[✔️] October 14, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*October 14, 2021*/

/[DW news ]/
*Pandemic, climate change and conflict fuel sharp rise in global hunger*
Nearly 50 countries are dealing with serious hunger levels as 320 
million people lost access to adequate food last year, a newly released 
index shows.
https://www.dw.com/en/pandemic-climate-change-and-conflict-fuel-sharp-rise-in-global-hunger/a-59488549



[BBC says]
*Climate change: Carbon emissions from rich countries rose rapidly in 2021*
Carbon emissions are rebounding strongly and are rising across the 
world's 20 richest nations, according to a new study.
*The Climate Transparency Report *says that CO2 will go up by 4% across 
the G20 group this year, having dropped 6% in 2020 due to the pandemic.

China, India and Argentina are set to exceed their 2019 emissions levels.

The authors say that the continued use of fossil fuels is undermining 
efforts to rein in temperatures.

    'Adapt or die' warning over UK climate change
    Facebook to act on illegal sale of Amazon rainforest
    UK public now eating significantly less meat

With just two weeks left until the critical COP26 climate conference 
opens in Glasgow, the task facing negotiators is stark....
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58897805

- -

/[here's the report]/
*The Climate Transparency Report 2021*
The Climate Transparency Report is the world’s most comprehensive annual 
review of G20 countries’ climate action and their transition to a 
net-zero emissions economy.

Developed by experts from 16 partner organisations from the majority of 
the G20 countries, the report informs policy makers and stimulates 
national debates. Thanks to comparable and concise information presented 
in a visually attractive form, the Climate Transparency Report serves as 
a useful reference for decision makers and actors, and also for those 
central for climate for whom climate is not central.

The review is based on 100 indicators for adaptation, mitigation and 
finance and aims to make good practices and gaps transparent. The 
summary report and 20 country profiles allow the report to be a clear 
reference tool for decision makers...
more at -- 
https://www.climate-transparency.org/g20-climate-performance/g20report2021



/[ follow the money ]/
*The Firms That Help Keep Oil Flowing*
Secretive investment funds are putting billions into fossil fuel 
projects, buying up offshore platforms and building new pipelines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/climate/nyt-climate-newsletter-investment-funds.html



/[ promoting the Net Zero fantasy] /
*Climate Science Denial Group Rebrands as ‘Net Zero Watch’*
The former Global Warming Policy Forum URL now re-directs to the Net 
Zero Watch website and the group’s Twitter account has been renamed.
Climate Science Denial Group Rebrands as ‘Net Zero Watch’
Adam Barnetton - Oct 11, 2021...
- -
“Net Zero Watch is clearly just the latest tactic by the Global Warming 
Policy Foundation to promote lukewarmer propaganda”, said Bob Ward, 
policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on 
Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

“It will continue to spread false claims about the implications of 
reaching net zero emissions while also denying the risks of climate 
change. Same old climate change deniers, same old climate change denial.”

He added: “I hope nobody will be fooled and that journalists in 
particular quiz them about their secret sources of funding in this 
country and abroad.”

A Greenpeace UK spokesperson said: “The people who spent the last twenty 
years campaigning to preserve our addiction to fossil fuels are 
transforming themselves into a radical new campaign to prolong our use 
of gas and petrol.

“Presumably in the hope that this sophisticated rebranding will fool the 
media into forgetting their history of being relentlessly wrong about 
everything climate-related.

“It’ll be interesting to see whether there’s anyone out there with a 
memory short enough to fall for this ruse.”

Richard Black, senior associate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence 
Unit, said: “Anyone who’s familiar with GWPF’s assembled body of flawed 
analysis won’t be surprised to see that the new organisation’s first 
offering is to claim to care about energy bills while promoting policy 
options that would increase bills for decades, namely nuclear and fracking.

“Nevertheless it is encouraging to find GWPF has given up on pretty much 
all of its other canonical arguments – climate change won’t be that bad, 
adapting to impacts is better than trying to cut emissions, no other 
nation but Britain is decarbonising – an effective admission that it has 
lost on all of them.”

He added: “Given the escalating cost of climate impacts and the tumbling 
cost of zero-carbon, plus the constant public support for climate 
solutions, GWPF will inevitably lose on this one, too: you can rebrand, 
but lipstick on a pig will always be obvious.”

The Global Warming Policy Forum has been contacted for comment.
https://www.desmog.com/2021/10/11/climate-science-denial-group-rebrands-as-net-zero-watch/

- -

/[ really?   No.   Really??  ]
/*Pro-Trump candidate suggests taking all boats out of the water to 
lower sea levels*
‘When you take things out of bath water, the bath water decreases, does 
it not?’

A Republican state legislative candidate in Virginia is being mocked on 
Twitter for suggesting an unscientific potential solution to rising sea 
levels.

