[TheClimate.Vote] December 6, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 6, 2020*/

[Strong Beginning]
*Denmark becomes first major oil-producing nation to set deadline to end 
extraction*
Dec. 4, 2020

COPENHAGEN -- Denmark on Friday became the first major oil-producing 
nation to announce an end to state-approved exploration in the North 
Sea, with the aim of phasing out all extraction by 2050.

The decision was applauded by some environmental activists, with 
Greenpeace celebrating it as a "watershed moment," although other groups 
had hoped for a faster timeline.

Denmark's new rules mean companies will be barred from receiving new 
licenses to search for and extract oil and gas resources. Previously 
issued licenses will remain valid until 2050.

Denmark is the top oil producer in the European Union, but it has come 
under mounting pressure as the E.U. aims to become carbon-neutral within 
the next 30 years...
- -
In a tweet, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said: "The real news 
here is that Denmark will apparently go on extracting fossil fuels for 
another 3 decades. To us children, this is not the 'good news' that some 
people seem to think."...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/denmark-phaseout-oil-production/2020/12/04/c5559eb4-35b0-11eb-9699-00d311f13d2d_story.html


[New organization will track nations progress]
*Climate Tracker has inspired, trained and mentored over 8000 Climate 
Journalists around the world.*
Who is Climate Tracker?
Climate Tracker works to support, train and develop young climate 
journalists from around the world. We have had more than 15,000 young 
journalists enter our trainings and competitions since 2016, and want to 
highlight their work here.

What is this publication?
The Climate Weekly will be written by a new young climate reporter each 
week, as they highlight the biggest climate change news in their country.

Can you get involved
Sure. All our newsletters are written by guest writers from around the 
world. Feel free to join our community and let us know you'd be keen to 
guest write one week...
- -
Since 2015 we have delivered cutting edge training, innovative media 
campaigns, and brought incredibly talented teams of young reporters to 
the UN climate negotiations.

We have delivered in-person trainings in more than 30 countries, 
hundreds of online webinars, and awarded travel scholarships to more 
than 350 young journalists.

We have run participatory media research in over 20 different countries, 
and are developing a unique data-analytics tool to give journalists the 
best possible chance to "cut through" national debates.

These young journalists have published more than 6000 articles in their 
national media, covering more than 114 countries and 24 languages...
We have supported young journalists from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, Costa 
Rica to Fiji. More than 90% of our opportunities have gone to young 
people from developing countries who can make big impacts in their 
national media. If you are a first time writer or a seasoned journalist, 
this is your chance to win a career-changing opportunity.

More than 60% of our awarded trackers have been women. Our global team 
is over 75% women.

If you are interested in partnering with us and inspiring young voices 
around the world develop innovative skills in data journalism, or 
connecting your brand to a global network of great writers, please let 
me know.
Chris Wright - Director, Climate Tracker - https://climatetracker.org/


[recent video with transcript \ Harvard Law School]
*Noam Chomsky at HLS*
Dec 1, 2020
Harvard Law School
On Nov. 20, Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the 
University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, spoke to 
first-year students at Harvard Law School about prospects for a better 
tomorrow. In a conversation moderated by HLS student Michael Lehavi, 
Chomsky touched on topics ranging from linguistics to activism to 
climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs-k1npk0Q8



[Media breakthrough, will this happen in the US?]
*A change in the weather: new demand for TV presenters to include 
climate in forecasts*
The ABC's Graham Creed says new climate change research could 'fill a 
big gap' in public understanding...

"Firstly, it's just that information that climate change is already 
happening and is influencing extreme temperatures.

"It's important to talk about how much more [temperature extremes] are 
looking to increase in the next 20 or 30 years. Those unprecedented 
extreme conditions in 2019 and 2020 end up in 20 years' time being 
almost normal."

Both Creed and Holmes says the bureau's work could represent a major 
breakthrough in the ability to communicate the affects of climate change 
to the general public.

