[✔️] December 7, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Wed Dec 7 08:57:34 EST 2022
/*December 7, 2022*/
/[ keep an eye on where the money goes ]/
*Hurricane Ian caused the second-largest insured loss on record after
Hurricane Katrina*
PUBLISHED THU, DEC 1 2022
Emma Newburger
-- Hurricane Ian, a deadly category 4 Atlantic hurricane that
struck Florida and South Carolina earlier this year, caused the
second-largest insured loss after -- Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
according to reinsurer Swiss Re.
-- Between $50 billion and 65 billion in insured damages were
recorded after Ian made landfall in western Florida in late
September with extreme winds, torrential rain and storm surge.
-- “Urban development, wealth accumulation in disaster-prone areas,
inflation and climate change are key factors at play,” said Martin
Bertogg, head of catastrophe perils at Swiss Re.
“When Hurricane Andrew struck 30 years ago, a $20 billion loss event had
never occurred before,” Bertogg added. “Now there have been seven such
hurricanes in just the past six years.”
Thierry Léger, the group’s chief underwriting officer, said that as
disasters grow more costly, demand for insurance is rising while “the
protection gap remains vast.”
The insurance industry is also grappling with so-called secondary
perils, or disasters that insurers have historically labeled as high in
frequency but relatively low cost. As the climate changes, these events
are increasingly driving catastrophe insurance losses. For instance,
secondary perils like floods and hail storms caused over $50 billion
insured losses this year, according to Swiss Re.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/01/hurricane-ian-was-costliest-disaster-on-record-after-katrina-in-2005.html
/[ Climate Migration - Yale Climate Connections ]/
*The deadly connections between climate change and migration*
People fleeing weather disasters at home face dire risks when they
attempt to walk across the U.S.-Mexico border through the Sonoran Desert.
by SARAH KENNEDY
JULY 20, 2022
Thousands of people have died attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico.
And the crossing is growing even more dangerous as the climate changes.
U.S. border security policy in the Southwest is designed to deter
unauthorized migration at heavily guarded urban entry points. So
undocumented migrants with little access to water often spend days on
foot in remote areas of the sweltering Sonoran Desert, located in the
Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, Baja California Sur, and the
U.S. states of Arizona and California.
More than 7,000 migrants died during attempted southern border crossings
between 2000 and 2020, according to the U.S. Border Control. The actual
death toll is likely far higher, because some bodies are never recovered.
UCLA anthropologist Jason De León directs the Undocumented Migration
Project, a long-term study of unauthorized migration. In a recent study,
De Léon and colleagues modeled the risk of dehydration and death during
undocumented border crossings – both now and over the next 30 years.
They found that as temperatures warm and desert conditions grow more
extreme, more migrants are likely to die from severe dehydration.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with De Léon about the deadly connections
between migration and climate change.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: What are the main drivers of undocumented
migration across the U.S.-Mexico border?
Jason De León: The primary reasons that people attempt undocumented
migrations include poverty, political instability, violence of different
forms, famine, a devaluation of currency, and, increasingly, climate change.
You’ve got people who are fleeing places like western Mexico because of
droughts. They’re fleeing places like Honduras because of the intensity
and frequency of hurricanes that are just devastating these places. And
so you have all of these migrants who are suddenly having to flee their
home countries because of the impacts of global warming. They’re headed
towards a country like the United States, which is largely responsible,
or one of the key players, in creating this global warming problem. And
then they are trying to cross through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona,
where they are facing even more risk as these places get hotter because
of climate change. And so these folks are being affected by climate
change at multiple points in their journey.
The relationship between climate change and migration is for me, one of
the most understudied and misunderstood parts of our global migration
crisis. I think people have tended to want to separate those two things.
And if you look at just Central America in the last couple of years, it
is very, very clear that as climate change starts to devastate these
very poor countries, people are going to start to be leaving in higher
and higher numbers. And so we are now living in a moment with climate
refugees. And the United States is going to have to deal with this
moving into the future. And this is not a problem that you can solve
with the border wall. This is not a problem that you can solve even with
guest worker programs. This is a global crisis around climate change
that we need to address in many, many different, large-scale ways to
better handle this problem.
