[TheClimate.Vote] August 12, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Wed Aug 12 11:31:07 EDT 2020

/*August 12, 2020*/

[James Hansen is the Grandfather of Climate Scientists]
*Why Are You Optimistic?*
11 August 2020
James Hansen
Why are you optimistic, I have often been asked since I wrote Young 
People's Burden, which describes the steep climate and energy hill that 
we are leaving for young people to climb. 
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/8/577/2017/

Two weeks ago I noted 
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200731_StudentLeadership.pdf 
the Students Government Leaders' Statement on Carbon Dividends, a 
bipartisan statement by 350+college student government presidents from 
all 50 states.  Scroll down their Statement 
https://www.s4cd.org/statement to see the impressive future leaders, who 
support carbon fee & dividend, the essential underlying policy needed to 
phase out fossil fuel emissions as rapidly as possible.

The essential adjunct to fossil fuel phaseout is a realistic alternative 
for abundant affordable clean energy, which is needed to provide a good 
standard of living for all people.  Six years ago I was at a United 
Nations meeting in Paris on sustainable development organized by Jeff Sachs.

There were teams from each of many individual nations examining 
potential pathways to reach carbon-free emissions by mid-century. In 
most cases it seemed that the pathway needed to include a role for 
advanced generation nuclear power - otherwise the complement to 
intermittent renewable energies would be gas, which is little better 
than coal.

My concern about nuclear power has been the effect of backward-looking 
1970s thinking that has poisoned public perception of nuclear power.  
Rational scientific arguments that modern nuclear power has the 
potential to be among the safest energies with the smallest 
environmental footprint seem to be inadequate to overcome the psychology 
of "nuclear fear" that has been promoted successfully by various groups 
and eagerly supported by the media.

Can young people overcome the obstacles that they are faced with?  I was 
encouraged by the dedication of the young people in the sustainable 
development meeting.  One of them was Jessica Lovering, pictured on the 
left above.  She is one of thousands of bright young people coming out 
of our universities today.  They are the basis for my optimism.

Look at this site and click on individual photos to see what some of 
these people are about.  They are smart, educated, idealistic, 
determined to make our world a better, fairer place for all people. Read 
about their progressive policy agenda...
- -
You can sign up for our (Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions) 
monthly global temperature updates here 
https://us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0ebaeb14fdbf5dc65289113c1&id=e318b2b9ff 

-
You can sign up for my other Communications here 
https://columbia.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0ebaeb14fdbf5dc65289113c1&id=2256fd804a
-
I opened a Twitter account @DrJamesEHansen, 
(https://twitter.com/drjamesehansen), but I am focusing mainly on 
finishing Sophie's Planet.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200811_Optimism.pdf

[Yale Climate Change Communications]
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new research article 
*"Personal Stories Can Shift Climate Change Beliefs and Risk 
Perceptions: The Mediating Role of Emotion"* in the journal 
Communication Reports.
  A key challenge in climate change communication is that many people 
perceive the impacts of climate change to be far away in time and space. 
Therefore, it is important to emphasize that climate change impacts are 
here and now, and already harming people and local ecosystems. One way 
to do this is to share the personal stories of people who have 
experienced the effects of climate change. Our own climate news service 
Yale Climate Connections, broadcasts a new story each weekday on more 
than 600 radio stations and frequencies nationwide, featuring diverse 
voices telling their own stories of local climate impacts and solutions.

In this study, we tested the persuasive effects of one such radio story 
in two experiments. The story features Richard Mode, a North Carolina 
sportsman, who describes his emotional response to the impacts of 
climate change on his favorite places to hunt and fish.
We found that listening to this radio story had significant positive 
effects on the climate change beliefs and risk perceptions of both 
conservatives in the U.S. (Study 1) and moderates and conservatives in 
six southeastern U.S. states (Study 2).

Prior research has found that emotions can play an important role in the 
persuasiveness of climate change messages. So, in our second experiment, 
we examined whether the persuasive effects of this radio story could be 
explained by the activation of feelings of worry and compassion. The 
results indicate that activated feelings of worry and compassion 
accounted for much of the story's effects--i.e., that the more people 
felt worry and/or compassion in response to the story, the more they 
changed their climate change beliefs and risk perceptions.

Together, these findings highlight the importance of sharing personal 
stories about how climate change is affecting people and ecosystems, and 
underscore the importance of emotion as well as facts in climate change 
communication.

The full article is available here to those with a subscription to 
Communication Reports. If you would like to request a copy, please send 
an email to climatechange at yale.edu with the subject line: Request 
Personal Stories of Climate Impacts paper.

We hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. And as always, 
thank you for your interest and support.

On behalf of my co-authors at Yale and NOAA: Abel Gustafson, Matthew 
Ballew, Matthew Goldberg, Matthew Cutler, and Seth Rosenthal.
Cheers,
Tony
-----
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D.

