[TheClimate.Vote] August 10, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August **10,**2020*/

[Sour Summers at the lake]
*Lake Erie's Toxic Green Slime is Getting Worse With Climate Change*
Algal blooms are a hazard around the country. But Lake Erie is 
especially vulnerable to the scourge, and researchers are looking for 
explanations.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082020/lake-erie-toxic-algae-climate-change



[Irony of coal and climate]
*Climate change hits back, Svalbard coal mine flooded by melting glacier*
After days with record heat at Svalbard, the penetration of water from 
the above melting glacier is now flooding Norway's only operating coal 
mine that supplies the country's only coal-power plant.
ByThomas Nilsen - July 30, 2020
Large water penetration in Gruve 7 (Mine 7) was discovered on Sunday 
July 26 during a routine inspection, the Store Norske mining company 
informs.

The day before, a record heat of 21,7C was measured in Longyearbyen, the 
highest temperature ever measured so far north in the European Arctic.

Mine 7 is located some 15 kilometers southeast of Longyearbyen and is 
the only remaining Norwegian operated coal mine on the Arctic 
archipelago. The mine supplies the local coal-power plant with about 
30,000 tons of coal annually, while another 80,000 tons are exported to 
customers in the European metallurgical and chemical industry.

The mountain above the mine is covered by a glacier and it is melting 
water from this glacier that now penetrates through the rocks into the mine.

Extra pumps are installed, but has so far not been able to remove more 
water than is coming in, the company explains. New pipes are put in 
place and more pumping capacity is brought in.

"We are also working on trying to get an overview of the equipment we 
can expect to have been destroyed and therefore need to be replaced 
before operations can start again," says mining chief Per Nilssen. He 
says it is too early to tell when coal mining can start again.

Operations were currently on a pause due to the coronavirus situation, a 
halt in mining supposed to last until August 17. The pause is now likely 
to be prolonged, the mining company informs.
Store Norske is owned by the state. Norway has for years been criticized 
for the paradox of mining coal and supplying electricity from a coal 
power plant to the town of Longyearbyen at the place on earth where 
temperatures are rising most due to climate changes.
Since the 70s, the annual average temperatures have risen by 4C at 
Svalbard, with winter temperatures rising more than 7C, as previously 
reported by the Barents Observer. A climate report released last year 
warns that annual average temperatures could increase with up to 10 
degrees Celsius by 2100.

This is not the first time climate changes troubles human activities on 
Svalbard. The Global Seed Vault, where some 45,000 international 
varieties are stored deep into what originally was believed to be safe 
permafrost, was recently forced to rebuild its entrance.

Climate change caused more snow and rain and the entrance was flooded 
several times. During reconstruction, the ground around the new 
waterproof entrance is artificially frozen to avoid further erosion.

In the town of Longyearbyen is houses sagging due to unstable ground as 
the permafrost melts. About 250 homes will have to be torn down and new 
buildings are built on steel pillars and sensors are placed in the 
ground to measure how the steel constructions impact the permafrost.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2020/07/coal-mine-flooded-melting-glacier



[a very bad greenhouse gas]
*INSIDE InsideClimate News with Reporters Phil McKenna and Lili Pike*
InsideClimate News
Reporters Phil McKenna and Lili Pike talk about their recent article on 
Chinese nitrous oxide plants, and how efforts to control the emissions 
of this dangerous superpollutant went haywire when funding for a carbon 
trading program dried up.
https://youtu.be/2P0ckbuvN4I
- -
[Nitrous Oxide]
*'Super-Pollutant' Emitted by 11 Chinese Chemical Plants Could Equal a 
Climate Catastrophe*
Emissions controls worked perfectly at Chinese plants, until a foreign 
subsidy dried up...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04082020/china-n2o-super-pollutant-nylon-emissions-climate-change



[some deeper considerations before we hop into the car]
*Why climate change is about to make your bad commute worse*
By Matt Alderton - August 8, 2020
Something remarkable happened on American roadways during the early days 
of the coronavirus pandemic: In even the most congested cities, traffic 
started moving again. With Americans staying home, cars suddenly rolled 
over highways like water through a freshly unclogged pipe. By mid-April, 
traffic had fallen to just 52 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according 
to traffic research firm INRIX.

