[TheClimate.Vote] February 18, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 18, 2021*/

[Climate destabilization]
*Heating Arctic may be to blame for snowstorms in Texas, scientists argue*
The wintry weather that has battered the southern US and parts of Europe 
could be a counterintuitive effect of the climate crisis

Associating climate change, normally connected with roasting heat, with 
an unusual winter storm that has crippled swaths of Texas and brought 
freezing temperatures across the southern US can seem counterintuitive. 
But scientists say there is evidence that the rapid heating of the 
Arctic can help push frigid air from the north pole much further south, 
possibly to the US-Mexico border.

This week, a blast of winter weather has reached deep into the heart of 
the US, causing several deaths and knocking out power for about 5 
million people. Sleet and ice have battered Oklahoma and Arkansas, while 
many people in Texas have been left marooned, amid unsafe travel 
conditions, in homes with no electricity.

“The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly 
generational,” said Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at 
Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved 
away as if it’s entirely natural. This is happening not in spite of 
climate change, it’s in part due to climate change.”...
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/17/arctic-heating-winter-storms-climate-change



[video talk 15 min]
*Brutally Cold US Outbreak Connections to Climate Change Mangled Jet 
Streams and Polar Vortex*
Feb 17, 2021
Paul Beckwith
The ongoing cold in the USA extending as far south as the Gulf of Mexico 
and the Mexican border continues to wreak havoc on much of the US, with 
Texas being affected the most due to its third world, rickety, totally 
unreliable privately run electrical power grid. Many millions of people 
are still without power (for days), and the water treatment plants in 
places including Houston are not operating. People in the suburbs of 
major cities are freezing in the dark, with pipes in their homes 
bursting, no potable water from the taps, while skylines in the nearby 
cities are still lit up like Christmas trees. Completely dystopian.

In this video I chat all about the polar vortex (this term refers to the 
stratospheric polar vortex) and the role of the jet streams in covering 
most of the USA with a persistent trough causing the brutal cold snap. I 
show, using graphics from a website ironically called Tropical Tidbits, 
how the surface temperature anomalies have changed from Feb 14th to 
today, and how they are forecast to change in the next 3 weeks. This 
thing is not over yet.

I then introduce 3 peer reviewed scientific papers that I will discuss 
in further videos, on the linkages between the stratosphere and 
troposphere, leading to mangling of the jet streams and extreme weather.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HcABNcc5x0



[MIT touches economic-techno-optimist-solutionism]
*Bill Gates and the problem with climate solutionism*
Science & Technology - Feb 16 -2021
Focusing on technological solutions to climate change feels like an 
attempt to dodge the harder political obstacles.
- clips -

As many others have pointed out, a lot of the necessary technology 
already exists; much can be done now. Though Gates doesn’t dispute this, 
his book focuses on the technological challenges that he believes must 
still be overcome to achieve greater decarbonization. He spends less 
time on the political obstacles, writing that he thinks “more like an 
engineer than a political scientist.” Yet politics, in all its 
messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change. And 
engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback 
loops that go awry.

Yes, minister
Kim Stanley Robinson does think like a political scientist. The 
beginning of his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, is set just 
a few years from now, in 2025, when a massive heat wave hits India, 
killing millions. The book’s protagonist, Mary Murphy, runs a UN agency 
tasked with representing the interests of future generations and trying 
to align the world’s governments behind a climate solution. Throughout, 
the book puts intergenerational equity and various forms of distributive 
politics at its center.

If you’ve ever seen the scenarios the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change develops for the future, Robinson’s book will feel familiar. His 
story asks about the politics necessary to solve the climate crisis, and 
he has certainly done his homework. Though it is an exercise in 
imagination, there are moments when the novel feels more like a graduate 
seminar in the social sciences than a work of escapist fiction. The 
climate refugees who are central to the story illustrate the way 
pollution’s consequences hit the global poor the hardest. But wealthy 
people emit far more carbon.

Reading Gates next to Robinson underlines the inextricable link between 
inequality and climate change. Gates’s efforts on climate are laudable. 
But when he tells us that the combined wealth of the people backing his 
venture fund is $170 billion, we may be puzzled that they have dedicated 
only $2 billion to climate solutions—less than 2% of their assets. This 
fact alone is an argument for wealth taxes: the climate crisis demands 
government action. It cannot be left to the whims of billionaires.

