[TheClimate.Vote] November 29, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 29, 2020*/

[looking up]
*Biden's Appointment of John Kerry as Climate Envoy Sends a 'Signal to 
the World,' Advocates Say*
The former senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate helped 
forge the Paris climate accord and now is expected to usher the U.S. 
back into the pact...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23112020/biden-kerry-climate-envoy-cabinet-picks-paris-agreement

- -

[more]
*As Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry Will Be No Stranger to 
International Climate Negotiations*
The Kigali Amendment is a little-known climate accord meant to phase out 
the use of super-polluting hydroflourocarbons. Kerry helped make it happen.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24112020/Kerry-Kigali-Amendment-Biden-special-envoy-climate



[not surprising]
*'Republicans Remain Opposed to Any Policies That Would Reduce 
Fossil-Fuel Use'
*By Jonathan Chait
- -
For more than a decade, the GOP has stood alone among major 
right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies worldwide in its 
refusal to endorse climate science. But during the Trump era, the 
party's rhetorical emphasis shifted. The major Republican point of 
agreement is now to insist on fossil-fuel use as an inherent good...
- -
But what kind of innovation do Republicans want? Halfway through the 
Examiner story, we arrive at the bottom line: "Republicans remain 
opposed to any policies that would reduce fossil-fuel use."

Well, then, that would rule out any policy. Innovation in this case 
actually means keeping all the incumbent energy technologies in place 
permanently. In other words, their actual priority is the opposite of 
innovation...
- -
Republicans can backfill any rationale they want. Their bottom-line 
position will be an opposition to any measures that reduce 
greenhouse-gas emissions. Every factor bearing on their energy position 
will push in the same direction: the politics of propping up jobs and 
profits in the fossil-fuel sector; the ideology of opposing new taxes, 
spending, or regulation to push for decarbonization; and the partisan 
imperative of demonizing any agenda Joe Biden settles on.

A conservative party capable of participating constructively in a 
democratic system might be able to work out some bargain on climate 
policy. The Republican party Biden will face is going to hysterically 
oppose anything he comes up with.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/republicans-climate-change-biden-science-greenhouse-gas.html



[Top 5]
*Newsom's Top Five Candidates for Kamala Harris's Senate Seat All Have 
Climate in Their Bios*
The list includes California's attorney general and secretary of state, 
two congresswomen and the mayor of Long Beach.

    *1. Xavier Becerra, 62, *California Attorney General, served 12
    terms (1993-2017) in Congress representing downtown Los Angeles,
    before accepting former Gov. Jerry Brown's offer to fill Harris's
    state Attorney General position in Jan. 2017, when she joined the
    Senate. As attorney general, Becerra has been a ferocious attack dog
    against President Donald Trump, suing the administration 105 times,
    with more than half the suits challenging its rollbacks of
    environmental rules and enforcement. His office has won 60 suits,
    with many still pending. In 2018, Becerra's office launched an
    environmental justice division with four attorneys devoted to
    challenging the federal government's rollbacks of environmental
    protections, reducing environmental toxins and prosecuting
    industries polluting the air, water and land in vulnerable
    communities. As the son of Mexican immigrants in a state where
    Latinos make up about 40 percent of the population, Becerra's
    appointment would boost Newsom's standing with a major constituency,
    but he is on another short list: President-elect Joe Biden's list
    for U.S. attorney general.

    *2. Alex Padilla, 47,* California Secretary of State, has a long
    political resume. He started as an intern for Sen. Dianne Feinstein
    and became the youngest president of the Los Angeles City Council at
    age 26. Before winning his election to be secretary of state in
    2014, Padilla served as a state senator for two terms. He earned a
    degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
    Technology, a leading climate research institution, and heavily
    promoted a ballot measure in 2015 to ban plastic bags to curb
    pollution and climate change. He is close to Newsom personally and
    politically, and political wisdom has it he would be a motivated
    ally and partner as Newsom tries to push bold climate policies
    before his 2022 re-election.
    *
    **3. Karen Bass, 67*, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is
    starting her sixth term in the House of Representatives, where she
    chairs the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human
    Rights and International Organizations. She spent six years in the
    California Assembly, the last two as speaker. Her fights for social
    and environmental justice go back to her days as a community
    organizer in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Her claim to fame in Congress
    is her leadership on police reform measures.  but she lists climate
    change as one of her major issues and has been a consistent vote
    against Trump's environmental rollbacks. In 2018, after the United
    Nations issued a dire warning about the global climate crisis, Bass
    issued a petition calling on the Trump Administration to commit to
    reducing carbon emissions and incentivizing the use of clean energy,
    a symbolic gesture given the Trump administration climate denials
    and push for fossil fuel development. Biden is considering her for
    several positions in his incoming administration.

