[✔️] November 11, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Thu Nov 11 08:37:36 EST 2021

/*November 11, 2021*/

/[ a daily report on COP26 from IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin - link 
and PDF ] /
*Report of main proceedings for 9 November 2021*
Glasgow Climate Change Conference
PDF Version
The Glasgow Climate Change Conference continued to be dominated by 
finance discussions. Informal informals, minister-led discussions, and 
Presidency-led discussions convened throughout the day.
https://enb.iisd.org/Glasgow-Climate-Change-Conference-COP26-daily-report-9Nov2021

/[ video lecture on climate fundamentals and outlooks 47 min ]/
*Climate and Ecological Crisis: Heading for Extinction*
Dec 30, 2019
Rafael Ubal
We are entering a critical decade in our history, in which a failure to 
enact unprecedented changes in all aspects of industrialized societies 
may lead to a catastrophic and irreversible ecological collapse. In this 
video I survey the most relevant scientific facts related with our 
current climate and ecological crisis, and urge all members of society 
to take immediate action for systemic change.

All scientific facts and predictions presented in this video are 
extracted from the mainstream scientific literature on the topic, 
accessible through the references below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pukN_S-EsH8&

/ ["...we believe the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented 
opportunities for profit." ]/
*Climate is the ‘biggest single opportunity’ the insurance industry has 
ever seen, CEO says*
PUBLISHED  NOV 9 2021
-- From floods and rising temperatures to cold snaps, the fallout from 
climate-related events already affects the insurance industry in a 
number of ways.
-- “We think of Covid as systemic risk – climate is the ultimate 
systemic risk,” John Neal, Lloyd’s CEO, tells CNBC.
LONDON — Climate is the “ultimate systemic risk” and represents “the 
biggest single opportunity the insurance industry has ever seen,” 
according to the CEO of the centuries-old insurance market Lloyd’s.

In an interview with CNBC, John Neal, who heads up the British company, 
attempted to paint a picture of how his sector would operate going forward.

“We think of Covid as systemic risk — climate is the ultimate systemic 
risk, so this is our chance to show businesses, communities and even 
governments how we can help,” Neal, who was speaking at the COP26 
climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, said last week.

 From floods and rising temperatures to cold snaps, the fallout from 
climate-related events already affects the insurance industry in a 
number of ways.

The Association of British Insurers says an extreme freeze in the U.K. 
during 2018 led to payouts for burst pipes totaling £194 million (around 
$263.16 million) across a period of three months. In the same year, an 
extreme heatwave saw over 10,000 homes in the U.K. claim for damage 
created by subsidence. This exceeded £64 million, according to the ABI.
- -  [cartoon 
https://twitter.com/gregbeier/status/1239948694167990274/photo/1 ]
*Data and the long game*
Back at Lloyd’s, Neal was asked about pricing climate risk when 
providing insurance and if the tools were available to do that. His 
response emphasized the importance of gathering knowledge over a 
sustained period of time.

“We’ve got 25 years of high quality weather data,” he said. “The 
frequency and severity of … convective storms, right the way up to 
hurricane related activity we see in the U.S. – we’ve got amazing data 
on that,” he went on to add.

“The advantage we have is unlike, say, life assurers where they’re 
making long, long-term decisions, we are repricing our products every 12 
months,” he said.

“So in real time, we’re managing weather and trying to understand 
weather and then trying to extrapolate that through a climate lens.”

Looking ahead, Neal was bullish about his sector’s prospects going 
forward. “The insurance industry’s got $35 trillion under management, so 
we’re part of the solution, if you like, of putting our assets at play 
to support transition,” he said.

He concluded by saying: “I genuinely, genuinely think … climate is the 
biggest single opportunity the insurance industry has ever seen.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/09/climate-biggest-single-opportunity-for-insurance-lloyds-ceo.html
https://twitter.com/gregbeier/status/1239948694167990274/photo/1

/[ Undermining ] /
*Julian Assange’s Fiancée Stella Moris: WikiLeaks Helped Expose Climate 
Change Hypocrisy & War Crimes*
NOVEMBER 9, 2021
*STELLA MORIS: *Hi, Amy. I am here because I’m here to rally support for 
Julian and also to raise awareness of the extraordinary wealth of 
information that WikiLeaks has published about the climate over the 
years. And the archive of WikiLeaks just becomes more and more relevant 
for every year that passes. There are thousands and thousands of emails 
and documents that document not only, for example, how the melting ice 
cap sparked a scramble for the Arctic, like the scramble for Africa, for 
Arctic oil and minerals, but also, for example, about how Shell had 
infiltrated the Nigerian government, and the Shell executive vice 
president boasted to the U.S. Embassy that they had seconded people into 
every relevant ministry of the Nigerian government and that the Nigerian 
government wasn’t aware that Shell knew exactly what was going on and 
which decisions were being taken and shaping how those decisions were 
being taken.