/Listen: Climate change is driving migration to U.S. and making it more
dangerous/
/https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/05/climate-change-is-driving-migration-to-u-s-and-making-it-more-dangerous//
When people see a bunch of little kids at the U.S.-Mexico border being
dropped off by their parents or by a smuggler or being carried across
the Rio Grande or through the desert with their parents, people say, “Oh
my God, I can’t believe you would ever do that to your children.” I
think the question we should be asking is, how bad must it be in your
home country for you to take those kinds of risks with your children?
When I look at that, I think, you know, things are horrific. That is the
last thing that a parent wants to do is to put their children in danger.
But these folks are having to do it because what’s waiting for them back
at home in a place like Honduras is famine, hurricanes, political
instability, rampant gang violence. So they’re really caught between a
rock and a hard place, but they will say to you things like, “I would
rather risk my life in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona than watch my
children die in San Pedro Sula from starvation or lack of health care or
because they were shot on a street corner by some gang.” At least in the
Arizona desert, those folks will say that they’re taking some control
over their destiny.
YCC: What are the greatest risks migrants face while attempting to enter
the U.S.?
Jason De León: In the mid-1990s, the United States developed a border
patrol policy called Prevention Through Deterrence. And what that policy
tries to do is it fortifies urban ports of entry – so San Diego, El
Paso, the town of Nogales in southern Arizona. And it makes it virtually
impossible to cross illegally through one of those zones because of the
heavy infrastructure. There’s a lot of agents on the ground and motion
sensors and helicopters and vehicles.
Because of ramped-up security, people are walking into more and more
remote areas where it’s hard for border patrol to get to them, but also,
it’s doubling or tripling the amount of time that they’ve spent walking
in the desert. And so when I began this project in 2009, most people
were walking two to three days in the desert. And now it’s not uncommon
to find someone who’s been walking out there for almost two weeks.
Now they have to walk sometimes upwards of 100 miles across vast and
treacherous terrain like the Sonoran Desert of Arizona or the South
Texas Backwoods. And the idea is that if we force those people to try to
cross through those locations, they will be deterred by the physical
cost of getting across that terrain. So in a lot of ways, we’ve
weaponized the desert as a way to slow down migration, and it’s killed
thousands of people. It’s led to the disappearance of thousands of
people. And this has been our primary security paradigm along the
U.S.-Mexico border since the mid-‘90s.
And we have to keep in mind that for many decades, the primary people
coming to the United States from farther south were coming from Mexico.
But starting around a little over 10 years ago, we really started to see
an increase in folks coming from other countries who had to cross now
all of Central America and Mexico in order to get to the United States.
And so we’re talking about people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and
really right now the majority of folks coming from Honduras as well as
farther places like Cuba, Venezuela, Africa. And so those folks now have
to cross several countries. They have to deal oftentimes with corrupt
immigration agents in various places. They are highly targeted for
kidnapping, for assault, for murder. And so now migrants not only have
to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, they also have to cross this
minefield that has become Mexico.
YCC: You and your colleagues studied water loss for migrants during
summer months. Why did you choose that specific risk factor? What did
you learn?
Jason De León: You know, I’ve written extensively about the experiences
of border crossers: What happens to those who die in the desert? What
happens to those who disappear? But much of that has either been sort of
forensic or ethnographic – so, talking with the families of the missing
and of the deceased, or talking to living migrants about their
experiences. And we really wanted to try to find a way to quantify the
physiological impact that Prevention Through Deterrence has on the body.
I already could have told you that a lack of water is what’s going to
kill you. And it’s impossible to carry enough water. I sort of already
knew this anecdotally. But we did learn, on a more specific level, just
how quickly the body becomes dehydrated and we’re able to really
quantify the rapid speed at which people lose water.
They’re facing, oftentimes, extreme heat, so they’re losing water at a
high rate and they’re not able to replenish that. And we know that the
risk of death is very, very high. And so we were interested in really
trying to quantify what water loss looks like at the level of the body.