Holmes says: "What this is doing is saying we can forecast how much of 
an upcoming event was due to greenhouse gases, and that's a whole new 
level of attribution. I think it can be a game-changer."

Creed spends much of his time in and around newsrooms, and he says by 
the time scientists have analysed extreme weather events for attribution 
studies, the news cycle has moved on.

So the potential to be able to refer to reliable information about the 
contribution of climate change to events as they happen "fills a big gap."

"It's phenomenal. The missing link has been us being able to say that 
this coming heatwave will be a degree warmer because of climate change."

Has Creed seen the climate change since he started presenting the 
weather 20 years ago?

"Yes, the weather is changing," he says. "Climate change used to be this 
big ethereal thing that was hard to understand. But we are now looking 
at the weather patterns changing.

"I think I should be talking about it."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/05/a-change-in-the-weather-new-demand-for-tv-presenters-to-include-climate-in-forecasts

- -

[A classic essay published long ago by Ross Gelbspan]

*U.S. Press Coverage of the Climate Crisis: A Damning Betrayal of Public 
Trust*
By Ross Gelbspan

I'm a reporter -- not an environmentalist -- so I came to this subject 
from a very peculiar angle. After I retired from The Boston Globe and 
was working on my second consecutive unpublished novel, there came to me 
Dr. Paul Epstein, of Harvard Medical School, with a series of articles 
he had published in The Lancet on climate change and the spread of 
infectious disease.

Since the work struck me as important, we collaborated on a piece for 
the Outlook section of The Washington Post. While writing the piece, I 
became very alarmed about the larger issue of climate change and began 
to consider writing a book on the subject.

But after the piece ran in the Post, I received several letters from 
readers who said that, the disease information notwithstanding, they 
didn't believe the climate was changing and they referred me to the work 
of a few scientists.
So I read Bob Balling's book, The Heated Debate, several issues of Pat 
Michaels' journal and papers by Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen. And I 
was persuaded that global warming was a non-issue. I told my wife 
there's no book here. And emotionally, I was very relieved not to have 
to deal with such a heavy issue. But I had scheduled interviews with 
four other scientists, and, just as a courtesy, I decided to keep those 
interviews.

Those scientists completely turned my head around. They showed me how 
Singer, Michaels and the others were manipulating data and 
misrepresenting the situation. That made me quite angry. Not because I 
love trees - I tolerate trees -- but because I had spent 31 years in a 
career predicated on the belief that in a democracy we need honest 
information on which to base our decisions. What these few scientists 
were doing was stealing our reality.

It was also strange that none of the mainstream scientists I interviewed 
knew where the skeptics' money was coming from.

By a very lucky coincidence, I soon learned that Singer, Michaels and 
Balling had received about a million dollars in undisclosed money from 
the coal industry in a three-year period.

(Parenthetically, the issue of disclosure is very important. 
Industry-funded research is neutral - it can be good or bad. But 
disclosure is critical so that the work in question can be reviewed with 
an eye to commercial bias. If, for instance, a medical researcher' work 
is funded by a pharmaceutical company, that funding must be declared in 
the tagline as a condition of publication. Unfortunately, those same 
guidelines do not apply to climate science.)

At that point, I thought if there's so much money going into a cover-up, 
let's see what it is they're covering up. And that's when I began to 
learn the science and many other aspects of the climate issue.

Thinking about the issue, it quickly became clear that the very survival 
of the coal and oil industries - which together constitute the biggest 
commercial enterprise in history - are threatened by climate change. The 
science is unambiguous on one point: climate stabilization requires that 
humanity cut its consumption of carbon fuels by about 70 percent. The 
motivation behind the disinformation campaign was very clear - as was 
the reporting imperative. In this case, it was also the path into an 
amazing drama - a once-in-a-lifetime story -- that, unfortunately, 
continues to unfold just outside the spotlit arena of public awareness.

There are a number of reasons for this - none of them, given the 
magnitude of the story, justifiable.

Let me run through a few.

