[TheClimate.Vote] April 14 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Apr 14 11:05:57 EDT 2020

/*April 14, 2020*/

[in the Salt Lake Tribune]
*Commentary: Coronavirus response is how we should be facing climate change*
We live in frightening times. Shelves stand barren in grocery stores, 
whilst an invisible enemy threatens our lives and the lives of our loved 
ones. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic is not the only catastrophe affecting 
Utah right now.

We are 11 students from the University of Utah's Honors College studying 
the climate changes that Utah is experiencing. Our class met with the 
Kem Gardner Institute's director, researched climate displacement and 
worked to assist the university's ongoing efforts toward carbon 
neutrality. Now we find ourselves in a pandemic that has surprising 
parallels to the climate emergency that motivated us in the first place. 
Speaking as students, youths and concerned community members, we want to 
say that the coronavirus has changed the world seemingly overnight, and 
it offers a new perspective to understand the culture surrounding 
climate change.

In the past decade, climate change has played a role in disastrous 
global events, posing a threat to Utah's youth, economy, and 
environment. Fortunately, our current response to COVID-19 has provided 
two lessons that can be used to address the climate crisis: the 
remarkable power of working together and the benefits of a swift response.

We are capable of coming together to benefit their community. The CDC 
warns that the number of COVID-19 cases will rise dramatically in the 
coming weeks, thereby overwhelming the current medical infrastructure. 
To prevent this, Utahns have been asked to participate in social 
distancing. By and large, we have successfully implemented this 
collective task relatively early in the crisis.

Acting in the collective interest is a lesson Utah should apply to the 
impending climate crisis. Currently, we are acting to protect our 
families and friends, but when the coronavirus subsides this energy can 
be dedicated to carbon neutrality and global warming. Investing in 
renewable energy, purchasing carbon offsets and supporting environmental 
legislation are ways we can help mitigate the effects of the climate 
crisis and create a healthier future for all of Utah.

The coronavirus pandemic shows the importance of quick and decisive 
action in the face of catastrophe. Our leaders mobilized our 
infrastructure, and proved the state can protect its citizens. In 
preparation for future crises, these practices should be taken to heart, 
particularly the need to mitigate before issues bloom into threats. The 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports limiting warming to 
1.5 degrees Celsius will reduce global environmental and economic 
threats to all our futures. To achieve this, large-scale collective 
responses are required.

Utah can create the building blocks to prepare for the climate crisis. 
The 2019 Utah Legislature, at the request of students from across the 
state, asked the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute to create solutions for 
Utah's air quality and climate crisis. The result was the Utah Roadmap. 
This policy recommendation formally recognizes the impacts that poor air 
quality and climate disruption have on local and global communities. It 
provides expert-recommended solutions to make Utah a leader in 
environmental and economic stewardship. It was introduced as a bill this 
past legislative session and enjoyed widespread support from students, 
businesses and Utahns. Despite the support, it was blocked by the House 
Rules Committee.

Climate change will affect Utah snow, air quality, agriculture and 
water. Innovative, bold solutions need to be implemented to transition 
our state towards sustainability and resilience. This virus emergency 
shows we can cooperate for the broader good and cooperate at all levels 
of government. Utah needs to respond to the long-term threat of climate 
change with the same seriousness as the imminent threat of COVID-19. We 
students hope the momentum of solving coronavirus can also carry us to 
climate solutions.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2020/04/11/commentary-coronavirus/

[Journal ]
*American Imago Special issue: Ecological Grief*
Volume 77, Number 1, Spring 2020
Johns Hopkins University Press
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42141

[good to know]
*Coronavirus Shows How to Fight Lies About Climate Change*
Americans have stayed vigilant against conspiracy theories about the 
coronavirus. Experts say there are lessons for how we deal with climate 
change.
With both the coronavirus and climate change, misconceptions abound. In 
each instance, people have downplayed the impact or blamed China, and 
many believe that news outlets are exaggerating the threat.
But with the coronavirus, news outlets and tech companies have done a 
much better job of quashing misinformation, experts say, which could 
provide lessons on how to fight conspiracy theories about climate change