So, really, the WikiLeaks archive is quite an extraordinary tool for 
activists, for academics, for people working in this area, to be able to 
understand the relationship between the states and the fossil fuel 
companies, how those interests are intertwined, the fact that there is 
no bright line between many of these states and the fossil fuel 
industry, and that, in fact, there’s a revolving door and that the goals 
of the summit are frustrated by this reality...
- -
STELLA MORIS: Well, ... I know that BP, for example, covered up a 
massive blowout in Azerbaijan just months before the Deepwater Horizon 
catastrophic disaster in the Mexican Gulf. So there’s an enormous wealth 
of information, of documents, about every single country and about these 
climate negotiations, from the inside, how the U.S. was manipulating and 
bribing smaller countries, spying on delegates, and so on.

And I encourage everyone who’s involved and who’s interested in our 
climate to go to the WikiLeaks archive and search, search for their 
specific companies — there are thousands and tens of thousands of 
references to the major oil companies — and also searchable by country 
and so on.
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/11/9/stella_moris_on_wikileaks_and_climate 

/[  Activism for YouTube still needed ] /
*YouTube's Climate Denial Problem*
Mar 23, 2020
zentouro
In January of 2020, AVAAZ released a report investigating YouTube and 
Climate Misinformation. Let's talk about it.
Great Climate & Environmental YouTube Peeps (let me know in comments 
anyone else I should be watching!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZYH_MirvV8

- -

/[ Avaaz is a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to 
decision-making everywhere.]/
*With millions of members from every country of the world, Avaaz is the 
largest global web movement in history.*
https://secure.avaaz.org/page/en/media/

/[ Academic lesson future climates..  Univ of Bonn.  53 min video 
lesson  ] /
*Climate change 4 - impact projection*
Nov 9, 2020
HortiBonn
This video was produced for the module ‘Tree phenology analysis with R’, 
which is offered to MSc students in agricultural programs at the 
University of Bonn in Germany. The materials are also accessible to 
anyone not taking this class. The module revolves around functions of 
the ‘chillR’ package for R, with the ambition that students of this 
course will be able to conduct analyses of climate change impacts on 
deciduous trees during their dormancy season.

This specific video is one of four contributions on climate change. This 
is video 4, which presents modeling approaches we can use to derive the 
responses of agricultural (and other) systems to projected future climates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q8HF4E7rkM

/
/

//[ "swamp...nic, nic, nic" - quote from 'Easy Rider' ]/
/*Serious about climate change? Get serious about peat.*
By William Booth
Nov 10, 2021
GARSTANG, England — Moor, bog, fen, mire, flush, swamp, slough. 
Peatlands have gotten a bum rap. They’re inhospitable, useless. Too wet 
to plow, too dry to fish, the old farmers say.

Slagged off as anaerobic wastelands, dissed in the popular imagination, 
imagined as the eerie Dead Marshes in “The Lord of the Rings” or the 
forbidding Grimpen Mire in “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” When bad 
things go down in Charles Dickens, the scene is set in a forbidding moor.

All slander, said Christian Dunn, wetlands scientist at Bangor 
University in Wales.

“Peat is the superhero of the natural world,” he said...
- -
Out at Winmarleigh Moss, they’re testing a new idea: “carbon farming.” 
In which the “crop” is the carbon a farmer is locking into the peat. 
Mike Longden, a peatland initiative officer with the Lancashire Wildlife 
Trust, stood on a berm and explained the farm.

The team took five aces of an unloved degraded peatland, drained in the 
1970s, and rebuilt the dikes, pumps and plumbing. They stripped off the 
top four inches of nutrient-rich top soil, left over from when sheep 
grazed the pasture, and planted 150,000 plugs of the new cover crop, 
sphagnum moss. Then they brought the water level back to the field to 
re-wet the new moss and existing five feet of unoxidized peat below.

The newly planted moss is looking happy and healthy. As it grows, it 
will carpet the site, and the bottom of the moss will just sit there in 
watery acidic conditions, to form — presto! — new peat.

Who will pay for it? Rob Stoneman, director of landscape recovery at the 
Wildlife Trusts, says very soon the government will probably pay land 
managers a few hundred dollars an acre to store carbon in a reclaimed 
peat bog. Corporations, too, might buy even more for credits from the 
carbon farmers of the future to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

“The thinking is, that if you are going to get to net-zero as promised 
in Britain, somebody is going to subsidize this,” Stoneman said.

For a thousand years?

“At least for a while,” Stoneman said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/10/cop26-peat-carbon//
/

/[ from the sci-fi novel Dune  - The fictional planet Arrakis and global 
warming  video]/
*Scientists Simulated Desert Planet Arrakis To See If It's Habitable*
Nov 9, 2021
Anton Petrov
Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk 
about a new interesting simulation of the desert planet Arrakis from 
Frank Herbert's Dune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC1yZVqtwxY
//

/- -/

/[ start with understanding the planet Earth -- text website]/
*Dune: we simulated the desert planet of Arrakis to see if humans could 
survive there*
October 26, 2021
- -
We are scientists with specific expertise in climate modelling, so we 
simulated the climate of Arrakis to find out. We wanted to know if the 
physics and environment of such a world would stack up against a real 
climate model.

