[✔️] April 22, 2023- Global Warming News Digest |

[Richard Pauli]

/*April*//*22, 2023*/

/[ BBC reports ] /
*Earth Day: How to talk to your parents about climate change*
By Georgina Rannard
BBC Climate and Science Reporter
You want to go vegan to help the planet, but you're not paying for the 
shopping. You think trains are better than planes, but your dad books 
the summer holiday.

Young people are some of the world's most powerful climate leaders and 
want rapid action to tackle the problem.
- -
Big changes are difficult, especially when they involve other people. 
Where do you begin? For this year's Earth Day, we spoke to people who 
have successfully had tricky climate chats at home. Here are their top tips:

*How to talk about going meat-free*
Eating less meat is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the 
planet, say scientists.

Ilse, 17, lives in Brighton with her parents Antonia and Sally. They 
used to eat meat two or even three times a day. When Ilse was 13 she 
decided to do more about climate change and read that cutting out meat 
was a good start.

Sally and Antonia were sceptical at first, worried about not getting 
enough protein or that Ilse was too young to make that decision.
- -
Antonia said her daughter's commitment to going meat-free persuaded the 
family it was worth trying
"I was thinking, you're not doing the cooking. It's a big hassle for 
us," says Antonia, saying she worried about how to cook "nice" Chinese 
vegetarian meals. After a one-day-a-week trial, they quickly scaled up 
and after a year were totally meat-free.

"It was daunting at the beginning, but now it's really good. There's a 
million recipes out there," Antonia adds. Ilse jumps in to say her 
favourite now is vegetarian fajitas, and they cook a lot of roast 
vegetables or lasagne.

Sally says that seeing the emotional impact of the topic on her daughter 
helped to persuade her it was the right thing for her family. "It's 
actually seeing her really stick to that commitment, even though we knew 
that she liked the taste of meat. That made me stop and think," she 
explains.

Ilse is part of Teach the Parent, a national campaign that encourages 
these conversations between generations. It was started by young people 
frustrated with the lack of international climate action and their 
feelings of powerlessness, says Melanie Kee from Students Organising for 
Sustainability UK who helps to run the project.
Even if the first conversation goes badly, Ilse says keep going. "Big 
lifestyle changes take time. If you bring it up every so often, it 
shapes people's attitudes in the long term."

*How to talk about flying less*
How we travel is a major source of carbon emissions, but switching from 
driving or flying can potentially limit family holidays and cost more.

Phoebe L Hanson, a 21-year-old student from Stafford, persuaded her 
family to go to Cornwall instead of flying abroad. Facts are important 
but she advises focussing on the reasons why you care.

"Say something like, 'I'm really scared about my future, these are the 
reasons I want to do something'," she suggests. Her mum Tracy explains 
that as Phoebe got older, their relationship changed from Tracy 
explaining facts to her to meeting in the middle to share knowledge.

Present a solution, not just a problem, Phoebe explains. "Give them 
options for something fun or exciting."

"Saying 'let's do this thing instead' is really good way to 
communicate," she suggests.

She also says one answer to concerns about money is to discuss what type 
of world parents want children to inherit. "People talk about how 
expensive trains are, but think about what the carbon emissions from 
taking a plane mean in the long term for us," she says.

*How to talk about being waste-free*
Radically reducing what we buy and throw away can improve our carbon 
footprint, but it can be time-consuming and difficult.

Becky Little, who is 20 and a community carer in Worcester, persuaded 
her parents Rob and Ellen to reduce food waste and think more carefully 
about what they buy.

Be well-informed about the things you want your family to start changing 
so they can see you care and have done some research," she says.

Her parents were concerned about convenience but she focussed on the 
positive impacts. "Explain why it will make their lives easier or 
cheaper," she suggests.

"Make connections with things they care about," she advises. Her family 
like to volunteer so they made meals using leftover food to donate to 
people in their local community.

"It's important to not go into it expecting them to change their whole 
lives. Small things can make a difference," she explains.

