[✔️] February 7, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February 7, 2022*/

/[  Make ready for different kinds of wildfires ]/
*Fires around the world “have grown weirder”*
Bill Gabbert -- February 6, 2022

     Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, CO
https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Smoke-column-from-the-Williams-Fire-southwest-of-Fraser-CO-Aug.-15-2020.-USFS-photo-by-Lauren-Demos.jpg
     Smoke column from the Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, 
Colorado, Aug. 15, 2020. USFS photo by Lauren Demos.

The Guardian has an excellent long-form article about wildland fires, 
titled ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown 
weirder. Author Daniel Immerwahr writes that in banishing fire from 
sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. He writes 
about fires around the world, pyrophobia, indigenous fire, and how 
hundreds of thousands die each year from such smoke-related maladies as 
strokes, heart failure and asthma.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/03/a-deranged-pyroscape-how-fires-across-the-world-have-grown-weirder

Toward the end of the article he writes about fires in Indonesia where 
forests have been drained, burned, or clear cut, then summarizes.

Here is an excerpt:

     …No single one of Indonesia’s many fires in recent decades has been 
especially noteworthy. But altogether they’ve been cataclysmic. In 1997, 
a dense haze of airborne particulates from Indonesia’s fires was 
perceptible as far as the Philippines and Thailand. That year, on 
Sumatra – centre of Indonesia’s fires – a commercial plane crashed due 
to poor visibility and killed all 234 aboard. The next day, two ships 
collided off the coast of Malaysia for the same reason, and 29 crew 
members died.

     The economist Maria Lo Bue found that Indonesians who were toddlers 
during the 1997 haze grew less tall, entered school six months later and 
completed almost a year less of education than their peers. Another 
economist, Seema Jayachandran, found that the fires “led to over 15,600 
child, infant and fetal deaths”, hitting the poor especially hard.

     Picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of 
tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate 
image is smoldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. 
The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing 
bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and 
you watch your daughter – short for her age – leave school a year early...
—
Books about fire typically end with prescriptions: we must invest in 
science, reclaim lost cultural knowledge, burn intentionally, build 
resiliently, and power our grids renewably. All that is true, surely. 
But given how complex fire is, and how unprecedented nearly everything 
we’re doing with it is, the best advice would seem to be: slow down. We 
have scrambled our landscape, changed our energy diet, altered the 
climate and revised our relationship to flame, all in a very short time. 
It’s not a surprise that fire, once a useful if obstinate companion to 
our species, has now slipped our grasp.

The world won’t burn up, as we sometimes imagine. But the fires of 
tomorrow will be different from those of yesterday, and we’re racing 
headlong into that unsettling future, burning tankfuls of gas as we go.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom.
https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/02/06/fires-around-the-world-have-grown-weirder/


/[  It's not easy examining green  ]/
*Climate change: Top companies exaggerating their progress - study*
By Georgina Rannard
BBC News
Feb 6, 2022

Many of the world's biggest companies are failing to meet their own 
targets on tackling climate change, according to a study of 25 corporations.

They also routinely exaggerate or misreport their progress, the New 
Climate Institute report says.

Google, Amazon, Ikea, Apple and Nestle are among those failing to change 
quickly enough, the study alleges.

Corporations are under pressure to cut their environmental impact as 
more consumers want green products.

Some of the companies told BBC News they disagreed with some of the 
methods used in the report and said they were committed to taking action 
to curb climate change.

The firms analysed account for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, 
the report says - which means although they have a huge carbon 
footprint, they have enormous potential to lead in the effort to limit 
climate change.

"The rapid acceleration of corporate climate pledges, combined with the 
fragmentation of approaches, means that it is more difficult than ever 
to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated," the 
study says.

Study author Thomas Day told BBC News his team originally wanted to 
discover good practices in the corporate world, but they were "frankly 
surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies' 
claims".
Amazon said in its statement: "We set these ambitious targets because we 
know that climate change is a serious problem, and action is needed now 
more than ever. As part of our goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, 
Amazon is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable 
energy by 2025."

And Nestle commented: "We welcome scrutiny of our actions and 
commitments on climate change. However, the New Climate Institute's 
Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor (CCRM) report lacks 
understanding of our approach and contains significant inaccuracies."

The Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor was conducted by non-profit 
organisations New Climate Institute and Carbon Market Watch...
- -
Companies set their own targets. For example, Google promises to be 
carbon-free by 2030, while Ikea pledges to be "climate-positive" by 2030.

Emissions are created by anything from transporting goods, to energy 
used in factories or shops. The carbon footprint of growing crops or 
cutting down trees also counts.

The study gave each firm an "integrity" rating. It found that some were 
doing relatively well in reducing emissions but that all corporations 
could improve. None was given a rating of "high integrity"...
- -
The way that businesses talk about their climate pledges is also a big 
problem, the study says. There is a large gap between what companies say 
and the reality, Mr Day says - and consumers are likely to find it 
difficult to determine the truth.

"Companies' ambitious-sounding headline claims all too often lack real 
substance," he explains. "Even companies that are doing relatively well 
exaggerate their actions."...
- -
Google told BBC News: "We clearly define the scope of our climate 
commitments and regularly report on our progress in our annual 
Environmental Report, where our energy and greenhouse gas emissions data 
is assured by Ernst & Young."

At the time of publication, Apple had not responded to a request for 
comment.

The Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor will continue to assess 
companies' pledges, releasing findings annually.

The full list of companies analysed is: Maersk, Apple, Sony, Vodafone, 
Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Enel, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Hitachi, Ikea, 
Vale, Volkswagen, Walmart, Accenture, BMW Group, Carrefour, CVS Health, 
Deutsche Post DHL, E.On SE, JBS, Nestle, Novartis, Saint-Gobain, Unilever./
/https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60248830?piano-modal/
/

/
/

/
/

/[  prefer the word 'aroma' ]/
*Climate change is altering the smell of snow*
Its scent is getting stronger as both the atmosphere and the land get 
warmer, researchers say

By Dawn Fallik
Feb 5, 2022
How would you describe the scent of winter?

Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas 
(flowers in bloom, beaches, decaying leaves), the current season is 
marked by the scent of nothing. Nothing’s growing. Nothing’s dying. It’s 
a kind of olfactory pause.

But snow has a scent, and researchers say that scent depends on what’s 
in the ground and the air. And as both the atmosphere and the land are 
getting warmer, the scent of snow is getting stronger.

Johan Lundstrom, a professor of clinical neuroscience who describes 
himself as a “smell researcher” at Monell Chemical Senses Center in 
Philadelphia, said because snow’s smell reflects the impurities in the 
air, the flakes in Wisconsin smell different from snow in Sweden, and 
from snow in a city.

*The scent of a season: Explaining the aromas of fall*
Lundstrom said that people notice smells more in the summer because the 
humid and warmer air intensifies odor molecules, in the same way perfume 
smells more intense and different on the skin than when it is sprayed in 
the air. But the cold and dry air of winter makes for a “poor odor 
environment.”

“It’s the same reason why the worst place to smell things is on a 
transcontinental airplane,” he said. “You have dry air, you have 
different air pressure, and it’s often colder than we would normally 
have in a room.”

The snow — particularly the top layer covering the ground — picks up 
compounds mostly from the air, Lundstrom said. As time passes, the snow 
absorbs more of those odor compounds, increasing the scent. And some 
molecules hit the nose harder than others.

“For example, decaying biological material creates the chemical geosmin, 
a chemical we are so sensitive to [it’s the odor of mold] so that if you 
take one drop and put that in an Olympic-size swimming pool and stir the 
water well, you can still smell the odor,” he said. “In other words, it 
often does not take much pollution for us being able to smell it.”

Climate change is affecting the way snow smells, said Parisa A. Ariya, a 
chemist and chair of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at 
McGill University. As the ground and air get warmer, that encourages the 
circulation — and intensity — of the odor molecules.

*Climate change is shrinking the odds of a white Christmas, this year 
included*

Climate change is also affecting the amount of snow that the United 
States receives. Nationally, the contiguous United States has warmed 1.7 
degrees since the 1901-1930 period, when climate normals were first 
calculated, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration. That means it’s getting wetter, but not snowier, with 80 
percent of weather stations seeing a decrease in snow, according to an 
Environmental Protection Agency analysis.

