[✔️] August 22, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 22, 2022*/

/[ John Oliver explains how offsets are useless -- 23mins video ]/
*Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)*
Aug 21, 2022  John Oliver explains what carbon offsets are, what they 
claim to do, how they might be making climate change even worse, and, of 
course, how Oscar Isaac is getting hotter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0



/[ Wake up, no matter what you believe -- important opinion ]/
*Whether you’re a climate ‘doomer’ or ‘appeaser’, it’s best to prepare 
for the worst*
Bill McGuire
While more extreme threats are unlikely to be realised, sticking to the 
precautionary principle is just plain common sense
Mon 22 Aug 2022
Our world is on course for a climate cataclysm. Or is it? Not long ago, 
the global heating battle lines were clear: you either believed it was 
happening, and that it resulted from the colossal volumes of carbon 
spewed out by human activities, or you didn’t. As the year on year 
breakdown of our once stable climate has become more apparent, however, 
denial has become increasingly irrelevant, and new battle lines are 
being drawn.

While widespread blistering heat, drought and wildfires have kept 
climate change in the public eye, they have also heightened tensions 
between those I call climate appeasers, who seek to minimise how bad 
climate breakdown will ultimately be, and others, disparagingly branded 
doomers (or doomists), who are honestly concerned that it may be 
catastrophic, perhaps even posing an existential threat to civilisation 
and possibly humankind itself.
This growing and increasingly acrimonious dispute has potentially 
serious ramifications for all of us. Climate appeasers are regarded as 
being almost as bad as deniers by some, who feel acceptance of their 
message, that things aren’t as bad as they might seem, will ensure we 
are seriously unprepared if climate breakdown takes a turn for the 
worse. On the other hand, there are plenty of people out there, 
including some eminent climate scientists, who call out those touting 
more extreme scenarios as unhelpful doomers who are out of step with 
reality, and want nothing more than to scare the hell out of us.

Doomism in the climate arena is nothing new, and looking around at the 
extreme weather rampaging across much of the world this summer, it is 
easy to understand why many of us might be scared about the future. But 
doomer feelings are not just vague intuitions of something nasty lying 
in wait. Some in the climate science community have also been damned as 
doomers too, even by colleagues, and their forecasts of bleak, 
climate-trashed futures are vetted and published in academic journals.

In a 2013 paper, the distinguished climate scientist James Hansen and 
his co-authors, advised that burning all fossil fuels would bring about 
runaway heating and severe hothouse conditions that we could not adapt 
to, making most of the planet uninhabitable.

Another study, published in 2018, warned that we could cross a tipping 
point where no future actions would be able to prevent a march towards a 
“hothouse Earth”, ultimately culminating in by far the highest global 
temperature for more than a million years.

A less extreme but still disturbing conclusion was arrived at in a 2020 
paper that showed the world was on a trajectory corresponding to the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case scenario. This 
assumes no mitigation of emissions and sees us blithely continuing with 
business as usual, driving a catastrophic temperature rise of 5C or more 
by the century’s end. Actions on emissions are still happening far too 
slowly, but it is already clear that we are not collectively stupid 
enough to do nothing. Nonetheless, say the authors, considering our poor 
understanding of the impact of the feedback loops that reinforce 
heating, it would be judicious to plan for such an eventuality.

The tensions between doomers and appeasers have been especially strained 
recently by the widely advertised publication of a paper whose authors 
have been thinking the unthinkable on our behalf. They conclude that 
ominously termed “climate endgame” scenarios – including societal 
collapse and the extinction of humankind – have so far been “dangerously 
unexplored”, and call on the IPCC to compile a special report on bad- to 
worst-case scenarios.

Such calls are anathema to many climate appeasers, who feel that even 
voicing such concerns stymies action on emissions through promoting fear 
and engendering the feeling that it is already too late to bring global 
heating to heel. Other appeasers simply have an optimistic – some would 
say naive – outlook, and are brimming with confidence that humankind 
will overcome this problem, as it has all others. Neither perspective is 
helpful and indeed, either may well make the situation worse.

