[TheClimate.Vote] March 5, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Mar 5 10:07:09 EST 2021 

/*March 5, 2021*/

[Explanation by amusing cartoon - Australia]
*Eight teenagers and a literal nun are taking on environment minister 
Sussan Ley*
First Dog on the Moon
They are trying to establish the federal government has a ‘duty of care’ 
in protecting future generations from the climateaggedon
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/05/eight-teenagers-and-a-literal-nun-are-taking-on-environment-minister-sussan-ley

- -

[The Guardian March 1, 2021]
*'A duty of care': Australian teenagers take their climate crisis plea 
to court*
Anj Sharma, 16, and her team hope to force change they say is not coming 
quickly enough from government

Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun head to an Australian court on 
Tuesday to launch what they hope will prove to be a landmark case – one 
that establishes the federal government’s duty of care in protecting 
future generations from a worsening climate crisis.

If successful, the people behind the class action believe it may set a 
precedent that stops the government approving new fossil fuel projects.

As with any novel legal argument, its chances of success are unclear, 
but the case is not happening in isolation.
It is one of a number of climate-related litigation cases expected 
before Australian courts and tribunals in the months ahead as lawyers 
and activists aim to use the law to force change they say is not coming 
quickly enough from Canberra or, in many cases, state governments.

The lead applicant of the case in the federal court in Melbourne this 
week is Anj Sharma, a 16-year-old student...
- -
The teenagers and their legal team argue the federal environment 
minister, Sussan Ley, would be breaching a common law duty of care to 
protect younger people against future harm if she used her powers under 
national environment laws to allow the mine extension to go ahead.

Solicitors at Equity Generation Lawyers, a Melbourne firm, had been 
working on the case and through the climate strike movement were 
connected with eight teenage activists who would join it and be its 
face. They are spread across four states, but most live in Sydney...
- -
The climate legal cases before Australian courts can be loosely divided 
into two categories – those that aim to stop or reverse planning 
approval of fossil fuel developments through traditional legal means, 
and those that are attempting to break new ground.

The latter group includes cases arguing the government has a duty of 
care, made on human rights grounds, and focused on the principle of 
carbon budgets, which aim to stop developments on the ground they would 
push the country beyond what it can mathematically emit if the world is 
to meet the goals of the Paris agreement...
- -
Morris says climate litigation based on the idea the government has a 
role to play in protecting people from climate catastrophe is only going 
to grow. He compares it to the rising push against the tobacco industry 
as the health ramifications became undeniable.

“Ten years ago, these sorts of cases seemed wild. People would have 
thought ‘how can you possibly have a case like that’,” he says. “Now, I 
think it’s going to become increasingly normal.”
more at - 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/02/a-duty-of-care-australian-teenagers-take-their-climate-crisis-plea-to-court



[NYT excellent, well-informed podcast]
*How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisi‪s‬*
The Ezra Klein Show
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-leah-stokes-david-wallace-wells.html
or play from 
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000510744256



[Physics actually]
*Humans, not nature, are the cause of changes in Atlantic hurricane 
cycles, new study finds*
BY JEFF BERARDELLI
MARCH 4, 2021
It's well known in science that for more than a century hurricane 
activity in the Atlantic Ocean has oscillated between active and 
inactive periods, each lasting a few decades. For the past couple of 
decades, meteorologists and climate scientists have believed that this 
ebb and flow was due to a natural warming and cooling cycle built into 
the climate system called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO.

The term was coined in the year 2000 by world-renowned climate scientist 
Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn 
State University and author of the new book "The New Climate War." The 
concept of the AMO has become ubiquitous in explanations and forecasts 
of active or inactive hurricane seasons...
- -
Hurricanes have also gotten stronger. According to research from NOAA 
climate scientist Dr. James Kossin, in the Atlantic, there's about twice 
the chance that a hurricane will be at major hurricane intensity 
(Category 3, 4 or 5), rather than a weaker Category 1 or 2, compared to 
the chances four decades ago.

In fact, this past fall, two very late-season Category 4 hurricanes hit 
Central America back to back, displacing over 500,000 people and 
triggering a surge of climate-related migration...
- -
Tropical systems also seem to be forming earlier in the season, with six 
preseason storms in the last five years. This has recently prompted the 
World Meteorological Organization to contemplate starting the Atlantic 
hurricane season earlier, on May 15th rather than June 1st. Also, the 
National Hurricane Center just announced it will start releasing its 
routine Atlantic tropical outlooks earlier, on May 15th rather than June 
1st...
- -
In other words, Trenberth feels many climate models are just not up to 
the task of simulating the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and, in 
addition, it is important to validate the ability of the models used in 
the research. Therefore, although the role of factors external to the 
climate system, such as volcanic eruptions, may well have been 
underestimated, Trenberth feels using today's climate models to disprove 
the existence of the AMO is premature.

