[✔️] July 21, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 21, 2022*/

/[ US weather forecast for today 21 Video]/
*Damaging Wind Threat with Isolated Hail and Tornadoes*
253 views  Jul 21, 2022  A Cold front will bring severe storm chances 
across the midwest with all modes of severe weather possible. Dangerous 
heat continues across much of the central and eastern US. Meteorologist 
Erica Lopez has your Thursday forecast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s85eM807Fak



/[ Author is a well respected climate scientist --  from the Conversation ]/
*How not to solve the climate change problem*
July 20, 2022
Kevin Trenberth - Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliated Faculty,..
- -
Studies show that the most effective way to address the climate change 
problem is to decarbonize the economies of the world’s nations. This 
means sharply increasing use of renewable energy – solar and wind cost 
less than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world today – and the 
use of electric vehicles...
- -
Geoengineering is also expensive.
So for hundreds of billions of dollars, the best prospect with these 
strategies is a tiny dent of 1 part per million by volume in the carbon 
dioxide concentration.
This arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions. There 
is no viable workaround.
https://theconversation.com/how-not-to-solve-the-climate-change-problem-187222 


- -

/[  Just Have a Think - video describing real action to reduce CO2 ] /
*A climate solution you might not think of.*
Jul 17, 2022  Climate solutions are desperately needed right now. You 
might not immediately think of going to the mining industry to find one 
of them though. But research shows shows that the unwanted by-product of 
the mining industry, rock dust, could be a transformational supplement 
to agricultural soils all over the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr4A7PKCHAw



/[ Just like the movie -- video look at media reality as it follows 
movie fantasy  ]/
*UK TV Interview About Historic, Deadly Heat Wave Eerily Mirrors 
Memorable ‘Don’t Look Up’ Scene As Host Complains, “I Want Us To Be 
Happy About The Weather”**
*By Tom Tapp
July 20, 2022
In the days this week before the UK suffered through all-time record 
temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius — or 104 degrees Fahrenheit — GB 
News host Bev Turner made light of a meteorologist’s warnings about the 
coming heatwave in a televised interview that bears a striking 
resemblance to the much talked-about fictional TV interview in Adam 
McKay’s Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up. In fact, one intrepid 
Twitter user cut the two scenes together, prompting McKay himself to 
weigh in. See below.

In the GB News interview last week, British meteorologist John Hammond 
warns that, while last week it was a near-perfect 20 degrees Celsius — 
or 68 degrees Fahrenheit — “By early next week you can scratch 20 
degrees. It could very well be 40 degrees. I think there will be 
hundreds, if not thousands, of excess deaths next week. The charts that 
I can see in front of me are frightening.”...
After he makes a few more grim points, Turner interrupts with, “So John, 
I want us to be happy about the weather, and I don’t know whether 
something has happened to meteorologists to make you all a little bit 
fatalistic and harbingers of doom.”

She continues, “All of the broadcasts, particularly on the BBC, every 
time I’ve turned on, anyone is talking about the weather and they’re 
saying there’s going to be tons of fatalities. But haven’t we always had 
hot weather, John?”

A seemingly incredulous Hammond replies with scientific data and more 
warnings about transit snarls and workplace difficulties — most of which 
proved true.

You can watch it below...
     --  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00uGSlFBVDs&t=172s
Hammond was right, of course, on his primary counts, as well: the 
temperature topped 40 degrees at London’s Heathrow airport and over 
1,500 people died across Europe as a result of the heat wave.

The exchange is eerily reminiscent of that between Jennifer Lawrence’s 
astronomer in Don’t Look Up exploding onscreen after listening to the 
blithe dismissals of Cate Blanchett’s news anchor even as a massive 
comet heads toward Earth.

In fact, one Twitter user cut both scenes together to devastating 
effect. Watch below.

McKay himself weighed in with, “There are clips like this from quite a 
few European countries floating around but not any from the USA. Why? 
Because the US for the most part doesn’t have any substantive 
discussions with climate activists or scientists on broadcast news.”
It’s not the first time comparisons have been made between the scene in 
McKay’s film and a climate change-centered interview on British 
television. There was another in April to which McKay also responded.
https://deadline.com/2022/07/uk-tv-interview-dont-look-up-climate-change-1235073308/ 


- -

/[ the solution is global, not individual ]/
*We're in an accountability crisis! | Clare Farrell on BBC NEWSNIGHT | 
Extinction Rebellion UK*
2,358 views  Jul 20, 2022  With the Government announcing the UK's first 
national heat emergency, Clare Farrell was invited to BBC Newsnight.

