[TheClimate.Vote] April 9, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 9, 2020*/

[Opinion in Scientific American ]
*We're Thinking about Climate Change the Wrong Way*
Rather than convince other nations to "do their part," the U.S. should 
develop clean energy technologies and make them cheap enough for 
everyone to adopt
By Solomon Goldstein-Rose on April 8, 2020
- - -
The only way to solve climate change by anywhere near scientists' 2050 
target is for the U.S. to treat this as an engineering challenge: 
replacing all the systems that emit greenhouse gases with ones that 
don't, then making these clean systems--many of which are still in 
development--affordable enough to spread rapidly worldwide.
We can do that through moonshot-style innovation projects: RD+D, policy 
and public procurement to drive deployment and scale up manufacturing, 
financing and other measures to bring every needed technology to the 
"nth of a kind" cost that can outcompete fossil fuels globally.
- - -
This mindset is the antidote to the voter's question of "Why should we 
act massively when China isn't doing enough?" We can solve pretty much 
the entire problem through domestic policy. We don't need China to do 
much if we do enough. In fact, the more we invest in these projects 
upfront, the larger share of the economic benefits we'll reap compared 
to China.
By communicating about solving climate change as an engineering 
challenge, we can reassure voters and politicians that it is achievable: 
if we act boldly enough with massive investments in the next few years, 
we will solve the entire problem.
But communicating from a technical perspective is also effective in 
painting a picture for voters of what solving climate change actually 
looks like. That's the subject of my new book, The 100% Solution. It 
lays out five pillars that constitute the physical transformation 
needed, nearly all driven by lowering the cost of clean systems through 
manufacturing scale-up. Spoiler: solving climate change means changing 
systems, not lifestyles. If we can communicate to the average voter the 
fact that they'll be able to heat their home the same amount, drive the 
same amount, fly when necessary--only with different equipment powering 
those processes--we can make the public (and therefore our political 
leaders) more comfortable buying into the idea of a massive set of projects.

And finally, by creating a consensus among political and thought leaders 
about what must physically be achieved and a strategy encompassing the 
full range of innovation to achieve it, we can make politics the trivial 
side of solving climate change. Who doesn't like American innovation? 
Job creation? Manufacturing booms? Healthier and cheaper equipment? 
That's what we're talking about when we talk about solving climate 
change: we simply don't say it often enough.

With more technical voices speaking up, we can create a consensus around 
what must be achieved and get people comfortable with the (pretty 
awesome!) world that will be realized through this transformation. And 
we can give hope to my fellow young people who need to know that it is 
entirely possible--and although technical, perhaps politically easy--to 
fully solve climate change.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/were-thinking-about-climate-change-the-wrong-way/



[Wallace-Wells clips will be distressing]
*The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future*
By David Wallace-Wells
COVID-19 is not a climate-change pandemic -- as far as we know, nothing 
about the emergence or spread of the coronavirus bears the recognizable 
imprint of global warming. But if the disease and our utter inability to 
respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate 
change, it should, not just as a "fire drill" for climate change 
generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed 
in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of 
future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues 
to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, 
collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that 
have governed all life on this planet for all of human history.

Among the many unnerving lessons the two crises share is this one: 
Nature is mighty, and scary, and we have not defeated it but live within 
it, subject to its temperamental power, no matter where it is that you 
live or how protected you may normally feel. As the coronavirus has 
paralyzed much of the northern hemisphere, for instance, 192 billion 
locusts, perhaps 8,000 times more than usual, are swarming East Africa 
in clouds as big as whole cities, thanks to weather patterns scrambled 
by climate change; a small swarm can destroy the food supply of 35,000 
people in a single day, and they are now traveling in swathes as wide as 
25 miles, imperiling the food supply of tens of millions. In the U.S., 
it looks likely we will now be sheltering in place into the beginning of 
hurricane season. "We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false 
comfort and denial," as George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian. 
"Living behind screens, passing between capsules -- our houses, cars, 
offices and shopping malls -- we persuaded ourselves that contingency 
had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: 
insulation from natural hazards."

COVID-19 is one such hazard we believed, until a few weeks ago, we were 
mostly invulnerable to. In the future, we may have to reckon also with 
diseases we believed we already defeated, since in addition to bringing 
about pandemics of the future, global warming will revive plagues of the 
past. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not 
circulated in the air for millions of years -- in some cases, since 
before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune 
systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric 
plagues emerge from the ice. Already, in laboratories, several microbes 
have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old "extremophile" bacteria revived 
in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a 
3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of 
curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018, 
scientists revived something a bit bigger -- a worm that had been frozen 
in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.

