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

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*August 18, 2021*/

[Great news, after 6 years, maybe now I can retire this mailing list]

*Majority of climate change news coverage now accurate: study*
by University of Colorado at Boulder

Good news: Major print media in five countries have been representing 
climate change very factually, hitting a 90 percent accuracy rate in the 
last 15 years, according to an international study out today with 
University of Colorado Boulder and Cooperative Institute for Research in 
Environmental Sciences (CIRES) authors. Scientifically accurate coverage 
of man-made climate change is becoming less biased—headlining the idea 
that print media are no longer presenting climate change as controversy. 
But there's one place where the team did find biased coverage: 
conservative media.

"Two decades ago, print media frequently gave equal credence to both 
legitimate climate experts and outlier climate deniers. But we found in 
more recent years that the media around the globe actually got it right 
most of the time. However, facts now outweigh a debate," said Lucy 
McAllister, former Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder 
and lead on the study out today in Environmental Research Letters. "Nine 
out of ten media stories accurately reported the science on human 
contributions to climate change. It's not portrayed as a two-sided 
debate anymore."

The researchers from the Technological University of Munich, University 
of New England and the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed nearly 
5,000 newspaper articles from 17 print outlets in five countries over 15 
years (2005-2019). The work updates previous research by Max Boykoff, 
CIRES Fellow and coauthor on the new study, that examined how the 
journalistic norm of balanced reporting contributed to biased print media.

"Many continue to cite the 2004 Max Boykoff and Jules Boykoff 
article—with data ending in 2002—as evidence of persistent bias in the 
media. An updated analysis was critically needed," added McAllister, now 
a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich.

Even though outlets around the world are becoming increasingly less 
biased when it comes to climate news—there's one place it still 
continues to fail, the team found: conservative media. Canada's National 
Post, Australia's Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and the U.K.'s 
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, all historically conservative outlets, 
had significantly less accurate coverage of climate change.

World events influenced media accuracy, too: media coverage was 
significantly less accurate in 2010 just after the late 2009 University 
of East Anglia email hacking scandal and U.N. negotiations of the 
Copenhagen Accord, the team found. And coverage was significantly more 
accurate in 2015, during the time of the Paris Agreement negotiation.

"Accurate reporting in these print outlets vastly outweighed inaccurate 
reporting, but this is not a cause for complacency," said Boykoff, 
director of the Environmental Studies program at the University of 
Colorado Boulder. "The terrain of climate debates has largely shifted in 
recent years away from mere denial of human contributions to climate 
change to a more subtle and  ongoing undermining of support for specific 
policies meant to substantially address climate change."

The researchers emphasize that people rarely read peer-reviewed 
scientific research about climate change, and are more likely to learn 
about it through the media. Therefore studies such as this one are 
critical to understand ongoing science and policy pursuits in the public 
sphere. There are also other competing pressures that shape our 
awareness of climate change—such as conversations with family and 
friends, entertainment and trusted leaders, the team says.

"Achieving consistently accurate media coverage is still not a 
silver-bullet solution to spark collective action," Boykoff added. "Our 
work helps provide insights on how the media are portraying human 
contributions to climate change, yet more clearly must be done."

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-majority-climate-news-coverage-accurate.html

- -

[source paper is but one study]
*Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of 
newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, 
Australia and Canada over the past 15 years*
Abstract
Through this research, we systematically updated and expanded 
understanding of how the print media represent evidence of human 
contributions to climate change. We built on previous research that 
examined how the journalistic norm of balanced reporting contributed to 
informationally biased print media coverage in the United States (U.S.) 
context. We conducted a content analysis of coverage across 4856 
newspaper articles over 15 years (2005–2019) and expanded previous 
research beyond U.S. borders by analyzing 17 sources in five countries: 
the United Kingdom (U.K.), Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. 
We found that across all the years of analysis, 90% of the sample 
accurately represented climate change. In addition, our data suggests 
that scientifically accurate coverage of climate change is improving 
over time. We also found that media coverage was significantly less 
accurate in 2010 and significantly more accurate in 2015, in comparison 
to the sample average. Additionally, Canada's National Post, Australia's 
Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and the U.K.'s Daily Mail and Mail 
on Sunday (all historically conservative outlets) had significantly less 
accurate coverage of climate change over this time period than their 
counterparts.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac14eb



[yes  please]
*Humans ‘pushing Earth close to tipping point’, say most in G20*
Global survey finds 74% also want climate crises and protecting nature 
prioritised over jobs and profit
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/16/three-quarters-g20-earth-close-to-tipping-point-global-survey-climate-crisis



[video fast motion looks like 1 second of video = 1 minute of real fire 
time]
*Caldor Fire 8/17/21*
Aug 17, 2021
ALERTWildfire
Caldor Fire in El Dorado County as viewed from the Leek Springs fire camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzJXI_3ErD8



[Hayhoe and Otto]
OPINION GUEST ESSAY
*Extreme Weather Is the New Normal. We Know Why.*
Aug. 17, 2021
By Katharine Hayhoe and Friederike Otto

    Dr. Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, is the chief scientist The
    Nature Conservancy. Dr. Otto is the associate director of the
    Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a
    co-investigator for World Weather Attribution, which assesses the
    human influence on extreme weather.

