[TheClimate.Vote] January 10, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 10, 2021*/

[overlap tweets]
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
@ayanaeliza
*“The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial 
has near-perfect overlap” — of both funders and followers. *
Excellent piece from ⁦
@blkahn
⁩connecting the dots between the GOP, white supremacy, and the climate 
crisis.
https://twitter.com/ayanaeliza/status/1347939148812922882

- -

[an amplifier]
*The Climate Crisis Will Be Steroids for Fascism*
Brian Kahn
Thursday 2:05PM
The Capitol has a police force with a $500 million budget, and yet it 
failed at its one job on Wednesday. Members of Congress, among the most 
protected people on the planet, were forced to hide in undisclosed 
locations as violent extremists overran the Capitol.

The anti-democratic message Wednesday’s insurrection sent is chilling. 
Far-right mobs incited by the president over baseless conspiracy 
theories and a commitment to white nationalism breached one of the most 
secure places in the U.S. and disrupted a basic democratic process of 
certifying election results. But what it portends for both the future of 
the Republican Party and its response to the climate crisis is even more 
chilling.

The ingredients for the toxic soup that stirred extremists to take on 
one of the branches of government (as well as numerous coordinated 
attacks at the state level) will only grow more plentiful and powerful 
as the climate crisis worsens. If elected officials aren’t ready to take 
a clear-eyed look at the damage done on Wednesday and what awaits us in 
the coming hotter decades, we’ll face even more extreme assaults on 
democracy and the most vulnerable among us.

The violent assault on the Capitol followed a pattern increasingly 
familiar in the Trump era, though it’s been an undercurrent in American 
society for much longer. Blatant lies about the election being rigged 
were spread over social media and used as cover to convene in 
Washington, DC, and storm the Capitol. Extremists clashed with police, 
met minimal resistance outside, and were allowed to mill about the 
building for hours, trashing offices and posing in the Senate for 
Parler-worthy photos.

Then they were allowed to politely file out of the building and only a 
few dozen were arrested. That number may rise, but the initial response 
pales in comparison to how Black Lives Matter protesters were treated 
this summer. Not to mention climate-related protesters like Fire Drill 
Fridays where police created a huge perimeter to cordon off press and 
onlookers and brought in buses to process protesters who were arrested.

Wednesday’s insurrection and law enforcement’s frail response are eerily 
similar to what happened this summer when right-wing militias spread 
conspiracies about wildfires in Oregon. In that case, extremists sowed 
confusion to assert control over regions engulfed in smoke, setting up 
armed checkpoints and threatening journalists. Law enforcement turned a 
blind eye, and in the case of one sheriff, even briefed extremists. At 
the time, experts told me it was in part an attempt by far-right figures 
to see what they could get away with.

The lesson in both cases is that the pushed boundaries didn’t snap back. 
The permissive nature of law enforcement and people in power—more than 
120 Republican representatives and senators voted to decertify state 
election results based on lies after the mob invaded the Capitol 
Building—opens the door to further violent probing.

Now, I’m a firm believer that an assault on democracy or unlawful 
behavior during a climate-fueled disaster alone should be reason to hold 
people to account. But looking at the two events in tandem and seeing 
the climate future that awaits us is what really raises my alarm 
bells—and should raise those of the people in power. Pretending this 
will pass or offering broad platitudes that “we are better than this” 
will ensure more terror.

Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms, more 
intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an assault on 
the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing mindset of small 
government have left the country with fewer resources to deal with the 
fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show, the far-right will be there to 
try to fill the power void. Those fires occurred in a predominantly 
white region.

There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran 
through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will 
happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, 
brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve 
seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom 
he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it 
in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina 
hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: 
ecofascism.

After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now 
expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate 
instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists 
literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When 
climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses—communities 
that hate groups already scapegoat—the results will be catastrophic.

It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top 
Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and hate. 
The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial 
has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures deny the climate 
crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the end of the day, their 
goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build and consolidate power.

Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of 
addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited 
extremists is a good place to start. Emily Atkin of Heated noted on 
Twitter in the wake of the Georgia special election that gave Democrats 
the Senate that democracy reform is climate policy, and I have to agree. 
Washington, DC, statehood, getting corrosive money out of politics, and 
expelling seditionists are all good places to start. A strong federal 
response to climate change that both draws down emissions and protects 
people from the impacts already in the pipeline is also crucial. Decades 
of weakening the federal government and proselytizing about the power of 
the individual has left millions exposed to calamity. Rebuilding the 
federal response to climate change, and ensuring it also engages 
everyone in moving the country forward through good-paying jobs and a 
just transition for frontline and fossil fuel communities, are essential 
to beating hate groups into the background.

None of this will make the fascism on full display disappear overnight. 
But doing nothing or insisting we turn the page opens the door to 
something much worse.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-climate-crisis-will-be-steroids-for-fascism-1846009446



[but it might be smart to start today]
*Our Best Chance to Slow Global Warming Comes in the Next Nine Years*
By Bill McKibben - January 7, 2021
- -
Global warming has been a public problem since only about 1990. 
Scientists had worked on it for decades prior, and we now know that the 
oil companies also had been studying the impact of their products on the 
climate. But it was James Hansen’s congressional testimony, in 1988, 
that brought the issue into the open, and it was the Rio Earth Summit, 
in 1992, that marked the first halting attempts at something like 
international negotiations to address it. 2050 has now emerged as the 
consensus target for many countries to go carbon-neutral. That date 
won’t mark the end of the climate crisis, but it’s useful as a final 
deadline for the transition to a new economic and energy regime that 
respects the physical limits of the planet. So, three decades down and 
three to go.

Of those decades, the two most important are the one we’ve just come 
through and the one we’re now entering. The nineteen-nineties and the 
two-thousands were essentially wasted: oil-company propaganda and 
accompanying political muscle made sweeping action impossible. The epic 
failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, in 2009, and of the 
cap-and-trade climate legislation on Capitol Hill, in 2010, closed that era.

But, right around that time, three trends started to gather force. 
First, by then we could see the effects of rising temperatures on the 
world around us: fires, floods, and storms were so much more frequent 
and intense that denying them became exponentially harder. Second, 
engineers took us swiftly down the learning curve of renewable energy, 
dropping the price of solar and wind power by an order of magnitude. 
Third, global environmental movements arose, which meant that 
politicians had someone to fear besides oil tycoons; they couldn’t come 
back empty-handed from Paris, as they had from Copenhagen, and they 
didn’t. The 2015 Paris agreement, and especially its commitment to try 
and hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, brought a new 
level of seriousness to the climate fight. Donald Trump was a big 
pothole in the road forward—he was able to slow the momentum, but not to 
stop it.

Yet the past decade only matters if this decade plays out perfectly. The 
elements are now in place for truly rapid action, but success will 
require going far faster than economics alone can push us, and far 
faster than politicians will find comfortable. Never forget that climate 
change is a timed test; our best chance to take the actions that will 
end the trajectory of rising emissions comes this decade. That’s why 
climate scientists talk so much about the change that must happen 
between now and 2030: emissions must fall by at least half. If 
civilization is to have a chance, we should be thinking of the years 
from 2030 to 2050 as the mopping-up phase: the big, hard breaks with the 
status quo have to come in the next nine years. What does that look like 
in practice? An immediate end to new fossil-fuel infrastructure, be it 
giant pipelines from the tar sands of Canada or natural-gas hookups to 
new homes and businesses. A retrofitting of buildings around the world 
to make them both efficient and fully electrified, so that they can take 
advantage of what needs to be a breathtaking rollout of renewable 
energy. An epic change in the way that we move ourselves and our stuff 
around the world—electricity and muscles need to replace hydrocarbons. 
An end to deforestation, and rapid research into and development of ways 
to grow foods that soak up, instead of spew, carbon. A halt to the flow 
of money to the epically irresponsible fossil-fuel industry.

