[✔️] April 20, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Apr 20 09:10:07 EDT 2021
/*April 20, 2021*/
[Political sea change in labor]
*Miners’ union backs shift from coal in exchange for jobs
*By MATTHEW DALY
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s largest coal miners’ union said Monday it
would accept President Joe Biden’s plan to move away from coal and other
fossil fuels in exchange for a “true energy transition” that includes
thousands of jobs in renewable energy and spending on technology to make
coal cleaner.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said
ensuring jobs for displaced miners — including 7,000 coal workers who
lost their jobs last year — is crucial to any infrastructure bill taken
up by Congress...
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-technology-cecil-roberts-climate-change-1ee4ba04f4f49246b19d1e025bec3586
[Bloomberg graphic display of future - worth reading]
*Whatever Climate Change Does to the World, Cities Will Be Hit Hardest*
By Laura Millan Lombraña and Sam Dodge
April 18, 2021
More than half of humanity is crowded together in cities. That’s about 4
billion people living on top of one another, working, commuting,
polluting, and figuring out how to survive. And that proportion will
only rise: By the end of the century, about 85% of the world’s
population will be urban, according to the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
Cities are also incredibly vulnerable to climate change. High
temperatures, sea level rise, and extreme weather are all felt more
acutely in urban areas. Built on concrete, they absorb solar radiation
but not water, making the effects of both heat waves and heavy rains
more severe.
If humans keep emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases at our current
pace, Earth will warm by at least 3C and as much as 4C by the end of the
century compared with preindustrial temperatures, causing much of the
planet to become unlivable. Radical emissions cuts could change that
forecast if they’re made within the next few decades. Lockdowns during
the coronavirus led to a record 7.5% drop in emissions in 2020, but the
reduction was short-lived. The latest data from the International Energy
Agency shows that global emissions were 2% higher in December than at
the same point in 2019...
- -
No matter how much the world warms, cities will have it worse, with
average summer temperatures rising between 1.9C and 4.4C above current
levels, depending on how the future plays out, according to a research
team led by Lei Zhao at the University of Illinois. That increase will
lead to more deaths in places with scarce resources to adapt and
mitigate the effects of a changing climate.
By 2100, cities will be significantly hotter than surrounding regions
Average summer temperature change under RCP 4.5
Difference between projected urban warming and background regional warming
Note: Urban temperatures are currently between 1 and 2 degrees Celsius
warmer than surrounding areas due to the urban heat island effect,
according to Zhao’s research...
- -
Sea level rise will wipe out most of Tianjin’s current surface area if
no adaptation measures are taken. Meanwhile, average temperatures in the
city are expected to increase between 2.5C and 5C above current levels.
As the world warms, the effects of climate change will become more
unpredictable, with storms, cold spells, and heat waves often matching
or even surpassing scientists’ worst-case scenarios. Cities and their
dwellers will need to spend trillions to mitigate damages, adapt, and
survive in a planet that’s growing more hostile by the minute.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-cities-climate-victims/
[video Brown University - video Watson Institute - Islam is supportive
of anthropogenic climate change]
*Wael Al-Delaimy ─ Climate Change and Global Warming Related to the
Middle East*
Apr 19, 2021
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Wael Al-Delaimy is Professor of Public Health and Associate Director of
the Institute for Public Health at the University of California San
Diego and the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Society for
Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World. He is also the
current Chair of the Eastern Mediterranean Chapter of the International
Society for Environmental Epidemiology. A native of Iraq where he
finished his medical degree and a graduate diploma in community
medicine, he obtained his PhD in Epidemiology from New Zealand, finished
post-doc training at Harvard School of Public Health, was a scientist
with the International Agency for Research on Cancer, before becoming a
faculty at the University of California San Diego. His recent research
focus has been on climate change health impacts, and global mental
health. His book that he edited with colleagues, titled Health of
People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility was published May 2020
by Springer Nature and reached a record milestone of more than 230,000
downloads.
His talk will focus on climate change health impacts in the Middle East
and North Africa (MENA) Region, which was the title of a chapter in the
above book. The climate change impacts are going to be felt in the MENA
region most severely and most early compared to other regions. Yet there
is limited data, research, policies, and preparation by the population
of the region and their governments. The talk will highlight the risks
and the need for regional cooperation to develop adaptation and
mitigation initiatives to lessen the impact on an already volatile
region in the middle of ongoing conflicts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dVtTOJBMdw
- -
[622 pages, the electronic version is free]
*Health of People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility: Climate
Change, Air Pollution and Health*
by Wael Al-Delaimy, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, et al. | May 13, 2020
This open access book not only describes the challenges of climate
disruption, but also presents solutions. The challenges described
include air pollution, climate change, extreme weather, and related
health impacts that range from heat stress, vector-borne diseases, food
and water insecurity and chronic diseases to malnutrition and mental
well-being.The influence of humans on climate change has been
established through extensive published evidence and reports. However,
the connections between climate change, the health of the planet and the
impact on human health have not received the same level of attention.