On a somewhat superficial level, the career path to the top at news 
outlets normally lies in following the track of political reporting. Top 
editors tend to see all issues through a political lens.

For instance, while climate change has been the focus of a number of 
feature stories (and small, buried reports of scientific findings), the 
only times it has gained real news prominence is when it has played a 
role in the country's politics. I think of the 1992 elections when the 
first President Bush slapped the label of "ozone man" on Al Gore because 
of his book, "Earth in the Balance." (I don't think it's a coincidence 
that Gore totally ran away from the climate issue during the 2000 campaign.)

The issue again received prominent coverage in 1997 when the Senate 
voted overwhelmingly not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol - not because of 
the substance but because it signaled a political setback for the 
Clinton Administration at the hands of inside the Beltway Republicans.

Most recently, the issue surfaced when President Bush withdrew the U.S. 
from the Kyoto process. And that coverage focused not on climate change 
but on resulting diplomatic tensions between the US and EU.

Prior to his withdrawal from Kyoto, President Bush declared he would not 
accept the findings of the IPCC - because they represented "foreign 
science" (even though about half of the 2,000 scientists, whose work 
contributes to the IPCC reports are American.) Instead, Bush called for 
a report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences which would provide 
"American science."

What I found astounding was this. Even as the Washington press corps 
reported this story, not one reporter bothered to check the position of 
the NAS. Had they done so, they would have found that as early as 1992, 
three years before the IPCC determined that that humans are changing the 
climate by our burning of oil and coal, the NAS recommended strong 
measures to minimize climate impacts.

So that's just a quick nod to the culture of journalism - which is, 
basically, a political culture which is not particularly hospitable - in 
fact, institutionally arrogant -- toward non-political areas of coverage.

The next reason has to do with this campaign of disinformation launched 
by the coal industry and most recently carried forward by ExxonMobil, 
which is now the major funder of the greenhouse skeptics. As I 
mentioned, the fossil fuel lobby paid a tiny handful of scientists - 
many of whom had no standing in the mainstream scientific community - to 
dismiss the reality of climate change.

(Parenthetically, we had some fun last year with Fred Singer, who is 
probably the most visible of the greenhouse skeptics. Singer declared in 
a letter to the Washington Post, that he had not received any money from 
the oil industry for at least 20 years - when he had done some 
consulting for an oil company. Shortly thereafter, we published the fact 
that Singer had received thousands of dollars in 1998 from ExxonMobil. 
It was on their website.)

In my book I go into some length about the public disinformation 
campaign by the fossil fuel lobby. One proof of the success of that 
campaign is reflected by two polls done by Newsweek Magazine. Back in 
1991, 35 percent of people surveyed by Newsweek said they thought global 
warming was a very serious problem. By 1996, even though the science had 
become far more robust and the IPCC declared it had found the human 
influence on the climate, that 35 percent had shrunk to 22 percent - 
because of the effectiveness of this public relations campaign of 
deception by the fossil fuel lobby.

It also had a profound effect on journalists.

For the longest time, the press accorded the same weight to the " 
skeptics" as it did to mainstream scientists. This was done in the name 
of journalistic balance. In fact it was journalistic laziness.

The ethic of journalistic balance comes into play when there is a story 
involving opinion: should abortion be legal? Should we invade Iraq? 
Should we have bi-lingual education or English immersion? At that point, 
a journalist is obligated to give each competing view its most 
articulate presentation- and at equivalent length.

But when it's a question of fact, it's up to a reporter to get off her 
or his ass and find out what the facts are. The issue of balance is not 
relevant when the focus of a story is factual.

In the case of the climate issue, the former head of the IPCC, Dr. Bert 
Bolin made a striking statement. In, I think 1997, Dr. Bolin - a very 
conservatively-spoken scientist -- declared definitively that there is 
no debate among any statured scientists working on this issue about the 
larger trends of what is happening to the climate. That is something you 
would never know from the press coverage.

