[TheClimate.Vote] November 12, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Nov 12 09:10:18 EST 2020
/*November 12, 2020*/
[report from the information battlegrounds]
*The guardians of Wikipedia's climate page*
An intensely devoted core keeps a bastion of climate science honest
by Mark Kaufman
- -
Moving forward requires focus. Mashable's Social Good Series is
dedicated to exploring pathways to a greater good by spotlighting issues
that are essential to making the world a better place.
- -
Femke Nijsse, a climate researcher, made her first Wikipedia edit seven
years ago. In 2018, she started editing Wikipedia's English climate
change webpage. Since then, she's grown increasingly obsessed.
"I slowly got more addicted," said Nijsse, who recently submitted a
Ph.D. thesis in mathematics at the University of Exeter's climate
systems group.
Nijsse has become the de facto leader (but certainly not ruler) of a
small, impressively devoted group of current editors to Wikipedia's
climate change page. The article is either one of the first, or first,
results that appear when one searches the web for "climate change" or
"global warming," resulting in over 6 million views in 2019 (this
doesn't include 135 other "climate change" pages written in different
languages). It's a hugely visible source of meticulously-vetted climate
information, during a time when scientific misinformation spreads on the
web like a furious 21st century California wildfire. The climate
article, with hundreds of credible citations, counters the stereotype
that publicly-policed, collaboratively-edited Wikipedia pages are
inherently unreliable (though the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia
projects certainly vary considerably and shouldn't be one's sole source
of information).
The seven-person core now editing the Wikipedia page (though others
certainly contribute!), four of whom spoke with Mashable, seeks to make
climate science graspable and available to everyone. The group has no
tolerance for unsubstantiated facts or biased sources.
"I'm an engineer by training and profession, and have taken a special
interest in communicating the basic facts and consensus about global
warming and climate change, largely because of the ghastly ignorance and
manipulative politicizing I have seen on Fox News and by the U.S.
president," said a Wikipedia editor who wished to remain anonymous for
privacy reasons. (They'll be referenced as "anonymous editor.")...
- -
"You need to know the information," emphasized Tetta. "I read around 100
pages of information to edit one sentence, or to significantly change a
sentence or two." And Tetta isn't just editing sentences. He rewrote an
entire section of the page, the "Mitigation" section (meaning how to
reduce or limit the impacts of planetary warming). Tetta estimated he
spent 90 hours doing that, which included reading 3,000 pages of research.
With such a profound commitment, the writing, though not attributed to
or owned by him, becomes a momentous, compelling achievement. "Once you
have skin in the game, you feel like it's your work," said Tetta.
In just over a year working on the climate change page, the anonymous
editor says they have spent hundreds of hours editing the page and
collaborating on the article's graphics. The page's visualizations show
the ocean's relentlessly rising temperature, skyrocketing atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels, and beyond...
- -
Murray, who is pursuing a master's degree in statistical science at the
University of Oxford, wants his Wikipedia efforts to educate the public
about a human-made problem that's driving significant planetary change
(19 of the last 20 years have been the warmest on record.) "I hope a
layperson leaves [the page] with a basic understanding of the problem,"
said Murray. "That human civilization emits -- and is emitting more
every year -- greenhouse gases that are deeply entangled with an
industrialized lifestyle. This, unfortunately, has been driving a rise
in global average temperatures."
The core team is clearly an ardent bunch. "We have some of the most
passionate, invested, devoted-to-public-knowledge contributors," said
Alex Stinson, a senior program strategist with the Wikimedia Foundation,
which hosts Wikipedia. Stinson, who is also a zealous Wikipedia editor
(though not of the climate change page specifically) and includes
himself as one of the "obsessed" Wikipedians, emphasized that important
contributions also come from the majority of editors who aren't so
devout, but still pop in to flag bad information or mark a citation. In
sum, everyone's efforts make Wikipedia an encyclopedia. "That's the only
way Wikipedia works," said Stinson....
