[TheClimate.Vote] July 13, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Mon Jul 13 10:39:17 EDT 2020

/*July 13, 2020*/

[Forbes - new book review]
*Fighting Climate Change Requires A New Capitalism*
Her experiences and the research that came out of them culminate in her 
new book, *Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire*, a deeply personal 
exploration of capitalism's role in addressing climate change...
- -
I hope the book will give them a sense of why what they're doing is so 
important, how every individual effort inside every firm has the 
potential to add up to systemic change, and an understanding of the 
pathways through which business can help to play a major role in solving 
our problems.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2020/07/13/fighting-climate-change-requires-a-new-capitalism/#4013ecda27fc 

- -

[Book Genre: Nonfiction / Business & Economics / Economics / Theory]
*Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire*
by Rebecca Henderson
A renowned Harvard professor debunks prevailing orthodoxy with a new 
intellectual foundation and a practical pathway forward for a system 
that has lost its moral and ethical foundation in this "powerful" book 
(Daron Acemoglu).

Free market capitalism is one of humanity's greatest inventions and the 
greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success 
has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and 
destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top. The time for action 
is running short.

Rebecca Henderson's rigorous research in economics, psychology, and 
organizational behavior, as well as her many years of work with 
companies around the world, gives us a path forward. She debunks the 
worldview that the only purpose of business is to make money and 
maximize shareholder value. She shows that we have failed to reimagine 
capitalism so that it is not only an engine of prosperity but also a 
system that is in harmony with environmental realities, striving for 
social justice and the demands of truly democratic institutions.

Henderson's deep understanding of how change takes place, combined with 
fascinating in-depth stories of companies that have made the first steps 
towards reimagining capitalism, provides inspiring insight into what 
capitalism can be. With rich discussions of how the worlds of finance, 
governance, and leadership must also evolve, Henderson provides the 
pragmatic foundation for navigating a world faced with unprecedented 
challenge, but also with extraordinary opportunity for those who can get 
it right.
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/rebecca-henderson/reimagining-capitalism-in-a-world-on-fire/9781541730137/

[video graphics explaining major ice melt]
*Why scientists are so worried about this glacier*
Jul 13, 2020
Vox
It's at the heart of Antarctica and on the verge of collapse.
- -
Man-made climate change is warming the planet's atmosphere and oceans, 
and the effects are being felt the most at the poles. In Antarctica, 
home to the largest chunk of ice on earth, ice shelves and glaciers are 
beginning to collapse, and one in particular could spell disaster. The 
Thwaites Glacier, in West Antarctica, has retreated more than 14 
kilometers in the last two decades as warm ocean water undermines it. 
The glacier is situated on a downward slope that falls deep into the 
center of Antarctica. It's why scientists are racing to find out how 
close it is to total collapse - and what that would mean for future sea 
levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRUxTFWWWdY

[more Beckwith on lightning]
*Lightning Types: Intracloud, Intercloud, and Cloud to Ground, and the 
Extremely Powerful Superbolts*
Jul 12, 2020
Paul Beckwith
In large storms powerful updrafts generate friction between graupel, and 
ice crystals causing charge separation (negative charge accumulates near 
cloud base, positive charge near cloud top). With large enough voltage 
separation, lightning occurs either intracloud (within one cloud),  
intercloud (cloud to cloud), or cloud to ground. Cloud to ground 
comprises about 20% of the total. Occasionally "superbolts" can occur 
with much higher energies, fortunately these occur mostly over oceans 
and over the Andes but they can occur anywhere. Lighting science is 
fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guNYjE_alCY

[dendrochronology]
JULY 7, 2020
*Tree rings show unprecedented rise in extreme weather in South America*
by Earth Institute at Columbia University
Scientists have filled a gaping hole in the world's climate records by 
reconstructing 600 years of soil-moisture swings across southern and 
central South America. Along with documenting the mechanisms behind 
natural changes, the new South American Drought Atlas reveals that 
unprecedented widespread, intense droughts and unusually wet periods 
have been on the rise since the mid-20th century. It suggests that the 
increased volatility could be due in part to global warming, along with 
earlier pollution of the atmosphere by ozone-depleting chemicals. The 
atlas was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences.

