[TheClimate.Vote] October 28, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*October 28, 2020*/

[Biden makes ~5 min video]
*Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice | Joe 
Biden for President*
Jun 4, 2019
Joe Biden
 From coastal towns to rural farms to urban centers, climate change 
poses an existential threat – not just to our environment, but to our 
health, our communities, our national security, and our economic 
well-being. Vice President Biden knows there is no greater challenge 
facing our country and our world. Today, he is outlining a bold plan – a 
Clean Energy Revolution – to address this grave threat and lead the 
world in addressing the climate emergency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku7uZ0Gok2g&feature=emb_logo

- -

[Opinion clips from Dave Roberts]
*The absurd controversy over Joe Biden's "transition away from the oil 
industry"*
Trump wants to make the shift to clean energy sound abrupt and scary.
By David Roberts - Oct 27, 2020...
- -
Americans want reform as long as it doesn't negatively affect them
Social science suggests that most people, even most politically active 
people, don't have particularly well-considered or coherent views on 
public policy issues. They vote based on identities and social 
affinities. Their opinions on issues are easily swayed by elite cues or 
the phrasing of poll questions...
- -
This is why there's an unending argument over whether America is or 
isn't a "center-right nation" -- it depends on how you ask America. More 
or less everyone wants to improve the collective welfare, but not at 
their own expense. Depending on how they are phrased, these kinds of 
questions don't so much uncover preexisting opinions as they guide and 
shape opinion formation. Trigger thoughts of things getting better, 
you'll get good poll results; trigger thoughts of sacrifice, privation, 
or unfair burdens, you'll get bad poll results.

Democratic politics isn't much different. Reformers pushing for change 
guide attention to the collective good that will come of it. 
Reactionaries pushing against change guide attention to the risks and 
dangers.

These are not, unfortunately, parallel endeavors. Asking people to 
imagine an alternative future calls upon their thinking and imagination 
-- their frontal cortex. Asking people to fear change calls upon 
something much deeper and older, their brainstem sense that it's a 
dangerous world, they're lucky to have what they have, and any 
disruption threatens it. The latter, when invoked, tends to drown out 
the former. That's why progressive change is so difficult to muster and 
so easy to reverse.

But that's the game in a democracy: changes that can improve collective 
circumstances versus the fear of personal loss.

Making the clean energy transition seem scary
This brings us back to Biden and energy. The core Republican approach, 
which they understand at a gut level even if there is no particular 
strategic intelligence at work in the Trump era, is to make change seem 
scary. They need to make Biden's climate plan seem abrupt, alien, and 
threatening. That's why they have resolutely ignored all the actual 
policies involved in the Green New Deal and instead made it a boogeyman, 
a repository for every conservative fear. They're going to take your 
hamburgers and your SUV!

That's why Republicans are so delighted to make a fracking ban -- a 
policy that no president can pass and no Congress would pass -- the 
center of discussion. And that's why they are delighted when Biden says 
he will transition away from oil. These changes sound sudden and 
disruptive; they draw attention to what will be lost, not to what will 
take its place. They define a playing field favorable to Republicans.
- -
In the meantime, the more specific lesson for climate advocates is that, 
in the home stretch of this election, Biden needs room to maneuver. His 
election depends on the whims of a few marginal voters in a few swing 
states, some of them living in places where fossil fuel production has 
unusually high salience. He needs votes from union households that do 
some of the very work he's talking about phasing out.

He needs to reassure them that the clean energy transition will not be 
abrupt and destructive; nothing will be banned or shut down overnight. 
It will unfold gradually, and as it does, new investments will reach 
their communities and new industries will rise to make use of their skills.

The transition will not come at their expense or leave them behind. They 
have a place in it.

This inclusiveness is a foundational part of Biden's plan and, more 
broadly, core to the spirit of the Green New Deal and the recent 
Democratic alignment on climate policy. It would immeasurably aid public 
understanding if more people explained that vision of a managed, 
inclusive transition and fewer nitpicked Biden's latest attempt to 
articulate it.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21531494/joe-biden-oil-industry-clean-energy-transition-trump



[be sure to vote]
*As Election Nears, Trump Makes a Final Push Against Climate Science*
The administration is imposing new limits on the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration that would undercut action against global 
warming.
By Christopher Flavelle and Lisa Friedman
Oct. 27, 2020

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has recently removed the chief 
scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 
nation's premier scientific agency, installed new political staff who 
have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter 
controls on communications at the agency.

