[TheClimate.Vote] April 19, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 19, 2020*/

[New Yorker Radio Hour 33 mins]
APRIL 17, 2020
*Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the Pandemic and the Environment*
Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert join David Remnick to talk about the 
twin crises of our time: the coronavirus pandemic and the climate 
emergency. During the COVID-19 national emergency, the Trump 
Administration has loosened auto-emissions standards, and has proposed 
easing the controls on mercury released by power plants, among other 
actions. With protesters no longer able to gather, construction on the 
controversial Keystone Pipeline has resumed. Still, McKibben and Kolbert 
believe that the pandemic could remind the public to take scientific 
fact seriously, and possibly might change our values for the better. 
Plus: Carolyn Kormann speaks with a disease ecologist who hunts for 
coronaviruses and other deadly pathogens in the bat caves where they 
originate.
download 
https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/tnyradiohour/tnyradiohour041720_podcast.mp3?siteplayer=true&dl=1
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/458929150/the-new-yorker-radio-hour



[Delay is immoral]
*Dr. Aaron Bernstein on Climate Change: Waiting to Act "is Malpractice"*
Apr 17, 2020
Climate One
"If I have baby, that i'm taking care of...and that baby has a fever, 
like the planet, I don't presume that everything is going to be ok,", 
says Ari Bernstein, interim director of The Center for Climate, Health, 
and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public 
Health (Harvard C-CHANGE).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EluAwqpuIo



[Bloomberg warns]
*Warmest Oceans on Record Could Set Off a Year of Extreme Weather*
By Brian K Sullivan - April 18, 2020

The world's seas are simmering, with record high temperatures spurring 
worry among forecasters that the global warming effect may generate a 
chaotic year of extreme weather ahead.

Parts of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans all hit the record 
books for warmth last month, according to the U.S. National Centers for 
Environmental Information. The high temperatures could offer clues on 
the ferocity of the Atlantic hurricane season, the eruption of wildfires 
from the Amazon region to Australia, and whether the record heat and 
severe thunderstorms raking the southern U.S. will continue.

In the Gulf of Mexico, where offshore drilling accounts for about 17% of 
U.S. oil output, water temperatures were 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit (24.6 
Celsius), 1.7 degrees above the long-term average, said Phil Klotzbach 
at Colorado State University. If Gulf waters stay warm, it could be the 
fuel that intensifies any storm that comes that way, Klotzbach said.

"The entire tropical ocean is above average," said Michelle L'Heureux, a 
forecaster at the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. "And there is a global 
warming component to that. It is really amazing when you look at all the 
tropical oceans and see how warm they are."
The record warm water in the Gulf of Mexico spilled over into every 
coastal community along the shoreline with all-time high temperatures on 
land, said Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring section at the National 
Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. 
Florida recorded its warmest March on record, and Miami reached 93 
degrees Wednesday, a record for the date and 10 degrees above normal, 
according to the National Weather Service.

While coronavirus has the nation's attention right now, global warming 
continues to be a threat. Sea water "remembers and holds onto heat" 
better than the atmosphere, Arndt said.

Overall, the five warmest years in the world's seas, as measured by 
modern instruments, have occurred over just the last half-dozen or so 
years. It's "definitely climate-change related," said Jennifer Francis, 
a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. 
"Oceans are absorbing about 90% of the heat trapped by extra greenhouse 
gases,"

Worldwide, sea temperatures were 1.49 degrees Fahrenheit above average 
in March. That's the second highest level recorded since 1880 for the 
month of March, according to U.S. data. In 2016, temperatures were 1.55 
degrees above average.

The first of Colorado State's 2020 storm reports, led by Klotzbach, 
forecast this year that eight hurricanes could spin out of the Atlantic 
with an above-average chance at least one will make landfall in the U.S. 
during the six-month season starting June 1. The U.S. is set to issue 
its hurricane forecast next month.

*Arctic Systems*
The searing global temperatures this year can also be traced back to 
intense climate systems around the Arctic that bottled up much of that 
region's cold, preventing it from spilling south into temperate regions. 
Combined with global warming, this was a one-two punch for sea 
temperatures that's brought them to historic highs.

