[✔️] August 1, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Aug 1 08:09:55 EDT 2021
/*August 1, 2021*/
[a new month]
*Soaring heat, dry conditions in West lead to fire warnings; California
faces potential power outages*
The Dixie Fire, the largest wildfire burning in California, is expected
to see increased fire behavior Saturday due to drying conditions.
Meanwhile, the state is preparing for potential power outages.
- -
Excessive heat -- combined with extreme drought in Western states -- is
a challenge for battling wildfires. In Oregon, red flag warnings are in
place as thunderstorms are expected to create new fire starts from
lightning strikes over "critically dry fuels," the National Weather
Service said Saturday. Nine new fires were reported in the last day, the
National Interagency Fire Center said...
- -
At least 87 fires are burning across the country, with weather
conditions over the weekend conducive to new fire starts in some areas
of the West, including Oregon, according to the National Weather
Service. More than 2,700 square miles have been consumed by fire so far...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/31/wildfire-updates-new-fire-warnings-west-california-power-outages/5443378001/
- -
[cough, cough]
*Dangerous B.C. air quality is among the worst on the planet*
Isabella O'Malley
Digital Reporter, Environmental Scientist
Saturday, July 31st 2021 - Hundreds of wildfires in B.C. and a stagnant
atmospheric pattern are contributing to hazardous air quality.
Friday brought the worst air quality on Earth to British Columbia. The
usual culprits in China, India and Iran were fair in comparison to the
southern Interior. Castlegar, B.C., had a daily average air quality
index of 415 --marking the third worst day in the past seven years and
the first time two days have exceeded 400 in the same year. Tuesday's
index reading was 404.
Some of the most dangerous components in wildfire smoke are carbon
monoxide and microscopic, ultrafine particles called PM 2.5, which are
2.5 microns in diameter or smaller and cause health complications when
they enter the lungs or bloodstream...
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/dangerous-british-columbia-air-quality-is-among-the-worst-on-the-planet
- -
[Near Paradise]
*In the shadow of Paradise, nearby residents make uneasy peace with fire*
Smoke, closed businesses and constant worry have changed life for those
living with disaster on their doorstep
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/31/california-towns-fire
[video]
*Why fossil fuel companies should be lawyering up*
Jul 30, 2021
DW Planet A
Corporations and governments have mastered the art of dodging the bullet
when it comes to tackling climate change. But now they're in trouble.
Climate activists around the world are taking them to court in climate
litigation cases– and they're winning.
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't
need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards
an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with
climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do
and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly
global look at how to get us out of this mess.
0:00 Intro
0:52 Suing governments
3:21 Inaction as human rights violation
5:01 Children suing polluters
6:11 Fossil fuel companies losing
8:37 Climate litigation as a solution?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVYzHgHx8U4
[lower lake]
*Lake Oroville feet away from historic low, could beat record in coming
days*
OROVILLE, Calif. — How low can Lake Oroville go? While losing over a
foot of water each day, historically low is the answer.
The lake is on track to beat its lowest recorded record: 645 feet above
sea level in September 1977. Friday, it sits at 646.97 feet, just feet
away from a new record.
This could drop dramatically further to 620 feet by late October,
according to Molly White, Water Operations Manager for the Department of
Water Resources (DWR)...
https://krcrtv.com/news/local/lake-oroville-feet-away-from-historic-low-could-beat-record-in-coming-days
[agreed]
*Our biggest enemy is no longer climate denial but climate delay*
Ed Miliband - Fri 30 Jul 2021
Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of action – which is all
that the British government is offering
Future generations will look back on the climate events of 2021 and say:
“That was the year they ran out of excuses.”
Heatwaves and flooding here in the UK, temperatures topping 50C in
Pakistan, hundreds killed by a heatwave in British Columbia, deadly
floods in Germany and China. All within a single month. Add to that the
recent dire warning from the Met Office that the age of extreme weather
has just begun.
The wake-up call that this offers is not just the obvious one: that
climate breakdown is already here. It also illustrates that we, in this
generation, are in a unique position in the history of this crisis.
Climate breakdown can no longer be plausibly denied as a threat etched
only in the future. And all too soon, avoiding it may be a luxury lost
to the past. The window to avoid catastrophe is closing with every
passing day. We’re in the decisive decade in this fight, and we must
treat the climate crisis as an issue that stands alone in the
combination of its urgency and the shadow it casts over future generations..
