[TheClimate.Vote] September 9, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Wed Sep 9 11:22:23 EDT 2020
/*September 9, 2020*/
*National fire and smoke map*
https://fire.airnow.gov/?lat=47.7167616&lng=-122.3262208&zoom=10
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*Fires: Current Conditions*
https://cfpub.epa.gov/airnow/index.cfm?action=topics.smoke_wildfires
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*PM2.5 Air Quality Intex*
https://tools.airfire.org/airtools/v1/pnw-smoke.html?lat=44.0&lng=-118.2&zoom=6
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*Wind and heat mapped by Earth NullSchool*
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-115.26,41.88,3000
[NYTimes offers live updates]
*Wildfires Lead to Helicopter Rescues in California and Destruction in
Washington*
Extreme weather is battering the Western United States, with fires
raging along the Pacific Coast and snow falling in Colorado.
Here's what you need to know:
- Wildfires, winds and extreme temperatures are battering several
Western states.
- Helicopters have flown people to safety as the Sierra National Forest
burns.
- Malden, Wash., is 'pretty much devastated throughout.'
- In Colorado, 'We switched from summer to winter in a day.'
- PG&E has shut off power to tens of thousands of customers over
wildfire fears.
- There is a strong link between California's wildfires and climate
change, experts say.
- 'We lost our home': A small California town was hit hard by the Creek
Fire.
**
*Wildfires, winds and extreme temperatures are battering several Western
states.*
Raging wildfires, windy conditions and a heat wave with temperatures
reaching upward of 100 degrees converged in a dangerous combination over
the weekend, as extreme weather continued to batter much of the Western
United States on Tuesday.
In California, helicopters battled smoky skies overnight in an attempt
to rescue dozens of people trapped in the fiery depths of the Sierra
National Forest and at least 148 people had been flown to safety by
Tuesday morning.
In Oregon, whipping winds and dry conditions have helped fuel fire
outbreaks. South of Portland, officials in Marion County implored some
residents to "please leave now" as fires that have burned through more
than 27,000 acres approached more densely populated areas.
And in Washington State, officials said that 80 percent of homes and
structures in Malden, a town of 200 in the eastern part of the state,
had been destroyed by fire. Deputies began going door to door and
announcing evacuations, but officials said many buildings, including the
fire station, post office, city hall and the library, were completely
burned to the ground.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/us/wildfires-live-updates.html
[Governor Gavin Newsom]
*Newsom: 'No patience for climate change deniers' amid historic wildfires*
The Democratic governor's statement seemed to be a determined retort to
California critics.
By COLBY BERMEL 09/08/2020
SACRAMENTO -- As California battles another round of life-threatening
wildfires, Gov. Gavin Newsom emphasized Tuesday that the state will
continue to pursue policies that combat climate change as it faces a
prolonged vortex of disasters...
- -
"I say this lovingly -- not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides
himself on being open to argument, interested in evidence -- but I quite
literally have no patience for climate change deniers," Newsom said.
"It's completely inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on
the ground, the facts as we are experiencing. You may not believe it
intellectually, but your own eyes, your own experiences tell a different
story."
The Democratic governor's statement seemed to be a determined retort to
California critics -- President Donald Trump chief among them -- who
have blamed the state's power outages on its aggressive push to
eliminate fossil fuels. Trump and others have likewise suggested the
state's environmental protections have deterred tree removal and other
steps to prevent forest fires.
Newsom, along with climate experts, instead say that California is
suffering from unusual weather cycles caused by global warming.
California's blazes have reached a crisis level weeks before the typical
peak of wildfire season in October and November.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/09/08/newsom-no-patience-for-climate-deniers-amid-historic-heat-fires-1316014
[Follow the money]
*Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc From Climate Change*
A report commissioned by President Trump's Commodity Futures Trading
Commission issued dire warnings about climate change's impact on
financial markets.
- -
The new report asserts that doing nothing to avert climate change will
do the opposite.
"This is the first time a government entity has looked at the impacts of
climate change on financial markets in the U.S.," said Robert Litterman,
the chairman of the panel that produced the report and a founding
partner of Kepos Capital, an investment firm based in New York. "Rather
than saying, 'What's the science?' this is saying, 'What's the financial
risk?'"
