[✔️] July 31, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 31, 2022*/

/[ Bloomberg news says ...]/
*Exxon CEO Loves What Manchin Did for Big Oil in $370 Billion Deal*
By Kevin Crowley
July 29, 2022
Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods called the spending bill agreed to by 
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and West Virginia Senator Joe 
Manchin “a step in the right direction.”

“We’re pleased with the broader recognition that a more comprehensive 
set of solutions” is needed to go through the...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/exxon-s-woods-calls-manchin-bill-step-in-the-right-direction#xj4y7vzkg
- -
/[ The NYTimes says ... ]/
*Democrats Got a Climate Bill. Joe Manchin Got Drilling, and More.*
Along the way to the $369 billion package, the West Virginia senator 
secured an array of concessions for his state and for the fossil fuel 
industry...
Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman
July 30, 2022...
- -
Some climate activists called the fossil fuel provisions a “poison pill” 
that would lock in oil and gas emissions. The bill would require the 
Interior Department to hold lease sales for oil and gas exploration in 
the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet in Alaska. It also requires the 
department to continue to hold auctions for fossil fuel leases if it 
plans to approve new wind or solar projects on federal lands.

Those provisions would make it impossible for President Biden to uphold 
his campaign promise to end new federal oil and gas leasing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/climate/manchin-climate-deal.html



/[  New book - _Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide_ by Bill McGuire - 
due out Aug 4th ] /
*‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be 
stopped, says expert*
Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things 
are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK 
scientist
Robin McKie - 30 Jul 2022
The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not 
be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by 
sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures 
across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to 
their discomfort.

    *Five unexpected threats posed by the pumping of carbon dioxide into
    the atmosphere*

    *Under our feet* As vast, thick sheets of ice disappear from high
    mountains and from the poles, rock crusts that had previously been
    compressed are beginning to rebound, threatening to trigger
    earthquakes and tsunamis. “We are on track to bequeath to our
    children and their children not only a far hotter world, but also a
    more geologically fractious one,” says Bill McGuire.

    *New battlefields *As crops burn and hunger spreads, communities are
    coming into conflict and the election of populist leaders – who will
    promise the Earth to their people – is likely to become commonplace.
    Most worrying are the tensions over dwindling water supplies that
    are growing between India, Pakistan and China, all possessors of
    atomic weapons. “The last thing we need is a hot war over water
    between two of the world’s nuclear powers,” McGuire observes.

    *Methane bombs *Produced by wetlands, cattle and termites, methane
    is 86 times more potent in its power to heat the atmosphere than
    carbon dioxide, though fortunately it hangs around for much less
    time. The problem is that much of the world’s methane is trapped in
    layers of Arctic permafrost. As these melt, more methane will be
    released and our world will get even hotter.

    *Losing the Gulf Stream* As the ice caps melt, the resulting cold
    water pouring from the Arctic threatens to block or divert the Gulf
    Stream, which carries a prodigious amount of heat from the tropics
    to the seas around Europe. Signs now suggest the Gulf Stream is
    already weakening and could shut down completely before end of the
    century, triggering powerful winter storms over Europe.

    *Calorie crunch *Four-fifths of all calories consumed across the
    world come from just 10 crop plants including wheat, maize and rice.
    Many of these staples will not grow well under the higher
    temperatures that will soon become the norm, pointing towards a
    massive cut in the availability of food, which will have a
    catastrophic impact across the planet, says McGuire.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus 
professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College 
London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming 
climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit 
warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. 
Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of 
storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current 
extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us 
avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the 
point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and 
temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where 
summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where 
our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 
will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire 
insists.
In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK 
government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. 
Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although 
not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas 
emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming 
is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in 
climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing 
in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the 
future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate 
appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to 
know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to 
tackle the crisis.”
McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes 
many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, 
including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he 
completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many 
of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with 
writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it 
is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”

Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement 
that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the 
highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest 
temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

In addition, London’s fire service had to tackle blazes across the 
capital, with one conflagration destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east 
London. Crews there had to fight to save the local fire station itself. 
“Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be 
almost wiped out by wildfires in 2022,” says McGuire. “If this country 
needs a wake-up call then surely that is it.”

Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across 
Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in 
the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone 
national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a 
different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to 
every one of us.”
These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate 
breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises 
translate into extreme weather.

“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated 
up by just over one degree,” says McGuire. “It turns out the climate is 
changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate 
models. That’s something that was never expected.”

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping 
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by 
just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was 
agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 
1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global 
carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. 
“Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that 
date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in 
less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C 
will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, 
devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and 
surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the 
stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted 
that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges 
made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

 From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming 
climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that 
lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation 
deteriorating even further, McGuire says...
Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to 
counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major 
headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last 
longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will 
become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050.

