[✔️] August 7, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Aug 7 09:37:56 EDT 2021
/*August 7, 2021*/
[Our Children's Trust]
*Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youth Plaintiffs, **Affirms Case Can
Proceed to Trial*
Aug 5, 2021 | News Release
Sixteen youth plaintiffs who are suing the state of Montana for
violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful
environment secured a critical victory Wednesday after Judge Kathy
Seeley denied the state’s attempt to prevent their case, Held v. State
of Montana, from proceeding to trial.
Judge Seeley, allowing the case to proceed to trial on the
constitutionality of Montana’s fossil fuel energy policies, recognized
that the youth plaintiffs are experiencing significant impacts from the
climate crisis, including economic, cultural, physical, and mental
health injuries. She also ruled that the plaintiffs can sue the state
over its aggressive expansion of the fossil fuel industry, a substantial
contributor to the climate crisis.
During a February hearing on the state’s motion to dismiss the case,
plaintiffs’ co-counsel Roger Sullivan of McGarvey Law in Kalispell noted
that “Montana is the carbon capital of the country” and described the
state’s “statutory double-headed hydra, which on the one hand explicitly
promotes increasing development and utilization of our massive coal
resources, oil, and gas, and on the other hand, facilitates defendants’
willful blindness to Montana’s contribution to the climate crisis in
violation of Montana’s constitution.”...
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/press-releases
- -
https://twitter.com/westernlaw/status/1423367309922488325
[record breaking records]
*Dixie Fire becomes largest single wildfire in California history*
COLBY BERMEL 08/06/202
The Dixie Fire burning in two Northern California counties is now the
largest single wildfire in recorded state history, exploding in size
overnight as drought-stricken lands continue to fuel the flames.
The fire, which has burned for 23 days and forced mass evacuations,
razed the Gold Rush town of Greenville on Thursday, destroying 91
buildings and damaging five others. Smoke from the blaze has blown to
lower parts of Northern California, including the state capital of
Sacramento where the air quality index on Friday reached "unhealthy"
levels...
- -
Warm temperatures, low humidity and high winds continuing to challenge
firefighters working to extinguish the blaze. The Butte County and
Plumas County DAs are probing PG&E over the Dixie Fire, although Cal
Fire has not yet officially announced the blaze's cause.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/08/06/dixie-fire-becomes-largest-single-wildfire-in-california-history-1389651
[Easy activism - call your Senator (202)-318-1885]
*It’s Never Been Easier to Call Your Senators and Demand Climate Action*
Call4Climate provides a super easy way to call your elected
representatives and demand clean energy, a Civilian Conservation Corps,
and more.
Dharna Noor - Aug 6, 2021...
Call4Climate was launched last month by Leah Stokes, an energy
researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with
Duncan Meisel and Jamie Henn, co-founders of the Clean Creatives campaign.
- -
To that end, the three created a dial-in number—(202)-318-1885 if you
want to put it on your speed dial—that people can use to easily hit up
their senators. Once you call the number, a voice asks you to punch in
your zip code. When you do, it reminds you to make four demands for a
bold climate bill. Those demands include a Clean Electricity Standard
that puts the country on a path to 100% clean power by 2035, ensuring
40% of green funding goes to frontline communities, ending fossil fuel
subsidies, and creating a Civilian Climate Corps. Those demands are
explained in detail on Call4Climate’s website, which also has a script
if you’re not ready to adlib the demands. Then, it patches you through
to your senators’ office lines so you can bring them the message yourself.
https://gizmodo.com/it-s-never-been-easier-to-call-your-senators-and-demand-1847431940
- -
[Try their script]
*What to say when you call: (202)-318-1885*
Hi, my name is [YOUR NAME], I am one of the Senator’s constituents
living in [YOUR CITY/TOWN, STATE]. I wanted to ask the Senator to
support a big, bold climate bill, that invests at the scale of the
crisis, including the following 4 things:
*A Clean Electricity Standard that cuts pollution and modernizes our
grid.*
*Directing 40% of funding to frontline communities.*
*No more subsidies for fossil fuel corporations.*
*A Civilian Climate Corps that puts people to work.*
https://call4climate.com/
[self-labels as an alarmist]
*David Wallace-Wells On 2021's 'Off The Charts' Climate Emergencies*
Jul 23, 2021
The Climate Pod
#davidwallacewells #adaptation #climatecrisis #weatheremergency #heatwaves
David Wallace-Wells joins the show to talk about his new piece "How To
Live In A Climate 'Permanent Emergency.'" He discusses how this year's
unprecedented climate catastrophes should shape adaptation measures, how
his thinking has changed since the publishing of The Uninhabitable
Earth, what he thought about the recent leaked IPCC report, and what he
hopes global leaders will do to address climate change at the upcoming
COP26 and beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVKhCf85IZE
[Wildfire mapping site]
*ALERTWildfire is a consortium of The University of Nevada, Reno,
University of California San Diego, and the University of Oregon
providing fire cameras and tools to help firefighters and first responders:*
Discover, locate, and confirm fire ignition.
