[✔️] August 31, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Aug 31 10:55:59 EDT 2021

/*August 31, 2021*/

[Beep, beep]
*Traffic nightmare as Caldor Fire forces evacuation of South Lake Tahoe*
Katie Dowd -- Aug. 30, 2021
Traffic is gridlocked throughout most of South Lake Tahoe as the city 
rushes to evacuate ahead of the raging Caldor Fire.
Mandatory evacuation orders were imposed late Monday morning ahead of a 
red flag warning for gusting winds that is expected to last until 11 
p.m. Wednesday. With highways 50, 88 and 89 all closed below the Tahoe 
Basin, people are being funneled out of town toward the Nevada state 
line. Anyone wishing to head toward Sacramento or the Bay Area cannot do 
it directly via Highway 50; they must drive north to connect up with 
I-80 near Truckee...
Justin Sullivan, a photojournalist for Getty Images, said the line of 
cars on Highway 50 hadn't moved in over 45 minutes, while a photographer 
for the Press Democrat said he'd been stuck in gridlock for over 90 
minutes. About 20,000 people live in South Lake Tahoe...
Traffic is backed up all the way down Lake Tahoe Boulevard up to 
Stateline, Nev. Live cameras show an occasional Cal Fire truck or 
ambulance headed in the mostly empty opposite direction; those lanes, 
though enticing for stand-still drivers, are needed for emergency 
traffic. Despite the conditions, Mercury News photographer Karl Mondon 
said people were remaining patient. ..
https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/traffic-highway-50-lake-tahoe-evacuation-roads-16423258.php 

- -

[See here]
*Live cameras show Caldor Fire nearing South Lake Tahoe in real time*
Andrew Chamings - Aug. 30, 2021

https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/caldor-fire-cameras-wildfire-live-streams-news-16423035.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stZdaBB3l_k

- -

[The one site to watch for live images from 50 camera views]
*Alert Wildfire*
ALERTWildfire is a consortium of three universities -- The University of 
Nevada, Reno (UNR), University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the 
University of Oregon (UO) -- providing access to state-of-the-art 
Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) fire cameras and associated tools to help 
firefighters and first responders: (1) discover/locate/confirm fire 
ignition, (2) quickly scale fire resources up or down appropriately, (3) 
monitor fire behavior through containment, (4) during firestorms, help 
evacuations through enhanced situational awareness, and (5) ensure 
contained fires are monitored appropriately through their demise.
http://www.alertwildfire.org/tahoe/index.html?v=fd40740

[fire and hurricane]
*Climate Crises Converge as Wildfire Burns West and Hurricane Pummels South*
Sharon Zhang, Truthout - August 30, 2021
Hurricane Ida made landfall in Southern Louisiana on Sunday as one of 
the most powerful hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. It has knocked out 
power to the hundreds of thousands of residents of New Orleans and over 
1 million in Louisiana and has caused at least one death so far.

Scientists say that the climate crisis has, without a doubt, made Ida 
more intense as higher water temperatures offshore act as fuel to a 
hurricane’s fire. Greenhouse gases resulting from human activity have 
contributed to a rise in average water temperatures in the Gulf of 
Mexico by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 20th century. The 
category 4 storm has so far blown entire roofs off buildings, devastated 
the Louisiana town of Jean Lafitte, and overwhelmed hospitals already 
filled with COVID patients.

Ida’s storm surge was so strong as it made landfall that the hurricane 
actually reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, something that 
experts say is extremely rare. With the threat of levee failure hanging 
over Louisiana, the hurricane, since downgraded to a tropical storm, is 
headed into Mississippi.
Though many residents evacuated the region before the storm, many 
others, unable to evacuate, have been left behind. Some people simply 
cannot afford the costs associated with seeking shelter out of the storm 
or may not have reliable access to transportation out of the area, such 
as a car. Other populations, such as incarcerated people, have no choice 
either way.

As Ida blasted through Louisiana, the climate crisis intensified blazes 
across the country. Wildfire Caldor has engulfed hundreds of homes in 
its wake as it has moved across eastern California in the past two 
weeks. It now threatens Lake Tahoe, where residents on the California 
side have been ordered to evacuate.

The Caldor fire has been particularly hard to contain. Firefighters have 
pushed back their estimated date for containment of the fire to 
September 8. As the Caldor fire blazes on, the Dixie Fire, just 65 miles 
to the North, is well into its second month of burning. At nearly 50 
percent containment and with over 770,000 acres burned so far, the Dixie 
Fire is the second-largest fire in California history, beaten only by 
the August Complex fire from last year.

California’s weather has become drier for longer periods over the past 
decades as global warming and climate disruption have lengthened the 
wildfire season and pushed winter rains further and further back in the 
year. It has wreaked havoc on the state, where six of the seven largest 
fires in the state, including the Dixie Fire, have occurred over the 
past year or so.

It’s unclear if all of these disasters were caused directly by the 
climate crisis, but they were surely fueled by it. As climate scientists 
warn of dire consequences if the world continues on its current path, 
the western part of the U.S. has experienced record heat waves, making 
July 2021 the hottest month in recorded history on Earth.

