[✔️] June 23, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Thu Jun 23 08:24:50 EDT 2022
/*June 23, 2022*/
/[ //clip from an opinion //] /
*What’s Worse: Climate Denial or Climate Hypocrisy?*
June 22, 2022
By David Wallace-Wells - Opinion Writer
- -
In this new world, it’s natural to want a neat fable, a clear sense of
direction. If you had to choose just one story to tell, probably the
most descriptive one is this: Warming is going to get considerably worse
than it is today, with the damage created primarily by the world’s rich
pummeling the world’s poor. But climate change is not only a morality
tale of that kind, and how we regard the near-term future is not a
simple, binary choice between two mood-affiliation poles — good news and
bad, optimism and pessimism, damage or resilience. It is likely to
unleash all of those at once, along with a lot of suffering and social
fragmentation. Between the (now unlikely) worst cases and the (even more
unlikely) best cases is an ugly muddle, through which we are now already
wading — feeling our way toward anything that might qualify, even by
degraded standards, as a relatively safe shore...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/opinion/environment/climate-hypocrisy-larry-fink.html
/
/
/
/
///[ we are exposed to disinformation - video cartoon 3:40 min ]/
*How to Watch the News Media and Stay Sane*
19,701 views Jun 22, 2022 We are used to thinking of what we call the
news as a tool that can help us to vanquish ignorance. But what it
continuously - albeit slyly - does is encourage us to forget entirely
what we actually feel in relation to certain events and crucially why
that is so important.
https://youtu.be/2G0mLxDE974
/
/[/Activism by FoodandWaterWatch.org asks us to send a message to
Congress ]/
*The Future Generations Protection Act — The Climate Bill We Urgently Need*
Any serious climate plan must take on the fossil fuel industry and
directly begin to shut down fossil fuel production, transport, and
combustion. Luckily, a recently re-introduced bill will do just that.
Will you send a message to Congress to support it?
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/
/[ "We cannot solve this crisis without combating corporate power" ]/
/[ top opinion today - maybe always ]/
*If we are to have a future, climate justice needs a legal footing*
The ICJ should issue a legal opinion on the rights of present and future
generations to inhabit a world that is not ravaged by climate change
effects.
Bob Loughman Weibur - - Prime Minister of the Republic of Vanuatu
21 Jun 2022
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/6/21/if-we-are-to-have-a-future-climate-justice-needs-a-legal-footing
/
/
/
/
/[ Dave Roberts podcast deep discussions ]/
*Volts podcast: Kimberly Nicholas on the best ways to get cars out of
cities*
Lessons from Europe.
David Roberts - - Jun 22, 2022
In the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice
word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars
and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is growing
agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly about fighting
climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality of life — living
without air and noise pollution, using your legs to get around, and
enjoying public spaces.
More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen found when
it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled on a bike adds
value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a car subtracts value.
The pushback against cars in Europe has been going on for decades now,
but there has been little effort to catalogue and rank the various
policies and initiatives involved. What works and what doesn’t? What
should other cities prioritize?
Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on
Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature (surveying 800
papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies. It was co-authored by
Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research) and Kimberly Nicholas of
Sweden’s Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. Nicholas
later wrote a summary of the research for The Conversation that received
an enormous amount of attention.
As it happens, pushing cars out of cities is one of my enduring
obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the
research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing policies, and
ponder whether such policies could ever take hold in the US. Our
conversation was enlightening and heartening, despite making me want to
move to Europe...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-kimberly-nicholas-on?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&utm_medium=email#details
- -
/[ read or listen to the narrated article ]/
*12 best ways to get cars out of cities – ranked by new research*
April 14, 2022
https://newsoveraudio.com/?embedPubName=The%20Conversation&embedPubId=103&offerId=the_conversation_exclusive_szm4rs
https://theconversation.com/12-best-ways-to-get-cars-out-of-cities-ranked-by-new-research-180642
- -
[ Case Studies on Transport Policy ]
*A dozen effective interventions to reduce car use in European cities:
Lessons learned from a meta-analysis and transition management*
Paula Kuss, Kimberly A.Nicholas
Highlights
We found 12 effective interventions to reduce urban car use and support
climate goals.
Effective interventions used multiple measures and policy instruments.
Public Goods & Services are often combined with economic/regulatory
instruments.
Effective interventions restricted car use (push) and encouraged
alternatives (pull).
Local experts rated novelty, feasibility, & suitability to guide pilot
implementation.
