[TheClimate.Vote] March 23 , 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 23, 2020*/

[CNBC]
*Air pollution falls as coronavirus slows travel, but scientists warn of 
longer-term threat to climate change progress*
PUBLISHED SUN, MAR 22 2020

- The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down countries across the world, 
causing a significant decline in air pollution in major cities as 
countries implement stricter quarantines and travel restrictions.

- The unintended air pollution declines from the virus outbreak are just 
temporary, experts say.

- But the pandemic's unintended climate impact could offer up a glimpse 
into how countries and corporations are equipped to deal with 
destruction of the slower-moving climate change crisis.
- -
Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist and environmental justice activist, 
said that the way in which the world recovers from the pandemic is vital 
in the fight against climate change.

"If the actions here continue to bail out fossil fuel companies and 
multinational corporations and banks, and invest in fossil fuel 
infrastructure, then we are digging a hole deeper into a more violent 
and dangerous place," Myhre said.

"I think that there's potential for this pandemic to become a moment of 
mass awaking of our ability to have compassion for each other," she added.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/21/air-pollution-falls-as-coronavirus-slows-travel-but-it-forms-a-new-threat.html


[not surprising]
*Study: global banks 'failing miserably' on climate crisis by funneling 
trillions into fossil fuels*
Analysis of 35 leading investment banks shows financing of more than 
$2.66tn for fossil fuel industries since the Paris agreement
- - -
"It is high time banks recognised that reaching the Paris climate goals 
requires an immediate end to finance for all new fossil fuel projects, 
and a rapid phase-out of existing fossil finance. This should be the 
Global Glasgow Goal for all banks."

JPMorgan Chase said the commitments it announced last month "reflect our 
ongoing efforts to help address climate change and promote more 
sustainable development".

It added: "This includes financing to support climate action and the 
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, backing market-based 
policy solutions to reduce carbon emissions, expanding restrictions on 
financing for coal mining and coal-fired power, and prohibiting project 
financing for new oil and gas development in the Arctic."

The bank looked forward, it said, to growing "its impact over time"...
- - -
Wells Fargo told the Guardian that it believes that climate change is 
one of the most urgent environmental and social issues of our time, and 
is committing to a low-carbon economy. The bank said it is working to 
measure and report on the carbon intensity of its credit portfolio.

A Bank of America spokesperson said they recognise their role in 
managing climate risk and in financing the transition to a low-carbon 
economy.

Citigroup did not respond when contacted by the Guardian for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/global-banks-climate-crisis-finance-fossil-fuels



[Bad movie plot]
*Locust Swarms, Some 3 Times the Size of New York City, Are Eating Their 
Way Across Two Continents*
Climate change is worsening the largest plague of the crop-killing 
insects in 50 years, threatening famine in Africa, the Middle East and 
the Indian subcontinent.
BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS
As giant swarms of locusts spread across East Africa, the Arabian 
Peninsula and the Middle East, devouring crops that feed millions of 
people, some scientists say global warming is contributing to 
proliferation of the destructive insects.

The largest locust swarms in more than 50 years have left subsistence 
farmers helpless to protect their fields and will spread misery 
throughout the region, said Robert Cheke, a biologist with the 
University of Greenwich Natural Resources Institute, who has helped lead 
international efforts to control insect pests in Africa.

"I'm concerned about the scale of devastation and the effect on human 
livelihoods," Cheke said, adding that he also worried about "the 
impending famines."

"Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the region needs money and equipment 
to deploy insect control teams in the affected regions," he said...
New swarms are currently forming from Kenya to Iran, according to the 
the United Nations locust watch website. Addressing the outbreak 
requires urgent, additional funding and technical help from developed 
countries, Cheke said, because the tiny size and budget of the United 
Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization team responsible for locust 
monitoring and control is already overwhelmed.

Changes in plant growth caused by higher carbon dioxide levels, as well 
as heat waves and tropical cyclones with intense rains, can lead to more 
prolific and unpredictable locust swarming, making it harder to prevent 
future outbreaks.

The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) needs moist soil to breed. 
When rains are especially heavy, populations of the usually solitary 
insects can explode. In Kenya, one of the biggest swarms detected last 
year was three times the size of New York City, according to a March 12 
article in the journal Nature. Swarms a fraction of that size can hold 
between 4 billion and 8 billion locusts.

