[TheClimate.Vote] June 3, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June 3, 2020*/

[it's all connected]
*There Is No Climate Justice Without Defunding the Police*
Brian Kahn - June 2, 2020
At the end of the day, adapting to the risks of climate change means 
giving people the chance to be safe in the face and aftermath of a 
storm, fire, or other unnatural disasters. Cops with rocket launchers 
ain't it, especially for black and brown communities.

Beyond that, defunding the police is another key step. A number of 
groups have been calling for a divest-invest strategy where cities pull 
money from the police and put it into community programs that actually 
make those places better (groups are advancing a similar policy for 
fossil fuels). In the context of climate change, that could include 
everything from improving access to healthcare, transit, and open 
streets. Ultimately, how that money is spent is a decision that's best 
left to communities themselves.

It's impossible to disentangle the various threads of environmental 
racism and its ties with policing. The history of redlining and 
police-enforced segregation has led to massive hotter neighborhoods and 
more people with chronic health problems tied to air pollution. Despite 
that, large parts of the climate movement have so far remained silent 
about the current wave of protests and the role of policing in climate 
policy. But without defunding the police, let alone more direct ideas of 
abolishing them altogether, there can never really be climate justice.

Windmills may slow the globe from heating, and seawalls may keep at 
least some neighborhoods dry when the next storm hits. If the same 
violent policing system exists, however, there will still be only more 
danger for the very people climate change will hit the hardest.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/there-is-no-climate-justice-without-defunding-the-polic-1843833563


[We are the asteroid]
*Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn*
Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost 
over previous century
The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, 
according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping 
point for the collapse of civilisation.

More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of 
extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In comparison, the 
same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Without the 
human destruction of nature, even this rate of loss would have taken 
thousands of years, the scientists said.

The land vertebrates on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 
individuals left, include the Sumatran rhino, the Clarion wren, the 
Espanola giant tortoise and the harlequin frog. Historic data was 
available for 77 of the species and the scientists found these had lost 
94% of their populations...
- -
"When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb 
on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support 
system," said Prof Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University in the US, and 
one of the research team. "The conservation of endangered species should 
be elevated to a global emergency for governments and institutions, 
equal to the climate disruption to which it is linked."...
- - -
"Action is important for many reasons, not least of which is that 
directly and indirectly we rely on the rest of life on Earth for our own 
health and wellbeing," she said. "Disrupting nature leads to costly and 
often hard-to-reverse effects. Covid-19 is an extreme present-day 
example, but there are many more."

Mark Wright, the director of science at WWF, said: "The numbers in this 
research are shocking. However, there is still hope. If we stop the 
land-grabbing and devastating deforestation in countries such as Brazil, 
we can start to bend the curve in biodiversity loss and climate change. 
But we need global ambition to do that."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/01/sixth-mass-extinction-of-wildlife-accelerating-scientists-warn



[Paying attention]
*Why are investors not pricing in climate-change risk?*
Failing to account for it makes markets less efficient
Jun 2nd 2020
COMPANIES ARE often quick to tout their green credentials. So are many 
of the sophisticated institutional investors who buy and sell their 
shares. Yet when it comes to pricing the risk of climate change, those 
investors may be falling short. New research suggests that the risk of 
climatic disasters such as floods, storms and wildfires are not 
reflected in the price of equities around the world. What is more, when 
disasters do occur, the fall in share prices is modest.

Researchers at the IMF studied the impact of 6,000 large climate-related 
disasters on stockmarkets in 68 developed and emerging countries since 
1980. They found that financial losses related to such disasters have 
varied widely. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, killed 2,000 people and 
affected half a million. It also had the largest absolute economic 
impact of any event in the researchers' sample, costing 1% of American 
GDP. Yet the American stockmarket scarcely budged. Floods in Thailand in 
2011, which killed 813 people and affected 9.5m, had the biggest 
relative economic effect, inundating South-East Asia's biggest carmaking 
industry and costing 10% of Thai GDP. The Bangkok stockmarket collapsed 
by 30%...
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/06/02/why-are-investors-not-pricing-in-climate-change-risk


[new concept: Green Swan event]
*What is a green swan?*
Climate change is a swan of a different color: a green one. Green swans 
are risks we humans create for ourselves by pumping contaminants into 
our air and water, destroying our ecosystems, and destabilizing our 
climate. ... "Climate catastrophes are even more serious than most 
systemic financial crises," the authors write.