- -
Sometimes people vandalize the Wikipedia climate page. ("Vandalism" is
Wikipedia parlance for maliciously disrupting a page.)
One day, Tetta found that another editor, who usually edited sports
pages, went rogue and wrote "Global warming is a hoax" atop the climate
page. "I caught and reverted it," he said. "It was there for a few
hours. That's how open source crowd-editing works."
But with ever-vigilant editors, namely the current group overseeing the
climate page, vandalism is easily spotted and cleaned up. Malicious
edits aren't hard to find: Each edit to the article is documented and
visible to everyone on the page's history. "Any edit that is blatant
vandalism or in some way or another non-encyclopedic will quickly get
removed," explained Murray. So, overall, there's little incentive for
vandalizing the climate page. Being a jerk simply doesn't pay off.
What's more, Wikipedia has given the climate change page the status of
"semi-protection," which makes it more difficult, but not impossible,
for random people to sign in and temporarily disrupt a page
(semi-protection requires editors to have an account for at least four
days and already to have made 10 Wikipedia edits). If one looks back on
the page's history, like in 2008 when the page didn't have
semi-protection, vandalism and poor, biased edits were "a major
problem," noted Nijsse.
The keepers of the page, however, don't make furtive edits when no one
is looking. The real editing is more like a public discussion, where
edits are talked about (online) and nothing is hidden, explained Nijsse.
You can see the dialogue on the "Talk" page. The goal is to present
readers with understandable, yet cold and hard facts. The climate
editors avoid brand new research or anyone's singular opinions. Instead,
they often rely on deeply vetted publications that synthesize hundreds
to thousands of studies, like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, or IPCC, reports. "It's really important that
Wikipedia remains neutral," Nijsse said. "The IPCC is a brilliant source
for us."
- -
Nijsse, however, will candidly point out flaws or potential problems
with anyone's edits. The "guardian" of the page, who is also busy
pursuing a Ph.D., probably has no choice but to speak frankly. "I think
your edits yesterday were a bit sloppy, not what I'm used [to] from
you," she wrote in September 2020, in response to an edit about a
well-publicized cloud study. "There are multiple problems with the
sentence, and I'm not sure that the sourcing is sufficiently good,"
Nijsse wrote in October 2020, referencing an estimate of over 1 billion
people becoming displaced by climate change. "I think this is a strong
deterioration," Nijsse recently said of a proposed paragraph about air
pollution.
The climate page keepers aren't all climate researchers like Nijsse, but
they have a strong grasp of science, and stay attuned to new
developments. "I've found that this particular set of editors as a whole
has been very well-informed, intelligent, careful to accurately
represent the science as disclosed in reliable sources, and mutually
respectful -- more so than with other random topics on Wikipedia," said
the anonymous editor, who has edited other pages...
- -
Human-created climate change isn't going away in our lifetimes. Those
who study the oceans know this all too well. The ocean, explained Josh
Willis, a NASA oceanographer, is the true keeper of climate change. Over
90 percent of the heat humans trap on Earth is soaked up by the seas.
It's inevitable that the oceans will continue absorbing heat as humans
turn up the atmospheric temperature dial this century. (Even if global
civilization, hypothetically, completely stopped burning oil, gas, and
coal right now, Earth wouldn't stop warming for at least decades).
The consequences are ever-warming waters that melt Earth's great ice
sheets, raise sea levels, acidify the water, intensify hurricanes, and
make habitats for many sea creatures unlivable.
"It's not going to stop anytime soon," said Willis, who has no
involvement with Wikipedia. "Our grandkids will still be watching the
oceans warm."
https://mashable.com/feature/climate-change-wikipedia/
- -
[Wikipedia Article]
*Climate change mitigation*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation
- -
[Wikipedia tab for the "talk" page]
*Talk:Climate change mitigation*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Climate_change_mitigation
[Serious]
*'Buddha would be green': Dalai Lama calls for urgent climate action*
Exclusive: The Dalai Lama warns of terrible consequences of climate
inaction...
