[✔️] May 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 9, 2021*/

[means everyone]
*The World Is Waking Up to the Truth That Natural Gas Is Dirty*
The U.N.’s new Global Methane Report throws cold water on a longtime 
fossil fuel industry talking point.
Kate Aronoff/May 7, 2021...
There are, as the “Global Methane Assessment” notes, several 
straightforward ways to decrease the amount of methane currently spewing 
from gas supply chains with existing technology, including new 
regulations on existing operations. But continuing to replace coal with 
gas threatens to lock in a fuel source that needs to decline rapidly. 
The report notes that in climate models that rely minimally on the 
prospect of low-cost miracle technologies emerging to save us, “global 
production of gas has to decline annually by ~3% over 2020–2030 to be 
consistent with a 1.5° C pathway. This corresponds to a decrease in gas 
usage by roughly one-third by 2030, whereas current plans and 
projections are for an increase of ~20 percent relative to 2020 usage.”

As the report’s lead author, Drew Shindell, underlined at a press 
conference announcing it, “One thing the report calls for very strongly 
is not building any more of this fossil fuel infrastructure. When you 
find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/162337/un-methane-report-natural-gas-dirty



[nature]
*Fevers are plaguing the oceans — and climate change is making them worse*
Sudden marine heatwaves can devastate ecosystems, and scientists are 
scrambling to predict when they will strike.
Giuliana Viglione - 5 MAY 2021
Ten years ago, dead fish began washing ashore on the beaches of Western 
Australia. The culprit was a huge swathe of unusually warm water that 
ravaged kelp forests and scores of commercially important marine 
creatures, from abalone to scallops to lobster. Over the following 
weeks, some of Western Australia’s most lucrative fisheries came close 
to being wiped out. To this day, some of them have not recovered.

After the crisis, scientists came together to assess the damage and try 
to understand what had caused the unusual warming. “This event really 
had such devastating consequences for marine ecosystems,” says Jessica 
Benthuysen, a physical oceanographer at the Australian Institute of 
Marine Science in Perth.

Since that event, researchers have seen dozens of similar hot spells in 
ocean regions around the world and have now given them a name — marine 
heatwaves. Although scientists have come up with a few different ways to 
define the events, they generally agree that they involve warm spells in 
surface waters of the ocean that last at least five days and reach a 
temperature threshold well above the normal range.

The effects of marine heatwaves can reverberate up the food chain,..
- -
And scientists predict that those trends will continue. Several studies 
have shown that even under moderate warming scenarios, almost all of the 
ocean will experience more-frequent and longer-lasting marine heatwaves 
over the coming years.

Many of the extreme events over the past several decades have been made 
worse by climate change, too. A 2020 study7 examining seven of the 
highest-impact marine heatwaves since 1981 concluded that all but one 
were at least partially due to human-driven warming (see ‘Four decades 
of marine heatwaves’). The researchers compared climate model 
simulations using pre-industrial concentrations of carbon dioxide in the 
atmosphere with model runs using present-day concentrations...
- -
The results showed that some of the events were so strong that they were 
fully attributable to anthropogenic climate change, says Charlotte 
Laufkötter, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland 
who led that work. “In pre-industrial times, they couldn’t have occurred.”

And at some point in the next century, scientists project that much of 
the ocean will have warmed past the temperature threshold that defines 
these events — plunging many parts of the world into a state of 
permanent marine heatwave. “If we have such strong warming,” Laufkötter 
says, “it’s not an extreme event any more. It’s always there.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01142-4



[find out the answers]
*Climate change: how bad could the future be if we do nothing?*
May 6, 2021
The climate crisis is no longer a looming threat – people are now living 
with the consequences of centuries of greenhouse gas emissions. But 
there is still everything to fight for. How the world chooses to respond 
in the coming years will have massive repercussions for generations yet 
to be born.

In my book How to Save Our Planet, I imagine two different visions of 
the future. One in which we do very little to address climate change, 
and one in which we do everything possible.
- -
Global diets have shifted away from meat. Farming efficiency has greatly 
improved during the transition from industrial-scale meat production to 
plant-based sustenance, creating more land to rewild and reforest.

Half of the Earth is dedicated to restoring the natural biosphere and 
its ecological services. Elsewhere, fusion energy is finally set to work 
at scale providing unlimited clean energy for the people of the 22nd 
century.

Two very different futures. The outcome your children and grandchildren 
will live with depends on what decisions are made today. Happily, the 
solutions I propose are win-win, or even win-win-win: they reduce 
emissions, improve the environment and make people healthier and 
wealthier overall.

This article is based on Mark Maslin’s latest book, _How to Save Our 
Planet: The Facts._
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-how-bad-could-the-future-be-if-we-do-nothing-159665 


- -

[buy the book]
*How To Save Our Planet The Facts*
Mark A. Maslin
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320/320155/how-to-save-our-planet/9780241472521.html



[watch out for this]
*Americans can't keep ignoring the dozens of states sneaking through 
laws that attack the right to protest and make it more dangerous to take 
to the streets*
Dana Fisher - May 8, 2021

    - Republican-led state legislatures in several dozen states have
    passed laws severely limiting the right to protest.

    - This is a consequence of a GOP takeover at the state level while
    Democrats focus on the federal level.

    - Americans need to pay attention to what's going on in their states
    or it will be too late.

The Republican party is waging an attack on our democracy at the state 
level — and getting away with it.

In the past few weeks, bills have been passed through Republican-led 
legislatures in Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Montana, 
Florida, and several other states.

