[✔️] June 17, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Jun 17 10:21:30 EDT 2021
/*June 17, 2021*/
[the NYT now uses both terms - global warming and climate change]
*Climate Change Batters the West Before Summer Even Begins*
Global warming has been fueling disasters in the region for years. Now,
an early heat wave and severe drought are threatening lives and leaving
water in perilously short supply...
- -
“We’re still a long way out from the peak of the wildfire season and the
peak of the dry season,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the
University of California, Los Angeles. “Things are likely to get worse
before they get better.”
Global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has been heating
up and drying out the American West for years. Now the region is
broiling under a combination of a drought that is the worst in two
decades and a record-breaking heat wave...
- -
“The Colorado River basin is ground zero for climate-change impacts on
water supplies in the U.S.,” said Kevin Moran at the Environmental
Defense Fund. “We have to plan for the river that climate scientists
tell us we’re probably going to have, not the one we want.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/climate/wildfires-drought-climate-change-west-coast.html
- -
[high heat means shorter fuse]
*Southwest heat wave intensifies, breaks records and worsens drought*
https://www.axios.com/southwest-heat-wave-intensifies-records-drought-126078e5-b23b-464f-9d9c-665533d13ee1.html
- -
[clearly understood]
*The West has all the ingredients for another terrible wildfire season*
Extreme heat and extreme drought are combining to drive up fire risks.
But blazes aren’t inevitable.
By Umair Irfan - Jun 16, 2021
Summer has not officially started yet, but wildfire season has already
arrived in the US. Now an intense heat wave coupled with extreme drought
is threatening to make things worse.
Large wildfires have already burned 981,000 acres this year to date,
more than the 766,000 acres burned by the same time last year, according
to the National Interagency Fire Center.
In Arizona, more than 208,000 acres have burned, sending smoke into
Colorado. The 123,000-acre Telegraph Fire is now in Arizona’s top 10
largest fires in history.
In Utah, blazes have charred more than 25,000 acres, with a new fire
ignited every day for three weeks. California has seen a fourfold
increase in year-to-date area burned compared to 2020.
It’s poised to get worse as summer officially begins. While 2021 may not
beat the record-setting 2020 season, experts say it will be severe.
“It’s probably going to be above-average for sure, but it’s not going to
be off-the-charts,” said Craig Clements, director of the Wildfire
Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State University...
- -
Over time, it’s possible to reduce the destructiveness of wildfires —
for example through controlled burns, regular thinning of trees and
brush that build up, and relocating homes and businesses away from
high-risk areas. But the current situation developed over more than a
century of poor planning, and it won’t be fixed overnight. So wildfires
in the West are likely to get worse before they get better.
https://www.vox.com/22527757/wildfires-heat-wave-drought-california-arizona-utah-colorado-climate
[Unconscious cooperation]
*How the U.S. Made Progress on Climate Change Without Ever Passing a Bill*
A ‘green vortex’ is saving America’s climate future.
By Robinson Meyer...
Yes...sigh—America knows what it needs to do: Pass a carbon fee or tax,
some kind of policy that nudges people to reduce their use of fossil
fuels. Yet America refuses. And so the 2010s, once greeted as a “new
era” for climate action, now seem unexceptional, the third decade in a
row that the United States understood the dangers of climate change but
failed to act. Meanwhile the seas rose, wildfires raged, and the Earth
saw its hottest 10 years on record.
You have probably heard this tale before; it is a popular and undeniably
accurate read of recent history. It has just one flaw: America is
decarbonizing anyway.
- -
What gives? America is supposed to be doing nothing right. Yet we’re
making progress anyway. How? Why?
A group of scholars, engineers, and economists may have an answer. Over
the past few years, this group has puzzled together a powerful thesis
that explains why America and the world are decarbonizing—and how they
can get better at it. Decarbonization isn’t best accomplished by fiat,
they argue, but by feedback loop; it proceeds by a self-accelerating
process that I have called “the green vortex.” The green vortex
describes how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work
together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate
coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has
also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the
cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the
Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.
- -
In the American economy, she told me, two such industries tower above
the rest: automakers and electric utilities. Both sell a product that
contributes to climate change today but does not need to. Ninety-eight
percent of light-duty vehicles sold in the United States in 2020 burned
gasoline, but automakers could—with some capital investment and
reorganizing—sell electric cars instead.
