[TheClimate.Vote] March 27, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 27, 2021*/

[big promotion for science]
*A Biden Administration Strategy: Send In the Scientists*
Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate scientist, will fill a newly created 
job of climate adviser to NASA, in a prominent example of Biden’s pledge 
to focus on climate policy.
- -
Today Dr. Schmidt is one of the most prominent scientists warning the 
world about the risks of a warming world. Recently he was named to a 
newly created position as senior climate adviser to NASA, a job that 
comes with the challenge of bringing NASA’s climate science to the 
public and helping figure out how to apply it to saving the planet.

Dr. Schmidt, who since 2014 had headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for 
Space Studies, will be working with an administration that is making the 
fight against climate change one of its priorities. The Biden team is 
adding positions throughout the government for policymakers and experts 
like Dr. Schmidt who understand the threats facing our planet.

“Climate change is not only an environmental issue that belongs to the 
E.P.A., it’s not only a science issue that belongs to NASA and NOAA,” 
said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. 
“Climate change is an everything issue,” she said, and “it needs to be 
considered by every single federal agency.”
- -
“Climate change changes what you need to worry about,” he said, and the 
space agency can help the nation, and the world, figure out what we all 
need to know. That includes things like “How do we accelerate the 
information that you need to build better defenses against coastal 
flooding?” and “What do we really understand about intensifying 
precipitation — How do we predict that going forward?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/climate/gavin-schmidt-climate-change-nasa.html#commentsContainer



[Big 3]

*Biden invites Russia, China to first global climate talks*
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is including rivals Vladimir Putin 
of Russia and Xi Jinping of China among the invitees to the first big 
climate talks of his administration, an event the U.S. hopes will help 
shape, speed up and deepen global efforts to cut climate-wrecking fossil 
fuel pollution, administration officials told The Associated Press.

The president is seeking to revive a U.S.-convened forum of the world’s 
major economies on climate that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both 
used and Donald Trump let languish. Leaders of some of the world’s top 
climate-change sufferers, do-gooders and backsliders round out the rest 
of the 40 invitations being delivered Friday. It will be held virtually 
April 22 and 23...
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-climate-climate-change-xi-jinping-1135c0a543afdbb500f0a10498eb5406 



[Kerry]
*Kerry: 'No government is going to solve' climate change*
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 03/26/21
- -
“The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what 
government needs to do is create the framework within which the private 
sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate 
and begin to take the framework that’s been created. ... We need to go 
after this as if we’re really at war.”
- -
“It’s a transition, yes, some people are going to have do things 
differently and begin to shift expenditure, shift priority and 
infrastructure transition and so forth,” he said. “But in all of that, 
none of that happens without jobs ... without people working, whether 
it’s pipefitters, electricians, construction workers across the board.”

Kerry predicted a “race to the new technology, whether it’s direct-air 
capture or better and more affordable storage, more effective geothermal 
... there are technology opportunities that are going to create enormous 
wealthy for those that are venturesome and go out and chase those gold 
pots.”

The former secretary of State added that infrastructure and grid 
modernization “is critical to our remaining a powerful force, to 
jump-starting our economy post-COVID.”

Kerry emphasized the need to “reassert American leadership” on climate, 
noting that the U.S. comprises 15 percent of worldwide emissions, while 
“China is about 30 percent and when you add the [European Union] you’re 
well over 50 percent.”...
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/545125-kerry-no-government-is-going-to-solve-climate-change?rl=1



[new leadership]
*'A bold agenda': hopes rise for US climate change reversal as Deb 
Haaland sworn in*
Experts say new interior secretary will renew focus on climate emergency 
and public lands after years of cuts under Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/25/deb-haaland-us-interior-policy-climate-change



[in war, the first task is to define the enemy]
*HOW THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT CAN MOVE FROM ABSTRACTION TO ACTION ON 
CLIMATE CHANGE*
March 26, 2012
- -
Senior defense officials need to translate the abstraction of the 
climate threat into decisions that meaningfully address cascading risks. 
The best way to do that on an accelerated basis is to convene a 
high-level tabletop exercise in order to make an abstract concept like 
climate change seem more concrete. Tabletop exercises have proven 
utility in generating a common picture of the future among leaders to 
inform decisions and highlight tradeoffs. These exercises also highlight 
new perspectives across the defense enterprise that can inform overall 
strategy. Moreover, they are a low-risk learning opportunity for 
participants to understand gaps in existing knowledge and institutional 
capacities.

