[✔️] November 21, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Nov 21 09:51:33 EST 2021
/*November 21, 2021*/
/[ the really big question - clips from NYTimes article ]/
*To Breed or Not to Breed?*
In a world of pandemic chaos, political strife and climate catastrophe,
some would-be parents see the future as too dark to procreate.
By Alex Williams - Nov. 20, 2021
- -
Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Ms. Little feels “the burden of
knowledge,” she said. The couple sees mounting disaster when reading the
latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about
having children has set in...
- -
“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision,
it’s not that far away,” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change
my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be
more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.”
Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a
carbon footprint.
In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts
concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over
climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any
preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”
There is much debate, however, over the idea that having fewer children
is the best way to address the problem. In an interview with Vox in
April, Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and co-author of a 2017
study of the most effective lifestyle changes to reduce climate impact,
said that population reduction is not the answer...
- -
Another poll in 2018 by Morning Consult for The New York Times found
that among young adults in the United States who said they had or
expected to have fewer children than the number they considered ideal,
33 percent listed climate change, and 27 percent named population growth
as a concern.
While economic concerns remained paramount, with 64 percent citing the
high cost of child care, 37 percent cited global instability and 36
percent, domestic politics. To some, those issues are all rolled
together. In 2020, the birthrate in the United States declined for the
sixth straight year, a dip of four percent believed to be accelerated by
the pandemic...
- -
Regardless, such questions are creeping into the cultural dialogue in a
manner that recalls the hippie-era “ecology” movement, when “The
Population Bomb,” the seismic 1968 best seller by the Stanford
University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, predicted a barren, exhausted
planet where hundreds of millions would die in famines during the 1970s.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both
have broached the question in recent years, with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez
asserting “a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going
to be very difficult,” in a 2019 Instagram Live, which leads “young
people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?’”
Celebrities have also raised the issue. “Until I feel like my kid would
live on an earth with fish in the water,” Miley Cyrus told Elle magazine
two years ago, “I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.”...
- -
“As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the child’s
life in an increasingly uncertain world,” said Michael Ellsberg, 44, a
writer in Berkeley, Calif. “Sure we might figure out how to limit global
warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. We might figure out how to
cooperate as a globe to prevent future pandemics. We might figure out
how to limit the risks of nuclear war and terrorism. But we might not.”
Mr. Ellsberg follows “The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast” and other such
outlets, and after two breakups in which his desire to not have children
was a major factor, he had a vasectomy to cement his decision.
Doomsday fears are hardly the only reason that some choose the
child-free lifestyle.
“I was raised in a family that did not try to condition me as a
girl-mommy-to-be,” said LiLi Roquelin, 41, a married, French-born
singer-songwriter who lives in Queens. She counts herself a proud member
of the so-called childfree by choice movement, celebrated on social
media under hashtags like #childfree and #neverkids, and recently posted
a self-penned anthem of sorts called “Childfree.”
Even so, she said that women who choose not to reproduce often face
intense social pressure from family, friends, even medical
professionals. “Over the years, I have been criticized as inhuman or
unloving,” she said. “In my mid-30s, my gynecologist kept telling me
that my hormones would run out.”
For her, such pushback is merely the price you pay. Ms. Roquelin said
she enjoys a rich and fulfilling life without children, and is now
studying for a master’s degree in business administration to capitalize
on her music career. “I have many more things to explore on my journey,”
she said, “that do not involve raising other suffering human beings on
an out-of-supplies planet.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html
/[ Major tactics as uncovered by John Cook ] /
*Climate Deniers Are Using These Four Major Scare Tactics to Stop
Climate Action*
From doomsday scenarios to conspiracies totally removed from reality, a
Twitter analysis found the top fear-based narratives that today’s
climate deniers are spreading to prevent climate policy.
OPINION - ANALYSIS
By Stella Levantesi and Giulio Corsion - Nov 16, 2021
When fossil fuel companies found out about the link between their
product and climate change decades ago, they did everything they could
to hide it. They lied, manipulated, and deceived.
- -
To better understand today’s type of climate science denial we analyzed
over 300,000 tweets from the past five years. Our social media analysis
found that climate deniers have been promoting at least four major
narratives based on drumming up fears of government control in order to
prevent effective climate policies, particularly in the United States.
