[TheClimate.Vote] July 2, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 2, 2020*/

[CBS News video]
*House Democrats release plan to fight climate change*
House Democrats have released a 500-page report with recommendations for 
government action to help fight climate change. Congresswoman Kathy 
Castor of Florida is the chair of the House Select Committee on the 
Climate Crisis, and she joined CBSN to discuss the recommendations.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/house-democrats-release-plan-to-fight-climate-change/


[changes are predictable]
*Why 2020 to 2050 Will Be 'the Most Transformative Decades in Human 
History'*
Climate change will force more people to leave their homes than at any 
other point in human history. Conflict is inevitable.
Eric Holthaus
Jun 24 · 2020
 From the book 'The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible 
in the Age of Warming' by Eric Holthaus. Copyright 2020 by Eric Holthaus.

The 30 years from 2020 to 2050 will be among the most transformative 
decades in all of human history. Collapsing ice sheets, the aerosol 
crisis, and rising sea levels will force more people to leave their 
homes than at any other point in human history. In some places, that 
means conflict is inevitable.

A study from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley 
found that higher temperatures and shifting patterns of extreme weather 
can cause a rise in all types of violence, from domestic abuse to civil 
wars. In extreme cases, it could cause countries to cease functioning 
and collapse altogether.

This ominous reality of climate change is far from fated, however. A 
rapidly changing environment just makes conflict more likely, not 
inevitable. People, ultimately, are still in control. Our choices 
determine whether or not these conflicts will happen. In a world where 
we've rapidly decided to embark on constructing an ecological society, 
we'll have developed countless tools of conflict avoidance as part of 
our climate change adaptation strategies.

Still, there will be those who choose to live outside the mainstream 
society who may pose an existential threat to the rest of us. Some 
groups and a few rogue countries will try to prevent the rest of the 
world's transition toward ecological and social justice. They will do 
this either because of the lingering influence from the dwindling fossil 
fuel industry, or because of a fascist ideological response to climate 
change that puts human rights at risk, or out of desperation.

Mary Annaise Heglar, a climate essayist and advocate for intersectional 
approaches to racial and environmental justice, is inspired particularly 
by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower for an example of how things 
could go very badly. In the book, Butler describes fire-obsessed cults 
that spring up in a post-rapid climate change world, craving some sense 
amid the destruction and chaos they see all around them. Heglar thinks 
that could be just the beginning. "The future I see is really ugly 
unless something very, very drastic changes," Heglar told me. "It's a 
world where people find many, many different ways, very creative ways, 
to be cruel to one another. Unpredictability brings out people's cruelty 
if you're not careful. And most people are not careful."

Heglar specifically thinks of the racial massacre in East Saint Louis, 
Illinois, in 1917 as an example of the kind of violence that might 
emerge if the world is not careful. Angry white mobs murdered dozens of 
Black people after they were hired in place of striking workers at 
factories during World War I. If lifesaving technology is not 
distributed fairly, or if governments lean too heavily on austerity 
along racial lines, or if climate disasters fragment already vulnerable 
populations, the result could be truly ugly.

"So many things that we think are impossible today could be completely 
normal in 20 years," Heglar told me. "I hear people saying now that 
'when it gets really bad, I'll just move to New Zealand or I'll move to 
Sweden, where climate change impact is not going to be that drastic.' 
But it's not going to be cute there. First of all, it's going to be 
mostly the 1% living there. So if you think your regular ass is gonna be 
able to buy land in New Zealand, good luck."

An escapist attitude is probably the most dangerous reaction to climate 
change today. It drives to the heart of how the problem of climate 
change came into being in the first place: By imagining ourselves as 
individuals who somehow exist outside the context of an interconnected, 
living ecosystem on a planet where all of our actions deeply affect one 
another, we fail to see each other's humanity and right to simply exist. 
It's the same attitude that drives the richest men in the world today to 
create their own private space agencies. Those who are already being 
affected by the climate emergency can't and won't simply be left to fend 
for themselves while the privileged few plot their escape plans -- to 
higher ground in their neighborhood, to inland mountain refuges, to Mars.

Until we build a world that works for everyone, we'll continue to have 
people whose survival is systematically erased by those in power. That's 
the dystopia for the rich and powerful: a world where the rest of us 
finally realize the power we had all along to fight for a 
justice-focused society.

