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

[Richard Pauli]

/*August **9,**2020*/

[succinct message]*
**LAUDATO SI' ACTION PLATFORM*
https://www.laudatosi.org/laudato-si/action-platform/
- -
[an EcoJesuit video]
*Connecting Voices, Connecting Laudato Si': Action 2021*
Ecojesuit - Jul 7, 2020
The message and the voice of Laudato Si' still continue to be a 
consoling message of peace for everyone, from the margins to the 
leaderships. Caring for our common home remains a relevant and urgent 
message as the world locked down from the impact of the global pandemic 
that laid bare more starkly the social and ecological crisis.

As people lived through the virus crisis in various forms of curfews and 
lockdowns, far away from homes or inaccessible to their loved ones, the 
human voice of compassion and concern is deeply appreciated, and people 
are sustained in the conversations of hope at a time of great suffering.

Ecojesuit shares this brief video of the different voices that expressed 
reflections on Laudato Si' celebrating the simplicity of life, of 
nature, and the deep importance of community. Ways forward and 
opportunities to establish a better normal are encouraging meaningful 
action for the common good, for the #CommonHome.

These reflections and comments come from various webinars during Laudato 
Si' Week and show the unity in diversity that calls us to action over 
the coming year. Listening to people, four steps emerged in the effort 
to connect. First is learning from the Covid-19 experience, then second 
is recognizing we can act if we act together. Third is that conversion 
makes the difference and gives the perseverance, and finally, if we all 
act, the hope and the change take place.
https://youtu.be/cZPcQ3HRYao

- -

[A dicastery is a department of the Roman Curia, sort of a court of the 
Catholic Church]
*The Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development has announced a 
special Laudato Si' Anniversary Year.*
Laudato Si' Goals
Like the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, the Laudato Si' 
Goals are at once a vision and plan. They name the major challenges of 
our times and point to an integrated program of action to respond at all 
levels.
The Laudato Si' Goals are:

    *1. Response to the Cry of the Earth *(greater use of clean
    renewable energy and reducing fossil fuels in order to achieve
    carbon neutrality, efforts to protect and promote biodiversity,
    guaranteeing access to clean water for all).
    *2. Response to the Cry of the Poor *(defence of human life from
    conception to death and all forms of life on Earth, with special
    attention to vulnerable groups such as indigenous communities,
    migrants, children at risk through slavery).
    *3. Ecological Economics* (sustainable production, Fair-trade,
    ethical consumption, ethical investments, divestment from fossil
    fuels and any economic activity harmful to the planet and the
    people, investment in renewable energy).
    *4. Adoption of Simple Lifestyles* (sobriety in the use of resources
    and energy, avoid single-use plastic, adopt a more plant-based diet
    and reduce meat consumption, greater use of public transport and
    avoid polluting modes of transportation).
    *5. Ecological Education* (re-think and re-design educational
    curricula and educational institution reform in the spirit of
    integral ecology to create ecological awareness and action,
    promoting the ecological vocation of young people, teachers and
    leaders of education).
    *6. Ecological Spirituality* (recover a religious vision of God's
    creation, encourage greater contact with the natural world in a
    spirit of wonder, praise, joy and gratitude, promote
    creation-centred liturgical celebrations, develop ecological
    catechesis, prayer, retreats, formation).
    *7. Emphasis on Community Involvement and Participatory Action* to
    care for creation at the local, regional, national and international
    levels (promote advocacy and people's campaigns, encourage
    rootedness in local territory and neighbourhood ecosystems).
    Institutions on a Seven-year Journey

Seven sets of institutions are being especially encouraged to embark on 
a journey towards 'total sustainability'. They are:

    1. Families
    2. Dioceses and parishes
    3. Schools
    4. Universities and Colleges
    5. Hospitals and Health Care Centres
    6. Businesses and Agriculture / Farms
    7. Religious Orders.

https://socialjustice.catholic.org.au/2020/05/22/laudato-si-action-platform/

- -

[clips from InsideClimateNews]
*Five Years After Speaking Out on Climate Change, Pope Francis Sounds an 
Urgent Alarm*
The encyclical 'Laudato Si' motivated many people to take action on 
global warming, but governments, the pope said, have lagged far behind.
BY JAMES BRUGGERS - AUG 7, 2020..
- -
This summer, the Vatican announced the "Laudato Si' Action Platform." It 
asks Catholics and Catholic institutions to achieve sustainability 
within seven years.

