[✔️] February 22, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Feb 22 06:45:00 EST 2022
/*February 22, 2022*/
/[ all is changing -- the Polar Vortex moving ]/
*The intense southern lobe of the Polar Vortex triggers another massive
50 degrees F temperature drop for the central U.S. this week, bringing
more snow, ice, and severe storms across the country*
By: Marko Korosec
21/02/2022
It looks like a neverending story of how unusually intense the Polar
Vortex is this winter season. The Arctic cold pool just keeps spreading
outbreaks of wintery weather towards the south across North America.
Another one is shaping up this week, resulting in a significant, nearly
50 °F drop of temperature from tonight into to Tuesday. The cold blast
will trigger two Winter Storms Nancy and Oaklee, leading to a busy
winter weather week across the U.S., with snow to the northern half,
rain, and severe weather on the south. In between, a swath of dangerous
ice storm is also increasingly likely on Thursday, with a potentially
destructive amount of ice from the mid-Mississippi to Ohio Valley.
An active winter and severe weather week are forecast across the U.S.
again as another push of Polar Vortex southern lobe follows in the
coming days. February 2022 is surely earning its name as the more active
month across North America.
The first system through the early week will blanket the West and North,
and bring severe weather for the central and South. While the second
wave brings an ice storm and more snow on Thursday.
https://www.severe-weather.eu/wp-content/gallery/andrej-news/polar-vortex-2022-extreme-temperature-winter-storm-nancy-oaklee-united-states.jpg
https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/polar-vortex-2022-extreme-temperature-winter-storm-nancy-oaklee-united-states-mk/
/[ briefing from COP26 - situation requires global agreements ]/
*Triple Threat to Polar Oceans (Summary Event)*
Nov 6, 2021
International Cryosphere Climate Initiative
Organized by PML, NOAA, British Antarctic Survey and AMAP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo1rCU0IghM
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/[ This 8 minute video summary of the problem -- with, clear, correct
language and simple visuals with reference links.
https://youtu.be/AIgMyinDCkk - in a hurry? start at 2:33 ] /
*Global Extinction: How Long Do We Have Left?*
Nov 1, 2021
Koranos
In the last 500 million years, five mass extinctions, known as the Big
Five, have nearly annihilated life on Earth. But according to the
National Academy of Sciences, the Sixth Mass Extinction has already
begun. It started in the middle of the 20th century, during a period
called the Great Acceleration. From pollution to the rapid increase in
carbon dioxide emissions, humans have severely impacted the Earth. Can
we work against the tide of destruction?
Sources:
Mass Extinction Facts and Information
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mass-extinction
The Permian Extinction—When Life Nearly Came to an End
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/permian-extinction
Siberian Volcanic Eruptions Caused Extinction 250 Million Years Ago
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171002105227.htm
Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’
https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment
The Sixth Mass Extinction is Happening Faster Than Expected
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/world/sixth-mass-extinction-accelerating-intl/index.html.
World of Change
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/global-temperatures
Glaciers, Old Masters, and Galileo: the Puzzle of the Chilly 17th Century
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/2002_shindell_06/
What Could Drive Humans to Extinction
https://www.livescience.com/human-extinction-causes.html
Status of World Nuclear Forces
https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/
Nuclear Warheads: Who Has What at a Glance
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat
Anthropocene
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/anthropocene/
Great Acceleration
http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html
How Much Longer Do We Have Left on Earth?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/world-end-history-cosmos-apocalypse-universe-earth-a9456011.html
Effects of Changing the Carbon Cycle
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle/page5.php
Will Humans Go Extinct?
https://theconversation.com/will-humans-go-extinct-for-all-the-existential-threats-well-likely-be-here-for-a-very-long-time-135327
Biological annihilation 6th Mass Extinction event
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089
Chief Editor:Tristan Reed
Science Editors:
Dr. Caroline Palmer-Puschendorf (PhD)
Dr. Sean McKenna (PhD)
Sound Production:Joseph McDade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIgMyinDCkk
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/[ //Finance & Investment//news from last week ]/
*‘Great Climate Backslide’ Takes Shape as Banks Pour Trillions Into Fossils*
February 15, 2022
Compiled by Mitchell Beer
With Bloomberg News declaring that governments’ “Great Climate
Backslide” has begun, recent reports show major banks pouring more than
a trillion dollars into oil, gas, and coal, even as they scramble to
burnish their green credentials.
