[✔️] February 23, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February  23, 2022*/

/[  the Guardian reports    ]/
*Antarctic sea ice falls to lowest level since measurements began in 1979*
Scientists say record drop can’t yet be linked to global heating but 
urgent research needed to work out cause
Graham Readfearn and Adam Morton
Tue 22 Feb 2022
Sea ice around Antarctica has dropped to its lowest level in more than 
40 years, according to preliminary data from satellites...
- -
Researchers first got a hint something unusual was happening last 
August, when the ice stopped growing and started showing signs of 
retreat about a month earlier than usual.

Antarctic sea ice is challenging to study because of the huge changes 
that occur. About 15m sq km of sea ice – an area double the size of 
Australia – grows and substantially melts each year. The ice can be 
influenced by the strength and direction of winds as well as heat in the 
atmosphere and ocean...
Hobbs, who is based at the University of Tasmania, said the record drop 
was a “watch and act” for scientists and should prompt a clammer for 
more research.

The sea ice was fundamental to ecosystems and may play a role in 
protecting the Antarctic ice sheet from the effects of ocean heat, he 
said. When the ice sheet melts it adds to global sea levels.

Prof Julie Arblaster, a climate scientist and Antarctic researcher at 
Monash University, said a lot of work was being done to pin down what 
was happening to the continent’s floating ice and how it might change in 
the future as the planet warms.

She said while most climate models suggested sea ice would drop around 
Antarctica in the future, there was still “low confidence” in the results.

“But it’s a critical issue because the ice has a lot of impacts on the 
global climate and on the marine life down there,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/23/antarctic-sea-ice-falls-to-lowest-level-since-measurements-began-in-1979



/[  probably not these exact words... ]/
*Texas Supreme Court Tells Exxon To Go Pound Sand*
Exxon has lost its last gasp appeal to the Texas Supreme Court.
By Steve Hanley 2-21-22
One month ago, we wrote about a brazen attempt by Exxon to neuter the 
lawsuits against it filed by 8 California cities and counties. Part of 
its argument was that the plaintiffs were in cahoots and were part of a 
grand conspiracy against the company because many of them were using the 
same law firm. That would be like saying the states that sued the 
tobacco companies were engaged in a conspiracy rather than attempting to 
hold evil doers responsible for their sins.

But Exxon wasn’t done. It argued that the suits against it were a 
violation of Texas sovereignty and that, if it hid the truth about the 
impact of its business activities on the environment, it had every right 
to do so because lies are protected “free speech.” A lower court ruled 
in 2020 that Exxon’s claims were stupid, idiotic, and groundless, but 
the company appealed that ruling to the Texas Supreme Court.
Ordinarily, one would assume that court, jam-packed with far right 
stooges beholden to the oil industry, would smile favorably on Exxon’s 
petition, especially since alleged Governor Greg Abbott personally filed 
a brief with the court in support of Exxon’s claims. It didn’t hurt that 
Abbott himself appointed many of those same judges to the Texas Supreme 
Court. It certainly seemed as though the fix was in.

*A Bad Day For Exxon*
It was not. Last week, the Texas Supreme Court rejected Exxon’s appeal. 
BAM! Just like that, Exxon lost a round it thought it couldn’t lose 
because the result was hardwired in its favor by the Byzantine laws of 
the Lone Star state. The ruling means the suits filed in California can 
now proceed (hopefully some of us will still be alive when they reach 
their conclusion).

Those legal actions are seeking to recover billions of dollars from 
Exxon and other oil companies to pay for costs related to sea level 
rise, wildfires, and other damages caused by the companies’ oil and gas 
products. They cite Exxon’s well-documented campaign to deceive the 
public about the “catastrophic” climate harms the company’s own 
scientists told executives decades ago that their oil and gas products 
would cause.
*
**The Center for Climate Integrity*
In an email to CleanTechnica, Richard Wiles, president of the Center for 
Climate Integrity, said, “Exxon’s bizarre legal arguments were a blatant 
attempt to intimidate and harass critics who dared to hold the company 
accountable for its climate deception. The First Amendment does not 
protect companies that lie about the danger of their products. The fact 
that Texas courts rejected Exxon’s ploy is a reminder that even powerful 
corporations are not above the law. When polluters lie, make a mess, and 
stick communities with the bill, those communities deserve their day in 
court to hold the polluters accountable.”...
- -
*The Takeaway*
The latest report from the National Ocean Service — compiled with input 
from NOAA, NASA, the Corps of Engineers, Homeland Security, and the 
Defense Department — shows the seas along the coastal areas of America 
will rise an average 12 inches in less than 30 years. In some areas — 
Florida and states that border the Gulf of Mexico — sea level rise could 
be significantly higher.

