[✔️] June 26, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*June  26, 2022*/

/[ "We have met the enemy, and he is us"  ]/
*‘The Biggest Uncertainty Is Us’*
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, says sustainable choices must 
become the easiest, most affordable ones.
By Somini Sengupta - - June 24, 2022
I wanted to speak with Katharine Hayhoe about us.

Us, as in the “us” in her book, _“Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case 
for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.”_

Hayhoe sets out a bold, rather quixotic goal at the very start of it. 
“In this book,” she writes in the preface, “I want to show you how to 
have conversations that will help you to reconnect with friends and 
family in real life, building genuine relationships and communities 
rather than tribes and bubbles.”...
- -
Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist by training. She is the chief 
scientist at The Nature Conservancy and a professor in the political 
science department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. She 
started a newsletter in April.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

    *Sengupta: Why did you call it “Saving Us?”*

    *Hayhoe:* All too often we are told to save the planet, as though we
    and the planet can live independently. The planet will be orbiting
    the sun long after we’re gone, regardless of what we do about
    climate change.

    It’s really about saving us. It’s us humans and many other living
    things that share the planet with us.

    *Sengupta: There’s an abiding debate between whether individual
    action matters or whether only structural change is sufficient to
    address climate change. How do you think about that?*

    Hayhoe: My answer to whether we need individual action or system
    wide change is yes! When individuals use their voice, systems change.

    *Sengupta: Speaking of individual action, I sometimes hear climate
    advocates gloating about the personal choices they’ve made, like
    buying an electric car and not paying high gas prices. What do you
    make of that?*

    *Hayhoe: *It’s almost become a form of religion with its own green
    Ten Commandments. That if I do this and this and this, I’m a good
    person. But this and this is not available to everyone. Focusing on
    personal action as the primary pathway to climate solutions enhances
    rather than diminishes the inequality of lifestyles that’s being
    exacerbated by climate change.

    The system has to change such that the easiest, most affordable
    option is the sustainable one. When public transportation and
    electric cars are cheaper than internal combustion engine cars.
    Plant-based meals. Insulated homes. Clean blue skies. Walkable
    cities. We want all of that to be the default rather than only if
    you can afford it.

    *Sengupta: Do you eat meat?*

    *Hayhoe: *Carefully. We only eat locally grown meat, which is more
    expensive and harder to find. So we eat less of it.

    *Sengupta: What do you say to the “What-can-I-do” question?*

    *Hayhoe:* Do something. Anything. Talk about it. Have a
    conversation. Start a conversation by saying “Hey, I tried this.” Or
    start a conversation by saying, “Hey that school did this. Maybe we
    should too.”

    Do something and talk about it.

    There’s little functional difference between dismissives who reject
    climate change and doomers who decide we can’t fix it.

    *Sengupta: Do you have moments of doubt about all this?*

    *Hayhoe: *I don’t see how you can look at a vast array of human
    responses and not have those moments. The biggest uncertainty is us.
    It’s up to us to save ourselve

https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/CLIM_sample.html



/[ recent National Park disaster ]/
*Climate Chaos Arrives in Yellowstone*
BY PHIL KNIGHT - -  JUNE 23, 2022
- -
On Monday,  June 13 Yellowstone and southern Montana experienced its 
worst natural disaster in modern times, with the possible exception of 
the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake. Following a dry and mild winter, 
unusually heavy late spring snowfall (6 feet over Memorial Day Weekend) 
in the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains north and east of Yellowstone 
left the landscape primed for a massive flood. And over the weekend of 
June 11 and 12 the skies delivered a killer punch in the form of 
torrential rain – an entire summer’s worth in 3 days. And atmospheric 
river aimed at Yellowstone like a warm water hose, dousing the wet 
spring snow pack with a vertical flood of rain. This heavy rain on the 
deep snow brought 8 inches of water out of the mountains in a hurry, 
swelling rivers and creeks to unheard of ferocity, altering the course 
of many rivers and demolishing everything in the way...
- -
Every creek and river coming out of the high country burst its banks, 
with catastrophic results. Roads were torn apart, bridges destroyed, 
communities heavily flooded with cold brown rushing water. The normally 
inviting blue-green Yellowstone River rose to over three feet beyond its 
record high level, reaching 50,000 cubic feet per second at Corwin 
Springs just north of the Park, where  the previous record was 32,000. 
Within hours it undercut riverbanks until homes fell into the river and 
were swept downstream. The Yellowstone in Yankee Jim Canyon rose 50 feet 
in a few hours, covering State Highway 89 and ripping down the old 
one-lane Carbella Bridge. The river, now an insane raging beast, 
inundated lower lying parts of Paradise Valley and the town of 
Livingston, requiring the hospital there to be evacuated. Only 
sandbagging on top of the levee – built following 2 consecutive years of 
“100-year” floods in 1996 and 1997 – kept the flooding in Livingston 
from being much worse.

