[✔️] May 6, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 6, 2021*/

[uh oh -another warning]
*Global heating pace risks ‘unstoppable’ sea level rise as Antarctic ice 
sheet melts*
World faces ‘abrupt jump’ in pace of ice loss around 2060 unless 
emissions reduced to meet Paris agreement goals, study warns...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/05/antarctica-ice-sheet-melting-global-heating-sea-level-rise-study




[Telling us the truth before we were listening]

*‘Decades ahead of his time’: history catches up with visionary Jimmy 
Carter*


Megan Mayhew Bergman - 4 May 2021 1


A new film rejects the popular narrative and recasts the former 
president, 96, as hugely prescient thinker, particularly on climate change
- -
Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp 
focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.

*Carterland: preview of the documentary on former president Jimmy Carter 
– video *https://youtu.be/MFt8sZR4ljw

“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the 
film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, 
weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his 
time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate 
solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment 
for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic 
problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the 
trajectory of this nation.”...
- -
The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a 
heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently begun to 
look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral bearing.

“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.

“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock offers. 
“Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as Carter.”

“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis on 
servant,” Biden says.
https://youtu.be/y7WVi_RFzTw

Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden – who 
became the first elected official outside of Georgia to support Carter’s 
bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried him as an 
“exuberant” idealist at the time.

- -

One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries 
like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on 
asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to 
focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision 
a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels 
from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted 
it as a fringe endeavor.

“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and 
ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had 
an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a 
climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive 
changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”...
- -
Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty, 
responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no 
potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”

While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to portray 
Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist that his 
presidency was more successful than history has acknowledged, 
particularly on the energy, conservation and human rights fronts. Still, 
there are aspects of his single term that will probably remain embedded 
in his narrative, such as his tenuous relationship with Congress, early 
catering to segregationists to win votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.

What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s presidency?

“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,” film-maker 
Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what qualities do you 
actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who will challenge you to 
be better, or speak in catchphrases and not ask much of you?

“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another 
Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”...
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/03/jimmy-carter-climate-change-carterland-film-biography



[Silence is the only wrong]
*The conventional wisdom on how to talk about climate change? It’s wrong.*
Faith Kearns’ new book offers insights from conversations IRL.
Kate Yoder, Associate Editor - May 04, 2021

Faith Kearns thought she knew how to talk about science. In 2008, she 
was getting a doctorate in environmental science from the University of 
California, Berkeley, and had worked in communications for years. Then 
she spoke at a community fire safety demonstration in Northern 
California. She and her colleagues followed all the conventional advice 
about what to say, but something felt off.

After the presentation, a man came up to Kearns, emotional. Listening to 
them present steps of what he should have done to protect his home from 
fire had been traumatizing. Just a few months before, wildfires had 
burned through this small community in Mendocino County. For her 
audience, the memory was still fresh, the wounds raw.

“I knew those fires that happened, but I didn’t put together that we 
were going to be talking to people who were directly affected by that 
fire, and that talking about things they should do raised a lot of 
guilt, a lot of shame, a lot of trauma,” Kearns said in an interview 
with Grist. Her rigorous academic training had not prepared her for this 
— and maybe it had made things worse. “That really forced me into a 
reckoning about what science communication is,” she said. “And I’m still 
reckoning with it.”

Kearns’ new book, _Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A 
Guide to Effective Engagement_, out this month, argues that there’s no 
one “right” approach to talking about the climate crisis and other 
contentious scientific issues. She collects anecdotes and advice from 
science communicators who are wrestling with all of the feelings and 
opinions that climate change, genetically modified foods, and vaccines 
tend to stir up.

She tells stories of an environmental journalist fielding desperate 
calls from New Jersey residents during Hurricane Sandy; a professor 
trying to help college students who felt helpless learning about climate 
change; and a scientist breaking the news to homeowners in Charleston, 
South Carolina, that their properties will soon be underwater. 
(Sometimes, climate scientists are like doctors delivering bad news to 
patients.)

The book holds lessons for anyone who wants to take on the challenge of 
talking about loaded scientific topics, and it addresses misconceptions 
and oversimplifications about the best way to do it.

*MYTH: It’s all about crafting the right message.*
No matter how pretty your slideshow is or how carefully you’ve curated 
your talking points, it will probably fall flat with people who have 
lived through a disaster. Good communication is two-sided, Kearns 
writes, requiring empathy and listening.

“It’s really absurd to think that you would have a class on ‘public 
listening,’ right?” Kearns joked. “Whereas like ‘public speaking’ is 
this ubiquitous thing. At some point, I start to wonder: Who’s doing all 
the listening to all this public speaking?”