*Abstract*
Transitioning to fossil-free transport and reducing car use are
necessary to meet European and national climate goals. Cities are
promising leverage points to facilitate system transitions by
promoting local innovation and policy experimentation. Building on
transition management, we developed a knowledge base for the
implementation of transition experiments to reduce city-level car
use. From screening nearly 800 peer-reviewed studies and case
studies, including in-depth analysis of 24 documents that met
quality criteria and quantitatively estimated car use reduction, we
identify 12 intervention types combining different measures and
policy instruments that were effective in reducing car use in
European cities. The most effective at reducing overall car use were
the Congestion Charge, Parking & Traffic Congrol, and Limited
Traffic Zone. Most interventions were led by local government,
planned and decided in collaboration with different urban
stakeholders. We evaluated the potential of the identified
intervention types to be implemented in a pilot study of Lund,
Sweden, using three criteria from Transition Management of novelty,
feasibility, and suitability, as assessed by interviews with local
experts. We recommend three transition experiments to reduce local
car use in Lund: Parking and Traffic Control, Workplace Parking
Charge, and Mobility Services for Commuters. We suggest
practitioners follow our method to identify effective and locally
suitable interventions to reduce car use, and future research
quantify the effectiveness of interventions to reduce car use using
the standardised outcome measure of daily passenger kilometres
travelled by car.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X22000281
/[ Grist is trying very hard ] /*
****Where have all the climate activists gone?*
With legislation stalled, a mass protest movement is struggling to find
its place.
- -
Fisher, who has spent 20 years studying climate policy and social
movements, is also disillusioned. In a recent paper, she argued that
without a truly massive social movement — some political scientists have
argued that it will take approximately 3.5 percent of a country’s
population — it is unlikely that we will see more substantive action on
climate change. The surge of activism over the past few years, she says,
was substantial — but not nearly enough. “It’s really unfathomable to
think that anything is going to change anytime soon,” she said. “Until
something really motivates a huge critical mass of Americans.”
Will that happen? There are signs, perhaps. Heat waves, droughts, and
wildfires are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore — even for
Republicans in Congress. Living in the American West has become an
unending series of weather disasters, some of which turn the sky orange
and the landscape black. Even in the best case scenarios for climate
change, the world will continue warming by at least another half of a
degree Celsius. That will mean even more disasters, more protests, and
more anger.
Many of the activists who devoted their lives to climate change for the
past few years are tired and frustrated. “It’s definitely extremely
demoralizing,” Mulholland said. “But the thing with climate change is
that we just don’t have the luxury of giving up. As long as climate
change continues being a problem, there will be young people who are
pissed about it.
https://grist.org/protest/where-have-all-the-climate-activists-gone/
/[ Opinion from a NYTimes email ] /
*Our world is changing, but we don’t have the ability yet to fathom how*
By David Wallace-Wells
June 22, 2022
In early 2020, Larry Fink — the chief executive of BlackRock, a
financial firm whose $10 trillion in assets under management are roughly
equivalent to the aggregate wealth of Latin America, and about twice
that of Africa — did his best to stake his claim as the face of an
environmentally responsible business future. “Climate change has become
a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects,” Fink wrote in his
annual letter to C.E.O.s that year. He called global warming the most
serious threat to the financial system in his 40 years of experience and
promised a drastic response from his firm: making sustainability
“integral to portfolio construction and risk management”; ditching
investments that contribute to the problem; and pursuing not just
sustainability but transparency, too, so we all could see what impacts
the company was having.
Not long before, captains of industry like Fink could have gotten away
with climate indifference, and many with outright denial. But something
had changed — with the Paris agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees
Celsius, with Greta Thunberg’s school strikes and the arrival, in the
global North, of obvious climate disasters long sequestered in the
global South. And finance seemed to take the hint, creating a new wave
of purportedly virtuous “environmental, social and governance” (E.S.G.)
investing.
But in his annual letter this January, just two years later, Fink struck
a radically different tone, rejecting “woke” capitalism and elevating
the principle that investors should center only on profits. In the
spring, the firm announced it would support fewer shareholder
resolutions on climate change, “as we do not consider them to be
consistent with our clients’ long-term financial interests.” Just months
before, BlackRock closed a $15.5 billion investment in Saudi pipelines.
What should we call an about-face like this? The word that comes most
easily to mind is “hypocrisy” — or perhaps “greenwashing,” the insult
that activists like to lob at companies that use eco-friendly rhetoric
to launder their reputations. But this basic phenomenon, in which
powerful people make climate pledges that turn out to wildly outrace
their genuine commitments, has now become so pervasive that it begins to
look less like venality by any one person or institution and more like a
new political grammar. The era of climate denial has been replaced with
one plagued by climate promises that no one seems prepared to keep.
