[✔️] February 3, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February 3, 2022*/

/[ The World Isn't Ready for Climate-Change-Driven Inflation - says The 
Atlantic ]/
*The Rise of Greenflation*
Extreme weather and energy uncertainty are already sending prices soaring.
By Robinson Meyer
- -
Imagine, now, that the kingdom’s outlying farms were destroyed by a 
dragon: The price of food would increase inside the castle walls, but it 
would be the dragon’s fault, not the royal mint’s. And the solution 
would be neither to raise taxes nor to slow the minting of coins from 
the king’s mines. In fact, if the king tried to claw back coins, then he 
could prolong the crisis: The townspeople would still use their meager 
earnings to bid up the price of food, but they would have less money to 
do it with, so everyone would be poorer and hungry. The king would 
instead need to import more grain, or ration out supplies, or plant more 
farms (hopefully in dragon-proof regions).

Though it might sound silly, the modern global economy is closer to that 
fabled realm than we might think: Yes, container ships and jumbo jets 
connect far-flung farms and factories to consumers, which has permitted 
a planetary smoothing out of prices. But ultimately globalization has 
stretched the castle walls as far as they can go, and the realm remains 
dependent on certain key and vulnerable places. A single woodland 
province furnishes timber for most American homes; a single highland 
country grows nearly half of the world’s magic beans; a single foundry 
on a distant island makes most of the thinking rocks that go inside 
American phones. Yet if something were to happen to the supply of goods 
from those places, we always have the same answer: The royal mint can 
fix it.

In truth, some combination of the two fairy tales now besets the 
American economy. The king probably threw too many free coins out the 
window last year, and some of our outlying lands are dragon-scarred. Yet 
if the climate scars on supply continue to grow, does the Federal 
Reserve have the right tools to manage? Stinson Dean, the lumber trader, 
is doubtful. “Raising interest rates will blunt demand for housing—no 
doubt. But if you blunt demand enough to bring lumber prices down, 
you’re destroying the economy,” Dean told me. “For us to have lower 
lumber prices, we can only build a million homes a year. Do you really 
want to do that?

“Raising rates,” he said, “doesn’t grow more trees.” Nor does it grow 
more coffee, end a drought, or bring certainty to the energy transition. 
And if our new era of climate-driven inflation takes hold, America will 
need more than higher interest rates to bring balance to supply and demand.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/02/greenflation-prices-inflation-climate-change-coffee-lumber/621456/



/[ door closed, only forward now ]/
*ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE PASSED “POINT OF NO RETURN” EIGHT YEARS AGO, 
SCIENTISTS SAY*
"EXTREME CLIMATE CHANGE IS HERE, IT’S IN THE OCEAN, AND THE OCEAN 
UNDERPINS ALL LIFE ON EARTH."
Point of No Return
Climate researchers are that warning extreme heat in the Earth’s oceans 
has passed the “point of no return” back in 2014, The Guardian reports.

It’s damning new evidence that underlines our path towards climate 
catastrophe — or, rather, that we’re already living in one.

“By using this measure of extremes, we’ve shown that climate change is 
not something that is uncertain and may happen in the distant future — 
it’s something that is a historical fact and has occurred already,” Kyle 
Van Houtan, researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and co-author of a 
new study about the findings published in the journal PLOS Climate, told 
The Guardian.

“Extreme climate change is here, it’s in the ocean, and the ocean 
underpins all life on Earth,” he warned.

Extreme Heat
Van Houtan and his colleagues looked at temperature data recorded from 
1920 to 2019. By 2015, temperatures had surpassed their 50-year record 
high, in what the researchers are calling the “point of no return.”

“For the global ocean, 2014 was the first year to exceed the 50 percent 
threshold of extreme heat thereby becoming ‘normal,’ with the South 
Atlantic (1998) and Indian (2007) basins crossing this barrier earlier,” 
the researchers write in the paper.

And 1998 “was 24 years ago — that is astounding,” Van Houtan told The 
Guardian.

The first wildlife to really feel the pressure are species like lobster 
and scallops in the areas off the northeast coast of the US and Canada. 
In fact, 14 fisheries in Alaska alone have already declared federal 
disasters.

The research paints a devastating picture, and should serve as a warning 
of what’s still to come.

“Oceans are critical to understanding climate change,” University of St 
Thomas professor John Abraham told the newspaper. “They cover about 70 
percent of the planet’s surface and absorb more than 90 percent of 
global warming heat.”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/environmental-catastrophe-point-no-return



/[ just present the information  ]/
*Revealed: The 11 slides that finally convinced Boris Johnson about 
global warming*
  1 February 2022
A scientific briefing that UK prime minister Boris Johnson says changed 
his mind about global warming has been made public for the first time, 
following a freedom-of-information (FOI) request by Carbon Brief.

