[TheClimate.Vote] February 24, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 24, 2021*/

[attack on fracking -2 min  video]
*“Natural” Gas Harms Our Health*Feb 17, 2021
Mothers Out Front
128 subscribers
Discover how, as moms, we engage in actions to protect our families from 
the illnesses and dangers related to the drilling, distribution, and 
household use of gas. This video teaches us that the fracked “natural” 
gas we use now is produced with a mixture of harmful chemicals, and 
these chemicals don’t go away as the gas moves from the fracking fields 
into our homes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUacwGZRyYI&feature=emb_logo



[Watching Big Ice Flow to the Sea]
*Climate change: West Antarctica's Getz glaciers flowing faster*
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56171302
- -
[Source material]
Widespread increase in dynamic imbalance in the Getz region of 
Antarctica from 1994 to 2018
Heather L. Selley, Anna E. Hogg, Stephen Cornford, Pierre Dutrieux, 
Andrew Shepherd, Jan Wuite, Dana Floricioiu, Anders Kusk, Thomas Nagler, 
Lin Gilbert, Thomas Slater & Tae-Wan Kim
Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 1133 (2021)
Abstract

    The Getz region of West Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing
    rate; however, the forcing mechanisms remain unclear. Here we use
    satellite observations and an ice sheet model to measure the change
    in ice speed and mass balance of the drainage basin over the last
    25-years. Our results show a mean increase in speed of 23.8 %
    between 1994 and 2018, with three glaciers accelerating by over 44
    %. Speedup across the Getz basin is linear, with speedup and
    thinning directly correlated confirming the presence of dynamic
    imbalance. Since 1994, 315 Gt of ice has been lost contributing
    0.9 ± 0.6 mm global mean sea level, with increased loss since 2010
    caused by a snowfall reduction. Overall, dynamic imbalance accounts
    for two thirds of the mass loss from this region of West Antarctica
    over the past 25-years, with a longer-term response to ocean forcing
    the likely driving mechanism.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21321-1



[Biily G tries again -asking us to trust technology - buy his book]
*Bill Gates on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster | Amanpour and Company*
Feb 22, 2021
Amanpour and Company
While billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has worked hard to help end 
the pandemic, he has never taken his eye off the growing threat to our 
natural world. Gates does not believe the situation is hopeless, but he 
does believe it requires immediate action – as outlined in his new book 
*"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.*" He speaks with Walter Isaacson as 
part of Peril & Promise, the ongoing public media initiative, reporting 
on the challenges and solutions of climate change.
Originally aired on February 22, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQiCHsLmB8c

- -

[TV appearance]
*Bill Gates: The Vaccines Offer Americans A Chance To Return To Normal Life*
Feb 23, 2021
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Bill Gates says that if enough Americans are inoculated with the 
Covid-19 vaccines, the country could return to a relatively normal life 
by this Fall. Bill Gates has also been working to fight climate change 
and you can read about it in his new book, "How To Avoid A Climate 
Disaster." #Colbert​ #ClimateChange​ #BillGates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLQt7EC0QjE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E83b32wqrLs



  [Financial Times about climate scientist Michael Mann]
*The new politics of climate change*

...Mann makes a convincing case that the fight against climate action 
continues — under different terms of engagement. “Outright denial of the 
physical evidence of climate change simply isn’t credible any more,” he 
writes in The New Climate War. The war on the science has ended, he 
says. But in its place has come a war on climate action, or “a softer 
form of denialism” in which “inactivists” deploy a mix of deception, 
deflection and distraction to delay cuts in emissions.


Many readers will be surprised to learn that one of Mann’s chief 
complaints concerns flight-shaming, vegan diets and other types of 
individual behaviour widely thought to be central to tackling climate 
change. Personal actions can help, and often set a sensible example. 
But, as Mann writes, they cannot rival broad, systemic measures such as 
carbon pricing or ending fossil fuel subsidies. For all the scrutiny of 
flying, it currently accounts for about 3 per cent of global carbon 
emissions.
https://www.ft.com/content/b6bdc4b1-d41f-49f0-a3df-61614cc1a2b7


[E&E News - SCOTUS opinion]
*Big Oil's 'Hail Mary' may roil U.S. climate cases*
Maxine Joselow, E&E News reporter-  February 23, 2021
The outcome of a Supreme Court battle between Baltimore officials and 
Big Oil over climate change impacts could reverberate in courtrooms 
across the country, legal experts say.

