[✔️] September 2, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*September 2, 2021*/

[predictions]
*Wildfire potential in September expected to remain above normal in 
parts of the Northwest*
Bill Gabbert -- September 1, 2021
Predicted to be above normal in Northern California through November
https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/month1_outlook.png
The forecast for wildland fire potential issued September 1 by the 
National Interagency Fire Center predicts that the potential for 
wildfires in Northern California will be above normal September through 
November. Northern Minnesota and the northwest one-quarter of the 
country will also be above normal in September. Hawaii and Wyoming could 
be busy in September and October. The southeast Atlantic coast states 
may experience above normal fire activity in October and November, but 
December looks to be pretty average in all 50 states.

“Climate outlooks indicate warmer than normal conditions are likely for 
much of CONUS through fall. Wetter than average conditions are likely 
across western Washington for the fall with below normal precipitation 
likely across the Southwest, Great Basin, central Rockies, and much of 
the Plains. The Southeast is forecast to have near normal precipitation 
through October but turn drier in late fall and early winter.

“Much of Southern Area and areas south of the Ohio River are likely to 
have below normal significant fire potential in September, but much of 
the southeast US and Mid-Atlantic is forecast to have above normal fire 
potential in October and November. Normal significant fire potential is 
forecast for Alaska along with most of Eastern Area through the period. 
The entire US is forecast to have normal fire potential in December.

“Above normal significant fire potential is forecast to continue for 
September across much of the Northwest and portions of the Great Basin, 
Northern Rockies, and Rocky Mountain Geographic Areas. Most of these 
areas will return to normal fire potential in October and November 
except for portions of Wyoming, northwest Colorado, and the Black Hills, 
which will remain above normal into October. Much of northern California 
is forecast to have above normal potential through November with leeside 
locations in Hawaii likely to have above normal significant fire 
potential into October.”...
https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/09/01/wildfire-potential-in-september-expected-to-remain-above-normal-in-parts-of-the-northwest/



[Peter Wadams is a gentle and wise scientist]
*Arctic Apocalypse*
Aug 4, 2021
Facing Future
The #Arctic is nearing the tipping point.  The world's leading polar 
scientist, Dr. Peter Wadhams, is headed to Greenland to study actual 
conditions there.  He expects the blue ocean event, when the summer ice 
melts completely, to occur much sooner than anticipated, probably in the 
next year or two.  The blue water will absorb more of the sun's heat, 
further warming our planet, and the Jet Stream, which balances weather 
in the northern hemisphere, will be disrupted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJon1u3U5M



[knock on - BBC]
*One in three trees face extinction in wild, says new report*
They range from well-known oaks and magnolias to tropical timber trees.

Experts say 17,500 tree species are at risk - twice the number of 
threatened mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles combined.
- -
Trees at particular risk of extinction include:

    Large tropical trees known as dipterocarps that are being lost due
    to the expansion of palm oil plantations
    Oak trees lost to farming and development in parts of Mexico, Chile
    and Argentina
    Ebony and rosewood trees being felled for timber in Madagascar
    Magnolia trees at threat from unsustainable plant collecting
    Trees such as ash that are dying from pests and diseases in the UK
    and North America

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58394215



[Look to the future]
*After Hurricane Ida, How Much Longer Can New Orleans’s New Levees Hold?*
The city may be better protected today than it was before Katrina, but 
with every day that passes the protection is waning.
By Elizabeth Kolbert - Aug 30, 2021...
- -
Then there’s the problem that New Orleans is sinking. The city was built 
on marshland, and as the soils compact—and the city pumps water out—the 
surface is dropping. Much of the city is already significantly below sea 
level, and some neighborhoods are subsiding at a rate of almost five 
inches a decade. When you factor in sea-level rise, the rate of 
subsidence vis-a-vis the Gulf is six inches every ten years. In 2019, 
the Corps announced that, owing to a combination of subsidence and 
sea-level rise, the system it had just finished upgrading would no 
longer provide adequate protection to the city as early as 2023. Just a 
few weeks ago, the Corps proposed spending another $1.7 billion to 
upgrade the system once again. As Mark Schleifstein observed, on 
Nola.com, the price “reflects the enormous public cost simply to 
maintain today’s level of risk reduction.” The upgrade, in other words, 
wouldn’t really be an upgrade; it would just be an attempt to maintain 
the status quo...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/after-hurricane-ida-how-much-longer-can-new-orleanss-new-levees-hold