The Vatican itself continues to gather advice from high-level scientists 
and other experts in working groups, with both climate and Covid-19 in mind.

"The Vatican is pulling expertise from all over the world to chart a 
course for a post-Covid world," Tucker said. "This is a huge commitment."

*The Importance of Catholic Divestment*
Experts will argue over whether divestment campaigns actually cripple 
the targeted industries. But to their supporters, the campaigns hurt 
companies by diminishing their reputations and their access to capital, 
the lifeblood of any corporation.

In McKibben's mind, the Vatican's full support for divestment of fossil 
fuel companies is "a big deal, since the Church is a serious financial 
force."

Various Catholic institutions have been divesting from fossil fuel 
companies for several years, including the University of Dayton and 
Georgetown University, with the pace picking up since Laudato Si', 
though many still have not divested, he said.

The author of more than 15 books, including The End of Nature, published 
in 1989 as an early warning about global warming, McKibben is also 
co-founder of the environmental group 350.org, which has run its own 
divestment campaign since 2012.

The environmental group counts more than 1,200 institutions and local 
governments and thousands of individuals representing over $14 trillion 
as having pledged to divest their assets from fossil fuels, including 
the Episcopal church, the Church of England, and the World Council of 
Churches.

S&P Global, a financial information and analysis company, has said the 
movement is gaining traction, and reported a new sense of clean-energy 
optimism in the market.

And, the  multinational oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell in its 
2019 annual report described the divestment campaigns as a significant 
enough risk that it felt it needed to warn investors.

Divestment campaigns "could have a material adverse effect on the price 
of our securities and our ability to access capital markets," the 
company disclosed. Shell also recently slashed the value of its assets 
by up to $22 billion amid crashing oil prices, the global pandemic and 
pressure to move away from fossil fuels.

The Global Catholic Climate Movement called the new divestment effort  
the first-ever endorsement of a fossil fuel divestment campaign to come 
from the full Vatican and said it followed the largest-ever announcement 
of divestment by faith institutions. In May 2020, 42 institutions in 14 
countries announced their commitment to drop fossil fuels.

"The more that banks and fossil fuel companies and insurance companies 
see investment in fossil fuels is a losing strategy, the more they are 
going to distance themselves from fossil fuel industry projects and see 
them as a losing strategy in terms of finances and risk," Wagner said.

*Engaging Conservative Catholics *
The pope's renewed climate push this year comes as Americans face a 
presidential election pitting two candidates with widely divergent views 
on climate change. For nearly four years, President Donald Trump has 
taken the country in the opposite direction from the Vatican, working to 
withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a 
global action to fight climate change. Democratic challenger and former 
Vice President Joe Biden, a Catholic, has embraced the encyclical, as 
well as a $2 trillion clean economy jobs program and timetable to 
achieve net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.

For some Catholics, Trump's fossil-fuel agenda has provided motivation 
to act on their own, said Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic 
Climate Covenant, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that 
includes 19 U.S. Catholic partner institutions and works to incorporate 
the encyclical's message in education and worship.  "People were saying 
nothing is going to happen on the national level, so we need to act at 
the local and state level," he said.

The encyclical has inspired actions across the country, he said. His 
organization has encouraged the creation of dozens of so-called Creation 
Care Teams to lead community action. It has started Catholic Energies, 
focused on solar power and energy efficiency. And it is encouraging 
advocacy in state capitals and Washington, D.C. "It's made a difference 
and it's continued to unfold," Misleh said.

The Atlanta climate action plan has been or is being used as a point of 
reference for climate plans at the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., 
where Archbishop Gregory now serves, and at dioceses in Boston, 
Columbus, Minneapolis, San Diego and elsewhere, Misleh and other 
Catholic leaders said.

But they acknowledged that there have been some dioceses and parishes 
less willing to embrace the climate fight due to competing priorities or 
resistance on political grounds. The Pew Research Center finds that 
Catholics are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats and 
polarized, generally.

Still, Misleh and other Catholics who are deeply concerned about climate 
change don't hesitate to engage Catholic conservatives who oppose 
abortion and reject the urgency to act on climate--a position not 
uncommon among Republicans.

"One cannot be concerned about the unborn and not be concerned about the 
world in which they are born into," said Michael Terrien, who works on 
climate issues with the Archdiocese of Chicago, which serves 2.2 million 
Catholics.