Just months ago, COP 26 President Alok Sharma praised countries’ “heroic
efforts” to tackle the climate emergency, marking the end of a marathon,
two-week negotiating session that delivered mixed results at best. In
late January, Sharma warned that even that limited progress will “wither
on the vine” without urgent action.
“Turns out the world was right to be skeptical,” Bloomberg writes. Three
months after the COP, “a toxic combination of political intransigence,
an energy crisis, and pandemic-driven economic realities has cast doubt
on the progress made in Scotland. If 2021 was marked by optimism that
the biggest polluters were finally willing to set ambitious net-zero
targets, 2022 already threatens to be the year of global backsliding.”
Bloomberg points to fossil fuels making a comeback in the United States,
China, Europe, India, and Japan, with clean energy stocks “taking a
hammering”, prospects for a faster transition to renewable electricity
“looking grim”, and emissions rising in 2021.
“That’s even as renewable energy costs have fallen rapidly and
investment in clean technologies is soaring, while voters across the
world demand stronger action,” the news agency writes.
“We’re going to have a multi-year stress test of political will to
impose costly transition policies,” said former White House official Bob
McNally, now president of Washington-based Rapidan Energy Group. He told
Bloomberg that countries’ response to the current spike in fossil energy
prices exposes their “Potemkin support” for climate action as a sham.
“We’re in trouble,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told a Chamber of
Commerce event last month. “We’re not on a good track.”
Bloomberg has a rundown on the discouraging news in different
countries—without even factoring in recent news on where big banks are
directing their investment dollars.
One of the big highlights at COP 26 was the launch of the Global
Financial Alliance for Net-Zero (GFANZ), a group of investors with more
than US$130 trillion in their control that committed to a 2050 net-zero
target. “It’s a mammoth transition,” said UN climate finance envoy Mark
Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of
Canada, in a CBC interview in Glasgow. “We have banks, asset managers,
pension funds, insurance companies from around the world,” so “one of
the key messages of this COP is: the money is there.”
But GFANZ only managed to bring together that much financial clout by
assuring participating institutions they could set their own pathways to
achieving net-zero, with or without a commitment to end fossil fuel
investment, The Energy Mix reported at the time.
“There’s not a rule about fossil fuel financing because it’s up to
individual banks how to get to that trajectory,” a GFANZ spokesperson
told The Mix. The initiative’s underlying assumption is that “no one
knows a bank’s portfolio like they do,” he added.
In subsequent conversations, the spokesperson outlined in more detail
how GFANZ hoped to prompt its members toward more effective emission
reduction investments. But so far, institutions seem to be pursuing a
business-as-usual approach that ignores the latest urgings from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy
Agency.
Even BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, which has been
running premature victory laps and taking hits from the fossil industry
for its support for a transition off carbon, maintains the process will
be slow and gradual.
“Today there is a significant degree of uncertainty about the
transition,” wrote a group of BlackRock executives that included vice
chair Philipp Hildebrand and Mark Wiedman, head of international and
corporate strategy. “The issue, however, is no longer whether the net
zero transition will happen but how – and what that means for your
portfolio.”
Yet their recent note to investors “told clients that financial markets
are just starting to price in the effects of climate change, which
creates significant investment opportunities in industries including oil
and gas,” Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
On Monday, London, UK-based ShareAction listed 25 leading European banks
that extended US$55 billion in financing to oil and gas expansion
projects last year, Reuters reports. $33 billion of that came after the
institutions joined the United Nations-backed Net-Zero Financing
Alliance in April, The Guardian writes, and more than half of that total
was from four of the alliance’s founding members: HSBC, Barclays, BNP
Paribas, and DeutscheBank.
The European banks’ fossil financing since 2016, the year the Paris
climate agreement came into force, stands at $406 billion.
The banks’ continuing support for their fossil industry clients ignores
the deepening hole they’re digging themselves into. “If oil and gas
demand decreases in line with 1.5°C scenarios, prices would fall and
assets become stranded,” ShareAction senior research manager Xavier
Lerin told The Guardian. “On the other hand, if demand did not fall
enough to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the economy would suffer from
severe physical climate impacts. Either way, value will be destroyed for
energy companies, banks, and their investors.”