“I’m curious, do you think the sea level would lower, if we just took 
all the boats out of the water? Just a thought, not a statement," said 
Scott Pio, as he shared an image of the Pacific Ocean swarming with 
thousands of icons seemingly representing boats. The tweet has since 
been deleted.

Mr Pio is in a race with Delaware Democrat David Reid in Loudoun County 
in Virginia. He has worked as an organiser in former president Donald 
Trump’s International Rapid Response Team, a force tasked with 
mobilising support for the Republican leader when he golfs in Virginia...
Mr Pio was mocked by several social media users and his Democrat 
competitors. “This guy’s an actual candidate for the VA House of 
Delegates. Yes, this is today’s Republican Party for ya,” said 
Democratic camp’s news curator Blue Virginia.

Mr Pio defended himself: “When you take things out of bath water, the 
bath water decreases, does it not? Got a lot of hate from your group for 
asking a question about taking things out of the water. Curious when you 
stopped believing in pure physics? I guess you don’t believe in science 
experiments?”...
- -
The answer is “about six microns, which is slightly more than the 
diameter of a strand of spider silk”, said Randall Munroe, an engineer 
and an award winning comic artist whose work majorly revolves around 
science, according to Raw Story. “But you don’t have to worry about that 
six-micron sea level drop.”

Mr Munroe explained that the oceans are currently rising at about 3.3mm 
per year due to global warming. In such a situation, if one is to remove 
every ship from the ocean, the water would rise back to its original 
average level in under a day, or 16 hours to be precise, Mr Munroe said.

According to NASA, global sea levels are rising as a result of 
human-caused global warming, with recent rates being unprecedented over 
the past 2,000 years. The surging sea levels, potentially threatening 
human life in the form of natural disasters, can be traced back to 
primarily two factors related to global warming — the added water from 
melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/virginia-scott-pio-sea-levels-b1937355.html



/[Technically an opinion - but it has lots of information.  Mostly 
graphics with text useful for discussions ]/
*The climate disaster is here*
Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this 
disaster from getting worse?
by Oliver Milman, Andrew Witherspoon, Rita Liu, and Alvin Chang
Thu 14 Oct 2021
The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate 
crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly 
small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era 
just before the car replaced the horse and cart.

These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN 
climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously 
dawdle or scramble to avert climate catastrophe. But the single digit 
numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake. “We have built a 
civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katherine 
Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the 
preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical 
boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much 
within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the 
oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic 
bombs dropping into the water every second.

When global temperatures are projected to hit key benchmarksthis century
Average global surface temperature relative to a 1850-1900 baseline
Worst-case scenario
/[- see visualizations ...]/
Every decision – every oil drilling lease, every acre of the Amazon 
rainforest torched for livestock pasture, every new gas-guzzling SUV 
that rolls onto the road – will decide how far we tumble down the hill. 
In Glasgow, governments will be challenged to show they will fight every 
fraction of temperature rise, or else, in the words of Greta Thunberg, 
this pivotal gathering is at risk of being dismissed as “blah, blah, blah”.

“We’ve run down the clock but it’s never too late,” said Rogelj. “1.7C 
is better than 1.9C which is better than 3C. Cutting emissions tomorrow 
is better than the day after, because we can always avoid worse 
happening. The action is far too slow at the moment, but we can still act.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/oct/14/climate-change-happening-now-stats-graphs-maps-cop26


/[Action steps now ]/
*Why You Should Talk About Climate Change Right Now*
In an excerpt from Saving Us, The Nature Conservancy chief scientist 
Katharine Hayhoe explains how the simple act of talking can be a big 
climate benefit.
By Katharine Hayhoe  Oct 13, 2021
Climate solutions are complex and multifaceted. Our response to the 
challenges climate change poses to our world, our identity, and our way 
of life are even more so. It’s taken a whole book even to begin to 
untangle them. But the first, crucial step forward is simple. For you, 
for me, for every single person reading or listening to this book, there 
is one simple thing that we can all do:

*Talk about it.*

A year or so ago I was reminded of how powerful this can be. I’d just 
finished a talk at the London School of Economics and was heading up the 
aisle of the underground lecture hall when an older man named Glyn 
approached me. He said that he lived in Wandsworth, a borough of London, 
and had taken the train in specifically to hear me speak. He’d watched 
my TED Talk called The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate 
Change Is Talk About It, and it had inspired him to have conversations 
about climate change with people in the borough where he lived.

I was amazed. Hearing that something I’ve done has made a 
difference—even just to one person—is why I do what I do. I sometimes 
get discouraged, and his words meant more to me than he knew. But Glyn 
wasn’t done yet.
He’d started keeping a record of all the people who’d joined in with 
these conversations, he said. “Would you like to see the list?” he 
asked. “Of course!” I said, surprised. I’d never heard anything like 
that before.

He reached in his leather satchel and pulled out a stack of papers.

