[✔️] September 11 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*September 11, 2021*/

/[US Wildfire forecast]/
*Update and Forecast for Caldor Fire, Dixie Fire, Monument Fire, and 
other California Wildfires*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cBMzbVFoGY

- -

/[Fire near me is 40 miles to the South]/
*'Megafire' declared near Mount Rainier after exceeding 100,000 acres*
The Schneider Springs Fire is more than 100,000 acres and may not be 
fully contained until Oct. 1.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/wildfire/schneider-springs-wildfire-rainier-megafire-climate-dry-warm/281-6d4ad192-a7e8-4846-960f-a78b5c53f096

- -

/[Food insecurity rising video]/
*Why Food Is Getting More Expensive In The U.S.*
Sep 10, 2021
CNBC
The pandemic sent food prices skyrocketing amid a slew of supply chain 
disruptions, but food costs have been steadily rising over the past five 
years. The rise in prices can have serious consequences for the most 
vulnerable Americans. According to the USDA, 13.8 million Americans 
qualified as food insecure in 2020. Watch the video to find out how much 
food prices have risen, what's driving the increase and how businesses 
and policymakers can fix it.

The Biden administration said Wednesday it plans to take “bold action” 
to enforce antitrust laws aimed at meatpacking companies it says are 
causing beef, pork, and poultry prices to rise at the grocery store.

Even though beef prices have been rising, farmers and ranchers have been 
making less money, the White House said.

Climate change, labor issues, transportation concerns and other supply 
chain disruptions have been contributing to the rising costs over the 
past several years. The pandemic disruptions then sped up the rate of 
growth in prices.

These price increases have significant consequences for the most 
vulnerable Americans. The United States Department of Agriculture 
reported Wednesday that 13.8 million households were considered food 
insecure in 2020.

The Biden administration last month increased assistance for the 
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Previously known as 
Food Stamps, the benefits were increased by more than 25%.

“It’s a combination of all these factors,” SuperMarketGuru.com editor 
Phil Lempert said. “It’s very difficult to say what did the pandemic do? 
What does climate change do? What is transportation do? So we’ve got to 
lump it all together. And we’ve got to solve them all together.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnYwMliFBSQ



/[Military News offers an opinion]/
*Climate Change Could Make 'Military Equipment Useless,' Experts Warn*
10 Sep 2021
Stars and Stripes | By David Choi
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea -- Leaders from defense institutes across 
the world converged in Seoul this week to raise the alarm on military 
threats posed by "irreversible and abrupt climate change."

Global temperatures are expected to reach or surpass a warming threshold 
of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 20 years, United Nations climate 
change experts reported in August, "unless there are immediate, rapid 
and large-scale reductions in greenhouse emissions."
Without action, the planet is in store for increasing heat waves, longer 
warm seasons and continued sea-level rise, contributing to coastal 
flooding and erosion, according to the report.

Panelists from the United States, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, 
India and Bangladesh gave their assessment of these threats during a 
three-day seminar hosted by South Korea's Ministry of Defense.

Tom Middendorp, Netherlands' former chief of defense and chairman of the 
International Military Council on Climate and Security, warned Wednesday 
that nations had "a responsibility to prepare" for the implications of 
climate change.

"I cannot remember any other conflict in my military experience where we 
had this level of scientific foresight," he said during the virtual 
portion of the seminar. "We know what's coming to us."

The Netherlands, according to Middendorp, appropriates a significant 
amount of its defense budget for "protection against the sea," because 
much of its population lives below sea level.

"As sea level rises, it's a big issue in a country like the 
Netherlands," he said.

Severe heat patterns are also already having a direct impact on military 
equipment, according to Shafqat Munir, head of the Bangladesh Center for 
Terrorism Research.

Troops stationed in Mali as part of a United Nations' peacekeeping force 
have been unable to use their communication devices until the evening, 
when the temperature cools off, Munir told the panelists.

"Excessive heat is going to render military equipment useless," Munir 
said. "We're already seeing some of that in action."