The culprit is primarily the carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere 
when fossil fuels — coal, oil, and methane — are burned. Those fuels 
have powered the Industrial Revolution and the global economy for the 
past 2 centuries. They provide much of our electricity, heat our homes, 
power our factories, and fuel our vehicles.

They are also killing us. Not only do they create poisonous oxides of 
nitrogen, they also create fine particulate matter — particles so small 
they cross directly into the blood stream in the lungs. Fine 
particulates are now found in abundance in human placentas and breast 
milk. They cause cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, which in turn 
make people ill and shorten the life span of many. They alter cognitive 
function in children. Millions of people are adamantly — even violently 
— opposed to receiving vaccinations that protect against disease yet the 
same infuriated mob cares not a whit that the air they breath is 
contaminated with crud from burning coal, oil, and gas.

The waste products created when fossil fuels are burned are far more 
dangerous than asbestos or DDT or Freon ever were, and yet, while those 
substances were banned for the good of the Earth and humanity, 
civilization cannot seem to muster the resolve necessary to curb fossil 
fuel emissions.

It was one thing in the 1950s to celebrate the wonders of automatic oil 
heat and automobiles with gargantuan tail fins. We didn’t know the 
danger then, just as we didn’t know the danger of asbestos or DDT or 
Freon. The crux of the matter is that the oil companies — and Exxon in 
particular — did know of the danger of using their products many decades 
ago because their own scientists told them so.

It is they who conspired among themselves to keep that knowledge secret. 
It is they who decided to endanger the Earth and everything on it so 
they could continue makings gobs of money. It is they who conspired to 
buy politicians who would pass laws shielding them from the consequences 
of their actions. Had the truth been know a half century ago, the cost 
of mitigating the damage would have been negligible. Now it is nearly 
incalculable.

Even if Exxon and its fellow fossil fuel companies are held responsible 
for their sins, they will simply declare bankruptcy and walk away from 
the mess they created. Their senior executives will be laughing all the 
way to the bank as they snicker about the joke they played on humanity.

Instead of screaming about their First Amendment rights, maybe they 
should start acting ethically with regard to their obligation not to 
kill the planet that sustains us all? The principal failure of 
capitalism is it aggressively seeks ways to avoid or evade the 
consequences of its actions. There is no law that requires ethics to be 
a component of corporate behavior and so morality is largely absent in 
the business world.

Doing the right thing costs money. There’s no incentive to act morally, 
therefore there is no obligation to do so. That has to change.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/21/texas-supreme-court-tells-exxon-to-go-pound-sand/



/[ YouTube video discusses the movie.... ] /
*MONBIOSIS with George Monbiot: Ep13 - Don't Look Up!*
Feb 22, 2022
George Monbiot
In this 2022 series of essential climate conversations George Monbiot 
continues to discuss and investigate the complex challenges we face in 
this time of climate and ecological emergency. Monbiosis brings together 
a diverse range of scientsist, experts, activists and change makers to 
examine some of the most critical environmental issues of our time.

Episode 13 - Don't Look Up.
A conversation with Peter Kalmus.

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He 
uses satellite data and models to study the rapidly changing Earth, 
focusing on biodiversity forecasting, clouds, and severe weather. He has 
a PhD in physics from Columbia University and a BA in physics from Harvard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKhzLdfoW9w



/[ COP26 methane and permafrost video ]/
*Seabed Permafrost and Clathrates*
Nov 4, 2021
COP26 Cryosphere Pavilion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66STIJTU2eA

- -

/[  methane levels at 1907 ppb -- all time high ] /
*‘Dangerously Fast’ Methane Increase Suggests Feedback Mechanism May 
Have Begun*
February 14, 2022
Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have risen at a “dangerously 
fast” rate and now exceed 1,900 parts per billion, prompting some 
researchers to warn that climate change itself may be driving the increase.

Atmospheric methane levels are now nearly triple pre-industrial levels, 
a news article in the journal Nature states, citing data released last 
month by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
(NOAA). “Scientists says the grim milestone underscores the importance 
of a pledge made at last year’s COP 26 climate summit to curb emissions 
of methane,” a climate pollutant that Nature cites as at least 28 times 
more potent than CO2, but is actually 80 to 85 times more damaging over 
the 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get the climate 
emergency under control.