But the reprieve was short-lived. As states and cities reopened their 
economies, drivers restarted their vehicles. By late June, INRIX 
reported, travel nationwide had already reached pre-pandemic levels, and 
in many states traffic was actually exceeding those levels.

That's bad news for motorists, who lost an average of 99 hours to 
congestion in 2019 -- two hours more than just two years prior.

Most motorists are familiar with many of the reasons for bad traffic: 
more cars on the road, unskilled drivers, construction, inadequate mass 
transit, crashes. Increasingly, however, there's at least one more 
culprit to consider: climate change.

"America's transportation system is not set up to recover and regain 
functionality after a major disruption or disasters," said Paula 
Pagniez, director of the Climate and Resilience Hub at global risk 
management firm Willis Towers Watson. "Both chronic and acute changes in 
weather impact America's roads, bridges, tunnels and transit."

In fact, weather already causes approximately 15 percent of congestion, 
according to the Federal Highway Administration. And with climate change 
escalating -- scientists expect extreme weather events such as heat 
waves, snow storms, hurricanes and floods to increase in both frequency 
and intensity -- gridlock will only grow. That is, unless governments 
change the way they plan, design and manage climate-sensitive 
infrastructure.

"We need to fundamentally reassess what our systems need to be able to 
deliver, and under what conditions," said Mikhail Chester, associate 
professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona 
State University and co-leader of the Urban Resilience to Extremes 
Sustainability Research Network. "And those conditions, it looks like, 
are going to be changing faster and faster in the future."
*The climate conundrum*
So fundamental is climate's impact on critical infrastructure that it's 
codified in local, state and even federal regulations.
"Everything that is built around you is built with some consideration 
for how much environmental exposure it's going to be able to tolerate," 
Chester explained. "When it comes to roads, for example, the American 
Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has guidelines 
that say asphalt should be engineered to withstand the hottest week on 
record during a certain historical period -- say, 1970 and 2000. In 
Arizona, that might be 115 degrees, and in Chicago, it might be 105 
degrees."

The problem is, thanks to climate change, past is no longer prologue. 
"We're not going to shut off CO2 emissions overnight, so the climate is 
going to continue changing. The question is, by how much and in which 
direction?" Chester said.

"Let's say you design a road in Chicago for the hottest week on record, 
which might be 105 degrees. Well, the hottest week going forward might 
be 108 degrees, or it could be 120 degrees," he said.
Faced with uncertainty, civil engineers can do little but guess. And the 
wrong guess could be costly.

Consider, for example, "robust design." That's design "that will 
withstand all of the environmental conditions you might expect over the 
lifetime of a road," said Jayne Knott, a civil and environmental 
engineer who is principal and senior scientist at JFK Environmental 
Services.

"The problem with that is, when you build a road that's good for all 
conditions, you end up with very thick asphalt," said Knott, who is also 
a research associate at the University of Massachusetts at Boston's 
School for the Environment. "When you consider paving an entire roadway, 
that extra asphalt costs big, big money. Plus, you're raising the road, 
so suddenly trucks don't fit under bridges. It's very complex."

If over-engineering hurts public coffers, under-engineering hurts public 
safety. When pavement falls victim to extreme temperatures or 
precipitation, for example, it fails. And when pavement fails -- 
creating cracks, potholes and rutting -- roads become hazardous.

It's not just roads, either. Also vulnerable are railroads, whose tracks 
can buckle in extreme temperatures; power lines, which can sag and fall 
during heat waves and topple during windstorms; dams and sewers, which 
can flood and fail during extreme rains; and bridges, which expand and 
contract with the temperature in ways that can degrade their structural 
integrity.

And along with fiscal and physical fallout, there are economic consequences.

"We need infrastructure to move the goods and people that make the 
economy go," said Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate 
and Energy Solutions, adding that infrastructure failure can hamper 
employment, productivity, logistics and commerce.

Solutions: More funding, adaptive engineering
Even without the specter of climate change, U.S. infrastructure is in 
dire straits, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 
which gave the nation a D+ on its most recent "Infrastructure Report Card."

"Climate change is an additional stressor on already taxed 
infrastructure," Chester said. The situation's silver lining, he added, 
is consensus: "Everyone is in agreement that we should do something 
about infrastructure."

