[✔️] February 19, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February  19, 2022*/

/[ As California goes, so goes the nation -- at least in cars  ]/
*Biden will allow California to set climate limits on cars. The move 
could influence the rest of the country.*
The Golden State — which has long dealt with smoggy skies — often sets 
environmental policy other states eventually follow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/02/17/biden-california-cars-climate-change/



/[  make every drop count - very serious condition   ]/
*Expecting the Western Drought to End Soon? Not Likely, Forecasters Say.*
Despite some wet weather last fall, warm and dry conditions have settled 
in and are expected to continue through spring and beyond, according to 
a new assessment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/climate/noaa-weather-western-drought.html



/[  assert, influence and change ]/
*Student climate activists from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and 
Vanderbilt file legal complaints to compel divestment*
For years, they tried to convince universities that investing in fossil 
fuels was immoral. Now they’re telling them it’s illegal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/16/college-fossil-fuel-divest-legal-action/ 


- -

/[ news release on the filling ]/
*PRESS RELEASE: Divestment campaigns at Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, 
and Vanderbilt file legal complaints against fossil fuel investments*
Complaints claim failure to divest violates the Uniform Prudent 
Management of Institutional Funds Act
https://fossilfree5.org/services/



/[ Making money directly with electricity defines carbon capitalism   ] /
*Bitcoin miners revived a dying coal plant – then CO2 emissions soared*
The Hardin coal plant in southern Montana was on the brink of closing 
when Marathon, a bitcoin ‘mining’ company bought it, and it roared back 
to life...
- -
Critics say the enormous electricity consumption needed to sustain 
cryptocurrency is fueling the climate crisis and now threatens a partial 
resurrection of coal in the US...
- -
As the bitcoin miners moved in last year, Hardin roared back to life. In 
the first nine months of 2021 alone, the plant’s boilers fired up on 236 
separate days. Planet-heating emissions from the burning of Hardin’s 
coal soared too, with 187,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted in the 
second quarter of last year, more than 5000% more than was expelled in 
the same period in 2020...
- -
This race for bitcoin wealth gobbles up an enormous amount of 
electricity – around 0.5% of total global consumption. The energy used 
to mine bitcoin every 60 seconds would be enough to power the average 
American household for 17 years, while the annual electricity 
consumption for mining would be able to power all kettles used to boil 
water for tea in the UK for 28 years...
- -
It remains to be seen if bitcoin will make a significant move away from 
fossil fuels, but in the meantime it will likely come under increasing 
scrutiny over its appetite for fossil fuel-powered electricity. “We 
simply don’t know how emissions from bitcoin mining will look in five to 
10 years,” said Jones, the University of New Mexico professor. “It seems 
likely, though, it will to continue to be a major consumer of energy 
going forward.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared


/[  "their goal is to have you do nothing" -  library hosted this 
excellent talk on the current situation  1:25  video ]/
*The Big Mess: Climate Change*
Jan 21, 2022
Saratoga Library
Major forces are in play that are endangering the natural world as we 
know it. At the top of the list are the movement of organisms around the 
planet, and, the biggest of them all, climate change. Both problems are 
exacerbated by our relentlessly increasing human population. The 
speaker, Al Hicks, a retired wildlife biologist with the New York State 
Department of Environmental Conservation, spent much of his career 
dealing with the consequences of the first, especially as it relates to 
bats,and the disease white nose syndrome, and he will speak about those 
efforts. He will also discuss the work of researchers that have been 
raising the alarm about climate change for decades but, thanks to the 
ceaseless actions of powerful interests, almost nothing has been done. 
Our window for addressing climate change is rapidly closing, and we 
cannot depend on the better angels of our elected officials alone to 
counter the tide, and prevent a dismal future for our children. Whatever 
good that comes out of the next few years will determine the future of 
this planet. That good will depend on you.
Co-sponsored by the Adirondack Mountain Club. #ADK #AdirondackMountainClub
Recorded January 19, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEWnGwAoNo



/[  Call is a Meta mistake, a Meta mess,     ] /
*Facebook whistleblower alleges executives misled investors about 
climate, covid hoaxes in new SEC complaints*
Legal experts called the filings a ‘creative’ approach to holding the 
tech giant accountable for misinformation...
By Cat Zakrzewski - Feb 18, 2022
- -
Filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit representing former Facebook 
employee Frances Haugen, the complaints allege that the company made 
“material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors” 
about its efforts to combat misinformation. The complaints, which have 
not been previously reported, build on Haugen’s congressional testimony 
and filings her lawyers submitted to the financial regulator last year, 
and they draw from thousands of internal documents that she took before 
leaving the company in May.

One complaint alleges that climate change misinformation was prominently 
available on Facebook and that the company lacked a clear policy on the 
issue as recently as last year, despite Facebook executives’ committing 
to fight the “global crisis” during earnings calls. A second, companion 
complaint argues that while Facebook executives were publicly touting 
their efforts to remove harmful covid misinformation, internal documents 
“paint a different story.” The complaint cites internal company 
communications about the spread of vaccine hesitancy in comments and 
internal surveys that showed the proliferation of covid misinformation 
on the service...
- -
Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School and director of 
the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, called the strategy a “creative” 
approach to the problem. “You cannot pass a law in the U.S. banning 
disinformation,” Persily said. “So what can you do? You can hold the 
platforms accountable to promises they make. Those promises could be 
made to users, to the government, to shareholders.”...
- -
“If the company says one thing to investors, but internal documents show 
that what they were saying is untrue, that could be something the SEC 
would look at,” she said...
- -
“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal 
reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for 
information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem 
across all surveyed markets.”...
- -
“Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers 
of human fatalities than covid-19,” said Mann, author of “The New 
Climate War.” “The fact that they’re treating greater threat with so 
much less urgency and care is problematic.”

Pusateri, the Meta spokesman, said that misinformation makes up a small 
amount of climate change content in the company’s apps, and that it 
spikes periodically, such as during extreme weather events. He said the 
company has taken steps to make it easier for fact-checkers to find 
climate content...
- -
The filings are part of Haugen’s team’s broader legal strategy. Her 
lawyers filed at least eight other complaints last year with the agency 
based on the trove of company documents. One complaint alleges that the 
company misled investors about its role in “perpetuating misinformation 
and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6 
insurrection.” Others accused the company of misleading investors about 
its removal of hate speech and the negative consequences of its 
algorithms promoting misinformation and hate speech....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/18/whistleblower-facebook-sec-climate-change/



/[ Reduced coal combustion caused worse weather -  fewer small particle 
emissions triggered heat ]/
*Climate change: Covid shutdown linked to record rainfall in China*
By Matt McGrath
Scientists say that a rapid drop in emissions because of Covid played a 
key role in record rainfall in China in 2020.
- - -  -
The decline in greenhouse gases and small particles called aerosols 
caused atmospheric changes that intensified the downpours.

Hundreds of people died and millions more were evacuated during a summer 
of record rainfall.
A number of scientific studies have looked at what caused the flooding 
events, some pointing to the extreme conditions in the Indian Ocean.

Now an international team has put forward a new theory. They argue that 
the abrupt reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, 
caused by shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, was a key cause of the 
intense downpours.
In their study the authors show that over the past four decades summer 
rainfall over eastern and central China has decreased significantly due 
to the increase in the number of aerosols in the atmosphere.

These particles, often associated with the burning of coal, can reduce 
the occurrence of large-scale storms which resulted in lower rainfall...
- -
This new study says that the absence of these particles, and lower 
greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 caused the opposite effect - a major 
increase in rain.

However, the chain of events that connects the pandemic shutdown to the 
floods is quite complex.

"There was heating over land due to aerosol reductions but also cooling 
over the ocean due to a decrease in greenhouse gases, which intensified 
the land/sea temperature difference in the summer," explained lead 
author Prof Yang Yang from Nanjing University of Information Science and 
Technology, in China.

