[TheClimate.Vote] January 9, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 9, 2020*/

[NYTimes news analysis]
*How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia's Bushfire Debate*
Critics see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative 
leaders and divert attention from climate change.
By Damien Cave - Jan. 8, 2020
WOMBEYAN CAVES, Australia -- Deep in the burning forests south of Sydney 
this week, volunteer firefighters were clearing a track through the 
woods, hoping to hold back a nearby blaze, when one of them shouted over 
the crunching of bulldozers.

"Don't take photos of any trees coming down," he said. "The greenies 
will get a hold of it, and it'll all be over."

The idea that "greenies" or environmentalists would oppose measures to 
prevent fires from ravaging homes and lives is simply false. But the 
comment reflects a narrative that's been promoted for months by 
conservative Australian media outlets, especially the influential 
newspapers and television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch.

And it's far from the only Murdoch-fueled claim making the rounds. His 
standard-bearing national newspaper, The Australian, has also repeatedly 
argued that this year's fires are no worse than those of the past -- not 
true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, 
with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 
years combined.
And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch's News Corp, the largest media company in 
Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An 
independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of 
arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian 
making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the 
newspaper's website.

It's all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the 
powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States 
and Britain -- shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and 
divert attention from climate change.

"It's really reckless and extremely harmful," said Joëlle Gergis, an 
award-winning climate scientist at the Australian National University. 
"It's insidious because it grows. Once you plant those seeds of doubt, 
it stops an important conversation from taking place."
News Corp denied playing such a role. "Our coverage has recognized 
Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to 
respond to it," the company said in an email. "The role of arsonists and 
policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, 
legitimate stories to report in the public interest."

Yet, for many critics, the Murdoch approach suddenly looks dangerous. 
They are increasingly connecting News Corp to the spread of 
misinformation and the government's lackluster response to the fires. 
They argue that the company and the coalition led by Prime Minister 
Scott Morrison are responsible -- together, as a team -- for the failure 
to protect a country that scientists say is more vulnerable to climate 
change than any other developed nation.

Editors and columnists for News Corp were among the loudest defenders of 
Mr. Morrison after he faced blowback for vacationing in Hawaii as the 
worst of the fire season kicked off in December.

In late December, the Oz, as the News Corp-owned paper is known here, 
heavily promoted an interview with the government's energy minister, 
Angus Taylor, warning that "top-down" pressure from the United Nations 
to address climate change would fail -- followed by an opinion piece 
from Mr. Taylor on New Year's Eve.

Other News Corp outlets followed a similar playbook. Melbourne's Herald 
Sun, for example, pushed news of the bushfires to Page 4 on New Year's 
Eve, even as they threatened to devastate towns nearby and push thick 
smoke into the city.

Days later, residents in a town nearly flattened by the fires heckled 
and snubbed Mr. Morrison during a visit to assess the damage. A new hire 
for Mr. Murdoch's Sky News channel, Chris Smith, branded them "ferals" 
-- slang for unkempt country hobos.

As is often the case at Murdoch outlets around the world, there have 
been exceptions to the company line -- an article about the Australian 
golfer Greg Norman's declaration that "there is climate change taking 
place"; an interview with an international expert who explained why this 
year's fires are unique.
But a search for "climate change" in the main Murdoch outlets mostly 
yields stories condemning protesters who demand more aggressive action 
from the government; editorials arguing against "radical climate change 
policy"; and opinion columns emphasizing the need for more backburning 
to control fires -- if only the left-wing greenies would allow it to happen.

The Australian Greens party has made clear that it supports such 
hazard-reduction burns, issuing a statement online saying so.

Climate scientists do acknowledge that there is room for improvement 
when it comes to burning the branches and dead trees on the ground that 
can fuel fires. But they also say that no amount of preventive burning 
will offset the impact of rising temperatures that accelerate 
evaporation, dry out land and make already-arid Australia a tinderbox.

