[✔️] September 5, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*September 5, 2021*/

[the last go first]
*‘Gray greens’: Grandparents are being arrested in London climate protests*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/climate-protests-london-arrests/2021/09/04/8e6cf6be-0bf1-11ec-a7c8-61bb7b3bf628_story.html*
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[a little history and a rising opinion]*
**Climate change deniers are as slippery as those who justified the 
slave trade*
Nick Cohen
Global warming sceptics should be hiding in corners. But still some 
defend the indefensible
4 Sep 2021
No one seems as defeated as the global warming “deniers” who dominated 
rightwing thinking a decade ago. Like late 18th-century opponents of 
abolishing the slave trade, Lord Lawson and the claque of Conservative 
cranks who filled the comment pages of the Tory press are remembered 
today as dangerous fools – assuming they are remembered at all.

The billions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry on propaganda 
and its acceptance by know-nothing elements on the right caused 
incalculable damage. They might have followed Margaret Thatcher, who 
warned in 1989 of C02 admissions leading to climate change “more 
fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known”. The desire 
of business to protect profits and the vanity of politicians and 
pundits, who saw themselves as dissidents fighting the consensus rather 
than fanatics enabling destruction, helped to waste two decades of 
valuable time.
Every argument they advanced has been disproved, as much by the 
experience of everyday life as science. Journalists are advised: “If 
someone says it is raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not 
your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find 
out which is true.” The world only had to look at the weather outside to 
know who was trying to fool it.

To pick from the dozens of examples in Richard Black’s history of the 
conspiracy theory (Denied: The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism) , 
global warming is not a “swindle”, as a Channel 4 documentary informed 
its viewers in 2007. Glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking and the seas 
are becoming more acidic. If there was swindling, it was at Channel 4, 
as Ofcom suggested when it found the station guilty of several breaches 
of the broadcasting rules. It is not “erroneous” to assume that humanity 
is driving the climate catastrophe, as the Spectator assured its readers 
as late as 2017. The pace of man-made climate change is faster than 
anything in the Earth’s history and all attempts to invent other 
explanations have failed.

Viscount Ridley, who presided over the collapse of Northern Rock, and 
now dismisses the collapse of the planet in the pages of the Times, said 
climate change was doing “more good than harm”. We should adapt to a 
warmer Earth and celebrate the reduction in deaths from the winter cold. 
But the seas and icecaps cannot adapt, nor can cities threatened with 
flooding and countries facing desertification. The lights did not go out 
as we switched to renewable energy, as so many pundits said they would. 
And energy bills have fallen rather than risen, despite the assertions 
of the noble Lawson to the contrary. Rightwing denialism appears buried 
so deep in the dustbin of history it can never be recycled.

And yet there is nervousness among the impressively large number of 
Conservative politicians who are serious about pushing for net zero. 
They are pleading with their colleagues to understand the advantages to 
consumers and businesses that a determined remaking of the economy would 
bring. The Conservative Environmental Network is already in a fight with 
a small group of rightwing MPs, who claim “the poorest will pay the 
highest price for net-zero fantasies” (even though no measure is more 
likely to reduce fuel poverty than a government home-insulation drive). 
That battle will only intensify.

I put “denier” in quotes at the top of this piece because the enemies of 
science (and of us all) are endlessly malleable shapeshifters. Once they 
can no longer deny the existence of man-made global warming, they shift 
and keet on shifting so no one can ever pin them down. In this, they 
mirror the defenders of slavery 230 years ago, who created the modern 
world’s first corporate PR campaign and provided an example for all who 
have followed.

The comparison isn’t harsh. One day, the attack on climate science will 
be seen as shocking as the defence of human bondage. Indeed, that day 
should have long passed. They are overwhelmingly old men or, in the case 
of Lawson, a very old man. They grew up in a 20th century where the 
carbon economy was natural: the way the world was and would always be. 
Slavery was equally natural to the plantation owners and slave traders 
of Georgian Britain. It had always existed, everywhere on Earth.

The 18th century had its Viscount Ridleys who opined that slavery did 
more good than harm. In 1789, during the hearings for the first 
abolition bill in history, one witness told parliament that Africans 
wanted to be enslaved and “nine out of 10 rejoice at falling into our 
hands”. The pro-slavery lobby was as well funded as the fossil-fuel 
lobby, and as relentless. The Telegraph comment pages did not exist in 
1789 so it commissioned The Benevolent Planters by one Thomas Bellamy to 
appear at the Theatre Royal in London’s West End. The play told the 
story of Oran and Selima, lovers who are separated in Africa. Their 
capture by slavers is a blessing. Far from being oppressors, kind slave 
owners bring the couple together in the West Indies and allow them to 
live productive lives together.