The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times. In 
Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that 
infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million -- 
about 3 percent of the world's population, and more had died in the 
world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. 
Scientists suspect smallpox is trapped in Siberian ice, among many other 
diseases that have otherwise passed into human legend -- an abridged 
history of devastating sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic 
sun. Many of these frozen organisms won't actually survive the thaw; 
those that have been brought back to life have been reanimated typically 
under fastidious lab conditions. But in 2016, a boy was killed and 20 
others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed 
the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 
years earlier; more than 2,000 present-day reindeer died.

What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing 
scourges relocated, rewired, or even reevolved by warming. The first 
effect is geographical. Before the early modern period, human 
provinciality was a guard against pandemic -- a bug could wipe out a 
town, or a kingdom, or even in an extreme case devastate a continent -- 
but in most instances it couldn't travel much farther than its victims, 
which is to say, not very far at all. The Black Death killed as much as 
60 percent of Europe, but consider, for a gruesome counterfactual, how 
big its impact might have been in a truly globalized world.

Today, even with globalization and the rapid intermingling of human 
populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as 
another limit -- we know where certain bugs can spread, and we know the 
environments in which they cannot. (This is why certain vectors of 
adventure tourism require dozens of new vaccines and prophylactic 
medications, and why New Yorkers traveling to London don't need to worry.)

But global warming will scramble those ecosystems, meaning it will help 
disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortes did. The footprint of 
every mosquito-borne illness is currently circumscribed, for instance, 
but those borders are disappearing rapidly as the tropics expand -- the 
current rate is 30 miles per decade. In Brazil, for generations, yellow 
fever sat in the Amazon Basin, where the Haemagogus and Sabethes 
mosquitoes thrived, making the disease a concern for those who lived, 
worked, or traveled deep into the jungle, but only for them; in 2016, it 
left the Amazon as more and more mosquitoes fanned out of the rain 
forest, and by 2017, it had reached areas around the country's 
megalopolises, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro -- more than 30 million 
people, many of them living in shantytowns, facing the arrival of a 
disease that kills between 3 and 8 percent of those infected.

Yellow fever is just one of the plagues that will be carried by 
mosquitoes as they migrate, conquering more and more of a warming world 
-- the globalization of pandemic disease. Malaria alone already kills a 
million people each year, infecting many more, but you don't worry much 
about it if you are living in Maine or France. As the tropics creep 
northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you may; over the course of 
the next century, more and more of the world's population will be living 
under the shadow of diseases like these. You didn't worry much about 
Zika before a couple of years ago, either.

As it happens, Zika may be a good model of a second worrying effect -- 
disease mutation. One reason you hadn't heard about Zika until recently 
is that it had been trapped in Uganda and Southeast Asia; another is 
that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects. 
Scientists still don't entirely understand what happened or what they 
missed, even now, several years after the planet was gripped by panic 
about microcephaly. It could be that the disease changed as it came to 
the Americas, the result of a genetic mutation or in adaptive response 
to a new environment, or that Zika produces those devastating prenatal 
effects only when another disease is present, possibly one less common 
in Africa, or that something about the environment or immunological 
history in Uganda protects mothers and their unborn children there.

But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects some 
diseases. Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions, which is one 
reason the World Bank estimates that by 2030, 3.6 billion people will be 
reckoning with it -- 100 million as a direct result of climate change.

Projections like those depend not just on climate models but on an 
intricate understanding of the organism at play. Or, rather, organisms. 
Malaria transmission involves both the disease and the mosquito; Lyme 
disease, both the disease and the tick -- which is another 
epidemiologically threatening creature whose universe is rapidly 
expanding, thanks to global warming. As Mary Beth Pfeiffer has 
documented, Lyme-case counts have spiked in Japan, Turkey, and South 
Korea, where the disease was literally nonexistent as recently as 2010 
-- zero cases -- and now lives inside hundreds more Koreans each year. 
In the Netherlands, 54 percent of the country's land is now infested; in 
Europe as a whole, Lyme caseloads are now three times the standard 
level. In the U.S., there are likely around 300,000 new infections each 
year -- and since even many of those treated for Lyme continue to show 
symptoms years after treatment, the numbers can stockpile. Overall, the 
number of disease cases from mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas have tripled 
in the U.S. over just the last 13 years, with dozens of counties across 
the country encountering ticks for the first time. But the effects of 
the epidemic can be seen perhaps most clearly in animals other than 
humans: In Minnesota, during the aughts, winter ticks helped drop the 
moose population by 58 percent in a single decade, and some 
environmentalists believe the species could be eradicated entirely from 
the state within the next few years.

In New England, moose calves have been found suckling as many as 90,000 
engorged ticks, which often kill the calves not through Lyme disease but 
simple anemia, the effect of that number of bugs each drawing a few 
milliliters of blood. Those that survive are far from robust, many 
having scratched so incessantly at their own hides to clear the ticks 
that they completely eliminated their own hair, leaving behind a spooky 
gray skin that has earned them the name "ghost moose."