[Busy with other things]
*Utility That Blacked Out New Orleans Was Too Busy Fighting Climate 
Regulations*
Entergy's infrastructure failed spectacularly on Sunday, frying New 
Orleans' electricity grid. It has a history of making the climate crisis 
worse.
Dharna Noor - Aug 31, 2921..
- -
On Sunday, the entirety of New Orleans lost power after Entergy suffered 
what it called “catastrophic transmission damage” after a major 
transmission line crumpled into the Mississippi River and numerous lines 
fell throughout the region. Now, the utility is scrambling to fix the 
mess, though it currently has no idea when electricity access will be 
restored and said it could take weeks. That means the more than 793,000 
Entergy customers without power will be forced to deal with blistering 
heat without air conditioning and nowhere to store fresh food, all while 
trying to put the pieces of their lives back together...
- -
“Entergy has known for decades—including longer than almost any of the 
general public who are suffering through Ida and its aftermath—that 
burning fossil fuels causes climate change, that climate change causes 
more extreme weather, and that these effects would create 
vulnerabilities for the electric grid,” David Pomerantz, the executive 
director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said in an email. “Despite 
that knowledge, Entergy has used deception, bullying and political power 
only available to monopolies to continue burning fossil fuels and to 
delay or kill efforts that might have made its customers become more 
resilient to climate change.”...
- -
Yet in the intervening years, Entergy has consistently opposed efforts 
to get off oil and gas and efforts to make the grid more resilient. Last 
year, it announced a plan to reach net zero by 2050... by expanding the 
use of carbon-polluting natural gas. The previous year, the firm pushed 
to gut a plan to pay customers for excess solar energy that they sell 
back to the grid, and according to emails obtained by Energy and Policy 
Institute, Entergy’s president of utility operations Rod West baselessly 
accused the “solar lobby” of stoking a “class war.”

The company loves gas so much, an independent investigation found that 
it even hired actors to show up at a 2018 city council vote in a show of 
astroturfed support of a new gas plant in New Orleans despite widespread 
local opposition. (The plant was approved over those local objections, 
though Entergy coughed up a $5 million fine.)

The utility has fought tooth and nail against federal climate 
regulations, too, including a 2007 bill to increase renewable power, a 
landmark 2009 cap and trade bill, and the Environmental Protection 
Agency’s 2015 Clean Power Plan.

At the same time, it’s fought against policies to make the grid ready to 
handle to extreme weather. In December 2019, it threatened to sue New 
Orleans for passing a “resilient renewable portfolio standard” requiring 
city electricity to reach net-zero carbon by 2050 and strengthen its 
climate resilience. All these efforts have both worsened the climate 
crisis and made catastrophic damage to the grid all but inevitable.

“Throughout all this, the company’s executives and shareholders have 
profited handsomely,” said Pomerantz. “Whether via policy or litigation, 
Entergy’s shareholders should be forced to pay to help its customers 
recover from the tragedy that they helped to exacerbate with their 
actions and inactions.”
https://gizmodo.com/utility-that-blacked-out-new-orleans-was-too-busy-fight-1847586645



[Joe the Juggler]
*Biden is caught between political worlds on climate change*
Ben Geman
These two things both happened Monday: The Health and Human Services 
Department unveiled its climate office, and the White House promoted 
efforts to keep gasoline prices in check.

Why it matters: The two moves show how the White House is now operating 
simultaneously in the old and new world of energy and climate policy.

On the new front, the new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity 
shows how the Biden administration is seeking to stitch efforts to 
address the causes and effects of climate change into agencies 
government-wide.
But Monday the White House also made public that the Federal Trade 
Commission is probing (among other things) gas stations mergers to avert 
potentially anti-competitive behavior that could drive up pump prices.
Our thought bubble: President Biden's administration is looking to 
accelerate the transition from fossil fuels, but it's also not going to 
abandon what a long string of administrations have viewed as the 
political imperative to show they want to constrain fuel costs.

