[TheClimate.Vote] August 5, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Aug 5 09:24:53 EDT 2020
/*August 5, 2020*/
[move the thermometer]
*Rising temperatures will cause more deaths than all infectious diseases
- study*
Poorer, hotter parts of the world will struggle to adapt to unbearable
conditions, research finds
The growing but largely unrecognized death toll from rising global
temperatures will come close to eclipsing the current number of deaths
from all the infectious diseases combined if planet-heating emissions
are not constrained, a major new study has found.
Rising temperatures are set to cause particular devastation in poorer,
hotter parts of the world that will struggle to adapt to unbearable
conditions that will kill increasing numbers of people, the research has
found.
The economic loss from the climate crisis, as well as the cost of
adaptation, will be felt around the world, including in wealthy countries.
In a high-emissions scenario where little is done to curb planet-heating
gases, global mortality rates will be raised by 73 deaths per 100,000
people by the end of the century. This nearly matches the current death
toll from all infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, HIV/Aids,
malaria, dengue and yellow fever.
The research used an enormous global dataset of death and temperature
records to see how they are related, gathering not only direct causes
such as heatstroke but also less obvious links such as a surge in heart
attacks during a heatwave.
"A lot of older people die due to indirect heat affects," said Amir
Jina, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and a
co-author of the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic
Research. "It's eerily similar to Covid - vulnerable people are those
who have pre-existing or underlying conditions. If you have a heart
problem and are hammered for days by the heat, you are going to be
pushed towards collapse."
Poorer societies that occupy the hottest areas of the world are set to
suffer worst. As already baking temperatures climb further this century,
countries such as Ghana, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan face an
additional 200 or more deaths per 100,000 people. Colder, richer
countries such as Norway and Canada, meanwhile, will see a drop in
deaths as fewer and fewer people perish due to extreme cold.
"You see the really bad impacts at the tropics," said Jina. "There's not
one single worldwide condition, there's a lot of different changes with
poorer people much more affected with limited ability to adapt. The
richer countries, even if they have increases in mortality, can pay more
to adapt to it. It's really the people who have done the least to cause
climate change who are suffering from it."
Huge heatwaves have roiled the US, Europe, Australia, India, the Arctic
and elsewhere in recent years, while 2020 is set to be hottest or second
hottest on record, in line with the longer-term trend of rising
temperatures. The deaths resulting from this heat are sometimes plain
enough to generate attention, such as the fact that 1,500 people who
died in France from the hot temperatures during summer last year.
Within richer countries, places already used to the heat will have an
adaptation head start on areas only now starting to experience scorching
conditions. "A really hot day in Seattle is more damaging than a really
hot day in Houston because air conditioning and other measures are less
widespread there," said Bob Kopp, a co-author and climate scientist at
Rutgers University.
"It's not going to be free for Seattle to get the resilience Houston
has. Obviously in poorer countries the situation is much worse. Climate
change is a public health issue and an equality issue."
The economic cost of these deaths is set to be severe, costing the world
3.2% of global economic output by the end of the century if emissions
are not tamed. Each ton of planet-warming carbon dioxide emitted will
cost $36.60 in damage in this high-emissions world, the researchers
calculated.
This worst-case scenario would involve emissions continue to grow
without restraint, causing the average global temperature increase to
surpass 3C by 2100. The world has heated up by about 1C, on average,
since the dawn of mass industrialization, an increase scientists say is
fueling increasingly severe heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods.
A more moderate path, where emissions are rapidly cut, will see
temperature-related deaths less than a third of the more severe
scenario, the researchers found. The economic costs will be
significantly lower, too.
"It's plausible that we could have the worst-case scenario and that
would involve drastic measures such as lots of people migrating," said
Jina. "Much like when Covid overwhelms a healthcare system, it's hard to
tell what will happen when climate change will put systems under
pressure like that. We need to understand the risk and invest to
mitigate that risk, before we really start to notice the impacts."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/rising-global-temperatures-death-toll-infectious-diseases-study
[check that future of RCP8.5]
*'Worst-case' global warming scenario still best guide until 2050, study
says*
Published on 08/03/2020
UN panel's RCP8.5 scenario of sharply rising emissions matches trends
since 2005, PNAS study says, rejecting criticisms it's "alarmist"
By Alister Doyle
A 'worst-case' scenario of surging greenhouse gas emissions this century
is still the 'most useful choice' for government planning until 2050
despite criticisms that it is alarmist, a US study said on Monday.
