[✔️] October 12, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*October 12, 2021*/

/[ WaPo -- environment measured -- wounded humans to follow.]/
*At least 85 percent of the world’s population has been affected by 
human-induced climate change, new study shows*
Researchers used machine learning to analyze more than 100,000 studies 
of weather events and found four-fifths of the world’s land area has 
suffered impacts linked to global warming
By Annabelle Timsit and Sarah Kaplan  October 11, 2021
- -
Yet despite a pledge to halve emissions by the end of the decade, 
congressional Democrats are struggling to pass a pair of bills that 
would provide hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy, 
electric vehicles and programs that would help communities adapt to a 
changing climate.

The contrast between the scope of climate disasters and the scale of 
global ambition is top of mind for hundreds of protesters who have 
descended on Washington this week to demand an end to fossil fuel use...
- -
In a letter released Monday, some 450 organizations representing 45 
million health-care workers called attention to the way rising 
temperatures have increased the risk of many health issues, including 
breathing problems, mental illness and insect-borne diseases. One of the 
papers analyzed for the Nature study, for example, found that deaths 
from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions.

“The climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing 
humanity,” the health organizations’ letter said.

Yet in many of the places that stand to suffer most from climate change, 
Callaghan and his colleagues found a deficit of research on what 
temperature and precipitation shifts could mean for people’s daily 
lives. The researchers identified fewer than 10,000 studies looking at 
climate change’s effect on Africa, and about half as many focused on 
South America. By contrast, roughly 30,000 published papers examined 
climate impacts in North America...
- -
Here in the nation’s capital, policymakers are still debating the costs 
of moving away from fossil fuels.

While members of both parties back a nearly $1 trillion infrastructure 
bill that has passed the Senate and would provide $7.5 billion to build 
out a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations and several 
other measures to cut carbon emissions, the White House is struggling to 
muster enough support for a $3.5 trillion bill that would provide 
incentives for utilities that get an increasing share of their power 
from solar, wind and other carbon-free sources and penalize those that 
don’t move swiftly enough...
- -
Increasingly, groups are calling on President Biden to restrict fossil 
fuel production outright.

On Wednesday, a coalition of more than 380 groups filed a legal petition 
demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stop issuing permits for 
new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Two days later, hundreds of 
scientists submitted an open letter asking Biden to do the same.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/10/11/85-percent-population-climate-impacts/

- -

/[ Nature Climate Change ]/
Published: 11 October 2021
*Machine-learning-based evidence and attribution mapping of 100,000 
climate impact studies*
Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests that climate change impacts are already 
observed around the world. Global environmental assessments face 
challenges to appraise the growing literature. Here we use the language 
model BERT to identify and classify studies on observed climate impacts, 
producing a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted evidence map. We 
estimate that 102,160 (64,958–164,274) publications document a broad 
range of observed impacts. By combining our spatially resolved database 
with grid-cell-level human-attributable changes in temperature and 
precipitation, we infer that attributable anthropogenic impacts may be 
occurring across 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the 
population reside. Our results reveal a substantial ‘attribution gap’ as 
robust levels of evidence for potentially attributable impacts are twice 
as prevalent in high-income than in low-income countries. While gaps 
remain on confidently attributing climate impacts at the regional and 
sectoral level, this database illustrates the potential current impact 
of anthropogenic climate change across the globe...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01168-6/
/

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/[Wired tells us what to do]
/*Actions You Can Take to Tackle Climate Change*/
/These apps and resources can help you manage your eco-anxiety—and take 
steps to tread more lightly on the planet./
/https://www.wired.com/story/actions-you-can-take-to-tackle-climate-change//
/

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/[ From the IPCC lots of data and charts nicely explained in video] /
*State of the Climate: Updates from the IPCC*
Oxford Climate Society
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quBcj0d26PE


/[ Briefing and background from the Guardian ] /
*What is Cop26 and why does it matter? The complete guide*
Everything you need to know about the Glasgow conference seeking to 
forge a global response to the climate emergency
*What is Cop26?*
For almost three decades, world governments have met nearly every year 
to forge a global response to the climate emergency. Under the 1992 
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), every 
country on Earth is treaty-bound to “avoid dangerous climate change”, 
and find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally in an 
equitable way.