The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States 
government information about climate change that underpins federal rules 
on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the 
agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.

An early sign of the shift came last month, when Erik Noble, a former 
White House policy adviser who had just been appointed NOAA's chief of 
staff, removed Craig McLean, the agency's acting chief scientist.

Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that 
asked them to acknowledge the agency's scientific integrity policy, 
which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven 
findings...
The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. "Respectfully, by 
what authority are you sending this to me?" he wrote, according to a 
person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated 
within NOAA.

Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him 
responsible for ensuring that the agency's rules on scientific integrity 
were followed.

The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. "You no longer serve as the 
acting chief scientist for NOAA," he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a 
new chief scientist had already been appointed. "Thank you for your 
service."

It was not the first time NOAA had drawn the administration's attention. 
Last year, the agency's weather forecasters came under pressure for 
contradicting Mr. Trump's false statements about the path of Hurricane 
Dorian.

But in an administration where even uttering the words "climate change" 
is dangerous, NOAA has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its 
ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the 
Earth's climate. It also still maintains numerous public websites that 
declare, in direct opposition to Mr. Trump, that climate change is 
occurring, is overwhelmingly caused by humans, and presents a serious 
threat to the United States.
Replacing Mr. McLean, who remains at the agency, was Ryan Maue, a former 
researcher for the libertarian Cato Institute who has criticized climate 
scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.

Dr. Maue, a research meteorologist, and Dr. Noble were joined at NOAA by 
David Legates, a professor at the University of Delaware's geography 
department who has questioned human-caused global warming. Dr. Legates 
was appointed to the position of deputy assistant secretary, a role that 
did not previously exist.

Neil Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, was not involved in the hirings, 
according to two people familiar with the selection process.

The agency did not respond to requests for comment and a request to make 
the new officials available for an interview.

NOAA officials have tried to get information about what role the new 
political staff members would play and what their objectives might be, 
with little success. According to people close to the administration who 
have questioned climate science, though, their primary goal is to 
undercut the National Climate Assessment.

The assessment, a report from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists 
led by NOAA, which the government is required by law to produce every 
four years, is the premier American contribution to knowledge about 
climate risks and serves as the foundation for federal regulations to 
combat global warming. The latest report, in 2018, found that climate 
change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States and its 
economy...
"The real issue at play is the National Climate Assessment," said Judith 
Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric 
Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who said she has been in 
contact with Dr. Maue, the new chief scientist. "That's what the powers 
that be are trying to influence."

In addition to Dr. Curry, the strategy was described by Myron Ebell, a 
director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of 
Mr. Trump's transition team, and John Christy, a professor of 
atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Christy, a critic of past National Climate Assessments, said he was 
asked by the White House this summer to take on a senior role at NOAA, 
according to E&E News, but declined the offer. He said he understood the 
role to include changing the agency's approach to the climate assessment.

Ms. Curry and the others said that, if Mr. Trump wins re-election, 
further changes at NOAA would include removing longtime authors of the 
climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which 
warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human 
activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security 
and the economy.

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging 
implications.

It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel 
companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional 
efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And, it ultimately could weaken what 
is known as the "endangerment finding," a 2009 scientific finding by the 
Environmental Protection Agency that said greenhouse gases endanger 
public health and thus obliged the federal government to regulate carbon 
dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Other changes could include shifting NOAA funding to researchers who 
reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and 
eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire 
consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon 
dioxide pollution.

Dr. Noble, the new chief of staff, has already pushed to install a new 
layer of scrutiny on grants that NOAA awards for climate research, 
according to people familiar with those discussions.
Meaningfully changing the National Climate Assessment's findings would 
be hard to accomplish, according to Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate 
science for the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of a chapter 
in the latest edition of the report.

Still, Dr. Ekwurzel said NOAA's role leading the report is vital and 
added that any attempt to undermine climate research for political 
purposes would threaten public safety and economic growth. "You need to 
have a well-functioning scientific enterprise," she said. "The more we 
back away from that, the more we erode our democracy."

Most of the changes at NOAA could be reversed by the next president, 
officials say, making next week's election a referendum on the future of 
the agency.

The dissonance between NOAA's work and Mr. Trump's dismissiveness toward 
climate change became clear at the end of 2018, with the publication of 
the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment. The report 
put Mr. Trump in the awkward position of disavowing the findings of his 
own government. "I don't believe it," the president said of the economic 
assessment in the report.