The commodities regulator, which is made up of three Republicans and two
Democrats, all of whom were appointed by President Trump, voted
unanimously last summer to create an advisory panel drawn from the world
of finance and charged with producing a report on the effects of the
warming world on financial markets. The initial proposal for the report
came from Rostin Behnam, one of the panel's two Democrats, but the
report is written by dozens of analysts from investment firms including
Morgan Stanley, S&P Global and Vanguard; the oil companies BP and
ConocoPhillips; and the agricultural trader Cargill, as well as academic
experts and environmental groups.
It includes recommendations for new corporate regulations and the
reversal of at least one Trump administration policy.
"It was shocking when they asked me to do this," Mr. Litterman said.
"This is members of the entire community involved in financial markets
saying with one voice, 'This is a serious problem, and it has to be
addressed.'"
A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, declined on Tuesday to comment on
the report because the White House had not yet seen it...
- -
"I appreciate Commissioner Behnam's leadership on convening various
private sector perspectives on the important topic of climate risk," Mr.
Tarbert said in a statement. "The subcommittee's report acknowledges
that 'transition risks' of a green economy could be just as disruptive
to our financial system as the possible physical manifestations of
climate change, and that moving too fast, too soon could be just as
disorderly as doing too little, too late. This underscores why it is so
important for policymakers to get this right."
The authors of the report acknowledged that if Mr. Trump is re-elected,
his administration is all but certain to ignore the report and its
recommendations.
Instead, they said they saw the document as a policy road map for a
Joseph R. Biden Jr. administration.
Mr. Biden's climate policy proposals are the most ambitious and
expensive ever embraced by a presidential candidate, and most of them
would meet resistance in Congress. But even without legislation, he
could press forward with regulatory changes. Lael Brainard, a Federal
Reserve governor who is seen as a top contender to be Treasury secretary
in a Biden administration, has called for financial regulators to treat
climate change as a significant risk to the financial system.
In calling for climate-driven policy changes, the report's authors
likened the financial risk of global warming to the threat posed by the
coronavirus today and by mortgage-backed securities that precipitated
the financial crash in 2008...
- -
"Climate change is linked to devaluing home values," said Jesse Keenan,
an editor of the report and a professor of real estate at Tulane
University in New Orleans.
"If in your town, your house is devalued, that makes it harder for your
local government to raise money," he said. "That's one set of risks that
could lead to a contagion and broader instability across financial
markets."...
more at -
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/climate/climate-change-financial-markets.html
[discussion between John Cook and the head of Yale Climate Communication]
*Anthony Leiserowitz talks climate communication*
Sep 8, 2020
[23 min video]
These two are the heroically great climate communicators.
John Cook
SkepticalScience
https://www.skepticalscience.com/
Anthony Leiserowitz
Yale Climate Communication
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=398tGbFcqOs
[brilliant conclusion at https://youtu.be/398tGbFcqOs?t=1216 Kahan argues]
[alarming video and transcript below]
*'A world with no ice': Confronting the horrors of climate change | Big
Think*
Jul 27, 2020
Big Think
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Climate change is often framed as a debate that has split society down
the middle and that requires more evidence before we can act. In
reality, 97 percent of scientists agree that it is real and only 3
percent are skeptical. A sticking point for some is the estimated
timeline, but as Columbia University professor Philip Kitcher points
out, a 4-5 Celsius temperature increase that makes the planet
uninhabitable is a disaster no matter when it happens.
In this video, 9 experts (including professors, astronomers, authors,
and historians) explain what climate change looks like, how humans have
already and are continuing to contribute to it, how and why it has
become politicized, and what needs to happen moving forward for real
progress to be made.
David Wallace-Wells, journalist and New America Foundation National
Fellow, says that the main goal of climate action is not to win over the
skeptical minority, but to "make those people who are concerned but
still fundamentally complacent about the issue to be really engaged in a
way that they prioritize climate change in their politics and their
voting and make sure that our leaders think of climate change as a
first-order political priority."
Read David Wallace-Wells' latest book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life
After Warming at https://amzn.to/2CMDSGI
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcript
GINA MCCARTHY: Climate is always portrayed on newscasts as being some
kind of big debate. You know, the big debate among the scientists is
that 97 percent of them know it's happening and are really worried about
it. Three percent are skeptical. That's not a balance. That's an
overwhelming majority and that needs to drive the decision, especially
in a democracy.
BILL NYE: The more you think about it everybody, 97 percent of the
world's scientists – not 97 percent of some institute that somebody
started in a remote part of the world and is releasing press releases.
Ninety-seven percent of the scientists in the world are very concerned
about climate change.