"In particular, experts said, more needs to be done to understand how 
extreme weather affects older people as well as communities of color, 
where families are more likely to live in areas hardest hit by 
disasters," Lisa Friedman reports.
https://www.axios.com/biden-climate-policy-gas-prices-c33c1717-a275-4ad5-8128-6e68a9d56772.html



[Best to learn this before it is taught to us]
*Food is Climate - Episode 47: Vegan World 2026! - The Moonshot of Our 
Generation*
Aug 31, 2021
Sailesh Rao
In this episode, we are joined by Glen Merzer, playwright, screenwriter 
and author. Glen wrote “Food is Climate” as the chapter that ate the 
book that it was originally in. When he found out how we have been 
misled into focusing on the wrong solution to the most important problem 
of our lives, so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjdrhLihA6I

- -

[a new phrase]
*Second-Hand Eating*
May 30, 2021
Earthkin
Eating meat and dairy ends up harming the earth in many unimaginable 
ways. It turns out, we do have another alternative. Make your body a 
garden, not a graveyard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpAb3vl4Fk



[we live on a globe shaped planet]
*Global warming: California wildfires, Hurricane Ida are all connected, 
Stanford climate expert says*
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- In California we're experiencing extreme 
heat-fueled wildfires. Along the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Ida made landfall 
as a category 4.

A Stanford climate expert says these extreme natural events could get 
worse as the planet continues to warm.
Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh says California is officially on a new climate. The 
proof are the heat waves, dry conditions and another record setting fire 
season.

"CAL FIRE and scientists who take the measurements knew that the 
vegetation was very dry. We started this year in terms of the summer 
season in very severe drought," said Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford 
Professor of Earth System Science.

Along the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Ida made landfall as a category 4. 
Louisiana's Governor is categorizing it as one of the strongest storms 
to make landfall in modern times. We sat down with Stanford climate 
expert Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh to understand how these extreme weather 
events affecting opposite sides of the country are ultimately connected.

"The primary way they are connected is that global warming is happening 
at a global scale and all parts of the world are experiencing that," 
said Dr. Diffenbaugh...
Research shows global warming is changing the conditions in which 
hurricanes are happening. The Ocean is storing more heat than ever.

"It's not just how warm the surface temperatures are, but also the heat 
in the upper layers of the ocean is increasing and that is providing 
more energy for storms. We are not just seeing stronger storms but rapid 
intensification of storm," said Dr. Diffenbaugh.

Dr. Diffenbaugh says 90% of the heat that has been added over the last 
century is in the ocean. He says this is triggering what would be 
category 1 hurricane to intensify and grow into stronger categories.

"Decades ago you would see that 1 out of 100 storms would do that. Now 
we are seeing like a 5% chance of that happening," said Dr. Diffenbaugh.

As fires intensify he says the smoke from the fires will create more 
greenhouse gases and air quality will continue to worsen...
Luz Pena: "Should we expect for smoke to sit in certain area for longer 
periods of time because of the dry conditions?"

Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh: "There is research on these air stagnation events. 
There is some indication that as global warning increases we could get 
more frequent occurrence of these air stagnation events."

Dr. Diffenbaugh says the solution is a different energy system and to 
reduce greenhouse gases fast.

"Reaching net zero is really in terms of our green gas emissions the 
only way to stabilize the climate system," said Dr. Diffenbaugh.
https://abc7news.com/global-warming-climate-change-ca-wildfires-hurricane-ida/10986366/

- -

[yes]
*Opinion: While Israelis and Palestinians fight, climate change 
threatens the land*
Opinion by Gershom Gorenberg
Aug, 30, 2021

A century ago, Egyptian explorer Ahmed Hassanein found pictures of 
animals carved in rock in the depth of the Libyan desert. “There are 
lions, giraffes, ostriches, and all kinds of gazelles,” he recorded. It 
was evidence that the surrounding area had once been verdant savanna. A 
prehistoric shift in climate, from natural causes, had made the land 
unlivable for beasts and humans.

I thought about that desolate place recently as I looked at the pale 
splotch of the sun behind clouds of smoke from a forest fire west of 
Jerusalem. I imagined explorers coming here in 500 years from temperate 
Greenland or Antarctica, looking at the desolate hills of the 
once-fertile land. In place of carvings of giraffes, they may find 
inscriptions in Hebrew and Arabic, commemorating victims of the struggle 
between Israelis and Palestinians, which ended when the land itself died.

The climate is shifting, this time because of human negligence.

In December 2010, when a huge forest fire raged through the Carmel range 
above Haifa, it seemed like a unique disaster. Then, in November 2016, 
came major blazes both in the Haifa area and the hills near Jerusalem. A 
wave of fires in 2019 was followed by another in 2020, and then by this 
month’s firestorm outside Jerusalem. What was unique has become annual.