As the high court deliberates its ruling in BP PLC v. Mayor and City 
Council of Baltimore, a host of other lawsuits aimed at holding the 
fossil fuel industry liable for the local effects of global warming are 
slogging through preliminary procedural battles. The Supreme Court's 
decision has the potential to further delay — or derail — those cases.

"I think this is an instance where there are many ways the oil companies 
can win partly or win big," said William Buzbee, a professor at 
Georgetown Law, at a recent webinar hosted by the D.C. Bar.

"And if they lose, they're back where they started," Buzbee added.

In 2018, Baltimore officials filed a landmark lawsuit seeking 
compensation from 26 fossil fuel firms for their role in causing climate 
change and its effects, including extreme heat and flooding. Dozens of 
similar cases have been filed by state and local governments across the 
country.

When the Supreme Court said it would hear Baltimore's case last year, it 
only agreed to consider the narrow technical question of whether federal 
appeals courts can review the entire scope of remand orders that have 
sent climate cases like Baltimore's back to the state courts where they 
were originally filed.

But in a bold bid, lawyers for the fossil fuel companies asked the 
justices to save time and find that all disputes related to interstate 
greenhouse gas emissions belong in federal court. Embattled oil and gas 
supermajors have been fighting for years to keep such cases in federal 
benches, which are seen as a more favorable venue for the industry.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last month and is expected 
to reach a decision by early summer (Climatewire, Jan. 20).

Buzbee, who spoke at the D.C. Bar webinar shortly after the Super Bowl, 
compared the oil and gas companies' request to a "Hail Mary" pass in 
football — typically a very long pass made in desperation with little 
chance of success.

"I think it's unlikely BP would get the big Hail Mary touchdown. It just 
doesn't seem to me the court would rule authoritatively on the question 
of whether this is exclusively federal jurisdiction here," Buzbee said.

But "if the Supreme Court drops in a little language in about this 
seeming federal, even if it's just hinting in that direction, then 
courts below may rethink the law," he added. "Or if [industry attorneys] 
can get some dissenting opinions on this, they might get some language 
they can work with."

Karen Sokol, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, agreed 
that the justices could insert language about the case raising federal 
issues into concurring or dissenting opinions.

Especially useful for the fossil fuel firms, she said, would be a 
reference to the 2011 Supreme Court case American Electric Power Co. 
Inc. v. Connecticut, in which the justices unanimously ruled that 
corporations cannot be sued for greenhouse gas emissions under federal 
common law.

"A reference or two to AEP could be really useful," Sokol said, "and 
could also be a sign that they'd be willing to revisit the issue down 
the line."...
more at - https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063725453



[Classic opinion essay in the NewYorker - that I could not read when 
first published.  Now maybe more relevant]
*What If We Stopped Pretending?*
The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit 
that we can’t prevent it.
By Jonathan Franzen
September 8, 2019