The converging climate disasters come as officials struggle to contain 
the pandemic scouring the country and contend with massive unrest in 
Afghanistan: Two crises that may seem unrelated but have actually been 
exacerbated by the climate crisis. Climate change helps spread 
infectious diseases, scientists have warned for years. There’s evidence 
that air pollution, including that of burning fossil fuels, has worsened 
COVID outcomes for frontline communities living in areas that bear the 
brunt of increased air pollution. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban 
has exploited the economic devastation and serious resource shortages 
brought on by the twin effects of drought and flooding caused by climate 
change to successfully overthrow the government that was propped up by 
the U.S.

Climate unrest has been on full display through this year and the last. 
But nearly all of these problems exacerbate each other, solidifying the 
so-called threat multiplier effect of the climate crisis.

California, for instance, cruelly forces incarcerated people to be on 
the frontline of firefighting when the wildfire season rolls around, 
paying them such absurdly low rates that it has been likened to slavery. 
But, with so many prisons ravaged by the pandemic, the state has had 
fewer incarcerated bodies to help fight the fires, making it harder to 
contain the blazes as they rage on...
https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crises-converge-as-wildfire-burns-west-and-hurricane-pummels-south/

[It's about time]
*Biden Opens New Federal Office for Climate Change, Health and Equity*
The office will be the first government effort to focus specifically on 
the public health dangers of global warming.
By Lisa Friedman  -- Aug. 30, 2021
WASHINGTON — Amid deadly heat waves and new evidence showing that 
wildfire smoke may contribute to premature births, the Biden 
administration is creating a new federal office to address the health 
consequences of climate change and their disproportionate effects on 
poor communities.

The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, which the administration 
announced on Monday, will be the first federal program aimed 
specifically at understanding how planet-warming greenhouse gas 
emissions from burning fossil fuels also affect human health. It will 
fall under the Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s an area that medical experts have urged the government to take more 
seriously, and public health leaders said the new office was long overdue.

“The health of the American people is falling through the cracks because 
there hasn’t been a targeted focus on climate risk,” said Aaron 
Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the 
Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 
“This is the opportunity to plug that hole.”

In 2009, scientists warned in the medical journal The Lancet that global 
warming would harm crop yields, cause tropical diseases to show up in 
new parts of the world and lead to water shortages. In 2020, the journal 
said those threats no longer belonged to the distant future.

“Climate change is fundamentally a health threat,” said Gina McCarthy, 
the White House national climate change adviser. She said part of the 
mission of the office would be to encourage doctors to talk to their 
patients about protecting themselves from things like heat waves, 
wildfire smoke and other air pollution.

In particular, experts said, more needs to be done to understand how 
extreme weather affects older people as well as communities of color, 
where families are more likely to live in areas hardest hit by disasters.

“There’s a saying that if white people catch a cold, Black people catch 
pneumonia,” said Beverly Malone, chief executive of the National League 
for Nursing. “Health equity has a lot to do with where you live, and we 
have understood the linkage.”

President Biden has requested $3 million to fund the climate office next 
year, a sum that still requires congressional approval. Those setting up 
the office have been brought in from other agencies drawing on existing 
funds. John Balbus, the senior adviser to the director of the National 
Institutes of Health on climate change, will serve as interim director.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/climate/biden-climate-change-health-equity.html

[Waters rising]
*Extreme sea levels to become much more common*
AUGUST 30, 2021
by University of Melbourne
Global warming will cause extreme sea levels to occur almost every year 
by the end of the century, impacting major coastlines worldwide, 
according to new research from an international team of scientists.
Published today in Nature Climate Change, the research predicts that 
because of rising temperatures, extreme sea levels along coastlines 
across the world will become 100 times more frequent by the end of the 
century in about half of the 7,283 locations studied.

Co-author of the study, University of Melbourne's Dr Ebru Kirezci, an 
ocean engineering researcher said areas where frequency of extreme sea 
levels are expected to increase faster include the Southern Hemisphere 
and subtropic areas, the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, 
the southern half of North America's Pacific Coast, and areas including 
Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Philippines and Indonesia.

"What we can also infer from this study, is that most of the eastern, 
southern and southwestern coastlines of Australia will be the impacted 
with almost an annual frequency of these extreme sea levels by 2100," Dr 
Kirezci said.

"This increased frequency of extreme sea levels will occur even with a 
global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And the changes are 
likely to come sooner than the end of the century, with many locations 
experiencing a 100-fold increase in extreme events even by 2070."

Lead author of the study, climate scientist at the US Department of 
Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Dr Claudia Tebaldi said 
it was no surprise that sea level rise will be dramatic even at 1.5 
degrees and will have substantial effects on extreme sea level 
frequencies and magnitude.

"This study gives a more complete picture around the globe. We were able 
to look at a wider range of warming levels in very fine spatial detail," 
Dr Tebaldi said.

The researchers called for more detailed studies to understand how the 
changes will impact communities within different countries. They added 
that the physical changes that the study describes will have varying 
impacts at local scales, depending on several factors, including how 
vulnerable the site is to rising waters and how prepared a community is 
for change.

