[✔️] May 15, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*May 15, 2021*/

[Greta shames the World Economic Forum]
*This is Greta Thunberg's message to Davos [video transcript]*

    My name is Greta Thunberg and I’m not here to make deals. You see, I
    don’t belong to any financial interest or political party. So I
    can’t bargain or negotiate. I am only here to once again remind you
    of the emergency we’re in. The crisis that you and your predecessors
    have created and inflicted upon us. The crisis that you continue to
    ignore.
    I am here to remind you of the promises that you have made to your
    children and grandchildren. And to tell you that we are not willing
    to compromise on the very minimum safety levels that still remain.

    The climate and ecological crisis can unfortunately no longer be
    solved within today’s systems. According to the current best
    available science that is no longer an opinion; that’s a fact.

    We need to keep this in mind as countries, businesses and investors
    now rush forward to present their new so-called “ambitious” climate
    targets and commitments. The longer we avoid this uncomfortable
    truth, and the longer we pretend we can solve the climate - and
    ecological emergency - without treating it like a crisis — the more
    precious time we will lose. And this is time we do not have.
    Today, we hear leaders and nations all over the world speak of an
    “existential climate emergency”. But instead of taking the immediate
    action you would in any emergency, they set up vague, insufficient,
    hypothetical targets way into the future, like “net-zero 2050”.
    Targets based on loopholes and incomplete numbers. Targets that
    equal surrender. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night,
    seeing your house on fire, then deciding to wait 10, 20 or 30 years
    before you call the fire department while labeling those trying to
    wake people up alarmists.

    We understand that the world is very complex and that change doesn’t
    happen overnight. But you’ve now had more than three decades of bla
    bla bla. How many more do you need? Because when it comes to facing
    the climate and ecological emergency, the world is still in a state
    of complete denial. The justice for the most affected people in the
    most affected areas is being systematically denied.

    Even though we welcome every single climate initiative, the
    proposals being presented and discussed today are very far from
    being enough. And the time for “small steps in the right direction”
    is long gone. If we are to have at least a small chance of avoiding
    the worst consequences of the climate and ecological crisis, this
    needs to change.

    Because you still say one thing, and then do the complete opposite.
    You speak of saving nature, while locking in policies of further
    destruction for decades to come.

    You promise to not let future generations down, while creating new
    loopholes, failing to connect the dots, building your so called
    ”pledges” on the cheating tactics that got us into this mess in the
    first place. If the commitments of lowering all our emissions by 70,
    68 or even 55 percent by 2030 actually meant they aim to reduce them
    by those figures then that would be a great start. But that is
    unfortunately not the case.

    And since the level of public awareness continues to be so low our
    leaders can still get away with almost anything. No one is held
    accountable. It’s like a game. Whoever is best at packaging and
    selling their message wins.

    As it is now, we can have as many summits and meetings as we want,
    but unless we treat the climate and ecological crisis like a crisis,
    no sufficient changes will be achieved. What we need — to begin with
    — is to implement annual binding carbon budgets based on the current
    best available science.
    Right now more than ever we are desperate for hope. But what is
    hope? For me hope is not more empty assurances that everything will
    be alright, that things are being taken care of and we do not need
    to worry.

    For me, hope is the feeling that keeps you going, even though all
    odds may be against you. For me hope comes from action not just
    words. For me, hope is telling it like it is. No matter how
    difficult or uncomfortable that may be.

    And again, I’m not here to tell you what to do. After all,
    safeguarding the future living conditions and preserving life on
    earth as we know it is voluntary. The choice is yours to make.

    But I can assure you this. You can't negotiate with physics. And
    your children and grandchildren will hold you accountable for the
    choices that you make. How's that for a deal?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/greta-thunberg-message-to-the-davos-agenda/
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=external&v=2622651194526588



[guest opinion]
*We’re Not Ready for the Next Big Climate Disasters*
May 14, 2021
By David G. Victor, Sadie Frank and Eric Gesick

Dr. Victor is a professor of industrial organization and climate science 
at University of California, San Diego, and a nonresident senior fellow 
at the Brookings Institution, where he leads a project examining how 
climate change will affect the financial markets. Ms. Frank was a 
research assistant at Brookings. Mr. Gesick is a visiting scholar at the 
Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and a former 
chief underwriting officer for Axis Capital, a global reinsurance company.

