[✔️] April 12, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | simple explanation, Longer explanation video, Racial burden of SLR, NPR 6 experts, Harvard 2015

[Richard Pauli]

/*April*//*12, 2023*/

/[ A simple, clear explanation in a 6 min video ]/
*The tricky plan to pull CO2 out of the air*
Vox
541,603 views  Apr 6, 2023
Will carbon dioxide removal work? It has to.

Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔  so you don't miss any videos: 
http://goo.gl/0bsAjO

In recent years, over 70 countries have committed to net-zero carbon 
emissions, aiming to become carbon neutral by mid-century. The 2015 
Paris Agreement aimed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius and 
ideally limit it to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Despite 
global efforts, emissions are still rising, and achieving the 1.5-degree 
goal has become increasingly difficult.

Most pathways to keep warming below 2 degrees, and eventually return 
back to 1.5 rely on negative emissions, which involve pulling carbon 
dioxide from the atmosphere using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods 
like enhanced weathering and direct air capture.

However, these techniques are still in early development stages, and 
require land, energy, and money. Critics argue that relying on CDR 
implicitly encourages governments and companies to postpone necessary 
emissions reductions because counting on CDR now means relying on future 
generations of leaders to deliver on those promises. Preventing 
emissions is broadly less costly than cleaning them up after the fact. 
But even with dramatic cuts to emissions, experts say some amount of CDR 
will still be necessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfNr2zUDEZc
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/[ cold, corrugated sea floor - science explained  ]/
//*Glacial Retreat of 610 meters (2013 ft) per day occurred in Past, 
Leaving Corrugated Seafloor Ridges*
Paul Beckwith
25.9K subscribers
Paul Beckwith
Who needs to go to a horror movie? Just learn about the very latest 
cutting edge climate science instead.

A very disturbing peer-reviewed scientific paper was just released 
online (open source, this means it is accessible to all for free). 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05876-1

This paper used high-resolution sonar to map the ocean seafloor on the 
continental shelves off Norwegian glaciers. During the last ice age, the 
on-land glaciers expanded far out over the continental shelves, the ice 
sheets rested on the continental shelf seafloor and then extended 
outward to floating ice shelves. The Grounding Line is the furthest 
extent seaward where the ice sheet rests on the ocean floor. The peak of 
the last ice age, where the glacier extent was maximum was roughly 
21,000 years ago. Since then, there was melting and loss of the ice 
sheets, and therefore retreat of the grounding line.

The tides are semi-diurnal off the Norway coast, meaning they cycled 
from high tide to low tide twice a day (hi-lo-hi-lo each day). At each 
low, the ice sheet ground into the ocean sediments, leaving a 
corrugating ridge parallel to the land, so two ridges were imprinted per 
day at the grounding line as the ice retreated. By simply measuring the 
distance between the ridges, we know the retreat rates of the ice per day.

This new study examined numerous ridges over a widespread region on the 
Norwegian continental shelves. The really scary finding is that the ice 
retreat rate was as high as 610 meters per day (2013 feet per day), and 
this rate could be maintained for at least 21 days. This rate is much 
higher than anything previously observed, and thus it means that huge 
ice sheets can melt much faster than we previously thought, and 
therefore sea level rise can occur much faster than we think.

I’m not surprised, this is all part and parcel of abrupt climate system 
change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plSMbst7iJU
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/[   NYT Non-fiction text ]/
*The Unequal Racial Burdens of Rising Seas*
In “Charleston,” a case study of climate change and government 
negligence in the South Carolina city, Susan Crawford makes clear the 
disproportionate costs borne by communities of color in the coastal 
United States.

By Emily Raboteau
April 10, 2023

All true climate-change stories are about the abuse of power. Knowing 
this, Susan Crawford makes a plea for climate justice in “Charleston,” 
her sweeping case study of the South Carolina city. Her premise is that 
this imperiled place is a bellwether for the rest of the coastal United 
States, where government at every level is failing to prepare for the 
catastrophic effects of sea level rise and increasingly severe storms, 
which are threatening lives and causing billions of dollars in damage.

