[✔️] December 21, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*December 21, 2021*/

/[ a few clips looking to the future - from the Nation ] /
*Life Circa 2050 Will Be Bad. Really Bad.*
Future widespread suffering won’t be caused by some unforeseen disaster 
but by all-too-obvious, painfully predictable reasons.
By Alfred McCoy - Dec 20. 2021
- -
And keep in mind that I can write all this now because such future 
widespread suffering won’t be caused by some unforeseen disaster to come 
but by an all-too-obvious, painfully predictable imbalance in the basic 
elements that sustain human life—air, earth, fire, and water. As average 
world temperatures rise by as much as 2.3° Celsius (4.2° Fahrenheit) by 
mid-century, climate change will degrade the quality of life in every 
country on Earth...
- -
Recent scientific research has found that, by 2050, the key drivers of 
major climate change will be feedback loops at both ends of the 
temperature spectrum. At the hotter end, in Africa, Australia, and the 
Amazon, warmer temperatures will spark ever more devastating forest 
fires, reducing tree cover, and releasing vast amounts of carbon into 
the atmosphere. This, in turn (as is already happening), will fuel yet 
more fires and so create a monstrous self-reinforcing feedback loop that 
could decimate the great tropical rainforests of this planet.

The even more serious and uncontrollable driver, however, will be in the 
planet’s polar regions...
- -
In fact, a “worst-case scenario” by the National Academies of Sciences 
projects a sea-level rise of as much as 20 inches by 2050 and 78 inches 
in 2100, with a “catastrophic” loss of 690,000 square miles of land, an 
expanse four times the size of California, displacing about 2.5 percent 
of the world’s population and inundating major cities like New York. 
Adding to such concerns, a recent study in Nature predicted that, by 
2060, rain rather than snow could dominate parts of the Arctic, further 
accelerating ice loss and raising sea levels significantly. Moving that 
doomsday ever closer, recent satellite imagery reveals that the ice 
shelf holding back Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier could “shatter 
within three to five years,” quickly breaking that Florida-sized frozen 
mass into hundreds of icebergs and eventually resulting “in several feet 
of sea level rise” on its own.
Think of it this way: In the Arctic, ice is drama, but permafrost is 
death. The spectacle of melting polar ice sheets cascading into ocean 
waters is dramatic indeed. True mass death, however, lies in the murky, 
mysterious permafrost. That sloppy stew of decayed matter and frozen 
water from ice ages past covers 730,000 square miles of the Northern 
Hemisphere, can reach 2,300 feet below ground, and holds enough 
potentially releasable carbon and methane to melt the poles and inundate 
densely populated coastal plains worldwide. In turn, such emissions 
would only raise Arctic temperatures further, melt more permafrost (and 
ice), and so on, year after year after year. We’re talking, in other 
words, about a potentially devastating feedback loop that could increase 
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beyond the planet’s capacity to 
compensate.
According to a 2019 report in Nature, the vast zone of frozen earth that 
covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is a sprawling 
storehouse for about 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon—twice the amount 
already in the atmosphere. Current models “assume that permafrost thaws 
gradually from the surface downwards,” slowly releasing methane and 
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But frozen soil also “physically 
holds the landscape together” and so its thawing can rip the surface 
open erratically, exposing ever-larger areas to the sun.

Around the Arctic Circle, there is already dramatic physical evidence of 
rapid change. Amid the vast permafrost that covers nearly two-thirds of 
Russia, one small Siberian town had temperatures that reached a historic 
100 degrees Fahrenheit in June 2020, the highest ever recorded above the 
Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, several peninsulas on the Arctic Sea have 
experienced methane eruptions that have produced craters up to 100 feet 
deep. Since rapid thawing releases more methane than gradual melting 
does and methane has 25 times more heating power than CO2, the “impacts 
of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate,” suggests that 2019 report in 
Nature, “could be twice that expected from current models.”....
- -
No one can predict with any certainty whether reforms like these and the 
power to change national behavior that would come with them will arrive 
in time to cap emissions and slow climate change, or too late (if at 
all) to do anything but manage a series of increasingly uncontrollable 
feedback loops. Yet without such change, the current world order will 
almost certainly collapse into catastrophic global disorder with dire 
consequences for all of us.