As billionaires go, Gates is arguably one of the good ones. He 
chronicles how he uses his wealth to help the poor and the planet. The 
irony of his writing a book on climate change when he flies in a private 
jet and owns a 66,000-square-foot mansion is not lost on the reader—nor 
on Gates, who calls himself an “imperfect messenger on climate change.” 
Still, he is unquestionably an ally to the climate movement.

But by focusing on technological innovation, Gates underplays the 
material fossil-fuel interests obstructing progress. Climate-change 
denial is strangely not mentioned in the book. Throwing up his hands at 
political polarization, Gates never makes the connection to his fellow 
billionaires Charles and David Koch, who made their fortune in 
petrochemicals and have played a key role in manufacturing denial.

For example, Gates marvels that for the vast majority of Americans, 
electric heaters are actually cheaper than continuing to use fossil gas. 
He presents people’s failure to adopt these cost-saving, 
climate-friendly options as a puzzle. It isn’t. As journalists Rebecca 
Leber and Sammy Roth have reported in Mother Jones and the Los Angeles 
Times, the gas industry is funding front groups and marketing campaigns 
to oppose electrification and keep people hooked on fossil fuels.

These forces of opposition are more clearly seen in Robinson’s novel 
than in Gates’s nonfiction. Gates would have done well to draw on the 
work that Naomi Oreskes, Eric Conway, and Geoffrey Supran—among 
others—have done to document the persistent efforts of fossil-fuel 
companies to sow public doubt on climate science. (I also tackled this 
subject in my own book, Short Circuiting Policy, which explains how 
fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities have resisted clean-energy 
laws in a number of American states.)

One thing Gates and Robinson do have in common, though, is the view that 
geoengineering—massive interventions to treat the symptoms rather than 
the causes of climate change—may be inevitable. In The Ministry for the 
Future, solar geoengineering, or spraying fine particles into the 
atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space, is used 
after the deadly heat wave with which the novel opens. And later, some 
scientists take to the poles and devise elaborate methods for removing 
melted water from underneath glaciers to prevent it from flowing into 
the sea. Despite some setbacks, they hold back sea-level rise by several 
feet. We might imagine Gates showing up in the novel as an early 
financial backer of these efforts. As he notes in his own book, he has 
been funding solar geoengineering research for years.

The Thick of It
The title for Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, is a 
reference to this nascent technology, since implementing it on a large 
scale could turn the sky from blue to white.

Kolbert notes that the first report on climate change landed on 
President Lyndon Johnson’s desk way back in 1965. This report did not 
argue that we should cut carbon emissions by moving away from fossil 
fuels. It advocated changing the climate through solar geoengineering 
instead, though that term had not yet been invented. It is disturbing 
that some would jump immediately to such risky solutions rather than 
addressing the root causes of climate change.

In reading Under a White Sky, we are reminded of the ways that 
interventions like this could go wrong. For example, the scientist and 
writer Rachel Carson advocated importing nonnative species as an 
alternative to using pesticides. The year after her 1962 book Silent 
Spring was published,
the US Fish and Wildlife Service brought Asian carp to America for the 
first time, to control aquatic weeds. The approach solved one problem 
but created another: the spread of this invasive species threatened 
local ones and caused environmental damage.

As Kolbert puts it, her book is about “people trying to solve problems 
created by people trying to solve problems.” Her reporting covers 
examples including the ill-fated efforts to stop the spread of Asian 
carp, the pumping stations in New Orleans that accelerate that city’s 
sinking, and attempts to selectively breed coral so that it can 
withstand hotter temperatures and ocean acidification. Kolbert has a 
keen awareness of unintended consequences, and she’s funny. If you like 
your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while 
Rome burns.

By contrast, though Gates is aware of the potential pitfalls of 
technological solutions, he still praises plastics and fertilizers as 
life-giving inventions. Tell that to the sea turtles swallowing plastic 
garbage, or the fertilizer-driven algal blooms destroying the ecosystem 
in the Gulf of Mexico.

With dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 
geoengineering might indeed prove necessary, but we shouldn’t be naïve 
about the risks. Gates’s book has many good ideas and is worth reading. 
But for a fuller picture of the crises we face, make sure to read 
Robinson and Kolbert too.
- -
Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef

Bill Gates and the problem with climate solutionism
Focusing on technological solutions to climate change feels like an 
attempt to dodge the harder political obstacles.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/16/1017832/gates-robinson-kolbert-review-climate-disaster-solutionism/ 


- -

[Nobel speech on climate change solutionism]
*Dr. Mike Hulme Presenting at Nobel Conference 55*
Streamed live on Sep 25, 2019
Gustavus Adolphus College
Beyond Climate Solutionism
Lecture by Dr. Mike Hulme
Professor of human geography and fellow of Pembroke College, University 
of Cambridge
Climate change is not only a natural phenomenon; it is also a cultural 
and social phenomenon. How do we reframe the adjustments that climate 
change demands of us by drawing upon the work of researchers beyond the 
sciences?

        [clips from an imperfect transcript]

        But my central point in the talk is this:  all five ideologies
        require science and technology to be placed in a subservient
        role to these
        normative visions of how the world should be ordered -- whether
        this ordering
        be around economic growth, human dignity, ecological integrity,
        eco-socialism or
        spiritual renewal.  Merely offering climate solutions is not the
        point --
        It is which solutions emerging from which visions that matters.
        Each of these
        ideologies may and they do mobilize science and technology in
        different ways --
        perhaps very different ways to bolster their ambitions.  But
        they illustrate why
        it's profoundly inadequate to suggest that tackling climate
        change is all
        about quote, "uniting behind the science" or quote "listening to
        scientists"

        There is no possibility that merely uniting behind the science
        will arrest climate
        change or deal with its consequences.

        Science on its own offers no moral vision; no ethical stance; no
        political
        architecture for the sort of world that people desire...
        - -
        So in conclusion, governing climate change thru our metrics for
        me is
        another form of reductionism.  It reduces the future to climate
        even more
        dangerously.  It masks the contested politics and values
        diversity that lie
        behind different personal and collective choices of who wins,
        who loses, whose values
        count.  It's a form of moral attenuation.  Metrics are alluring
        because they
        simplified complex realities into objective numbers.

        As Jerry Miller in his book _The Tyranny of Metrics_ says
        metrication may make a troubling
        situation more salient without making it more soluble.  The
        circulation of
        ubiquitous carbon metrics operates as a facilitative, an
        imminent mode of power
        morality by numbers -- also marginalizes other forms of moral
        reasoning which
        cannot be reduced to calculation.  But these latter offer richer
        narrative
        contexts that enable the wisdom of different choices to be
        deliberated,
        interpretive, interpreted, and judged.

        Wise governance of climate -- as indeed in the application of
        wisdom and everyday life --
        emerges bests when rooted in larger and thicker stories about
        human purpose,
        identity, duty, and responsibility.  Such stories are what
        traditional and
        religious knowledge can offer.

        Carbon metrics should only be used as a compliment to experience
        and to wider
        modes of moral reasoning not as a substitute. thank you
        Auto transcript from https://youtu.be/IBEJ2fq7Ir4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBEJ2fq7Ir4&feature=youtu.be

- -

October 14, 2020
*The Sugar Daddy of Geoengineering*
Bill Gates’ fossil fuel interests and funding for global climate engineering
Aerial photograph of tar sands fields in Canada
ETC Group contributes to a new Global Citizen’s Report ‘Gates to a 
Global Empire’ which explores the many ways in which the Bill and 
Melinda Gates Foundation wield immense influence across the globe, 
driving a form of “techno-solutionism” that prioritizes corporate power 
and profit and ignores over strengthening communities and sustainable 
solutions. Here we examine Bill Gates’ well-known promotion and funding 
of untested and potentially devastating geoengineering technologies, 
which provide cover for his less-known financial investments in fossil 
fuel technologies. Gates and his engineering-for-everything mentality is 
an obstacle to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
https://www.etcgroup.org/content/sugar-daddy-geoengineering


[Mountain video 3 mins]
*Massive Shockwave - Everest region Avalanche*
Jan 20, 2021
David Snow
World's largest and biggest Avalanche-not caused by set charges.
No hikers you hear and see were injured by the shockwave.
Filmed from Kapuche Lake, Nepal.   Avalanche slide from the face of 
Annapurna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgv7ntfRUQ


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 18, 2004 *

Sixty scientists, including several Nobel laureates, issue a joint 
statement denouncing the George W. Bush administration for distorting, 
downplaying and disregarding scientific findings on such issues as 
human-caused climate change.

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html 



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