[✔️] December 27, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Tue Dec 27 10:41:56 EST 2022


/*December 27, 2022*/

/[ BBC has a summary - video news 4 min ]/
*US winter storm traps New York State residents in cars - BBC News*
BBC News 13.6M subscribers
28,520 views  Dec 27, 2022  #US #BBCNews
At least 27 people have died in Buffalo, a city in upstate New York, as 
a monster storm continues to batter the US.

US President Joe Biden has approved an emergency declaration allowing 
federal support for the state, which has been the worst affected area.

Some people have been trapped in their cars for more than two days, a 
state official said.

At least 60 people are known to have been killed in the storm, which has 
stretched from Canada to Mexico.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC6lRMEydro

- -

/[ longer report in PBS news hour - YouTube video ]/
*PBS NewsHour full episode, Dec. 26, 2022*
Dec 26, 2022
Monday on the News Hour, parts of the country try to dig out of a 
massive winter storm that has led to dozens of deaths, widespread power 
outages and travel delays...
WATCH TODAY’S SEGMENT:  Brutal winter storm paralyzes parts of U.S. with 
50 dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7HiuWHimk&t=0s



/[  E&E News ClimateWire ]/
*Climate misinformation spreads on Musk’s Twitter*
By Scott Waldman | 12/23/2022
At Tesla, Elon Musk helped kick-start an electric vehicle revolution 
that will meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. Now, as Twitter’s 
CEO, he’s overseeing one of the world’s most popular social media 
platforms that’s rife with climate change misinformation.

And it appears to be getting worse.

Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter two months ago, some prominent climate 
deniers have returned to the platform after being banned for pushing 
misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. There also are signs that 
scientists have left Twitter after their posts depicting global warming 
research were swarmed by critics.

Among the changes potentially driven by Musk’s effort to tear down 
barriers that once prohibited figures like former President Donald Trump 
from spreading election lies are a rise in the popularity of tweets that 
claim climate change is a scam. Some recent posts have earned 40,000 likes.

Marc Morano, who runs a blog that routinely attacks climate science, 
said that since Musk bought Twitter the appearance of his name in 
climate search results “appear to be juiced by the new algorithms.”

“My Twitter account and many others opposing the ‘consensus’ climate 
view have all increased visibility dramatically since Musk took over 
Twitter,” he said in an interview. “Whatever Musk is altering, I hope he 
keeps it up.”

Indeed, the number of tweets rejecting climate science have never been 
higher than in 2022, according to research by the University of London 
conducted on behalf of The Times newspaper. There have been more than 
850,000 climate denial tweets or retweets so far this year. There were 
650,000 such messages in 2021 and 220,000 in 2020, the analysis found.

Musk has said he will sell the blue check marks that Twitter uses to 
verify account holders to anyone who pays $8 a month. Users who pay the 
fee will see their posts “rocket to the top of replies, mentions and 
search,” according to Twitter. That could also mean that scientists who 
refuse to pay the monthly fee could see their posts lose visibility...
- -
*‘Climate is a scam’*
A few weeks after Musk bought Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion, the 
company eliminated a policy that cracked down on Covid-19 
misinformation. Some scientists, including Mann, said the policy also 
limited inaccurate climate narratives.

“That was a clear message that it’s open season on twitter for the 
promotion of anti-science, and clearly we’ve seen an escalation in 
climate denial rhetoric,” Mann said of the policy’s withdrawal.

Scientists concluded decades ago that humans are warming the planet at 
an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels. A movement to 
dilute those findings has been funded in part by energy companies and 
linked to conservative politics in the U.S. and other countries. Twitter 
is a key platform for spreading that type of false information.
In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 
sixth assessment report and found that effective communication of 
climate science has been significantly damaged by the spread of false 
claims on social media.

“Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined 
significantly by climate change countermovements, in both legacy and 
new/social media environments through misinformation,” the report stated.

That same month, Twitter banned paid ads that promote climate denial.
- -
Since July, months before Musk bought Twitter, there was an uptick in 
content referring to “#ClimateScam,” “climate scam,” or “climate is a 
scam,” totaling more than 500,000 mentions, according to a report 
released last month by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an 
international coalition of environmental groups. The messages originated 
from about 150,000 accounts and spiked around the time that global 
climate talks began in Egypt last month, the report found.