Alfred McCoyAlfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author 
of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US 
Global Power and Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the 
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-future-disasters/



/[  Clips discussing politics as planned acts of social groups ]/
*Increased political polarization found to thwart global environmental 
goals*
December 17, 2021
The latest UN climate summit — the 26th edition of the “Conference of 
the Parties,” or COP26 annual meeting — ultimately delivered on its 
primary goal of keeping alive the Paris Agreement’s aim to limit global 
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

Nations agreed on the Glasgow Climate Pact, which states that carbon 
emissions will have to fall by 45% by 2030 to keep alive the 1.5-degree 
goal.

ASU professor Charles Perrings

But according to new research led by School of Life Sciences Professor 
Charles Perrings, it may become even harder for nations to reach a 
consensus within this modern era of increased political polarization.

“What we found is that polarization leads to greater treaty 
non-compliance. It's more difficult to negotiate and sustain 
international agreements, the more polarized the electorate is and the 
more polarized political parties are,” Perrings said.

At Arizona State University, Perrings directs — along with School of 
Life Sciences colleague Ann Kinzig — the ecoSERVICES Group within The 
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The group studies the causes and 
consequences of change in ecosystem services — the benefits that people 
derive from the biophysical environment.

Perrings led a team that viewed international environmental agreements 
from this big-picture perspective.

In a new research study published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences, a team comprising Perrings, ASU political scientist 
Michael Hechter, a professor in the School of Politics and Global 
Studies, and Robert Mamada of Grand Canyon University used a complex 
adaptive systems approach to analyze the effect of polarization on 
national compliance with international environmental treaties.

Complex adaptive systems occur when the seemingly uncoordinated 
responses of nation-states adapt to changes in the conditions addressed 
by particular environmental agreements. These changes may generate 
seemingly coordinated patterns of behavior at the level of the system.

For the study, they considered how polarization of political parties and 
stakeholders on the issues addressed by international environment 
agreements affects commitment to those agreements.

There have been more than 3,600 International Environmental Agreements 
(IEA) since the 19th century. Of these, the big majority (80%) represent 
bilateral agreements: 10% involving 10 or fewer signatories, and less 
than 1% involving 100 or more signatories. According to Perrings, this 
network of IEAs has been characterized as a complex adaptive system in 
which, in the absence of international controls, simple behavioral rules 
at the national level may give rise to complex international adaptive 
dynamics.

The network of treaties has evolved from a single node (treaty) in 1857 
to 747 nodes with 1,001 directed links by 2012 — with waves of increased 
activity following the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human 
Environment (the Stockholm Conference) and the 1992 Earth Summit (the 
Rio Conference).

Fanning the flames
The complex adaptive systems approach sees decentralized interactions 
between nation-states pursuing their own agendas on particular issues as 
a potential source of seemingly coordinated adaptive behaviors across 
the network.

The approach anticipates the emergence of herd-like adaptations to 
changes in environmental conditions as a function of the topology of the 
system. ..
- -
“The simplest analogy would be to the way that a forest fire spreads,” 
Perrings said. “If you think about a forest area as a set of pixels, 
then there are well-defined relations governing combustion within and 
between the individual pixels. Each one has a very simple relationship 
to the next, but the spread of the fire across multiple pixels may be 
very, very complicated.”

However, within politics, the fire spreading is an increased political 
polarization that leads to less diversity of opinion, and less ability 
to reach consensus.

“It's a similar kind of thing when we look at human behavior,” Perrings 
said. “Individuals are interacting — very often through social media — 
and those interactions can generate at the level of a wider system.