[32 page report]
*Canary in the coalmine: A former senior fossil fuel executive speaks out*
Ian Dunlop - 10 Aug 2020
Download PDF https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature
This post is the introduction, by Ian Dunlop, to the publication this 
week by Breakthrough of a collection of Ian's media commentary 
articles.  Ian is is a senior member of the Breakthrough Advisory Board 
and a Member of the Club of Rome. He was formerly an international oil, 
gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal 
Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He 
is co-author of "What Lies Beneath: the understatement of existential 
climate risk", and of the Club of Rome's "Climate Emergency Plan".

This publication brings together some of my commentaries over the last 
three years on the need for real action on climate change. Not the 
normal variety of political action, but an emergency approach, akin to a 
wartime level of response, which before long will have to be adopted as 
impacts escalate around this hot, dry and vulnerable continent, and 
around the world.

Climate change is now an existential risk to humanity which, unless 
addressed immediately as a genuine emergency, will likely destroy 
civilisation as we know it within decades. We are not going to let that 
happen.
My life seems to have revolved around these types of risks. As a 
toddler, I was hugely impressed with the appearance of four duckponds in 
a line across my grandfather's farm in the east of England as a German 
bomber jettisoned its cargo while trying to avoid a pursuing Hurricane. 
Fortunately no-one was hurt, but it could easily have been otherwise. It 
prompted my rapid evacuation to Wales. Living on a former German airbase 
with my Royal Air Force parents immediately after World War Two, school 
was shared with displaced children who had lost everything in the war. 
Then came the Cold War, with that same airbase on 24-hour alert keeping 
supply lines open as part of the Berlin airlift, interrupted by regular 
emergency alarms.

Training as an engineer, and recognising in the 1950s that the world ran 
on energy, not money, I joined the oil industry, which for years was a 
hugely satisfying career, taking me to remote and fascinating parts of 
the world. I was also fortunate early on to become involved in long-term 
scenario planning which thought about issues like climate change, and 
the unsustainability of an economic system reliant upon perpetual 
economic growth. Not as immediate priorities, but as issues which sooner 
or later would become a constraint on global society, as the Club of 
Rome was identifying around the same time.

Risk-management experience was eventful. I was on the first 
semi-submersible oil rig offshore of Scotland soon after it started 
operations when the proverbial one-in-a-hundred year storm hit, dragging 
the rig on an inadvertent voyage, 300 kilometres down the North Sea. 
Then there was coal-mining in Australia, where well-established 
geological conditions could suddenly change into deadly working 
environments overnight.

By the end of the 1980s, as James Hansen gave his first testimony on 
climate change to the US Senate, climate science was becoming ever more 
definitive and the evidence of climate impact was mounting. The risks 
had reached the point where action to reduce carbon emissions from 
fossil fuels was essential. Accordingly I left the industry in the early 
1990s, to work toward that end, and more broadly the evolution of 
genuinely sustainable societies.

After working constructively with other industry leaders in the late 
1980s on responses of the coal industry to climate change, I rather 
naively assumed that their successors would continue with a progressive 
approach. But it was not to be. As the 1990s progressed, the 
introduction in Australia of perverse short-term incentives, combined 
with myopic conservative politics, ensured that climate concerns took a 
back seat to the expansion of fossil fuels and climate denialism reigned 
supreme. The same is true globally. Since the UN climate negotiations 
were initiated in 1990, the world has emitted as much carbon to the 
atmosphere as had occurred from the Industrial Revolution till 1990. And 
global emissions are still increasing.

The result is an immediate existential threat to our civilisation as 
irreversible climate tipping points begin to trigger. The drought and 
bushfires devastating large parts of Australia are early signs that 
these tipping points are starting to manifest themselves here.

The lesson I learnt from the energy industry is that the successful 
management of high risks requires brutal honesty in assessing those 
risks at the outset, otherwise inadequate solutions are adopted and 
chaos ensues, as we are now seeing.

The further lesson is that in a genuine emergency, early action is 
essential, otherwise the impacts become so overwhelming that all 
resources are devoted to addressing symptoms, particularly recovery from 
disaster, rather than paying adequate attention to the underlying cause. 
The result is a "death-spiral" toward social collapse, as impacts 
escalate unconstrained. This is already evident in our politicians' 
response to the growing bushfire threat, as they perform ever more 
grotesque contortions to avoid emergency climate action.

After three decades of deliberate refusal to face reality, it is clear 
that our political system is not prepared to learn these lessons, 
rendering it incapable of managing the climate threat. Even worse, the 
government and its conservative business and media paymasters appear 
hellbent on maintaining their denialist, pro-fossil fuel stance 
irrespective of the immense damage it will do to global and local 
communities.