The tourist town of Gardiner Montana was completely cut off as roads all 
around the town were flooded and destroyed. The town water system was 
polluted and the power went out. Red Lodge Montana, a popular tourist 
town on the Beartooth Highway, was devastated when Rock Creek raged 
through the middle of town, covering roads in deep rushing water, 
flooding hundreds of home and businesses and tearing houses off their 
foundations. The main street in town was left covered with huge boulders 
and trees and bridges were gone. Cooke City and Silver Gate Montana, 
near Yellowstone’s Northeast Entrance, were also cut off and lost all 
their bridges. The Beartooth Highway, called by some “the most scenic 
road in America”, has at least 6 major washouts and is closed 
indefinitely. Currently the only way to reach Cooke City is from Cody, 
Wyoming over the Chief Joseph Highway...
- -
The one amazing silver lining is that no one was hurt or killed in these 
floods. Search and Rescue folks deserve a huge amount of credit. Swift 
water rescues, helicopter rescues and rapid contact and evacuation of 
park visitors made sure everyone was safe...
- -
We seem to assume things will stay as they are, that each catastrophe is 
a one-off and will not happen again nor will we be faced with a worse 
one. The Yellowstone floods have brought home how bad it can get and how 
quickly. Waters rose within minutes in many places, taking people by 
surprise and inundating areas viewed as above flood zones. Now we have a 
massive mess to clean up, an immense amount of repairs to do, and a 
large unemployed work force of guides (myself included), Park Service 
folks, restaurant and hotel employees, raft guides, bus drivers, etc. 
right at the start of what is usually the busiest season for the 
national parks. Add this massive layoff to the cost of repairs and the 
huge loss of tourism dollars. Catastrophes like the Yellowstone floods 
are extremely expensive and should be added to the cost/benefit analysis 
of development of existing and new fossil fuel sources.

The irony is not lost on me that my job and the tourism industry are 
heavily dependent on fossil fuels. On a typical day on the job as a 
Yellowstone tour guide I was driving about 240 miles with some days up 
to 400. So I realize I was contributing to the eventual demise of the 
place I love and work. Industrial tourism is one of many arms of the 
fossil fuel beast, burning up petrified swamps and dinosaur bones in a 
mad frenzy to do and see and consume the beauty and mystery of the 
vanishing natural world before it is gone. Eco-tourism as such does not 
really exist unless it is birding in your own back yard or walking local 
trails.

Thanks to a serious injury that sidelined my guiding career in May this 
year I have burned very little fossil fuel in the past 2 months. With 
oil corporations profiteering off the Ukraine war and gas around $5.00 
per gallon, being sidelined is a bit of a relief and is saving my wife 
and I some serious money on gas (which is instead going to medical 
bills). Tour companies in Yellowstone and everywhere are raising rates 
as a necessity with fuel prices skyrocketing. The Covid 19 pandemic had 
already put a serious dent in tourism during the last 2 years  – I was 
out of work for 2 months in the spring of 2020. Yellowstone area tourism 
had rebounded quite a bit and was on track to be back to near record 
numbers – 4.5 million visitors per year. Now it’s all a big question how 
much the park can handle and how many people will still visit. And where 
will all those displaced visitors go? Other parks like Glacier and Grand 
Teton are guaranteed to get swamped with visitors.

Of course the federal government and state and local tourism promoters 
are hell bent on getting everything open as soon as possible. Most of 
Yellowstone will be up and running by early July, but the north and 
Northeast entrance roads are too heavily damaged and will require major 
work. Still, with Yellowstone such a major tourist draw all stops will 
be pulled out to get it back open, impacts and expense be damned.

Perhaps this would be a good time to take a pause and consider what we 
are doing. How should we approach preservation of iconic and imperiled 
landscapes like Yellowstone, part of the “last great intact temperate 
ecosystem”?  Is heavy duty tourism really the best way to interact with 
such places as Yellowstone Lake, Hayden Valley, Lamar Valley? Is 
unfettered tourism even sustainable? Are we killing the goose that laid 
the golden egg?

