[✔️] November 19, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Nov 19 09:45:56 EST 2021
/*November 19, 2021*/
/[ COP Cartoon ]
/*Cop26 Guardian Opinion cartoon*
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2021/nov/12/martin-rowson-on-attempts-to-phase-out-fossil-fuel-subsidies-at-cop26-cartoon/
/
/
/
/[ Top history news important to see - article with links to images ] /
*The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing*
Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial
messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual
guide
by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes
Thu 18 Nov 2021
Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so
difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.
The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion
dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate
action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis
and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of
advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our
children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the
climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not
solvable. The campaign continues to this day.
As recently as last month, six big oil CEOs were summoned to US Congress
to answer for the industry’s history of discrediting climate science –
yet they lied under oath about it. In other words, the fossil fuel
industry is now misleading the public about its history of misleading
the public.
We are experts in the history of climate disinformation, and we want to
set the record straight. So here, in black and white (and color), is a
selection of big oil’s thousands of deceptive climate ads from 1984 to
2021. This isn’t an exhaustive analysis, of which we have published
several, but a brief, illustrated history – like the “sizzle reels” that
creatives use to highlight their best work – of the 30-plus year
evolution of fossil fuel industry propaganda. This is big oil’s PR
sizzle reel.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bc26f9877245599725835f964ef753296e43a155/0_0_2482_1630/master/2482.jpg?width=880&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=e11f6794c48c21a55ac676e0d5642a1e
*Early days: learning to spin*
Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) was not self-conscious about the potential
environmental impacts of its products in this 1962 advertisement touting
“Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!”
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5351df687b61f45aedc4c39bbf796a7f71d048d6/0_266_2531_3014/master/2531.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=47ce31a0d85ffcbff71dd23658ed7644
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/40dd0233d9518d4d564f9ce59a403dd01d137250/51_310_2032_2909/master/2032.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=cc5643f2fba4a32cd0de45a460b7acac
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8e8d16c0c97b7bb61d3673633bf5afaec65848d5/0_53_1144_1734/master/1144.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=02738715a17b0027daf65e83433c5eda
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing
*The truth behind the ads: *Big oil’s rhetoric has evolved from outright
denial to more subtle forms of propaganda, including shifting
responsibility away from companies and on to consumers. This mimics big
tobacco’s effort to combat criticism and defend against litigation and
regulation by “casting itself as a kind of neutral innocent, buffeted by
the forces of consumer demand”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing
- -
/[ Shell opinion manipulation - video ]/
*Cat’s Powering Progress | #MakeTheFuture*
Oct 13, 2020
Shell
Cat is the CEO of Limejump, part of the Shell Group. Through a lot of
hard work, her goal of supplying the UK grid with 100% renewables keeps
getting closer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uInWV7MMamk
/[ Notice some pretty clear comment-intimidation - from "Kim
Donald" ]/
Jessica Clark-Dinsmore
1 year ago
You lot are cheeky! Put my house in the advert without my
permission while you were criticising other people filming in
your petrol stations without asking you. I have tweeted you and
posted a Facebook post, please respond promptly
Kim Donald
11 months ago
What a powerful comment... Where are you from Jessica ?
Jessica Clark-Dinsmore
11 months ago
North London
Kim Donald
11 months ago
Jessica Clark-Dinsmore North London wow 😳 I had a friend there
before but died due to COVID19
Kim Donald
11 months ago
Jessica Clark-Dinsmore Please be very careful out there
Jessica.. it’s nice having you here ❤️
/[ This is a classic attack by an agent from a "50 Cent Army" -
hired to counter-attack individuals in social media - These often
follow a dramatic script. Notice the empty page of Kim Donald -
seems to have been made for one purpose - commenting on YouTube.