“Despite repeated warnings, hundreds of thousands of these inappropriate 
homes continue to be built every year,” adds McGuire.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire 
blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and 
obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we 
have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C 
climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will 
crash through it.”

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses 
that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, 
and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly 
calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will 
be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate 
breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would 
appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival 
of human civilisation.

“This is a call to arms,” he says. “So if you feel the need to glue 
yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an 
electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. 
Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat. Stop flying; lobby your 
elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your 
vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the 
climate emergency.”
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by 
Icon Books, £9.99
- -
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/30/total-climate-meltdown-inevitable-heatwaves-global-catastrophe



[ Opinions ]
*The Case Against Commercial Logging in Wildfire-Prone Forests*
By Chad Hanson and Michael Dorsey
July 30, 2022
- -
In fact, a large and growing body of scientific research and evidence 
shows that these logging practices are making things worse. Last fall 
over 200 scientists and ecologists, including us, warned the Biden 
administration and Congress that logging activities such as commercial 
thinning reduce the cooling shade of the forest canopy and change a 
forest’s microclimate in ways that tend to increase wildfire intensity.

Logging emits three times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per 
acre as wildfire alone. Most of the tree parts unusable for lumber — the 
branches, tops, bark and sawdust from milling — are burned for energy, 
sending large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. In contrast, 
wildfire releases a surprisingly small amount of the carbon in trees, 
less than 2 percent. Logging in U.S. forests is now responsible for as 
much annual greenhouse gas emissions as burning coal...
- -
The president and Congress must instead increase forest protections from 
logging to reduce carbon emissions and allow intact forests to absorb 
more of the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. A failure to do so 
will put countless species at risk, worsen global warming and increase 
threats of wildfire to vulnerable towns. Current logging subsidies 
should be redirected into programs to directly help communities become 
fire safe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/opinion/california-wildfires-oak-fire-yosemite-sequoias.html



/[  video discussion  ] /
*Has the News Become Divisive Propaganda? ‘The Sum of Us’ Author Heather 
McGhee on Resetting America*
103,359 views  Premiered Feb 25, 2021  We’re having big discussions 
about the path forward to Reset America with Heather McGhee. The 
acclaimed author, commentator and former president of think tank Demos 
joins Carlos to discuss her bold new book about how to achieve racial 
justice. What connection does she draw between the news media and the 
systemic racial issues seen across society — and how does she propose we 
fix it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr0olcSVbPI



/[ The affliction is the lesson ]/
*Climate change said driving force behind larger, more extreme wildfires*
EAST LANSING, Mich., Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Climate change is likely behind the 
larger and more frequent extreme wildfires being experienced in the U.S. 
West, researchers say.

More of the unpredictable and erratic fires, harder to contain and often 
resulting in catastrophic damage and loss of property and life, could be 
in store with ongoing climate change, a study led by Michigan State 
University indicates.

The researchers analyzed current and future climate patterns and their 
effect on the spread of fire in a mountainous region that includes 
Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, a university 
release said Thursday.

"Our findings suggest that future lower atmospheric conditions may favor 
larger and more extreme wildfires, posing an additional challenge to 
fire and forest management," MSU geography Professor Lifeng Luo said.

The study focused on August -- the most active month for wildfires in 
the western United States -- and found 3.6 million acres burned there in 
that month in 2012, the most of any August since 2000.

However, the researchers noted, the number of fires was the second 
fewest in that 12-year time frame, meaning the fires were much larger.

Exceptionally dry and unstable conditions in the Earth's lower 
atmosphere can increase natural factors including the availability of 
fuel (vegetation), precipitation, wind and the location of lightning 
strikes, they said.

"Global climate change may have a significant impact on these factors, 
thus affecting potential wildfire activity across many parts of the 
world," the study authors said.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2013/08/01/Climate-change-said-driving-force-behind-larger-more-extreme-wildfires/42431375391483/?u3L=1#ixzz2mp7Qhmhl


/[ New Yorker magazine - text and audio reading ]/
*Living Through India’s Next-Level Heat Wave*
In hospitals, in schools, and on the streets, high temperatures have 
transformed routines and made daylight dangerous.
By Dhruv Khullar
July 25, 2022
The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic 
place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, 
stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers 
stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly 
trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian 
government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant 
water. Thousands of people who live in slums near the mountain’s base 
work as waste pickers, collecting, sorting, and selling the garbage 
created by around half of Delhi’s residents.