One of the best-known examples of how oceans drive global weather 
patterns is the development of the climate system known as El Nino. It 
occurs when unusually warm waters in the equatorial Pacific interact 
with the atmosphere to alter weather patterns worldwide. In the 
Atlantic, for instance, El Ninos can cause severe wind shear that can 
break up developing storms with the potential to become dangerous 
hurricanes.

This year, the chance of an El Nino developing are small, and scientists 
are theorizing one reason could be that climate change is warming all 
the world's oceans. El Nino "depends on contrasts, as well as absolute 
values of sea-surface temperatures," according to Kevin Trenberth, a 
scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

*Strengthening Their Fury*
Meanwhile, if the Atlantic stays warm through the six-month storm season 
that starts June 1, the tropical systems can use it as fuel to 
strengthen their fury.

The oceans also play a role in setting the stage for wildfires. In the 
case of Australia and the Amazon, really warm areas of the ocean can 
pull rain away from the land, causing drier conditions and, in extreme 
cases, drought. Last year, for instance, the Indian Ocean was really 
warm off Africa, so that is where all the storms went. Australia was 
left high and dry.

Back in the Atlantic, research by Katia Fernandes, a geosciences 
professor at the University of Arkansas, has also shown a correlation 
between sea surface temperatures in the northern tropical Atlantic and 
drought and wildfires in the Amazon. The warmer the water, the further 
north rainfall is pulled across South America.

According to Fernandes model, even Atlantic temperatures in March can 
serve to predict if the Amazon will be dry and susceptible to fires.

For California, the outlook isn't as clear. Wildfires there depend as 
much on how well vegetation grows, providing fuel for the flames, as it 
does on the weather conditions coming off the Pacific.

"Tricky question," said Mike Anderson, California state climatologist. 
"Our weather outcomes are influenced by sea-surface temperatures in the 
Pacific, but it depends on where and when the warm waters appear and how 
long they persist. In the end we have a highly variable climate that 
doesn't map in a statistically convenient way to patterns of sea-surface 
temperatures."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-18/warmest-oceans-on-record-could-set-off-a-year-of-extreme-weather



[49 minute video record of the briefing - note - *YouTube* shut down the 
live recording of this presentation]
*Climate change, migration and the coronavirus pandemic*
Apr 16, 2020
Climate & Migration Coalition
Roughly 15 million people are displaced every year by climate and 
weather related disasters. This year much of that displacement will take 
place against the backdrop of a pandemic. This talk explores how the 
coronavirus pandemic collides with current patterns of climate-linked 
migration and displacement, and what this new situation means for the 
people most at risk. The session will explore locations that are 
particularly at risk, and examine the contexts in which these global 
crises coverage.

Presenter - Alex Randall
Alex is a leading specialist in the connections between climate change, 
migration and conflict. He is programme manager at the Climate and 
Migration Coalition. He has been working on issues around climate, 
migration and human rights for 15 years. He advises a number of key 
international agencies and governments on their responses to 
climate-linked migration and displacement. Alex has also served on the 
steering group of the Nansen Initiative and Platform on Disaster 
Displacement.
Alex has written extensively on climate change and migration for the 
Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Prospect and 
numerous other outlets. He is the author of a number of book chapters 
focusing on the connections between climate change and the rights of 
refugees and migrants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XI0CvEHsfQ&feature=youtu.be



[global warming as film MacGuffin]
*Film Culture and climate change*
Why does cinema ignore climate change?
Apocalyptic films feature disease, war or alien invasions - but there's 
one thing they almost always avoid. Nicholas Barber asks why Hollywood 
is still so squeamish about the real environmental crisis.

By Nicholas Barber - 17 April 2020

Whether you believe that art imitates life or life imitates art, it 
often seems as if the 21st Century is imitating a Hollywood blockbuster. 
At the moment, as many of us have observed, the current situation seems 
to be echoing Contagion and 28 Days Later. Before that, the climate 
crisis - with its news reports about hurricanes, tidal waves and 
wildfires - felt like every mega-budget movie about a world-shaking 
apocalypse.