Settling on an approach that would satisfy both appeasers and doomers is 
problematic and perhaps unrealistic. The truth is that the more extreme 
climate breakdown scenarios are very unlikely to be realised, and even 
those scientists who have flagged them agree with this. Nonetheless, 
they are possible, and as such we have a duty to address them, if only 
because adherence to the precautionary principle makes plain common sense.
- -
While it would be nice to think that we are overplaying the threat of 
climate breakdown, following an appeaser line would be courting 
disaster. This is particularly the case as there seems to be a growing 
propensity to label pretty much anything outside the current consensus 
as doomist. But consensus doesn’t equate to being right. In fact, 
research has revealed that climate scientists as a tribe (of which I 
count myself a member), and IPCC reports underplay the speed and 
intensity with which climate breakdown is happening.

The reality is that our understanding of potential tipping points and 
feedback effects remains too poorly constrained for us to be confident 
of how severe climate breakdown will end up proving to be. Furthermore, 
minimising the potential impact of climate breakdown is more likely to 
lead to increased reticence in relation to slashing emissions than any 
potential exaggeration of the likely endgame.

A middle of the road route would be to no one’s advantage – so, as for 
most situations wherein the risk is hard to quantify, there is only one 
sensible way forward: to hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.
Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at 
UCL
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/22/climate-emergency-doomer-appeaser-precautionary-principle
//

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/[  The Guardian - PM of New Zealand video ] /
*Jacinda Ardern says one-in-100 year weather events becoming more frequent*
750 views  Aug 21, 2022  Jacinda Ardern has warned about the impact of 
climate change during a visit to the city of Nelson on New Zealand's 
flood-battered South Island. The New Zealand prime minister called on 
the country to do all it can to lessen the impacts of climate change. 
'We're asking the rest of the world to do that,' Ardern said. 'You can 
see the extreme weather events that we're experiencing as a result of a 
warming climate'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWbRXFt2TGY


/
/

/[ melted water and muds flow downhill ]/
*Thawing of Arctic hillsides a major, neglected part of carbon release**
*By Erin Blakemore
August 20, 2022
As Earth warms, its frozen Arctic hillsides begin to thaw, belching 
carbon into the atmosphere.

But research in the Cryosphere journal suggests thawing causes hillsides 
to collapse in a way that makes even more carbon release inevitable.

Scientists studied hillsides on Siberia’s Taymyr Peninsula, which 
borders the seas that open north into the Arctic Ocean. The region is 
covered in permafrost tundra and is extremely cold, with a mean annual 
air temperature of just 14 degrees.

Using satellite imagery from 2010 to 2017 and 2018 to 2021, a team 
studied how elevations and landscapes changed on the peninsula and found 
evidence of what they call “thaw slumps” — landslides that occur as ice 
slowly melts, leading to horseshoe-shaped collapses in the hillside.

Between 2010 and 2017, researchers noted 82 slumps. But between 2018 and 
2021, that number climbed to 1,404 slumps, with a 43-fold increase in 
the volume of affected material.

Climate change’s impact intensifies as U.S. prepares to take action

As they thawed and collapsed, the hillsides released carbon once trapped 
beneath the ice. Researchers estimate that carbon release increased 
28-fold in the study period; much of that was linked to 2020, when the 
region recorded temperatures that were much warmer than average.

The climate models used to quantify and predict climate change don’t 
account for that carbon release.

That should change, the researchers write. They contend the hillsides 
are a “major but largely neglected component of the Arctic carbon cycle.”

