[TheClimate.Vote] July 24, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Jul 24 07:02:32 EDT 2020
/*July 24, 2020*/
[follow the money - revolutionary notion]
*Morgan Stanley is spilling the climate tea
*It's Thursday, July 23, and Morgan Stanley is disclosing how its
business affects climate change.
Morgan Stanley has joined the Partnership for Carbon Accounting
Financials (PCAF), an international collaboration founded in 2019 that
aims to "standardize carbon accounting for the financial sector" by
tracking how banks' and investment firms' assets are contributing to
climate change.
Morgan Stanley is the first U.S.-based global bank to join the more than
60 PCAF members. Together, all PCAF members manage more than $6 trillion
in assets. The group already includes international firms based in
Europe, Africa, and Latin America, as well as smaller banks in the U.S.
and around the world.
https://grist.org/beacon/morgan-stanley-is-spilling-the-climate-tea/
[Greta and Stephen Colbert]
*Greta Thunberg: Humanity Is "Setting Fire To The Boat" Instead Of
Facing The Climate Crisis*
Jul 22, 2020
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg describes the world's current
response to the climate change crisis as being stuck in the middle of
the ocean and "setting fire to the boat."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brtog4AABBg
[42 minute report just released ]
*Apocalypse in the Amazon rainforest | DW Documentary*
Jul 23, 2020
DW Documentary
A raging fire devastated Brazil's Amazon rainforest in the summer of
2019. Images of the blaze frightened experts and politicians around the
globe. Protecting the unique ecosystem is essential for climate
conservation.
The sight of forests in the Amazon burning in 2019 struck fear into
anyone who saw it. Suddenly, the threat to the climate was tangible. The
trees some call the "world's lungs" were going up in flames. Suddenly,
politicians, journalists, and the general population agreed that
something had to be done. Because without the Amazon, the world has a
big existential problem. In terms of species diversity, the Amazon river
and surrounding forest are one of the earth's richest regions. It's also
home to many indigenous peoples, whose homes are seriously threatened by
degradation of the forest. This documentary depicts the current
humanitarian and environmental disaster and goes in search of reasons
why this unique ecosystem is being destroyed. Satellite images from
Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, the INPE, form the
framework for the film. A renowned scientist and former head of the
institute, Ricardo Galvão, was fired by Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro, who said the images damaged Brazil's reputation and were
flawed anyway. Yet the data from 2019 shows a drastic rise in illegal
clear cutting. Filmmaker Albert Knechtel went to the region to take
stock. He traveled across Brazil, from the Bolivian border to Xingu,
traversing the crisis-stricken area and meeting local experts, critics,
and residents who describe the situation. Together they sharpen
understanding of the region, which is at a crossroads. The next
direction the Amazon takes will influence the fate of the entire world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEb7F3DcE_k
[NYT magazine]
*THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION*
By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut
- -
Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to
the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global
North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new
people into an aging work force could be to everyone's benefit. But
securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can
relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more
migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves
off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are
increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and
the careful management of turbulent political forces; without
preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove
wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the
worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate
change could topple as whole regions devolve into war...
- -
As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete
numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible
futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many
climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false
precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any
discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more
potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering
human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors...
- -
For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend
is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon
farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded.
It's in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure,
resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn
that the most severe strains on society will unfold. Food has to be
imported -- stretching reliance on already-struggling farms and
increasing its cost. People will congregate in slums, with little water
or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other
disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos.
It is a shift that is already well underway, which is why the World Bank
has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East
African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has
doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035. In
Mexico, the World Bank estimates, as many as 1.7 million people may
migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding
up in Mexico City...
- -
Our models show that much of the growth will be concentrated in the
city's slumlike suburbs, places like San Marcos, where people live in
thousands of ramshackle structures, many without electricity or fresh
water. In these places, even before the pandemic and its fallout, good
jobs were difficult to find, poverty was deepening and crime was
increasing. Domestic abuse has also been rising, and declining sanitary
conditions threaten more disease. As society weakens, the gangs -- whose
members outnumber the police in parts of El Salvador by an estimated
three to one -- extort and recruit. They have made San Salvador's murder
rate one of the highest in the world...