It’s a purposefully unsettling premise. Charleston’s woeful lack of 
planning for the displacement by flooding of its Black and low-income 
residents — while the city acts to protect high-value real estate and 
recklessly develop where it should not be building — is hardly unique in 
the land of the dollar. What is unique about Charleston, in Crawford’s 
view, is the misalliance between its reputation for charming hospitality 
and the burden of risk allotted to its poorest residents. Even for 
readers who already know whose lives matter in this calculus, and whose 
don’t, Charleston’s story is instructive.

At least 13 million Americans are expected to have to move away from the 
nation’s coasts in the decades to come. Reading this book reminded me 
that my family and I will likely number among them. (The first thing I 
did after finishing it was check with my husband about our flood 
insurance status.) Crawford is not the only writer to predict that our 
mass migration will be forced, frenzied and, above all, unfair — unless 
we plan as a nation for managed retreat, right now.

“Charleston” joins a platoon of important books published in the last 
few years that, each in its own way, have sounded the same alarm, some 
tilting more toward realpolitik. These include Jeff Goodell’s “The Water 
Will Come,” Elizabeth Rush’s “Rising,” Gilbert M. Gaul’s “The Geography 
of Risk,” Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey’s “Sea Level Rise” and 
John Englander’s “Moving to Higher Ground.” One hopes these works will 
have a cumulative impact on local, state and federal policy in their 
shared concern that the most vulnerable among us don’t get left behind 
as the waters rise.

Crawford’s book stands apart from its predecessors because of its 
sustained focus on one threatened city. (In that sense, it shares 
something with the also excellent “More City Than Water: A Houston Flood 
Atlas,” edited by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett.) Charleston is a 
fascinating and haunted locale, and Crawford is gifted at sketching its 
grossness and grace. It’s located in South Carolina Lowcountry. Its 
historic peninsula is flanked by two rivers and surrounded by outer 
boroughs, all of which lie low and flat. More than a third of its homes 
sit on land that is less than 10 feet above sea level. Much of the city 
was built not on solid ground but on fill: trash, oyster shells, human 
waste, graves, loose dirt plopped over centuries atop marshland. People 
who live there have gotten so used to high-tide flooding on sunny days 
that they now check the tide charts before getting into their cars.
Crawford doesn’t go as far into the dystopian future as she could have. 
Her reason for picking Charleston as a site of scrutiny is that it sits 
so squarely at the intersection of climate change and race. We do learn 
in these pages about what life will be like in Charleston by 2050 when 
damaging flooding is projected to happen 10 times as often as it did 
last year, particularly for its Black residents. But just as important, 
we go deep into the marl of history.

Like a tour guide walking us back in time and across town, Crawford 
shows us the ways in which legacies of slavery and racism have shaped 
Charleston’s response to the present. A professor at Harvard Law School, 
where she teaches courses on climate adaptation and public leadership, 
Crawford was previously President Barack Obama’s special assistant for 
science, technology and innovation policy. She excels at writing about 
political cowardice. She uses maps effectively throughout. She has the 
good sense, as an outsider, to introduce us to locals and pass them the 
mic. In fact, she’s organized many of the book’s chapters by 
neighborhood, pairing them with profiles of and sophisticated analyses 
by Black Charlestonians from that part of town.

We hear the voices of the Rev. Joseph Darby, a minister with a lot to 
say about the city’s overlapping problems of race and water, as well as 
about its “raging politeness”; Michelle Mapp, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. 
who formerly directed the local housing trust; Quinetha Frasier, a young 
entrepreneur with Gullah Geechee roots and well grounded fears about the 
displacement of her people; Charlton Singleton, a jazz trumpeter who 
mourns the loss of the city’s historically Black communities to 
gentrification; and Mika Gadsden, a founder of the Charleston Activist 
Network who’s running for mayor on the following platform: “We deserve a 
Charleston that affirms love for all its people through policy and 
practice.”
Crawford’s own perspective is delightfully pointed: “The place has an 
amnesiac, ahistorical quality that is highly attractive to white 
celebrants, who drowsily pad along its pretty streets before tucking 
into their next big meal; they are enjoying the suggestion of moneyed 
graciousness around them, not thinking too hard about where that money 
came from.” The Holy City may be a top tourist destination, but Crawford 
makes it clear we’re not here to relax. We’re here to do some tough 
reckoning with what compounded denial, boosterism, widespread 
development, segregation, gentrification, white supremacy and public 
complacency have wrought.