Last year, on the eve of the UK hosting COP26 in Glasgow, Johnson 
described tackling climate change as the country’s “number one 
international priority”. He also published a net-zero strategy and told 
other countries at the UN General Assembly to “grow up” when it comes to 
global warming.

However, just a few years earlier, Johnson was publicly doubting 
established climate science. For example, in a Daily Telegraph column 
published in 2015 he claimed unusual winter heat had “nothing to do with 
global warming”. And, in 2013, he said he had an “open mind” to the idea 
that the Earth was heading for a mini ice-age.

Last year, acknowledging his past climate scepticism, Johnson told 
journalists that he had now changed his mind, largely due to a 
scientific briefing he received shortly after becoming prime minister in 
2019.

Johnson admitted he had been on a “road to Damascus” when it comes to 
climate science:

“I got them [government scientists] to run through it all and, if you 
look at the almost vertical kink upward in the temperature graph, the 
anthropogenic climate change, it’s very hard to dispute. That was a very 
important moment for me.”

The Sunday Times later reported that this briefing had been given by Sir 
Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific advisor, and, 
according to one of the prime minister’s close allies, it “had a huge 
impact”...
- -
(Carbon Brief has learned that Boris Johnson received at least one 
further science briefing on climate change following this January 2020 
presentation. In March 2021, for example, he was specifically briefed 
about, among other topics, the projected climate impacts at 2C and 4C of 
global warming. The information about these impacts was prepared by Prof 
Richard Betts from the Met Office and the University of Exeter using 
findings from the EU-funded HELIX project. Prof Betts also provided UK 
examples from the Technical Report of the Third UK Climate Change Risk 
Assessment, often known as CCRA3. Carbon Brief also understands that, 
even though Sir Patrick Vallance led the briefing at No 10 Downing 
Street on 28 January 2020, the 11 slides themselves were presented by 
Prof Belcher.)
https://www.carbonbrief.org/revealed-the-11-slides-that-finally-convinced-boris-johnson-about-global-warming



/[  World Economic Forum says ] /
*Global Risks 2022: The 'disorderly' net-zero transition is here and 
it’s time to embrace it*
This article is part of the The Davos Agenda

    -- This year’s Global Risks Report highlights fears of a disorderly
    net-zero transition.

    -- But the net-zero transition still represents the best and only
    chance of achieving the climate goals.

    -- We must not let the risks of a disorderly transition become an
    excuse for slowing the journey to net-zero. Instead, we should grasp
    the opportunities that this change will create.

The 2022 Global Risks Report has “climate action failure” as the number 
one risk over the coming decade. The most documented risks associated 
with climate action failure are physical risks, such as an increase in 
the frequency and severity of severe weather.

Undoubtedly the climate crisis is the biggest long-term threat facing 
humanity.

But the risks linked to the transition to a net-zero future are getting 
more attention. A disorderly transition would exacerbate these risks, 
impacting the ability for organizations to conduct business, causing 
economic volatility and destabilizing the financial system...
- -
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/responsive_large_webp_gs1ztJhJIkw2rVRwjXW5HLl7fWPXVCVOUmecIBiX_eY.webp
- -
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/global-risks-2022-disorderly-net-zero-transition



/[  big interactive explanation -- scroll through screens and check 
audio to listen to a reading ]/
*Probable Futures */
/For decades, scientists have accurately predicted how Earth’s 
temperature would respond to carbon emissions. They warned of rising 
temperatures, more frequent extreme weather, and the possibility of 
entering an unpredictable—or even unstable—climate. This looming 
forecast had a simple, though not easy, solution: Reduce the amount of 
greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere.

Our efforts to reduce emissions haven’t matched the urgency of this 
forecast, and the impacts of global warming are already here. Earth’s 
temperature continues to rise and will likely reach 1.5°C above the 
pre-industrial climate by 2030. Unless we reduce emissions drastically, 
it will be 3°C around mid-century.

Probable Futures was founded in 2020 by a group of concerned leaders and 
citizens who started asking climate scientists direct, practical 
questions about what climate change would be like in different places 
around the world:

What does the world look like at 1.5°C of warming? What will it feel 
like? At 2°C? 3°C?

Do these different levels of warming mean radically different outcomes 
for society?

Could we communicate the consequences of each increment of warming so 
vividly that everyone—from parents and teachers to poets and CEOs—can 
better understand, prepare for, and address what is coming?