"Public policy makers should take note of these studies and work towards 
improving coastal protection and mitigation measures. Building dykes and 
sea walls, retreating from shorelines, and deploying early warning 
systems are some of the steps which can be taken to adapt to this 
change," Dr Kirezci said.
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-extreme-sea-common.html

[Wake up or not, you may not want to read this]
*You’re Not Going to Homestead Through Collapse*
No matter how self-sufficient you become
Shelly Fagan -- Aug 20, 2021
People who criticize billionaires for foolishly building underground 
bunkers believe they can survive the impending doom of climate change by 
hunkering down on a homestead.
Both groups are attempting to escape the realities of collapse. It’s a 
race that most humans will likely lose. It’s now a question of whether 
the species can survive extinction.
On one hand the survivalists (rightfully) poo-poo plans for colonizing 
Mars as too difficult on a “dead planet” while simultaneously clinging 
to the belief that for all their beans and bullets, gardens and wells 
—the hoarded supplies of a prepper will see them through the sixth mass 
extinction on a dying Earth. It’s the poor-man’s version of an Elysium 
space station.
The cognitive dissonance must physically hurt.
And let’s admit what no one is saying out loud. The carefully made plans 
for some sort of Neo-Thoreau lifestyle is more about surviving the 
collapse of civilization in relative safety and comfort than reducing a 
carbon footprint — the same attitude that put us in this predicament in 
the first place.
Here are just a few of the reasons this fantasy won’t work.
6 Million US Workers Are on Strike
The silent labor movement no one is talking about
shellyfaganaz.medium.com

Collapse will be everywhere but not all at once.
The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty 
consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to 
maintain. . . .Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at 
that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or 
your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the 
return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally 
unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and 
available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer 
has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and 
it goes under. That’s catabolic collapse. — John Michael Greer, 
originally published by The Archdruid Report
Planet Earth is a closed economic system. Sure, some places might fare 
better than others, and only for awhile, but there will be no Garden of 
Eden on 40 acres in Missouri. Moving to New Zealand won’t save you. No 
place will remain untouched because it not just about climate, weather 
events, social systems, or politics.
It’s everything.
We are a global network of systems — made up of individuals — all 
interconnected and fragile because humans may be resilient, but they are 
not immortal. This means a problem on the other side of the planet will 
eventually reach you, and it carries with it the seeds of your potential 
decline. Wildfires on another continent produce choking smoke. A novel 
virus stops all air travel. Terrorism in one region spills over to 
another. It’s coming for you.
So losing factories in China to fire (up 150% this year) means a massive 
disruption in the supply chain. That results in supply shortages of 
semiconductor chips, plastics, cardboard (up 638%) which affects 
numerous products. The same chip shortage which drives up the costs of 
cars and trucks, also affects things like heating systems, cell phones, 
and a total of 169 different industries.
You can’t escape it. And unless you are so self-sufficient that you 
never need to replace equipment, buy a new phone, visit a doctor, take 
prescription medication — and the countless other necessities of modern 
life, you will be affected. Yes, even on a homestead.
If you manage to wrest yourself from modern civilization (however 
doubtful), and things look promising for now, it probably won’t be in 
ten years when climate collapse comes for everyone.
You’re stuck here and this is a global problem. You can’t escape it.
You can’t prepare for something unknown.
Traditional prepping focuses on the most common disasters for any given 
region.
If you live in the South, you prepare for hurricanes. In the Midwest, 
you dig a root cellar to escape tornadoes. If you live in the Southwest, 
you build homes with flat white roofs to reflect sunlight.
The problem with climate change is that “change” part. That means we may 
have tornadoes in the South, flooding in the Southwest, or heat domes in 
the Pacific Northwest. Maybe your area cycles through disasters. Likely, 
these new events will be novel for the region. And no one can predict 
how it will play out other than the loss of plants and wildlife not 
acclimated to such weather extremes.
While models can estimate sea level rise, researchers can’t forecast how 
catastrophic weather will manifest. Canada may swelter under a heat 
dome, or become freezing cold. Wildfires could spread smoke and ash. Any 
number of life-threatening scenarios might play out, but preppers 
believe they can cover all potential threats from the safety of their 
personal haven.
And this is a problem as homesteading doesn’t allow much room for error. 
Nature doesn’t care if you starve to death.
Desert dwellers are not going to be skilled at surviving in the cold. 
Gardening in a temperate zone is going to be different than growing food 
in a hot house. You won’t have the skills or necessary equipment.
You’re betting on the hope that global climate change won’t be visited 
on your homestead.
Most preppers assume the weather in their locale will be the same albeit 
more severe.
Environmental scientists can model global warming but not specific 
events for a given region — so they don’t publish the likely extremes. 
And because of this, most preppers believe that this translates into any 
location doing well today will hold true tomorrow because no one is 
talking about all the potential scenarios they could face.
The perceived advantages that make your homestead desirable may disappear.
Preppers who choose a colder climate for their homestead may experience 
collapse sooner than those in cities and suburbs.
If survival depends on a wood stove for heating, what happens when all 
the trees are gone? Siberia fires are now bigger than all the worlds 
other blazes combined. Once lost, those trees aren’t coming back because 
things like drought and climate change create conditions which make the 
area unsuitable for the once dominant species.
If you plan to supplement your meager garden with hunting because game 
is plentiful, you should be aware that according to the Living Planet 
Index, two-thirds of vertebrates are gone — and continue to decline.
You can’t prepare for every outcome when the changes are unknown. And 
you can’t move a homestead if the region becomes uninhabitable.
Decisions made by leaders are likely going to serve those in populated 
areas, diverting critical resources like water or fire suppression away 
from you.
You may be forced to flee.
A number of scenarios may force you to flee — wildfires, relentless 
drought, extreme flooding, or civil unrest. After investing all your 
resources in a homestead, will you be able to leave?
Events such as flooding may require you to temporarily abandon your 
homestead and relocate to more suitable area. This is far more likely a 
scenario as climate change renders certain regions uninhabitable. While 
scientists can guess what areas those might be, remember no one 
predicted wildfires in Siberia.
The world is already facing unpredictable events.
How to Get 5 Billion People on Board to Fight Climate Change
Forget the science, let’s do this instead
shellyfaganaz.medium.com