Quickly scale fire resources up or down.
Monitor fire behavior during containment.
Help evacuations through enhanced situational awareness.
Observe contained fires for flare-ups.
http://beta.alertwildfire.org/
[Scientists]
Risky Climate
*This Is Why Even Scientists Underestimate Climate Change*
Climate science and economics are inherently conservative, and that may
be a factor in Monday's highly-anticipated report from the UN-backed IPCC.
By Gernot Wagner - - August 6, 2021
Scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global
group backed by the United Nations, have spent the past two weeks in
meetings to ready their latest assessment of the physical science
underpinning past, present, and future climate change. Expect the IPCC
to paint a sobering picture of what is to come. The steep costs of such
a world are all too apparent, but tallying them is harder still.
That latter bit is the bread and butter of climate economics: accounting
for climate damages in dollars and cents. The Holy Grail is translating
those numbers into how much each ton of CO₂ costs society and, thus,
should cost those doing the polluting. It’s important but thankless—more
like boring accounting than cutting-edge economics.
Seeing how it takes years to assess the latest science, with 234 authors
from all over the world working through more than 14,000 studies, adding
economics on top of that implies an even greater lag between the latest
observed climatic changes and a full accounting of their impacts.
“I think it’s now clear that economists have underestimated the costs of
climate change,” says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard
University. By now there are plenty of broadsides against climate
economics: the discipline has “failed us,” the awarding of the
first-ever Nobel in climate economics may have done “more harm than
good,” and even calls for economics to undergo “a climate revolution.”
The discipline does need change, and I should know: I’m a climate
economist quoted in one of those broadsides and the co-author of
another. Yes, many of these critiques are self-reflective, coming from
within.
Criticizing, of course, is easy. Pinpointing the specific reasons for
why economists have traditionally underestimated climate costs, and then
improving on those shortcomings, is much harder.
One reason—and speaking from my own experience—is the objective
difficulty in tallying costs. Doing so “bottom-up,” one heatwave or
hurricane at a time, is a punishing undertaking. That has led climate
economists to make often heroic assumptions that allow them to estimate
climate damages “top-down” with guesstimates of how climate damages
affect the economy. That’s how we calculate total economic damages for
each degree of global average warming.
No surprise, such an exercise misses a lot of detail. It’s not yet
clear, though, that this top-down process would necessarily lead to
underestimates. Perhaps climate economics, as a discipline, has
coalesced around progressively more aggressive assumptions that end up
overestimating climate costs?
To glean some more insights into this question, I went back to Oreskes’s
book, Why Trust Science?. The book focuses on the physical climate
science and the inherent “conservatism” of the discipline. I also
checked in with her about climate economics specifically.
Oreskes sees parallels between the natural and social sciences. “This
may be, in part, another instance of what my colleagues and I documented
in physical climate science: the tendency to underestimate the rate and
magnitude of climate change that we called ‘erring on the side of least
drama,’” she wrote in an email exchange this week. Oreskes sees that
tendency as very much part of scientists’ DNA: “The scientific
conception of rationality as sitting in opposition to emotion, leads
many scientists to feel that it is important for them to be ‘sober,’
dispassionate, unemotional, and ‘conservative.’ This often leads them to
be uncomfortable with dramatic findings, even when they are true.”...
- -
Climate economics may have two other factors at play. One Oreskes
discussed in an op-ed she co-authored with Lord Nicholas Stern: climate
effects are likely to be cascading, and economists may be lacking the
tools to specifically deal with these cascading effects. Economists are
wont of compartmentalizing. Tackling one problem at a time has its clear
advantages, but as I have argued (with the European Climate Foundation’s
Tom Brookes), “marginal thinking is inadequate for an all-consuming
problem touching every aspect of society.”
- -
Of course not every number generated by climate economists, or every
policy pronouncement, will be conservative. But it’s important to
recognize the inherent delays and biases of the scientific enterprise as
a whole. The same reasons why we can trust climate science overall leads
to IPCC reports being inherently conservative in their overall
assessment—and why climate economics has straggled behind in its policy
recommendations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-06/why-even-scientists-underestimate-climate-change
- -
[and then there is plenty of misdirection and misinformation]
*Oil and Gas Inundated Facebook With Election Season Ads After Biden
Released Climate Plan*
ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute were top spenders in a
$9.6 million election-year fossil fuel marketing blitz targeting U.S.
Facebook users.