Even fire officials report that most of the off-season burns they want 
to do are hindered not by land-use laws but by weather -- including the 
lengthier fire season and more extreme precipitation in winter that 
scientists attribute to climate change.

Still, the Murdoch outlets continue to resist. "On a dry continent prone 
to deadly bushfires for centuries, fuel reduction through controlled 
burning is vital," said an editorial published Thursday in The 
Australian. It went on to add: "Changes to climate change policy, 
however, would have no immediate impact on bushfires" -- a stance that 
fits hand in glove with government officials' frequent dismissals of the 
"bogey man of climate change."
It's that echoing between officialdom and Murdoch media that has many 
people so concerned.

"Leaders should be held to account and they should be held to account by 
the media," said Penny D. Sackett, a physicist, astronomer and former 
chief scientist for Australia.
Timothy Graham, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who 
conducted the study of Twitter accounts exaggerating the role of arson 
in Australia's fires, said media companies also needed to be cognizant 
of the disinformation ecosystem and stop contributing to the problem. 
That includes mainstream outlets, like ABC News, sharing inaccurate maps 
that exaggerate the reach of the fires.

But in the case of the arson issue, he said, scores of bots and trolls 
-- many of which previously posted support for President Trump -- have 
joined conservative media like the Murdoch outlets in promoting the idea 
that Australia's fires are not a "climate emergency" but an "arson 
emergency."

"Maybe 3 to 5 percent of fires could be attributed to arson, that's what 
scientists tell us -- nevertheless, media outlets, especially those that 
tend to be partisan, jump on that," Dr. Graham said.
Of course, it is often hard to know just how much influence any media 
company has. Gerard Henderson, a columnist for The Australian, said he 
didn't think there was much need to address climate change because it 
was already a focal point across the rest of the media.

"It's hard to distract from climate change because it's spoken about 
constantly," he said.

But there are signs that the Murdoch message is making headway -- at 
least in terms of what people make a priority. Many firefighters working 
the smoky hills south of Sydney hesitated to state their views on 
climate change this week (some said senior leaders had told them to 
avoid the issue). But they were quick to argue for more backburning.

Similarly, in Bairnsdale, Tina Moon, whose farm was devastated by the 
fires, said she was mostly furious about the government's failure to 
clear the land around her property.
"I don't think it's climate change," she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires-murdoch-disinformation.html



[Vox makes a video argument]
*Google and Amazon are now in the oil business*
Jan 3, 2020
Vox
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are teaming up with Big Oil to squeeze 
more oil and gas out of the ground using machine learning technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144

[brilliant comment on the issue by Richard Pauli:
Not very smart of the computer industries.  Continued carbon
combustion will shorten the lifespan of most all living creatures on
Earth.  And if this lesson is not learned, it will be repeated. Or
maybe the cybernetics industries are in the business of deception,
and self-deception. Eventually of course we will ask AI for help in
facing the future -- asking how can we optimize our industrial and
economic world to permit human multigenerational survival - and it
appears we will not like their solutions - but then AI will fulfill
the ultimate need of blaming a scapegoat for the ruthless survival
budgeting required of a lifeboat world. We would be wise to deploy
AI on that task right away. Today, they might get it solved by 3 PM
this afternoon.]



[OK, get up, Boomers- wield power]
*Boomers: You can still be heroes in the story of climate change*
You have the political power to solve the climate crisis. Use it.
By Laura McGann - Jan 8, 2020

Boomers: It's not too late. You can be heroes in the story of climate 
change.

You might not like to hear it, as many of you have long told pollsters 
you consider yourselves environmentalists, but collectively you have 
exacerbated the climate crisis more than any other generation.

Fossil fuels were cheap as you came of age and you burned too much of 
them. Your lifetime carbon footprint is so high you're forcing kids born 
today to emit eight times less than you just to hit a modest goal. And 
you've never taken climate change as seriously as the generations behind 
you.

