[TheClimate.Vote] January 21, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Thu Jan 21 04:01:03 EST 2021

/*January 21, 2021*/

[President Joe]
*President Joe Biden rejoins the Paris climate accord in first move to 
tackle global warming*
JAN 20 2021
Emma Newburger

-- President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order rejoining 
the U.S. into the Paris climate accord, his first major action to tackle 
global warming.
-- Nearly every country in the world is part of the Paris Agreement, a 
landmark nonbinding accord among nations to reduce their carbon emissions.
-- Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2017.
-- Biden vows to move quickly on climate change action, and his 
inclusion of scientists throughout the government marks the beginning of 
a major policy reversal after four years of the Trump administration’s 
environmental rollbacks.
- -
“Rejoining is just table stakes,” said John Morton, who was President 
Barack Obama’s energy and climate director at the National Security 
Council. “The hard work of putting the country on a course to becoming 
net zero emissions by mid-century begins now.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/biden-inauguration-us-rejoins-paris-climate-accord.html

[World Weather Attribution]
*Siberian heatwave of 2020 almost impossible without climate change*
In the first six months of 2020, Siberia experienced a period of 
unusually high temperatures, including a record-breaking 38 degrees C in 
the town of Verkhoyansk on 20 June, causing wide-scale impacts including 
wildfires, loss of permafrost, and an invasion of pests.
World Weather Attribution
Since 2015 the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative has been 
conducting real-time attribution analysis of extreme weather events as 
they happen around the world. This provides the public, scientists and 
decision-makers with the means to make clear connections between 
greenhouse gas emissions and impactful extreme weather events, such as 
storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts.

We research and develop scientific tools and methodologies to perform 
timely and robust assessments of whether and to what extent 
human-induced climate change played a role in the magnitude and 
frequency of extreme weather events.

We’ve made real and significant advances in isolating the climate signal 
in the costly impacts of such events, in both developed and developing 
countries. Our partners are at the forefront of this emerging scientific 
field
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/about/

[NYmag]
David Wallace-Wells
*Climate change is much bigger than the U.S., and addressing it much 
more complicated than electing a new president. *
But on the eve of the inauguration, a thread to show just what a 
different world the new president is inheriting. (1/x)
After Climate Alarmism
The war on denial has been won. And that’s not the only good news.
@dwallacewells
·
"The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as 
has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric 
cars."
·
"The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the 
“intermittency” (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power 
whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since 
just 2015."
·
"Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with 
offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline."
.
"Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost 
everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to 
build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old 
fossil-fuel infrastructure."
https://twitter.com/dwallacewells/status/1351627130103328768

[action]
*Earth is hotter than ever — So what happens next?*
By Chelsea Gohd - 1-19-2021
"These are really big numbers for the Earth."

This week, NASA revealed that 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest year on 
record.

The announcement,  part of an annual release of global temperature data 
by NASA and NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration), revealed that our planet just keeps getting hotter. 
This data is an important part of our growing understanding of climate 
change.

But what do these new findings mean for the future of our planet and 
life on Earth?

"We're already seeing impacts," Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and 
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, 
told Space.com in an exclusive interview. Schmidt, who led the new 
study, named increasing numbers of heatwaves, increasing wildfires 
across the globe, drought, sea level changes in the Arctic, changes in 
rainfall and melting ice sheets in Greenland as just a few of the many 
consequences of climate change that we're already seeing.

According to an analysis from NASA, 2020 was the hottest year on record.

According to an analysis from NASA, 2020 tied 2016 for the hottest year 
on record.  (Image credit: NASA/Scientific Visualization Studio)
"We've warmed more than 2degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, 
those trends are continuing and may even be accelerating," Schmidt 
added. "And that's driven by our emissions of carbon dioxide and methane 
and other greenhouse gases."

Now, when talking about rising temperatures many look to the Paris 
Agreement, an international treaty made within the United Nations 
Framework Convention on Climate Change that was signed in 2016. The 
agreement's goal is to limit global warming to, hopefully, 1.5 degrees 
Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) when compared to levels before the 
industrial revolution.

"Nothing particularly terrible happens exactly at 1.5 degrees," Schmidt 
said. However, "what we're going to see is [a] continuing amount of 
damages and impacts increasing as the global mean temperature increases."

For video - 
https://www.space.com/2020-global-temperature-nasa-climate-change-interview?jwsource=cl
And according to Schmidt, we're not that far off from missing the goal 
of the Paris Agreement. In fact, "we will probably get our first year 
above 1.5 [degrees C] by the end of this decade, by 2030 or so. And 
then, to be kind of like permanently above that number, that will take 
maybe another 10 years," he said.

