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

Wed Jan 19 09:28:04 EST 2022

/*January 19, 2022*/

/[  Climate crime legal tactical assault]/
*How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its 
climate denial*
America’s largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the 
climate crisis is protected by the first amendment
ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and 
intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over 
its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate 
the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it 
to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more 
than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing 
lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the 
officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first 
amendment rights.

The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the 
California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where 
the company is headquartered.

Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil 
firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, 
including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising 
temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in 
compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme 
weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to 
prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures...
- -
Exxon wants to use the provision to force the California officials to 
travel to Texas to be questioned by the firm’s lawyers about what the 
company describes as “lawfare” – the misuse of the legal system for 
political ends...
- -
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of Merchants of Doubt: 
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco 
Smoke to Global Warming, said Exxon had a long history of attempting to 
bully its critics into silence.

“Now that the arguments have moved into the legal sphere, this feels to 
me like an extension of the sort of harassment, bullying and 
intimidation that we’ve seen in the scientific sphere for the last two 
decades,” she said.

Oreskes said that the legal strategy is also part of a broader public 
relations campaign to paint the company as a victim of radical 
environmentalists and opportunistic politicians when Exxon argues that 
it should be heralded for its efforts to combat the climate crisis.

“Exxon Mobil has for a long time now tried to make themselves out to be 
the victim, as if somehow they’re the innocent innocent party here,” she 
said.

The Texas supreme court is considering the case after a lower court 
backed Exxon’s attempts to use rule 202 against the California 
officials. The ruling was later overturned on appeal.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/18/exxon-texas-courts-critics-climate-crimes
//

/- -/

/[ A cartoon aids in understanding this absurdity ]/
*Oiled Up*
by Jen Sorensen
POSTED ON JANUARY 19, 2022

    https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/JS1-2.png
    https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/JS2-2.png
    https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/JS3-2.png
    https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/JS4-2.png

https://thenib.com/petro-persecution/

/
/

/[  Realism falls before fantasy ] /
*'We conclude' or 'I believe?' Study finds rationality declined decades ago*
by Wageningen University - JAN 12, 2022
Scientists from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Indiana 
University have discovered that the increasing irrelevance of factual 
truth in public discourse is part of a groundswell trend that started 
decades ago...
- -
While the current "post-truth era" has taken many by surprise, the study 
shows that over the past forty years, public interest has undergone an 
accelerating shift from the collective to the individual, and from 
rationality towards emotion.

*From ratio to sentiment*
Analyzing language from millions of books, the researchers found that 
words associated with reasoning, such as "determine" and "conclusion," 
rose systematically beginning in 1850, while words related to human 
experience such as "feel" and "believe" declined. This pattern has 
reversed over the past 40 years, paralleled by a shift from a 
collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected by the ratio of 
singular to plural pronouns such as "I"/"we."

"Interpreting this synchronous sea-change in book language remains 
challenging," says co-author Johan Bollen of Indiana University. 
"However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as 
well as non-fiction. Moreover, we observe the same pattern of change 
between sentiment and rationality flag words in New York Times articles, 
suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed."

*Causes*
"Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 
necessarily remains speculative," says lead author Marten Scheffer of 
WUR. "One possibility when it comes to the trends from 1850 to 1980 is 
that the rapid developments in science and technology and their 
socio-economic benefits drove a rise in status of the scientific 
approach, which gradually permeated culture, society, and its 
institutions ranging from the education to politics. As argued early on 
by Max Weber, this may have led to a process of 'disenchantment' as the 
role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and 
secularized societies."

What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend 
around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. However, 
according to the authors there could be a connection to tensions arising 
from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have 
been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not 
equally distributed.

*Social media*
The authors did find that the shift from rationality to sentiment in 
book language accelerated around 2007 with the rise of social media, 
when across languages the frequency of fact-related words dropped while 
emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from 
collectivistic to individualistic language.