In fact, bipartisan legislation is awaiting action by Congress. The 
Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019 would invest $4.9 billion over 
five years in a new resiliency program to protect roads and bridges from 
extreme weather and natural disasters. If passed, it would build upon 
the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act of 2015, which requires 
state departments of transportation to incorporate resilience into 
long-term infrastructure planning, and the Disaster Recovery Reform Act 
of 2018, whose Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program 
funds infrastructure projects that proactively mitigate communities' 
disaster risks.

Federal funding is especially important in light of the coronavirus 
pandemic, according to Allie Kelly, executive director of the Ray C. 
Anderson Foundation, which oversees the philanthropically funded Ray C. 
Anderson Memorial Highway (the Ray) in Troup County, Ga.

"An added complication for us right now as we're promoting smart, 
resilient infrastructure is the economic damage we'll likely be working 
through for years, not months, as a result of covid," Kelly said, adding 
that the funding mechanisms transportation departments rely on to build, 
operate and repair infrastructure are drying up because of the pandemic.

"People don't drive during economic downturns, so they don't use as much 
gas. That means DOTs don't have the gas-tax revenue that is their 
lifeblood," she said.

Creativity and adaptability are also essential. Along its 18-mile 
stretch of Interstate 85, for example, the Ray tests new infrastructure 
solutions that deliver cost savings, performance improvements and 
climate resilience. Two that show particular promise are roadside 
vegetation and rubber-modified asphalt. The former fills vacant roadside 
land with perennial grains whose deep roots retain water and hold soil 
against storm water flooding. The latter, made with recycled tires, are 
rutting- and crack-resistant, which increases road durability and 
extends the life of the pavement by up to 30 percent or more.

In some cases, answers lie in geography. "In the Southwest, they use 
different asphalt binders than in the Northeast," Knott said. "As the 
climate warms, materials that are used right now down South might be 
appropriate for up North. We just have to be willing to make changes 
instead of sticking with what we've always used."

Chester agreed, suggesting that engineers respond to climate change by 
designing infrastructure for the short term, instead of the long term.

"The way we typically approach infrastructure is to assume stability, 
but it's looking more and more like the world in the future is going to 
be unstable," he said. "So instead of building rigid systems that are 
supposed to last 50 or 100 years, we might want to think about building 
systems that are reasonable for the next 10 or 20 years, then pivoting 
quickly as conditions change."

Whatever solutions they bring to bear, the biggest need for communities 
to fortify their infrastructure against climate change is better data.

"If we know what the conditions are going to be, we have enough skill in 
the engineering field to be able to design for those. The weak link 
right now is that we don't have the information we need to project what 
those future conditions will be," said Perciasepe, of the Center for 
Climate and Energy Solutions. He cited the flood plain maps generated by 
the Federal Emergency Management Agency as an example. As recently as 
December 2016, a government audit found only 42 percent of the flood map 
miles in FEMA's inventory were updated and valid.

"We need additional investment to be able to get that data updated so 
it's available for people to use when they're doing climate 
vulnerability assessments," Perciasepe said.

Sandy shines a light
Even as the nation falls behind, however, some cities are pulling ahead. 
Among them is New York, whose coastline was walloped by Hurricane Sandy 
in 2012. Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) established the 
Mayor's Office of Resiliency to lead climate adaptation across the 
city's five boroughs.

"Hurricane Sandy was a pivotal moment in New York City's climate action 
work," said Jainey Bavishi, the office's director. "We wanted to make 
sure we weren't just recovering from Hurricane Sandy, but that we were 
building a city that's more resilient to the chronic impacts of climate 
change that we know we are going to continue facing."

Bavishi and a staff of approximately 30 are charged with executing a $20 
billion resiliency strategy whose components include building coastal 
infrastructure to protect against sea-level rise and developing 
guidelines to help civil engineers leverage climate projections in their 
designs.

Because it must rely on external stakeholders to execute its work -- 
including other city departments, regional agencies and the private 
sector -- the office's most important contribution might be leadership.

"Within the city, we very much are a thought leader, policy leader and 
multiagency convener. A major part of our role is bringing agencies 
together to introduce them to the challenge and figure out how we're 
going to manage it together," Bavishi said. "We're basically leading an 
organizational change process from the ground up for the entire city 
government. It's a massive effort."

Large though it may be, experts insist that this kind of effort is critical.