Lyme is still, in relative terms, a young disease, and one we don't yet 
understand all that well. We attribute a very mysterious and incoherent 
set of symptoms to it, from joint pain to fatigue to memory loss to 
facial palsy, almost as a catchall explanation for ailments we cannot 
pinpoint in patients who we know have been bitten by a bug carrying the 
bug. We do know ticks, however, as surely as we know malaria -- there 
are not many parasites we understand better. But there are many, many 
millions we understand worse, which means our sense of how climate 
change will redirect or remodel them is shrouded in a foreboding 
ignorance. And then there are the plagues that climate change will 
confront us with for the very first time -- a whole new universe of 
diseases humans have never before known to even worry about.

"New universe" is not hyperbole. Scientists guess the planet could 
harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses -- many of them, 
like COVID-19, for now "quarantined" in particular susceptible species, 
but which could evolve or "jump" into humans, either as the result of 
changing climatic conditions or because the scrambling of native 
ecosystems and habitats brings the host species into contact with humans 
in a much more direct way that ever before. The more we pave over and 
log and deforest the natural world, disrupting stable ecosystems and 
turning those organisms living happily within them out into the human 
world, the more diseases, and pandemics, we'll produce. That is what it 
means to be living entirely outside the window of climate conditions 
that enclose all of human history -- everything we have ever taken to be 
stable about our relationship to the planet is thrown into chaos. That 
chaos will confront us, again and again, with undiscovered disease.

Bacteria are even trickier, and so we probably know about even fewer of 
them. Perhaps scariest are those that live within us, peacefully for 
now. More than 99 percent of even those bacteria inside human bodies are 
currently unknown to science, which means we are operating in near-total 
ignorance about the effects climate change might have on the bugs in, 
for instance, our guts -- about how many of the bacteria modern humans 
have come to rely on, like unseen factory workers, for everything from 
digesting our food to modulating our anxiety, could be rewired, 
diminished, or entirely killed off by an additional few degrees of heat.

Overwhelmingly, of course, the viruses and bacteria making homes inside 
us are nonthreatening to humans -- at present. Presumably, a difference 
of a degree or two in global temperature won't dramatically change the 
behavior of the majority of them -- probably the vast majority, even the 
overwhelming majority. But consider the case of the saiga -- the 
adorable dwarflike antelope, native to Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly 
two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days -- 
every single saiga in an area the size of Florida, the land suddenly 
dotted with hundreds of thousands of saiga carcasses and not one lone 
survivor. An event like this is called a "megadeath," this one so 
striking and cinematic that it gave rise, immediately, to a whole raft 
of conspiracy theories: aliens, radiation, dumped rocket fuel. But no 
toxins were found by researchers poking through the killing fields -- in 
the animals themselves, in the soil, in the local plants. The culprit, 
it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocida, which had 
lived inside the saiga's tonsils, without threatening its host in any 
way, for many, many generations. Suddenly, it had proliferated, 
emigrated to the bloodstream, and from there to the animals' liver, 
kidneys, and spleen. Why? "The places where the saigas died in May 2015 
were extremely warm and humid," Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic. "In fact, 
humidity levels were the highest ever seen in the region since records 
began in 1948. The same pattern held for two earlier, and much smaller, 
die-offs from 1981 and 1988. When the temperature gets really hot, and 
the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger, Pasteurella 
is the bullet."

This is not to say we now understand what precisely about humidity 
weaponized Pasteurella, or how many of the other bacteria living inside 
mammals like us -- the one percent we have identified, or perhaps more 
worryingly the 99 percent we house without any knowledge or 
understanding -- might be similarly triggered by climate, friendly 
symbiotic bugs with whom we've lived in some cases for millions of years 
transformed suddenly into contagions already inside us. That remains a 
mystery. But ignorance is no comfort. Presumably climate change will 
introduce us to some of them.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/the-coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-climate-change-future.html 




[A great young voice - from a disasterologist]
Dr. Samantha Montano
@SamLMontano
https://twitter.com/samlmontano/
https://twitter.com/SamLMontano/status/1213131182877093889
- - -
[Hot Take audio podcast with transcript]
*Disaster Denialism with Guest Co-Host Dr. Samantha Montano*
https://megaphone.link/ADL3388618773
- -
[Samantha Montano video talk in 2017]
*From Acts of God to Disasterology | Dr. Samantha Montano | Skepticon 10*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_wM657RJK0



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - April 9, 2007 *

Environmental activist Laurie David and singer Sheryl Crow begin a brief 
tour of colleges and universities across the United States to raise 
awareness about climate change. Later in the month, the Washington Post 
reports on the David/Crow tour.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041900650.html

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