[✔️] August 22, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Aug 22 05:28:03 EDT 2021
/*August 22, 2021*/
[affects everything]
*How climate change helped strengthen the Taliban*
BY CARA KORTE
AUGUST 20, 2021 / CBS NEWS
- -
Whether from drought or flood-ravaged soil, farmers in the region
struggle to maintain productive crops and livestock. When they cannot
profitably farm, they're forced to borrow funds to survive. When Afghans
can't pay off lenders, the Taliban often steps in to sow government
resentment.
"If you've lost your crop and land or the Afghan government hasn't paid
enough attention [to you] then of course, the Taliban can come and
exploit it," said Kamal Alam, a nonresident senior fellow at the
Atlantic Council's South Asia Center.
The Taliban has capitalized on the agricultural stress and distrust in
government to recruit supporters. Alam said the group has the means to
pay fighters more, $5-$10 per day, than what they can make farming.
"[Farmers] fall into choices. That's when they become prey to people who
would tell them, 'Look, the government is screwing you over and this
land should be productive. They're not helping you. Come and join us;
let's topple this government,'" said Nadim Farajalla, director of the
climate change and environment program at the American University of Beirut.
- -
The ripples of these climate-spurned Afghans can last for years.
Farajalla said farmers who abandon their land often leave their families
behind, arguably making those children easier recruiting targets for
extremism.
Climate change has fueled terrorism and civil unrest elsewhere in the
world. Boko Haram gripped water-scarce central Africa in 2017 as they
gained footholds along the Lake Chad Basin. ISIS has taken advantage of
agrarian communities suffering from extreme drought in Iraq and Syria.
Farajalla said arid or semi-arid areas in impoverished countries with
low levels of education and poor infrastructure are all ripe for extremism.
The Taliban has not only used farmers and rural communities to fortify
their ranks, but also to help fund their efforts by taxing farmers on
their territory. Most crucially, they have controlled the uber-lucrative
poppy trade in Afghanistan.
- -
The country is the world's leading supplier of opium poppies. Not only
has the Taliban made billions from their illicit drug trade, but poppies
require less water than other crops, providing more stable means to
struggling farming communities. Poppy cultivation is most abundant in
the south of the country, where drought in part fueled by climate change
has been the most severe and the Taliban is most popular.
These partnerships have helped the Taliban's popularity. But since
taking control of the country, the group has vowed to make the nation
poppy-free — a tenuous political decision that would not be popular with
the rural communities that rely on the crop, said Vanda Felbab-Brown,
director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and a senior fellow
at the Brookings Institution.
"If they went to go for the ban quickly, they would cause themselves a
huge economic downturn. They would set off massive miseration of the
population. And they would have real problems with maintaining
stability," she said.
"Their own fighters often harvest poppy. For many of the fighters, poppy
was the principal source to help them fund their family and themselves.
They could do jihad for months but would have to disengage to harvest so
the family had food."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-taliban-strengthen/
[Vermont Public Radio gives a personal discussions]
*If You're Worried About Climate Change, Where Should You Live?*
Vermont Public Radio | By Justine Paradis
Published January 7, 2021
Vermont Public Radio's people-powered journalism project Brave Little
State is featuring the Outside/In episode "Climate Migration." Find more
about the show and a full transcript
http://outsideinradio.org/shows/climate-migration .
https://www.vpr.org/programs/2021-01-07/if-youre-worried-about-climate-change-where-should-you-live
[Yale 360]
*As Disasters Mount, Central Banks Gird Against Threat of Climate Change*
From the Bank of England to the People’s Bank of China, monetary
authorities of the world’s largest economies are gauging how climate
change could rock the financial system. Though long committed to being
“market neutral,” some are even starting to push greener investments.
BY FRED PEARCE - AUGUST 18, 2021
Climate change is rattling the world’s central bankers. With
unprecedented heat and wildfires in the American West and southern
Europe, and record floods racing through German towns and Chinese
megacities in recent weeks, fears are growing among regulators of a
coming cascade of climate-induced economic blows potentially more
far-reaching and intractable than the financial crash just over a decade
ago.
In the past two months, the central banks of the world’s five largest
economies — the United States, China, the European Union, Japan, and the
United Kingdom — have all raised the stakes in their demands for the
commercial banks they regulate to make public the looming risks they
face as wild weather takes hold.
Their calls show that central bankers are already responding to concerns
about their past passivity on climate — concerns reflected at a G7
meeting in June, where Western industrial leaders issued a final
communique that declared, “We emphasize the need to green the global
finance system … We support moving towards mandatory climate-related
financial disclosures.” That means requiring commercial banks to reveal
the risks to their balance sheets — and those of their clients — of both
a changing climate and any rapid collapse of markets for fossil fuels as
governments try to head off disaster by weaning off fossil fuels.