While the research focused to some degree on methane released through 
microbial action, Nature says nearly two-thirds of the methane releases 
between 2007 and 2016 were caused by human activity.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 
latest, landmark climate science assessment in August, researchers 
pointed to rapid, deep methane cuts as the single most important step in 
stemming the rise of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. In 
early November, scientists warned that the 30% reduction pledge at COP 
26 fell short of what was needed.

The new research shows the problem getting worse.

“The growth of methane emissions slowed around the turn of the 
millennium, but began a rapid and mysterious uptick around 2007,” Nature 
writes. “The spike has caused many researchers to worry that global 
warming is creating a feedback mechanism that will cause ever more 
methane to be released, making it even harder to rein in rising 
temperatures.”

The report explains the analysis scientists conduct to attribute to 
accurately attribute methane emissions to different sources, from 
microbial activity to fossil fuel production. Xin Lan, an atmospheric 
scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, 
said microbes account for 85% of the emissions increase since 2007, with 
the rest due to fossil fuel production.

“Is warming feeding the warming? It’s an incredibly important question,” 
said Royal Holloway, University of London Earth scientist Euan Nisbet. 
“As yet, no answer, but it very much looks that way.”

But “regardless of how this mystery plays out, humans are not off the 
hook,” Nature adds. “Based on their latest analysis of the isotopic 
trends, Lan’s team estimates that anthropogenic sources such as 
livestock, agricultural waste, landfill, and fossil fuel extraction 
accounted for about 62% of total methane emissions from 2007 to 2016.”

The Nature report last week landed just five days after new satellite 
imagery identified “ultra-emitters” in Turkmenistan, Russia, and the 
United States as the world’s biggest sources of methane leaks from oil 
and gas facilities, New Scientist reports. The next three biggest 
emitters were Iran, Algeria, and Kazakhstan.

“While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been 
detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio 
and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know 
about their extent globally,” New Scientist explains. “Now, images 
captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an 
algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane 
streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide.”

The more than 25 tonnes of methane per hour coming from the 
ultra-emitters is “a heck of a lot”, U.S. Environmental Defense Fund 
Chief Scientist Steve Hamburg told New Scientist climate specialist Adam 
Vaughan.

“Collectively, these contribute about eight million tonnes of methane a 
year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry’s total annual emissions 
for 2019-20,” Vaughan writes.
https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/02/14/dangerously-fast-methane-increase-suggests-feedback-mechanism-may-have-begun/


/[  gee whiz video ] /
*Algae - natures answer to fossil fuels and plastics!!*
Feb 20, 2022
Just Have a Think
Algae has been used by humans for thousands of years, but the idea of 
using algae as a secret weapon to combat climate change is definitely a 
modern day concept. The more scientists delve into the biology of algae, 
the more species they find and the more they discover just how 
incredibly versatile this primordial organism really is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZKbyXCrTG8




/[   Explaining ice  ] /
*The hidden melting of the most important ice on Earth, explained*
The future of sea level rise is being written underneath Antarctica and 
Greenland.
By Umair Irfan -  Feb 21, 2022

The largest ice masses on the planet contain so much water that they’re 
increasing sea levels around the globe as temperatures rise. Satellites 
can see these drastic changes from space.

But new research finds that some of the most profound changes to Earth’s 
ice are largely invisible because they’re happening far beneath the 
surface. Land ice and ice shelves are wearing thin from below, and it’s 
happening much faster than previously expected.

Ice is at once extremely simple and extraordinarily complicated. It’s 
just frozen water. But as it gathers in miles-thick sheets near the 
planet’s poles, it becomes a geological force that can move mountains 
and reshape the contours of the planet.

The sheer weight of ice presses down on the land and carves it over 
millennia as the ice slides. Ice holds more than three-quarters of the 
world’s fresh water.

And when it melts, it can threaten the lives and livelihoods of billions 
of people. More than one-third of humanity lives within 60 miles (100 
kilometers) of a coastline. As average temperatures continue to rise, so 
will the oceans.

Warmer temperatures are melting solid ice into liquid water that flows 
into the seas. The oceans themselves are heating up, too, causing the 
water to expand. Together, these factors are pushing water levels ever 
higher. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 
recently that the next 30 years could cause seas to rise in the coastal 
United States as much as they did in the past century — about 10 to 12 
inches (25 to 30 cm).