Ilse, Phoebe and Becky all say that the conversations can be challenging 
at times but worth it. "Taking action as an individual mean I've managed 
to feel a lot more in control of my future," Phoebe explains.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339214

- -

/[ nice little video - from BBC IDEAS ]/
*How to talk with children about climate change*
Climate change can feel overwhelming, particularly for children. What’s 
the best way to talk about the issue?
Animated by Flock, 13 April 2023
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/how-to-talk-with-children-about-climate-change/p0fgdjtz



/[ Asia heating up - DW video news 13 min ]/
*Heatwaves ravage Asia, climate protesters disrupt Berlin | DW News*
DW News
Apr 21, 2023  #weather #asia #heatwaves
The World Metereological Organisation says the last eight years have 
been the hottest on record. Asia has been hit especially hard by rising 
temperatures. Climate change is also linked to other extreme weather 
events, such as the flooding that devastated Pakistan earlier this year. 
Critics say governments are not doing enough to tackle global warming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA52toutUNs



/[  From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ]/
*Faster than forecast, climate impacts trigger tipping points in the 
Earth system*
By David Spratt | April 19, 2023
“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal 
collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a 
dangerously underexplored topic … yet there are ample reasons to suspect 
that climate change could result in a global catastrophe,” wrote the 
eminent Australian climate scientist Will Steffen and his colleagues in 
August 2022 in “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change 
scenarios.”

Steffen, who died earlier this year, will be remembered for some of the 
big, crucial ideas he contributed to the understanding of the Earth 
system, particularly planetary boundaries, tipping point vulnerabilities 
and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “hothouse Earth” 
scenario—ideas developed with Tim Lenton, Johan Rockström, Katherine 
Richardson, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and others.

In their 2018 “hothouse” paper, Steffen and his colleagues explored the 
potential for self-reinforcing feedbacks to push the Earth System toward 
a planetary threshold that, if crossed, “could prevent stabilization of 
the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued 
warming on a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway even as human emissions are reduced.”

This challenged the notion that climate warming was a predictable, 
linear consequence of increasing levels of greenhouse gases, and instead 
pointed to critical thresholds, or tipping points, in which a small 
change causes a larger, more critical change to be initiated, taking the 
climate system as a whole or particular systems within it from one state 
to a discretely different state. The loss of polar glaciers, or the 
Amazon rainforest drying and being replaced by sclerophyll forest, are 
examples...
- -
The change may be abrupt or non-linear—characterized by sudden change 
rather than smooth progress—and irreversible on relevant time frames.

It may also lead to cascading events in which the mutual interaction of 
individual climate tipping points and/or abrupt changes lead to more 
profound changes to the entire system. This is already happening. The 
loss of sea ice in the Arctic is adding to regional warming, 
accelerating ice melt from Greenland, such that an influx of cold, 
non-salty water into the North Atlantic is slowing the Gulf Stream, 
which in turn is changing the Amazon climate.

Recent research has confirmed that tipping points and cascades are 
already occurring, not at 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming, but right 
now. In one of his last published pieces, a 2022 book chapter, Steffen 
said, “it is clear from observations of climate change-related impacts 
in Australia alone—the massive bushfires of the 2019-2020 Black Summer, 
the third mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in only five years, 
and long-term cool-season drying of the country’s southeast agricultural 
zone—that even a 1.1°C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous 
level of climate change.”

While observed warming has been close to climate model projections, the 
impacts have in many instances been faster and even more extreme than 
the models forecasted. William Ripple and his co-researchers show that 
many positive feedbacks are not fully accounted for in climate models.

And prominent climate scientist Michael Mann says that when it comes to 
certain important consequences of warming, including ice sheet collapse, 
sea level rise, and the rise in extreme weather events, “the 
[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] reports in my view 
have been overly conservative, in substantial part because of processes 
that are imperfectly represented in the models.”

In September 2022, Stockholm University’s David Armstrong McKay and his 
colleagues concluded that even global warming of 1-degree Celsius risks 
triggering some tipping points, just one data point in an alarming 
mountain of research on tipping points presented in the last year and a 
half.

Denman Glacier, in East Antarctic, was identified as susceptible to 
collapse of its ice shelf and inundation of the glacier itself, which 
sits on a retrograde base below sea level. Scientists announced that the 
Thwaites Glacier ice shelf in West Antarctica was fracturing and likely 
to result in a speeding up of the glacier’s flow and ice discharge, 
possibly heralding the collapse of the glacier itself and triggering 
similar increases across the Amundsen Sea glaciers. “The final collapse 
of Thwaites Glacier’s last remaining ice shelf may be initiated … within 
as little as five years,” they said.