The actions we take defy the normal rhythm of political cycles. What we
do in the next few years will have effects for hundreds of years to
come. Unless the world cuts emissions in half in this decade, we will
probably lose the chance to avoid warming of significantly more than the
1.5C set out in the 2015 Paris accord. We have seen the catastrophic
effects of a world warmed by just 1.2C. What happens if we get to 2.5 or
3C? By then, we’ll look back at recent summers as not the hottest we’ve
ever had but, in all likelihood, the coolest we will ever have again.
The accompanying truth is that our biggest enemy is no longer climate
denial but climate delay. The most dangerous opponents of change are no
longer the shrinking minority who deny the need for action, but the
supposed supporters of change who refuse to act at the pace the science
demands. As Bill McKibben, environmentalist and climate scholar, says on
climate: “Winning slowly is the same as losing.”...
- -
Meanwhile, we know that inaction is entirely unaffordable, leaving
massive costs of climate damage racked up and left for future
generations. The OBR also tells us that delay will significantly raise
the cost of action, in part because we are baking high carbon into our
infrastructure. We will have to make the transition at some point;
failing to act now will betray our children and grandchildren and will
just end up costing more.
We should act now not just because we must avoid future generations
living in a disaster movie but because rewriting the script can produce
a better world. Rapid decarbonisation is the imperative, but we can do
so in a way that fixes the inequalities that exist in our current
economic system. This is the promise of the Green New Deal – that this
transformative programme of investment can also generate good jobs, help
existing industries transition and create new ones, ensure warmer homes,
cleaner air, and a lasting shift in wealth and power across our country.
This is the vision we must fight for.
Particularly, in this year of all years, what we do here at home has
real impacts around the world. If other governments believe that a
country that has led the way on climate is full of hot air, it simply
undermines trust and lets the big polluters off the hook. In the less
than 100 days left to COP26, the prime minister must finally wake up to
the fact that this is not a glorified international photo opportunity
but a complex and fragile negotiation where he must deliver at home and
engage in the hard yards of diplomacy.
Just over 50 years ago, Martin Luther King said of the fight for racial
and economic justice: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is
today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In the
unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being
too late.” As the generation that stands astride the causes and
consequences of this climate emergency, we must take heed of those words.
Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and shadow business,
energy and industry secretary
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/30/climate-denial-delay-inaction-british-government
[learning something from observations]
*Good wildfire news? Evidence from the Bootleg Fire supports thinning
forests.*
A story from Oregon offers lessons for a dried-out, overheated West.
Nathanael Johnson - - Jul 26, 2021
The Nature Conservancy had been preparing for this moment for decades.
The Jim Castles research station sits at the north end of the Sycan
Marsh reserve: 30,000 acres of mixed wetland and dry pine forest in the
Klamath Basin, which the nonprofit acquired in the 1980’s. The
conservation group worked with the Klamath Tribes that call this area
home to restore the forested areas to the landscape that existed before
Americans took over the land and began putting out fires. They cut down
small trees, leaving fire-adapted specimens like thick-barked ponderosa
pines, and they began setting fires, allowing them to consume decades of
needles and branches on the forest floor...
- -
In the next few years, scientists will scrutinize the Sycan Marsh to see
how the Bootleg Fire reacted to different types of forest management,
Caligiuri said, which will help people understand how to tame wildfires.
There’s a long way to go, but neighbors across the West are organizing
community groups to thin trees and conduct prescribed burns, while state
and federal agencies are ramping up spending to increase this kind of
management. People are starting to move in the right direction, Hepner
said, “and yet sometimes conditions seem to be outpacing us.”
https://grist.org/extreme-weather/wildfire-bootleg-fire-news-forests/
[maybe change the name to Highway 61]
*Will climate change and a rising ocean mean the end of the road for NC
Highway 12?*
The highway runs the length of the Outer Banks, supporting the economy,
welcoming tourists and often providing a lifeline for residents. But as
sands shift and the sea rises, can N.C. 12 survive?
The road runs the length of the developed Outer Banks. It is a crucial
engine for the region’s economy and a lifeline for year-round residents
of the region’s small coastal towns. Now, engineers, scientists and
homeowners are making choices about how to best protect the highway and,
thus, the villages it supports.
A handful of flood- and erosion-prone spots along Highway 12 have posed
particular problems for local officials and transportation engineers for
almost a century. Sea levels in the Outer Banks are rising twice as fast
as they are along North Carolina’s southeastern coast and storms are
strengthening, heightening urgency among officials to find new answers
to an old problem.