These things have to happen everywhere; doing them in scattered 
countries doesn’t get the job done. And they have to happen against the 
backdrop—really, now, against the foreground—of a climate-stressed 
world, where all the effects we’ve seen so far will only get worse. It’s 
clearly physically and financially possible to do what needs to be done. 
(Much of the cost of the transition can be covered simply because each 
year we will be spending less to buy fuel.) But beating both inertia and 
vested interests will be, as usual, the trick. It should get easier as 
time goes on: ExxonMobil is no longer the giant it was a decade ago, and 
each new electric car cuts its power a little more. The world’s 
governments are increasingly saying the right things, and none more so 
than the incoming Biden team. But they will need the forces of the past 
decade—the engineering triumphs and the movement-building—to keep 
accelerating in order to provide the required push. Most people alive 
today will see how this story comes out. A decade is a hundred and 
twenty months. That’s about five hundred weeks. It’s all the time we’ve 
got...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/our-best-chance-to-slow-global-warming-comes-in-the-next-nine-years


[Inside Climate News]
*Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly 
After Emissions Go to Zero*
That’s one of several recent conclusions about climate change that came 
more sharply into focus in 2020.
By Bob Berwyn - January 3, 2021
- -
*Climate Justice and Science are Connected*
California, one of the wealthiest parts of the world, may be able to 
adapt to sea level rise, but it’s a matter of life and death for 
millions of other people in developing countries with small carbon 
footprints that contribute little to global warming.

But new research in 2020 showed that researchers have done relatively 
little to study impacts of global warming extremes in areas where the 
most people are affected. And this year, climate impacts were compounded 
by the coronavirus pandemic. Together, they affected at least 50 million 
people worldwide, mostly in developing countries in Asia and Africa, as 
well as Central America.

But the impacts have mostly been measured in the developed world by 
scientists in wealthier nations, raising a fundamental issue of climate 
justice in science, said University of Oxford climate scientist Fredi 
Otto, co-author of a recent study that outlines the challenges of 
understanding climate extremes in lower income countries.

Soon after starting work on the study, she said, “It became very obvious 
that scientists research what’s in their backyard, but not in Africa, 
large parts of Asia, or South America.” As climate extremes intensify, 
the information gaps become “a lot more obvious,” she said.

The reason it’s important is that a lack of accurate information about 
extreme climate impacts puts more lives at risk, she said. “We don’t 
know what we need to adapt to and build resilience for … or what should 
trigger a heat warning,” she added.

*Making it Stop*
Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful messages 
because they know that the worst possible outcome is avoidable.

Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will break 
the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice, wildfires and 
rising sea levels faster than expected just a few years ago.

There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial 
College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of the 
next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change.

“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, 
the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade 
or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no additional warming. 
Our best estimate is zero.”

The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional 
warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous IPCC 
reports, were based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments 
done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.”

Those models assumed that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere would remain constant, that it would take centuries before 
they decline, said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who 
discussed the shifting consensus last October during a segment of 60 
Minutes on CBS.

The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after 
emissions go to zero was described as a “game-changing new scientific 
understanding” by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of news 
organizations covering climate.

“This really is true,” he said. “It’s a dramatic change in the paradigm 
that has been lost on many who cover this issue, perhaps because it 
hasn’t been well explained by the scientific community. It’s an 
important development that is still under appreciated.”“It’s definitely 
the scientific consensus now that warming stabilizes quickly, within 10 
years, of emissions going to zero,” he said.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/ 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 10, 2006 *

The New York Times interviews MIT's Kerry Emanuel regarding his research 
on climate change and hurricanes.

    For decades, Kerry Emanuel, the meteorologist and hurricane
    specialist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was known
    as a cautious centrist on questions of global warming and hurricane
    ferocity.

    Professor Emanuel asserted often that no firm link had been
    established between warming and the intensity and frequency of
    hurricanes.

    But in August, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf
    Coast, Professor Emanuel wrote in the journal Nature that he had
    discovered statistical evidence that hurricanes were indeed affected
    by global warming. He linked the increased intensity of storms to
    the heating of the oceans.

    "His paper has had a fantastic impact on the policy debate," said
    Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford. "Emanuel's this
    conservative, apolitical guy, and he's saying, 'Global warming is
    real.' "...
    - -
    Q. Because last year's hurricane season was so intense, many people
    declared: "Ah, ha! Global warming!" Were they right?

    A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But
    the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On
    the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly
    constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in
    concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global
    warming.

    There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been
    warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any
    natural process we know about.

    We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the
    two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global
    warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of
    hurricanes.

    I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a
    degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5
    percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a
    larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature
    increase of only one-half degree Centigrade...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10conv.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


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