It will take active, conscious effort to defuse the tensions sure to 
arise in a warming world. Overcoming a coordinated effort by the fossil 
fuel industry to save itself is not going to be easy, but we know it's 
coming. That effort has been going on since the fossil fuel industry 
began, and it won't just go away in the 2040s, even amid two decades of 
radical and hopeful changes. As always, our best hope will remain that 
we can prepare along the way to increase the chances of a peaceful 
transition to a fossil-free world.

We know that the weather in the 2040s will be worse than it is today. A 
major, sudden change, like a collapsing ice sheet or a quick rise in 
global temperatures after eliminating aerosols, would make the weather 
even more destructive than current predictions, even if we are able to 
radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What we can control, of 
course, is how we decide to respond to the worsening weather.

Since my conversation years ago with Rear Admiral David Titley, I've 
repeated his idea of "catastrophic success" over and over to myself when 
I think things can't get any worse, and I've let it shape my view of how 
the world could quickly change beyond our wildest imaginations -- for 
the better. Titley sees the warming world both as a scientist (he's a 
meteorologist by training) and as a former military officer. He 
understands that the potential for a massive increase in refugees is a 
heartbreaking and almost inevitable looming humanitarian crisis due to 
the science of the escalating severity of droughts, floods, and severe 
weather we've already seen in recent decades and the historical tendency 
for leaders to close borders during times of crisis. A worsening of this 
trend could make the world practically ungovernable in our lifetimes.

The U.S. military has been among the first large-scale entities to 
recognize this. That kind of makes sense if you consider its mission of 
ensuring U.S. safety and prosperity continues for as long as possible: 
Without planetary stability, there is no U.S. stability. That's part of 
why U.S. military strategists at the Pentagon have begun calling climate 
change a "threat multiplier."

When Titley talks about migration, though, even he struggles to put the 
stakes in context. In the 2040s, if global sea levels rise by three feet 
and droughts, fires, heat waves, and floods continue to worsen, we could 
see around 250 million people forced from their homes. That's about four 
times as many people as are currently displaced and about 50 times as 
many as were displaced during the Syrian civil war. In short, it would 
challenge our understanding of nationality, borders, and politics as usual.

"Post-World War II," Titley told me, "tens of millions of people within 
Europe were on forced migration in the 1940s. We kind of gloss over that 
part of history. I mean, Europe was really bad after World War II. It's 
part of what got the Marshall Plan. I think it really kind of scared us 
that, hey, this whole place is just collapsing, basically, and something 
had to be done."

An uncontrolled, unanticipated climate-related migration crisis could be 
even worse than the refugee crisis after World War II, which, despite 
its horrors, displaced less than 1% of the world's population. Climate 
change could displace three times that amount just in the next two or 
three decades. Although displacement due to extreme weather is already 
becoming increasingly common, the proximate cause of displacement and 
migration is usually fleeing violent conflict. How do we anticipate a 
world that could quickly fracture and urgently work to reduce the risk 
of violent conflict before it occurs?

A crisis like this will require proactive harm reduction on a 
civilizational scale. We will need to establish policies that encourage, 
rather than restrict, freedom of movement. And we must establish robust 
social safety nets so that families are less likely to abandon their 
homes in search of a place where they can simply live. Also, even before 
we reach zero emissions globally, we will have to recognize the need to 
take aggressive actions to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the 
atmosphere. All of this will remain just as urgent in the 2040s as in 2020.

"I'm probably wrong," Titley said, "but I'm actually more optimistic 
that we are going to do real things now than I have been for a long, 
long time. I think there's actual legitimate cause for optimism."

Specifically, Titley pointed to the steady shift away from outright 
denial among rank-and-file members of the Republican Party as evidence 
that attitudes can shift toward action, no matter how meager. And once 
that facade of climate denial breaks, an avalanche of action could soon 
follow. "We may be much closer to catastrophic success right now. Things 
can change, and not always for the worse. They can change for the 
better. It can happen very, very quickly."
https://onezero.medium.com/why-2020-to-2050-will-be-the-most-transformative-decades-in-human-history-ba282dcd83c7



[Heating to come]
*Global heating will make it much harder for tropical plants to 
germinate, study finds*
Temperatures will be too hot for the seeds of one in five plants by the 
year 2070, Australian researcher says.
Global heating will make it much harder for tropical plants around the 
world to germinate, with temperatures becoming too hot for the seeds of 
one in five plants by the year 2070, according to a new study.