As usual, allegations of arson followed the latest blaze. Police and 
firefighters reportedly asked the Shin Bet security service to join the 
investigation, given suspicion of “nationalist motives” — meaning 
Palestinian terror. Palestinians, meanwhile, pointed to photos of the 
denuded hillsides. The fires, they said, revealed agricultural terraces 
of pre-1948 Palestinian villages, which had been hidden by Israeli 
forestation. Both reactions neatly fit the disaster into the familiar 
frame of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I don’t make light of that conflict, or of the complicated history of 
1948. But attention is a limited resource, and both Israelis and 
Palestinians should be devoting much of our attention to whether any of 
us will be able to live here in 2048.


As Tel Aviv University climate expert Amir Givati told me, temperatures 
in the entire Mediterranean region are rising even faster than the 
global average. In Israel, he says, the increase in recent decades is 2 
degrees Celsius.

The change isn’t equally spread through the wet Mediterranean winter and 
the rainless summer, says climatologist Hadas Saaroni, also of Tel Aviv 
University. “The summer is heating up more than the winter,” she said. 
And the wet season is getting shorter, Saaroni and colleagues found in 
recent research. Though total annual rainfall isn’t shrinking, it’s 
falling on fewer days — meaning more floods, less water soaking into 
soil and more parched months between the last rain of spring and the 
first storm of fall or winter.

Fall, at the end of dry seasons that lasted too long, has been 
particularly dangerous in recent years. But this year’s megafire — or 
possibly the first such fire this year — came in August, indicating that 
already in summer, conditions are worse than in the past. The longer dry 
season, says Givati, combines with unusual heat to dry plants totally, 
“from the leaves down to the roots,” so that they are more flammable and 
burn quicker. “There have always been fires,” he says, “but what’s 
happening now are firestorms. The spread is so quick that it is 
difficult to control.”

The fires are the most blatant symptom of change here — easier to 
visualize than the vanishing of cool breezes on August nights, or 
steadily worse heatwaves. But year by year, the land is less livable.

In this harsh glare, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond 
tragic. Why should Israel insist that it cannot give up settlements, or 
Palestinians insist on the individual right of return of refugees to 
homes in pre-1967 Israel, when both peoples may end up as climate 
refugees knocking uselessly on the gates of Canada and Finland? We 
should be desperate to reach a political compromise so that our 
diplomats can jointly travel from capital to capital, demanding action 
on greenhouse emissions.

To make that case, though, we need to do more here. “There’s no doubt 
that we need to increase the use of solar energy drastically,” says 
climatologist Saaroni. Yet, as of 2020, Israel was producing just 7 
percent of its electricity from renewable sources, and the cabinet 
recently gutted key goals from a plan to cut emissions.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli peace activist and former renewable 
energy executive Gershon Baskin spent years “fighting the Palestinian 
Authority and the Israeli authorities to get Palestine to become 50 
percent” dependent on renewable energy during daylight hours, he told 
me. Israeli unwillingness to give up control over land and grid lines 
and “Palestinian governmental dysfunctionality” foiled the plan, he 
says. “We’ve shed so much blood over how much we love this land,” Baskin 
says, “and yet we treat it so badly.”

That cannot last. Let me combine cynicism and optimism: Israelis and 
Palestinians now face a shared, existential threat. Perhaps that will 
finally force us to make peace and work together.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/30/while-israelis-palestinians-fight-climate-change-threatens-land/

- -


[Global warming is global, so it applies everywhere]
*A New Breed of Crisis: War and Warming Collide in Afghanistan*
Unrest and climate change are creating an agonizing feedback loop that 
punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Somini Sengupta has reported on more than 10 conflicts around the world, 
including in Afghanistan.

Aug. 30, 2021
Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. 
Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s 
most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of 
the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, 
the second in three years.

Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the 
hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a 
nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most 
vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.

And while it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to 
climate change, the effects of warming act as what military analysts 
call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people 
out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while 
the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.

“The war has exacerbated climate change impacts. For 10 years, over 50 
percent of the national budget goes to the war,” said Noor Ahmad 
Akhundzadah, a professor of hydrology at Kabul University, said by phone 
Thursday. “Now there is no government, and the future is unclear. Our 
current situation today is completely hopeless.”...
- -
A third of all Afghans face what the United Nations calls crisis levels 
of food insecurity. Because of the fighting, many people haven’t been 
able to plant their crops in time. Because of the drought, the harvest 
this year is certain to be poor. The World Food Program says 40 percent 
of crops are lost, the price of wheat has gone up by 25 percent, and the 
aid agency’s own food stock is due to run out by the end of September.