Cop stands for conference of the parties under the UNFCCC, and the 
annual meetings have swung between fractious and soporific, interspersed 
with moments of high drama and the occasional triumph (the Paris 
agreement in 2015) and disaster (Copenhagen in 2009). This year is the 
26th iteration, postponed by a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, 
and to be hosted by the UK in Glasgow.

*When?*
The conference will officially open on 31 October, a day earlier than 
planned, because of Covid-19, and more than 120 world leaders will 
gather in the first few days. They will then depart, leaving the complex 
negotiations to their representatives, mainly environment ministers or 
similarly senior officials. About 25,000 people are expected to attend 
the conference in total.

The talks are scheduled to end at 6pm on Friday 12 November, but past 
experience of Cops shows they are likely to extend into Saturday and 
perhaps even to Sunday.

*Why do we need a Cop – don’t we already have the Paris agreement?*
Yes – under the landmark Paris agreement, signed in 2015, nations 
committed to holding global temperature rises to “well below” 2C above 
pre-industrial levels, while “pursuing efforts” to limit heating to 
1.5C. Those goals are legally binding and enshrined in the treaty.

However, to meet those goals, countries also agreed on non-binding 
national targets to cut – or in the case of developing countries, to 
curb the growth of – greenhouse gas emissions in the near term, by 2030 
in most cases.

Those national targets – known as nationally determined contributions, 
or NDCs – were inadequate to hold the world within the Paris temperature 
targets. If fulfilled, they would result in 3C or more of warming, which 
would be disastrous.

Everyone knew at Paris that the NDCs were inadequate, so the French 
built into the accord a “ratchet mechanism” by which countries would 
have to return to the table every five years with fresh commitments. 
Those five years were up on 31 December 2020, but the pandemic prevented 
many countries coming forward.

All countries are now being urged to revise their NDCs before Cop26 in 
line with a 1.5C target, the lower of the two Paris goals. Scientists 
estimate that emissions must be reduced by 45% by 2030, compared with 
2010 levels, and from there to net zero emissions by 2050, if the world 
is to have a good chance of remaining within the 1.5C threshold.

*Are we nearly there?*
No. The UN reported recently that current NDCs, including those that 
have been newly submitted or revised by the US, the EU, the UK and more 
than 100 others, are still inadequate. They would result in a 16% 
increase in emissions, far from the 45% cut needed. So much more remains 
to be done.

*Is this all about China?*
The world’s biggest emitter, China, has yet to produce a new NDC, and it 
is not yet known whether the president, Xi Jinping, will come to 
Glasgow. His attendance would be a major boost, but leading figures in 
the talks have said they can still have a successful outcome without his 
physical presence.

Xi announced last year that China would reach net zero emissions by 
2060, a major step forward, and peak emissions by 2030. The latter 
pledge is regarded as insufficient, and could lead to the world 
breaching 1.5C. Analysts say China could cause emissions to peak by 
2025, with some additional effort, and that this would be enough to keep 
the world on the right path.

China is not the only country in the frame: major fossil fuel producers 
including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Australia have also refused to 
strengthen their commitments. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is still presiding 
over the disastrous destruction of the Amazon.

There are also question marks over the commitment of the new Japanese 
government. India was close to committing to net zero last spring but 
was overtaken by the Covid crisis; its rapidly growing economy and 
dependence on coal make it a key country at the talks, and other 
developing nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa and Mexico 
will also be closely watched.

*Why is 1.5C so important?*
As part of the Paris agreement, the world’s leading authority on climate 
science – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – was charged 
with examining closely what a 1.5C temperature rise would mean for the 
planet. They found a vast difference between the damage done by 1.5C and 
2C of heating, and concluded that the lower temperature was much safer.

An increase of 1.5C would still result in a rising sea levels, the 
bleaching of coral reefs, and an increase in heatwaves, droughts, 
floods, fiercer storms and other forms of extreme weather, but these 
would be far less than the extremes associated with a rise of 2C.

Further findings from the IPCC, released in August, underlined these 
warnings and concluded that there was still a chance for the world to 
stay within the 1.5C threshold but that it would require concerted 
efforts. Crucially, they also found that every fraction of a degree of 
increase is important.

*How far do we have to go?*
Temperatures around the world are already at about 1.1 – 1.2C above 
pre-industrial levels, and greenhouse gas emissions are still on an 
upward trend.

