
Hurricane Sandy; nursing home residents in Florida who died from extreme 
heat after their institution failed to evacuate in advance of Hurricane 
Irma; or disaster warnings that are inaccessible to Deaf communities. 
Such stories call attention to the ways in which Deaf and disabled 
people are especially vulnerable to climate disruption.
- - -
"It's terrible," he told me. "But what can you do? Some people just 
aren't going to make it." Once I got over my outrage, I realized my 
colleague had unwittingly named a core problem facing those of us 
organizing for climate justice: the assumption that some folks simply 
aren't cut out to survive...
- - -
That kind of political story is a powerful tool for organizing. Those 
political recognitions led disabled filmmakers at Rooted in Rights to 
document and organize for collective action -- and spurred policy 
analyst Adrien A. Weibgen to lay out "the right to be rescued," building 
upon a class action lawsuit that found the City of New York's inadequate 
disaster plan discriminated against people with disabilities after 
Superstorm Sandy in 2012...
- - -
Popular accounts of disability and disaster usually follow one of two 
scripts. Disabled people are either used to sell a story of triumph over 
adversity, to showcase the possibility of overcoming seemingly 
insurmountable odds; or we serve as icons of disaster, as visible 
embodiments of tragedy and vulnerability. All too often, that tragic 
story makes disabled people seem like natural victims -- "expected 
losses" of climate crisis.

While these two stories feel like opposites, the political work they 
perform is strikingly similar: They focus our attention on the 
individual, rather than the political. They veil the effects of 
structural inequality and injustice. They turn our gaze away from the 
problem of power.

Working for climate justice requires challenging the root causes of 
vulnerability, rather than treating disabled people as the inevitable 
casualties of climate change. It also means interrogating the realities 
that keep some of us farther from the storm...
- - -
No body is disposable. That ethical call pulses at the heart of climate 
justice and disability justice movements.
https://truthout.org/articles/disabled-people-cannot-be-expected-losses-in-the-climate-crisis/


[buckle up]
*From Antarctica to the Oceans, Climate Change Damage Is About to Get a 
Lot Worse, IPCC Warns*
Dangerous shifts are already underway. If fossil fuel use continues at 
this pace, the world will see sweeping consequences for nature and 
humans, report authors say.
BY SABRINA SHANKMAN - SEP 25, 2019

As the planet warms, diverse ecosystems--from mountain glaciers to the 
icy Arctic to the oceans--are already seeing dangerous effects from 
climate change. Future warming will threaten food supplies, force the 
migration of countless species and dramatically change the icy regions 
of the world. The changes are coming. How much is up to us, scientists 
warn in a new report released Wednesday by the United Nations.

The changes are happening faster than many scientists expected to see, 
and they're often intricately connected, with cascading effects that can 
ripple through ecosystems.

As global temperatures rise, time is running out. The cryosphere--areas 
of the planet that are frozen--is shrinking as glaciers and sea ice 
melt, snowpack declines and permafrost thaws. At the same time, oceans 
have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat and about a quarter of the 
carbon dioxide from human activities, leading to greater acidification 
that harms shellfish and corals and lowers oxygen levels in the water.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25092019/ipcc-cryosphere-ocean-report-climate-change-sea-level-rise-greenland-antarctica


[The Economist inquires, but In the LONG term the answer has to be no]
*Can you insure against climate change? | The Economist*
Sep 28, 2019
The Economist
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change. 
As the economic costs of disasters rise, can the insurance industry cope 
with the losses? Read more https://econ.st/2ndFMZ3

Extreme weather events like these are becoming more frequent. It's not 
just causing untold human suffering but also ever-growing economic 
costs. As the losses pile up, will insurers be able to cope with the damage?

In 2017 Hurricane Harvey, mudslides in Sierra Leone, and monsoon floods 
in South Asia all contributed to the largest year on record for 
insurance losses - with payouts totalling $144bn.

In America for example between 1980 and 2015 you had about five events a 
year that each cost more than $1bn in damage. Since 2016 it's been an 
average of 15 events like this a year.

This leaves the insurance industry uniquely exposed and having to pay 
out a lot of money all at once. Insurers aren't helped by the obsolete 
information they rely on either. They find it hard to predict when this 
happens because their models are not really taking into account climate 
change. They look at maybe 30, 40 years of data and they assume that the 
environment within these data, this period, is pretty stable. So these 
models look at a world that doesn't really exist anymore.

And it's no surprise what's now happening to the price of insurance. If 
you look at the last quarter premiums on property insurance in America 
rose by 10%. In Australia and New Zealand they rose by about 18%. And at 
some point premiums may simply become unaffordable especially so as 
disasters regularly happen in places where people can least afford to 
pay high premiums.

Half of last year's losses from natural disasters were uninsured. And in 
America 85% of homeowners have no flood insurance even though half of 
the population lives near water. Increasing premiums might just lead to 
even more people being left out in the cold. But there are some more 
novel solutions.

So, for example, Lloyd's of London has a policy that sends 1,000 
(Sterling) per hectare to Spanish olive farmers as soon as the 
temperatures reach 36 degrees. So these are very simple solutions to put 
in place, very easy to implement and also quite cheap in fact, which is 
the main advantage. Rather than compensate the farmers after their 
losses are reported insurance companies monitor a specific parameter 
such as rainfall or temperature.

When this passes an agreed threshold they pay out a lump sum. Known as 
parametric insurance, this approach can help the insurance companies cut 
costs and in turn bring down premiums for the consumer. But as the 
climate crisis worsens the same challenges are likely to re-emerge. We 
cannot expect insurers to save us from climate change because the world 
fundamentally cannot be insured against climate change. However many 
companies already offer discounts to homeowners who for example install 
metallic shutters on the windows or flood-proof doors.

But they could make a more drastic step. So a city on the coast wants to 
build flood defences. This will require a lot of money but perhaps 
insurers maybe in cooperation with banks could offer some financing for 
them to do that. They can help us design solutions or take measures that 
will limit losses. And this is really the crucial role they can play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rboohXy4QcU



*This Day in Climate History - September 30, 2004 - from D.R. Tucker*
In his first debate with President Bush, Democratic challenger and 
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry incurs the wrath of the right wing by 
declaring:

    "The president always has the right, and always has had the right,
    for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold
    War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with
    respect to arms control. No president, though all of American
    history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in
    any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

    "But if and when you do it, Jim [Lehrer], you have to do it in a way
    that passes the test, that passes the global test where your
    countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what
    you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for
    legitimate reasons. Here we have our own secretary of state who has
    had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the
    United Nations.

    "I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile
    crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle.
    And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles
    in Cuba, he said, 'Here, let me show you the photos.' And DeGaulle
    waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president
    of the United States is good enough for me."

    "How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a
    result of what we've done, in that way? So what is at test here is
    the credibility of the United States of America and how we lead the
    world. And Iran and Iraq are now more dangerous -- Iran and North
    Korea are now more dangerous.

    "Now, whether preemption is ultimately what has to happen, I don't
    know yet. But I'll tell you this: As president, I'll never take my
    eye off that ball. I've been fighting for proliferation the entire
    time -- anti-proliferation the entire time I've been in the
    Congress. And we've watched this president actually turn away from
    some of the treaties that were on the table.

    "You don't help yourself with other nations when you turn away from
    the global warming treaty, for instance, or when you refuse to deal
    at length with the United Nations.

    "You have to earn that respect. And I think we have a lot of earning
    back to do."

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/FullS  (59:20--61:22)
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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