- -
Models can't say much about the cultural strain that might result from a
climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say
is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they
are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply.
At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will
most likely see its own climate exodus. One in six Mexicans now rely on
farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in
poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability
per capita could decrease by as much as 88 percent in places, and crop
yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does
indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most
likely come from Chiapas.
Yet a net increase in population at the same time -- which is what our
models assume -- suggests that even as one million or so climate
migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will
become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward
in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current
stresses far worse.
Percentage of future urban growth that, according to the International
Committee of the Red Cross, is likely to take place in some of the
world's most fragile cities, where risk of social unrest is high:
Already, by late last year, the Mexican government's ill-planned
policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising
resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively
sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with
nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets,
unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation...
- -
To some migrants, this place is Eden. But El Paso is also a place with
oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate
crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the
year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two
days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car
crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs -- already a third of some
residents' budgets -- will get pricier, and warming will drive down
economic output by 8 percent, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable
as the places farther south.
In 2014, El Paso created a new city government position -- chief
resilience officer -- aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into
its urban planning. Soon enough, the climate crisis in Guatemala -- not
just the one in El Paso -- became one of the city's top concerns. "I
apologize if I'm off topic," the resilience chief, Nicole Ferrini, told
municipal leaders and other attendees at a water conference in Phoenix
in 2019 as she raised the question of "massive amounts of climate
refugees, and are we prepared as a community, as a society, to deal with
that?"...
- -
And therein lies the basis for what may be the worst-case scenario: one
in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome
migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated,
closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat
counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping
more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life.
In that scenario, the global trend toward building walls could have a
profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death
toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But
in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the
conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will
bring...
-- -
If this happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves
in, as much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are
policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America's
demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a
productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest
in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth
alone doesn't overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and
exacerbating inequalities. At the same time, the United States and other
wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding
development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N.
World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in
El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and
improved farmers' incomes. It can't reverse climate change, but it can
buy time.
Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the
scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds,
in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive
study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet's
population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche
for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study's authors, told me
that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the
peer-review process and that he felt pushed to "understate" the
implications in order to get the research published. The result:
Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman
for the journal declined to comment because the review process is
confidential.)
If this happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves
in, as much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are
policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America's
demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a
productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest
in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth
alone doesn't overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and
exacerbating inequalities. At the same time, the United States and other
wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding
development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N.
World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in
El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and
improved farmers' incomes. It can't reverse climate change, but it can
buy time.
Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the
scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds,
in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive
study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet's
population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche
for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study's authors, told me
that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the
peer-review process and that he felt pushed to "understate" the
implications in order to get the research published. The result:
Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman
for the journal declined to comment because the review process is
confidential.)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html
[on propaganda - podcast connection, iTunes or Spotify]
Apple Podcasts Preview
*S3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial*
DRILLED
Social Sciences
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Big Oil gave Hitler propaganda tips decades ago and their PR machine has
only grown from there. This season we dig into the history of fossil
fuel propaganda and the few "Mad Men of climate denial" who shaped it.
Coming January 2020.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i=1000458727231
*S3, Ep 6: Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future--Edward
Bernays and W. Howard Chase *
DRILLED
Social Sciences
Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term "public
relations" when propaganda started to become a negative term. His
specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and
orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients' favor (clients like Standard
Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors). A few decades
later, W. Howard Chase built onto that foundation with the idea of
issues management--predicting an industry's potential issues, and
manipulating political, social, and cultural forces to neutralize them.
Chase is responsible for one of the best-known examples of greenwashing,
the so-called "crying Indian ad," which introduced the idea of "litter
bugs" and individual responsibility for pollution.
Support us: https://www.patreon.com/Drilled
Read more: www.drillednews.com
Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/s/to0gvv8bco37xm0/S3_Ep6.docx?dl=0
Subscribe to Heated: http://www.heated.world
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode about Edward Bernays is here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i=1000466602017
[looking forward, look back]
*E.P.A. Proposes Airplane Emission Standards That Airlines Already Meet*
Staving off a lawsuit, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed
new regulations to hold airlines to the carbon dioxide emissions
standards they created.