PHILIP KITCHER: Climate science is built on views about the atmosphere
that have been developed very successfully and in a very rigorous way
from the nineteenth century to the present. There isn't any doubt about
the mechanisms of the greenhouse effect. There isn't really any doubt
about the evidence behind the consensus that says we have contributed
enormously to the warming effects that are now becoming apparent not
only in the present but also from the record of the earth's average
temperature.
NYE: You can look at the graphs. You can study the stuff for yourself.
If nothing else do this. Wherever you live, get access to the coldest
temperature of each year for the last century. And unless you live in
just very few places you will see the coldest temperature where you live
has steadily increased. They'll be some dips. There'll be some ups, but
overall you'll find it – and that's just one that almost everybody who
has internet access can get those data, they're available. And just look
at that one thing and you'll see the world's getting warmer everybody.
MICHELLE THALLER: Now the reason our atmosphere is getting warmer and
warmer and warmer is because we humans are putting lots of carbon
dioxide up into the atmosphere. And this acts as what we call a
greenhouse gas. Sunlight can get through the atmosphere, but the carbon
dioxide traps it and it can't release itself back into space so it gets
warmer and warmer over time. Carbon dioxide doesn't just warm the
atmosphere. It also affects our oceans. When ocean water combines with
carbon dioxide to create something called carbonic acid and it makes the
oceans more and more acidic over time. And this is a really big problem
for marine life. There are things like algae. The algae in the oceans
are responsible for most of the oxygen that we breathe. And the algae
are having trouble forming because of the higher acid levels in the
ocean. So even if the one thing you solved was cooling the earth down,
if we continue to put more and more carbon dioxide into our atmosphere
there will be other serious repercussions. We could end up killing the
ocean life system, for example.
NYE: The earth is getting warmer faster than it has ever gotten before
and that's the problem. It's not that the world hasn't had more carbon
dioxide. It's not that the world hasn't been warmer. The problem is the
speed at which things are changing. We are inducing a sixth mass
extinction event kind of by accident and we don't want to be the
extinctee if I may coin this noun.
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Climate change challenges, threatens to undermine
the entire infrastructure of our modern world, all of our political
institutions, all of our social institutions, our national institutions.
Everything is vulnerable to the transformations of climate because we
all live within climate. There's basically no life on Earth I think that
will be untouched by the force of climate in the decades ahead and in
most cases that means deformed, damaged, transformed. The UN says that
the track we're on now, the trajectory we're on now is likely to take us
to about 4.3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century if we
don't change course. So, 4.3 degrees would mean $600 trillion in global
climate damages. That's double all the wealth that exists in the world
today. It would mean parts of the world could be hit by six climate
driven natural disasters at once. It would mean more than double the
warfare that we see today. And the impacts would be in our economic
activity. It would be in flooding and the refugee crisis. There are so
many impacts that we have not really been able to think clearly about
because all of us are so reluctant to consider these horrifying
outcomes. But the fact that they are horrifying should not make us turn
away. They should make us focus on them more intently. We all have all
of these psychological reflexes that make us reluctant to consider
horrible possibilities. And for that reason it's more important for us
to take seriously the science because we need to fight against those
impulses to do better planning, to take more aggressive action than we
would if we allowed ourselves to slip back into complacency.
KITCHER: Now we can't say, for example, how much the temperature of the
Earth is going to rise by 2100. The one that's really important to
understand here is that 2100 isn't some magical moment. I mean it's not
really going to matter that much if the temperature rises say four or
five degrees Celsius. If that comes in 2100 or whether it comes in 2120
or whether it comes in 2150 or whether it comes in 2200. That's going to
be a real disaster for human beings on our planet because five degree
Celsius above preindustrial temperatures is a world in which there's no
ice whatsoever and in which you've got reptiles that are able to live
within both polar circles. It's that hot. That would be a world in which
lots of the Earth's surface might become quite uninhabitable for us.