In November 2022, the State of the Cryosphere report concluded that more 
than four meters of additional sea level rise was locked in “with 
sections of the West Antarctic ice sheet potentially collapsing even 
without any further emissions over the coming centuries.” An ingenious 
look at the genetic history of Turquet’s octopus and its population 
movement across Antarctica in past warm periods led to the conclusion 
that “even under global heating of 1.5°C—the most ambitious goal under 
the global Paris climate agreement—the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be 
consigned to collapse.”

In August, researchers showed that the Arctic has warmed nearly four 
times faster than the globe since 1979 and concluded it is likely 
climate models systematically tend to underestimate this amplification. 
A few months later, scientists reported that Greenland Ice Sheet 
glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously calculated. At the 
end of 2021, Professor Jason Box said that the Greenland Ice Sheet has 
passed a tipping point: “Technically, now [at 1.2°C] Greenland is beyond 
its viability threshold… 1.5°C would mean the ‘beyond the threshold’ 
state is enhanced and the loss [of ice mass] becomes a complex, 
non-linear, amplified response guaranteeing the ice sheet remains beyond 
its viability threshold.”

Permafrost carbon emissions and the feedback loops they will initiate 
are not accounted for in most Earth system models or Integrated 
Assessment Models, including those which informed the IPCC’s special 
report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, nor are they fully 
accounted for in global emissions budgets. If carbon-cycle feedbacks 
such as tipping points in forest ecosystems and abrupt permafrost thaw 
are accounted for, the estimated remaining budget for carbon emissions 
could disappear altogether.

In a ground-breaking 2021 paper, Northern Arizona University’s Katharyn 
Duffy and colleagues mapped the relationship between increasing 
temperatures and carbon uptake in Amazon forests by analyzing more than 
20 years of data on the transfer of carbon dioxide between plants, land, 
and the atmosphere; their analysis showed that in recent hot periods the 
thermal maximum for photosynthesis had been exceeded. At higher 
temperatures, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by plants 
(photosynthesis) will decline sharply, whilst carbon dioxide released by 
plants (respiration) will continue to rise.

In addition, recent evidence shows human fossil fuel emissions are still 
rising and will not likely plateau until the end of this decade, a far 
cry from the “carbon law,” which requires halving emissions by 2030 to 
keep warming to under a 2-degree Celsius trajectory. Current analysis 
suggests the world is heading to around 3 degrees Celsius of warming, or 
perhaps 3.5 degrees Celsius in a plausible high-end trajectory.

There are fair and reasonable concerns that focusing on worst-case 
scenarios will cause public despair and paralysis. But when risks are 
existential, it is precisely those high-end possibilities of system 
collapse, rather than the middle-of-the-road linear probabilities, that 
must be the focus of concern and should spur the world to action.

Speaking in 2018, Steffen said that the dominant linear, deterministic 
framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher 
levels of temperature rise. Model projections that don’t include these 
feedback and cascading processes “become less useful at higher 
temperature levels… or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are 
making a big mistake when we think we can ‘park’ the Earth System at any 
given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there.”
https://thebulletin.org/2023/04/faster-than-forecast-climate-impacts-trigger-tipping-points-in-the-earth-system/




/[ disinformation watch  --  Paltering is lying by omission; paltering 
can involve failing to disclose relevant information, but unlike lying 
by omission, paltering involves the active disclosure of true but 
misleading information: paltering enables the would-be deceiver to 
actively influence a target's beliefs.]/
*The Meat Industry Is Advertising Like Big Oil*
But they’re using public funds to do it.
Cartie Werthman, a young woman with straight blonde hair, smiling in 
front of an evergreen tree and aerial view of a city
ByCartie Werthmanon
Apr 18, 2023
- -
The “Beefing up Sustainability” campaign paints a different picture 
though. “Per the EPA, beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of 
greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.,” it says. However, according to 
Jennifer Jaquet, an NYU professor researching the advertising and 
lobbying activities of agribusiness, this low-seeming percentage is due 
to the United States’s relatively high overall emissions.