*Enduring Obstacles*
The two key challenges to climate action at the Defense Department are 
the complexity of accurately modeling future risks and the deteriorated 
state of the department’s strategic foresight capabilities. The 
department will need to translate complex forecasts on the environmental 
impacts of climate change to issues that affect the Department of 
Defense mission set, such as regional conflicts, force readiness, and 
humanitarian and disaster relief at home and abroad.
- -
For more than a decade, the Defense Department has studied how climate 
will affect the viability of military installations and the military’s 
carbon footprint. Climate was elevated as a strategic priority under the 
Obama administration, with detailed mentions in both the 2010 and 2014 
Quadrennial Defense Reviews, the 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, 
and the creation of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for 
Operational Energy. Even during the climate-denial era of the Donald 
Trump administration, some limited progress was made. Despite a National 
Defense Strategy that made no mention of “climate change,” there was 
continued recognition across the Department of Defense that it would 
need to manage the threat to military installations and operational 
readiness posed by the threat. Congress also has been increasingly 
active on the topic, with explicit reference to climate change threats 
in the past three National Defense Authorization Acts and directed 
studies. None of these efforts, however, tackle the sprawling complexity 
of the climate challenge.

Now, the White House is pushing the department to go further by focusing 
on how climate change will affect everything the joint force needs to 
prepare for. The good news for Defense Department leaders is that while 
they may be scrambling to answer the novel guidance they’ve been given, 
important and serious work has been done on this topic for more than a 
decade by the broader policy community. For example, CNA’s 2007 and 2014 
Military Advisory Board — under the direction of former Deputy 
Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) Sherri Goodman — 
identified a range of concrete potential considerations. These included 
accelerating preparations for military operations in the arctic, 
integrating climate impacts into the National Infrastructure Protection 
Plan, and conducting comprehensive assessments of climate impacts on 
mission and operational resilience.

However, climate action in the Defense Department could become mired in 
its bureaucracies’ underperforming strategic foresight process, 
including the fragmented Analytic Agenda and Defense Planning Scenarios 
and its suboptimal use of wargames. This will take some time to fix. 
Embedding considerations of climate change from the 120-day review into 
this process will be an even tougher task. A tabletop exercise (or 
series of exercises) can serve as a bridge while these slower processes 
catch up with an increasingly urgent problem.

*Lessons From Climate Change Tabletop Exercises*
The Defense Department should host a series of tabletop exercises to 
explore implications of climate change for future force readiness, 
contingency operations, and resilience. The series should be designed 
around a single, compelling scenario and ideally run on a repeat basis 
with multiple audiences. However, the first exercise should be optimized 
for the high-level members of the Climate Working Group.

The tabletop exercises would help senior leaders build a common, more 
concrete understanding of how climate challenges will affect the 
Department of Defense and its particular responsibilities within the 
enterprise. For busy leaders coping with multiple issues, a tabletop 
exercise can afford an immersive, uninterrupted learning experience. 
Certainly, it is not meant to substitute for the years of work ahead to 
implement the intent of the Biden administration’s guidance on 
addressing climate change as a national security threat. And it ought to 
be taken in tandem with the ongoing 120-day assessment of climate risks 
as a foundation for the department’s overall climate efforts.

We speak from firsthand experience. The Center for Strategic and 
International Studies used tabletop exercises at its annual Global 
Security Forum this past September. One of the three scenarios 
considered by participants was the effects of runaway climate change 
using the tabletop exercise format. We posited a very challenging future 
scenario of compounding first- and second-order consequences of climate 
change, and asked questions about the interests at stake, the tools the 
United States and its allies and partners had to meet the challenges at 
hand, and how to take actions today that could reduce future risks. The 
tabletop exercise proved immediately useful in helping illuminate future 
uncertainty through structured dialogue without the need to toil 
endlessly in “exactly” forecasting the future.

The “2030 scenario” used at the event — a once-in-a-1,000-year drought 
precipitating shortages in key agricultural commodities and a migration 
crisis on the southern border, with much of the rest of the world 
similarly reeling — helped illustrate, quite vividly, the complexities 
of climate change as a national security threat. It also revealed 
several weaknesses in U.S. government and international coordination 
mechanisms and in existing security paradigms.

The broader benefit from this exercise was its effect on participants’ 
imaginations. Back-casting from a scenario — that is, positing a 
potential future and asking what specific steps would have to be taken 
today to create or avoid that future — helped shift from an 
understanding in the abstract that climate change is a “threat 
multiplier” to understanding how it might strain future force readiness 
for overlapping contingency operations.