- -
He says his greatest personal contribution to fighting climate change is
education and promoting the concept of compassion. The Dalai Lama is
most passionate when talking about his idea of oneness among 7 billion
people. "We see too much emphasis on my nation, my religion, their
religion. That really is causing all these problems due to different
religions and different nations are fighting. So now we really need
oneness." He even says he can now live as one with China, which he
claims is "the biggest Buddhist population now"...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/buddha-would-be-green-dalai-lama-calls-for-urgent-climate-action
[11-11-2020]
*The Energy 202: Biden's climate diplomacy has already begun*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/11/energy-202-biden-climate-diplomacy-has-already-begun/
[plan ahead]
*Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are
Still Moving There.*
Instead of moving away from areas in climate crisis, Americans are
flocking to them. As land in places like Phoenix, Houston and Miami
becomes less habitable, the country's migration patterns will be forced
to change...
- -
New data from the Rhodium Group, analyzed by ProPublica, shows that
climate damage will wreak havoc on the southern third of the country,
erasing more than 8% of its economic output and likely turning migration
from a choice to an imperative.
The data shows that the warming climate will alter everything from how
we grow food to where people can plausibly live. Ultimately, millions of
people will be displaced by flooding, fires and scorching heat, a
resorting of the map not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now as
then, the biggest question will be who escapes and who is left behind.
https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-make-parts-of-the-u-s-uninhabitable-americans-are-still-moving-there
[most assuredly]
*What Will Trump's Most Profound Legacy Be? Possibly Climate Damage*
President-elect Biden can restore many of the 100-plus environmental
regulations that President Trump rolled back, but much of the damage to
the climate cannot be reversed.
Economists see little evidence that Mr. Trump's rollbacks of
environmental protections bolstered the economy.
By Coral Davenport - Nov. 9, 2020
WASHINGTON -- President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will use the next four
years to try to restore the environmental policies that his predecessor
has methodically blown up, but the damage done by the greenhouse gas
pollution unleashed by President Trump's rollbacks may prove to be one
of the most profound legacies of his single term.
Most of Mr. Trump's environmental policies, which erased or loosened
nearly 100 rules and regulations on pollution in the air, water and
atmosphere, can be reversed, though not immediately. Pollutants like
industrial soot and chemicals can have lasting health effects,
especially in minority communities where they are often concentrated.
But air quality and water clarity can be restored once emissions are put
back under control.
That is not true for the global climate. Greenhouse pollution
accumulates in the atmosphere, so the heat-trapping gases emitted as a
result of loosened regulations will remain for decades, regardless of
changes in policy.
"Historically, there is always a pendulum to swing back and forth
between Democratic and Republican administrations on the environment,
and, theoretically, the environment can recover," said Jody Freeman, a
professor of environmental law at Harvard and a former adviser to the
Obama administration. "You can put rules back in place that clean up the
air and water. But climate change doesn't work like that."
Moreover, Mr. Trump's rollbacks of emissions policies have come at a
critical moment: Over the past four years, the global level of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere crossed a long-feared threshold of
atmospheric concentration. Now, many of the most damaging effects of
climate change, including rising sea levels, deadlier storms, and more
devastating heat, droughts and wildfires, are irreversible.
At home, Mr. Biden may find it more difficult than his former boss,
President Barack Obama, to use executive authority to create tough,
durable climate change rules because the six-justice conservative
majority on the Supreme Court is expected to look unfavorably on
policies that significantly expand federal agencies' authority to
regulate industry.
And abroad, the influence that the United States once had in climate
talks was almost certainly damaged by Mr. Trump's policy rollbacks and
withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Those actions slowed
down international efforts to reduce emissions and prompted other
governments to follow the American lead in weakening emissions rules,
though none have followed the United States out of the agreement.