Extinction Rebellion's spokesperson Clare Farrell has mentioned the 
accountability crisis: The government haven't helped anybody to 
understand it and we have an abject accountability crisis. It's still 
okay for the banks to invest hundreds of billions. It's still okay for 
the government to fail on their targets. It's still okay for them to be 
found guilty, apparently in the High Court of having a totally, 
catastrophically poor plan that can't make it so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR-rWVeWesY



/[  New words, old tactic ]/
*Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate 
Action*
The party has largely moved beyond denying the existence of climate 
change but continues to oppose dramatic action to halt it, worried about 
the short-term economic consequences.
WASHINGTON — One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are 
under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing 
Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a climate emergency as 
temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering 
Europe are ablaze.

But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash 
action in response to the burning planet.

“I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our 
economy in the name of climate change,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, 
Republican of South Carolina.
One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week 
blocked what could have been the country’s most far-reaching American 
response to climate change. But lost in the recriminations and 
finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in 
the Senate have been as opposed to decisive action to confront planetary 
warming.

Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly dismiss the scientific 
evidence that human activities — the burning of oil, gas and coal — have 
produced gases that are dangerously heating the Earth.

But for many, denial of the cause of global temperature rise has been 
replaced by an insistence that the solution — replacing fossil fuels 
over time with wind, solar and other nonpolluting energy sources — will 
hurt the economy.

In short, delay is the new denial.

Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that 
the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas 
and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the 
carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat 
like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.
“I’m not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the 
president to shut down the production of oil and gas in the United 
States is not going to help,” said Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho.

President Biden is not proposing to shut down fossil fuel production. He 
wants to use tax credits and other incentives to speed up the 
development of wind, solar, and other low-carbon energy, and to make 
electric vehicles more affordable.
The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas 
emissions or global rising temperatures will reach catastrophic levels 
does not appear to faze many conservatives.

In many ways, elected Republicans mirror the views of their voters. A 
May poll commissioned by Pew Research Center found 63 percent of 
Democrats named climate change as a very big problem, while just 16 
percent of Republicans felt the same.
“The Democratic Party has made climate change a religion and their 
solutions are draconian,” said Mr. Graham, who accepts the science of 
global warming. He is among a handful of Republicans who support putting 
a price on carbon dioxide emissions to encourage industries to clean up 
their operations.

But Mr. Graham dismissed Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions by 
half by 2030, to try keep average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees 
Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond 
which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases 
significantly. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Mr. Graham repeated a common refrain among Republicans that it would be 
foolish for the United States, historically the country that has emitted 
the most carbon dioxide, to reduce its pollution unless other big 
polluters like China and India do the same.

“The point to me is to get the world to participate, not just us,” he said.

So it has gone with the Republican Party, where warnings of a 
catastrophe are mocked as hyperbole, where technologies that do not 
exist on a viable scale, such as “carbon capture and storage” and “clean 
coal,” are hailed as saviors. At the same time, those that do, such as 
wind and solar power and electric vehicles, are dismissed as unreliable 
and overly expensive. American leadership on a global problem is seen as 
a fool’s errand, kneecapping the domestic economy while Indian and 
Chinese coal bury America’s good intentions in soot.

“When China gets our good air, their bad air’s got to move,” Herschel 
Walker, a former football star and now a Republican candidate in Georgia 
for the Senate, explained last week. “So it moves over to our good air 
space. Then now we’ve got to clean that back up.”

The party’s political attacks often center on the symptoms of the 
climate crisis as they point to Central American climate refugees 
massing at the southern border, poor “forest management” as wildfires 
burn, and environmentalists who deprive farmers of water in record droughts.

For decades, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry denied the science 
of climate change. That has slowly started to change as the evidence 
that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate has become 
undeniable, and started to resonate with moderate and independent voters...
- -
“Denial used to be the way to delay,” said Jon Krosnick, a social 
psychologist at Stanford University. Now, he said of Republican 
lawmakers “they’ve got to come up with some other way to delay.”