With that said, Trenberth does agree that variability from aerosols and 
greenhouse gases have played at least some role in sea surface 
temperature changes and therefore changes in hurricane activity in the 
North Atlantic.

So, while there may not be complete consensus across science about 
whether human activity explains some or all of the modern cycles of 
hurricane activity in the North Atlantic, Mann's research does lend 
significant evidence that the choices made by humankind have influenced 
our climate system in general, and hurricanes in particular.

And if it is clear that our choices have significantly shaped our 
hurricane past, that also means our choices can shape our hurricane future.

"There is now great URGENCY in acting on the climate crisis, but there 
is also AGENCY," Mann said–– in an email. "If we cease adding carbon 
pollution to the atmosphere, state of the art climate models tell us 
that the surface warming (which appears tied to more destructive 
hurricanes) stabilizes within a few years. We can prevent these impacts 
from getting worse if we act now."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-atlantic-hurricane-cycles/



[unhappy motoring]
*California's Pacific Coast Highway is falling into the ocean. Is this 
the end of the road for one of America's most scenic drives?*
Joel Shannon
Doyle Rice
USA TODAY
Soaring mountains on one side of the road and the Pacific Ocean on the 
other: It was 1956 and Gary Griggs was experiencing California State 
Route 1 for the first time.

He was a child, but in the following decades he would drive this scenic 
stretch of road, called the Pacific Coast Highway, dozens of times. He'd 
also learn how fragile it is.

In 2017, Griggs consulted on a major repair to the highway as an erosion 
expert. Now, he says the iconic road's days may be numbered – at least 
in its current form.

Future generations may say “it was great while it lasted,” the 
University of California, Santa Cruz professor predicted.

Frequent damage has long plagued the PCH. Most recently, in January, yet 
another chunk fell into the ocean following intense rainstorms, which 
created a debris flow that overwhelmed water drains more than 100 miles 
south of San Francisco...
- -
"There's a lot of evidence that atmospheric rivers will become more 
intense as the climate warms," Swain said. While we may not see more 
atmospheric rivers overall, the ones that cause problems will become 
stronger, and there will be more major storms, he said.

Made visible by clouds, the ribbons of water vapor known as atmospheric 
rivers extend thousands of miles from the tropics to the western U.S. 
They provide the fuel for the massive rain, snowstorms and subsequent 
floods along the U.S. West Coast.

These "rivers in the sky" are responsible for up to 65% of the western 
USA's extreme rain and snow events, a 2017 study said. Though beneficial 
for water supplies, these events can wreak havoc on travel, trigger 
deadly mudslides and cause catastrophic damage to life and property, the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

One well-known nickname for an atmospheric river is the "Pineapple 
Express," which occurs when the source of the moisture is near Hawaii.

Swain said that it's the powerful atmospheric river storms that have 
historically caused problems with the Pacific Coast Highway, which "is 
not in a very geologically stable position even in the best of times."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/03/pch-climate-change-california-big-sur-highway-1/4560256001/



[smart energy, wise investment, good news, and a disinformation warning]
*How Wind Turbines Fund Better Schools*
Mar 4, 2021
greenmanbucket
Wind turbines are not only the lowest cost source of new electrical 
generation, they provide enormous benefits to the communities that host 
them, in the form of lease payments to landowners, and tax payments to 
local townships, cities, and counties.
This video describes some of those benefits to wind communities in the 
upper Midwest, and the efforts of some fossil fuel lobbying groups to 
block funding for our communities, and our kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWiQfSlLnH8

- -

[podcast - utility disinformation ]
*Episode 9: The ‘Darth Vader’ of Electric Utilities*
In 2013, a series of attack ads blitzed television sets across Arizona. 
They warned of a dire threat to senior citizens. Who was the villain? 
Solar energy.

These ads came from front groups funded by Arizona Public Service, the 
state’s largest utility. It was part of a years-long fight against 
rooftop solar.

But APS isn’t alone. It’s a prime example of how monopoly utilities 
abuse their power to influence regulatory decisions and slow 
clean-energy progress.
https://www.degreespod.com/episodes/episode-09

- -

[it's because of years of opinion manipulation]
*Report: Nobody talks about ‘global warming’ anymore*
By Kate Yoder on Mar 4, 2021
A new report shows how differently people talk about climate change from 
how they did 10 years ago. Researchers at BayWa r.e., a German renewable 
energy company, scoured 1.3 trillion tweets, Reddit posts, news 
articles, and other publicly available sources, along with Google search 
data. They found that searches for global warming, once the most common 
phrase for our overheating planet, are down 73 percent since 2010. The 
older expression is simply going out of fashion. Climate change began to 
outpace global warming around 2015, and the newly popular climate crisis 
might someday catch up if current trends continue. It’s another sign, 
researchers say, that the public is beginning to grasp the magnitude of 
the problem.
- -
“Global warming can potentially be confusing for people, because while 
the warming happens at a global level, there’s obviously local extreme 
weather dynamics that don’t always correlate with warming,” said Emma 
Frances Bloomfield, an assistant professor of communication at the 
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She pointed to the freak winter storm 
in Texas last month: Some scientists say that warming patterns in the 
Arctic are sending frigid polar air south more often, leading to periods 
of extreme cold in parts of the United States.