Hotter, faster, stronger: That isn’t a tagline for the next blockbuster 
superhero movie. This is what climate change is doing to many extreme 
weather events. As the planet warms, heat waves are getting hotter, 
wildfires are moving faster and burning larger areas, and storms and 
floods are becoming stronger.

These effects are no longer a future or distant concern: They are 
affecting us — all of us — here and now. The last week of July, in 
Ontario, where one of us, Dr. Hayhoe, was visiting family, the sun was 
orange and hazy, and smoke from the wildfires that blazed across Canada 
hung in the air. The week before, Dr. Otto anxiously checked in with 
family in Rhineland-Palatinate, the region in western Germany where 
heavy rainfall caused floods that took more than 150 lives.

We’re both climate scientists, so when a disaster happens, we’re often 
asked: Is this climate change or just bad weather?

While it is a natural human inclination to want to categorize things in 
simple terms, how climate change affects our weather is not an either/or 
question. We are already living in a world that is two degrees 
Fahrenheit warmer than it was at the outset of the Industrial 
Revolution. That means that every weather event is already superimposed 
over the background of a changed climate...
- -
The more precise question to ask is this: Did climate change alter the 
severity, frequency or duration of this event? Increasingly, the answer 
is a resounding yes. And thanks to cutting-edge science, we’re starting 
to be able to put some numbers on it, too. This type of research is 
called “attribution.”

How can science tease out the exact contribution of human-caused climate 
change to a given event without a separate, otherwise identical, but 
human-free earth to compare it to? The first step is to characterize the 
event using observations: how long and hot was the heat wave, or how 
much rain fell during the storm, or how strong was the hurricane.

Then, we turn to our climate models. These are sophisticated 
physics-based simulations of the atmosphere, ocean and land surface that 
are run on powerful supercomputers. Because we know very well the amount 
of greenhouse gases humans have added to the atmosphere, we can remove 
the human influence from climate models’ atmospheres to create a world 
without climate change. Using the models, we can then identify how 
strong, how long, how big, and how likely the same event would be in 
that imaginary world.

The effect of climate change is the difference between what happens in a 
world without human influence and what happened in the real world. When 
scientists find that, say, what is now a one in a 100 years event in the 
real world would have occurred only once every 200 years without climate 
change, this doubled risk can be attributed to climate change.

Attribution matters because our human brains prioritize immediacy. We 
are wired to feel more concerned about a small leak in our roof than we 
are about a few degrees rise in ocean temperature 50 or 500 miles away. 
But when your home is in Houston, an increase of a few degrees in ocean 
surface temperature turns a distant problem into an immediate 
catastrophe, as when rain from a storm like Hurricane Harvey deluges 
your home for days upon days...
--
That storm hit Houston in August 2017. It wasn’t until December of that 
year, though, that the first attribution study was published showing 
that climate change made a storm with as much rainfall as Hurricane 
Harvey three times more likely. It took until 2020 for scientists to 
calculate that three-quarters of the tens of billions in economic damage 
suffered during the storm stem from the additional rainfall amounts 
attributed to human-caused climate change. This is a stunning number, 
but by then, the news cycle had long since moved on.

This is why new rapid attribution analyses are so important. Take the 
heat wave this summer in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, 
which resulted in an estimated hundreds of heat-related deaths, ruined 
crops and wildfire outbreaks. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, 
broke the temperature record for Canada three days in a row. On the 
fourth day Lytton was all but destroyed by wildfire. These events were 
so extreme that they were very difficult to imagine, even for climate 
scientists like us, just two months ago.

Dr. Otto was part of an international team of researchers organized by 
the World Weather Attribution initiative who conducted a rapid analysis 
of the event. They found that human-induced global warming made the heat 
wave 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and at least 150 times more likely to 
occur. The report garnered headlines in part because it was released 
just nine days after the heat wave occurred, so it was still news.

The attribution team is working on its next report, analyzing the heavy 
rain and flooding in Germany and Belgium in July. We won’t have exact 
numbers until the analysis is completed this month, but we do know from 
basic physics that in a warmer atmosphere, the chance of heavy rainfall 
is higher. The just published report by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change has shown this very clearly.

As extreme weather increasingly becomes the new norm, this is how rapid 
analysis and attribution science can help us more clearly and succinctly 
label and calculate the ways climate change multiplies the threat of 
extreme weather and puts us all at risk. But we don’t need to analyze 
any more events to know we need to act, and quickly.