Researchers found one account, @climate_fact, that was responsible for 
more than 50,000 tweets. Every few minutes, it retweeted posts that use 
“#climatescam,” “#greatreset” and other phrases. It’s unclear who runs 
the account or where they are located.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-misinformation-spreads-on-musks-twitter/




/[ Inside Climate News ]/

*Oil Companies Had a Problem With ExxonMobil’s Industry-Wide Carbon 
Capture Proposal: Exxon’s Bad Reputation*
Documents show Shell initially resisted working with Exxon on the 
Houston project and believed Chevron had doubts, too. Both companies 
eventually signed on.
By Nicholas Kusnetz
December 21, 2022
ExxonMobil has been the prime target of activists and politicians 
angered by the oil industry’s efforts to block action on climate change. 
Now, newly disclosed documents confirm that the oil company’s 
reputational woes have extended into the industry itself and threatened 
to derail Exxon’s biggest climate proposal to date.

Last year, Exxon struggled to gain support from its peers when it 
proposed a cross-industry effort to build a carbon capture and storage 
hub in Houston, according to documents released by the House Committee 
on Oversight and Reform, which has been investigating the oil industry. 
Top executives at Shell, in particular, worried that joining with Exxon 
would present an “unacceptable risk” to the European oil major’s reputation.

“I am not interested in participating with any advocacy effort led by” 
Exxon, wrote Krista Johnson, Shell’s head of U.S. government relations, 
in a July 2021 email to Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell USA. 
Johnson said their competitor was continuing to draw negative headlines 
and that “zero companies” were prepared to join an Exxon-led consortium 
at that time.
A month later, Watkins said she opposed any public participation with 
Exxon. “Their reputation is severely damaged here,” she wrote to 
colleagues in the Netherlands, where Shell was headquartered at the 
time, “and we will only do harm to the strength of Shell’s US 
reputation.” (Shell later moved its headquarters to London.)...
- -
Funk also said Chevron viewed Exxon’s claims about how much carbon 
dioxide the project could capture, and how many jobs it could create, as 
“inflated—but harmless inflation.”

Chevron and Shell declined to comment for this article...
- -
Todd Spitler, an Exxon spokesman, declined to comment on Shell’s 
internal discussions, but said in an email that “The House Oversight 
Committee report has sought to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position on 
climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by 
recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company 
disinformation campaign.” He added, “Our CEO has testified under oath on 
this subject during two all-day Congressional hearings before two 
separate committees, we’ve been in regular communication with the 
committee for over a year, and have provided staff with more than one 
million pages of documents, including board materials and internal 
communications.”

Beyond the drama between companies, the documents released by the 
committee also shed light on the oil industry’s sustained efforts to 
promote carbon capture and storage. For years, the documents show, 
companies saw the technology as a means of enabling continued fossil 
fuel consumption, even as the world’s transition to cleaner energy grew 
more urgent. But the only way carbon capture could succeed, the 
companies said, was by winning substantial government funding and public 
support.

In 2016, for example, a Princeton University program that is sponsored 
by BP sent the company advice on how to address climate change. One of 
the recommendations was to “Understand the potential for CCS,” or carbon 
capture and storage, “to enable the full use of fossil fuels across the 
energy transition and beyond.”

A 2017 Shell document titled “US Gulf Coast CCS Opportunity Framing” 
said “the window for CCS to remain relevant with governments and society 
is closing quickly,” and that action was needed within a decade. “The 
value of CCS to Shell is the ability to decarbonize our products, retain 
a larger market share for our products in the energy transition, in 
addition to reputational value,” it said.

Two years later, a note to Shell’s executive committee said carbon 
capture in the United States faced “economic challenges,” but that the 
company would continue to pursue a Gulf Coast project because of the 
possibility of future incentives and the “potential need for CCS on 
critical Shell projects.”

The documents also include a 2018 update on a National Petroleum Council 
report about carbon capture and storage, written by John Mingé, a former 
chief of BP America who led the petroleum council study. In addition to 
lowering emissions, the document said, wide deployment of carbon capture 
technology could help increase U.S. oil production, secure the export of 
fossil fuels to countries with stringent climate policies and allow for 
continued use of “existing infrastructure over the long term.”