The Yellowstone floods may be a one-off or they may return this season 
or next spring. You can expect more of the same – or worse – in 
Yellowstone or any number of other locations. For instance, in Denali 
National Park in Alaska a big chunk of the only road into the park 
interior slid off a mountain recently (probably due to permafrost 
melting), and will require major repairs to access the campgrounds and 
resorts at Wonder Lake and Kantishna.

Anyone care to predict the next mega disaster caused by fossil fueled fools?

Phil Knight is an environmental activist in Bozeman, Montana. He is a 
board member of the Gallatin-Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/23/climate-chaos-arrives-in-yellowstone/



/[ //  Lather, rinse, repeat//.  Please read this again --  sometime 
soon.] /
*Impact of reading about climate science goes away almost instantly*
How long does the information stick? About as long as it takes to read 
an article.
JOHN TIMMER - 6/22/2022

For decades, the scientific community has been nearly unanimous: Climate 
change is real, it's our doing, and its consequences are likely to be 
severe. Yet even as it gets more difficult to avoid some of its effects, 
poll after poll shows that the public hasn't gotten the message. There's 
very little recognition of how strong the scientific consensus is, and 
there is a lot of uncertainty about whether it's our doing—and none of 
the polling numbers seem to shift very quickly.

Over these same decades, there have been plenty of studies looking at 
why this might be. Many of them have found ways to shift the opinions of 
study subjects—methods that have undoubtedly been adopted by 
communications professionals. Yet the poll numbers have remained 
stubborn. Misinformation campaigns and political polarization have both 
been blamed, but the evidence for these factors making a difference is 
far from clear.

A new study offers an additional hint as to why. While polarization and 
misinformation both play roles in how the public interprets climate 
science, the biggest problem may be that the public has a very short 
memory, and anything people learn about climate science tends to be 
forgotten by a week later.

*Time after time*
To test people's responses to climate information, researchers gathered 
a set of materials that had appeared in major publications. Some weren't 
climate-related and served as a "placebo." Others were coverage of an 
earlier report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
Finally, there was a set of articles that focused on partisan 
disagreements regarding climate change (as opposed to the scientific 
content) and a set of opinion pieces that argued against accepting the 
scientific evidence.
The study focused on creating a bunch of paths through this information, 
with different readings in consecutive weeks. For example, one group of 
participants might receive science all the way through, while another 
might get science one week and then have it contradicted by an opinion 
piece the week after. The goal was to detect whether exposure to science 
had a lasting effect or if it could be undercut by either time or 
misinformation.

The risk here was that having so many potential paths through the 
information would mean that only a few people went down each particular 
path, making any results statistically suspect. The researchers overcame 
this by recruiting a lot of participants—nearly 3,000 people did the 
entire multi-week process. To do so, they had to rely on Mechanical 
Turk, a service some users have managed to script. But a number of 
studies have indicated that Mechanical Turk results have been replicated 
by in-person studies, so the researchers felt it was sufficiently reliable.

The experiment ran over four weeks. In the first, basic information 
about the participants' existing beliefs about climate change was 
established. Afterward, there were two weeks of reading articles, 
followed by additional polling. Week four simply saw a final poll to 
determine whether the previous weeks' reading had changed any opinions.
*Ups and downs*
The study showed that facts make a difference. When exposed to science 
news stories on the climate, people were more likely to accept that 
climate change is happening and is caused by humans. This also had 
consequences for thoughts on policy, as people who read science news 
favored government action and an expansion of renewable energy. The two 
alternative presentations—partisan conflict and anti-science opinion 
pieces—didn't have a statistical effect on the acceptance of climate 
change. (The anti-science opinion pieces did reduce support for 
renewable energy, though.)

The problem is that facts don't make a difference for very long. Even 
the participants who got two weeks of science news in a row saw their 
acceptance of science drop a week later. A week of science with either 
random news stories or a discussion of partisan arguing made things drop 
even more quickly. And a week of science followed by a week of 
anti-science opinion pieces did exactly what the writers of the opinion 
pieces might hope for: They essentially canceled each other out.

Unsurprisingly, support for policy action generally followed the drop in 
acceptance of the science that should drive the policy.

Throughout all of this, partisan biases seemed to play a relatively 
small role. The primary point where it became obvious was when 
participants were exposed to the anti-science opinion pieces, which had 
a stronger impact on Republicans. These articles also had a stronger 
effect on people who rejected climate science at the start of the study, 
although this population is likely to have a strong overlap with 
Republicans.