Oil and Gas Inundated Facebook With Election Season Ads After Biden
Released Climate Plan
Sharon Kelly - - Aug 5, 2021
Ads promoting fossil fuels reached Facebook users in the U.S. at least
431 million times in 2020, a new analysis by watchdog organization
InfluenceMap finds, with the bulk arriving after the release of
then-candidate Joe Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan and in the lead up
to the presidential election. Ads specifically focused on marketing
fossil fuels as clean, green, or part of a climate change “solution”
were viewed more than 122 million times by Facebook users in the U.S.,
the report finds.
The 25 oil and gas companies and advocacy groups covered in the report
paid Facebook a total of $9.6 million to share the ads with social media
users...
- -
Facebook Feeds Flooded with Pre-Election Oil Ads
The vast majority of the oil and gas industry’s ads were paid for
between July and November 2020, InfluenceMap found, adding that there
appeared to be a sharp uptick immediately after Biden released his
sweeping climate plan last July.
- -
‘More Nuanced Messaging’
The themes in the Facebook ads reflect the increasing sophistication of
the oil and gas industry’s efforts to promote burning fossil fuels and
delay the transition to renewable energy despite the escalating climate
crisis, the report found.
“This research reveals the latest iteration of the oil and gas
industry’s playbook on climate change,” Faye Holder, an InfluenceMap
program manager, said. “Rather than outright climate change denial, the
industry is deploying more nuanced messaging including the idea that it
is part of the solution to the climate crisis.”...
- -
“Some of the most significant tactics found included tying the use of
oil and gas to maintaining a high quality of life, promoting fossil gas
as green, and publicizing the voluntary actions taken by the industry on
climate change,” the report concludes.
That’s all on top of ads that actively promoted outright climate denial
in 2020, which a previous InfluenceMap report found Facebook users saw
at least 8 million times during the first half of 2020.
“The research also shows the industry is using social media
strategically,” InfluenceMap concluded, “and deploying its ads at key
political moments.”
InfluenceMap’s findings drew a scathing response from Democratic Rep. Ro
Khanna, chairman of the Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee
on Oversight and Reform, CNN reports.
“For decades, fossil fuel companies have misled the public, to
regulators, and to Congress about the true danger posed by their
products,” Khanna said in a statement to CNN Business, noting that his
committee intends to ask fossil fuel CEOs to testify before the
Congressional subcommittee soon. “This report proves our knowledge that
the industry’s disinformation campaign is alive and well.”
https://www.desmog.com/2021/08/05/oil-gas-facebook-election-ads-biden-climate/
[a chilling thought]
*Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse*
A shutdown would have devastating global impacts and must not be allowed
to happen, researchers say
Thu 5 Aug 2021
Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the
Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points.
The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last
century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional
overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their
slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they
may be nearing a shutdown...
- -
David Thornalley, at University College London in the UK, whose work
showed the AMOC is at its weakest point in 1,600 years, said: “These
signs of decreasing stability are concerning. But we still don’t know if
a collapse will occur, or how close we might be to it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-crisis-scientists-spot-warning-signs-of-gulf-stream-collapse
- -
[research]
*RAPID AMOC*
monitoring the Atlantic overturning circulation
https://rapid.ac.uk/
- -
[WAPO]
*A critical ocean system may be heading for collapse due to climate
change, study finds*
‘The consequences of a collapse would likely be far-reaching’...
- -
If the circulation shuts down, it could bring extreme cold to Europe and
parts of North America, raise sea levels along the U.S. East Coast and
disrupt seasonal monsoons that provide water to much of the world...
- -
If the AMOC does completely shut down, the change would be irreversible
in human lifetimes, Boers said. The “bi-stable” nature of the phenomenon
means it will find new equilibrium in its “off” state. Turning it back
on would require a shift in the climate far greater than the changes
that triggered the shutdown.
“It’s one of those events that should not happen, and we should try all
that we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible,”
Boers said. “This is a system we don’t want to mess with.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/05/change-ocean-collapse-atlantic-meridional/
- -
[OK this is the real question]
*How Worried Should You Be About a Key Atlantic Current Collapsing?*
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could be at risk. But
don't freak out quite yet. (About it, anyways. Climate change is still a
nightmare.)
ByBrian Kahn and Molly Taft - Aug 6, 2021
- -
The AMOC is so important, in fact, that its wellbeing is considered a
key climate “tipping point.” Scientists have been keeping an eye on the
AMOC because, worryingly, it appears that climate change is having an
unwelcome impact. The Greenland ice sheet is melting, resulting in a
large pool of cold freshwater in the North Atlantic that essentially
acts as a roadblock to the current...
That’s what makes this new study so troubling. Previous studies of the
AMOC have largely relied on data from the past few decades. The new
study analyzes historic temperature and salinity data stretching back to
the 19th century as well as the more recent data and climate models.