Carbon dioxide output plunged during the Covid-19 lockdowns last year, 
but that was temporary and they have surged again since as economies 
have recovered. To stay within 1.5C, global emissions need to come down 
by about 7% a year for this decade.

*What about net zero?*
To stay within 1.5C, we must stop emitting carbon dioxide and other 
greenhouse gases – from burning fossil fuels, from agriculture and 
animal husbandry – which create methane – from cutting down trees and 
from certain industrial processes – almost completely by mid-century. 
Any residual emissions remaining by then, for instance from processes 
that cannot be modified, must be offset by increasing the world’s carbon 
sinks, such as forests, peatlands and wetlands, which act as vast carbon 
stores. That balance is known as net zero.

Long-term goals are not enough, however. The climate responds to 
cumulative emissions, and carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 
about a century after it is released, so we could reach net zero by 2050 
but still have emitted so much in the meantime that we exceed the 1.5C 
threshold irrevocably.

A sign drawing attention to the Paris goal of limiting global 
temperature increase to 1.5C, photographed on 3 October 2021 at a 
‘Climate Justice Camp’ in Berlin
A sign in Berlin drawing attention to the Paris goal of limiting global 
temperature increase to 1.5C. Photograph: Paul Zinken/dpa
That is why scientists and politicians are calling the 2020s the crucial 
decade for the climate – if emissions can peak soon and be reduced 
rapidly, we can keep cumulative emissions from growing too much, and 
still have a chance of staying within 1.5C.

*Is Cop26 just about 1.5C?*
The NDCs are the central part of the negotiations, and getting more 
countries to sign up to a long-term net zero goal is also important. But 
the UK presidency also hopes to help achieve these goals with a focus on 
three other areas: climate finance, phasing out coal, and nature-based 
solutions.

Climate finance is the money provided to poor countries, from public and 
private sources, to help them cut emissions and cope with the impacts of 
extreme weather. Poor countries were promised at the Copenhagen Cop in 
2009 that they would receive $100bn a year by 2020.

That target has been missed: the OECD found in a report in September 
that only about $80bn was provided last year. Developing countries want 
reassurances that the money will be forthcoming as soon as possible, and 
want to see a new financial settlement that will vastly expand the funds 
available beyond 2025.

The phase-out of coal is essential to staying within 1.5C. Countries 
have made moves in this direction – China, the world’s biggest coal 
consumer, will stop financing new coal-fired power plants overseas, for 
instance. But China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Australia and several 
other countries are still major producers and consumers of coal, and 
much more needs to be done.

Nature-based solutions are projects such as preserving and restoring 
existing forests, peatlands, wetlands and other natural carbon sinks, 
and growing more trees. These are important initiatives, and the 
destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests around the world is a 
huge contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss. Experts urge 
caution, however: while growing trees is a good idea, there is not room 
to grow all the trees some have suggested, and they cannot solve the 
climate crisis alone. Fossil fuel use must also end.

There has also been progress on issues such as methane, a greenhouse gas 
that can heat the planet 80 times more than carbon dioxide, and which 
comes from animal husbandry, agricultural waste, oil drilling and other 
fossil fuel exploration. The EU and the US formed a partnership to cut 
global methane emissions by 2030, which recent research found could 
mostly be achieved at little or no cost.

*Any other problems?*
At Cop26, countries will also have to find an answer to the conundrum of 
carbon trading. Carbon trading was first introduced to the talks in the 
Kyoto protocol of 1997, as a mechanism by which rich countries could 
hive off some of their carbon reduction to developing countries. It 
works like this: a tonne of carbon dioxide has the same impact on the 
atmosphere wherever it is emitted, so if it is cheaper to cut a tonne of 
carbon dioxide in India than in Italy, the Italian government or 
companies could pay for projects – solar panels, for example, or a wind 
farm – in India that would reduce emissions there, and count those 
“carbon credits” towards their own emissions-cutting targets.

In this way, poor countries gain access to much-needed finance for 
emissions-cutting efforts, and rich countries face less of an economic 
burden in cutting carbon.