The scenario of rising fossil fuel use, used by the UN panel of climate
scientists in reports over the past decade, had accurately tracked
cumulative carbon dioxide emissions to within 1% in the years 2005-2020,
it said. That was more precise than the other three main pathways for
emissions until 2100.
Known as representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5, the scenario
foresees a rise in temperatures of up to 5C above pre-industrial times
by 2100, sharply at odds with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to
limit warming "well below 2C", agreed by almost 200 nations.
It remains consistent with announced government policies until 2050 and
has "highly plausible" levels of CO2 emissions in 2100, according to the
study.
"RCP8.5 is very, very relevant," lead author Christopher Schwalm of the
Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, told Climate Home News. "If
it didn't exist, we'd have to create it."
He said the study could be a wake-up call for greater action to curb
climate change.
RCP8.5 is often portrayed by governments, scientists and the media as a
"business as usual" of increasing emissions. Yet it has become
increasingly controversial, with many scientists arguing it is unlikely
to materialise and could make people feel hopeless about the future.
"RCP8.5 is characterised as extreme, alarmist, and 'misleading', with
some commentators going so far as to dismiss any study using RCP8.5.
This line of argumentation is not only regrettable, it is skewed,"
Schwalm and colleagues wrote.
"Looking at mid-century and sooner, RCP8.5 is clearly the most useful
choice" for planners, they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences...
Among attacks on RCP8.5, two scientists in January called RCP8.5
"dystopian" and said it "becomes increasingly implausible with every
passing year". The scenario assumes a fivefold rise in coal use in the
long term, whereas global coal consumption may have already peaked.
"Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most
likely outcome -- more-realistic baselines make for better policy,"
urged Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland,
California and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate
Research, Oslo, Norway.
Exaggerating the risks by referring to RCP8.5 as the default for the
future world economy could lead to defeatism and undermine government
planning "because the problem is perceived as being out of control and
unsolvable," they wrote in the journal Nature.
Schwalm acknowledged that RCP8.5 was far from perfect. It has
overestimated coal use and underestimated the fall in the price of
renewable energies relative to fossil fuels. But he said that these
flaws were not significant enough to undermine the scenario as a whole.
Other huge risks, such as a thaw of permafrost that could release vast
amounts of methane, are typically omitted from such models.
And he said too much of the criticism of RCP8.5 focused on 2100, such as
growth of coal or a doubling of the global population to 12 billion
people, both of which now look unlikely. On a more human time scale of
30 years to mid-century - the typical length of a home mortgage loan -
he said RCP8.5 was still the best guide.
Detlef van Vuuren, a senior researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental
Assessment Agency who helped design the RCPs, told CHN that RCP8.5 was
never intended to represent "business as usual" as it covered the most
extreme 5% of scenarios for emissions growth.
And he wrote in an email that RCP8.5 had become less likely overall with
changing economic trends.
"Since 2011, on the one hand no stringent climate policy was implemented
… But at the same time, renewables became much cheaper - and it has
become more likely that future cars will be electric instead of petrol
cars," he wrote.
"All-in-all, I think that RCP8.5 is still useful as low probability,
high impact case," he wrote.
Nico Bauer, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also
said that RCP8.5 was still relevant for scientific and political debate.
"First, it cannot be excluded, because fossil fuels are abundant and the
last decades have shown that countries like China and the US can
increase their production within short time periods by substantial
amounts," he wrote in an email.
Also, it is useful to study the likely impact of climate change with
high emissions - even if it never happened - to understand the impacts
of policies and new technologies, he said.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit the rise in
average world surface temperatures to "well below" 2C while pursuing
efforts for 1.5C. The UN says that reaching the 1.5C goal would require
unprecedented cuts in carbon dioxide emissions of 7.6% a year this decade.
Emissions are expected to dip in 2020 because of the economic downturn
caused by the coronavirus, but rebound in the absence of structural change.
The authors of Monday's report said that the pandemic did not affect
their findings.
"Assuming pandemic restrictions remain in place until the end of 2020
would entail a reduction in emissions of 4.7 billion tonnes of carbon
dioxide," they wrote. "This represents less than 1% of total cumulative
CO2 emissions since 2005 for all RCPs and observations."
UN reports often contrast RCP8.5 with the most stringent scenario,
RCP2.6, that foresees sharp emissions cuts to get on track for the Paris
Agreement.