*What is a green swan event?*
Green swan events may force central banks to intervene as "climate 
rescuers of last resort" and buy large sets of devalued assets, to save 
the financial system once more.
- - -
"Climate change is a swan of a different color: a green one.  Green 
swans are risks we humans create for ourselves by pumping contaminants 
into our air and water, destroying our ecosystems, and destabilizing our 
climate. They're different from black swans in that their inevitability 
increases predictably, even as the specific outcomes become less 
predictable and more dangerous."
- -
Climate change is a swan of a different color: a green one.  Green swans 
are risks we humans create for ourselves by pumping contaminants into 
our air and water, destroying our ecosystems, and destabilizing our 
climate. They're different from black swans in that their inevitability 
increases predictably, even as the specific outcomes become less 
predictable and more dangerous.

The concept has been around for a while, but last week [January 2020] 
the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published an e-book called 
"The Green Swan: Central Banking and Financial Stability in the Age of 
Climate Change," which summarizes the thinking to-date and tries to 
offer ways that central banks can help address the risk (short answer: 
they can't).

Published...[in January], the 115-page book offers a detailed but 
surprisingly readable summary of both physical risks (climate-induced 
unnatural disasters or the spread of disease) and transition risk (mass 
bankruptcies of companies that failed to adapt) as well as the ways 
banks have traditionally assessed both. It's not for the faint of heart.

"Climate catastrophes are even more serious than most systemic financial 
crises," the authors write. "They could pose an existential threat to 
humanity, as increasingly emphasized by climate scientists."
- -
Black Swans gunk up the financial system because banks and insurance 
companies use historical data to calculate risks, and historical data 
doesn't account for the new variable.

"As a result, the standard approach to modeling financial risk 
consisting in extrapolating historical values…is no longer valid in a 
world that is fundamentally reshaped by climate change," the authors 
write. "In other words, green swan events cannot be captured by 
traditional risk management."

Risk managers, of course, aren't stupid. Most have moved beyond 
historical modeling and begun incorporating more forward-looking 
scenarios into their planning. This, however, involves trying to figure 
out how complex systems like society are going to respond to other 
complex systems like an upended global ecology. There are just too many 
places where projections can run amok, as a 2015 paper called "Global 
non-linear effect of temperature on economic production" made clear. The 
authors, nonetheless, took a stab at it and concluded that the global 
economy will probably shrink by 23 percent in the next 80 years if we 
don't fix the climate mess.
- - -
We didn't listen, and in January the World Economic Forum's 15th Global 
Risks Report identified environmental degradation as the single greatest 
threat to global prosperity.

If one theme is clear in all of these analyses, it's that adaptation is 
not an option. The only way to confidently address the climate challenge 
is to reverse it, and quickly. Every penny we spend now will amount to a 
fortune saved for our children.
https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/coronavirus-is-dangerous-but-the-green-swan-is-worse/
- - -
[Jan 2020 paper]
*The green swan*
Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change
Abstract

