[✔️] February 15, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Feb 15 08:18:06 EST 2022

/*February 15, 2022*/

/[ no water out West ]/
*Southwest drought is the most extreme in 1,200 years, study finds*
The past 22 years rank as the driest period since at least 800 A.D.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/02/14/southwest-megadrought-worst-1200-years/

- -

/[ from the Journal nature climate change ]/
*Rapid intensification of the emerging southwestern North American mega 
drought in 2020–2021*
A. Park Williams, Benjamin I. Cook & Jason E. Smerdon
Nature Climate Change (2022)Cite this article
Published: 14 February 2022

*Abstract*
A previous reconstruction back to 800 CE indicated that the 2000–2018 
soil moisture deficit in southwestern North America was exceeded during 
one megadrought in the late-1500s. Here, we show that after exceptional 
drought severity in 2021, ~19% of which is attributable to anthropogenic 
climate trends, 2000–2021 was the driest 22-yr period since at least 
800. This drought will very likely persist through 2022, matching the 
duration of the late-1500s megadrought.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z

[ gravity rules ]
*Another home along the Outer Banks crumbles into the Atlantic*
Earlier this month, a beachfront home collapsed into the ocean, 
spreading debris as far as seven miles away. This is the third home to 
fall into the Atlantic Ocean and officials say weather is only part of 
the reason for these collapses.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/climate/outer-banks-home-crumbles-into-the-atlantic-ocean/1140981 

/[ forthcoming ]/
*Scientists and governments meet to finalise UN report on 'nightmare' 
impacts of global warming*
By Seth Borenstein and Frank Jordans  with APTN  - -  2/14/2022
Scientists and governments met on Monday to finalise a major UN report 
on how global warming disrupts people's lives, their natural environment 
and the Earth itself.

Don’t expect a flowery valentine to the planet. An activist group has 
instead predicted, “a nightmare painted in the dry language of science.”

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a 
collection of hundreds of the world’s top scientists, issues three huge 
reports on climate change every five to seven years. The latest update, 
which won't be finished until the end of February, will explain how 
climate change already affects humans and the planet, what to expect in 
the future, and the risks and benefits of adapting to a warmer world...
- -
“The forthcoming IPCC report will confirm what we already know about the 
crushing toll of heatwaves, drought, floods, storms, wildfires and ocean 
acidification for people and critical ecosystems," said Rachel Cleetus 
of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This comprehensive scientific assessment will underscore how much worse 
the climate crisis is likely to get if we fail to take bold global 
action.”...
- -
“You need not just incremental change,” she said at a United Nations 
Foundation briefing last week. “You need systemic change.”
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/14/scientists-and-governments-meet-to-finalise-un-report-on-nightmare-impacts-of-global-warmi

/[  A new view of psychoanalysis - resonates strongly now. (Thanks 
W.G.!)   ] /
*THINKING CATASTROPHIC THOUGHTS: A TRAUMATIZED SENSIBILITY ON A HOTTER 
PLANET*
Susan Kassouf
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2022)Cite this article
14 February 2022

*Abstract*
While catastrophizing has traditionally been pathologized within 
psychoanalytic traditions, in this paper I suggest that cataclysmic 
realities of climate change call upon all of us to cultivate 
catastrophic thinking. Our new climatic normal demands of us not only 
new concepts and language, but also a new sort of thinking, building on 
Wilfred Bion’s ideas that to think is to use our mind’s capacity to be 
in touch with internal and external realities. I suggest that sometimes 
people are able to learn from their experiences of trauma in ways that 
disrupt the culturally dominant anenvironmental orientation, that is, an 
orientation that brackets out the more-than-human environment. Instead, 
they develop a capacity to think catastrophically about and to be 
permeable to the more-than-human environment. What I call their 
“traumatized sensibility” can offer guidance as we come to co-exist with 
and respond more consciously to our hotter planet.

Catastrophize: to imagine the worst possible outcome of an action or 
event: to think about a situation or event as being a catastrophe or 
having a potentially catastrophic outcome.—Merriam Webster Dictionary

Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more 
dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I 
lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.

—William Vollmann, Carbon Ideologies

The phrase “catastrophic thinking” was first articulated in 1962 
(Ellis), and its meaning has not changed much since. Those who indulge 
are busy turning molehills into mountains, afflicted with premature, 
disproportionate or paranoid panic. A quick internet search finds the 
term, among other places, used clinically to describe symptoms (see 
Psychology Today online or the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing 
Archive) or colloquially to admonish and insult. In other words, should 
you find yourself overreacting in this manner, knock it off. And indeed, 
Psychology Today offers a helpful on-line posting about how to do 
exactly that: “5 Ways to Stop Catastrophizing” (Bonoir, 2016).