For centuries, Charleston has played a starring role in the nation’s 
tortured racial history: first as a major slave port, then as a central 
domestic slave market, then as the spot where the Civil War started, at 
which point the ratio of Black people to white in the state was around 3 
to 1. Charleston’s economy was developed on the backs of the enslaved 
who worked in the rice paddies and picked the indigo and filled the 
soggy edges of the peninsula with trash and rubble and offal so the city 
could grow. Which it did in spades, most remarkably in the three decades 
following Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when the local mayor harnessed 
national attention plus public funding to develop the peninsula and 
spread outward, over marshes and sea islands — a process that involved 
annexing suburbs, attracting retirees, gentrifying rampantly and 
transforming a majority Black city into a majority white one.

Discrimination persisted into the current era, during which, after the 
massacre at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015, long-simmering 
tensions boiled into protest that finally brought down the Confederate 
flag at the state capitol. But if you’ve gone through centuries of 
second-class citizenship and generations of flooding without being heard 
or helped to get to higher ground by the city you built, as the toxic 
sludge pulls at your ankles, you must ask yourself, is this progress?

For white and wealthy residents, Charleston’s quandary is a real estate 
issue. But whether to sell now or stay is a question that its poor may 
not have the luxury of posing. For these citizens — renters and 
public-housing residents — the issue is a moral one. As the historian 
Annette Gordon-Reed asks in her foreword to the book, “Will the 
government authorities be able to rise above historical patterns and 
take action on behalf of the marginalized people in the city?”

Crawford wouldn’t have written this book if she thought the answer was 
no. Her vision for Charleston involves revising, resettling, rewilding 
and redrawing the metropolitan map. She’s not alone in imagining that 
the city, and by extension the nation, has the potential to get this 
transition right. Toward the end of her book, she quotes Michelle Mapp, 
who’s not giving up: “If Charleston can change, the South can change. If 
the South can change, America can change.” But so much depends upon 
who’s seated at the table of power...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/books/review/charleston-susan-crawford.html



/[ WBUR - NPR   audio - text  ]/
*Climate solutions do exist. These 6 experts detail what they look like*
Play
March 05, 2023
Julia Simon
Scientists say there's a lot we can still do to slow the speed of 
climate change. But when it comes to "climate solutions", some are real, 
and some aren't, says Naomi Oreskes, historian of science at Harvard 
University. "This space has become really muddied," she says.

So how does someone figure out what's legit? We asked six climate 
scholars for the questions they ask themselves whenever they come across 
something claiming to be a climate solution.

*A big climate solution is an obvious one*
It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to 
reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: 
burning fossil fuels.

Scientists say that means ultimately transitioning away from oil, coal 
and gas and becoming more energy efficient. We already have a lot of the 
technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and 
batteries, Oreskes says.

"What we need to do right now is to mobilize the technologies that 
already exist, that work and are cost competitive, and that essentially 
means renewable energy and storage," she says.

*Think about who's selling you the solution*
It's important to think about both who's selling you the climate 
solution and what they say the problem is, says Melissa Aronczyk, 
professor of media at Rutgers University.

"People like to come up with solutions, but to do that, they usually 
have to interpret the problem in a way that works for them," she says.

Oreskes says pay attention when you see a "climate solution" that means 
increasing the use of fossil fuels. She says an example is natural gas, 
which has been sold as a "bridge fuel" from coal to renewable energy. 
But natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and its production, transport 
and use release methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon 
dioxide.

