[✔️] August 15, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 15, 2022*/

/[ TODAY show video - moving toward climate safety ]
/*Americans Moving To Places More Resistant To Climate Change*
Aug 13, 2022  A growing number of Americans say fires, floods, drought 
and climate change are making them rethink where they want to live. Most 
people move for a new job, better opportunity but some are packing up in 
search of a sense of relief. NBC’s Anne Thompson reports for Saturday TODAY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pADNowkcmI



/[ PBS on marine heatwaves --  4 min video ]/
*Climate change is worsening heat waves in oceans. Here's why that's a 
problem*
Aug 14, 2022  This summer has seen record-high temperatures around the 
world, but the damaging effects of heat do not stop at the water's edge. 
In Europe, the Mediterranean Sea has been experiencing elevated 
temperatures since May, with deadly consequences for delicate underwater 
ecosystems. Ali Rogin reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhgwKEC-sVY/



/[ physicists say it "isn't as stable and protected as we once thought." ]/
*World's biggest ice sheet could cause massive sea rise without action: 
study*
AUGUST 13, 2022
The world's biggest ice sheet could cause "several meters" of sea-level 
rise over centuries if the global temperature rises more than 2°C, 
according to a British study published Wednesday.

Researchers at Durham University concluded that if global greenhouse 
emissions remain high, the melting East Antarctica Ice Sheet (EAIS) 
could cause nearly half a meter of sea-level rise by 2100. Their 
analysis was published in the scientific journal Nature.

If emissions remain high beyond that, the EAIS could contribute around 
one to three meters to global sea levels by 2300, and two to five meters 
by 2500, they said.

However, if emissions were dramatically reduced, EAIS could contribute 
around two centimeters of sea level rise by 2100, according to the 
assessment.

This would represent far less than the ice loss expected from Greenland 
and West Antarctica.

"A key conclusion from our analysis is that the fate of the East 
Antarctic Ice Sheet remains very much in our hands," said lead author 
Chris Stokes, from Durham University's Department of Geography.

"This ice sheet is by far the largest on the planet, containing the 
equivalent of 52 meters of sea level and it's really important that we 
do not awaken this sleeping giant.

"Restricting global temperature increases to below the 2°C limit set by 
the Paris Climate Agreement should mean that we avoid the worst-case 
scenarios, or perhaps even halt the melting of the East Antarctic Ice 
Sheet, and therefore limit its impact on global sea level rise," he added.

Computer simulations
The study did note that the worst scenarios projected were "very unlikely".

World leaders agreed at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris 
to limit global warming to well below 2°C and pursue efforts to limit 
the rise to 1.5°C.

The research team, which included scientists from the UK, Australia, 
France and the US, analyzed how the ice sheet responded to past warm 
periods when making their predictions.

They ran computer simulations to model the effects of different 
greenhouse gas emission levels and temperatures on the ice sheet by the 
years 2100, 2300 and 2500.

They found evidence to suggest that three million years ago, when 
temperatures were around 2-4°C higher than present, part of the EAIS 
"collapsed and contributed several meters to sea-level rise".

"Even as recently as 400,000 years ago—not that long ago on geological 
timescales—there is evidence that a part of the EAIS retreated 700 km 
inland in response to only 1-2°C of global warming," they added.

Nerilie Abram, a co-author of the study from the Australian National 
University in Canberra, warned the sheet "isn't as stable and protected 
as we once thought."
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-world-biggest-ice-sheet-massive.html


/[ politics from Lizzy Kolbert,  "Even money...seems an insufficient 
explanation"  ]/
*How Did Fighting Climate Change Become a Partisan Issue?*
Twenty years ago, Senator John McCain tried to spearhead an effort. What 
has happened to Republicans since then?
By Elizabeth Kolbert
In January, 2000, during the run-up to the New Hampshire primaries, 
Presidential candidates in the Granite State were confronted by a young 
man—a recent Dartmouth graduate—wearing a red cape, orange long johns, 
and yellow-painted galoshes. He called himself Captain Climate, and 
asked any candidate within shouting distance, “What’s your plan?” All 
the candidates ignored him, except one.