And yet, “highlighting the pushback from international investors keen to
limit the costs of shifting away from fossil fuels, a report last week
by the accountants EY found that 70% of UK firms admit they have
encountered resistance from investors and shareholders about their plans
to reduce emissions,” The Guardian adds, “with 42% saying their
shareholders want them to wait for competitors to act first.”
Then yesterday, an update to the Global Coal Exit List maintained by
German non-profit Urgewald showed financial institutions funnelling $1.5
trillion into the coal industry between 2019 and 2021, despite many of
them issuing net-zero pledges, Reuters reports.
“Banks like to argue that they want to help their coal clients
transition, but the reality is that almost none of these companies are
transitioning,” said Katrin Ganswind, the group’s head of financial
research. “And they have little incentive to do so as long as bankers
continue writing them blank cheques.”
Urgewald said 85% of the funding came from banks in six countries—China,
the United States, Japan, India, the UK, and Canada. Stand.earth says
Canadian banks shelled out more than C$127 billion, including $25.5
billion to Canadian coal companies. The Royal Bank of Canada leads the
pack, with $14 billion in loans and financing for thermal coal and $83
billion in bonds and shares.
“While communities across Canada and around the world experience
devastating climate impacts from fires to floods, Canada’s fossil banks
continue to finance coal-related companies to the tune of roughly $100
billion,” said Stand Climate Finance Director Richard Brooks. “In 2022,
RBC financing fossil fuels while spouting sustainability is like handing
out cigarettes while warning about the dangers of smoking.”
But the mounting evidence of a Great Climate Backslide hasn’t stopped a
leading green rating agency from “rewarding some of Wall Street’s
biggest banks, even though they continue to lend billions of dollars to
fossil fuel companies,” Bloomberg writes. MSCI Inc., which ranks
corporations globally on environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
criteria, has issued rating upgrades to Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup
Inc., and Morgan Stanley, among others, after the three big institutions
arranged a combined US$74 billion in new fossil fuel financing.
A Bloomberg News analysis of MSCI data showed 13 of 22 institutions
getting upgrades, while only three were downgraded—largely because the
ratings are based on the proportion of a bank’s total portfolio devoted
to fossil fuels. “For example,” the news agency explains, “if a bank
lent billions to an oil company but those loans represented a small part
of its overall lending, MSCI would consider the bank to be greener—and
worthy of a rating upgrade—compared with one that lent millions but
whose loans accounted for a larger part of its overall portfolio.”
MSCI markets its green ratings as a way to “build better portfolios for
a better world,” Bloomberg notes, maintaining that the assessments “are
used by institutional investors to better understand a company’s
exposure to financially relevant ESG risks, not to measure a company’s
total climate impact—we have other tools and data for that purpose. We
are explicit about this investment management purpose and investors
using our ratings understand and agree with our approach.”
But in November, CEO Henry Fernandez acknowledged to Bloomberg that
“many portfolio managers don’t totally grasp that.”
https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/02/15/great-climate-backslide-takes-shape-as-banks-pour-trillions-into-fossils/
/[ Climate For Health ]/
*New Article in the Journal of Environmental Health, “Climate Change:
Everyone, Every Day”*
Jennifer Giordano
February 21, 2022
ecoAmerica’s most recent contribution to the National Environmental
Health Association’s Journal of Environmental Health, “Climate Change:
Everyone, Every Day” is now available in the March 2022 issue. If you
follow the polls on climate change, you will discover something
interesting: 74% of people in the U.S. are concerned about climate
change, with 46% saying they are very concerned. When you ask them if
others around them are concerned, however, only 23% say others around
them are very concerned. That is one-half the number of people who are
actually very concerned about this issue (ecoAmerica, 2020). The gap in
actual versus perceived climate concern contributes to inaction on the
issue and points to the increasingly urgent need for visible climate
leadership and engagement. While 74% of respondents say they are
concerned about climate change, 6% report that they hear people they
know talking about climate change at least once per week and 13% say it
is once a month. That leaves 81% who speak about it a few times a year
or less (Leiserowitz et al., 2021). Why, if so concerned about climate
change, don’t people talk about it?
https://climateforhealth.org/climate-change-everyone-every-day-blog/
/[ for educators, mental heath professionals and social workers -
open-access documents Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health ]/
//*CAMH Special Issue – ‘Mental Health and the Global Ecological Crisis’*
ACAMH News keeps you up to date with the latest information
Posted on 20 January 2022
To accompany the CAMH 2022 Special Issue on ‘Child and youth mental
health & the global ecological crisis’ (Out Now!), ACAMH is proud to
bring you a series of events, content, and Open Access papers, focusing
on the mental health implications of climate change.