The world’s major central banks, which control the production and
distribution of money on behalf of national governments, have
traditionally sought to remain “market neutral” when carrying out their
responsibilities. That means they avoid favoring one part of the economy
over others. But now the biggest central banks appear to be concluding
that carbon neutrality is more important than market neutrality...
- -
“Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability,
it may already be too late.”
- -
The possibilities here are huge. Most central banks are big investors.
As part of their core responsibilities to maintain economic growth, they
routinely buy bonds and other financial products. The Bank of England,
for instance, currently holds more than $20 billion in corporate bonds.
Central banks usually claim they make these investments in a
“market-neutral” way. But critics say this is disingenuous. It
reinforces the status quo. Market neutrality “hardwires a carbon bias,”
Dafermos said...
- -
It is now 14 years since the former chief economist at the World Bank,
Nicholas Stern, wrote an influential report for the British government
which concluded that, as he told the London Times, climate change was
“the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” Central
bankers are still grappling with the implications. But Dougherty
believes change is coming. “In five years, I would be very surprised if
climate change wasn’t a major consideration in all Fed regulation,” she
said.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disasters-mount-central-banks-gird-against-threat-of-climate-change
[time for a reminder]
*Heat, drought and fire: how climate dangers combine for a catastrophic
‘perfect storm’*
The three conditions feed off each other to create a vicious cycle,
demanding urgent action
Gabrielle Canon
Tue 10 Aug 2021
Northern California’s Dixie fire this weekend swelled to become the
single largest fire incident the state has ever recorded, a mammoth that
has leveled mountain towns, produced flames that shot 200ft in the air,
and scorched through close to 490,000 acres.
“It is just the perfect storm,” says Rick Carhart, the California
department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) public information
officer, adding that the difficult and steep terrain, parched
vegetation, and hot, dry weather had all come together to fuel the
conflagration that has sent flames 200ft into the sky.
And, he says, the Dixie fire was just one of a series of large blazes
that have affected the area in recent years. “It has been giant
devastating fire after giant devastating fire.”
Researchers are concerned that the Dixie fire’s record won’t hold for
long. The parched landscapes and increased temperatures that set the
stage for bigger blazes this year are not anomalies – they are trends.
And the conditions are going to get worse.
*A climate crisis trifecta*
Drought, extreme heat, and destructive infernos are each devastating in
their own right, but together they cause calamity. The combination
augments their effects and causes each individual condition to
intensify. Scientists say they are seeing the trifecta more frequently
in the west and that climate breakdown is the key culprit.
“This is what climate scientists have been warning about for years now,”
says Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Drought and fire have always been part of the climate in the western US,
but increasing heat, which scientists say is directly attributable to
human-caused climate change, has had a devastating impact. “These things
amplify each other,” Williams says, adding that the effects
exponentially increase.
The climate conditions don’t act alone, and fire and and water policies
play a part in increasing risks and determining the outcome as well.
Most fires are still started by people. The expansion of communities in
forested and fire-prone areas adds new dimensions that complicate
containment efforts when blazes get big. But what’s happening in the
environment has made fires much harder to fight.
That’s why new records don’t just nose out the old ones – they
obliterate them. In 2020, the 4.2m acres that burned in California was
nearly triple the previous record. This year, fires have burned more
than three times as much land as they had by this point in 2020,
according to Cal Fire.
“And there’s really no end in sight for the capacity for that type of
thing to happen again,” Williams says.
*A vicious cycle of heat and drought*
Heat affects drought in several ways. Higher temperatures cause
precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. Snow that does fall
melts away much more quickly, leaving less to trickle into streams,
rivers, and reservoirs. People, plants and animals depend on the
snowpack to feed the water systems and with less available, the
landscape and anything living in it or off of it will feel the strain.
Heat also bakes moisture right out of the landscape. The hotter it is,
the more water plants and animals need to regulate themselves, and that
increases water scarcity even further. What makes all this more
complicated is that the relationship works in the other direction as
well – drought conditions increase heat.
“Heat is both a response to drought and also a driver of drought,” says
Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s physical sciences laboratory. Dry soils radiate and
reflect the sun’s energy that otherwise would be used in evaporation.
That pushes surface temperatures even higher.
“Just like we get cold when we climb out of a swimming pool, the earth
cools off when water evaporates,” Hoell says. “When soils are dry, when
it’s hot out, there isn’t as much water available to evaporate. That
means the earth doesn’t get to cool off.”
