[✔️] December 7, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*December 7, 2021*/

/[  this top story will likely be repeated  ]/
*Extreme weather and pandemic help drive global food prices to 46-year high*
Current high food prices, combined with the ongoing pandemic, will make 
the global food supply highly vulnerable to extreme weather shocks in 2022.

by JEFF MASTERS -- DECEMBER 6, 2021
Global food prices in November rose 1.2% compared to October, and were 
at their highest level since June 2011 (unadjusted for inflation), the 
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its 
monthly report on December 2. After adjusting for inflation, 2021 food 
prices averaged for the 11 months of 2021 are the highest in 46 years.

The high prices come despite expectations that total global production 
of grains in 2021 will set an all-time record: 0.7% higher than the 
previous record set in 2020. But because of higher demand (in part, from 
an increased amount of wheat and corn used to feed animals), the 2021 
harvest is not expected to meet consumption requirements in 2021/2022, 
resulting in a modest drawdown in global grain stocks by the end of 
2022, to their lowest levels since 2015/2016.

https://i1.wp.com/yaleclimateconnections.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/1121_fao-food-price.jpg?w=974&ssl=1

The November increase in global food prices was largely the result of a 
surge in prices of grains and dairy products, with wheat prices a 
dominant driver.

    Drought & heat-related crop insurance payouts now top $2.6B in the
    United States -- and quickly rising. Most losses? Not in the West,
    but in the Northern Tier.

    The overall economic cost expected to exceed $5B.
    https://twitter.com/SteveBowenWx/status/1466102990411083786

*Extreme weather a key factor in high food prices*
Food prices are complex, with weather, biofuel policies, trade policies, 
grain stocking policies, and fluctuating international financial 
conditions all important factors. High fuel prices, supply chain 
disruptions resulting from the pandemic, and high fertilizer prices are 
all contributing to the current high global food prices.

According to Reuters, global fertilizer prices have increased 80% this 
year, reaching their highest levels since the 2008-2009 global financial 
crisis. Primary causes of the current high prices include extreme 
weather events (particularly the February cold wave in Texas and 
Hurricane Ida in August), which disrupted U.S. fertilizer production, 
and the high cost in Europe of natural gas, a key component in producing 
fertilizer). Fertilizer shortages threaten to reduce grain harvests in 
2022, according to CF Industries, a major fertilizer producer.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/12/extreme-weather-and-pandemic-help-drive-global-food-prices-to-46-year-high/


/[  most wildfires and highest CO2 ] /
*From Siberia to the U.S, wildfires broke emissions records this year*
By Kate Abnett - December 6, 2021
BRUSSELS, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Wildfires produced a record amount of carbon 
emissions in parts of Siberia, the United States and Turkey this year, 
as climate change fanned unusually intense blazes, the European Union's 
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said on Monday.

Wildfires emitted 1.76 billion tonnes of carbon globally in 2021, 
Copernicus said. That's equivalent to more than double Germany's annual 
CO2 emissions.
Some of the worst-hit hotspots recorded their highest wildfire emissions 
for any January-November period since Copernicus' dataset began in 2003, 
including parts of Siberia's Yakutia region, Turkey, Tunisia and the 
western United States...
https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/siberia-us-wildfires-broke-emissions-records-this-year-2021-12-06/

.



/[   Language changes//and word counts ]/
*The language of climate is evolving, from ‘change’ to ‘catastrophe’*
“Climate emergency” was used just 17 times prior to January 2019, but 
283 times since.
BY TALIB VISRAM  -- 12-6-21
“Global warming” is out. “Climate catastrophe” is in.

The language of climate change has shifted over time, according to data 
collected by language learning platform Babbel, and the Media and 
Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) at the University of Colorado at 
Boulder. Particularly, the words and phrases more frequently utilized by 
media outlets reflect the worsening of the crisis, bringing more intense 
terms like “catastrophe” and “emergency” into the mainstream lexicon, as 
opposed to subtler choices prevalent at the beginning of the 2000s. 
Linguistic experts say the media’s choices, which have been influenced 
by scientists and organizations like the UN, are important because they 
convey to the public an increasingly urgent threat.

Babbel and MeCCO, a volunteer-led initiative that tracks climate 
terminology in the press and its impact on popular opinion, scanned news 
stories from January 2006 to October 2021 in major U.S. publications, 
including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, 
and found some recognizable trends. Notably, “climate catastrophe” has 
been used 1.5 times more in 2021 than in 2020. They did the same study 
with British publications, including The Guardian, The Times, and The 
Sun, where this trend was even more apparent: they used it three times more.