The infrastructure bills taking shape in Congress will be the first test 
of the Biden administration’s ability to legislate on climate change. 
Most eyes are on how greener infrastructure can cut emissions of warming 
gases.

But it will take decades to achieve the enormous reductions required 
globally; in the meantime emissions will continue and so will the 
warming. That’s why the nation has much at stake in bolstering 
communities, highways, rail lines, water systems and the like now 
against the devastating consequences of climate change, including 
worsening hurricanes, flooding, rising seas, drought and wildfires. We 
must also get better at managing climate disasters as they become more 
numerous.

Over decades, our spending on infrastructure and disaster relief has 
become fine-tuned to political expedience rather than the geophysical 
realities of the climate. We build roads and protect houses in 
vulnerable places; we subsidize insurance for homes prone to flooding 
and for years avoided updating insurance maps that would let the federal 
government set rates that reflect real danger. When communities are 
flattened by nature, the nation helps pay for rebuilding — often 
rebuilding the same infrastructure in the same place, a target for the 
next disaster. Flatten, flood, scorch — rebuild and repeat.

The fact that politics, not geophysics, sets the tune in Washington is 
hardly surprising. What’s needed now is a politically smart strategy for 
giving voice to geophysics to help our communities prepare for the future.

Studies going back decades have shown, for example, that farmers and 
city managers who prepare for a changing climate can absorb the shocks, 
at least to a point. By contrast, policies such as disaster assistance 
and subsidized flood insurance can have the opposite effect: They invite 
people to invest in harm’s way and make us less prepared when disaster 
strikes, as will become more common in a warming world.

We have combed through data from experts and the government and have 
tabulated what the federal government spends on climate-related 
disasters, including on infrastructure and insurance. We measured the 
balance of spending between “building back the same,” the usual response 
to disasters, and investing in making our infrastructure more resilient.

Our study found that the federal government is spending about $46 
billion per year on recovery from disasters, which is seven times the 
level of investment in resilience. (Depending on the accounting method, 
that ratio could be as high as 40 to 1.) That nobody really knows these 
numbers shows why the nation must take stock of its infrastructure and 
disaster spending with an eye to resilience. At the same time, the 
National Climate Assessment, mandated by Congress and prepared by 
climate scientists every four years to evaluate the nation’s climate 
vulnerabilities, needs to look beyond what the scary science says to 
assess how government policies and private investment are amplifying or 
dampening the potential consequences of global warming.

Resilience matters because it is impossible to wall off the country from 
the effects of climate change. Tens of trillions of dollars are invested 
in infrastructure and personal property, with a lot more investment to 
come. Federal money accounts for only one-quarter of the nation’s 
investment in public infrastructure, but how that money is spent has a 
big influence on how the rest of the country invests and behaves.

Redirecting federal money toward resilience rather than simply 
rebuilding after disasters will be hard. But the longer we wait, the 
harder it will become as the costs of climate change mount.

More and more people are living in places that are highly exposed to 
weather that will get nastier with climate change — places that are 
already hot, communities along the coasts vulnerable to storms and sites 
in or near increasingly flammable forests. For example, the Great Miami 
Hurricane of 1926 would today incur insured losses of $128 billion — 
dwarfing all big storms of recent memory.

Last year all 94 major natural catastrophes — severe storms, droughts, 
wildfires and floods, along with earthquakes — caused insured losses of 
$74 billion in the United States. Over the next three decades, climate 
change could raise the annual losses in the country from hurricanes 
alone by one-fifth, according to a new analysis by AIR Worldwide, a 
catastrophe modeling firm. (Disclosure: AIR hired Mr. Gesick for an 
unrelated matter after the analysis was published.)

Everyone deeply involved with infrastructure and disaster assistance 
knows that changes are needed. When municipalities on the front lines 
borrow for infrastructure, nobody much pays attention to their exposure 
to climate change in part because everyone involved, including the 
investors, expect to be bailed out if disaster strikes. The Federal 
Emergency Management Agency is brimming with good ideas such as smarter 
mapping and earmarking funds for grants that can make communities more 
resilient. We also found emerging bipartisan support for many of these 
reforms, including in the most recent big disaster recovery reform bill 
that Congress passed in 2018.

