[TheClimate.Vote] August 16, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 16, 2020*/

[first ever]
*A 'fire tornado' warning? Weather service issues what could be a first 
at California blaze*
The Reno office of the National Weather Service warned Northern 
California of a fiery tornado Saturday afternoon that had sprung up near 
a large, fast-moving wildfire in the Sierra.

That's right: A firenado. 
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article216789230.html

It is the first known issuance of a tornado warning for the climate 
phenomenon since it burst into California's consciousness during the 
deadly Carr Fire in 2018.
Wendell Hohmann, the NWS forecaster who penned the tornado warning said 
that it was the first time to his knowledge of a tornado warning of this 
nature.

"It's probably the first time it's been issued outside of a thunderstorm 
environment," Hohmann said...
https://www.sacbee.com/news/weather-news/article244993335.html
- - -
video https://twitter.com/BSWinston/status/1294742294315245569
https://twitter.com/HunterCutting/status/1294808280095576065


[fire map]
*Wildfire smoke forecast for 9 a.m. MDT August 16*
https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Smoke-forecast-9-am-MDT-August-16.jpg
The map above is the forecast for the distribution of smoke from 
wildfires at 9 a.m. MDT August 16, 2020. Locations where it will be most 
noticeable include areas in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, 
New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and 
southern California.
https://wildfiretoday.com/2020/08/15/wildfire-smoke-forecast-for-9-a-m-mdt-august-16/



[different ways that ice melts]
*Pools of Water Atop Sea Ice in the Arctic May Lead it to Melt Away 
Sooner Than Expected*
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10082020/arctic-sea-ice-melt-pools-warming-climate
- -
[Source material -Published: 10 August 2020]
*Sea-ice-free Arctic during the Last Interglacial supports fast future loss*
Abstract

    The Last Interglacial (LIG), a warmer period 130,000-116,000 years
    before present, is a potential analogue for future climate change.
    Stronger LIG summertime insolation at high northern latitudes drove
    Arctic land summer temperatures 4-5 C higher than in the
    pre-industrial era. Climate model simulations have previously failed
    to capture these elevated temperatures, possibly because they were
    unable to correctly capture LIG sea-ice changes. Here, we show that
    the latest version of the fully coupled UK Hadley Center climate
    model (HadGEM3) simulates a more accurate Arctic LIG climate,
    including elevated temperatures. Improved model physics, including a
    sophisticated sea-ice melt-pond scheme, result in a complete
    simulated loss of Arctic sea ice in summer during the LIG, which has
    yet to be simulated in past generations of models. This ice-free
    Arctic yields a compelling solution to the long-standing puzzle of
    what drove LIG Arctic warmth and supports a fast retreat of future
    Arctic summer sea ice.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0865-2



[some clips from NY Magazine - The Intelligencer]
*What Climate Alarm Has Already Achieved*
By David Wallace-Wells - AUG. 14, 2020
One plague, when big enough, occludes others, and the coronavirus 
pandemic has, for six months now, almost fully eclipsed the very real, 
very large, and very pressing threat of climate change...
- -
Over the past six months, the coronavirus has often been called a "fire 
drill" for climate change. But at present it looks more like a 
white-noise machine, drowning out what would be, in any other year, the 
unmistakable signal of a climate emergency. Last week, new research 
produced by the Climate Impact Lab on the relationship between warming 
and mortality underscored just what scale of emergency we may be facing 
in the decades ahead. By the end of the century, the researchers found, 
unmitigated warming produced by worst-case emissions trajectories could 
make climate change more deadly than all infectious disease in the world 
combined. Bill Gates summarized the research this way: "By 2060, climate 
change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five 
times as deadly." And unlike this pandemic, it would not abate and could 
not even be stalled, except by entirely zeroing out every ounce of 
carbon being produced now -- 37 gigatons annually -- by the planet we 
have transformed into an emissions factory, and then waiting, at least 
decades and perhaps centuries, for the climate to stabilize.

