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

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*June 8, 2021*/

[CBS News video report]
*Record-breaking heat wave threatens millions*
Jun 7, 2021
CBS Evening News
Millions of Americans are under a heat advisory as some states record 
record-high temperatures on Monday. Meanwhile, severe drought conditions 
helped fuel two wildfires in Arizona.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXes2gj6FM



[Not the game, the metaphor]
*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
Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can 
destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect 
with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.

Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a 
critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. 
Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed 
their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.

The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West 
Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon 
rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found 
domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were 
below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.
Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can 
destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect 
with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.

Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a 
critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. 
Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed 
their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.

The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West 
Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon 
rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found 
domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were 
below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/03/climate-tipping-points-could-topple-like-dominoes-warn-scientists
- -
[There's big excitement about this paper]
*Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects 
under global warming*
Overall, we find that the interactions tend to destabilise the network 
of tipping elements. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the qualitative 
role of each of the four tipping elements within the network, showing 
that the polar ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are 
oftentimes the initiators of tipping cascades, while the AMOC acts as a 
mediator transmitting cascades. This indicates that the ice sheets, 
which are already at risk of transgressing their temperature thresholds 
within the Paris range of 1.5 to 2 ∘C, are of particular importance for 
the stability of the climate system as a whole.
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/12/601/2021/



[Wildfire Today]
*Additional evacuations ordered for Telegraph Fire southwest of Globe, 
Arizona*
Bill Gabbert -- June 7, 2021
Additional evacuations ordered for Telegraph Fire southwest of Globe, 
Arizona
Evacuation orders still in effect for Mescal Fire
https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/06/07/additional-evacuations-ordered-for-telegraph-fire-southwest-of-globe-arizona/



[Esquire article]
*We're Inching Towards Actual Violence Over Access to Water*
The Hoover Dam is losing its reason for being.
Here at the shebeen, one of the larger elements in our portfolio is 
water—specifically, the increasing political salience of water, 
especially in the West, where they are experiencing such profound 
drought conditions that the Hoover Dam, of all things, is losing its 
reason for being. From CBS News:

    For more than eight decades, the iconic Hoover Dam has relied on
    water from Nevada's Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at
    age 85, it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the
    dam is supposed to be holding back is gone. "This is like a
    different world," said Pat Mulroy, the former head of the Southern
    Nevada Water Authority. She told CBS News senior national and
    environmental correspondent Ben Tracy that Lake Mead, the nation's
    largest reservoir, is on track to soon hit its lowest level ever
    recorded.

The dam is estimated to have lost a quarter of its customary 
hydroelectric power. Worse, the lower Colorado River, without which the 
country would have a lot of new deserts, is at a crisis stage, and the 
federal government may have to take serious action that will affect the 
region’s farmers—and that I guarantee you will set off the Bundy-ite fringe.

    For the first time ever, the federal government is expected to
    declare a water shortage on the lower Colorado River later this
    summer. That will force automatic cuts to the water supply for
    Nevada and Arizona starting in 2022. Homeowners have higher priority
    and, at first, won't feel the pain as badly as farmers. Dan
    Thelander is a second-generation family farmer in Arizona's Pinal
    County. The water to grow his corn and alfalfa fields comes from
    Lake Mead. "If we don't have irrigation water, we can't farm," he
    said. "So, next year we are going to get about 25% less water, means
    we're going to have to fallow or not plant 25% of our land.” In 2023
    Thelander and other farmers in this part of Arizona are expected to
    lose nearly all of their water from Lake Mead, so they are rushing
    to dig wells to pump groundwater to try to save their farms.

Meanwhile, a few degrees north, the High Country News reports the 
drought is killing fish and local economies, in that order.

    Fish have been dying on the Klamath since around May 4, according to
    the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department. At that time, 97% of the
    juvenile salmon caught by the department’s in-river trapping device
    were infected with the disease C. shasta, and were either dead, or
    would die within days. Over a two-week period, 70% of the juvenile
    salmon caught in the trap were dead.