Afghanistan is not the only country to face such compounding misery. Of 
the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a 
dozen are affected by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index 
developed by the University of Notre Dame.

In Somalia, pummeled by decades of conflict, there’s been a threefold 
increase in extreme weather events since 1990, compared to the previous 
20 year-period, making it all but impossible for ordinary people to 
recover after each shock. In 2020, more than a million Somalis were 
displaced from their homes, about a third because of drought, according 
to the United Nations.

In Syria, a prolonged drought, made more likely by man-made climate 
change, according to researchers, drove people out of the countryside 
and fed simmering antigovernment grievances that led to an uprising in 
2011 and ultimately, a full-blown civil war. This year again, drought 
looms over Syria, particularly its breadbasket region, the northeastern 
Hassakeh Province.

In Mali, a violent insurgency has made it harder for farmers and herders 
to deal with a succession of droughts and flood, according to aid agencies.

“The convergence of climate risks and conflict further worsens food and 
economic insecurity and health disparities, limits access to essential 
services, while weakening the capacity of governments, institutions and 
societies to provide support,” the International Committee of the Red 
Cross warned in a recent report that examined the combined effects of 
conflict and climate shocks, including in Mali.

Climate change cannot be blamed for any single war, and certainly not 
the one in Afghanistan. But rising temperatures, and the weather shocks 
that come with it, act as what Marshall Burke, a Stanford University 
professor, calls “a finger on the scale that makes underlying conflict 
worse.” That is particularly true, he argued, in places that have 
undergone a long conflict and where government institutions have all but 
dissolved...

“None of this means that climate is the only or the most important 
factor in conflict,” said Dr. Burke, co-author of a 2013 paper looking 
at the role of climate change in dozens of conflicts across many years. 
“But based on this evidence, the international community would be 
foolish to ignore the threat that a warming climate represents.”

The combination of war and warming compound the risks facing some of the 
world’s most vulnerable people: According to the United Nations 
children’s agency, Afghanistan is the 15th riskiest country in the world 
for children, because of climate hazards, like heat and drought, and a 
lack of essential services, like health care. Two million Afghan 
children are malnourished.

That is in sharp contrast to Afghanistan’s part in global warming. An 
average Afghan produces 0.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per 
year, compared to nearly 16 metric tons of the average American.

The collapse of the government has also made Afghanistan’s participation 
in the next international climate talks entirely uncertain, said one of 
its members Ahmad Samim Hoshmand. “Now I don’t know. I’m not part of any 
government. What government I should represent?”  he said.

Until recently, he had been the government official in charge of 
enforcing the country’s ban on ozone-depleting substances, like 
refrigerants used in old air-conditioners and that are banned by the 
Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that Afghanistan had 
ratified.  Just days before the Taliban seized Kabul, he fled to 
Tajikistan. The traders of illegal substances whom he helped arrest are 
now out of prison, keen to exact revenge. He says they will kill him if 
he returns.

Mr. Hoshmand is now scrambling to emigrate elsewhere. His visa in 
Tajikistan expires in a matter of weeks. “My only hope is the ozone 
community, the Montreal Protocol community, if they can support me,” he 
said.

Afghanistan’s geography is a study of extreme hazard, from the 
glacier-peaked Hindu Kush mountains in the north to its melon farms in 
the west to the arid south, stung by dust storms.

Climate data is sparse for Afghanistan. But a recent analysis based on 
what little data exists suggests that a decline in spring rains has 
already afflicted much of the country, but most acutely in the country’s 
north, where farmers and herders rely almost entirely on the rains to 
grow crops and water their flocks.

Over the past 60 years, average temperatures have risen sharply, by 1.8 
degrees Celsius since 1950 in the country as a whole and by more than 2 
degrees Celsius in the south.

“Climate change will make it extremely challenging to maintain — let 
alone increase — any economic and development gains achieved so far in 
Afghanistan,” the United Nations warned in a 2016 report. “Increasingly 
frequent and severe droughts and floods, accelerated desertification, 
and decreasing water flows in the country’s glacier-dependent rivers 
will all directly affect rural livelihoods — and therefore the national 
economy and the country’s ability to feed itself.”

