[TheClimate.Vote] October 3, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Oct 3 08:56:10 EDT 2020
/*October 3, 2020*/
[future closer to now]
*Americans are becoming climate migrants before our eyes*
While the US closes the doors on climate migrants from abroad, it must
acknowledge that the problem has already come home
Alex Domash - 2 Oct 2020
In November 2018, I traveled with a caravan of thousands of Central
American migrants as they marched across Mexico towards the US border.
While some were seeking refuge in the US from gang violence or political
persecution, many others were looking to escape something much more
subtle: climate change. The Trump administration decried these climate
migrants as "invaders" and attempted to build a wall to keep them out.
But today, as much of the western US burns, and the country looks on in
horror as San Francisco suffocates in an orange cloud of ash, we see
that the US way of life is also gravely threatened by climate change.
More than 8,100 wildfires have burned over 3.9m acres in California this
year. The fires have killed 30 people, destroyed more than 7,500
structures, and displaced thousands in the state. Meanwhile in Oregon,
half a million people were put under an evacuation order.
The message from the visceral scenes unfolding in the western US is
clear: climate displacement isn't something that happens only outside of
our borders. It has already begun in the US, and we can no longer turn
our backs on the more than 20 million climate migrants worldwide.
- -
But the American dream of tomorrow is also under great stress. The
climate displacement of the Dust Bowl era is already here - and has been
here for many, many years.
In Louisiana, the coast has been losing at least a football field's
worth of land every 100 minutes, which has prompted thousands of coastal
Louisianans to migrate from the state. The Urban Institute estimated
that in 2018 more than 1.2 million Americans left their homes for
climate-related reasons. One 2018 study, published in the Journal of the
Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, predicts that one
in 12 Americans in the southern half of the country will relocate over
the next 45 years due to slow-onset climate influences alone. While
mega-disasters like the wildfires in the western US capture our
attention, slow-onset disasters such as sea-level rise or annual
flooding are even more likely to cause permanent displacement...
- -
When the Dust Bowl ravaged the United States in the 1930s, a mass exodus
of 2.5 million midwestern farmers migrated towards California. These
climate migrants, just like the ones today, were derided as "aliens" and
"undesirables". The state of Colorado even deployed its militia for 10
days to stop the migrants from entering. Ultimately, this act was deemed
unconstitutional, as it was declared that "the citizens of each state
shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the
several states".
The US response to climate displacement today must recognize a similar
collective responsibility towards all those affected by climate change.
Many of today's climate migrants are, after all, American.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/climate-change-migration-us-wildfires
[follow the money]
*San Francisco rents plunge, showing strain from pandemic and wildfires*
OCT 1 2020
- Rent prices continued to plunge in big U.S. cities last month, with
San Francisco leading the decline, according to data from Zumper, a
real-estate start-up.
- In September, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San
Francisco dropped more than 20% from a year ago, to $2,830.
- That's the largest decline the company has recorded.
Houses in the city are still selling, CNBC reported Sunday. They're just
on the market for longer periods of time, and not receiving as many bids
as they did in recent years. The city reached its highest number of home
listings in August, at 1,483, and price cuts have become more common.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/01/san-francisco-one-bedroom-rent-dropped-20percent-from-sept-2019-to-2020.html
[California lightning]
*What Made This a Record Fire Season? It Started With Lightning*
By Tim Arango and Mike Baker - Oct. 2, 2020
An unusual confluence of weather conditions sent nearly 14,000 bolts of
lightning into the dry, hot forests of Northern California in August.
But that was only the beginning...
- -
Officials in Oregon and Washington State have provided more detailed
data than California on the causes of wildfires this year. In Oregon,
there have been 614 human-caused fires and 600 that were caused by
nature. Washington has reported 765 human-caused fires and 69 caused by
nature.
