[✔️] October 19, 2022 - Global Warming News - daily selection
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Wed Oct 19 07:34:59 EDT 2022
/*October 19, 2022*/
/
//[ water, water, everywhere, but only desalinated waters may we drink ]/
*California approves desalination plant as historic drought hits water
supplies*
OCT 14 2022
KEY POINTS
-- California regulators this week approved a $140 million
desalination plant that could convert up to 5 million gallons of
seawater each day into drinking water.
-- The approval of the plant comes as record temperatures and
drought conditions have forced states like California to address a
future with dwindling water supplies.
-- The Doheny Ocean Desalination Project in Orange County, Southern
California could be functioning within the next five years and
supply water for thousands of people in the South Coast Water
District...
- -
There are 12 existing desalination facilities throughout California,
according to the state’s Water Resources Control Board, including the
Carlsbad desalination project in San Diego County, which is the largest
desalination plant in the western hemisphere and produces three million
gallons of drinking water each day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/14/california-approves-desalination-plant-as-drought-hits-water-supplies.html
/[ from SALON ]/
*Study: Climate anxiety is spreading all over the planet*
The broadest look yet shows it's not just a Western worry
By KATE YODER
OCTOBER 18, 2022
If you're feeling anxious about climate change, the common wisdom goes,
there's an antidote: Take action. Maybe you can alleviate your worries
by doing something positive, like going to a protest, becoming an
advocate for mass transit, or trying to get an environmental champion
elected.
New research reveals that these anxieties are not just Western concerns
— they're common among young people on nearly every continent — but that
the ability to do something about them depends on where you live. "The
question is whether you have the opportunity or not to engage in those
behaviors," said Charles Ogunbode, a psychologist at the University of
Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
The study, recently published in the Journal of Environmental
Psychology, takes the broadest look yet at climate anxiety around the
globe. Ogunbode and researchers all over the world surveyed more than
10,000 university students in 32 countries, asking how climate change
made them feel. They found that it was hurting people's mental health
virtually everywhere, from Brazil to Uganda, Portugal to the Philippines. ..
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/18/study-climate-anxiety-is-spreading-all-over-the-planet_partner/
- -
/[ Journal of Environmental Psychology -- //Volume 84, December 2022,
101887 ]/
*Climate anxiety, wellbeing and pro-environmental action: correlates of
negative emotional responses to climate change in 32 countries*
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101887
*Highlights*
• This study examines negative emotional responses to climate change
in 32 countries.
• Climate anxiety is positively related to pro-environmental
behaviour and environmental activism.
• Climate anxiety is inversely related to mental wellbeing.
• Climate anxiety is more strongly related to pro-environmental
actions in individualistic and wealthier countries.
*Abstract*
This study explored the correlates of climate anxiety in a diverse
range of national contexts. We analysed cross-sectional data
gathered in 32 countries (N = 12,246). Our results show that climate
anxiety is positively related to rate of exposure to information
about climate change impacts, the amount of attention people pay to
climate change information, and perceived descriptive norms about
emotional responding to climate change. Climate anxiety was also
positively linked to pro-environmental behaviours and negatively
linked to mental wellbeing. Notably, climate anxiety had a
significant inverse association with mental wellbeing in 31 out of
32 countries. In contrast, it had a significant association with
pro-environmental behaviour in 24 countries, and with environmental
activism in 12 countries. Our findings highlight contextual
boundaries to engagement in environmental action as an antidote to
climate anxiety, and the broad international significance of
considering negative climate-related emotions as a plausible threat
to wellbeing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494422001323?via%3Dihub#bib57
/[ Global heating is responsible - fossil fuel feeds the heat -- video
report - next comes dust ]/
*Utah's Great Salt Lake shrinks to unsustainable levels amid a
decades-long megadrought*
924 views Oct 18, 2022 The Great Salt Lake in Utah is the largest body
of water in the western hemisphere without an outlet to the sea. Its
levels fluctuate naturally, but scientists say the record-low water
levels the lake has seen in recent years are worrying. A megadrought
means less precipitation, and a growing population is taking more water
before the lake can refill. Stephanie Sy reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsBXpt5RIsQ
/[ Go West Young Man ]/
*Starved of new talent: Young people are steering clear of oil jobs*
Who wants to work for the brands that brought you climate change?
