[✔️] April 18, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 18, 2021*/

[Entertaining instructional video 27 min]
*Climate Change Is An Absolute Nightmare - School Friendly Version!*
Apr 16, 2021
UpIsNotJump
Welcome to my School Friendly Climate Change Video!

So. What is Climate Change? Do you know the facts? No?

Well I personally had no idea. One day it just hit me, I knew very 
little about climate change. Even with a useless degree in chemistry, 
climate change is a confusing mess of strange and difficult to 
understand information.

I made this video to gather all the facts I could find about climate 
change, in a fun way, and without any bias on my part. I wanted anyone 
who watched this video (and myself too!) to understand all the important 
facts relating to climate change. Non-scientists welcome.

Science is exciting! It’s just school and most of our education systems 
aren’t…

In a few months this video will be uploaded as to remove any language or 
scenes not suitable for schools, so it can be used to teach about 
climate change in schools.  [this version]

Games used to make the space visuals
SpaceEngine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/31...​
Universe Sandbox: https://store.steampowered.com/app/23...​

Dr. Simon Clark provided much of the climate change graphics at the end, 
subscribe!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRRr_xrOm66qaigIbwFLvbQ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_5PyOreBbo
[see more footnotes for source]



[BBC - New Zealand to show how money must follow the law]
*NZ to launch world-first climate change rules*
New Zealand is to become the world's first country to bring in a law 
forcing its financial firms to report on the effects of climate change.

The country wants to be carbon neutral by 2050 and says the financial 
sector needs to play its part.

Banks, insurers and fund managers can do this by knowing the 
environmental effect of their investments, says its Climate Change 
Minister James Shaw.

Legislation is expected to receive its first reading this week.

"This law will bring climate risks and resilience into the heart of 
financial and business decision making," said Mr Shaw.

About 200 of the country's biggest companies and several foreign firms 
that have assets of more than NZ$1bn ($703m, £511m) will come under the 
legislation.

"Becoming the first country in the world to introduce a law like this 
means we have an opportunity to show real leadership and pave the way 
for other countries to make climate-related disclosures mandatory," said 
New Zealand's Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark.

The law will force financial firms to assess not only their own 
investments, but also to evaluate the companies they are lending money 
to, in terms of their environmental impact.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56728381



[Watching the CO2 numbers]
*Rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide continues unabated*
Despite Covid-induced reductions in industrial activity last year, 
climate concerns remain
Every day, above where this column appears in the newspaper, the latest 
daily atmospheric carbon dioxide readings are recorded in parts per 
million from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.

Week by week they keep rising and make for grim reading. We are within a 
whisker of 420ppm, 50% more than the 280ppm of pre-industrial times, 
before we began to burn oil and coal in significant quantities.

When carbon dioxide levels were last at this level, 3.6m years ago, sea 
levels were 20 metres higher and vast areas now covered in ice were 
forested. Land where many of our coastal cities now stand and much of 
our food is grown were deep under water. Large areas in the tropics 
would have been uninhabitable because they would have been too hot.

Just as alarming as the carbon dioxide levels are those of methane, 30 
times as potent a greenhouse gas. Despite pandemic-induced reductions in 
industrial activity last year, methane levels produced from fracking 
activities, leaky pipelines, cattle ranching as well as melting 
permafrost rose faster than at any time since records began 40 years ago.

It shows that all efforts to avoid overheating the climate taken so far 
are hopelessly inadequate and will not prevent the impending chaos.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/17/rise-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-covid-climate



[following the money into lands of dark ethics]
*It’s not just Big Oil. Big Meat also spends millions to crush good 
climate policy.*
A new study reveals how the companies you buy meat from block climate 
action.
By Sigal Samuel - Apr 13, 2021

You probably already know that the fossil fuel industry has spent many 
millions of dollars trying to sow doubt about climate change and the 
industry’s role in it.

But did you know that big meat and dairy companies do the same thing?

According to a new study out of NYU, these companies have spent millions 
of dollars lobbying against climate policies and funding dubious 
research that tries to blur the links between animal agriculture and our 
climate emergency. The biggest link is that about 14 percent of global 
greenhouse gas emissions come from meat and dairy...
- -
In fact, the NYU paper notes that if the Food and Agriculture 
Organization is right in projecting that meat consumption will rise 73 
percent by 2050, emissions by some meat and dairy companies could exceed 
the emissions of several fossil fuel companies.

That means people who care about the climate need to get serious about 
holding Big Meat and Big Dairy accountable, just as they’ve been trying 
to do for years with Big Oil.