Are you capable of growing food in every possible climate?
Growing enough food to survive is challenging in itself. It’s a skill 
that takes years to learn in perfect weather. So what happens when the 
climate changes? Are you skilled at growing food indoors? How about in a 
drought?
If commercial farming struggles to feed the population when they have 
every advantage, do you really think you can shift gears to an entirely 
new climate and weather extremes, and be successful? Due to changing 
climate, foraging may be out of the question as well. Hunting isn’t 
sustainable.
Providing enough calories for yourself without external inputs will 
likely become the most pressing issue and consume all your time and effort.
Which makes protecting it a bit of a challenge.
If your homestead is successful or you are part of a thriving community, 
you will be overrun by refugees.
There is little you can do to protect your homestead and fields from 
people highly motivated by hunger. You can’t protect your garden around 
the clock. The problem is so pervasive that many farming areas passed 
laws to punish crop theft — and that was prior to people becoming 
desperate for food.
If you are fortunate to be part of a community, you will be overrun by 
refugees as word gets out to family and friends that you’re doing well. 
And if you manage to select a region unaffected by extreme weather, 
there will be increasing pressure from those relocating.
Your homestead may no longer be as isolated as you planned.
The end result will not be what you envision.
Homesteaders seem to be betting on civilization collapse while ignoring 
the root cause of it. Resource depletion, climate change, and loss of 
biodiversity damages more than society alone — it’s killing the future 
of our species.
If you manage to survive the unraveling of civilization, you haven’t won 
anything because the causes of a mass die-off will still remain.
You may be surviving only to face even greater privations.
What can we do?
The solution is not to isolate and attempt to ride it out alone. That 
will only delay the inevitable. It’s more of the same thought process 
that led to the unsustainable lifestyle we have now.
We are in this predicament because too many believe we don’t need each 
other — “each man is an island” — and that we can survive this without 
the cooperation of the rest of humanity.
The rugged individualism of America will doom the nation to a dystopian 
future. We think our selfishness won’t impact others. We point fingers 
at industry, emerging nations, and people jet-setting to their private 
yachts when pretty much everyone is to blame. Homesteading is more of 
the same mindset, the “I got mine so screw you.”
It’s understandable. The problems facing humanity seem hopeless when 
solving them requires the concerted effort of so many who are ignorant 
or in denial. Instead of shaking people awake, some turn to doing what 
they can to save themselves.
But this is the wrong approach because it removes an aware voice from 
the chorus of alarm.
Prepping is based on the belief that one can get away from it all and 
collapse will not follow. You can’t outrun it. You can’t prepare for it. 
You can’t ignore it.
The only solution is to fight to stave off the worst effects of collapse 
now to insure the survival of the planet in the future.
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/youre-not-going-to-homestead-through-collapse-be8d89a6ab19

[No time for despair]
*Climate change is radicalizing young people — here’s what that means 
and how to combat despair*
MON, AUG 30 2021
Catherine Clifford
@IN/CATCLIFFORD/
@CATCLIFFORD

KEY POINTS
Environmental studies professor Sarah Ray wrote “A Field Guide to 
Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.”
Ray hopes it will better equip people with the morphing and sharpening 
fears her Humboldt State students brought to her classroom.
In this conversation with CNBC, Ray shares how she thinks climate 
communications and psychology need to change to help young people.
Her advice is useful for anyone struggling to find a way to productively 
move through climate change fears and paralysis.
- -
The future of climate communication, the future of climate psychology 
has to simply be the “both-and” orientation. It’s just going to have to 
be, because we’re all going to learn at some point that living in doom 
and gloom narratives is very ineffective, and it makes us literally want 
to kill ourselves. This is very scary. We’ve gone from nobody caring 
enough about climate change to people caring so much that they’re 
nihilistic. We cranked up the urgency and then we’ve like overshot the mark.

It’s not that urgency is a bad thing. Urgency has a rhetorical situation 
and purpose and audience that is very effective and needs to happen. And 
we need to keep using urgency where appropriate. So I am not rejecting 
urgency outright. But for people who do really care a lot, it is not a 
productive thing.

We are going to be in this for a while. There is some urgency needed, 
but we need to focus on those fears that we do have control over, and 
slow down and do the work in a way that is sustainable for ourselves. 
And simply put that is the recipe for engaging in this work without 
burning out, without getting overwhelmed.