This is the country’s biggest risk, Dr. Akhundzadah argued. 
Three-fourths of his compatriots work in agriculture, and any 
unpredictable weather can be calamitous, all the more so in a country 
where there hasn’t been a stable government and no safety net to speak of.

The Taliban, for their part, appear more exercised by the need to scrub 
women’s pictures from billboards than addressing climate hazards.

But climate change is a threat multiplier for the Taliban, too. Analysts 
say water management will be critical to its legitimacy with Afghan 
citizens, and it is likely to be one of the most important issues in the 
Taliban’s relations with its neighbors as well.

Already on the Afghan battlefield, as in many battlefields throughout 
history, water has been an important currency. The Taliban, in their bid 
for Herat, a strategic city in the west, repeatedly attacked a dam that 
is critical for drinking water, agriculture and electricity for the 
people of the region. Likewise, in Kandahar Province in the south, one 
of the Taliban’s most critical victories was to seize control of a dam 
that holds water for drinking and irrigation.

Climate change also stands to complicate the Taliban’s ability to 
fulfill a key promise: the elimination of opium poppy cultivation. 
Poppies require far less water than, say, wheat or melons, and they are 
far more profitable. Poppy farming employs an estimated 120,000 Afghans 
and brings in an estimated $300-400 million a year, according to the 
United Nations, and has in turn enriched the Taliban.

Areas under poppy cultivation grew sharply in 2020.

Analysts said the Taliban would seek to use a poppy ban to gain 
legitimacy from foreign powers, like Qatar and China. But it is likely 
to face pushback from growers who have few alternatives as the rains 
become less reliable.

“It’s going to be a gigantic political flash point,” said Vanda 
Felbab-Brown, who studies the region at the Brookings Institution in 
Washington.

The last drought, in 2018, left four million Afghans in need of food aid 
and forced 371,000 people to leave their homes, many of whom haven’t 
returned.

“The effects of the severe drought are compounded by conflict and the 
Covid-19 pandemic in a context where half the population were already in 
need of aid,” the United Nations humanitarian coordinator, Ramiz 
Alakbarov, said by email from Kabul on Thursday. “With little financial 
reserves, people are forced to resort to child labor, child marriage, 
risky irregular migration exposing them to trafficking and other 
protection risks. Many are taking on catastrophic levels of debt and 
selling their assets.”

Dr. Akhundzadah, a father of four, is hoping to emigrate, too. But like 
his fellow academics, he said he has not worked for foreign governments 
and has no way to be evacuated from the country. The university is 
closed. Banks are closed. He is looking for research jobs abroad. For 
now, there are no commercial flights out of the country.

“Till now I’m OK,” he said on the phone. “The future is unclear. It will 
be difficult to live here.”
Somini Sengupta is an international climate correspondent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/climate/afghanistan-climate-taliban.html


[compassion risk research]
*Paul Slovic | Confronting the Deadly Arithmetic of Compassion | Talks 
at Google*
Aug 28, 2021
Talks at Google
Paul Slovic discusses human perception towards mass tragedies and losses 
at scale.

We as a global society value individual lives greatly and respond 
strongly to protect a single person in need, but often ignore mass 
tragedies and fail to take appropriate measures to reduce their losses.  
As the numbers grow larger, we become insensitive; the data fail to 
trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. In some 
cases, large numbers convey a false sense of inefficacy, discouraging us 
from taking valuable actions. Understanding how our minds deceive us in 
the face of large losses of life is essential to motivating actions 
needed to reduce the harm from catastrophic consequences such as those 
associated with poverty, disease, climate disasters, and violence.

Paul Slovic received his B.A. degree from Stanford University, and his 
M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from the University of Michigan. In 
1976, Dr. Slovic founded the research institute Decision Research with 
Sarah Lichtenstein and Baruch Fischhoff, where he currently serves as 
President. He has also been a professor of psychology at the University 
of Oregon since 1986. He and his colleagues worldwide have developed 
methods to describe risk perceptions and measure their impacts on 
individuals, industry, and society. His most recent work examines 
“psychic numbing” and the failure to respond to global threats from 
genocide and nuclear war. He publishes extensively and serves as a 
consultant to industry and government.

