[✔️] September 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*September 9, 2021*/

[Of course]
*Climate change: Fossil fuels must stay underground, scientists say*
By Victoria Gill  Sept 9, 2021
Science correspondent, BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58494391



[Fires move into towns "Maybe this is the start of the end"]
*Greece’s Summer of Fire and Anger*
Sep 4, 2021
VICE News
After a week of wildfires, VICE World News travelled to the island of 
Evia, Greece to meet local villagers that defied evacuation orders. With 
insufficient forces on the ground, volunteer firefighters took matters 
into their own hands and fought the fires themselves. They are angry at 
the mismanagement of the country’s fire services, a force that has long 
been underfunded and ill prepared to tackle the onslaught of the climate 
crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2igfZB3YFU8



[keep it down underground]
*Climate change: Fossil fuels must stay underground, scientists say*
By Victoria Gill - - Science correspondent, BBC News
Sept 8, 2021
Almost 60% of oil and gas reserves and 90% of coal must remain in the 
ground to keep global warming below 1.5C, scientists say.

The forecast is based on close analysis of global energy supply and demand.

It is a "bleak" but realistic assessment of "what the science tells us 
is needed", the researchers say.

And they have "painted a scenario of the future" that leaves much less 
room for fossil fuels to be extracted than previously estimated.

'Bouncing back'

Globally, the researchers calculated, production of fossil fuels needed 
to have peaked in 2020 and be on a steady decline of 3% every year until 
2050.

"Through the Covid pandemic, we have seen a large decline in production 
- but that is bouncing back," UCL associate professor of energy systems 
Dr Steve Pye told BBC News.

The research focuses on how much energy is required and what the limit 
must be on carbon emissions.

Dr James Price, also at UCL, said: "We say to our model, 'Meet all those 
demands from now until 2100 without emitting too much carbon dioxide.'

"The result we get is a rapid reduction in fossil fuels - and a large 
amount of fossils fuels [left in the ground] - simply because the carbon 
budget is so tight."

The study, in the journal Nature, also found the decline in oil and gas 
production required globally by 2050 - to stick to that tight carbon 
budget - means many regions face peak production now or during the next 
decade.

Many fossil-fuel extraction projects already planned or in operation are 
likely to hurt the world's chances of meeting internationally agreed 
target limits on global warming set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

And this "bleak picture", the scientists say, "is very probably an 
underestimate of what is required".

The carbon budget determined by the modelling would give the world a 50% 
chance of limiting warming to 1.5C.

But the study says: "That does not consider uncertainties around, for 
example, climate-system feedbacks

"So to ensure more certainty of stabilising at this temperature, [even] 
more carbon needs to stay in the ground."

'Stark numbers'
The researchers highlight bold national policies to entirely phase out 
fossil-fuel extraction, including an alliance devised by Costa Rica and 
Denmark, set to be launched at the crucial United Nations Climate Change 
Conference, in Glasgow, this year, asking states to stop issuing 
fossil-fuel exploration permits.

And the scientists say they hope the "stark numbers" will inspire the 
political will to make swift and urgent change to move away from a 
reliance on fossil fuels.

"The physics doesn't care about the political will," Dr Price said.

"We know technically how to do this, it is just about actually doing it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58494391


[VICE News offers  a strong indictment of the industry]
*The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Dirty Secret*
Sep 7, 2021
VICE News
Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change decades ago. But instead 
of doing something about it, they spent millions to confuse the public 
and seed doubt. VICE World News explores their seedy tactics.
This is the fossil fuel industry’s system error.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvbm8xEgQ9s



[Job hunting in this time of change]
*No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers*
Colleges offer support as young people aim to devote their lives to 
battling the crisis
Angela Lashbrook
6 Sep 2021
- -
“I cannot imagine a career that isn’t connected to even just being a 
small part of a solution,” says Mimi Ausland, 25, the founder of Free 
the Ocean, a company that aims to leverage small actions to remove 
plastic from the ocean.....

Young people are finding their way to these careers, though, with or 
without the federal government’s support. Brooke Hoese, a 24-year-old 
undergraduate in Texas pursuing a career in restoration ecology, is 
taking an interdisciplinary approach. They spent the summer working on a 
farm that practices regenerative agriculture, a method to restore soil 
biodiversity, to contribute toward an integrative studies degree 
involving ecology, literature, and philosophy.

“My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and 
hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments,” they say.