The scenario used during the exercise was far from a worst-case 
scenario, yet its deep and broad consequences took several experts by 
surprise. The multidimensional nature of cascading crises was 
particularly challenging for participants to take on all at once. The 
many unprecedented ways in which climate change is likely to affect the 
national security environment and Department of Defense capabilities 
requires imaginative thinking and exercises that push analysts and 
leaders alike out of their comfort zones and frames of reference.

The first clear takeaway from the tabletop was how no single participant 
was an expert in the overlapping and interconnected issues raised by the 
exercise. Challenges of migration, global food security, and border 
security cut across different areas of expertise and made prediction of 
consequences more difficult. Many climate experts have devoted their 
attention to mitigation alone, while few resilience experts were 
sufficiently versed in global food security issues, for example, to be 
able to predict the consequences of a wheat shortage in North America. 
Where the phrase “whole-of-government” is thrown around a lot in climate 
conversations, the exercise painted a vivid portrait of why greater 
bureaucratic collaboration has to be a strategic priority.

Second, in a world of increasingly dire and compounding climate change 
effects, environmental issues shift from being moral concerns in 
developed nations to national security issues with global consequences. 
A drought of Dust Bowl proportions would likely create a humanitarian as 
well an ecological crisis in the United States, and could open windows 
of opportunity for adversaries and non-state actors to “weaponize” 
natural resources like water and agricultural staples like wheat. In our 
scenario, Russia withheld wheat from global markets to drive a wedge 
between U.S. allies, transforming an environmental disaster into a 
geopolitical crisis...
- -
While it may seem hard to believe now, in time climate change may be the 
most formidable and unpredictable adversary the Department of Defense 
has ever faced. U.S. adversaries typically have motivations that can be 
scrutinized and resource limitations that can be exploited. Their 
actions can be deterred. Runaway climate change would be merciless. The 
planet has no regard for borders or conventions or theaters of war. The 
changing climate will affect every aspect of life on Earth, and by 
extension, every facet of America’s strategic operating environment. In 
some instances, it will amplify existing security risks, while in others 
it will force the national security apparatus to consider new risks 
entirely. It will drain resources from military readiness and 
modernization within Defense Department budgets and as tradeoffs are 
made to fund other federal priorities in response to climate change.

Protecting the nation’s interests means proactively building a long-term 
climate action strategy with other branches of government, segments of 
society, and global partners — a theme ably picked up on by the newly 
released Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. It means more 
than hardening assets and bolstering resilience but building strategies 
to prevail in this new and uncertain future. Like many other entities in 
both the public and private sectors, the Department of Defense has been 
thinking about climate change as one item in a long list of global 
challenges, but not as the dominant global trend that will frame all 
other issues. The Biden administration’s early charge to make climate 
change a central priority gives the Department of Defense an opportunity 
to better understand a future that will create compounding stresses and 
challenges affecting its future as much if not more than a rising China.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/how-the-defense-department-can-move-from-climate-change-abstraction-to-action/

- -
[24 page - released by the White House]
*Interim National Security Strategic Guidance*
March 2021

    *Conclusion*
    This moment is an inflection point. We are in the midst of a
    fundamental debate about the
    future direction of our world. To prevail, we must demonstrate that
    democracies can still
    deliver for our people. It will not happen by accident – we have to
    defend our democracy,
    strengthen it and renew it. That means building back better our
    economic foundations.
    Reclaiming our place in international institutions. Lifting up our
    values at home and speaking
    out to defend them around the world. Modernizing our military
    capabilities while leading with
    diplomacy. Revitalizing America’s network of alliances, and the
    partnerships that have made
    the world safer for all of our peoples.
    No nation is better positioned to navigate this future than America.
    Doing so requires us to
    embrace and reclaim our enduring advantages, and to approach the
    world from a position of
    confidence and strength. If we do this, working with our democratic
    partners, we will meet
    every challenge and outpace every challenger. Together, we can and
    will build back better.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf


[Yes, we are moving in an RCP 8.5 world]
*RCP 8.5—A scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions*
Keywan Riahi & Shilpa Rao & Volker Krey &
Cheolhung Cho & Vadim Chirkov & Guenther Fischer &
Georg Kindermann & Nebojsa Nakicenovic & Peter Rafaj
Published online: 13 August 2011