By Coral Davenport - July 22, 2020
WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration on Wednesday made public the
federal government's first proposal to control planet-warming pollution
from airplanes, but the draft regulation would not push the airlines
beyond emissions limits they have set for themselves.
President Trump is still pressing forward on his three-and-a-half-year
rollback of environmental standards, and the proposed airline rule would
stave off an impending lawsuit by putting the federal government in
compliance with a legal requirement that it regulate airplane greenhouse
emissions.
"This is the third time in the past two years that this administration
has taken major action to regulate greenhouse gases in a way that is
legally defensible, reduces CO2 and protects American jobs," Andrew
Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on a
telephone call with reporters Wednesday morning.
Mr. Wheeler said he was referring to a 2019 regulation on greenhouse
emissions from power plants and an April rule governing emissions from
vehicle tailpipes. Both of those rules replaced far more stringent
climate change standards developed by the Obama administration, and in
both cases the new rules allow for more planet-warming emissions than
their predecessors...
- -
In 2016, the Obama administration released a legal conclusion known as
an "endangerment finding," which determined that the planet-warming
pollution produced by airplanes endangers human health by contributing
to climate change. The endangerment finding did not include the details
of a regulation, but it set off a legal requirement under the Clean Air
Act for the E.P.A. to establish a rule.
In January, several environmental groups filed a legal notice of their
intent to sue the Trump administration for its failure to meet that
requirement, giving 180 days notice. That notice expires on July 28, but
with the release of the draft rule, the environmental groups no longer
have grounds to sue the administration to release a regulation on
aviation pollution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/climate/airplanes-climate-change.html
[bad news]
Capital Weather Gang
*Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios*
An analysis finds the most likely range of warming from doubling carbon
dioxide to be between 4.1 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit
By Andrew Freedman and Chris Mooney - July 22
The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely
to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a
comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers
studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science
-- how sensitive the Earth's climate is to a doubling of the amount of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- found that warming is extremely
unlikely to be on the low end of estimates.
These scientists now say it is likely that if human activities -- such
as burning oil, gas and coal along with deforestation -- push carbon
dioxide to such levels, the Earth's global average temperature will most
likely increase between 4.1 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 and 4.5
degrees Celsius). The previous and long-standing estimated range of
climate sensitivity, as first laid out in a 1979 report, was 2.7 to 8.1
degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius).
If the warming reaches the midpoint of this new range, it would be
extremely damaging, said Kate Marvel, a physicist at NASA's Goddard
Institute of Space Studies and Columbia University, who called it the
equivalent of a "five-alarm fire" for the planet...
- -
*Knowing the climate sensitivity range could enable better decision-making*
The term "climate sensitivity" might seem like an academic construct, a
metric that matters more in the grand theories and computer models of
scientists than it does in our everyday lives.
In fact, the study has a message that matters to us a great deal: There
is basically little or no chance that we are going to get lucky and find
that the warming caused by our activities turns out to be minor.
There are at least two main lines of evidence that lead to the
conclusion, based on the study. The first is simply the warming that has
already occurred since the industrial revolution.
Currently, with atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 415
parts per million (compared with a preindustrial level of 280 parts per
million), the world is about halfway toward doubling atmospheric carbon
dioxide (560 parts per million). And already, the Earth has warmed by at
least 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial
temperatures.
The new research finds that, in light of this, there is strong evidence
refuting the notion that a doubling of carbon dioxide would only cause
about 2.6 degrees (1.5 Celsius) of warming.
At the same time, researchers rejected the idea that there is any factor
in the climate system that will counteract the warming trend in a
meaningful way.
In the past, climate change contrarians and doubters have said that
clouds might be such a factor. For instance, if as the planet warms the
overall size, composition or surface area of clouds increases, they
could reflect more sunlight from Earth, which would cool the planet
some. But the study finds that isn't likely to happen.
"We find that a negative total cloud feedback is very unlikely," the
authors write, concluding that for this reason the climate sensitivity
cannot be very low.