WALLACE-WELLS: Many of the biggest cities in south Asia and the Middle
East would be lethally hot in summer at two degrees which could happen
as soon as 2050. These are cities like Calcutta, five, ten, twelve
million people. You wouldn't be able to go outside, certainly work
outside without incurring a lethal risk and that could happen again just
by 2050 which is one reason why the UN expects that we could have 200
million climate refugees by that same date, 2050, 200 million. They
think it's possible that we get as many as one billion which is as many
people as live today in North and South America combined. I think those
numbers are realistic. I think they're too high, but even if we get 100
million or 150 million climate refugees it's important to remember that
the Syrian refugee crisis which totally destabilized European politics,
led in its way to Brexit and has transformed our politics globally
through the way it's affected Europe was the result of just one million
Syrian refugees coming to the continent. We're talking about a refugee
crisis that is almost certain to be a hundred times as large and it
comes at a time when most nations of the world are retreating from our
commitments to one another, retreating from our organizations and
alliances, retreating from the UN, retreating from the EU and embracing
xenophobia and nativism and nationalism. That's especially concerning
when you think about what's ahead because there are going to be many
more people in much more desperate need in the decades ahead.
KITCHER: Some of the forecasts about the future – rising sea levels,
much more frequent heat waves, much bigger storms are really very
serious dangers for the habitability of some parts of the world,
droughts. All of that sort of stuff in general is very, very well
supported by the evidence.
CHARLES FERGUSON: If we let this problem continue to worsen then 20, 30,
40, 50 years from how our children are going to suffer a lot. About half
of the world's largest cities are on coastlines and if the Greenland ice
melts then the sea is going to rise by over 20 feet and half of the
world's cities will be underwater literally.
JON GERTNER: In fact, our civilization has been built on the idea that
sea levels are relatively stable and we know that they're not. We know
that they're not by looking back in time that ice sheets have melted
before, that vast floods have covered our coasts. But we also know now
by just watching our tidal gauges, by using our satellites to measure
how the tides are going up that sea levels are rising. They're rising at
an accelerating rate and that the future bodes poorly for this idea that
we can kind of keep colonizing the coast and stake out on these coastal
cities.
WALLACE-WELLS: But there are cases that are worse than 4.3 degrees.
There are what are called feedback loops in the climate system that
could conceivably accelerate warming beyond what human action does. So
there's what's called the albedo effect which is a little complicated to
explain.
GERTNER: As the ice sort of decreases, the albedo of the Arctic changes
and albedo is the reflectivity. Ice, of course, is white and bright and
it reflects solar energy back into space. When it exposes dark open
ocean that open ocean absorbs more sunlight and more energy and it
creates a kind of feedback loop that the more ocean that's exposed, the
more energy that's absorbed, the more heat that's actually absorbed as
well and it kind of builds on itself.
WALLACE-WELLS: As Arctic ice melts the planet's ability to reflect solar
energy back into space would diminish and warming would accelerate.
There is froze in the Arctic permafrost a lot of methane or I should say
a lot of carbon which could be released into the atmosphere as methane
if that permafrost melts. Methane is depending on how you count at least
30 and perhaps 80 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide
and there is enough carbon in that permafrost to double the
concentration of carbon in the atmosphere that we have today. If that
were released it could accelerate warming by a couple of degrees all on
its own.
FERGUSON: Weather will be far more extreme. The last time that the world
was as hot as it will get this century if we don't fix climate change
was about 100,000 years ago and scientists have found evidence of
extremely destructive storms. Storms that were strong enough to lift
very large boulders from the bottom of the ocean and put them on top of
mountains. So Hurricane Sandy is very, very minor trouble compared to
what we'll face if we don't handle this problem.
THALLER: The problem is really getting at our emissions of carbon
dioxide and stopping those and stopping these dramatic changes that we
see coming. Some of them are going to be very difficult to stop. I mean
right now we're observing the icecaps a both poles of the planet in
Antarctica and in the North Pole melting very quickly. That won't stop.
Those icecaps will largely melt over many, many centuries and the ocean
levels will rise in accordance. And I do think that the challenge right
now is how are we going to deal with the changes. We might not be able
to change very many of them at this point. We need to band together as
people, make sure that we have ways to deal with refugees. If people
need to leave where they are because the oceans are rising there's going
to be a lot of people that need homes and there's going to be a lot of
support needed for the changes in agriculture, in fishing, in so many
parts of our economy and our lives. There's no easy solution.
DANIEL ESTY: I think this has to be understood as in some regards an
ethical issue, a moral issue and one has to see it as a wrong to
contaminate the planet and to put at risk the future of humanity on the
planet.
ANDREW WINSTON: Often what people call sustainability which is not I
think always the perfect word but the things that fall under that that
are environmental or social challenges, there's this assumption in
business quite often that trying to tackle these issues will be
expensive. That there's this tradeoff, this fundamental tradeoff between
trying to manage these big challenges in a profitable way and just
managing your bottom line in a normal way and that it's going to be
expensive. This myth was based in some reality for a long time. There
were things that did cost more money and green products or green
services they weren't very good for a long time. So there's the sense
that green was somehow not good for business. It wasn't out of nowhere
but that's really a dated view.
