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

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 6, 2020*/

[USA Today noticed]
*In hottest decade on record, climate change appears nowhere in State of 
the Union address*
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/05/trumps-state-union-no-climate-change-but-talk-trees/4655960002/


[science knows]
*How Europe Turned Into a Perfect Landscape for Wildfires*
TIVISSA, Spain -- Forests are getting some high-profile attention lately.

President Trump expressed his support on Tuesday night for a global 
effort to plant one trillion trees, which itself was announced at a 
gathering of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, in 
January. A trillion trees, it was said at that meeting of the World 
Economic Forum, would go a long way in addressing climate change.

But while trees -- and particularly forests full of trees -- are vital 
for swallowing up and storing carbon, currently absorbing 30 percent of 
planet-warming carbon dioxide, they are also extremely vulnerable in the 
age of climate disruptions.

In a hotter, drier, more flammable climate, like here in the 
Mediterranean region, forests can die slowly from drought or they can go 
up in flames almost instantly, releasing all the carbon stored in their 
trunks and branches into the atmosphere.

That raises an increasingly urgent question: How best to manage 
woodlands in a world that humans have so profoundly altered? "We need to 
decide what will be the climate-change forest for the future," is how 
Kirsten Thonicke, a fire ecologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate 
Impact Research, framed the challenge.
A forest revival in Europe is forcing that discussion now.

Today roughly 40 percent of the European Union's landmass is covered by 
trees, making it one of the most forest-rich regions in the world. It's 
also ripe for wildfire.

In 2019, intense heat and drought helped spread fires across roughly 
1,300 square miles on the Continent, a swath of scorched land 15 percent 
bigger than the decade's annual average, according to preliminary data 
issued in mid-January by the European Forest Fire Information System...
- - -
"Instead of fighting fire, making peace with fire," Mr. Castellnou advised.

The only way to keep the woods from becoming dry brush by the time his 
two children are grown, he said, is to manage the landscape. He can see 
what climate change has already wrought on the hills he has lived in his 
whole life. The seasons are unpredictable. The heat and high winds are 
like nothing he has seen before.

"You can't read the signals anymore," he said. "You don't know what's 
going to happen next. It's like feeling estranged at home."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/climate/forests-europe-climate-changed.html



[Canada fuels]
**When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada's leaders have reached a 
new low**
Bill McKibben
A territory that has 0.5% of the Earth's population plans to use up 
nearly a third of the planet's remaining carbon budget

Americans elected Donald Trump, who insisted climate change was a hoax – 
so it's no surprise that since taking office he's been all-in for the 
fossil fuel industry. There's no sense despairing; the energy is better 
spent fighting to remove him from office.

Canada, on the other hand, elected a government that believes the 
climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the 
nation's Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest 
warming on Earth. Yet the country's leaders seem likely in the next few 
weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into 
the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can't bring 
themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.

The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles 
of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood 
Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite 
conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the 
land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily 
visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have 
ever carved on the planet's surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that 
the mine was nonetheless in the "public interest".

Here's how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada's prime 
minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years 
ago: "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and 
leave them there." That is to say, Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet's 
population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet's remaining 
carbon budget. Ottawa hides all this behind a series of pledges about 
"net-zero emissions by 2050" and so on, but they are empty promises. In 
the here-and-now they can't rein themselves in. There's oil in the 
ground and it must come out.

This is painfully hard to watch because it comes as the planet has 
supposedly reached a turning point. A series of remarkable young people 
(including Canadians such as Autumn Peltier) have captured the 
imagination of people around the world; scientists have issued ever 
sterner warnings; and the images of climate destruction show up in every 
newspaper. Canadians can see the Australian blazes on television; they 
should bring back memories of the devastating forest fires that forced 
the evacuation of Fort McMurray, in the heart of the tar sands complex, 
less than four years ago.

The only rational response would be to immediately stop the expansion of 
new fossil fuel projects. It's true that we can't get off oil and gas 
immediately; for the moment, oil wells continue to pump. But the Teck 
Frontier proposal is predicated on the idea that we'll still need vast 
quantities of oil in 2066, when Greta Thunberg is about to hit 
retirement age. If an alcoholic assured you he was taking his condition 
very seriously, but also laying in a 40-year store of bourbon, you'd be 
entitled to doubt his sincerity, or at least to note his confusion. Oil 
has addled the Canadian ability to do basic math: more does not equal 
less, and 2066 is not any time soon. An emergency means you act now.

In fairness, Canada has company here. For every territory making a 
sincere effort to kick fossil fuels (California, Scotland) there are 
other capitals just as paralyzed as Ottawa. Australia's fires creep ever 
closer to the seat of government in Canberra, yet the prime minister, 
Scott Morrison, can't seem to imagine any future for his nation other 
than mining more coal. Australia and Canada are both rich nations, their 
people highly educated, but they seem unable to control the zombie 
momentum of fossil fuels.

