[✔️] February 27, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February  27, 2022*/

/[  SCOTUS  seems too crafty  ] /
*Will the Supreme Court Frustrate Efforts to Slow Climate Change?*
Feb. 26, 2022
With Congress doing little on climate change, President Biden must use 
his executive authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the 
U.S. economy.

The Supreme Court appears determined to thwart him.

In a case to be argued on Feb. 28, the court seems poised to restrict 
the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority to limit carbon 
pollution from power plants and, by doing so, frustrate the country’s 
efforts to slow the pace of climate change.

The justices went out of their way to take the case brought by coal 
companies and Republican-led states even though no federal rule in 
effect regulates greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and no 
company or state is required to take any action to control those 
emissions. No power company petitioned the court for its review, and in 
fact, several of the nation’s biggest power companies opposed the 
justices’ adding the case to their docket...
- -
The Biden administration argues that the court should wait until the 
E.P.A. issues a rule, as it plans to do; otherwise, any decision would 
be an advisory opinion based on a hypothetical, which the court has said 
repeatedly the Constitution does not allow. But the State of West 
Virginia and its fellow petitioners, including 17 other states and coal 
and mining companies, argue that any agency rule to cut carbon from the 
electric power sector will have such enormous consequences that the 
court should act now to curtail the agency’s authority.
- -
The case is complicated but the question underlying it boils down to 
this: Is the E.P.A.’s regulatory authority over power plant emissions 
narrowly limited to requiring only negligible improvements at each 
source, which would produce minimal if any emission reductions? That is 
what the coal companies and the states bringing this case want.

Or can the agency use a broader approach based on other things power 
plants can do to cut emissions, for example, by combining coal with 
other, less-polluting fuels like natural gas, biogas and hydrogen; 
integrating renewables; using technology that captures the emissions 
before they leave the smokestack; and by allowing companies to trade 
emissions credits or average emissions reductions across a company’s 
fleet? That is what the E.P.A. and many power companies want. They also 
want the states to be free to consider such measures when deciding how 
best to achieve federal emissions limits.
- -
The justices should restrain themselves and let the regulatory process 
play out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/opinion/climate-change-supreme-court.html



/[ follow the money ]/
*Russia Invasion Sparks Renewable Energy Stock Gains*
As oil prices jump, solar and clean-energy plays also advance...

    “We’re not shocked there’s a bid for renewables,” says Shawn
    Kravetz, president of Esplanade Capital, an investor in renewable
    energy. Instead, the invasion underlines the importance of energy
    independence. In the United States, for example, a winter storm is
    rolling into Texas, just a year after a winter storm left millions
    without access to electricity for days. That has made solar and
    other renewable energies more valuable.

    “The invasion helps renewables more than it hurts,” says Kravetz.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1081300/russia-invasion-sparks-renewable-energy-stock-gains

- -

/[  a bad slip backwards  ]/
*China Banished Cryptocurrencies. Now, ‘Mining’ Is Even Dirtier.*
New research shows that China’s Bitcoin ban has sent the process of 
creating new coins, known as mining, to countries where it uses far less 
renewable energy.
By Hiroko Tabuchi - Feb. 25, 2022
China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies upended the world of Bitcoin last 
year, triggering a mass exodus of “miners” — who use power-hungry 
computers to mine, or create, new Bitcoins — to new locations around the 
world.

Now, research has found that the exodus likely made cryptomining, which 
already uses more electricity than many countries, even worse for the 
climate. According to the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the 
journal Joule, the Bitcoin network’s use of renewable energy sources 
like wind, solar or hydropower dropped from an average of 42 percent in 
2020 to 25 percent in August 2021.

One likely reason: Bitcoin miners lost their access to hydropower from 
regions within China that had powered their computers with cheap, 
plentiful, renewable energy during the wet summer months. Instead, a 
substantial number of miners migrated to nearby Kazakhstan, as well as 
farther afield to the United States...
- -
The latest research adds to the debate about Bitcoin mining’s 
environmental effects at a time when the cryptocurrency’s standing in 
mainstream finance has grown. Mining for Bitcoin, in particular, has 
come under scrutiny because it is designed to become more difficult as 
more miners participate, making mining each Bitcoin more 
energy-intensive. (Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, is working on an 
alternative method that would use far less energy.)