In Atlanta, the climate action plan Varmaloff helped write directly 
replies to the suggestion that the encyclical runs counter to business, 
a common refrain in the South. Business is a "noble vocation," the plan 
says, but it adds that Francis is asking for "is a future in which 'all 
people can prosper personally and economically in harmony with the gifts 
God has given us in nature.'"

The Atlanta Archdiocese has been able to perform or schedule energy 
audits on about two dozen of its 103 parishes so far. St. Mary's 
Catholic School in Rome, Georgia, for example, has 1,500 new 
energy-saving LED lights, cutting gym energy use in half, said Brian J. 
Savoie, the archdiocese sustainability program coordinator.

He said he has a simple message as he works with the parishes on energy 
efficiency: "Stop wasting, save money and fix the environmental burden."

Spending less on heating, air conditioning and lighting leaves more 
money to go toward social justice work, like feeding and clothing the 
poor, said Kat Doyle, who heads up the Laudato Si' initiative for the 
Atlanta Archdiocese.

"We want to tie all of this climate and energy work into how we are 
serving the least among us," she said. "We have to change hearts first, 
then we have to change minds, and then we have to change behaviors."

And, she said, Catholics must answer the question, "What does our faith 
call us to do?"
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082020/climate-change-pope-francis


[Popular Science fundamentals]
*This worst-case climate scenario might be the most realistic*
Climate scientists are still debating what's the most likely outcome, 
though none of them are looking good.
By Ula Chrobak - August 7, 2020
With news every day of environmental protections being stripped away, 
hotter summers, more powerful storms, and biodiversity in crisis, it's 
perhaps easy to assume we're on a dangerous path for climate change. 
However, among climate scientists, there's a surprising amount of debate 
around the so-called "worst-case" scenario and whether it's fair to say 
we're going down that route.

The technical term for this worst-case scenario is Representative 
Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change first used the RCPs in preparing their Fifth Assessment Report, 
published in 2014. There are four main RCPs: 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, 8.5. The 
numbers represent different values for radiative forcing, a measure of 
how much of the sun's energy the atmosphere traps. Starting with 2005, 
the RCPs project the trajectory of greenhouses gas into 2100. Each 
projection has different assumptions about future human population, 
economic activity, and fossil fuel use.

All except RCP 8.5 include climate change mitigation. For that reason, 
it's sometimes also called a "business-as-usual" scenario--in which we 
continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with abandon, 
including by increasing coal use by about 500 percent by 2100.

On Monday, Christopher Schwalm and colleagues at the Woods Hole Research 
Center published a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences that argues we are indeed in line with RCP 8.5′s trajectory. 
But other scientists argue that RCP 8.5 doesn't provide an accurate 
picture of what's happening now, and is especially unlikely as a future 
scenario moving into 2100.

Schwalm found that, since the RCPs were developed, we've been closest to 
that worst-case pathway. For the past 15 years, our greenhouse gas 
emissions have tracked most closely with those projected under RCP 8.5. 
"It was designed to track the high end of what might be plausible," says 
Schwalm. But it appears to match what's happened since then and into the 
near future. "It is a very good characterization of where we are going 
to be if current trends are simply extrapolated out forward in time … 
And it tracks historical emissions within 1 percent."

Schwalm and his team also considered where we might be heading. Putting 
together historical emissions, energy-related emissions forecasts 
created by the International Energy Agency, and policy commitments by 
countries, they projected where we might end up in 2030 and 2050. That 
pathway, it seems, is somewhere between the emissions of RCP 4.5 and 
8.5. The authors argue that if you consider some of the factors the RCPs 
don't include--including complex feedback loops like permafrost 
degradation that will probably result in greater emissions--it's best to 
plan for an RCP 8.5 world.

Schalm thinks that, considering how close we are to matching the RCP 8.5 
path now and into the next couple decades, it's worth using it as a tool 
in planning. If you're building a dam today that needs to sustain the 
impacts of a warmer climate, it may be wise to consider what an RCP 8.5 
world will do to the intensity of storms in 2050 just in case. "The 
overall terms of the debate, in terms of trying to understand what a 
useful scenario is, really have to be much more focused on the near term 
as opposed to the end of the century," says Schwalm. "That is much more 
important, both from a policy standpoint and just from a standpoint of 
human relatability, than some technical discussion about the level of 
coal use that may or may not happen 80 years from now."

