[✔️] November 23, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 23, 2022*/

/[ Royalty of climate journalism, Elizabeth Kolbert scrolls through the 
alphabet of global warming items --  in the New Yorker  - text and 
listen-to-the-story audio ]/
*CLIMATE CHANGE FROM A TO Z*
The stories we tell ourselves about the future.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
November 21, 2022
/[it concludes] /Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by 
summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or 
“conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a 
happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending 
at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are 
limits, and we are up against them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/climate-change-from-a-to-z

- -

/[  Now Bill McKibben warns us off geo-engineering -- also in the New 
Yorker ]/
*Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re 
Inching Toward It*
The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try 
it. But climate inaction is making it more likely.
By Bill McKibben
November 22, 2022
But there’s no denying the author’s prescience: this spring saw the most 
dire pre-monsoon heat wave in Indian history; only a slightly lower 
humidity prevented a real-life reprise of the mass death in the book. It 
will take such an event to trigger something as powerful as 
geoengineering, Robinson said, when we talked this summer. Countries and 
individuals probably won’t be spurred to preëmptively geoengineer the 
atmosphere “by the sense of a coming crisis,” he told me, “nor by sea 
level rise or habitat loss or anything else that is an indirect effect 
of rising global temperatures. It will be the direct consequence—deaths 
by way of extreme heat wave—that will do it.” He pointed out that, as we 
spoke, China was undergoing a heat wave even more anomalous than the one 
in South Asia, and, as a result, had deployed fleets of planes to seed 
clouds with silver iodide in hopes of inducing rain—not a huge step from 
sending those same fleets into the stratosphere with sulphur. I think 
Robinson’s analysis is likely correct; there will come a point when the 
sheer impossible horror of what we’re doing to the planet, and what we 
have already done, may make geoengineering seem irresistible.

But there’s another plot device that has emerged, this one in real life: 
the dramatic drop in the price of renewable energy. We’ve long imagined 
that dealing with global warming requires moving from cheap fossil fuels 
to expensive renewable energy, but, in the past few years, oil, gas, and 
coal have grown more expensive, and sun and wind power have plummeted in 
price. Suddenly, we have the power to deal with global warming by 
transitioning, very rapidly, from expensive fossil fuels to cheap 
sources of renewable energy.

The transition to clean energy should keep getting easier in the next 
few years, both because the price of clean energy keeps dropping as we 
get more experienced at using it, and because the political power of the 
fossil-fuel industry to slow down the transition should wane, as solar 
and wind builds its own muscular constituency. And it needs to happen if 
we are to halve emissions by 2030 and so have a decent chance of meeting 
the targets set in Paris. Perhaps we’d take that deadline more seriously 
if we saw it as our best shot at avoiding a planet wrecked by carbon and 
also put at risk by sulphur. Solar panels and wind turbines are our best 
vaccine against high temperatures, but also against the hubris of one 
more giant gamble. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/dimming-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-a-desperate-idea-yet-were-inching-toward-it?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_McKibben_11222022&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea0ea53f92a404695c0198&user_id=29625806&hasha=a0e71543f9768904d435122e83356d30&hashb=d79260b0c8ea3be054ef3d9538ec6d6ef33c0123&hashc=076065f74a4a4ceff0e349bf1785280ac9e39c12b83e63c5f22c6f6c42fba23e&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_ClimateCrisis

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/dimming-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-a-desperate-idea-yet-were-inching-toward-it 




/[ Aljazeera - Opinion from outside the Western hemisphere ]//
///*The West will not act on climate change until it feels its pain*
Pleas from the Global South will not stir Western government into 
action. Only Western suffering will.
Patrick Gathara
Communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political 
cartoonist based in Nairobi.
Published On 19 Nov 2022

If there is anything that has been true in the history of the world, it 
is that states, and especially Western states, rarely if ever act out of 
a sense of moral compulsion, when such acts could impose hardships back 
home. Look at the rhetoric around support for Ukraine following the 
Russian invasion as an example.