Dr. Slovic is a past President of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 
1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993 he received 
the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American 
Psychological Association. In 1995 he received the Outstanding 
Contribution to Science Award from the Oregon Academy of Science. He has 
received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics 
(1996) and the University of East Anglia (2005). Dr. Slovic was elected 
to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and the National 
Academy of Sciences in 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVslwDOO5kM




[trees]
*California Planted Trees to Fight Climate Change. Those Trees Are Now 
on Fire.*
RISHIKA PARDIKAR
California’s emissions reduction program is going up in smoke because 
regulators severely underestimated the impact of climate change–fueled 
wildfires.
- -
When the original program was conceived, California presumed that some 
forests would naturally burn — and therefore the law required polluters 
to buy slightly more woodland as an insurance mechanism to account for 
such losses. But experts say the amount of woodland set aside in these 
so-called “buffer pools” wildly underestimated the amount of trees that 
are now burning in the era of climate change.

And companies that invested in forestland to counter their greenhouse 
gas pollution and look responsible are not obligated to invest more when 
wildfires subsequently incinerate those offsets.

The result: The fires are now burning up the much-touted emissions 
reduction projects that are necessary to combat the climate crisis.
- -
*Underestimating Wildfire Risks*
When forests burn, they release carbon dioxide. That’s why California’s 
carbon offset projects were designed to set aside 2 to 4 percent of 
their forests as excess woodlands to account for such emissions. But the 
size of these buffer pools are “nowhere near adequate for the risks that 
forests face in the United States in a changing climate,” said William 
Anderegg, associate professor, University of Utah and lead author of a 
2020 paper that assessed climate-driven risks to carbon offset projects.
- -
“We’ve Bought Forest Offsets That Are Now Burning”
Major brands have invested in carbon-offset forest projects to meet 
emission reduction targets — and many of those companies publicly brag 
about them to try to convince customers and investors that they are 
environmentally responsible businesses.

“We’ve bought forest offsets that are now burning,” Elizabeth Willmott, 
Microsoft’s carbon program manager, said at a carbon removal panel 
earlier this month. “We don’t want this to force us to pull out of 
investing in nature-based solutions… [but companies must] get really 
smart about what the risks are.”

Similarly, BP, the multinational oil and gas company, recently touted 
its investments in carbon offsets after spending more than $100 million 
to purchase thirteen million emission credits from the massive Colville 
carbon-offset project in Washington state. But this summer, roughly 
fifty thousand of the project’s four hundred fifty thousand acres burned 
to the ground.

Last year, a California state working group tasked with revamping the 
state’s offset protocols submitted a report recommending prioritizing 
fire suppression efforts in carbon-offset forest projects, among other 
endeavors.

But Anderegg at the University of Utah said that the task force’s 
recommendations were skewed toward business interests that benefitted 
from carbon-offset projects, including timber companies. And earlier 
this year, several environmental advocates resigned from the task force, 
said Anderegg, because “the group was not taking their interests into 
account.”

According to Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, no 
amount of project tweaks or offset recalculations will address the core 
problem of California’s carbon-offset program: Companies are choosing to 
invest in forest offsets because it allows them to avoid the difficult 
but more important work of fully reducing their own emissions.

“If we want our climate policies to succeed, we need to take a clear 
look at the evidence and decide whether we should rely on offsets at 
all,” said Anderegg. “Reducing emissions directly will be far more 
effective and less risky.”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/california-climate-change-crisis-wildfires-carbon-offset-pollution




[Information weapons]
*Study: The public is pretty confused by your climate change jargon*
Carbon neutral? Mitigation? People don't know the words scientists think 
they do.
Kate Yoder & Matthew Craft - Sep 01, 2021

If you’ve ever furrowed your brow trying to remember what “mitigation” 
meant, you’re not alone.

Many people don’t understand key terms experts use to talk about climate 
change, according to a recent study from researchers affiliated with the 
United Nations Foundation and the University of Southern California. 
Some of the most difficult-to-understand words were mitigation, 
referring to efforts to reduce emissions to slow down climate change, 
and carbon-neutral, when there’s no net increase in the amount of carbon 
dioxide in the air.

Experts in a given field might think that technical language is more 
precise or more efficient than commonplace alternatives. But subjecting 
normal people to obscure terms can leave them feeling confused and 
disengaged and can sometimes encourage a head-in-the-sand response. 
Everyone has heard the advice “know your audience.” That’s easier said 
than done, especially since many specialists may not even realize what 
counts as jargon, with their non-expert days long in the past.