When snow falls, Ariya said, it’s “a snapshot of the atmospheric 
process.” In 2017, she helped conduct a study looking at how snow 
absorbs the pollution from gasoline engine exhaust, which could then 
contaminate the water and soil on the ground as it melts.

What’s on the ground gets pulled into the air, so a polluted area might 
see more trace metals in the snow, and an agricultural area might have 
more nitrogen [from fertilizer], Ariya said. Once the snow melts, some 
of that pollution is released into the soil, the water supply and back 
into the atmosphere. And the cycle begins again.

“The increases in temperature have been suggested to increase the 
toxicity of certain contaminants and enhance the chemical reaction rates 
and degradation processes,” Ariya said.

Deadly air pollutant ‘disproportionately and systematically’ harms 
Americans of color, study finds

The reason people often say they can “smell snow coming” is similar to 
differences in the air when a thunderstorm comes in during the summer, 
Lundstrom said. The air feels a little warmer, and gets more humid, 
which carries scent better, and there’s a change in the barometric pressure.

Lundstrom, who heads two research centers, one at Monell, another at the 
Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, 
said that snow in the city has an odor to it, whether it is exhaust from 
cars or the rubber from tires.

But when he goes to his cabin in Bjurstrask, which is about 60 miles 
from the Arctic Circle, it smells “extremely clean,” he said.

It’s not only snow that carries a scent, he said. Ice does as well. 
Think of old ice in the fridge — it smells odd and musty, as it has 
absorbed food odors. But ice can also carry fragrances that invoke happy 
memories.

When Lundstrom was 4 years old, growing up in Sweden, he would go ice 
fishing with his father and grandfather. He distinctly remembers the 
smell of the ice shavings as they drilled a hole for perch and pike.

“I would lie on a reindeer fur, and your face is right there next to the 
hole and you smell the shavings, and it smells like the lake,” he said, 
adding that it’s a sweet water lake, so ice smells fresh with a tinge of 
sea grass and sediment. “So every time I go back with my daughter and 
make a hole in the ice I’m right back, I’m 4-years-old lying on the 
reindeer fur trying to get fish. It’s a very positive emotion.”

Trying to explain what snow smells like is a challenge. When perfumer 
Christopher Brosius was creating the scent he called “Snow,” he was 
looking for a burst of something fresh and cold. Nothing really worked — 
until he talked to a friend about her first snow.

“She reminded me of a line from a French book, ‘Claudine at School,’ 
where she bites into a snowball and says ‘It always smells a little of 
dust, this first [snow]fall,’ ” Brosius, founder of the “CB I Hate 
Perfume” line, said. “So I had something that was earthy and wet and 
slightly green, but the thing missing was dust. That’s when I grabbed a 
bunch of bottles out of the archive and started creating.”

The result, which he created for his former perfume line Demeter, won 
awards for both male and female fragrance of the year in 2000. Brosius, 
who goes by “CB,” later created other snow iterations, including “Winter 
1972,” and “Walking in the Air,” each of them slightly different based 
on the place and time of the snowfall.

In 2018, he created an art installation based on the smell of snow for 
the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum based in New York. The 
project involved a room with a wool carpet below and pale blue balls of 
felted wool above, both of which were infused with a scent of snow. 
Compared with his other “snow” scents, he described this one as 
“fresher, wetter, more frozen and colder.”

“It was about that smell of snow when you put woolen mittens up to your 
face to keep your nose warm, with a bit of pine trees that were about 50 
to 75 yards away at the edge of a field,” CB said. “Some people said 
that it even smelled cold.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/02/05/snow-smell-climate-change/



/[ Conjecture: //"Think of it this way: in the Arctic, ice is drama, but 
permafrost is death." ////--  We cannot prevent this from happening, but 
with great effort, we can influence when it happens.  Extinction should 
always be pushed back to the furthest moment  ]/

*Melting of Ice Sheets Is Dramatic, But Melting of Permafrost Means Mass 
Death*
Alfred W. McCoy, TomDispatch
December 16, 2021

When midnight strikes on New Year’s Day of 2050, there will be little 
cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with 
fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But 
for most of humanity, it’ll just be another day of adversity bordering 
on misery — a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.

In the previous decades, storm surges will have swept away coastal 
barriers erected at enormous cost and rising seas will have flooded the 
downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people. 
Relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world, putting 
villages, towns, and cities at risk.

