[✔️] February 5, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February 5, 2022*/

/[  Methane is an easy and obvious fix ] /
*Cracking down on methane ‘ultra emitters’ is a quick way to combat 
climate change, researchers find*
Latest study underscores how satellites are exposing emission sources 
around the globe. ‘It’s a harbinger of what’s to come,’ one expert says.
- -
“But we have to be careful to not say this is the whole problem,” he said.

The bulk of methane emissions from oil and gas comes from less dramatic 
but more persistent parts of the system, he said — leaking wells, faulty 
flares and other infrastructure that collectively have an even more 
detrimental climate footprint.

“It’s necessary to do, but it’s not sufficient,” he said of stopping 
only the biggest leaks. “It’s only a small slice of a very large 
opportunity.”

And as remote-sensing technology expands and improves, opportunities to 
target methane sources large and small should only grow.

“It’s a harbinger of what’s to come,” he said of the paper. “Two years 
from now, we’ll be doing this in a much more robust way, with numerous 
satellites, in a much more robust system. Right now, we are seeing just 
one part of the elephant, but we still need to see the whole thing.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/02/03/cracking-down-methane-ultra-emitters-is-quick-way-combat-climate-change-researchers-find/




/[  so far, the best video explanation of the movie in this 40 min video ] /
*Don’t Look Up – A Problematic Metaphor For Climate Change?*
Jan 26, 2022
Like Stories of Old
*Clips from transcript*

    "But you have to understand, this is now beyond our control... "
    There is also the deeper struggle of just trying to talk about
    something real, something sincere,
    of trying to get people to meaningfully engage with the world and
    with each other.

    "Sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another. We
    need to hear things."
    It’s something so simple, yet so vital, and somehow it seems to have
    been rendered impossible.
    The movie gives us some specific surface level reasons as to why,
    but when seen as a whole,
    it also invokes a deeper realization, one that isn’t as explicitly
    expressed but one that slowly dawned on me on
    a more intangible emotional level.
    It’s the realization that pretty much every generation living right
    now, at least here in the west,
    has been raised in the same historical period, one that can be
    defined by unprecedented progress, prosperity and relative stability.
    And that, perhaps, we’ve all mistakenly come to assume these
    characteristics as normal and everlasting.
    And you know, who could blame us, because for a while there, it
    seemed like everything was within our reach;
    countless innovations were leading the way to exciting new
    technologies; food supplies were no longer dependent on seasons or
    country, everything was just there the whole year around; we were
    all driving cars and flying across the world.

    I mean, we talked about the end of history, you know, we were so
    close.  And then came the internet and suddenly we were able to
    reach everyone, everywhere and at any time.

    It was beautiful, promising....But now, it feels like it’s all
    slipping away from us, it’s all turning against us.
    We already came to realize that our financial system is not the
    source of everlasting wealth as we had hoped,
    that our governments and political systems are not as unshakable and
    incorruptible as we thought.

    And now that the very foundations of the world we inhabit are
    changing, it’s like we’re moving into the endgame.
    We’re awakening, or perhaps; re-awakening to a world that is much
    bigger and complex than we are,
    that won’t submit itself to our dominion,
    and that is confronting us with a mirror image of who have really
    become, revealing how, despite all our riches and the possibilities
    it gave us, we were not really trying to make progress, we were not
    really striving for freedom as a communal sense of prosperity and
    security; we were merely trying to build our own private
    paradises,we were trying to be left alone, do whatever we want.
    Completely detached from any real sense of community, from nature,
    from all external influences, consequences, responsibilities.

    We were completely unconcerned with the world around us., we wanted
    to be.
    "You think you're motivated by beliefs, high ethical beliefs. But
    you just run towards pleasure and away from pain"

    But what it has left us with, it seems, is just this profound sense
    of despair and powerlessness, not just because we’ve somehow locked
    ourselves into systems that rob us of our agency, and seem to make
    any meaningful change impossible...

    But on a more interpersonal level too, it increasingly feels like
    all the things that were supposed to connect us,
    that were supposed to bring us together, are now tearing us apart.

    I think by now everyone has experienced a friend or family member
    drifting away into a worldview so different from ours
    that it feels like we can no longer agree with them on even the most
    basic elements of our reality,
    that we cannot even phantom how they could possibly look at the
    world so differently,
    and they probably feel the same way about us.