We need to be clear-eyed about it. I’m not suggesting that we block out 
everything that we can’t control. Taking in of all this information 
through the news, social media, all the ways that we have a 24-7 news 
stream, in general, that negativity bias of media and negativity bias in 
our psychologies and in our brains does not equate to reality. And it 
does equate to serious depression and anxiety.

We can be aware of how bad things are, and also how good things are. We 
can counterbalance the overwhelming negativity of news and our own 
biases around negativity by consuming and actively seeking out things 
that are positive. And that’s not about being in denial or naive. That 
is about making sure we are consuming, that we’re exposed to reality, 
which is not all bad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/30/how-to-stop-climate-change-despair-according-to-professor.html

[Good question]

*The NYT stopped shilling for cigarettes. Why won't it stop shilling for 
fossil fuels?*
As climate disasters devastate America, activists aren't the only ones 
wondering why the paper of record is still advertising fossil fuels.

The paper of record’s reporting will undoubtedly be of quality. But 
readers will have to be careful not to get distracted.

In addition to information about these deadly disasters, Times readers 
today may also be shown advertisements for the fossil fuel industry—the 
main industry responsible for making the disasters worse.

- -
Peter Gleick 🇺🇸
@PeterGleick
The city of New Orleans is without power because of a 
climate-change-enhanced hurricane.
South Lake Tahoe is being evacuated because of a climate-change-enhanced 
superfire.
Welcome to the future.

[Rethinking climate change]
*Rethinking Climate Change. The path to a 90% emissions reduction by 2035.
*Just Have a Think
The climate emergency requires climate solutions. And fast!  There are 
lots of different proposals floating around  - some of which don't even 
exist yet, and probably never will. So, it's easy to get confused about 
which direction is best. Now though, a new analysis suggests that 90% of 
the job could be achieved by just a handful of disruptive technologies 
that are very real indeed, and are already either disrupting their 
markets or are poised to do so. We just need to choose to embrace them!

RETHINKX - Rethinking Climate Change Report
https://www.rethinkx.com/

Video Transcripts available at our website
http://www.justhaveathink.com

EXTRA DEEP DIVE DISCUSSION WITH IPCC SCIENTISTS 16.8.21
In an extraordinarily candid interview with Dr. Alison Green, Sir Robert 
Watson and Dr. James Dyke reflect on the IPCC AR6 report on the physical 
science of climate change, published on August 9th. They both stress the 
need for urgent action at the CoP in Glasgow in November 2021, and for 
honesty about what governments will actually do between 2021 and 2030.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjyREwAaILI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUySXZ6y2fk

- -

[discussions of the AR6 report]
*IPCC Report - A Climate Reality Check*
Aug 16, 2021
ScientistsWarning
In an extraordinarily candid interview with Dr. Alison Green, Sir Robert 
Watson and Dr. James Dyke reflect on the IPCC AR6 report on the physical 
science of climate change, published on August 9th. They both stress the 
need for urgent action at the CoP in Glasgow in November 2021, and for 
honesty about what governments will actually do between 2021 and 2030.

Sir Robert Tony Watson is an Atmospheric scientist who has worked as a 
Chief scientist and advisor for NASA the World Bank and the British 
government. He is the Chair of Environmental Science and Science 
Director of the Tyndall Centre in the UK.

Dr. James Dyke is an Earth system scientist, writer, and author. He is 
an Assistant Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University 
of Exeter, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the 
European Geosciences Union, and serves on the editorial board of the 
journal Earth System Dynamics.
https://www.jamesgdyke.info/about/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjyREwAaILI

[We are not surprised]
*Economists Are Vastly Underestimating the Economic Impact of Climate 
Change*
Economists are expecting a tiny reduction in GDP despite climate science 
suggesting far more dramatic consequences, according to a new study.
The Physics  - Aug 26, 2021

When it comes to the climate emergency, the scientific consensus is 
clear: human activity is heating Earth more rapidly now than at any 
point in the last 2,000 years. This is causing rapid, widespread changes 
to our oceans, our atmosphere and our biosphere.

The effects will continue for decades, possibly centuries, to come with 
dramatic increases in extreme weather events, such as heat waves, forest 
fires, hurricanes, flooding, ice melts and sea level rises. Indeed, this 
increase in extreme events is already upon us.

Parts of the planet are likely to become uninhabitable, where 
temperature increases will make it impossible to live or grow food. And 
that is likely to trigger patterns of migration with global consequences.

It’s easy to imagine that these changes will have a huge impact on the 
global economy and our ability to maintain the quality of life we enjoy 
today.

But according to economists, the economic impact of all this climate 
change is likely to be minimal. “Economists have predicted that damages 
from global warming will be as low as 2.1 percent of global economic 
production for a 3◦C rise in global average surface temperature, and 7.9 
percent for a 6◦C rise,” say Steve Keen, at University College London 
and a group of colleagues.

Now, this team has examined the approach that economists have taken and 
say it is riddled with misconceptions and lacking in a basic 
understanding of climate science. And the predictions of economists have 
led to a number of significant missteps by policy makers, for example, 
in the pricing of carbon.