"This in turn, increased sea level pressure over the South 
China/Philippines sea and intensified the winds bringing moist air to 
eastern China which then saw intense precipitation."
- -
"Because emissions were reduced dramatically in early 2020 when the 
Covid-19 pandemic emerged, it caused an immediate and abrupt change in 
various components of the climate system."

"Such sudden change of the climate system would be very different from 
changes in response to continuous but gradual policy-driven emissions 
reductions."

The new study has been published in the journal, Nature Communications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60423329



/[  from a New Yorker Interview..  ]/
*Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an Insider Now?*
After three years in the halls of power, she’s seen the “shit show” up 
close—and hasn’t given up on her vision for how to change it.
By David Remnick - February 14, 2022

/- - [ //in this one audio segment there are uncomfortable pauses//]/

*You’ve used a phrase “if we have a democracy ten years from now.” Do 
you think we won’t?*
  I think there’s a very real risk that we will not. What we risk is 
having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to 
pretend that it is, but isn’t.

*What’s going to bring us to that point? You hear talk now about our 
being on the brink of civil war—that’s the latest phrase in a series of 
books that have come out. What will happen to bring us to that degraded 
point?*
Well, I think it has started, but it’s not beyond hope. We’re never 
beyond hope. But we’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where 
you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across 
the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is 
threatened by changing electorates and demographics. You have 
white-nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical 
mass. What we have is the continued sophisticated takeover of our 
democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all 
in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.

*The concern is that we will look like what other nation?*
I think we will look like ourselves. I think we will return to Jim Crow. 
I think that’s what we risk.

*What’s the scenario for that?*
You have it already happening in Texas, where Jim Crow-style 
disenfranchisement laws have already been proposed. You had members of 
the state legislature, just a few months ago, flee the state in order to 
prevent such voting laws from being passed. In Florida, where you had 
the entire state vote to allow people who were released from prison to 
be reënfranchised after they have served their debt to society, that’s 
essentially being replaced with poll taxes and intimidation at the 
polls. You have the complete erasure and attack on our own understanding 
of history, to replace teaching history with institutionalized 
propaganda from white-nationalist perspectives in our schools. This is 
what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was.

So there are many impulses to compare this to somewhere else. There are 
certainly plenty of comparisons to make—with the rise of fascism in 
post-World War One Germany. But you really don’t have to look much 
further than our own history, because what we have, I think, is a 
uniquely complex path that we have walked. And the question that we’re 
really facing is: Was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil 
Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a 
multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for 
those in power? And we will revert to what we had before, which, by the 
way, wasn’t just Jim Crow but also the extraordinary economic oppression 
as well?...

/More at/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/is-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-an-insider-now


/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 19, 2006*
February 19, 2006: The CBS program "60 Minutes" reports on the effects 
of human-caused climate change in the Arctic.
This story originally aired on Feb. 19, 2006.

    The North Pole has been frozen for 100,000 years. But according to
    scientists, that won't be true by the end of this century. The top
    of the world is melting.

    There's been a debate burning for years about the causes of global
    warming. But the scientists you're about to meet say the debate is
    over. New evidence shows man is contributing to the warming of the
    planet, pumping out greenhouse gases that trap solar heat.

    Much of this new evidence was compiled by American scientist Bob
    Corell, who led a study called the "Arctic Climate Impact
    Assessment." It's an awkward name — but consider the findings: the
    seas are rising, hurricanes will be more powerful, like Katrina, and
    polar bears may be headed toward extinction.

    What does the melting arctic look like? Correspondent Scott Pelley
    went north to see what Bob Corell calls a "global warning."

    Towers of ice the height of 10-story buildings rise on the coast of
    Greenland. It's the biggest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere,
    measuring some 700,000 square miles. But temperatures in the arctic
    are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world, so a lot of
    Greenland's ice is running to the sea.
    "Right now the entire planet is out of balance," says Bob Corell,
    who is among the world's top authorities on climate change. He led
    300 scientists from eight nations in the "Arctic Climate Impact
    Assessment."