It’s unclear what happens to that carbon and how it contributes to 
global warming and climate change. Scientists say it will take more 
research, including remote sensing via satellite, to understand more 
about the sliding hillsides and their long-term consequences for both 
the Arctic landscape and the planet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/08/20/arctic-thawing-carbon-release-climate-change/



/[ Scary Storms in many places ]/
*Europe in Ruins! Scary Storm in France, Italy and Spain (Aug. 18, 2022)*
402,002 views  Aug 18, 2022  After a summer of drought, heat waves and 
forest fires, violent storms are whipping France and have flooded Paris 
subway stations and snarled traffic.
Winds of more than 100 km/h were recorded at the top of the Eiffel Tower 
during a flash flood Tuesday, and similar winds were forecast Wednesday 
in the southeast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWsJIwYn1QA



/(damn!  this song was written in 2017 )/
*Billy Bragg - King Tide and the Sunny Day Flood (Lyric Video)*
Aug 4, 2017 'King Tide And The Sunny Day Flood’ is the new track from 
Billy Bragg's brand new mini albu
https://youtu.be/lWPZeQzN_Ws



/[ recent Chomsky --- "must change sooner than we wanted" video interview ]/
*Noam Chomsky | Crazy Town Podcast*
Aug 10, 2022   Noam Chomsky on Crazy Town
------------------------------------------------------------
As a follow up to Episode 61 of the Crazy Town podcast 
(https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/..., Noam Chomsky, the well-known 
linguist, author, and social critic, joins Asher Miller for an interview 
in Crazy Town to discuss the failures and dominance of neoliberalism — 
which Chomsky describes as “class war” — since delivery of the Powell 
Memo 50 years ago.

Chomsky responds to George Monbiot’s critique of the political center 
and left for not, in Monbiot’s view, developing viable alternatives to 
neoliberalism. Disagreeing with Monbiot’s (and admittedly Post Carbon 
Institute’s own) views about the limits of Keynesian “green growth” 
economic policies, Chomsky discusses proposals developed by places like 
the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) that he believes would 
meet the needs of the poor and working classes while tackling the 
climate crisis. Noam’s emphasis on community power, going back to his 
childhood experiences, strongly resonate with “Do the Opposite” themes 
explored in Season 4 of Crazy Town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UYVmiD__AA



/[The news archive - looking back -- I was alive and aware then -- and 
may have read the Walter Sullivan article then --  this was a big deal //]/
/*August 22, 1981*/
August 22, 1981: The New York Times reports on a groundbreaking study by 
Dr. James Hansen on the risks of escalating carbon emissions.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/22/us/study-finds-warming-trend-that-could-raise-sea-levels.html

    *STUDY FINDS WARMING TREND THAT COULD RAISE SEA LEVELS*
    By Walter Sullivan
    Aug. 22, 1981

    A team of Federal scientists says it has detected an overall warming
    trend in the earth's atmosphere extending back to the year 1880.
    They regard this as evidence of the validity of the ''greenhouse''
    effect, in which increasing amounts of carbon dioxide cause steady
    temperature increases.

    The seven atmospheric scientists predict a global warming of
    ''almost unprecedented magnitude'' in the next century. It might
    even be sufficient to melt and dislodge the ice cover of West
    Antarctica, they say, eventually leading to a worldwide rise of 15
    to 20 feet in the sea level. In that case, they say, it would
    ''flood 25 percent of Louisiana and Florida, 10 percent of New
    Jersey and many other lowlands throughout the world'' within a
    century or less.

    Workings of Greenhouse
    The forecast, which also envisions widespread disruption of
    agriculture, is the fruit of analyses and computer simulations
    conducted by the Institute for Space Studies of the National
    Aeronautics and Space Administration. The institute, which is in New
    York City, is part of the space agency's Goddard Spaceflight Center
    in Greenbelt, Md. The forecast is in an article in the Aug. 28 issue
    of the journal Science.

    Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is primarily a result of
    mankind's burning of fuels, is thought to act like the glass of a
    greenhouse. It absorbs heat radiation from the earth and its
    atmosphere, heat that otherwise would dissipate into space. Other
    factors being equal, the more carbon dioxide there is in the
    atmosphere, the warmer the earth should become, according to the theory.

    A century ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 280 to 300
    parts per million. It is now 335 to 340 parts per million and it is
    expected to be at least 600 parts per million in the next century.