The green vortex also makes Biden’s climate and infrastructure agenda,
the American Jobs Plan, fit into place. Large swaths of Biden’s plan,
which has been criticized for a lack of focus and unnecessary
constraints, are devoted to beefing up industries. This choice makes
more sense in light of the green vortex. It focuses much of its
attention on industries that are crucial to decarbonization but that
remain in their early stages. So it spends, for instance, $174 billion
on “winning” the global EV market, chiefly by building “domestic supply
chains” for electric vehicles and helping consumers buy specifically
American-made vehicles.
The Biden plan spends even more time on industries that don’t yet have a
plan to go zero-carbon. So it promises to invest in 15 industrial-scale
demonstration projects to produce green hydrogen, and to create another
10 factories that will pioneer new ways to make zero-carbon steel,
cement, and chemicals. And the plan promises that the federal government
will buy such zero-carbon products to help fledgling firms...
- -
Could a dynamic like the one these policy wonks and academics describe
really save the world? According to Kelsey, it already has—just not for
climate change. The green vortex helped fix the fraying ozone layer in
the 1980s, she argues, when it allowed for the global phaseout of
ozone-depleting chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. “The most
important thing, the underreported thing, is that the same companies
that made the polluting CFCs also made the substitute for CFCs,” she said.
When major American chemical companies realized they could sell those
new chemicals, called hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, to the same customers
who once bought their CFCs, they lobbied a recalcitrant Reagan
administration to support a global ozone pact. The 1987 Montreal
Protocol, which phased out use of CFCs, passed soon afterward. Then,
when demand for HFCs wasn’t as robust as those companies had projected,
they pushed the U.S. and the world to toughen the Montreal Protocol. The
agreement was tightened multiple times in the ’90s and made stricter
again in 2016
And that vortex has continued forward on its own strength. In the past
decade, it has become clear that although HFCs do not deplete the ozone
layer, they do ravage the climate, trapping heat thousands of times more
effectively than carbon dioxide. (Humanity, you might say, leapt from
the atmospheric frying pan into the climatological deep-fat fryer.) Yet
again, the U.S. has moved swiftly to address this problem. Last year,
bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to keep phasing out the
chemicals over the next 15 years, which will prevent the equivalent of
900 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than Germany’s annual
emissions. President Trump signed the phaseout, one of the most
substantial pieces of climate policy in American history, into law on
December 27. Why did Trump, no climate fan, approve the measure? Perhaps
because it created another new market for those same chemical companies
to sell a new type of replacement. Trump was, in other words, trapped in
the green vortex. In the next decade, we’ll find out if that feedback
loop can work the same for decarbonization more broadly—and whether
American policy makers can learn not just to live in the green vortex,
but to manipulate it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/climate-change-green-vortex-america/619228/
[always use fresh batteries]
*Why Electric Planes are Inevitably Coming*
Jun 16, 2021
Wendover Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH4b3sAs-l8
[Battle for influence]
*Tailoring climate change messaging for conservatives could shift
understanding of crisis: Study*
Researchers studied how to make climate change communication more
persuasive.
The key to easing partisanship on the topic of global warming may be in
the way the messages are conveyed, according to new research.
Tailoring online messaging and advertising toward Republican voters
could shift their views on climate change, a new study published Monday
in Nature Climate Change suggests...
As of 2020, 73% of Americans believed that global warming was happening,
and 62% think that it was caused by human activities. In 2010, only 57%
of Americans thought that global warming was happening, researchers said.