    Irrigators upriver from the fish kill were told in mid-May that for
    the first time since “A” Canal in the Klamath Project began
    operating in 1907, they would not receive any water from it. The
    irrigators say they need 400,000 acre-feet of water but this year,
    they will receive just 33,000 acre-feet from the Klamath Project — a
    historic low. The situation has put pressure on an embattled region
    already caught in a cyclical mode of crisis due to a drying climate.
    “For salmon people, a juvenile fish kill is an absolute worst-case
    scenario,” Myers said in a statement.

As is obvious, this is all yet another crisis within the general climate 
crisis. We are inching closer to the days when we might see actual 
violence over access to water. As if we all need another excuse.
Charles P. Pierce
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot 
America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36651183/hoover-dam-water-shortage-colorado-river/ 




[NPR report]
*Carbon Dioxide, Which Drives Climate Change, Reaches Highest Level In 4 
Million Years*
June 7, 2021
The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere reached 419 parts per 
million in May, its highest level in more than four million years, the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Monday.

After dipping last year because of pandemic-fueled lockdowns, emissions 
of greenhouse gases have begun to soar again as economies open and 
people resume work and travel. The newly released data about May carbon 
dioxide levels show that the global community so far has failed to slow 
the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, NOAA said in 
its announcement...
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1004097672/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-fueling-climate-change-hits-a-four-million-year-high



[NBC Bay Area]
*As Sea Level Rise Threat Grows, SF Officials Don't Have Public Plan to 
Save Sewers*
Rising seas that flood sewage treatment plants can prevent toilets from 
flushing. How will the Bay Area keep sewers working? NBC Bay Area's 
Investigative Unit asked 10 sewage treatment facilities for their 
survival plans. All had one to show - except San Francisco.
Because Bay Area low-lying sewage treatment plants remain vulnerable to 
rising sea levels, government regulators told sewage facility managers 
to “provide a written plan for coping with SLR by the fall of 2021 - or 
they will be given a plan.”  The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit reached 
out to 10 “at risk” sewage treatment plants to see those plans. All 
except one provided extensive documents of their proposals, the cost to 
address them, and even provided tours of completed work. San Francisco’s 
Public Utilities Commission replied to the Investigative Unit’s public 
records request that after a “diligent search for records...no records 
were found.”...
- -
At East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), wastewater director 
Eileen White has been facing a monumental task to “keep the stormwater 
in the stormwater system and the wastewater in the wastewater system,” 
she said.

East Bay MUD is working on repairing its 1,600 miles of leaking pipes 
because when a big storm comes, the storm water can overwhelm the sewer 
pipes.

“We're very fortunate at this treatment plant ... we’re higher than 
(some of the) other wastewater treatment plants in the Bay Area,” said 
White.

Even so, EBMUD’s plans to protect against sea level rise include, as a 
last resort, the construction of a mile and a half long, 4-foot-high 
floodwall at a cost of $140 per linear foot or about $2 million dollars 
in total.

“We're expected to have about 12 to 15 inches of sea level rise by the 
year 2050,” White said. “We've adopted design guidelines so...we make 
sure we raise the electrical equipment up so it won't be impacted by sea 
level rise.”...
- -
“Nobody knows how quickly sea level is going to rise and I think if you 
just look back in the past 10 years, what we thought 10 years ago, where 
we'd be today, we've already blown past that,” said Roche. ..
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/as-sea-level-rise-threat-grows-sf-officials-dont-have-public-plan-to-save-sewers/2554470/



[opportunistic disinformation warfare]
*The far right is weaponizing climate change to argue against immigration*
The right-wing solution to environmental problems: more borders and 
exclusion.
By Jariel Arvin  Jun 3, 2021
- -
Some advocates are worried that the Arizona case, which uses climate 
change as a weapon against immigrants, communities of color, and poor 
people, could become a more common means of attack for the right.

This idea has deep roots in right-wing environmentalism. But it also has 
disturbing echoes of a far-right ideology known as “ecofascism.”

Ecofascism refers to “groups and ideologies that offer authoritarian, 
hierarchical, and racist analyses and solutions to environmental 
problems,” Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social 
Ecology, told me.