Last year, for instance, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) on melting snow and ice and the state of the ocean
only used those two extreme scenarios, omitting what many scientists
view as the more likely middle RCP options.
And a UN Environment report last year projected that temperatures are on
track to rise by 3.2C by 2100, if all governments' climate action plans
were fully implemented, far short of the RCP8.5 scenario.
Climate scientists are updating climate modelling with new scenarios for
the next round of IPCC reports, starting in 2021.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/08/03/worst-case-global-warming-scenario-still-best-guide-2050-study-says/
[Time zone climate science - text and audio]
August 3, 2020
Heard on Morning Edition
Rebecca Hersher at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018
*Everyone Loves The Chat Box: How Climate Science Moved Online*
In mid-April, hundreds of scientists from around the world were supposed
to fly to Ecuador for a five-day meeting about the latest research on
reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere.
It was an important event. The scientists are writing part of a crucial
global climate science report scheduled for release next year by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the part of the United
Nations that assesses global climate science. National governments rely
on the multi-chapter report to anchor international climate negotiations
and to set greenhouse gas emissions targets.
But the pandemic forced the IPCC to hold April's in-person meeting
online. Smaller scientific gatherings scheduled for the spring and
summer also met remotely...
- -
"For years we have faced a number of challenges in making our physical
meetings more participatory and inclusive," Valerie Masson-Delmotte,
co-chair of the IPCC working group that analyzes the physical science of
climate change, told the scientific journal Nature before April's remote
meeting. "Now we need to work to make online meetings as inclusive and
as participatory as possible."
- -
A scheduling nightmare
Making the April meeting virtual did present some serious challenges.
One of the thorniest was figuring out what time of day to schedule large
group discussions. The scientists and other experts involved in writing
the report are spread out over 23 time zones, which meant there were
only two hours each day when everyone could participate without being
awake between midnight and 6 a.m. local time.
The time zone issues forced the meeting to take place over two extra
days and, even with the additional time, the scientific goals were
scaled back.
It's unclear how that will affect the release date for the final report.
Finishing it on time, so governments can use it as they enter the next
round of climate negotiations, may ultimately hinge on how the authors
adapt to remote work...
- -
Going virtual was also harder for some participants than others. Almost
a third of the participants said they weren't able to fully participate,
including 36% of those from developing countries, according to a survey
conducted by the IPCC. That's compared to just 25% of participants from
developed countries.
One problem, especially for female scientists, was competing familial
responsibilities and work commitments. Leaving home for meetings is
inconvenient, but it separates participants from day-to-day child care
and other domestic responsibilities that already fall disproportionately
to women.
"Many of us really struggle to work from home," says Lisa Schipper, an
environmental social scientist at the University of Oxford and
coordinating author of a report chapter about climate resilient
development options. She says that on one hand, she's glad that being
interrupted by children during work calls has become more normal during
the pandemic. "Having this opportunity to kind of feel a bit more
relaxed about these interruptions is good. But it's, of course,
extremely distracting too, because you can't listen to what people are
saying."
Schipper worries that remote meetings will make it more difficult for
women to exert their influence and apply their expertise to the IPCC's
final report.
That's particularly concerning because the IPCC has excluded women,
especially women from outside Europe and North America, for decades. A
2018 study found that only one quarter of the executive leaders for the
latest IPCC report are women. Many female scientists told that study's
authors that child care and housework responsibilities were their
biggest obstacle to fully participating in IPCC work.
One unexpected benefit of holding the meeting online was the chat
function that is built into video conferencing software. During group
video discussions, participants could simultaneously express themselves
in writing.
- -
"There is always work going on, but you really get that flurry of
activity in the few weeks before the deadline," Byers says. "Perhaps
more frequent meetings online every two months or something, maybe that
would keep more of the momentum going."
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/03/893039258/everyone-loves-the-chat-box-how-climate-science-moved-online
[Corruption at First Energy]
*How a utility undermined climate policy -- then got caught*
Benjamin Storrow, E&E News reporterPublished: Tuesday, August 4, 2020
In 2018, FirstEnergy Corp. was looking for help.
Efforts by the Ohio utility to secure bailouts for its coal and nuclear
plants had been rebuffed by federal regulators. But the power company
had a plan to change its fortunes.
Over the next two years, FirstEnergy channeled millions of dollars to a
dark money group allegedly controlled in secret by Larry Householder, a
Republican state lawmaker who became speaker of the Ohio House in 2019.