But for the president's advisers, the climate assessment posed a greater 
problem than being mildly embarrassing. It threatened the 
administration's policy aims, because its conclusions about the threat 
of climate change made it harder, from a legal perspective, for the 
administration to justify rolling back limits of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Ebell and another former member of Mr. Trump's transition team, 
Steven J. Milloy, said they expected that Dr. Legates in particular 
would steer the next National Climate Assessment in a sharply different 
direction. They said Dr. Legates intended to question the models that 
NOAA scientists use to predict the future rate of warming and its 
effects on precipitation. Climate denialists broadly say the models used 
by scientists are flawed.
That could ultimately make the endangerment finding, the scientific and 
legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerable. As 
recently as July, Mr. Legates explained the connection himself: In an 
op-ed for Townhall, a conservative website, he noted that the science 
that underpins the endangerment finding relies primarily on the National 
Climate Assessment and claimed the models employed by its authors 
"systematically overestimate" warming.

Officials at NOAA also say they fear that the new staffers will bring 
more climate denialists into the agency and push out scientists who 
object. They cite an executive order Mr. Trump signed last week making 
it easier to hire and fire civil servants involved in setting policy.

The spate of new appointees isn't the only example of growing political 
constraints.

In August, a few weeks before the new political staff began arriving at 
NOAA, the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA and a handful of 
other agencies, issued a surprise memorandum: All internal and external 
communications must be approved by political staff at the department at 
least three days before being issued. The restrictions applied to social 
media posts, news releases and even agencywide emails.

The new policy meant that Dr. Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, could no 
longer send messages to his own staff members without having them 
cleared from above. The goal of the policy was to make sure all 
communications "serve the needs of your employees and mission while 
aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and 
Department," the memo said.

"I think that until recently NOAA has been mostly spared the political 
interference with science that we've seen as a hallmark across this 
administration," said Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA administrator 
in the Obama administration.

"That integrity and the credibility that it brings are threatened by 
these recent appointments," Dr. Lubchenco said. "The positions that 
these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, 
distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is."

Christopher Flavelle focuses on how people, governments and industries 
try to cope with the effects of global warming. He received a 2018 
National Press Foundation award for coverage of the federal government's 
struggles to deal with flooding. @cflav

Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from 
Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump 
administration's efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit 
the use of science in policymaking. @LFFriedman
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/climate/trump-election-climate-noaa.html



[August report - negligible impact]
*Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19*
*Abstract*
The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sudden 
reduction of both GHG emissions and air pollutants. Here, using national 
mobility data, we estimate global emission reductions for ten species 
during the period February to June 2020. We estimate that global NOx 
emissions declined by as much as 30% in April, contributing a short-term 
cooling since the start of the year. This cooling trend is offset by 
~20% reduction in global SO2 emissions that weakens the aerosol cooling 
effect, causing short-term warming. As a result, we estimate that the 
direct effect of the pandemic-driven response will be negligible, with a 
cooling of around 0.01 ± 0.005 °C by 2030 compared to a baseline 
scenario that follows current national policies. In contrast, with an 
economic recovery tilted towards green stimulus and reductions in fossil 
fuel investments, it is possible to avoid future warming of 0.3 °C by 2050.
image graph - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0883-0/figures/2
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0883-0



[difficult opinion - animated video]
*Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do*
Oct 27, 2020
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSu5sXmsur4



[audio interview with Mike Roddy]
*Rethinking How We Build Homes In Fire-Prone Areas*
We can trim forests, regulate activities that cause sparks and flames, 
and clean out the underbrush around our houses. But we can't stop the 
wind from blowing, and that turned out to be a huge factor in the 
devastating fires of September.

With thousands of homes destroyed, it's time for a chat about how we 
build our houses. Mike Roddy at Butte Built Better advocates building 
homes with steel studs, not wood, and making homes fire-resistant in 
other ways.

He is making the case alongside Dominick DellaSalla, forest expert and 
chief scientist at Wild Heritage, who has studied wildfire extensively. 
They visit to talk about not repeating the practices of the past.

Mike says you are welcome to contact him: mike.greenframe at gmail.com
https://www.ijpr.org/show/the-jefferson-exchange/2020-10-15/fri-8-am-rethinking-how-we-build-homes-in-fire-prone-areas



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 28, 2006 *

Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) urge ExxonMobil 
to stop funding climate-change-denying think tanks.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130303200905/http://www.rockefeller.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=87f3ae3b-0f0d-44ee-af03-9080592901a4



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