Mingé’s update recommended “simplifying the narrative” about carbon 
capture, as part of an effort to win support for the technology across 
academia, environmental groups, governments and the financial sector.

The petroleum council report, published in December 2019, went on to 
become a foundational document for the industry’s lobbying over the last 
two years. Over that period, Congress and the Biden administration have 
allocated more money to carbon capture than any other government in history.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21122022/big-oil-exxon-reputation-carbon-capture



/[  "Water, water everywhere..."  video ] /
*How This Billionaire Couple STOLE California's Water Supply | The Class 
Room ft. @SecondThought*
More Perfect Union*
*99,072 views  Dec 20, 2022
While 40 million Californians suffer through unprecedented drought, one 
billionaire couple owns a massive share of the state's water system, 
largely seized in a series of secretive meetings two decades ago.

That system was largely paid for by the very taxpayers whose water these 
billionaires hold hostage.  The Resnicks are the biggest farmers in 
California–as of 2007 they owned four San Francisco’s worth of farmland. 
Nearly half of Americans buy at least one of their products: pistachios, 
POM pomegranate juice, mandarins, flowers, and more.

It’s all under one massive umbrella: The Wonderful Company, a privately 
owned company worth at least 5 billion dollars. The majority owners, the 
Resnicks, are worth at least 8 billion.

We dug into how Lynda and Stewart Resnick were able to seize control of 
what should be a shared public resource with @SecondThought on this 
latest episode of "How They Got Rich" by The Class Room at More Perfect 
Union.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B19qb1Az94



/[ video - China Uncensored - critical opinion show 
https://youtu.be/_zcA3rtywXQ]/
*“Woke” Investors Funding China’s Human Rights Abuses*
China Uncensored
1.85M subscribers
25,262 views  Dec 26, 2022  #China
There has been a big movement in the investment world to screen 
investments based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) 
criteria. While it's good investors that care about the impact of their 
investments, what's not good is that those same "woke" investors are 
funding China's human rights abuses and environmental destruction. In 
this episode of China Uncensored, we look at  the "responsible" 
investing strategy of some large investment funds, what Chinese 
companies those funds are invested in, and why those companies are bad 
investments for anyone who cares about ESG.

/[7 years ago] /20 Signs China's Pollution Has Reached Apocalyptic 
Levels | China Uncensored
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwOBRH56Ic0&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zcA3rtywXQ



/[  how video games might save the future ]/
*Climate Activism and Attitudes in Videogaming*
On December 9th, 2022, the Yale Center for Environmental Communication 
hosted a panel with Marina Psaros, head of sustainability at Unity 
Technologies; Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, founder of Games for Good; and Dr. 
Jennifer Carman, Deputy Research Manager at the Yale Program on Climate 
Change Communication on videogaming and climate change. The discussion 
centered on the ways in which digital games can be utilized for 
large-scale social change in relation to our recent report of video 
gamers’ opinions on global warming. Dr. Lynn Fiellin, Professor of 
Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, the Yale Child Study Center, 
and the Yale School of Public Health, moderated the panel.
*Key Takeaways include:*

    -- The gaming community is more than its stereotypes: its
    demographics reflect the United States’ and videogamers hold similar
    attitudes toward climate change.
    --Videogamers are more willing to engage in behaviors to combat
    global warming than the general U.S. public and therefore represent
    a critical and untapped resource for climate action.
    --There are existing and developing strategies for “saving the
    world” with games: Expand the definition of “green games.”Blend
    in-game and real world experiences through augmented reality to
    generate interest in specific actions and/or offering in-game
    rewards for real-world actions. This can additionally be used to
    collect citizen-sourced data from around the world that can be used
    by an international research community.
    --Reduce the carbon footprint of games themselves, particularly
    through scope 3 emission reductions.
    --Videogamers are generally receptive to climate change-specific
    content in games and from well-known gamers.
    --Games for Good found that a large majority of videogamers
    appreciate the importance of gaming as an environmental educational
    tool and welcome environmental content in the games they play, with
    the important caveat that the content needs to fit the overarching
    storyline of the game.
    --Prominent players (i.e. “trusted messengers”) in the videogaming
    community can and have been successfully using their prominence to
    push for change.
    --The International Game Developers Association Climate Special
    Interest Group (IGDA CLIMATE SIG) is a gathering space for this type
    of work.
    --There are many ways videogamers can advocate for change within
    their community.
    -- It is important both that influencers talk about these issues to
    their followers and that gamers talk to their friends and family
    about climate topics.
    --To reduce electricity consumption, gamers can look into powering
    their home or their gaming technology with renewable energy; they
    can also set their devices to efficiency modes (on consoles, in-game
    settings, power strips, and more).
    --To reduce waste, gamers can keep their consoles and other
    technology as long as possible. --However, the responsibility also
    lies with developers to not require new technologies to play a game.
    --Younger gamers are part of a generation that has been especially
    active in drawing attention to racial and social injustices, mental
    health issues, and climate change. There are great opportunities for
    these voices to be uplifted within the gaming community to promote
    action instead of overwhelmed inaction.