The choices facing the Outer Banks are particularly stark, but they are
similar to those people in many other parts of the state and country
will face as climate change’s effects continue to worsen: At what cost
do you maintain homes, businesses and livelihoods in a place that is
gravely imperiled?...
- -
“When sand is deposited through overwash, that is the land form
adjusting to changing conditions,” Moore said. “Every time we reset
island elevation by removing that sand, we’re increasing vulnerability
as sea level continues to rise. We’re trying to hold the elevation of
the island fixed as the sea level is rising around it.”...
- -
“It’s scary having to worry about somewhere that you grew up your whole
life and you slowly see the water coming up and you slowly see the
storms taking more and more with it, and it’s hard making decisions and
having to worry about other things other than here,” Barley said.
Barley isn’t sure she’ll come back to Hatteras Island after she walks
across the graduation stage in Greenville, possibly as soon as 2023.
“If I find a better opportunity somewhere else, then I probably won’t,”
Barley said.
“But this is always home,” she continued. “I don’t think anywhere that I
ever move would ever feel as much like home as this place does.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article252949138.html
[Dark outlook]
*Why the Paris Climate Agreement Might be Doomed to Fail*
An economist argues that the international accord, which depends on
collective action, does not include the kinds of incentives and
penalties that would ensure that countries do their part.
By Nicholas Kusnetz - - July 28, 2021
Not long before the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, Scott Barrett
wanted to test how likely it was that the pact would work. As an
economist who studies international cooperation, Barrett decided to
design a game to model how the signatories might behave.
Poker chips stood in for emissions cuts. The goal was to avoid
“catastrophe,” which players could achieve by contributing some of their
chips to a collective pot. Just as no one knows the exact level of
emissions cuts necessary to avoid a given amount of warming, the players
did not know exactly how many chips the pot needed to avoid catastrophe,
only that the threshold lay within a certain range.
Players were told to agree on a common goal for the pot, and to make
pledges for their own contributions. If they avoided catastrophe,
everyone received a substantial pay-out. If they failed, each player was
given only a small number of chips, creating a clear incentive to reach
the goal.
Barrett is the vice dean of Columbia University’s School of
International and Public Affairs, and designed the experiment with
Astrid Dannenberg, a behavioral and environmental economist at the
University of Kassel, in Germany. The key question was whether the
“name-and-shame” structure of the Paris Agreement, in which governments
periodically review each others’ pledges, would lead countries to make
steeper emissions cuts.
Barrett and his colleague ran many rounds of the game with different
players, and the result was clear: The pact’s design led players to
agree on a higher collective goal, and to make more ambitious individual
pledges. But for the most part, players ended up contributing fewer
chips than they had promised, barely giving more than they would have
without the “name-and-shame” design, which did little to avoid catastrophe.
The outcome of the game illustrates a problem inherent to climate
change: Success or failure is determined only by whether the collective
goal is achieved, regardless of how much any single country contributes.
So while countries are all but assured of a bad outcome if they don’t
take action, they could be even worse off if they limit their own
emissions sharply but others do not.
“What they want is some kind of assurance that others will contribute,”
Barrett said.
The game showed that the Paris accord, like the global climate pacts
that preceded it, fails to provide this assurance, Barrett said...
- -
India initially resisted joining the agreement. At the time, the country
was planning to expand the production and use of CFCs. But in 1992, as
it saw its potential trading market shrink because it could not make
deals with countries that had signed, and with the promise of payments
to help phase out CFCs if it joined, India signed the protocol.
In contrast, in 2015, not long before signing the Paris Agreement, India
announced plans to double its coal production. “And the rest of the
world just pretty much shrugged its shoulders,” Barrett said.
India wanted to develop its economy and reduce poverty. Burning more
coal was the simplest way to do that, and the accord gave no compelling
incentives to look at alternatives.
“If you have an effective system for negotiation,” Barrett said, “then
what the rest of the world should have said is, ‘Of course we understand
why you want to do that. But if you do that, you’re going to undermine
your future development as well as that of everyone else. And’—this is
really critical—‘Here’s another technology that gives you the same
energy you would have gotten from coal, and the only reason you’re not
going to it in the first place is because it’s more expensive. But we’re
going to pay you the difference.’”...
To work, Barrett said, diplomats would also have needed a stick to
punish India if it didn’t agree, as they did with the trade barrier in
the Montreal Protocol.
One of the key shortcomings of the Paris Agreement, Barrett argues, is
that it fails to address the “free-rider problem,” which stems from the
fact that countries would enjoy the benefits of global efforts to limit
emissions regardless of their contributions. This creates a temptation
to ride on the emissions cuts of other nations, and can doom the overall
effort: If everyone shirks, the global cuts never materialize.