Here’s a visualisation of our climate model of Arrakis: 
https://images.theconversation.com/files/427871/original/file-20211021-15766-1q37jmx.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=2
- -
*How do you build a fantasy world like Arrakis?*
We started with a climate model commonly used to predict weather and 
climate here on Earth. To use these sorts of models you have to decide 
on the physical laws (well-known in the case of planet Earth) and then 
input data on everything from the shape of mountains to the strength of 
the sun or the makeup of the atmosphere. The model can then simulate the 
climate and tell you roughly what the weather might be like.

We decided to keep the same fundamental physical laws that govern 
weather and climate here on Earth. If our model presented something 
completely strange and exotic, this could suggest those laws were 
different on Arrakis, or Frank Herbert’s fantastical vision of Arrakis 
was just that, fantasy.
We then needed to tell the climate model certain things about Arrakis, 
based on the detailed information found in the main novels and the 
accompanying Dune Encyclopedia. These included the planet’s topography 
and its orbit, which was was essentially circular, akin to the Earth 
today. The shape of an orbit can really impact the climate: see the long 
and irregular winters in Game of Thrones.

Finally, we told the model what the atmosphere was made of. For the most 
part it is quite similar to that of the Earth today, although with less 
carbon dioxide (350 parts per million as opposed to our 417 ppm). The 
biggest difference is the ozone concentration. On Earth, there is very 
little ozone in the lower atmosphere, only around 0.000001%. On Arrakis 
it is 0.5%. Ozone is important as it is around 65 times more effective 
at warming the atmosphere than CO₂ over a 20-year period...
- -
Arrakis’s climate is basically plausible
The books and film describe a planet with unforgiving sun and desolate 
wastelands of sand and rock. However, as you move closer to the polar 
regions towards the cities of Arrakeen and Carthag, the climate in the 
book begins to change into something that might be inferred as more 
hospitable...
- -
The book says that there is no rain on Arrakis. However, our model does 
suggest that very small amounts of rainfall would occur, confined to 
just the higher latitudes in the summer and autumn, and only on 
mountains and plateaus. There would be some clouds in the tropics as 
well as polar latitudes, varying from season to season.

The book also mentions that polar ice caps exist, at least in the 
northern hemisphere, and have for a long time. But this is where the 
books perhaps differ the most from our model, which suggests summer 
temperatures would melt any polar ice, and there would be no snowfall to 
replenish the ice caps in winter.

*Hot but habitable*
Could humans survive on such a desert planet? First, we must make an 
assumption that the human-like people in the book and film share similar 
thermal tolerances to humans today. If that’s the case then, contrary to 
the book and film, it seems the tropics would be the most habitable 
area. As there is so little humidity there, survivable wet-bulb 
temperatures – a measure of “habitability” that combines temperature and 
humidity – are never exceeded...
- -
It’s important to remember that Herbert wrote the first Dune novel way 
back in 1965. This was two years before recent Nobel-winner Syukuro 
Manabe published his seminal first climate model, and Herbert did not 
have the advantage of modern supercomputers, or indeed any computer. 
Given that, the world he created looks remarkably consistent six decades on.
https://theconversation.com/dune-we-simulated-the-desert-planet-of-arrakis-to-see-if-humans-could-survive-there-170181

///[ basic lessons video 28 min  ]/
*Disappearing beaches - The trouble with sand | DW Documentary*
DW Documentary
Around the world, beaches are under threat. Severe storms and sea levels 
are rising. Huge quantities of sand are being washed away into the 
ocean. Even entire islands are in existential danger.

In Germany, the island of Sylt is battling against disappearance. Its 
beaches, like those of other North Sea islands, have been under assault 
for decades. Authorities are trying to halt the loss of kilometers of 
sandy beaches with construction measures and beach nourishment. Big sand 
dredging ships play an important role in this process. They remove 
enormous quantities from the seabed and pump it back onto eroding shores.

Replenishing an shorelines in this manner costs several million euros a 
year. But the financial expense is not the only problem - the ecological 
price of these significant interventions into the fragile maritime 
ecosystem is far from clear. Currently, people are still putting coastal 
protection before environmental protection. But there are debates about 
whether this strategy can be continued in future. After all, sand is the 
second most important commodity in our modern society after water. It 
can be found in concrete, cars, computer chips, cleaning detergents and 
cellphones. And because desert sand is too fine, all of this sand has to 
come from the sea or from rivers.

In total, between 40 and 50 billion tons of sand are used each year. As 
a result, sand has gradually become a scarce resource. Meanwhile, many 
countries have seen a rise of illegal sand mining organized by criminal 
gangs. Sand mafias plunder and destroy entire regions. The workers who 
remove sand from beaches, the sea, or riverbeds often do so under 
hazardous conditions.
Researchers are working hard to find replacement materials and 
innovative recycling processes. Sand may seem essentially limitless, but 
global demand far outstrips availability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iuQjyMP8_c

/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 11, 2013*
November 11, 2013:
MSNBC's Chris Jansing interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on 
Washington's climate silence.
http://www.msnbc.com/jansing-and-co/watch/will-washington-act-on-climate-change-62900803599

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