[TheClimate.Vote] April 3, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 3, 2020*/

[it is all connected]
*Covid-19's viral lessons for climate heating*
April 2nd, 2020, by Kieran Cooke
In the midst of the coronavirus epidemic, Covid-19's viral lessons offer 
a warning of what may lie ahead.

LONDON, 2 April, 2020 - There are some glimmers of hope discernible in 
the loss, confusion and misery that's spreading worldwide, and one is 
that Covid-19's viral lessons could help to equip us all to tackle the 
climate crisis that's remorselessly building up.

A major side effect of the battle against the spread of the corona 
virus, for example, has been a significant reduction in the amount of 
climate-changing greenhouse gas being pumped into the atmosphere.

Power plants and factories in China and elsewhere have been shut down: 
the use of fossil fuels, particularly oil, has plummeted.

As a result of this reduced pollution, millions of people in cities and 
regions across the world are breathing fresher, cleaner air.

The epidemic has had other environmental consequences: residents of 
Venice in northern Italy say they have never seen such clear water in 
the city's canals, mainly due to the dramatic drop in tourist numbers.

With several countries in lockdown, car and truck traffic no longer 
clogs up the roads and motorways.

"Covid 19 is a test of how the world copes with crisis. Climate change 
will present a much greater challenge"...
- -
Warnings ignored
Epidemiologists have constantly warned of the likelihood of the 
worldwide spread of a virus, saying it is not a case of if, but when. 
For the most part, they have been ignored.

In the same way, climate scientists have been warning for decades of the 
catastrophe threatened by global heating. Covid-19 shows how vital it is 
to listen to the science. Perhaps the epidemic will prompt a more urgent 
approach to climate change.

Covid-19 also reinforces the difficult-to-get-hold-of concept that 
nothing is normal any more. Suddenly the world has been turned into a 
very uncertain place. Behaviour which many of us have taken for granted, 
such as international travel, is, for now at least, no longer 
acceptable, or good for our health.

Scientists say climate change will mean even greater and more sustained 
adjustments to our lives. Rising seas will result in the displacement of 
millions of coastal dwellers. Floods and droughts will cause 
agricultural havoc and severe food shortages. People will have to adjust 
to a new - and constantly changing - reality.

Leadership and a clarity of policy - again, both at a national and 
international level - have been shown to be essential in fighting the 
coronavirus. After initial failings, China and South Korea moved to 
impose a strict and comprehensive regime to control the epidemic...
- -
In Brazil, Bolsonaro - he refuses to believe in climate change - 
describes Covid-19 as a fantasy, suggesting it's all a plot by China to 
weaken the country's economy. Opposition to Bolsonaro's lack of action 
on the pandemic is growing.

Covid 19 is a test of how the world - and its leaders - copes with 
crisis. Climate change, rapidly galloping down the tracks, will present 
a much greater challenge. - Climate News Network
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/covid-19s-viral-lessons-for-climate-heating/



[Bloomberg Green]
*Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Time of Coronavirus and Climate Change*
Like climate economics, the economics of Covid-19 mean we need to take 
aggressive action, not incremental steps.
By Gernot Wagner - April 1, 2020
- - -
Denying basic physics and chemistry will not make the climate problem 
disappear, as much as attempting to reinterpret biological and medical 
realities isn't going to make Covid-19 go away. In both cases, the 
economics, too, point in one and only one direction. Economics 101 
supports the fundamental conclusions of climate science, much like it 
supports the fundamental epidemiological conclusions in the case of 
Covid-19.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/cost-benefit-analysis-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-and-climate-change



[rescheduled - from the Guardian]
*Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021*
Crucial UN conference will be delayed until next year as a result of the 
coronavirus crisis

The UN climate talks due to be held in Glasgow later this year have been 
postponed as governments around the world struggle to halt the spread of 
coronavirus.

The most important climate negotiations since the Paris agreement in 
2015 were scheduled to take place this November to put countries back on 
track to avoid climate breakdown. They will now be pushed back to 2021.

A statement from the UN on Wednesday night confirmed that the meeting of 
over 26,000 attendees would be delayed until next year. It said new 
dates for the conference would be decided in due course.

The UK energy minister and president of the Cop26 conference, Alok 
Sharma, held crunch talks with the UN and several other countries on 
Wednesday evening to confirm the timing of the summit. "The world is 
currently facing an unprecedented global challenge and countries are 
rightly focusing their efforts on saving lives and fighting Covid-19. 
That is why we have decided to reschedule Cop26," he said.