A pandemic is a horrible sort of social bottleneck. It is invariably 
brutal, but you can get to the other side of it. Indeed, we are counting 
on doing so -- here in the U.S., counting on doing so only with the help 
of vaccines, given our utter American incompetence at managing the 
disease socially and politically without that simple silver-bullet 
solution. But climate change doesn't work in the same way; practically 
speaking, without a complete elimination of the planet's carbon 
footprint, it won't ever end. We will be living in that new, lethal era 
of climate change indefinitely. Perhaps forever. Which makes the most 
pressing question we face: How will we adapt?
- -
Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the 
planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems 
nightmarish -- and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet 
more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path 
without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize 
climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much 
human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with 
what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting 
all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of 
the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, 
and blithely.

More recently, for Vox, David Roberts picked up the same thread in a 
long essay headlined, "The Scariest Thing About Global Warming." "For as 
long as I've followed global warming, advocates and activists have 
shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will 
act," he wrote. "But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more 
plausible: We never really wake up at all. No moment of reckoning 
arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it 
never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained 
attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is 
treated as rising background noise."...
- -
But on climate action in particular, much of the movement undoubtedly 
comes from how much more worried the world has become recently about the 
medium-term threat of dramatic warming. Even when we don't make time for 
news about locust plagues or fires in the Amazon, foreboding about the 
climate crisis has come to shape the country's political, social, and 
emotional relationship to its own future much more profoundly than ever 
before. Our politics and policy can't help but reflect those priorities 
now, even when we aren't debating them directly. We are now alarmed 
enough about climate change, collectively, that even when we aren't 
particularly freaking out about it, we still find ourselves drifting 
rapidly, as in a very fast stream, toward dramatic action...
- -
I want to be careful, here, to not overstate how much progress has been 
made, in terms of policy -- by any scientific measure, all of these 
proposals, even taken together, are nevertheless inadequate, and of 
course much remains to be seen about how any of it is implemented and 
what effect on emissions, if any, is achieved. But I do want to clearly 
note the very different place climate change, and climate action, now 
occupies in the political conversation in the U.S. and around the world, 
indeed how central climate change has become to the way nearly every 
country in the world conceives of progress, and public investment, and 
the very landscape of the future. When massive public investment appears 
necessary, as it has suddenly to stimulate a global recovery from the 
pandemic, climate investments are now included by default -- not just on 
the margins or as window dressing, and, perhaps even more significantly, 
without all that much debate or discord. In each of these cases, the 
broad outlines of logic are the same: When engineering and designing 
that investment, the urgency of stimulus doesn't mean sidelining climate 
goals, but embracing them, enfolding green prerogatives into an existing 
portfolio of good-governance values, which used to exclude them as 
"fringe."...
- -
This is another shift which the terrifying distraction of the pandemic 
has perhaps prevented us from noticing or acknowledging properly. 
Because activists have such a clear-eyed sense of just how necessary 
immediate action is, and such a firm grasp of its necessary scale, they 
can be very hard to impress. (Indeed, being hard to impress is simply 
part of the job.) Others, less attuned to climate concerns, may not have 
even really noticed that decarbonization has become so central to the 
way the world's governments are talking about recovery, or understood 
precisely what it means for the future of climate policy -- a future 
still largely unresolved, and which remains very open to contestation. 
None of these plans are sufficient to meaningfully mitigate global 
warming, or prevent the planet from warming past two degrees -- the 
threshold long described by scientists as "catastrophic," and often 
called, by island nations, "genocide." But while we are still largely 
talking at the level of rhetoric and policy pledges rather than 
already-banked gains, the climate action quietly encoded in these 
stimulus measures -- and likely to be encoded in future rounds, as well 
-- is nevertheless very real progress. And it is in large part, I 
believe, a credit  to the work of climate activists deploying alarmist 
rhetoric in ever-greater numbers and at ever-greater volume over the 
past several years...
- -
To that I would say: What danger? I've written before about the 
scientific validity of alarm -- based on the science, alarmism happens 
to be true. In their essay, Betts and Hausfather usefully outline that, 
from a scientific perspective, what were recently considered plausible 
best-case and plausible worst-case scenarios have come to look, over the 
last several years, considerably less plausible, giving us a narrower 
range of likely outcomes than we were staring at less than a decade ago, 
when the last major omnibus IPCC report was published (I've written 
about this, too). In that sense, they are right to suggest that, 
compared to how we might have oriented our understanding of future 
climate change five or ten years ago, we should probably be both a 
little less panicked and a little less optimistic at once. 
Unfortunately, compared to the climate of the present day -- already 
"unprecedented," already producing those strings of 500-year storms and 
once-unimaginable heat waves -- even a best-case outcome is quite 
alarming: At two degrees, 150 million more people may die from air 
pollution, storms, and flooding that used to hit once a century but now 
come every year, and we could see the migration of possibly hundreds of 
millions of people. The world north of two degrees contains many more 
disasters, much more punishingly extreme weather, much more social 
disarray, and a much steeper climb to "adaptation" than humans have ever 
managed in their entire history. Presumably, we will find ways to manage 
it, at least to some degree, but that project will be much more 
difficult, much more expensive, and much more full of human suffering 
both discriminate and indiscriminate, the hotter the planet gets.