    *4. Barbara Lee, 74*, vice-chair and founding member of the LGBT
    Caucus, has served in Congress since 1998 (and in the state assembly
    for six years, from 1990 to 1996). Her history in Washington goes
    back to 1975, when she joined the office of Rep. Ron Dellums, where
    she rose from intern to become his chief of staff. She gained fame
    after the 9/11 attacks for being the only member of Congress to vote
    against the Iraq War and has been a leader in anti-war legislation.
    In 2018, she introduced the Women and Climate Change Act, which aims
    to create a Federal Interagency Working Group on Women and Climate
    Change. The bill, she said in a statement, was prompted by the
    reality that "as climate change worsens, provoking historic
    droughts, rising sea levels and violent storms, women and girls will
    bear the brunt of this global crisis." Lee is also being considered
    for a Biden administration post.

    *5. Robert Garcia, 42*, mayor of Long Beach, would seem like an
    outlier. A Peruvian-American whose family emigrated to California
    when he was five, Garcia, who holds a doctorate in education from
    California State University at Long Beach, is the only mayor on the
    short list. But he has become a prominent voice on several issues,
    most notably the coronavirus, and, especially, the environment. In
    2015, during his inaugural address, Garcia declared his intention to
    make Long Beach a national climate leader. He commissioned an
    assessment of the city's vulnerability and potential responses from
    the Aquarium of the Pacific, a trusted source for scientific
    information in the greater Los Angeles area. The responses have
    included a citizen's guide to building a climate resilient Long
    Beach, published in 2017, workshops for different communities to
    discuss climate hazards and possible solutions, programs for Cal
    State, Long Beach students to engage communities vulnerable to sea
    rise and coastal flooding, a lecture series and other actions.
    Garcia may not be known outside of southern California, but voters
    given brief bios of prospective Senate appointments for the USC
    Schwarzenegger California Issues Poll chose Garcia above all other
    short-listers, followed by Bass, Padilla and Lee. And although
    voters also said they were not interested in having a "historic
    first" in the Senate, Garcia would be California's first openly gay
    senator as well as its first Latino.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20112020/gavin-newsom-kamala-harris-senate-seat



[sharp, focused commentary on auto adjusting color]
*Photography Has Gotten Climate Change Wrong from the Start*
Smoggy-looking daguerreotypes in 19th-century London foreshadowed 
today's muted smartphone photos of California fires.
NOVEMBER 27, 2020
Kim Beil - Associate director of ITALIC program at Stanford University

I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. On September 9, the sky 
was still dark at 7:15 a.m. Eventually it revealed a deep-orange light, 
darker and dustier than any sunset. After a dry lightning storm in late 
August had sparked more than 900 fires around California, high-altitude 
smoke hung over the San Francisco Bay Area. I took a photo out the 
window with my iPhone. It wasn't right. I tried again, tapping the 
screen and dragging the exposure slider down. Still, the tawny orange of 
the sky didn't register.

The iPhone rendered it a pale yellow, the foreboding automatically 
corrected by the camera's built-in software. Manually fiddling with the 
controls, I darkened a few images and increased the warmth. Then I 
watched as my Instagram and Twitter feeds filled up with nearly 
identical views from all around the Bay Area, many accompanied by 
captions describing the difficulty of taking the picture. No software 
engineer had predicted this apocalyptic scenography--created by an 
unusually active fire season that kept consuming forests deep into 
November. So phone cameras had busily corrected the unnatural view, 
making it seem more like a pretty picture rather than what it was: a 
terrifying and true example of the effects of human-generated climate 
change.
News articles portrayed smartphone photographers' dilemma as something 
of a novelty. The San Francisco Chronicle quickly published an explainer 
online: "Why your phone camera can't capture Northern California's 
orange sky." Yet anthropogenic forces reshaping the environment have 
flummoxed photographers before. Many improvements in photographic 
technology aim to enhance what we see, offering up the world as we 
imagine it or want it to be. Sometimes we struggle to understand the 
gulf between the representation and the gross reality before our eyes. 
Sometimes photos help us understand a changing climate; sometimes they 
obscure it.

In the mid-19th century, England's infamous industrial smog was blamed 
for the poor quality of early photographs made there. Daguerreotypes, 
the first publicly available photographic process, can possess 
exceptional detail and luminosity, but critics at the time found English 
daguerreotypes dark and ill-defined. At the first World's Fair, held at 
London's Crystal Palace in 1851, American photographers won three of the 
five medals awarded to daguerreotypes. One correspondent from the United 
States wrote of the exhibition: "The excellence of American pictures is 
evident, which is to be accounted for by several reasons. In the first 
place, American skies are freer from fog and clouds--from bituminous 
coal not being much used, the atmosphere of our cities is free from smoke."

The smoke and industrial "fog" of London (the catchall term used for fog 
and smog in the 19th century) appeared frequently in descriptions of the 
city. Charles Dickens wrote in Bleak House of the "smoke lowering down 
from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in 
it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might 
imagine, for the death of the sun." Oscar Wilde cited "the yellow fog" 
in his poem "Impressions du Matin."

Despite the foul-smelling evil gloom of the fog, Claude Monet relished 
its effect on the light. He wrote in a letter: "I can't begin to 
describe a day as wonderful as this. One marvel after another, each 
lasting less than five minutes, it was enough to drive one mad. No 
country could be more extraordinary for a painter."