"I think we need to start by looking at what happens when the fossil 
fuel industry comes up with solutions, because here is the greatest 
potential for conflict of interest," Aronczyk says.

*A solution may sound promising, but is it available and scalable now?*
Sometimes you'll hear about new promising technology like carbon 
removal, which vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it 
underground, says David Ho, a professor of oceanography at University of 
Hawaii at Manoa.

Ho researches climate solutions and he says ask yourself: is this 
technology available, affordable, or scalable now?

"I think people who don't work in this space think we have all these 
technologies that are ready to remove carbon dioxide from the 
atmosphere, for instance. And we're not there," Ho says...

*If it's adding emissions, it's not a climate solution*
These days all kinds of companies, from airlines to wedding dress 
companies, might offer to let you buy "carbon offsets" along with your 
purchase. That offset money could do something like build a new wind 
farm or plant trees that would - in theory - soak up and store the 
equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of taking a flight or making a new 
dress.

But there are often problems with regulation and verification of 
offsets, says Roberto Schaeffer, a professor of energy economics at the 
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "It's very dangerous, 
very dangerous indeed," he says.

WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your 
financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading 
right now, give today.

He says with offsets from forests, it's hard to verify if the trees are 
really being protected, that those trees won't get cut down or burned in 
a wildfire.

"You cannot guarantee, 'Okay, you're gonna offset your dress by planting 
a tree.' You have no guarantee that in three years time that tree is 
gonna be there," he says.

If you make emissions thinking you're offsetting them, and the offset 
doesn't work, that's doubling the emissions, says Adrienne Buller, a 
climate finance researcher and director of research at Common Wealth, a 
think tank in the United Kingdom, "It's sort of like doubly bad."

*If a solution sounds too easy, be skeptical*
Many things sold as carbon offsets - like restoring or protecting 
forests - are, on their own, great climate solutions, Buller says. "We 
need things like trees," she says, "To draw carbon out of the atmosphere."

The problem is when carbon markets sell the idea that you can continue 
emitting as usual and everything will be fine if you just buy an offset, 
Buller says. "It's kind of a solution that implies that we don't have to 
do that much hard work. We can just kind of do some minor tweaks to the 
way that we currently do things," she says.

Schaeffer says there is a lot of hard work in our future to get off of 
fossil fuels and onto clean energy sources. "So people have to realize 
there is a price to pay here. No free lunch."

*It's not all about business. Governments must play a role in solutions, 
too*
We often think of businesses working on climate solutions on their own, 
but that's often not the case, says Oreskes. Government often plays a 
big role in funding and research support for new climate technology, 
says June Sekera, a visiting scholar at The New School who studies 
public policy and climate.

And governments will also have to play a big role in regulating 
emissions, says Schaeffer, who has been working with the United Nations' 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 25 years.

That's why all the scholars NPR spoke with for this story say one big 
climate solution is to vote.

Schaeffer points to the recent election in Brazil, where climate change 
was a big campaign issue for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula 
won, and has promised to address deforestation, a big source of Brazil's 
emissions.

*There's no one solution to climate change - and no one can do it alone*
Aronczyk wants to make one thing clear: there is no one solution to 
climate change.

"We're human beings. We encounter a problem, we wanna solve that 
problem," Aronczyk says, "But just as there is no one way to describe 
climate change, there's no one way to offer a solution."

Climate solutions will take different forms, Sekera says. Some solutions 
may slow climate change, some may offer us ways to adapt.

The key thing, Aronczyk says, is that climate solutions will involve 
governments, businesses, and individuals. She says: "It is an all hands 
on deck kind of a situation."
      Copyright NPR 2023.
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1160783951/6-scholars-explain-what-a-real-climate-solution-is



/[The news archive - looking back at demonstrable activism ]/
/*April 12, 2015*/
April 12, 2015:
• Harvard Heat Week--a series of demonstrations against Harvard 
University's refusal to sever ties with the fossil fuel industry--begins 
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    OPINION | BILL MCKIBBEN
    Shake Harvard free of oil stock
    By Bill McKibben
    April 7, 2015, 4:10 p.m.