The dark money group in turn rained television advertisements down on
the state in an effort to drum up support for a bailout of FirstEnergy's
power plants.
Yet the energy company's name was nowhere to be seen on the ads.
Many of the TV spots sounded like they were crafted by
environmentalists. One shows utility workers striding purposefully past
wind turbines and standing near solar panels; a female narrator then
hopefully declares, "Clean air and clean energy begin with clean
government."
In another, a young father who is described as a energy worker says,
"Big Oil wants us gone." News reports later identified him as an
employee of a FirstEnergy nuclear plant.
In July 2019, with Householder at the head of the Ohio House, state
lawmakers approved a bailout for FirstEnergy worth $1.3 billion. The law
subsidized a pair of nuclear plants owned by the company and two coal
plants operated by a consortium of utilities, including FirstEnergy. It
also gutted the state's renewable energy portfolio and its energy
efficiency standards.
Federal investigators arrested Householder and four associates on
racketeering charges last month. He's accused of accepting about $60
million from FirstEnergy in exchange for bailing out the company's power
plants.
The scandal revealed the sustained, coordinated and ultimately
successful attacks by FirstEnergy on wind and solar programs in Ohio.
The company has supported a freeze on clean energy mandates, backed
anti-wind politicians, and pushed for a federal bailout of its coal and
nuclear plants in Washington.
"The utility has captured the rulemakers and stacked the deck against
clean energy and in favor of the status quo," said Geoff Greenfield,
president and founder of Third Sun Solar LLC, a developer in Athens, Ohio.
Greenfield laid off 20 people following passage of the subsidy law,
known as H.B. 6, last year. He said efforts to attract investors and
employees have been hampered by the state's opposition to the clean
energy industry.
"They see how our state treats renewables, and it basically undermines
their faith in Ohio," Greenfield said. "Investors say, 'I have lots of
places to invest my money, and Ohio doesn't look like a favorable
economic environment or as favorable. I'm going to invest elsewhere.'"
The bailout's cost to the climate is potentially enormous.
The two coal plants subsidized by the legislation emitted 12.6 million
tons of carbon dioxide last year, or about what's released by 2.5
million cars annually. A third coal plant, the second-largest in the
state, elected to reverse its closure plans and stay open following the
legislation's passage...
- -
The climate consequences can be serious.
In Ohio, FirstEnergy Solutions made the decision to keep open W.H.
Sammis, the second-largest coal plant in the state, after the bailout
law passed.
Sammis emitted 12.3 million tons of CO2 in 2013, according to EPA data.
But the plant has run less and less in recent years. It ran only 20% in
2019, down from 61% in 2014.
Last year, it reported CO2 emissions of 4.6 million tons, or what
900,000 cars emit annually.
The result is a one-two punch to climate and consumers, forcing them to
pay for polluting plants that are no longer economic, said Leah Stokes,
a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has
written extensively about Ohio's bailout law.
She said FirstEnergy represents one of the most egregious cases of
utility corruption, but is part of a larger pattern of power companies'
approach to climate policy.
"The goal is to slow down the clean energy transition so they can pay
down the debt on their fossil fuel infrastructure and build new gas,"
she said. "In that way, it is part of a national trend, which is climate
delay from electric utilities."
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063680411
[Transformational expression]
*Margaret J. Wheatley: Post-doom with Terry Patten*
Jul 14, 2020 - thegreatstory
TITLE: "Opening to the World" - Terry Patten in conversation with Meg
Wheatley (May 2020)
Original conversation:
https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/podcast/028-meg-wheatley-warriors-wanted-its-time-to-defend-the-human-spirit/
Meg's website: https://margaretwheatley.com/ and Terry's podcast:
https://newrepublicoftheheart.org/podcast/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDyMYWoDy_I
- - -
[thinking deeper]
*Collapse 101: The Inevitable Fruit of Progress (Dowd)*
Jul 24, 2020
thegreatstory
This stand-alone 75-minute video is also the first in a two-part series,
"Collapse and Adaptation Primer". The second video in the series is
titled, "Post Gloom: Deeply Adapting to Reality". See
https://postdoom.com/ for more information. Additional resources here:
https://postdoom.com/resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml9uJNF_kXk
[MIT classic hurricane lecture by Kerry Emanual]
*What Do Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Portend?*
Oct 2, 2017
Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences MIT
Speaker: Kerry A. Emanuel, Cecil & Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric
Science, Co-Director of the Lorenz Center
Natural disasters are the result of the interaction of a natural
phenomenon with human beings and their built environments. Globally and
in the U.S., large increases in coastal populations are causing
corresponding increases in hurricane damage and these are now being
compounded by rising sea levels and changing storm characteristics owing
to anthropogenic climate change. In this talk, I will describe
projections of changing hurricane activity over the rest of this century
and what such projections tell us about how the probabilities of
hurricanes like Harvey and Irma have already changed and are likely to
continue to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR7a3ET5uws
[young students present FutureEcologies - 8 chapters]
*'Scales of Change' - Technosalvation*
Today we're featuring an episode from one of our favourite podcasts
Future Ecologies, and their new mini-series "Scales of Change."
