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

Sat Nov 6 06:25:54 EDT 2021

/*November 6, 2021*/

/[ many excellent BBC reports ]/
*COP26: Greta Thunberg tells protest that COP26 has been a 'failure'*

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59165781

Pages of reports and video links: 
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56837908

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/[ young people inherit the future ] /
*Teens and Unions Take Over Glasgow as Greta Thunberg Declares UN 
Climate Talks a 'Failure'*
As week one of United Nations climate talks comes to a close, strikers 
took to the streets to show the movement to protect the planet is growing.
Brian Kahn - Nov 5, 2021
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — The leaves of Kelvingrove Park are a patchwork of 
yellow and green, caught between summer and fall, life and death. A 
stiff wind stirred the boughs above a throng of strikers who gathered 
there on Friday to send a message to negotiators in the conference rooms 
at United Nations climate talks a mile (1.6 kilometers) away: The time 
for promises is over. The era of climate action has to begin...
- -
Cries of “climate justice” echoed off the city’s buildings as police 
cleared a path from Kelvingrove to George Square at the heart of the 
city’s downtown...
- -
Unions and the climate movement have increasingly become aligned around 
the world, including in the U.S. The Texas AFL-CIO voted earlier this 
year to endorse a green jobs plan and just transition. The International 
Trade Union Confederation also endorsed a major global climate strike in 
2019. But seeing the flags of GMB flying next to climate groups like 
Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion represents an even closer 
alignment that could be a potent political force...
- -
Other workers also took time off to show up and support the young 
adults. Helena Clements, a pediatrician, came to highlight the grave 
health crisis climate change poses to kids. Indeed, climate change is 
already making people sick and causing death now. A recent report from 
the Lancet, a premier medical journal, underscored just how bad things 
are for the present, let alone the risk future generations will face.

“This was the first year where I can say confidently that I and my 
patients very clearly experienced the impacts of climate change,” Jeremy 
Hess, co-author of the U.S. policy brief, emergency medicine physician, 
and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the 
University of Washington, told Earther at the time the report came out.

“There’s no point in me looking after the health of children if we don’t 
look after the planet,” Clements said of why she made the six-plus hour 
trip to Glasgow from Nottingham. “We’re here as Doctors for XR raising 
the role of financiers in funding climate change.”...
- -
“The voices of young people must be heard and reflected in these 
negotiations here at COP.”

What those voices are calling for is more action that backs up promises. 
They’re also calling for a system change, one that doesn’t rely on the 
goodwill of capitalist overlords to address the climate crisis. On that 
front, COP26 has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. A contingent of 
countries has committed to no longer funding fossil fuels abroad, a 
concrete plan that brings public finance to bear on the clean energy 
transition. (There are still some loopholes, but it’s a good step.)

However, major private financial institutions have mostly made a 
splashy-sounding pledge about firms with $130 trillion in assets going 
on a net zero pathway that’s been panned as greenwashing by the likes of 
Greta Thunberg and the Financial Times alike. U.S. leaders at the talks, 
including John Kerry, have also a very business-oriented approach to the 
crisis given Congress’ inability to pass strong climate provisions to 
date...
- -
“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,” Greta Thunberg told the 
group after a string of other speeches in George Square. “It should be 
obvious that this crisis cannot be solved with the same methods that got 
us into it in the first place.”...
- -
“It’s important to have our voices heard and let everybody know that we 
want a change,” said Kortney Brooks, a 16-year-old who was on the same 
class trip. “We want justice. There’s a lot of young people here who 
want them to hear our voices. And hopefully, we get that change.”...
- -
https://gizmodo.com/teens-and-unions-take-over-glasgow-as-greta-thunberg-de-1848005350 

/[ a bit of atmosphere science: heat rises ]/
*Earth’s lower atmosphere is rising due to climate change*
Higher temperatures are forcing the upper boundary of the troposphere to 
expand upward
Atmosphere readings collected by weather balloons in the Northern 
Hemisphere over the last 40 years reveal that climate change is pushing 
the upper boundary of the troposphere — the slice of sky closest to the 
ground — steadily upward at a rate of 50 to 60 meters per decade, 
researchers report November 5 in Science Advances.

Temperature is the driving force behind this change, says Jane Liu, an 
environmental scientist at the University of Toronto. The troposphere 
varies in height around the world, reaching as high as 20 kilometers in 
the tropics and as low as seven kilometers near the poles. During the 
year, the upper boundary of the troposphere — called the tropopause — 
naturally rises and falls with the seasons as air expands in the heat 
and contracts in the cold. But as greenhouse gases trap more and more 
heat in the atmosphere, the troposphere is expanding higher into the 
atmosphere (SN: 10/26/21).