Global heating will impact the ability of more than half of all tropical 
plants to germinate if emissions of greenhouse gases remain high...
- -
The seed bank database includes a range of germination experiments and 
Sentinella and colleagues examined only species where results covered 
the same species from the same locations.

Then the study looked at the warmest three months of each year from 1970 
to 2000 where those plants existed, and compared those temperatures to 
what was expected by 2070 under a scenario where greenhouse gas 
emissions remain very high.

By 2070, the results showed more than half the tropical plants had been 
pushed beyond the best temperature range for germination. For about 20% 
of species, the study suggested temperatures would be too high for the 
plants to germinate...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/02/global-heating-will-make-it-much-harder-for-tropical-plants-to-germinate-study-finds



[clips from the NewYorker article]
*What Facebook and the Oil Industry Have in Common*
By Bill McKibben - July 1, 2020
Why is it so hard to get Facebook to do anything about the hate and 
deception that fill its pages, even when it's clear that they are 
helping to destroy democracy? And why, of all things, did the company 
recently decide to exempt a climate-denial post from its fact-checking 
process? The answer is clear: Facebook's core business is to get as many 
people as possible to spend as many hours as possible on its site, so 
that it can sell those people's attention to advertisers. (A Facebook 
spokesperson said the company's policy stipulates that "clear opinion 
content is not subject to fact-checking on Facebook.") This notion of 
core business explains a lot--including why it's so hard to make rapid 
gains in the fight against climate change.

For decades, people have asked me why the oil companies don't just 
become solar companies. They don't for the same reason that Facebook 
doesn't behave decently: an oil company's core business is digging stuff 
up and burning it, just as Facebook's is to keep people glued to their 
screens. Digging and burning is all that oil companies know how to 
do--and why the industry has spent the past thirty years building a 
disinformation machine to stall action on climate change. It's why--with 
the evidence of climate destruction growing by the day--the best that 
any of them can offer are vague pronouncements about getting to "net 
zero by 2050"--which is another way of saying, "We're not going to 
change much of anything anytime soon." (The American giants, like 
ExxonMobil, won't even do that.)

Total, the French oil company, has made the 2050 pledge, but it is 
projected to increase fossil-fuel production by twelve percent between 
2018 and 2030. These are precisely the years when we must cut emissions 
in half, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to 
have any chance of meeting the vital targets set by the Paris climate 
agreement, which aim to hold the planet's temperature increase as close 
as possible to one and a half degrees Celsius. The next six months will 
be crucial as nations prepare coronavirus recovery plans. Because 
effective climate planning at this moment will require keeping most oil, 
coal, and gas reserves in the ground, the industry will resist fiercely.

So we need power brought to bear from companies whose core business is 
not directly challenged by climate activism. Consider the example of 
Facebook again: after organizing by people like Judd Legum and 
StopHateForProfit.org, companies including Unilever and Coca-Cola agreed 
to temporarily stop advertising on the social platform. Coke's core 
business is selling you fizzy sugar water that can help make you 
diabetic--when that's threatened, the company fights back. But when it 
feared being attacked for helping Facebook's core business, it simply 
stopped advertising with the company, which wasn't essential for Coke's 
business.

That's why it is critical to get third parties to pressure the oil 
industry. This past month, the growing fossil-fuel divestment campaign 
got a huge boost when the Vatican, whose core business is saving souls, 
called for divestment, and the Queen of England, whose core business is 
unclear but involves hats, divested millions from the industry. Keith 
Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, announced that he was suing 
ExxonMobil, as well as the American Petroleum Institute and Koch 
Industries, for perpetrating a fraud by spreading climate denial for 
decades. (Ellison's core business is justice, and his office is pursuing 
this climate action at the same time that it is prosecuting the killers 
of George Floyd.) All this, in turn, puts pressure on the financial 
industry to stop handing over cash to oil companies. As I pointed out in 
a piece last summer, JPMorgan Chase may be the biggest fossil-fuel 
lender on earth, but that's still only about seven per cent of its 
business--big, but not core.