These conversations led to a collaboration with the renowned team of 
climate scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Together, we 
leveraged well-established climate models to produce maps depicting 
temperature, precipitation, drought, and other phenomena, around the 
world and at different increments of global warming.

With these maps, climate change was no longer an abstraction. The 
results were stark, even for those who had been studying climate change 
for decades. The consequences became real and personal. We found these 
portrayals of the future to be useful, intuitive, and profound. We 
wanted to share them with others, so we set out to share these maps with 
the world and translate them into practical tools, stories, and 
resources available online to everyone, everywhere.

Founder Spencer Glendon chose the name Probable Futures, inspired by the 
idea that we could all have an understanding of the basics of climate 
science and then envision the future in ways that would positively 
affect how we think, feel, act, and relate to others. The plural Futures 
conveys the existence of a range of future outcomes, while Probable 
indicates that this range should be used as a guide: Some futures have 
zero probability, others are likely, and still others have low 
probabilities but would be so catastrophic that ignoring them would be 
grossly negligent. His vision for Probable Futures was that we could be 
frank about the range of outcomes we face and also encouraging to anyone 
who wants to participate in creating the future we and our successors 
will live in./
/https://probablefutures.org/


/[ oops.  Darn. //oopsie.//]/
*Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014*
Formerly rare high temperatures now covering half of seas and 
devastating wildlife, study shows
Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 
2014 and has become the new normal, according to research.

Scientists analysed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, 
which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme 
temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred 
at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014.

In some hotspots, extreme temperatures occur 90% of the time, severely 
affecting wildlife. More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse 
gases is absorbed by the ocean, which plays a critical role in 
maintaining a stable climate.

“By using this measure of extremes, we’ve shown that climate change is 
not something that is uncertain and may happen in the distant future – 
it’s something that is a historical fact and has occurred already,” said 
Kyle Van Houtan, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, US, and one of the 
research team. “Extreme climate change is here, it’s in the ocean, and 
the ocean underpins all life on Earth.”...
- -
The heat content of the top 2,000 metres of the ocean set a new record 
in 2021, the sixth in a row. Prof John Abraham at the University of St 
Thomas in Minnesota, one of the team behind the assessment, said ocean 
heat content was the most relevant to global climate, while surface 
temperatures were most relevant to weather patterns, as well as many 
ecosystems.

“Oceans are critical to understanding climate change. They cover about 
70% of the planet’s surface and absorb more than 90% of global warming 
heat,” Abraham said. “The new study is helpful because the researchers 
look at the surface temperatures. It finds there has been a big increase 
in extreme heat at the ocean’s surface and that the extremes are 
increasing over time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/01/extreme-heat-oceans-passed-point-of-no-return-high-temperatures-wildlife-seas 


- -

[Plos Climate journal ]
*The recent normalization of historical marine heat extremes*
Kisei R. Tanaka ,Kyle S. Van Houtan
Published: February 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000007
*Abstract*

    Climate change exposes marine ecosystems to extreme conditions with
    increasing frequency. Capitalizing on the global reconstruction of
    sea surface temperature (SST) records from 1870-present, we present
    a centennial-scale index of extreme marine heat within a coherent
    and comparable statistical framework. A spatially (1° × 1°) and
    temporally (monthly) resolved index of the normalized historical
    extreme marine heat events was expressed as a fraction of a year
    that exceeds a locally determined, monthly varying 98th percentile
    of SST gradients derived from the first 50 years of climatological
    records (1870–1919). For the year 2019, our index reports that 57%
    of the global ocean surface recorded extreme heat, which was
    comparatively rare (approximately 2%) during the period of the
    second industrial revolution. Significant increases in the extent of
    extreme marine events over the past century resulted in many local
    climates to have shifted out of their historical SST bounds across
    many economically and ecologically important marine regions. For the
    global ocean, 2014 was the first year to exceed the 50% threshold of
    extreme heat thereby becoming “normal”, with the South Atlantic
    (1998) and Indian (2007) basins crossing this barrier earlier. By
    focusing on heat extremes, we provide an alternative framework that
    may help better contextualize the dramatic changes currently
    occurring in marine systems.

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000007



/[The news archive - looking back - cough, cough ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 3, 2016*

February 3, 2016:

The Los Angeles Times reports:

"Southern California Gas Co. on Tuesday was charged with failing to 
immediately notify state authorities about the natural gas leak in Aliso 
Canyon.

"L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey filed four misdemeanor criminal 
charges against the gas company, accusing it of releasing air 
contaminants and neglecting to report the release of hazardous materials 
until three days after the leak began Oct. 23."

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-attorney-general-lawsuit-aliso-canyon-leak-20160202-story.html 



/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

   Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and 
sender. This is a hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for commercial 
purposes. Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.