Whilst the recent COP26 highlighted the importance of a unified global
response to climate change, there is an ongoing debate regarding how
relevant this topic should be for mental health professionals, and those
that work with children.
This CAMH Special Issue Series aims to:
Examine the evidence
Explore youth experience
Engage with how to move forward
We hope that you can join us at our fantastic FREE events, listen to our
podcasts, and access our Open Access Early View papers. Please share
with colleagues to raise awareness of child and adolescent mental health
issues in this ecological crisis.
https://www.acamh.org/blog/camh-eco-crisis-mental-health/
- -
[ additional documents ]
Volume 27, Issue 1
*Special Issue:Child and Youth Mental Health & The Global Ecological Crisis*
Pages: i-iv, 1-98
February 2022
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/camh.12477
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14753588/2022/27/1
/[ Disaster Diaries - YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnuSeGnB8t8 ]/
*On Being a "Doomer"*
Sep 13, 2021
Disaster Diaries
Links for today's video:
https://www.climatedisaster.net/2021/09/on-being-a-doomer/
The planet is in crisis. Everywhere we turn, there is another climate
change fueled disaster. We are headed at full speed into unknown and
uncharted planetary conditions. Survivability on planet Earth for the
ironically named species homo sapiens (wise man) will not exist for very
much longer.
In case it is not yet clear to you, I am a "doomer."
In these videos, I will be covering current climate disasters in real
time, reacting to the day's news and giving you my analysis and
perspective. These diaries are as much for the viewer to learn and keep
up with the day's big disaster news as they are a tool for me to relieve
my own sadness, stress and sense of futility. Life will go on until it
doesn't. But along the way it will be very sad.
In the mean time, please consider these three choices for living your
life you can make right now:
1) Be kind. Avoid pettiness and battles over the small stuff. And
today, more than ever before, it is ALL small stuff.
2) Be generous. To the best of your ability, give to others. Give to
people who are in need. Give to organizations that are doing what they
can to prolong habitable spaces and conditions where nature can endure.
3) Be of service. Find ways to donate your time to help others and help
the planet. If you help one butterfly live another day, you have done
enough.
And love. Most of all, love. Others may not agree with your politics,
your thoughts about COVID or your religious views on the meaning of
life. But they are going through the end of global-industrial
civilization with you and they are going through the sixth mass
extinction with you. So at the very least, you can love them.
The word “doomer” may not be the right word to describe my own
perspective on life during the planet’s transition. Maybe there is
no right word. Maybe there are no universals. I don’t know. But
this is really hard and I am profoundly sad. We have never been
here before. No one individually, no society and no other
generation of humans on earth has ever had to process events of this
magnitude or attempt to express thoughts like these in the context
of overwhelming scientific evidence backing this view.
I am not going to propose another word to replace “doomer” in the
way I’ve used it here. I don’t know a word that is more suitable.
But the other way to look at this is that the word “doomer” captures
all the positive perspectives that come with understanding the
inevitability of death. Life is short, sadly much shorter for many
than we expected it to be when we were younger. But that’s where we
are. Doomer or not, whatever word makes you most comfortable, what
we all can do going forward from here is to act with kindness, be as
generous as we are able and find ways to be of service.
Contact:
Web: www.ijmp.org
Twitter @EliotJacobson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnuSeGnB8t8/
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//
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming February 22, 2010*
Media Matters reports: "A New York Post editorial baselessly asserted
that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 'bogus'
statement about the date by which Himalayan glaciers will likely
disappear was a 'key finding' in order to claim that climate change
science is 'unraveling.' In fact, scientists have noted that the IPCC
report's claim should not be described as a central finding because it
was not included in the IPCC's larger summaries; moreover, the editorial
distorted several of climate scientist Phil Jones' statements on warming
trends to suggest that they undermine the consensus that human
activities are contributing to higher global temperatures."
http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/02/22/ny-post-distorts-facts-to-claim-climate-change/160719
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