College campuses across the country are now finding new ways to help 
students like Hoese integrate climate studies across various 
disciplines. The University of Southern California in Los Angeles, for 
example, launched the Sustainability Across the Curriculum program 
earlier this year to teach the college’s 20,000 undergraduate students 
how their majors intersect with sustainability and the environment.

I think I’m in the last generation who may be able to do anything about 
climate change
Rachel Larrivee, sustainability consultant

A 2020 USC survey found that 64% of undergraduate students are “very 
interested” in on-campus sustainability, while 27% are “interested”. 
They’re also practicing what they preach: 33% of survey respondents say 
they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report 
weekly sustainability practices.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/06/gen-z-climate-change-careers-jobs


[NYT Opinion]
SPENCER BOKAT-LINDELL
*Climate Disaster Is the New Normal. Can We Save Ourselves?*
Sept. 7, 2021
How to summarize the summer of 2021? I might choose a statistic: Nearly 
one-third of Americans live in a county that was hit by a weather 
disaster in the past three months, up from just about one-tenth during 
the same period five years ago, according to The Washington Post.

Scientists long ago predicted that climate change would cause heat 
waves, floods and storms to grow more frequent and more intense, and the 
relationship has become much clearer in recent years. But “these events 
tell us we’re not prepared,” Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for 
climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama 
administration, told The Times. “We have built our cities, our 
communities, to a climate that no longer exists.”

What does the United States need to do to prepare for a hotter future, 
and what are the limits of adaptation? Here’s what people are saying.
*
**Mitigate, adapt or suffer*
Fourteen years ago, a Harvard climate and energy expert, John Holdren, 
coined a kind of axiom for the three choices climate change posed for 
humanity: Mitigation — the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions — 
adaptation and suffering. “We’re going to do some of each,” he said. 
“The question is what the mix is going to be.”

For years, the policy conversation has rightfully been dominated by the 
first part of the equation, because, as he explained, “the more 
mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less 
suffering there will be.”

But nations delayed curbing their emissions for so long that global 
warming is now guaranteed to intensify in the next three decades. And 
that means that mitigation alone, while still as necessary as ever, is 
no longer sufficient to prevent suffering: As devastating as recent 
extreme weather events have been, scientists say the next 30 years will 
bring even more, hotter heat waves, longer and more intense droughts, 
and more episodes of catastrophic flooding.

In its 2018 National Climate Assessment, the federal government released 
a sweeping report of all the ways the United States would need to adapt. 
Here are just four, courtesy of The Times’s Brad Plumer:

    *Rethink how we farm: *Intensifying drought and extreme heat
    jeopardizes both the yields of crops and the workers who harvest
    them. Farmers may have to use more precise irrigation techniques to
    conserve water, relocate production and invest in climate-controlled
    buildings.

    *Build for the future, *not the past: The nation’s deteriorating
    infrastructure — its roads, sewer systems, public transportation,
    power plants and transmission lines — was built with historical
    weather conditions in mind, so it can’t just be repaired; it also
    has to be rebuilt or retrofitted for the weather of the future.

    *Enlist nature to help: *Restoring degraded wetlands and expanding
    green space can protect cities and coasts from flooding, while
    planting more trees can reduce urban temperatures and protect people
    from deadly heat waves.

    *Expect the unexpected: *Earth hasn’t warmed this quickly in tens of
    millions of years, long before humans even existed. Changes this
    rapid are likely to bring unpredictable dangers, and the more the
    world warms, the greater the risk of such surprises, some of which
    may be irreversible and self-reinforcing.

At the moment, however, there is no national plan for climate 
adaptation, just as there is no national plan for mitigation. Every 
year, the federal government spends about $46 billion on recovery from 
disasters — about seven times what it spends on resilience, as David G. 
Victor, Sadie Frank and Eric Gesick note in The Times. In many cases, 
recovery money is spent in ways that increase the risks and costs of 
climate change by inviting people to build and move into harm’s way.

“When communities are flattened by nature, the nation helps pay for 
rebuilding — often rebuilding the same infrastructure in the same place, 
a target for the next disaster,” they write. “Redirecting federal money 
toward resilience rather than simply rebuilding after disasters will be 
hard. But the longer we wait, the harder it will become as the costs of 
climate change mount.”...

‘The truth is that you can’t protect everything’
The 2018 National Climate Assessment mentioned a fifth major strategy 
the United States will need to adapt to climate change: Get out of the 
way. In some parts of the country, particularly along coastlines, many 
areas will become too expensive or impractical to inhabit; some already 
have.