There have been widely varying past estimates of the share of renewable 
energy sources that Bitcoin miners use. A survey by the Cambridge Centre 
for Alternative Finance put the global average of renewables used in 
mining at around 40 percent. The Bitcoin Mining Council, an industry 
group, has said the number was closer to 60 percent. And Coinshares, the 
digital-asset investment firm, has estimated that as much as 73 percent 
of the electricity Bitcoin miners use is powered by renewables...
- -
Chris Bendiksen, the Bitcoin research lead at Coinshares, said that his 
firm tapped location data gathered from financial disclosures, as well 
as proprietary industry data, to arrive at its estimates of renewable 
use. It also accounted for the fact that a growing number of miners in 
the United States were entering into contracts with natural gas drillers 
to use excess gas that would otherwise have been “flared” — 
intentionally burned off as waste — or else simply released into the 
atmosphere unburned and unused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-energy-pollution.html



/[  Guest post, opinion  ] /
25 February 2022 *
Guest post: How to model society’s response to climate change
*
How ambitious climate policy will be in the future is key to 
understanding the scale of climate change impacts we can expect. Yet, 
the question of how society responds to climate change is not well 
represented in climate and energy models.

Although the links between society, policy, technology and climate 
change are complex, they are not unknowable. In a paper published in 
Nature, my co-authors and I identify the factors that influence climate 
policy – from an individual to the global scale – and use them to 
simulate future emissions.

Some of the most important factors include the public’s perception of 
climate change through their experience of weather; the future cost and 
effectiveness of mitigation technologies; and the responsiveness of 
political institutions.

Our overall finding that the world is likely to experience warming of 
between 2-3C by 2100 is strikingly similar to studies that project 
emissions based on countries’ pledges to the Paris Agreement.

Together, these suggest that although society has moved away from 
high-emissions pathways in which global warming of 4-5C is possible, the 
goals of the Paris Agreement remain largely out of reach on our current 
trajectory.

*Complex society *
The question of how ambitious and effective climate policy will be is 
key to understanding climate change impacts in the long-run. This is 
because the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions will determine global 
temperature: the range of warming in 2100 across different emissions 
pathways is larger than variation due to uncertainties in the climate 
system or natural variability.

However, almost all climate and energy-system models fail to represent 
the complex reality of human behaviour and social systems, even though 
they are a key driver of Earth’s future climate.

Global climate models simulate the climate under alternative emissions 
futures, while energy system models optimise the technology mix given a 
specific condition, such as limiting global temperature to 2C. Although 
different emissions pathways reflect alternate storylines about economic 
growth, population growth and climate policy, climate models do not tend 
to allow for feedbacks that can accelerate or stymie the pace of change 
and cannot place probabilities over different emissions pathways.

For example, just as there is the potential for “tipping points” in the 
climate system, similar tipping point-style behaviour can emerge in the 
social or energy systems – for example, by the desire to conform to 
social norms or by learning-by-doing feedbacks that accelerate 
installation of new energy technologies. Policy changes can also either 
reinforce or resist further change.

Not including this complex behaviour in climate models is limiting for 
two main reasons. First, as a scientific question, leaving one of the 
single most important drivers of the climate system – namely future 
climate policy – unexamined and unmodelled is somewhat unsatisfying.

Second, presenting climate impacts under alternative emissions pathways, 
with no formal assessment of their relative likelihood, is a problem for 
adaptation planners seeking to prepare for climate change because they 
do not know the probabilities of different impacts.
*
**Modelling social systems*
The pace of decarbonisation that is required to meet either the 1.5C or 
2C temperature target under the Paris Agreement vastly exceeds anything 
in the historical record at the global scale.

On the other hand, specific cases of very rapid change in energy systems 
do exist, including the rapid fall in coal generation in the UK 
electricity mix and the dominance of electric vehicles sales in Norway.

Drawing on the social and political sciences can also help us understand 
the likelihood and evolution of the kind of transformations that are 
needed to tackle climate change.