Recent droughts have battered agriculture in wide areas of the 
continent, trends the study calls "alarming." Lead author Mariano 
Morales of the Argentine Institute of Snow, Glacier and Environmental 
Sciences at the National Research Council for Science and Technology, 
said, "Increasingly extreme hydroclimate events are consistent with the 
effects of human activities, but the atlas alone does not provide 
evidence of how much of the observed changes are due to natural climate 
variability versus human-induced warming." The new long-term record 
"highlights the acute vulnerability of South America to extreme climate 
events," he said.

Coauthor Edward Cook, head of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University's 
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said, "We don't want to jump off the 
cliff and say this is all climate change. There is a lot of natural 
variability that could mimic human-induced climate change." However, he 
said, armed with the new 600-year record, scientists are better equipped 
to sort things out.

The South American Drought Atlas is the latest in a series of drought 
atlases assembled by Cook and colleagues, covering many centuries of 
year-by-year climate conditions in North America; Asia; Europe and the 
Mediterranean; and New Zealand and eastern Australia. Subsequent studies 
building on the atlases have yielded new insights into how droughts may 
have adversely affected past civilizations, and the increasingly 
apparent role of human-induced warming on modern climate. Most recently, 
followup analyses of North America have suggested that warming is 
driving what may be the worst-ever known drought in the U.S. West...
- -
The new atlas covers Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, most of 
Bolivia, and southern Brazil and Peru. It is the result of years of 
field collections of thousands of tree-ring records, and subsequent 
analyses by South American researchers, along with colleagues in Europe, 
Canada, Russia and the United States. Ring widths generally reflect 
yearly changes in soil moisture, and the researchers showed that 
collected rings correlate well with droughts and floods recorded 
starting in the early Spanish colonial period, as well as with modern 
instrumental measurements. This gave them confidence to extend the 
soil-moisture reconstruction back before written records.
- -
The atlas indicates that there has been a steady increase in the 
frequency of widespread droughts since 1930, with the highest return 
times, about 10 years, occurring since the 1960s. Severe water shortages 
have affected central Chile and western Argentina from 1968-1969, 
1976-1977, and 1996-1997. Currently, the drylands of central Chile and 
western Argentina are locked in one of the most severe decade-long 
droughts in the record. In some areas, up to two-thirds of some cereal 
and vegetable crops have been lost in some years. This threatens "the 
potential collapse of food systems," says Morales.

At the same time, southeastern parts of the continent are seeing heavier 
than normal rains. Walter Baethgen, who leads Latin American 
agricultural research for Columbia University's International Research 
Institute for Climate and Society, says his own studies show that the La 
Plata basin of Uruguay has seen more frequent extremely wet summers 
since 1970, with corresponding increases in crop and livestock 
production. But the frequency of very dry summers has remained the same, 
which translates to bigger losses of expected yields when they do come 
along, he said.

"Everything is consistent with the idea that you'll be intensifying both 
wet and dry events with global warming," said Jason Smerdon, a climate 
scientist at Lamont-Doherty and a coauthor of the study.

Using newly developed tree-ring records from Peru, Brazil, Bolivia and 
Colombia, the group is now working to expand the atlas to cover the 
entire continent, and extend the climate reconstruction back 1,000 years 
or more, said Morales.

The authors wish to dedicate the study to the memory of the late María 
del Rosario Prieto, their coauthor, and active promoter of environmental 
history studies in South America.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-tree-unprecedented-extreme-weather-south.html

[Bookmark and check this regularly for scholarly reports]
*Skeptical Science New Research for Week #27, 2020*
Posted on 8 July 2020 by doug_bostrom
79 Articles
https://skepticalscience.com/new_research_27_2020.html

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - July 13, 2003 *

Former EPA Climate Policy Adviser Jeremy Symons recounts the George W. 
Bush Administration's assault on climate science in a Washington Post 
op-ed.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Symons.pdf?language=printer

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