    Corell believes he has seen the future. "This is a bellwether, a
    barometer. Some people call it the canary in the mine. The warning
    that things are coming," he says. "In 10 years here in the arctic,
    we see what the rest of the planet will see in 25 or 35 years from now."

    Over the last few decades, the North Pole has been dramatically
    reduced in size and Corell says the glaciers there have been
    receding for the last 50 years.

    Back in 1987, President Reagan asked Corell to look into climate
    change. He's been at it ever since.

    In Iceland, he showed 60 Minutes glaciers that were growing until
    the 1990s and are now melting. In fact, 98 percent of the world's
    mountain glaciers are melting.

    Corell says all that water will push sea levels three feet higher
    all around the world in 100 years.

    "You and I sit here, another foot. Your children, another foot. Your
    grandchildren, another foot. And it won't take long for sea level to
    inundate," says Corell.

    "Sea level will be inundating the low lands of virtually every
    country of the world, ours included," Corell predicts.

    To find the sights and sounds of the arctic melting, there are few
    places better than a fjord in Greenland, with a glacier just a short
    distance away.

    Pelley stood on a huge block of ice that had split off from the
    glacier and had dropped into the sea — a big iceberg.

    "This part of Greenland is melting faster than just about any other.
    To get a sense of the enormity of what's happening, consider this:
    The ice that is melting here is the equivalent of all the ice in the
    Alps," Pelley explained, standing atop the iceberg.

    That's more than 105 million acres of melted ice in 15 years. Just
    four minutes after Pelley cleared off this berg, part of the ice
    caved in.

    60 Minutes got a bird's-eye view of how unstable the ice is becoming
    on a flight with glaciologist Carl Boggild.

    Boggild anchored 10 research stations to the ice. But every time he
    comes to visit, the ice and his stations have moved.

    Flying over the ice, Pelley noticed lots of fissures and crevices
    breaking through the ice.

    Asked what causes this, Boggild explained, "This is actually the ice
    flow, where you have so much tension in the ice that it cannot stick
    together. And it breaks and opens a crevice which goes about 150,
    200 feet down."

    The ice is also melting on the sides, Boggild says.

    High overhead, Pelley remarked that one could hear the water running.

    "It's like a small river," Boggild said.

    A leading theory says those little rivers lubricate the bottom of
    the ice sheet, helping it move off the bedrock and out to sea.

    And there may be no stopping it. Arctic warming is accelerating.
    It's a chain reaction. As snow and ice melt they reveal dark land
    and water that absorb solar heat. That melts more snow and ice, and
    around it goes.

    There's long been a debate about how much of this is earth's
    naturally changing climate and how much is man's doing. Paul
    Mayewski, at the University of Maine, says the answer to that
    question is frozen inside an ice core from Greenland.

    With funding from the National Science Foundation, Mayewski has led
    35 expeditions collecting deep ice cores from glaciers. The ice
    captures everything in the air, laying down a record covering half a
    million years.

    "We can go to any section of the ice core, to tell, basically, what
    the greenhouse gas levels were; we can tell whether or not it was
    stormy, what the temperatures were like," Mayewski explains.

    60 Minutes brought Mayewski back to Greenland, where he says his
    research has proven that the ice and the atmosphere have man's
    fingerprints all over them.

    Mayewski says we haven't seen a temperature rise to this level going
    back at least 2,000 years, and arguably several thousand years.

    As for carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, Mayewski says, "we haven't seen
    CO2 levels like this in hundreds of thousands of years, if not
    millions of years."

    What does that tell him?

    "It all points to something that has changed and something that has
    impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago.
    And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity," he says.

    It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide
    and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. is by far the largest polluter.
    Corell says there's so much greenhouse gas in the air already that
    more temperature rise is inevitable.

    Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant —
    stopping all greenhouse gas emissions — Mayewski says the planet
    would continue to warm anyway. "Would continue to warm for another,
    about another degree," he says.