*MYTH: If people just know the facts, they’ll change how they act. Right?*
For a long time, scientists have relied on a “deficit” model of 
communication. The idea is that if people are given enough facts and 
data about, say, climate change, then they’d accept the science— in a 
logical, rational way — and decide to take action. This idea isn’t 
necessarily wrong, but it ignores the messiness of the world and the 
role that emotions play in guiding decisions. “We’ve just sort of 
neglected many other pieces of communicating that don’t have to do with 
providing information,” Kearns said.

*MYTH: Scientists can be and should be totally objective.*
It’s time to change the assumption that scientists ought to be cool, 
calm, collected intellectuals who stoop down to talk to journalists 
every once in a while, Kearns argues. After all, scientists are part of 
the public, too, and with wildfires and hurricanes growing in intensity, 
they’re often living through the very effects they’re studying. She says 
true objectivity is impossible.

“Indeed, what the debate over science advocacy has regularly glossed 
over is that there are at least as many ethical concerns with standing 
on the sidelines as there are with engaging,” she writes.

*MYTH: People just need to “listen to the science.”*
“The landscape of climate communication has been dominated by a 
particular type of argumentation: ‘You’re with us or you’re against 
us,’” Kearns said. So it follows that the underlying reasons people 
dismiss climate science have more to do with political identity than 
logic. You can see this same story play out vividly with COVID-19.

Kearns says that the label of “climate denier” has been applied too 
broadly, making matters worse. “We end up in these very contentious 
spaces, where the ability to have complex conversations is just really, 
really lost.”

*MYTH: Climate communicators need to learn how to elicit the “right” 
emotions.*
A long-standing debate on Twitter — and in academic research — centers 
on one question. What’s the better way to get people to care about 
climate change: Scare them into action or give them hope so they don’t 
become hopeless? The whole idea of trying to use emotions as levers to 
get people to care “feels very false,” Kearns said. “What I’m talking 
about is just dealing with very strong emotions that actually already 
exist on all of these topics.”

Though it might not sound like the most interesting topic, people have 
strong opinions about water, just waiting to bubble up. “I can show up 
on a Saturday morning at a community center, and there will be 40 people 
there who are really interested in talking about water in California, 
and they have very, very strong feelings about it.”

*MYTH: Good conversations steer away from conflict.*
“Actually, the absence of conflict, to me, tends to mean that people 
aren’t invested in a topic,” Kearns said. She’s conflict-averse herself, 
so she understands wanting to avoid a shouting match. But she says that 
conflict needs to be more accepted, or “normalized,” because it can be a 
start to an effective conversation. The more people become used to 
having disagreements without getting overheated, the easier they are to 
navigate.

“There’s a lot of richness within conflict, and maybe getting more 
comfortable with operating in a conflict space might actually help us to 
figure out better how to proceed.”
https://grist.org/article/the-conventional-wisdom-on-how-to-talk-about-climate-change-its-wrong/




[Anxiety]
*The New Yorker The Climate Crisis*
Even as we begin to emerge from the stress of the pandemic year, 
mental-health professionals are noting a steady uptick in a different 
form of anxiety—the worry over climate change and the future that it 
will bring. The latest survey research from Yale and George Mason 
universities shows about forty per cent of Americans feeling “disgusted” 
or “helpless” about global warming; a poll from the American Psychiatric 
Association last autumn found that fifty-five per cent of respondents 
were concerned about the effects of climate change on their own mental 
health. The effects seem particularly harsh on new mothers, and, indeed, 
a fear of adding to the climate problem and of the disintegration it 
might cause seems to be deterring large numbers of young people from 
having kids of their own. Understandably, the fear of a wrecked future 
increases as you descend the age scale: a March survey of Gen-Z 
Americans aged between fourteen and twenty-four found that eighty-three 
per cent are concerned about the health of the planet (although nearly 
half said that they have been feeling a little better since Biden took 
office).

Perhaps there are ways in which this fear is a luxury—Sarah Jaquette 
Ray, who literally wrote the book on climate anxiety, noted recently 
that it is an “overwhelmingly white” phenomenon. Not because people of 
color care less about the climate crisis (in fact, they care more), but 
because they’ve faced other existential crises. “The prospect of an 
unlivable future has always shaped the emotional terrain for Black and 
brown people, whether that terrain is racism or climate change,” Ray 
wrote. “Exhaustion, anger, hope—the effects of oppression and resistance 
are not unique to this climate moment. What is unique is that people who 
had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of 
their own unlivable future.” Eric Holthaus, in his always interesting 
Substack newsletter on climate, echoed some of these thoughts, after 
describing his own anxiety as so crippling that, during attacks that 
lasted weeks, he’d “been unable to write, unable to interact with 
friends, unable to function normally.” But, he said, since those “who 
have already been marginalized by centuries of oppression will be hurt 
the worst . . . our job, as the climate anxious, is to repair that 
oppression, repair that marginalization, to make sure you’re not 
offloading your anxiety onto someone else in ways that are causing more 
harm.”