This March was the hottest on record in India. The same was true for 
April. On the afternoon of April 26th, Bhalswa caught fire. Dark, toxic 
fumes spewed into the air, and people living nearby struggled to 
breathe. By the time firefighters arrived, flames had engulfed much of 
the landfill. In the past, similar fires had been extinguished within 
hours or days, but Bhalswa burned for weeks...
- -
“The heat has created a rise in physical, psychological, and social 
symptoms,” he said. “Heatstroke, dizziness, low blood pressure, 
dehydration, exhaustion—we are seeing these almost daily.” The hospital 
was on a main road, and often admitted travellers. “The A.C.s in cars 
can’t function at such high temperatures,” he said. “The cars become 
extremely hot. The other day, three passengers came in—one person 
vomiting, one person with fever, one person so weak he couldn’t move.”..
- -
I walked through the doors of the pediatric I.C.U. Alarms were pinging 
loudly; a child screamed behind a curtain and a nurse rushed past. Two 
pediatricians were completing their rounds, reviewing X-rays, speaking 
with one family and then another. The sun blazed through a window at the 
far end of the room.

Behind me, a toddler rested after suffering a febrile seizure—a 
frightening, uncontrollable shaking, driven by heat and infection. Up 
ahead, a woman tended to a teen-age boy, his head wrapped in a bloodied 
bandage. In a nearby bed, a young girl lay sleeping. I traced the I.V. 
tubing from her arm up along the pole next to her. A bag of fluid hung 
at the top, dripping its contents one hydrating drop at a time. I 
thought about how a warmer planet would affect her ability to study, 
work, and live, and about how little time we have to change course. The 
dripping of the I.V. felt less like a remedy than a countdown.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/living-through-indias-next-level-heat-wave 




/[The news archive - looking back at media engagement ]/
/*July 31, 2015*/
The New York Times reports on desperate efforts by Charles and David 
Koch to improve their media image.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/us/koch-brothers-brave-spotlight-to-try-to-alter-their-image.html

The New York Times editorial page observes:

    "Hillary Rodham Clinton has promised a series of initiatives to
    address the challenge of climate change. The first installment,
    unveiled this week in Iowa, calls for an aggressive expansion of
    wind, solar and other carbon-free energy sources so that they
    provide one-third of America’s electricity by 2027 — enough, she
    says, to power every home in the country.

    "Mrs. Clinton at least is willing to confront global warming, which
    her prospective Republican opponents have been doing their best to
    avoid, belittle and deny. But as solutions go, setting goals isn’t
    much. Getting there is the tough part. And even then, renewables can
    be only part of a comprehensive energy strategy...

    "[Clinton's plan doesn't mention] the one mechanism that would
    guarantee a shift in the way the country produces and consumes
    energy, namely putting a price on carbon emissions, presumably with
    a tax. Mrs. Clinton has already been through the carbon pricing wars
    in Congress (including an ill-fated cap and trade bill she supported
    in 2008) and apparently sees it as a lost cause in the current
    political environment.

    "It will be interesting to watch Mrs. Clinton flesh out her ideas.
    The nation needs investment in a new generation of nuclear power, a
    carbon-free source that provides one-fifth of the nation’s
    electricity. Many environmentalists and scientists would like to see
    her take a much tougher approach to new oil and gas exploration than
    Mr. Obama, whose generally benevolent attitude toward fossil fuel
    development (Alaska being an exception) seemed at odds with his
    commitment to cut carbon pollution.

    "If the global warming’s worst consequences are to be avoided, a big
    chunk of the world’s fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground. A
    big test of Mrs. Clinton’s commitments will be whether and how she
    addresses this reality."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/opinion/setting-big-goals-hillary-clinton-joins-the-climate-battle.html?ref=opinion


=======================================
*Mass media is lacking, here are a few daily summariesof global warming 
news - email delivered*

=========================================================
**Inside Climate News*
Newsletters
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or 
once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines 
deliver the full story, for free.
https://insideclimatenews.org/
---------------------------------------
**Climate Nexus* https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*
Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News summarizes the 
most important climate and energy news of the day, delivering an 
unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant reporting. It also provides 
original reporting and commentary on climate denial and pro-polluter 
activity that would otherwise remain largely unexposed.    5 weekday
=================================
*Carbon Brief Daily https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up*
Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon Brief 
sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to thousands of 
subscribers around the world. The email is a digest of the past 24 hours 
of media coverage related to climate change and energy, as well as our 
pick of the key studies published in the peer-reviewed journals.
more at https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief
==================================
*T*he Daily Climate *Subscribe https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*
Get The Daily Climate in your inbox - FREE! Top news on climate impacts, 
solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered week days. Better than coffee.
Other newsletters  at https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/

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

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

   Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and 
sender. This is a hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for commercial 
purposes. Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.