Trying to forestall that warming, of course, raises the strategic 
question: What political value is alarmism, fear-mongering, and urgent, 
strident declarations of climate emergency? Thankfully, the last few 
years offer, I think, something close to a natural experiment in 
precisely this kind of activism. I am thinking, chiefly, of activists 
and organizations like Greta Thunberg and the loose global alliance of 
school-age climate strikers she has inspired; Varshini Prakash and the 
Sunrise Movement here in the U.S.; and Extinction Rebellion, based in 
the U.K., with various offshoots all around the globe.

None of these people or organizations were known to the world, in any 
significant way, when the U.N.'s IPCC published its landmark "Doomsday" 
report in October 2018, outlining just how radically different the 
planet would look at two degrees of warming than at 1.5 -- and why it 
was therefore quite imperative to do what could be done to keep the 
temperature lower. And the period of unmistakably alarmist activism that 
followed -- and which is embodied by those few leaders -- hasn't 
coincided with a diminution of public concern about climate change, at 
all, but the opposite. Those two years have been the most productive and 
progressive in the decades-long history of climate politics. And while 
there are of course other factors contributing to the change -- chiefly 
the increasing prevalence of extreme weather, particularly in the 
Northern Hemisphere, where it had long been harder to see, and the 
declining price of renewable energy everywhere on the planet -- it is 
very hard to look objectively at the political experience of the last 
several years as someone hoping for decarbonization and see this 
alarmist activism as dampening the pace of progress...
- -
For years, some climate activists have warned about the risks of using 
fear as a PR tool, suggesting that fatalism could set in more quickly 
than action, depriving the world of the collective opportunity for 
action (or, in more local ways, depriving the forces of climate action 
of the support of some natural allies). I am sure that there are some 
people on the planet who've gone from engaged to disengaged over the 
last few years, but the angle of change strikes me as tilting very much 
in the opposite direction -- making more people care about this issue, 
and intensifying the concern of those who do care (both intuitions are 
very much reflected in polling, for all its limitations). And while it 
is true there is a gap -- in some cases, a large one -- between the 
values and principles espoused by alarmist activists and what the median 
voters in their countries find plausible, or advisable, in potential 
climate policy, that distance isn't an indictment of their activism, 
it's a description of its purpose: pulling the public toward more 
ambitious action. If activists met voters where they were, they'd just 
be voters, too. And considering that the alarmist rhetoric of that 
"Doomsday" report -- that everything needed to be done to avoid two 
degrees of warming -- is now the official platform goal of the 
Democratic Party, I'd say those activists have pulled the public, and 
our politics, quite far indeed...
- -
And while there hasn't been nearly as much direct coordination between 
climate activists and big business, the movement there has been 
striking, too, if, as with everything else, still insufficient by the 
standards of the science. Without the pressure of activists, would 
Microsoft, or BlackRock, or BP have made commitments to decarbonization 
and climate action anywhere close to the ones they have?