William Wilberforce was assailed by claims that if Britain abolished 
slavery, “our manufactures will droop in consequence, our land-tax will 
be raised, our marine destroyed, while France, our natural enemy and 
rival, will strengthen herself by our weakness”. Today, Nick Timothy, 
the man who destroyed Theresa May’s premiership, tells Telegraph readers 
the British will be forced into penury by “net-zero zealots” while other 
countries “break their promises” and profit from our naivety.

In the 18th and 21st centuries, as soon as one fake position was 
exposed, another took its place. The arguments change. The intent 
remains the same.

It remains an open question as to whether Boris Johnson secretly shares 
a denialist intent. Conservative environmentalists look on him with 
approval as he prepares to host the Cop26 climate change conference in 
November. He says all the right things, but the investment and political 
will needed to electrify transport, reduce meat eating and refit the 
housing stock are nowhere to be seen. Denialism is a shapeshifter. Its 
latest form may be a bombastic prime minister who promises the Earth but 
does next to nothing to protect it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/04/climate-change-deniers-are-as-slippery-as-those-who-justified-the-slave-trade



[Climate Cafe]
*Anxiety and biscuits: the climate cafes popping up around the world*
Organisers say showing people they are not alone in their fears is key 
to instigating climate action
4 Sep 2021
Kathy Kilmer tried bringing up the climate crisis twice at a recent 
dinner party, but it didn’t go well. Guests quickly turned the 
conversation to other topics.

“I just feel awful bringing it up,” said Kilmer, a retired conservation 
group communications director from Denver, Colorado. “And yet, I feel 
like talking about it is absolutely key to getting people to understand it.”

That is why Kilmer attended a virtual “climate cafe” earlier this year – 
a meetup where talking about the climate crisis is not only encouraged, 
it is the main event. As the effects of climate change become harder to 
ignore, and climate anxiety continues to rise, more and more such events 
are cropping up around the world for youth activists and retirees alike 
to process their climate angst.

“Climate change is happening, it exists already, and much of what is 
coming is already baked in in terms of the science,” said Rebecca 
Nestor, an Oxford-based organisational consultant who facilitated the 
recent Climate Psychology Alliance cafe that Kilmer attended. “So a lot 
of what I think we’re going to need to do … is [to support] people to 
acknowledge this and manage their feelings about it.”

While the exact origins of climate cafes are murky, leaders say they are 
loosely based on death cafes, which started in the UK as a space for 
people to talk about mortality over tea and pastries.

Jess Pepper, who in 2015 started what may have been the first climate 
cafe in Dunkeld and Birnam, Scotland, said the idea came to her after 
she gave a local presentation on climate change. Attendees came up to 
her in the street afterwards, asking what they could do. “It just dawned 
on me that people needed to be speaking with each other, and not just in 
a one-off kind of session,” she said.

Pepper says the climate cafes she has helped start around the UK are 
meant to be less formal than activist groups – and, ideally, more 
welcoming to people not already committed to climate advocacy. Some, 
such as those held by Aberdeen Climate Action, serve as an informal 
outreach arm of an existing climate group, with each cafe bringing in 
guest speakers and connecting like-minded people.

Sussex Green Ideas, meanwhile, is more like a fair, with booths and 
stations to fill up reusable toiletry bottles. Carrie Cort, its 
organiser, said her group recently adopted the festival-like format and 
dropped “climate” from the event title because, with all the hardships 
of the pandemic, they thought it was better to “focus on the future that 
we can achieve if we take action”.

Another breed of climate cafes are billed as “action-free” spaces. These 
are smaller affairs, led by trained facilitators who guide the attendees 
through free-flowing conversations about their climate-related feelings.

Nestor starts off each of the cafes by having attendees do a show and 
tell with an object that connects them to the natural world. “Typically, 
there might be one person who’s an activist in the group and the others 
are often in that state of ‘I am the only one in my family who was 
worried about this at all’,” she said. “And so this is a massively 
important space for them.”

Concerns about raising children – or whether to have children – in a 
world that is heating up are a common topic of discussion. There are 
also youth climate cafes cropping up specifically to help a generation 
whose mental health, experts say, is especially imperilled by the 
climate crisis.

Kilmer said she was astonished by how good she felt at the end of the 
first climate cafe she attended. “Even though I had shed a lot of tears, 
and gotten in touch with some powerful feelings, there was a sense of 
relief that I could share that with somebody,” she said.

Dr Sarah Jaquette Ray, programme leader of the environmental studies 
department at California’s Humboldt State University and author of a 
book on climate anxiety, said making people feel less individualistic 
was key to combating inertia and despair around the climate emergency. 
“A sense of the collective is probably the most important thing that 
will alleviate climate anxiety, but also mitigate climate change,” she said.

