[✔️] October 31, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Oct 31 08:31:49 EDT 2021
/*October 31, 2021*/
/[ important thinking deserves a listen ]/
//Hidden Brain
*We Broke the Planet. Now What?*
We’ve grown accustomed to viewing climate change as an enemy we must
urgently defeat. But is that the right metaphor for the greatest
existential problem of our time? This week, we consider how to reframe
the way we think about life on a changing planet. If you like our work,
please consider supporting it! See how you can help at
support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and
ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at
news.hiddenbrain.org.
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/we-broke-the-planet-now-what/
- -
/[ snips from a delightfull article ]/
*Heaven or High Water - Selling Miami's last 50 years*
Apr 2, 2019
Sarah Miller @sarahlovescali
Sunny day flooding” is flooding where water comes right up from the
ground, hence the name, and yes, it can certainly rain during sunny day
flooding, and yes, that makes it worse. Sunny day flooding happens in
many parts of Miami, but it is especially bad in Sunset Harbour, the
low-lying area on Miami Beach’s west side.
The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900; in the 2000
years prior, it did not really change. The consensus among informed
observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13
and 34 inches by 2050. By 2100, it is extremely likely to be closer to
six feet, which means, unless you own a yacht and a helicopter,
sayonara. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do
so more quickly.
Thus, I felt the Sunset Harbour area was a good place to start
pretending to buy a home here. Amazingly, in the face of these
incontrovertible facts about the climate the business of luxury real
estate is chugging along just fine, and I wanted to see the cognitive
dissonance up close.
Lying is not my favorite, but when it’s called for the only thing to do
is jump in with both feet.
- -
I kind of thought that I was crazy, listening to these people tell me
these streets were raised, the buildings were raised, there were pumps,
it was all good. I spoke to Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist
with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
According to their projections, by 2030, there will be fifty days of
sunny day flooding per year. By 2045, there will be 250 per year. She
then confirmed my suspicion that while the raising of buildings was good
for the buildings, it didn’t do much for the well-being of those living
inside. “Yes, you do need to be able to get out of the building to get
medicine and groceries,” she said. “If all the streets are flooded, what
then?”
I talked to Amy Clement, a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric
Sciences at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and
Atmospheric Science, who said, re: pumps and raised buildings, “No,
you’re not crazy. That alone is not coordinated planning, and it’s not a
comprehensive solution.” She told me about a legal battle between
homeowners and county government in St. Johns County, near Jacksonville.
The homeowners said the county was depriving them of access to their
land, the county said they would no longer foot the bill for the
millions of dollars it took to maintain a road continually ravaged by
storms and erosion. “People are just assuming the government will
maintain their roads and that may not always be the case,” Clement said.
Then there is the problem of walls. The Big Plan in the Netherlands
depends on walls. Since Miami is built on limestone, which soaks up
water like a sponge, walls are not very useful. In Miami, sea water will
just go under a wall, like a salty ghost. It will come up through the
pipes and seep up around the manholes. It will soak into the sand and
find its way into caves and get under the water table and push the
ground water up. So while walls might keep the clogs of Holland dry,
they cannot offer similar protection to the stilettos of Miami Beach.
Miami Beach is not the only threatened part of Miami. There are plenty
of neighborhoods with equally bad or worse flooding, and worse prognoses
from sea level rise. But while Miami Beach is fussed over, every scrap
of attention or money these lower-income areas receive, they must beg for...
- -
People say Miami is douchey, but really, I loved almost everything about
it, the symmetry of the blue umbrellas on the beach, riding a bike under
a canopy of trees, sitting on a wall watching the sunset, definitely not
thinking about how sea water might be infiltrating the septic systems
behind me. The whole time I was there I was like, yeah, I could see why
no one wants to admit how fucked this place is.
That night I went out to dinner with a friend who grew up in Miami, and
left for college twenty years ago, never expecting to return. He was in
elementary school when Hurricane Andrew hit. He realized that Miami was
not going to last forever.