In our paper, my co-authors and I present a model in which fundamental 
social, political and technical processes are included as factors that 
directly drive climate policy and emissions pathways.

The icons in the figure below illustrate the six major components of the 
climate-social model and the scales of the processes they represent 
(from individual to global), and modelled connections between components.

The emissions component (orange icon) models the reduction in emissions 
compared to a no-policy baseline scenario (“RCP7.0”). The climate 
component (red icon) converts global greenhouse gas emissions into a 
change in global average temperature using a simple three-box carbon 
cycle model (atmosphere, upper ocean and lower ocean) and two-box 
temperature model (atmosphere and ocean).

The model tracks shifts in public opinion on climate policy (blue icon) 
and the fraction of the public adopting pro-climate behaviour (purple 
icon). Public opinion can be affected by people’s direct perception of 
climate change through their experience of weather (cognition component, 
yellow icon). Public opinion is filtered through the policy component to 
produce climate policy (for example, a carbon tax or subsidy; green icon).

We identify eight key feedback processes that connect the different 
components of the model, drawn from a wide range of literature, 
including psychology, political science, law and engineering. For 
example, emissions affect the climate, which in turn affects the weather 
people experience, which may affect their perception of the evidence for 
climate change and, by extension, their support for climate policy. To 
account for this, we allow for feedbacks from the climate system to 
public opinion through the cognition component.

*Drivers of emissions *
Using the model, we simulate 100,000 possible future policy and 
emissions trajectories. The vast majority produce global temperatures in 
2100 that are much lower than the 3.9C above pre-industrial levels 
reached in the business-as-usual case, without any climate policy.

The factors that are most important in determining emissions pathways 
and, therefore, warming over the 21st century are: public perception of 
climate change and their experience of weather; the future cost and 
effectiveness of mitigation technologies; and the responsiveness of 
political institutions.

More than 90% of our simulations produce warming of between 1.8C and 
3.0C by 2100. Our most common cluster of results, which we term the 
“Modal Pathway”, contains 48% of runs and produces warming of 2.3C by 2100.

Emissions in this pathway are strikingly similar to previous work that 
estimated the impact of countries’ pledges under the Paris Agreement for 
emissions in 2030 and 2050. This is particularly notable since we do not 
use data on these commitments in either designing or calibrating the model.

Our overall finding of a high probability of warming between 2-3C above 
pre-industrial by 2100 matches findings from a number of recent papers 
that use different approaches.

Collectively these suggest the world has moved decisively away from a 
business-as-usual emissions path, and that warming of between 4-5C by 
2100 is increasingly unlikely, but also that the Paris Agreement 
temperature targets remain largely out of reach given our current 
trajectory.

*Moving forward*
Our paper points to the possibility of integrating social and political 
theories with climate and energy system modelling to better understand 
climate futures.

There are, however, important caveats to our findings. First, we use a 
single climate model, and so do not account for uncertainty in the 
climate system. Uncertainty in climate sensitivity and carbon-cycle 
feedbacks could increase uncertainty in 2100 warming at both the high 
and low-end of our projected range.

The second caveat is that our model does not include the possibility of 
negative emissions techniques to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and 
bury it under the ground or sea for the long-term. This means that if 
this technology were to advance substantially over the next few decades, 
emissions and temperatures could be lower than we simulate.

A further challenge with very general models of the type we use here is 
obtaining relevant data to calibrate the model. Ideally, we would 
attempt to match long-term data on public opinion, policy and behaviour 
change from countries around the world, but unfortunately this data does 
not exist.

Instead, we perform two limited calibrations. One is based on a 
time-series of public opinion about climate change together with 
carbon-price data from the World Bank. The second is based on a recent 
study on the effect of Swedish carbon prices on emissions.

Our approach should be seen as the beginning of a highly 
interdisciplinary research agenda, rather than an end. Future work will 
focus on improving representation of politics and political economy in 
the policy component, on calibrating mitigation rates to the output of 
more detailed energy-system models, and on better representing strategic 
interactions and policy spillovers between countries.

