[TheClimate.Vote] December 30, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 30, 2020*/

[Greta]
*'We cannot make it without science': Greta Thunberg says climate 
experts are being ignored*
Climate specialists not being listened to despite Covid showing 
importance of following science, activist says

Climate experts are not being listened to despite the coronavirus 
pandemic highlighting the importance of following science, the 
environmental activist Greta Thunberg has said.

The Swedish teenager argued that the Covid-19 crisis had “shone a light” 
on how “we cannot make it without science”, but people were “only 
listening to one type of scientist”.

Her comments came in a joint interview with the author Margaret Atwood, 
broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday as part of the two-times Booker 
prize-winning writer’s guest-editing of the Today programme.

Thunberg was asked if the pandemic’s impact on people’s appreciation of 
science would have an effect on climate information.
“It could definitely have. I think this pandemic has shone a light on 
how … we are depending on science and that we cannot make it without 
science,” Thunberg said.

“But of course, we are only listening to one type of scientist, or some 
types of scientist, and, for example, we are not listening to climate 
scientists, we’re not listening to scientists who work on biodiversity 
and that, of course, needs to change.”...
- -
Elsewhere in the interview, Thunberg said she tried to ignore content on 
Twitter, adding: “If I were to spend my time trying to defend myself, I 
wouldn’t be doing anything else.”

She said it was great to be back at school after a period of campaigning 
and that she loved studying.

The coronavirus pandemic has in recent months prevented the Fridays for 
Future movement that Thunberg inspired from holding its mass rallies, 
which started as a solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament in Stockholm 
in August 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/29/we-cannot-make-it-without-science-greta-thunberg-says-climate-experts-are-being-ignored



[lost news stories from DeSmogBlog]
*These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020*
By Sharon Kelly - December 28, 2020
At the start of December 2020, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres 
spoke at Columbia University, appearing not before a packed auditorium 
as in years past, but before a “virtual” audience, making his annual 
State of the Planet address. “To put it simply,” he said, “the state of 
the planet is broken.”

“Today, we are at 1.2 degrees of warming and already witnessing 
unprecedented climate extremes and volatility in every region and on 
every continent,” Guterres said.

“Let’s be clear: human activities are at the root of our descent towards 
chaos,” he went on. “But that means human action can help solve it.”

The speech was a fitting postscript for a year that brought not just the 
Covid-19 pandemic, but also a pummeling of catastrophes worldwide, many 
related to climate change.

But amid those disasters and under an openly hostile-to-science Trump 
administration, momentum continued to quietly build — albeit 
excruciatingly slowly — away from the burning of coal, oil, and natural 
gas and towards, perhaps, meaningful action to slow the climate crisis.

The past year may be a difficult one to look back on — but amid the 
crises, there are signs that long-entrenched powerful interests may in 
fact be dug in on shaky ground.

*Unprecedented Disasters*
2020 may well be the warmest year ever recorded, the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in mid-December.

Amid that heat came a seemingly unending series of climate-linked 
disasters, prompting the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain to 
warn in November that “climate change will have a more significant 
medium- and long-term impact on the human life and on Earth” than even 
Covid-19.

The U.S. was hit by a billion-dollar weather and climate disasters 16 
times between January and September, according to NOAA — an average of 
one major catastrophe every 2.5 weeks for 40 weeks.

During this record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season that brought 30 
named storms (the historic yearly average is 12), other 
multi-billion-dollar disasters barely registered in the national media. 
NOAA’s list includes eleven outbreaks of derechos, tornadoes, hail, or 
“severe weather” in the central and southern U.S., along with three 
named hurricanes (Laura, Sally and Isaias).

“It was such a busy and crazy a year that a derecho that savaged the 
Midwest somehow flew under the radar, despite damage nearing $10 
billion, and is barely remembered,” the Associated Press reported of the 
August events...
And while major storms themselves made headlines, the toxic pollution 
that followed in their wakes often barely registered in the national 
press — and at times, went unmeasured because monitors were offline.