Kate Yoder Staff Writer Grist
Oct 18, 2022
- -
“I do feel that there’s this big pincer movement coming for the fossil
fuel industry — you know, they’re going to be pinched in lots of
different directions,” said Caroline Dennett, a safety consultant who
publicly quit working for Shell earlier this year because the company
was expanding oil and gas extraction projects. “And that’s exactly what
we need.”
‘Retention is a massive, massive problem’
If it weren’t for climate change, now might seem like the perfect time
to drill for more oil. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices
soaring this year, driving them up as high as $120 a barrel in June —
the “boom” of the boom and bust cycle. The price has since dropped to
$85, but could climb higher since OPEC, the oil cartel that includes
Russia and Saudi Arabia, recently agreed to cut production by 2 million
barrels a day.
With prices this high, oil companies would normally begin digging up
more wells to increase production. But the calculus has changed. After
years of losses, investors want their dividends. “Now we’re in a
situation where the oil and gas companies are making a lot of cash flow
… but the investors who stuck with those companies are basically saying,
‘Well, I stuck it out with you, give me my money back,’” said Peter
Tertzakian, an energy and investing analyst, on the podcast Odd Lots
this summer. Added to that is the growing pressure for financial
institutions to divest from fossil fuels. All this, along with the “end
of oil narrative,” has made investors hesitant to back new drilling
projects, Tertzakian explained.
And even if investors were interested in expanding drilling right away,
many oil companies don’t have extra drilling equipment lying around
ready to use, or extra people ready to operate it. Trained and
knowledgeable workers are retiring or moving to other industries. The
average oil and gas worker is 44 years old, a recent report from
Deloitte found. The industry has mostly rehired the 15,000 workers it
laid off during the 2020 crash, according to data from the U.S. Bureau
of Statistics. But the workforce numbers have been on a long downward
trend since 2015, when oil prices took a plunge after a supply glut. The
volatility of the industry — the cycle of laying off and hiring people —
is another factor that makes the jobs unappealing, the Deloitte report said.
“Half of oil and gas professionals, I believe, would gladly leave the
oil and gas industry tomorrow if they could get a renewable energy job,”
said Dar-Lon Chang, who worked as an engineer at ExxonMobil for 16 years
before resigning in 2019 over concerns about climate change. A recent
global survey by AirSwift found that 82 percent of current oil and gas
workers would consider switching to another energy sector in the next
three years, up from 79 percent last year and 73 percent in 2020.
Fifty-four percent of those thinking about leaving picked the renewable
industry as a preferred destination.
“Retention is a massive, massive problem,” Dennett said. “They’re losing
their most expert, skilled, and experienced technicians, engineers,
designers, operators, mechanics … I think they will be starved of new
talent.”
When Big Oil comes up in the news, it’s usually something bad — oil
spills, climate lawsuits, or other dirty business. The industry has
drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco, and this image has started to affect
workers. “We don’t want to be the bad guys,” said one anonymous
participant in a study surveying oil workers’ opinions about climate
change as part of a recent paper in the journal Energy Research and
Social Science.
Krista Haltunnen, the author of that study and an energy researcher at
Imperial College London, said that many workers believe they can drive
change within their company. “A lot of them think that they’re doing the
best they can for climate change or for a better society, whether
they’re right or not,” Haltunnen said. Dennett, for example, worked with
Shell to make oil operations safer; Chang joined ExxonMobil after
assurances from recruiters that the company was “seriously considering
transitioning away from oil” and researching cleaner alternatives, and
that he’d be working with natural gas — sold as the “bridge fuel” to a
renewable future.
Bernard Looney, the CEO of BP, has acknowledged that Big Oil’s
reputation is causing problems for companies like his. In an interview
with the Times of London in 2020, Looney said that oil was becoming
increasingly “socially challenged.” Employees at BP were having doubts
about their line of work, he said, and some job candidates were
reluctant to join the company. “There’s a view that this is a bad
industry, and I understand that,” Looney said at the time.
A ‘permanent black mark’
The generation that’s been striking from school to protest government
inaction on climate change isn’t exactly itching to join the oil
workforce. A poll by the consulting firm EY in 2017 found that 62
percent of 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States found a career in
oil and gas unappealing. More than two out of every three teenagers
surveyed said that the industry causes problems instead of solving them.
Young people tend to view oil careers as “unstable, blue-collar,
difficult, dangerous and harmful to society,” the report said,
perceptions that posed a “significant obstacle” toward attracting and
retaining a highly skilled workforce.