“Some of the people in our study were really concerned about climate 
change,” said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a professor of psychology and 
behavioral science at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price 
School of Public Policy. “If they don’t understand what you’re trying to 
tell them, you could be missing an opportunity to make a difference.”

The researchers landed on a shortlist of terms for the study by talking 
with experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group 
of U.N. scientists that released a dire report last month warning that 
greenhouse gas emissions were quickly destabilizing the climate with 
devastating and “irreversible” consequences. They picked words and 
phrases that were important for understanding climate policy but tend to 
get misinterpreted, like tipping point, carbon dioxide removal, and 
adaptation. Then the researchers interviewed 20 people, picked to 
provide a diversity of views, asking them to define these words and rate 
how easy they were to understand. The takeaway from the study: “many of 
the terms were unfamiliar or perceived as needlessly complex.”

More than half of the participants turned out to be unfamiliar with the 
meaning of mitigation in its climate change context, instead associating 
it with law or insurance, where the term refers to minimizing losses. 
“Mitigation, oh God I hate this word,” one person said. Another third 
appeared to conflate it with the similar-sounding “mediation,” where a 
neutral party helps resolve a conflict through discussion.

An informal survey by Grist of folks around Seattle revealed similar 
problems. Bud Goodwin, owner of Rising Sun Farms & Produce in Seattle, 
feels strongly that something needs to be done about climate change. 
Worsening droughts, wildfires, and heavy rains have hit the farmers who 
supply his fruits and vegetables. He said he’s heard the terms tipping 
point, carbon-neutral, and adaptation in the context of climate change. 
But he was stumped when it came to mitigation. “The only thing I can 
think of is ‘mitigating circumstances,’” he said. “That’s the only time 
I’ve heard of that used. And I don’t know if that’s the right context.”

Theo Henderson, who works at Third Place Books in north Seattle, was 
unsure what to make of the phrase tipping point when it’s used so widely 
in other contexts, like epidemiology, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book, 
and iconic moments in sports. “It’s used in contradictory ways,” he 
said. “It’s almost like you just don’t want to say it anymore, because 
it means different things to different people.”

In a bit of irony, even the phrase used to talk about talking about 
climate change — “climate communication” — confounded some people on the 
streets of Seattle.

That general sense of confusion was reflected in the study. When asked 
about tipping point — a point of no return for ice shelves, ocean 
patterns, rainforests, or other systems central to life on Earth — 
people didn’t always see the link to the warming planet, instead 
thinking of a seesaw, a sudden change of mind, or difficulty going back 
to how things were before. Only 15 percent of those interviewed in the 
study mentioned climate change in their initial definition.

Another inscrutable phrase for some was carbon neutral, with just under 
half of people in the study understanding it right off the bat. Some 
people found the shorthand use of carbon confusing. “I know carbon is 
used in front of a lot of words, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide … 
Carbon neutral means – I don’t know,” one participant said.

Even putting the tricky words and phrases in context — the classic 
vocab-learning trick you learned in school — often failed to help people 
understand their meanings. The example sentences, pulled from 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, were long and wordy 
and often filled with other jargon. See for yourself. Does the following 
sentence help you understand what sustainable development means? 
“Natural hazards, climate change, and societal vulnerability can pose 
fundamental limits to sustainable development.” (If you’re curious, the 
study describes sustainable development as “meeting the needs of people 
living today without compromising the needs of people living in the 
future.”)

Companies have helped muddy the picture by using buzzwords to tout their 
sustainability cred. You can buy “carbon-negative” hand sanitizer or a 
“climate positive” burger. In a recent survey commissioned by Yeo 
Valley, an organic dairy company in the United Kingdom, 79 percent of 
people said that eco-friendly jargon should be translated into plainer 
language.

There are plenty of ways to phrase things more simply, and communication 
experts have long advised specialists to do so. But the problem is, 
Bruine de Bruin said, scientists might not even realize which words are 
coming across as gibberish, having used mitigation for so long that they 
think it’s a simple, straightforward term. The concrete examples of 
misunderstandings quoted in the study, she said, and are “more powerful 
than people coming in saying, ‘Look, don’t use jargon.’”
https://grist.org/language/study-climate-change-jargon-mitigation-tipping-points/


[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming September 2, 2005*
September 2, 2005: Climate scientist Stephen Schneider appears on "Real 
Time with Bill Maher" to discuss climate change's role in Hurricane Katrina.
http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ


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