“There has to be a big reimagining of meat and dairy,” Jacquet said. 
Whether that will entail a reduction in meat consumption or a total 
switch to plant-based or lab-grown meat and dairy, one thing is for 
sure: “Given what we know about climate change,” Jacquet said, “it seems 
clear that business as usual is not the answer.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22379909/big-meat-companies-spend-millions-lobbying-climate
- -
[source material ]
*The climate responsibilities of industrial meat and dairy producers*
Oliver Lazarus, Sonali McDermid & Jennifer Jacquet
Climatic Change volume 165, 25 March 2021

    Abstract
    Our view of responsibility for climate change has expanded to
    include the actions of firms, particularly fossil fuel producers.
    Yet analysis of animal agriculture’s role in climate
    change—estimated as 14.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas
    emissions—has mainly focused on the sector as a whole. Here we
    examine the world’s 35 largest meat and dairy companies for their
    commitments to mitigating climate change and find four companies
    that have made an explicit commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050.
    In general, these commitments emphasized mitigating energy use, with
    minimal focus on emissions (e.g., methane) from animal and land use,
    which make the biggest warming contributions in the agricultural
    sector. We also compare the companies’ projected global emissions
    under a business-as-usual scenario to their headquarter countries’
    future emissions, assuming each country’s compliance with their
    commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement. Taking this view of
    responsibility and emissions accounting (which is not the conception
    of responsibility in the Paris Agreement), our results show that
    including industrial meat and dairy producers’ full global emissions
    in national accounting would impact national targets for greenhouse
    gas reductions. As examples, by our calculations, two
    companies—Fonterra in New Zealand, and Nestlé in Switzerland—would
    make up more than 100% of their headquarter country’s total
    emissions target in the coming decade. Finally, we evaluated using
    20 yes-or-no questions and a variety of sources the transparency of
    emissions reporting, mitigation commitments, and influence on public
    opinion and politics of the 10 US meat and dairy companies.
    According to the evidence we collected, all 10 US companies have
    contributed to efforts to undermine climate-related policies. Each
    of these analyses approaches responsibility in new and different
    ways. Under the swiftly changing social conditions provoked by
    climate change, we can expect new imaginings of responsibility for
    GHG emissions, as well as increased attention to the role of
    corporate actors and their accountability for climate change impacts.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-021-03047-7



[Weather - Cat1 to Cat5 in 24 hrs]
*Super typhoon Surigae explodes to Cat. 5 intensity*
Andrew Freedman
- -
Super Typhoon Surigae surged in intensity from a Category 1 storm on 
Friday to a beastly Category 5 monster on Saturday, with maximum 
sustained winds estimated at 190 mph with higher gusts.

Why it matters: This storm — known as Typhoon Bising in the Philippines 
— is just the latest of many tropical cyclones to undergo a process 
known as rapid intensification, a feat that studies show is becoming 
more common due to climate change.

The storm appears destined to recurve out to sea just northeast of the 
Philippines, sparing the disaster-prone country from its worst impacts, 
but it will bring heavy rains, high seas and gusty winds to some areas.
It may also help shake up weather patterns far downstream, including 
across North America, over the next few weeks.
Details: The storm maxed out at the top end of the scale according to 
techniques that meteorologists use to estimate storm intensity via 
satellites, scoring an 8 out of 8 on one particular metric, which is 
unusual.

Of note: Since aircraft do not fly into West Pacific typhoons the way 
they do in the Atlantic, we may never know how strong Super Typhoon 
Surigae is, and it's possible the 190 mph intensity is an underestimate.
By the numbers: The storm is the first Category 5 tropical cyclone (a 
category that includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) to occur in 
2021. Typically, each year sees about 18 Category 4 and 5 storms around 
the world.

The storm jumped from a 90-mph Category 1 storm Friday to a 180-mph 
Category 5 super typhoon 24 hours later, a staggering rate of 
intensification that is more than double the criteria for rapid 
intensification. The storm further intensified to an estimated maximum 
sustained winds of 190 mph by Saturday evening.
https://www.axios.com/super-typhoon-surigae-category-5-a67131f7-31a1-4f1b-b4bf-fa1091b3a4bb.html



[Seattle area news*- this is my area]*
*Officials warn of early start to wildfire season after devastating 2020*
by Cole Miller, KOMO News Reporter  April 16th 2021
A brush fire that broke out in Pierce County Friday signals what could 
be the start to yet another devastating wildfire season in the Pacific 
Northwest after a catastrophic 2020.

