[✔️] July 23, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Fri Jul 23 08:06:25 EDT 2021

/*July 23, 2021*/

[The New Republic - difficult opnion]
*The Left Is the Only Reason We’re Talking About Climate Change at All*
Kate Aronoff - -July 22, 2021
It’s become fashionable to suggest climate activists are too hard on Joe 
Biden. Being hard on Joe Biden is what got climate spending into the 
infrastructure package...
- -
The average age of a House member is 58. The average senator is 62. 
Statistically speaking, they will be dead by the time shit really hits 
the fan in the United States and probably still insulated from its worst 
effects if they’re alive: Over half of members of Congress are millionaires.

The brutal fact is that, since James E. Hansen’s pivotal testimony 
before Congress on the “greenhouse effect” in 1988, no strategy to pass 
comprehensive climate policy in the U.S. has been successful; every 
“win” activists have managed to eke out so far should be put in that 
context. Every rhetorical commitment from Democrats to pass climate 
legislation is so far just that: rhetorical. Even the $3.5 trillion 
worth of overall infrastructure spending now on the table—itself already 
a gross compromise with physics—may not pass. The climate left is 
pushing to make sure it does. The full range of policies needed for the 
U.S. to play its part in zeroing out global carbon emissions by 
2050—what’s really needed—are not politically possible right now.

The role of social movements is to make things that look impossible seem 
possible. In recent years, the climate left has done just that. There’s 
no guarantee it’ll be able to do it again.

Left to their own devices, though, neither Congress nor the White House 
can be trusted to pass climate policy. They certainly won’t pass 
anything that meets the scale of the challenge head-on, which requires a 
radical shift away from the fossil fuels that have built industrial 
capitalism. Many, many thousands of people need to join the fight and 
put more pressure on congressional inertia. Who knows whether they will, 
or if it’ll work. But no one should be telling the handful of people 
who’ve dragged politicians this far to keep quiet.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163026/sunrise-ocasio-cortez-infrastructure-climate

[Yale Climate Communications]
*Extreme rainfall in China: over 25 inches falls in 24 hours, leaving 33 
dead*
Zhengzhou received more than a year’s worth of rain on July 20.
JEFF MASTERS - - JULY 22, 2021
At least 33 people are dead and 8 missing in Zhengzhou, China, after a 
July 20 extreme rainfall event of nearly unimaginable intensity. 
Zhengzhou, a megacity of more than 10 million – and the world’s biggest 
manufacturing base for iPhones and a major hub for food production and 
heavy industry – recorded an astonishing 644.6 mm (25.38 inches) of rain 
in the 24 hours ending at 21Z July 20. This is literally more than a 
year’s worth of rain: Its average annual precipitation (1981-2010 
climatology) is only 640.9 mm (25.24 inches)...
- -
According to meteorologist Minghao Zhou, a Ph.D. student at SUNY Albany, 
the city’s maximum one-hour rainfall rate between 8 and 9Z July 20 (4-5 
p.m. local time) was a staggering 201.9 mm/hr (7.95 inches/hr). This 
amount shattered China’s national record for highest one-hour rainfall 
of 168.3 mm/hr (6.63 inches/hr) for all 2,418 national weather stations 
in mainland China, previously set at Maoming, Guangdong...
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/extreme-rainfall-in-china-over-25-inches-falls-in-24-hours-leaving-33-dead/ 

- -

[Must we move to above-ground transportation?]
*Climate Crisis Turns World’s Subways Into Flood Zones*
Swift, deadly flooding in China this week inundated a network that 
wasn’t even a decade old, highlighting the risks faced by cities globally.

By Hiroko Tabuchi and John Schwartz - - July 22, 2021
Terrified passengers trapped in flooded subway cars in Zhengzhou, China. 
Water cascading down stairways into the London Underground. A woman 
wading through murky, waist-deep water to reach a New York City subway 
platform.

Subway systems around the world are struggling to adapt to an era of 
extreme weather brought on by climate change. Their designs, many based 
on the expectations of another era, are being overwhelmed, and 
investment in upgrades could be squeezed by a drop in ridership brought 
on by the pandemic.

“It’s scary,” said Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the Rudin Center 
for Transportation at New York University. “The challenge is, how can we 
get ready for the next storm, which was supposed to be 100 years away,” 
she said, “but could happen tomorrow?”

