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

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 13 , 2020*/

[similarity]
*Q&A: A Harvard Expert on Environment and Health Discusses Possible Ties 
Between COVID and Climate*
Air pollution makes people more vulnerable to respiratory infections; 
climate change brings people in closer contact with animals that can 
spread disease...
- -
*How certain are you that there could be a next time, a next pandemic, 
and that climate change could play a role in that, to bring it all full 
circle?*

    The likelihood is high that this will happen. This has happened
    through human history but the data we have shows that the pace is
    accelerating. That's not terribly surprising. We're living in highly
    dense urban places. Air travel is much more prevalent than it used
    to be. And climate is a part of what is fundamentally reshaping our
    relationship with the natural world.

    We are concerned, for instance, that the trees of New England are
    changing, turning over rapidly, and the new forests taking over New
    England may in fact be more fire-prone.  Wildfires, which destroy
    forests and habitat, can lead to human-animal interfaces that
    wouldn't have happened. Because when animals lose their homes
    they're going to go somewhere else. Climate change is a
    destabilizing force when it comes to the spread of infection through
    several potential pathways.

    If you wanted to do something to prevent disease emergence, first of
    all we need to seriously reconsider how we do business with the
    biosphere. We can't simply pretend that we can extract things and
    put species in assortments that they've never been in before, and
    hope that somehow doesn't lead to disease emergence. And another
    good thing to do would be to prevent climate change because it
    changes how we relate to other species.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032020/coronavirus-harvard-doctor-climate-change-public-health 




[examination]
*What Climate Change Can Teach Us About Fighting the Coronavirus*
**By Somini Sengupta
March 12, 2020
"Alarming levels of inaction." That is what the World Health 
Organization said Wednesday about the global response to coronavirus.

It is a familiar refrain to anyone who works on climate change, and it 
is why global efforts to slow down warming offer a cautionary tale for 
the effort to slow down the pandemic.

"Both demand early aggressive action to minimize loss," said Kim Cobb, a 
climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was 
teaching classes remotely this week. "Only in hindsight will we really 
understand what we gambled on and what we lost by not acting early enough."

Scientists like Dr. Cobb have, for years, urged world leaders to bend 
the curve of planet-warming emissions. Instead, emissions have raced 
upward. Now the consequences are being felt: a three-month-long flood in 
the Florida Keys, wildfires across a record hot and dry Australia, 
deadly heat waves in Europe...

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University, called the 
virus "climate change on warp speed."

*Why have we not taken climate risks to heart? Politics and psychology 
play a role.*
Change is hard when there's a powerful industry blocking it. The fossil 
fuel industry has pushed climate science denial into the public 
consciousness. It has lobbied against policies that could rein in the 
emissions of planet-warming gases. And, it has succeeded: The United 
States, history's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is the only 
country in the world to have withdrawn from the Paris accord, designed 
to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

On display this week was some of that same disregard for scientific 
evidence with respect to coronavirus, which prompted an unusually blunt 
editorial in Science magazine. It called out President Trump for 
demanding a coronavirus vaccine at a time when his administration had 
gutted funding for scientific research and repeatedly questioned the 
fundamentals of science, saying, "you can't insult science when you 
don't like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can't 
give on demand."...
Then, there's human psychology. As with climate change, our collective 
ability to confront the pandemic is shaped by our brains. We are bad at 
thinking about tomorrow.

Elke Weber, a behavioral scientist at Princeton University, said that 
makes climate science, which deals in future probabilities, "hard to 
process and hard for us to be afraid of."

"We are evolutionarily wired for taking care of the here and now," Dr. 
Weber said. "We are bad at these decisions that require planning for the 
future."

That appears to be true even if the future isn't so far away. The Arctic 
is on track to be ice-free in summers in 20 years, researchers say, 
while the Amazon rain forest could turn into a savanna in 50 years.

Here, too, are lessons for our ability to confront the virus. Precisely 
because we are bad as individuals at thinking about tomorrow, economists 
and psychologists say it's all the more important to have leaders enact 
policies that enable us to protect ourselves against future risk.