As several hundred million climate-change refugees in Africa, Latin 
America, and South Asia fill leaky boats or trudge overland in a 
desperate search for food and shelter, affluent nations worldwide will 
be trying to shut their borders even tighter, pushing crowds back with 
tear gas and gunfire. Yet those reluctant host countries, including the 
United States, won’t faintly be immune from the pain. Every summer, in 
fact, ever more powerful hurricanes, propelled by climate change, will 
pummel the East and Gulf Coasts of this country, possibly even forcing 
the federal government to abandon Miami and New Orleans to the rising 
tides. Meanwhile, wildfires, already growing in size in 2021, will 
devastate vast stretches of the West, destroying thousands upon 
thousands of homes every summer and fall in an ever-expanding fire season...

And keep in mind that I can write all this now because such future 
widespread suffering won’t be caused by some unforeseen disaster to come 
but by an all-too-obvious, painfully predictable imbalance in the basic 
elements that sustain human life — air, earth, fire, and water. As 
average world temperatures rise by as much as 2.3° Celsius (4.2° 
Farenheit) by mid-century, climate change will degrade the quality of 
life in every country on Earth.

*Climate Change in the 21st Century*
This dismal vision of life circa 2050 comes not from some flight of 
literary fantasy, but from published environmental science. Indeed, we 
can all see the troubling signs of global warming around us right now — 
worsening wildfires, ever more severe ocean storms, and increased 
coastal flooding.

While the world is focused on the fiery spectacle of wildfires 
destroying swaths of Australia, Brazil, California, and Canada, a far 
more serious threat is developing, only half-attended to, in the 
planet’s remote polar regions. Not only are the icecaps melting with 
frightening speed, already raising sea levels worldwide, but the vast 
Arctic permafrost is fast receding, releasing enormous stores of lethal 
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

At that frozen frontier far beyond our ken or consciousness, ecological 
changes, brewing largely invisibly deep beneath the Arctic tundra, will 
accelerate global warming in ways sure to inflict untold future misery 
on all of us. More than any other place or problem, the thawing of the 
Arctic’s frozen earth, which covers vast parts of the roof of the world, 
will shape humanity’s fate for the rest of this century — destroying 
cities, devastating nations, and rupturing the current global order.

If, as I’ve suggested in my new book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders 
and Catastrophic Change, Washington’s world system is likely to fade by 
2030, thanks to a mix of domestic decline and international rivalry, 
Beijing’s hypernationalist hegemony will, at best, have just a couple of 
decades of dominance before it, too, suffers the calamitous consequences 
of unchecked global warming. By 2050, as the seas submerge some of its 
major cities and heat begins to ravage its agricultural heartland, China 
will have no choice but to abandon whatever sort of global system it 
might have constructed. And so, as we peer dimly into the potentially 
catastrophic decades beyond 2050, the international community will have 
good reason to forge a new kind of world order unlike any that has come 
before.

*The Impact of Global Warming at Midcentury*
In assessing the likely course of climate change by 2050, one question 
is paramount: How quickly will we feel its impact?

For decades, scientists thought that climate change would arrive at what 
science writer Eugene Linden called a “stately pace.” In 1975, the U.S. 
National Academies of Sciences still felt that it would “take centuries 
for the climate to change in a meaningful way.” As late as 1990, the 
U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that 
the Arctic permafrost, which stores both staggering amounts of carbon 
dioxide (CO2) and methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, was 
not yet melting and that the Antarctic ice sheets remained stable. In 
1993, however, scientists began studying ice cores extracted from 
Greenland’s ice cap and found that there had been 25 “rapid climate 
change events” in the last glacial period thousands of years ago, 
showing that the “climate could change massively within a decade or two.”

Driven by a growing scientific consensus about the dangers facing 
humanity, representatives of 196 states met in 2015 in Paris, where they 
agreed to commit themselves to a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas 
emissions by 2030 and achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050 to limit 
global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This, they argued, 
would be sufficient to avoid the disastrous impacts sure to come at 
2.0°C degrees or higher.

However, the bright hopes of that Paris conference faded quickly. Within 
three years, the scientific community realized that the cascading 
effects of global warming reaching 1.5°C above preindustrial levels 
would be evident not in the distant future of 2100, but perhaps by 2040, 
impacting most adults alive today.