The U.S. military recently described climate change as a top national 
security issue and incorporated it into its wargame simulations. A 
Defense Department assessment in 2019 found 79 installations impacted by 
climate change.

"Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the 
climate crisis," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a climate 
change seminar in April. "We face all kinds of threats in our line of 
work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The 
climate crisis does."

Climate change's biggest impact on national defense is the way it 
"undermines and destabilizes societies," said Sharon Burke, a former 
U.S. assistant secretary of defense for operational energy. She told the 
panel that while the military is unable to fight climate change through 
conventional means, it "may well result in military missions" ranging 
from humanitarian, disaster relief and combat.

"If the nations of this world are unable to cut greenhouse gas emissions 
... if we fail, then militaries should be planning for profound 
insecurity and more military missions later in this century, or possibly 
sooner, if we hit certain tipping points," Burke said...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/09/10/climate-change-could-make-military-equipment-useless-experts-warn.html



/[Video interview]/
*Saleemul Huq | We Have Crossed A Threshold | ADAPT NOW*
Sept 10, 2021
Nick Breeze
Dr Saleemul Huq is a highly respected climate scientist from Bangladesh 
who has worked for decades to progress the safety of the most vulnerable 
people up the climate policymaking agenda.

Traditionally the most vulnerable people have been from places like 
Saleem's own country, Bangladesh, but in this interview, he stresses 
that we have crossed a new threshold.

What we have been seeing in the US and Northern Europe clearly shows 
that the most vulnerable could be ourselves, our neighbors, or our loved 
ones.

Global climate extremes have arrived at our door and the time to adapt 
and build resilience is now. As an expert in this field, Saleem gives us 
some pertinent insights into what makes resilience really work. It is 
not technology and it is not wealth.

Thanks for listening to Shaping The Future, there are many more episodes 
being produced in which we are striving to increase our own 
understanding and help create a future that we all want to live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph4Qvk6cTe4



/[What if - conjecture - an exercise in history]/
*Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change 
Instead of the War on Terror*
At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national resources in 
the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to turn things around.
SARAH LAZARE -- SEPT 7, 2021
Twenty years into a nebulous ​“War on Terror,” the United States is in 
the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose 
severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded 
cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 
people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid 
evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires 
and droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has 
borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new ​“normal” in the 
United States.

The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential 
battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger ​“out there,” when, in 
reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of the U.S. 
government’s own creation. Plotting out the connections between this 
open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an 
important one. It’s critical to examine how the War on Terror not only 
took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out 
effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by 
foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States 
could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not 
academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, 
a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of 
lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea.

One of the most obvious lessons is financial: We should have been 
putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than 
pouring public goods into the war effort. According to a recent report 
by the ​​National Priorities Project, which provides research about the 
federal budget, the United States has spent $21 trillion over the last 
20 years on ​“foreign and domestic militarization.” Of that amount, $16 
trillion went directly to the U.S. military — including $7.2 trillion 
that went directly to military contracts. This figure also includes $732 
billion for federal law enforcement, ​“because counterterrorism and 
border security are part of their core mission, and because the 
militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration 
both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement.”

Of course, big government spending can be a very good thing if it goes 
toward genuine social goods. The price tag of the War on Terror is 
especially tragic when one considers what could have been done with this 
money instead, note the report’s authors, Lindsay Koshgarian, Ashik 
Siddique and Lorah Steichen. A sum of $1.7 trillion could eliminate all 
student debt, $200 billion could cover 10 years of free preschool for 
all three and four year olds in the country. And, crucially, $4.5 
trillion could cover the full cost of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid.

But huge military budgets are not only bad when they contrast with poor 
domestic spending on social goods — our bloated Pentagon should, first 
and foremost, be opposed because of the harm it does around the world, 
where it has roughly 800 military bases, and almost a quarter of a 
million troops permanently stationed in other countries. A new report 
from Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that between 
897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed ​“directly in the violence 
of the U.S. post‑9/​11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen 
and elsewhere.” This number could be even higher. One estimate found 
that the U.S. war on Iraq alone killed one million Iraqis.

