[✔️] November 24, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*November 24, 2021*//
/

/[ large paycheck guy expresses one opinion - free with your fill-up. 
text and audio reading ] /
*Exxon lobbyist questions urgency of climate’s catastrophic risks*
Speaking on panel, ExxonMobil lobbyist highlights carbon capture’s 
potential and says of global warming: ‘Is it catastrophic inevitable 
risk? Not in my mind.’
By Desmond Butler
Nov 24, 2021
Just last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods assured lawmakers his 
company neither disputed the scientific consensus on climate change nor 
lobbied against efforts to cut carbon pollution. But a lobbyist for the 
oil giant struck a different tone less than two weeks later, according 
to a recording obtained by The Washington Post, suggesting global 
warming might not be so dire.

Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit
Erik Oswald, a vice president and registered lobbyist for Exxon, during 
a Nov. 9 panel hosted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission 
in Santa Fe, N.M., highlighted his firm’s financial interest in curbing 
carbon emissions rather than the dangers posed by climate change.

“Is it catastrophic inevitable risk? Not in my mind. But there is risk,” 
he said, according to a recording that the watchdog group Documented 
shared with The Post...
- -
“ExxonMobil has captured more CO2 than any other company since the 
inception of the technology,” the company said in one news release.

Oswald, who became vice president of strategy/advocacy at the company’s 
low-carbon solutions division this year, outlined some of Exxon’s plans 
for carbon capture technology during the panel discussion. Exxon is 
exploring whether it and other companies can make Houston a hub for a 
project to remove huge amounts CO2 released by Texas’ oil and gas 
industry, he said, by storing massive quantities of captured carbon 
underneath the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico.

Many scientists believe carbon capture could play a helpful role in 
keeping the global average temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 
degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels. The world has 
already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), and 
researchers warn that a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius or more 
could trigger dangerous tipping points such as the melting of vast ice 
sheets and massive sea level rise...
- -
Last month’s congressional hearing was sparked by a secretly recorded 
conversation with an Exxon executive, who called the Biden 
administration’s goals for cutting greenhouse gases “insane” and said 
that the company had funded “shadow groups” that fought government 
action on global warming. The activist group Greenpeace UK taped the 
executive under the pretense of a job recruiting session, and a British 
news channel broadcast it in July.

The controversy prompted Woods to issue a statement calling the 
executive’s comments “entirely inconsistent with our commitment to the 
environment, transparency and what our employees and management team 
have worked toward since I became CEO four years ago.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/24/exxon-global-warming-climate-skepticism/



/[  BBC reports on the misinformation battles ] /
*Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedia*
By Marco Silva - - Climate change disinformation specialist
November 24, 2008: In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," 
Robert Redford denounces the Bush administration's plan to have the 
Bureau of Land Management hold an oil and gas lease auction in Salt Lake 
City, Utah on December 19, 2008. That auction would become famous for 
Tim DeChristopher's act of civil disobedience during the event, as well 
as the auction's illegality.

http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs
Yumiko Sato, a Japanese writer based in the US who has investigated 
misinformation on the platform, said: "Wikipedia only works if the 
editing community is large and diverse."

Launched in 2001, the online encyclopaedia is one of the world's most 
visited websites.

The English-language version, the largest, has more than 40,000 users 
actively editing it each month.

Its climate-change pages have a group of dedicated volunteer editors who 
actively patrol for any sign of bad information or pseudoscience.

But the same does not apply to many of the pages in languages other than 
English.

In more than 150 languages, fewer than 10 people a month regularly edit 
any pages.

"[These versions] are much smaller and lack editorial diversity, so that 
makes them vulnerable to manipulation," Ms Sato said.

*Push back**
*One of Wikipedia's core principles is self-governance.
So, unless the community of editors steps in, the Wikimedia Foundation 
can do little.

"The foundation has never intervened on editorial policies directly and 
that is not what we do," Mr Stinson said.

"We need to push back on this disinformation in science - but that only 
works if the science-literate show up in that language, in that context, 
and that Wikipedia [version]."