“Interactions between individuals in a society that's polarized may be 
increasingly limited to those who share the same opinions. The social 
media they access then become echo chambers that amplify differences 
between groups.”...
- -
Existential threats
How much of the environmental crisis is seen as an existential threat by 
the nations that govern the response? Perrings notes that even during 
the great threat of the current COVID-19 pandemic, one might have been 
expected a coordinated international disease control effort under the 
World Health Organization. But the immediacy of the threat to national 
populations led to an almost the polar opposite — a wholly decentralized 
response to the pandemic...
- -
The general cost of polarization is that it makes it more difficult to 
coordinate action to cooperate across groups to provide things of 
benefit to the wider public.

Polarization puts environmental issues and solutions off the table, and 
a range of consequences that are really quite significant are completely 
ignored.

“Whether the system is robust enough that it can adapt to environmental 
threats that are not being addressed is an open question. This should be 
one of the objectives of governments. You want to be able to survive the 
bad stuff,” Perrings said. “In the long run, we are all better off if 
1,000 flowers are let to bloom.”
https://news.asu.edu/20211217-global-engagement-increased-political-polarization-found-thwart-global-environmental-goalsll

/
/

//
/[ Dave Roberts on messaging - great audio interview  ] /
*Volts podcast: how the left can suck less at messaging, with Anat 
Shenker-Osario*
Including some advice on climate change.
David Roberts
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-how-the-left-can-suck



/[ Here's examples of legislative manipulation ] /
*Revealed: the Florida power company pushing legislation to slow rooftop 
solar*
Florida Power & Light delivered bill text to a state lawmaker. Its 
parent company sent $10,000 to her campaign coffers

Mary Ellen Klas for the Miami Herald and Mario Alejandro Ariza for 
Floodlight
Mon 20 Dec 2021
The biggest power company in the US is pushing policy changes that would 
hamstring rooftop solar power in Florida, delivering legislation for a 
state lawmaker to introduce, according to records obtained by the Miami 
Herald and Floodlight.

Florida Power & Light (FPL), whose work with dark money political 
committees helped secure Republican control of the state Senate, is 
lobbying to hollow out net metering, a policy that lets Florida 
homeowners and businesses offset the costs of installing solar panels by 
selling power back to the company.

Internal emails obtained from the Florida Senate show that an FPL 
lobbyist, John Holley, sent the text of the bill to state senator 
Jennifer Bradley’s staff on 18 October. FPL’s parent company contributed 
$10,000 to Bradely’s political committee on 20 October. A month later, 
Bradley filed a bill that was almost identical to the one FPL gave her. 
Another lawmaker introduced the same measure in the House.

Bradley said the donation was unrelated to the bill.

“Any decision I make to file legislation is based entirely on whether 
it’s in the best interest of our state and my district,” she said. “This 
discussion about fairness in metering is happening in legislatures 
across the country and it’s time for it to happen in Florida.”

FPL’s parent company, NextEra, said its political committee did not make 
its contribution to Bradley’s campaign “with an expectation of favor”.

An FPL spokesman, Chris McGrath, said the company does not oppose net 
metering but that the law should be revised so rooftop solar users are 
not subsidized by other customers who continue to buy electricity and 
pay to maintain the power grid. FPL argues that rooftop solar could cost 
Florida utilities about $700m between 2019 and 2025, according to 
documents submitted to state regulators.

“We simply believe rooftop solar customers should pay the full cost of 
this investment,” McGrath said.

The solar industry is fiercely opposing the effort. Katie Chiles 
Ottenweller, south-east director for Vote Solar, said she was wary, 
given FPL’s clout in the legislature.

“Companies do not pass legislation,” she said. “Legislators pass 
legislation. I’m hopeful this is a conversation-starter but at the same 
time it’s really hard to have a conversation when you have a gun to your 
head. The bill as it is written will decimate this industry.”

Only about 90,000 Florida electricity customers, about 1%, sell excess 
energy back to the grid. But the arrangement has driven significant 
rooftop solar expansion. The proposed legislation could seriously 
curtail that growth.