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/news-events/climate-activism-and-attitudes-in-videogaming/



/[ forty videos from the International Centre for Thoreticcal Sciences - 
high geek facttor ]/
*TIPPING POINTS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS (HYBRID, 2022)*
International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
40 videos updated on Nov 8, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL04QVxpjcnjgKhQr3ma2XIoRQt5u_YCDD
- -
/[ one of 40 advanced academic lectures - a bit tedious - academic  ]/
*Critical rates of climate warming and abrupt collapse of ecosystems by 
Taranjot Kaur*
International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
Oct 10, 2022  TIPPING POINTS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS (HYBRID, 2022)
PROGRAM
TIPPING POINTS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS (HYBRID)

ORGANIZERS: Partha Sharathi Dutta (IIT Ropar, India), Vishwesha Guttal 
(IISc, India), Mohit Kumar Jolly (IISc, India) and Sudipta Kumar Sinha 
(IIT Ropar, India)
DATE: 19 September 2022 to 30 September 2022
VENUE: Ramanujan Lecture Hall and Online

Complex systems are seen across various branches of science; examples 
include climatic systems, financial markets, systems biology, and 
ecosystems. Many new techniques have emerged for understanding the 
dynamics of complex systems and predicting their long-term behavior, 
which are often obscured by apparent randomness and disorder. 
Nevertheless, these systems can undergo abrupt, large, and often 
irreversible changes to the system's state that have wide-ranging 
implications. When a dynamical system is tipped to a contrasting state 
in a relatively short period under the influence of small stochastic 
perturbations; this phenomenon is called a critical-transition or 
tipping. In the last two decades there are significant developments in 
the studies of tipping. This workshop will cover all the three major 
types of tipping; B-tipping, N-tipping and R-tipping, and will also 
discuss the recent advances on tipping point research including the 
application of machine learning.

The meeting aims to bring together ecologists, climate scientists, and 
dynamical system theorists, or in related fields who have contributed 
substantially to the field for catalyzing constructive discussions that 
can lead to further advancements of this subject and identify exciting 
and unexplored areas.
CONTACT US: tipc at icts.res.in
PROGRAM LINK: https://www.icts.res.in/program/tipc2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoRlD7-ijDc



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*December 27, 2014*/
December 27, 2014:
• The New York Times reports:
"In state legislatures and major professional associations, a bipartisan 
effort is emerging to change the way state attorneys general interact 
with lobbyists, campaign donors and other corporate representatives.

"This month, during a closed-door meeting of the National Association of 
Attorneys General, officials voted to stop accepting corporate 
sponsorships. In Missouri, a bill has been introduced that would require 
the attorney general, as well as certain other state officials, to 
disclose within 48 hours any political contribution worth more than 
$500. And in Washington State, legislation is being drafted to bar 
attorneys general who leave office from lobbying their former colleagues 
for a year.

"Perhaps most significant, a White House ethics lawyer in the 
administration of George W. Bush has asked the American Bar Association 
to change its national code of conduct to prohibit attorneys general 
from discussing continuing investigations or other official matters 
while participating in fund-raising events at resort destinations, as 
they often now do. Those measures could be adopted in individual states.

"The actions follow a series of articles in The New York Times that 
examined how lawyers and lobbyists — from major corporations, energy 
companies and even plaintiffs’ law firms — have increasingly tried to 
influence state attorneys general."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/us/bipartisan-effort-to-restrict-lobbyists-influence-of-attorneys-general.html

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