Republicans involved in the issue say there has been clear movement from 
the day in 2015 when Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, 
brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that global warming 
was a myth. Some Republicans privately acknowledge that bipartisan trips 
to see the glaciers melting in Greenland have settled any doubts they 
had about what is happening to the planet.

House Republicans have a series of incremental steps that they say they 
will pass if they win the majority in November: encouraging investments 
in American renewable energy and the restoration of forests and wetlands 
to absorb carbon dioxide. Senators Kevin Cramer, Republican of North 
Dakota, and Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, have proposed a 
carbon tariff on imports from countries that are doing less than the 
United States to stem climate change...
- -
Republicans say Mr. Biden, pushed hard by uncompromising climate 
activists on the left, took such a maximalist approach to climate 
legislation that its collapse was inevitable.

“The far left has screwed this up so badly that Republicans might 
actually enact the first real action on climate change,” said Benjamin 
Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a 
right-of-center environmental organization.

But even Republicans who are trying to address the effects of climate 
change in their home states appear to find it difficult to recognize the 
root cause of the problem. Last week, three Utah Republicans, Senator 
Mitt Romney and Representatives Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens, 
proposed legislation to save the shriveling Great Salt Lake before its 
dusty remains choke the capital city that shares its name.

But absent from the proposal — which included Army Corps of Engineers 
monitoring programs, ecosystem management and “potential technologies” 
to redirect water, reinforce canals and address drought — was any 
mention of climate change.

The same went for an appeal on Friday from Mr. McCarthy, to save the 
giant sequoias in his district from fire and drought. In an opinion 
piece he co-authored in Time, Mr. McCarthy blamed “decades of fire 
suppression and misinformed policies” for year-round forest fires in his 
state, obliquely referring to “worsening drought conditions and extreme 
heat” without once mentioning climate change.

One of his co-authors, Representative Scott Peters of California, a 
Democrat who helped draft the “Save Our Sequoias” bill, declined to say 
why climate change went unmentioned in the Time piece, but he did say, 
“I wholeheartedly believe climate change is fueling catastrophic 
wildfires in the southwest.” He added of the bill, “As far as I’m 
concerned, they can tell the world that birthday cakes are starting 
these fires as long as we get the damn thing to the president’s desk.”...
- -
Republicans grappling with the undeniable reality of climate change 
still struggle with a philosophical aversion to intervening in energy 
markets — or, they would most likely say, in any markets at all. Left 
unsaid are federal tax breaks totaling as much as $20 billion a year 
that the fossil fuel industry enjoys and that Republicans, and some 
Democrats, support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/politics/climate-change-republicans-delay.html




/[  recognition is the first step ] /
*Biden Announces Plans to Deal With Climate ‘Emergency’*
The president stopped short of declaring a national emergency and 
instead announced several steps aimed at dealing with the effects of 
climate change.
WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Wednesday that he would expand 
existing federal programs to help Americans cope with the extreme heat 
wrought by climate change, even as he faces intensifying pressure to 
take aggressive action to cut the fossil fuel emissions that are 
dangerously warming the planet.

The measures fell short of the types of executive action an increasing 
number of Democrats have called on Mr. Biden to take in the wake of last 
week’s decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, to 
walk away from clean energy legislation in the Senate. That decision 
effectively doomed the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda, 
leaving Democrats and Mr. Biden searching for other ways to achieve 
their goals.

Mr. Manchin’s move followed a June decision by the Supreme Court to 
limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate 
climate-warming pollution from power plants, dealing a blow to another 
tool that Mr. Biden had hoped to use...
- -
Speaking at a shuttered coal plant in Somerset, Mass., that is being 
converted into a facility to make wind power components, Mr. Biden 
insisted that even after the two cornerstones of his climate agenda had 
crashed and burned, he would use executive authority to rein in 
heat-trapping fossil fuels.

“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to 
the world,” Mr. Biden said. His comments came as sweltering heat 
disrupted transportation networks in the United Kingdom, melted the 
roofs of factories in China and scorched the South and West of the 
United States. Noting the lack of Republican support for his climate 
proposals, Mr. Biden said, “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I 
will look at it that way.”