Nationwide, power companies are feeling pressured by the rise of 
distributed renewable energy. Rooftop solar, while critical to fighting 
climate change, is a threat to the traditional utility business model. 
Electricity companies like FPL make money off of the things they build: 
mainly large power plants and lines that bring that energy to customers. 
They don’t make money off of solar power generated from rooftops.

The Florida bill is just one front in a decade-long battle against the 
policy. FPL backed a failed ballot amendment in 2016 that would have 
allowed regulators to impose fees and barriers to rooftop solar 
installation. FPL has also invested millions in swaying elections in 
favor of Republicans.

According to reporting by the Orlando Sentinel, FPL executives have been 
tied to a series of “dark money” groups with untraceable donors. One 
group, Grow United, was behind a candidate who had no political 
background but the same last name as the incumbent Democrat. The 
candidate diverted votes and helped Republicans maintain a majority in 
the state Senate. A Florida state attorney is investigating. In response 
to questions for this story, FPL denied any wrongdoing related to 
political campaigns.

‘Significant costs’
Bradley, the bill sponsor, is a first-term senator but is close to 
Senate leadership. She is married to former state senator Rob Bradley, 
an influential politician who was head of the budget committee. Bradley 
said the bill language emerged after a meeting with Holley and other 
members of the utility industry.

“I looked at the language,” she said. “It was based on our discussion 
and it was one that I could support as a starting point.”

Emails show Bradley’s staff followed up with FPL after that discussion. 
On 8 October this year, legislative aide Katie Heffley emailed Holley 
under the subject line “Net Metering Bill”.

“Good afternoon, Hope you’re doing well,” Heffley wrote. “I just wanted 
to check in and see if you had any follow up information or language in 
regards to the net metering bill you discussed with Senator Bradley.”

Eight minutes later, Holley replied: “I do. Can I bring it to you all 
later today?”

Heffley suggested he could “send it via email today or we will be at the 
Capitol next week”.

Holley opted instead to drop off a copy in person. Ten days later, 
Heffley emailed him again.

“I just want to reach out and see if I could get an electronic copy of 
the net metering bill so I can put it into drafting,” she said.

Emails obtained in a public records request show FPL drafted a bill to 
end net metering so that a Florida state lawmaker could introduce the 
legislation.

Two days after that, on 20 October, NextEra Energy gave $10,000 to 
Bradley’s political committee, Women Building the Future, according to 
campaign records.

The email records were provided to the Herald and Floodlight by the 
Energy & Policy Institute, a watchdog that works to counter 
misinformation about renewable energy.

Under the bill, customers whose solar panels deliver energy back to the 
grid would be compensated less, at wholesale rather than retail rates. 
Utilities could also charge rooftop solar customers more by adding in 
facility charges, grid access fees and minimum monthly payments. 
Customers already using rooftop solar power before 2023 would be 
grandfathered in and keep previous compensation rates for 10 years.

Bradley said she was open to discussing alternative models, including a 
system in use in the Carolinas to pay rooftop solar customers for 
sending power to the grid when it is most in demand.

In an interview, Lawrence McClure, the House sponsor of the bill, said 
it was “not baked”.

“[It’s] very early on in this bill’s ride,” he said. “I think it has a 
real chance to settle out in a way that most parties are not upset.”

McClure noted that the net metering law is due for a discussion because 
it has not been updated in 13 years.

“I feel rooftop solar is beneficial to the environment, and Floridians,” 
he said. “I am concerned that it will result in significant costs here, 
but I also don’t want to destroy the rooftop solar industry in Florida.”

McClure did not receive campaign donations from FPL or its parent 
company in the period the bill was under discussion. But his campaign 
did get a $10,000 donation from a related political committee on 4 
November. It came from Voice of Florida Business, which is linked to an 
industry group, Associated Industries of Florida. The group’s 
consultants also worked on the dark money campaigns in the state senate, 
according to the Orlando Sentinel.

McClure said the contribution “had absolutely nothing to do with the 
sponsorship of the bill”.

“I don’t think there’s ever been any contribution that motivated me to 
sponsor a bill,” he said.