“We need to decide where it is in our national interest to be spending 
federal money, and equally important, where that coastal protection has 
the best chance of providing meaningful, longer-term protection,” Robert 
S. Young writes in The Times. “In the many places we cannot protect, we 
must seriously discuss how we can take measured, gradual steps to move 
people and homes away from the hazards.”

But the United States has no clear national plan for climate migration 
either, as Alexandra Tempus explains in The Times. She notes that some 
1.7 million disaster-related displacements occurred in 2020 alone, 
according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, but the 
process is entirely reactive and ad hoc, with homeowners routinely left 
to wait years before obtaining buyouts.

“Real change — like relocating entire neighborhoods and communities out 
of harm’s way — would be far better handled not in times of crisis, when 
the displaced must weigh complex decisions in the midst of chaos and 
loss, but before a crisis hits,” she writes.

But more proactive migration will prove difficult in the United States, 
where government is especially loath to infringe on personal property 
rights. Consider, by comparison, the Netherlands: There, where much of 
the land lies below sea level, government water boards have the ultimate 
authority over land use and there is no national flood insurance program 
because, the Dutch argue, the government’s job is to protect people, not 
homeownership, from floods.

“If they determine an area is needed for flood protection, its residents 
must move,” The Times reports. “It’s a different story in the United 
States.”

*The limits of adaptation*
Just as humanity’s failure to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions has 
made a necessity of adaptation, so too, if that failure continues, will 
it make a necessity of suffering. “There are limits to how much the 
country, and the world, can adapt,” The Times’s Christopher Flavelle, 
Anne Barnard, Brad Plumer and Michael Kimmelman write. “And if nations 
don’t do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate 
change, they may soon run up against the outer edges of resilience.”

Some of those edges will be found in the world’s food and water systems. 
At 1.5 degrees of warming, nearly one billion people worldwide could 
swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves, and hundreds of 
millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. At 2 
degrees of warming, coral reefs will all but cease to exist, causing 
irreversible loss for many marine ecosystems and jeopardizing the ocean 
food supply.

On land, farmers can adapt to an extent, but the 2018 National Climate 
Assessment report emphasized that “these approaches have limits under 
severe climate change impacts.” Yields for such crops as maize, rice and 
wheat will be smaller at 2 degrees of warming than at 1.5 degrees, 
according to NASA, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and 
Central and South America, and 7 percent to 10 percent of rangeland 
livestock will be lost. Even now, at just 1.2 degrees of warming, some 
farmers in drought-ridden California have found it more lucrative to 
sell off water rights than to grow food.

*Even successful adaptation projects may create their own climate threats:*

In Louisiana, the vast system of levees and flood walls that has been 
erected to manage the Mississippi — and that helped keep New Orleans 
relatively dry during Hurricane Ida — is also causing the southern part 
of the state to disintegrate, as Elizabeth Kolbert has written.

As extreme heat intensifies, energy-guzzling air-conditioning is fast 
becoming necessary in places where it wasn’t, which in turn threatens to 
accelerate global warming.

Such prospects are why, as Young writes, mitigation remains the first 
line of defense, even if it has already been breached: “We can build all 
the sea walls, dunes, beaches and marshes we want, but the problem 
long-term is not what we put on the ground. It is what we put in the air.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/opinion/climate-change-disaster-adaptation.html



[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming September  9, 2005*

September 9, 2005: At the National Sierra Club Convention in San 
Francisco, Al Gore declares:

    "There are scientific warnings now of another onrushing catastrophe.
    We were warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; we didn't respond.
    We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't
    respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us that the
    average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global
    warming. A scientist at MIT has published a study well before this
    tragedy showing that since the 1970s, hurricanes in both the
    Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration, and in
    intensity, by about 50%. The newscasters told us after Hurricane
    Katrina went over the southern tip of Florida that there was a
    particular danger for the Gulf Coast of the hurricanes becoming much
    stronger because it was passing over unusually warm waters in the
    gulf. The waters in the gulf have been unusually warm. The oceans
    generally have been getting warmer. And the pattern is exactly
    consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years. Two
    thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most
    elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of
    humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a
    string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves
    and deal with the underlying causes of global warming. It is
    important to learn the lessons of what happens when scientific
    evidence and clear authoritative warnings are ignored in order to
    induce our leaders not to do it again and not to ignore the
    scientists again and not to leave us unprotected in the face of
    those threats that are facing us right now."


http://web.archive.org/web/20050924210135/http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0912-32.htm



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