The strange thing is, though, that despite the uneasy connection between 
environmental news reports and apocalyptic films, climate change is 
mentioned in hardly any of them. On the big screen, the threats to 
civilisation as we know it are war (The Book of Eli; Mad Max: Fury Road; 
Alita: Battle Angel), disease (Zombieland; World War Z; Contagion; 
Inferno), drugs that were intended to counteract disease (I Am Legend; 
Rise of the Planet of the Apes), alien invasions (Oblivion; Edge of 
Tomorrow; A Quiet Place), and demons (This Is The End). Clearly, this 
glut of doom-laden entertainment was responding to our anxieties about 
the state of the planet. But the idea that our carbon footprints might 
have something to do with it doesn't get a look-in.

In The Core (2003), the Earth's core has stopped rotating, and nuclear 
explosions are required to jump start it. In Danny Boyle's Sunshine 
(2007), it's the Sun which is almost defunct, and again, nuclear 
explosions are what's needed to bring it back to life. In Christopher 
Nolan's Interstellar (2014), the problem is crop blights. In Alfonso 
Cuaron's Children of Men (2006), it's infertility. Then there is Bong 
Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013), which the Korean director made a few years 
before the Oscar-winning Parasite. His dystopian action movie is set 
during a new ice age, but rather than being brought about by climate 
change per se, the catastrophe was caused by a misguided attempt to 
reverse it by "dispersing CW7 into the upper levels of the atmosphere"...
The only major Hollywood feature film to have the opposite message is 
Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (2004). The German 
writer-director is best known for Independence Day and Godzilla, both of 
which gloried in mass destruction, but his interest in extreme weather 
conditions and ecological issues was evident decades earlier. The 
student film he made in 1984, The Noah's Ark Principle (Das Arche Noah 
Prinzip), was set aboard a space station that could whip up torrential 
storms. In 1990, he released another science-fiction thriller, Moon 44, 
in which corporations were mining for minerals all across the galaxy, 
having used up the Earth's natural resources. Then, once he was 
established in Hollywood, Emmerich used Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's 
book, The Coming Global Superstorm, as the basis of his star-studded, 
1970s-style disaster movie.
Like his other films, The Day After Tomorrow is about as stupid and 
cliched as cinema gets. But parts of it hold up remarkably well. The 
panic-buying scenes are all too prescient (although no one appears to be 
stockpiling toilet paper), and the satire has sharpened with age. When 
the US become largely uninhabitable, refugees pile south across the Rio 
Grande, but are not allowed into Mexico until all Latin American debt is 
cancelled. This conceit was bold enough in 2004, but today, in the 
'Build the Wall' era, it seems revolutionary.