*Fires Around the World*
In January, as Wuhan entered its first lockdown and quarantine and the 
first Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in the U.S., Australia was battling 
deadly bushfires that ultimately raged across an area twice the size of 
Florida.

By summer, it was the U.S. Pacific coast that was burning. A horrific 
fire season this year turned skies blood-red from California to 
Washington state.

As of December 18, the National Interagency Fire Center had tracked 
56,914 wildfires in the U.S., which burned across more than 10.25 
million acres.

“We’re seeing fires in places that we don’t normally see fires,” Crystal 
A. Kolden, a University of California, Merced professor of fire science, 
told the New York Times in September. “Normally it’s far too wet to burn.”

That’s in part because 2020 also brought an extraordinary — but 
relatively less discussed — drought that spread across a third of the 
U.S.. “Compared to late 2019 and early 2020, when there was very little 
drought in the continental United States, this is quite an extreme 
single-year event that developed rapidly over the course of 2020,” 
Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space 
Studies, said. “But if you look over longer time scales, I would argue 
this is really a continuation of a multi-decadal event that began around 
2000. There have been some breaks, but the Southwest has been in 
more-or-less continuous drought conditions since then.”

Not only did California’s wildfires continue into December, but a third 
major wildfire system further south also burned this year while 
attracting less global attention. In Brazil, the Pantanal wetlands — 
afflicted by drought — caught fire repeatedly this year and burned 
rapidly, with the blazes consuming a quarter of the tropical wetlands in 
what the World Wildlife Foundation calls “one of the most biologically 
rich environments on the planet.”

And this summer, the Arctic, which has seen climate heating at roughly 
double average rates, not only experienced an abnormally hot summer — 
with temperatures in the Siberian town Verkhoyansk hitting 100.4°F, the 
highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic circle — but the 
Siberian tundra then broke out in wildfires of its own.
*
**Plummeting Fossil Fuel Prices*
But amid all the crises, signs of a different shift have begun to emerge 
— one that may have some potential to alter the climate trajectory we’ve 
stayed on for decades.

The oil, coal, and gas industries went into 2020 in rough financial 
shape, generating the lowest returns in the S&P 500 in 2019 after 
underperforming compared to the rest of the economy for a decade. That 
was before the price of oil plunged — and even, for a very brief moment 
in April, dipped far below zero.
Take, for example, ExxonMobil, which has continually doubled down on 
fossil fuel expansions. “The company, for decades one of the most 
profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the 
first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 
percent this year,” The New York Times reported in December. “In August, 
Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by 
Salesforce, a software company.”

Also in December, Exxon’s former CEO Lee Raymond, incidentally, quit the 
board of JPMorgan Chase, a role he’d held for more than three decades. 
Divestment campaigners at 350.org took credit for an ouster, calling it 
“a sign of the changing winds of financial institutions taking climate 
action seriously.”

*Cheap Renewables*
In contrast, renewable energy sources like solar and wind have proved to 
be relatively resilient — or, in the words of Fatih Birol, director of 
the International Energy Agency, in November, “immune to Covid.”

Utility-scale renewable energy saw costs continue to fall, making 
renewable energy often cheaper than fossil fuels — and installations 
reflected that competitiveness. “For solar, for example, new U.S. 
residential installations will be basically flat for 2020, and new 
non-residential (commercial, industrial, and institutional) megawatts 
will be down from 2019’s tally,” The Union of Concerned Scientists, an 
environmental organization, writes. “But large-scale projects have 
mostly been able to keep happening, boosted by favorable (but declining) 
tax incentives, and their successes will be enough to actually propel 
solar to a record year: We look set to have a total of more than 19,000 
megawatts in new solar power capacity, 43% above 2019’s installations, 
and 20% above the previous record.”
Building electrification efforts also spread in 2020. As of December 2, 
Sierra Club tracked 40 communities in California that had made that 
commitment, and 50 more considering all-electric policies. While 
electricity is still mostly generated by fossil fuels, those efforts lay 
the groundwork for renewable energy and proponents claim they will help 
reduce a single-family home's emissions by up to 90 percent within 30 years.