WALLACE-WELLS: There's a huge amount of new research in this area that
reverses that logic completely which says that faster action on climate
would actually be, would offer huge economic payoffs in a quite short
term way. There was one big study in 2018 that said we could add $26
trillion to the global economy just by 2030 through rapid
decarbonization. I think that estimate may be a little rosy but it
suggests just how completely this conventional wisdom has flipped just
in the last few years. I don't think that understanding has yet risen up
to the level of our policymakers who are still a little bit bound by the
earlier perspective that we'd have to forego economic growth to take
action. But I think it will get to them soon and I think our policy and
our politics will change actually quite dramatically when that happens.
So I don't think it's a question of money. I really think it's a
question of political will through the green energy we have now, through
the knowledge we have about infrastructure and agriculture. It is within
our power to take action and avert our worst case outcomes.
WINSTON: We now have a situation where the challenges are so vast and
the world is changing so fundamentally that the only path we have
forward is to manage these issues. That's the point of the big pivot so
that we will find a profitable path to do it and we have so many options
now. There's a whole category of things that companies do that save
money very quickly. All things that fall under kind of the banner of
ecoefficiency or energy efficiency or using less. I mean in part green
is about doing more with less. That's just good business.
WALLACE-WELLS: And you do see Bill Gates doing exactly that. He's made
really significant investments in negative emissions technologies and
is, in fact, behind the most exciting research in that area which is
quite exciting. There's a company called Carbon Engineering led by a guy
named David Keith that has found that you can take carbon out of the
atmosphere at a cost of about $100 a ton. That would mean, in theory,
that we could completely neutralize all global carbon emissions at a
cost of about $3 trillion a year which would mean that the economy could
continue just as it is. Our agriculture could continue just as it is.
Our infrastructure, our industry can continue just as they are and we
could just completely suck out all of the carbon that was being emitted
for $3 trillion a year which sounds like an enormous amount, but there
are estimates that about how much we subsidize the fossil fuel business
today that run as high as $5 trillion a year. In theory we could
redirect those subsidies to this technology and solve the problem
already. That's in theory. There are huge engineering problems. We'd
have to find a place to put the carbon which would require the experts
say a new industry two or three times the size of the oil and gas
business right now that's just to put the carbon back into the ground.
But nevertheless, there are really promising technological paths forward.
FERGUSON: In the last decade there's been remarkable progress in
renewable energy technology, in electric cars, in sustainable
agriculture and now we know how to solve this problem. And, in fact, we
could solve this problem in a way that would make the world more
prosperous and healthier and happier.
WALLACE-WELLS: There are great technological opportunities for people
who are focused on solving the problem through technology. The problem
is the most powerful people who we've decided are our technological
leaders just seem not all that interested in this problem and I think we
really need to change those minds because we need that money. We need
that intellectual power. We need that cultural cache focused on this
problem. In fact, we need everything we can get. This is really an all
hands on deck problem and I don't think we'll be able to address it
without technology so we need all those people.
ESTY: The big divide which has often been framed around the science with
one side being called science deniers actually hasn't really been about
the science. The science is an excuse particularly for some republicans
who fear the implications of the science for policy. By the mid-1990s
there was a political divide that became a partisan issue. In fact,
worse than that it became a wedge issue which the republicans used in
one respect to enliven their base. The democrats pushed in another
direction and the two parties saw no value in coming together. So I
think we really have a serious problem on our hands where this is a
partisan issue because frankly, the climate change problem in
particular, but the need to move to a sustainable future more broadly
cannot be done on a one party basis. Transformative change of the kind
that's required here relaying the energy foundation of our economy and
our society can only be done when you come up the middle with about 70
percent of the public and the political sphere moving together. And that
is by definition not going to happen on a one party basis.
NYE: On my side of it in the science education world, I mean this whole
thing is so frustrating. The United States used to be the world leader
in technology, but when you have this group of leaders, elected
officials who are anti-science you're setting the U.S. back and then
ultimately setting the world back.