Still, the financial cost of war is worth examining because it reveals 
something about the moral priorities of our society. Any genuine effort 
to curb the climate crisis will require a tremendous mobilization of 
resources — a public works program on a scale that, in the United 
States, is typically only reserved for war. Now, discussions of such 
expenditures can be a bit misleading, since the cost of doing nothing to 
curb climate change is limitless: When the entirety of our social fabric 
is at stake, it seems silly to debate dollars here or there. But this is 
exactly what proponents of climate action are forced to do in our 
political climate. As I reported in March 2020, presidential candidates 
in the 2020 Democratic primary were grilled about how they would pay for 
social programs, like a Green New Deal, but not about how they would pay 
for wars.

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) estimated that the 
Green New Deal would cost $10 trillion. Her critics on the Right came up 
with their own number of up to $93 trillion, a figure that was then used 
as a talking point to bludgeon any hopes of the proposal’s passage. But 
let’s suppose for a moment that this number, calculated by American 
Action Forum, were correct, and the price of a Green New Deal came to 
4.43 times the cost of 20 years of the War on Terror? So what? Shouldn’t 
we be willing to devote far more resources to protecting life than to 
taking it? What could be more valuable than safeguarding humanity 
against an existential threat?

The reality is that warding off the worst-case scenario of climate 
change, which the latest IPCC report says is still possible, will 
require massive amounts of spending upfront. Not only do we have to stop 
fossil fuel extraction and shift to decarbonized energy, but we have to 
do so in a way that does not leave an entire generation of workers 
destitute. Several proposals for how to achieve this have been floated: 
a just transition for workers; a revamping of public transit and public 
housing; public ownership of energy industries for the purpose of 
immediately decarbonizing them; global reparations for the harm the 
United States has done. Any way you look at it, meaningful climate 
legislation will require a huge mobilization of public resources — one 
that beats back the power of capital. And of course, dismantling the 
carbon-intensive U.S. military apparatus must be part of the equation.

In our society, it’s a given that we spend massive amounts of these 
public resources on military expansion year after year, with the 
National Defense Authorization Act regularly accounting for more than 
half of all discretionary federal spending (this year being no 
exception, despite President Biden’s promise to end ​“forever wars”). 
Over the past 20 years, the mobilization behind the War on Terror has 
been enabled by a massive propaganda effort. Think tanks financed by 
weapons contractors have filled cable and print media with ​“expert” 
commentators on the importance of open-ended war. Longstanding civilian 
suffering as a result post‑9/​11 U.S. wars has been ignored. From 
abetting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass 
destruction to the demonization of anti-war protesters as ​“terrorist” 
sympathizers, the organs of mass communication in this country have 
roundly fallen on the side of supporting the War on Terror, a dynamic 
that is in full evidence as media outlets move to discipline President 
Biden for actually ending the Afghanistan war.

What if a similar effort had been undertaken to educate the public about 
the need for dramatic climate action? Instead of falsehoods and 
selective moral outrage, we could have had sound, scientifically-based 
political education about the climate dangers that Exxon has known of 
for more than 40 years. We could have spent 20 years building the 
political will for social transformation. It may seem ridiculous to 
suggest that the war propaganda effort could have gone toward 
progressive ends: After all, the institutions responsible — corporate 
America, major media outlets and bipartisan lawmakers — were 
incentivized against such a public service, and would never have 
undertaken similar efforts for progressive ends.