Co-author Ingrid van de Leemput from WUR notes, "Whatever the drivers, 
our results suggest that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a 
historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of 
thinking: Reasoning versus intuition. If true, it may well be impossible 
to reverse the sea change we signal. Instead, societies may need to find 
a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and 
emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power 
of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity."
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-rationality-declined-decades.html

/[  not surprising ] /
*New studies link global warming to early births and effects on babies' 
health*
The studies were recently published in a special issue of the journal 
Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology.
Alejandra O'Connell-Domenech -- Jan. 17, 2022
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/590042-new-studies-link-global-warming-to-early

/[ physical leaks ]/
*New Data Shows Massive Climate-Warming Leaks by New Mexico Oil and Gas 
Operators*
While most producers dramatically increased their reporting, the state’s 
largest natural gas producer’s numbers haven’t budged.
  Jerry Redfern-- Jan 18, 2022
In New Mexico, new state rules sparked a dramatic increase in reported 
incidents of vented and flared natural gas in 2021 — and reveal that the 
oil and gas industry has been losing vastly more of the 
climate-change-driving fossil fuel than previously reported...
- -
A review of year-end data from the state’s Oil Conservation Division 
(OCD) shows that producers vented or flared enough natural gas to power 
nearly 39,000 homes for a year — roughly the number of households in Las 
Cruces, the state’s second-largest city.
The actual total for the year is likely much higher as the new reporting 
only began in May...
https://capitalandmain.com/new-data-shows-massive-climate-warming-leaks-by-new-mexico-oil-and-gas-operators/[ 
small funding for huge question ] /
*Entomologists to study how climate change may influence pollinator 
stressors*
Jan 17, 2022
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State-led team of researchers will use a 
newly awarded $682,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 
National Institute of Food and Agriculture to examine how climate change 
may influence and interact with various stressors that affect the health 
of pollinators.

The funding is part of USDA-NIFA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.

The project will employ a novel, integrative approach to understand how 
temperature variation, pesticides and pathogens interact to influence 
the fitness and survival of crop pollinators, according to team leader 
Margarita López-Uribe, Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor and 
assistant professor of entomology in Penn State's College of 
Agricultural Sciences...
- -
The team will build species distribution models that incorporate data on 
pesticide exposure, disease pressure and microclimatic conditions, 
explained project co-director Rudolf Schilder, associate professor of 
entomology and biology, Penn State. "Our combined lab, field and 
modeling approach will allow us to identify key stressors in different 
habitats and to develop recommendations for mitigation measures to 
enhance pollinator health," he said.

López-Uribe added that the study's findings will address a current 
knowledge gap about how multiple stressors impact pollinator health in 
agroecosystems that are critical to the food supply.
https://www.psu.edu/news/agricultural-sciences/story/entomologists-study-how-climate-change-may-influence-pollinator//] 
/

/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming January 19, 2014*
January 19, 2014: In the New York Times, climate scientist Michael Mann 
observes:

    "It is not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially
    compromise our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters
    or the societal implications of our work. And it would be
    problematic if our views on policy somehow influenced the way we
    went about doing our science. But there is nothing inappropriate at
    all about drawing on our scientific knowledge to speak out about the
    very real implications of our research.

    "My colleague Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who died in
    2010, used to say that being a scientist-advocate is not an
    oxymoron. Just because we are scientists does not mean that we
    should check our citizenship at the door of a public meeting, he
    would explain. The New Republic once called him a 'scientific
    pugilist' for advocating a forceful approach to global warming. But
    fighting for scientific truth and an informed debate is nothing to
    apologize for.

    "If scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a
    vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of
    short-term self-interest. There is a great cost to society if
    scientists fail to participate in the larger conversation — if we do
    not do all we can to ensure that the policy debate is informed by an
    honest assessment of the risks. In fact, it would be an abrogation
    of our responsibility to society if we remained quiet in the face of
    such a grave threat."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/if-you-see-something-say-something.html 

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

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