Critics of English daguerreotypes blamed the smoggy skies for shadowy 
pictures, even those made indoors, such as portraits. However, American 
photographers who set up shop in London didn't have the same problem. 
John Jabez Edwin Mayall, a successful Philadelphia photographer, 
relocated his studio to London in 1846, where he became known for the 
quality of his large-scale portraits. One photographic journalist wrote 
in 1853: "Mayall is known as the 'American Daguerreotypist,' and is 
considered about the best in London. His specimens are certainly proof 
that the fogs of London are not the cause of Daguerreotypists failing in 
procuring clear pictures; for many of his are equal to the best ever taken."

... Daguerreotypes also looked uncannily like the dark clouds witnessed 
in London. Only a dozen years after the first public announcement of 
photography, people already believed that the medium should represent 
the world as they saw it.

This summer and fall, amateur photographers in California looked for 
technological tips to make their smartphone photos more accurately 
represent the smoke-obscured skies. Smartphones and other consumer-grade 
cameras offer a series of preset color temperatures: deep shade, open 
shade, bright sun, and fluorescent and tungsten lighting. Will your next 
phone include a setting for "wildfire sky" as it becomes a new reality, 
at least in the western United States? Seven of California's 10 largest 
fires in recorded history have occurred within the past three years, 
five of them since August of this year.

In the 19th century, critics were so alert to the presence of air 
pollution that they erroneously thought it was affecting their 
photographs. But today, our cameras seem to deny that such anthropogenic 
weather even exists. A simple software fix could rectify that. Alongside 
all the other white-balance icons--pictures of the sun, a building in 
shade, and a lightbulb--wildfire sky could be represented by the burning 
of fossil fuels: smokestacks, airplanes, exhaust pipes, just so there's 
no mistaking this tragic sight for an extraordinary one, as Monet did.

A smartphone camera is an aide-memoire. Not only do we use it to record 
major events and milestones, but we snap thousands of pictures of What's 
for dinner?, There's my dog, Here are my feet, and reminders, such as 
Buy this brand of shampoo for me, please. Several months from now, when 
California is green and gorgeous again, the dusty-orange photos from 
this fall will show up in residents' otherwise banal photo libraries.
In contrast, disappearance was almost a natural part of the 19th-century 
photograph's life cycle, so we have few surviving examples of bad 
British daguerreotypes, which looked so smoggy to critics. These 
historic pictures may have vanished because of poor chemical fixing, or 
perhaps they were discarded because they just weren't good enough to 
keep. In the 21st century, our trillions of photographs--good and bad, 
true and false representations--just might outlast us all.

Adding a wildfire-sky white-balance setting may feel too much like 
giving up, like accepting our fate. But these devastating weather events 
will most certainly continue. Climate-related catastrophes will also 
worsen, unless we accept responsibility for them and change behavior on 
a global scale. For that, we need to remember their terrible impact on 
our daily lives; we need to see the orange glow casting a pall over all 
the other memories in its midst.

KIM BEIL is the associate director of ITALIC, an interdisciplinary arts 
program at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A 
History of Popular Photography.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/photography-has-never-known-how-handle-climate-change/617224/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 29, 2015 *
The New York Times reports:

    "After two decades of talks that failed to slow the relentless pace
    of global warming, negotiators from almost 200 countries are widely
    expected to sign a deal in the next two weeks to take concrete steps
    to cut emissions.

    "The prospect of progress, any progress, has elicited cheers in many
    quarters. The pledges that have already been announced 'represent a
    clear and determined down payment on a new era of climate ambition
    from the global community of nations,' said Christiana Figueres,
    executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on
    Climate Change, in a statement a month ago.

    "Yet the negotiators gathering in Paris will not be discussing any
    plan that comes close to meeting their own stated goal of limiting
    the increase of global temperatures to a reasonably safe level.

    "They have pointedly declined to take up a recommendation from
    scientists, made several years ago, that they set a cap on total
    greenhouse gases as a way to achieve that goal, and then figure out
    how to allocate the emissions fairly. The pledges countries are
    making are voluntary, and were established in most nations as a
    compromise between the desire to be ambitious and the perceived cost
    and political difficulty of emissions cutbacks.

    "In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that
    collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal, much like a
    patient who, upon hearing from his doctor that he must lose 50
    pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, takes pride in
    cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.

    "The scientists argue that there is only so much carbon -- in the
    form of exhaust from coal-burning power plants, automobile
    tailpipes, forest fires and the like -- that the atmosphere can
    absorb before the planet suffers profound damage, with swaths of it
    potentially becoming uninhabitable."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/science/earth/paris-climate-talks-avoid-scientists-goal-of-carbon-budget.html?_r=0

In a New York Times op-ed, Curt Stager observes:

    "A switch from finite fossil energy to cleaner, renewable energy
    sources is inevitable: We are only deciding how and when to do it.
    That is what world leaders and policy makers will be grappling with
    at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change that begins
    Monday in Paris. Much of the environmental harm that we have already
    done was unintentional, but now that science has exposed our role in
    it a new moral dimension has been added to our actions. Pope
    Francis' recent encyclical on the environment makes it clear that to
    continue taking a profligate carbon path is to sin against future
    generations and our own human dignity."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/opinion/sunday/tales-of-a-warmer-planet.html?ref=opinion


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