He moved back last year, after years away, and saw that the party was
still on, even though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. That said, it was
perhaps on for this night, for here we were at Niu Kitchen, downtown,
drinking a really good wine from the Languedoc, surrounded by extremely
good-looking people, enjoying luxury while discussing the horrors that
luxury has visited on the world.
My friend is active in the local civic world, but says he’s skeptical
even of the activist discourse around sea level rise. “There’s all this
talk about ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience,’ he said, “and it kind of
sounds to me like “what’s the least we can do in order to keep the party
going?”
I told him about someone I knew who had gone to a meeting about climate
change where Miami officials had talked about how they had to
demonstrate to the world that they were all about resilience, and how
she had been amazed that they thought this was actually their job.
This is the neoliberal notion, that the reasonable and mature way to
think about this stuff is: Get more efficient and find the right
incentives to encourage the right kinds of enterprise. But my friend
wondered, what if the mature thing to do is to mourn – and then retreat?...
https://popula.com/2019/04/02/heaven-or-high-water/
/[ potholer54 is a careful journalist -- this video about Australia's
transition away from coal ]/
*A clean energy solution embraced by both sides of politics*
Oct 30, 2021
potholer54
The charity I endorse is called Health in Harmony (see my video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9-GR....) It funds hospitals and
affordable health care to villages on the edge of a national parks, in
return for a pledge not to cut down trees. The pledges are monitored,
and the result has been a dramatic decrease in deforestation rates and
an increase in the health of the local population.
Thanks to your generous contributions so far, amounting to nearly
$200,000, the founders are spreading the idea to other countries. See
also https://psmag.com/social-justice/save... for an explanation of
their work. You can make a donation by bank transfer here…
https://healthinharmony.org/donate/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vInH3MqiaC8
/[ Washington Post summarizes the Congressional investigation ]/
*Big Oil CEOs testify before House Oversight Committee*
Members of ‘the Squad’ grill executives over harm to communities of
color
Rep. Katie Porter uses props to illustrate ‘green-washing’
Democrats, Republicans spar over Big Oil’s First Amendment rights
American Petroleum Institute comes under fire for lobbying
Top Democrat says oil industry is ‘obviously lying like the tobacco
executives were’
Shell Oil president pressed on whether warming is ‘existential threat’
Top Republicans question ‘legitimacy’ of Democrats’ hearing
Oversight panel details Big Oil’s lobbying in new report
Republicans to hammer Biden on energy, climate policy
Top Democrat draws parallels between Big Oil and Big Tobacco
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/10/28/oil-executives-testimony-live-updates/
/[ Exxon knew, and then they obliterated any opposition - video report ]/
*The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change | Climate Town*
Jan 21, 2021
Climate Town
We've totally beefed it on climate policy for 30 years, let's try a new
approach.
sUbScRiBe FoR mOrE ViDes: https://www.youtube.com/c/climatetown
PATREON PAGE: https://www.patreon.com/ClimateTown
First and foremost, thank you so much for taking that little trip down
memory lane with me. It's easy to forget that there was a time when the
greenhouse effect wasn't politically controversial, and Exxon was the
world leader in climate science. There's probably a good utopian novel
about what would have happened if a few things had gone differently. Oh
well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM
/[ opinion in NYTimes ]/
*When the World Is on the Brink, $3.5 Trillion Is a Pittance*
Oct. 28, 2021
- -
The current price tag of nearly $1.9 trillion for climate and other
social spending might seem enormous — though less so than the original
$3.5 trillion plan. But over the long term, either would be a pittance.
By zeroing in on those numbers, the public debate seems to have skipped
over the economic ramifications of climate change, which promise to be
historically disruptive — and enormously expensive. What we don’t spend
now will cost us much more later...
- -
For every ton of carbon dioxide emitted starting today, temperatures
will rise higher and faster. Solomon Hsiang, an economist and climate
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-director
of the research group Climate Impact Lab, estimates that each degree
Celsius of warming will erase 1.2 percent of G.D.P. per year, and those
tolls will mount. Failure to curb climate emissions at all could put the
United States on a path to losing 5 percent to as much as 10.5 percent
of its G.D.P. annually. Based on last year’s G.D.P., that extreme — and
unlikely — scenario could amount to nearly $2.2 trillion each year...