Such names are made automatically by the thousands. Most social
media likes to minimize these -- however they all realize that
controversial hostility draws in more viewers. It is no longer rare
to see veiled death threats. Also note that Jessica Clark Dinsmore
does not have much of a home page either -- although more authentic
in her comments. ]/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uInWV7MMamk
- -
/[ China invented the 50 Cent Army - possibly as early at 2004 ]/
From a Washington Post article in 2016
*The Chinese government fakes nearly 450 million social media comments a
year. This is why.*
Internet researchers have long known that the Chinese government
manipulates content on the Internet. Not only does it censor heavily,
but it also employs hundreds of thousands of people, the so-called 50
cent army, to write comments on the Internet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/19/the-chinese-government-fakes-nearly-450-million-social-media-comments-a-year-this-is-why/
/[ Breaking news?! Yawn ,wake me up when I can plug in my car.. always
promised 50 years hence ]/
*Breaking News: Fusion Recedes Into Far Future For The 57th Time*
Fusion has an amazing future as a source of energy. In space craft
beyond the orbit of Jupiter sometime in the next two centuries.
Michael Barnard -- Nov 9, 2021
Fusion has an amazing future as a source of energy. Which is to say, in
space craft beyond the orbit of Jupiter, sometime in the next two
centuries. Here on Earth? Not so much. At least, that’s my opinion...
- -
But fusion generation of electricity, as opposed to big honking nuclear
weapons using fusion, is a perpetual source of interest. When Lewis
Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission,
talked about nuclear being “too cheap to meter” in 1954, he was talking
about fusion, not fission. Like everyone since the mid-1950s, he assumed
that fusion would be generating power in 20 years.
And so here we are, 67 years later. How is fusion doing?
Let’s start with the only credible fusion project on the planet, the
ITER Tokamak project. It’s been around for decades. It planted its roots
in 1985 with Gorbachev and Reagan. 35 countries are involved. Oddly,
ITER isn’t an acronym, it’s Latin for “The Way,” a typically optimistic
and indeed somewhat arrogant assumption about its place in the universe.
It’s supposed to light up around 2040. That’s so far away I hadn’t
bothered to think much about it, as we have to decarbonize well over 50%
of our economy long before that. As a result, I had a lazy read on it. I
had assumed, as most press and indeed pretty much everyone involved with
it asserted, that it would be generating more energy than it consumed,
when it finally lit up.
It’s pretty easy to get that assumption when all of their press material
and statements stay that they’ll put in 50 MW of heat and get out 500 MW
of heat, or 10x the power. They’ve been saying that for at least 30
years, after all. I assumed that they would have excess energy, and
could bolt a steam generator onto the very expensive tech and produce
electricity if they wanted to. I didn’t assume that the million
components and hundreds of kilometers of wrapped, very expensive, exotic
material wires in the electromagnets would be remotely economical, but I
did assume that they were going to have excess energy.
And they’ve managed to make plasma, if not run a fusion reaction.
However, something crossed my desk today that made me sit up and
challenge my assumptions. There’s an obsessive guy named Steven B.
Krivit who seems to spend most of his time looking at various
alternative nuclear generation technologies, including debunking cold
fusion. His piece from November 3rd, 2021 asserted that he’d identified
in 2017 that ITER wouldn’t be generating more energy than was put in,
and that ITER finally admitted it to a press outlet.
Really? This project that will end up costing somewhere between $18 and
$45 billion isn’t intended to generate extra energy? That seemed unlikely.
So I poked around. Krivit’s numbers didn’t add up for me, as his
diagrams were clearly showing MW at various stages of the process, and
not net MWh. But other parts of his story were clearer, and other
participants in ITER were clearer still. I found a page from the JT-60SA
project. It’s a project devoted to “the early realization of fusion
energy by addressing key physics issues for ITER and DEMO.” It’s an ITER
sub-project. And it agrees with Krivit, but in the right units.
What it amounts to is that ITER will require about 200 MW of energy
input in total running as it creates 500 MW of heat. But the exergy of
heat means that if it were tapped, it would only return about 200 MW of
electricity. So it might be a perpetual motion machine, but one that
wouldn’t do anything more than keep its lights running as long as you
fed it tritium, about $140 million worth of the stuff a year.
And it gets worse. ITER is planning at the end of this process to
maintain this for less than 3000 seconds at a time. That’s 50 minutes.
This is at the end of the process. As they build up to less than an
hour, mostly they’ll be working on fusion that lasts five minutes,
several times a day. It’s a very expensive physics experiment that will
not produce climate-friendly energy. It’s going to teach us a bunch,
which I completely respect, but it’s not going to help us deal with
climate change.
