[✔️] August 13, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Fri Aug 13 08:59:20 EDT 2021

/*August 13, 2021*/

[Heat 48.8° C = 120° F]
*Climate Change: How prepared is Europe for extreme weather? - BBC 
Newsnight*
Aug 11, 2021
BBC News
As wildfires rage in Greece and Italy registers record temperatures, 
what impact is climate change already having on Europe and how prepared 
are governments for what the future holds? Please subscribe HERE 
http://bit.ly/1rbfUog

Two days after the IPCC called climate change a 'code red for humanity' 
Europe has reported what would be its 'highest ever' temperature - 48.8C 
in Sicily.
How are people already coping with the impact of climate change and how 
prepared are European countries for the future?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdex2J9Q0As

- -

[ABC news video report distills the issue well]
*UN climate report warns of ‘code red for humanity’*
Aug 10, 2021
ABC News
ABC News’ Maggie Rulli reports on the new U.N. climate report on the 
dire threat warming temperatures pose to the planet, as fires and 
extreme weather events spread globally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ6hcV6lbos

[Dr Suess knew 50 years ago - but misinformation made us forget]
*'The Lorax' Warned Us 50 Years Ago, But We Didn't Listen*
Heard on Morning Edition - - August 12, 2021
Elizabeth Blair
Call it fate or an unfortunate coincidence that Dr. Seuss' The Lorax 
celebrates its 50th anniversary the same week the United Nations 
releases an urgent report on the dire consequences of human-induced 
climate change. The conflict between the industrious, polluting Once-ler 
and the feisty Lorax, who "speaks for the trees," feels more prescient 
than ever.

    /"Once-ler!" he cried with a cruffulous croak./
    /"Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke!/
    /My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can't sing a note!/
    /No one can sing who has smog in his throat./

"He wanted a book that captured the effects of pollution on ecosystems 
and I would say it was really ahead of its time," says anthropologist 
and evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominy, who teaches at Dartmouth. 
"The different species disappear from the narrative in succession," he 
notes. "The Bar-ba-loots leave because they run out of food. The 
Swomee-Swans leave because the air is polluted. The humming fish leave 
because the water's polluted. He's describing what we would now call a 
'trophic cascade,' and for me, as a scientist, I just find that genius 
that he anticipated that concept by a decade or more."
While it might be a children's book, The Lorax's ominous message of what 
happens when you harvest nature to death made it an icon of the 
environmental movement, spawning movie and stage adaptations not to 
mention a gazillion school projects.

With its mostly gray, scrappy, barren images, the story stood in sharp 
contrast to other books by Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) such as The 
Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.
*
**The environmental movement takes root*
Geisel began writing The Lorax at a time of growing concern about the 
environment. Images of an oil-slicked river in Cleveland catching fire 
in 1969, the first Earth Day in 1970 and other events helped build the 
movement and put it front and center. According to Geisel biographer 
Donald Pease, the author believed in the movement but didn't care for 
its rhetoric. He thought it was "preachy and bossy," says Pease.

Geisel was also furious about construction going on in his La Jolla, 
Calif., neighborhood. "They were destroying quite beautiful eucalyptus 
trees, and he wanted to do something about this, and he had to find a 
way to transform what he understood to be a propaganda-oriented 
perspective on these matters into a fable that even children could 
understand." But, Pease explains, "he also was confronted with writer's 
block."
*Inspiration strikes during a trip to Kenya*
His wife, Audrey Geisel, suggested they go on a trip to the Mount Kenya 
Safari Club. While they were there, "he caught a view in the mountains 
of elephants crossing," says Pease. "He said afterward 'the logjam 
broke' and he was able to write 90% of The Lorax that afternoon."

"It is built on one of the most beautiful landscapes with a spectacular 
view of Mount Kenya so I'm not surprised Dr. Seuss was inspired by 
that," says Wanjira Mathai, vice president and regional director for 
Africa at The World Resources Institute.
What can happen to that beauty is made vividly clear by the end of the 
story. The greedy Once-ler ravages the land by chopping down Truffula 
Trees. He needs them to make his "thneed" garment.

The Lorax is apoplectic.

    /"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues./
    /And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" —/
    /he was very upset as he shouted and puffed --/
    /"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"/

Spoiler alert: the land where once upon a time, "the grass was still 
green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean" is 
destroyed by the Once-ler's insatiable appetite to sell more "thneeds."

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot ..."
The parallels with this week's U.N. climate report are stark. "The 
report paints a very sobering picture of the unforgiving, unimaginable 
world we have in store if our addiction to burning fossil fuels and 
destroying forests continues," says Mathai. She says Dr. Seuss' 
eco-parable is a "powerful depiction" of this point, despite being 
written so many years ago. "The Thneed — read fossil fuels — is 
something 'everyone needs.' And sadly with the Lorax, the damage was 
done and the environment that was bustling with life, destroyed."
The Lorax ends with a kind of challenge.
/UNLESS someone like you//
//cares a whole awful lot,//
//nothing's going to get better.//
//It's not./
"He kind of says 'I told you so,' like, I told you this was going to be 
bad and now it's bad," says Mark Gozonsky, a writer and high school 
English teacher in Los Angeles whose students have analyzed The Lorax in 
the context of global warming. Like Mathai, Gozonsky is struck by the 
parallels with this week's report. "The book ends on a question mark ... 
'Well, what are you going to do about it?' And that's the very question 
mark that we land on today," he says. So many years later scientists are 
still warning, "You've got ... a couple of years to make a difference 
... Time, as we all know, is ticking away."

