[✔️] July 8 , 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*July 8, 2021*/

[What next]
*California braces for dangerously high temperatures in new heatwave*
Temperatures could reach 115F in the Central Valley and 120F in desert 
areas like Palm Springs
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/07/california-heatwave-high-temperatures-inland-central-valley 


- -

[Fire is next]
*Wildfires threaten all of the West — and one group more than others*
That threat to Latinos has grown in the past decade, and they are twice 
as likely to live in areas most threatened by wildfires relative to the 
overall U.S. population.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/06/wildfires-latino-threat-498273

- -

[follow the data]
*Pace of California wildfires so far this year greatly exceeds 
disastrous 2020 numbers*
Associated Press - Jul 7, 2021
The number of wildfires and amount of land burned in parched California 
so far this year greatly exceed totals for the same period in the 
disastrous wildfire year of 2020.

Between Jan. 1 and July 4, there were 4,599 fires that scorched 114.8 
square miles, according to the California Department of Forestry and 
Fire Protection.
In the same time frame last year, there were 3,847 fires that blackened 
48.6 square miles.

https://ktla.com/news/california/pace-of-california-wildfires-so-far-this-year-far-exceed-disastrous-2020-numbers/



[We felt it]
*North America endured hottest June on record*
Satellite data shows temperature peaks are lasting longer and rising higher
- -
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service also revealed 
that June temperatures in North America were 1.2C higher than the 
average from 1991 to 2020, which is more than 2C above pre-industrial 
levels...
- -
This is the 12th consecutive year of above-average June temperatures in 
the region, and the greatest increase recorded until now...
- -
Meteorologists said these anomalies were made more possible by the 
broader pattern of warming, which was caused by human emissions.

“Natural variability and a warming trend make a freakish event even more 
freakish,” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate 
Change Service. “Because the climate is generally warming and so even in 
Niña year we see very high temperatures.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/07/north-america-endured-hottest-june-on-record



[cooking by the sun]
*An Estimated 1 Billion Sea Creatures Cooked to Death in the Pacific 
Northwest Heat Wave*
“A mussel on the shore in some ways is like a toddler left in a car on a 
hot day."
Molly Taft - July 7, 2021
There’s bad news for crustacean lovers. Some researchers are estimating 
that more than 1 billion sea creatures—including clams, mussels, 
barnacles, and snails—basically cooked to death during the record 
Pacific Northwest heat wave...
- -
Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, 
told the CBC that he was “pretty stunned” walking along Vancouver’s 
Kitsilano Beach late last month, where was able to smell the mass death 
and see endless amounts of mussels cracked open with meat inside—which 
indicates they had recently died....
- -
The incredibly hot temperatures in Vancouver and some poor timing with 
the tides seem to have combined to create an incredibly sad situation 
for the region’s crustaceans. During the heatwave in late June, when 
temperatures reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) in 
Vancouver, Harley’s lab recorded temperatures up to 122 degrees F (50 
degrees Celsius) along the shoreline using a thermal imaging camera. 
Crustaceans like mussels and clams were then exposed to these crazy high 
temperatures for more than six hours when the tide went out....

“A mussel on the shore in some ways is like a toddler left in a car on a 
hot day,” Harley told the CBC. “They are stuck there until the parent 
comes back, or in this case, the tide comes back in, and there’s very 
little they can do. They’re at the mercy of the environment. And on 
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, during the heat wave, it just got so hot that 
the mussels, there was nothing they could do.”...
https://gizmodo.com/an-estimated-1-billion-sea-creatures-cooked-to-death-in-1847244037



[3 min video from Peter Sinclair]
*Analysts dissect historic Pacific Northwest ‘heat dome’*
Jul 6, 2021
YaleClimateConnections
Record-breaking consecutive 100-degree-plus days left the region 
staggering:  Experts explain the phenomenon and prospects for more of 
the same in coming years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkOlUZr1tNY

more at -- 
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/analysts-dissect-historic-pacific-northwest-heat-dome/

/*
*/

[war of opinion manipulation]
*Exxon Exposed: Greenpeace Tricks Top Lobbyists into Naming Senators 
They Use to Block Climate Action*
video and transcript 
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/6/exxon_blocks_congressional_action_climate

    Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna, the chair of the House
    Oversight Subcommittee on the Environment, has announced plans to
    ask the CEOs of Exxon and other fossil fuel companies to testify
    before the committee about their role in blocking congressional
    action to address the climate emergency. Khanna made the request
    after Greenpeace UK released a video of two lobbyists discussing
    Exxon’s secretive efforts to fight climate initiatives in
    Washington, revealing how the oil giant supported a carbon tax to
    appear proactive about climate change while privately acknowledging
    that such a tax has no chance of being passed. We feature the
    complete video and speak to one of the activists involved with it.
    “The reality is that almost nothing has changed in the Exxon
    playbook,” says Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at
    Greenpeace UK. “This has been going on for decades.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/6/exxon_blocks_congressional_action_climate



[Why not?]
*Volts podcast: treating fossil fuels like nuclear weapons, with 
Tzeporah Berman*
A conversation about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
David Roberts
For as long as I've been covering climate change, it's been conventional 
wisdom among economists — and the kind of people who aspire to please 
economists — that the proper focus of climate policy is on demand. We 
must reduce demand for fossil fuels, the argument goes, otherwise any 
supply we shut down will just pop up somewhere else.