- -
In the more than three decades since Congress held its first major
hearing on global warming, the nation has spent nearly $2 trillion
sweeping up from disasters, many now believed to have been made worse by
climate change. Since 2017, floods, hurricanes and other disasters have
cost nearly $700 billion. This year alone has seen 18 disasters causing
losses of more than $1 billion each.
And these figures don’t account for the drag of slowed growth. Dr.
Hsiang and his colleagues have estimated that Hurricane Maria set back
Puerto Rico’s prosperity by more than two decades.
- -
The warming climate will worsen virtually every existing service, from
water and sewage treatment to mass transit to food distribution to
health care, and erode the wealth of millions. Dr. Hsiang, who presented
his findings to Congress in 2019, estimates that over the next 80 years
intensifying heat alone will reduce Americans’ incomes by $4 trillion to
$10.4 trillion as farming becomes more difficult, food prices rise and
labor productivity falls. Climate risks are already undercutting the
value of real estate in the most vulnerable parts of the country,
including the roughly $1.6 trillion worth of private property directly
threatened by sea level rise and wildfires.
“We’re going to be burning money just to adapt,” he told me. “Just the
status quo is going to start costing us more.”
These numbers tell only part of the story, because the costs will be
spread unequally. High-risk areas of the Gulf Coast could see 20 percent
of their economies erased. Crop yields in parts of Texas and Oklahoma
are projected to drop by 70 to 90 percent. People of color and the poor
will likely fare worst.
Still, not a single one of these projections is a foregone conclusion.
Eliminating as much carbon dioxide emissions as possible now would
reduce the cost to taxpayers later. The National Climate Assessment
estimates that limiting warming to around two degrees Celsius would
reduce economic harm in many cases by 30 percent to 60 percent. Research
by the Union of Concerned Scientists suggests that emissions cuts now
could save $780 billion worth of residential properties by 2100...
- -
The warming climate will worsen virtually every existing service, from
water and sewage treatment to mass transit to food distribution to
health care, and erode the wealth of millions. Dr. Hsiang, who presented
his findings to Congress in 2019, estimates that over the next 80 years
intensifying heat alone will reduce Americans’ incomes by $4 trillion to
$10.4 trillion as farming becomes more difficult, food prices rise and
labor productivity falls. Climate risks are already undercutting the
value of real estate in the most vulnerable parts of the country,
including the roughly $1.6 trillion worth of private property directly
threatened by sea level rise and wildfires.
“We’re going to be burning money just to adapt,” he told me. “Just the
status quo is going to start costing us more.”
These numbers tell only part of the story, because the costs will be
spread unequally. High-risk areas of the Gulf Coast could see 20 percent
of their economies erased. Crop yields in parts of Texas and Oklahoma
are projected to drop by 70 to 90 percent. People of color and the poor
will likely fare worst.
Still, not a single one of these projections is a foregone conclusion.
Eliminating as much carbon dioxide emissions as possible now would
reduce the cost to taxpayers later. The National Climate Assessment
estimates that limiting warming to around two degrees Celsius would
reduce economic harm in many cases by 30 percent to 60 percent. Research
by the Union of Concerned Scientists suggests that emissions cuts now
could save $780 billion worth of residential properties by 2100...
- -
The nation is venturing into an era where the siloed definitions of
programs — infrastructure versus social welfare versus health care — no
longer match the blended nature of the threat. Economic policy is no
longer distinct from environmental policy, because, for example,
creating high-paying jobs in Texas isn’t worth much if it’s too hot to work.
Just as economists have linked hotter temperatures to declining crop
yields, they have also linked them to more disease, more crime, more
suicides and other effects on people’s health and well-being. All of
them result in losses — both social and economic — and threaten the
country’s strength and stability.