While the conflict has been presented in starkly moralistic terms, as 
the West helping brave Ukraine stand up to Russian bullies, it has been 
clear that moralism can be quickly discarded in the face of discomfort 
for their citizens. The prospect of cold European homes and high prices 
motivated the European Union to leave a myriad of loopholes in its 
sanctions to allow for the flow of Russian gas and oil to continue. When 
Russian gas was cut off, European governments did not hesitate to reach 
out to various fossil fuel-rich autocrats they otherwise regularly 
criticise for their dismal human rights record.

The same dynamic is evident in the narratives and proposals that were 
tabled at the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm 
el-Sheikh, Egypt. Lots of the talk was about helping the 
unfortunately-situated “Global South” cope with the ravages of extreme 
weather events such as droughts and floods, and helping them transition 
into greener sources of energy.

Like during the Cold War, the West is actively theatre-shopping, 
recruiting countries to serve as arenas for its climate fight. 
Switzerland, for example, plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in 
half by 2030, not by actually reducing them, which might require 
inconveniencing its citizens, but by paying countries like Ghana to 
reduce its emissions and give it credit.

The idea would be for the Swiss government to pay for efficient lighting 
and cleaner stoves to be installed in Ghanaian households and claim the 
resulting reduction in emissions as its own. Switzerland is not the only 
Western nation to use such carbon-offsetting schemes, which displace 
climate action from rich polluting nations and frame poorer nations that 
have contributed little to the crisis as the ones that need to change 
the most.

They were very much present at COP 27, too. The United States, for 
example, unveiled a new carbon trading scheme that supposedly would help 
poorer nations transition to cleaner energy. In it, large Western 
companies would invest in renewable energy projects in the Global South 
in exchange for being allowed to continue emitting large quantities of 
greenhouse gases. As environmentalists have pointed out, this is little 
more than another scheme allowing Western Big Business to continue 
polluting and reaping large profits.

However, Western talk about transition by poorer countries is not only 
about deflecting from a focus on their reluctance to decarbonise their 
own economies and shifting the blame for the climate problems to those 
least responsible for them. It is also an example of what 19th-century 
German economist Friedrich List called “kicking away the ladder”.

“It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the 
summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed 
up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him,” 
he wrote in 1841.

While List applied this to the familiar prescriptions of free trade by 
the British who had themselves clambered up the ladder of mercantilism, 
it is just as applicable to today’s push by the West to have others not 
follow their energy path to the top, while they keep the advantages of 
such ascension – an approach they have also applied to nuclear weapons 
technology.

In response, many non-Western countries have been keen to either 
highlight the injustice of having to bear the cost of mitigating extreme 
weather events caused by others. They have also appealed to the Western 
sense of self-preservation by arguing, as the prime minister of the 
Bahamas has, that climate change would send hordes of refugees to 
Europe, overwhelming the systems of privilege the West has built to 
insulate itself from the problems it has caused in the rest of the world.

However, both these approaches accept a faulty premise: that climate 
change is primarily a problem for the Global South, with the West 
escaping largely unscathed, yet again managing to outsource the pain to 
the rest of the globe.

Yet, a report from the World Meteorological Organization released on 
November 2 said “temperatures in Europe have increased at more than 
twice the global average over the past 30 years – the highest of any 
continent in the world” and predicted “exceptional heat, wildfires, 
floods and other climate change impacts will affect society, economies 
and ecosystems”.

Just this year, the effects of this have been startlingly visible. The 
region suffered extreme heatwaves that caused the worst drought in half 
a millennium, dried up rivers and reservoirs, fuelled wildfires that 
destroyed more than 660,000 hectares (1.63 million acres) of land and 
killed at least 15,000 people. Further west, states in the US are 
battling a 22-year megadrought, the worst in a millennium, and across 
North America, water levels in rivers, lakes and reservoirs are dropping.

Rather than appealing to the West’s conscience or pushing the tale that 
they will only be indirectly affected by the folly of their actions, the 
world should borrow the language of JRR Tolkien in The Hobbit: “If this 
is to end in fire, then we should all burn together.”