But when good ideas meet politics, they seem destined to die at the 
hands of powerful opponents, such as updating flood insurance policies 
(unpopular in the Northeast, as we have seen recently) or stopping the 
most egregious rebuilding after hurricanes (unpopular in much of the 
coastal Southeast). One fix would be for Congress to follow the playbook 
it used to close military bases, where piecemeal shutdowns faced 
political death. As it did with base closures, Congress should create a 
commission to do the work. It would draw up a package deal to build 
climate resilience that can spread the pain while making the nation 
better able to withstand the calamities that are sure to come.

We must get ready, politically, for the next big disaster — not just 
because the nation will need recovery but also because that’s the 
political window for reform. For example, after Hurricane Sandy blew 
through Northeastern and other states in 2012, inflicting about $75 
billion in damages, Congress paid $58 billion of those costs, and the 
7:1 ratio on spending to rebuild versus resilience dropped to about 2:1. 
So, too, the 2017 hurricanes that ravaged Houston and Puerto Rico were 
followed by the 2018 Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which set up the 
innovative Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, 
focused largely on resilience, with funding to help move some 
communities out of harm’s way.

Geophysics will never set the agenda in Washington, but a smart 
political strategy can give it a stronger voice — and not a moment too 
soon as the planet warms. More spending on infrastructure is long 
overdue, but these new investments must come with the right incentives 
so that we don’t inadvertently exacerbate the dangers of warming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/climate-disasters.html



[some food scientists think "half by mid century"]
*Third of global food production at risk from climate crisis*
Food-growing areas will see drastic changes to rainfall and temperatures 
if global heating continues at current rate
A third of global food production will be at risk by the end of the 
century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current 
rate, new research suggests.

Many of the world’s most important food-growing areas will see 
temperatures increase and rainfall patterns alter drastically if 
temperatures rise by about 3.7C, the forecast increase if emissions stay 
high.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have calculated that about 
95% of current crop production takes place in areas they define as “safe 
climatic space”, or conditions where temperature, rainfall and aridity 
fall within certain bounds.

If temperatures were to rise by 3.7C or thereabouts by the century’s 
end, that safe area would shrink drastically, mostly affecting south and 
south-eastern Asia and Africa’s Sudano-Sahelian zone, according to a 
paper published in the journal One Earth on Friday.

However, if greenhouse gases are reduced and the world meets the goals 
of the Paris agreement, in limiting temperature rises to 1.5C or 2C 
above pre-industrial levels, then only about 5%–8% of global food 
production would be at risk.
Matti Kummu, an associate professor of global food and water at Aalto 
University and lead author of the paper, said: “A third of global food 
production will be at risk. We should be worried, as the climate safe 
space is quite narrow. But there are measures we can take in reducing 
greenhouse gas emissions. And we should empower people and societies in 
the danger zones, to reduce the impact and increase their resilience and 
adaptive capacity.”

Although rising temperatures could increase food production in some 
areas that are currently less productive, such as the Nordic regions, 
that would not be anywhere near enough to offset the loss of important 
food producing regions in the south, said Kummu.

“There will be winners as well as losers, but the wins will be 
outweighed by the losses, and there is just not enough space for food 
production to move – we are already at the limits,” he said.

Livestock farming would be affected, as well as the risks to crop 
production, he said, and many areas were likely to suffer large 
increases in water scarcity. The researchers examined the impacts of 
climatic changes on 27 of the most important food crops and seven types 
of livestock.

By the end of this century, in a high-emissions scenario, there could be 
as much as 1.5m sq miles (4m sq km) of new desert around the world, the 
research found.

Under 1.5C to 2C of warming, the boreal forests of northern America, 
Russia and Europe would shrink from their current 7m sq miles to about 
6m sq miles by 2100. In a high emissions scenario, only 3m sq miles 
would remain, the researchers forecast.