"We will continue working tirelessly with our partners to deliver the 
ambition needed to tackle the climate crisis and I look forward to 
agreeing a new date for the conference."

The Cop26 meeting was scheduled to be held in Glasgow at the SEC arena, 
a venue that the Scottish government plans to turn into a field hospital 
to treat virus victims...
more at - 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/01/uk-likely-to-postpone-cop26-un-climate-talks-glasgow-coronavirus



[From Wired a few paragraphs]
*This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For*
Pop culture has been inundated with catastrophe porn for decades. None 
of it has prepared us for our new reality.
LAURIE PENNY - 03.30.2020
THE SHOCK ITSELF is shocking. Shouldn't we have been more prepared? 
Hasn't culture been drenched in catastrophe porn for decades? The bomb. 
The breakdown. The fallout. The senseless armies of shambling corpses, 
all the nightmares of dead generations sliding out of our screens. For 
more than a decade, young and young-ish people have been living in 
anticipatory grief for everything we know. But somehow, this is different.

The idea of imminent annihilating catastrophe has been part of the 
collective unconscious for as long as we've had one. From the end date 
of the Mayan calendar to the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Genesis flood 
to the Book of Revelation, humans have been haunted by the idea of the 
end of everything for a very, very long time. Lately, it's been our 
default popular entertainment. Raised with the threat of global warming 
in the teeth of a financial crisis, we sat stunned and exhausted, 
watching our civilization die onscreen again and again. More 
postapocalyptic entertainment has come out in the beginning of this 
century than in the entirety of the last one. The Day After Tomorrow. 
Zombieland. The Walking Dead. The Road. Children of Men. The Last of Us. 
The same story again and again, somewhere between wish fulfillment and 
trauma rehearsal, getting us used to the idea that the future was 
canceled, that someday soon everything would collapse, and there would 
be nothing left and nothing we could do about it...
- - -
This is because late capitalism has always been a death cult. The 
tiny-minded incompetents in charge cannot handle a problem that can't be 
fixed simply by sacrificing poor, vulnerable, and otherwise expendable 
individuals. Faced with a crisis they can't solve with violence, they 
dithered and whined and wasted time that can and will be counted in 
corpses. There has been no vision, because these men never imagined the 
future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in 
gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain 
amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to 
protect the current financial system. The airwaves have been full of 
spineless right-wing zealots so focused on putting the win in social 
Darwinism that they keep accidentally saying the quiet bit out loud...
- - -
Pop culture catastrophism didn't prepare us for this. "Look, this isn't 
a movie," as one furious Italian mayor, broadcasting from his front 
room, put it last week. "You are not Will Smith in I Am Legend." For one 
thing, it's so relentlessly social...
- - -
The end of the world has never been quite so simple a mythos for women, 
likely because most of us know that when social structures crack and 
shatter, what happens isn't an instant reversion to muscular 
state-of-naturism. What happens is that women and carers of all genders 
quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many 
people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the 
front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very 
people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the 
ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, 
cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of 
the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the 
species--not even when they imagine its grave.
In the end, it will not be butchery. Instead it will be bakery, as 
everyone has apparently decided that the best thing to do when the world 
lurches sideways is learn to make bread. Yeast is gone from the shops. 
Even I have been acting out in the kitchen, although my baked goods are 
legendarily dreadful. A friend and former roommate, who knows me well, 
called from Berlin to ask if I had "made the terrible, horrible biscuits 
yet." These misfortune cookies tend to happen at moments of such extreme 
stress that those around me feel obliged to eat them. They say that if 
you can make a cake, you can make a bomb; if the whole thing implodes, 
my job will not be in munitions.

My job will be the same as yours and everyone else's: to be kind, to 
stay calm, and to take care of whoever happens to need taking care of in 
my immediate vicinity. We have been living for many, many years in what 
Gramsci called a time of monsters, where "the old is dying and the new 
cannot be born." The new is now being induced in a hurry, because after 
this, nothing is going back to normal. It's the end of the world as we 
know it, and everything does feel fine--not fine like chill, but fine 
like china, like glass, like thread. Everything feels so fine, and so 
fragile, and so shockingly worth saving.
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-apocalypse-myths/


[Smithsonian Mag site]
*Why This Rare, Huge Ozone Hole Over the Arctic Is Puzzling Scientists*
The new wound further diminishes Earth's protective shield against 
damaging solar radiation
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/huge-ozone-hole-opens-over-arctic-rare-atmospheric-event-180974560/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 3, 1980 *
"The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" reports on the role coal 
plays in fueling global warming.
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/

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