An Associated Industries of Florida consultant, Sarah Bascom, said the 
group “does not discuss specific political giving”.

“However, if you are implying that contributions given are tied to 
specific legislation being filed or not filed, the answer is an emphatic 
no,” she said.

‘Forced to subsidize’
Florida is one of 47 states to allow households and businesses that 
produce power to sell it back to the grid at a set rate. However, 
utilities are increasingly concerned about how the growth of distributed 
solar energy affects their bottom line. In California, regulators plan 
to increase fees for rooftop solar customers. Even some environmental 
advocates say the change is fair and necessary because of the fast rate 
of rooftop solar development in that state.

In Florida, rooftop solar expanded slowly until 2018, when regulators 
allowed electricity customers to lease solar systems with little or no 
upfront costs. That decision catapulted the growth of small-scale solar 
capacity in the state. It grew by 57% in 2020, according to the US 
Energy Information Administration.

FPL says its 24,000 net-metering customers cost the company $30m in 
2020, or about $1,250 per customer. Utility experts have testified to 
Florida regulators that rooftop solar in the state could grow at 39% a 
year until 2025 if the current net-metering system is left in place. 
Such growth has the utilities and legislators worried.

“As a result of the current system, my constituents are being forced to 
subsidize the decisions of neighbors in other counties who are in a 
position to be able to put these expensive systems on their homes,” 
Jennifer Bradley said.

The solar industry frequently counters that rooftop solar in most states 
has not grown enough to substantially increase costs for other customers.

Florida has the second-largest solar workforce in the US, according to 
the Solar Energy Industries Association. It ranks third among states for 
installed solar capacity, although much of that is large-scale and 
utility owned.

Justin Vandenbroeck, president of the Florida Solar Energy Industries 
Association who also owns an Orlando-based solar installation company, 
said if the bill passes it could “send Florida back to 2013”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/20/revealed-the-florida-power-company-pushing-legislation-to-slow-rooftop-solar 





/[   Some more history -- ]/
//*Strange Weather We’re Having*
How early 20th century journalists wrote about climate change.
BY ALICE BELL - DEC 20, 2021
The weather of 1911 was weird—or so reported the March 1912 edition of 
Popular Mechanics. Among reports of zeppelins, new developments in 
submarine tech, an electronic hearing aid from France, and the 
innovative use of canaries in coal mines in Tennessee, there’s a 
four-page illustrated feature on climate change.

The author, Francis Molena, describes a heavy heat having begun to dig 
in around June of the previous year: “The cities baked and gasped for 
breath, while the burning Sun and hot winds withered the corn and cost 
the farmers a million dollars a day.” What had started in the U.S.. soon 
made its way to Europe. Whalers brought back reports of once-icy Arctic 
regions full of water. Then, around the middle of the summer, “the 
flood-gates of the heavens opened.” Kentucky was deluged while a cyclone 
devastated Costa Rica, and the Philippines were “more thoroughly drowned 
than they had been before since the time of Noah.” By this year, 
temperature records had been kept in the U.S. for several decades, and a 
graph illustrated how temperatures in 1911 had been beaten in each month 
but November. It’s the sort of reporting we’re all too used to today—but 
this was 1912...
- -
Molena notes “a general impression among older men” that the “good 
old-fashioned winters” they knew in their youth—snow 15 feet deep, 
lasting six months—had gone. The weather just wasn’t what it used to be. 
Molena reminds readers that once upon a time, parts of the Earth had 
very different climates. After taking them through a basic explanation 
of the greenhouse effect and the warming role of carbon dioxide, he asks 
whether, as we know burning oil and coal produces carbon dioxide, we 
might now be producing sufficient quantities to alter the climate?...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/climate-change-history-journalism-alice-bell.html



/[The news archive - looking back]/

*On this day in the history of global warming December  21, 2013*

December 21, 2013: On MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry," guest host Joy 
Reid discusses the ecological leadership of Pope Francis.

http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/pope-francis-places-focus-on-environment-97805379704# 


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