However, the system has been open to abuse in some cases and is 
inadequate in any case in a world where all countries, developed and 
developing, must cut their carbon as fast as possible. Carbon trading 
was included in article 6 of the Paris agreement, but conflicts over how 
to implement it have never been resolved. Arguments over article 6 
helped derail the last Cop, in Madrid in 2019, and the UK hosts are 
hoping the issue can be managed this time, in order not to wreck any 
potential outcome.
*
**This is the 26th Cop – why has all this taken so long?*
Since the industrial revolution, the modern world has run on fossil 
fuels. We live in a Promethean age – nearly all of our prosperity and 
technology has been built on cheap, easy-to-access energy from fossil 
fuels. Ending their reign will require huge changes, to energy systems, 
to the built environment, to transport, to our behaviour and diet.

Getting 196 nations to agree on something so complex has not been easy. 
Developed countries have been unwilling to take on the costs, while 
developing countries have demanded the right to continue to use fossil 
fuels to achieve economic growth. There have been wranglings over 
historic responsibility, over burden-sharing, over costs, over science, 
and the politics has been influenced by changes of government in key 
countries – Donald Trump, for instance, withdrew the US from the Paris 
agreement.

On the plus side, the cost of renewable energy and other green 
technology has plunged in recent years, so that it is now as cheap as 
fossil fuels in most parts of the world. Electric vehicle technology 
also progressed rapidly, and new fuels such as hydrogen are being developed.

*Why will it be held in Glasgow?*
The presidency is up for grabs each year, and tends to swing between 
developed and developing countries, and around the world so that all 
regions are represented. Previous notable Cops have taken place in 
Copenhagen, Kyoto, Marrakesh, Lima and Durban, and next year’s is likely 
to be in Egypt. The UK is actually co-hosting Cop26 with Italy, which 
has hosted several precursor meetings, including a pre-Cop and a youth 
Cop in Milan, and will host the G20 leaders’ meeting just days before Cop26.

*Won’t this be a massive Covid superspreader?*
The Cop was originally scheduled for November 2020, but a decision was 
taken in May last year to postpone, because of the pandemic. The 
Scottish government, the UN and the UK’s national government have all 
been closely involved in the preparations.

The decision was taken to hold the event in person, rather than 
virtually, because of the urgent need for countries to increase their 
ambition on emissions cuts, and the difficult of getting progress to 
that end without people meeting face-to-face. The fear – well-grounded, 
given the experience of other virtual conferences – was that a virtual 
conference would let countries off the hook.

Countries have also been wary of committing to firm decisions on the 
complex technical negotiations by virtual means. Some of the 
negotiations have taken place in advance, virtually, but the decisions 
cannot be formalised until they are agreed by all nations in person.

Delegates have been offered vaccinations by the UK government ahead of 
the talks, but those from red list countries will still have to 
quarantine. The UK government will pay the costs for those countries 
that cannot otherwise afford to come.

*What happens if Cop26 fails?*
The big players in the talks – the UN, the UK, the US – have already 
conceded that Cop26 will not achieve everything that was hoped for. The 
NDCs likely to emerge from Glasgow will not add up to all that is needed 
to ensure the world remains within 1.5C.

That is disappointing for many observers, but is not a surprise. Given 
the complexity of the negotiations, a perfect outcome was never likely. 
What the UK hosts are now focused on is ensuring that there is enough 
progress on emissions cuts for 2030 to “keep 1.5C alive”, and to pursue 
as many other routes – phasing out coal; cutting methane; setting a path 
away from fossil fuels for transport; getting business, financial 
institutions and sub-national governments to set out plans to cut 
emissions in line with 1.5C – that will help reach that goal as possible.

One of the key issues now is to ensure that the talks themselves run 
smoothly. The Copenhagen Cop in 2009 was widely perceived as a failure, 
even though it produced a partial agreement that became the foundation 
for Paris. But it ended in scenes of chaos, division, recriminations and 
discord. If that can be avoided, and a clear routemap drawn up that can 
credibly keep the world from exceeding 1.5C, Cop26 may still have a 
successful outcome.