At times, the locusts in East Africa have swarmed so thick that they 
have prevented planes from taking off and their dead bodies have piled 
up high enough to stop trains on their tracks.

Global Warming's Many Impacts on Insects
The changing climate has spurred other insect invasions. Warmer winters, 
for example, are magnifying an ongoing bark beetle outbreak in western 
North America. Until the 1980s, periodic cold snaps kept the beetles in 
check. But since then, the tree-killing bugs have swarmed--not as fast 
as desert locusts, but just as destructively. Since 2000, they've killed 
trees across about 150,000 square miles in Canada and the western U.S., 
an area nearly the size of California. In recent years, historic bark 
beetle outbreaks have also devastated European forests.

Other research shows that seasonal shifts caused by global warming are 
disrupting cycles of insect reproduction and plant pollination, 
including a recently documented decline of bumblebees, threatening food 
production in some areas.

Global warming is also affecting the feeding and breeding patterns of 
North America's grasshoppers, species that behave similarly to locusts. 
In the 1930s, swarms of grasshoppers destroyed crops in the Midwest, 
even eating wooden farm tools and clothes that were drying outside. 
States like Colorado used flamethrowers and explosives to battle the 
insects.

It's hard to predict how grasshoppers will respond to today's changing 
climate, said University of Oklahoma biologist Ellen Welti, who studies 
the relationship between insects and plants.

But, she said, "Warmer winters, with less egg mortality and changes in 
precipitation patterns that affect the amount and quality of plant food, 
could lead to outbreaks of particular grasshopper species or other 
herbivorous insects."

Locust outbreaks could be driven by changes in plant nutrients caused by 
extreme weather, Welti said, like more frequent soggy tropical storms, 
which make plants grow faster but dilute elements like nitrogen. 
"Locusts have a weird physiology--they like low nitrogen plants," she 
said of connections she explored in a recent study published in the 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But the current locust outbreaks, Welti said, are occurring against the 
backdrop of an alarming global decline in overall insect abundance, 
which is also, to some degree, connected to climate change and will have 
far-reaching ecosystem impacts.

Extreme Weather, Failed Governance Favor Swarms
Warm weather and heavy rains at the end of 2019 set up a perfect storm 
of breeding conditions for the destructive bugs. The outbreak followed 
an unusually active West Indian Ocean cyclone season with several of the 
storms bringing extreme rainfall to parts of East Africa.

Studies in the last few years have showed that global warming is 
boosting the rainfall from tropical storms. Other recent research shows 
that human-driven warming may be intensifying a regional Indian Ocean 
pattern of warming and cooling that could exacerbate extremes like 
tropical storms, heavy rains and heat waves--all factors that can affect 
locust populations.

More moisture is a double-edged sword for the Horn of Africa, said 
Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate 
Centre, which addresses the human impacts of climate change.

"We need rain for agricultural productivity, but it is then also 
conducive to locust breeding," van Aalst said. "It's a classical case of 
rising risks partly due to rising uncertainties. But we can manage some 
of this uncertainty. In this case we have had good predictions of 
elevated risks, and it is concerning that it still takes us so long to 
respond."

Martin Huseman, head of the entomology department at the University of 
Hamburg Center for Natural Sciences, said, "In general I think it's 
partly climate change. We get more extreme weather conditions. The 
cyclones we had there in the region could lead to enhanced swarming."

Locusts swarm out to find more food when they reach extremely dense 
populations during the nymph stage of their development. Aided by wind, 
the insects can travel more than 90 miles per day. Scientists warn they 
could spread across hundreds of thousands more square miles from 
Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia to Sudan, and across the Persian Gulf and 
Arabian Sea into Iran, Pakistan and India. Such a spread would threaten 
the food supplies of 20 million people.

Those food shortages will mainly be felt later in the year, so there is 
still time to act by bolstering regional food supplies, van Aalst said. 
But travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic will challenge 
locust control projects, as well as relief efforts. According to the 
UN's locust watch program, the countries facing the biggest risk are 
Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iran, Pakistan and Sudan.