If you've had the feeling that we need to reconvince the US public of 
the dangers of climate change every few months, that idea seems to have 
a basis in reality. Exposing people to scientific information seems to 
work, but only briefly—and very briefly if they subsequently get exposed 
to misinformation in the form of opinion pieces. The researchers 
involved refer to holding accurate information as "fragile" and conclude 
that "the persistence of misperceptions reflects both the limits of 
human memory and the constraints imposed by the political information 
environment." In that regard, these results are likely to apply well 
beyond climate change.

PNAS, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2122069119  (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/impact-of-reading-about-climate-science-goes-away-almost-instantly/

- -

/[ research article and source material ]/
*Time and skeptical opinion content erode the effects of science 
coverage on climate beliefs and attitudes*
Brendan Nyhan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7497-1799, Ethan Porter 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9530-6955 evporter at email.gwu.edu, and Thomas 
J. Wood https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8536-5329Authors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Leticia Bode, Georgetown University, Washington, DC; received 
December 6, 2021; accepted April 8, 2022 by Editorial Board Member 
Margaret Levi
June 21, 2022
119 (26) e2122069119
*Significance*

    Why does the public remain misinformed about many issues, even
    though studies have repeatedly shown that exposure to factual
    information increases belief accuracy? To answer this question, we
    administer a four-wave panel experiment to estimate the effects of
    exposure to news and opinion about climate change. We find that
    accurate scientific information about climate change increases
    factual accuracy and support for government action to address it
    immediately after exposure. However, these effects largely disappear
    in later waves. Moreover, opinion content that voices skepticism of
    the scientific consensus reverses the accuracy gains generated by
    science coverage (unlike exposure to issue coverage featuring
    partisan conflict, which has no measurable effects).

*Abstract*

    Although experiments show that exposure to factual information can
    increase factual accuracy, the public remains stubbornly misinformed
    about many issues. Why do misperceptions persist even when factual
    interventions generally succeed at increasing the accuracy of
    people’s beliefs? We seek to answer this question by testing the
    role of information exposure and decay effects in a four-wave panel
    experiment (n = 2,898 at wave 4) in which we randomize the media
    content that people in the United States see about climate change.
    Our results indicate that science coverage of climate change
    increases belief accuracy and support for government action
    immediately after exposure, including among Republicans and people
    who reject anthropogenic climate change. However, both effects decay
    over time and can be attenuated by exposure to skeptical opinion
    content (but not issue coverage featuring partisan conflict). These
    findings demonstrate that the increases in belief accuracy generated
    by science coverage are short lived and can be neutralized by
    skeptical opinion content.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.212206911
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2122069119



/[The news archive - looking back -- where the hell is it? ]/
/*June  26, 2006*/
June 26, 2006: The Associated Press reports:

    “The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush
    administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global
    warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important
    decisions on the environment.

    “The decision means the court will address whether the
    administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat
    climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.

    "'This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the
    Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from
    cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants,'
    said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club.

    “Bookbinder said if the court upholds the administration's argument
    it also could jeopardize plans by California and 10 other states,
    including most of the Northeast, to require reductions in carbon
    dioxide emissions from motor vehicles.

    “There was no immediate comment from either the EPA or White House
    on the court's action.

    “’Fundamentally, we don't think carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and
    so we don't think these attempts are a good idea,’ said John Felmy,
    chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group
    representing oil and gas producers.

    “A dozen states, a number of cities and various environmental groups
    asked the court to take up the case after a divided lower court
    ruled against them.

    “They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to
    limit carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles under the federal
    Clean Air Act because as the primary ‘greenhouse'’ gas causing a
    warming of the earth, carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

    “The administration maintains that carbon dioxide -- unlike other
    chemicals that must be controlled to assure healthy air -- is not a
    pollutant under the federal clean air law, and that even if it were
    the EPA has discretion over whether to regulate it.

    “A federal appeals court sided with the administration in a sharply
    divided ruling.

    “One judge said the EPA's refusal to regulate carbon dioxide was
    contrary to the clean air law; another said that even if the Clean
    Air Act gave the EPA authority over the heat-trapping chemical, the
    agency could choose not to use that authority; a third judge ruled
    against the suit because, he said, the plaintiffs had no standing
    because they hadn't proven harm.

    “Carbon dioxide, which is release when burning fossil fuels such as
    coal or gasoline, is the leading so-called 'greenhouse' gas because
    as it drifts into the atmosphere it traps the earth's heat -- much
    like a greenhouse. Many scientists cite growing evidence that this
    pollution is warming the earth to a point of beginning to change
    global climate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/washington/AP-Scotus-Greenhouse-Gases.html?pagewanted=print 



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