The fact is, the West has just as much to lose, if not more, than the 
rest of us, from the climate crisis. Using the tropes of the 1990s’ 
humanitarian appeals that portray Global South folk as helpless victims 
will only inspire the same superficial, charitable responses that are 
designed to make the giver look and feel good, rather than address the 
problem – as Switzerland has demonstrated.

       [ see the political cartoon 
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/COP27.jpg?resize=770%2C513 
]

Rather than saving Brazilian rainforests, maybe a better and more 
impactful discussion would be what to do about the drying Seine. Rather 
than the image of climate change being floods in Pakistan, perhaps it 
should be the thousands dying in heatwaves in the United Kingdom.

In the end, it is not our pain and suffering that will move the West in 
any meaningful way. It is a recognition of their own. And only when we 
change the conversation can we expect that to happen.

/The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance./
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/11/19/global-south-pleas-wont-get-the-west-to-act-on-climate-change



/[  Every person and living being in the world is connected to climates 
destabilizing  ]/
*Live from #COP27: Katharine Hayhoe & Bernadette Woods Placky | UN 
Climate Change*
UN Climate Change
1,290 views  Streamed live on Nov 10, 2022
At COP 27, countries come together to take action towards achieving the 
world’s collective climate goals as agreed under the Paris Agreement and 
the Convention. Building on the outcomes and momentum of COP 26 in 
Glasgow last year, nations are expected to demonstrate at COP 27 that 
they are in a new era of implementation by turning their commitments 
under The Paris Agreement into action. The conference will take place 
from 6-18 November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Heads of State and 
Government will attend the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit 
on 7 and 8 November. A high-level segment primarily attended by 
Ministers will take place from 15-18 November.

https://youtu.be/Kf3QR7-Jfig?t=167



/[ voice of expertise ]/
*How Long Would Society Last During a Total Grid Collapse?*
Practical Engineering
2.99M subscribers
Nov 22, 2022
A summary of how other systems of infrastructure (like roadways, water, 
sewer, and telecommunications) depend on electricity and how long each 
system could last under total blackout conditions.

This video was guest produced by my editor, Wesley, who is also the 
actor in the blackout scenes ;)

Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the 
human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady 
Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for 
updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a 
comment, or watch another of our videos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OpC4fH3mEk


/[ Nice to see that the EPA regards climate change as risk - two videos ]/
*See risk-based climate change planning in action*
https://www.epa.gov/cre/risk-based-adaptation

- -

/[ standard definitions of risk - video  13 mins  ]/
*ISO 31000 Risk Definition, Principles, Framework and Processes, and how 
they effect Objectives*
PCR Global
632 views  Sep 6, 2022
Video: ISO 31000 Risk Definition, Principles, Framework and Processes, 
and how they effect Objectives
If you are new to risk management or in particular have an interest in 
ISO 31000 this video may be of interest.

Despite there being no universal definition, having a 'go to' definition 
of risk which we can explain amongst peers, colleagues and articulate to 
clients is really important if we are to embed risk management into 
organisations, programs and projects.

This video is on the definition of risk and how both it, the principles, 
framework and risk management process can effect objectives is an 
element taken from the wider PCR Global ISO 31000:2018 training course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K85qXpu0y9E



/[ The news archive - looking back at early awareness ]/
/*November 23, 2014 */
November 23, 2014: The New York Times reports:

"A warming climate is melting [Glacier National Park's] glaciers, an icy 
retreat that promises to change not just tourists’ vistas, but also the 
mountains and everything around them.

"Streams fed by snowmelt are reaching peak spring flows weeks earlier 
than in the past, and low summer flows weeks before they used to. Some 
farmers who depend on irrigation in the parched days of late summer are 
no longer sure that enough water will be there. Bull trout, once 
pan-fried over anglers’ campfires, are now caught and released to 
protect a population that is shrinking as water temperatures rise."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/climate-change-threatens-to-strip-the-identity-of-glacier-national-park.html?mwrsm=Email


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