Public transportation plays a critical role in reducing travel by car in 
big cities, thus reining in the emissions from automobiles that 
contribute to global warming. If commuters become spooked by images of 
inundated stations and start shunning subways for private cars, 
transportation experts say it could have major implications for urban 
air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions...
- -
Some experts question why public transportation needs to be underground 
in the first place and say that public transit should reclaim the 
street. Street-level light rail, bus systems and bicycle lanes aren’t 
just less exposed to flooding, they are also cheaper to build and easier 
to access, said Bernardo Baranda Sepúlveda, a Mexico City-based 
researcher at the Institute for Transport Development, a transportation 
nonprofit.

“We have this inertia from the last century to give so much of the 
available space above ground to cars,” he said. “But one bus lane 
carries more people than three lanes of cars.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/climate/subway-design-flooding-china.html

[Turn to the science]
*What to Expect from the Next Major Global Climate Report*
Next month the IPCC will begin releasing its periodic assessment of the 
state of climate science
By Sara Schonhardt, E&E News on July 22, 2021
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change grabbed the world’s 
attention in 2018 when it released a sobering report that warned—in no 
uncertain terms—world leaders needed to take drastic and immediate steps 
to blunt the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.

Policymakers responded with a range of emotion, from denial to outrage. 
But the message was clear. “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm 
going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, executive director of the 
United Nations Environment Programme, told The Washington Post at the 
time...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-to-expect-from-the-next-major-global-climate-report/

[practice, practice, practice]
Liza Featherstone/July 22, 2021
*How to Live in a Burning World Without Losing Your Mind*
The emotional burden of climate change can be overwhelming alongside the 
grief and frustration of our own lives.
It was the middle of June, and my mother had just died.

“It’s 112 degrees in Seattle,” someone told me.

“Fuck you,” I recall responding. “My mother just died. I can’t take this 
shit.”

It wasn’t the first time I had resented the ever-present nature of the 
climate threat. At the height of the Covid-19 spike in New York City 
last year, sirens blaring from every direction, locked down at home, 
hearing news of friends or acquaintances passing and bracing for more, I 
avoided climate news. I envied the conservatives their denial.

The front page of the paper this week brings reports of floods in 
Germany, with hundreds of people still missing and at least 164 dead; 
the lush vineyards of the Napa Valley parched with drought; forest fires 
in Siberia. (Siberia!) And what the hell is a “fire tornado”? As my 
teenage son headed out to spend the next 10 hours playing baseball 
outside in the New York City summer heat, I read that the smoke from the 
fires in the West had drifted east, adding to our urban haze.

I’m in no condition to receive this news. I can’t tolerate more worry, 
death, sickness, sadness, or pain—more mothers and grandmothers dying, 
and maybe even less bearably, children.

I’m not alone.

We are in the middle of another wave of horrific climate news, but many 
of us are too traumatized to pay attention. The more loss and horror 
we’re facing in the rest of our lives—whether from the coronavirus and 
opioid pandemics, economic upheaval, or the ordinary awfulness of cancer 
and death—the less equipped we are to take it in. Meanwhile, as a nation 
we are at a crucial political juncture. Our country is no longer run 
exclusively by right-wing climate denialists, but the Biden 
administration needs pressure to act. We must somehow make room in our 
minds for a burning world if we are to save it.

We must somehow make room in our minds for a burning world if we are to 
save it.
Environmental activists have a word for our inability to engage with 
climate change: apathy. But as psychologist Renée Lertzman, an 
environmental consultant and a senior research fellow at Portland State 
University, argued in a 2010 lecture, the word in this context is “a 
misnomer, misleading, patronizing, destructive.” (It’s a testament to 
the unfortunate marginality of psychoanalysis in public life that it 
took so long for anyone to challenge the assumption that we would have 
no feelings on such an important matter.) Rather, she argued, 
disengagement from the climate issue is far more complicated than that, 
hiding fear, helplessness, and distress—all of which may be unconscious.