These bills include draconian provisions to limit peaceful protest, like 
increasing penalties for blocking streets, expanding the definition of a 
riot so that it applies to groups as small as three people, and making 
it legally defensible for drivers to run over protesters with their 
cars. The bills are a clear response to the unprecedented wave of 
predominantly peaceful protests against police brutality and systemic 
racism that swept over the country last summer in the wake of the murder 
of George Floyd, and the indigenous-led protests that target projects 
that expand fossil fuel infrastructure.
*
**Immunity for drivers who run over protesters*
Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis became the fourth Republican governor to 
sign what he called an "anti-riot" bill into Florida law. The new law in 
Florida empowers the state to overrule municipalities' decisions to 
reduce police budgets and makes it a felony to destroy historical 
structures, including (Confederate) flags and memorials, during 
protests. It also grants civil immunity to people driving into crowds of 
protesters.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a similar law, enacting criminal 
penalties for those protesting in the street, while granting criminal 
and civil immunity to drivers who harm said protesters.

These driver immunity bills would make it legally defensible for people 
like neo-Nazi James Alex Fields to drive their cars into peaceful 
protests and hit innocent protesters like Heather Heyer, who was killed 
when she was hit by Fields' car while demonstrating against the Unite 
the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. 
Participants in the January 6 insurgency in Washington, DC should 
consider themselves extremely lucky no such law was in place when they 
marched without a legal permit from the demonstration at the Washington 
Monument to storm the US Capitol.

*A consequence of GOP takeover at the state level*
Across the country, while efforts to limit voting have been introduced 
in most states and have gained substantial attention, more than 90 bills 
have been simultaneously introduced across 35 states that aim to reduce 
citizen's right to assemble and protest. These attacks on the very 
foundation of democratic participation — voting and peaceful assembly — 
are the most recent example of a coordinated effort by the Right to 
target policies at the state-level while all eyes are on a new 
Democratic president and his high-profile efforts to implement 
progressive change at the federal level.

After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a coordinated 
effort by conservative funders to use their "dark money" to push back 
against Democratic wins and the new president's agenda. That effort took 
the form of activism through the Tea Party and state-level initiatives 
to change the political make up of legislatures across the country. By 
the early months of the Trump presidency eight years later, the 
Democratic Party was seen as "being hollowed out from below" with 
Republicans in control of both chambers of state legislatures in 34 
states and Democrats having ceded 13 governorships to the GOP.

Rather than targeting state houses, the GOP's coordinated efforts today 
target citizens' constitutional rights to participate in our democracy. 
The focus is on limiting citizens' capacity by restricting voting and 
penalizing those who participate in peaceful demonstrations in their 
communities.

These efforts specifically target the forms of civic participation most 
available to the least powerful in our society. Beyond voting, people 
with limited power and scant access to institutional politics tend to 
take advantage of the rights afforded by the Constitution to voice their 
opinions as outsiders demonstrating in the streets. America is built on 
the foundation of empowering the powerless by letting them take to the 
streets to be heard and affect social change.

Efforts to restrict voting and penalize individuals who participate in 
protest are part of the consistent conservative strategy to respond to 
Democratic political gains at the national level by pushing back at the 
state level. Even as the Republican Party appears to be struggling 
nationally to keep itself together, the level of coordination at the 
state level tells a very different story. Indeed, the past shows that if 
inadequate attention is paid to what is happening in the states, the 
Right will once again build a powerful platform to affect their agenda. 
In addition to pushing for democratic reform through federal bills such 
as the "For the People Act," citizens across the US must respond to 
these state-level efforts to limit our democracy with resistance.

If the past six years have taught us anything, it is that it is very 
easy to distract Americans from what is most important. We, the people, 
are capable of great collective change when we're paying attention. If 
we don't start paying attention and pushing against this frightening 
trend to limit political participation in our democracy at the state 
level, by the time this attack on democracy hits the national level, it 
will be much too late to stop it.

- Dana R. Fisher is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of the 
Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland.

https://www.businessinsider.com/protest-bills-states-sneaking-through-limit-the-right-to-protest-2021-5



[LA Times opinion]
*Op-Ed: We can’t hold back rising oceans. We can only move out of the way*
Shoreline erosion and coastal retreat have become global issues and an 
increasing challenge for California’s coastal cities and counties. In 
part that’s because of the state’s concentrated coastal population, but 
it’s also because of our coastal-dependent economy and intensive 
shoreline development...
- -
The fact is, California’s coastal communities face a challenge of 
increasing magnitude — and we have no clear agreed-upon solutions.

Some communities and neighborhoods are already experiencing coastal 
flooding during king tides and periods of large waves. Every coastal 
city and county in California needs to determine its most vulnerable 
areas and assets and develop response plans with thresholds for 
relocation or beginning the process of moving back from the shore. 
Thresholds could include when sea level reaches a specific elevation, or 
when a street, neighborhood or home is flooded or damaged a certain 
number of times during a given period.

These will need to be community-specific decisions, and it’s not too 
early to start these discussions with the rate of sea level rise 
accelerating. Even if we don’t know exactly how high the sea level will 
be at a specific point in the future, we know that this process will 
continue. In the long run, there is no effective way to hold back the 
Pacific Ocean.
Gary Griggs is a distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences 
at UC Santa Cruz.



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 9, 2007 *
May 9, 2007: Grist.org reports on News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's plans 
to make his company carbon-neutral and conscious of climate risk, plans 
that apparently did not involve ending the Fox News Channel's fixation 
on attacking climate science.
http://grist.org/article/murdoch/


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