  Moore, F. et al. (2022) Determinants of emissions pathways in the 
coupled climate-social system, Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04423-8


/[  radically viewpoint to keep producing fossil fuels - selling 
complexity   ]/
*No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World*
Feb 26, 2022
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Join us for a discussion of Deborah Gordon's new book, No Standard Oil: 
Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World. Gordon is a Senior 
Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute, and 
serves as the Senior Principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI.

Discussants are Marian Chertow, Professor of Industrial Environmental 
Management, Yale University; Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Associate 
Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs and 
director of the Climate Solutions Lab, and Chas Freeman, Senior Fellow 
in International and Public Affairs. Moderated by Edward Steinfeld, 
Howard R. Swearer Director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for 
International and Public Affairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rh1Gc_OcgQ



/[  Just in time for Sunday services  ]
/*Vatican launches online platform to help Catholics fight climate change*
The Laudato si’ platform helps Catholics assess their environmental 
impact and create a plan for change.
by YCC TEAM
FEBRUARY 25, 2022
Pope Francis called upon the world to reduce global warming in a 2015 
letter known as Laudato Si’.

Now the Vatican has launched an online platform to help inspire and 
guide Catholics who are ready to act.

Any Catholic congregation, organization, or individual can enroll in the 
Laudato Si’ Action Platform.

It helps them assess their environmental impact and create a plan for 
actions they will take, such as planting trees, reducing energy use, or 
divesting from fossil fuels.

Jose Aguto directs the Catholic Climate Covenant, a U.S.-based nonprofit 
working to support the campaign.

He says participants’ plans and ambitions will vary widely.

“You need to meet people where they are,” he says. “If a parish and the 
parishioners want to do recycling and they want to do a community 
garden, that’s where you meet them. On the other end of the spectrum, 
we’ve got some young Catholics who have a high degree of motivation and 
a high degree of anxiety to want to solve the climate crisis right now. 
And we need to meet that, too.”

So he says the online platform encourages all Catholics to move beyond 
thinking and praying about the Pope’s words — and start acting on them.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media and Molly 
Matthews Multedo
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/02/vatican-launches-online-platform-to-help-catholics-fight-climate-change/




/[  simple experience explained by science  ]/
*HOW CLIMATE CHANGE WILL PUSH PEOPLE TOWARD VIOLENCE*
**FEBRUARY 23RD, 2022
POSTED BY RACHEL CRAMER  -IOWA STATE
**
A new book uses climate science and psychology to explain how a rapidly 
warming planet increases aggression and violence.

Climate Change and Human Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 
maps out how hotter temperatures and more frequent and severe weather 
events can directly and indirectly alter the way people think and 
interact with others.

Leaning on decades of previous research, the authors demonstrate how 
these impacts at the individual and group levels can escalate to 
political unrest, civil war, and other forms of violence. They say 
proactively addressing these challenges now could help buffer some of 
the long-term costs in the future.

“One of our goals with this book was to outline some of the human costs 
that are on our doorstep and how core psychological concepts can be used 
to reduce both the amount of global warming and human violence problems 
that arise from the climate crisis,” says Iowa State University 
psychology professor Craig A. Anderson, who wrote the book with Andreas 
Miles-Novelo, a psychology graduate student.

The authors explain high temperatures cause the brain to divert 
resources to other parts of the body in an effort to cool down. When 
this happens, areas of the brain are not running at full capacity, 
making it harder for someone to process new information, manage 
emotions, and control impulses. People who are hot also perceive other 
people as behaving aggressively, which increases the odds of hostile 
confrontations.

“Heat stress primes people to act more aggressively,” says Anderson. “We 
can see this play out on a larger scale across geographic regions and 
over time.”

The authors consistently found that hotter regions in the US and around 
the world have higher rates of violent crime, even when controlling for 
other risk factors like poverty and age distribution. Previous research, 
much of it led by Anderson, also showed a strong connection between 
hotter stretches of time and violence; murder, rape, and assault rates 
in the US were higher during hotter days, months, seasons, and years.