Granted there have been a few credentialed scientists - although only 
Dick Lindzen comes to mind -- who are have published in the 
peer-reviewed literature - who minimize climate change as relatively 
inconsequential.
In that case, if balance is required, I would think that would suggest 
that a reporter spend a little time reviewing the literature, talking to 
some scientists on background, learning where the weight of scientific 
opinion lay -- and reflecting that balance in his or her reporting. Were 
that to have happened, the mainstream scientists would get 90 percent of 
the story -- and the skeptics a couple of paragraphs at the end.

Today, that is finally beginning to happen.

One of the first impacts of climatic instability is an increase in 
weather extremes - longer droughts, more heat waves, more severe storms 
and the fact that we get much more of our rain and snow in intense, 
severe downpours.
That is reflected in the fact that weather extremes today constitute a 
much larger portion of news budgets than they did 20 years ago.

Given the dramatic increase of extreme weather events - you would think 
that journalists, in covering these stories, would include the line: 
"Scientists associate this pattern of violent weather with global 
warming." They don't.
A few years ago I asked a top editor at CNN why, given the increasing 
proportion of news budgets dedicated to extreme weather, they did not 
make this connection. He told me, "We did. Once."   It triggered a 
barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition at the top 
executives at CNN. (The GCC was the main lobby group opposing action on 
global warming.) They argued that you can't attribute any one extreme 
event to climate change -- just as you can not attribute any one case of 
lung cancer to smoking. But even though the connection has been accepted 
as a given by mainstream science, nevertheless the industry intimidated 
CNN into dropping this connection from its coverage.

But I think there's a deeper betrayal of trust here by the media. By now 
most reporters and editors have heard enough from environmentalists to 
know that global warming could, at least, have potentially catastrophic 
consequences. Given that reality, I think it is profoundly irresponsible 
for an editor or reporter to pass along the story with some 
counterposing quotes without doing enough digging to satisfy herself or 
himself as to the bottom line gravity of the situation. Their assessment 
needn't be the same as mine. But simply to treat the story like any 
other -- without taking the time to reach an informed judgment about its 
potential gravity -- is a fundamental violation of the trust of readers 
and viewers who assume a modicum of informed interpretation from their 
news providers.

Finally, over and above the campaign of manufactured denial by the 
fossil fuel public relations specialists, there is a natural human 
tendency toward denial of this issue. When one is confronted by a truly 
overwhelming problem - and one does not see an apparent solution - the 
most natural human reaction is not to want to know about it. And that 
applies to editors just as much as readers.
So for that reason, I am trying very hard to promote a set of policies 
that a group of us believe very strongly would achieve the 70 percent 
cuts required by nature, even as they would create huge numbers of jobs 
and economic growth - especially in developing countries.

I think that only when a person sees that an intellectually honest 
solution is really possible that he will then let the bad news in on 
himself. Absent that realization, I think you will continue to see 
either a complete denial of the reality, or a more sophisticated form of 
denial which expresses itself as a minimization of the magnitude and 
urgency of the problem.

The U.S. press today is in what I call "stage-two" denial of the climate 
crisis. They acknowledge its existence - and they minimize its scope and 
urgency. You can see this from the pattern of coverage that provides 
occasional feature stories about the decimation of the forests in Alaska 
- but which continues to ignore the central diplomatic, political and 
economic conflicts around the issue.

So if there is a message in all this, I think, should be: this problem 
is real. It threatens the survival of our civilization. There are 
solutions - which could hold the key to lots of other problems facing 
this profoundly fractured world. And, most important, this is by far the 
most dramatic and exciting story you could ever want to work on.
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=7743&method=full



[skirmish in the Information wars]
*Study Against EVs Backed By Legacy Automakers Is Debunked In Epic Way*
https://insideevs.com/news/458458/legacy-automakers-backed-study-against-evs-debunked/ 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 6, 2005 *

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in California, James Hansen 
delivers a speech entitled: "Is There Still Time to Avoid 'Dangerous 
Anthropogenic Interference' with Global Climate?"

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Keeling_20051206.pdf

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