The solution to those problems, ecofascists believe, is “the same as the 
right’s answers to many other issues: more walls, more borders, more 
exclusion, and more justification of hierarchy and elite rule,” said 
Taylor, author of “Alt-Right Ecology: Ecofascism and far-right 
environmentalism in the United States.”...
- -
But although these far-right environmentalists blame immigrants for 
environmental problems, the science indicates otherwise. It’s the 
world’s richest who are driving the climate emergency.

A September 2020 report by Oxfam found that from 1990 to 2015 — a 
critical 25-year period during which humans doubled the amount of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere — the wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s 
population accounted for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 
3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity...
- -
To recognize [and counter] ecofascism requires understanding the tropes 
and the longer history of environmentalism’s racist, classist, and 
sexist components. The environmental movement must offer an articulation 
of environmental concerns that is emancipatory and social and doesn’t 
fall into the traps it has fallen into in the past. Avoiding those 
mistakes means having a bit of sensitivity and understanding that ideas 
can point us in better and worse directions politically.

This is why I’ve argued for a social ecology — not just looking at 
numbers and population growth but looking at how different groups and 
systems are disproportionately to blame and face disproportionate 
impacts. This is largely the kind of work we do at the Institute for 
Social Ecology, offering democratic and emancipatory answers to 
environmental and social problems
https://www.vox.com/22456663/arizona-environment-immigration-climate-change-right-wing



[looking ahead]
*Climate crisis to shrink G7 economies twice as much as Covid-19, says 
research*
G7 countries will lose $5tn a year by 2050 if temperatures rise by 2.6C..
- -
The G7 countries – the world’s biggest industrialised economies – will 
lose 8.5% of GDP a year, or nearly $5tn wiped off their economies, 
within 30 years if temperatures rise by 2.6C, as they are likely to on 
the basis of government pledges and policies around the world, according 
to research from Oxfam and the Swiss Re Institute...
- -
The leaders of the G7 countries – the UK, the US, Japan, Canada, France, 
Germany, Italy – and the EU will meet in Cornwall on Friday to discuss 
the global economy, Covid-19 vaccines, taxes on business, and the 
climate crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/07/climate-crisis-to-shrink-g7-economies-twice-as-much-as-covid-19-says-research

- -

[Report from Swiss Re]
*The economics of climate change: **no action not an option*
https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:e73ee7c3-7f83-4c17-a2b8-8ef23a8d3312/swiss-re-institute-expertise-publication-economics-of-climate-change.pdf



[Washington State]
*Wildfire season 2021: What to expect this summer*
Oregon, and much of the Pacific Northwest, is heading into fire season 
very dry.

    So just how dry has it been? In March we only saw 1.55 inches of
    rain, April was the driest on record with .39 inches of rain. In
    May, it was .58 inches of rain. Those three months combined add up
    to about 2.50 inches of rain. In a normal spring we should get over
    nine inches of rain during those three months. Now, there is a lot
    of concern heading into summer.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/wildfire/wildfire-season-2021-what-to-expect/283-8171052a-4246-4e26-8cc2-20201e01cad8



[Huffington Post]
*David Attenborough Says Climate Change Is A ‘Crime’ Humanity Has 
Inflicted On The Planet*
The documentarian reiterated his grief that society has destroyed large 
swaths of the natural world, but said humanity is “not beyond redemption.”
In his book and documentary, Attenborough pointed to existing technology 
that could help greatly alleviate the threat of climate change, 
primarily an immediate shift away from fossil fuels and an effort to 
“rewild” large tracts of the planet, giving the natural world time to 
recover.

The threat, he concluded, has grown so large as to be beyond the burden 
of any one nation.

“I would say that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and 
look for an international ambition of survival,” he said. He later 
added: “What good does it do to say, “Oh, to hell with it, I don’t 
care.’ You can’t say that. Not if … you love your children. Not if you 
love the rest of human― how can you say that?”
- -
In his book and documentary, Attenborough pointed to existing technology 
that could help greatly alleviate the threat of climate change, 
primarily an immediate shift away from fossil fuels and an effort to 
“rewild” large tracts of the planet, giving the natural world time to 
recover.

The threat, he concluded, has grown so large as to be beyond the burden 
of any one nation.