That’s why Hoell calls climate change a “threat multiplier”. As the
region becomes hotter and drier, the risk of small sparks quickly
igniting into enormous and erratic wildfires magnifies.
*Fires add another dimension to the threat*
New research also suggests that the wildfires themselves will increase
drought and heat, adding a new dimension to the catastrophic cycle.
Researchers are discussing hypotheses, Hoell explains, that smoke and
aerosols released into the atmosphere by wildfires can alter weather
patterns. There are already studies that show wildfires influence the
formation of clouds in the sky and could decrease precipitation.
“It is very dynamic and very complicated but that’s where we are going
as a science community – we are trying to figure out how wildfires feed
back on to drought,” he said.
Researchers are also investigating how reduced canopies from forests
decimated in fires expose the snowpack that was once shaded to the sun.
Although more research is needed to better understand these complex
relationships, the scientific record is clear that rising heat will lead
to an increase in extreme events.
“Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the
mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered,” according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth report, released
on Monday, which went on to detail and list the expected increase in
both frequency and intensity of hot extremes, ecological droughts, and
the reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost, along with
other catastrophic conditions.
“Under all future scenarios and global warming levels, temperatures and
extreme high temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” the
report said of North and Central America, attributing the rise to “human
influence”.
Models show that extreme heatwaves are expected to happen more
frequently, more intensely, and across larger areas of land in just the
next three decades. “Historically we have had between four and six
extreme heat events in any given year,” said Steve Ostoja, director of
the USDA California Climate Hub. “By 2050, we expect that number to go
somewhere between 25 and 30 events. That’s a huge difference. That
basically means it is going to be that hot all the time.”
*No time to lose*
The trends are already being felt. Currently, about half of the
contiguous US is in drought, according to federal agencies. The entire
state of California is experiencing drought conditions, with more than
88% of the state in the “extreme drought” category, as determined by the
US Drought Monitor. Meanwhile, dozens of climate stations across the
west documented the warmest June and July on record, as extreme
heatwaves spiked temperatures across the region.
Stressed ecosystems have already become more vulnerable. The disasters
have taxed trees, which are being ravaged by diseases and pests. Studies
show roughly 150 million trees died in the last period of drought and
billions of creatures living along the coasts perished during heatwaves
this summer.
Climate scientists say that there is still time to make big changes, and
there’s a chance that the worst effects of the changing climate can be
staved off. But there’s no time to lose.
In the west, the wildfires, drought, and heat are already wreaking
havoc. Williams, the climate scientist from UCLA, says there are clear
indications that places like California won’t look like they do now for
much longer. The landscape is growing arid, and as it gets drier and
hotter, there will be more fires. That will lead to fewer forests and
more grasslands, shrublands, and deserts.
“Fire has been around for hundreds of millions of years and it is a
critical part of the earth’s system,” he said. But the fires of the
future will do much more than clear the underbrush. “Now the fires we
are seeing are eliminating giant patches of forest entirely,” he added,
explaining that many tree species had not evolved to repopulate the
giant gaps quickly.
“It could take hundreds of years for ponderosa or Jeffrey pine – which
we see a lot of in the Sierra Nevada – to actually reoccupy giant
patches of forest,” he said. “By that time the climate might be totally
inappropriate for those species anyway.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/10/heat-drought-and-fire-how-climate-dangers-combine-for-a-catastrophic-perfect-storm
[Youth movement video https://youtu.be/AYC_O2jDZzg ]
*How to Change Everything: A Conversation with Naomi Klein*
May 10, 2021
IWL Rutgers
Naomi Klein is a globally renowned author who has turned her powerful
voice to support young activists with her new young adult book, "How to
Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and
Each Other." Naomi spoke in conversation with Dr. Marc Aronson,
co-author of "Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan Fought
for Their Lives and Warned the Nation."
Professor Joyce Valenza and her students introduced a digital toolkit
packed with youth activism resources to use in your library or
classroom. The panel and audience was welcomed by Jonathan Potter, Dean
of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
Naomi Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media,
Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and an award-winning
journalist, syndicated columnist and international and New York Times
bestselling author of: "How To Change Everything: The Young Human’s
Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other" (2021), "On Fire: The
(Burning) Case for a Green New Deal" (2019), "No Is Not Enough:
Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need" (2017),
"This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate" (2014), "The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (2007) and "No Logo" (2000).
In 2018, she published "The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On
the Disaster Capitalists" (2018) reprinted from her feature article for
The Intercept with all royalties donated to Puerto Rican organization
juntegente.org.