In the series, hosts Mendel and Adam take a deep dive into the various
"Dragons of Climate Inaction," the psychological barriers which prevent
us from collectively responding to climate change with the appropriate
urgency.
Listen to this episode on "Technosalvation" and subscribe to their
series by searching for Future Ecologies, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Website: www.futureecologies.net/dragons
https://soundcloud.com/radioecoshock
[Digging back into the internet news archive - finding greatness]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 5, 1996 *
August 5, 1996: The New York Times profiles climate scientist Ben
Santer, who had just become the target of a lavishly-financed defamation
campaign by the fossil fuel industry.
*Believer Finds Himself At Center of Hot Debate*
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
LIVERMORE, CALIF. -- Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, a shy, even-spoken,
41-year-old American climatologist who climbs mountains, runs
marathons and enjoys a reputation for careful and scrupulous work,
is the chief author of what may be the most important finding of the
decade in atmospheric science: that human activity is probably
causing some measure of global climate change, as environmentalists
have long assumed and skeptics have long denied.
The finding, issued for the first time in December 1995 by a panel
of scientists meeting under United Nations sponsorship in Madrid,
left open the question of just how large the human impact on climate
is. The question is perhaps the hottest and most urgent in
climatology today.
Dr. Santer is in the forefront of a rapidly unfolding effort to
answer it..
Dr. Santer graduated with top honors in 1976 from the University of
East Anglia in Britain with a degree in environmental sciences.
To his dismay, his British education availed him little in the job
market when he returned to his parents' home, then in the Baltimore
area. He bounced around for the next few years, working at various
times as a soccer teacher, a German teacher for Berlitz and an
assembler in a zipper factory, at which point, he says, he found
himself "down and out in Seattle." He made two stabs at a doctorate
at East Anglia, abandoning both.
He soon made a third attempt to earn a doctorate at East Anglia,
which boasts one of the world's top climatology departments, and
this time he succeeded.
"I found it fascinating," he said, "the idea that humans could have
a potentially large impact on climate." In his dissertation, Dr.
Santer used statistical techniques to investigate the accuracy with
which computerized models of the climate system simulated regional
climates.
He soon moved to another leading climatological laboratory, the Max
Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he worked for the
first time on the problem of detecting the signal of human-caused
climate change, especially global warming -- the "greenhouse
fingerprint." He also met his wife, Heike, in Hamburg, and they now
have a 3-year-old son, Nicholas.
Since moving to Livermore in 1992, Dr. Santer has grappled with the
related problems of testing the validity of climate models and
searching for the greenhouse fingerprint. His strategy is to examine
observed patterns of temperature change to see whether they matched
the unique patterns expected to result from the combination of
growing industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon
dioxide, on one hand, and sulfate aerosols that cool some parts of
the planet, on the other. According to this reasoning, the pattern
produced by the combination of greenhouse gases and aerosols would
be markedly different from that produced by any natural cause.
Climate models have been widely criticized for, among other things,
failing to adequately represent natural variability. One critic, Dr.
Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
says the models are so flawed as to be no more reliable than a Ouija
board.
"I think that's garbage," said Dr. Santer, part of whose job is to
assess how good the models are. "I think models are credible tools
and the only tools we have to define what sort of greenhouse signal
to look for. It's clear that the ability of models to simulate
important features of present-day climate has improved enormously."
He says that if the models are right -- still a big if -- the human
imprint on the climate should emerge more clearly in the next few
years. All in all, he says, he expects "very rapid" progress in the
search for the greenhouse fingerprint.
When might it become clear enough to be widely convincing?
"Even if New York were under six feet of water, there would be
people who would still say, 'Well, this is a natural event,' " he said.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/120197believe.html
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