Our research found that climate denial has evolved into a softer, more
insidious type of misinformation, one that focuses on denying urgency
and action, one that targets the solutions more than anything else. Key
elements of this strategy include promoting confusion, doomist
perspectives, conspiracy theories, and fabricating lies to convince the
public that there is no real need for climate change policy, certainly
not at the scale of what scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic
impacts — basically, supporting any effort to postpone or halt ambitious
climate action and protect business as usual.
According to John Cook, research fellow at Monash Climate Change
Communication Research Hub in Australia, climate misinformation used to
be more focused on undermining the science, but over time, the
strategies have been moving more towards attacking solutions and
creating fear, as well as leaning towards “cultural-war” type
misinformation.
“It’s about scaring people and ‘othering’ people who care about climate
change or who are concerned about climate change and advocating for
action,” said Cook...
- -
*“It polarizes the public and then that makes it harder to get consensus
and progress.”*
— John Cook, climate misinformation expert
Of course, fear-mongering is as old as politics itself, but developments
in the reach and power of social media, paired with a chaotic
informational environment where disinformation runs amok, have made it
easier for climate deniers to tap into the average person’s uncertainties.
Through disinformation and scare tactics, climate change deniers seek to
create a sense of fear and insecurity around climate policies —
suggesting that they will cost too much, require giving up personal
freedoms, and enable the much-maligned system of socialism. In this way,
climate deniers have linked political action on climate to the demise of
conservative values, the loss of freedom, and, in extreme cases, global
conspiracy theories...
- -
The resulting data provides a clear snapshot of some of the most
significant elements of recent climate denier narratives, and in
particular, it shows how fear tactics have evolved to become central to
contemporary climate change denial, both on and off social media.
*Doomsday Scenarios*
Mounting studies are finding that the costs of current and potential
future climate change are massive, including for the U.S. Indeed, in
2020 the U.S. experienced an unprecedented number of billion-dollar
disasters — 22 events wrought devastation across the country from
heatwaves and drought to seven hurricanes.
In stark opposition to this fact, the first and most widespread scare
tactic we identified in the data — appearing in over 40 percent of all
posts containing scare tactics — presents a doomsday scenario narrative
in which global economic systems are wrecked by climate change policies.
Exploiting widespread fears of recession, poverty, and higher taxation,
tweets within this group often claim that climate policies will end up
hurting the average household, which will be made poorer by
environmental regulations...
- -
A clear example of this blame-shifting game is evident in the Texas
blackouts of February 2019. When natural gas pipelines froze, causing a
state-wide blackout, the state saw nearly twice as many power failures
from natural gas, goal, and nuclear compared to frozen wind turbines or
solar panels.
But this didn’t stop fossil fuels advocates and fear mongers from trying
to shift the blame onto renewable energies. Climate science critic Alex
Epstein, for example, claimed that “the root cause of the TX blackouts
is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of
unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.”
*A Trojan Horse to Socialism*
Climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and is caused
by human activity, namely by burning fossil fuels and cutting down
forests. Scientific analyses also show that the world is on track for
“disastrous” heating across the planet if nations fail to enact stronger
climate policies.
Nevertheless, the second scare tactic we analyzed from this slice of
tweets is based on the claim that climate change is a “trojan horse”
meant to turn the United States into a communist or socialist regime.
This argument is the most pervasive in our data in terms of both
quantity and reach.
This scare tactic claims that climate policy was never about “fixing”
the climate, but rather, about imposing a communist or socialist agenda.
This conspiracy theory exploits decades-old “red threat” scares to
polarize climate policy along political party lines, and is often
propagated by well-known anti-climate change think tanks...
- -
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, together with the Rio
summit, led conservatives to substitute the disappearing “red threat”
for the new “green threat” — communists now overlapped with
environmentalists. The fossil fuel industry and conservative activists
set up various lobby groups to prevent the passing of government
regulation to curb climate pollution, such as the Global Climate
Coalition or the Information Council for the Environment to name a couple.
*A Threat to Hamburgers*
A major source of greenhouse gas emissions comes from agriculture,
including the methane from burping cows and their manure ponds. To
address this pollution, the Green New Deal resolution introduced by
Congressional Democrats in 2019 called for “working collaboratively with
farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and
greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is
technologically feasible.” There was no mention of banning burgers.