*Exposing Risk*
This year also saw investigative reporting into ways that, for example, 
automakers GM and Ford have known for a half-century that climate change 
was underway and failed to act. Journalists have also exposed the ways 
that PR firms like FTI Consulting used deceptive campaigns and front 
groups to spread pro-fossil fuel propaganda.

The impacts of climate change drew closer scrutiny from large financial 
institutions. “More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make 
bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase 
price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have 
awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at 
risk,” the New York Times reported this summer. “And in one of the 
clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are 
increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them 
to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on 
the hook financially if any of the loans fail.”

That, of course, isn’t exactly a heartwarming story of hope — but it is 
a sign that efforts by fossil fuel companies to sow confusion and doubt 
on climate change are becoming less and less compelling to decision-makers.
*
**Moving Forward*
The year also saw Black Lives Matter protests become what the New York 
Times called the “largest movement in U.S. history” in the wake of the 
police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This summer's uprisings 
across the U.S. brought growing attention to widespread, 
institutionalized racial injustice — and echoed with the idea that, as 
marine biologist and Urban Ocean Lab founder Ayana Elizabeth Johnson put 
it in a June column in Time magazine, “we can't solve the climate crisis 
unless Black lives matter.”

In 2021, in addition to taking a more intersectional approach towards 
environmental justice, climate activists have vowed to keep the pressure 
on the incoming Biden administration — which has promised to move the 
U.S. towards a net zero pathway. If it does so, the U.S. will join 
China, Japan, and South Korea which all announced net zero emission 
targets this year.

This shift, according to the Financial Times, means that the Paris goals 
aren’t entirely out of reach. “‘If all these countries meet their 
long-term targets of net zero, then the Paris agreement goals are within 
reach again,’ says Niklas Höhne, professor of environmental systems at 
Wageningen University in the Netherlands,” as the FT reported in 
December. “Warming of 2.1C is now likely by the end of the century — 
much lower than seemed likely only a few years ago, according to 
analysis he has done with colleagues at the NewClimate Institute and at 
Climate Analytics, both non-profit research groups.”

The picture, of course, looks a lot more grim when you take into account 
countries’ questionable records of delivering on Paris pledges, the FT adds.
While this was a year of compounding and overlapping crises and 
tragedies, there is perhaps some glimmer of hope to be found in the fact 
that some of the past year’s under-reported stories could signify — 
depending on what we all do in the coming days — that structural shifts 
may be underway and that, as U.N. Secretary Guterres suggested, as 2020 
comes to an end, some elements of the climate crisis remain unwritten.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/12/28/2020-end-year-underreported-climate-news



[The big think]
*American Individualism Is My Climate Fear*
The stories we tell dismiss the collective. And collective action is all 
that can save the planet’s many inhabitants.
Lydia Millet - July 14, 2020
For years you were a bore and a doomsayer if you mentioned climate 
change at a party. It wasn’t even the elephant in the room: There were 
no elephants. Just people.

When an unapologetic denier of reality took over the White House, and 
media outlets finally decided to run with those little climate change 
end-times features that had been cooking along on a back burner for 
roughly a half-century, the elephant finally shuffled in. Now everyone 
acts like its presence is completely normal. What climate change 
eleph—oh, you mean Stan? Well yeah, of course Stan’s here. Stan’s always 
here. He makes a mess in the corner, I mean Stan’s a big guy, but we’ll 
clean it up later. Wait, I see him now—hey, Stan! Stan the Man! He’s 
over at the finger-food table, picking up crab puffs with his trunk. Um, 
does he actually know that’s crab? I thought he was a vegetarian!

That’s how it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, anyway. While we still 
went to parties. A few people still do, sure, but they’re either wearing 
MAGA hats and possibly packing, or frat-boyish hordes whose anti-mask 
rebellion looks like Daytona at spring break. The partiers’ sense of 
entitlement appears so immense that it leaves no space for 
elephants—figurative or otherwise.