Policymakers will have to start somewhere. Among the bill’s lesser-known
provisions in the last publicly released version of the bill were
funding to survey forests and to hire people to fight wildfires; to
provide agricultural research for farmers whose crops won’t grow in
hotter climates; to help homeowners transition from gas appliances to
low-emission technologies and to study health risks linked to climate
change.
Taken as a whole, these trillion-dollar-plus plans look more like down
payments — investments in keeping the planet, and the U.S. economy and
standard of living, as close as possible to the way it is now.
Not to invest in these societal defenses today looks like an embrace of
chaos and a choice to roll the dice on a period of unpredictable and
disruptive change probably greater than anything in human existence.
When the stakes are viewed this way, investing in defending economic
stability seems conservative. Failing to respond to the scientific and
economic forecasts is what seems dangerously radical
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/climate-change-biden-spending.html
/[ Tomorrow's scheduled video talk ]/
*Weather Reports: The Climate of Consciousness, featuring Michael Pollan
and Terry Tempest Williams*
Scheduled for Nov 1, 2021 - 7 PM ET
Harvard Divinity School
Michael Pollan has been educating us with illuminating prose on “the
botany of desire” for a very long time. He will discuss his latest book
This Is Your Mind On Plants and his landmark bestseller How To Change
Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About
Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Pollan’s
call for change, restoration, and resiliency may be the very thing we
need to bolster our consciousness in the midst of climate collapse.
Pollan is the author of six New York Times bestsellers.
Respondent: Charles Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World
Religion
The live conversation will be streamed on the Harvard Divinity School
YouTube page and is a series Constellation Project in partnership with
the Center of the Study of World Religions, Religion and Public Life,
and the Planetary Health Alliance.
November 1, 2021 | 7 pm Eastern
Harvard Divinity School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUmudIdHM6s
/[ fiction finds the way ]/
*Kim Stanley Robinson on how to have a good Anthropocene*
HUMANS 27 October 2021
By Adam Vaughan
“EVERYTHING is happening way faster than it happens in The Ministry for
the Future,” says Kim Stanley Robinson of his latest novel, set in a
world where an international agency is tasked with fighting for future
generations on climate change. That vision was imagined mostly in 2018,
which the US science fiction writer says now feels like “another
geological age” because so much has happened, from Donald Trump’s
election defeat to the covid-19 pandemic.
“Climate change seems to be the main topic on the table now, with all
the storms, droughts, fires, freezings – the climate weirdness that has
begun and looks like it will never cease in our lifetimes,” he says.
Stanley Robinson – or Stan as he is often known – has repeatedly tackled
climate change in his work, which is studded with heroic scientists and
nods to scientific papers. His focus has increasingly moved beyond the
problem of a rapidly warming world to what we should do about it. New
York 2140, his 2017 novel, is a salutary warning of the risk of a
drowned world if free market economics keep trumping the environment.
The Ministry for the Future hops from Switzerland to India and
Antarctica as it mulls every climate fix imaginable, from the titular
agency to legal and financial incentives, all the way to activists who
are so desperate that they resort to extremism.
Real-world versions of the ministry, such as Wales’s future generations
commissioner, have suffered from a lack of clout. Does Stanley Robinson
think his fictional one would work in reality?
“It would be a great thing, but it wouldn’t be simple or in any way easy
to incorporate, because we’re so present-orientated,” he says. Moreover,
it would be no panacea. “People would love to have the idea of a single
fix, one thing will make everything right,” he says. “That’s just not
going to happen.”
Nor is he comfortable with the answer being violent extremism and
illegal “black ops”, which some of the book’s characters resort to. “I’m
sure that there’s going to be people around the world who are really
angry in coming decades and they will commit violence hoping to make a
better situation, calling it resistance,” he says. “I think it would be
better if we managed to forestall that with legal reforms that are
really fast.”
So where does hope lie? In top-down efforts such as international
diplomacy, in grassroots local efforts by citizens and everything in
between, says Stanley Robinson. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.