Liu and her colleagues found that the tropopause rose an average of 
about 200 meters in height from 1980 to 2020. Nearly all weather occurs 
in the troposphere, but it’s unlikely that this shift will have on a big 
effect on weather, the researchers say. Still, this research is an 
important reminder of the impact of climate change on our world, Liu says.

“We see signs of global warming around us, in retreating glaciers and 
rising sea levels,” she says. “Now, we see it in the height of the 
troposphere.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-lower-atmosphere-rising-climate-change-troposphere

/[ Hayhoe notes that scientists have been underestimating... ] /
*Climate One TV: Katharine Hayhoe*
Nov 4, 2021
Climate One
Despite her identity as an evangelical, climate scientist Katharine 
Hayhoe doesn't accept global warming on faith; she crunches the data, 
analyzes the models, and helps engineers, city managers and ecologists 
quantify the impacts. In her new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s 
Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, Hayhoe argues that when it 
comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the 
equation; we need to find shared values in order to connect our unique 
identities to collective action. Yet in light of the latest, bleakest UN 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — which has been called 
a “code red for humanity” — where does Hayhoe still manage to find hope? 
Join us for a conversation with this United Nations Champion of the 
Earth and one of Time ’s 100 Most Influential People.
#letstalkclimate

    3:00 Glasgow
    8:21 Climate Conflict
    16:20 Late night talk shows talk climate
    21:35 Ten Climate Commandments

https://www.climateone.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sinKAmrNF5g

/[ The founder of https://skepticalscience.com/  4 min video ]/
*John Cook: Solutions Help Change Minds About Climate*
Nov 4, 2021
greenmanbucket
John Cook PhD, of Monash University in Melbourne Australia, on the 
dynamics of behavior change and opinion change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igHc0PqfdNs

/[ Is it crucial to experience nature? ] /
*Rebecca Solnit on the Politics of Pleasure*
The author discusses her new book, “_Orwell’s Roses_,” and the role of 
art and beauty as forms of resistance.
By Helen Rosner  Nov 5, 2021...
- -
Solnit’s most recent book, “_Orwell’s Roses,_” is, depending on how the 
light hits, a natural history of gardening, a dissection of the rose as 
capitalist metaphor, or a defense of art and beauty as a bulwark against 
the annihilating forces of totalitarianism. At its core, it is an 
intimate recounting of the life and politics of George Orwell, who 
planted the roses of Solnit’s title in the spring of 1936, when he was 
living at a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, about thirty miles 
north of London. That year, between reporting on labor conditions in 
Manchester coal mines and travelling to the Continent to fight in the 
Spanish Civil War, Orwell found time to get his hands in the soil, and 
over the following years he took great pleasure in cultivation. When 
Solnit visited his cottage in person, in 2017, she found that the fruit 
trees he had planted were decades gone, but two tremendous 
rosebushes—likely Orwell’s own—were in bloom. I recently spoke to Solnit 
by phone; in our conversation, which has been edited for length and 
clarity, we discussed pleasure as a form of resistance, the horrors of 
modern commercial rose farms, and why she doesn’t consider “Orwell’s 
Roses” a biography.
- -
*Is it actually the case that cultivating a rose garden can be an act of 
resistance, or is it just a line that we tell ourselves to stave off 
despair?*

There are a lot of ways in which the destructive forces around us want 
us to be consumers, want us to be malleable and gullible. Anything that 
makes us something else—somebody with a robust sense of self, somebody 
with a sense of pleasure, somebody with independence of thought—is not 
the revolution itself, but it might help reinforce the character who can 
resist. This touches on something else that was really important to me 
in the book: we often have a sense that the only stuff that makes us 
people who can resist is, you know, the propaganda telling us that bad 
people are doing bad things, and it’s bad, and we should stop it. But 
there’s also a question of who is capable of independent thought, who 
resists the lies, the propaganda, the totalitarianism, who has the 
courage to stand up—and what might instill that in you?