However, critics of the Green New Deal seized on a fact sheet about it
(that was later withdrawn), which mentioned it would be difficult to
“get rid of farting cows.” As a result, the third prominent fear tactic
we identified among tweets from over the past five years centers on
claims that climate policy will be used by “alarmists” — which is how
deniers brand environmentalists, climate scientists, or anyone who
pushes for climate action — to “take away America’s burgers.”
This narrative — the least common scare tactic in our data — is based on
the idea that climate policy will ultimately lead to a ban on meat
consumption. This argument is often used to radicalize the denier front
and further polarize political debate. In this scenario, climate
activists are oppressive, undemocratic, and keen on dictating what
citizens are and aren’t allowed to do or, in this case, eat.
Tweets containing this type of narrative are overcome with a clear and
immediate sense of fear: several Twitter users go as far as urging
others to “get an extra freezer and buy meat, as prices are going to soar.”
Other claims of this kind include racist arguments, such as one in which
the suggestion to eat less meat is actually an excuse to reclaim land
and replace it with low-income housing, serving to motivate others to
fight against this planned urban sprawl.
According to Cook, cultural misinformation — such as the socialism and
the burger arguments — is probably the most dangerous because it
includes “tribal arguments” which “tap into very primal instincts of
people”.
“The simple myths tend to resonate more rather than complicated
scientific myths or arguments,” said Cook. “It polarizes the public and
then that makes it harder to get consensus and progress.”
*Full-on Conspiracy Theories*
Climate change deniers have often been shown to be attracted or
vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, and the final narrative we
detected is the most extreme, as it exploits a tendency to create an
alternative world which is very far from facts and allows deniers to
avoid facing reality.
The fourth scare tactic we found relies on the assumption that the
ultimate goal of climate policies is to trigger a society-wide “Great
Reset,” which will, in turn, lead to a totalitarian new world order...
- -
Denier discussions in this area include the idea that the public is
being brainwashed by “global elites” and that these efforts should be
criminalized. Conspiracy theories are also falsely claiming that
Covid-19 was a tool intended to reduce the world’s population as part of
a larger climate change plan. Depopulation is where Covid-19 and climate
change denial conspiracy theories meet.
While some of these scare tactics may sound imaginative at best — and
perhaps delusional at their worst — they do contain key insights into
the climate change denial of today. These days, the merchants of doubt
are seeding a different type of disinformation, focusing less on denying
the basic science, and more on creating unrealistic, polarizing, and
politicized debates to convince the public that climate action is
unnecessary and, most times, outright harmful.
As our analysis demonstrates, narratives of denial and fear tactics are
deeply interlinked, making them a dangerous self-feeding mechanism. This
means that these tactics overlap within the tweets themselves — one
tweet may contain elements from more than one scare tactic.
Climate change, socialism, Covid-19, a new world order, and meat bans
are all different sides of the same denial coin. And the message is a
simple one: climate change is a dangerous plot to limit individual
liberty, depopulate the Earth, and destroy national governments. In this
scenario, discussing science is no longer relevant — climate change
becomes exclusively a political matter, completely removed from science
or facts.
The more we see climate action become a part of serious policymaking
discussions, the more we can expect these types of fear tactics to
become relevant. In fact, we saw in our data that use of these fear
tactics always spiked around climate protests and key political moments,
such as the 2019 proposal for the Green New Deal in the U.S. Senate and
the September climate strikes that same year, also known as the Global
Week for Future.
Whenever climate policy is under the spotlight, deniers fight back by
spreading fear and uncertainty. It is fundamental to work towards
breaking this link and expose the mechanisms behind these fabricated
narratives, ultimately avoiding climate policy from being seen as
catastrophic and divisive and making climate action more resilient to
the disruption efforts of the climate denial machine.
“The general strategy against any form of misinformation is to explain
to people how they’re being misled because, no matter where people sit
on the political spectrum, everyone is averse to being tricked,” said
Cook. “No one likes being deceived. So if you explain why there is a
strategy that is being used to manipulate you, you can neutralize the
strategy.”
https://www.desmog.com/2021/11/16/four-major-climate-denial-scare-tactics-twitter/
/[ science lecture for kids ]/
*Christmas Lectures 2020: Water World - with Helen Czerski*
Nov 8, 2021
The Royal Institution
In the second lecture of the 2020 Christmas Lectures, physicist and
oceanographer Helen Czerski unpicks the Earth’s heating and plumbing
systems, showing how shifting ocean water creates an engine that
distributes heat and nutrients around our planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg4IzxDs_0Y
/[ opinion -- seems obvious -]/
*Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular
Action,” Not Politicians*
AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky talks about US hypocrisy in stoking needless conflict with
China, the unnecessarily bloody and grinding war in Afghanistan, and why
the United States could easily solve climate change./
/
Despite rapidly approaching his ninety-third birthday, Noam Chomsky
shows few signs of slowing down. The world-famous public intellectual
has published two books in 2021 — Consequences of Capitalism:
Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (with Marv Waterstone) and The
Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social
Change (with C. J. Polychroniou) — and his willingness to sit down for
interviews on wide-ranging topics remains unflagging.