For coronavirus, those may be costly now, Dr. Wagner pointed out in a 
telephone interview, but they yield huge benefits in the not-too-distant 
future.

"It's costs today and benefits within days and weeks," Dr. Wagner said 
of the needed coronavirus measures. "Even though the time scale is 
compressed, we still apparently can't figure out what to do."...
Scientists have repeatedly said that global emissions must be reduced by 
half over the next decade in order to keep average temperatures from 
rising to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, from 
preindustrial levels. A failure to do so is likely to usher in 
catastrophes as early as 2040, including the inundation of coastlines, 
worsening wildfires and droughts.

Those warnings don't spark much policy change. We are not told to do the 
climate equivalent of coughing into our elbows. We are not discouraged 
from flying. Instead, sales of sports utility vehicles soar. The Amazon 
burns so more soy and cattle can be produced.

The dangers of to human life, though, are already being felt. Climate 
change was linked to a crippling drought around Cape Town in 2018. Heat 
waves in Western Europe last summer resulted in hundreds of additional 
deaths, according to government agencies. In England alone, over the 
course of two months, there were an additional 892 deaths, mostly older 
people, while in France that number was 1,435.

A study by University of Chicago researchers projected that, by 2100, 
climate change would kill roughly as many people as the number who die 
of cancer and infectious disease today. As with the European heat waves, 
the most vulnerable in society will bear the brunt. "Today's poor bear a 
disproportionately high share of the global mortality risks of climate 
change," the paper concluded.

But here's the big unknown: Will the effort to revive the global economy 
after the pandemic accelerate the emissions of planet-warming gases, 
rather than avert climate change? That depends on whether the world's 
big economies, like China and the United States, use this moment to 
enact green growth policies or continue to prop up fossil fuel industries.

This was to be a crucial year for global climate goals, with presidents 
and prime ministers under pressure to get more ambitious about reining 
in greenhouse gas emissions when they gather for United Nations-led 
climate talks in Glasgow in November. The United Nations Secretary 
General, Antonio Guterres, has leaned on world leaders to announce more 
ambitious targets and to end what he called "vast and wasteful subsidies 
for fossil fuels."

In a speech this week, Mr. Guterres hinted at another deficit faced by 
both the health and climate crises...
"In the months ahead, we need to rebuild trust," he said. "We need to 
demonstrate that international cooperation is the only way to deliver 
meaningful results."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/climate/climate-change-coronavirus-lessons.html

- - -

[last week in the New Yorker]
*What Can the Coronavirus Teach Us?*
By Bill McKibben
March 5, 2020
There's nothing good about the novel coronavirus--it's killing many 
people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main 
companion. However, if we're fated to go through this passage, we may as 
well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few 
insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of 
our lives.

Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate 
killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards. Other ideas 
evaporate once you think about them: China is producing far less carbon 
dioxide, for the moment, but, completely apart from the human toll, 
economic disruption is not a politically viable way to deal with global 
warming in the long term, and it also undercuts the engines of 
innovation that bring us, say, cheap solar panels.

Still, it's worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have 
learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay 
productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we 
need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often 
be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real 
need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we'll see that the 
benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline 
consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Of course, that's a lesson that can be learned in reverse as well. The 
best excuse for an office is people bouncing ideas off one another, and 
the best excuse for a society is just people bouncing off one another, 
something that's getting harder right now, as events start cancelling. 
But the "social distancing" that epidemiologists now demand of us to 
stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar 
to lots of Americans. Living lives of comparative, suburban isolation, 
we already have fewer close friends than we used to. (Health-care 
authorities warned, on Thursday, of a serious epidemic of loneliness, 
which older Americans are more vulnerable to. The research shows that, 
when controlling for all other variables, older Americans who reported 
being lonely are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who 
aren't.) But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are 
so ingrained that we've come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an 
odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit 
more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can't imagine what it's 
like to be penned up in a Wuhan apartment; I can guess, though, that 
liberation will feel sweet when it comes, not only because people 
presumably will be safe but because they can be social. A certain kind 
of environmentalist has long hoped that we'll learn to substitute human 
contact for endless consumption; maybe this is the kind of shock that 
might open a few eyes. (Also, strained global supply chains are a good 
reminder that local agriculture has very practical benefits.)

