[✔️] July 1, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*July 1, 2021*/

[Democracy Now video and text]
*Sea Level Expert in Miami: “We Are Building Here Like There’s No 
Tomorrow — Maybe That’s Correct”*
June 30, 2021
As the death toll from the 13-story apartment building collapse in 
Florida rises to 12, with nearly 150 people still missing, we examine 
how the disaster raises new questions about how rising sea levels will 
impact oceanside buildings in Miami and other cities. “The reason this 
is so important is that either this is something unique to the building 
or this is a general problem that all the condos along the coasts of the 
world are going to have to deal with,” says Harold Wanless, a professor 
in geography and urban sustainability at the University of Miami who 
leads a project called The Invading Sea, a collaborative effort by news 
organizations across Florida to address the threat of sea level rise...
- -

    *JUAN GONZÁLEZ:* And, Dr. Wanless, could you talk about the impact
    of saltwater on structures? Because we see this in New York City all
    the time on highways that are right along the water, that they’re
    constantly having to repair them because of the corrosive nature of
    the salt.

    *HAROLD WANLESS:* That’s right. And in contrast, Flagler built the
    railroad down to Key West in the early part of the previous century,
    and he used some German concrete that was designed for saltwater.
    And we do it all the time with bridges and other structures around
    the world. And the problem is, I don’t think we’re using the proper
    quality concrete, because — you know, it could be in 20 to 30 years
    we could have as much as two to three feet of further sea level
    rise. Ice melt is really accelerating our sea level rise. And so,
    we’re really in for it. And so, we have to deal with the question
    you asked, straight up. You know, it’s not, “Well, this is above sea
    level.” No, it’s not really above sea level in the near future.
    *AMY GOODMAN:* And can you talk about Miami, its future?

    *HAROLD WANLESS:* Miami’s future? Well, because we’ve warmed the
    ocean — almost all the heat from global warming is in the ocean —
    because that warmed ocean and the warmed atmosphere is now — has
    initiated and is rapidly accelerating ice melt on both Greenland and
    Antarctica, we are, as I said, certainly going to be in for a
    two-to-three-foot further sea level rise by midcentury — a mortgage
    cycle away only. And we could be at eight to as much as 15 feet by
    the end of the century.

    So, Miami? Well, there’s only 3% of Miami-Dade County is greater
    than 12 feet above sea level. And even at six feet, it’s pretty well
    going to be over later this century. But we’re building here like
    there’s no tomorrow — maybe that’s correct. You know, it’s a hard
    thing for people to think that this hasn’t always been here, but it
    hasn’t. Sea level just happened to slow down for the last couple
    thousand years, and so we built like this has always been here. And
    unfortunately, the barrier island of Miami Beach and all the barrier
    islands of the world are going to be inundated, compromised, eroded,
    storm surged across more aggressively in the pretty near future...

    The problem with Miami, we live on very porous limestone, so you
    can’t put a dike or a levee around this and keep the water out. It
    will come right up through the rock.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/30/florida_building_collapse_climate_change



[Academic paper]
*Hot dry days increase perceived experience with global warming*
Jennifer R.Marlona, XinranWanga, MattoMildenbergerd , ParrishBergquisth 
, SharmisthaSwaini, KatharineHayhoe, Peter D.Howe, EdwardMaibach, 
Anthony Leiserowitz
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102247
Highlights
• Some types of weather affect Americans’ belief that they have 
experienced global warming.
• Americans associate hot, dry days and extreme drought with global warming.
• People often fail to interpret extreme rainfall or flooding as due to 
global warming.

    Abstract
    Public perceptions of climate change in the United States are deeply
    rooted in cultural values and political identities. Yet, as the
    public experiences extreme weather and other climate change-related
    impacts, their perceptions of the issue may shift. Here, we explore
    whether, when, and where local climate trends have already
    influenced perceived experiences of global warming in the United
    States. Using a large national survey dataset (n = 13,607), we
    compare Americans’ experiences of climate with corresponding trends
    in seven different high-resolution climate indicators for the period
    2008 to 2015. We find that increases in hot dry day exposure
    significantly increases individuals’ perceptions that they have
    personally experienced global warming. We do not find robust
    evidence that other precipitation and temperature anomalies have had
    a similar effect. We also use multilevel modeling to explore
    county-level patterns of perceived experiences with climate change.
    Whereas the individual-level analysis describes a likely causal
    relationship between a changing climate and individuals’ perceived
    experience, the multilevel model depicts county-level changes in
    perceived experience resulting from particular climate trends.
    Overall, we find that exposure to hot dry days, has a modest
    influence on perceived experience, independent of the political and
    socio-demographic factors that dominate U.S. climate opinions today.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378021000261