Listen to The Denial Files: 'We fight climate denial on Wikipedia' on 
the BBC World Service.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499

- -

/[ BBC  audio reports ] /
Trending
The Denial Files
*5. ‘We fight climate denial on Wikipedia’*
Released On: 20 Nov 2021Available for over a year
At the grand old age of 20, Wikipedia remains one of the world’s most 
popular websites. The fact that anyone with internet access can edit its 
pages is a key part of its success. But the website’s openness to the 
public is also the reason why it has become an unlikely battleground on 
global warming.

Despite the overwhelming body of science proving climate change is real 
and man-made, deniers are still active on Wikipedia. Whether it is by 
editing climate pages or spreading conspiracy theories, they have for a 
long time tried to reframe our understanding of climate change.

But a small group of dedicated volunteers is determined to keep them at 
bay, setting the record straight on the facts and the science behind 
global warming.

In this episode of the Denial Files, we set out to meet some of those 
volunteers and investigate how vulnerable Wikipedia remains to climate 
denial today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct2yqn


/[clips from a classic prognostication//from The Atlantic//]/
*We’re Heading Straight for a Demi-Armageddon*
What happens when we do something—but not enough—to stop climate change?
By Emma Marris
NOVEMBER 3, 2021...
- -
The world is wandering into a kind of gray area between total failure 
and real global commitment to containing global warming. In a recent 
video call to supporters, Varshini Prakash, the head of the Sunrise 
Movement, which advocates for aggressive action on climate change, said 
she felt two ways at once—proud “that we forced Democrats and the 
president to care about our generation” and also angry.

“I feel disappointed that this is all that we’ve won,” she said.

It is hard to know how to feel. A future of possibly 5 degrees 
Fahrenheit of warming seems like an unknown country. Is it a 
civilization-ending crisis? Or is it a more familiar version of awful—a 
bit sweatier, more chaotic, and less just than the world we currently 
inhabit?

Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research 
Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and the 
University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of this 
question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of the five 
different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or 
SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report.

These five futures aren’t just versions of 2100 at different 
temperatures. Each started with a different idea about how society might 
develop. The SSP 1 pathway, which keeps us under that 1.5-degree-Celsius 
goal, for example, is the “Sustainability” path. In this scenario, the 
global economy still expands, but humanity “shifts toward a broader 
emphasis on human well-being, even at the expense of somewhat slower 
economic growth over the longer term.” The highest-temperature scenarios 
are SSP 4, in which inequality accelerates to even more grotesque 
levels, but advanced technology zaps some emissions, and SSP 5, where 
the world simply charges forward with fossil-fuel-powered turbo-capitalism.

The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2, 
which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in which 
“social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from 
historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in which we do not 
heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but in which we also 
don’t get much worse than we already are.

So what does this SSP 2 world feel like? It depends, O’Neill told me, on 
who you are. One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the 
paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on 
average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will 
continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to 
decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible 
future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a 
Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin 
individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down 
rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, 
“we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures 
that are worse than today.”

But all the current physical impacts of climate change—drought, extreme 
heat, fire, storms, sea-level rise—would get significantly worse by 2100 
under SSP 2. And say goodbye to coral reefs. “At 2.5 degrees [Celsius], 
it’s probably a world in which we don’t have them,” O’Neill said. “They 
don’t exist.” The Arctic? “My guess is that we would have a permanently 
ice-free Arctic in the summer. And so we would have all of the 
ecological consequences that would come along with that.”

All the IPCC scenarios might be wrong. They’re using statistical 
extrapolation and models, and as O’Neill reminded me, history is always 
wilder than people expect. (Just as Mad Max scenarios are missing from 
the SSPs, so are “no growth” scenarios.) But the world we are heading 
toward may be one in which the average human is living longer and making 
more money than ever, but some vulnerable humans and many nonhumans are 
collateral damage.

This is why many climate activists frame global warming as a problem of 
justice.