I expected more from ITER. Not much more. I mean, it is a
million-component fission reactor expected to light up in 2040 and not
generate any electricity at that point. But I had assumed based on all
the press that it would generate more electricity than it used to
operate if you bolted a boiler and some turbines to it, even if it were
grossly expensive. Apparently not. Just grossly expensive, no net new
electricity.
As a side note, Krivit asserts that a former ITER spokesman admitted
this to Le Canard Enchainé, a French newspaper. Having become, briefly,
conversational in French, something seemed off to me. Why would a paper
be called The Chained Duck? It turns out that it’s in a tradition of
semi-serious, semi-satirical journalistic outlets that both get good
juicy quotes, leaks, and gossip from governmental insiders, but also
acted as the Onion of the day, just with actual real news mixed in with
the satire. Still going, it seems. The combination appears to mean that
the former ITER representative did say what he said, that Krivit was
right, but he said it to an outlet that only occasionally gets taken
seriously, and it wasn’t taken up by any media that were serious most of
the time.
However, ITER is not the only fusion reactor in the game. There are
startups! And we all know startups make no promises that they can’t keep
and are excellent at disclosure.
Like Helion. They have a photo-shopped peanut asserting it’s a 6th
prototype with regenerative power creation that’s never achieved fusion
that is backed by Peter Thiel! It just received $500 million more of VC
funding, with an option to get up to $2.2 billion if they hit their targets!
I’m not sure if I could have made up a paragraph less likely to make me
think that there was some there there.
The website is likely intentionally lacking in anything approaching
detail. It’s low-information and VC friendly, which in the energy space
is Thiel’s jam. He’s the guy who, despite being partnered with Elon
Musk, has never realized that electrical generation was already being
disrupted by wind and solar. His acolytes in startups disrupting energy
crashed and burned, because he and they never bothered to do the hard
work of understanding how electricity actually works at grid scale. At
least Musk was solid on solar, although he got the wrong end of it and
hasn’t quite figured that out yet.
While Helion has achieved 100 million degrees Celsius, it’s with a
high-energy laser pulse — not new ideas, in fact 1950s ideas, just
easier now — and they are incredibly coy about duration. The assumption
to be taken is that it lasts for a picosecond at a time. They talk about
their prototype having worked for months, but that means it’s
maintaining a vacuum and occasionally creating plasma, a precursor to
fueled fusion. Many years and tens of millions of dollars in, they are
promising the moon, and soon. And to be clear, they are well behind on
their initial schedule.
Unlike ITER, at least they are proposing fuels — Helium-3 and deuterium
— which aren’t absurdly difficult and expensive to get. But still,
Helium-3 isn’t terribly common. Lots of lunar mining proposals related
to it. So they are going to manufacture helium-3 apparently.
And they promise to create electricity directly. It’s not
heat-generating steam or powering thermocouples.
“The FRC plasmas in our device are high-beta and, due to their internal
electrical current, produce their own magnetic field, which push on the
magnetic field from the coils around the machine. The FRCs collide in
the fusion chamber and are compressed by magnets around the machine.
That compression causes the plasma to become denser and hotter,
initiating fusion reactions that cause the plasma to expand, resulting
in a change in the plasma’s magnetic flux. This change in magnetic flux
interacts with the magnets around the machine, increasing their magnetic
flux, initiating a flow of newly generated electricity through the
coils. This process is explained by Faraday’s Law of Induction.”
Sure. They create intense magnetic fields and then create plasmas which
generate their own magnetic field, and the combination generates
electricity. I will be fascinated to read third-party assessments of
their results.
There were no published results that I was able to find. No third party
assessments that I was able to find. Undoubtedly their NDA and legal
documents are things of beauty. Nothing except their assertion that they
had found a way to create electricity incredibly cheaply, something that
fusion researchers have been claiming for 67 years. They are asserting
that their end price of electricity will be $0.01 cents per kWh. Unlikely.
I’m disappointed about ITER. I think Helion is likely to be a less well
known and publicized Theranos, without in any way asserting that the
principals are Elizabeth Holmes as much as just optimistic about
timelines by decades, and far too enamored of their own, pulsing technology.