Intuitively, the answer is "no," but a powerful counterexample is 
offered by recent history, as well. Five years ago, say, none of them 
were making anything like these moves or investments, though the science 
was fundamentally the same and the cost of decarbonization not 
dramatically higher. What has changed, beyond the culture of climate 
concern more broadly, is widespread fear, in the corporate world, of 
generational disgust and abandonment. There is much talk on the 
environmental left, today, of stranded assets -- all the built 
infrastructure and oil (and coal and gas) that will have to be abandoned 
for the world to come anywhere close to its climate targets. But those 
companies outside the fossil-fuel sector don't want to be stranded 
either, forsaken by a rising generation much more centrally focused on 
climate politics and much more demanding that the corporations they 
patronize, even those only tangentially related to climate issues, 
reflect those politics, too. It's the same dynamic that made soda and 
shoe companies into outspoken, if not entirely earnest, social-justice 
activists between the period following the Ferguson protests, when Black 
Lives Matter was a nationally divisive crusade, and the period following 
the George Floyd uprisings, when it commanded overwhelming American 
support. Getting even the hypocrites onboard is one mark of political 
progress, whether it's through shame or fear or genuine awakening. And 
that threat of generational revolt has been made visible on climate not 
by large-scale boycotts, or consumer protests at the pump or the cash 
register. It has been made visible by protests, by outraged activists 
screaming out in alarm...
- -
At the very least, corporate communications are like a seismograph of 
public opinion, and suddenly there is talk of urgency all across the 
board. Is it possible that climate action would have more momentum today 
if those pushing hardest for it had focused their energies on coalition 
building with the security state and the Davos-sphere? In some very 
theoretical way, I suppose. But these are all social experiments which 
history, and the climate, allows us to run only once. This time, we got 
a confrontational activism, and I'm very, very glad we did.

 From one vantage, this is shocking progress to have achieved in just a 
few years, given how little movement was produced over the previous 
generation. On the other hand, it really shouldn't surprise anyone, 
because it is precisely what political activism of this kind is meant to 
do -- not persuade the median voter to embrace the full platform of the 
radicals in the streets but to shift the boundaries of political 
discourse such that the median voter may still find that platform 
uncomfortably radical but finds him or herself endorsing as reasonable, 
and indeed necessary, action that seemed, until just before, hopelessly 
extreme. (And indeed sets the public on a track to accept something more 
like the truly radical platform before too long.) This is, like, 
activism 101. To draw on an over-drawn-on analogy, it also explains how, 
for instance, a country in which 75 percent of Americans disapproved of 
Martin Luther King Jr. just before he was assassinated passed a landmark 
civil-rights law one week later (and how one that had found him only 
slightly more appealing had passed an even bigger one a few years 
before). It explains how the women's movement achieved the gains it has, 
and how the fight for gay marriage was won -- not by meeting the public 
and its leaders where they are, but tugging them along through acts of 
often-unpopular moral grandstanding. This is the general strategy for 
the rising left, in many ways still politically marginalized, offered 
brilliantly by Thea Riofrancos in a recent call to arms in the New York 
Times, and why Noam Chomsky has taken to praising Joe Biden, too. 
"Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things 
like climate," he told Anand Giridharadas this week. "It's far better 
than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal 
conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they're being 
hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others." 
Activists aren't aiming for popularity, or the support of the average 
voter, though they'd welcome both, and we fool ourselves by judging them 
on those metrics. XR doesn't need to get its founders Roger Hallam and 
Gail Bradbrook, or its spokesperson Rupert Read, elected to Parliament 
to succeed, and Thunberg doesn't need to be elected secretary-general of 
the U.N. -- indeed, as she has said, many times, she doesn't want that 
responsibility, or that power, but simply to shame and coerce the 
world's leaders into taking the state of the science seriously. They're 
not there yet -- not to Greta's satisfaction, and not to mine. But at 
least they are having the same conversation now.

What happens from here is not any kind of safe bet, at all -- and, if I 
had to bet, well, I'd bet on considerable further frustration and 
disappointment from those who care most about the climate crisis about 
what insufficient actions are being taken. The uncompromising alarmism 
of activists may even complicate or stall efforts at climate action in 
the near future, and of course there is much more to effectively 
addressing the problem than marshaling political will to do something -- 
you actually have to figure out what that something is, what trade-offs 
need to be made, at what scale and in what places, then see to it that 
it all actually gets done. But will is the critical first ingredient, 
and for the time being, the political achievement on that metric is very 
clear: The Overton window has shifted dramatically toward action, even 
if all of those involved in moving it -- Prakash and AOC, Justice 
Democrats and New Consensus and Roosevelt Forward and Data for Progress, 
XR and Greta and Xiye Bastida and Jamie Margolin and Alexandria 
Villaseñor and many, many more -- all are still living a bit outside the 
window, frustrated it isn't moving faster.