Activists have always disagreed with this logic. For many of them, the 
fight against climate change is a fight for places — specific places, 
with histories, peoples, and ecosystems — and every fossil fuel project 
is, in some way or another, an assault on a place. Over the last decade, 
more economists and policy wonks have come around to their way of 
thinking, questioning both the economics and the sociology of the 
demand-focused conventional wisdom. As things stand now, wealthy fossil 
fuel–producing countries are making grand emission reduction commitments 
while continuing to ramp up production. All that fossil fuel has to go 
somewhere. It creates its own set of commitments and investments, its 
own momentum.

My guest today, Canadian activist Tzeporah Berman, has been fighting for 
places since grunge and flannel were big. There is no way to do her 
resume justice in a short intro, or else I would never get to the 
podcast, but here are some highlights.

In the 1990s, she fought clear-cutting projects with blockades and civil 
disobedience. In 2000, she co-founded ForestEthics, which uses clever 
communications campaigns to shame companies into using less old-growth 
wood...
- - audio - https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-treating-fossil-fuels
The IPCC is clear: there are already enough fossil fuels in known 
reserves to blow the world past its 1.5°C temperature limit. Yet fossil 
fuel production continues to increase.

Fossil fuels have become a threat to all of humanity, as nuclear weapons 
are, and just as with nuclear weapons, Berman believes we need a global 
agreement to cap their growth and ramp them down. The Fossil Fuel 
Non-Proliferation Treaty is meant to be a template for such an agreement.

Though the treaty is relatively new, it has already been signed by nine 
cities and subnational governments, more than 480 organizations, and 
over 12,000 individuals, including a wide array of academics, 
researchers, and scientists.

I called Berman to hear more about the need to address fossil fuel 
supply, the motivations behind the treaty, and where it might go in the 
future.
listen at -- https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-treating-fossil-fuels



[new data]
*Extreme temperatures kill 5 million people a year with heat-related 
deaths rising, study finds*
More people died of cold than heat in past 20 years but climate change 
is shifting the balance
Donna Lu and Lisa Cox -- 7 Jul 2021
More than 5 million people die each year globally because of excessively 
hot or cold conditions, a 20-year study has found – and heat-related 
deaths are on the rise.

The study involving dozens of scientists around the world found that 
9.4% of global deaths each year are attributable to heat or cold 
exposure, equivalent to 74 extra deaths per 100,000 people.

It’s prompted calls for better housing insulation and more solar-powered 
air conditioning, as well as warnings that climate change will increase 
temperature-linked deaths in the future.

Researchers analysed mortality and weather data from 750 locations in 43 
countries between 2000 and 2019, and found the average daily temperature 
in these locations increased by 0.26C per decade.

The study found more people had died of cold than heat over the 
two-decade period. But heat-related deaths were increasing, while 
cold-linked deaths were dropping.
- -
The findings come as a separate analysis by the Global Climate and 
Health Alliance ranked Australia equal last out of 66 countries for 
efforts to include human health concerns in their climate commitments.

Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Norway and Iceland all received a score 
of zero out of 15 on the report card as countries that failed to even 
mention human health in their nationally determined contributions.

The organisation also examined what countries were doing to strengthen 
their health systems for the burdens caused by the climate crisis, how 
much extra funding these policies received, and to what extent countries 
acknowledged that reaching net zero emissions would have co-benefits for 
human health.

The European Union was also near the bottom, with a score of one out of 
15, while the US and the UK received scores of 6 and 7 respectively. 
Costa Rica was ranked highest, scoring 13 out of 15.

In May, more than 60 health groups, including the Australian Medical 
Association and Hesta Super Fund, called on the Morrison government to 
prioritise health in Australia’s climate goals under the Paris agreement.

“This scorecard shows that Australia is again at the bottom of the pack 
when it comes to taking the health effects of climate change seriously,” 
said Fiona Armstrong, the executive director of Australia’s Climate and 
Health Alliance.

“The prime minister must both act to reduce emissions, and prioritise 
health in our international climate commitments before COP26 to protect 
our health.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/08/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-people-a-year-with-heat-related-deaths-rising-study-finds



[Sarcastic report about a new army on the disinformation battleground]
*Good News, Oil Companies! Fox Is Launching a Weather Channel*
Fox Weather will reportedly be launching later this year. Sorry, what?
Molly Taft - July 6, 2021
We’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times 
reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. 
owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the 
weather called Fox Weather.

Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content—the Weather Channel’s 
viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership 
fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves 
gripping much of the country this summer—caused partially by stalled 
climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies 
and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation—it’s not hard 
to see why.

The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep 
as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating 
country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves 
out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to 
denial. Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that 
climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix 
global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, 
climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News 
programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting 
too worked up about this global warming thing. Even the supposedly 
nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct 
denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 
2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from 
misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.
“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the 
director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, 
Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That 
is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, 
like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a 
very classic Fox move.”

Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors 
used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re 
emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and 
weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or 
the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of 
global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. 
“They’re the ones who have made weather political.”
According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because 
it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change 
and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a 
spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth 
reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to 
showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform 
can deliver beginning this fall.” Some of Fox’s future competitors 
making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into 
figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, 
has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show 
about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted 
ice (sorry, what?).

But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.
“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she 
said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a 
platform there—that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to 
go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on 
Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that 
out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate 
change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, 
it’s not.”
https://gizmodo.com/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-1847236993


[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming July 8, 2010*
July 8, 2010: CNN reports on the exoneration of Michael Mann and other 
climate scientists who had been falsely accused of fraud in 2009.
http://youtu.be/AMbZxVCUT-I


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