The book points to a robust body of developmental research that shows 
poor pre- and post-natal nutrition is a predictor of being convicted of 
violent crime as an adult. Stress throughout childhood (e.g., living in 
poverty or in a violent neighborhood, family separation, economic and 
housing instability, displacement) also can cause adverse cognitive and 
emotional outcomes and increase risk factors for violence-prone behaviors.

“What struck me when I really started delving into this a decade or so 
ago was how many of the risk factors for adulthood violence are going to 
become much more common as a result of rapid climate change,” says Anderson.

As the climate crisis causes more extreme and frequent droughts, 
wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, the authors explain, people around 
the world will be at higher risk of hunger and malnutrition, economic 
instability, and poverty. This can drive mass migrations to areas with 
more resources (e.g., better grazing land, cities with more jobs), which 
can lead to real (or perceived) competition over resources.

“This is a little oversimplified, but the civil war in Syria started 
with an extreme drought. A large proportion of the rural population 
moved to cities in search of jobs, food, and water, but an already 
unstable government did not prepare for the influx of people, which led 
to competition over resources like jobs and housing, spurring political 
unrest and eventual civil war,” says Miles-Novelo.

Miles-Novelo adds that the violence in Syria then led to massive 
migration to Europe, which fueled anti-immigration movements in places 
like Germany and the United Kingdom.

The authors emphasize that no matter how bleak the future may seem, 
there are solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change. They say 
one of the first steps should be changing the narrative around climate 
change. Scientists, politicians, and media outlets, the authors argue, 
should help people understand the causal link between rapid global 
warming and the threats people experience in their daily lives (e.g., 
poverty, crime) rather than debate whether climate change is real.

Another important step is shifting some of the burden from individuals 
to governments and corporations. The authors included a reference to a 
2017 report from the Carbon Majors Database that detailed how 100 
corporations contributed 71% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. 
Anderson and Miles-Novelo say tackling emissions at this higher level is 
a more efficient way to minimize climate change than merely expecting 
individuals to solve the problem on their own.

The authors say other examples of proactive responses that can lessen 
the impacts of climate change on individuals and communities include 
bolstering programs that support pre-natal and post-natal nutrition, 
which can help offset some of the risk factors for violence-prone adults.

Anderson adds that more countries, especially those with substantial 
resources, need to start planning for hundreds of millions—if not 
billions—of people who will be migrating due to environmental disasters 
or political unrest.

“There are issues we’re going to have to take more seriously in the US 
and worldwide as climate change pushes more eco-migration. The problems 
that we’re seeing now are relatively small compared to what’s going to 
happen in the next 50 years,” says Anderson.

Anderson says governments and international organizations need to start 
preparing for eco-migrations in a positive way that integrates people 
into communities where they can live sustainably and makes use of their 
talents, skills, and aspirations to benefit the community as well as 
their own families.

Source: Iowa State University
Original Study DOI: 10.1017/9781108953078
**https://www.futurity.org/climate-change-violence-2701922-2/
**


/[ YouTube sometime makes it difficult to find playlists  ]/
*Collected Music for Global Warming Anthropocene and Changing Climates - 
a playlist of over 150 compositions*
Search for an Anthem for Global Warming
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU5dY2n3AbGHCgJ9OiDxG5hjY9QYAkQ55


/[Another Playlist]/
*Global Warming Climate Change music playlist *
Every struggle has its own music - a body of heroic songs, stirring 
marches,  and anthems.  Even a dirge or two.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL77C46FF49252AEFD}



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 27, 2009*
February 27, 2009: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann leaves some clean coal in Fox 
News Channel host Glenn Beck's stocking:

"The runner-up, Glenn Beck.  We all laughed the first time he attacked 
the carbon capture projects in the stimulus package, branding them 
'earmarks,' and saying, 'I don‘t even know what the hell that is.'  But 
he's done it again, derisively saying: 'The spending bill, 'clean' of 
earmarks, has $800 million for carbon capture projects.'

"Glenn, carbon capture projects...that‘s clean coal technology. Last 
June, you claimed that Democrats, 'controlled by the radical 
environmental special interest groups,' were blocking clean coal 
technology.  You support clean coal technology, nit wit!"

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


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