[✔️] January9 , 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sun Jan 9 09:41:06 EST 2022

/*January 9, 2022*/

/[   seeing the sea ] /
*Photos from the king tides show what permanent sea level rise could 
look like in San *Francisco Bay Area by 2050
Amy Graff - SFGATE
Jan. 8, 2022
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/36/31/21882457/6/ratio3x2_2400.jpg
- - https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/36/31/21882461/9/2400x0.jpg
Experts say the king tides help us understand what the impacts of future 
sea level rise will be, and the photos above and below taken in Mill 
Valley and Sausalito show roadways and bike paths entirely underwater 
and water encroaching on buildings...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/King-tides-show-sea-level-rise-16751896.php

/[  Bankers in their traditional role - Financial Time$ ]/
*Banks risk becoming new fossil fuel villains in 2022*
Financing climate change culprits is becoming more visible — and 
troublesome — than ever before...
--
https://www.ft.com/content/73615213-08ce-4786-9b8c-773029552bbc

[ What if ?  -- clips from text-- Asks Foreign Policy ]
*What if Democracy and Climate Mitigation Are Incompatible?*
Elected officials work through compromise, but a warming planet waits 
for no one.
By Cameron Abadi
JAN 7, 2022
- -
If the basic principle of democracy is that each person (or each 
country) has equal voice, then it seems obvious that the majority of the 
world—the portion of the global population that contributes least to 
carbon emissions and stands to suffer the most from their effects—should 
be able to hold the minority accountable. That is, they should be able 
to compel the developed world to pay whatever it takes to transition to 
renewable energy at a speed consistent with maintaining the critical 
1.5-degree threshold (and to assist poorer countries with any damages 
that nevertheless result from that mitigated climate change).

The reality, of course, is that there is no global government that can 
organize democratic government, and grant democratic rights, on a global 
scale. The international community must instead rely on existing 
national governments—the sovereign actors in the international system—to 
organize global collective action. Many of those governments, of course, 
are themselves democratic. And they have plenty of incentive to create 
an international framework that invites equal participation from the 
countries of the world and seems to enjoy democratic legitimacy; plenty 
of their own constituents would demand as much. The annual U.N. climate 
change meetings, known as COP, which produced the Paris Agreement and 
continue to monitor its progress and in which nearly all the countries 
of the world participate, are an example of just such a framework.

Unlike other environmental problems, the effects of climate change are 
not immediate, which makes it even harder to form a democratic consensus...
- -
But the example also cuts the other way: The COP framework is 
ill-matched to solving climate change in a timely fashion because it 
doesn’t solve the international governance dilemma at its heart. Climate 
change, in economic terms, is a commons management issue. The goal is to 
create a stable ecosystem, but every country has an incentive to free 
ride and let others swallow the costs of providing it. It’s in nobody’s 
immediate self-interest to go first and bear the costs of mitigating 
carbon emissions: Why commit to something if others won’t? That’s 
especially so since early movers on climate policy only earn a small 
share of the global benefits while paying a disproportionate share of 
the costs...
- -
There’s no clear path offered by the current democratic political system 
to get from here to there. The Paris Agreement—which offers no method of 
punishing countries for failing to meet their climate commitments aside 
from peer pressure and embarrassment at future COP meetings—might mark 
the height of what’s achievable...
- -
And so it should come as no surprise that almost none of the world’s 
countries are on pace to keep their Paris commitments. The agreement’s 
lack of any supervisory authority—countries have been left to pursue 
their goals on their own—constrained it from the start. Countries that 
couldn’t trust one another’s good faith (both in the creation of the 
climate goals and the pursuit of them) had incentive to free ride on the 
sacrifices made by others. Meanwhile, rich countries had little 
incentive to prevent damage that would disproportionately affect many of 
the world’s poorest.

Compared with the problems of international governance, the structural 
impediments posed by domestic democratic politics are no less daunting. 
The essence of the democratic process in any nation-state is elections, 
a form of governance that focuses attention on immediate problems, holds 
national leaders accountable for solving them, subjects those solutions 
to revision within a few years’ time, and invites public involvement...
- -
Technology is also increasingly intersecting with political radicalism 
outside the channels of normal democratic politics. The 2018 report 
issued by the IPCC has raised the possibility of deploying various 
technological fixes to slow the global warming that more straightforward 
democratic politics has failed to manage. Deep in the report is a 
startling line: “There is robust evidence but medium agreement for 
unilateral action potentially becoming a serious SRM governance issue.” 
SRM refers to “solar radiation modification,” the most frequently 
discussed form of geoengineering, which involves injecting aerosols into 
the atmosphere to cool the planet, just as major volcanic eruptions do 
naturally. The key term from the IPCC report, however, is “unilateral 
action.” It refers to the possibility that someone might simply take 
matters into his or her own hands. Indeed, what’s clear is that a single 
billionaire might be able to finance such a venture without other 
political actors being able to do much about it.