The medium-term effects of climate change will only be amplified by the 
uneven way the planet is warming, with a far heavier impact in the 
Arctic. According to a Washington Post analysis, by 2018 the world 
already had “hot spots” that had recorded an average rise of 2.0°C above 
the preindustrial norm. As the sun strikes tropical latitudes, huge 
columns of warm air rise and then are pushed toward the poles by 
greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere, until they drop down to 
earth at higher latitudes, creating spots with faster-rising 
temperatures in the Middle East, Western Europe, and, above all, the Arctic.

In a 2018 IPCC “doomsday report,” its scientists warned that even at 
just 1.5°C, temperature increases would be unevenly distributed globally 
and could possibly reach a devastating 4.5°C in the Arctic’s high 
altitudes, with profound consequences for the entire planet.

*Climate-Change Cataclysm*
Recent scientific research has found that, by 2050, the key drivers of 
major climate change will be feedback loops at both ends of the 
temperature spectrum. At the hotter end, in Africa, Australia, and the 
Amazon, warmer temperatures will spark ever more devastating forest 
fires, reducing tree cover, and releasing vast amounts of carbon into 
the atmosphere. This, in turn (as is already happening), will fuel yet 
more fires and so create a monstrous self-reinforcing feedback loop that 
could decimate the great tropical rainforests of this planet.

The even more serious and uncontrollable driver, however, will be in the 
planet’s polar regions. There, an Arctic feedback loop is already 
gaining a self-sustaining momentum that could soon move beyond 
humanity’s capacity to control it. By midcentury (or before), as ice 
sheets continue to melt disastrously in Greenland and Antarctica, rising 
oceans will make extreme sea-level events, like once-in-a-century storm 
surges and flooding, annual occurrences in many areas. If global warming 
grows beyond the maximum 2°C target set by the Paris Agreement, 
depending on what happens to Antarctica’s ice sheets, ocean levels could 
increase by a staggering 43 inches as this century ends.

In fact, a “worst-case scenario” by the National Academies of Sciences 
projects a sea-level rise of as much as 20 inches by 2050 and 78 inches 
in 2100, with a “catastrophic” loss of 690,000 square miles of land, an 
expanse four times the size of California, displacing about 2.5% of the 
world’s population and inundating major cities like New York. Adding to 
such concerns, a recent study in Nature predicted that, by 2060, rain 
rather than snow could dominate parts of the Arctic, further 
accelerating ice loss and raising sea levels significantly. Moving that 
doomsday ever closer, recent satellite imagery reveals that the ice 
shelf holding back Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier could “shatter 
within three to five years,” quickly breaking that Florida-sized frozen 
mass into hundreds of icebergs and eventually resulting “in several feet 
of sea level rise” on its own.

Think of it this way: in the Arctic, ice is drama, but permafrost is 
death. The spectacle of melting polar ice sheets cascading into ocean 
waters is dramatic indeed. True mass death, however, lies in the murky, 
mysterious permafrost. That sloppy stew of decayed matter and frozen 
water from ice ages past covers 730,000 square miles of the Northern 
Hemisphere, can reach 2,300 feet below ground, and holds enough 
potentially releasable carbon and methane to melt the poles and inundate 
densely populated coastal plains worldwide. In turn, such emissions 
would only raise Arctic temperatures further, melt more permafrost (and 
ice), and so on, year after year after year. We’re talking, in other 
words, about a potentially devastating feedback loop that could increase 
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beyond the planet’s capacity to 
compensate.

According to a 2019 report in Nature, the vast zone of frozen earth that 
covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is a sprawling 
storehouse for about 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon — twice the 
amount already in the atmosphere. Current models “assume that permafrost 
thaws gradually from the surface downwards,” slowly releasing methane 
and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But frozen soil also “physically 
holds the landscape together” and so its thawing can rip the surface 
open erratically, exposing ever-larger areas to the sun.

Around the Arctic Circle, there is already dramatic physical evidence of 
rapid change. Amid the vast permafrost that covers nearly two-thirds of 
Russia, one small Siberian town had temperatures that reached a historic 
100 degrees Farenheit in June 2020, the highest ever recorded above the 
Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, several peninsulas on the Arctic Sea have 
experienced methane eruptions that have produced craters up to 100 feet 
deep. Since rapid thawing releases more methane than gradual melting 
does and methane has 25 times more heating power than CO2, the “impacts 
of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate,” suggests that 2019 report in 
Nature, “could be twice that expected from current models.”