And they’re making their qualms known. Last week, dozens of students at
Harvard, MIT, and Brown disrupted on-campus recruiting events for
ExxonMobil, protesting that the company was undermining their future.
College students are also steering clear of petroleum engineering
programs, creating a gap as oil companies look to replace retiring Baby
Boomers. Over the last five years, the number of people graduating from
petroleum engineering programs has dropped from 2,300 to around 400, an
83 percent plunge, according to statistics from Lloyd Heinze, a Texas
Tech University professor. Schools in America’s oil patch, such as
Louisiana State University and the University of Houston, are seeing
drastic declines in enrollment in petroleum engineering, and others are
beginning to shut down their programs: The University of Calgary in
Canada and Imperial College London both pressed pause on their oil and
gas engineering majors last year.
The trend extends from fieldwork to the front office. From 2006 until
2020, the number of business school graduates who went into a career in
the oil and gas industry fell by 40 percent, according to a survey of
3.5 million MBA students conducted by LinkedIn, while the number of
students recruited into renewables rose.
Workers on an elevated crane watch a cleaning robot wash large solar panels
Workers use a cleaning robot on solar panels in Huntington Beach,
California, July 14, 2022. Jeff Gritchen / MediaNews Group / Orange
County Register via Getty Images
“The dilemma is happening in every company, because if you’re involved
in projects that you know are detrimental for the environment,” what you
do every single day may “test your moral values,” said Manuel Salazar,
an activist in Ireland who is working to help employees push their
companies to protect the environment.
Oil companies require other services to stay running — and advertisers
and lawyers may get harder to come by as they turn their backs on the
industry. About 400 advertising and PR agencies have signed a pledge by
the group Clean Creatives to cut ties with fossil fuel clients. And as
oil companies face a mounting pile of climate-related lawsuits, some
young lawyers may be reluctant to defend them. Two years ago, 600
lawyers in training signed a letter to the firm Paul Weiss pledging that
they would not work at the company unless it dropped ExxonMobil as a
client. (It has not.) An anonymous law student graduating with student
debt recently wrote in to the New York Times’ ethics column to ask
whether it was OK to defend polluting companies they were “ethically
opposed to” in order to pay off their loans, worrying it could create a
“permanent black mark” on their record.
Chang thinks that his decade-plus as an engineer at ExxonMobil has
gotten in the way of working in clean energy. He has applied for
hundreds of clean energy positions since 2015 but has only gotten a few
interviews. Eventually, he ended up creating his own job, a startup
that’s trying to get funding to renovate people’s homes to get to
net-zero emissions.
“I think that people who go into renewable energy, they tend to be
suspicious of people who are trying to leave the oil and gas industry,”
Chang said. While there may be some “bad apples,” he thinks the majority
of oil and gas employees “are legitimately trying to do the right thing”
— and would leave if they could.
https://grist.org/energy/young-people-are-steering-clear-of-oil-jobs-retention-hiring/
/[ keep an eye out for this ]/
*Amount of ocean heat found to be accelerating and fueling extreme
weather events*
The rate of warming in the top 2km has doubled from levels in the 1960s,
review finds
Graham Readfearn
Tue 18 Oct 2022
The amount of heat accumulating in the ocean is accelerating and
penetrating ever deeper, with widespread effects on extreme weather
events and marine life, according to a new scientific review.
One of the report’s authors said the devastating floods in eastern
Australia had likely been made worse by warming oceans. The risks would
continue to rise as the ocean took up more heat, the report said.
More than 90% of the heat caused by adding greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere through burning fossil fuels is taken up by the ocean.
The rate of warming in the top 2km has doubled from levels in the 1960s,
the article in the journal Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment said.
According to the review the extra heat is accelerating sea level rise,
intensifying extreme rain events, melting ice, adding energy to cyclones
and changing where they form, and causing more intense marine heatwaves.
Marine habitats including coral reefs were being threatened and the
heating meant oceans were less able to take carbon out of the atmosphere.
Even under the most ambitious scenarios for action on greenhouse gas
emissions, the review said the ocean’s heating will at least double from
current levels by the end of the century.
“Ocean warming is already causing flooding rains, melting ice and rising
sea levels, as well as damaging coral reefs and ecosystems,” said Prof
Matt England, a review co-author and oceanographer at the University of
New South Wales. “Without emissions reductions, this is only going to
get much worse.”...