That the world’s democracies are witnessing a growing spectrum of 
climate radicalism, both from the bottom up and the top down, is not to 
suggest that authoritarian systems would do any better in solving the 
relevant political and economic issues involved in moving beyond the 
carbon economy. But it is a sign that democracy, in its current form, is 
not necessarily the path to a solution. It might, instead, be part of 
the problem.
Cameron Abadi is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @CameronAbadi
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/07/climate-change-democracy/

/[   In Washington State we call them the Pineapple Express.. Explained 
in video ] /
*Never Before Seen Weather Phenomenon Called Atmospheric Lake Found*
Jan 8, 2022
Anton Petrov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyfRigY_Zs

/[ Another physicist explains event attribution - understanding more ]/
*Does Climate Change cause more Extreme Weather?*
Jan 8, 2022
Sabine Hossenfelder
Check out the math & physics courses that I mentioned (many of which are 
free!) and support this channel by going to 
https://brilliant.org/Sabine/ where you can create your Brilliant 
account. The first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

In the past two years or so we have seen many headlines about extreme 
weather events: floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes. In some cases, 
climate scientists claim they can "attribute" those extreme weather 
events to climate change. But what exactly does that mean? How does one 
calculate this? And how reliable are those estimates? This video is a 
brief intro into the young research area of extreme event attribution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqNHdY90StU

/[   shocked but not surprised ]/
*A month of unprecedented U.S. weather disasters ends with Colorado fire 
catastrophe*
December 2021 put an exclamation point on a migration of warm-season 
threats toward winter.
by BOB HENSON -- JAN 4, 2022
- -
The devastating Marshall Fire came just weeks after a pair of stunning 
tornado outbreaks. The first, on December 10-11, was the nation’s 
deadliest and likely most damaging on record for any December, with at 
least 90 fatalities, chiefly across western and central Kentucky, and a 
record 69 confirmed tornadoes.

Then, on December 15, a massive cyclone whipped across the central U.S., 
spawning EF2 tornadoes as far north as Minnesota and Wisconsin – an 
outbreak unprecedented for December in its northward extent and in the 
total number of twisters confirmed. The total of 100 tornadoes made it 
one of the largest one-day outbreaks on record for any time of year, and 
it broke the December record set just five days earlier...
- -
An evocative extended interview in New York magazine with local resident 
and climate scientist Daniel Swain paints a vivid picture of the fire’s 
complex meteorology, climate, and geography contexts.

Ultimately, the nation’s freakish, hellish weather catastrophes of this 
past December (which could easily run over $4 billion in insured losses 
alone, based on estimates of $3-5 billion from the December 10 tornado 
outbreak) suggest we’re going to find ourselves more vulnerable 
year-round to the kind of multifactorial weather disasters made more 
possible by a warming climate. Tornadoes and wildfires have struck in 
December before, but the sheer intensity of this month’s events tells us 
we’d be well advised to take such phenomena as seriously in the depths 
of winter as we normally might in May or September.

Such events aren’t turned on and off by climate change like a light 
switch. Instead, they are “climate-enabled and weather-driven.”

Or, as Colorado journalist Allen Best put it, “So this is what climate 
change looks like: operating on the margins, yet able to dramatically 
alter the story on center stage.”...
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/01/a-month-of-unprecedented-u-s-weather-disasters-ends-with-colorado-fire-catastrophe/

/[  burning coal just blocks the sun ] /
*The country’s biggest solar farm is coming to one of the 
coal-friendliest states*
How one small farming community in Indiana came to embrace a massive 
solar project.
- -
And for many landowners, the payments they will receive from Doral 
Renewables will be more than they make farming the land or leasing it 
themselves. Landowners can expect to receive between $600 and $1,000 per 
acre per year that they lease out for solar panels. About 60 landowners 
have agreed to lease land to the project. Mammoth Solar in total is 
expected to bring $1.5 billion in investment to the state...
- -
https://grist.org/energy/the-countrys-biggest-solar-farm-is-coming-to-one-of-the-coal-friendliest-states/

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming January 9 ,*

January 9, 1989: In a letter to House Speaker Jim Wright and Vice 
President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan writes: "Because 
changes in the earth’s natural systems can have tremendous economic and 
social effects, global climate change is becoming a critical concern."
(Apparently, Reagan's reference to the "critical concern" of climate 
change has never been acknowledged by right-wing media entities such as 
the Fox News Channel.)

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=35346

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