That candidate was John McCain, then the senior United States senator 
from Arizona. McCain went on to win New Hampshire’s Republican primary 
and then to lose the nomination to George W. Bush. He had been troubled 
enough by the shouted question that he returned to Washington that 
spring and held a series of hearings on climate change. At the first 
hearing, he apologized for not having a plan to deal with the problem, 
but said that everyone—especially policymakers—should be “concerned 
about mounting evidence.” “I had a genuine sense that he wanted to know 
the best information,” Kevin Trenberth, a scientist from the National 
Center for Atmospheric Research who testified at one of the hearings, 
later recalled.

McCain then did come up with a plan. With Senator Joseph Lieberman, 
Democrat of Connecticut, he introduced a bill to impose an economy-wide 
limit on carbon-dioxide emissions. The Climate Stewardship Act, as it 
became known, was modelled on legislation that had been approved a 
decade earlier, under President George H. W. Bush, which had used a 
so-called cap-and-trade program to curb the emissions that cause acid 
rain. In 2003, McCain managed to force a floor vote on the bill, over 
the objections of Senate leaders. It failed, even though McCain and five 
other Republicans voted for it. Ten Democrats voted against it. (Joe 
Biden, then a senator from Delaware, was a “yea.”) McCain said, “We’ve 
lost a big battle today, but we’ll win over time, because climate change 
is real.”

Last week, the Senate finally approved a bill that aims to limit carbon 
emissions—the Inflation Reduction Act. It has been called “the most 
important climate action in U.S. history,” which is certainly true; the 
act provides more than three hundred and fifty billion dollars—mostly in 
the form of tax credits—to promote clean energy. This time, the vote was 
strictly along party lines: all fifty Democrats voted for it, all fifty 
Republicans against it. (Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the 
tie-breaking vote.) On Friday, the House passed the bill, also with no 
Republican votes. These days, it seems practically every vote in 
Congress is along party lines, so the votes on the I.R.A. weren’t 
considered surprising. But they should have been.

As a problem, climate change is as bipartisan as it gets: it will have 
equally devastating effects in red states as in blue. Last week, even as 
Kentucky’s two Republican senators—Rand Paul and the Minority Leader, 
Mitch McConnell—were voting against the I.R.A., rescuers in their state 
were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by 
climate-change-supercharged rain. Meanwhile, most of Texas, whose two 
G.O.P. senators—Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—also voted against the bill, 
was suffering under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.

How did caring about a drowned or desiccated future come to be a 
partisan issue? Perhaps the simplest answer is money. A report put out 
two years ago by the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate 
Crisis noted, “In the 2000s, several bipartisan climate bills were 
circulating in the Senate.” Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court, in the 
Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations and wealthy donors 
could, effectively, pour unlimited amounts of cash into electioneering. 
Fossil-fuel companies quickly figured out how to funnel money through 
front groups, which used it to reward the industry’s friends and to 
punish its enemies. After Citizens United, according to the report, 
“bipartisan activity on comprehensive climate legislation collapsed.”

When it comes to direct contributions, the top recipient of fossil-fuel 
money in Congress this election cycle has been Senator Joe Manchin, 
Democrat of West Virginia. Manchin killed off earlier iterations of the 
climate bill, and inserted into this version most of its worst 
provisions, including a mandate that the federal government auction 
millions of acres for oil and gas drilling. Among the top twenty 
recipients of oil and gas money are three other Democrats: Senator 
Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, and Representatives Henry Cuellar and Lizzie 
Fletcher, of Texas. The rest are Republicans.

Even money, though, seems an insufficient explanation. The G.O.P.’s 
opposition to action on climate change has transcended crass calculation 
to become an article of faith. Several red states, including Texas and 
Louisiana, have taken steps to penalize financial firms that say they 
are reducing their investments in fossil fuels, even though these steps 
are likely to cost the states’ taxpayers money. As the I.R.A. was headed 
toward a vote, the Wall Street Journal reported that congressional 
Republicans were pressuring fossil-fuel companies to take a stronger 
stand against the bill. G.O.P. lawmakers, according to the Journal, had 
“become frustrated” by the oil companies’ support for some measures to 
combat climate change, and so they took to lobbying the lobbyists.