    *Abstract *
    This paper summarizes the main characteristics of the RCP8.5
    scenario. The
    RCP8.5 combines assumptions about high population and relatively
    slow income growth
    with modest rates of technological change and energy intensity
    improvements, leading in
    the long term to high energy demand and GHG emissions in absence of
    climate change
    policies. Compared to the total set of Representative Concentration
    Pathways (RCPs),
    RCP8.5 thus corresponds to the pathway with the highest greenhouse
    gas emissions. Using
    the IIASA Integrated Assessment Framework and the MESSAGE model for the
    development of the RCP8.5, we focus in this paper on two important
    extensions compared
    to earlier scenarios: 1) the development of spatially explicit air
    pollution projections, and 2)
    enhancements in the land-use and land-cover change projections. In
    addition, we explore
    scenario variants that use RCP8.5 as a baseline, and assume
    different degrees of greenhouse
    gas mitigation policies to reduce radiative forcing. Based on our
    modeling framework, we
    find it technically possible to limit forcing from RCP8.5 to lower
    levels comparable to the
    other RCPs (2.6 to 6 W/m2). Our scenario analysis further indicates
    that climate policy induced
    changes of global energy supply and demand may lead to significant
    co-benefits for other
    policy priorities, such as local air pollution

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y.pdf


[Digging back into the internet news archive for important lessons for 
today]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 27, 2007 *

March 27, 2007: In a post on CallingAllWingnuts.com about a recent 
confrontation with Competitive Enterprise Institute honcho Myron Ebell, 
blogger Mike Stark observes:

    By Mike Stark
    *Global Warming? Phooey!*
    03/27/2007 -- Updated May 25, 2011

    It’s just not sound science.

    Yeah, that’s what I expected to hear when I went to a Federalist
    Society’s event that featured Myron Ebell of the Competitive
    Enterprise Institute.

    Well, that’s not what he said.  I’m not really sure what he said,
    actually.  And I think that’s the point.

    You see, there’s a new tactic being used by those obsessed with Al
    Gore and new ways of obtaining Exxon-Mobil’s money.

    Confuse.  Confuse.  Confuse.

    It works like this:

    Global warming is a huge, multidisciplinary science involving
    atmospheric scientists, astronomers, biologists, ecologists,
    physicists, chemists and a whole bunch of scholars that come with
    6-syllable titles I just can’t pronounce.  For me, and just about
    everyone else, we’re forced to accept that we can’t possibly know
    everything, but when over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers are published
    and they all point to the same conclusion, well...  we trust that
    the scientists are correct.

    Not the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Instead,
    they look at the forest, find a mushroom and say, “Sheesh, that’s
    not a tree!!  How can this possibly be a forest?  Oh, I see... well,
    so it is.  Aha!  That proves my I think point!!  This mushroom is
    growing on a dead tree!  This forest cannot possibly be a threat if
    the trees are dead!  In fact, this dead tree makes for wonderful
    fertilizer.  We should all celebrate dead trees!! Oh, yes, I see. 
    There are a lot of live, sturdy trees around here, aren’t there? 
    Well, you know, all the same, this isn’t a forest - it’s merely a
    grove.  And, by the way, if it was a forest, it’d cost a lot of
    money to chop it down.”

    Seriously.  That’s Myron Ebell’s strength of argument...
    - -
    "Upon reflection, I really think there are a couple of lessons for
    progressives to be found in this five minute exchange.

    "First of all, when arguing with somebody that either has no
    credibility or is not arguing a credible position, don't donate the
    credibility they need to be seen as your equal."

    "You see, by calling his credibility into question immediately - and
    not letting him up for air - well, I've got no proof, but I really
    think that everyone in the room knew that Mr. Ebell had been
    bettered. When we ask policy or science questions of these
    charlatans, we give the impression that we care what they think. We
    don't. We know they are rank liars, we're just wondering if they'll
    be able to spin a sufficient answer. But these guys get millions of
    dollars a year from the largest corporate titans precisely because
    they have the skill to ink up the issue. Why let them show off?

    "Secondly, don't go out of your way to be nice or polite. Hell, I
    won't afford these profit-gandists any respect on my blog, why the
    hell should I do it face to face? A large part of their professional
    career derives from their ability to mock me and the things I
    believe in. The Competitive Enterprise Institute once liked global
    warming to 'being invaded by space aliens' for example. By
    addressing these people with the indignant scorn they deserve, you
    project the moral superiority of your position. To many times it
    seems that Democratic and progressive pundits are more interested in
    being our opponents' friends than we are in vigorously arguing the
    issues. In this media environment - when equal time is given to
    global warming deniers... well, we just can't afford the small talk.

    "In the end, these guys are not good people. This isn't a case of
    principled people disagreeing. At this point in the global warming
    debate, the only principled disagreements to be had revolve around
    what we should be doing to address the crisis. The Myron Ebells of
    the world - the die-hard denialists... well, we need to move them
    off the stage by marginalizing them at every opportunity."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-stark/global-warming-phooey_b_44407.html


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