    Climate change poses new challenges to central banks, regulators and
    supervisors. This book reviews ways
    of addressing these new risks within central banks' financial
    stability mandate. However, integrating
    climate-related risk analysis into financial stability monitoring is
    particularly challenging because of the
    radical uncertainty associated with a physical, social and economic
    phenomenon that is constantly
    changing and involves complex dynamics and chain reactions.
    Traditional backward-looking risk
    assessments and existing climate-economic models cannot anticipate
    accurately enough the form that
    climate-related risks will take. These include what we call "green
    swan" risks: potentially extremely
    financially disruptive events that could be behind the next systemic
    financial crisis. Central banks have a
    role to play in avoiding such an outcome, including by seeking to
    improve their understanding of climaterelated risks through the
    development of forward-looking scenario-based analysis. But central
    banks alone
    cannot mitigate climate change. This complex collective action
    problem requires coordinating actions
    among many players including governments, the private sector, civil
    society and the international
    community. Central banks can therefore have an additional role to
    play in helping coordinate the measures
    to fight climate change. Those include climate mitigation policies
    such as carbon pricing, the integration
    of sustainability into financial practices and accounting
    frameworks, the search for appropriate policy
    mixes, and the development of new financial mechanisms at the
    international level. All these actions will
    be complex to coordinate and could have significant redistributive
    consequences that should be
    adequately handled, yet they are essential to preserve long-term
    financial (and price) stability in the age
    of climate change...

- -
In the worst case scenario, central banks may have to confront a 
situation where they are called
upon by their local constituencies to intervene as climate rescuers of 
last resort For example, a new
financial crisis caused by green swan events severely affecting the 
financial health of the banking and
insurance sectors could force central banks to intervene and buy a large 
set of carbon-intensive assets
and/or assets stricken by physical impacts.
But there is a key difference between green swan and black swan events: 
since the accumulation
of atmospheric CO2 beyond certain thresholds can lead to irreversible 
impacts, the biophysical causes of
the crisis will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo at a later 
stage. Similarly, in the case of a crisis triggered
by a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, there would be little 
ground for central banks to rescue
the holders of assets in carbon-intensive companies. While banks in 
financial distress in an ordinary crisis
can be resolved, this will be far more difficult in the case of 
economies that are no longer viable because
of climate change. Intervening as climate rescuers of last resort could 
therefore affect central bank's
credibility and crudely expose the limited substitutability between 
financial and natural capital...
- - -
Acknowledging the limitations of risk-based approaches and embracing the 
deep uncertainty at stake
suggests that central banks may inevitably be led into uncharted waters 
in the age of climate change...
https://www.bis.org/publ/othp31.pdf



[a political action item for today]
*Obama's Recovery Act breathed life into renewables. Now they need 
rescuing.*
By Shannon Osaka on Jun 1, 2020
It was the beginning of 2009, and the U.S. economy was hemorrhaging more 
than half a million jobs every month. The housing bubble had burst and 
set off the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In 
February, a few weeks after being sworn in, President Barack Obama 
signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an $800-billion 
stimulus package designed to reinvigorate the economy and save millions 
from losing their houses and jobs.

Hidden in the Recovery Act was something that largely escaped notice at 
the time -- $90 billion earmarked for clean energy generation, electric 
vehicles, transit, and training for green jobs. By many accounts, that 
10 percent chunk of the stimulus bill changed the trajectory of 
renewables in America. Now, 12 years later, with 36 million Americans 
out of work amid the economic fallout from the coronavirus, it could 
also serve as a model for stimulus measures to come...
- -
The massive $2 trillion rescue package passed by Congress in March 
didn't include any climate-friendly provisions; in fact, some media 
outlets have reported that fossil fuel companies have recently received 
millions of dollars in loans intended for small businesses.

The bill President Obama signed back in February 2009 still stands out 
as an example of what could be possible -- the first green stimulus of 
its kind. Browner said that it's hard to imagine where the clean energy 
industry would be today without the government's help. "I'm not sure 
that renewables would have made it," she said.
more at - 
https://grist.org/energy/obamas-recovery-act-breathed-life-into-renewables-now-they-need-rescuing/



[Storms]
*Why Atlantic Hurricane Season Got Such a Rapid Start*
Brian Kahn
June 2nd 2020
Tropical Storm Cristobal spun up on Tuesday in the Gulf of Mexico. It's 
the third tropical cyclone of the Atlantic hurricane season that only 
officially began on Monday, and marks the earliest third storm on record.

Forecasts called for this to be a busy season, and it's clearly off to a 
roaring start. The conditions in the ocean and the atmosphere right now 
are ripe for storms. While the quick start doesn't guarantee the rapid 
pace of storms will continue, it's nevertheless a worrying sign in a 
world full of stress.