All ocean basins were getting hotter, but heating was most pronounced in
the southern ocean and the Atlantic, the review found. From the 1990s,
heating was also detected deeper than two kilometres.
Dr Kevin Trenberth, a co-author and distinguished scholar at the US
National Center for Atmospheric Research, said: “The best indicator of
the planet’s warming is the global ocean heat content...
- -
At current rates, Trenberth said, the amount of energy being added to
the ocean each year in the form of heat was equal to about 80 times the
total global electricity generation.
“Even if we get to net zero in 2050 the ocean heat content continues to
go up, and sea levels go up for a couple of centuries beyond that,” he said.
Prof David Schoeman, of the University of the Sunshine Coast, was not
involved in the review but was a co-ordinating lead author of the oceans
chapter in the most recent UN climate report.
He said the review was broadly in line with previous UN assessments but
had reduced the uncertainties and likely ruled out the highest and
lowest predictions of changes in ocean heat.
Schoeman said marine heatwaves, made worse from global heating, had
caused mass mortalities of marine plants and animals.
“The estimates in this paper suggest on average we have released energy
equivalent to around 3.5 Hiroshima atomic bombs into the ocean every
second over the period 1971-2018,” he said.
“The global ocean contributes in a very real way to almost every aspect
of our lives, but this is often overlooked in favour of the things that
we see in front of us.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/18/amount-of-ocean-heat-found-to-be-accelerating-and-fuelling-extreme-weather-events
/[ video discussion 38 mins ]/
*Saving the EPA From Itself*
Oct 16, 2022 Join special guests Dan Galpern and Donn Viviani of the
Climate Protection & Restoration Initiative as they discuss the EPA’s
recent negative response to their petition to phase out greenhouse gas
emissions with Dr. Peter Carter, Paul Beckwith and Charles Gregoire of
the Climate Emergency Forum.
- -
This video was recorded on October 5, 2022, and published on October
16th, 2022.
- -
Some of the topics discussed:
- How the petition is to the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act,
abbreviated TSCA or TOSCA, and other U.S. Federal law. It demands a
phaseout of certain chemical substances and mixtures which are
greenhouse gas emissions including legacy greenhouse gas emissions. The
petitioners note these emissions are presenting an unreasonable risk of
injury to health or the environment and are therefore in conflict with
section 6 of the Toxic Substance Control Act.
- How the petition was filed with EPA on June 16, with petitioners Donn
Viviani, the renowned climate scientist James Hansen, the atmospheric
scientist, John Birks, the well-known climate accountability analyst,
Richard Heede, and the physician and writer Lisa Van Susteren.
- The three main reasons the EPA responded negatively to the petition
with their response provided on September 14th.
- Why, in the opinion of our guests, the reasons for a negative response
from the EPA was not a good one.
- The reasons why the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to deal with the
problem are not sufficient.
- The question of whether the EPA is sufficiently informed about the
risks of climate change to render the correct decision regarding the
petition.
- In light of the negative response from the EPA, what are some of the
Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative’s plans moving forward?
- -
Guest Panelists:
Dan Galpern - Attorney at Law, Legal and policy adviser to climate
scientist James Hansen.
Don Viviani - 35 year EPA Veteran, PHD Organic Chemistry.
Regular Panelists:
Paul Beckwith - Climate Systems Scientist. Professor at the University
of Ottawa in the Paleoclimatology Laboratory as well as at Carleton
University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUy4KfpolH0
/[ TV Review from the Guardian ]/
*Amol Rajan Interviews Greta Thunberg review – she is doomed to the pure
hell of arguing with people*
Faced with questions both remarkable and daft, the climate crisis
campaigner calmly sees each one off. But then there’s the one that makes
her giggle uncontrollably …
A master in knocking back questions we should stop asking … Greta
Thunberg with Amol Rajan.
Jack Seale - 18 Oct 2022
What must it be like to be Greta Thunberg? To be, at 19 years of age,
the most recognised climate crisis campaigner in the world, shouldering
the burden of averting – or at this late stage, merely softening – the
biggest calamity humanity has ever faced? What can that possibly feel like?
At the end of Amol Rajan Interviews Greta Thunberg (BBC Two), the
conversation becomes more personal and we get a few answers: how
Thunberg doesn’t enjoy being stopped in the street and certainly doesn’t
appreciate threats to her family; how she despairs at being told her
presence reassures people about the future of the planet, because it
implies they are outsourcing their individual responsibility to her.