This might also be the moment when we decide to fully embrace the idea 
that science, you know, works. My grandfather was, for many decades, 
doctor to the tiny town of Kirkland, Washington, now a suburb filled 
with software execs, which has turned into an American coronavirus 
ground zero. So I'm thinking frequently of the brave nurses and 
paramedics carrying out front-line care, and also the researchers who 
have scrambled with remarkable speed to produce prototype vaccines. 
Elites seem a little better when they come bearing cures. And that 
should probably carry over to other realms: Americans, polling shows, 
are wary of Trump's cavalier disregard for reality when it comes to 
global warming; now he's claiming that the virus is a hoax, as well. 
Given his contention that maybe a "miracle" might make it "disappear," 
I'd expect that skepticism to keep growing.

And one would also expect a growing awareness that what happens 
elsewhere matters--that there's no real way to shut out the rest of the 
planet. That's true for the virus, which seems to have seeped through 
most of the world's borders in a matter of days. It's even truer, of 
course, for the CO2 molecule. Not even a guy in a hazmat suit, clutching 
a temperature gun, can slow down the warm air cascading up to the 
Arctic, or the hurricane headed across the Atlantic. So maybe it's a 
moment when we remember that cooperation with the rest of the world is a 
boon, not a trap.

Above all, I think, a physical shock like covid-19 is a reminder that 
the world is a physical place. That's easy to forget when we apprehend 
it mostly through screens, or through the cozy, contained environments 
that make up most of our lives. We seem to have a great deal of control, 
right until the moment that we don't have any. Things can go very, very 
wrong, and very, very quickly. That's precisely what scientists have 
been telling us for decades now about the climate crisis, and it's what 
people have learned, from Australia to California, Puerto Rico, and 
everywhere that flood and fire has broken out. That planets get sick 
slightly slower than populations do--over a few decades, not a few 
weeks--doesn't change the basic calculation. Biology doesn't really care 
what we think of it, any more than physics or chemistry does. Reality is 
capable of biting, and biting hard...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/what-can-the-coronavirus-teach-us



[Warning]
*Here's Exactly How a Trump 2020 Win Would Spark a Nightmare Climate 
Scenario*
By Geoff Dembicki
Feb 12 2020

A second Trump administration wouldn't just let energy companies run 
wild, it would encourage other countries to abandon the fight to cut 
emissions.
- -
Goldwyn and his colleague Andrea Clabough described the gifts oil and 
gas companies could receive from a reelected Trump in a paper this 
January for the Atlantic Council. These gifts include legislation 
handicapping the ability of states and tribal authorities to oppose 
fossil fuel projects, doubling down on efforts to open Alaska's Arctic 
National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, and a Federal Energy 
Regulatory Commission dominated by Republicans, meaning even less 
environmental oversight of new oil pipelines or liquefied natural gas 
terminals. Granting the fossil fuel industry's wildest wish list is an 
ongoing project--last week, the administration finalized a policy giving 
energy companies mining access to 5 million acres of previously 
federally protected wilderness.

Trump is also locking in the damage further by appointing conservative 
judges favorable to these rollbacks. These include Brett Kavanaugh, a 
longtime opponent of climate regulations. Trump's administration has 
already appointed 50 federal appeals judges, compared to the 55 Obama 
appointed during his entire eight-year presidency, a trend that will 
continue in Trump's second term as long as Republicans maintain control 
of the Senate. If those judges make rulings limiting the government's 
power to fight climate change, future administrations--Democratic or 
Republican--could have a difficult time reversing the onslaught of 
climate-destroying regulations during the dwindling years we have left 
to hit 1.5 or 2 degrees...
- -
[another view - of the future]
*Trump could trigger an international catastrophe*
Trump already badly damaged the international effort to fight climate 
change by announcing withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017--a move 
especially insulting to the rest of the world because the accords were 
designed to satisfy U.S. demands. For example, Obama pushed for Paris to 
be voluntary so he could sign on without approval from the 
Republican-dominated Senate. But four more years of U.S. absence could 
be a deathblow. "I predict a scenario of dysfunction and dissension and 
probably a breakdown of the treaty," Sachs said.