“And that’s been the whole problem from the beginning,” he said. “We’ve
had 30 years of negotiations, more diplomatic effort on this than any
other in all of world history, and all this time global emissions have
been rising.”...
- -
“Climate change is going to produce winners and losers, and if you’re a
loser, you’re going to fight like hell to make sure that climate
regulation doesn’t move forward,” said Jessica Green, an associate
professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “And in
fact, that’s what we’ve seen.”
Green and others identify the decades-long fight waged by the fossil
fuel industry as the most important force holding back change. They
point to studies that have demonstrated the well-known effects of
lobbying by oil and gas companies, and to research findings that run
counter to the idea that global climate efforts have been stymied by the
collective action problems Barrett studies.
“I think that the capture of political processes by fossil capital is a
huge, huge problem, and it is the first order problem,” Green said.
“Unless you deal with that, you can’t make meaningful progress. You make
incremental progress, and that’s what we’ve done.”
From this perspective, Montreal’s success hinged on the support it
received from the chemical industry. But this glosses over an important
detail: It was the agreement itself that helped bring the industry on board.
“When the Montreal Protocol was signed, there was opposition all the way
up to the signature,” said Stephen Andersen, who was working at the EPA
on ozone-depleting substances at the time, and has devoted his career to
supporting the protocol.
“In fact, when the deal was made in Montreal, industry was
flabbergasted. They thought they’d blocked it,” Andersen said. Only
about two-dozen countries joined the agreement initially, “but as soon
as it was signed, industry started looking at it and saying, ’Well, if
this is what’s happening, what should we do?’”...
- -
Barrett acknowledges that Montreal is an imperfect analogue for the
Paris Agreement. While CFCs were used in a relatively narrow set of
products, fossil fuels power the global economy. DuPont and other
chemical companies were in the best position to produce alternatives,
but it is not clear whether oil companies have any competitive advantage
in the renewable energy sector or other fields.
But he is not alone in thinking that the Paris Agreement’s avoidance of
trade restrictions misses an important opportunity to press countries to
act.
“Trade is the thing that drives climate change,” said Diann Black-Layne,
ambassador for climate change for Antigua and Barbuda and lead climate
change negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. “If you block
the importation of goods and services—and please include services—you
would have a transition like you would not believe.”
- -
“We do have good signs that the Paris Agreement is starting to work the
way it was intended to work,” said Nathaniel Keohane, president of the
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a climate change think tank.
“If it works, it would be because it creates a framework where countries
have to set targets and then are expected to live up to them, and where
their progress is monitored and reported on and there’s a real degree of
transparency. Now we are just on the cusp of that.”
Barrett said he is not optimistic. But he also doesn’t favor replacing
or renegotiating the Paris Agreement. “The message isn’t that Paris is
bad, it’s not,” he said. “The message is that Paris is not enough.”
Instead, Barrett points to a more obscure agreement as a model, one that
piggy-backed on the Montreal Protocol and could help countries meet
their targets under the Paris accord. In 2016, nations agreed on the
Kigali Amendment, which targets hydrofluorocarbons, potent greenhouse
gases that were developed as ozone-friendly replacements for CFCs.
Notably, the chemical industry and Republican Senators pressed the Trump
administration to join the agreement, but the White House delayed
ratification of the amendment. President Joe Biden initiated the process
in January.
Barrett said diplomats should work to create smaller, more technical
agreements that could supplement the Paris Agreement, focusing, for
example, on emissions cuts in particular industries. These agreements
would lack the dramatic appeal of the Paris accord, especially because
any gains they achieved would necessarily be incremental and limited.
Barrett is not even convinced that these types of pacts could limit
warming to within the Paris agreement targets, but he thinks it’s the
best shot we’ve got.
“This approach we’re taking of trying to do everything together hasn’t
worked,” he said. “Let’s try to build some other agreements. And yeah,
each one is not going to solve the problem, but each one will do
something. And maybe we can start, over a period of time, start to piece
things together.”
Nicholas Kusnetz
Reporter, New York City
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28072021/pairs-agreement-success-failure/
[Oreskes video - historian of science]
*Is Climate Change the End? And if so, the End of What?*
Mar 28, 2019
Case Western Reserve University
Naomi Oreskes - -March 22, 2019
https://youtu.be/Gc7RNrh8i-A
- -
[David Suzuki]
*Why it’s time to think about human extinction | Dr David Suzuki*
Dec 16, 2018
Kerwin Rae
After listening to this ep with Dr David Suzuki, you’ll never be the
same again. The environmentalist, activist, professor of genetics and
science broadcaster hits us with some home truths about what our future
will look like if we continue to live the way we have been. What will
life be like for our children and grandchildren? Can the damage we’ve
done to the planet be reversed? Is extinction of the human race imminent?