Climate change itself has been criticized for sounding too neutral — 
after all, change is often a good thing. Since 2019, activists and media 
organizations like the Guardian have been amping up the sense of gravity 
around the issue, switching up the lingo with climate crisis, climate 
emergency, climate breakdown, climate disruption, and global heating.

BayWa r.e. had a hunch that this more dramatic vocabulary was catching 
on. “Climate change felt like it got real, and people were talking about 
it in a different way, becoming more urgent,” said Mark Cooper, the 
company’s head of global communications.* “So we thought, well, is that 
actually the case?”...
- -
Although climate change might not be consuming our conversation as much 
as it was in 2019, Bloomfield is encouraged by the connections people 
are making between the pandemic and the planetary crisis. The report 
found that the most popular news articles about climate change last year 
linked it with the pandemic — showing how carbon emissions dipped during 
the lockdowns last year, for instance, or how preserving forests could 
help stop the next pandemic.
https://grist.org/climate/report-nobody-talks-about-global-warming-anymore/

- -

[source material - German researchers]
*The Decade That Matters**
**Climate conversations: the last decade*
This report represents ten years of digital data, encapsulating 1.3 
trillion public documents in an effort to survey the conversational 
landscape around climate change and renewable energy.

The result is an exploration of how our online conversations and 
publications belie, and can predict, an ever-shifting landscape in 
public perception and environmental action – on an individual, 
corporate, national and global level...
- -
In fact, the overall volume of conversations around ‘climate change’ 
grew by 110% in 2019 when compared to 2018 (from 18 million mentions to 
38 million mentions), with the term itself generating an average of 3.16 
million global monthly mentions across blogs, forums, social networks 
and news sites in 2019. By way of a benchmark, mentions in online 
conversations around US President Donald Trump – a mainstay topic for 
social media over the past five years – increased from 355 million to 
371 million in that same timeframe, a 4.5% increase only.

What is encouraging, however, is that we also see growth in discussion 
across the breadth of the internet around more niche areas of the 
conversation – showing us that people are thinking practically. Terms 
like ‘green energy supplier’ and ‘Net Zero emissions’ have trended 
upwards throughout the past decade, and specifically in the last few years.

Carbon-related conversations (zero, neutral, etc.) are also growing – up 
133% in 2019 compared to 2018, and up a further 26% in 2020.
more at - 
https://www.baywa-re.com/en/rethink-energy/explore-the-decade-that-matters/social/climate-conversations/#topic-evolution



[Quick overview of current visual data exploration -  an armchair video 
tour of the ocean floor]
*How Ocean Bathymetry Allowed Formation of a Completely Freshwater 
Arctic Twice in Past 150,000 Years*
Mar 3, 2021
Paul Beckwith
The entire Arctic Ocean became a fresh water ocean during the coldest 
long duration ice ages (60,000 years ago to 70,000 years ago; 130,000 to 
150,000 years ago) underneath the thick sea-ice and expansive ice 
shelves (up to 900 meters thick) extending far out from the coastlines.

In order to understand how this was possible, you need to know that the 
global sea level was 130 meters lower since vast amounts of water from 
the ocean were frozen into the glaciers on land.

You also need to know the bathymetry of the Arctic. With the greatly 
lower sea levels, the Bering Strait and Canadian Archipelago regions 
were dry land, so there was no channel between the Arctic Ocean and the 
Pacific Ocean. On the Atlantic side, tracing a line from Greenland to 
northern Scotland, most of the passages were blocked due to lower sea 
level and the fact that 90% of the thick ice shelves were below water. 
These two facts choked off the channels connecting the Arctic Ocean to 
the Atlantic Ocean. Since fresh water continuously entered the Arctic 
Ocean from northern rivers, rainfall, snow and ice melt, etc. the 
heavier salty water was forced out of the Atlantic Ocean.

To understand the bathymetry of the Arctic Ocean that allowed this to 
happen, I give you the tools to look for yourself.

Most people know about Google Earth, but did you know that you can 
Google Google Earth Ocean bathymetry and zip around the planet seeing 
how deep the water is everywhere. I demonstrate this tool in my video, 
and be sure to try it out for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZO0eM3FhDk


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 5, 2009 *

Rep. John Larson (D-CT) introduces the "America's Energy Security Trust 
Fund Act," a bill that would tax carbon emissions to encourage 
investment in clean energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/politics/07carbon.html?_r=0


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