But a fundamental insight into Thunberg’s existence has already been
provided by the previous half-hour of questions about her advocacy of
“annual, drastic, immediate emissions cuts, on a scale unlike anything
the world has ever seen”. Thunberg has sacrificed her youth to tackle
the climate emergency, having realised that it demands a radical
reimagining of our whole way of life. Now she is doomed to the pure hell
of arguing with people who cannot conceive of that way of life changing.
Rajan, who asserts in his introduction that Thunberg’s influence must be
acknowledged “whether you admire her or despair of her”, spends large
parts of the interview reflecting mainstream discourse on climate –
which is to say, he risks sounding ignorant in order to give commonplace
gotchas and canards an airing. The sport is in how efficiently Thunberg
can knock down questions we should, by now, have moved beyond asking...
Early on, she is pressed for an opinion on nuclear power and shale gas.
Aren’t they important components of a strategy to hit net zero by 2050,
as per the Paris Agreement? Thunberg does say that the former is too
slow and the latter is, er, a fossil fuel and thus not a cracking idea,
but stresses that her concern is driving awareness of the extent of the
problem, not getting bogged down in hot-button issues: arguments about
which bucket of water to use will dissipate once people agree that the
house is on fire. Unskewing our priorities is also the rejoinder to
Rajan’s question, steeped in conservative attitudes towards which
expenditures are inevitable and which must be interrogated, about how we
would “pay for” free public transport, a key Thunberg objective, during
a “cost of living crisis”.
Thunberg is presented with several versions of the same argument: we
can’t do that, because it would cost money or be inconvenient in the
short term. At a time when both main UK political parties have recently
used the slogan “growth, growth, growth”, Thunberg’s contention that the
endless pursuit of economic expansion might just be, you know, suicidal
feels like listening to an intelligent alien who is beamed down to sort
us out. Rajan’s question on the topic is remarkable: “Economic growth
creates leisure time, it creates opportunities for new experiences –
some of which will have a negative impact on the environment, but a lot
of which people really enjoy. Flying is one of those … do you think
flying should be illegal?”
More credibly, Rajan asks how Thunberg can call capitalism a failed
ideology, when life expectancy and infant survival rates in China and
India have risen as those countries have commercialised. Delicately,
Thunberg observes that the collapse of life-support systems, wars for
resources and other likely effects of out-of-control global warming
might soon cause those graphs to slope back down.
It’s not all such a struggle. Thunberg often has a refreshingly
unguarded response to daft statements: her reaction to Rajan sincerely
intoning that “There is one individual looming over this debate – and
that’s Elon Musk” is untrammelled giggling. And, in this extended
format, Rajan has time to include more profound questions. An inquiry
about whether the gap between what we’re doing and what we need to do is
widening (yes) is valuable, as is a discussion about whether Thunberg
ought not to encourage blanket cynicism towards politicians, and should
consider going into politics herself.
She counters that although politicians will ultimately implement the
required action, public opinion will be what compels them to act, and
protest is an effective way of amplifying that consensus. The
politicians themselves then become irrelevant, and we can “reconsider
what is politically possible” – the payment of reparations to poorer
countries deeply affected by a changing climate they have done little to
cause, to take the example Rajan puts forward of a demand that is
absurdly unrealistic, might well become feasible.
Her main point is that this needs to happen soon. We are desperately
short of time, and Thunberg has given herself the task of communicating
that urgency. As this programme shows, it is a terribly difficult job.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/18/amol-rajan-interviews-greta-thunberg-review-she-is-doomed-to-the-pure-hell-of-arguing-with-people
/[The news archive - looking back at what continues today ]/
/*October 19, 2010*/
October 19, 2010: The New York Times reports, "A secretive network of
Republican donors is heading to the Palm Springs area for a long weekend
in January, but it will not be to relax after a hard-fought election —
it will be to plan for the next one.
"Koch Industries, the longtime underwriter of libertarian causes from
the Cato Institute in Washington to the ballot initiative that would
suspend California’s landmark law capping greenhouse gases, is planning
a confidential meeting at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort and Spa to, as an
invitation says, 'develop strategies to counter the most severe threats
facing our free society and outline a vision of how we can foster a
renewal of American free enterprise and prosperity.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20koch.html
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