“By 2050, moderate flooding ⁠— which is typically disruptive and 
damaging by today’s weather, sea level and infrastructure standards ⁠— 
is expected to occur more than 10 times as often as it does today,” said 
Nicole LeBoeuf, NOAA national ocean service director, in a press 
release. “These numbers mean a change from a single event every 2-5 
years to multiple events each year, in some places.”

Despite the enormous consequences of melting polar ice, there’s a lot 
scientists still don’t know — including some of the mechanisms behind 
it, where tipping points may lie, and its ripple effects over the whole 
planet. But recent studies are bringing one of the most 
difficult-to-study regions into sharper focus: what scientists can’t see 
with their own eyes. Their findings could change how much the oceans are 
expected to rise in the coming decades.

*What’s hiding beneath the ice*
There are two main kinds of ice that shape sea levels. The first is sea 
ice, which comes from ocean water that freezes solid. It makes up most 
of the ice at the North Pole. As it forms, it changes the saltiness of 
seawater and helps shape powerful ocean currents.

Melting sea ice doesn’t change the overall amount of water in the ocean, 
just as melting ice cubes don’t change the water level in a glass of 
water. But sea ice tends to reflect sunlight, while the darker ocean 
tends to soak up its heat. That speeds up warming and drives more ice 
melt in a worrying feedback loop. The warmer temperatures also 
contribute to the thermal expansion of water, which in turn can raise 
sea levels.

The second kind of ice is land ice, which builds up in sheets over 
thousands of years from compacted snow. In Antarctica, the ice sheet is 
1.5 miles thick (2.4 km) on average, reaching up to 3 miles (5 km) in 
some areas. Greenland’s ice sheet averages a mile in thickness. When 
land ice starts to jut out over the ocean, it creates a floating ice shelf.

Most of the world’s ice shelves are in Antarctica, where they span more 
than a million square kilometers, or 386,000 square miles. They act as a 
buttress, slowing down glaciers that would otherwise flow more quickly 
into the ocean. But as they get thinner or break apart, the glaciers 
flow into the ocean at a faster rate, raising sea levels.

Ice loss has accelerated in Antarctica in recent years. Every 40 hours, 
Antarctica loses a billion metric tons of ice, according to a 2018 
study, and at least half that loss comes from ice shelves.

*Antarctica has lost 2.71 trillion tons of ice. Here’s what that looks 
like.*
Many of these staggering losses are occurring in places that are very 
hard to monitor. “It’s a hidden world,” said Robert Larter, a 
geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey. “We can see from 
satellites that the ice is thinning quite dramatically in certain areas, 
but it’s happening from the bottom up rather than the surface down.”

Scientists are finding innovative new ways to deepen their understanding 
of these crucial ice shelves, Larter wrote in a recent commentary in the 
journal Geophysical Research Letters. The key is measuring the melting 
that happens below rather than above, a phenomenon called basal melting.

The chilly air above the South Pole tends to keep ice frozen from above 
and around its edges. But deep Antarctic waters aren’t quite as frigid. 
“At depth in the Southern Ocean, there is a tremendous amount of heat 
energy below a few hundred meters down,” said Larter. This warmer water 
can then come into contact with the underside of ice shelves, causing 
them to melt.

“Warm” by Antarctic standards means “barely above freezing,” but it’s 
enough to thin ice shelves. “That is in fact what is the driver of most 
of the serious ice loss that’s happening in Antarctica at the moment,” 
Larter said...
- -
There are several mechanisms that shape the formation and melt of ice 
shelves in Antarctica, as seen in this cross-section of the Thwaites 
Glacier Eastern Ice Shelf. Marlo Garnsworthy/Geophysical Research Letters
Some of the most intense basal melting is happening at the ice shelves 
around the Thwaites Glacier and the Pine Island Glacier in West 
Antarctica. For 60 years, the ice front around the Pine Island Glacier 
stood in place, but between 2015 and 2020, its northern region suddenly 
retreated more than 30 kilometers. It’s an example of how changes in ice 
aren’t always slow and steady but can be sudden.

Scientists are probing the melting depths of ice shelves in several 
ways. They are drilling holes through ice shelves and lowering 
instruments and robots down below, for example.

But researchers have also found that melting beneath ice shelves can 
leave telltale signs above. Ice shelves tend to have a smooth surface, 
but they get rougher as they melt from below, according to a study in 
Geophysical Research Letters last year. Measuring surface roughness of 
ice shelves could become an easy way to gauge how much basal melting is 
occurring far below. The roughness could be an early warning sign of 
destabilizing fractures in the ice that could lead to a collapse.