“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a 
fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for 
ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to 
get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening 
world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no 
hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in 
global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the 
feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and 
despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward 
reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If 
you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the 
radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, 
apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of 
millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat 
or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed 
to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live 
on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping 
that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or 
enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is 
coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to 
abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to 
“roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate 
change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this 
message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully 
clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years 
as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts 
have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact 
that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. 
Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the 
reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus 
on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still 
basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new 
comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my 
mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or 
thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: 
one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. 
Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of 
increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization 
begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and 
maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican 
Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is 
entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. 
The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial 
proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to 
avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan 
renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those 
proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply 
that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the 
left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed 
allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone 
seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate 
change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of 
control. Some scientists and policymakers fear that we’re in danger of 
passing this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by 
more than two degrees Celsius (maybe more, but also maybe less). The 
I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to 
limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the 
trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, 
globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust 
the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in 
Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from 
exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace 
and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, 
scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host 
of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten 
thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make 
a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist 
predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number 
about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. 
The rise might, in fact, be far higher.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future 
scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology 
and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy 
consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy 
have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios 
in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I 
draw from the prescriptions of policymakers and activists, share certain 
necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting 
countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of 
its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its 
economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions 
from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal 
lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further 
gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold 
of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new 
energy and transportation projects already planned or under 
construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention 
needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. 
Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep 
pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast 
sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without 
lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke 
of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the 
deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American 
subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn 
farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of 
government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe 
curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must 
accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme 
measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as 
fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial 
resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations 
and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by 
hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just 
getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, 
they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature 
fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios 
through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target 
being met.

To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of 
Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s 
future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s 
harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m 
not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a 
reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we 
publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage 
people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not 
only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little 
progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it 
remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of 
eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience, 
nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And 
so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told 
ourselves the truth.

First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees 
of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for 
reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no 
difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no 
return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the 
shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. 
Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of 
warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point 
of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the 
speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of 
temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer 
devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it 
would be a goal worth pursuing.

In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To 
fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are 
available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very 
well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions 
of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean 
that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. 
During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea, 
not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question 
was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into 
Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re 
good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world 
would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, 
and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that 
it will save me.

More than that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If 
you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit 
yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s 
overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of 
complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, 
avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can 
for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that 
the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, 
there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.

Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a 
longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will 
save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent 
on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North 
America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations 
to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every 
renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the 
“green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the 
giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms 
in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a 
natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, 
overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective 
will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of 
carbon, they’re within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech 
conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating 
less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive 
industrial changes.

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was 
winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take 
on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a 
directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the 
urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing 
chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than 
in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia 
is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, 
functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more 
just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate 
action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme 
wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines 
on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration 
policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for 
laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, 
ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate 
actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the 
natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and 
healthy as we can make it.

And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends 
on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, 
when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the 
planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I 
might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them 
longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the 
constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to 
come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles 
that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing 
for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love 
specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s 
in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do 
now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really 
meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something 
to love, you have something to hope for.

In Santa Cruz, where I live, there’s an organization called the Homeless 
Garden Project. On a small working farm at the west end of town, it 
offers employment, training, support, and a sense of community to 
members of the city’s homeless population. It can’t “solve” the problem 
of homelessness, but it’s been changing lives, one at a time, for nearly 
thirty years. Supporting itself in part by selling organic produce, it 
contributes more broadly to a revolution in how we think about people in 
need, the land we depend on, and the natural world around us. In the 
summer, as a member of its C.S.A. program, I enjoy its kale and 
strawberries, and in the fall, because the soil is alive and 
uncontaminated, small migratory birds find sustenance in its furrows.

There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the 
systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and 
homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional 
local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal 
buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing 
healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be 
essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project 
like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while 
undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. 
Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 24, 2002 *

In the Denver Post, Bruce Smart of Republicans for Environmental 
Protection rips President George W. Bush's February 14, 2002 speech on 
climate change:

    "...President Bush reaffirmed the nation's commitment to the U.N.
    Framework Convention's 1992 goal 'to stabilize greenhouse gas
    concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human
    interference with the climate,' and he outlined an environmental
    path for the nation to follow. A number of the specifics he
    proposed, if forcefully pursued, can be helpful.

    "But the medicine prescribed for the world's greatest environmental
    threat—the malignant growth of atmospheric concentrations of
    greenhouse gases—is only a well-packaged placebo. It is no cure for
    global warming and the hazardous changes in climate that a great
    majority of scientists believe it is likely to cause."

http://web.archive.org/web/20030122161530/http://www.rep.org/opinions/op-eds/19.htm


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