Marc Aronson is an Associate Professor of Practice, Library and
Information Science at the School of Communication and Information at
Rutgers University. Marc has worked in the field of literature for
younger readers for more than thirty years as an author, editor,
speaker, publisher, and critic. He is the only person to have been a
winner or finalist for both of the American Library Association's prizes
for excellence in youth nonfiction as both an author and as an editor.
Joyce Valenza is an Associate Teaching Professor of Library and
Information Science at the School of Communication and Information at
Rutgers University. Joyce has been a school, public, reference, and
special librarian. For ten years, Joyce was the techlife at school
columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She writes the
NeverEndingSearch blog for School Library Journal, contributes to a
variety of edtech journals, speaks internationally about issues relating
to libraries and thoughtful use of technology. Joyce is active in ISTE,
ALISE, AASL, ALA, YALSA and online communities of practice.
https://youtu.be/AYC_O2jDZzg
- -
[New book]
***THE BOOK*
Naomi Klein’s eighth book, *How to Change Everything: A Young Human’s
Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other* is her first book written
specifically for young readers. Along with Rebecca Steffof, she adapts
over twenty years of reporting and research on climate change and the
movements that are trying to stop it. Young readers will find stories
and information that they can use on their journeys to create a better
future. A global movement is already underway to combat not only the
environmental effects of climate change but also to fight for climate
justice and make a fair and livable future possible for everyone. And
young people are not just part of that movement, they are leading the
way! Young leaders are showing the world that this moment of danger is
also a moment of great opportunity—an opportunity to change everything
for the better.
https://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/core-faculty/66-core-faculty/1219-klein-naomi
[Music for a Sunday worship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFX6Gi-nmdk
*The World's On Fire (and We Still Fall in Love) - Parker Woodland
(OFFICIAL VIDEO)*
Jan 13, 2021
Parker Woodland
Written and performed by Erin Walter, Dan McMonigle, and Ralph Cutler.
Engineered and mixed by Jonas Wilson at the Pink Room.
Album art by Ralph Cutler.
Video directed by Jazz Mills and edited by Cole Burris, with biggest
thanks from Parker Woodland.
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/3nJPuvM
iTunes: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-...
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/parkerwoodland
LYRICS:
GO!
It’s a hard time to look for hope when the
Truth can feel like a joke or worse
And they tell you it’s your fault if you trust
But if there’s one know it’s this
Opposites do coexist
And the last thing they’ll ever kill is love
The world's on fire and we still fall in love
The world's on fire and we still fall in love
The world's on fire and we’re not giving up
No, no
I could let you go
Say it’s not worth it, oh
I could give up before we know
Cuz what’s the use in having hope
Then even though
Everything’s wrong and it shows
I still look at you and I know
One thing could be perfect
The world's on fire and we still fall in love
The world's on fire and we still fall in love
The world's on fire and we’re not giving up
No, no
I don’t want to be naive but I
Catch myself wanting to believe and I
Think I could take a risk this time
It’s a hard time to look for hope when the
Truth can feel like a joke or worse
And they tell you it’s your fault if you try
The world is on fire and we still fall in love
The world is on fire and we still fall in love
The world is on fire and we still fall in love
Hey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFX6Gi-nmdk
Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRmxz4fw_LzwQF19LKXgRVg
[religion]
*Staunch atheists show higher morals than the proudly pious, from the
pandemic to climate change*
When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core
secularists exhibit much more empathy
https://www.salon.com/2021/08/21/staunch-atheists-show-higher-morals-than-the-proudly-pious-from-the-pandemic-to-climate-change/
[Rambling video opinion from smart guy]
*US CITIZENS CLICK ON THIS*
Aug 13, 2021
hankschannel
Here's a little script for you:
Hey, I just wanted to call and say how important it is to me that YOUR
REPRESENTATIVE OR SENATOR is taking climate change seriously. I know
we've got a chance right now to set targets, like getting an 80%
decrease in emissions by 2030 and investing a lot in new and existing
technologies.
Anything that YOUR SENATOR OR REPRESENTATIVE can do to make this a
reality really matters so much, and I appreciate it.
IF THEY ASK FOR MORE INFORMATION (sometimes you get a real person)
I just know that the budget reconciliation bill is one of our last
chances to pass meaningful laws that will affect our impact on the
climate. Anything to spur investment in clean energy, carbon capture, or
energy storage is really important. But most importantly, we need to see
real, ambitious targets for decreasing carbon emissions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhHR7alzXiY
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 22, 1981*
The New York Times reports on a groundbreaking study by Dr. James Hansen
on the risks of escalating carbon emissions.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/22/us/study-finds-warming-trend-that-could-raise-sea-levels.html
http://youtu.be/D6Un69RMNSw
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