[Information battleground]
*Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the 
price*
Chris McGreal
Wed 30 Jun 2021
Via an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a 
reckoning for the devastation caused by fossil fuels..
The environmentalist Bill McKibben once characterized the fossil fuel 
industry’s behavior as “the most consequential cover-up in US history”. 
And now for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward 
public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to 
rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.

“We are at an inflection point,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at 
the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Center for 
Law, Energy, and the Environment.

“Things have to get worse for the oil companies,” he added. “Even if 
they’ve got a pretty good chance of winning the litigation in places, 
the discovery of pretty clearcut wrong doing – that they knew their 
product was bad and they were lying to the public – really weakens the 
industry’s ability to resist legislation and settlements.”...
- -
In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause 
dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.

“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.
But instead of heeding the evidence of the research they were funding, 
major oil firms worked together to bury the findings and manufacture a 
counter narrative to undermine the growing scientific consensus around 
climate science. The fossil fuel industry’s campaign to create 
uncertainty paid off for decades by muddying public understanding of the 
growing dangers from global heating and stalling political action.

The urgency of the crisis is not in doubt..
- -
Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor 
carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s 
scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the 
globe’s temperature to date.

“The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the 
Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … 
explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate 
change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”

Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and 
other research downgraded.

What followed was what Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the report America 
Misled, called a “systematic, organised campaign by Exxon and other oil 
companies to sow doubt about the science and prevent meaningful action”.

The report accused the energy companies of not only polluting the air 
but also “the information landscape” by replicating the cigarette 
makers’ playbook of cherry-picking data, using fake experts and 
promoting conspiracy theories to attack a growing scientific consensus.

Many of the lawsuits draw on a raft of Exxon documents held at the 
University of Texas, and uncovered by the Columbia Journalism School and 
the Los Angeles Times in 2015.
Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a 
“balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard 
evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of 
the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating 
as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate 
denialism in any developed country.

The company placed advertisements in major American newspapers to sow 
doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled 
Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It 
claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already 
backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the 
supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.

Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry 
executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to 
whether human activities affect global climate”.

“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, 
cut fossil fuel use,” he said.

Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s 
management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.

In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, 
told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate 
modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the 
company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a 
perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.

Hoffert said he “hoped that the work would help to persuade Exxon to 
invest in developing energy solutions the world needed”. That was not 
the result.
“Exxon was publicly promoting views that its own scientists knew were 
wrong, and we knew that because we were the major group working on this. 
This was immoral and has greatly set back efforts to address climate 
change,” said Hoffert.

“They deliberately created doubt when internal research confirmed how 
serious a threat it was. As a result, in my opinion, homes and 
livelihoods will likely be destroyed and lives lost.”

Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift 
attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the 
industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to 
ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through 
disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when 
“recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.

The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour 
billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws 
and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding 
names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state 
department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto 
protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input 
from you”.

Exxon alone has funded more than 40 groups to deny climate science, 
including the George C Marshall Institute, which one lawsuit claims 
orchestrated a “sham petition” denying manmade global climate change. It 
was later denounced by the National Academy of Science as “a deliberate 
attempt to mislead scientists”.

To Sharon Eubanks the conspiracy to deny science sounded very familiar. 
 From 2000, she led the US justice department’s legal team against nine 
tobacco firms in one of the largest civil cases filed under the 
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act, which was 
designed to combat organised crime.

In 2006, a federal judge found that the industry had spent decades 
committing a huge fraud on the American public by lying about the 
dangers of smoking and pushing cigarettes to young people.

Eubanks said that when she looked at the fossil fuel industry’s 
strategy, she immediately recognised big tobacco’s playbook.

“Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the 
tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a 
massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, 
the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And 
some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”

The danger for the fossil fuel industry is that the parallels do not end 
there.