*Hollywood's bad habits*
More importantly, at least as far as Hollywood was concerned, The Day 
After Tomorrow was a box-office smash. The sixth highest grossing 
release of 2004 - just one place behind The Passion of the Christ - it 
proved that a film could have prominent environmental themes and still 
rake in several hundred million dollars. And yet it didn't set a trend 
for climate-conscious eco-thrillers. The subject cropped up in 
documentaries, such as the Oscar-winning adaptation of Al Gore's slide 
show, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). But directors of fictional films 
continued to shy away from climate change, and even Emmerich retreated 
from it. When he made another global disaster move, 2012 (2009), he 
blamed the worldwide floods in the film on... errr... neutrinos from a 
solar flare, as opposed to anything that human beings might have done.
Perhaps the structure of The Day After Tomorrow can offer some clues as 
to why it is such a one-off. The film starts well, with a climate 
researcher, Professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), nearly plummeting to his 
doom in the Antarctic when a mile-long crack splits the ice shelf 
beneath his feet. Soon afterwards, he explains how the North Atlantic 
Current works to the US's sceptical vice president (Kenneth Welsh, a 
Dick Cheney lookalike), but Emmerich doesn't keep things theoretical for 
long. Hailstones the size of tennis balls batter Tokyo. Tornadoes rip 
Los Angeles to pieces. Helicopters fall from the sky when their fuel 
lines freeze in Scotland. A frighteningly convincing tsunami sloshes 
through Manhattan, submerging its streets and turning its skyscrapers 
into islands. New York is then buried under metres of snow and ice. The 
science may be iffy, but these scenes are vivid enough to make anyone 
think twice about ordering a gas-guzzling new car.
Once you've shown civilisation being flattened, though, where do you go 
next? Much of the film's second half is given over to Jack's teenage son 
Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to stave off frostbite in The New York 
Public Library, while Jack hikes through the snow to find him. These 
scenes are fine, but they can't help but seem insignificant compared to 
the devastation we've just witnessed. Ultimately, who cares about Jack 
and Sam? Blockbuster movies tend to be about the heroes' efforts to save 
thousands or millions of lives. They concoct a cure for a virus or they 
disarm a bomb. In Emmerich's own canon, they topple a humungous mutant 
lizard (Godzilla) and they blow up a squadron of alien spacecraft 
(Independence Day). In contrast, all Jack does is reunite with his son; 
society at large is still in tatters.
Could that be why climate change is so often overlooked by filmmakers? 
Because it's just too big and overwhelming for a two-hour adventure? And 
because it can't be fixed by a hero defeating a villain? In a way, 
almost every one of us is the villain of the story, due to our own small 
daily choices to take that flight, to eat that steak, and to upgrade 
that phone. It's understandable that Hollywood studios don't want to 
alienate audiences by reminding them of that inconvenient truth. 
Commercially speaking, it's more sensible to blame the apocalypse 
instead on some mad scientist's experiments or some foreign dictator's 
nuclear missiles.

It's also true that Hollywood can't complain about our environmental 
unfriendliness without drawing attention to its own. The average film is 
a paean to conspicuous consumption: an invitation to covet private jets, 
luxurious apartments, and designer outfits. And The Day After Tomorrow 
itself has its share of product placement. Behind the scenes, the 
industry isn't much better. It relies on countless people flying all 
over the world, first to make a film and then to promote it in the most 
opulent possible fashion. In January, Stella McCartney boasted on 
Twitter that Joaquin Phoenix would be doing his bit for "the future of 
the planet" by wearing one dinner suit "for the entire award season", 
ie, a couple of months. The tweet was roundly mocked, especially by 
those of us who have worn the same dinner suit for 20 years.
Still, the statement was at least a sign that Hollywood is aware of its 
own bad habits. Other signs include the Producers Guild of America's new 
Green Production Guide, and Sony's move to install solar panels on its 
soundstages. But will James Bond ever swap his Aston Martin for a 
bicycle? Will Phoenix wear his Stella McCartney suit next award season? 
And, when the film business gets up and running again, will Hollywood 
start greenlighting some more disaster movies which face the climate 
crisis head on, as The Day After Tomorrow did?
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200416-why-does-cinema-ignore-climate-change



[battles]
*Climate Science Deniers Turn to Attacking Coronavirus Models*
Vocal critics have cited perceived flaws in both climate and virus 
modeling, despite scientific evidence to the contrary
E&E News on April 15, 2020
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-deniers-turn-to-attacking-coronavirus-models/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - April 19, 1990 *

  The New York Times reports:
"President Bush, responding to criticism that the United States had
delayed taking concrete steps to address the threat of global warming
linked to pollution, said today, 'We have never considered research a
substitute for action.'

"Closing a two-day White House conference on the issue, Mr. Bush said:
'To those who suggest we're only trying to balance economic growth and
environmental protection, I say they miss the point. We are calling
for an entirely new way of thinking, to achieve both while
compromising neither, by applying the power of the marketplace in the
service of the environment.'

"Mr. Bush also proposed a series of steps for integrating
international responses to the issue of global climate change. They
included an international 'charter' for cooperation in science and
economics related to global change, a statement of principles to guide
such research, the creation of international research institutes and a
communications network to monitor global changes."
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/19/us/bush-denies-putting-off-action-on-averting-global-climate-shift.html

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