    There is something truly terrifying about the way we all seem to be
    diverging into parallel realities;
    increasingly out of touch, out of reach...

    And that, in the end, might be the more important comet;
    not the one that is promising a total climate catastrophe,
    but the one that is slowly but surely revealing something important
    about ourselves;
    how there is something vital not only to our survival but also to
    our humanity that we’ve let gone to waste,
    that we’ve let ourselves get detached from by all this madness;
    all the distractions, the trivialities, the blind faith in our
    grandiosity, and the illusions of everlasting paradise,
    of unobstructed progress.

    Because no, the world is not going to end, and it isn’t all bad.
    There is a lot to be grateful for, we’ve done some wonderful things,
    some of which are nothing short of miraculous
    and will certainly be important as we move forward.
    And beneath all of it, you know, we’re still us.

    But nevertheless, it does feel like something is ending, like we’re
    awakening from a dream.
    And in that sense, Don’t Look Up is not so much about our future as
    it is about our past,
    about the closing of a chapter, one where, for a while…

    "We really did have everything, didn’t we?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7QggAyha_0



/[ emerging specialty ] /
*A Scoping Review of Interventions for the Treatment of Eco-Anxiety*
by Pauline Baudon and Liza Jachens
Psychology, Sociology and Professional Counselling, Webster University, 
1293 Geneva, Switzerland
- -
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(18), 9636; 
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189636
Received: 2 August 2021 / Revised: 7 September 2021 / Accepted: 11 
September 2021 / Published: 13 September 2021
*Abstract*
As climate change worsens and public awareness of its grave impact 
increases, individuals are increasingly experiencing distressing mental 
health symptoms which are often grouped under the umbrella term of 
eco-anxiety. Clear guidance is needed to enable mental health 
professionals to make informed choices of appropriate interventions and 
approaches in their eco-anxiety treatment plans. A scoping review was 
conducted to examine the current understanding of eco-anxiety and 
related intervention options and recommendations. The review included 34 
records, 13 of which reflected specific psychological approaches. A 
thematic analysis of the content of the selected records yielded five 
major themes across interventions for individual and group treatment of 
eco-anxiety: practitioners’ inner work and education, fostering clients’ 
inner resilience, encouraging clients to take action, helping clients 
find social connection and emotional support by joining groups, and 
connecting clients with nature. Recommendations for treatment plans are 
to focus on holistic, multi-pronged, and grief-informed approaches that 
include eco-anxiety focused group work.
Full text and PDF available
/[clips]/

    Research confirms that our collective sense of a looming climate
    change-related threat is taking a significant toll on our mental
    health. Recent studies point to a surge in the psychological
    distress associated with “awareness of the overarching problem
    humans face as a result of global climate change” . The
    International Psychoanalytical Association now names climate change
    as the greatest global health threat of the 21st century [14].
    Though research on this specific form of distress is still in its
    infancy, the umbrella term of eco-anxiety, which is not yet listed
    in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
    Disorders), is emerging as a key term...
    - -
    The review found a high number of proposed interventions involving
    groups. Unsurprisingly, since mental health interventions often
    involve connecting the client with inner resources, most records
    (89%) stressed interventions focused on fostering clients’ inner
    resilience. However, the degree of presence (62%) of interventions
    aimed at connecting clients with groups—specifically those groups
    intent on providing social connection and emotional support rather
    than groups oriented towards action—is perhaps more surprising. Many
    group endeavors and organizations focused on actively mitigating
    climate change have bloomed as public awareness of its consequences
    has increased (Extinction Rebellion, Plastic Pollution Coalition,
    among others) but these groups are mostly focused on helping
    individuals take action. This usually involves making lifestyle
    changes, engaging politically, or spreading an ecological message.
    These groups seem to place little emphasis on the emotional
    experience of feeling distress over our changing climate.