When Lertzman interviewed residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who lived 
near a Superfund site and considered themselves disengaged with 
environmental issues, she found not apathy but instead “a surplus of 
affect. Once they started talking, they couldn’t stop.” She found that 
her subjects were overwhelmed by the climate crisis. They were also 
conflicted: Like most of us, the people she interviewed wanted to save 
the planet, but they also wanted cheap flights and air conditioning. 
They were mired in guilt over their own destructive desires and actions, 
a classic psychoanalytic conundrum. They also spoke with premature 
nostalgia about the natural environment around them; rather than 
actively visiting, loving, and working to protect the beaches and 
waterways of their childhoods, they were in mourning for them, as if 
these places were already gone.

What looked like apathy, then, was a defensive reaction against pain and 
distress. Eric Bichard, professor of sustainable development at Salford 
University, remarked at the time that the revelation of Lertzman’s 
research was that environmentalists had misunderstood disengagement: The 
problem wasn’t that people cared too little about the environment, but 
“that they care too much.”

This has important implications for how we approach climate information. 
Bombarding people with information that will shock and alarm might be 
productive if people really didn’t care. But since many of us are 
instead busily repressing big feelings of sorrow and terror about global 
warming, this doomsaying approach just activates our defenses. We tune out.

Lertzman tested her subjects’ reaction to a 2006 poster that warned 
people in big letters that, if we don’t take action, “No More Great 
Lakes.” She found that people tend to tune out messages like this to 
protect themselves from distress. That’s consistent with findings from 
other studies. Yet such appeals are still common: This summer, a 
full-page print ad for the Center for Biological Diversity on the back 
of the Nation’s July-August issue (the magazine’s audience is hardly 
unaware of climate change) confronts us with a serious-looking jaguar, 
his face half in shadow. It reads, “Extinction is Forever.” I feel sad 
and turn away. I can’t think about this right now.

“We already know a lot about what the conditions are now that promote 
healing and working through trauma,” Lertzman told The Guardian last 
fall. “It’s just that, for the most part, we haven’t applied that to a 
climate trauma context.” It’s instinctive, she said, for our brains to 
shut out information—even our own experiences, like fire, unseasonable 
heat, or bad air quality—that’s overwhelming or disturbing. “Frankly,” 
she said, by fixating on sharing our information and our sense of 
urgency, “what a lot of us are doing unintentionally is simply 
retraumatizing each other over and over again.”

The way out of this confusion is neither feel-good solutionism nor 
submitting to the apocalypse. Instead, we need to learn to make space, 
in our conversations, activism, and media, for feeling grief, anxiety, 
guilt, and fear about climate change, no matter how difficult or dark. 
Where many of us rush into the role of town crier—a Paul Revere shouting 
out warnings—we may be better off, to use Lertzman’s framing, becoming a 
guide, helping those around us work through difficult emotions and 
figure out how they can take action.

I’m not always as sad and avoidant as I am right now. Sometimes I’m sure 
that we humans can solve this problem. But that attitude isn’t always 
helpful, either. Positivity can be just as tone deaf as relentless 
doom-saying, say trauma experts, if it denies us the space for sadness, 
hopelessness, and despair—emotions we need to acknowledge, work through, 
and become resilient enough to face.

I’m beginning to realize that my can-do spirit can be just as alienating 
and annoying to people as the doom-and-gloom of the No More Great Lakes 
campaigners. Several years ago, when our apartment building signed up 
for the city’s municipal composting program, a neighbor asked me how it 
worked. I began to explain.

Composting is so beautiful to me that I’m sometimes in danger of 
becoming a bore on the subject. (I’ve been known to take a photo of the 
lemon peel in the coffee grounds and post it to Instagram.) Plus, I’m a 
journalist: I assume that what people need from me is information. As I 
prattled on—compost is not too stinky, you can put it out in the brown 
bin frequently, or you can get a little bucket with a filter—my neighbor 
sighed. “It’s so hard,” she mused, looking troubled. “No, no, it’s 
actually pretty easy!” I hastened to reassure her, offering still more 
practical tips.

I’m learning from Renée Lertzman’s work that I should listen more and 
talk less. My neighbor was probably not saying that composting was hard 
in a practical sense, like living off the grid, or traveling by boat 
rather than by plane (as Greta Thunberg famously does). She meant that 
changing her habits, thinking more about her garbage, taking in the 
overwhelming scary reality of the climate threat, and having feelings 
about it is hard. She might have sensed that in the context of global 
petrocapitalism, her individual composting efforts wouldn’t make much 
difference, and felt helpless. Or maybe she was waking up to her own 
climate impact as a middle-class consumer in a rich country and felt 
overburdened by responsibility and guilt. Maybe she wanted to talk about 
all of that, but unfortunately, I shut her down with my perky, 
mission-driven practicality.