    That's enough to melt the Arctic — and if greenhouse gases continue
    to increase, the temperature will rise even more. The ice that's
    melting already is changing the weather by disrupting ocean currents.

    Corell points to floods in the U.S., heat waves in Europe; and 60
    Minutes wanted to know about the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season.

    "The one thing I think we can say with a fairly high degree of
    confidence is the severity of the storms, how strong the storms,
    these cyclonic events like hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific,
    are going to get — they're gonna be more severe. Now one thing that
    is in doubt is whether there'll be more of them," Corell explains.

    "The oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they've been
    on record. When they get up in that temperature, they spin off
    hurricanes. Well, if it goes up another degree, it's gonna spawn
    these with more intensity," Corell says.

    The name "arctic" comes from ancient Greek meaning "Land of the
    Great Bear."

    But the warming climate is threatening this icon of the arctic, the
    polar bear. Flying above the sub-arctic region of Hudson Bay,
    Canadian scientist Nick Lunn is hunting polar bears in a 30-year
    study that tracks their health. It's the job of his assistant Evan
    Richardson to take them down with a tranquilizer dart.

    Once tranquilized, Lunn carefully checks the bear with a pole,
    without getting too close.

    The polar bear is the largest predator on land. Native people in the
    region say he'll even hunt humans, but not on the day Pelley joined
    Lunn: with the tranquilizer, the bear was awake but immobile.

    The scientists knew this bear by his tattoo. His history is written
    chapter and verse in the "bear bible."

    "This is the record book of all the bears that have been handled by
    us or Manitoba Conservation," Lunn explains.

    The study began at the Wapusk National Park, because the bear
    population was thought to be the healthiest in the world.

    Lunn's annual checkup records changes in fat, dimensions and an
    inventory of weapons. The polar bear uses its teeth to hunt
    primarily one thing — seals. That's where arctic warming comes in.

    Polar bears can only hunt on the ice. Lunn says the ice is breaking
    up three weeks earlier than it did 30 years go. He's now finding
    female bears 55 pounds lighter — weaker mothers with fewer cubs.

    Asked how the bear population has changed since he started his
    research, Lunn says, "When we first started doing this research,
    we've done inventories in the mid-80s, in the mid-90s. Both times we
    came out with an estimate of approximately 1,200 animals for what is
    known as the western Hudson Bay population. The numbers now suggest
    that the population has declined to below 1,000."

    The bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there's a complete
    loss of ice in summer, which the arctic study projects will happen
    by the end of this century.

    There are skeptics who question climate change projections like
    that, saying they're no more reliable than your local weatherman.
    But Mayewski says arctic projections done decades ago are proving
    accurate.

    "That said, the skeptics have brought up some very, very interesting
    issues over the last few years. And they've forced us to think more
    and more about the data that we collect. We can owe the skeptics a
    vote of thanks for making our science as precise as it is today,"
    says Mayewski.

    One big supporter of climate science research is the Bush
    administration, spending $5 billion a year. But Mr. Bush refuses to
    sign a treaty forcing cuts in greenhouse gases.

    The White House also declined 60 Minutes' request for an interview.
    Corell, who first studied the issue for President Reagan, believes
    the climate change facts are in, even if President Bush does not.

    "When you look at the American government, which is saying
    essentially, 'Wait a minute. We need to study this some more. We
    can't flip our energy use overnight. It would hurt the economy.'
    When you hear that, what do you think?" Pelley asked.

    "Well, what I do then is, I try to tell them exactly what we know
    scientifically. The science is, I believe, unassailable," says
    Corell. "I'm not arguing their policy, that's their business, how
    they deal with policy. But my job is to say, scientifically, shorten
    that time scale so that if you don't push out the effects of climate
    change into the long, long distant future. Because even under the
    best of circumstances, this natural system of a climate will
    continue to warm the planet for literally hundreds of years, no
    matter what we do."
    By Bill Owens

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-global-warning/


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


/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.