I’d been expecting about seventy or eighty names. But his list recorded 
over ten thousand names. Now it’s upwards of twelve thousand (I checked 
back in with him before writing this). Twelve thousand conversations 
about climate change in a single English city borough, all because of 
one man watching one TED Talk about how important it is that we talk 
about why climate change matters to us and what we can do about it.

And that wasn’t all. His borough had just voted to declare a climate 
emergency, he said—because of the conversations they’d had. Now, two 
years on, they’ve also divested from fossil fuels, invested in 
renewables, and just before COVID they announced they’d be spending £20 
million on their new environment and sustainability strategy.*
*

*What Happens When We Don’t Talk*

You can do what Glyn did: use your voice to talk about why climate 
change matters to you, here and now. Use it to share what you are doing, 
what others are doing, what they can do. Use it to advocate for change 
at every level—in your family, your school, your organization, your 
place of work or worship, your city or your town, your state or your 
province. Use it to vote and to inform decisions your school, your 
business, your city, and your country can make. Talk about it in every 
community that you are part of and whose values and interests you share.
Talking may sound simple, almost too simple. But here’s the thing: most 
of us are not doing it. Even people who are alarmed and concerned about 
climate change tend to “self-silence” on the topic, says Nathan Geiger, 
a communications researcher. They want to speak up, and they know it’s 
important, but they can’t get the words out of their mouths.

Nathan decided to study environmental educators. These are people who 
are trained in communication and whose job it is to talk to the public. 
He found even they often hesitate to talk about climate change. And not 
doing so has repercussions for them; serious ones, he discovered. Many 
of them say they suffer from “severe psychological distress,” he writes, 
“as a result of not being able to connect with others by discussing a 
topic about which they report concern.”

How do the rest of us compare? According to polling data from the Yale 
Climate Communication Program, when people across the U.S. are asked, 
“Do you discuss global warming at least occasionally?” the answer was 
mostly no. Only 35 percent of people discuss it even once in a while.

What do we talk about? Things we care about. Our speech is the 
television screen of our mind, so to speak. It displays what we’re 
thinking about to others, which in turn connects us to their minds and 
thoughts. So if we don’t talk about climate change, why would anyone 
around us know that we care—or begin to care themselves if they don’t 
already? And if they don’t care, why would they act?

Don’t be afraid of sounding like a broken record. We learn things from 
hearing them, again and again. As health and communication researcher Ed 
Maibach has been saying to anyone who will listen for the last twenty 
years, “the most effective communication strategies are based on simple 
messages, repeated often, by many trusted messengers.” In other words, 
the eighth time you’ve said something, people will just be paying 
attention. What do people pay attention to most? In general, we tend to 
favor personal stories and experiences over reams of data or facts. In 
fact, when you hear a story, neuroscientists have found, your brain 
waves start to synchronize with those of the storyteller. Your emotions 
follow. And that’s how change happens.

Excerpted from “Saving Us,” published by One Signal/Atria Books, a 
division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2021 by Katharine Hayhoe.
https://gizmodo.com/the-single-biggest-way-you-can-address-climate-change-i-1847849240

- -

/[What ?  is this true?]/
*How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2020*/
/Climate coverage has decreased, getting a whopping 112 cumulative 
minutes of airtime in 2020...
- -
The volume of corporate broadcast TV news coverage of climate change -- 
nightly news shows and Sunday morning political shows on ABC, CBS, and 
NBC -- plummeted from 238 minutes in 2019 to just 112 minutes in 2020, 
constituting a 53% decrease./
/https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/how-broadcast-tv-networks-covered-climate-change-2020



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October  14, 2013*

October 14, 2013: In an editorial, the Baltimore Sun declares:

"The latest analysis produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC), compiled by hundreds of scientists and dozens of authors 
from around the globe, shows that climate change is real, it's largely 
caused by man, and it's the greatest environmental threat we face.

"That's not alarmism, it's reality. Of course, know-nothing deniers will 
be as dismissive of the IPCC findings as they've been of similar reports 
in the past. That the IPCC is under the auspices of the United Nations 
will be used to stir up nationalistic suspicions. That climate change 
policy is highly inconvenient for the fossil fuel industries will cause 
the big coal and oil companies to continue their disinformation campaigns.

"None of which changes the reality that climate change poses a serious 
threat, and as the evidence mounts, it's actually become easier to 
distinguish these basic changes in the ecosystem from the normal ups and 
downs of weather. No one super storm or drought or tornado is traceable 
to global warming, of course, but the data are simply too overwhelming 
to ignore. Each of the last three decades has proven successively warmer 
than the previous. Any recent slowing of that trend or plateau, as the 
report notes, has more to do with variables such as volcanic activity 
and the solar cycle over the last five years than it does the build-up 
of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-10-14/news/bs-ed-climate-20131014_1_ipcc-report-climate-change-intergovernmental-panel


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