"The nation can save $6 in future disaster costs for every $1 invested 
in hazard mitigation," Pagniez said, citing data from the National 
Institute of Building Sciences. "Beyond a misuse of taxpayer dollars, 
the consequences of not acting include lives and livelihoods lost and 
assets damaged -- sometimes beyond repair."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/why-climate-change-is-about-to-make-your-bad-commute-worse/2020/08/08/7ad97ba8-d5b6-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html


[pair of political propaganda books - warns the Guardian]
*False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg; Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger 
- review*
Two prominent 'lukewarmers' take climate science denial to another 
level, offering tepid manifestos at best
Bob Ward - 9 Aug 2020
It is no longer credible to deny that the average temperature around the 
world is rising and that other phenomena, such as extreme weather 
events, are also shifting. People can now see with their own eyes that 
the climate is changing around them.

Nor is it tenable to deny that the Earth's warming is driven by 
increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere, resulting from human activities, such as the production and 
burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Such denial is only now 
promoted by cranks and conspiracy theorists who also think, for 
instance, that the Covid-19 pandemic is linked to the development of the 
5G network.

So instead, a different form of climate change denial is emerging from 
the polemical columns of rightwing newspapers. They paint a Panglossian 
picture of manmade climate crisis that will never be catastrophic as 
long as the world grows rich by using fossil fuels. The "lukewarmers" 
are on the march and coming to a bookshop near you.

Two prominent lukewarmers are now launching new manifestos: False Alarm: 
How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to 
Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental 
Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger.

Although they are aimed primarily at American audiences, they will 
appeal to anyone who, like the authors, proclaims themselves to be an 
environmentalist, but despises environmental campaigners.

Both books contain many pages of endnotes and references to academic 
publications, conveying the initial impression that their arguments are 
supported by reason and evidence. But the well-informed reader will 
recognise that they rely on sources that are outdated, cherry-picked or 
just wrong...
- -
The content of False Alarm will be familiar to those who have read 
Lomborg's previous books, The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. 
New findings and evidence are twisted and forced into the same 
haranguing narrative for his new contribution. Shellenberger's book is 
far easier to read, at least near the beginning, but gradually descends 
into a bitter rant against environmentalists, the media and politicians 
who do not share his fervour for nuclear power...
Not everything that Lomborg and Shellenberger write is wrong. They are 
both correct in saying that the world should be investing far more in 
making populations, particularly in poor countries, more resilient to 
our changing climate. Even if the world is successful in its 
implementation of the Paris Agreement and limits global warming to well 
below 2C by the end of the century, the impacts will continue to grow 
over the coming decades, threatening lives and livelihoods across the globe.

But their argument that adaptation to climate crisis impacts is easier 
and cheaper than emissions cuts is undermined by their admission that 
the economic costs of extreme weather are rising because 
ever-more-vulnerable businesses and homes are being built in high-risk 
areas.

Lomborg is also right that the world should be spending far more on 
green innovation to develop technologies to help us to tackle climate 
breakdown. But he is pinning all his hopes on the breakthrough discovery 
of a magical new energy source that will be both zero-carbon and cheaper 
than fossil fuels.

This is wrong-headed for at least two reasons. The first is that most 
innovation occurs through the incremental improvement of existing 
technologies and we will probably need several different sources of 
affordable and clean energy. The second is that climate crisis results 
from the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is 
already happening, so we cannot afford to delay the deployment of 
today's alternatives to fossil fuels.

I also have some sympathy for Shellenberger's argument that nuclear 
power has a role to play in creating a zero-carbon energy system. 
However, instead of calmly explaining its advantages over fossil fuels, 
he attempts to promote it by trash-talking about new renewable 
technologies, particularly wind and solar...
He is right that we cannot yet store energy affordably on the scale 
needed to power an entire electricity grid with intermittent renewables. 
But he also claims that windfarms might be responsible for an alarming 
decline in insect populations in Germany, which entomologists have 
blamed on agricultural practices. And he complains that the turbines 
"are almost invariably loud and disturb the peace and quiet", although 
he stops short of repeating Donald Trump's ridiculous falsehood that the 
noise causes cancer.