The paper adds to previous research that has found that global heating 
is already having an impact on agricultural productivity.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/14/third-of-global-food-production-at-risk-from-climate-crisis



[burger, burger, cheeseburger]
*Crying about hamburgers is dead-end on climate crisis, Republicans warned*
Congressman Peter Meijer, 33, warns that false claims of a burger ban or 
blaming immigrants risk losing the young generation

Lies that hamburgers will be banned, conspiracy-laden claims of 
government tyranny, blame for environmental degradation foisted upon 
immigrants – the Republican response to Joe Biden’s climate agenda 
suggests the base instincts of Donald Trump still strongly animate the 
party.

Amid Biden’s attempts to cut planet-heating emissions, Republicans 
remain mired in the protection of fossil fuel interests, using 
aggressive, and sometimes invented, claims in the process.

But the continued embrace of Trumpian rhetoric has concerned some 
younger Republican lawmakers aware of the increasingly dire warnings 
from climate scientists and growing voter alarm over global heating.

“Plenty of members of the [Republican] conference are still in perpetual 
skeptic mode,” Peter Meijer, a 33-year-old Republican House 
representative, told the Guardian. “When you talk to younger 
conservatives, the issue of climate is No 1 or 2, but for older 
generations that’s not the case. It’s important for the future of our 
country and the party we stop viewing it as a partisan issue.”


Meijer, one of the 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump over 
the former president’s role in the January 6 insurrection at the US 
Capitol, said that the party was in the midst of a “generational shift” 
on climate but that progress was slow.

“It’s moving a very large ship a matter of degrees. It won’t happen 
overnight,” said Meijer, who represents a Michigan district. “Climate is 
one of the areas I was concerned about in terms of the long-term 
trajectory of the party. We are seeing first steps in messaging and 
proposals. There’s a recognition that we have not been on the right side 
of this and we need to get on the right side of this.”

Such progress can be hard to ascertain.

Last month, in the wake of a major White House summit of world leaders 
where Biden vowed to cut US emissions in half this decade, the most 
prominent Republican response was a parade of invented claims that the 
president was going to restrict meat-eating to once a month. “OK, got 
that? No burgers on the Fourth of July. No steaks on the barbecue,” 
claimed Larry Kudlow, a former Trump adviser now a host on Fox News, 
which remains a hotbed of climate science denial but did ultimately 
acknowledge Biden has no such proposal.

“We’ve always had a problem in respect to climate and now there’s this 
retreat to reactionary rhetoric that Biden is a socialist or Marxist,” 
said William Reilly, a Republican who was administrator of the 
Environmental Protection Agency under George HW Bush. “It’s just not 
true and it doesn’t work because the country knows it’s not true.”

Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, did unveil a narrow climate 
plan based largely around tree planting and clean energy innovation, 
although it does not mention phasing out the fossil fuels that are 
driving the climate crisis, nor set out any sort of emissions reduction 
target.

Meijer said he supported McCarthy’s plan and that Biden had embraced 
“fanciful and implausible priorities that are more about messaging to a 
progressive base than moving the needle on emissions”, but conceded that 
the untruths spread on meat bans showed “we are still prone to latching 
on to things without checking their veracity.”

Republicans have also aligned themselves with rightwing groups to claim 
Biden will forcibly take away private property to meet his goal of 
protecting 30% of America’s land and waters by 2030, despite the White 
House pointing out this has never been proposed.

On 4 May, a bill put forward by Lauren Boebert, a Republican 
congresswoman from Colorado, to prevent the federal government acquiring 
more land was first announced in a newsletter sent by American Stewards 
of Liberty, a property rights group whose members have likened the Biden 
conservation plan to a famine caused by Joseph Stalin, as well as to the 
actions of Adolf Hitler.

A spokesman for Boebert denied that American Stewards of Liberty crafted 
the bill and said it was “common practice” to consult outside groups 
before public announcements. The congresswoman herself said that Biden 
was guilty of a “massive leftist land-grab” driven by “extremist enviros 
funded by George Soros that believe the federal government should 
control every aspect of our daily lives, including our land”.

Moves at the state level on climate change have also veered towards the 
extreme. Republicans are attempting to make Louisiana a “fossil fuel 
sanctuary state” to block federal rules that affect polluting 
industries, while their counterparts in Wyoming have set up an 
extraordinary legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take and 
burn its coal.

The Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, has even channeled Trumpist 
nativism by claiming in a lawsuit that immigrants are, in fact, the 
cause of the climate crisis as they release “pollutants, carbon dioxide, 
and other greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere.

“Muscle memory has taken over when we should be playing an entirely 
different game,” said Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the 
center-right Niskanen Center. “There are plenty of alternative, 
market-based policies for climate change but instead we just have this 
grab-bag of predictable, reflexive responses. If you’re crying about 
hamburgers you don’t really get to influence the policy debate.”

Republican recalcitrance on the climate crisis is increasingly out of 
step with other conservative-led countries, such as the UK and Germany 
that have vowed to phase out polluting industries such as coal and 
eliminate emissions, and even its own voter base, with polling showing 
that GOP voters are increasingly worried about climate change and 
support measures such as limits on carbon emissions.

Biden’s allies worry that the ability to combat the climate crisis will 
be hampered without a sea change in Republican opposition.

“Eventually we will need a Republican party that has original, effective 
climate change ideas but right now it’s just utterly pathetic, it’s 
driven by grievance and exploiting resentments,” said Paul Bledsoe, who 
was an energy and climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s administration.

Bledsoe added: “Biden’s proposals are very popular and clearly 
Republicans are getting desperate. They just aren’t interested in 
solving problems or governing, they have no proper identity. That will 
remain the same as long as Trump dominates the party.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/14/republicans-climate-crisis-trump-peter-meijer


[interesting tactic]
*Exxon Blames You for Climate Change*
https://earther.gizmodo.com/exxon-blames-you-for-climate-change-1846882224



[Box fan and duct tape]
*Santa Fe women built homemade air purifiers to help protect people from 
wildfire smoke*
Members of the Three Sisters Collective, a group of Indigenous activist 
women, mobilized to help the local community during last summer's wildfires.
by YCC TEAM - MAY 12, 2021
As summer approaches, so does the worst of wildfire season.

Last summer, a wildfire burned thousands of acres in the Sangre de 
Cristo mountains in New Mexico. People in the Nambé Pueblo and several 
other nearby Indigenous communities faced dangerous air pollution.

“They were getting a lot of smoke and being severely affected by it,” 
says Carrie Wood of the Three Sisters Collective, a group of Indigenous 
activist women in Santa Fe.

During the fire, the group mobilized to help protect Pueblo residents 
from breathing smoke-polluted air.

They collected donations and purchased more than 50 air purifiers. But 
local stores soon ran out, so the women made about 60 by hand.

“So you just buy a basic box fan, some duct tape, and an air filter that 
is rated to filter smoke, and you literally just duct tape the filter to 
the box fan,” Wood says.

The collective donated the air purifiers to vulnerable Pueblo residents. 
Their fast response and ingenuity helped protect people during a crisis.

But Wood says as wildfires get more extreme, local agencies should take 
steps to protect people before a fire starts.

“With climate change, this is the new normal, and so we shouldn’t treat 
it like it’s unexpected,” she says.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/05/santa-fe-women-built-homemade-air-purifiers-to-help-protect-people-from-wildfire-smoke/

- -

[hauntingly beautiful]
SPIRIT LINE ALBUM AND GUIDE
*SPIRIT LINE: WOVEN TOGETHER FOR OUR MISSING & MURDERED INDIGENOUS 
RELATIVES*
https://threesisterscollective.org/mmiwgt2sresources/


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 15, 2001 *

May 15, 2001: The New York Times reports:

"Despite the Bush administration's decision to back away from regulating 
emissions of global- warming gases, many multinational companies plan to 
continue reducing such emissions because they face strong pressure to do 
so in Europe and Japan, fear rising energy costs or want to promote 
their products as being friendly to the environment.

"Some of the executives with plans to reduce emissions say they are 
trying to be good corporate citizens. But companies also cite a wide 
range of business reasons that have little to do either with the 
environment or with what happens in Washington.

"And even as they move ahead on their own, some top officials at these 
companies say that while voluntary action is the right approach in the 
short run, at some point they expect the United States and others to 
adopt binding restrictions on the gases."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/15/business/pre-emptive-strike-global-warming-many-companies-cut-gas-emissions-head-off.html?pagewanted=print


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