Another noticeable pattern is the fading-out of “global warming” and 
“greenhouse effect.” Publications used “global warming” 157 times in 
October 2021, versus 378 times at its peak in June 2008, a fall of 
141%—despite an increase in climate reporting. “Greenhouse effect” 
peaked in 2008 and 2010, then dropped off and never regained the same 
usage levels. Even the once-prevailing phrase “climate change” has 
dipped in usage, by 133% less than at its peak in January 2008.

Word choices by the press in this field matter because they are 
influential on public opinion, says Todd Ehresmann, senior linguist at 
Babbel. “News outlets have a strict duty to accurately represent the 
true state of things,” he says. “By using phrases that reflect the 
urgency of the situation, media outlets are conveying the importance of 
addressing these issues.” As the climate situation has escalated, those 
more emphatic and urgent terms like “emergency” and “catastrophe,” as 
well as “climate crisis” and “climate breakdown,” are necessary.

Similarly, Ehresmann says “global warming” is no longer accurate enough. 
As temperatures have risen by 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over 
the past 40 years, a more accurate term is “global heating.” In 2018, a 
leading climate scientist at the U.K. Met Office declared that was the 
preferred term, and a German scientist, founder of the Potsdam Institute 
for Climate Impact Research, agreed: “‘Global warming’ doesn’t capture 
the scale of destruction,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber said. “Speaking of 
hothouse Earth is legitimate.” Meanwhile, “greenhouse effect,” prevalent 
in the early 2000s in the years following An Inconvenient Truth, is a 
clearly defined scientific term, but doesn’t have a sense of urgency or 
trigger an emotional response.

2019 seemed to be a shifting point for the linguistics of climate. The 
UN started to use more emphatic language, such as in the Secretary 
General’s address at the Climate Action Summit. Groups such as Al Gore’s 
Climate Reality project, as well as Greenpeace and the Sunrise Movement, 
petitioned news organizations to alter their language; there were even 
protests outside of The New York Times building to force the change. In 
May 2019, The Guardian officially changed its style guide. “The phrase 
‘climate change’ sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists 
are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity,” said The Guardian‘s 
editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. International newspapers such as EFE 
in Spain, and The Hindustan in India, also made official changes.

Babbel did this research because, as a language app, it’s concerned with 
how popular speech continually evolves. And, media outlets are a 
“barometer” of why we tend to talk a certain way. “The language we 
choose conveys our attitudes towards the topic,” Ehresmann says. “By 
normalizing this language, we are galvanizing ourselves against the 
mortal threat of rising global temperatures.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90702024/the-language-of-climate-is-evolving-from-change-to-catastrophe


/[ Look to the future to record the past ]/
*This Mysterious, Indestructible 'Black Box' Will Tell The Future What 
Happened to Us*
PETER DOCKRILL -- 6 DECEMBER 2021
At a distant end of the Earth – hidden somewhere on the remote 
Australian island of Tasmania – a strange structure is about to witness 
and record the end of the world as we know it.
The project, called Earth's Black Box, is a giant steel installation, 
soon to be filled with hard drives powered by solar panels, each of them 
documenting and preserving a stream of real-time scientific updates and 
analysis on the gloomiest issues the world faces.

Information related to climate change, species extinction, environmental 
pollution, and impacts on health will all be chronicled in the 
monolithic structure – so that if some future society might one day 
discover the archive, they'll be able to piece together what happened to 
our planet.

"Unless we dramatically transform our way of life, climate change and 
other man-made perils will cause our civilization to crash," the Earth's 
Black Box website explains.

"Earth's Black Box will record every step we take towards this 
catastrophe. Hundreds of data sets, measurements and interactions 
relating to the health of our planet will be continuously collected and 
safely stored for future generations."

In a sense, the box, which evokes the brutalist design of Norway's 
famous 'Doomsday Vault', actually serves a somewhat complementary purpose.

While the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a fortress designed to protect a 
vital backup of the world's seeds in case the worst ever happens, 
Earth's Black Box is conceived as an ongoing record of the world's 
trajectory towards a dire predicament.

"The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this 
indestructible recording device will be there for whoever's left to 
learn from that," Jim Curtis, executive creative director at marketing 
agency Clemenger BBDO, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

"It's also there to hold leaders to account – to make sure their action 
or inaction is recorded."