"The uncertainty is really asymmetric here," Marvel said in an
interview. "We can be very confident in ruling out sensitivities on the
low end. So basically what we're saying here is that there is really no
evidence for any sort of natural response, any sort of big, stabilizing
feedback, that in the absence of human actions, is going to save us from
climate change."
But Gavin Schmidt, the study's co-author and Marvel's colleague at NASA
Goddard, offered some optimism, noting that collective action by nations
could prevent the doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"The primary determinant of future climate is human actions," Marvel said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/22/climate-sensitivity-co2/
- -
[Source material]
*An assessment of Earth's climate sensitivity using multiple lines of
evidence*
S. Sherwood M. J. Webb J. D. Annan K. C. Armour P. M. Forster J. C.
Hargreaves G. Hegerl S. A. Klein K. D. Marvel E. J. Rohling M.
Watanabe T. Andrews P. Braconnot …
First published: 22 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000678
...Please cite this article as doi: 10.1029/2019RG000678
*Abstract*
We assess evidence relevant to Earth's equilibrium climate
sensitivity per doubling of atmospheric CO2, characterized by an
effective sensitivity S . This evidence includes feedback process
understanding, the historical climate record, and the paleoclimate
record. An S value lower than 2 K is difficult to reconcile with any
of the three lines of evidence. The amount of cooling during the
Last Glacial Maximum provides strong evidence against values of S
greater than 4.5 K. Other lines of evidence in combination also show
that this is relatively unlikely. We use a Bayesian approach to
produce a probability density (PDF) for S given all the evidence,
including tests of robustness to difficult‐to‐quantify uncertainties
and different priors. The 66% range is 2.6‐3.9 K for our Baseline
calculation, and remains within 2.3‐4.5 K under the robustness
tests; corresponding 5‐95% ranges are 2.3‐4.7 K, bounded by 2.0‐5.7
K (although such high‐confidence ranges should be regarded more
cautiously). This indicates a stronger constraint on S than reported
in past assessments, by lifting the low end of the range. This
narrowing occurs because the three lines of evidence agree and are
judged to be largely independent, and because of greater confidence
in understanding feedback processes and in combining evidence. We
identify promising avenues for further narrowing the range in S , in
particular using comprehensive models and process understanding to
address limitations in the traditional forcing‐feedback paradigm for
interpreting past changes.
*Plain Language Summary*
Earth's global "climate sensitivity" is a fundamental quantitative
measure of the susceptibility of Earth's climate to human influence.
A landmark report in 1979 concluded that it probably lies between
1.5‐4.5C per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, assuming that
other influences on climate remain unchanged. In the 40 years since,
it has appeared difficult to reduce this uncertainty range. In this
report we thoroughly assess all lines of evidence including some new
developments. We find that a large volume of consistent evidence now
points to a more confident view of a climate sensitivity near the
middle or upper part of this range. In particular, it now appears
extremely unlikely that the climate sensitivity could be low enough
to avoid substantial climate change (well in excess of 2C warming)
under a high‐emissions future scenario. We remain unable to rule out
that the sensitivity could be above 4.5C per doubling of carbon
dioxide levels, although this is not likely. Continued research is
needed to further reduce the uncertainty and we identify some of the
more promising possibilities in this regard.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019RG000678
[Energy malfeasance]
*Ohio state House speaker arrested in connection to $60 million bribery
scheme*
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/politics/larry-householder-ohio-speaker-arrested/index.html
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - July 24, 2014 *
The New York Times reports:
"Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma are
among the most vocal Republican skeptics of the science that burning
fossil fuels contributes to global warming, but a new study to be
released Thursday found that their states would be among the biggest
economic winners under a regulation proposed by President Obama to fight
climate change.
"The study, conducted by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and the Rhodium Group, both research organizations, concluded
that the regulation would cut demand for electricity from coal -- the
nation's largest source of carbon pollution -- but create robust new
demand for natural gas, which has just half the carbon footprint of
coal. It found that the demand for natural gas would, in turn, drive job
creation, corporate revenue and government royalties in states that
produce it, which, in addition to Oklahoma and Texas, include Arkansas
and Louisiana."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/states-against-epa-rule-on-carbon-pollution-would-gain-study-finds.html
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