[TheClimate.Vote] April 26, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Apr 26 10:08:28 EDT 2020
/*April 26, 2020*/
[Heat is up]
*State of the climate: First quarter of 2020 is second warmest on record*
This year is shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record -- if
not the warmest. This is particularly noteworthy because 2020 is likely
to see neutral El Nino/La Nina conditions that will play little-to-no
role in boosting annual temperatures.
The first three months of 2020 were the second warmest on record, behind
only the super-El Nino-fuelled 2016. The past 12 months were also nearly
tied for the warmest 12-month period on record. Near-record sea surface
temperatures have driven extensive coral bleaching during the southern
hemisphere summer.
Global temperatures are currently running at or above the level
projected by the generation of climate models featured in the 2013
Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) fifth assessment
report (AR5)...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-first-quarter-of-2020-is-second-warmest-on-record
[methane]
*Some leaked US methane 'is double official figure'*
The leaked methane is a byproduct of fracking for oil, often burned off
or simply emitted instead of captured for use as fuel.
NEW YORK, 25 April, 2020 -- Methane emissions from the Permian basin of
West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, one of the largest oil-producing
regions in the world, are more than twice as high as US federal
estimates, a new study suggests. The findings, published recently in the
journal Science Advances, reaffirm the results of a recently released
assessment and further call into question the climate benefits of
natural gas...
"I'm afraid there is all manner of mayhem happening out there"...
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/some-leaked-us-methane-is-double-official-figure/
[Distinctly similar]
*The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation*
The disinformation industry has deployed these strategies across
multiple issues.
amywestervelt
For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up
disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the chemical
industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became incredibly
clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific publicists was
that this version of history is not quite right; if disinformation
strategies were cooked up by any particular industry it was the public
relations industry, which put these strategies to work on behalf of
fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and more, often all at the
same time. The very first publicist, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, worked on behalf
of both Standard Oil and, shortly after, American Tobacco, for example.
Daniel Edelman developed astroturf campaigns for both RJ Reynolds
tobacco company and the American Petroleum Institute, as did John Hill,
who went so far as to have tobacco folks join the API. He also worked
with Monsanto, juggling all three clients at the same time. E. Bruce
Harrison worked for the chemical guys first, then managed front groups
for tobacco and fossil fuels at the same time. You get the drift.
These industries all surely learned from each other at various points in
time, but that was mostly because they were working with the same
publicists. The history is less that tobacco or oil embraced
disinformation first and then passed it on and more that a handful of PR
firms and consultants created the disinformation industry, and then put
it to work on behalf of whatever industry needed it at any given time.
Today, those same strategies are at work on behalf of those who worry
that the response to COVID-19 will undermine capitalism, which is why
climate folks keep noting how familiar the whole anti-science component
of the rightwing response to the pandemic feels. It's familiar because
the exact same strategies are being deployed, in some cases by the same
people. Here are a few key examples:
*Disinformation Strategy #1: He who controls the language controls the
narrative.* Ivy Lee's big thing, way back 100+ years ago when he was
working with the Rockefellers... oh, and advising Hitler and Goebbels
too… was to take control of language. If the government wanted to impose
safety regulations on your industry, you described them as "extra" or
"additional" or "surplus". In climate, we've seen language shift from
"the greenhouse effect" to global warming to climate change. When media
finally seized the power to make its own language choices, opting for
"climate crisis" or "climate emergency", it was deemed radical, even by
other journalists. In the COVID-19 context, we've seen this too. It's
gone from a "flu" to "a really bad flu" to "a pandemic" in a relatively
condensed amount of time. But you'll see those trading in disinformation
continue to refer to it as "just a bad flu" or point out how many people
the flu kills every year.
*Disinformation Strategy #2: Leverage science illiteracy to create
doubt:* This has been a hugely effective tactic for multiple industries
because the vast majority of public don't spend a lot of time reading
scientific studies, nor do they understand that scientific research has
its own language. That makes it very easy to point to something like the
uncertainty inherent in any scientific research and say "see, they don't
really know." The best recent example of this is the re-emergence of
Michael Fumento, as Drilled News contributor Paul Thacker pointed out
recently. Fumento questioned health models for the tobacco guys, climate
models for the oil guys, and has now returned to question public health
models used to predict the spread and likely death toll of COVID-19.