The concept of climate anxiety has faced accusations of being a white 
phenomenon. Ray and others have pointed out that certain parts of the 
world have been feeling the effects of climate change for decades – they 
have just been largely ignored by wealthier nations.

These concerns are on the minds of some climate cafe organisers. The 
hosts of a new climate cafe in Boston, for example, say they are holding 
meetups in more diverse parts of the city, which, not incidentally, are 
also more vulnerable to climate change.

Keerat Dhami, a community organiser, started a climate cafe in Peel, 
Ontario, last March for activists to discuss the emotional challenges of 
their work.

Dhami said attendees of the online event, now open to everyone, had been 
mostly white. But participants have also joined the cafe from places at 
the frontlines of the climate crisis, such as the Middle East and 
coastal Mexico.

While Dhami understands concerns about the “whiteness” of climate 
anxiety, she also feels that “when you give space for underprivileged or 
under-represented folks to speak … everyone comes in and learns from 
each other”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/04/anxiety-and-biscuits-climate-cafes-popping-up-around-world



[ follow the money ]
*Homebuyers aren’t taking climate change seriously, says Redfin CEO*
SEP 3 2021
Kevin Stankiewicz
@KEVIN_STANK
KEY POINTS
*- - Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman believes there has yet to be a serious 
reckoning among U.S. homebuyers about the dangers climate change presents.*
- -“*The buyers just keep marching into the jaws of destruction,*” he 
told CNBC on Friday.
- -“*The most affordable places in America are the places that are at 
the most risk of being affected by climate change*,” the executive said.

The CEO of real estate brokerage Redfin told CNBC on Friday he believes 
there has yet to be a serious reckoning among U.S. homebuyers about the 
dangers climate change presents.

“The buyers just keep marching into the jaws of destruction,” Redfin’s 
Glenn Kelman said in an interview on “Closing Bell.”

Wildfire season in the American West is becoming longer and more intense 
as a result of human-induced climate change, fueled by warmer 
temperatures and drier conditions. Similarly, scientists say, hurricanes 
and floods are increasing in ferocity due to the warming planet and 
rising sea levels.

Homebuyers in vulnerable parts of the country are not deterred by those 
realities, Kelman said. “The buyers themselves are driven by 
affordability, and the most affordable places in America are the places 
that are at the most risk of being affected by climate change,” he said. 
“They’re going to be flooded by hurricanes. They’re going to be affected 
by wildfires.”...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/03/homebuyers-not-worried-about-climate-change-redfin-ceo.html


[Steven Poole's word of the week- Hycean and nightmare]
*‘Hycean’: a portmanteau of hydrogen and ocean that’s not so far, far away*
This new class of planet hoped by scientists to harbour alien life is a 
hot waterworld. Let’s stop Earth turning into one
Astronomers have begun scrutinising a new class of planet that might 
support alien life: the hycean. This is a portmanteau coinage combining 
“hydrogen” and “ocean”, since the planets are hot waterworlds with 
hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

In ancient Greek, Oceanus was the great river encompassing the disc of 
the Earth, personified as the son of Uranus and Gaia. Hydrogen, 
meanwhile, is Greek for “water-generating”, as H indeed is when combined 
with O2.

That reaction also occurs in hydrogen fuel cells that produce 
electricity, but where do we get the hydrogen from in the first place? 
Mainly, as it turns out, from burning fossil fuels. One type of this 
CO2-emitting process is called, in a truly marvellous act of Unspeak, 
“blue hydrogen”, even though hydrogen is colourless – presumably in the 
hope that the association with the colour of clear skies will act as 
rhetorical greenwashing. (“Blue hydrogen” captures and stores some but 
not all of the CO2 created, while your actual “green hydrogen” is made 
with renewable energy.)

But let’s not be too hard on human ingenuity: with enough sea-level rise 
and global heating, we could even turn Earth itself into a hycean for 
aliens to study.
Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/03/hycean-portmanteau-hydrogen-ocean-planet-hot-water-earth 


- -

[defined by Wikipedia]
*A hycean planet -* from the words hydrogen and ocean] - is a 
hypothetical type of habitable planet described as a hot, water-covered 
planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere that is possibly capable of 
harboring life. According to researchers, hycean planets, based on 
planet densities, may include rocky super-earths as well as 
mini-Neptunes (such as K2-18b and TOI-1231 b),] and, as a result, are 
expected to be numerous in the exoplanet population...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hycean_planet


[The news archive - looking back] *
**On this day in the history of global warming September 5, 2009*
White House advisor Van Jones decides to resign after a series of 
vicious rhetorical attacks on him by Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck 
and other conservative pundits.
http://youtu.be/_RuAFg0haCk


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