Chomsky spoke with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson from the Danish
magazine Eftertryk in October 2021 about the war in Afghanistan, ongoing
US-instigated conflicts with China, climate change, and anarchism. You
can watch the conversation on YouTube here. The conversation has been
edited for length and clarity./
/
Full video interview with Noam Chomsky. Eftertryk Magazine. (Oct. 2021)
Oct 17, 2021
Eftertryk Magasin
On 8th October 2021, Eftertryk Magazine interviewed professor Noam
Chomsky on four issues of our times:
1) The justification for the Afghanistan war in the immediate
wake of 9-11
2) AUKUS and the new cold war with China
3) The climate crisis
4) The principles and values of socialist anarchism.
We hope you enjoy the video, press the like button, and engage us
with a comment down below./
/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Xm3h-EAAY
There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel
companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and
the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over the
summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation. It was a very
dire warning — much more than before.
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start
right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically
every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice.
The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth.
Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it
goes on to disaster. Those are the options...
- -
The Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Nothing. [They] won’t accept
anything. The Democrats do have a swing vote. The so-called moderate
Democrats, who should be called “ultra-reactionaries,” are the swing
vote. One of them is the chair of the Senate Energy Committee, [who]
also happens to be the champion in Congress of receiving funding from
the fossil fuel industry — which is quite an achievement, because they
pay off everyone — but he’s the champion. His name is Joe Manchin. He
has a policy — he’s made it explicit — that’s taken from the playbook of
the oil companies. He made it very clear; he said: “No elimination, only
innovation.” So, no cutbacks on the use of fossil fuel. If you can make
up something new, it’s okay. So, he’s blocking it. There are climate
change provisions in it. They’re already out. Blocked.
- -
The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing to
do with the markets or anything else. Just class war. This is another
form. Do we want to hand the future of our children and grandchildren to
elements that want to make as much profit as possible and then don’t
care what happens tomorrow? That’s one choice. The other choice is to
move onto a livable and better world.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china
/[ 40 min video- goes over the fundamentals ]/
*"Halting Climate Change: Why Zero Emissions Is Only the Beginning" by
Joeri Rogelj*
Aug 4, 2021
Aspen Global Change Institute
The 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement has set a goal of keeping global warming
well below 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C. In this lecture, Dr. Joeri
Rogelj of Imperial College London looka at what that means for the
amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted, the emissions
pathways we need to follow, and why reaching net-zero emissions is only
the beginning of a much longer journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mYSiGBPYmM
/[ powerful documentary video by DW 1:28 ]/
*Girls for Future and their fight against the global climate crisis | DW
Documentary*
Nov 19, 2021
DW Documentary
‘Girls for Future’ follows four girls as they fight for a better future.
Aged between 11 and 14 years, they are all directly affected by
environmental destruction - from air pollution to water shortage - and
its consequences.
The protagonists are from India, Australia, Indonesia and Senegal,
respectively. In Senegal, we see the global water crisis; in Indonesia,
it’s plastic waste pollution; we look at the agricultural crisis in
India; and in Australia, we witness the fatal destruction in the oceans
and on land through climate change. All four of the girls are directly
affected by the consequences of environmental destruction.
In Senegal, 14-year-old Fatou has to spend hours fetching water. This
leaves her with little time to study for school. Lack of access to water
affects two billion people around the world. As Fatou testifies, it’s a
lack that impacts every aspect of life.
In Punjab, India, twelve-year-old Gagan faces the fatal effects of
industrial agriculture. Burning crop residues in the fields is causing
enormous air pollution, and the use of chemical fertilizers is ruining
the soil.
In Australia, eleven-year-old Sabyah witnesses how the largest coral
reef on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, has already lost more than half
of its corals forever. Sabyah sees the connection to the coal industry.