But, the shift in public opinion on climate change has largely been
driven by Democrats. In previous research, when asked how high of a
priority global warming should be, just 22% of Republicans said it
should be a "high" or "very high" priority, compared to 83% of
Democrats, according to the study...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tailoring-climate-change-messaging-conservatives-shift-understanding-crisis/story
- -
[Source = Nature Climate Change]
Published: 14 June 2021
*Shifting Republican views on climate change through targeted advertising*
Matthew H. Goldberg, Abel Gustafson, Seth A. Rosenthal & Anthony
Leiserowitz
Nature Climate Change (2021)
Abstract
It is essential to increase public understanding of the existence,
causes and harms of climate change. In the United States,
Republicans are one important audience, as the bipartisan support
needed for ambitious and durable climate policy is currently
lacking. An important limitation of most climate change message
testing is that it is usually based on controlled experiments, which
may or may not be equally effective in the real world. Here we
report the effects of a one-month advertising campaign field
experiment (N = 1,600) that deployed videos about the reality and
risks of climate change to people in two competitive congressional
districts (Missouri-02 and Georgia-07). The videos were designed to
appeal to Republicans and were targeted to this audience via online
advertisements. The study finds that, within the targeted
congressional districts, the campaign increased Republicans’
understanding of the existence, causes and harms of climate change
by several percentage points.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01070-1
[yes, they are. Older study should be remembered]
*Are Earthquakes Linked To Drought?*
Monday, August 25, 2014
By Amita Sharma, Patty Lane, Tom Fudge
The loss of an estimated 63 trillion gallons of water in West, most of
it groundwater, was reported in a study done by researchers at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography. [2014] The loss of the water has
caused the ground to actually rise more than a half-inch in California's
mountains...
video https://youtu.be/x1oKf6vK1zc
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/aug/25/landrise-connected-drought-linked-earthqukes/
[discussion of the darkest places]
*Civilization might collapse at any moment | Sheldon Solomon and Lex
Fridman*
Aug 21, 2020
Lex Clips
Full episode with Sheldon Solomon (Aug 2020):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKyN...
Clips channel (Lex Clips): https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Main channel (Lex Fridman): https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3HygCi20Y
- -
[Four year old anger and despair]
*Why everything will collapse*
Dec 25, 2017
The 4th monkey
If you sense that the future looks bleak, that there is little chance
that this whole mess will end in joy and good humor, that there is a
tiny chance that we will escape a systemic collapse of the
thermo-industrial civilization, you are not far from reality. In this
video, based on the available data, we try to explain why we think the
situation is inextricable and that a systemic collapse is now inevitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8
- -
[deserves calm assessment]
*Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?*
Mar 19, 2013
Macquarie University
"For the first time an array of interconnected problems is moving a
global civilization toward collapse. Driven by increasing overpopulation
and over consumption by the rich, these dilemmas include climate
disruption, loss of ecosystem services, global poisoning, depletion of
resources (especially soils and groundwater), and the threat of vast
famines, epidemics and resource wars. Only a concerted effort to reduce
the scale of society and focus much more attention on agriculture and
equity seems likely to much improve the human prospect. Growth is the
disease; sustainability is attainable, but only with unprecedented
rethinking, effort, and cooperation."
This seminar consists of a short presentation given by Professor Paul
Ehrlich based on his recent paper Can a collapse of global civilization
be avoided? and will be followed by an extended interactive Q&A session
with the audience.
Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, and
President, Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. His
research interests are in the ecology and evolution of natural
populations of butterflies, reef fishes, birds and human beings.
Anne Ehrlich is a Senior Research Scientist in Biology at Stanford and
focuses her research on policy issues related to the environment. She
has carried out research and coauthored many technical articles in
population biology. She also has written extensively on issues of public
concern such as population control, environmental protection, and
environmental consequences of nuclear war and is coauthor of ten books.
http://www.mq.edu.au/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtaGNQqUWo0
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming June 17, 2011*
June 17, 2011: Syndicated columnist Steve Chapman notes that at some
point, Republicans will have to knock it off with climate-change denial
and propose solutions to the problem:
"Conservatives fear liberals will use climate change to justify
heavy-handed intrusive regulation and wasteful subsidies, and they
are right to worry. But that’s no excuse for pretending global
warming is a myth or refusing to do anything about it. It’s an
argument for devising cost-effective, market-based remedies that
minimize bureaucratic control.
"If today’s Republican attitude had prevailed four decades ago,
Americans would not have such vital measures as the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act. Then, many people worried that
environmentalism would strangle economic growth and personal
freedom. But both have survived and even flourished.
"Conservatives once understood that corporations are not entitled to
foul the environment, any more than individuals have the right to
dump garbage in the street. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP
presidential nominee, wrote, 'When pollution is found, it should be
halted at the source, even if this requires stringent government
action.'"
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20110617-steve-chapman-republicans-must-return-to-pro-environmental-roots-.ece
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