[TheClimate.Vote] November 14, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sat Nov 14 12:13:06 EST 2020

/*November 14, 2020*/

[continuing assault]
*White House taps second controversial scientist to steer major U.S. 
climate change report*
NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue joins climate skeptic David Legates
By  Andrew Freedman, Juliet Eilperin and  Jason Samenow
November 13, 2020
A second Trump political appointee who questions the seriousness of 
global warming has been assigned a key role in the program that oversees 
the federal government's definitive report on climate change.

Ryan Maue, the newly installed chief scientist at the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been detailed to the White 
House where he will have an oversight role at the U.S. Global Change 
Research Program, which carries out the climate report.

Maue's move was confirmed by two NOAA officials who spoke on the 
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on 
personnel matters.

Maue joins climate skeptic David Legates, a meteorologist who claims 
that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants and that 
global warming is harmless. Earlier this week, Legates was moved from 
NOAA to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as 
executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 
overseeing 13 federal agencies that study global warming.
The two men will oversee the program to run the congressionally mandated 
National Climate Assessment, a report that is issued every five years. 
Last week, the White House abruptly removed the career climate scientist 
who ran the climate assessment for the past five years, Michael Kuperberg.

Both Legates and Maue joined NOAA in September. Each is keeping his NOAA 
title while working on the climate report. According to one of the NOAA 
officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, it is generally 
understood that Legates and Maue will help select authors for the next 
edition of the National Climate Assessment, which examines climate 
change damage and includes projections for the United States, down to 
regional and local levels.

The report provides information to those navigating the rapidly changing 
climate, from city officials seeking to build new sewage treatment 
plants to farmers gauging how shifting rains could affect which crops to 
plant...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/13/national-climate-assessment-ryan-maue-noaa/

[Two researchers say]
*'We packed long underwear and never wore it': Arctic scientists shocked 
at warming*
Couple finds areas that once required ice-breaking ship have become open 
water

Emily Holden in Washington
Fri 13 Nov 2020
When the Arctic researchers Jacqueline Grebmeier and Lee Cooper made 
their annual scientific pilgrimage to frigid seas off Alaska last month, 
what they found was startling.

Areas that were previously accessible at that time of the year only with 
an ice-breaking ship had become open, wavy water.

"We packed our long underwear, and we never put it on," Cooper said...
- -
Cooper said the changes were particularly sad for indigenous communities 
that have been in Alaska for thousands of years and are now coping with 
unstable sea ice and trying to hunt animals that are moving.

"Not in our lifetimes is it going back to the way it was when we first 
started out working in Alaska in the late 1980s," Cooper said.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/13/arctic-melting-climate-change

[saint, hero]
*'I Am Greta' Review: Birth of a Climate Warrior*
Nathan Grossman alternates truth-to-power moments with quiet ones in his 
documentary about the young Greta Thunberg.

_I Am Greta_ Directed by Nathan Grossman Documentary, Biography 1h 37m
https://www.imdb.com/showtimes/title/tt10394738?ref_=ref_ext_NYT

In September 2019 at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, Greta 
Thunberg made headlines by condemning world leaders for abandoning 
today's children to the ravages of climate change. "How dare you?" she 
asked, her voice shaking with anger. Truth-to-power moments like this 
alternate with quiet ones in "I Am Greta," a documentary about 
Thunberg's meteoric rise that suggests a new kind of hero.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/movies/i-am-greta-review.html

[information battleground commentary with Renee DiResta]
*Disinformation Expert Renee DiResta: We Have No Common Sense of Facts | 
Amanpour and Company*
Nov 13, 2020
Amanpour and Company
Conspiracy theories and misinformation about coronavirus and the recent 
election are spreading like wildfire online. These are the sort of 
phenomena Renee DiResta has been studying for years. She is a 
disinformation expert and technical research manager at the Stanford 
Internet Observatory, and she speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about what 
can happen when false narratives go viral, and what can be done to break 
the cycle.
Originally aired on November 13, 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGe7cbC7dN0

[important thinking]
JASON HICKEL
*A RESPONSE TO POLLIN AND CHOMSKY: WE NEED A GREEN NEW DEAL WITHOUT GROWTH*
November 2, 2020...
- -
We need to reject the ideology that conflates growth with progress and 
well-being.  Growth is ultimately a kind of propaganda term; it takes 
processes of extraction, commodification and elite accumulation, which 
are quite often destructive to human communities and to ecology, and 
sells them as natural, good and common-sense (who could possibly be 
against growth?).  The language of growth is the bedrock of capitalism's 
cultural hegemony.

We must reject this trick.  We cannot let ourselves be dragged into 
framing our aspirations for a better world in the language of growth, 
for it immediately traps us within the logic of capital; and on that 
terrain we will lose. We need to be smarter than that.  We need to call 
for a different kind of economy altogether: one that is organized around 
the interests of human well-being and ecology, rather than around the 
interests of capital.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/10/19/we-need-a-green-new-deal-without-growth

[Predictions - audio reading and text in The Atlantic ]
*The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse*
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise 
and fall of societies. He has bad news.
DECEMBER 2020...
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it 
has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders 
endorsing violence, homicides surging--to a normal American, these are 
apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which 
incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. 
("Not all of human history," he corrected me once. "Just the last 10,000 
years.") He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and 
political trends portend an "age of discord," civil unrest and carnage 
worse than most Americans have experienced...
- -
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: 
a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining 
living standards among the general population; and a government that 
can't cover its financial positions. His models, which track these 
factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to 
explain in a nontechnical publication. But they've succeeded in 
impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him 
comparisons to other authors of "megahistories," such as Jared Diamond 
and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had 
once found Turchin's historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made 
him a believer: "At this point," Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, 
"I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him."...
more at - 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/ 

- -

[Video lecture by Peter Turchin]
*This View of History: A Conversation With Peter Turchin*
Jul 10, 2018
The Evolution Institute
This webinar features evolutionary anthropologist and author Peter 
Turchin discussing his new book "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War 
Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hTYBDjeUUU

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 14, 2012 *
At a post-election press conference, President Obama declares:

    "I think the American people right now have been so focused, and
    will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that
    if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth
    simply to address climate change, I don't think anybody is going to
    go for that.  I won't go for that. If, on the other hand, we can
    shape an agenda that says we can create jobs, advance growth, and
    make a serious dent in climate change and be an international
    leader, I think that's something that the American people would
    support."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlF6ikIbjGU

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