[TheClimate.Vote] February 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Feb 9 07:35:19 EST 2021

/*February 9, 2021*/

[Global Times]
*Climate change has high cost*
Study finds global warming linked to slowing economy
By AFP
Increasingly erratic weather caused by global warming threatens global 
economic growth, scientists warned Monday with a report showing that 
even short-lived climate volatility can have a significant impact.

Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is causing 
planet-wide temperature rises that have intensified deadly droughts, 
heat waves, floods and super storms.

But researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 
(PIK), Columbia University and the Mercator Research Institute on Global 
Commons and Climate Change said impact studies often look at annual 
averages, rather than the effects of day-to-day temperature fluctuations.

"The real problem caused by a changing climate are the unexpected 
impacts, because they are more difficult to adapt to," said co-author 
Anders Levermann from PIK and Columbia, adding that these rapid changes 
work differently to long-term ones...
- -
In 2015, the world's nations vowed to cap global warming "well below" 2 
C, and 1.5 C if possible.

A subsequent report from the UN's climate science advisory panel, the 
IPCC, left no doubt that 1.5 C was the safer threshold. There has been 
just over 1 C of warming so far.

The six years since 2015 are the six warmest ever registered, as are 20 
of the last 21, evidence of a persistent and deepening trend, the EU's 
Copernicus Climate Change Service has said.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215434.shtml

[Enticement]
*XPrize details Elon Musk's $100M prize to fight climate change*
Teams will develop a prototype system to remove at least a ton of carbon 
dioxide from the atmosphere per day.
https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/
- -
[ "Phase one, collect underpants...Step 3, Profit" - South Park ]
*XPrize details Elon Musk's $100M prize to fight climate change*
Teams will develop a prototype system to remove at least a ton of carbon 
dioxide from the atmosphere per day.
Last month, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO and richest person in the world 
Elon Musk announced he'd put a small percentage of his billions toward 
"a prize for best carbon capture technology."  On Monday, XPrize 
announced the broad outline of the competition.

The nonprofit will run the contest, which it says will be the largest 
incentive prize in history. Teams from anywhere in the world are invited 
"to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide 
directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in 
an environmentally benign way," according to a post on YouTube...
- -
A new page on the XPrize website announces the basic outline of the 
competition, which will last for four years and require teams to build 
"a working carbon removal prototype that can be rigorously validated and 
capable of removing at least one ton per day."

Teams will be judged not only on a working prototype, but also on their 
plan to economically scale the new technology to the gigaton level. 
(That's a billion tons.)..
- -
Over the years, Musk has said his two main business ventures, Tesla 
Motors and SpaceX, are motivated by his desire to address climate change 
and to provide a backup plan for humanity (on Mars), respectively.
https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/
- -
[XPrize video]
*$100M XPRIZE FOR CARBON REMOVAL FUNDED BY ELON MUSK TO FIGHT CLIMATE 
CHANGE*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX1DAqxXEI8

[Doomistic preaching from a Unitarian minister]
*Unstoppable Collapse: How to Avoid the Worst (Dowd 1-8-21)*
Jan 8, 2021
thegreatstory
The first draft of this video -- "Irreversible Collapse: Accepting 
Reality, Avoiding Evil": https://youtu.be/iQeK04WOGaA -- garnered 8,000 
views and 200 comments in one week, including suggestions for 
improvement. So I revised it based on collective intelligence. SUMMARY: 
The stability of the biosphere has been in decline for centuries and in 
unstoppable, out of control mode for decades. This “Great Acceleration” 
of biospheric collapse is an easily verifiable fact. The scientific 
evidence is overwhelming.
Evidence is also compelling that the vast majority of people will deny 
this, especially those still benefitting from the existing order and 
those who fear that “accepting reality” means “giving up.”
The history of scores of previous boom and bust (progress / regress) 
societies clearly reveals how and why industrial civilization is dying. 
Accepting that Homo colossus’ condition is incurable and terminal may be 
key to not making a bad situation catastrophically worse.

APPLICATION — TO AVOID BECOMING EVIL on a geological timescale, we must…
1. Minimize deadliest toxicity (nuclear, methane, chemicals).
2. Assist plants (especially trees) in migrating poleward.
3. Invest time, energy, and resources in all things regenerative, 
including thriving with LESS (less energy, stuff, stimulation), learning 
from and supporting indigenous wisdom and experience, and nurturing 
community eco-literacy and resilience.

CORE MESSAGE: Without an understanding of ecology, energy, and history, 
good people with the best of intentions will unknowingly propose and 
support policies likely to make a bad situation catastrophically worse. 
Or as an ecologist friend of mine likes to say, “If you don’t 'get' 
overshoot, you’ll misinterpret or misdiagnose virtually everything 
important.”