While Cristobal's precursors were fairly wimpy and short-lived, the new 
storm has already caused serious damage. It traversed from the Pacific, 
where it was Tropical Storm Amanda, dropping heavy rain in El Salvador 
and Guatemala that caused floods and killed at least 15 people. 
Rechristened as Cristobal, the storm continues to rake the Mexican 
states of Tabasco, Veracruz, and Capeche with up to 25 inches of rain 
and tropical storm-force winds as it basically does a lazy loop through 
the end of the week.

By the weekend, the storm should finally cruise over the open waters of 
the Gulf. By early next week, it's slated to potentially make landfall 
along the Gulf Coast. It is way too early to talk about impacts on the 
U.S. so for the moment, it's wait-and-see territory.

But what is striking is Cristobal's formation itself. The storm follows 
Arthur and Bertha as the third tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane 
season. The season nominally starts on June 1, but this is the sixth 
year in a row of the first named storm forming before that official 
date. Tropical Storm Arthur formed in mid-May, and Tropical Storm Bertha 
formed last week and immediately made landfall in South Carolina. 
Cristobal makes three tropical storms to kick things off.

There are two main ingredients for a tropical storm, broadly speaking: 
warm oceans and a relatively calm atmosphere. Both have been in 
plentiful supply in the Atlantic basin, helping to kickstart the 
hurricane season early.

Tropical storms generally spin up when winds stay calm in the upper 
atmosphere. A lot of wind moving in multiple directions--something 
meteorologists call wind shear--can essentially rip tropical storms 
apart or stop them from forming in the first place. There are a number 
of natural factors that can drive shear, particularly El Nino. But that 
periodic warming of tropical Pacific is nowhere to be seen right now, 
opening the door to more spinning storms.

"Vertical shear along the East Coast of the U.S. has generally been 
lower than normal...during the second half of May," Phil Klotzbach, a 
hurricane expert at Colorado State University, told Earther in an email.

Then there's the oceans side of it. When oceans are hot, more water can 
evaporate and act as fuel to power up storms. Bernadette Woods Placky, 
the chief meteorologist at Climate Central (and someone I used to work 
with there), told Earther in an email that with "both the Gulf of Mexico 
and western Atlantic running very warm," the oceans are definitely 
helping generate storms. Large parts of the basin are anywhere from 1.8 
to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (1-2 degrees Celsius) above normal. The area 
where Cristobal is currently spinning is one of the hot spots, which is 
helping fuel the copious rainfall piling up in Mexico.

Woods Placky noted that there's been a trend in the satellite era that 
started in the 1970s where more storms get named earlier in the season. 
Going further back, the data gets more murky, since observations systems 
in, say, 1903 weren't quite as sophisticated as those available today. 
That means it's not quite as simple as saying there's a clear climate 
change link to more early season storms. It's still an area of active 
research, though warmer oceans being one of the hallmarks of climate 
change feels like it could make that connection more likely.

The early season run of storms is likely to slow down, and Klotzbach 
said the storms themselves are not a predictor of future activity. But 
nevertheless the forecast he puts out, as well as forecasts from other 
agencies, all point toward an active hurricane season, which is bad news 
in the midst of a pandemic.

"The next 10 days look very active in the Gulf," he said. "And I'm 
certainly on board for an active season."
https://earther.gizmodo.com/why-atlantic-hurricane-season-got-such-a-rapid-start-1843862346



[new data display - lightning strikes]
*Network for Lightning and Thunderstorms in Real Time*
http://en.blitzortung.org/live_lightning_maps.php



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 3, 1977 *
The New York Times reports,

    "To avoid accumulation in the air of sufficient carbon dioxide to
    cause major climate changes, it may ultimately be necessary to
    restrict the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, according to
    Dr. William D. Nordhaus of the President's Council of Economic
    Advisers."

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15FC355D167493C1A9178DD85F438785F9

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