Fumento was also famously fired when Businessweek outed him for
accepting $60,000 from Monsanto one year to write GMO-friendly pieces in
his column, which was syndicated to dozens of papers across the country.
Of course models, like science in general, have a bit of uncertainty
baked in; they represent both the most extreme outcomes and the most
likely scenarios, they encapsulate multiple variables. And if you know
enough about them, it's quite easy to cherry pick data and flaws and
argue, as Fumento does, that modeling in general is bunk that ought to
be thrown out.
*
**Disinformation strategy #3: Astroturfing *This weekend, social media
was awash in the news that those anti-lockdown rallies in Minnesota,
Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado were all fomented by rightwing donors.
Someone on Reddit figured out all the "re-open the economy" websites
were made by one guy in Florida. This is astroturfing 101, and it's a
strategy that's been a key tool in the disinformation toolbox for at
least 100 years. When coalminers and steelworkers were striking
regularly back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publicists like Ivy
Lee, Edward Bernays and John Hill helped create fake protest groups that
supposedly represented all the coal miners who just wanted these strikes
to be over so they could get back to work. In more recent years, fossil
fuel companies have backed fake advocacy groups like the California
Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy to
fight against everything from emissions regulations to a carbon tax.
Astroturfing is fake activism meant to give the illusion of grassroots
opposition to policy. My favorite example is the Save the Plastic Bag
Coalition, a petrochemical and plastic manufacturers-backed group that
protests bag bans and bag taxes. It's somewhat rare, however, to get a
sitting U.S. President supporting and promoting your astroturf campaign,
as Trump has done with the fake "re-open the economy" movement.
Season 3 of Drilled gets into these strategies and more in great detail,
and you're bound to see in this history the roots of today's pandemic
disinformation machine.
This week is Earth Week and a lot of media outlets are focused on
solutions to climate change, a conversation that COVID-19 has certainly
changed. Which got me thinking: often people act like climate
accountability is not a solution, like all we do is point out problems
or play the blame game. Sorry for harshing your mellow about carbon
capture occasionally, but for the team at Drilled News, accountability
is an absolutely necessary part of addressing climate change. How can
you move forward functionally if you don't know where things went wrong
in the past? How can any technological solution possibly work if it's
plugged into the same old system (carbon capture is an excellent example
of this, come to think of it)?
Our hope, of course, is that when people learn to recognize these
strategies and know what's behind them, they might become less
effective. Disempowering the disinformation industry is a necessary part
of any climate solution.
https://drillednews.substack.com/p/the-reason-covid-19-and-climate-seem
[Interview with a top climate scientist]
*Climate Disaster: Greenland is Melting!--Kevin Trenberth on global
warming--Radio Ecoshock 2019-09-04*
Mar 26, 2020
Stop Fossil Fuels
Is the astounding melt on Greenland this summer due to a natural
atmospheric cycle rather than global warming?
Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth specializes in the transport of heat, water and
energy in the atmosphere and ocean. He was a pioneer in the study of El
Nino and La Nina events, and a lead author for three reports by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Originally from New
Zealand, Dr. Trenberth is a Distinguished Senior Scientist in the
Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR).
Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at
https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/09/climate-disaster-greenland-is-melting-new-show.html
Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and
tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more
at https://stopfossilfuels.org
*MARINE HEAT WAVES KILL MILLIONS OF FISH, and DAMAGE THE ENTIRE OCEAN
FOOD WEB*
"Marine heat waves" like the hot blob in the North Pacific in 2015-2016
"led to the loss of over 100 million cod. It had profound effects on the
entire food web, from the phytoplankton to the zooplankton, the small
fish, large fish, all the things that prey on the fish including the
whales, sea otters, and marine animals."