*Climate change is squeezing Greenland’s ice sheet from above and below*
Greenland is home to the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, accounting 
for 8 percent of the world’s ice, and it too is melting ever faster. But 
Greenland’s ice loss is different from Antarctica’s in crucial ways.

One is that almost all of Greenland’s ice is on land, with few sections 
floating on water. The air over Greenland is also warmer, so melting at 
the surface of the ice sheet is a much more significant driver of ice 
loss than at the South Pole. In fact, during the summer, thousands of 
meltwater lakes and streams form on the surface of the ice sheet.

“The ice sheet is melting fast on the surface, and that’s something we 
don’t see in Antarctica,” said Poul Christoffersen, a glaciologist at 
the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The water doesn’t stay on top. It pours through cracks and fissures in 
the ice, falling more than a mile in some places to the rocky ground 
below. In a study this week published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences, Christoffersen and his colleagues revealed that 
this is melting Greenland’s ice sheet from below.

Like the water that rushes through a hydroelectric dam, falling 
meltwater carries an immense amount of kinetic energy. That energy 
causes water to warm as it pools beneath the ice sheet. This in turn 
triggers basal melting. “The melt rates are actually astounding,” said 
Christoffersen. He estimated peak basal melt rates on the Greenland ice 
sheet to be 100 times greater than previous estimates that didn’t 
include this heat source.

The water sandwiched between the ground and the ice sheet also acts as a 
lubricant, allowing the ice sheet to slide more easily toward the ocean. 
But because this water is hidden from view, researchers only have a 
spotty picture of what’s going on. “We don’t really know a lot about 
these systems,” Christoffersen said. “Are they large rivers or a myriad 
of small streams, or even tiny films?”

Researchers estimated that these factors would increase the overall melt 
rate of Greenland by 8 percent. “It doesn’t sound like much, but anybody 
[who] has ever had a mortgage at 8 percent, they know it’s pretty 
painful,” Christoffersen said. That means over the coming years, 
Greenland’s contributions to sea level rise around the world may be 
greater than previously thought.

*There are still more mysteries locked in the ice*
These latest findings further confirm that Earth’s cryosphere — its 
frozen regions — is in trouble. There are forces at work that scientists 
are only now starting to appreciate.

The ice we’ve lost to climate change this past decade, visualized
A better understanding of melting ice helps us imagine the future and 
prepare for what’s coming. It could help people decide whether to adapt 
to rising seas, for example with sea walls and elevating buildings, or 
retreat from coastal areas altogether. But researchers caution that 
there’s a lot left to study, and the ice could cross a threshold of no 
return.

For instance, the thinning ice shelves in West Antarctica could enter a 
cycle of collapse. They could lose enough mass that they fall apart, and 
the glaciers they keep on land would flow into the ocean much faster.

“There are theoretical scenarios where it could run away,” Larter said. 
“Once it starts, it would be very difficult to stop.” These potential 
tipping points are some of the biggest uncertainties for predicting sea 
level rise, particularly after 2050.

The other major uncertainty — and potential source of hope — is what 
humans will do about climate change. Confronted with the ice already 
lost and the growing threats of rising seas, people could start cutting 
greenhouse gas emissions drastically enough to stave off some of the 
worst possibilities for sea level rise.

Or countries could continue on the path toward disaster, allowing the 
planet to heat up further. For billions of people around the world, the 
future is on thin ice.
https://www.vox.com/22939545/antarctica-greenland-ice-sheet-shelf-glacier-melt-climate-sea-level-rise


/[ Re-considering sulfur ]
/*It’s Not Just Temperature: Why Sulfates Do More Harm than Good*
Nov 11, 2021
International Cryosphere Climate Initiative
Use of sulphate pollution to cool the planet has been put forward by 
some proponents as a way to “buy time” for the climate.  However, this 
proposal carries with it a number of known negative impacts, ranging 
from increased ocean acidification, to massive crop failures in the 
Northern Hemisphere and monsoon disturbance in India.  This side event 
will explore the science and history of such negative impacts, in order 
to promote a more well-informed debate. Organized by the Bolin 
Centre/Stockholm University and Saami Council
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCCjQSQI3Y



/[ Opinion Bloomberg Green Email message  ]/
Akshat Rathi
*NET ZERO*
Looking at the climate future we face, you’d be well within reason to 
make a grim assessment of humanity. More than three decades after 
scientific consensus found that a hotter planet will bring disastrous 
impacts, we continue to pump increasing amounts of planet-warming 
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

But that’s a limited view. Most of our understanding of where the world 
is headed is, in fact, devoid of the very things that make us human: how 
our opinions change in the face of evidence and what we do as a group in 
response. A study published in Nature last week shows that, if you took 
those additional factors into consideration, the world is likely headed 
for warming about 0.5 degrees Celsius lower by the end of the century 
compared with where predictions stood after last year’s COP26 climate 
summit.