Still, the actions Mr. Biden announced on Wednesday will do next to 
nothing to help the United States significantly cut its emissions. 
Instead, the president’s moves mainly acknowledge that the nation is 
already in the grips of the disastrous impact of climate change and seek 
to lessen its impact on households and communities.

He announced the allocation of $2.3 billion from an existing Federal 
Emergency Management Agency program to help communities, particularly 
those in disadvantaged neighborhoods, build structures and programs to 
withstand the severe heat, storms, fires and floods that climate change 
has already started to bring...
- -
Separately, he announced the expansion of the federal Low Income Home 
Energy Assistance Program, which has historically been used to help 
people pay to heat their homes in winter. The program will now also be 
used to help pay for people to cool their homes in summer, and to build 
community cooling centers.
- -
“All we’ve seen are a handful of executive actions and the slow death of 
climate legislation in Congress,” Varshini Prakash, executive director 
of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group, said in a statement. 
“Young people are tired of receiving scraps from our government.”

Mr. Kerry also emphasized the dire global consequences of the inability 
to pass climate legislation in the United States.

“You see the impacts in Europe with the fires, houses burning, runways 
melting, railroad trains that can’t move fast because the warming of the 
metal,” Mr. Kerry said. Greenhouse gas emissions will not stop spewing 
into the atmosphere “just because people can’t get their act together 
and get something done.”

Mr. Kerry said the struggle to enact Mr. Biden’s once-ambitious 
proposals is already causing concern on the international stage.
- -
In Berlin earlier this week for a climate conference, Mr. Kerry said he 
was approached by a Chinese negotiator who asked him about the impact of 
the recent Supreme Court E.P.A. case. Others, he said, asked if Mr. 
Biden would be able to live up to his pledge to cut U.S. emissions 
roughly in half.
“It’s very interesting when you hear people in other countries asking 
you whether or not you can meet your goals,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that 
he worries other countries could use Congress’s inaction as an excuse 
not to reduce emissions.

Resistance to tackling climate change, Mr. Kerry said, also “underscores 
the narrative” among some critics that the United States is a nation in 
decline.

“It is a hard argument to counter when you don’t pass legislation,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/politics/biden-climate-emergency.html



/[  Lower 48 states avg temp increase from  1970 - 2022  - Top increased 
state is New Jersey at 4.5F ] /
*Fastest-warming states since 1970*
To determine the fastest-warming states in America, Stacker consulted 
the climate at a glance
tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fastest-warming states since 1970
Updated July 18, 2022
- -
Every state is growing warmer, with higher temperatures fueled by 
everything from powerful ocean currents and giant coal-fired power 
plants to commuters, cows, and leaky old buildings.

To determine the fastest-warming states in America, Stacker consulted 
the climate at a glance tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration. All states (save Hawaii and Alaska, for which 
state-level data is unavailable) are ranked here according to their 
average warming, with the temperature changes of each state’s 
fastest-warming cities included for context. Ties are broken by the 
fastest-warming city in each state. Where available, data for the three 
fastest-warming cities are included; for some states, data for only one 
or two cities were available.

The leading cause of rising temperatures today is an increase in 
human-derived greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane. 
The more gases we emit by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal, 
and in our farming practices, the more heat is trapped. Plants and trees 
mitigate the situation somewhat by absorbing carbon dioxide during 
photosynthesis. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, too, but it can only 
store so much.

As temperatures rise, winters grow shorter. The ice on the Great Lakes 
forms later and disappears earlier. Colorado’s snowpack is melting as 
many as 30 days earlier than it was just a generation ago. With less 
snow in the New Mexico and Colorado mountains to feed the Rio Grande, 
the river is drying up...
https://www.mycouriertribune.com/news/national_news/fastest-warming-states-since-1970/collection_b92622e9-5ec9-5f2b-8460-d3b817c8acf4.html#1



/[The news archive - looking back at disinformation battles]/ /*
*//*July 21, 2008*/
July 21, 2008: The UK Office of Communication criticizes Britain's 
Channel 4 for running the 2007 denialism doc "The Great Global Warming 
Swindle." Below, Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks.com debunks the doc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/earth/22clim.html?_r=0

http://youtu.be/boj9ccV9htk

http://youtu.be/8nrvrkVBt24


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