Arson is rarely the cause of a large wildfire, officials say. Often,
arsonists are quickly caught and their fires extinguished before growing
out of control. In Oregon this year, authorities reported several fires
being deliberately set, many of them quickly put out...
- -
Mark Wallace, a former state fire marshal in Oregon, said arson
wildfires, when stacked up against other causes -- lightning, unattended
campfires, fireworks and other things -- tend to make up only a sliver
of cases in most years.
"In the whole scope of things," he said, "that's pretty rare."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/02/us/fire-california-oregon-start.html
[internationally]
*Wildfires tear through drought-racked Paraguay amid record heat*
Country faces more than 5,000 fires, with yellow smoke reaching the
capital as neighbouring Brazil and Argentina face blazes
William Costa in Asuncion - 2 Oct 2020
Devastating wildfires have broken out across across Paraguay, as drought
and record high temperatures continue to exacerbate blazes across South
America.
A total of 5,231 individual wildfires broke out across the country on 1
October - up 3,000 on the previous day. Most of were concentrated in the
arid Chaco region in the west of the country, but thick yellow smoke had
reached as far as the capital, Asunción.
Paraguay's outbreak came as the southern hemisphere heads into summer
and neighbouring countries also face unprecedented wildfires. The
Brazilian Amazon is recording its worst blazes in a decade, with numbers
up 61% on the widely reported fires of last year, and separate fires in
the southern Pantanal region.
- -
Late on Thursday, Paraguay's Congress approved Bills to declare a state
of national emergency and to transfer more resources to the fire
service. The decision came shortly after the government said it was
overwhelmed by the situation and would request international assistance
from Chile and Brazil...
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/02/paraguay-wildfires-drought-heat
[Prof Michael Mann says "Results in 3 years"]
*A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says top
scientist*
'Our destiny is determined by our behavior'
Fortunately, there is encouraging news about climate science as well. It
was long thought that Earth's climate system carried a substantial lag
effect, mainly because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere,
trapping heat, for many decades after being emitted. Even if all CO2
emissions were halted overnight, global temperatures would keep rising
and heatwaves, droughts, storms and other impacts would keep
intensifying "for about 25 to 30 years", Sir David King, the former
chief science advisor to the British government, said in 2006.
Mann says research over the last decade has overturned this interpretation.
Using new, more elaborate computer models equipped with an interactive
carbon cycle, "what we now understand is that if you stop emitting
carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly,"
Mann says. Such ocean storage of CO2 "mostly" offsets the warming effect
of the CO2 that still remains in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual lag
between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to
30 years, he explains, but "more like three to five years".
This is "a dramatic change in our understanding" of the climate system
that gives humans "more agency", says Mann. Rather than being locked
into decades of inexorably rising temperatures, humans can turn down the
heat almost immediately by slashing emissions promptly. "Our destiny is
determined by our behavior," says Mann, a fact he finds "empowering".
This reprieve will not necessarily spare polar ice sheets or evade
tipping points that cannot be recrossed, the scientist cautions, and
Earth is already experiencing "much more extreme weather … than we
expected 10 years ago". Greenland and Arctic ice is already melting
after the current temperature rise of 1C, or 2.7F, above preindustrial
levels, and it will continue melting even without further warming. The
resulting possibility of "massive sea level rise" is one example of why
Mann says that humanity is "walking out on to a minefield" of tipping
points: "The more we warm the planet, the more of those unwelcome
surprises we might encounter."
In the face of this urgency, Mann broadly supports implementing a Green
New Deal. This he defines as a vast government effort that deploys both
regulations - for example, no more coal plants - and market mechanisms
like carbon pricing to transition away from fossil fuels as rapidly as
possible. In the coming weeks, he adds, there is no more important way
for US citizens to exercise agency than to vote - vote for candidates
who support such a transition, such as Joe Biden, and against Donald
Trump and other Republicans who obstruct it.