Both Lomborg and Shellenberger also make some legitimate criticisms of 
"alarmism" by environmentalists. One of the most difficult problems in 
making the case for action on climate crisis is that the elevated levels 
of greenhouse gases we create over the next few decades will have 
consequences not fully realised until the next century and beyond. Some 
campaigners deal with this communications challenge by wrongly warning 
of imminent catastrophe.

However, many scientists do suspect that we are approaching, or have 
already passed, thresholds beyond which very severe consequences, such 
as destabilisation of the land-based polar ice caps and associated sea 
level rise of several metres, become unstoppable, irreversible or 
accelerate. Lomborg and Shellenberger both downplay these huge risks 
because they fatally undermine the fundamental basis for their 
lukewarmer ideology.

Lomborg's book relies heavily on the creative use of the Dynamic 
Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (Dice). William Nordhaus, 
who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2018 for his pioneering work on 
climate change, created the Dice model, but it has been strongly 
criticised for omitting the biggest risks.

A graph in Lomborg's book shows that he has used Dice to predict that 
4.1C of global warming by the end of the century would only reduce 
global economic output, or GDP, by about 4%. He also finds that even 
more extreme warming of 7C would lead to a loss of GDP of just 15%. 
These are hard to reconcile with the scientific evidence that such 
temperature changes would utterly transform the world...
- -
Lomborg also exaggerates the costs of action by automatically doubling 
researchers' estimates for reducing emissions. He justifies this by 
referring to an obscure study in 2009 that concluded it may prove twice 
as costly as the European commission expected for the member states to 
cut their collective emissions by 20% by 2020. But the European Union 
reached its target ahead of schedule in 2018, with the price of 
emissions permits over the previous decade usually at less than half of 
the level anticipated by the commission.

Nevertheless, Lomborg doubles Nordhaus's estimates of the costs of 
global action and concludes that the "optimal" level of global warming, 
balancing both damages and emissions cuts, would be 3.75C by 2100.

This calculation made me laugh out loud because modern humans have no 
evolutionary experience of the climate that would be created by such a 
temperature rise. The last time the Earth was more than 2C warmer than 
pre-industrial times was during the Pliocene epoch, three million years 
ago, when the polar ice caps were much smaller and global sea level was 
10 to 20 metres higher than today. Only lukewarmers would claim that 
modern humans are best suited to a prehistoric climate!

*In short, these new books truly deserve their place on the bookshelf 
among other classic examples of political propaganda.*
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/09/false-alarm-by-bjorn-lomborg-apocalypse-never-by-michael-shellenberger-review
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research 
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of 
Economics

- False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the 
Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg is published by Basic 
Books. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com.

- Apocalpyse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael 
Shellenberger is published by HarperCollins. To order a copy go to 
guardianbookshop.com.
- - -
[checking background quotes of 2 propagandists]
*DeSmog Climate Disinformation Research Database* where you can search 
and browse our extensive research on the individuals and organizations 
that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected 
leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and 
fight global warming. Choose a tab below to view the lists of climate 
science denier individuals and organizations.
*Bjorn Lomborg*
July 2020
Lomborg published a book titled False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic 
Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. It was 
promoted by the Institute for Energy Research and the Hoover Institution 
among other groups.
The thesis of the book, reported in a review at the New York Times, was 
that "Activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of 
climate change. If we listen to them, Lomborg says, we will waste 
trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most."

Joseph E. Stiglitz of The New York Times notes that, "Somehow, missing 
in his list of good policy measures are easy things like good 
regulations -- preventing coal-burning electric generators, for 
example." Stiglitz adds that Lomborg, "exhibits a naïve belief that 
markets work well -- ignoring a half-century of research into market 
failures that says otherwise -- so well, in fact, that there is no 
reason for government to intervene other than by setting the right price 
of carbon."

"A second mistake -- which biases the results in the same way -- is 
Nordhaus's and Lomborg's underestimation of the damage associated with 
climate change." Examples of that damage include ocean acidification and 
sea level rise. "Climate change also includes more extreme weather 
events -- more intense hurricanes, more droughts, more floods, with all 
the devastation to life, livelihood and property that accompanies them."

A third mistake identified in the article is "not taking due account of 
risk."

"As the atmospheric concentration of carbon increases, we are entering 
uncharted territory. Not since the dawn of humanity has there been 
anything like this. The models use the 'best estimate' of impacts, but 
as we learn more about climate change these best estimates keep getting 
revised, and, typically, in only one direction -- more damage and sooner 
than had been expected."