Of course, activists often find themselves disappointed by the end 
product -- and invariably, that will be the case on climate, since the 
response that science demands of us is so much bigger than anything our 
contemporary politics seems capable of producing. But that 
disappointment is not really failure; it is practically by design, and 
what differentiates activism from revolutionary politics. (This is, 
perhaps, activism 102.) If you believe that combating the climate crisis 
requires a total reformation of the existing political and social order, 
you are likely to regard Joe Biden's move leftward on climate as 
terribly inadequate. (There is, fortunately or unfortunately, a fair 
amount of wisdom in that perspective, given the scale of the challenge 
and how little time we have to address it.) And if your ideological 
inclinations draw you toward skepticism -- or skepticism that any 
meaningful change is necessary -- you will probably find any movement, 
and any activism to drive it, self-destructive or worse. But if you are 
hoping the climate crisis could be met with a response approaching the 
necessary scale without first having to overturn the entire global 
geopolitical order, Sunrise and XR aren't threats to that vision -- they 
are the political agents making it possible.

Indeed, here in the U.S., Prakash is actually helping craft Biden's 
climate plans, having given the candidate an "F" grade during the 
primary, with Sunrise protesters disrupting not just a few of his 
events. This is an additional sign, if you needed one, that Sunrise is 
not alienating the relevant powers that be, but strong-arming and 
negotiating with them. They made a place on those teams and in those 
rooms for themselves -- indeed, made a place for environmental activism 
and climate justice more generally at the very center of Democratic 
politics. They did so through organizing, and protesting, and above all, 
objecting, loudly, that the status quo approach to their issue wasn't 
working, and that those who believed it should continue were 
unacceptable choices. As a result, the party, and its candidate, moved. 
This is not a disconcerting or counterproductive overreach. It is 
precisely how activism is meant to work. And, indeed, it is working -- 
especially if you're looking at the polls and the policies, and not the 
carbon concentrations, which are still rising, and will continue to, 
almost invariably, for decades at least.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/what-climate-alarm-has-already-achieved.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive - with Brad Blog]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 16, 2013 *

The climate documentary "The Politics of Power" airs for the first, last 
and only time on MSNBC. [and then has not been seen again]

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=10284

MSNBC's 'Missing' Climate Change Documentary Finally Found! (Sort Of)
Chris Hayes' special quietly made available 'On Demand'...
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 10/2/2013, 12:04pm PT
In late August, climate hawk and too-occasional BRAD BLOG contributor 
D.R. Tucker reported how MSNBC's August 16th Chris Hayes hosted 
documentary on climate change and the global warming denial industry, 
was nowhere to be found online. Unlike previous docs from the cable net, 
this one had not made available online after its initial airing.

Despite our best efforts at the time to receive an explanation from 
MSNBC or Chris Hayes or the producers of his nightly prime-time show, 
All In (which produced and presented the doc during their normal hour), 
as to why the special had not been posted online, several weeks went by 
and we received no response.

The unexplained online "black out" of Politics of Power led Tucker to 
wonder, by August 29th, if "certain entities" (such as ExxonMobil and 
other fossil fuel industry corporations, global warming deniers and 
other similarly big advertisers on MSNBC) "might not be happy with the 
prospect of the video being widely available and, who knows, maybe even 
going viral."

Well, we've still received no direct response to our queries from Hayes 
or anyone at MSNBC as to the whereabouts of the "missing" documentary, 
or the explanation for it. But while browsing some video clips recently 
at the MSNBC website, I just happened to come across this graphic 
amongst a list of video clips available on the site...

Clicking on it brought me to a page with this explanation:

A few of our viewers have been looking for the online clips to the 
documentary Politics of Power.
We've posted the first part of the documentary, above.

The documentary can be found in its entirety on the following cable 
providers' websites (authentication required). Search "All In with Chris 
Hayes 8.16."

[found a partial transcript of the first segment]

August 15, 2013
*The Politics of Power: The evidence of climate change*
What once seemed like science fiction in the film "The Day After 
Tomorrow" now seems closer to reality as the dangerous formula of a 
fossil fuel economy and climate change continues to play out. Chris 
Hayes tells the story of world energy use, recent weather developments, 
and the climate denial industry.