The idea of either/or, or one’s better, one’s worse, all that needs to
be thrown over the side,” he says. It is for this reason that Stanley
Robinson thinks research into geoengineering methods, such as
temporarily reducing the amount of the sun’s energy reaching Earth, is
worth pursuing. All that matters is what works and is fast, he says.
He is also clear that our economic systems need reform. “It’s one of the
reasons we aren’t reacting faster [on climate] than we are, because
we’re locked into an ineffective system,” he says.
Stanley Robinson thinks the “capacious” nature of novels makes the form
good at tackling the subject of climate change. He says its two
strengths are giving readers time travel – “you are suddenly in a
different time and space and really living it” – and telepathy. “You are
in someone else’s head,” he says. But there are limits. “You can only
push a novel so far. I don’t even believe in futurism or futurology –
I’m a novelist.”
Yet he follows new science more closely than most novelists. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on the state
of climate change science was “the ultimate in alarms going off”, he
says. “The scientific community has been ringing that alarm since the
late 90s. And the response has been slow and the resistance has been
high.” But he fears the warning is being drowned by the noise of others,
from pandemic disruption to “so-called political divides”, he says.
One of Stanley Robinson’s worries is a real-world equivalent of the
deadly heatwave that opens his latest novel. “I fear that something like
that is going to happen,” he says. He suspects such an event might
topple a government but fail to affect global action. “The rest of the
world will say, ‘oh, that’s what happens in the tropics’. We’re very
good at ignoring stuff that happens elsewhere and saying ‘it can’t
happen to me’.”
Stanley Robinson says he sees opportunity at the COP26 climate summit in
Glasgow, UK, where he will give a speech. “My hopes are high COP26 will
come up with something striking. Progress will be made.” He is also a
big fan of US president Joe Biden. “He has been surprisingly good on
climate. And I say this as a leftist.”
And what next? More climate change-themed novels are in the offing.
Stanley Robinson has already written novels set in Antarctica, including
The Ministry for the Future, and now he wants to head to the other pole.
“I’m looking at the Arctic – can we keep an ice sheet over the Arctic?
It’s so important,” he says. If the idea grows into a story, it will
explore a melting Arctic’s impact on governance, ecology and culture,
not to mention the global climate as the region’s reflectivity changes.
“You can only push a novel so far. I don’t believe in futurism or
futurology – I’m a novelist”
Sixteen years ago, Stanley Robinson told New Scientist he liked novels
with happy endings. Does he hope for one on climate change? “We could
have a good 21st century, we could have a good dealing with climate
change, we could have a good Anthropocene,” he says. “This is what I
charge the young science fiction writers with: you have to write that
story so people can imagine it in advance – and then try for it.”
Read more:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133581-200-kim-stanley-robinson-on-how-to-have-a-good-anthropocene/#ixzz7Alz4p32A
/[ more class instructions ]/
*Day 10 Talk by Lauren Feldman: Communicating Hope and Fear in a Context
of Climate Emergency*
MC: Stevan Harnad, Professor of Psychology (cognitive sciences) at UQAM
and at McGill and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southampton.
Abstract:
Scholars, journalists, and activists continue to debate the role of
emotional messaging in climate change communication. This talk will
consider existing theory and research on the role of emotions,
especially fear and hope, in public engagement and activism around
climate change. Particular attention will be paid to how media,
including both news and entertainment, evoke emotions about climate
change, with the potential to both activate and alienate publics.
Bio:
Lauren Feldman is an associate professor of journalism and media
studies, in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers
University. She studies media effects in political and science
contexts.Her recent work on climate change communication includes
studies of the effects of partisan media on public opinion about climate
change, the portrayal of climate change in satirical news programs, and
how efficacy information in media coverage of climate change influences
public engagement.
Lauren's research has been supported by grants from the National Science
Foundation, the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on Journalism, and the
Spanish Ministry of Science. She has been published her research in
numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGlU1-JyIbM
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming October 31, 1978*
October 31, 1978: President Carter signs the National Climate Program
Act into law.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg601.pdf
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