This paper is an invitation not to stop but to start catastrophizing. In 
terms of anthropogenic climate change, “it is worse, much worse, than 
you think,” as David Wallace-Wells reminds us in The Uninhabitable Earth 
(Wallace, 2019, p. 3). These cataclysmic realities, which include the 
zoonotic corona virus, call upon us to develop our capacities to think 
catastrophically, a call that psychoanalysis is poised to help us 
answer. Our new climatic normal demands of us not only new concepts and 
language (see, for example, Albrecht, 2020), but also a new sort of 
thinking, building on Wilfred Bion’s ideas that to think is to use our 
mind’s capacity to be in touch with internal and external realities 
(1957, p. 271).

In “The Psycho-Analytic Study of Thinking,” Bion (1962) builds on 
Freud’s (1911) “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental 
Functioning,” to describe his ideas about thinking as relates to 
frustration. Tolerance of frustration leads to its modification, that 
is, a thought and the development of an apparatus for thinking. 
Intolerance of frustration leads to the evasion of thought, often by 
destructive attacks. Bion, like Freud, explores frustration using the 
context of the mother-infant dyad and the infant’s experience of breast 
or no-breast: “If the capacity for toleration of frustration is 
sufficient the ‘no-breast’ inside becomes a thought, and an apparatus 
for ‘thinking’ it develops” (Bion, 1962, p. 307). Although both Freud 
and Bion developed these psychoanalytic theories about thinking at 
different moments in the climatically stable 20th century, their 
theories share a historical indebtedness to the idea of a bourgeois, 
nuclear family and the primacy of the mother-infant bond.

Extending these theories beyond their historical context and focus on 
the mother-infant bond to the more-than-human environment may illuminate 
ways to engage with anthropogenic climate change. Such an extension 
seems in keeping with Freud’s own interest in the “relation of neurotics 
and of mankind in general to reality” and his desire to bring “the 
psychological significance of the real external world into the structure 
of our theories” (Freud, 1911, p. 218). At present, the real external 
world confronts us—not with frustration or no-breast—but with a sixth 
extinction, a catastrophe—not no mother, but possibly no human species. 
Recall the etymology of catastrophe: “Katastrophé, a lit overturning 
(kata, down) hence a fig upsetting, hence a conclusion, esp. in drama, 
of a tragedy, hence ruin, a great misfortune” (Partridge, 1958, p. 673).

In our waning era of petromodernity, most of us are, to differing 
degrees, witnessing participants in an overturning of those climate 
systems that made earth habitable for much of life as we know it. Can we 
overturn our thinking in response? I suggest that developing our 
capacity to think catastrophic thoughts may allow us to make meaningful 
contact with these evolving realities, enabling us to translate thought 
into long overdue action and make change in the world. (Bion, 1962, p. 
309; see also Freud, 1911, pp. 219 and 221).

Many analytically-minded people working in this area are leading the way 
in showing how psychoanalysis can aid our understanding of dynamics 
around, for example, denial, dissociation, and narcissism (see for 
example Allured, 2018; Gentile, 2020; Lifton, 2017; Orange, 2016; and 
Weintrobe, 2012). And many beyond psychoanalysis grappling with 
ecological breakdown point to a need for a new kind of thinking, such as 
Stacey Alaimo’s consideration of “exposure” (2016), Jem Bendell’s ideas 
of “deep adaptation” (2018) and Timothy Morton’s ingenious 
“hyperobjects” (2013). Morton in his Dark Ecology (2016), which uses 
some permutation of “think” over 200 times in a book with far fewer 
pages, moves in a similar vein, trying to distinguish between Easy Think 
and Difficult Think.

I draw upon many of these ideas and others, such as Thomas Ogden’s 
description of “transformative thinking” (Ogden, 2010, p. 320), in order 
to explore some of the following cultural and clinical questions. What 
might we learn from people who are thinking catastrophically, in other 
words from those who are deeply open to what is happening on our planet? 
Or, what might we learn from those moments when people open themselves 
up to it? What enables some to disrupt a still prevailing 
“anenvironmental” orientation, that is, an orientation that brackets out 
the more-than-human environment?2 How do some adopt a sensibility 
permeable to the more-than-human environment and our traumatizing reality?

Asking these questions invites us to revisit and re-contextualize our 
ideas about trauma, one of the conflicted cornerstones of psychoanalysis 
(Herman, 1992; Woodbury, 2019). As Zhiwa Woodbury points out in his 
discussion of what he calls Climate Trauma, at present “we lack the 
necessary psychological framework for understanding the dynamics of this 
[climate] crisis” (Woodbury, 2019, p. 3). My own enactments of an 
anenvironmental orientation during my training as well as a hesitance to 
think catastrophically as an analyst brought this lack home to me in the 
form of clinical moments I did not explore. Despite these missed 
opportunities, I have found in my own practice as well as in 
interactions with dedicated colleagues working in this area that some 
are able to learn from their usually early experiences of interpersonal 
trauma in ways that translate to a capacity to think catastrophically 
about the more-than-human environment. What I call their “traumatized 
sensibility” can offer guidance as we come to co-exist more consciously 
with evolving and dangerous external realities...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s11231-022-09340-3#Sec2