Various people—including, I think, Orwell—argue that this is often a 
much more complex and subtle process. Rereading “1984” in the course of 
writing this, I was surprised to find a book that felt very different 
than it had all the other times I’d read it over the forty or so 
previous years. Winston Smith, in rebelling against Big Brother—his very 
first act is to pull out a beautiful blank book he’s bought, and Orwell 
describes the sensuousness of the paper, the act of writing with pen and 
ink. He’s not only cultivating an independence of thought but he’s 
appreciating the sensuality of the materials and the act. He goes on 
from there to listen to birds singing, to have a love affair, to eat 
forbidden chocolate, to acquire a paperweight with a bit of coral that 
becomes a symbol for this private world he’s created with his love 
affair, to admire the washerwoman hanging up diapers and singing in a 
beautiful contralto voice out the window. This itself becomes his 
reclaiming of all the things he’s not supposed to have and see and be 
and enjoy. When I understood that, the book took a really different 
shape: it’s not just about the need to destroy or resist Big Brother, 
but to do it in these very indirect ways, by being who they don’t want 
you to be.
- -
More broadly, we still haven’t fully accepted the question of how the 
personal and the political connect. It was a great feminist rallying 
cry, but we’re still not done doing that work. And we’re still not done 
thinking about what an activist life, an engaged life, can look like. 
We’re still not done connecting the natural world to the political 
world. It’s an ongoing project, and it felt like this book was an 
eclectic way to come at some of that stuff from an unfamiliar angle.

*Roses have such a rich history as a metaphorical vehicle that they’re 
almost a cliché—Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare. But in this 
book you take them to places that feel very new: capitalism, 
colonialism, climate change.*
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/rebecca-solnit-on-the-politics-of-pleasure

- -

[ one more important essay ]
*Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap*
April 22, 2021
https://theconversation.com/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap-157368 

/[ on fiction in text and audio ]/
*Novelists illustrate the climate futures that could await us*
November 5, 2021
Peter O'Dowd
Politicians and scientists gathered in Scotland this week to set goals 
to roll back emissions and save the planet from catastrophic climate 
change at COP26. It’s a task so daunting it’s even hard to imagine.

But fiction writers are trying to do just that...
- -
Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has also been writing about 
the climate futures that may await us.

In books like “New York 2140,” “Red Mars,” and most recently “The 
Ministry for the Future,” he’s explored how a changing climate would 
change humanity. He’s also proposed solutions: “The Ministry for the 
Future” is about a UN agency that takes great risks to solve the crisis.

Robinson is so well-regarded that the real-life, non-fiction, UN invited 
him to COP26 this week.

Kim Stanley Robinson: “Well, I'm a science fiction writer, and so what I 
mean by that is I like to set my stories in the future because it makes 
for interesting stories. So you set a story in the future. Well, it 
could be 5 million years in the future, and that's what we think of as 
space opera. A lot of people think science fiction is just that, but 
there's near-future science fiction. And what I'm going to say is that 
all near future science fiction has now become climate fiction because 
it's an over determining situation that you can't escape. So if you're 
going to write about the near future, suddenly you're writing climate 
fiction now.”

On whether something like the massive disasters he writes about in 
“Ministry for the Future” could spur climate action

Robinson: “I'm not so sure about that to tell you the truth. And my 
working method was that if I could tell people about it in fiction, they 
might become aware that it's going to happen and it could happen almost 
anywhere. And this wet bulb temperature that is a combination of heat 
and humidity, which is what I described in my novel, one of the hottest 
wet bulb temperatures ever was recorded outside of Chicago. And the 
scientific community, warning us of that kind of coalesced about two or 
three or four years ago, and when I read about it, I thought, I have to 
take this on. It's not well enough known that we cannot adapt to higher 
global average temperatures because we don't even survive without air 
conditioning in wet bulb 35 temperature and we're already hitting wet 
bulb 34. It could happen anywhere, any time. Most of the human world is 
in danger of heat waves of this sort, and so that really drove this 
particular book.”

On what innovations are needed to combat the climate crisis

Robinson: “The crucial one is finance, which is to say the software of 
civilization. How do we pay ourselves to quickly do the right things to 
decarbonize, as opposed to continuing to pay ourselves to exploit and 
destroy the Earth for the generations to come and drive ourselves into a 
mass extinction event merely because it seems to be profitable by the 
current system. So a new political economy, a new sense of what money is 
and how we create it and what we spend it on. This is the crucial 
technology.”

On the “economy 2.0” that could stave off disaster
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/11/05/kim-stanley-robinson-climate-change

/[ The news archive - looking back ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 6, 1990*

November 6, 1990: In a speech to the 2nd World Climate Conference in 
Geneva, Margaret Thatcher declares, "The danger of global warming is as 
yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so 
that we do not live at the expense of future generations."

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108237

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