    However, this review’s findings reflect a strong theme present
    across many papers namely that, in order to engage with eco-anxiety,
    it is just as vital to provide a space for the expression of emotion
    as it is to act ...
    - -
    The review identified a variety of interventions for both individual
    and group treatment...
    - -
    The 14 records equally point to the importance of understanding the
    specific kinds of grief underlying eco-anxiety. Two authors [10,13]
    notably offer their proposal that eco-anxiety is a form of
    disenfranchised grief, thus requiring both that practitioners be
    familiar with the concept and that they be prepared to offer the
    required heightened level of support that must accompany a grief
    that is deemed not socially acceptable. Fittingly, three authors
    recommend group mourning rituals [7,45,53] in an effort to spread
    the weight of the grief process and to provide participants with the
    experience of being seen and validated by the collective in their
    pain. The literature identified in this review repeatedly highlights
    the tension between the individual and the collective, namely the
    line betweenwhat is personal pain and responsibility, and what can
    and should be shouldered by a greater group of peers...
    - -
    Four authors identified in the review [13,16,42,53] refer to the
    traumatic component of eco-anxiety, with Bednarek [53] and Pihkala
    [13] specifically confirming Van Susteren (as cited in Kerecman
    Myers [22]) and Kaplan’s [23] conceptualization of eco-anxiety as a
    form of anticipatory trauma. However, these authors focus on the
    need for practitioners to familiarize themselves with this kind of
    trauma rather than proposing specific, trauma-informed
    interventions. This illustrates a larger finding of the review,
    namely a great disparity in the level of specificity of
    interventions proposed across the records reviewed. Some
    interventions are highly targeted, for example Randall’s
    recommendation that mental health professionals provide
    psychoeducation on the dynamics of unconscious collective guilt [30]
    or Hasbach’s ecotherapy intervention whereby clients identify a
    space in nature that they like and visit it regularly to build a
    nurturing relationship with it [36]. Other interventions are far
    more general, as evidenced by Davenport’s recommendation that
    clients should be encouraged to cultivate community connection [10]
    or the Good Grief Network’s vague exhortation to eco-anxious
    individuals that they “do inner work” [48] (p. 3). This disparity
    could be due to two factors. First, more than half of the records
    reviewed take a holistic approach to eco-anxiety, proposing many
    interventions that address the subject from a variety of different
    angles rather than exploring a few interventions in depth. Second,
    most of the records identified in the review are reflections on the
    general subject of eco-anxiety which happen to mention interventions
    rather than papers or studies pointedly addressing or measuring
    treatment interventions for eco-anxiety...

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/18/9636

/
/

/
/

/[ Methane release is a deliberate crime -- totally avoidable - text 
below audio available ]
/*A satellite finds massive methane leaks from gas pipelines*
February 3, 2022
Heard on Morning Edition
Dan Charles
There's new evidence, collected from orbiting satellites, that oil and 
gas companies are routinely venting huge amounts of methane into the air.

Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, the fuel. It's also a 
powerful greenhouse gas, second only to carbon dioxide in its warming 
impact. And Thomas Lauvaux, a researcher with the Laboratory of Climate 
and Environmental Sciences in France, says there's been a persistent 
discrepancy between official estimates of methane emissions and field 
observations.

"For years, every time we had data [on methane emissions] — we were 
flying over an area, we were driving around — we always found more 
emissions than we were supposed to see," he says.

Researchers turned to satellites in an effort to get more clarity. The 
European Space Agency launched an instrument three years ago called the 
TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) that can measure the 
methane in any 12-square-mile block of the atmosphere, day by day.

Lauvaux says that TROPOMI detected methane releases that the official 
estimates did not foresee. "No one expects that pipelines are sometimes 
wide open, pouring gas into the atmosphere," he says.

Article continues after sponsor message

Yet they were. Over the course of two years, during 2019 and 2020, the 
researchers counted more than 1,800 large bursts of methane, often 
releasing several tons of methane per hour. Lauvaux and his colleagues 
published their findings this week in the journal Science.

The researchers consulted with gas companies, trying to understand the 
source of these "ultra-emitting events." They found that some releases 
resulted from accidents. More often, though, they were deliberate. Gas 
companies simply vented gas from pipelines or other equipment before 
carrying out repairs or maintenance operations.

Lauvaux says these releases could be avoided. There's equipment that 
allows gas to be removed and captured before repairs. "It can totally be 
done," he says. "It takes time, for sure, resources and staff. But it's 
doable. Absolutely."

The countries where bursts of methane happened most frequently included 
the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, Russia, the United States, 
Iran, Kazakhstan and Algeria. Lauvaux says they found relatively few 
such releases in some other countries with big gas industries, such as 
Saudi Arabia.