We no longer have time for interminable royal commissions and inquiries, 
whose conclusions are invariably ignored. The government and opposition 
must make way for a new governance structure with leadership and 
expertise capable of handling the immediate climate emergency.

This is a drastic step which I do not propose lightly. I hope these 
articles will explain why it is now essential. The status quo is not an 
option.
https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature

[estimates down from 2080]
*End of Arctic sea ice by 2035 possible, study finds*
August 11th, 2020, by Alex Kirby
How soon will the northern polar ocean be ice-free? New research expects 
the end of Arctic sea ice by 2035.
LONDON, 11 August, 2020 - The temperature of the Arctic matters to the 
entire world: it helps to keep the global climate fairly cool. 
Scientists now say that by 2035 there could be an end to Arctic sea ice.

The northern polar ocean's sea ice is a crucial element in the Earth 
system: because it is highly reflective, it sends solar radiation back 
out into space. Once it's melted, there's no longer any protection for 
the darker water and rock beneath, and nothing to prevent them absorbing 
the incoming heat.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial - the warm 
period around 127,000 years ago - have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an 
international research team to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during 
the last interglacial with the present day. Their findings are important 
for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

What is striking about the latest research is the date it suggests for a 
possible total melt - 2035. Many studies have thought a mid-century 
crisis likely, with another even carefully specifying 2044 as the year 
to watch. So a breathing space of only 15 years may surprise some experts...

During spring and early summer shallow pools of water form on the 
surface of the Arctic sea ice. These "melt ponds" help to determine how 
much sunlight is absorbed by the ice and how much is reflected back into 
space. The new Hadley Centre model is the UK's most advanced physical 
representation of the Earth's climate and a critical tool for climate 
research, and it incorporates sea ice and melt ponds.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Climate 
Change. Using the model to look at Arctic sea ice during the last 
interglacial, they concluded that the impact of intense springtime 
sunshine created many melt ponds, which played a crucial role in sea ice 
melt. A simulation of the future using the same model indicates that the 
Arctic may become sea ice-free by 2035.

The joint lead author of the team is Dr Maria Vittoria Guarino, an earth 
system modeller at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge. She 
says: "High temperatures in the Arctic have puzzled scientists for 
decades. Unravelling this mystery was technically and scientifically 
challenging. For the first time, we can begin to see how the Arctic 
became sea ice-free during the last interglacial.

"The advances made in climate modelling mean that we can create a more 
accurate simulation of the Earth's past climate which, in turn, gives us 
greater confidence in model predictions for the future."

Dr Louise Sime, the group head of the palaeoclimate group and joint lead 
author at BAS, says: "We know the Arctic is undergoing significant 
changes as our planet warms. By understanding what happened during 
Earth's last warm period we are in a better position to understand what 
will happen in the future.

Melt ponds crucial

"The prospect of loss of sea ice by 2035 should really be focussing all 
our minds on achieving a low-carbon world as soon as humanly feasible."

Dr David Schroeder from the University of Reading, UK, who co-led the 
implementation of the melt pond scheme in the climate model, says: "This 
shows just how important sea ice processes like melt ponds are in the 
Arctic, and why it is crucial that they are incorporated into climate 
models."

The extent of the areas sea ice covers varies between summer and winter. 
If more solar energy is absorbed at the surface, and temperatures rise 
further, a cycle of warming and melting occurs during summer months.

When the ice forms, the ocean water beneath becomes saltier and denser 
than the surrounding ocean. Saltier water sinks and moves along the 
ocean bottom towards the equator, while warm water from mid-depths to 
the surface travels from the equator towards the poles.

Scientists refer to this process as the ocean's global "conveyor-belt". 
Changes to the volume of sea ice can disrupt normal ocean circulation, 
with consequences for global climate. - Climate News Network
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/end-of-arctic-sea-ice-by-2035-possible-study-finds/

[Aug 7, 2020]*
**Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsKsaF-JcN4

- - -

[graduate student reports]
*Coastal Erosion Variability: Permafrost Collaboration Team June 2020 
Meeting*
IARPC Collaborations
Coastal Erosion Variability at the Southern Laptev Sea Linked to Winter 
Sea Ice and the Arctic Oscillation - presentation by David Marcolino 
Nielsen, PhD student.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3a9kMGdiCY

- - -

[From 2018 - starts 5 min in. ]
*Development of a Predictive Model for Arctic Coastal Erosion // Diana Bull*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJCp3JpeMI4

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 12, 2004 *

August 12, 2004: Discussing a BusinessWeek story about the business 
community's growing worries about global warming, the Washington 
Monthly's Kevin Drum observes:

"Like national healthcare, I suspect that global warming will really get 
taken seriously only when the business community finally demands it. 
What BusinessWeek documents is only the first whispers of those demands, 
but the endgame is already in sight."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004498.php
http://web.archive.org/web/20131216021452/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-08-15/global-warming 

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