The legal process is likely to oblige the oil conglomerates to turn over 
years of internal communications revealing what they knew about climate 
change, when and how they responded. Given what has already come out 
from Exxon, they are unlikely to help the industry’s case.

Eubanks, who is now advising attorneys general and others suing the oil 
industry, said a turning point in her action against big tobacco came 
with the discovery of internal company memos in a state case in 
Minnesota. They included language that talked about recruiting young 
people as “replacement smokers” for those who died from cigarettes.

“I think the public was particularly stunned by some of the content of 
the documents and the talk about the need for bigger bags to take home 
all the money they were going to make from getting people to smoke,” 
said Eubanks.

The exposure of the tobacco companies’ internal communications shifted 
the public mood and the politics, helping to open the door to 
legislation to curb smoking that the industry had been successfully 
resisting for decades.

Farber, the Berkeley law professor, said the discovery process carries a 
similar danger for the oil companies because it is likely to expose yet 
more evidence that they set out to deceive. He said that will undercut 
any attempt by the energy giants to claim in court that they were 
ignorant of the damage they were causing.

Farber said it will also be difficult for the oil industry to resist the 
weight of US lawsuits, shareholder activism and shifting public and 
political opinion. “It might push them towards settlement or supporting 
legislation that releases some from liability in return for some major 
concessions such as a large tax to finance responses to climate change.”

The alternative, said Farber, is to take their chance on judges and 
juries who may be increasingly inclined to take the climate crisis 
seriously.

“They may think this is an emergency that requires a response. That the 
oil companies should be held responsible for the harm they’ve caused and 
that could be very expensive,” he said. “If they lose, it’s catastrophic 
ultimately.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment


[checking in with Russia]
*The looming Arctic collapse: more than 40% of north Russian buildings 
are starting to crumble*
Previously solid ground is quickly degrading. The melting of the 
permafrost is about to cause huge damage to buildings and infrastructure 
across the country, Russia's natural resource minister warns.
Atle Staalesen -- June 28, 2021
The heat is on, and it is hitting the Arctic with detrimental 
consequence. Global warming is now leading to quick and irreversible 
change in the North. And Russia is among the ones worst affected.

This week, the temperatures in the Russian north again beat records. In 
Saskylah, a small community in the Arctic Circle, the air temperature 
reached 31.9 C, the highest measurement since 1936. According to 
Roshydromet, the Russian meteorology institute, average temperatures 
along parts of the Russian Arctic coast have since 1998 increased with 
as much as 4,95 C degrees...
- -
Researchers from the Russian Cryosphere Institute believe that the 
border of the permafrost zone over the last 40 years has moved more than 
30 km to the north and that up to 500 square kilometers of land is every 
year sliding into the Arctic ocean and disappearing.

This process is irreversable, and it is impossible to stop it, Head of 
the Russian Cryosphere Institute Dmitry Drozdev said.

With the melting of the frozen tundra comes also growing risks of new 
and lethal diseases. Among the many infectious disease agents preserved 
in the permafrost is Anthrax.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/climate-crisis/2021/06/looming-arctic-collapse-more-40-north-russian-buildings-are-starting-crumble



[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming July 1, 1983*

July 1, 2014:  Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen praises former 
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for pointing out that climate 
disruption is indeed risky business. He also observes:

"What possesses the tea party on climate change? Some of it has to do 
with traditional anti-establishment sentiment. If the elite say it’s 
getting hot, then it must be getting cold. Mostly, though, its position 
is rooted in a raging antipathy toward (hiss!) big government. Climate 
change is hardly a local problem. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even a 
national problem. (China and India are major polluters.) It will take 
national and international agreements to deal with global warming, and 
tea party types would rather — almost literally — burn in a kind of hell 
than submit to Washington or, God forbid, the United Nations.

"So reports will be issued and the Obama administration will pump for a 
reduction in carbon emissions and much of the Republican Party will deny 
the undeniable. But the waters will rise and the country will bake. 
Years from now, people gasping for air will ask how we let this happen 
and the GOP, sticking to its plan, will deny that anything is happening 
at all. Have an iced tea, y’all."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-on-climate-the-tea-party-would-rather-burn-than-submit-to-washington/2014/06/30/35166398-007d-11e4-b8ff-89afd3fad6bd_story.html?hpid=z3 



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