John Paul Jose is a young climate activist based in Kerala, India, where 
a series of flash floods linked to climate change have killed hundreds 
of people since 2018. “In all seasons throughout the year, there is 
cyclones, extreme rainfall and flood, heat waves,” he says. “And the 
place where I live is an ecologically fragile and sensitive hill, an 
extension of Western Ghats. The immediate danger we have is of 
landslides and flooding in low-lying areas. So anything could happen in 
future; the only thing is to live in fear and hope.” He wants to see 
drastic emissions cuts promised at COP26, along with serious money 
flowing from rich countries that have historically emitted the most 
toward poor communities where the impacts are the worst. At COP16, in 
2010, wealthy nations promised to send $100 billion a year to 
“developing countries” by 2020, but Oxfam International estimates that 
climate-specific net assistance is currently more like $20 billion a year.

Climate advocates like Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa 
Barbara and an adviser to congressional Democrats on climate policy, are 
determined to find a way through this gray area. For her, the action 
that is happening is a motivation to push for even more action. “If they 
are able to pass this bill, it won’t just be okay; it will be 
transformative,” she told me. But there’s more to do after the 
celebrations. “The climate crisis is not going to be solved in one bill. 
Every ton matters. Every dollar we get invested in this matters. It all 
adds up,” she said.

Fighting for incremental investment dollars is not as dramatic as a 
single sweeping intervention to avoid total planetary ruin, and 
activists moved by horrific visions of human extinction may not be as 
motivated by the quest to steer the globe from SSP 2 to SSP 1, to shave 
just a few degrees off the total average warming. But anyone who needs 
an apocalypse to focus on can rest assured that it’s happening, 
unequally, for some. Even at today’s 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees 
Fahrenheit) of warming, for many individual people, communities, and 
species, climate change has already meant the end of their world.

Emma Marris is a freelance writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and 
the author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Nonhuman World.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/how-bad-will-climate-change-get/620605/



/[ Clips from an Opinion in Scientific American ]/
*Marine Oxygen Levels are the Next Great Casualty of Climate Change*
Julie Pullen, Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Oregon State University.
Nathalie Goodkin, Ph.D. from a joint program of the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
November 23, 2021
- -
The increasing frequency of dead zones will affect billions of people 
who rely on the ocean for survival
Last summer, more than 100 miles of Florida’s coastal waters became an 
oxygen-depleted dead zone, littered with fish that could be seen even 
into Tampa Bay. On the other side of the country, Dungeness crabs were 
washing onto Oregon’s shoreline, unable to escape from water that has, 
in dramatic episodes, become seasonally depleted of oxygen over the past 
two decades.

While much of the conversation around our climate crisis focuses on the 
emission of greenhouse gases and their effect on warming, precipitation, 
sea level rise and ocean acidification, little is said about the effect 
of climate change on oxygen levels, particularly in oceans and lakes. 
Water without adequate oxygen cannot support life, and for the three 
billion people who depend on coastal fisheries for income, declining 
ocean oxygen levels are catastrophic.

As ocean and atmospheric scientists focus on climate, we believe that 
oceanic oxygen levels are the next big casualty of global warming. To 
stop this, we need to build on the momentum of the recent COP26 summit 
and expand our attention to the perilous state of oceanic oxygen 
levels—the life support system of our planet. We need to accelerate 
ocean-based climate solutions that boost oxygen, including nature-based 
solutions like those discussed at COP26

As the amount of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, not only does it warm 
air by trapping radiation, it warms water. The interplay between oceans 
and the atmosphere is complex and interwoven, but simply,oceans have 
taken up about 90 percent of the excess heat created by climate change 
during the Anthropocene. Bodies of water can absorb CO2 and O2, but only 
to a temperature-dependent limit. Gas solubility decreases with warming 
temperatures; that is, warmer water holds less oxygen. This decrease in 
oxygen content, coupled with a large-scale die-off of oxygen-generating 
phytoplankton resulting not just from climate change, but from plastic 
pollution and industrial run-off, compromises ecosystems, asphyxiating 
marine life and leading to further die-offs. Large swaths of the oceans 
have lost 10–40 percent of their oxygen, and that loss is expected to 
accelerate with climate change.