WALLACE-WELLS: Even though Americans are concerned about climate change
nobody wants to spend as much as $10 a month to address it. The median
commitment a recent poll found was just $1 a month. So while people are
concerned about climate change they're not concerned enough. And my
personal perspective is that the main goal for climate action is to make
those people who are concerned but still fundamentally complacent about
the issue to be really engaged in a way that they prioritize climate
change in their politics and their voting and make sure that our leaders
think of climate change as a first order political priority, not a third
or fourth order political priority, and maybe even a political
imperative that governs all others because that is true. If you care
about economic inequality, if you care about violence basically every
political thing that you could worry about in this world bears the
fingerprint of climate change and will be made worse if climate change
continues unabated. So, addressing any of them on some level means
addressing climate change and that's the perspective I think we really
need to have or more of us need to have.
ESTY: I think what you're seeing now is a recognition that the problem
is real and that's going to be increasingly accepted across party lines,
but that what's really required is a thoughtful new and serious approach
to policy. Almost certainly a portfolio approach with a number of
different strategies woven together, some price signal. We're going to
have to make people pay for the harm they're causing which I think
should be done with a slowly escalating carbon charge starting at $5 per
ton and going up by $5 per ton per year for 20 years. So that at the end
of a 20 years timeframe you'd have $100 a ton price on greenhouse gas
emissions and that would immediately change behavior. Not just at year
20 but in year one because people see that rising price and whether
they're building a powerplant or building a building or even buying a
car, they'll start to think about what it means to have to pay that
charge for their greenhouse gas emissions. They'll change behavior and
it will spur innovation. So I think there's actually a lot happening
that we can be quite excited about and I do see the parties coming
together and prospects for progress emerging out over the next several
years.
BILL NYE: Acknowledge that not wasting water bottles, not throwing
newspapers away, recycling them – that's all good and important. Driving
less, driving smaller cars or more efficient cars – electric car. But
the main thing we can all do about climate change right now is talk
about it.
MCCARTHY: And it's extremely important to recognize your own limitations
about who you're good at talking to and who's going to believe you and
who are the people you're trying to influence listen to. Because we can
talk all we want about the science at EPA, but you need to put that into
people's homes and ears in a way that they're going to listen, absorb
and know they can be part of the solutions moving forward. That gets
them off the dime and builds the constituencies you need to succeed in
something that is really as big as this. The challenge of climate change
is enormous for us and so you need to attack that from all different
angles and make sure to get everybody engaged.
WALLACE-WELLS: I think that there's a bigger risk of advocates and
activists talking to one another and not addressing the sort of median
concerned liberal who is worried but fundamentally complacent. That, to
me, is the main target of messaging and when I look around the world I
see many, many more people like that. Many more societies like that than
I see people who are really deeply committed or who are really deeply in
denial. And I say that as someone who felt that way myself until quite
recently and who was awakened from that complacency by fear and alarm
which is one reason why I think that talking bluntly about the science
and everything that it projects for our near term future is really
important. We shouldn't shy away from the projections that science has
made for us. We should look as squarely at them as we can even if they
horrify us because fear can be mobilizing, can be motivating. We know
that from environmental history. We know that from advocacy history. In
this case I don't think it needs to be the only way that we talk about
climate change, but we shouldn't be scared of fear. We should know that
the impacts are terrifying and that we need to do everything we can to
avoid as many of them as we can.
{read the full transcript
https://bigthink.com/videos/confronting-the-horrors-of-climate-change]
video at - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzksqQDI_kE
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 9, 2005 *
At the National Sierra Club Convention in San Francisco, Al Gore declares:
"There are scientific warnings now of another onrushing catastrophe.
We were warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; we didn't respond.
We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't
respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us that the
average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global
warming. A scientist at MIT has published a study well before this
tragedy showing that since the 1970s, hurricanes in both the
Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration, and in
intensity, by about 50%. The newscasters told us after Hurricane
Katrina went over the southern tip of Florida that there was a
particular danger for the Gulf Coast of the hurricanes becoming much
stronger because it was passing over unusually warm waters in the
gulf. The waters in the gulf have been unusually warm. The oceans
generally have been getting warmer. And the pattern is exactly
consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years. Two
thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most
elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of
humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a
string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves
and deal with the underlying causes of global warming. It is
important to learn the lessons of what happens when scientific
evidence and clear authoritative warnings are ignored in order to
induce our leaders not to do it again and not to ignore the
scientists again and not to leave us unprotected in the face of
those threats that are facing us right now."
http://web.archive.org/web/20050924210135/http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0912-32.htm
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