[TheClimate.Vote] December 31 , 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*December 31, 2020*/

[clips from year-end lists]
*Fires, floods, hurricanes, and locusts: 2020 was an epic year for 
disasters*
A record number of billion-dollar disasters struck the US in 2020 amid 
the Covid-19 pandemic.
By Umair Irfan  Dec 30, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic was unfortunately not the only natural disaster of 
2020. There were so many that it’s easy to forget everything that 
happened this year. Here is a brief sampling of 2020’s weather-related 
events:

    -- The year began with a series of bushfires in Australia that
    forced thousands to flee, killed at least 29 people and more than a
    billion animals. The fires that sent smoke around the world had
    ignited amid weeks of record-breaking heat and drought.
    -- Swarms of locusts descended on East Africa, the Middle East, and
    South Asia, threatening food supplies for millions of people in the
    spring. The swarms were triggered in part by torrential rainfall in
    East Africa.
    -- This summer, California experienced its worst fire season on
    record in terms of area burned, as well as its largest single
    wildfire on record. Colorado also had its largest wildfire in
    history, and blazes in Washington and Oregon created an
    unprecedented disaster.
    -- A record number of wildfires this summer swept through the
    Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands, spanning Bolivia,
    Brazil, and Paraguay. Many of these blazes were illegally ignited to
    clear land for agriculture, and spread because of hot and dry
    conditions in an area that’s usually wet.
    -- A powerful storm known as a derecho swept through South Dakota,
    Nebraska, Illinois, and Iowa in October and became the most costly
    thunderstorm in US history, causing an estimated $7.5 billion in
    damages.
    Residents are carried on a forklift truck to dry land through flood
    waters brought by heavy rain from Typhoon Vamco after it made
    landfall in Thua Thien Hue province on November 15, 2020.
    Storms like Typhoon Vamco brought deadly flooding in Vietnam. Huy
    Thanh/AFP via Getty Images
    -- Typhoon Goni became the largest tropical storm to ever make
    landfall when it struck the Philippines in October, whipping the
    country with winds reaching 195 miles per hour.
    -- More than 100 people died in Vietnam in October amid the worst
    flooding in decades, triggered by tropical storms and typhoons.
    -- The Atlantic Ocean experienced its most active hurricane season
    on record, with 30 named storms as the season closed in November.
    The hurricanes wrought destruction across the Caribbean and Central
    America, while forcing thousands to flee in the United States. More
    than 400 people were killed by Atlantic tropical storms this season.
    -- In the waning days of 2020, Tropical Storm Chalane struck the
    coast of Mozambique, bringing heavy rains and 75 mph winds to a
    region that is still recovering from the devastating strike by
    Cyclone Idai last year.

These disasters were deadly and destructive, and several of them nudged 
records even higher. But while their origins are in nature, humanity’s 
actions are what made these events truly devastating. From continuing to 
build in high-risk areas, to failing to evacuate people at risk, to 
changing the climate, disasters often end up with a far higher toll than 
they would otherwise. As populations increase in vulnerable areas and 
with climate change pushing weather toward greater extremes, the risks 
are poised to grow.

*2020 was the year of the compound disaster*
Covid-19 was lurking in the background of most natural disasters this 
year. Since the pandemic began, efforts to contain it complicated 
everything from locust control pesticide spraying to organizing camps 
for wildland firefighters.

And people fleeing disasters faced extra challenges as they tried to 
maintain social distance in shelters that tend to force people into 
close proximity...
- -
At the same time, disasters made it harder to contain the spread of the 
coronavirus, which has already killed more than 1.79 million people 
around the world. The pandemic also devastated the global economy, and 
many local disaster responders saw budget cuts and layoffs just as they 
needed support the most...

“Yes, it’s a health crisis,” said Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social 
scientist who studies disasters at the RAND Corporation. “It’s also an 
economic crisis, and it’s a social crisis.”

Disasters in 2020 also compounded when extreme weather struck 
repeatedly. Louisiana, for instance, saw a record five major storms make 
landfall this year, including Hurricane Laura, the strongest storm to 
strike the region in 150 years.