“Yes,” I should have said, “it is hard.” Because it is.

Liza Featherstone @lfeatherz
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the 
Culture of Consultation (2018).
https://newrepublic.com/article/163021/climate-change-grief

[video talk over graphics of West Coast Fires]
*Update and Forecast for Dixie Fire, Bootleg Fire, and Tamarack Fire*
Jul 21, 2021

Holt Hanley Weather
The Dixie Fire, Bootleg Fire, and Tamarack Fire all continue to burn in 
the West. The most active behavior right now appears to be over the 
Dixie Fire, which has grown to 85,000 acres. The Bootleg Fire has 
officially combined with the Log Fire and stands at 395,000 acres, 
although we have seen reduced spread rates in the last 24 hours. The 
Tamarack Fire has officially crossed the state line into Nevada, and 
continues to see tricky conditions with gusty winds and exceptionally 
dry fuels.
Throughout this video, we'll look at all the important updates, as well 
as the fire weather forecast to predict how all these wildfires may 
change in the coming days.
You can subscribe to stay updated on all major wildfires throughout the 
2021 season.
I hope this video was helpful, and thanks for watching.

Update and Forecast for Dixie Fire, Bootleg Fire, Tamarack Fire, and 
other Western Wildfires - Chapters:
0:00 = Overview of Dixie Fire, Bootleg Fire, and Tamarack Fire
2:12 = Dixie Fire Update/Forecast
18:21 = Bootleg Fire Update/Forecast
24:10 = Tamarack Fire Update/Forecast
32:28 = Why are the fuels so dry?
34:29 = Summary of Western Wildfires
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgM6UPoTF7I

[it was 4 decades ago now]
JULY 23, 2019
*The Charney Report: 40 years ago, scientists accurately predicted 
climate change*
Forty years ago, a group of climate scientists sat down at Woods Hole 
Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts for the first meeting of the 
"Ad Hoc Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate". It led to the preparation 
of what became known as the Charney Report—the first comprehensive 
assessment of global climate change due to carbon dioxide.

It doesn't sound as impressive as landing on the Moon, and there 
certainly weren't millions waiting with bated breath for the 
deliberations of the meeting.

But the Charney Report is an exemplar of good science, and the success 
of its predictions over the past 40 years has firmly established the 
science of global warming.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-charney-years-scientists-accurately-climate.html

- -

the last line of the report concludes:

    If the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is indeed doubled and
    remains so long enough for the atmosphere
    and the intermediate layers of the ocean to attain approximate
    thermal equilibrium,
    our best estimate is that changes in global temperature of the order
    of 3° C will occur and that these will be accompanied by significant
    changes in
    regional climatic patterns.

https://www.bnl.gov/envsci/schwartz/charney_report1979.pdf

- -

[Seems like The Economist just read that 1979 report and today agrees on 
3 degrees]
*Three degrees of global warming is quite plausible and truly disastrous*
Rapid emission cuts can reduce the risks but not eliminate them
A 3°C world is thus both a pretty likely outcome if nothing more gets 
done and the worst that might still happen even if things go very well 
indeed. That makes it worth looking at in some detail, and the result is 
alarming. Those modelling climate impacts have long argued that they do 
not increase linearly. The further you go from the pre-industrial, the 
steeper the rate at which damages climb. And as what was rare becomes 
common the never-before-seen comes knocking (see chart 2). Judging by 
the results of specific studies, the differences between 2°C and 3°C 
are, in most respects, far starker than those between 1.5°C and 2°C...
- -
The limits to adaptation apply to nature, too. Animal and plant species 
adapt to warming climates by shifting to cooler ones where possible. 
Already fish are on the move, some species edging away from tropical 
waters to temperate, others from the temperate to the chilly. Land 
animals unable to trek to higher latitudes can, if they live in hilly 
places, find respite at nearby higher altitudes instead. But these 
strategies only work up to a point: mountains have peaks, and the Earth 
has poles.