Scientists predict our possible climate futures using models. These 
models typically take a particular storyline of emissions—how much the 
world emits each year for decades to come—and then predict what global 
temperatures would result from that. Other approaches look at targets, 
say, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, and extrapolate what kind of 
energy system the world will have to build to get there.

It’s a feat of human ingenuity and computing power that we can do this 
at all. And, yet, most experts will also happily admit to the 
limitations of their models. That’s because the world is far too complex 
to run as a perfect simulation—yes, the Matrix is not real. That means 
researchers are forced to choose fewer variables to analyze in order to 
simplify the worlds they’re trying to predict.

A group of researchers is now questioning the assumptions in that 
selection process, such as the tendency to ignore how public opinion 
shapes our climate future. “It’s difficult to predict how political 
systems and social settings give rise to climate policy,” said Frances 
Moore, assistant professor at University of California, Davis and lead 
author of the study. “Climate scientists see their role as informing 
policy, which makes it okay to not try and model those policy outcomes.”

Moore and her colleagues went against the grain and included how humans 
would react to climate impacts and what kind of policies that would lead 
to. When they combined climate systems with ever-changing social 
settings, their models show “a high likelihood of accelerating emissions 
reductions over the 21st century, moving the world decisively away from 
a no-policy, business-as-usual baseline.”

In the 100,000 possible futures that the model generated, nearly half 
end up with a world warming 2.3°C by the end of the century after 
emissions peak in early 2030s and reach zero by 2080. In a little less 
than a third of those futures, people agree to aggressive climate 
polices that would restrict warming to 1.8°C by 2100. The remaining 
minority of possible futures see the world warming 3°C or even 3.6°C.

In other words, more than 75% of all possible futures see a world that’s 
cooler than the COP26 outcome. Actions based on current policies would 
see the world warm by 2.7°C, according to Climate Action Tracker’s 
assessment in November.

No outcome seems to keep warming below 1.5°C — the stretch goal of the 
Paris Agreement — and one reason for that is Moore and her colleagues 
don’t model for the use of carbon-removal technologies, which experts 
say would most likely be needed to meet that target. Moore also said the 
current models focus on national climate policies and do not include the 
highly unpredictable impacts of potential geopolitical developments at 
the international level during the transition away from fossil fuels.

Still, the importance of understanding how human behavior helps climate 
policy and how climate policy shapes human behavior is set to grow, says 
Navroz Dubash, professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy 
Research. “The way we build our world introduces behavioral changes,” he 
said. “So you want do it in such a way that avoids locking in a 
high-carbon future.”

Here’s an example: cities that are designed to have more green spaces 
and higher penetration of public transport will also be the ones that 
are more adaptable to a warming planet and have lower carbon footprints. 
Their roads will have less congestion and their air will be less 
polluted, which will make people happier and more willing to support the 
policies that created those cities.

What’s clear is that, as the climate imperative grows, the world is 
gaining a more nuanced understanding of how to influence outcomes that 
will lower emissions and thus rule out more and more of the disastrous 
futures that still remain in sight. “There’s a lot of good news,” says 
Moore. “Even 10 years ago, we would not have ruled out a 4°C or 5°C 
world, which is very different than a 2°C or 3°C world.”

Akshat Rathi
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-22/messy-human-reactions-to-climate-change-are-a-good-thing-for-the-planet?cmpid=BBD022222_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220222&utm_campaign=greendaily



[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming February 23, 2014*
February 23, 2014:
The New York Times reports:
"President Obama’s annual budget request to Congress will propose a 
significant change in how the government pays to fight wildfires, 
administration officials said, a move that they say reflects the ways in 
which climate change is increasing the risk for and cost of those fires.

"The wildfire funding shift is one in a series of recent White House 
actions related to climate change as Mr. Obama tries to highlight the 
issue and build political support for his administration’s more muscular 
policies, like curbing carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. On 
Monday, Mr. Obama plans to describe his proposal at a meeting in 
Washington with governors of Western states that have been ravaged 
recently by severe drought and wildfires."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/us/obama-to-propose-shift-in-wildfire-funding.html


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