When I think of the future under climate change, I think of populations 
in migration, sea-level rising, weather patterns morphing, and crops and 
nation states failing. I think of diseases in migration, as mosquitoes 
and ticks and other vectors spread to new territories. Uncertainty and 
instability on a scale we can barely imagine, though we’re getting a 
sneak peek with the Covid pandemic. I think of chaos and strife—forms of 
social disorder, unjust and tragic in their own right, whose effects 
can’t be undone. Chiefly I’m preoccupied with what we call mass 
extinction, which is irreversible and closely tied to climate change. 
Collective action is the only thing that may be able to stop either.

At the moment—a sustained, tormented moment—it doesn’t look like 
collective action is our strong suit, here in the United States.

What I fear, when it comes to climate change, is the war between the 
self and the community.
There’s been a curious loneliness, for people like me, in working on 
climate and species extinction threats these past decades. At first, it 
felt like gaslighting: The scientific evidence for both of these ongoing 
crises was overwhelming, and their relevance and urgency, not merely to 
one narrow interest group but to every interest group that lives and 
will live, seemed painfully clear. (Some sectors of the military, for 
instance, have been trying to plan for climate change for ages, 
recognizing it as a clear and present danger to national security.) Yet 
the mainstream gave the crises minimal attention. The matter of 
planetary life support was a bit of a boutique concern, in many people’s 
eyes. Like quilting or collecting vinyl, it had its adherents—often 
poignantly committed to their arcane hobbies—but their doings were of 
little general interest.

There’s a kind of desperate fierceness that grows from such isolation, 
from such commitment to an unpopular idea. I’ve seen it with other ideas 
that are widely held to threaten the American way of life—socialism and 
atheism, say, though each of those cases has its own history and scope. 
“But can’t you see?” plead their proponents from the sidelines. “Can’t 
you see?”

These days the extended disinformation campaign over what should 
properly be seen as a life-support emergency has retreated from public 
and social spaces to the halls of Congress—specifically Republican 
lawmakers and their constituent donors in a range of fossil-fuel-related 
industries—where it’s making a last stand in very, very bad policy. It’s 
also thriving—temporarily, I like to hope—in an anti-government 
executive branch and its Cabinet-for-hire, a willfully ignorant cadre of 
inverted Chicken Littles who run around claiming the sky isn’t falling, 
even as sizable chunks of it rain down awkwardly on their heads.

Climate anxiety should probably be called climate fear. “Anxiety,” after 
all, is a condition we believe we can and should manage and subdue, 
maybe with therapy or pills. Fear, on the other hand, is a motivator—a 
reflex we developed over the span of deep time through painful trial and 
error, to avoid what can hurt or kill us. When we wish to survive and 
thrive, we take coordinated, strategic action to keep the object of that 
fear at bay.

The human capacity for self-preservation through social collaboration is 
often named as one of our primary and unique attributes, along with the 
complex language we command and can use to achieve it. In climate change 
and mass extinction, we’re facing down the most powerful adversaries our 
kind has ever known. These are clearly enemies of our own making. As the 
once-famous political cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote in the 1970s and put 
in the mouth of a fictional possum: We have met the enemy and he is us.

These are vast, systemic problems that demand a vast, systemic solution. 
A touch of personal nervousness won’t produce an adequate defense. Only 
our superpowers of cooperation will be able to save the day.

What I fear, when it comes to climate change, is the war between the 
self and the community. That war is nothing new—in this country, the 
self has been winning the fight since Ronald Reagan and probably 
before—but with climate and extinction at stake, and a time frame that’s 
acutely limited, we’re at a crucial inflection point.

The current commander in chief is an absurdly perfect embodiment, in 
fact a caricature, of the side that’s pulling for the self. More than 
any other factor that has been cited to explain his popularity—including 
his commitment to a broad corporate license to pollute, profit, and 
kill; to white supremacy; to sexism; or to an anti-choice posture—that 
perfect embodiment is what accounts for the die-hard loyalty of about a 
third of the voting populace. He represents and repeatedly enacts, with 
a zealous and triumphal abandon, the notion that one man, an individual 
and by extension the individual—driven by no impulse or thought beyond 
pure, inexhaustible self-interest—should spin like the sun at the center 
of all being.