According to the researchers, the large releases of methane that they 
detected accounted for 8-12% of global methane emissions from oil and 
gas infrastructure during that time.

Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, 
which has focused on the problem of methane emissions, says these 
massive releases are dramatic. But it's also important to remember the 
"ordinary" leaks that make up the other 90% of emissions from oil and 
gas facilities. "They really matter," he says.

EDF is planning to launch its own methane-detecting satellite in about a 
year, which will take much sharper pictures, showing smaller leaks. 
Other organizations are developing their own methane detectors.

That new monitoring network will transform the conversation about 
methane emissions, Hamburg says. Historically, no one could tell where 
methane was coming from, "and that's part of the reason we haven't 
taken, globally, the action that we should. It was just out of sight, 
out of mind," Hamburg says. "Well, it no longer will be. It will be 
totally visible."

He thinks that will translate into more pressure on oil and gas 
companies to fix those leaks.
/https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1077392791/a-satellite-finds-massive-methane-leaks-from-gas-pipelines
/

/
/

/
/

/[   disinformation is a weapon, as this is a war, it defines the enemy   ]/
*Kids are falling victim to disinformation and conspiracy theories. 
What’s the best way to fix that?*
Although children are prime targets, educators cannot figure out how 
best to teach them to separate fact from fiction.
By MELINDA WENNER MOYER Feb. 3, 2022, 10:40 a.m.
The following is an abridged version of an article that was originally 
published by Scientific American. It is being republished here with 
permission.

When Amanda Gardner, an educator with two decades of experience, helped 
to start a new charter elementary and middle school outside of Seattle 
last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the 
Holocaust happened, argued that Covid is a hoax and told their teacher 
that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children 
insisted that these conspiracy theories were true. Both misinformation, 
which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an 
intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the 
past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the 
issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent 
plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”

Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when 
kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according 
to a 2021 study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many 
teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. 
In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford 
University researchers found that less than 20 percent of high schoolers 
seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook 
post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the 
site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous 
radiation levels persisted in the area.

Disinformation campaigns often directly go after young users, steering 
them toward misleading content. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation 
found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which offers personalized 
suggestions about what users should watch next, is skewed to recommend 
videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer 
started with. For instance, when researchers searched for videos using 
the phrase “lunar eclipse,” they were steered to a video suggesting that 
Earth is flat.

One tool that schools can use to deal with this problem is called media 
literacy education. The idea is to teach kids how to evaluate and think 
critically about the messages they receive and to recognize falsehoods 
masquerading as truth. For many children, school is the one place where 
they can be taught skills to evaluate such claims objectively.

Yet few American kids are receiving this instruction. Last summer, 
Illinois became the first U.S. state to require all high school students 
to take a media literacy class. Thirteen other states have laws that 
touch on media literacy, but requirements vary widely. A growing number 
of students are being taught some form of media literacy in college, but 
that is “way, way too late to begin this kind of instruction,” says 
Howard Schneider, executive director of the Center for News Literacy at 
Stony Brook University. When he began teaching college students years 
ago, he found that “they came with tremendous deficits, and they were 
already falling into very bad habits.”

Even if more students took such classes, there is profound disagreement 
about what those courses should teach. Certain curricula try to train 
students to give more weight to journalistic sources, but some 
researchers argue that this practice ignores the potential biases of 
publications and reporters. Other courses push students to identify 
where information comes from and ask how the content helps those 
disseminating it.

Most media literacy approaches “begin to look thin when you ask, ‘Can 
you show me the evidence?’” says Sam Wineburg, a professor of education 
at Stanford University, who runs the Stanford History Education Group. 
The approaches in use have not been compared head-to-head, and some have 
only small studies supporting them. Like online media sources 
themselves, it is hard to know which ones to trust.

Some programs, such as Schneider’s Stony Brook program, teach students 
to discern the quality of the information in part by learning how 
responsible journalism works. They study how journalists pursue news, 
how to distinguish between different kinds of information and how to 
judge evidence behind reported stories. The goal, Schneider wrote in a 
2007 article for Nieman Reports, is to shape students into “consumers 
who could differentiate between raw, unmediated information coursing 
through the Internet and independent, verified journalism.”

Other approaches teach students methods for evaluating the credibility 
of news and information sources, in part by determining the goals and 
incentives of those sources. They teach students to ask: Who created the 
content and why? And what do other sources say? But these methods are 
relatively new and have not been widely studied.