That’s fair enough—action has always seemed the best salve to me. (And 
for those for whom it is not enough, the Climate Psychology Alliance 
North America has published a directory of “climate-informed 
therapists.”) But I think there’s another reason that climate change can 
be so uniquely anxiety-producing: we’re not used to dealing with fights 
that we don’t know we can win. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s statement, 
quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral 
universe is long, but it bends toward justice” was comforting in a 
civil-rights fight that required—and requires—enormous courage: they 
meant, I think, “this may take a while, but we’re going to win.” But a 
different kind of courage is needed for the climate battle, because the 
arc of the physical universe is short and it bends toward heat. If we 
don’t win soon, we will never win, because the Earth is rushing toward 
irrevocable tipping points. We’ve already passed some—there’s no plan 
afoot to refreeze the Arctic. And clearly things will get much worse 
before they (possibly) start to stabilize; we’ve raised the temperature 
a degree Celsius already, and the most optimistic thinkers on the planet 
reckon that we might just be able to top out at 1.5 degrees.

All of which is to say that we are right to be anxious. There are 
profound reasons to hope that we’re about to make serious progress: the 
sudden arrival of cheap renewable energy; the shifting zeitgeist. (As is 
often the case, Rebecca Solnit sums them up with particular power.) Even 
if we catch some breaks from physics, though, it’s going to be a tough 
few decades. And what will make it toughest may be the (very American) 
assumption that we have to endure the anxiety by ourselves, in our own 
heads. I’ve found the simple solidarity of movements at least as useful 
as the opportunities for action that they provide; just knowing that 
lots of other people are at work on the same problem is a solace, and a 
goad to keep working. It’s one reason I’m glad that vaccinations are 
proceeding apace. It’ll be strategically useful to be back in the 
streets, but it will also be psychologically useful: we are shoulder to 
shoulder on Zoom, but it’s not quite the same.
https://link.newyorker.com/view/5e4f6ed6954fcf61233b06c1e54ak.ovj/4d9d332c


[NYT opinion - must see 7 min video - nations compared to US]
*The United States has a schizophrenic relationship with the environment.*
It boasts a spectacular system of more than 400 national park sites; a 
robust environmental lobby; and strong federal environmental law, 
including the landmark Endangered Species Act, which is credited with 
saving the bald eagle and the grizzly bear from extinction.

Yet it also harbors a dark side, including an insatiable appetite for 
fossil fuels; a longstanding romance with behemoth, gas-guzzling 
vehicles; and perhaps the highest per capita generation of plastic waste 
in the world.

For the video above, we collated data and other information about 
America’s posture on the environment and presented them to people from 
other countries that, in some ways, have made the United States, the 
wealthiest country in the world, seem like an environmental laggard...
Their reactions? Well, check out the video to find out. But an Indian 
participant seemed to speak for everyone when he remarked, his face 
furrowed in dismay, “That’s … that’s America?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opinion/climate-change-recycling-america.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 6, 2001 *

May 6, 2001: The New York Times reports on EPA Administrator Christine 
Todd Whitman's persona-non-grata status in the George W. Bush 
administration:

"Mrs. Whitman was greeted like a political star when she arrived here 
several months ago to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Not a 
single senator, not even her Democratic rivals, opposed her appointment.

"But no sooner had the former New Jersey governor unpacked her bags than 
she found her authority undercut by the very man who had lured her to 
Washington, George W. Bush.

"The most recent snub occurred when the White House openly contradicted 
a claim she made on national television two weeks ago that the 
administration might back away from its plans to open up the Arctic 
National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling amid growing opposition in 
Congress.

"Only weeks earlier, Mrs. Whitman declared that Mr. Bush intended to 
fulfill a campaign pledge to lower carbon dioxide emissions from power 
plants -- only to find that the president had decided against that 
policy without so much as telling his chief environmental overseer.

"So it is not surprising that the public embarrassments Mrs. Whitman has 
had to endure at the hands of her new boss are giving rise to questions 
about her ability to lead the environmental agency, though she and the 
White House insist that there is no strife and that she is an important 
voice in the administration...

"The recent setbacks also threaten to undermine the credibility of Mrs. 
Whitman, a politician whose plain-spoken manner and seemingly moderate 
political views had made her one of the nation's most prominent 
governors and at one point a potential vice presidential candidate.

"Indeed, Mrs. Whitman's nomination to head the environmental agency 
cheered many people on the left -- despite her mixed record on the 
environment in New Jersey -- who were wary of the conservative 
Republican crowd that had moved into the White House. But those very 
same people are no longer so optimistic that her voice will be heard 
within the new administration."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/nyregion/hitting-ground-limping-for-whitman-chaos-her-wake-sharp-elbows-her-future.html?pagewanted=all

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