*The climate crisis is not the only environmental crisis – what about 
species loss and nature?*
Countries are also meeting for a parallel set of talks on stemming 
biodiversity loss, restoring natural ecosystems and protecting the 
oceans. Those talks were set to be hosted by the Chinese government in 
Kunming last October, but have been delayed. They will reach a 
conclusion next April at an in-person meeting, with virtual negotiations 
in the run-up.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/11/what-is-cop26-and-why-does-it-matter-the-complete-guide



/[  Heatwave horrors, pay attention to last summer in Portland, OR ]/
*Seventy-Two Hours Under the Heat Dome
*A chronicle of a slow-motion climate disaster that became one of 
Oregon’s deadliest calamities.
By James Ross Gardner*...
* - - clips --
By the time temperatures cooled, at least ninety-six people would be 
confirmed by the state medical examiner to have died of heat-related 
causes, making this one of the deadliest natural disasters in Oregon’s 
history. In neighboring Washington, officials reported ninety-five dead. 
An analysis of C.D.C. data by the Times suggests that the real number of 
fatalities in the Pacific Northwest may be three times those official 
counts.

For the majority of those who died, the heat was experienced privately, 
for hours upon hours, and then for days. And when temperatures took 
their final toll, the victims dehydrated and in a hyperthermic state, 
that was private, too. This was a climate catastrophe unlike any the 
public is used to seeing play out on TV. We’ve grown accustomed to the 
dramatic images of human-caused climate change, via increasingly 
frequent hurricanes and wildfires, but the element at the center of it 
all, the heat, has been more abstract, not as directly connected to 
Americans’ lives. The evidence indicates that that’s likely to change.

In early July, an international team, part of the World Weather 
Attribution group, concluded that the intensity of the heat wave would 
have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” 
The scientists, including researchers at Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, 
Oxford, and the Sorbonne, argued in their report that “our rapidly 
warming climate is bringing us into uncharted territory that has 
significant consequences.” In their analysis, which has not yet been 
peer-reviewed, the researchers posited that temperatures within the heat 
dome were 3.6 degrees hotter than they would have been at the beginning 
of the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, they concluded that the heat 
wave was most likely a once-in-a-millennium event, and that, in thirty 
years, with rising temperatures, similar heat waves could be 
once-in-a-decade events, or even once-every-five-years events.

“What happened this June was startling,” Oregon’s state climatologist, 
Larry O’Neill, told me. “We’re setting more records all the time, and 
seeing things that we usually don’t see in places we don’t see them. It 
makes me very concerned that the climate projections are underestimating 
the degree of climate change.” Climatologists weren’t expecting to see 
events on this scale for another twenty or thirty years, O’Neill said. 
Joe Boomgard-Zagrodnik, an atmospheric scientist at Washington State 
University, said, “People died from this. That’s a threshold event.”

In August, Multnomah County released a report assessing its handling of 
the disaster. Nowhere else in the state had seen as many heat-related 
deaths—sixty-two people by the latest official count. The county 
admitted that its call line, 211info, a source of critical information 
for people looking for cooling shelters and other emergency services, 
inadvertently dropped more than seven hundred and fifty calls, and that 
when callers got through they were sometimes given inaccurate 
information. The county vowed to improve that system, and to make sure 
that cooling shelters were more equitably situated—closer to the homes 
of the Portlanders who needed them most—and to make transportation to 
the shelters easier to obtain.

Ten days after the end of the heat wave, when temperatures were in the 
sixties and seventies, I sat with Chris Voss in an empty conference room 
in the county headquarters. He described the days and nights in the 
convention center, the ice runs and the momentary elation at finding new 
ways to feed hundreds of people under the same roof. When I asked about 
the more than sixty county residents who had died in the heat, he grew 
emotional and his glasses steamed up. “That number’s not palatable for 
us,” he said. “It’s not palatable for anybody.”

In late July, Shane Brown held a memorial service for his mother in 
White Salmon, Washington, along the Columbia River, where Jolly’s mother 
is buried. Shane invited a few friends and family members for the 
informal gathering, which is how his mother would have wanted it. “She 
had paid for everything in advance—her urn, her cremation, where she was 
going to be buried,” Shane told me. Jolly was a planner. She knew she 
would die. She just didn’t know the time or the place.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/seventy-two-hours-under-the-heat-dome



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October  12, 2004*
In a sentence that speaks volumes, Wall Street Journal columnist Brendan 
Miniter, discussing the October 8 debate between President Bush and 
Democratic opponent John Kerry, observes:

"On the one issue in the debate in which Democrats hold the natural 
advantage, the environment, Mr. Kerry came out on top."

http://web.archive.org/web/20041120230653/http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110005744


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