All of that means that as Mr. Biden works to enact domestic climate
change rules and rejoin the Paris accord, emissions attributable to Mr.
Trump's actions will continue, tipping the planet further into a danger
zone that scientists say will be much harder to escape.
"Donald Trump has been to climate regulation as General Sherman was to
Atlanta," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate
Change Law at the Columbia Law School, referring to the Union general
who razed the city during the Civil War. "Hopefully it won't take as
long to rebuild."
- -
Scientists have long warned that if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
passed 400 parts per million, staving off a warming of 2 degrees Celsius
would become far more difficult. The Paris climate accord agreed to that
target because above it, the planet is likely locked into a fate of
rising sea levels, stronger storms, widespread droughts and heat waves,
and mass die-offs of coral reefs.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere first hit 400 parts per million
in 2016, the year Mr. Trump was elected. But the president put economic
growth above emissions targets, arguing that climate and other
environmental regulations were harming job creation.
Economists see little evidence that Mr. Trump's rollback of climate
change rules bolstered the economy. Jobs in the auto sector have been
declining since the beginning of 2019, and the trend continued despite
the rollback of rules aimed at vehicle pollution from greenhouse gases.
Domestic coal production last year dropped to its lowest level since
1978. In September, the French government actually blocked a $7 billion
contract to purchase American natural gas, arguing that gas produced
without controls on methane leaks was too harmful to the climate.
Meantime, in May, carbon dioxide levels reached 417 parts per million,
the highest level recorded in human history.
"Because global emissions in 2020 are so much higher than they were 10
or 20 or 30 years ago, that means that a year wasted in the Trump
administration on not acting on climate has much bigger consequences
than a year wasted in Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton's
administration," said Michael Wara, a climate and energy expert at
Stanford University.
Analysts say that the past four years represented a closing window in
which the world's largest polluting economies, working together, could
have charted a path toward slowing the rate of planet-warming emissions.
To do that, a scientific report in 2018 found that the world's economies
would need to reduce emissions 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 --
and the policies to do so should be implemented rapidly.
Instead, in the largest economy in the world, they began to fray.
- -
"We've lost very important time on climate change, which we can ill
afford," said Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a
nonpartisan energy and environment-focused research organization in
Washington. "There is severe damage. To ignore climate for four years,
you can't put a price on that. It's a huge issue that needs to be
confronted with long-term momentum and extreme dedication, and we have
lost that."
- -
A recent analysis by the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research
organization, found that if the five largest Trump climate control
rollbacks, including rules on carbon dioxide emissions from auto
tailpipes and power plants and methane leaks from oil and gas wells,
were to go forward, an additional 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse
gases would be in the atmosphere by 2035. That's more than the combined
energy emissions of Germany, Britain and Canada in one year.
Assuming Mr. Biden succeeds in re-implementing them, two years would
pass before those rules would be legally finalized, resulting in still
more emissions.
"If Biden puts the rules back in place, the emissions will be lower than
the number in our study, but it will still have a lasting effect," said
Hannah Pitt, a co-author of the study.
Speaking of Mr. Trump's rollback of Obama-era rules on auto-fuel
economy, which would have lowered tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide,
she said, "The four years of a Trump administration plus another one or
two years to get a rule in place -- cars purchased in that period will
be less efficient and burn more fossil fuels than they would have
otherwise. And those cars can stick around on the road for 10 or 12
years. And once those greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they trap
heat for decades."....
- -
Legal experts say that Mr. Trump's appointment of Justices Neil M.
Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett could prove to be a
significant part of Mr. Trump's climate legacy, particularly if Mr.
Biden is unable to persuade Congress to enact new climate change laws.
Then he would seek, as Mr. Obama did, to use the executive authority of
the Environmental Protection Agency to control greenhouse pollution.
"I think the new Supreme Court is going to make it much harder to
implement climate policy by regulation than it was four years ago," Mr.