To add a dangerous wild card to such an already staggering panorama of 
potential destruction, about 700,000 square miles of Siberia also 
contain a form of methane-rich permafrost called yedoma, which forms a 
layer of ice 30 to 260 feet deep. As rising temperatures melt that icy 
permafrost, expanding lakes (which now cover 30% of Siberia) will serve 
as even greater conduits for the release of such methane, which will 
bubble up from their melting bottoms to escape into the atmosphere.

*New World Order?*
Given the clear failure of the current world system to cope with climate 
change, the international community will, by mid-century, need to find 
new forms of collaboration to contain the damage. After all, the 
countries at the recent U.N. climate summit at Glasgow couldn’t even 
agree to “phase out” coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Instead, in 
their final “outcome document,” they opted for the phrase “phase down” — 
capitulating to China, which has no plans to even start reducing its 
coal combustion until 2025, and India, which recently postponed its goal 
of achieving net-carbon neutrality until an almost unimaginably distant 
2070. Since those two countries account for 37% of all greenhouse gases 
now being released into the atmosphere, their procrastination courts 
climate disaster for humanity.

Who knows what new forms of global governance and cooperation will come 
into being in the years ahead, but simply to focus on an old one, here’s 
a possibility: to exercise effective sovereignty over the global 
commons, perhaps a genuinely reinforced United Nations could reform 
itself in major ways, including making the Security Council an elective 
body with no permanent members and ending the great-power prerogative of 
unilateral vetoes. Such a reformed and potentially more powerful 
organization could then agree to cede sovereignty over a few narrow yet 
critical areas of governance to protect the most fundamental of all 
human rights: survival.

Just as the Security Council can (at least theoretically) now punish a 
nation that crosses international borders, so a future U.N. could 
sanction in potentially meaningful ways a state that continued to 
release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or refused to receive 
climate-change refugees. To save that human tide, estimated at between 
200 million and 1.2 billion people by mid-century, some U.N. high 
commissioner would need the authority to enforce the mandatory 
resettlement of at least some of them. Moreover, the current voluntary 
transfer of climate reconstruction funds from the prosperous temperate 
zone to the poor tropics would need to become mandatory as well.

No one can predict with any certainty whether reforms like these and the 
power to change national behavior that would come with them will arrive 
in time to cap emissions and slow climate change, or too late (if at 
all) to do anything but manage a series of increasingly uncontrollable 
feedback loops. Yet without such change, the current world order will 
almost certainly collapse into catastrophic global disorder with dire 
consequences for all of us.

/Alfred W. McCoy//
//Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington chair in history at the University 
of Wisconsin-Madison. His 2009 book, Policing America’s Empire, won the 
Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies./

https://truthout.org/articles/melting-of-ice-sheets-is-dramatic-but-melting-of-permafrost-means-mass-death/



/[ Let me share a quiet room with friend or professional and just talk 
..  or drink coffee and read the NYT - clips from article]/
*Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room*
Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would 
suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone.
By Ellen Barry - Feb. 6, 2022
PORTLAND, Ore. — It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader 
Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.

Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in 
layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a 
landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of 
her children.

She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she 
had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old 
who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were 
slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.

In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down 
a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass 
extinction. Then she would stare into the dark.
It was for this reason that, around six months ago, she searched 
“climate anxiety” and pulled up the name of Thomas J. Doherty, a 
Portland psychologist who specializes in climate.

A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of 
psychology at the University of Wooster, published a paper proposing a 
new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful 
psychological impact — not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, 
but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the 
notion was seen as speculative...
- -
Recent research has left little doubt that this is happening. A 
10-country survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 published last month in 
The Lancet found startling rates of pessimism. Forty-five percent of 
respondents said worry about climate negatively affected their daily 
life. Three-quarters said they believed “the future is frightening,” and 
56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”

The blow to young people’s confidence appears to be more profound than 
with previous threats, such as nuclear war, Dr. Clayton said. “We’ve 
definitely faced big problems before, but climate change is described as 
an existential threat,” she said. “It undermines people’s sense of 
security in a basic way.”...
- -
Sometimes, though, she’s not sure that relief is what she wants. 
Following the news about the climate feels like an obligation, a burden 
she is meant to carry, at least until she is confident that elected 
officials are taking action.