Trenberth: "The North Atlantic Oscillation is a weakening or a
strengthening of the overall Westerlies across the NA. In the positive
phase the Westerlies are active further north. The storm track is
further north. It's very warm in Europe and all of the storms that go
from Europe into Siberia have a particular track. In the negative phase,
the whole pattern tends to shift further south. It's a lot weaker in the
north and you get very cold conditions in that case in Europe."
*OCEAN HEATING, HOT PATCHES & HURRICANES*
Heat transfer from a hotter atmosphere to the ocean is "pretty regular,
and the best single indicator that the planet is warming. 2018 is the
warmest year for the global oceans, 2017 2nd warmest, 2015 3rd warmest
and 2016 4th warmest."
2016 was slightly less warming for the ocean due to the El Nino event
that year. During an El Nino, large amounts of heat are released in the
Eastern Pacific Ocean, meaning a transfer of heat from the ocean to the
atmosphere, rather than the other way around. 2016 was the warmest year
for the land surface temperatures, due mainly to the El Nino. But 2018
stands out as the year of the warmest oceans so far.
*ROAMING OCEAN HOTSPOTS CAN BIRTH KILLER STORMS*
"Where the hot spots occur from one year to the next can vary, partly
because of things like El Nino and maybe the North Atlantic Oscillation
or the weather more generally. So where the hotter spot occurs can vary,
but as a whole the oceans are certainly warming up."
"Some of the biggest warming is occurring in the southern oceans. But
the difference is that there are very strong winds there and a lot of
that heat gets carried down to greater depths in the ocean." Those winds
can drive sea ice further offshore, as happened a few years ago,
increasing the extent. The sea ice extent in Antarctica is not a good
indicator of global warming, compared to Arctic sea ice coverage. Yet in
the last few years, we have seen "remarkably low" sea ice in Antarctica.
The oceans have absorbed most of the abnormal heat energy from humans
loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Up to 90% of the real
warming went into the oceans, and water holds heat better than land.
All the record hot years in the seas were in the last four years, with
2018 the hottest ever recorded. This extra heat is not evenly
distributed. Hot spots and marine heat waves can pop up anywhere in the
world.
The warmest patches in the ocean move around. In 2017 one of the warmest
patches of ocean was in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to Harvey, Irma &
Maria. In 2018, one of the warmest patches of the ocean was off the
Carolinas, adding to the destructive power of Hurricane Florence. Hot
patches occurred in the Indian Ocean, leading to two "very unusual"
cyclones, Idai & Kenneth, that devastated Mozambique and neighboring
countries in March 2019. Trenberth credits ocean hot patches for cyclone
Fani that struck India and Pakistan in May 2019. And the waters were hot
in the Caribbean as Hurricane Dorian powered up from a Category 2 to Cat
5 storm in just two days.
TV weather experts explain a hotter ocean can add energy to hurricanes,
as both added rains to drop and higher wind speeds. But they never
connect that to the big picture of warming oceans all over the world.
Our hotter ocean pops up as strong and unusual storms half a world away
from countries emitting the most greenhouse gases. This is one of the
way our pollution spreads damage to countries with tiny emissions.
There's been a lot of talk about rising seas overcoming island nations,
but very little about devastating storm damage. Random ocean hot spots
sound like a weapon in a climate war against the world, a kind of carbon
terrorism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywwDSWtdtE
[Ross Gelbspan opines on hope from 2015]
*The Climate Movement and the Liabilities of Hope*
Ross Gelbspan
The inner fire of hope propels perseverance and, occasionally in the
face of overwhelming odds, breathtaking resolve.
In all those contexts, hope was the seed of collective heroism...
- -
Unfortunately activists today continue to funnel virtually all their
time and energy into defeating the carbon lobby.
The longer they cling to that misleading hope, the less likely we are to
prepare to manage -- as effectively and humanely as possible -- the
period of coming chaos.
Honest hope comes from looking a hard reality in the eye.
[more at]
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=8714&method=full
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 26, 1978 *
The Supreme Court explicitly gives private-sector
entities (including polluters) 1st Amendment rights in the First
National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=435&invol=765
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