[✔️] June 5, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sat Jun 5 10:34:20 EDT 2021

/*June 5, 2021*/

[don't ignore risk]
FEDERAL RESERVE
*Powell says climate change is not a main factor in the Fed’s policy 
decisions*

    -- Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said climate change is not a main
    consideration for monetary policy.
    -- Powell made clear that the institution’s role in the matter is
    limited to oversight of banks and the rest of the financial system.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/powell-says-climate-change-is-not-a-main-factor-in-the-feds-policy-decisions.html 

- -

[somebody tell the FED]
*Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists*
Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of 
heating, with severe long-term effects

    “The study suggests that below 2C of global warming – ie in the
    Paris agreement target range – there could still be a significant
    risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points,” said Lenton.
    “What the new study doesn’t do is unpack the timescale over which
    tipping points changes and cascades could unfold – instead it
    focuses on the eventual consequences. The results should be viewed
    as ‘commitments’ that we may be making soon to potentially
    irreversible changes and cascades, leaving as a grim legacy to
    future generations.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/03/climate-tipping-points-could-topple-like-dominoes-warn-scientists

[too much in the middle]
*Biden Faces First Major Climate Protest As President*
Sunrise Movement, the youth campaigners behind the Green New Deal, are 
set to rally at the White House.
President Joe Biden’s honeymoon with climate activists looks set to end 
Friday as Green New Deal activists descended on the White House to 
demand that the administration abandon plans to water down its landmark 
infrastructure proposal.

On Friday morning, a few dozen Sunrise Movement volunteers and staffers 
rallied outside the White House to protest the Biden administration’s 
move to prioritize Republican support for his spending package over 
funding programs activists say are needed to transition the United 
States to a safer climate future.

“Now that Biden is in power, that promise of co-governance with 
progressives and young people has disappeared,” Varshini Prakash, 
executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in a statement before the 
protest. “He’s spent more of his time meeting with a Republican Party 
who to this day contests he is the democratically elected President.”
- -
Things grew worse from there. The administration outraged environmental 
groups last week when it defended a massive fossil-fuel drilling project 
in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The so-called Willow Project, 
led by ConocoPhillips, is slated to produce 590 million barrels of oil 
over its 30-year lifespan ― the kind of development that seems wildly 
misaligned with Biden’s pledge to transition the U.S. away from 
planet-warming fossil fuels.

Ahead of Friday’s event, Sunrise Movement previewed what seemed to be a 
scattershot list of demands. Rather than press the administration to up 
the spending on its climate proposals overall, the group zeroed in on 
Biden’s plan to establish a Civilian Climate Corps modeled on a 
similarly named New Deal-era conservation program. The White House’s 
initial pitch included $10 billion for a job program to revive wetlands, 
bolster renewables and restore America’s public lands. Sunrise Movement 
wants the program to have a much larger budget.
The nonprofit is also demanding Biden prioritize meeting one-on-one with 
its leaders over Republican lawmakers whose counterproposal to the 
infrastructure package sought to strip out most of the climate provisions.

“It’s time to meet with us, the young organizers that elected him, 
instead,” Prakash said in the press release. “This moment demands an 
infrastructure package that will stop climate change and create millions 
of good jobs in the process, and we won’t stop until he delivers.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-climate-sunrise-movement-protest_n_60b94bcee4b0169ca972db88

[Online movie trailer]
https://youtu.be/Gb6wQtNjblk

- -

[Science gives emotions]
*David Attenborough Netflix documentary: Australian scientists break 
down in tears over climate crisis*
Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet shows the toll the demise 
of the Earth’s natural places is having on the people who study them
One of Australia’s leading coral reef scientists is seen breaking down 
in tears at the decline of the Great Barrier Reef during a new Sir David 
Attenborough documentary to be released globally on Friday evening.

Prof Terry Hughes is recounting three coral bleaching monitoring 
missions in 2016, 2017 and 2020 when he says: “It’s a job I hoped I 
would never have to do because it’s actually very confronting …” before 
tears cut him short.

The emotional scene comes during the new Netflix documentary, Breaking 
Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, and shows the toll the demise of 
the planet’s natural places is having on some of the people who study them.

The film visits scientists working on melting ice, the degradation of 
the Amazon, and the loss of biodiversity, and looks at a 2019/2020 
“summer from hell” for Australia that featured unprecedented bushfires 
and the most widespread bleaching of corals ever recorded on the Great 
Barrier reef.

The 70-minute film features another Australian scientist, Dr Daniella 
Teixeira, walking through a blackened landscape where she was working to 
conserve endangered glossy black cockatoos.

“There’s no sign of any wildlife at all,” says Teixeira, with footage of 
twisted and burnt animals and trees turned to charcoal. “There’s nothing 
left.”..
- -
The documentary, fronted by Attenborough, is centred on the research of 
Swedish scientist Prof Johan Rockström, whose work looks at the concept 
of tipping points and boundaries in different systems around the planet, 
such as the polar regions, the Earth’s biodiversity and the climate.