This number might seem meaningless or not all that important, 1.5 
degrees doesn't seem like that much of a change without context.

But, as Schmidt pointed out, 1.5 degrees is a major deal.

"For folks who say, 'Oh, well, you know, these aren't big numbers,' 
these are really big numbers for the Earth," he said. "When you put it 
on the scale of previous changes on the Earth, this is massive."

"A really good way of conceptualizing it," Schmidt added, "is to 
remember that the last ice age … was only about 5degrees Celsius, [or] 8 
and 9 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than the pre-industrial [levels]. And 
so the two degrees Fahrenheit that we've warmed since the 19th century, 
that's like a quarter of an ice age, right, but in the other direction.

"The fact that we're already seeing impacts, tells us that, if it gets 
much worse, the impacts are going to be very, very severe."

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd at space.com or follow her on Twitter 
@chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
https://www.space.com/2020-global-temperature-nasa-climate-change-interview

[The Barents Observer reports]
*Disney to shoot climate change drama at Svalbard*
Few places see a more dramatic impact of climate changes than Svalbard, 
where sea ice vanishes, glaciers shrink, and permafrost thaws.
ByThomas Nilsen
January 18, 2021
When daylight is back in the high Arctic, a crew filming for 
Disneynature head to Svalbard to document climate changes.

Local newspaper Svalbardposten reports about the film crew receiving 
permits from the Governor of Svalbard to land at three glaciers with 
personnel. The filming is also reported by Forbes.

It is PolarX logistics, specialized Film and TV production services, 
that will assist Disneynature in the filming set to take place from 
March to May this year.

The company says to Svalbardposten the project has “massive potential” 
to raise awareness about climate changes to a worldwide audience.

As previously reported by the Barents Observer, Svalbard has since 1971 
experienced a winter warming of 7ºC. And worse could it be. In 
Longyearbyen, the main Norwegian settlement on the archipelago, people 
see their houses sagging as the ground underneath is thawing.

Precipitation for the years to come is more rain instead of snow. This 
will lead to increased combined snowmelt-, glacier melt- and 
rain-floods. Isfjorden (The Ice fjord) next to Longyearbyen no longer 
freezes in winter, something that would have been unthinkable only a few 
decades ago.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/climate-crisis/2021/01/disney-shoot-climate-change-drama-svalbard

[Labor joins climate activists - the New Yorker]
*Joe Biden’s Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline Is a Landmark in the 
Climate Fight*
By Bill McKibben
January 21, 2021
In his first hours in office, Joe Biden has settled—almost certainly, 
once and for all—one of the greatest environmental battles this country 
has seen. He has cancelled the permit allowing the Keystone XL pipeline 
to cross the border from Canada into the United States, and the story 
behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we stand in the push 
for a fair and working planet...
- -
As the legislative director of the United Auto Workers explained to 
Congress, “The continuing recovery of the automobile industry in the 
United States has as its foundation the regulatory certainty of these 
tailpipe-emission standards, which is driving innovation in every 
company and in every vehicle segment.” A few days before Biden’s 
Inauguration, the team sat down with labor leaders for a formal 
“listening session.” The official readout was anodyne, but the effort 
itself was promising—if Biden sticks to his stance that all policy is 
climate policy, then much can be done. Even Joe Manchin, the 
conservative Democrat from West Virginia, who now may be the most 
powerful man in the Senate, given its fifty-fifty split, can perhaps be 
enticed with a series of proposals to cushion the irrevocable demise of 
the coal industry. Bernie Sanders now runs the Senate Budget Committee, 
which will have to look at any of these transition projects, and in the 
Senate he’s been both organized labor’s biggest booster and the most 
outspoken opponent of new fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Biden’s action on Keystone XL couldn’t be more welcome, but it’s cold 
comfort to the Native Americans camped out along the upper Mississippi 
trying to block Line 3. That battle looks hard right now, especially 
because the coronavirus pandemic is preventing people from joining them 
in large numbers. But the Keystone battle looked impossible at the 
start. When enough people demand action, vested interest and political 
convenience have to accommodate them. That’s how change works.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-bidens-cancellation-of-the-keystone-pipeline-is-a-landmark-in-the-climate-fight

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 21, 2009 *

January 21, 2009: Peter Sinclair's "Climate Denial Crock of the Week" 
video series debuts.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week- "It's cold. So there's no Climate Change"
http://youtu.be/l0JsdSDa_bM

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