Evidence-Based Science
That needs to change. Instead, the team say predictions about the future 
of the global economy must be based on evidence-based science so that 
policy makers can best decide how to plan for the future.

First some background. Predicting the future of the global economy is 
notoriously difficult. Nevertheless, economists have developed a number 
of models to evaluate the potential impact of climate change. Perhaps 
the most influential is the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy, or DICE, 
model developed by William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale University in 
New Haven.

The DICE model has hugely influenced thinking about the economic impact 
of climate change. In 2018, Nordhaus received the Nobel Prize in 
economics for his work on “integrating climate change into long-run 
macroeconomic analysis”.

But now Keen and colleagues say there are serious flaws in the way this 
and other models represent the impact of climate change. That’s why they 
predict such a small impact when the change to the climate and our way 
of life will be massive.

The team says that these models do not properly take scientific thinking 
into account. For example, climate scientists agree that an important 
property of Earth’s climate is the existence of tipping points in which 
climate subsystems switch from one state to another, often in ways that 
cannot easily be reversed.

These are important because they amplify the effects of warming, 
creating conditions in which other systems can flip in a tipping point 
cascade. Examples include the disappearance of summer ice cover in the 
Arctic Sea and the irreversible shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet.

Tipping Points
The big fear is that we are much closer than expected to these tipping 
points. The team point to one influential paper that suggested “a 
variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this 
century.”

Curiously, tipping points do not feature in most economic analyses of 
the impact of climate change. Keen and co say that Nordhaus asserts that 
there are “no critical tipping elements with a time horizon less than 
300 years until global temperatures have increased by at least 3◦C.”

Another problem is that the DICE model assumes that the economic effects 
of climate change will be small compared to other factors such as new 
technology, population changes and so on. This does not seem reasonable 
when some cities and regions are likely to become uninhabitable after an 
increase of just 4◦C.

Indeed, the model assumes that climate change will influence just a 
small part of the economy. Keen and co say this is because Nordhaus 
seems to consider only those industries affected by the weather, which 
make up just 13 percent of the economy. The rest will seemingly 
experience negligible effects.

However, Keen and co point out that confusing weather with climate in 
this way is a serious mistake. “This assumption that only economic 
activities that are exposed to the weather will be affected by climate 
change can be rejected on at least three grounds,” they say.

For example, wildfires can significantly impact the output from nearby 
factories, not least because many people will be unable to work there. 
And higher outdoor temperatures that make regions uninhabitable will 
certainly affect factory output. “Factories without workers produce zero 
output,” they say. And changes in biodiversity will influence the 
availability of resources and have significant economic impact.

If economic models do not consider these possibilities, they are bound 
to under-estimate the impact of climate change.

One line of thought is that when some regions become less productive, 
others will become more productive. For example, crops could be grown at 
higher latitudes.

But Keen and co say this is unlikely to make up the difference or come 
anywhere near to it. They give the example of a commodity such as grain 
and imagine a scenario in which America’s breadbasket regions such as 
Idaho become hotter and less productive for grain. But in that case, 
grain production “will not be replaced at higher latitudes due to the 
poorer topsoil,” they say.

In all these cases, the economic impact is likely to be huge and 
devastating.

The withering conclusion from this study is that economic models are not 
fit for purpose. “We conclude that there are fundamental and 
insurmountable weaknesses in estimates by economists of the damages from 
climate change, such that they should not be used to assess the risks 
from climate change,” says Keen and co.

That’s a damning assessment and one that policy makers would do well to 
consider in more detail before setting out their response to climate 
change. These are decisions we need to make now; we cannot afford to get 
them wrong.

Ref: Economists’ Erroneous Estimates Of Damages From Climate Change : 
arxiv.org/abs/2108.07847
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/economists-are-vastly-underestimating-the-economic-impact-of-climate-change

[A bit cynical, but may be valid]
*Don’t Expect Real Climate Solutions From COP26. It Functions for 
Corporations.*

Simon Pirani - August 29, 2021

In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 
the U.K. in November — the 26th session of the talks that were launched 
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — the governments of the world’s richest 
countries are making ever-louder claims that they are effectively 
confronting global warming. Nothing could be more dangerous than for 
social, labor and environmental movements to take this rhetoric at face 
value and assume that political leaders have the situation under control.

There are three huge falsehoods running through these leaders’ 
narratives: that rich nations are supporting their poorer counterparts; 
that “net zero” targets will do what is needed; and that 
technology-focused “green growth” is the way to decarbonize.

First, wealthier countries claim to be supporting poorer nations — which 
are contributing least to global warming, and suffering most from its 
effects — to make the transition away from fossil fuels.

But at the G7 summit in June, the rich countries again failed to keep 
their own promise, made more than a decade ago, to provide $100 billion 
per year in climate finance for developing countries. Of the $60 billion 
per year they have actually come up with, more than half is bogus: 
analysis by Oxfam has shown that it is mostly loans and non-concessional 
finance, and that the amounts are often overstated.

Compare this degrading treatment of the Global South with the 
mobilization of many hundreds of billions for the post-pandemic 
recovery. Of $657 billion (public money alone) pledged by G20 nations to 
energy-producing or energy-consuming projects, $296 billion supports 
fossil fuels, nearly a third greater than the amount supporting clean 
energy ($228 billion).

Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are magnified by poverty. This 
year’s floods, wildfires and record temperatures in Europe and North 
America have been frightful enough. The same phenomena cause far greater 
devastation outside the Global North.

In 2020, “very extensive” flooding caused deaths, significant 
displacement of populations and further impacts from disease in 16 
African countries, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) 
annual climate report recorded. India, China and parts of Southeast Asia 
suffered from record-breaking rainfall and flooding, too.

Climate and weather events had “major and diverse impacts on population 
movements, and on the vulnerability of people on the move,” the WMO 
reported. Cyclone Amphan displaced 2.5 million people in India and 
Bangladesh last May. Many could return soon, but 2.8 million homes were 
damaged, leading to prolonged displacement. Severe storms in Mozambique 
piled on dangers for tens of thousands of people displaced by the 
previous year’s floods and who had not been able to return home.

The political leaders’ second fiction is their pledge to attain “net 
zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (the U.S., U.K. and Europe) or 
2060 (China).

“Net zero” signifies a point at which the amount of greenhouse gases 
being pumped into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount being 
withdrawn. Once, it may have been a useful way of taking into account 
the way that forests, in particular, soak up carbon dioxide. But three 
decades of capitulation to fossil fuel companies, since the UN Framework 
Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, have turned it into a 
monster of deceit.

Thanks to corporate capture and government complicity, many of the 
greenhouse gas emissions projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change’s recent report factor in huge levels of carbon removal 
by dubious technologies that do not, and may never, work at scale (e.g., 
carbon dioxide removal, carbon capture and storage, and bioenergy with 
carbon capture and storage). Governments have drawn up “net zero” 
targets reliant on these myths.

On top of this, the 2015 Paris agreement left rich nations to decide 
what share of global emissions they would take responsibility for. So 
the U.K. government, which laughably describes itself as “leading the 
world” on climate, uses targets for emissions cuts at half the level 
that scientists say is necessary.

The politicians’ third and more complex deception is in the 
technology-centered “decarbonization” measures they embrace in the name 
of “green growth.” These rely on tweaking, rather than transforming, the 
big technological systems through which most fossil fuels are consumed — 
transport networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, and 
industrial, agricultural and military systems.

An example is electric vehicles, promoted as the principal means to 
reduce transport sector emissions. Governments ignore the carbon 
footprint of the vehicles’ manufacture and electricity use (unless and 
until the grids are 100 percent green), and the roads and parking spaces 
that the vehicles use.

Alternative approaches focus on expanding public transport, shifting to 
non-motorized modes (walking, cycles, electric scooters), and reducing 
the total number of journeys, especially in cities. In a climate 
emergency, they ask, shouldn’t we stretch our imaginations beyond lives 
made miserable sitting in rush-hour traffic?

But governments avoid or oppose such solutions, because they would 
involve confronting the corporate power of oil companies, car 
manufacturers and property developers, in whose interests it is to 
perpetuate car culture.

A second example of governments’ corporate-based technology approach 
involves home heating and cooling. Small-scale technologies that can 
slash the energy throughput needed — proper insulation, electric heat 
pumps instead of gas, small-scale renewables generation — are eschewed. 
Instead, political leaders advocate incremental change to large systems, 
at a pace that suits the companies that control them.

In the U.K., architects protest as the government loosens building 
regulations, when it should be tightening them to ensure that new houses 
are near-zero-carbon. Trades unions in Leeds campaign for insulation and 
heat pumps — the right solution for the city’s housing stock — instead 
of a scheme to swap the gas network for hydrogen, that is little more 
than a survival strategy for the companies producing oil and gas on the 
North Sea.

In the U.S., community groups advocate zero-carbon energy systems as 
part of an integrated approach to a “just transition” away from fossil 
fuels.

Governments resist because the corporations resist. Energy corporations 
fear decentralized electricity generation outside of their control; 
property developers despise regulation that compels them to use 
zero-carbon building techniques; gas distributors hate electric heat 
pumps. Just as oil companies and car manufacturers dread radical 
decarbonization of transport, petrochemical giants fear plastic-free 
supply chains, big agribusiness is terrified by low-carbon food systems, 
and so on.

Climate researchers have shown that absolute zero (not “net zero”) 
emissions is entirely achievable, by reducing energy throughput and 
living differently. The path is blocked not by technological factors, 
but by political ones: by the dynamics of wealth and power that 
constitute capitalism — the same dynamics that force the burden of 
climate change on the Global South.

Tackling climate change involves overcoming those dynamics. It is not so 
much about replacing bad government with good government, as it is about 
subverting, confronting, confounding and defeating corporate power. It 
is about developing a vision of our collective future that goes beyond 
capitalism.

We see glimpses of the social forces that could achieve this. Resistance 
to neocolonial resource extraction, which is at the heart of the 
fossil-fuelled economy, rages across the Global South. In the Global 
North, there are acts of great heroism — by the saboteurs of the Dakota 
Access pipeline, for example — and new waves of direct action, by 
Extinction Rebellion and others, and school strikes in response to 
climate change.