[Video is unavailable. Transcript from the closed captions:]

    *I**'m Chris Hayes and this is an msnbc special, "the politics of
    power."*

    If we do not act soon, it is our children and our grandchildren who
    will have to pay the price.

    Professor Hall, our economy is every bit as fragile as the
    environment. perhaps you should keep that in mind before making
    sensationalist claims.

    Well, the last chunk of ice that broke off was about the size of the
    state of Rhode Island. Some people might call that pretty sensational.

    What once seemed science fiction in the film "the day after
    tomorrow" now, almost a decade later, is closer to reality. it's the
    dangerous formula of fossil fuel and climate change continues to
    play out. in the next hour, we'll show that climate change is
    happening, and the root of the problem is our dependence on fossil
    fuels . the story of our energy use is fascinating, where we get it,
    what type it is, and how much we use. and that needs to change. the
    evidence is overwhelming. 2012 was the hottest year on record in the
    continental united states . across the Midwest and Texas, crops
    shriveled in the worst drought in 50 years. in Alaska, qualifying
    races for the 2013 Iditarod were canceled. the reason, not enough
    snow. in the arctic, sea ice continues to melt at an alarming rate
    and the pattern is clear. ten of the record-breaking warmest years
    worldwide have all occurred since 1998 and a new study finds global
    temperatures are the highest in 4,000 years.

    If we continue business as usual, you're going to see temperature
    rise that we haven't seen in millions and millions of years. it's
    just across the board, something that human civilization has never
    had to deal with before.

    October 2012, Superstorm Sandy barrels into the east coast from the
    unusually warm waters of the North Atlantic. in its wake, at least
    147 dead and $65 billion in damages.

    It's like one minute your life was fine, and then ten minutes later,
    you lost everything.

    New York's Governor, Andrew Cuomo , has little doubt what's behind
    the devastation.

    Climate change , extreme weather , call it what you will. it is
    undeniable.

    "Bloomberg Businessweek" magazine puts it even more bluntly. across
    the globe, a disturbing statistic. carbon emissions from the
    consumption of energy are up 48% since 1992. We've heard it many
    times before, but it bears repeating, because some people still
    don't get it. When coal, oil, and natural gas are burned to create
    energy, the process pumps carbon dioxide and other gases into the
    atmosphere. they don't dissipate, they stay there, creating a sort
    of blanket that traps heat in. if the heat stays in, the planet gets
    warmer. if the planet gets warmer, the ice caps melt. If the ice
    caps melt, they can no longer reflect the sun's rays. That means the
    rays are absorbed by the dark water . warmer water means the seas
    expand, rise, and fuel superstorms, like sandy.

    On the West coast, you have fires, droughts in the middle of the
    country, and on the East coast , you have storms.

    And yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, only one third of
    Americans are greatly worried about climate change . what can
    possibly explain this an think when 99.8% of scientific studies
    support the existence of human caused global warming? Well, some of
    the credit goes to the so-called experts, who peddle dubious science
    to counter any government attempt to tackle the issue. the deniers.

    If you do nothing about this at all, for the whole of the next 23
    years, the worst that will happen, using the UN.'s own estimate, is
    a one Fahrenheit degree warming, which will be largely harmless and
    beneficial.

    I think it's really important for people to realize that climate
    change denial has nothing to do with science. these people are for
    hire. they do not have any real scientific credentials.

    Not surprisingly, some of the funding for climate change denial
    comes from the very industry with the most to lose, fossil fuel
    companies. one of the largest financial backers of the climate
    denial movement was ExxonMobil . its annual reports show that from
    1998 to 2007, ExxonMobil gave millions of dollars to organizations
    that cast doubt on the scientific validity of climate change .

    It's obviously why they want climate change not to be true. as long
    as climate change is not true, then we can keep selling coal,
    natural gas, and oil. So remove the cause and your business is
    preserved.

    In 2008, ExxonMobil announced they would discontinue contributions
    to groups that could, quote, divert attention in the important
    discussions on how the world will secure the energy required for
    economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner. in fact,
    ExxonMobil is funding research devoted to mitigating the increase in
    greenhouse gases . yet there remain numerous deep-pocketed
    billionaires and corporations still supporting climate change denial .