"The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens," he
says. "It's up to us. The way we end this national and global nightmare
is by coming out and voting for optimism over pessimism, for hope and
justice and progress over fear and malice and superstition. This is a
Tolkienesque battle between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be
defeated on election day here in the United States."
Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the
environment correspondent for the Nation, has covered climate change
since 1990 for leading outlets around the world and in books including
Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/02/donald-trump-climate-change-michael-mann-interview
[new batch of law students take charge]
*Introducing ls4ca.org*
The world is on fire, and the legal industry bears some of the blame.
With forests ablaze, hurricanes crashing ashore, entire island nations
and a third of the animal world facing imminent extinction, and the
skies periodically turning blood-red, the climate crisis has taken on a
new and frightening urgency. Yet, in the face of this unprecedented
catastrophe, many individuals and organizations have seen an opportunity
to make a little extra money. The names of many of these actors are
well-known: Exxon, BP, Peabody Energy, the Koch Brothers. But others
might be more surprising: Paul Weiss, Hogan Lovells, Allen & Overy,
Latham & Watkins, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Indeed, of the Vault Law
100 Firms--a national ranking of the hundred most influential law
firms--a majority are actively profiting from the climate crisis.
If you find this hard to believe, you are not alone. The legal
industry's culpability in perpetuating the climate crisis is not
well-known. No one has systematically studied the environmentally
destructive clients that law firms take on, the transactional work these
firms undertake on behalf of polluters, or the lobbying that these firms
do for companies like Chevron and Shell. Until now...
more at - https://www.ls4ca.org/blog/introducing-ls4caorg
- -
[following the money]
*Top Law Firms Called Out for Serving Fossil Fuel Industry Clients in
New Climate 'Scorecard'*
By Dana Drugmand - October 1, 2020
With lawsuits against major fossil fuel producers over climate damages
on the rise, a new report and initiative examines how prestigious law
firms are enabling climate breakdown. The student-led initiative, Law
Students for Climate Accountability, calls for holding the legal
industry accountable for profiting from work defending and lobbying for
fossil fuel clients as the world faces what scientists say is a climate
emergency. This campaign is emerging as industries ranging from finance
to insurance are facing greater scrutiny in a rapidly warming world.
"Law firms write the contracts for fossil fuel projects, lobby to weaken
environmental regulations, and help fossil fuel companies evade
accountability in court. Our research is the first to expose the broad
extent of firms' role in driving the climate crisis," Alisa White, a
student at Yale Law School and a lead author on the report, said in a
press release.
The 2020 Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard, as the report is titled,
looks at the top 100 most prestigious law firms in the U.S. (known as
the Vault 100) and grades them according to their work in service of the
fossil fuel industry. According to the analysis, the top 100 firms
"worked on ten times as many cases exacerbating climate change as cases
addressing climate change; were the legal advisors on five times more
transactional work for the fossil fuel industry than the renewable
energy industry;" and "lobbied five times more for fossil fuel companies
than renewable energy companies."
Overall, per this scorecard, only four firms received an "A" grade while
41 firms scored a "D," and 26 received an "F."...
- -
"The fossil fuel industry does everything it can to avoid responsibility
for the massive damage it's done to our planet," Sen. Whitehouse said in
the press release. "One of the strongest weapons in that fight is
litigation carried out by some of the most established law firms in the
legal world. It's past time these firms reconsidered how they represent
one of the most destructive industries in history, and there's no reason
law students should not consider this representation in deciding how to
direct their careers. I applaud this important effort."
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/10/01/law-students-climate-accountability-scorecard-fossil-fuels
- -
[Search for a law firm]
*Top law firms conduct 5 to 10 times more work to exacerbate climate
change than mitigate it.*
https://www.ls4ca.org/climate-change-scorecard
[NYTimes does amazing opinion reportage]
*THE AMAZON HAS SEEN OUR **FUTURE*
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/02/opinion/amazon-rainforest-future.html
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 3, 1970 *
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is established.
https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies/national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration
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