    The possibility that the greenhouse effect could alter the earth's
    temperature has long been debated. Scientists have agreed that
    carbon dioxide is increasing, but disagree on whether temperatures
    are also increasing.

    The major difficulty in accepting the greenhouse theory ''has been
    the absence of observed warming coincident with the historic carbon
    dioxide increase,'' the scientists wrote.

    Researchers were further confounded by an apparent cooling trend
    since 1940. As a result, many atmospheric scientists concluded that
    the climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide might not become
    detectable for many decades. But the Government scientists say they
    see clear evidence that carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere since
    the Industrial Revolution has already warmed the climate.

    If fuel burning increases at a slow rate with emphasis on other
    energy sources, the study predicts a global temperature rise in the
    next century of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit. If fuel use rises
    rapidly, which some believe may occur as the developing countries
    industrialize, the predicted rise is from 6 to 9 degrees.

    Even the more moderate rise of 5 degrees, the authors say, would
    result in higher average temperatures than were reached in the
    period between the last two ice ages. At that time sea levels were
    30 feet higher than they are today, probably because West Antarctica
    was ice free. The climate ''would approach the warmth of the
    Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs,'' the report says.

    The study's conclusions are likely to be challenged on two counts:
    their detection of a trend of temperature increase and linking it
    with a carbon dioxide increase, and their projections of the
    consequences of the increase.

    A leading participant in past carbon dioxide studies has been Dr.
    Stephen H. Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
    in Boulder, Colo. Reached by telephone there, he said the
    conclusions about the extent of warming and how quickly it will
    occur would be reasonable if the assumptions on which they are based
    prove valid, but that many can be challenged.

    One of these is the space agency group's contention that a cooling
    trend in recent decades was caused by dust from volcanic eruptions
    high in the atmosphere. If that was not the case, their model might
    be seriously flawed.

    Other assumptions open to challenge include such uncertain factors
    as population growth rates, energy-consuming trends in the
    developing world, new developments in solar energy and other
    alternative energy sources, trends in energy conservation and lack
    of knowledge regarding the extent to which oceans might remove
    carbon dioxide from the air.

    These uncertainties are, to a large extent, recognized in the new
    report, signed by Dr. James Hansen and six colleagues at the space
    studies institute.

    In their analysis, the scientists seek to respond to an outspoken
    skeptic regarding the carbon dioxide threat, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, a
    climate specialist with the Federal Department of Agriculture in
    Phoenix. Last March he circulated an analysis saying that a doubling
    or tripling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would have little effect
    except to increase global agricultural productivity by 20 to 50 percent.

    Plants grow by converting carbon dioxide and water into
    carbohydrates and other compounds, aided by solar energy. One
    proposed strategy to limit the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide
    would be to plant extensive forests.

    Dr. Hansen and his colleagues cite the observed surface temperatures
    of Mars and, particularly, Venus as support for their predicted
    greenhouse effect. The surface of Venus, with an atmosphere formed
    largely of carbon dioxide, is at about 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Their conclusion that the climate has warmed by almost one degree in
    the last century is based on a re-analysis of global observations,
    paying special attention to the Southern Hemisphere. ''The common
    misconception that the world is cooling,'' they say, ''is based on
    Northern Hemisphere experience to 1970.''

    As ''an appropriate strategy,'' the report proposes emphasis on
    energy conservation and development of alternative energy sources
    while using fossil fuels ''as necessary'' in the coming decades.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/22/us/study-finds-warming-trend-that-could-raise-sea-levels.html

*
*

*Appropriate to Include the CLASSIC and excellent video by Peter 
Sinclair h**ttp://youtu.be/D6Un69RMNSw*

*This Year's Model*
Jun 26, 2009  Climate science is not completely dependent on climate 
models. There are many threads of supporting evidence. Still,  it is 
clear that climate models are telling us something important that we 
cannot afford to ignore.  Includes references to 
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1...
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/year/1978.html


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