    It's really disheartening, as a climate scientist to hear the
    misrepresentation of the science science. and reminds me of what
    happened with tobacco.

    In 1994 , they said their product was not addictive, despite the
    evidence proving the opposite.

    "I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive."

    "I believe that nicotine is not addictive."

    The cigarette industry created 50 years of pseudo science to
    convince regulators and smokers that smoking was not harmful. is the
    fossil fuel industry now paying for pseudo science to convince
    policy makers they're not to blame for policy change? of course they
    are.

    There is a window of time where we need to act, and once you go past
    that window, if the missions keep going up, you lose the arctic. i
    have to hope that people think about how they're going to protect
    their homes, their families, their kids, and get down to business,
    because we don't have that much time.

    *Chris Hayes: *We are now on the leading edge of climate change with
    more to come. with me is Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a veteran of the
    climate wars. he was chief scientist for the environmental defense
    fund , and is now a professor of geosciences at Princeton
    university. In 2007 , he was part of a group of scientists who won
    the Nobel peace prize for their work on climate change . wonderful
    to have you here, doctor.

    *Dr. Michael Oppenheimer* Happy to be here.

    *Chris Hayes* How should we understand, I think when you say to
    people, okay, we're headed the towards two degrees of warming or
    three degrees of warming, four degrees of warming. i think to
    myself, well, i sit in my room and i out the thermostat from 68 to
    72, and that's a little different, maybe i take off my jacket, but
    that's not a huge amount. how should we think about those numbers?

    *Dr. Michael Oppenheimer* What really hurts us and makes us
    vulnerable to the climate is not the average. It's the extremes. and
    it's the extremes that change a lot when the average just changes a
    little. so even if earth only warms about five degrees Farren Hyatt,
    which is the average prediction for this century, we're going to see
    sea level rising because of the warming by an amount of two, three,
    four feet. and on a typical east coast beach, for instance, that
    takes away 200, 300, 400 feet of beach horizontally inland. we are
    likely to see an increase in the intensity and frequence of heat
    waves . and you have to remember, heat waves kill. we had one in
    europe a few years ago that killed about 40,000 people. we've had
    heat waves in the united states that kill a thousand people or more.
    so, small changes in that average create huge headaches for us.

    *Chris Hayes* So it's the extreme weather events that are the signal
    to us about what's happening, and the thing to prepare for in the
    future. are we already seeing that now?

    *Dr. Michael Oppenheimer* We're already seeing some changes in the
    extremes that we can tie to global warming . there's already more
    heat waves , there's already an anticipation of heavy precipitation
    events, the kinds of things that cause intense flooding. there's
    already a rise in sea level , which means we're getting events of
    extreme high water , like having hurricane sandy. and the critical
    point is, we're not prepared for any of this. hurricane sandy or
    hurricane Katrina gave us examples of how well we are prepared, or
    at least in these cases, unprepared, to deal with these extreme
    events. we're falling behind. it's getting worse all the time. we're
    -- as long as we let the world warm, we're always going to be
    playing catch-up ball. and we're never going to be good enough at it.

    *Chris Hayes* You have had to have had the experience of being a
    climate scientist, battling people on the other side, who often are
    not scientists. what has the experience been like, and what has the
    effect of this climate denial industry been on how the u.s. policy
    apparatus and government deals with the issue?

    *Dr. Michael Oppenheimer* The denialists have been given a big
    megaphone by private interest groups that want to continue the use
    of fossil fuels , continue society, heading -- surging in the wrong
    direction, essentially. and through that megaphone, i think they've
    confused the public. they've tossed up a lot of dust, basically. I
    have to believe the basic truth outs in the long-term. the trouble
    is, we don't have forever. the emission of these gases, once they're
    in the atmosphere, they stay there for hundreds of years, so the
    situation is irreversible. We can't wait for the dust to settle.
    Action has to begin now. on the positive side, governments are
    painfully, slowly starting to make moves in the right direction.

    *Chris Hayes* Dr. Michael Oppenheimer , thank you so much.

    Up next, an examination of America's oil addiction and why it's so
    darned hard to kick the carbon habit.  (end of available content)

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/all-in-/52778102


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