Australia is the second-largest exporter of this most climate-damaging
fuel.
In Indonesia, we meet twelve-year-old Nina. She lives surrounded by
mountains of plastic waste. Not only Nina’s country, but all of
Southeast Asia has become a dumping ground for the Western
industrialized countries.
The global climate crisis is multi-faceted and complex. When media or
government officials speak of possible solutions, these are often
described as so complex that they can hardly be implemented. Yet in this
documentary, we meet four young girls, each of which it finding ways to
protect and restore our climate. Their resilience is a testimony of
strength and patience. Their energy and enthusiasm will inspire viewers
of all ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Fn_MZ1iZ8
/[ Time for new targets on the misinformation battlegrounds ]/
//*Climate change deniers are over attacking the science. Now they
attack the solutions.*
A new study charts the evolution of right-wing arguments.
Believe it or not, it’s nearly 2022 and some people still think we
shouldn’t do anything about the climate crisis. Even though most
Americans understand that carbon emissions are overheating the planet
and want to take action to stop it, attacks on clean energy and policies
to limit carbon emissions are on the rise.
In a study out this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports,
researchers found that outright denying the science is going out of
fashion. Today, only about 10 percent of arguments from conservative
think tanks in North America challenge the scientific consensus around
global warming or question models and data. (For the record, 99.9
percent of scientists agree that human activity is heating up the
planet.) Instead, the most common arguments are that scientists and
climate advocates simply can’t be trusted, and that proposed solutions
won’t work...
- -
That came as a surprise to the researchers. Scientists get called
“alarmists,” despite a history of underestimating the effects of an
overheating planet. Politicians and the media are portrayed as biased,
while environmentalists are painted as part of a “hysterical” climate
“cult.”
“It kind of dismayed me, because I spent my career debunking the first
three categories — ‘it’s not real, it’s not us, it’s not bad’ — and
those were the lowest categories of misinformation,” said John Cook, a
co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Climate Change
Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia. “Instead,
what they were doing was trying to undermine trust in climate science
and attack the actual climate movement. And there’s not much research
into how to counter that or understand it.”...
- -
Researchers found that attacks on “climate solutions” are also on the
rise. People who want to delay action often argue that renewable energy
can’t replace fossil fuels. They also say that climate policies will
hurt working families, ruin the economy, and raise prices. Typically
such arguments overlook how pollution from burning fossil fuels shortens
lifespans and how climate-charged disasters like wildfires, flooding,
and heat waves are already ruining people’s lives and costing billions.
They tend to ignore estimates that the changing climate could cost the
U.S. 10.5 percent of GDP by the end of the century.
“Climate solutions misinformation is really the future of climate
misinformation,” Cook said. It has been the predominant argument from
conservative think tanks since 2008 and recently became the second-most
common point made on anti-climate blogs, beating out the increasingly
unbelievable claim that the Earth isn’t warming...
- -
https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-claims-hierarchy.png
For the study, researchers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and
Australia used machine learning to categorize arguments against taking
climate action, tracking how they evolved over time. Using material from
33 prominent blogs and 20 think tanks, they analyzed more than 255,000
documents from 1998 to 2020, the majority of them from the United States.
It took Cook and his team about five years to create a machine learning
model that was able to reliably detect real-life climate misinformation
claims. “Misinformation is messy and doing content analysis is messy,
because the real world is always a bit blurry,” Cook said. First, they
developed a taxonomy to sort arguments into broad categories — say,
“climate change isn’t bad” — narrower claims (“carbon dioxide is not a
pollutant”) and even more specific points (“CO2 is food for plants!”).
Then they fed common climate myths into the machine until it was able to
recognize each one consistently out in the wild.
The study also tracked how arguments against taking action changed over
time. In general, misinformation around solutions ramped up before
international climate conferences or at times when Congress debated
climate legislation, such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act
in 2009. After the announcement of a big climate bill, conservative
think tanks argue that the policy will take a toll on the economy,
followed by another spike right before the bill goes up for vote...
- -
https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-misinformation-claims.png
That means there’s also “an air of predictability” around
misinformation, Cook says. “If we’re proactive enough, we can get ahead
of it and inoculate the public,” he said.