The project – a collaboration between Clemenger BBDO, creative agency 
The Glue Society, and researchers at the University of Tasmania – is due 
to be completed in its undisclosed location in early 2022, but the box's 
systems are already partially active, in that they are 'live recording' 
environmental updates in a beta test.

Part of the point of the exercise, the box's makers say, is to help 
nudge humanity away from doomsday-like scenarios, with the mere 
existence of the installation hopefully encouraging today's society to 
act more progressively and responsibly in terms of climate action and 
environmental stewardship.

"When people know they're being recorded, it does have an influence on 
what they do and say," The Glue Society's Jonathan Kneebone told the ABC.

"That's our role if anything, to be something in the back of everyone's 
mind."

While some might belittle Earth's Black Box as a PR stunt designed to 
capture people's attention – as opposed to a serious scientific 
documentation project – there's no doubting the world urgently needs 
more attention and action on these issues, no matter how those eyeballs 
are secured.

In a world where ice sheets are destabilizing in response to 
unprecedented levels of global warming, where greenhouse gas emissions 
are headed the wrong way, where water is running out, and where animals 
are vanishing with such speed that scientists say we've entered our 
planet's sixth mass extinction, this is not the time to look away.

"The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the 
events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for 
future generations, and inspire urgent action," the Earth's Black Box 
makers say.

"How the story ends is completely up to us."
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-mysterious-indestructible-black-box-will-tell-the-future-what-happened-to-us

- -

/[ See what they are doing .]/
https://www.earthsblackbox.com/



/[  Photos from San Francisco ]/
*Photos: King Tides Offer Window Into a Bay Area Marked by the Climate 
Crisis*
SF NEWS --  5 DECEMBER 2021
MATT CHARNOCK
King tides — which average two feet higher than normal tides — flooded 
parts of San Francisco this weekend. And by doing so, they gave us a 
glimpse into how the city might look in the future with rising sea levels.
Over the weekend, the moon, Earth, and sun all came into a specific 
alignment, causing an unusually strong gravitational pull that made Bay 
Area coasts see rare high tides. In some areas like Half Moon Bay, the 
highest lunar tides of the year rose to 6.7 feet 9 a.m. — before 
dramatically plunging to about 1.5 feet lower than usual at 4 p.m., 
according to KRON4. While king tides are normal occurrences that can 
happen multiple times a year, they exacerbate sea level rise and have 
the potential to cause unusually severe coastal flooding.

https://twitter.com/KJBaylor/status/1466859178798968833

Twitter was inundated with images showing a temporarily flooded San 
Francisco. Sidewalks along the Embarcadero were wet with sea water; 
those who chose to catch their breath on benches along Pier 39 found 
their feet soaked; Ocean Beach saw a recent sand restoration project 
effectively disappear back into the ocean. (Other parts of the Bay Area 
also experienced these exaggerated tides — as evident by this tweet of 
cyclists riding through a partially submerged San Francisco Bay Trail.)

Over the next three decades, the San Francisco Bay could swell by up 
nearly two feet — a figure that could more than triple by the end of the 
century. Because of this looming climate catastrophe, SF Port Commission 
released a report in November saying the City will need to raise parts 
of the Embarcadero by some 6 feet to avoid the worst of the flooding, 
per KQED.

So... let this weekend's king tides serve as a concrete example — albeit 
a tempered one — of what's to come, should we not steer ourselves away 
from the worst of the climate crisis. And because pictures really are 
worth a thousand words, especially as they pertain to natural phenomena, 
here are some of the most affecting images of Saturday and Sunday's king 
tides.
https://sfist.com/2021/12/05/photos-king-tides-offer-window-into-a-bay-area-marked-by-the-climate-crisis/



[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming December 7, 1999*
December 7, 1999: The New York Times reports:

    "In a concession to environmentalists, the Ford Motor Company said
    today that it would pull out of the Global Climate Coalition, a
    group of big manufacturers and oil and mining companies that lobbies
    against restrictions on emissions of gases linked to global warming.

    "Ford's decision is the latest sign of divisions within heavy
    industry over how to respond to global warming. British Petroleum
    and Shell pulled out of the coalition two years ago following
    criticisms from environmental groups in Europe, where there has been
    more public concern than in the United States. Most scientists
    believe that emissions from automobiles, power plants and other
    man-made sources are warming the Earth's atmosphere.

    "British Petroleum and Shell were so-called general, or junior,
    members of the lobbying group. Ford is the first company belonging
    to the board that has withdrawn, and the first American company to
    leave the coalition, said Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the coalition."

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/07/business/ford-announces-its-withdrawal-from-global-climate-coalition.html


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