For years, when advocates lamented the “emissions gap,” they meant the
gulf between what scientists said was necessary and what public and
private actors were willing to promise. Today that gap has almost
entirely disappeared; it has been estimated that global pledges, if
enacted in full, would most likely bring the planet 1.8 degrees Celsius
of warming — in line with the Paris agreement’s stated target of “well
below two degrees” and in range of its more ambitious goal of 1.5
degrees. But it has been replaced by another gap, between what has been
pledged and what is being done. In June, a global review of net-zero
pledges by corporations found that fully half of them had laid out no
concrete plan for getting there; and though 83 percent of emissions and
91 percent of global G.D.P. is now covered by national net-zero pledges,
no country — not a single one, including the 187 that signed the Paris
agreement — is on track for emissions reductions in line with a 1.5
degree target, according to the watchdog group Climate Action Tracker.
In trading denial for dissonance, a certain narrative clarity has been
lost. Five years ago, the stakes were clear, to those looking closely,
but so were the forces of denial and inaction, which helps explain the
global crescendo of moral fervor that appeared to peak just before the
pandemic. Today the rhetorical war has largely been won, but the outlook
grows a lot more confusing when everyone agrees to agree, paying at
least lip service to the existential rhetoric of activists. It’s not
just Boris Johnson — who once mocked “eco-doomsters” — declaring at the
2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference that it was “one minute to midnight
on that doomsday clock.” The 1.5-degree goal was recently described as
“fundamental for the survival of the ecosystem as a whole” by, of all
people, the head of OPEC.
Rhetoric this unmoored from reality is often called disinformation. It
is also simply disorienting — especially given how many narratives have
been layered over our picture of the post-warming future. Yes, there’s
still an awful lot of fossil-fuel propaganda out there, as well as a
profusion of wishful thinking, climate poptimism and giddy
techno-solutionism. But even among those who take the inevitability of
warming seriously, there’s also a lot of normalization and
compartmentalization, which allow many of the world’s most privileged to
regard climate suffering as distant if tragic. And there are the
narrative temptations of apocalyptic thinking, too — which, while often
misleading, at least gives a familiar shape to a future that can be
otherwise quite difficult to make sense of.
As significant climate impacts have begun unmistakably to arrive, indeed
now almost daily, the curtain of denial has been pulled back, revealing
not a simple story but a complicated new world. During the South Asian
heat wave, we heard warnings of wet-bulb temperatures that approached
the theoretical limit for human survivability, but then the punishing
heat wave endured for three months with relatively few deaths. We hear
about the rapid decline in the price of renewables — photovoltaic solar
power is now the “cheapest source of electricity in history,” according
to the International Energy Agency — but also that major oil companies
are reportedly planning more than 200 new projects globally in just the
next three years; in May, 73 percent of shareholders of Exxon Mobil,
which has a 2050 net-zero pledge, voted against trying to reduce
emissions at all.
Among the disorienting features of climate news is that it isn’t
actually all bad anymore; the planet seems not to be veering as
certainly toward a worst-case future as felt likely just a few years
ago. Those trying to project a climate outcome through the veil of
uncertainty now estimate that, given current policies, the world is
probably heading this century for about 2.5 or three degrees of warming
— a full degree or two cooler than was described as “business as usual”
as recently as a few years ago, but a degree or more warmer than has
been described as “disastrous” for longer still. An enormous amount of
possible suffering may have been averted; but an unconscionable amount
still lies in store, at least in the absence of rapid and monumental
additional action.
Those straining to make the math work on the back end, by invoking
large-scale carbon removal later this century, are generating novel
dissonance, too. We see headlines about Stripe and its tech allies
making a $925 million commitment to removal — perhaps without realizing
that the I.P.C.C. has already built into nearly all its lower-warming
scenarios the fact that, by 2050, every single year many billions of
tons of carbon will be removed from the atmosphere. We nod our heads
reflexively about proposals to plant a trillion trees, without realizing
that doing so, as climate scientists like David Ho have pointed out,
would set the carbon clock back by less than eight months at current
emissions levels. (Plus, trees burn, unfortunately; last year, in fact,
the carbon released by wildfires exceeded that released by any of the
world’s economies except the United States and China.)
In this new world, it’s natural to want a neat fable, a clear sense of
direction. If you had to choose just one story to tell, probably the
most descriptive one is this: Warming is going to get considerably worse
than it is today, with the damage created primarily by the world’s rich
pummeling the world’s poor. But climate change is not only a morality
tale of that kind, and how we regard the near-term future is not a
simple, binary choice between two mood-affiliation poles — good news and
bad, optimism and pessimism, damage or resilience. It is likely to
unleash all of those at once, along with a lot of suffering and social
fragmentation. Between the (now unlikely) worst cases and the (even more
unlikely) best cases is an ugly muddle, through which we are now already
wading — feeling our way toward anything that might qualify, even by
degraded standards, as a relatively safe shore.
https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion [ The NYT will not always print
opinions from Wallace-Wells - especially about climate ]
/[The news archive - looking back at an important day that should have,
would have made a better world today ]/
/*June 23, 1988*/
June 23, 1988: NASA scientist James Hansen warns the US Senate about the
risks of human-caused climate change.
*Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate*
By Philip Shabecoff, Special To the New York Times
June 24, 1988
The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than
in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and
the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected
global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist
reported today.
Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising
global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming
caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ''greenhouse
effect.'' But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was
99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural
variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other
artificial gases in the atmosphere.
Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview
that there was no ''magic number'' that showed when the greenhouse
effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and
weather. But he added, ''It is time to stop waffling so much and say
that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is
here.'' An Impact Lasting Centuries
If Dr. Hansen and other scientists are correct, then humans, by
burning of fossil fuels and other activities, have altered the
global climate in a manner that will affect life on earth for
centuries to come.
Dr. Hansen, director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies in
Manhattan, testifed before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee.
He and other scientists testifying before the Senate panel today
said that projections of the climate change that is now apparently
occurring mean that the Southeastern and Midwestern sections of the
United States will be subject to frequent episodes of very high
temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond. But they
cautioned that it was not possible to attribute a specific heat wave
to the greenhouse effect, given the still limited state of knowledge
on the subject. Some Dispute Link
Some scientists still argue that warmer temperatures in recent years
may be a result of natural fluctuations rather than human-induced
changes.
Several Senators on the Committee joined witnesses in calling for
action now on a broad national and international program to slow the
pace of global warming.
Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at
hearing today, said: ''As I read it, the scientific evidence is
compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere
gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are
going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to
cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.'' Trapping of
Solar Radiation
Mathematical models have predicted for some years now that a buildup
of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and
oil and other gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere
would cause the earth's surface to warm by trapping infrared
radiation from the sun, turning the entire earth into a kind of
greenhouse.
If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the
effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from
the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections. This rise in
temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be
greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees, and
lower at the Equator.
The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal
expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus
causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the
next century. Scientists have already detected a slight rise in sea
levels. At the same time, heat would cause inland waters to
evaporate more rapidly, thus lowering the level of bodies of water
such as the Great Lakes.
Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring
stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the
hottest years on record occurred in the 1980's. Compared with a
30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature
averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a
degree higher last year. In the entire century before 1880, global
temperature had risen by half a degree, rising in the late 1800's
and early 20th century, then roughly stabilizing for unknown reasons
for several decades in the middle of the century. Warmest Year Expected
In the first five months of this year, the temperature averaged
about four-tenths of a degree above the base period, Dr. Hansen
reported today. ''The first five months of 1988 are so warm globally
that we conclude that 1988 will be the warmest year on record unless
there is a remarkable, improbable cooling in the remainder of the
year,'' he told the Senate committee.
He also said that current climate patterns were consistent with the
projections of the greenhouse effect in several respects in addition
to the rise in temperature. For example, he said, the rise in
temperature is greater in high latitudes than in low, is greater
over continents than oceans, and there is cooling in the upper
atmosphere as the lower atmosphere warms up.
''Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a
high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between
the greenhouse effect and observed warming,'' Dr. Hansen said at the
hearing today, adding, ''It is already happening now.''
Dr. Syukuro Manabe of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration testified today
that a number of factors, including an earlier snowmelt each year
because of higher temperatures and a rain belt that moves farther
north in the summer means that ''it is likely that severe
mid-continental summer dryness will occur more frequently with
increasing atmsopheric temperature.'' A Taste of the Future
While natural climate variability is the most likely chief cause of
the current drought, Dr. Manabe said, the global warming trend is
probably ''aggravating the current dry condition.'' He added that
the current drought was a foretaste of what the country would be
facing in the years ahead.
Dr. George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole Research Center in
Woods Hole, Mass., said that while a slow warming trend would give
human society time to respond, the rate of warming is uncertain. One
factor that could speed up global warming is the widescale
destruction of forests that are unable to adjust rapidly enough to
rising temperatures. The dying forests would release the carbon
dioxide they store in their organic matter, and thus greatly speed
up the greenhouse effect. Sharp Cut in Fuel Use Urged
Dr. Woodwell, and other members of the panel, said that planning
must begin now for a sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and
other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide. Because trees absorb
and store carbon dioxide, he also proposed an end to the current
rapid clearing of forests in many parts of the world and ''a
vigorous program of reforestation.''
Some experts also believe that concern over global warming caused by
the burning of fossil fuels warrants a renewed effort to develop
safe nuclear power. Others stress the need for more efficient use of
energy through conservation and other measures to curb fuel-burning.
Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist with the
Environmental Defense Fund, a national environmental group, said a
number of steps can be taken immediately around the world, including
the ratification and then strengthening of the treaty to reduce use
of chlorofluorocarbons, which are widely used industrial chemicals
that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect. These
chemicals have also been found to destroy ozone in the upper
atmosphere that protects the earth's surface from harmful
ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html
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