The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water is compounding 
climate-related feedback mechanisms described by scientists in many 
fields, hundreds of whom signed the 2018 Kiel Declaration on Ocean 
Deoxygenation. This declaration has culminated in the new Global Ocean 
Oxygen Decade, a project under the U.N. Global Ocean Decade (2021–2030). 
Yet, despite years of research into climate change and its effect on 
temperature, we know comparatively little about its effect on oxygen 
levels and what falling oxygen levels, in turn, may do to the 
atmosphere. To address this unfolding crisis, we need more research and 
more data.

In the past 200 years, humans have shown remarkable ability to change 
the planet by altering the timescales in which the Earth cycles 
chemicals such as CO2. We need to evaluate any possible solutions for 
their impact on not just greenhouse gases but other critical elements of 
life, such as oxygen levels. As the financial world invests in climate 
change solutions focused on CO2 drawdown, and possibly including future 
geoengineering efforts such as iron fertilization, we run the risk of 
causing secondary harm by exacerbating oxygen loss. We need to evaluate 
potential unintended consequences of climate solutions on the full life 
support system.

Beyond enhanced monitoring of oxygen and the establishment of an oxygen 
accounting system, such an agenda encompasses fully valuing the 
ecosystem co-benefits of carbon sequestration by our ocean’s seaweed, 
seagrasses, mangroves and other wetlands. These so-called “blue carbon” 
nature-based solutions are also remarkable at oxygenating our planet 
through photosynthesis. The theme of COP26 chosen by the host country 
(U.K.) was “nature-based solutions.” And we saw a lot of primarily 
terrestrial focused (forestry) initiatives and commitments that are an 
excellent step forward. We hope this year’s conference and next year’s 
COP27 help oceanic nature-based solutions to come into their own, 
propelled by the U.N. Global Ocean Decade.

Putting oxygen into the climate story motivates us to do the work to 
understand the deep systemic changes happening in our complex 
atmospheric and oceanic systems. Even as we celebrated the return of 
humpback whales in 2020 to an increasingly clean New York Harbor and 
Hudson River, dead fish littered the Hudson River in the summer as 
warmer waters carried less oxygen. Ecosystem changes connected to 
physical and chemical systems-level data may point the way to new 
approaches to climate solutions—ones that encompass an enhanced 
understanding of the life support system of our planet and that 
complement our understanding of drawdown to reduce emissions of carbon 
dioxide. Roughly 40 percent of the world depends on the ocean for their 
livelihoods. If we do not stop marine life from oxygen-starvation, we 
propagate a further travesty on ourselves.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marine-oxygen-levels-are-the-next-great-casualty-of-climate-change/



/[  “It’s about drive it’s about power, we stay hungry, we devour”  VICE 
news video  22 min  ]/
*We Can’t Beat the Climate Crisis Without Rethinking This | Planet A*
Nov 22, 2021
VICE News
In this episode of ‘Planet A’, Professor Pamela McElwee explains the 
environmental impacts of our food production systems and how the 
degradation of the earth can be directly traced to structures like 
colonialism and racism, before explaining some of the possible solutions 
that could get us out of this mess.

In 'Planet A', VICE World News takes viewers on a global tour of the 
ecosystems that sustain life on earth to expose the existential threats 
that reach far beyond climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXjW-A60oc



/[ The news archive - looking back - Robert Redford interviewed by 
Rachel Maddow ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November  24, 2008*
November 24, 2008: In an interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," 
Robert Redford denounces the Bush administration's plan to have the 
Bureau of Land Management hold an oil and gas lease auction in Salt Lake 
City, Utah on December 19, 2008. That auction would become famous for 
Tim DeChristopher's act of civil disobedience during the event, as well 
as the auction's illegality.

http://youtu.be/fmgYX8gfxfs

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-rejected-drill_b_144499

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