Meanwhile, back-to-back wildfires across the Western United States not 
only destroyed homes and businesses, but cast smoke over huge swaths of 
the country, turning skies orange and making breathing the air as bad as 
smoking a pack of cigarettes in a day. That dirty air in turn worsened 
risks for Covid-19, a disease that afflicts the airways. “Exposure to 
air pollutants in wildfire smoke can irritate the lungs, cause 
inflammation, alter immune function, and increase susceptibility to 
respiratory infections, likely including COVID-19,” according to the 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The events this year showed that disasters aren’t singular events, but 
overlapping and intersecting phenomena. In the future, disaster planners 
will have to better account for how many things can go wrong at once, 
and that areas may not have time to fully recover from one catastrophe 
before the next one strikes....
- -
It’s clear then that the impacts of disasters stem from forces of nature 
as well as humanity’s decisions. However, because people are driving 
many of the factors that make extreme weather so devastating, people can 
also take steps to reduce these impacts. That can take the form of 
relocating away from high-risk areas, building seawalls and protective 
infrastructure, and investing more in disaster management so communities 
can recover faster. And over the long term, reducing greenhouse gas 
emissions will help avert the most extreme disaster scenarios.

But the impacts of the disasters this year will linger for a long time 
as people look to rebuild their lives and cope with the trauma. 
“Disasters change people, they change communities, and they change 
societies,” said Clark-Ginsberg. That means the shadow of 2020 will 
likely stretch well into 2021 — and beyond.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22204677/Screen_Shot_2020_12_30_at_10.10.55_AM.png



[The year -clips from The Guardian]
*Floods, storms and searing heat: 2020 in extreme weather*
While Covid has dominated the news, the world has also felt the effects 
of human-driven global heating
by Jonathan Watts - 30 Dec 2020...
- -
Scientists are surprised temperatures have been so high in the absence 
of an El Niño, the phenomenon that boosts warmer years such as the 
current record, 2016. On the contrary, the latter half of this year 
there was the emergence of a cooling La Niña, which churned up 
chillier-than-normal waters in the equatorial Pacific. Petteri Taalas, 
the secretary-general of the WMO, said that without this influence, 2020 
would certainly have been the warmest year ever measured.

In climate terms, the long-term trend is more important than individual 
records, but it is the latter that directly affects lives and 
livelihoods. Unusual heat, drought, fires or storms can be caused by 
natural variation, local factors or industrial emissions, but scientists 
are increasingly able to identify that extreme weather events are more 
frequent and intense as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere...
Humankind’s fingerprint was particularly evident in the Siberian 
heatwave, which was made at least 600 times more probable by humans, and 
the Australian bushfires, which were made more than 30% more likely.

Here is how this year unfolded with global heating at 1.1C above 
pre-industrial levels. This toll may seem horrifying, but it is just a 
sample – and will be modest compared with a future world on course for 
more than 3C of warming.
[Months of 2020:]
*JANUARY*
Hottest January on record...
*FEBRUARY*
Second-hottest February on record...
*MARCH*
Second-hottest March on record...
*APRIL*
Second-hottest April on record...
*MAY*
Joint-hottest May on record...
*JULY*
Second-hottest July on record...
*AUGUST*
Second-hottest August on record..
*SEPTEMBER*
World’s hottest September on record...
*OCTOBER*
World’s fourth hottest October on record...
*NOVEMBER*
World’s second-hottest November on record...
*30 December*
Almost one year on from the first reported case of Covid-19 in Wuhan, 
China, the worldwide death toll of the pandemic has passed 1.6 million 
people and is estimated to cause $28tn of losses. Scientists have warned 
such outbreaks will become more common as the world’s natural life 
support systems, including the climate, break down as a result of rising 
temperatures, deforestation and the illegal wildlife trade. The UN 
secretary general says humanity has been waging war on nature, and that 
making peace will be the defining task of the 21st century...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/30/floods-storms-and-searing-heat-2020-in-extreme-weather 




[worse than old Soviet industries]
*A German Initiative Seeks to Curb Global Emissions of a Climate 
Super-Pollutant*
The nitrous oxide emissions from hundreds of chemical plants globally, 
300 times more warming than carbon dioxide, are the greenhouse 
equivalent of 45 million cars.
By Phil McKenna - December 30, 2020
- -
In 2019, the Donaldsonville plant released 6,665 tons of nitrous oxide 
into the atmosphere, according to information plant owner CF Industries 
submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency.  That is equal to the 
annual greenhouse gas emissions of 430,000 automobiles.