Her goal is not to be released from her fears about the warming planet, 
or paralyzed by them, but something in between: She compares it to 
someone with a fear of flying, who learns to manage their fear well 
enough to fly.

“On a very personal level,” she said, “the small victory is not thinking 
about this all the time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/health/climate-anxiety-therapy.html

- -

/[ Find a climate-aware therapist near you ]/
* Climate-Aware Therapist Directory*
We are in the beginning stages of recruiting a widespread network of 
climate-aware therapists across the continent. In the near future, we 
envision growing (and training) an expansive network of mental health 
professionals ready to support clients across North America with the 
mental health impacts of climate change.
https://www.climatepsychology.us/climate-therapists



/[  Look again at Don't Look Up  - a long essay look ] /
*“Don’t Look Up!” — A Philosophical Reflection*
What is the Good Life?
Brandon Tumblin
Jan 27. 2022
What would you do if you had a couple of days left to live? Such a 
question can immediately stop you in your tracks and force you to 
contemplate what matters to you and, equally important, what does not. 
Such is the fundamental question behind the latest Netflix movie, Don’t 
Look Up! I’ve heard many say that they didn’t enjoy this movie. It’s a 
profound statement because, in some lights, I didn’t “enjoy” it either. 
I found it very deep and thought-provoking, but it was far from 
pleasant. Indeed, this would never be cause for avoidance for a Stoic. 
Therefore, what lessons can we take from this movie?
*What Is The Good Life?*
First, it is worth explaining what can constitute a good life. Broadly 
speaking, philosophy as a way of life moves you towards something better 
and away from something worse. Different philosophies have different 
ways of achieving this “better” life, but generally, they agree on what 
it means.
The Greeks used the word eudaemonia to describe what constituted a good 
life. Modern interpretations include happiness or flourishing; I prefer 
to use the term meaningful. I believe a meaningful life in which the 
suffering inherent to life ceases to be relevant is ultimately what 
eudaemonia was to the Greeks. Stoicism and Epicureanism both think this 
to be the goal in life, though they disagree on how to get there.
The Epicureans believed that pleasure was the principal goal of life, 
while the Stoics believed that only good moral character could lead you 
to eudaemonia. Epicureanism values friendship, learning, and other 
pleasures (though in moderation) and discourages political involvement. 
Stoicism urges you to do the right thing, even though it may not be 
pleasant for you; what’s good for the world may not be suitable for you 
individually. It doesn’t discourage friendship, learning, or pleasure 
but seeks to use these externals in a way to cultivate a good character 
and make the world a better place.
The point is that though many agree on what the ideal future feels like, 
they may disagree on the best way to get there. However, when we 
consider the question of “what it means to live,” there do seem to be 
significant similarities between what is valuable.

My conversation with Dr. Jeremy Sherman on the Strong Stoic Podcast 
revealed: organisms adapt to fit their environments, and humans must fit 
three environments. You must feel good in your skin, you must fit in 
with those around you, and you must be aligned with reality itself. A 
way of life that doesn’t consider these three environments important 
will undoubtedly result in unnecessary suffering.
Interestingly enough, this is reflected well in Stoicism, which places a 
significant emphasis on balancing your requirements with the world and 
keeping that aligned with truth. The maxim “live according to nature” 
can be dissected down into “live according to your nature,” “live 
according to the shared nature of humanity,” and “live according to 
Mother Nature.”
What it means to live can be understood as adopting responsibility that 
allows you to be happy with who you are. By having a harmonious 
relationship with people around you (often including close friends and 
family), and pursuing truth so that reality doesn’t pull the rug out 
from under your feet.
*Don’t Look Up!*
With an understanding of what philosophy, particularly Stoicism, would 
say in response to the question of “what it means to live,” let’s have a 
look at the theme of Don’t Look Up! I’ll provide a summary of the plot. 
Still, first I’m obliged to alert you to potential spoilers. Read on at 
your own risk.
*Plot Summary*
A team of astrologists discovers an incoming comet destined to destroy 
the earth if humanity doesn’t do anything about it. They try to alert 
the president of the USA, but she is so preoccupied with polls and 
election results that she pays no heed. They then turn to major media 
outlets and find a similar reaction — all they care about is their 
numbers. Eventually, they make a plan to destroy the comet but change 
their minds at the last minute when the CEO of a significant company 
discovers that there are precious metals in the meteor and that they’d 
make a lot of profit if they extracted such metals.