But this gets at something crucial — if difficult to quantify — about 
the harm done by 20 years of the War on Terror. The push for 
militarization has been used to shut down exactly the left-wing 
political ideas that are vitally needed to curb the climate crisis. As I 
argued in February 2020, U.S. wars have repeatedly been used to justify 
a crackdown on left-wing movements. World War I saw passage of the 
Espionage Act, which was used to crack down on anti-war protesters and 
radical labor organizers. The Cold War was used as pretext for 
crackdowns on a whole host of domestic movements, from communist to 
socialist to Black Freedom, alongside U.S. support for vicious 
anti-communist massacres around the world. The War on Terror was no 
different, used to justify passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was used to 
police and surveil countless protesters, including environmentalists. 
The Global Justice Movement was sounding the alarm about the climate 
crisis in the late 1990s, and was not only subjected to post‑9/​11 
government repression, but was then forced to refocus on opposing George 
W. Bush’s global war effort.

The War on Terror also makes it nearly impossible to attain the kinds of 
global cooperation we need to address the climate crisis. It is 
difficult for countries to focus on making the transformations needed to 
curb climate change when they are focused on trying to survive U.S. 
bombings, invasions, meddling and sanctions. And it’s difficult to force 
the United States to reverse its disproportionate climate harms when 
perpetual war and confrontation is the primary American orientation 
toward much of the world, and the vast majority of U.S. global 
cooperation is aimed at maintaining this footing.

Such grim reflections on the climate harms wrought by 20 years of the 
War on Terror do not amount to a nihilistic ​“I told you so.” We vitally 
need to apply these grisly lessons now, as the nebulous ​“War on Terror” 
is still being waged, from drone wars in Somalia to the bombing campaign 
against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, while Biden claims to be 
​“ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” 
he is overseeing an increasingly confrontational posture toward China, 
an approach championed by members of Congress in both parties. As dozens 
of environmental and social justice organizations noted in July, it is 
inconceivable that the world can curb the climate crisis without the 
cooperation of the United States (the biggest per-capita greenhouse gas 
emitter) and China (the biggest overall greenhouse gas emitter). Instead 
of militarizing the Asia-Pacific region to hedge against China, the 
United States could acknowledge this stark reality and launch an 
unprecedented effort for climate cooperation with China.

The possibilities for an alternative global orientation are both vast 
and difficult to know. What we do know is that the status quo of the War 
on Terror is not working. In addition to the hospitals the United States 
has bombed, the homes it has destroyed, the factories it has 
obliterated, and the people it has terrorized, the American military 
project has deeply worsened the climate crisis. And that crisis is now, 
undeniably, on our shores.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/climate-change-floods-war-on-terror-crisis-china


/
//[modeling the future based on climate science]/
*What’s the worst that could happen?*
These five climate scenarios show us what the future of the planet could 
look like.
By Umair Irfan  Sep 10, 2021
- -
What’s far less certain is just how bleak the future of our planet will be.

This critical question reaches beyond physical sciences into economics, 
sociology, and even psychology. Humans still have the power to slow the 
climate crisis — though with each day that goes by without sweeping 
societal changes to slash emissions, the outlook grows more grim...
- -
Even small increases in warming are consequential, and the impacts of 
climate change are already visible today in phenomena like melting ice 
caps, rising sea levels, and more destructive extreme weather. But the 
flip side is that all efforts to mitigate climate change are meaningful, 
even if the world overshoots its targets. All the warming that’s avoided 
will save lives and property and will enhance human welfare. There may 
be a point of no return, but there is no point at which our actions 
don’t matter.
https://www.vox.com/22620706/climate-change-ipcc-report-2021-ssp-scenario-future-warming



/
//[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming September  11, 2015*

September 11, 2015:  The Los Angeles Times reports:

"The push for aggressive new state policies to fight climate change 
suffered another setback Thursday.

"Legislation to put into law executive orders on long-term targets for 
reducing carbon emissions was pulled from consideration. It had failed 
to win enough support from lawmakers and faced objections from the 
governor's office.

"The bill's author, state Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), vowed to 
revive it next year.

"The defeat came a day after Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders 
withdrew a key portion of another proposal to combat climate change, one 
calling for California to cut its use of gasoline in half. They had been 
unable to overcome fierce opposition from the oil industry and 
resistance from some Democrats."

http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-bills-legislature-20150911-story.html


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