Netflix says the film documents “the most important scientific discovery 
of our time – that humanity has pushed Earth beyond the boundaries that 
have kept Earth stable for 10,000 years, since the dawn of civilisation.”

Hughes has become a high-profile scientific figure in Australia for his 
research on the complex impacts of global heating on the world’s biggest 
reef system and his monitoring flights to document mass bleaching.

“In big thermal extremes like we’ve been seeing during mass bleaching 
events in recent decades [corals] can actually die very very quickly. 
They cook,” he says in the documentary.

Hughes told the Guardian that “if anything I think the emotional 
response has lessened over time” and that the 2016 bleaching event in 
the north of the reef “was the most confronting”.

“But it’s still deeply saddening,” he said.

He said Rockström’s research, which he has collaborated on, was “simple 
and powerful” and showed how the world was on a “trajectory that is not 
sustainable”...
- -
“You can easily transgress a tipping point and not notice it for a 
couple of decades,” he said, adding he thought the amount of CO2 in the 
atmosphere had probably reached a tipping point for coral reefs in the 
1980s.

Hughes, of James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef 
Studies, said the black summer bushfires and coral bleaching “points to 
Australia’s vulnerability”.

In the documentary, Attenborough says: “We are heading for a future 
where the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard.”

He describes Australia’s 2019/20 summer as “a summer from hell, fuelled 
by record-breaking temperatures and drought”.

Texeira, from the University of Queensland, is filmed in February 2020 
returning to sites on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast 
where she was studying endangered glossy black cockatoos.

She finds one of the nests erected to help the birds on a fallen tree 
with an iron plate around the trunk to stop possums climbing up and 
attacking the young.

With the iron buckled from the heat and the nest melted, Texeira says: 
“They weren’t enough to save them.”

She told the Guardian: “There are days when I still get overwhelmed. At 
the end of the day, we’re humans and we have emotions.”

She had been visiting the island for four years and the fires had come 
just as she was completing her PhD.

“I have come out the other side now but it has really made me more 
focused on the urgency of the problems and how we as scientists can make 
changes now.”

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet is available on Netflix 
on 4 June
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/04/david-attenborough-netflix-documentary-australian-scientists-break-down-in-tears-over-climate-crisis

*
*

[an app]
*Looking to escape wildfire smoke in WA this year? A new tool could help*
Smoke forecasting is notoriously hard to do, but a new tool from the 
state Department of Ecology may help us anticipate hazardous air five 
days in the future.

by Hannah Weinberger / June 4, 2021
- -
Forecasters say no long-forecast tool can really change the basic fact 
that, for Washingtonians, smoke in the summer is a fact of life now: 
Being prepared for it should be the default, not something to start 
thinking about a few days out.

“It's summer in the Northwest — you should really use this opportunity, 
when there's no panic, to be prepared,” Swartzendruber says. He compares 
smoke preparation to fixing a leaky roof. “When it's dry, there's no 
problem to fix,” he says. “But when it's raining and the roof is 
leaking, you can't go up on the roof and fix it because it's raining, so 
take advantage of when there's not a problem to make sure you're ready 
for when there might be.”
https://crosscut.com/environment/2021/06/looking-escape-wildfire-smoke-wa-year-new-tool-could-help

- -

[bookmark thsi site]
*Washington Air Monitoring Some Forecast*
https://enviwa.ecology.wa.gov/home/text/421#Forecast

[Book discussion audio]
12 Rules For WHAT
*42 - White Skin, Black Fuel w/ Andreas Malm And Lise Benoist*

Alex and Sam talk with two members of the Zetkin Collective, Andreas 
Malm and Lise Benoist about their new book, White Skin Black Fuel.

We discuss Rassemblement national's ecological turn in France, how far 
right acceptance of the climate crisis is just denial in another form, 
the attachement of the far right to blocks of capital and the political 
character of national landscapes.

White Skin, Black Fuel is the new book from the Zetkin Collective. It 
delves into the intersection of the far right and the climate crisis.

"In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White 
Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political 
constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. Fossil-fuelled 
technologies were born steeped in racism. No one loved them more 
passionately than the classical fascists. Now right-wing forces have 
risen to the surface, some professing to have the solution—closing 
borders to save the nation as the climate breaks down.

Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political 
fronts that can only heat up."
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3812-white-skin-black-fuel
https://soundcloud.com/12rulesforwhat/ep-42-white-skin-black-fuel-w-andreas-malm-and-lise-benoist

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming June 5, 2014*

June 5, 2014: On MSNBC's "The Ed Show," Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) 
discusses President Obama's efforts to reduce carbon pollution from 
existing power plants.

http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/cleaning-up-americas-carbon-footprint-274479171724#

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