Soon enough, the comet is visible. Humanity can see it coming. However, 
the president says to the citizens, “don’t look up! They are trying to 
scare you!” In the meantime, the scientists are working hard to find 
another solution, but they ultimately lose hope when the president’s 
plan fails. At this point, destruction is imminent. Aware of their 
demise, they decide to spend their last night with their family. They 
went grocery shopping while discussing the little things — the 
difference in quality between wild-caught salmon and farmed salmon, for 
example. They have a beautiful dinner with friends and family while 
discussing more of the little things — on being very particular on the 
way to prep one’s coffee, for example — right up until the comet strikes 
the earth and kills everyone.
*A Caveat*
I must first state that things change slightly when death is imminent. 
Many philosophies assume a future, so it’s not an entirely accurate 
perspective that translates to everyday life. However, that in no way 
means that lessons can’t be extracted from the exercise. The Stoics use 
the thought of imminent death as a catalyst to live a good life.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s 
left and live it properly.”Marcus
Aurelius
*If You Had One Day to Live*
Let’s get back to the question that started this article: what would you 
do if you had one day to live? Like the family in Don’t Look Up!, you 
would probably want to spend your remaining hours with those who you 
love. However, you likely would not want to do anything extravagant, 
like sky-diving or visiting the Grand Canyon. No, you’d probably want to 
do the things you do every day with the people you love — grocery 
shopping, cooking, sharing a meal, hugging, talking about memories, and 
the little things in life.

What is truly fascinating to me is that we come to regard many of these 
things in life as tasks. We don’t get excited about going to the grocery 
store; we consider it a chore. We aren’t thrilled by the idea of cooking 
dinner with our family; we would rather order take-out. It really does 
seem to be the case that the things that really matter in life are those 
very things that we get the opportunity to do every single day.
Every day of your life, you get the opportunity to be present in 
whatever you are doing. You get to grind fresh coffee beans and enjoy a 
cup of Joe. You get to kiss your partner when you return from work. You 
get to comment on little things like the difference between wild-caught 
salmon and farmed salmon. Every. Single. Day.
Understand that it’s not so much achieving the goal that really makes 
life worthwhile — it’s being present in each and every moment on the 
road to achieving that goal.
*What About Success and Goals?*
Success is important. Goals are important. Self-improvement is 
undeniably important, not only philosophically but psychologically. 
However, understand that this isn’t in disagreement with the lesson 
above. Understand that it’s not so much achieving the goal that makes 
life worthwhile — it’s being present in every moment on the road to 
achieving that goal. You can have as many plans as you want while also 
being present along the way.
*Closing Remarks*
I’ll end with a short Charlie Brown story. There’s a scene where Charlie 
Brown and Snoopy are staring out over the water while seated on a pier. 
Charlie Brown says, “one day, we will die Snoopy.”
And Snoopy replies, “Yes, but every other day we will live….”
https://medium.com/perennial/dont-look-up-a-philosophical-reflection-68ffc451186b//


/[The news archive - looking back  to an active day ]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 7, 2007*
February 7, 2007:

-- Air America host Betsy Rosenberg and Competitive Enterprise Institute 
representative Chris Horner discuss the recently released 4th IPCC 
report on the Fox News Channel program "Hannity and Colmes."

http://youtu.be/5k267NdmiFY

-- The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation 
holds a hearing on climate change research and scientific integrity, 
focusing on the George W. Bush administration's slicing and dicing of 
science and data. White House whistleblower Rick Piltz and Nobel 
laureate Sherwood Rowland testify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vXi61G0MU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYDQD8AeORA

http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/02/07/senate-fireworks-on-climate-an/

http://scienceblogs.com/integrityofscience/2007/02/07/administration-testimony-one-o/

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/01/31/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-john-kerry-about-climate-change-and-the-bush-white-house/

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/06/03/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-lautenberg/


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


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