“I would say that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and 
look for an international ambition of survival,” he said. He later 
added: “What good does it do to say, “Oh, to hell with it, I don’t 
care.’ You can’t say that. Not if … you love your children. Not if you 
love the rest of human― how can you say that?”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/david-attenbourough-climate-change-crime_n_60bd88c7e4b0882193c5e7b7


[wake up, guys]
*Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women*
In disaster patriarchy, women lose their safety, their economic power, 
their autonomy, their education, and they are pushed on to the 
frontlines, unprotected, to be sacrificed.

As Covid-19 has swept the world there has been an explosion of violence 
against women, and a full-blown assault on their rights. It’s time to 
fight back against a system that allows women to be sacrificed, erased 
and violated
V (formerly Eve Ensler) - 1 Jun 2021
Covid has unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my 
lifetime. While watching this happen, I have started to think we are 
witnessing an outbreak of disaster patriarchy.

Naomi Klein was the first to identify “disaster capitalism”, when 
capitalists use a disaster to impose measures they couldn’t possibly get 
away with in normal times, generating more profit for themselves. 
Disaster patriarchy is a parallel and complementary process, where men 
exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance, and rapidly erase 
hard-earned women’s rights. All over the world, patriarchy has taken 
full advantage of the virus to reclaim power – on the one hand, 
escalating the danger and violence to women, and on the other, stepping 
in as their supposed controller and protector...
- -
The feminist author Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986: “The system of 
patriarchy in a historic construct has a beginning and it will have an 
end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course. It no longer serves 
the needs of men and women, and its intractable linkage to militarism, 
hierarchy and racism has threatened the very existence of life on Earth.”

As powerful as patriarchy is, it’s just a story. As the post-pandemic 
era unfolds, can we imagine another system, one that is not based on 
hierarchy, violence, domination, colonialisation and occupation? Do we 
see the connection between the devaluing, harming and oppression of all 
women and the destruction of the Earth itself? What if we lived as if we 
were kin? What if we treated each person as sacred and essential to the 
unfolding story of humanity?

What if rather than exploiting, dominating and hurting women and girls 
during a crisis, we designed a world that valued them, educated them, 
paid them, listened to them, cared for them and centred them?
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/01/disaster-patriarchy-how-the-pandemic-has-unleashed-a-war-on-women

- -

[this article is 14 years old]
*Disaster capitalism: how to make money out of misery*
Naomi Klein
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/aug/30/comment.hurricanekatrina 




[Deep dive into psychology of Earnest Becker]
*Sheldon Solomon at Town Hall Seattle*
Feb 4, 2016
ernestbecker
Sheldon Solomon speaks on Terror Management Theory, Ernest Becker, and 
his new book, "The Worm at the Core."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS0mwd9cR24




[The news archive - historic debate between two esteemed scientists]
*On this day in the history of global warming June 8, 1990*
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts a global-warming debate 
between climate scientist Stephen Schneider and climate denier Dick 
Lindzen. Reporting on the debate the next day, the Boston Globe notes:

"A long-anticipated showdown at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology yesterday between two prominent voices in the global-warming 
debate brought little agreement about the reliability of current 
predictions for the rate and magnitude of climate change. But despite 
the seriousness of the topic, the event did provide a theatrical and 
sometimes humorous presentation of the arguments on either side.

"Underscoring the range of scientific opinion on the issue, the 
organizers put MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen on one side and climate 
researcher Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric 
Research on the other side of a table divided down the middle. 
Schneider, who believes there is a better-than-even chance of 
'unprecedentedly fast climate change' in the next century, sat at the 
red end in front of a palm tree, while Lindzen, one the most vocal 
skeptics, commanded the blue extreme before a scraggly spruce. The 
moderator straddled the border.

"These models are made up of equations that are meant to represent the 
important physical processes -- such as motion and heat transport in the 
atmosphere -- that work together to create weather and climate. Based on 
the work of five climate modeling teams in the United States and Britain 
and forecasts of energy use, scientists have projected that the earth's 
average temperature will rise between 3 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the 
middle of the next century. While such a temperature rise might not 
sound like much, climate researchers say that such a sharp rise in 
global temperature in such a short time almost certainly would cause 
major shifts in climate."

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8177663.html [dead site I am unable to 
find a video or audio record of this event]

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