There's obviously something hideous about watching the Trumps and the 
Putins of the world gleefully shred our future. But it's disturbing in a 
different way to watch leaders pretend to care – a kind of gaslighting 
that can reduce you to numb nihilism. Trudeau, for all his charms, 
doesn't get to have it both ways: if you can't bring yourself to stop a 
brand-new tar sands mine then you're not a climate leader.

Bill McKibben is an author and Schumann distinguished scholar in 
environmental studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent 
book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/when-it-comes-to-climate-hypocrisy-canadas-leaders-have-reached-a-new-low


[PR newswire]
Homeland Security News Wire
*Warming Oceans Could Drive Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse, Sea Level Rise*
The study took a modeling approach to gather best estimates of the 
planetary influences underlying glacial and ice sheet melt as well as 
sea level rise, including greenhouse gas concentrations, global 
temperatures, and subsurface ocean temperatures.

Using the Community Climate System Model version 3 from the National 
Center for Atmospheric Research, the research team ran simulations for 
more than 25,000 model years using conditions and climate 
reconstructions surmised from data collected around the globe.

That includes greenhouse gases measured in deep ice cores, sea level 
indicators in corals, and cave features called speleothems. The 
simulations also included the position of the planet relative to the 
sun, ice sheet data and changes in heat transport associated with 
changes to AMOC.

The study found that AMOC was reduced in a single step at the transition 
of the last interglacial for roughly 7,000 years. During the transition 
into the current interglacial period, the Holocene, AMOC reduction 
lasted only about two-thirds as long and occurred in two steps.

During both transitions, however, AMOC reduction caused subsurface 
warming throughout the Atlantic Basin, which agrees with observed data. 
The reduction resulted in more sea ice in the North Atlantic Ocean and 
the reduction of ocean convection. Both of these reduce heat loss from 
the surface ocean, warming the subsurface, similar to the way in which 
winter snow helps insulate the ground below.

"Though we have known for a long time that sea levels rose during this 
past warm period, this study helps us to identify why and how that 
happened," says Andrea Dutton, study co-author, professor of geoscience 
at UW–Madison, and a current Fulbright scholar at the Antarctic Research 
Centre in New Zealand. "In particular, this new work points to the 
importance of the warming of the ocean in destabilizing marine-based ice 
sheets."

In the U.S., four out of ten people live in populous coastal areas, 
making them vulnerable to the effects of rising seas. Seventy percent of 
the world's largest cities are located near a coast.

Globally, by 2010, seas had already risen about 10 inches above their 
average levels in pre-industrial times. According to the National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2014 they were rising at an 
increasing rate of roughly one-eighth of an inch each year.

Also by 2014, global temperatures had increased by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 
deg Fahrenheit) relative to pre-industrial conditions, representing the 
same amount of warming that led to sea level rise during the last 
interglacial period.

"This is really scary because on paper at least, it shows that six to 
nine meters of sea level rise can occur with the same amount of global 
warming happening right now," says He.

"The Antarctic Ice Sheet is very susceptible to warming from the ocean 
so if we want to reduce the uncertainty of sea level rise from the 
Antarctic we need to monitor where subsurface warming will occur, with 
more ice sheet modeling development," He says. "Sea level rise is the 
number one threat of global warming."
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20200204-warming-oceans-could-drive-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-sea-level-rise?page=0,1


[sober video documentary - 28 min]
*Australia: Ravaged by drought and fire | DW Documentary*
Feb 4, 2020
DW Documentary
Bushfires are nothing new in Australia, but this season's blazes have 
taken on a new dimension. Their vast scale is largely down to extreme 
weather conditions. Last year was the hottest and driest since 
recordings began in 1910.

More than 12 million hectares of land have been razed since the outbreak 
of the Australian bushfires in October 2019. As well as the human and 
financial costs, the fires have killed an estimated one billion wild 
animals.
One reason for the scale of the blazes is severe drought. Sheep farmer 
Brendan Cullen, who lives 60 km from the outback town of Broken Hill in 
southern Australia, says he has stopped looking at the weather report 
because it fills him with fear.