Not all climate scientists agree with Schwalm. Some, including Zeke 
Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough 
Institute, have issues with describing RCP 8.5 as similar to our current 
track because its underlying assumptions about energy use don't match 
reality. For example, it projected that the  world will use five times 
as much coal as it did in 2005, due to a growing population and weak 
market for alternative energy. As Hausfather explains, global coal use 
peaked in 2013 and the especially-dirty fossil fuel seems to be slowly 
losing steam. Although our emissions on the surface are similar to the 
8.5 track right now, we've already started moving away from it's 
assumptions on fossil fuels.

Hausfather says that framing this climate scenario as the one we're on 
track for is misleading. He says that RCP 8.5 way underestimates 
emissions that rise from changing land uses (think, a forest being 
chopped down for use in agriculture), and conversely overestimates 
energy emissions. Therefore, while total emissions so far match the 
worst-case projection, it's not because we've been burning fossil fuels 
at quite the rate projected by RCP 8.5. As Hausfather put it, "It's the 
right answer for the wrong reason."

The RCPs were formulated in 2005, and a lot has changed in energy and 
policy since then. Experts have estimated that, based on the policy 
commitments countries have made since then, we're most likely on track 
to warm the planet by 3 at the end of century. RCP 8.5, however, puts us 
at around 5. This is important because numerous studies use the 8.5 
trajectory to predict the resulting impacts of a world warmed under that 
scenario. Hausfather thinks researchers should use less-extreme climate 
scenarios than RCP 8.5 to provide a clearer picture of what we're 
potentially in store for.

Where the two scientists agree is that we should not just throw away 
this worst-case pathway. As Hausfather explains, there are certainly 
scenarios in which we could reach an RCP 8.5 level of warming by 2100, 
or at least close to it. And it's probably best not to ignore a 
worst-case scenario with something as profoundly impactful as climate 
change.

Adding another dimension to the RCP projections could help. As part of 
its next assessment, the IPCC has developed Shared Socioeconomic 
Pathways, or SSPs, which interact with the RCP scenarios to influence 
the pathways of our emissions. For example, in a world of "resurgent 
nationalism," as one SSP describes, countries may fail to cooperate on 
climate agreements, and spiral toward a future of 4 warming in 2100. 
Considering these SSPs, which also include information about land use 
change, will help scientists make better predictions.

Even as climate scientists improve these projections, though their main 
message hasn't shifted much over the decades. "The overall narrative 
that was articulated some 30, 40 years ago, is really the exact same one 
that we have today, which is we have to wean ourselves off of fossil 
fuels," says Schwalm. "And the sooner we do that, the better."
https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/worst-case-climate-scenario-realistic/

- -

[Source material]
*RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions*

    *Abstract*
    Climate simulation-based scenarios are routinely used to
    characterize a range of plausible climate futures. Despite some
    recent progress on bending the emissions curve, RCP8.5, the most
    aggressive scenario in assumed fossil fuel use for global climate
    models, will continue to serve as a useful tool for quantifying
    physical climate risk, especially over near- to midterm
    policy-relevant time horizons. Not only are the emissions consistent
    with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO2
    emissions (within 1%), but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to
    midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly
    plausible levels of CO2 emissions in 2100.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/30/2007117117



[6 min video report explains it well]
*Melting arctic ice fuels climate change and extreme weather events | DW 
News*
Aug 7, 2020
DW News
Global climate change is perhaps most clearly visible at the cold top 
and bottom of the globe. The arctic has been warming up for years - and 
now, the warnings of experts and scientists are clear for everyone to 
see - the poles are melting.
As the differences in temperature between the poles and the equatore 
reduce, the jetstream winds, which move weather around the globe - are 
slowing down. The result - extreme weather. High- and low pressure 
systems remain at the same spot for longer, creating floods and droughts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjhj7lEVFZU



[Rains explained on the West Coast]
*Extreme atmospheric rivers: what will California's strongest storms 
look like in a warming climate?*
https://weatherwest.com/archives/7364
[Twitter]
*THE CLIMATE GROUP'S TOP 100 TWITTER ACCOUNTS 2020*
https://www.climateweeknyc.org/climate-groups-top-100-twitter-accounts-2020


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 9, 2010 *
August 9, 2010: NASA scientist Jay Zwally appears on MSNBC's "Countdown 
with Keith Olbermann"  to discuss Greenland's ice melt and the political 
dysfunction that has prevented legislative action on climate change in 
the US.
http://youtu.be/5vmupjRkgmU

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