We talk about population control, the importance of renewable energy and
discuss what we can do right now in our own lives that can actually make
a difference. This is for anyone who cares about the future of mankind.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Dr David Suzuki
20:06 Why humanity has only got 1 minute left to live
25:25 Humans are the only species that don't care about their own
children
29:17 Educate yourself on politics or don't complain about the
government
36:26 Can we be saved from our own extinction?
59:09 A final challenge for entrepreneurs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktnAMTmgOX0
[Big Think has made an excellent video]
*Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign? | Big Think*
Oct 3, 2020
Big Think
--------------------------------------------
From America's inception, there has always been a rebellious,
anti-establishment mentality. That way of thinking has become more
reckless now that the entire world is interconnected and there are added
layers of verification (or repudiation) of facts.
As the great minds in this video can attest, there are systems and
mechanisms in place to discern between opinion and truth. By making
conscious efforts to undermine and ignore those systems at every turn
(climate change, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, politics, etc.),
America has compromised its position of power and effectively stunted
its own growth.
A part of the problem, according to writer and radio host Kurt Andersen,
is a new media infrastructure that allows for false opinions to persist
and spread to others. Is it the beginning of the end of the American empire?
----------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:
KURT ANDERSEN: Americans have always been magical thinkers and
passionate believers in the untrue. We were started by the Puritans
in New England who wanted to create, and did create, a Christian
utopia and theocracy as they waited for the imminent second coming
of Christ and the end of days. And in the South by a bunch of people
who were convinced, absolutely convinced, that this place they'd
never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in
Virginia. And they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20
years before they finally, finally faced the facts and the evidence
and decided that they weren't going to get rich overnight there.
So that was the beginning. And then we've had centuries of 'buyer
beware' charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical quackery to an
extreme degree, and increasingly exotic, extravagant, implausible
religions over and over again from Mormonism, to Christian science,
to Scientology in the last century. And we've had this
anti-establishment, "I'm not going to trust the experts. I'm not
going to trust the elite," in our character from the beginning. Now,
all those things came together and were supercharged in the 1960s
when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. Then,
a generation later when the internet came along, giving each of
those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are,
their own kind of media infrastructure.
We had entertainment, again, for our whole last couple 100 years,
but especially in the last 50 years, permeating all the rest of
life, including presidential politics, from John F. Kennedy through
Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton. So, the thing was set up for Donald
Trump to exploit all these various American threads and
astonishingly become president. But then you look at this history
and it's like, "Oh, we should've seen this coming."
TYSON: The power of journalism: A mistake becomes truth. The print
journalism is taking what I said and turning it into an article, so
it has to pass through the journalist, get processed, and then it
becomes some written content on a page. One hundred percent of those
experiences, the journalist got something fundamentally wrong with
the subject matter. And just as an interesting point about the power
of journalists, I had people read the article and say, "Neil, you
must know better than that. That's not how this works." They assumed
the journalist was correct about reporting what I said, not that I
was correct and that the journalists was wrong. This is an
interesting power that journalists have over whether you think what
they're writing is true or not. That was decades ago. In recent
years, what I think has happened is that they're more journalists
who are science fluent that are writing about science than was the
case 20 years ago. So now I don't have to worry about the journalist
missing something fundamental about what I'm trying...
Read the full transcript at
https://bigthink.com/videos/anti-science-pro-conspiracy-america
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S58vlJwhwDw
[Great question]
*Could sea level rise cut off Nova Scotia from the rest of North America?*
Friday, July 30th 2021, 5:18 pm - Experts say that sea level rise is
having a noticeable impact in Atlantic Canada and is putting some towns
in jeopardy.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/could-sea-level-rise-cut-off-nova-scotia-from-the-rest-of-north-america
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 1, 1988*
Sacramento, California-based right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh
begins his nationally syndicated program; over the next three decades,
Limbaugh aggressively promotes the notion that climate science is a "hoax."
RUSH TO JUDGMENT
Attacking environmentalists as hippie-dip “wackos” who care more
about spotted owls than people and use polar bears for propaganda,
Rush Limbaugh has blinded millions of Americans to the climate crisis.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/wolcott200705
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/wolcott200705
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