PERSONAL NOTE: I consider this video to be the single most important 
thing I've created. Thanks to all who helped me improve it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8lNTPlsRtI
- -
[first draft of the above video]
*Irreversible Collapse: Accepting Reality, Avoiding Evil*
Dec 29, 2020
thegreatstory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQeK04WOGaA

[Book review - a modern question]
*'Under A White Sky' Examines What It Might Take For Humans To Continue 
To Exist*
February 8, 2021
ADAM FRANK
_Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,_ by Elizabeth Kolbert
What is the difference between a city and a wetland? How about a factory 
and a forest? What separates the environments that "nature" builds and 
the ones we humans build?

While this might have been an abstract question for philosophers at one 
point, it's not anymore. Decades into what is appropriately called "the 
climate crisis," humans are now facing down a planet that has been 
profoundly changed by our collective activities. In our struggle to find 
a response, and hopefully save ourselves, the relationship between 
humans and nature is being reconstructed.

That ongoing reconstruction is the focus of Elizabeth Kolbert's new book 
Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future. And, as she shows us, it's 
a project that's neither clear, clean or certain.

Kolbert is well-known as the best-selling author of The Sixth 
Extinction. Her reporting brought the ongoing mass-extinction event that 
we're inadvertently causing now from talk in scientific literature to 
common knowledge. In this new book, Kolbert once again looks down the 
barrel of the Anthropocene, the new geologic epoch where human activity 
represents the most powerful force shaping the machinery of Earth's 
planetary evolution. Early in the book, Kolbert lists the startling 
facts of this new Anthropocene Earth:

    "People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the
    ice-free land on earth — some twenty-seven million square miles —
    and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most
    of the world's major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops
    fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our
    planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more
    carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. ...humans and livestock outweigh
    all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish. In the age of
    man, there is nowhere to go, and this includes the deepest trenches
    of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does
    not already bear our Friday-like footprints."

The consequence of the extraordinary power we're exerting on the Earth 
is that the planet is changing. It's sliding out of the state we found 
it in 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. But this new planet 
seems like it's going to be a lot less hospitable to our "project of 
civilization" than the one we've started with. In response to this 
sobering fact, communities across the world are trying to shift from 
inadvertent impacts on the natural world to conscious and intentional 
control. Kolbert's book is, essentially, reporting from the front lines 
of these frenzied efforts.

Under A White Sky is broken into three parts. The first, Down The River, 
tells two stories: The first is the effort to manage and control fish 
populations associated with rivers in the Midwest. The story is really 
about the Chicago River but, as Kolbert takes pains to show, the big 
problem in managing the Anthropocene is that everything is connected to 
everything else. A species like silver carp introduced into an Arkansas 
pond may eventually find their way to taking over lakes in Illinois. In 
the second part of the section, Kolbert tells of the equally complicated 
effort to deal with the drowning of Louisiana's Mississippi River delta 
which, itself, is a consequence of the last century's vast effort to 
tame that same river. The second section of the book, Into The Wild, 
details the attempts to save species and ecosystems from our impacts — 
while the third, Up In The Air, tells the story of "geoengineering," 
where global warming is countered not by reducing fossil fuels but by 
literally rewiring the atmosphere. As Kolbert shows, the lurking, 
unintended consequences geoengineering can be pretty frightening. One 
plan to cool the planet by spraying tiny sunlight-reflecting particles 
high into the air would turn the sky from blue to white.

What unites Kolbert's reporting in all these stories is the sense of 
scale that comes with the problems we face targeting a reasonable 
outcome for our Anthropocene — a "good Anthropocene" as some call it. 
For more than a decade, I have been thinking about the Anthropocene from 
my astronomer's perspective; this means I see it from a 
10,000-light-year view where it appears as planetary transition much 
like the other huge transformations Earth and its life have gone through 
before. What was so illuminating about Kolbert's writing was to see 
planetary transformation brought down to the human scale. Reaching a 
good Anthropocene, if such a thing exists, would only happen as a result 
of millions of people in millions of communities doing experiments. They 
will be trying millions of ways to alter, adjust and adjudicate the 
natural processes we already altered by mistake. With considerable 
humor, Kolbert shows us just how fraught that project will be.

What makes Under A White Sky so valuable and such a compelling read is 
Kolbert tells by showing. Without beating the reader over the head, she 
makes it clear how far we already are from a world of undisturbed, 
perfectly balanced nature — and how far we must still go to find a new 
balance for the planet's future that still has us humans in it.

Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester 
and author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the 
Earth. You can find more from Adam here: @adamfrank4.
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965306203/under-a-white-sky-examines-what-it-might-take-for-humans-to-continue-to-exist

- -

[the essential human in Grist]
*Interview: Elizabeth Kolbert on why we’ll never stop messing with nature*
By Shannon Osaka on Feb 8, 2021

In Australia, scientists collect buckets of coral sperm, mixing one 
species with another in an attempt to create a new “super coral” that 
can withstand rising temperatures and acidifying seas. In Nevada, 
scientists nurse a tiny colony of one-inch long “Devil’s Hole pupfish” 
in an uncomfortably hot, Styrofoam-molded pool. And in Massachusetts, 
Harvard University scientists research injecting chemicals into the 
atmosphere to dim the sun’s light — and slow down the runaway pace of 
global warming.

These are some of the scenes from Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a 
White Sky, a global exploration of the ways that humanity is attempting 
to engineer, fix, or reroute the course of nature in a climate-changed 
world. (The title refers to one of the consequences of engineering the 
Earth to better reflect sunlight: Our usual blue sky could turn a pale 
white.)

Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, has been covering the environment 
for decades: Her first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, traced the 
scientific evidence for global warming from Greenland to Alaska; her 
second, The Sixth Extinction, followed the growing pace of animal 
extinctions.

Under a White Sky covers slightly different ground. Humanity is now, 
Kolbert explains, in the midst of the Anthropocene — a geologic era in 
which we are the dominant force shaping earth, sea, and sky. Faced with 
that reality, humans have gotten more creative at using technology to 
fix the problems that we unwittingly spawned: Stamping out Australia’s 
cane toad invasion with genetic engineering, for example, or using giant 
air conditioners to suck carbon dioxide out of air and turn it into 
rock. As Kolbert notes, tongue-in-cheek: “What could possibly go wrong?”

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
*
**Q. Under a White Sky is about a lot of things — rivers, solar 
geoengineering, coral reefs — but it’s also about what “nature” means in 
our current world. What got you interested in that topic?*

A. All books have complicated births, as it were. But about four years 
ago, I went to Hawaii to report on a project that had been nicknamed the 
“super coral project.” And it was run by a very charismatic scientist 
named Ruth Gates, who very sadly passed away about two years ago. We 
have very radically altered the oceans by pouring hundreds of billions 
of tons of CO2 into the air — and we can’t get that heat out of the 
oceans in any foreseeable timescale. We can’t change the chemistry back. 
And if we want coral reefs in the future, we’re going to have to counter 
what we’ve done to the oceans by remaking reefs so they can withstand 
warmer temperatures. The aim of the project was to see if you could 
hybridize or crossbreed corals to get more vigorous varieties.

This idea — that we have to counteract one form of intervention in the 
natural world (climate change) with another form of intervention (trying 
to recreate reefs) — just struck me as a very interesting new chapter in 
our long and very complicated relationship with nature. And once I 
started to think about it that way, I started to see that as a pretty 
widespread pattern. That’s really what prompted the book.
*
**Q. Some of these human interventions to save nature seem hopeful and 
positive — and others go wrong in pretty epic ways. How do you balance 
those two types of stories?*

A. The book starts with examples that probably will strike many Grist 
readers as “OK, that makes sense. That makes sense.” But it goes from 
regional engineering solutions through biotechnology, through gene 
editing, and all the way up to solar geoengineering. So it kind of leads 
you down what we might call “a slippery slope.” And one of the 
interesting things about these cases is that they will divide up people 
differently. Even people who consider themselves environmentalists will 
come down on different sides of some of these technologies. The bind 
we’re in is so profound that there’s no right answer.

*Q. So someone who accepts what we’re doing to save the Devil’s Hole 
pupfish might not necessarily accept gene-editing mosquitos or dimming 
the sun through solar geoengineering.**
*
A. Exactly. And I think sometimes those lines seem clearer than they are 
once you start to think about it.

*Q. At one point in the book, there’s a quote that is (apocryphally) 
attributed to Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same 
thinking we used when we created them.” But you don’t say whether you 
agree with that sentiment or not. Is that on purpose?**
*
A. Yeah, you can read the book and say, “I’m really glad people are 
doing these things, and I feel better.” Or you can read the book and 
say, as one scientific quote does, “This is a broad highway to hell.” 
And both of those are very valid reactions.

*Q. When you write about geoengineering, you point out that many 
scientists conclude that it’s necessary to avoid catastrophic levels of 
warming, but that it could also be a really bad idea. Do you think that 
in 15 or 20 years you’ll be writing about a geoengineering experiment 
gone wrong, much as you’re writing now about failed attempts to protect 
Louisiana from flooding?*

A. I might argue about the timescales. I’m not sure I’ll be reporting on 
it in 15 years, but I think you might be reporting on it in 30 years.