And keep in mind that that in the models that we did, we drew a straight
line from point A to point B and said, OK, a migrant would walk from
here to there over the course of, you know, three or four days. They
would lose a lot of water. They would run out of water by day three or
day four. That’s assuming that people are walking on the straightest
path with no obstacles in their way. But what we know is that people are
taking very circuitous routes to get to a place like Tucson, so they’re
winding through the mountains and adding days and days to their
journeys. And so, they are on these journeys with a much higher
likelihood of death than what our scenarios would even suggest.
YCC: What can be done to save lives?
Jason De León: It’s a great question and always the most difficult one
to answer. For me it’s a couple of different things. I think one is we
need to understand that we have a border policy in place that weaponizes
the Arizona desert and has killed thousands of people, has disappeared
thousands of people, and has physically brutalized millions of people.
So for me, one of the first big steps is to cease to use this policy.
And if people want to come here and apply for asylum, let them do that.
Let them come here legally to go through the legal process.
I think we need to improve our work visa program that allows folks to
move back and forth. And work visa programs are very tricky because they
oftentimes lead to a lot of exploitation, which is what we had in the
‘50s and ‘60s. It ended up becoming such a problem with abuses against
guest workers that we got rid of the program altogether. But I think we
need something new that is more sensitive and secure for those who we
want to come here and work and be able to move back and forth. I think
we need to take a hard look at how much we rely on immigrant labor in
this country and recognize and value the value that those folks give to
us and treat them better.
But then also, helping these countries to deal with climate change and
all the other issues that are happening in their home countries that
oftentimes the U.S. has a big hand in. So we think about political
stability in Central America: The U.S. has been destabilizing Central
America since the early 20th century. We could think about the ways in
which we have used exports and the production of U.S. goods in places
like Mexico at lower rates that make those jobs really unsustainable for
those who are trying to make a living. I think we need to figure out how
to have more equal trade agreements, but then also helping those
countries to combat climate change as it’s happening in their countries,
political corruption, the drug war. In the drug war that’s happening in
Mexico, it’s U.S. consumers and European consumers who are the ones who
are driving that market. So it’s a lot of different things and people
often get frustrated when they ask an anthropologist how to fix these
things because it is so complicated. But I think of a big part of it,
too, is just understanding that for so long we’ve been convinced that a
border wall could solve some kind of a problem or that immigration
reform can happen exclusively at the U.S.-Mexico border. And it’s a much
bigger problem. It’s a global problem that we need to deal with both
domestically and internationally.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/the-deadly-connections-between-climate-change-and-migration/
/[ blame, cause, or warning? ]/
*Big Tech’s toxic business model is turbo-charging the climate crisis*
(01/12/22)
• A new briefing paper showcases for the first time, the full
impact Big Tech has on the climate crisis.
• Big Tech platforms’ “surveillance advertising” based business
model is fuelling climate change by driving emissions, driving
consumerism, driving division and driving out democracy.
• Campaigners believe the climate movement cannot achieve its
aims without addressing Big Tech’s toxic business model.
1 December 2022 – A new briefing paper authored by barrister and digital
human rights expert Susie Alegre for environmental charity Global Action
Plan finds that the world’s biggest tech companies such as Meta,
Twitter, Google and TikTok are standing in the way of effective climate
action.
The paper details how Big Tech companies are systematically exacerbating
the climate crisis by driving emissions, driving consumerism, driving
division and driving out democracy.
The report outlines the enormous climate impacts of the technical
processes behind the advertising upon which platforms are almost
entirely reliant – an estimated 1% of total energy consumption on this
planet is used in the process of serving online ads. The nature of the
complex auction system behind these ads means the vast majority of this
1% is effectively pointless, wasted energy that leads to zero ads being
placed. The effect of the ads that are seen is profound: Purpose
Disruptors recently found that advertising now adds an estimated 32% to
the carbon footprint of every person in the UK.
As well as consuming and wasting energy, online ads turbocharge
excessive consumption while ‘engagement based’ algorithms drive division
by spreading climate misinformation and disinformation, deepening
climate denial, and threatening democracy. Big Tech’s lobbying power now
outstrips the oil and gas sector and poses a direct threat to
environmental action.