Nitrous oxide, or N2O, the “laughing gas” long administered by dentists, 
is a climate super-pollutant nearly 300 times more warming of the planet 
than carbon dioxide. Emissions of the gas, which do not cause local 
health impacts, are unregulated in most countries, including the United 
States and Uzbekistan.

The divergent paths the plants’ owners have chosen to address N2O 
emissions highlight how global climate policies have largely failed to 
address an easy, low-cost fix that could dramatically curb global 
greenhouse gas emissions. The Uzbek plant also shows how some of the 
world’s poorest countries, aided by the German government, may soon 
surpass the U.S. in efforts to mitigate a potent greenhouse gas...
- -
Since 2011, at least two more plants have begun to abate at least some 
of their emissions. One of them is the Donaldsonville Nitrogen Complex 
in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, which treats emissions from one of the 
facility’s four nitric acid production lines.

The remaining emissions from the Donaldsonville plant, and all other 
nitric acid plants in the U.S., totaled 34,000 tons of nitrous oxide in 
2019, according to data self-reported by the plants to the EPA. That is 
equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 2.2 million automobiles.

The Donaldsonville plant is the largest emitter.

CF Industries, the owner of the plant, declined to comment other than to 
note that they have set a goal to reduce total CO2 equivalent emissions 
by 25 percent by 2030 and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In a recent financial report, the company said that more stringent 
greenhouse gas  regulations, “if they are enacted, are likely to have a 
significant impact on us, because our production facilities emit GHGs 
such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.”

The company said that “to the extent that GHG restrictions are not 
imposed in countries where our competitors operate or are less stringent 
than regulations that may be imposed in the United States, Canada or the 
United Kingdom, our competitors may have cost or other competitive 
advantages over us.”

Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity 
Project, one of the environmental organizations that filed the 2009 
lawsuit against the EPA to try to require nitrous oxide regulations, 
said that if developing countries can move forward on emissions 
reductions, the U.S. can too.

“Getting whipped by Uzbekistan is pretty bad,”  Schaeffer said. “We 
ought to be able to hold our own against the old Soviet Republics.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30122020/chemical-plant-nitrous-oxide-climate-warming-emissions/



[hard to find classic audio interview described below]
Nick Breeze interviews Katharine Hayhoe
*Prof. Katharine Hayhoe - COVID & Climate Linkages To A Better World*
Shaping The Future - From Pandemic To Climate Change
Episode Description

    Professor Katharine Hayhoe is well-known the world over for her
    clear communications on the risks posed by climate change and why
    these risks and can be addressed in a non-political and non-partisan
    way. Katharine is an atmospheric scientist, the Political Science
    Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech
    University in the US and directs their Climate Center. Life on Zoom
    In the period of lockdown, Katharine discusses how technology has
    played a critical role human interactions, from the emotional
    experience of her grandmother's death to more passive interactions
    such as knitting or just staying in touch with family and friends.
    This all leads her to rename social distancing so it becomes
    physical distancing with social connectivity. COVID-19 and carbon
    emissions There is much talk about how the pandemic is good for the
    environment but, as Katharine points out, this has to be taken in
    context. Because we are not pumping out so much pollution as normal,
    we are still adding to the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases.
    Air quality linked to human suffering Another linkage from the
    pandemic pause is the cleaner air that has been a tangible benefit
    of reducing nearly all transport to a small fraction of what it was
    before. Low-balling climate change Climate scientists have always
    produced scenarios based on different estimates of outcomes from
    climate forcing and Earth system sensitivity. Katharine explains how
    typically scientists have been low-balling the speed and severity of
    climate change. The 3 choices that humanity has to select from are
    mitigation, adaptation, or suffering. It turns out we will likely be
    forced to select all three but the balance of each is still up to
    us. Katharine gives her view on how this current crisis informs us
    to best face the future. Climate change and politics In the US and
    UK especially, climate change has been forced into a political
    framing in order to try and make conservatives think that the threat
    is not real or very serious. Now, with impacts so tangibly in our
    faces, from the loss of the polar ice caps and ice sheets like in
    Greenland, or the fires in the Amazon, Australia among many other
    places, people are realising this is real and anxiety about the
    future is commonplace. What can we do about it? The world won’t end
    in 2030 There is an emerging narrative that if the world does not
    decarbonise by 2030 then we will experience the apocalypse.
    Katharine Hayhoe discusses the importance of having a vision of the
    future that balances the reality of climate change with the outcome
    that we want to see and that we can collectively and individually
    work towards. Collapsing oil, personal suffering and policy
    Katharine discusses how the collapse of the oil price is impacting
    thousands of people in the oil industry who are losing their jobs
    and facing financial hardship in a very uncertain time. These are
    not bad people but rather a part of our society who are trying to
    support their families. What can we do to help them transition to
    new sectors? Despite this, lobbyists for oil-producing regions like
    Alberta in Canada are trying to roll back environmental taxes aimed
    at starting the transition to clean energy. Katharine explains why
    carbon taxes are still part of the solution, perhaps more so than
    ever before.