/[  wild-fire-fighters ]/
*Citing hostile work environment, firefighters resign from county fire 
crew in Colorado*
Bill Gabbert   - - February 13, 2022
Citing hostile work environment, firefighters resign from county fire 
crew in Colorado
A tweet posted on the crew’s account said 18 volunteers “mass resigned”
https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/02/13/citing-hostile-work-environment-firefighters-resign-from-county-fire-crew-in-colorado/

/[   Dry way out west  ] /
*How Bad Is the Western Drought? Worst in 12 Centuries, Study Finds.
*Fueled by climate change, the drought that started in 2000 is now the 
driest two decades since 800 A.D.
FEB 14 2022
ALBUQUERQUE — The megadrought in the American Southwest has become so 
severe that it’s now the driest two decades in the region in at least 
1,200 years, scientists said Monday, and climate change is largely 
responsible.

The drought, which began in 2000 and has reduced water supplies, 
devastated farmers and ranchers and helped fuel wildfires across the 
region, had previously been considered the worst in 500 years, according 
to the researchers.

But exceptional conditions in the summer of 2021, when about two-thirds 
of the West was in extreme drought, “really pushed it over the top,” 
said A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of 
California, Los Angeles, who led an analysis using tree ring data to 
gauge drought. As a result, 2000-21 is the driest 22-year period since 
800 A.D., which is as far back as the data goes.

The analysis also showed that human-caused warming played a major role 
in making the current drought so extreme.
- -
“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to 
anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years,” she added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/climate/western-drought-megadrought.html

/[  Ice cream invention will save energy ] /
*The Keurig of ice cream is heating up fast*
Billerica-based ColdSnap raises $27 million in funding and plans to 
launch commercial sales of its make-them-at-home frozen treat machine.
By Annie Probert Globe Correspondent
- -
The ColdSnap system also aims to disrupt the ice cream industry’s 
standard cold chain. Manufacturing and shipping ice cream typically 
requires keeping it frozen at all times, an expensive and 
environmentally taxing process. But a machine that freezes pods 
on-demand changes the equation.

“By eliminating all the freezing, we save tons of money, tons of energy, 
and we are able to reduce the carbon emissions associated with making 
ice cream by 35 to 75 percent,” said Fonte..

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/02/14/business/keurig-ice-cream-is-heating-up-fast/?s_campaign=breakingnews:newsletter 

/[  brief video on doubt and disinformation - 10 years old ]/
*DOUBT*
Jan 10, 2012
Climate Reality
Join us and stand up for reality. http://climaterealityproject.org - 
This film exposes the parallels between Big Tobacco's denial of 
smoking's cancer-causing effects and the campaign against the science of 
climate change — showing that not only are the same strategies of denial 
at work, but often even the same strategists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDacrl1aSA/
/

/
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/[  chill the waters before planting  ]/
*Flourishing plants show warming Antarctica undergoing ‘major change’*
Dramatic spread of native plants over past decade is evidence of 
accelerating shifts in fragile polar ecosystem, study finds..
Phoebe Weston  - -14 Feb 2022
- -
The plants are adapted to a very short growing season and are able to 
photosynthesise in snowy conditions with air temperatures below 0C. 
Despite being able to reproduce quickly and in harsh climatic 
conditions, they are not good at competing with other non-native plants. 
Although warming may benefit some native species in isolation, it 
greatly increases the risk of the establishment of non-native species 
that could outcompete native species and trigger irreversible wildlife 
loss, researchers warn...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/14/flourishing-plants-show-warming-antarctica-undergoing-major-change-aoe
//

/
/

//

/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 15, 2010*
In the Boston Globe, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel writes:

    "With all the interest in alleged misdeeds of the Intergovernmental
    Panel on Climate Change and hacked email exchanges among climate
    scientists, it is easy to lose track of the compelling strands of
    scientific evidence that have led almost all climate scientists to
    conclude that mankind is altering climate in potentially dangerous
    ways...A few essential points are undisputed among climate
    scientists. First, the surface temperature of the Earth is roughly
    60 F higher than it would otherwise be thanks to a few greenhouse
    gasses that collectively make up only about 3 percent of the mass of
    our atmosphere.

    "Second, the concentrations of the two most important long-lived
    greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, have been increasing
    since the dawn of the industrial era; carbon dioxide alone has
    increased by about 40 percent. These increases have been brought
    about by fossil fuel combustion and changes in land use.

    "Third, in the absence of any feedbacks except for temperature
    itself, doubling carbon dioxide would increase the global average
    surface temperature by about 1.8 F. And fourth, global temperatures
    have been rising for roughly the past century and have so far
    increased by about 1.4 F. The rate of rise of surface temperature is
    consistent with predictions of human-caused global warming that date
    back to the 19th century and is larger than any natural change we
    have been able to discern for at least the past 1,000 years."

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/02/15/climate_changes_are_proven_fact/ 

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