Cheke said poor monitoring, conflict and a breakdown of governance in 
key locust breeding areas enabled the recent outbreak to grow unchecked, 
and threatens the progress made in controlling locusts during the last 
half century.

"It all started with substantial rainfall in May and October 2018 
allowing good desert locust breeding in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian 
Peninsula to continue until March 2019, where it was not noticed and 
thus left uncontrolled," he said.

Swarms Could Expand Their Range and Emerge More Frequently
Huseman said that, in the global warming era, other parts of the world 
may also need to prepare for unexpected insect invasions as part of 
larger scale shifts in the distribution of animals. In northern Germany, 
for example, scientists recently spotted Asian wasps for the first time. 
A 2013 study found that crop-damaging insects are moving poleward at 
about 4 miles per year.

In addition to the ongoing plague of locusts around the Horn of Africa, 
there have been recent outbreaks of varying intensity in places like 
Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, and Las Vegas.

David Inouye, a University of Maryland biologist who studies the effects 
of global warming on plants and animals, said conditions favoring 
outbreaks are becoming more common.

"I think that there is the potential for locust swarms to become more 
frequent, and potentially more widely distributed, as the environmental 
factors like rain and warm temperatures that favor their outbreaks 
continue to become more prevalent," he said. Some insects have a strict 
biological clock, but locusts respond strongly to environmental factors 
like precipitation and temperature.

Arianne Cease, a researcher at Arizona State University's School of 
Sustainability, said there are other factors related to climate that 
could promote locust swarms. Livestock grazing, rising carbon dioxide 
levels and extreme rainfall all lower nitrogen levels in plants--exactly 
the conditions that locusts thrive on.

"However," she said, "a direct link between atmospheric CO2, plant 
nutrients and swarming grasshoppers or locusts has yet to be tested, to 
my knowledge."

Cheke said it's unlikely, but possible, that locusts could swarm into 
new regions.

"With climate change it is possible that increasing aridity or changes 
in rainfall patterns could lead to locusts expanding their usual 
geographical range," he said. "For instance, in October 1988 desert 
locusts crossed the Atlantic but the habitat on the other side was 
unsuitable. Similarly, there are cases of desert locusts reaching the 
U.K. and Italy."

He believes several important questions remain to be answered, including 
whether locusts' speed of development from egg to maturity--which is 
temperature dependent--has increased in line with global warming.

"What I think is worth considering is whether climate change has led to 
habitat changes," he said. "Or changes ... regarding rainfall that might 
facilitate the success and spread of a locust plague once it has 
started. Or if climate change, through its effects on weather changes, 
could lead to changes in the locusts' usual migration routes."

In Africa, some of those questions have already been answered. Colin 
Everard, formerly with the Royal Aeronautical Society (U.K.), worked on 
locust control in Africa for 40 years. The increase in regional tropical 
cyclone activity during the last few years is certainly a factor, he 
said, as such storms are known to cause locust plagues.

"If this trend continues, for sure there will be more desert locust 
outbreaks in the Horn of Africa," he said. "There will be hunger and 
starvation in northeastern Kenya, the area which borders Somalia. Apart 
from humans, livestock will also starve to death due to the destruction 
of grazing."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032020/locust-swarms-climate-change

- -

[data source material]
*Desert Locust situation update*
New swarms continue forming in Horn of Africa
http://www.fao.org/ag/locusts/en/info/info/index.html




[dangerous denial]
*Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks*
By Sharon Kelly • Monday, March 16, 2020
On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that 
the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease 
COVID-19, was officially a "public health emergency of international 
concern." At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and 
deaths in China had reached 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) 
published an article titled, "Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?"

"Is coronavirus worse than the flu?" it began. "No, not even close."

"It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it 
probably won't go far," ACSH added. "And the American healthcare system 
is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem."

ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial 
that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with 
potentially deadly consequences.

American Council on Science and Health?
The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of "peer-reviewed 
mainstream science," in the words of the organization's mission. Their 
experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and 
magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write 
critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding 
from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, 
chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.

When it comes to climate change, ACSH has published a steady stream of 
articles downplaying climate science and criticizing efforts to slow 
carbon emissions -- even in the face of a mountain of peer-reviewed 
research on the climate crisis.