    To understand why prominent Harvard alumni are joining students to
    demand their alma mater divest its fossil fuel stock, consider how
    the university has behaved.

    Here was the scene last fall. In New York, 400,000 climate
    protesters marched down 6th Avenue, the largest demonstration about
    any issue in the United States in years. Also, the World Council of
    Churches, representing 580 million Christians, announced plans to
    divest its fossil fuel holdings. Then members of the Rockefeller
    family — the first family of fossil fuel — took the same step.

    And in Cambridge? After huge majorities of Harvard students asked
    for divestment, and after a letter signed by much of the faculty
    backed the request, the Harvard Corporation septupled its direct
    investments in fossil fuels. Most of Harvard’s investments are
    secret, but in the relatively small portion of its portfolio that it
    discloses, it increased by a factor of seven its investment during
    the third quarter of 2014. Talk about sending a message.

    The biggest of those new investments illustrates everything that’s
    wrong with Harvard’s stance, and helps make it clear why prominent
    alumni from Cornell West to Bevis Longstreth (two-time Reagan
    appointee to the SEC) to Natalie Portman have called for sit-ins in
    Harvard Yard later this month. According to an investigation by
    Chloe Maxmin, a student co-founder of DivestHarvard, the university
    plunked down $57.4 million for a stake in Anadarko Petroleum, one of
    the country’s biggest independent oil and gas exploration firms.
    Anadarko not only played a cameo role in the Deepwater Horizon
    tragedy, but also just paid the federal government $5 billion to
    settle the “largest environmental contamination case in American
    history.”

    But hey, anyone can make mistakes. The real story is what Anadarko
    does on purpose. It hunts for new sources of oil and gas — even
    though climate scientists have said that we have far more carbon in
    our current reserves than we could possibly burn and keep the planet
    from catastrophe. And if you don’t trust the scientists? Here’s Mark
    Carney (Harvard Class of ’88) from his radical post as governor of
    the Bank of England, also last fall: “The vast majority of reserves
    are unburnable.”

    Even with falling oil prices causing all drillers to cut back for
    the moment, Anadarko reassured its shareholders in late March that
    this year it “expects to drill nine to 12 deepwater
    exploration/appraisal wells focusing on play-opening exploration
    opportunities in Colombia, Kenya, and the Gulf of Mexico.” Once
    more: We already have discovered, by nearly every estimate, far more
    oil than we can burn, and yet Anadarko keeps looking for more.

    Behaving with this kind of irresponsibility gets harder and harder
    in a world where drought, flood, and endless snow make clearer each
    day the toll climate change takes on us all, especially the poorest
    and most vulnerable. But never fear. Here’s the method an Anadarko
    executive recommended to a 2011 conference of industry peers on how
    to face down anti-fracking citizens groups: “I want you to download
    the US Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual because we are
    dealing with an insurgency here.”

    That’s the ground war — but Anadarko hasn’t neglected to pay off the
    generals either. It has donated more than $5 million to members of
    Congress since 1990, almost all of it to Republicans, including a
    hefty chunk to Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the
    country’s most outspoken climate deniers.

    Universities from Stanford to Sydney to Scotland to Stockholm have
    begun the process of divesting from companies like Anadarko, Shell,
    Exxon, and Gazprom. The World Bank and the International Energy
    Agency, HSBC, and Deutschebank have done their patient best in the
    last year or two to explain that we need less carbon, not more.

    At Harvard, though, there’s no commitment at all. It’s business as
    usual, with a kind of sad obliviousness to the realities of the day.
    That’s why we’ve got to park ourselves in Harvard Yard this spring,
    and hope through nonviolent witness to shake the richest university
    in the world out of its persistent, willful slumber.

    Bill McKibben, a graduate of Harvard University, is founder of the
    climate group 350.org and the Schumann distinguished scholar in
    environmental studies at Middlebury College.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/04/07/wake-harvard-time-divest-from-fossil-fuels/9xT2pzgtL8PIpI7UakKyOJ/story.html?event=event25


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