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources issued a temporary 
burn ban spanning the 13 million acres it protects. The ban will last as 
long as the dry and hot conditions are in place.

Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz is urging anyone going out 
this weekend to be extremely cautious and be mindful of the fire threat.

“We’re going to have another bad year this year most likely,” said Franz 
in a Zoom interview.

Fire and units from Orting battled the blaze, eventually containing it 
Friday evening. At one point, a few homes were threatened. One fire 
fighter suffered minor injuries.

In Oregon, a 40-acre brush fire threatened structures near Oregon City, 
just outside of Portland. Crews with Clackamas Fire were able to knock 
it down after a few hours.

In Washington state, Franz said this early start to the fire season is 
worrisome. DNR employs just 60 full-time fire fighters and training is 
still taking place. Fire season usually starts around June or July.

“And we don’t even have our seasonal fire fighters up and ready,” added 
Franz.

Other agencies up and down the Puget Sound are already gearing up for 
wildfire season. Last year, 40 percent of wildfires flared up west of 
the Cascades. Across the state, more than 1,600 wildfires scorched 
roughly 800,000 acres.

“What we used to think of as that fire season typically on the east side 
of the state where its hot and dry all the time, has really kind of 
changed as the west side experiences warmer and drier summers,” said 
Captain Joe Root with Puget Sound Fire.

With local resources bracing for what’s ahead, Franz also tells KOMO 
News that federal resources will likely be stretched thin again this 
year. It’s why she’s pushing the state legislature to specifically fund 
work to combat the destructive fires, calling 5 of the last 6 years 
‘catastrophic.’

“We have to have consistent, dedicated revenue every year,” said Franz. 
HB1168 would provide $125 million every two years for funding wildfire 
response, speeding up forest rehabilitation, and boost community resilience.

The bill recently passed the Senate unanimously and heads back to the 
House. Franz is confident it will get to the floor for a vote and to 
Governor Jay Inslee’s desk even with the clock winding down on this 
year’s legislative session.

“We’re urging our legislature to help make Washington more dependent on 
itself to have those resources and to have them earlier for the exact 
situation we’re facing right now, here in April,” she said.

If passed, the bill would provide funding over the next eight years.
https://komonews.com/news/local/officials-warn-of-early-start-to-wildfire-season-after-devastating-2020



[awaken the mind]
*Therapists are reckoning with eco-anxiety*
by Isobel Whitcomb -- Apr 17, 2021
Andrew Bryant, a therapist based in Tacoma, Washington, felt helpless 
the first time climate change came up in his office. It was 2016, and a 
client was agonizing over whether to have a baby. His partner wanted 
one, but the young man couldn't stop envisioning this hypothetical child 
growing up in an apocalyptic, climate-changed world.

Bryant was used to guiding people through their relationship conflicts, 
anxieties about the future, and life-changing decisions. But this felt 
different — personal. Bryant had long felt concerned about climate 
change, but in a distant, theoretical way. The patient's despair faced 
him with an entirely new reality: that climate change would directly 
impact his life and the lives of future generations.

"I had never considered the possibility," Bryant said. In that moment, 
his fear was a dense fog. All he could think about in response to his 
client's anxiety was his own young children: What world would they 
inherit? Should he feel guilty for bringing them into it?

"I didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say," Bryant said. He 
did know that nothing in his years of training and experience had 
equipped him to deal with climate change. Bryant has since spent years 
studying the mental health effects of climate change. Today, he is well 
equipped for these situations. But that first experience marked the 
beginning of a reckoning — one he sees happening in the field at large.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) recognizes climate change as 
a growing threat to mental health, but many mental health professionals 
feel unequipped to handle the growing number of people anxious and 
grieving over the state of the planet.

Therapists in a few subspecialties, such as eco-therapy, train 
specifically to integrate environmental awareness into their work with 
clients. But these therapists make up a small percentage of the field, 
and the vast majority of people don't have access to climate-informed 
therapy. A 2016 study found that more than half of therapists 
interviewed felt that their training had not adequately prepared them to 
deal with the mental health impacts of the climate crisis. Moreover, the 
same study found that although most respondents recognized the 
importance of climate change in the mental health profession at large, 
nearly half saw climate change as irrelevant to their own work specifically.

The reality is that climate change is impacting everyone in the 
therapist's office; it's the background — and increasingly the 
foreground — of life on Earth. But for a therapist who is themself 
barely coming to terms with climate change, offering nonjudgmental 
counsel to a patient can be particularly challenging...
- -
It's only natural to feel anxious in the face of a melting planet and 
the sixth mass extinction, both wrought by human actions. But while 
humanity may be responsible for the carbon pollution warming our planet, 
the reality is that just a few large corporations — and complicit 
politicians — have set us on this path. As individuals, it's easy to 
feel helpless to stop the destruction of the biosphere.