"The big difference between coronavirus and climate change is that 
peoples' bullshit detectors are on high alert on this issue compared to 
climate change," said John Cook, a cognitive psychologist at the George 
Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and co-author 
of a new handbook on how to debunk conspiracy theories. "They just have 
a much lower tolerance for misinformation -- both the public and the media."
*
**Here are the big takeaways.*
The coronavirus is an urgent crisis. Climate change has to feel the same 
way for people to take misinformation seriously.
With the coronavirus rapidly spreading through the United States, 
correcting misinformation has become a matter of life and death. Climate 
change doesn't share the same sense of urgency.
"The media have been clamping down on misinformation much harder than 
they normally would. The difference is that with coronavirus, it's a 
much more immediate threat," Cook said. "It's like climate change on 
fast forward."
Thus, while brand-name news outlets like The New York Times have been 
willing to run op-eds skeptical of climate science, they wouldn't do the 
same with the coronavirus, said Cook's collaborator Stephen Lewandowksy.
"People in The New York Times might develop some edifice inside their 
heads that justifies their denial -- by appealing to uncertainty or 
whatever -- but that's very different from saying, 'No one is dying of 
coronavirus.' There is a qualitative difference there," said 
Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol and 
co-author of the handbook. "That makes it much harder for well-adjusted 
people to engage in this nonsense."
With the coronavirus, round-the-clock reporting has made the 
extraordinary stakes of the pandemic clear, spurring people to be more 
skeptical of conspiracy theories. Experts said that news outlets have to 
do the same thing with climate change. We take their cues on the scale 
and urgency of a problem from the volume of news coverage.
We also learn from the people around us. In response to the grim news 
about the coronavirus, Americans are donning masks, stockpiling food and 
canceling dinner plans, creating a new norm around the illness, said 
Margaret Klein Salamon, a trained clinical psychologist who now heads 
The Climate Mobilization Project. She said we need to take a similar 
approach with climate change, treating the issue with the seriousness it 
deserves, while staying watchful for misinformation...
more at - 
https://nexusmedianews.com/the-coronavirus-is-a-case-study-in-how-to-fight-conspiracy-theories-865d11bd7506

[Opinion]
*Will the next great pandemic come from the permafrost?*
As the Arctic warms, 'zombie' viruses and microbes are rising from the 
thawing ground. But infectious diseases migrating north could pose an 
even bigger threat to human and animal health
- - -
'A gigantic reservoir of ancient microbes or viruses'
In a 2017 paper, a team of Belgian researchers describe the threats to 
human health from microbes that were previously frozen in permafrost.

"Over the past few years, there has been increasing evidence that the 
permafrost is a gigantic reservoir of ancient microbes or viruses that 
may come back to life if environmental conditions change and set them 
free again," the authors write.

The paper describes a separate study in which two viruses emerged from a 
single sample of 700-year-old caribou droppings. They were both able to 
be resurrected.

In 2014, scientists discovered a giant virus (a classification only 
discovered a decade earlier) frozen in a 30,000-year-old ice core. Like 
a scene out of a sci-fi movie, the scientists thawed it and watched it 
take over an amoeba.

The scientists concluded in a paper that their ability to resurrect the 
virus suggests that thawing permafrost -- as a result of global warming 
or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions -- might pose a threat 
to human or animal health.

Evolutionary ecologist Ellen Decaestecker, who co-authored the 2017 
paper, says the increasing encroachment of people into natural areas 
worldwide is presenting new opportunities for health crises.

"We are changing the environment very fast at this moment in terms of 
habitat fragmentation and climate change," she says, adding that people 
are also travelling more and more (or at least they were before COVID-19 
hit). "The chance that [an outbreak] happens as a result of the 
combination of these factors is quite high." ...
more at - https://thenarwhal.ca/next-great-pandemic-permafrost/

[important archive video]
*"Arctic Amplification" of Global Warming | Prof. Philip Wookey | 
TEDxHeriotWattUniversity*
Oct 16, 2015
TEDx Talks
24M subscribers
As a region, the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the 
planet; it is both a sentinel of global change and a key component of 
the climate system. In this talk Phil will highlight the powerful 
linkages between the biosphere and the cryosphere (the frozen world) in 
the Arctic, and how this matters to us all.

Phil is Professor of Ecosystem Science at Heriot-Watt University, 
Edinburgh. He holds a Combined Honours degree from the University of 
Exeter (1984) and a PhD in air pollution effects research from Lancaster 
University and the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (1988). His passion 
for "The North" and unwavering love of cold, snowy and windswept places 
has inevitably led him to the Arctic, where he continues to research its 
amplification on global warming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a5DJVcSh8A

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - April 14, *
April 14, 1964: Writer and biologist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book
"Silent Spring" galvanized a generation to take environmental concerns
seriously, passes away at 56.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/reviews/carson-obit.html

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