And it only works for species and ecosystems that are able to move 
faster than the climate warms. Coral reefs do not have that facility. 
They are predicted to disappear completely in a 3°C world (their boiled, 
bleached fate is worsened by the fact that higher carbon-dioxide levels 
make seawater too acidic for them). Some such failures to adapt make the 
world hotter still. The Amazon rainforest, already weakened by logging 
and burning, would be very unlikely to survive in such a world. In its 
passing it would release further gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

The Amazon will not disappear overnight. Even if emissions go largely 
unchecked from now on, a 3°C future looms only in the second half of the 
century, not the first. But the longer it takes to cut emissions, the 
more avoiding 3°C becomes something only achievable through the 
application of untested and in some cases troubling technologies 
designed either to suck carbon from the atmosphere in vast amounts or to 
throw some of the sun’s warming rays back into space. Humanity would 
find itself wedged between a geoengineered rock and a very hot place.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/07/24/three-degrees-of-global-warming-is-quite-plausible-and-truly-disastrous

- -

[from the IPCC]
*AR5 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2014*
The Synthesis Report (SYR) of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) 
provides an overview of the state of knowledge concerning the science of 
climate change, emphasizing new results since the publication of the 
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
- -
*AR6 SYR will be finalized in September 2022.*
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/

- -

[Simple video]
*Why reducing our carbon emissions matters (a little story about climate 
change)*
Jun 12, 2017
The Conversation
While it's true that Earth's temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have 
always fluctuated, the reality is that humans' greenhouse emissions 
since the industrial revolution have put us in uncharted territory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivf479bW8Q

[Video Stephen Colbert]
*Climate: Changed - Is The Sun God Angry At Us?*
Jul 22, 2021
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
8.58M subscribers
In the last month alone, we've seen frightening climate change-fueled 
weather events including ice quakes, fire tornadoes and heat domes, and 
that's just in North America. Stephen Colbert takes a sobering look at 
how the world is reacting to this new normal of frequent extreme weather 
events. #Colbert #Comedy #ClimateChange
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I_K63hOgzk&t=70
"Red Sun in the sky, we're all gonna die"

- -

[video explantion ]
*How Climate Change boosts Killer Heatwaves*
Jul 22, 2021
ClimateAdam
Climate change is making extreme heat - like the recent Pacific heatwave 
- more common and more intense. This extreme weather has huge effects on 
human health, and as the global warming continues, temperatures will 
continue to become more deadly. In fact, some parts of the world may 
have even - temporarily - crossed the 35°C wet bulb temperature 
threshold - conditions that our bodies simply can't handle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXN2UxV3ePw

[common sense change]

*Maine passes nation’s first law to make big companies pay for the cost 
of recycling their packaging - After a quarter-century, a Boston-based 
nonprofit scores big win with nation’s first law making companies pay to 
recycle the waste they produce* - 
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/19/business/maine-move-make-big-companies-pay-all-their-packaging/ 
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/19/business/maine-move-make-big-companies-pay-all-their-packaging/>

    /moves the responsibility from the public to the producer of the
    packaging/ ....

    According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the US discarded
    82.2 million tons of containers and packaging in 2018, which
    accounts for nearly one-third of all municipal solid waste that ends
    up in our trash and recycling bins. Since 2018, when China stopped
    buying US recyclables, finding a place for all that waste has become
    an increasingly costly endeavor.
    There’s a massive climate impact, too. Because it’s often cheaper
    for companies to create more packaging than use recycled products,
    the production of every new bag, box, bottle, or jug releases more
    greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

  https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/19/business/maine-move-make-big-companies-pay-all-their-packaging/

[The news archive - looking back - about the Charney Report]

*On this day in the history of global warming July 23, 1979*

July 23, 1979: The National Academy of Sciences begins work on a 
groundbreaking report regarding the risks of carbon pollution. The 
report makes it clear that the consequences of a warming world will be 
severe.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf 
[This is a superb and important document. Succinct. Although it was 
captured in a format that makes copying difficult, it is likely 
available elsewhere] - look for the Charney Report 1979 - All versions I 
have seen are difficult to copy

http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M  video unavailable
This video contains content from Warner Bros. Entertainment, who has 
blocked it on copyright grounds.

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