Each of these issues is hugely problematic. Taken together, they
demonstrate how Big Tech – and its underlying business model, built upon
surveillance advertising and recommender algorithms – is a fundamental
blocker to effective climate action.
Campaigners are calling for the climate movement to join wider efforts
to tackle Big Tech’s toxic business model and curb the power of online
platforms.
Download the report - “Big Tech’s dirty secret: How Big Tech’s toxic
business model undermines action against climate change”
https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/files/big_tech_report.pdf
“Big Tech billionaires are the oil barons of the 21st century and their
impact on climate change is no less destructive. This paper should serve
as a wake-up call to the climate movement.” - Susie Alegre, barrister,
digital human rights expert and author of the report.
“Big Tech’s way of doing business is fundamentally at odds with efforts
to stave off the deepening climate crisis. These platforms and their
eye-watering profits rely on processing massive quantities of data at a
huge direct carbon cost. This is inseparable from the incentives of an
online advertising industry which is built on surveillance and
compulsive attention. These incentives accelerate consumerism, but they
also pollute our information environment in ways that are even more
devastating to effective climate action than direct emissions from the
sector.” - Oliver Hayes, policy & campaigns lead at Global Action Plan.
Media contact
Bryony Aylmer, Communications Manager, Global Action Plan –
bryony.aylmer at globalactionplan.org.uk - +447903812863
Global Action Plan is an environmental charity focused on issues where
the connection between the health of people and our planet is most
tangible. We mobilise people and organisations to take action on the
systems that harm us and our planet.
Global Action Plan convenes the ‘End Surveillance Advertising to Kids’
coalition which is calling on the UK Government to outlaw the practice
of surveillance advertising to under 18s.
https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/news/big-tech-s-toxic-business-model-is-turbo-charging-the-climate-crisis
/[Cynical, old opinion, December 7th, do you know where your historian
is? ]/
*The Multi-Headed Super-Crisis That Will Only Get Worse*
SORRY FOR THE BAD LANGUAGE
Patrick Metzger
Dilettante, smartass, apocalypticist
Jul 17
We’re all going to get fucked and no one's buying us dinner first
It’s an exciting time to be alive. Inflation soaring, markets crashing,
pandemics raging, wildfires blazing, and everything from sriracha to
tampons is vanishing from the shelves of your local GluttonMart.
This is a sub-optimal situation, not least because I like sriracha. But
what’s sub-sub-optimal, indeed downright dangerous, is the idea that
these interconnected disasters can be neatly categorized and addressed
independently.
It’s this approach to problem-solving that leaves us playing
whack-a-mole with catastrophes, except the moles are on fire and the
hammer is made of cotton candy, and we’re not playing the game so much
as staring at it sullenly and complaining that it’s too expensive.
So, you’re asking, how are all these crises connected?
The human-caused climate crisis
I’ve written about this many times, as have more articulate, successful
doomers here on Medium (but do you also write poetry, Umair? Jessica?
You do? Never mind then.)
But since each day’s news feed reveals exciting new aspects of our
planetary dumpster fire, it’s worth a few more bullet points of disaster
to hammer the point home.
If you’re thinking about retiring to Scottsdale, bring bottled water.
Western America is drying up, suffering from the biggest megadrought in
1200 years. It’s estimated that 42% of the drought stems from climate
change brought about by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Contributing to this unfortunate aridity is a series of heatwaves that
have been melting already-shoddy infrastructure across the US. And
though most Americans will be indifferent to it, Europe and Asia are
also experiencing dangerous, disastrous temperatures.
Remember when woodsmoke was “Let’s roast marshmallows, Mabel!”, not “We
shouldn’t be able to smell that from here, should we?”.I’m only going to
give you one link — ok, two — about record-breaking wildfires, but trust
me, it’s fucking chaos out there.
And scientists have learned that wildfires were a major contributor to
ecosystem collapse in the most comprehensive extinction of all time. So
that’s something to look forward to.
Disasters are expensive, which brings us to…
The economic crisis
As goes the ecosystem, so goes the economy.