The I.R.A. has many flaws. Though it’s been widely reported that, by 
2030, it will reduce the U.S.’s emissions by forty per cent compared 
with their levels in 2005, most of this projected reduction is 
attributable to other developments, including the fact that many power 
plants have already switched from coal to lower-emitting natural gas. 
But one of the bill’s many benefits is that it could finally break the 
partisan logjam. Today, roughly five hundred thousand Americans work in 
the petroleum industry, and another two hundred thousand work in the 
natural-gas sector. This represents a significant constituency for 
maintaining the fossil-fuel-powered status quo. If the I.R.A. functions 
as hoped, however, it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in clean 
energy and, with them, a growing constituency for climate action. Among 
the bill’s provisions is a ten-per-cent “bonus” tax credit for companies 
that situate clean-energy projects in communities where coal-fired 
plants have been shuttered, or where a lot of people now work extracting 
oil or gas.

Perhaps when the next climate bill comes up for a vote, lawmakers from 
West Virginia, Kentucky, and Texas, whatever party they hail from, will 
be leading the charge. And let us hope that there is another bill, 
because, as was already clear twenty years ago, climate change is real.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/how-did-fighting-climate-change-become-a-partisan-issue



/[ Shameless politics --  The Inflation Reduction Act is a SMALL 
FRACTION of what is needed.  And yes, thank you and high praise - but 
the present and future calamities come from physical reality -- not 
politics.  Our painful lessons will be increasingly intense. Humans will 
strive to survive, governments will be useful, or not. ] /
*Biden's Chief of Staff GOES IN on Republicans in must-see takedown*
Aug 14, 2022  INTERVIEW: Brian interviews White House Chief of Staff Ron 
Klain about Biden’s win with the Inflation Reduction Act, the disconnect 
between these wins and the president's approval rating, how the abortion 
vote in Kansas changes things moving forward, and whether Biden knows 
about the Dark Brandon memes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48cWQ9I8TOI



/[  Less bad than expected  - see the link ]/
*Wildfire acres burned to date in United States (outside Alaska) is 
lower than average*
Bill Gabbert
August 13, 2022
It seemed to me that over the last few weeks the wildfire activity has 
been slower than typical for this time of the year, so I did a little 
digging. Using historical data from the National Interagency Fire Center 
and acres burned to date from the August 13 national Situation Report, 
it turns out that Alaska has burned nearly three times their 10-year 
to-date average while the other 49 states combined are running 12 
percent below the to-date average.

Over the last 10 years Alaska’s average acres burned in a full year is 
1.1 million. This year they are at 3.1 million, more than the other 49 
states combined. There has been a major increase in Alaska acres burned 
after mid-August in only 2 of the last 18 years. And it has been fairly 
quiet there, fire wise, for the last four weeks.

So far this year, fires in the other 49 states have blackened about 2.8 
million acres, 12 percent below the to-date 10-year average of 3.2 
million. The 49 states typically burn 6.2 million in a full year, so if 
this year turns out like the average of the last 10, we’re about half 
done...
https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/August_outlook.png



/[ Just Have a Think -  weekly video report/ ]
*Are EVs really better for the climate?*
15,762 views  Aug 14, 2022  Electric vehicles are rapidly growing in 
popularity as the number of different options has increased dramatically 
over the last couple of years and prices are beginning to move towards 
parity with internal combustion engine cars. But once all the carbon 
costs of extracting, processing and manufacturing are taken into 
account, how much lower is the overall lifetime carbon footprint of an 
EV compared to and ICE car? And for that matter, what's the carbon 
footprint of all the other types of transport we use in modern society?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi7U6Cj_2aI


/[ Young couple escape to Panama to start a new life....video series - 
sponsored ]/
*The End Of Off Grid Living*
Aug 14, 2022  We roast coffee from Panama. Check it out here: 
https://www.themorningmovementcoffee....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGEWivFdnrc



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*August 15, 2004*/
August 15, 2004: In the New York Times, Al Gore reviews Ross Gelbspan's 
"Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and 
Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert 
Disaster," the follow-up to his seminal 1997 book "The Heat Is On: The 
Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Politicians-Journalists-Crisis--And/dp/0465027628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936832&sr=8-1&keywords=boiling+point+ross+gelbspan

http://www.amazon.com/The-Heat-Is-On-Prescription/dp/0738200255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936855&sr=8-1&keywords=the+heat+is+on+ross+gelbspan


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