ACSH slammed the medical journal The Lancet as "an ideologically driven 
outlet with a very clear political agenda where being sensationalist and 
culturally woke trumps evidence and reasonability" (after the Lancet 
published an article titled "The carbon footprint"). The purported 
"pro-science" advocacy group has labeled Greta Thunberg's activism 
"doomsday prophesying." It has (falsely) suggested that climate change 
is less of a concern because "more people die in winter than in summer" 
(they don't).

And that's all just in the past nine months. The ACSH's stance against 
climate action dates back to at least 1997.

When it comes to coronavirus, now a global pandemic, ACSH's authors 
rushed to judgment. They assured readers that there was little to worry 
about, and put some of the same faulty thinking that underlies their 
stance on climate change on display...

more at - 
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/16/climate-science-deniers-downplayed-covid-19-cato-acsh-aei





[possible]
MARCH 19, 2020
*The right dose of geoengineering could reduce climate change risks, 
study says*
Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering is the idea that adding a layer of 
aerosol particles to the upper atmosphere can reduce climate changes 
caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide...
Previous research shows that solar geoengineering could be achieved 
using commercially available aircraft technologies to deliver the 
particles at a cost of a few billion dollars per year and would reduce 
global average temperatures. However, the question remains whether this 
approach could reduce important climate hazards at a regional level. 
That is, could it reduce region-by-region changes in water availability 
or extreme temperatures?

Results from a new study by UCL and Harvard researchers suggest that 
even a crude method like injecting sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere 
could reduce many important climate hazards without making any region 
obviously worse off.

The findings, published today in Environmental Research Letters, used 
results from a sophisticated simulation of stratospheric aerosol 
geoengineering to evaluate whether the approach could offset or worsen 
the effects of climate change around the world. How these effects 
differed under different temperature scenarios was also tested.

The team found that halving warming by adding aerosols to the 
stratosphere could moderate important climate hazards in almost all 
regions. They saw an exacerbation of the effects of climate change in 
only a very small fraction of land areas.

Lead author, Professor Peter Irvine (UCL Earth Sciences), said: "Most 
studies focus on a scenario where solar geoengineering offsets all 
future warming. While this reduces overall climate change substantially, 
we show that in these simulations, it goes too far in some respects 
leading to about 9% of the land area experiencing greater climate 
change, i.e. seeing the effects of climate change exacerbated.

"However, if instead only half the warming is offset, then we find that 
stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could still reduce climate change 
overall but would only exacerbate change over 1.3% of the land area."

The team emphasise that solar geoengineering only treats the symptoms of 
climate change and not the underlying cause, which is the build-up of 
CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It should therefore be 
considered as a complementary approach to emissions cuts as a way to 
address climate change...
more at - https://phys.org/news/2020-03-dose-geoengineering-climate.html



[tracking data]
*US Health Weather Map*
Overview
The U.S. Health Weather Map is a visualization of seasonal illness 
linked to fever - specifically influenza-like illness. The aggregate, 
anonymized data visualized here is a product of Kinsa's network of Smart 
Thermometers and the accompanying mobile applications. Kinsa is 
providing this map and associated charts as a public service.

The map shows two key data points: (1) the illness levels we're 
currently observing, and (2) the degree to which those levels are higher 
than the typical levels we expect to see at this point in the flu 
season. (Details on how we calculate this are available in our technical 
approach document.) We believe this latter data point -- which we're 
calling "atypical illness", may in some cases be connected to the 
COVID-19 pandemic.
https://healthweather.us/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 23, 2006 *
In a CBSNews.com interview,  "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley 
explains why he doesn't cite the views of climate-change deniers in his 
stories:

    "'If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel,' he asks, 'am I required as
    a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?' He says his team tried
    hard to find a respected scientist who contradicted the prevailing
    opinion in the scientific community, but there was no one out there
    who fit that description. 'This isn't about politics or
    pseudo-science or conspiracy theory blogs,' he says. 'This is about
    sound science...'There becomes a point in journalism where striving
    for balance becomes irresponsible.'"

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/scott-pelley-and-catherine-herrick-on-global-warming-coverage/ 


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