Your generation put yourselves before the rest of us. As economics 
reporter Jim Tankersley has written time and again, "At nearly every 
point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those 
tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations." So instead of 
investing in cleaner energy sources or preparing for a less-stable 
environmental future during good economic times, you passed on problems.

The future generations are coming of age themselves. Your grandchildren 
are leading a movement calling for big change. Time's Person of the Year 
in 2019 was Greta Thunberg, a teenage climate activist who has become a 
voice of moral clarity for Gen Z and millennials. Her rallying cry has 
been heard around the world, inspiring millions (of all ages) to protest 
and demand that leaders prioritize the planet.

But for all the successes millennials and Gen Zers have had in making 
their cause a cultural phenomenon, they do not have enough of what they 
really need and what you do: political power...
- - -
We need you now
The climate emergency is getting worse and it's happening faster than 
scientists feared. Land and oceans are getting hotter. Seas are rising 
faster. And we're seeing a trend in more ferocious storms and wildfires, 
and devastating droughts and floods.

As the New York Times puts it:

But how fast temperatures will continue to increase, and how much
worse things may get, depends in large part on whether the world
reins in greenhouse gas emissions, and by how much. After flattening
between 2014 and 2016, annual emissions from burning fossil fuels
for energy have risen again.

The problem isn't that we don't know what to do. The solutions are 
clear: We need to burn fewer fossil fuels, restore forests instead of 
destroying them, eat less meat, and consume less overall.

The problem isn't that we don't have people who are calling for change. 
The problem is political will, which requires political power. Your 
generation has it.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/8/21055097/baby-boomers-climate-change-australia



[A little science]
JANUARY 6, 2020
*Global warming found to give rise to earlier springs contributing to 
drier summers**
*by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A diagram showing how earlier spring greening modulates summer soil 
moisture. Credit: Xu Lian
An international team of researchers has found evidence that suggests 
global warming is giving rise to earlier springs in some parts of the 
world, which contributes to drier summers--at least in the northern 
hemisphere. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, 
the group describes their study of satellite data over a 30-year period 
and what they learned from it.

As humans emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the 
atmosphere, the planet responds by heating up. No one knows for sure 
what overall impact a warming planet will have on our species, but many 
studies have suggested it could be catastrophic. Because of that, 
scientists continue to look for ways to reduce carbon emissions even as 
they try to better understand what a warming planet will look like. In 
this new effort, the researchers looked at the possible impacts of an 
earlier spring.

Prior studies have shown that as the planet heats up, many areas 
experience longer warm seasons, which means an earlier spring, a longer 
summer and a later fall--and a shorter winter. In this new study, the 
researchers wondered what impact an earlier spring might have on weather 
conditions. To find out, they used satellite data for the northern 
hemisphere for the years 1982 to 2011 to build climate models.

[graphics] https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2020/5e13313fd2fc0.jpg

The researchers report that they found that earlier greening led to 
water earlier water depletion from the soil by plants, which led to 
drier soil as summer came on. Noting that most of the water that is 
pulled by plants makes its way into the air through pores in leaves, the 
researchers wondered if that might contribute to more rainfall. The 
researchers found that it did contribute to more rainfall, but not 
enough to offset the amount of water pulled from the soil by plants. 
They suggest that in addition to making conditions more difficult for 
plants, the drier soil could also lead to higher temperatures in the 
drier areas due to less evaporative cooling in the summer. They report 
also that they found drying is worse in Europe, east and west Asia and 
some parts of North America. One area that seemed to benefit from drying 
was Siberia, which grew wetter in models because of moisture-laden air 
arriving from Europe. The researchers plan to carry out a similar study 
for the southern hemisphere.
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-global-earlier-contributing-drier-summers.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - January 9, 2007 *
In an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," notorious GOP operative Frank 
Luntz--who years prior wrote a memo urging Republicans to keep raising 
questions about climate science as opposed to actually doing anything to 
reduce carbon pollution--shamelessly defends his tactics.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6761960

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