Official webpage: https://climateseries.com/climate-change-podcast

*Life on Zoom*
In the period of lockdown, Katharine discusses how technology has played 
a critical role human interactions, from the emotional experience of her 
grandmother's death to more passive interactions such as knitting or 
just staying in touch with family and friends. This all leads her to 
rename social distancing  so it becomes physical distancing with social 
connectivity.

*COVID-19 and carbon emissions*
There is much talk about how the pandemic is good for the environment 
but, as Katharine points out, this has to be taken in context.

Because we are not pumping out so much pollution as normal, we are still 
adding to the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases.

*Air quality linked to human suffering*
Another linkage from the pandemic pause is the cleaner air that has been 
a tangible benefit of reducing nearly all transport to a small fraction 
of what it was before.

*Low-balling climate change*
Climate scientists have always produced scenarios based on different 
estimates of outcomes from climate forcing and Earth system sensitivity. 
Katharine explains how typically scientists have been low-balling the 
speed and severity of climate change.

The 3 choices that humanity has to select from are mitigation, 
adaptation, or suffering. It turns out we will likely be forced to 
select all three but the balance of each is still up to us. Katharine 
gives her view on how this current crisis informs us to best face the 
future.

*Climate change and politics*
In the US and UK especially, climate change has been forced into a 
political framing in order to try and make conservatives think that the 
threat is not real or very serious.

Now, with impacts so tangibly in our faces, from the loss of the polar 
ice caps and ice sheets like in Greenland, or the fires in the Amazon, 
Australia among many other places, people are realising this is real and 
anxiety about the future is commonplace. What can we do about it?
*
**The world won’t end in 2030**
*There is an emerging narrative that if the world does not decarbonise 
by 2030 then we will experience the apocalypse. Katharine Hayhoe 
discusses the importance of having a vision of the future that balances 
the reality of climate change with the outcome that we want to see and 
that we can collectively and individually work towards.

*Collapsing oil, personal suffering and policy *
Katharine discusses how the collapse of the oil price is impacting 
thousands of people in the oil industry who are losing their jobs and 
facing financial hardship in a very uncertain time. These are not bad 
people but rather a part of our society who are trying to support their 
families. What can we do to help them transition to new sectors?

Despite this, lobbyists for oil-producing regions like Alberta in Canada 
are trying to roll back environmental taxes aimed at starting the 
transition to clean energy. Katharine explains why carbon taxes are 
still part of the solution, perhaps more so than ever before.
https://anchor.fm/nick-breeze

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SFqOTF2ilwkaQfU6gBnHf

- -

[series of audio podcasts]
*Shaping The Future - From Pandemic To Climate Change*
Journalist Nick Breeze
https://open.spotify.com/show/1jhQYkBysSB7vUo1Phq0QB



[clips from an opinion]
*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
- -
At the moment—a sustained, tormented moment—it doesn’t look like 
collective action is our strong suit, here in the United States...
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....
- -
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...
- -
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...
- -
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 @lydia_millet
https://newrepublic.com/article/158483/american-individualism-climate-fear



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - December 31, 2012 *

Media Matters compiles a list of the "10 Dumbest Things Fox Said About 
Climate Change In 2012."

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/10-dumbest-things-fox-said-about-climate-change-2012


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