Together, they all suggest that the AMOC is losing strength and is more
susceptible to major changes that could knock it off its course...
So... what’s the takeaway for regular people here? Do we need to prepare
for the ocean’s conveyor belt to suddenly stop and change weather as we
know it within our lifetimes? Will Dennis Quaid shepherd us all into the
New York Public Library to save us from a monster wave of storm surge?
The paper crucially includes no prediction for when the AMOC could go
awry, but it does suggest that the current is losing strength to resist
any major changes. According to the latest climate models, an AMOC
collapse by 2100 is pretty unlikely—not impossible, but it’s probably
not going to happen.
“Yes, a collapse could happen during our lifetime, but it is impossible
to give a probability because our models are not good enough to trust
their future projections in a quantitative sense,” Sybren Drijfhout, an
oceanographer at University of Southampton and affiliated with the Royal
Netherlands Meteorological Institute who has studied the AMOC, said in
an email. He also noted that “both previous media reports and, to a
lesser extent the manuscript itself, tend to make too strong claims and
tend to neglect various reservations that should have been made.”
Among the issues he noted were that the paper looks at “fingerprints” of
the AMOC and not the circulation itself, fingerprints that could be
reflecting changes to other parts of the climate system such as the
North Atlantic Oscillation. He added that, while the signals the paper
looks at seem to line up with AMOC collapse, they don’t necessarily
“PREDICT such a collapse.”
What’s more, the prospect of crossing this AMOC “tipping point”
threshold isn’t as dire as reaching other tipping points, because
slowing the ocean’s circulatory system takes place over decades, not
years. In other words, even if we pass the first point of no return,
there’s theoretically time to fix it by getting temperatures under
control before it completely collapses. Other recent research shows the
planet would have to warm upwards roughly 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4
degrees Celsius) for the AMOC to cross the tipping point threshold, but
it could theoretically come back.
“If we were to cross the AMOC tipping point threshold, then there is
still the possibility with fast climate mitigation that a complete
collapse could still be prevented,” Paul Ritchie, a postdoc at the
University of Exeter who studies tipping points and led that other
research, said in an email. With that in mind, there are other more
pressing climate matters that can occupy our anxious minds.
Ritchie said that he’s more worried about reaching crisis points in
other systems that “work on much faster timescales.” Another paper put
out last year shows that some key ecosystems we rely on, like the
Amazon, could collapse suddenly in the coming decades if we continue to
push them too hard via the climate crisis and deforestation.
“Some tipping elements work on much faster timescales, such as monsoons
and the Amazon rainforest, which may be decades or only years, and for
these faster tipping elements there is less chance to prevent the
irreversible change once over the threshold,” Ritchie said. “So, I’m
possibly more concerned about crossing a fast-onset tipping threshold,
such as the Amazon rainforest, as there would be little chance to
prevent large-scale dieback (which would amplify global warming further)
if we were to cross that particular threshold.”
But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be at least think about what
happens if the AMOC were to collapse. Drijfhout said the new study is a
“very interesting and societally disturbing paper with an important
message that cries out for further research to corroborate these yet
preliminary results.”
“The consequences of a collapse would be significant, and therefore we
should still be worried about it, even if the probability might be low,”
Ritchie said. “I see it similar to the chances of a house fire: the
probability is very low, but we still install smoke detectors to keep us
safe.”
Frankly, when it comes to our present climate, the alarms are already
ringing pretty loudly. We don’t need any more warnings to know that
fossil fuel use must be wound down.
https://gizmodo.com/how-worried-should-you-be-about-a-key-atlantic-current-1847438406
[collected video skits -- humor with a message]
*Full Frontal Rewind: Climate Change*
Aug 4, 2021
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
1.04M subscribers
You’re not imagining things: it’s getting hotter. Cool down with our
best pieces from the show about climate change and what we can do about
it before Denver has a beach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIokiycQmZg
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 7, 2009*
The New York Times reports: "Ten moderate Senate Democrats from states
dependent on coal and manufacturing sent a letter to President Obama on
Thursday saying they would not support any climate change bill that did
not protect American industries from competition from countries that did
not impose similar restraints on climate-altering gases."
The 10 senators were Evan Bayh of Indiana; Sherrod Brown of
Ohio; Robert C. Byrd and John D. Rockefeller IV of West
Virginia; Bob Casey and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania; Russ
Feingold of Wisconsin; Al Franken of Minnesota; and Carl Levin
and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/us/politics/07climate.html
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html>
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request>
to news digest./
- Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only. It does not carry
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers. A
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and
sender. This is a hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for commercial
purposes. Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe,
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to
this mailing list.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20210807/fc864aa0/attachment.htm>
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list