And fusion generating electricity appears to be as far away as ever.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-recedes-into-far-future-for-the-57th-time/
/[ One more opinion on what happened at COP26 ]/
*COP26 Is Over - Where Do We Go From Here? (w/ Global Citizen's Michael
Sheldrick)*
Nov 18, 2021
The Climate Pod
#COP26 #GlobalCitizen #ClimateChange
After a two year wait, COP26 has finally concluded. We are left with the
Glasgow Climate Pact, which is no doubt disappointing and fails in
several key areas. But all was not lost at COP26. Several major
commitments were made and pressure continues to mount on world leaders
to do more. We review the outcome with Michael Sheldrick, Co-Founder and
Chief Policy, Impact and Government Affairs Officer at Global Citizen.
Thank you to our sponsor Octopus Energy, a 100% renewable electricity
supplier. Octopus Energy is currently serving millions of homes around
the globe in countries like the United Kingdom, United States, New
Zealand, and Germany.
Listen to the full episode of The Climate Pod featuring Michael Sheldrick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVRxuVYGow
/[ strong opinion by retired Unitarian minister - out-of-control
collapse is a process ]/
*Collapse in a Nutshell: Understanding Our Predicament (33 min)*
Nov 15, 2021
thegreatstory
This is part one of a two-part primer on the nature, inevitability, and
speed of biospheric and civilizational collapse. Part two, "Collapse in
a Nutshell" can be found here: https://youtu.be/lPMPINPcrdk It is almost
impossible to truly understand (i.e., to get your head and heart around)
our current local and global-scale challenges without this
understanding. To join with others (in the "post-doom, no gloom"
community) to share best practices and strategies for how to cope and
adapt to this knowledge, see here: https://postdoom.com/discussions/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6FcNgOHYoo
/[ today's science lesson - less carbon and less moisture ]/
*Warmer soil stores less carbon: study*
Global warming will cause the world's soil to release carbon, new
research shows.
Scientists used data on more than 9,000 soil samples from around the
world, and found that carbon storage "declines strongly" as average
temperatures increase.
This is an example of a "positive feedback", where global warming causes
more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, further accelerating
climate change.
Importantly, the amount of carbon that could be released depends on the
soil type, with coarse-textured (low-clay) soils losing three times as
much carbon as fine-textured (clay-rich) soils.
The researchers, from the University of Exeter and Stockholm University,
say their findings help to identify vulnerable carbon stocks and provide
an opportunity to improve Earth System Models (ESMs) that simulate
future climate change.
"Because there is more carbon stored in soils than there is in the
atmosphere and all the trees on the planet combined, releasing even a
small percentage could have a significant impact on our climate," said
Professor Iain Hartley of Exeter's College of Life and Environmental
Sciences.
"Our analysis identified the carbon stores in coarse-textured soils at
high-latitudes (far from the Equator) as likely to be the most
vulnerable to climate change.
"Such stores, therefore, may require particular attention given the high
rates of warming taking place in cooler regions.
"In contrast, we found carbon stores in fine-textured soils in tropical
areas to be less vulnerable to climate warming."
The data on the 9,300 soil profiles came from the World Soil Information
database, with the study focusing on the top 50cm of soil.
By comparing carbon storage in places with different average
temperatures, the researchers estimated the likely impact of global warming.
For every 10°C of increase in temperature, average carbon storage
(across all soils) fell by more than 25%.
"Even bleak forecasts do not anticipate this level of warming, but we
used this scale to give us confidence that the effects we observed were
caused by temperature rather than other variables," Professor Hartley said.
"Our results make it clear that, as temperatures rise, more and more
carbon is release from soil.
"It's important to note that our study did not examine the timescales
involved, and further research is needed to investigate how much carbon
could be released this century."
The researchers found that their results could not be represented by an
established ESM.
"This suggests that there is an opportunity to use the patterns we have
observed to improve how models represent soils, and further reduce
uncertainty in their projections," Professor Hartley said.
The differences in carbon storage based on soil texture occur because
finer soils provide more mineral surface area for carbon-based organic
material to bond to, reducing the ability of microbes to access and
decompose it.
The paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, is entitled:
"Temperature effects on carbon storage are controlled by soil
stabilisation capacities."
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-warmer-soil-carbon.html
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming November 19, 2018*
November 19, 2018:
On “MSNBC Live,” Michael Mann discusses the role human-caused climate
change played in fueling the California wildfires.
https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/climate-change-no-longer-a-far-off-subtle-threat-says-climate-expert-1375033923933?v=raila&
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