Even areas close to the coast have been hard hit by bush fires. The 
problems have unleashed fresh debate about climate change in Australia. 
Opposition to the country's giant coal mining industry is growing.  This 
documentary shows a land in turmoil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0LLW-tJDAM



[Online, free publication]
*THE 1.5C BUSINESS PLAYBOOK*
Build a strategy for exponential climate action

This playbook is developed for companies and organisations of all
sizes that want to align with the 1.5C ambition. Small, medium
and larger companies may find it useful both for strengthening
their own strategy and to help in engaging suppliers and setting
requirements.
Companies with advanced climate strategies that have already
joined sector climate initiatives can use it to benchmark their
approach and raise ambitions. In this capacity, the playbook will
help to establish a clear climate strategy, define targets aligned with
science, set requirements for suppliers and align supply chains and
value propositions with a 1.5C ambition.
https://exponentialroadmap.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/1.5C-business-playbook-1.0_digital-spread.pdf 



[clips from a new essay from Eisenstein]
*Extinction and the Revolution of Love*
January 2020
1. No demand is big enough
Contrary to its self-conception, Extinction Rebellion is not actually 
about climate change. The climate issue is, rather, the vehicle for the 
expression of a deeper yearning. Greta Thunberg and the climate strikers 
embody a refusal to comply with a system that is anti-life. "I will not 
go to school. I will not participate in this. I want no part of the 
program."

The climate emergency gives form to an intuitive, inarticulate 
alienation from the project of civilization as it stands. It offers a 
focal point to identify as the source of wrongness. It channels onto one 
thing the revolutionary aspiration to change everything. But if we were 
to awaken tomorrow to the news that the science was mistaken and global 
temperatures have leveled off, the driving energy of the protestors 
would persist. That is because they recognize that the challenge facing 
humanity is not "How do we sustain business-as-usual using 
carbon-neutral fuels?" Business-as-usual is not OK, and switching fuels 
will not make it so. Like the anti-war radicals of the 1960s, like the 
anti-globalization protestors of the 90s, like the Occupy Wall Street 
occupiers, they do not aspire to modest reforms. They know that modest 
reforms do not reach deep enough. They recognize, whether consciously or 
not, that ecocide is a feature and not a bug of the current 
socioeconomic system. They know that we can do better than a world of 
unrelenting poverty, inequality, warfare, domestic violence, racism, and 
environmental destruction. And they know that each of these generates 
the others.

In other words, the issue is not whether our current civilization is 
sustainable. Do we even want to sustain it? Can't we do better than this?...
- - -
The fossil-fuel based system has enormous momentum. It is woven into 
every facet of modern life, from medicine to agriculture to transport, 
manufacturing, and housing. Every activist must understand that a demand 
to get off fossil fuels is a demand to change everything, and that this 
demand is impossible to fulfill. Its goal is not impossible; a change in 
everything is what we are here to serve. But it cannot be realized as a 
demand, because there is no one with the power to fulfill it...
- - -
By framing anything as a demand, we entrench existing political power 
relationships. We limit what we can achieve to what those in power can 
grant. We confer power upon those whom we hold powerful, and inevitably 
set them up as enemies when they fail to enact the ultimatum...
- - -
There is a certain comfort in establishing a set of enemies as the key 
to solving a crisis. We replace a goal we don't know how to achieve 
(changing everything) with one we do (toppling a leader, overthrowing a 
government, seizing political power). In this way, the illusion of power 
diverts our revolutionary energy onto a lesser goal. If the engineer 
won't throttle the engine, why, we'll toss him off the train and 
throttle it ourselves. Probably, like most revolutionaries, we will fail 
to seize control at all. In the unlikely event that we succeed and find 
ourselves in the engine room, we will discover we are just as incapable 
of throttling the engine as its previous occupant was...
- - -
Adding to public distrust of activists is the self-righteousness that is 
coded into appeals to personal virtue. If we hold ourselves virtuous for 
our activism and low-carbon lifestyles, and grant ourselves 
self-approval and membership in the ranks of the moral, we thereby cast 
others into the ranks of the immoral, the ignorant, the wrong. The more 
we douse ourselves in the perfume of virtue, the more we give off the 
stench of sanctimony. We would be more effective if, rather than holding 
ourselves apart in unforgiving judgement, we would seek to understand 
deeply the totality of the circumstances of those we judge. That is 
called inclusivity. It is the gateway to a revolution of love...
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/extinction-and-the-revolution-of-love/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - February 6, 2007 *
In a New York Times article, former Times environmental reporter William 
K. Stevens notes:

    "The [American public's] awakening [on climate] has been energized
    largely by dramatic reports on the melting Arctic and by fear --
    generated by the spectacular horror of Hurricane Katrina -- that a
    warmer ocean is making hurricanes more intense.

    "Politicians are weighing in on the subject as never before,
    especially with the advent of a Democratic-led Congress. It appears
    likely, if not certain, that whoever is elected president in 2008
    will treat the issue seriously and act accordingly, thereby bringing
    the United States into concert with most of the rest of the world.
    Just last week, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a presidential
    aspirant and the co-author of a bill mandating stronger action,
    asserted that the argument about global warming 'is over.' Back in
    the day, such words from a conservative Republican would have been
    unimaginable, even if he were something of a maverick."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/science/earth/06clim.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& 


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