On the other side, pulling for community, are arrayed the forces of 
reason. And whether or not you find this particular commander in chief 
to be charismatic (speaking for myself: no), the problem with the forces 
of reason is that they don’t lend themselves to a rebel-hero narrative.

We choose, in the stories we tell, to omit or dismiss the collective in 
favor of the lone fighter.
Our cultural meaning-making is so profoundly vested in this one story, 
which we tell over and over again, that we don’t truly believe in any 
other. Movies, TV, and even video games focus on one person who triumphs 
over the odds to save either the world or simply him- or (more rarely) 
herself. Our mainstream fiction is that of an individual under fire, who 
fights to vanquish evildoers. Sometimes the individual joins up with a 
merry band or love interest, and sometimes at the end we’re presented 
with a neat, attractive nuclear-family unit, standing with their arms 
around each other amid the smoldering ashes. But this is mostly a wink 
and a nod: We understand the merry band or love interest is largely 
window dressing. You need them for dialogue and drama.

We make a crucial choice when we decide our meaning-making vehicles will 
all be about one person’s victory over others. We choose, in the stories 
we tell, to omit or dismiss the collective in favor of the lone fighter. 
So we shouldn’t be surprised when that rebel-hero narrative rises up to 
crush other, less established fables beneath its shiny boot heel.

Storytelling is everything. Actually being a rebel or hero isn’t a 
requirement for the position of boss of these United States; possessing 
literally no rebellious or heroic characteristics doesn’t have to be a 
problem. If you can tell a tale of yourself as a rebel and a hero loudly 
and confidently enough, using simple, reductive words, some people will 
listen, hearing in your egotistical fantasy the tolling bell of their 
personal liberation.

I worry that our failure to tell a new story just as loudly—of love and 
respect for the natural world that sustains us, of an embrace of science 
by secular and religious groups alike, of sacrifice for the common good, 
of the nobility of putting a livable and beautiful future before the 
indulgent pleasures and reliable sameness of the present—will lock us 
onto a path of desperate loss.

The trick with the elephant in the room is not to befriend it, all the 
while drinking and talking pleasantly as before, but to confront it and 
wrestle it down. (This is the problem with extended analogies, since 
real-life elephants deserve far kinder treatment.) The metaphorical 
elephant is gigantic. No single guest at the feast can possibly prove 
sufficient to the task: All partygoers are needed.

Lydia Millet is chief editor at the Center for Biological Diversity. She 
is also a novelist whose latest book is A Children’s Bible.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158483/american-individualism-climate-fear



[lessons not learned will be repeated]
Plos One
*Increased winter drownings in ice-covered regions with warmer winters*
Published: November 18, 2020https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241222

    Abstract
    Winter activities on ice are culturally important for many
    countries, yet they constitute a high safety risk depending upon the
    stability of the ice. Because consistently cold periods are required
    to form stable and thick ice, warmer winters could degrade ice
    conditions and increase the likelihood of falling through the ice.
    This study provides the first large-scale assessment of winter
    drowning from 10 Northern Hemisphere countries. We documented over
    4000 winter drowning events. Winter drownings increased
    exponentially in regions with warmer winters when air temperatures
    neared 0°C. The largest number of drownings occurred when winter air
    temperatures were between -5°C and 0°C, when ice is less stable, and
    also in regions where indigenous traditions and livelihood require
    extended time on ice. Rates of drowning were greatest late in the
    winter season when ice stability declines. Children and adults up to
    the age of 39 were at the highest risk of winter drownings. Beyond
    temperature, differences in cultures, regulations, and human
    behaviours can be important additional risk factors. Our findings
    indicate the potential for increased human mortality with warmer
    winter air temperatures. Incorporating drowning prevention plans
    would improve adaptation strategies to a changing climate.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241222



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 30, 2014 *

"NBC Nightly News" reports on NOAA's finding that 2014 is the hottest 
year on record.

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/2014-officially-warmest-year-record-n277121 


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