[TheClimate.Vote] February23 , 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sun Feb 23 09:42:50 EST 2020

/*February 23, 2020*/

[more heat, faster evaporation]
*Climate change is drying up the Colorado River*
Less snow means more evaporation in a critical water resource
- -
As climate change disrupts historical patterns of rainfall and 
temperature, the Colorado River has not been faring well, and it's 
getting even increasingly unlikely that the river will reach the sea 
again. A paper published this week in Science reports that the river's 
flow has been declining by an alarming 9.3 percent for every 1C of 
warming--and that declining snow levels are the main culprit for this 
dramatic decline.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/climate-change-is-drying-up-the-colorado-river/
more at 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169/

[Check your wallet too]
*Inside Clean Energy: Tesla Gets Ever So Close to 400 Miles of Range*
The increased range is a step toward bringing EVs--and their 
contribution to combating climate change--into the mainstream.

Tesla already makes an electric car that has the longest battery range 
in the industry--373 miles. Now the model has gotten an update that will 
push that up to nearly 400 miles.

That's a lot, and it's a step toward electric vehicles that can ease 
drivers' fears of running out of power on long trips without access to a 
charging station. Overcoming those customer concerns can help EVs break 
out of their niche status--EVs and plug-in hybrids comprise only about 2 
percent of the new cars and trucks sold in the U.S.--and provide a 
realistic pathway to reducing vehicle emissions.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that his company's Model S sedan 
now has an estimated range of more than 390 miles, the result of 
hardware and software improvements.

A list of the EVs with the longest ranges in the 2020 EPA Fuel Economy 
Guide is pretty much a list of Tesla products. Tesla has the top 14 
spots, including variations on the Model S, Model X, Model Y and Model 3.

It's important to note that most of these come with premium prices. The 
Model S Long Range, for example, the 390-mile version, has a base price 
of $74,490.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022020/clean-energy-tesla-model-s-solar-gasoline?

[information warfare]
*Don't @ Me: What Happened When Climate Skeptics Misused My Work*
A student who saw his climate research misrepresented in online forums 
shares the experience, as well as lessons learned and recommendations 
for how to counter efforts to distort climate science...
- -
*Lessons Learned*
I still feel guilty for not engaging those who misrepresented my work on 
Twitter; maybe I was wrong to abdicate responsibility for standing up 
for my science. Regardless, the experience taught me valuable lessons 
that will inform my response--and that may be of help to other 
scientists, early career or otherwise--when similar episodes occur.

One lesson I learned is to anticipate how my science could potentially 
be distorted and to address these points explicitly in abstracts and in 
any public-facing components of my research. If I could go back and 
rewrite the abstract of my group's paper, I would include a sentence 
that points out why a feedback between surface temperatures and 
downwelling longwave radiation does not preclude the existence of the 
greenhouse effect.

Journal editors can act as a second line of defense, directing authors 
to acknowledge and preemptively refute points in their papers that could 
be misrepresented. Such refutations will undoubtedly seem obvious to 
trained scientists, but they are still important. By explicitly refuting 
potential distortions in our publications, we acknowledge the presence 
of a controversy and help to address it on our own platforms that lend 
professional credibility to our statements. The clearer we are in our 
publications, the more difficult it is for skeptics to muddy the water, 
and the more difficult it becomes for politicians and corporations to 
disingenuously question consensus climate science.

The unprecedented dissemination of information (and misinformation) made 
possible by the Internet demands that scientists and their institutions 
evolve to meet the public's growing appetite for credible science while 
also acknowledging political implications of their work. Still, these 
steps do not address the significant public dialogue about science that 
now takes place on social media. The unprecedented dissemination of 
information (and misinformation) made possible by the Internet demands 
that scientists and their institutions evolve to meet the public's 
growing appetite for credible science while also acknowledging political 
implications of their work.
Social media training offered by universities and membership 
organizations like AGU is important for preparing those who want to use 
social media to communicate science to the general public. Even though 
online ecosystems can feel alarmingly hostile to informed debate, we 
must all do our part to ensure that our work is as difficult as possible 
to misrepresent. By addressing head-on the fact that our public-facing 
communications about research will be scrutinized by those with 
political axes to grind against climate science, we can reduce the 
bandwidth across which skeptics can misrepresent science on Twitter and 
other platforms; ultimately, this practice will diminish their credibility.

The political dimensions of climate change guarantee that climate 
science will continue to be misrepresented by those with ideological 
agendas. Climate scientists have a responsibility to untangle fact from 
fiction and to communicate with society clearly about the dangers of 
climate change. If we do not actively take on that role, others will 
fill the vacuum that our silence creates...
https://eos.org/opinions/dont-at-me-what-happened-when-climate-skeptics-misused-my-work

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February  23, 2007 *
Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) declares himself "a conservative and a 
conservationist" in a Washington Post article:

    "For the past 20 years, I have seen the ever-so-gradual effects of
    rising sea levels at our farm on the South Carolina coast. I've had
    to watch once-thriving pine trees die in that fragile zone between
    uplands and salt marshes. I know the climate change debate isn't
    over, but I believe human activity is having a measurable effect on
    the environment."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201455.html

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