The evidence and the data is already clear: The faster we cut our 
emissions, the better off we’ll all be.

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University and the author 
of the forthcoming book “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope 
and Healing in a Divided World." Friederike Otto is a climate scientist 
at the University of Oxford and the author of “Angry Weather: Heat 
Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/extreme-weather-climate-change.html



[Here's some history]
*Fact check: A 1912 article about burning coal and climate change is 
authentic*
McKenzie Sadeghi
USA TODAY Aug 14, 2021
The claim: An article from 1912 warned coal consumption can have a 
negative impact on climate
A viral image of a 1912 newspaper clip circulating on social media 
claims scientists have known for more than a century that coal 
consumption can have a negative effect on climate.

The image of the newspaper article, shared to Facebook on Aug. 12 by the 
page Historic Photographs, is titled, “Coal Consumption Affecting 
Climate,” and it says the coal burned in furnaces around the world is 
causing an effect that "may be considerable in a few centuries." It’s 
dated Aug. 14, 1912.

The same photo was shared to Twitter on Aug. 12 in a tweet with more 
than 16,000 likes, with the caption, "Climate change prediction from 
1912." In the replies, some were skeptical about the authenticity of the 
article.

But the article in question is authentic, originally published more than 
100 years ago.

And it has proven true, as today the U.S. Environmental Protection 
Agency says, "the burning of coal, natural gas and oil for electricity 
and heat is the largest single source of global greenhouse emissions."

USA TODAY reached out to the poster for comment, and they noted Snopes 
had previously identified the clipping as legitimate.

Fact check: Posts falsely claim 95% of energy for charging electric cars 
comes from coal

*Article is authentic*
The text in the article originates from a March 1912 report in the 
magazine Popular Mechanics titled, “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The 
Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate – What Scientists 
Predict for the Future.”

The same phrasing was published on Aug. 14, 1912, in the New Zealand 
newspaper Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 
which is the publication shown in the viral image.  Prior to that, it 
appeared in The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, an Australian 
newspaper, on July 17, 1912.

“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of 
coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with 
oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the 
atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket 
for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be 
considerable in a few centuries."

Reports about coal burning and its effect on the atmosphere date back to 
the 1800s, according to The New York Times.

In an April 1896 paper titled, "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the 
Air upon the Temperature of the Ground," Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish 
scientist, suggested a link between carbon dioxide levels and temperature.

*Our rating: True*
The claim that an article from 1912 warned coal consumption can have a 
negative impact on climate is TRUE, based on our research. The article 
first appeared in Popular Mechanics in March 1912, then was republished 
in other newspapers that same year.
Our fact-check sources:

    Popular Mechanics, March 1912, Remarkable Weather of 1911
    The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, July 17, 1912, Coal
    Consumption Affecting Climate
    Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, Aug. 12,
    1912, Coal Consumption Affecting Climate
    The New York Times, Oct. 21, 2016, Coverage of Coal's Link to Global
    Warming, in 1912
    Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, April 1896, On the
    Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground
    Snopes, Oct. 18, 2016, Did a 1912 Newspaper Article Predict Global
    Warming?
    Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our
    print edition, ad-free app, or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact-check-yes-1912-article-linked-burning-coal-climate-change/8124455002/




[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 18, 2015*
August 18, 2015:The New York Times reports:

"The Obama administration is expected to propose as soon as Tuesday the 
first-ever federal regulation to cut emissions of methane, a powerful 
greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, by the nation’s oil 
and natural-gas industry, officials familiar with the plan said on Monday.

"The proposed rule would call for the reduction of methane emissions by 
40 to 45 percent over the next decade from 2012 levels, the officials 
said. The proposal was widely expected, after the Environmental 
Protection Agency said in January that it was working on such a plan.

"The new rules are part of Mr. Obama’s broad push for regulations meant 
to cut emissions of planet-warming gases from different sectors of the 
economy. This month, Mr. Obama unveiled the centerpiece of that plan, a 
regulation meant to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 32 percent from 
2005 levels by 2030, a move that could transform the way the nation 
produces and consumes electric power.

"The new rules on methane could create a tougher regulatory scheme on 
the nation’s fossil fuel production, particularly on the way that 
companies extract, move and store natural gas.

"Environmental advocates have long urged the Obama administration to 
crack down on methane emissions. Most of the greenhouse gas pollution in 
the United States comes from carbon dioxide, which is produced by 
burning coal, oil and natural gas. Methane, which leaks from oil and gas 
wells, accounts for just 9 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas 
pollution — but it is over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so 
even small amounts of it can have a big impact on global warming."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/business/us-is-set-to-propose-regulation-to-cut-methane-emissions.html 



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