The agreement as it stands is insufficient. Plans submitted by countries 
would ideally only limit temperature rise to 2.7 degrees. In theory, 
countries are supposed to keep increasing their ambition, submitting 
ever more transformative plans that reduce the odds of climate impacts 
becoming cataclysmic. But big emitters are already failing to do so, and 
with Trump reelected countries like China or India might give up on 
meeting their already more modest goals. This could set off a chain 
reaction where other big emitters like Australia withdraw, sending the 
process into disarray and potentially killing Paris altogether. "Such 
outcomes would be disastrous and threaten the habitability of many parts 
of the planet," Sachs writes.

We are already seeing a version of this play out in Brazil, where 
deforestation of the Amazon rainforest was actually declining in the 
mid-2000s, but is now accelerating under the far-right presidency of 
Jair Bolsonaro. "He is largely feeling like he is not beholden to a U.S. 
president or the international community," Larsen from the Rhodium Group 
said. "The signal that a Trump reelection would send about America's 
willingness to rejoin the international community on emissions is going 
to be very important."

That's an understatement. If Trump wins in November, the climate is 
screwed."In that respect, the outcome of the election is highly 
determinative of the future course of [climate and energy] regulation," 
Goldwyn explained.
more at - 
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvg7yz/heres-exactly-how-a-trump-2020-win-would-spark-a-nightmare-climate-scenario


[restoration is a positive term - video]
*Climate Restoration with Peter Wadhams & Peter Fierkowsky**
*Mar 12, 2020
Scientists Warning
'Climate Restoration' is the proverbial 'third leg of the stool' along 
with mitigation and adaptation. We need to get our heads around the idea 
that it's not enough to aim at reducing emissions and adapting the the 
changes already 'dialed in' to the climate system. We must establish a 
goal of getting atmospheric carbon levels down to a point where human 
survival with conditions resembling those in which civilization 
developed and flourished.
Enjoy this intriguing discussion of Climate Restoration recorded live at 
the UN-sponsored COP-25 climate negotiations in Madrid, Spain in 
December 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpWHIPXeIxU



[Propaganda war report]
Climate disinformation bloated by automated bots
*Revealed: quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots*
Draft of Brown study says findings suggest 'substantial impact of 
mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages'
The Guardian (U.K.), Feb. 21, 2020
The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped 
by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a 
quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by 
bots, the Guardian can reveal.

The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global 
heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to 
include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.

An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald 
Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement 
found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and 
spread misinformation about the science.

The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University 
and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be 
directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on 
Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.

"These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in 
amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support 
for Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement," states the draft 
study, seen by the Guardian.

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the 
climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain 
topics – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about "fake science" 
and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to 
support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% 
prevalence. The findings "suggest that bots are not just prevalent, but 
disproportionately so in topics that were supportive of Trump's 
announcement or skeptical of climate science and action", the analysis 
states.

Thomas Marlow, a PhD candidate at Brown who led the study, said the 
research came about as he and his colleagues are "always kind of 
wondering why there's persistent levels of denial about something that 
the science is more or less settled on".

The researchers examined 6.5m tweets posted in the days leading up to 
and the month after Trump announced the US exit from the Paris accords 
on 1 June 2017. The tweets were sorted into topic category, with an 
Indiana University tool called Botometer used to estimate the 
probability the user behind the tweet is a bot.

Marlow said he was surprised that bots were responsible for a quarter of 
climate tweets on an average day. "I was like, 'Wow that seems really 
high,'" he said.

The consistent drumbeat of bot activity around climate topics is 
highlighted by the day of Trump's announcement, when a huge spike in 
general interest in the topic saw the bot proportion drop by about half 
to 13%. Tweets by suspected bots did increase from hundreds a day to 
more than 25,000 a day during the days around the announcement but it 
wasn't enough to prevent a fall in proportional share.