Inflation is at a multi-decade high, and wages aren’t keeping up. In
response. central banks raise interest rates on the premise that people
have too much money to spend. This premise is fundamentally flawed —
prices aren’t rising because of excessive demand, but because of
insufficient supply.
And while there are numerous reasons for that, a growing factor is the
above-mentioned global heating. Drought and flooding are making
chickpeas more expensive, and excessive heat is driving up the price of
pork in China and killing cattle in Kansas.
In the big picture, global weather disasters cost USD329 billion in
2021, money that’s no longer available to harden up our melting,
collapsing transportation and power infrastructure against tomorrow’s
heatwaves and hurricanes.
Just in case you think homo sapiens sapiens might get their shit
together and work together to stave off our imminent extinction, the
best evidence suggests we’re not gonna do that, because of…
The social crisis and the triumph of Dunning-Kruger
Instead of science and common sense, humans, and American humans in
particular are turning to tribalism and magical thinking to cope with
current cascading crises.
To right-wing media, the end of civilization is not a challenge to be
overcome, but an opportunity to keep their army of ignorati clicking on
ads from MyPillow and Applebees. The talking headcases of Fox News and
their satellite shit-slingers spew a rancid slurry of racism, science
denial, and conspiracy ideation, designed to cow a terrified audience
into supporting their own exploitation by politicians who despise them.
With the masses bread-and-circused into compliance, GOP demagogues use
their partisan courts — decades in the making!— to reshape America into
a Twilight Zone version of the 1950’s, except with porn. The climate
crisis is ignored or denied, and the economic crisis is blamed on
immigrants or a powerful, dangerous, and wholly imaginary left.
The actual, ineffectual, left, spend their days adding pronouns to their
LinkedIn profiles and enforcing diversity in Netflix period pieces, then
congratulate themselves and call it a day. Generally, I fall into the
liberal camp, or at least lurk around its periphery sighing and looking
disgruntled, but these days I find myself unimpressed.
You can’t address problems you don’t acknowledge.
Where do we go from here?
Without immediate and concerted action, straight off the cliff. Studies
suggest that the end of civilization could be about two decades away.
The whole planet, but especially America as the world’s most powerful
failed state, needs to overcome doctrinal differences and follow the
science on climate change. It seems more likely, however, that President
Joe Biden will mumble and sleepwalk his way into history. That leaves
the 2024 field to Trump or some secondary sociopath who will ignore
science, and use social polarization to advance their inexplicable agenda.
Even if the right could be convinced to focus on something other than
policing the sex lives and bodily autonomy of others, the investment in
clean energy, and the cost of lifestyle changes required to avert
disaster, would be enormous. People living paycheque to paycheque in a
collapsing economy can’t pony up the cash, and the one-per-cent would
rather invest in rocket ships and hidey-holes in New Zealand.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though, because it’s better to go
down in a noble effort than die of fear and apathy. We can have
conversations. We can be politically active. We can do more than shrug
and accept our fate.
https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/the-multi-headed-super-crisis-that-will-only-get-worse-fa57fab93621
/[The news archive - looking back at how Ford incrementally improves
it's corporate morality ]/
/*December 7, 1999*/
December 7, 1999: The New York Times reports:
"In a concession to environmentalists, the Ford Motor Company said today
that it would pull out of the Global Climate Coalition, a group of big
manufacturers and oil and mining companies that lobbies against
restrictions on emissions of gases linked to global warming.
"Ford's decision is the latest sign of divisions within heavy industry
over how to respond to global warming. British Petroleum and Shell
pulled out of the coalition two years ago following criticisms from
environmental groups in Europe, where there has been more public concern
than in the United States. Most scientists believe that emissions from
automobiles, power plants and other man-made sources are warming the
Earth's atmosphere.
"British Petroleum and Shell were so-called general, or junior, members
of the lobbying group. Ford is the first company belonging to the board
that has withdrawn, and the first American company to leave the
coalition, said Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the coalition."
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/07/business/ford-announces-its-withdrawal-from-global-climate-coalition.html
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