The lack of rigorous studies of the different approaches is indeed a 
major roadblock, says Paul Mihailidis, a civic media and journalism 
expert at Emerson College. “Most of the science done is very small 
scale, very exploratory. It’s very qualitative,” he says. That is not 
simply because of a lack of resources, he adds. “There’s also a lack of 
clarity about what the goals are.”

Moreover, the small amount of research that does exist has largely been 
conducted with college students. The various approaches that are being 
used in K–12 classrooms have hardly been tested. As part of his current 
research initiative, Mihailidis and his team interviewed the heads of 
all major organizations that are part of the National Media Literacy 
Alliance, which works to promote media literacy education. “We are 
finding, repeatedly, that many of the ways in which they support schools 
and teachers — resources, guidelines, best practices, etc. — are not 
studied in much of a rigorous fashion,” he says.

Some researchers, including Wineburg, are trying to fill in the research 
gaps. In a study published in 2019, Wineburg and his team compared how 
10 history professors, 10 journalism fact-checkers and 25 Stanford 
undergraduates evaluated websites and information on social and 
political issues. Historians and students were often fooled by 
manipulative websites, but journalism fact-checkers were not. In 
addition, their methods of analysis differed significantly: historians 
and students tried to assess the validity of websites and information by 
reading vertically, navigating within a site to learn more about it, but 
fact-checkers read laterally, opening new browser tabs for different 
sources and running searches to judge the original website’s credibility.
But what about the longer-term impact of media literacy? Once students 
learn how to evaluate websites and claims, how confident can we be that 
they will retain these skills and use them down the line? And will these 
methods lead students to become civically engaged members of society? 
“There’s always this kind of leap into ‘that will make our democracy and 
news systems stronger.’ And I don’t know if that’s necessarily the 
case,” Mihailidis says.

At the same time, pressing students to be skeptical about all 
information also may have unexpected downsides. “We think that some 
approaches to media literacy not only don’t work but might actually 
backfire by increasing students’ cynicism or exacerbating 
misunderstandings about the way news media work,” says Peter Adams, 
senior vice president of education at the News Literacy Project. 
Students may begin to “read all kinds of nefarious motives into everything.”

Some say that the way around this might be to help students develop 
mindsets in which they become comfortable with uncertainty. According to 
educational psychologist William Perry of Harvard University, students 
go through various stages of learning. First children are 
black-and-white thinkers — they think there are right answers and wrong 
answers. Then they develop into relativists, realizing that knowledge 
can be contextual. This stage can be dangerous, however. It is the one 
where, as Russell notes, people can come to believe there is no truth. 
When students think everything is a lie, they can also think there is no 
point in engaging with difficult topics. But instead of driving students 
to apathy, the goal is to steer them toward awareness and engagement.

Schools still have a long way to go before they get there, though. One 
big challenge is how to expand these programs so they reach everyone, 
especially kids in lower-income school districts, who are much less 
likely to receive any news literacy instruction at all. And teachers 
already have so much material they have to impart — can they squeeze in 
more, especially if what they have to add is nuanced and complex?

More investment in media literacy education is also critical if 
America’s young people are going to learn how to navigate this new and 
constantly evolving media landscape with their wits about them. And more 
research is necessary to understand how to get them there.

But many more studies will be needed for researchers to reach a 
comprehensive understanding of what works and what doesn’t over the long 
term. Education scholars need to take “an ambitious, big step forward,” 
Schneider says. “What we’re facing are transformational changes in the 
way we receive, process and share information. We’re in the middle of 
the most profound revolution in 500 years.”

Melinda Wenner Moyer is a journalist who covers parenting, science and 
medicine. She is also the author of How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schoolkids-are-falling-victim-to-disinformation-and-conspiracy-fantasies/

/
/



/[ What a wonderful thing is the passage of time ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 5, 1990*

February 5, 1990: Addressing a special IPCC gathering in Washington,
D.C., President George H. W. Bush acknowledges the reality of
human-caused climate change, but says that solutions to the problem of
a warming planet must not inhibit worldwide economic growth.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100811144431/http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=1514&year=1990&month=all

http://c-spanvideo.org/program/PresidentialAddress28

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-02-05/news/mn-275_1_global-warming


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


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