Finding hope in the last seed left
Mathai still believes it's important to be hopeful. Her mother was a 
little like the Lorax of Kenya, the very place that so inspired Geisel's 
story. Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai founded The Green Belt 
movement, which is credited with planting more than 51 million trees 
across the country, part of a campaign to end poverty.

"My mother ... always talked about trees as a symbol of hope and so The 
Lorax in many ways was that and remains that for me. That each of us can 
be such a potent agent of change. We can be custodians of hope."

The Once-ler saved that one seed and waited for someone who cared to 
come along. It will take each of us doing our part to reverse what is 
coming.

Wanjira Mathai, vice president and regional director for Africa at The 
World Resources Institute

Just as she read The Lorax when she was a girl, Mathai reads it to her 
two daughters today.

"The Once-ler saved that one seed and waited for someone who cared to 
come along. It will take each of us doing our part to reverse what is 
coming. The latest report indicates we have even less time to turn 
things around," she says. Mathai takes heart that "we have a number of 
'Loraxes' spreading the word and sounding the alarm."
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1026385429/the-lorax-dr-seuss

[Paper archived by KPMG]
*Limits to Growth**
**What is the balance of the pursuit of economic growth and its effects 
on environmental and social factors?*

    Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model with
    Empirical Data
    by Gaya Herrington

    Abstract
    I conducted a data update to Limits to Growth (LtG), best known from
    the 1972 bestseller that
    forecasted a scenario of global societal collapse occurring around
    the present time if humanity
    did not alter its priorities. Empirical data comparisons since then
    indicated that the world was
    still heading for collapse. My objectives were to examine whether
    this was still the case based on
    the most recent data, and whether there was opportunity left to
    change that trajectory. My
    research benefited from improved data availability, and included a
    scenario and two variables
    that had not been part of previous comparisons. I collected data
    from academia, (non-
    )government agencies, United Nations entities, and the World Bank.
    This was plotted along four
    LtG scenarios spanning a range of technological, resource, and
    societal assumptions. From these
    graphs and two quantitative accuracy measures, I found that the
    scenarios aligned closely with
    observed global data, which is a testament to the LtG work done
    decades ago. The two scenarios
    aligning most closely indicate a halt in growth over the next decade
    or so, which puts into
    question the usability of continuous growth as humanity’s goal in
    the 21st century. Both
    scenarios also indicate subsequent declines, but only one—the
    scenario in which declines are
    caused by pollution, including greenhouse gas pollution—depicts a
    collapse pattern. The scenario
    with the smallest declines aligned least with empirical data,
    however, absolute differences were
    rarely big and sometimes insignificant. This suggests that it’s
    almost, but not yet, too late for
    society to change course.

https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html

[News from last month]
*PNW Heatwave Like ‘One Of Those Post-Apocalyptic Movies’*
NEXUS MEDIA NEWS
JULY 12, 2021
Less than two weeks after an extreme and deadly heatwave in the Pacific 
Northwest, the a heat dome broiled the West again this weekend as 
climate change caused by the combustion and extraction of fossil fuels 
continues to kill people, especially those who labor in fields and 
warehouses. The late-June heatwave, which killed nearly 200 people, 
would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according 
to an analysis from the World Weather Attribution group. Both Oregon and 
Washington passed new safety laws last week to protect workers 
especially vulnerable to heat.

Not to be outdone, Death Valley hit 130°F on Friday, tying last year’s 
record as the hottest temperature reliably recorded on planet Earth. 
Meanwhile, well over 1 billion tidal sea creatures have been cooked to 
death along the Pacific Coast in scenes University of British Columbia 
marine biologist Christopher Harley told the New York Times was “like 
one of those postapocalyptic movies.”
https://nexusmedianews.com/top_story/pnw-heatwave-like-one-of-those-post-apocalyptic-movies/

[positive tipping points discussed may carry an optimism bias]
University of Exeter
*Imperial Climate X Change Seminar: Tipping Points: Looming 
Non-linearities in the Climate System.*
What is a tipping point? Why are they important? Are they connected to 
one another?  Will we find out in time before we cross one?
Professor Tim Lenton, expert on tipping points and Director of the 
Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter to explain 
everything there is to know about tipping points!
Date: 7/5/2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haG2S0B0aNU

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 13, 2015*
August 13, 2015:
The Los Angeles Times reports:

"In another sign that El Niño is gaining strength and could soak 
California this winter, sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean 
have increased to their highest level so far this year.
"That temperature increase — 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the average — 
was recorded Aug. 5 by the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction 
Center at a benchmark location in the Pacific. That is slightly higher 
than it was Aug. 6, 1997, when it was 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

"The summer of 1997 was the prelude to the largest El Niño event on 
record. Storms that winter brought widespread flooding and mudslides, 
causing 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars of damage. 
Downtown L.A. got nearly a year's worth of rain in February 1998."

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-el-nino-20150813-story.html

The Los Angeles Times also reports:

"President Obama will become the first sitting commander in chief to 
visit the Alaskan Arctic, the White House announced Thursday, the latest 
in a string of stops this summer that have been presidential firsts.

"In a trip from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3, Obama will visit the state's rapidly 
melting glaciers and meet with hunters and fishermen whose livelihoods 
are threatened by global warming as he seeks to draw attention to his 
fight against climate change."

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-alaska-20150813-story.html
http://youtu.be/igaz_hm7zKM

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