Therefore, the global focus on the public health impacts of climate
change is a relatively recent area of interest. This focus is timely
since scientists have concluded that changes in climate have led to new
weather extremes such as floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and fires,
in turn leading to more than 600,000 deaths and the displacement of
nearly 4 billion people in the last 20 years. Previous work on the
health impacts of climate change was limited mostly to epidemiologic
approaches and outcomes and focused less on multidisciplinary,
multi-faceted collaborations between physical scientists, public health
researchers and policy makers. Further, there was little attention paid
to faith-based and ethical approaches to the problem. The solutions and
actions we explore in this book engage diverse sectors of civil society,
faith leadership, and political leadership, all oriented by ethics,
advocacy, and policy with a special focus on poor and vulnerable
populations. The book highlights areas we think will resonate broadly
with the public, faith leaders, researchers and students across
disciplines including the humanities, and policy makers.
Review
“The book is written for scientists and policy developers. It will
probably be most useful to scientists, engineers, and technicians in
government bureaus and departments seeking facts and solutions for
environmental problems. … This work is unique in bringing together
expert scientists and leading political and religious figures to work on
needs and solutions in environmental policy.” (Eugene N. Anderson,
Doody’s Book Reviews, October 9, 2020)
https://www.amazon.com/Health-People-Planet-Our-Responsibility-ebook/dp/B088LMSRQH/ref=sr_1_1
[in the New Yorker]
*Greta Thunberg’s Happy Crusade*
From a Stockholm safe house, the teen-age activist discusses her
disappointment in Biden and Merkel, her new documentary, and pranking
her parents.
By Lizzie Widdicombe - April 8, 2021
- -
Greta Thunberg, the eighteen-year-old Swedish climate activist, hasn’t
decided exactly what she’ll be doing on Earth Day (April 22nd) this
year. But she’s sure she will have some critical things to say about the
virtual climate summit that begins that day, to which President Biden
has invited forty world leaders. Even though Biden has reversed the
course set by his predecessor, who liked to call climate change “a very
expensive hoax,” Thunberg knows she will be disappointed. “The things
that they are going to present will not be nearly enough for what
science is saying will be in line with the Paris Agreement,” she said.
“So I’ll just be calling that out, I guess.”...
- -
Later this month, a three-part BBC documentary about Thunberg will
première on PBS. The film, “A Year to Change the World,” follows her as
she takes a year off from school to visit sites that show the climate
crisis in all its complexity—melting glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, a
California town torched by wildfires, a Polish coal mine. The film
provides a gentle portrait of Thunberg growing up and growing into her
power. She attends the World Economic Forum, in Davos, where she’s cast
as a media foil to Donald Trump, an experience that she said she found
surreal. “Even though I was in the very middle of it, I was still just
watching it from a distance,” she recalled. She meets with Angela
Merkel, the German Chancellor, to discuss the country’s Paris Agreement
progress, and emerges unimpressed. (“Is this in line with what you have
promised?” Thunberg asks in the film. “The fact is, no.”)...
- -
Thunberg is on the autism spectrum, and the film illustrates how the
condition lends a unique moral clarity to her activism. “I don’t follow
social codes,” she said. “Everyone else seems to be playing a role, just
going on like before. And I, who am autistic, I don’t play this social
game.” She eschews empty optimism. Her over-all reaction to the
coronavirus pandemic is to compare it with her cause: “If we humans
would actually start treating the climate crisis like a crisis, we could
really change things.”
Her uncompromising words can give the wrong impression. “People seem to
think that I am depressed, or angry, or worried, but that’s not true,”
she said. Having a cause makes her happy. “It was like I got meaning in
my life.”...
- -
“People say autistic people can’t understand irony,” she went on. She
disputes this energetically. “I am irony, almost,” she said. “I think
the world, as it is, is quite funny.” She finds the climate crisis
darkly comic, especially the response in rich countries—the posturing,
the self-justification, the bargaining, the denial. “If you are doing
everything you possibly can, and you can’t do anything more, then you
might as well just sit back and laugh at it,” Thunberg said. “Because
otherwise you will get depressed.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/greta-thunbergs-happy-crusade
[ice update- one minute video]
*An update on the Greenland Ice Shelf*
Apr 18, 2021
60 Minutes
Back in 2006, Scott Pelley travelled north to a fjord in Greenland to
witness “Global Warning” – the melting arctic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y-G0biDv74
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 20, 2002 *
The Guardian reports:
"The head of the international scientific panel on climate change,
which has called for urgent action to curb global warming, was
deposed yesterday after a campaign by the Bush administration,
Exxon-Mobil and other energy companies to get him replaced.
"At a plenary session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Robert Watson, a British-born US
atmospheric scientist who has been its chairman since 1996, was
replaced by an Indian railway engineer and environmentalist, R K
Pachauri.
"Dr Pachauri received 76 votes to Dr. Watson's 49 after a
behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign by the US to persuade
developing countries to vote against Dr Watson, according to
diplomats. The British delegation argued for Dr Watson and Dr
Pachauri to share the chairmanship.
"The US campaign came to light after the disclosure of a
confidential memorandum from the world's biggest oil company,
Exxon-Mobil, to the White House, proposing a strategy for his removal."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/20/internationaleducationnews.climatechange
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