At the moment, it’s still the realm of sci-fi, and I’m not claiming to 
have any particular insight into how people are going to respond in the 
future. But the case that’s made in the book by some very smart 
scientists is that we don’t have very many tools in our toolbox for 
dealing with climate change quickly, because the system has so much 
inertia. It’s like turning around a supertanker: It takes literally 
decades, even if we do everything absolutely right.
*
**Q. You’ve reported on climate change for a long time. How does it feel 
to see geoengineering being explored as a more valuable — and 
potentially necessary — option?*

A. Well, one thing I learned in the course of reporting the book was 
that what we now refer to as “geoengineering” was actually the very 
first thing that people started to think about when they realized we 
were warming the climate. The very first report about climate change 
that was handed to Lyndon Johnson in 1965 wasn’t about how we should 
stop emitting — it was: “Maybe we should find some reflective stuff to 
throw into the ocean to bounce more sunlight back into space!”

It’s odd, it’s kind of almost freakish, and I can’t explain it, except 
to say that it sort of fits the pattern of the book.

*Q. There’s been a longstanding fight in environmentalism between a 
“technology-will-save-us” philosophy and a “return-to-nature” 
philosophy. Based on the reporting in this book, do you think that the 
technology camp has won?*

A. I think the book is an attempt to take on both of those schools of 
thought. On some level, technology has won — even people who would say 
“don’t do geoengineering” still want to put up solar panels and build 
huge arrays of batteries, and those are technologies! But where does 
that leave us? It goes back to Ruth Gates and the “super coral project”. 
There was a big fight among coral biologists about whether a project 
like that should even be pursued. The Great Barrier Reef is the size of 
Italy — even if you have some replacement coral, how are you going to 
get them out on the reef? But Gates’s point was, we’re not returning. 
Even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, you’re not getting the Great 
Barrier Reef back as it was in a foreseeable timeframe.

My impulse as an old-school environmentalist is to say “Well, let’s just 
leave things alone.” But the sad fact is that we’ve intervened so much 
at this point that even not intervening is itself … an intervention.

*Q. Now that we have a U.S. president who takes climate change 
seriously, do you think we could actually start cutting carbon emissions 
quickly?*

A. I really do want to applaud the first steps that the Biden 
administration has taken. I think they show a pretty profound 
understanding of the problem. But the question, and it’s a big one, is 
“What are the limits?” Will Congress do anything? What will happen in 
the Supreme Court? The U.S. is no longer the biggest emitter on an 
annual basis, but on a cumulative basis we’re still the biggest. And we 
still don’t have resolution on how much CO2 we can put up there to avoid 
1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Those are questions with big error 
bars. If we’re lucky, I think we can avoid disastrous climate change. 
But if we’re not lucky, we’re already in deep trouble.

*Q. Is there anything else you want to say about the book?*

A. It sounds kind of weird after our conversation, but the book was 
actually a lot of fun to write. It sounds odd when you’re talking about 
a book where the subject is so immensely serious.

*Q. You mean like when the undergraduates in Australia are tossing each 
other buckets of coral sperm?*

A. Yes! There is always humor in all these situations. I hope that sense 
of fun comes through.
https://grist.org/climate/interview-elizabeth-kolbert-on-her-book-under-a-white-sky-and-why-well-never-stop-messing-with-nature/

[The history of ice core science is barely 100 years]
*Drilling for Climatology: Antarctica's Deep Bore Ice Cores*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BmjeVItGIM

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 9, 2003 *

February 9, 2003: In a speech at Harvard University, Democratic 
presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry declares:

    "We should be the world's environmental leader. Our global
    environmental policy should be driven by our convictions, not our
    constraints. America has not led but fled on the issue of global
    warming. The first President Bush was willing to lead on this issue.
    But the second President Bush's declaration that the Kyoto Protocol
    was simply Dead on Arrival spoke for itself - and it spoke in dozens
    of languages as his words whipped instantly around the globe. What
    the Administration failed to see was that Kyoto was not just an
    agreement; it represented the resolve of 160 nations working
    together over 10 years. It was a good faith effort - and the United
    States just dismissed it. We didn't aim to mend it. We didn't aim to
    sit down with our allies and find a compromise. We didn't aim for a
    new dialogue. The Administration was simply ready to aim and fire,
    and the target they hit was our international reputation. This
    country can and should aim higher than preserving its place as the
    world's largest unfettered polluter. We should assert, not abandon
    our leadership in addressing global economic degradation and the
    warming of the atmosphere that if left unchecked, will do untold
    damage to our coastline and our Great Plains, our cities and our
    economy."

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/issues/kerr020903spenv.html

http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticPolicy

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