Climate change protesters often accuse governments of “inaction.” Let’s 
look at it from a different angle: Governments are acting, but they are 
acting in accordance with capital’s economic imperatives.

They are allowing global average temperature to rise far more than 2 
degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, and pushing the resulting 
suffering on to hundreds of millions of people outside the rich world. 
They are empowering fossil fuel producers and corporations in 
fossil-intensive industrial sectors to dabble with dangerous techno 
fixes and false “solutions” in the name of economic “growth.” They are 
protecting their system.

The most powerful response to looming climate catastrophe will come not 
from within the COP26 process, but from outside it, in the actions of 
grassroots organizers, communities, social and labor movements, and of 
society as a whole.

In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 
the U.K. in November — the 26th session of the talks that were launched 
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — the governments of the world’s richest 
countries are making ever-louder claims that they are effectively 
confronting global warming. Nothing could be more dangerous than for 
social, labor and environmental movements to take this rhetoric at face 
value and assume that political leaders have the situation under control.

There are three huge falsehoods running through these leaders’ 
narratives: that rich nations are supporting their poorer counterparts; 
that “net zero” targets will do what is needed; and that 
technology-focused “green growth” is the way to decarbonize.

First, wealthier countries claim to be supporting poorer nations — which 
are contributing least to global warming, and suffering most from its 
effects — to make the transition away from fossil fuels.

But at the G7 summit in June, the rich countries again failed to keep 
their own promise, made more than a decade ago, to provide $100 billion 
per year in climate finance for developing countries. Of the $60 billion 
per year they have actually come up with, more than half is bogus: 
analysis by Oxfam has shown that it is mostly loans and non-concessional 
finance, and that the amounts are often overstated.

Compare this degrading treatment of the Global South with the 
mobilization of many hundreds of billions for the post-pandemic 
recovery. Of $657 billion (public money alone) pledged by G20 nations to 
energy-producing or energy-consuming projects, $296 billion supports 
fossil fuels, nearly a third greater than the amount supporting clean 
energy ($228 billion).

Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change are magnified by poverty. This 
year’s floods, wildfires and record temperatures in Europe and North 
America have been frightful enough. The same phenomena cause far greater 
devastation outside the Global North.

In 2020, “very extensive” flooding caused deaths, significant 
displacement of populations and further impacts from disease in 16 
African countries, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) 
annual climate report recorded. India, China and parts of Southeast Asia 
suffered from record-breaking rainfall and flooding, too.

Climate researchers have shown that absolute zero (not “net zero”) 
emissions is entirely achievable. The path is blocked not by 
technological factors, but by political ones.
Climate and weather events had “major and diverse impacts on population 
movements, and on the vulnerability of people on the move,” the WMO 
reported. Cyclone Amphan displaced 2.5 million people in India and 
Bangladesh last May. Many could return soon, but 2.8 million homes were 
damaged, leading to prolonged displacement. Severe storms in Mozambique 
piled on dangers for tens of thousands of people displaced by the 
previous year’s floods and who had not been able to return home.

The political leaders’ second fiction is their pledge to attain “net 
zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (the U.S., U.K. and Europe) or 
2060 (China).

“Net zero” signifies a point at which the amount of greenhouse gases 
being pumped into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount being 
withdrawn. Once, it may have been a useful way of taking into account 
the way that forests, in particular, soak up carbon dioxide. But three 
decades of capitulation to fossil fuel companies, since the UN Framework 
Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, have turned it into a 
monster of deceit.

Thanks to corporate capture and government complicity, many of the 
greenhouse gas emissions projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change’s recent report factor in huge levels of carbon removal 
by dubious technologies that do not, and may never, work at scale (e.g., 
carbon dioxide removal, carbon capture and storage, and bioenergy with 
carbon capture and storage). Governments have drawn up “net zero” 
targets reliant on these myths.

On top of this, the 2015 Paris agreement left rich nations to decide 
what share of global emissions they would take responsibility for. So 
the U.K. government, which laughably describes itself as “leading the 
world” on climate, uses targets for emissions cuts at half the level 
that scientists say is necessary.

The politicians’ third and more complex deception is in the 
technology-centered “decarbonization” measures they embrace in the name 
of “green growth.” These rely on tweaking, rather than transforming, the 
big technological systems through which most fossil fuels are consumed — 
transport networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, and 
industrial, agricultural and military systems.

An example is electric vehicles, promoted as the principal means to 
reduce transport sector emissions. Governments ignore the carbon 
footprint of the vehicles’ manufacture and electricity use (unless and 
until the grids are 100 percent green), and the roads and parking spaces 
that the vehicles use.

Alternative approaches focus on expanding public transport, shifting to 
non-motorized modes (walking, cycles, electric scooters), and reducing 
the total number of journeys, especially in cities. In a climate 
emergency, they ask, shouldn’t we stretch our imaginations beyond lives 
made miserable sitting in rush-hour traffic?

Tackling climate change involves subverting, confronting, confounding 
and defeating corporate power.
But governments avoid or oppose such solutions, because they would 
involve confronting the corporate power of oil companies, car 
manufacturers and property developers, in whose interests it is to 
perpetuate car culture.