That was my experience. I grew up in a region of Oregon heavily impacted 
by drought and wildfire. Over the past 10 years, my grief has steadily 
intensified as lack of snow closed the mountain where I learned to ski, 
as smoke blanketed my hometown each summer. Though I was in therapy for 
five years, I didn't speak about my yearly dread of triple-digit 
temperatures, or my obsession over local snowpack reports. I assumed 
that therapy couldn't ease my sadness, because I was there to deal with 
internal problems. In contrast, climate change seemed like the ultimate 
external problem. If I had no control over climate change, how could I 
begin to tackle my own despair?
- -
One mental health professional told me about an experience with her own 
therapist, when she divulged her anguish over the increasing severity of 
drought. In response, her therapist asked "OK, but what is this really 
about?" The otherwise highly competent, trusted therapist couldn't 
comprehend that climate change was the sole cause of her distress.

While eco-anxiety is a natural response, it can also become unhealthy 
when it becomes paralyzing, Clayton said. But that doesn't make it 
exaggerated or misplaced.

When a therapist dismisses a client's distress, it can be profoundly 
damaging, Davenport said. "The client becomes the problem and the source 
of dysfunction," Davenport said of this scenario. "Anytime a person is 
wrongfully blamed it can be painful, but coming from a mental health 
professional, an expert where a power differential is also in play, it 
can be disorienting for the client, causing them to question their own 
reality." This dynamic harms the foundation of trust between client and 
therapist, and can drive the anxious client into further isolation, 
Davenport said...
- -
When a therapist dismisses a client's eco-anxiety or grief, the response 
doesn't necessarily come from a lack of empathy or concern for the 
climate crisis, Hickman said. Oftentimes, the reaction occurs because 
therapists themselves feel unable to cope with their own feelings about 
environmental destruction — much less those of the client. "Therapists 
are only human — but have a duty and responsibility, I believe, to face 
this stuff and reflect on their own vulnerability in order to help their 
clients," Hickman added.

For John Burton, a psychoanalyst based in New York City, there's rarely 
a day when he doesn't think about climate change. When a client brings 
up the topic — even in a passing comment about air travel or Greta 
Thunberg — he immediately feels a jolt of anxiety.

"It stirs up such feelings of helplessness," he said. "That's what comes 
up for me. It shouldn't."

When a therapist hasn't begun to come to terms with their own emotions 
around climate change, it can add to the emotional turmoil of clients 
coping with overwhelming grief and anxiety, said Tree Staunton, a 
climate psychotherapist in Bath, England. For example, a therapist's own 
grief, anxiety or guilt might come off as defensiveness or withdrawal.

"In therapy, we need to stay with that person's reality and that 
person's response. And the worst thing we can do as a therapist is bring 
in our own defenses," Staunton said. "We don't want to really experience 
the distress or the anxiety, so we can't hear the other person's."
- -
Climate anxiety and grief are what Davenport called "disenfranchised" 
emotions. As a society, we don't yet make space for it as a valid 
emotional response; not in the same ways that we would for, say, grief 
over the death of a family member. "It's prevalent, but no one's allowed 
to speak up," she said.

Under a climate-informed model of therapy, therapists encourage these 
people, who otherwise might remain silent, to bring their grief and 
anxiety into the open. They might help clients tease out passing 
comments about climate change, or even include climate change-related 
questions on intake forms.

It sometimes takes a crisis to provoke change. In the wake of the 9/11 
attacks, the Council for Accreditation for Counseling and Related 
Standards, which accredits master's and doctoral degree programs in 
counseling and its specialties, began requiring programs to include 
crisis, disaster and trauma response as core counseling curricula.

"Before 9/11, no one ever thought about the role of therapy for 
disasters, ever," Burton said. He hopes that climate change will force a 
similar change sooner, rather than later.

For Bryant, that first experience working with an eco-anxious client was 
a reckoning. Since then, Bryant has devoted years to learning about the 
psychology of climate change. He facilitates study groups on Zoom, posts 
detailed guidelines for leading a climate-change support group, and 
gathers articles on climate science and psychology. Today, others 
consider him a leader in the field of climate-change informed 
psychotherapy. He's seen these changes mirrored in the field at large.

"I've seen a huge shift in discourse," Bryant said.