Effective progress on climate will require government and the finance 
industry to enforce the edicts of chemistry and physics: massive action 
undertaken inside a decade, not gradual, gentle course correction. And 
that will require the rest of us to press those institutions. Because 
our core business is survival...
more at - 
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/what-facebook-and-the-oil-industry-have-in-common


[beavers say 'gnaw']
*The Newest Threat to a Warming Alaskan Arctic: Beavers*
The large rodents are creating lakes that accelerate the thawing of 
frozen soils and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions, a study 
finds.
BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS - JUN 29, 2020
Alaskan beavers are carving out a growing web of channels, dams and 
ponds in the frozen Arctic tundra of northwestern Alaska, helping to 
turn it into a soggy sponge that intensifies global warming.

On the Baldwin Peninsula, near Kotzebue, for example, the big rodents 
have been so busy that they're hastening the regional thawing of the 
permafrost, raising new concerns about how fast those organic frozen 
soils will melt and release long-trapped greenhouse gases into the 
atmosphere, said scientists who are studying the beavers' activity.

The number of new beaver dams and lakes continues to grow exponentially, 
suggesting that "beavers are a greater influence than climate on surface 
water extent,"
- -
The bigger and deeper the pools made by the beavers, the warmer the 
water. The larger pools hold heat longer, which delays refreezing in 
autumn. Tape said Arctic vegetation, permafrost, hydrology and wildlife 
are all linked. Even against the backdrop of other recent Arctic global 
warming extremes, like raging wildfires, record heat waves and dwindling 
glaciers and sea ice, the impact of beavers stands out, he said.

"It's not gradual change," he said. "It's like hitting the landscape 
with a hammer."

"And it's a continual change that the Arctic is just not used to," he added.
- -
Another way to see them is as "agents of Arctic adaptation," said Ben 
Goldfarb, author of a recent natural history book that shows how beavers 
could help many other species, including humans, survive the era of 
rapid, human-caused climate change.

"Beavers create fantastic habitat for all kinds of species, like 
songbirds and moose," Goldfarb said. "All of those species are moving 
northward because of climate change, and beavers are preparing the way." 
As a habitat-creating keystone species, beavers are also important food 
for wolves, and recent research shows that beaver ponds are good at 
keeping carbon locked up, he added.

Beavers may even hold the key to survival for some salmon species that 
are losing their streams to global warming and other changes farther south.

"We're losing salmon in other places. If they're going to shift their 
climate envelope, they're probably going to need beavers to help them," 
Goldfarb said.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29062020/beavers-alaska-climate-change-permafrost


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - July 2, 2006 *
Notorious climate denier Dick Lindzen whines, moans, kvetches and 
complains about "An Inconvenient Truth" in a piece for the Wall Street 
Journal's OpinionJournal.com.

    *Don't Believe the Hype*
    Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.
    BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
    Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
    According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in
    for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in
    sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical
    disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

    Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel,
    proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore
    were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the
    consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why
    not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific
    community is over."

    That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George
    Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk.
    What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there
    really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and
    then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over,
    it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the
    first place...
    - -
    So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would
    suggest at least three points.
    First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with
    understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types,
    environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such
    claims also serve to intimidate the public and even
    scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics.
    Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely
    cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster
    constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an
    inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political
    issue but a "moral" crusade.

    Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by
    scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt
    at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This
    time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
    Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science
    at MIT.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060705111127/http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597 

- -
We may learn more about Lindzen at DeSmogBlog 
https://www.desmogblog.com/richard-lindzen

Including Fossil Fuel Funding
As part of a March 2018 legal case between the cities of San Francisco 
and Oakland and fossil fuel companies, Lindzen was asked by the judge to 
disclose any connections he had to connected parties.]

In response, Lindzen reported that he had received $25,000 per year for 
his position at the Cato Institute since 2013. He also disclosed $1,500 
from the Texas Public Policy Foundation for a "climate science lecture" 
in 2017, and approximately $30,000 from Peabody Coal in connection to 
testimony Lindzen gave at a proceeding of the Minnesota Public Utilities 
Commissions in September 2015....


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