Wara said. "It is not obvious that Biden will be able to just go back to
a more stringent version of the Obama regulations. It's just not that
easy when you have a court that looks with much greater suspicion at
agencies that exercise executive-branch authority."
Meantime, Mr. Trump's actions, domestically and internationally, helped
embolden the leaders of some other major economies to weaken their
emissions standards.
- -
"There has been a domino effect," said Laurence Tubiana, who served as
France's chief climate ambassador during the 2015 Paris negotiations.
"As Trump has destroyed U.S. climate policy over the past four years, he
has caused some other countries to do the same."
Ms. Tubiana pointed specifically to the president of Brazil, Jair
Bolsonaro, who has styled himself after Mr. Trump on climate issues,
calling the movement to reduce global warming a plot by "Marxists" to
stifle economic growth, and to the prime minister of Australia, Scott
Morrison, who, like Mr. Trump, has dismissed the link between climate
change and wildfires while promoting the use of coal.
Still, Ms. Tubiana noted that other major economies have moved forward
on announcing their plans to reduce emissions, with or without the
United States. China, the world's largest carbon dioxide polluter,
recently pledged to eliminate its emissions by 2060. Japan pledged to do
the same by 2050.
And, Ms. Tubiana said, a climate-friendly Biden administration will be
welcomed back into the global community.
"The entire world is waiting for the U.S. to come back on climate," she
said. "There will be immense relief when it does."
But Ms. Tubiana and others said it was hard to see how the United States
could step back into the climate leadership role it held when Mr. Obama
helped forge the Paris Agreement.
"The United States will no longer be seen as the single, individual
leader," she said, but rather will have to work within "a competitive
partnership with the E.U. and China. But that may not be a bad thing."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/climate/trump-legacy-climate-change.html
[A 3 minute video]
*How the Climate Crisis Will Force A Massive American Migration*
video https://youtu.be/pWu_-duWSh8
ProPublica
The climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in
the United States. Extreme heat, massive floods and more fires may force
millions of people to move -- and millions may be left behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWu_-duWSh8&feature=emb_logo
- -
THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION
*Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are
Still Moving There.*
Instead of moving away from areas in climate crisis, Americans are
flocking to them. As land in places like Phoenix, Houston and Miami
becomes less habitable, the country's migration patterns will be forced
to change.
by Lucas Waldron and Abrahm Lustgarten Nov. 10, 2020
Over the past year, the advent of a professional economy powered by
people working from home has quickened the conversation about where to
live, particularly among millennials. "Is now the right time to buy
property in Minnesota?" "Is Buffalo the new place to be?"
How important is proximity to fresh water? Should you risk moving
somewhere that has fire seasons? How far north do you have to go to find
liveable summers?
Americans have defied the norms of climate migration seen elsewhere in
the world, flocking to cities like Phoenix, Houston and Miami that face
some of the greatest risks from soaring temperatures and rising sea levels.
Those patterns seem likely to change.
New data from the Rhodium Group, analyzed by ProPublica, shows that
climate damage will wreak havoc on the southern third of the country,
erasing more than 8% of its economic output and likely turning migration
from a choice to an imperative.
The data shows that the warming climate will alter everything from how
we grow food to where people can plausibly live. Ultimately, millions of
people will be displaced by flooding, fires and scorching heat, a
resorting of the map not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now as
then, the biggest question will be who escapes and who is left behind.
https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-make-parts-of-the-u-s-uninhabitable-americans-are-still-moving-there
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 12, 2012*
November 12, 2012: Powerful conservative activist Grover Norquist is
quoted in the National Journal as saying that a federal revenue-neutral
carbon tax would not violate the Republican Party's "no new taxes"
position. After being viciously criticized by representatives from Koch
Industries, Norquist abruptly flip-flops.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/13/1182511/grover-norquist-abruptly-reverses-position-on-carbon-tax-after-facing-criticism-from-koch-backed-group/
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