In England, Staunton has been advocating for more systemic changes. 
Recently, her advocacy led to the addition of new training standards in 
the UK's Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy College, one of 10 
subsections of the UK Council for Psychotherapy. New therapists will be 
required to learn about the environmental and climate crises and the 
unconscious defenses we're all employing when we think about this 
crisis. They'll have to learn when to support those defenses in clients 
— and how to help clients overcome them.

In the coming years, the number of people on the frontlines of climate 
change is going to grow. Widespread training promises more widespread 
access to necessary mental healthcare, Staunton said.

"Climate change is the context in which we're doing therapy," Staunton 
said. "And it can't be left out of therapy."

[Isobel Whitcomb is a science reporter based in the Pacific Northwest. 
Her work covering health care and ecology has appeared in Bay Nature 
Magazine, Hakai and Atlas Obscura.]
https://www.ncronline.org/news/earthbeat/therapists-are-reckoning-eco-anxiety



[Jennifer Francis -- a disruptive scientific paper just released - ]
*How do intermittency and simultaneous processes obfuscate the Arctic 
influence on midlatitude winter extreme weather events?*
J E Overland, T J Ballinger, J Cohen, J A Francis, E HannaR Jaiser, B -M 
Kim, S -J Kim, J Ukita, T Vihma, M Wang and X Zhang

Published 18 March 2021 • © 2021 The Author(s)
Environmental Research Letters, Volume 16, Number 4

    *Abstract*
    Pronounced changes in the Arctic environment add a new potential
    driver of anomalous weather patterns in midlatitudes that affect
    billions of people. Recent studies of these Arctic/midlatitude
    weather linkages, however, state inconsistent conclusions. A source
    of uncertainty arises from the chaotic nature of the atmosphere.
    Thermodynamic forcing by a rapidly warming Arctic contributes to
    weather events through changing surface heat fluxes and large-scale
    temperature and pressure gradients. But internal shifts in
    atmospheric dynamics—the variability of the location, strength, and
    character of the jet stream, blocking, and stratospheric polar
    vortex (SPV)—obscure the direct causes and effects. It is important
    to understand these associated processes to differentiate
    Arctic-forced variability from natural variability. For example in
    early winter, reduced Barents/Kara Seas sea-ice coverage may
    reinforce existing atmospheric teleconnections between the North
    Atlantic/Arctic and central Asia, and affect downstream weather in
    East Asia. Reduced sea ice in the Chukchi Sea can amplify
    atmospheric ridging of high pressure near Alaska, influencing
    downstream weather across North America. In late winter southward
    displacement of the SPV, coupled to the troposphere, leads to
    weather extremes in Eurasia and North America. Combined tropical and
    sea ice conditions can modulate the variability of the SPV.
    Observational evidence for Arctic/midlatitude weather linkages
    continues to accumulate, along with understanding of connections
    with pre-existing climate states. Relative to natural atmospheric
    variability, sea-ice loss alone has played a secondary role in
    Arctic/midlatitude weather linkages; the full influence of Arctic
    amplification remains uncertain.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abdb5d/meta




[Claritin made this story, but they didn't pay me for it]
*New Study Says Climate Change Is Indeed Making Your Allergies Worse*
By Ally Hirschlag2 days ago
If you've been sneezing and rubbing your eyes more and more each year, 
you're not alone. Pollen season is getting longer and more intense 
thanks to Climate Change.
- -
While pollen season extends into the fall, the study found the biggest 
increases in pollen concentrations happen in the spring. This makes 
sense considering how many pollen-producing plants begin to bloom in the 
spring. Researches also noted the largest, most consistent pollen 
increases were in Texas and the midwestern United States.

What you can do to keep your allergies in check

Aside from using over-the-counter antihistamines and other allergy 
medications to treat symptoms, you can try and avoid exposure to pollen 
as much as possible. Check your local pollen alerts, and on high pollen 
count days, keep your windows closed and stay inside from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m..

If you have to go out for a while, leave your shoes outside when you 
come back, and take your clothes off to wash as soon as you come inside. 
It's also a good idea to shower at night since pollen can get trapped in 
your hair.

Vacuuming regularly and buying a couple HEPA air filters will also help 
keep allergies at bay while your inside your home.
https://weather.com/health/allergy/news/2021-04-16-study-climate-change-making-allergies-worse




[Digging back into the internet news archive- what don't we understand?]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 18, 1977 *

April 18, 1977: President Carter declares that the effort needed to 
avert an energy crisis is the "moral equivalent of war."
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=7369


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