Last year, Cook released a free game that “vaccinates” people against
fake news. A cartoon character called Cranky Uncle — representing
conspiracy-prone uncles everywhere — uses his favorite techniques to
teach you to become a science denier like him. In the process of
learning how to create fake news, people learn how to spot logical
fallacies and other techniques used to dismiss scientific evidence, like
cherry-picking temperature data or citing fake experts. This approach,
called “pre-bunking,” has been shown to be effective — playing a similar
kind of game can reduce people’s susceptibility to misinformation for
three months, one study found.
Cook believes Cranky Uncle-style games could also help counter arguments
against climate solutions or attacks on the movement, too. “Pre-bunking
is kind of a universal template,” he said.
https://grist.org/politics/study-charts-show-rising-attacks-on-clean-energy-and-climate-policy/
- -
/[ Academic studies ]/
*Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change*
Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook & Mirjam O. Nanko
Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 22320 (2021) Cite this article
*Abstract*
A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of
misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our research
builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing and
validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism, (2)
conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian
claims, (3) developing a computational model to accurately classify
specific claims, and (4) drawing on an extensive corpus from
conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs to
construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years. Our
study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian blogs
have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science and
scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy and
renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach
by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation funding on
the production and dissemination of specific contrarian claims.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4/figures/1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4
/[ Oh why not just pile on? ] /
*The Plague Is More Likely Now Thanks to Climate Change*
A new study examines how rising temperatures in the western U.S. have
influenced plague outbreaks. Yes, that plague.
ByMolly Taft - Nov 19, 2021
The risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the
western U.S. has increased since 1950 thanks to climate change, a new
study has found. Importantly, the research gives valuable insights into
how this deadly disease has historically moved and developed in the
U.S., which can help us understand more about its future.
https://gizmodo.com/the-plague-is-more-likely-now-thanks-to-climate-change-1848092533
- -
/[ go ahead, read the boring academic article ] /
*Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of
environmental change*
Colin J. Carlson,Sarah N. Bevins,Boris V. Schmid
First published: 18 November 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15966
*Abstract*
After several pandemics over the last two millennia, the wildlife
reservoirs of plague (Yersinia pestis) now persist around the world,
including in the western United States. Routine surveillance in this
region has generated comprehensive records of human cases and animal
seroprevalence, creating a unique opportunity to test how plague
reservoirs are responding to environmental change. Here, we test whether
animal and human data suggest that plague reservoirs and spillover risk
have shifted since 1950. To do so, we develop a new method for detecting
the impact of climate change on infectious disease distributions,
capable of disentangling long-term trends (signal) and interannual
variation in both weather and sampling (noise). We find that plague foci
are associated with high-elevation rodent communities, and soil
biochemistry may play a key role in the geography of long-term
persistence. In addition, we find that human cases are concentrated only
in a small subset of endemic areas, and that spillover events are driven
by higher rodent species richness (the amplification hypothesis) and
climatic anomalies (the trophic cascade hypothesis). Using our detection
model, we find that due to the changing climate, rodent communities at
high elevations have become more conducive to the establishment of
plague reservoirs—with suitability increasing up to 40% in some
places—and that spillover risk to humans at mid-elevations has increased
as well, although more gradually. These results highlight opportunities
for deeper investigation of plague ecology, the value of integrative
surveillance for infectious disease geography, and the need for further
research into ongoing climate change impacts...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15966
/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 21, 2015*
November 21, 2015:
In a New York Times op-ed, Jeff Biggers observes:
"Negotiators en route to the United Nations conference on climate
change in Paris, scheduled to begin later this month, should take a
detour on rural roads here in Johnson County. A new climate
narrative is emerging among farmers in the American heartland that
transcends a lot of the old story lines of denial and cynicism, and
offers an updated tale of climate hope.
"Recent polls show that 60 percent of Iowans, now facing flooding
and erosion, believe global warming is happening. From Winneshiek
County to Washington County, you can count more solar panels on
barns than on urban roofs or in suburban parking lots. The state’s
first major solar farm is not in an urban area like Des Moines or
Iowa City, but in rural Frytown, initiated by the Farmers Electric
Cooperative.
"In the meantime, any lingering traces of cynicism will vanish in
the town of Crawfordsville, where children in the Waco school
district will eventually turn on computers and study under lights
powered 90 percent by solar energy. Inspired by local farmers, who
now use solar energy to help power some of their operations, the
district’s move to solar energy will not only cut carbon emissions
but also result in enough savings to keep open the town’s once
financially threatened school doors."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/iowas-climate-change-wisdom.html?ref=opinion
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