Stiglitz concluded:
"This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. 
It's nominally about air pollution. It's really about mind pollution."

IER disagreed with Lomborg's case of a tax on carbon, suggesting "a 
no-carbon-tax policy is better than the 'optimal' carbon tax."
Lomborg was also interviewed at the Hoover Institution, where he is a 
visiting fellow, on July 24 to discuss the book.
find source details at - https://www.desmogblog.com/bjorn-lomborg
- - -
*Michael Shellenberger*
*Key Quotes*
July 2, 2020
The following is from an interview Shellenberger did for The Heartland 
Institute's podcast:
[00:19:50] "I don't blame people for being apocalyptic environmentalists 
anymore than I blame being blame people for catching the coronavirus. 
You know, it's like an infectious disease. Right. All right. It's 
treatable, though. Highly treatable."

He later commented on climate change:

[00:36:27] "Climate needs to have its importance diminished. It's not 
the most important environmental problem in the world. The main function 
of IPCC appears to be to terrify people. I don't know what else it does."

July 2, 2020
In an interview for Alex Epstein's podcast, Shellenberger described how 
he believed climate change would be solved, and also gave Epstein credit 
for the term "unreliables" in relation to wind and solar -- a term 
Shellenberger said he used in his recent book.

Michael Shellenberger: [00:04:39] We're going to deal climate change by 
by by just switching to power sources that don't have that don't produce 
carbon emissions. So those like the first big thing. And then it was 
like once I was on board with that. It wasn't. Is it's hard to be like, 
OK, maybe you do need nuclear. And then it was just becoming 
disenchanted with renewables. It was really the land use impacts and the 
environmental impacts of renewables. So, you know, you and your 
listeners know I don't need to tell you guys. But, you know, 400 times 
more land on average, for solar and wind farms than you need for natural 
gas or nuclear plants. Of course, it's completely unreliable. By the 
way, do you see got yourself a little section. You got this. I gave you 
a little section headline once. Unreliables. [00:05:23]

Alex Epstein: [00:05:24] Yeah, I'm glad. [00:05:25]

Michael Shellenberger: [00:05:26] I don't know you wrote that. But I. 
[00:05:27]

Alex Epstein: [00:05:27] I did, but I didn't know that you credited me. 
Where did you credit me? [00:05:30]

Michael Shellenberger: [00:05:30] I didn't credit you. I just stole it 
from you. I'm crediting you now. Um, no, I was going to say and I mean 
it was unreliables. [00:05:37]

Alex Epstein: [00:05:38] I know, I love it. I was so happy when I saw 
that, because I've wanted that to get wider use. [00:05:42]

Later in the interview, Shellenberger compared feras of climate change 
to fears of nuclear energy:

Michael Shellenberger: [00:26:34] So climate change, if you listen to 
how people talk about it, like the apocalyptic stuff. It sounds almost 
identical to fears of nuclear weapons and nuclear wars. It's like the 
same… Nuclear is kind of the prototypical apocalypse. And then they'd 
kind of be like, well, yeah, overpopulation, you know, that would be 
like a bomb going off. Yeah. But what? Really? I mean, not really, 
right. Like, not at all. But whatever it would be like population bomb. 
[00:26:58]

Michael Shellenberger: [00:26:59] That was the name of the big 
Malthusian population scare in 1968 and now climate change. And if I 
would point out the Amazon has talked about like a bomb going off. So 
the bomb became kind of the ultimate symbol of humankind's apocalyptic 
power. And then and then you can see that it becomes the devil and then 
you're trying to get away from it. You're going to the angels, which 
just renewables. I mean, the overall cosmology of apocalyptic 
environmentalism is kind of so basic and dumb. It's almost embarrassing 
to when you describe it, you know, you're kind of like God, I can't 
believe people really believe this, but that is what's going on. It's 
ultimately this idea that with renewables, we're going to harmonize 
ourselves with the new god of nature. And they keep destroying the 
environment in order to save it while doing that. [00:27:43]
see source details at - https://www.desmogblog.com/michael-shellenberger


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 10, 2013 *
CBS News reports on a new study linking rising temperatures to more 
violence.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-may-increase-violence-new-study-finds/ 


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