Trump has consistently spread misinformation about the climate crisis, 
most famously calling it "bullshit" and a "hoax", although more recently 
the US president has said he accepts the science that the world is 
heating up. Nevertheless, his administration has dismantled any major 
policy aimed at cutting planet-warming gases, including car emissions 
standards and restrictions on coal-fired power plants.

The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or 
groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of 
influence they have had around the often fraught climate debate.

However, a number of suspected bots that have consistently disparaged 
climate science and activists have large numbers of followers on 
Twitter. One that ranks highly on the Botometer score, @sh_irredeemable, 
wrote "Get lost Greta!" in December, in reference to the Swedish climate 
activist Greta Thunberg.

This was followed by a tweet that doubted the world will reach a 
9-billion population due to "#climatechange lunacy stopping progress". 
The account has nearly 16,000 followers.

Another suspected bot, @petefrt, has nearly 52,000 followers and has 
repeatedly rejected climate science. "Get real, CNN: 'Climate Change' 
dogma is religion, not science," the account posted in August. Another 
tweet from November called for the Paris agreement to be ditched in 
order to "reject a future built by globalists and European eco-mandarins".

Twitter accounts spreading falsehoods about the climate crisis are also 
able to use the promoted tweets option available to those willing to pay 
for extra visibility. Twitter bans a number of things from its promoted 
tweets, including political content and tobacco advertising, but allows 
any sort of content, true or otherwise, on the climate crisis.

Research on internet blogs published last year found that climate 
misinformation is often spread due to readers' perception of how widely 
this opinion is shared by other readers.

Stephan Lewandowsky, an academic at the University of Bristol who 
co-authored the research, said he was "not at all surprised" at the 
Brown University study due to his own interactions with climate-related 
messages on Twitter.

"More often than not, they turn out to have all the fingerprints of 
bots," he said. "The more denialist trolls are out there, the more 
likely people will think that there is a diversity of opinion and hence 
will weaken their support for climate science.

"In terms of influence, I personally am convinced that they do make a 
difference, although this can be hard to quantify."

John Cook, an Australian cognitive scientist and co-author with 
Lewandowsky, said that bots are "dangerous and potentially influential", 
with evidence showing that when people are exposed to facts and 
misinformation they are often left misled.

"This is one of the most insidious and dangerous elements of 
misinformation spread by bots – not just that misinformation is 
convincing to people but that just the mere existence of misinformation 
in social networks can cause people to trust accurate information less 
or disengage from the facts," Cook said.

Although Twitter bots didn't ramp up significantly around the Paris 
withdrawal announcement, some advocates of action to tackle the climate 
crisis are wary of a spike in activity around the US presidential 
election later this year.

"Even though we don't know who they are, or their exact motives, it 
seems self-evident that Trump thrives on the positive reinforcement he 
receives from these bots and their makers," said Ed Maibach, an expert 
in climate communication at George Mason University.

"It is terrifying to ponder the possibility that the Potus was cajoled 
by bots into committing an atrocity against humanity."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis


[Register for Webinar on Health, Equity, and Climate Change]
- WEBINAR -
*State of the Evidence on Health and Climate: Useful Tools for Communities*
Tuesday, March 17, 2020 - 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Advancing the conversation on health, equity, and climate change
Dr. Aparna Bole of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Dr. John 
Balbus with the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences 
will lead the second webinar in our series.
The discussion will include:
Updated evidence on the state of health and climate.
How this evidence can be used by localities across the U.S. to implement 
health and climate solutions.
How health systems, health practitioners, and community groups can 
better collaborate to address the intersecting issues of health, equity, 
and climate change.
How we can center the leadership of environmental justice communities in 
these collaborations.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-the-evidence-on-health-and-climate-useful-tools-for-communities-tickets-99469178992 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - March 13, 2001 *

The Bush administration announces that it will not regulate carbon 
dioxide emissions from power plants, abandoning a campaign pledge under 
pressure from the fossil fuel industry.

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3657&method=full

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