This technique of using statements that are technically true but omit 
crucial information and therefore are misleading, is called paltering — 
and it’s an old favorite of the fossil fuel industry.

In fact, it’s not the only tactic the NCBA has borrowed from Big Oil. 
Increasingly, as NCBA and other agribusiness trade associations like the 
National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in 
Action try to convince the public that animal agriculture is 
sustainable, they are turning to the fossil fuel industry’s tried and 
true playbook for greenwashing.
     - -Screenshot of an ad that ran in the New York Times on Sunday, 
August 8, 2021.
https://www.desmog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-18-at-11.24.18-AM.png.webp
Like fossil fuel trade associations, these agribusiness trade 
associations are financing and promoting the work of third-party 
academics; fomenting uncertainty and doubt in cases where the evidence 
is already clear enough to act upon; and using slick PR and ad campaigns 
to present the industry as part of the solution to climate change, 
rather than a contributor to it.

At the bottom of each of NCBA’s “Beefing Up Sustainability” ads is a 
logo with “Beef Checkoff” written on it. This logo marks the biggest 
difference between the fossil fuel industry’s PR machine and that of 
animal agriculture: The animal agriculture industry’s efforts to 
minimize their products’ climate impact are paid for from a pot of 
public funds to which all beef and pork farmers and ranchers are 
required to contribute.

*The Checkoffs*
These funds, known as the Checkoffs, were set up through the 1985 Farm 
Bill as a way for producers to pool resources to promote beef, pork, 
dairy, soybeans, and other agricultural products to the public. The Beef 
Checkoff program requires every rancher to pay $1 on each live cow sold, 
and the Pork Checkoff requires producers to pay 35 cents per $100 in 
live pig sales. Last year, the Beef Checkoff brought in $43.1 million 
dollars, while the Pork Checkoff collected $106 million from farmers.

There are 19 different Checkoffs promoting various commodities. Although 
they are run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Checkoff 
programs do not directly promote their commodities. Instead, they are 
required to contract with “industry-governed organizations” — private 
trade associations — to promote products. Each year, trade associations 
submit proposals to the Checkoffs seeking funding for public relations 
campaigns and research projects.

Enter the NCBA. Even though the Beef Checkoff paid for the ads 
proclaiming that “beef is tonight’s sustainable dinner option,” NCBA 
created the public relations campaign. NCBA, NPPC, the U.S. Meat Export 
Federation, and Dairy Management Inc. are just a sampling of the private 
trade associations representing industrial agriculture companies, like 
the American Petroleum Institute represents oil and gas companies. Yet 
unlike API, which is funded by dues from member companies, most of these 
groups’ funding comes from contracts with the public Checkoff programs.

The NCBA receives a whopping 70 percent of its funding from the Beef 
Checkoff. And while all farmers, however big or small, are required to 
contribute to the Checkoff, the NCBA’s ranks are stacked with 
representatives from Big Ag. The Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the Pork 
Board, which oversee the Beef and Pork Checkoffs and approve the funding 
requests from trade associations for promotional campaigns, are full of 
NCBA and NPPC members.

Vaugn Meyer, a committee chairman for R-CALF USA, an association of 
cattle ranchers and sheep producers, is the rare person who served on 
the Cattlemen’s Beef Board without being affiliated with NCBA.

“It actually is probably close to 80, 90 [percent],” he says of NCBA 
members on the Beef Board. “Once in a while, some of those slip in on 
the other side. I was one of them.”

For the small producers, this close relationship between the Checkoffs 
and the trade associations that favor industrial agriculture is a problem.

“They [the NCBA] claim to be the voice of the cattlemen, but it’s 
basically under the table owned by the [meat] packers,” Meyer told DeSmog.

Meyer is referring to the “Big 4” meatpackers — JBS, Tyson Foods, 
Cargill, and Marfrig — all of which are members of NCBA. They control 85 
percent of the market but, unlike cattlemen, they don’t pay into the 
Beef Checkoff. And while all cattle producers in the United States are 
required to pay into the Checkoff funds, less than 4 percent are members 
of NCBA.

R-CALF USA has sued the USDA and the NCBA because it says the Beef 
Checkoff operates unconstitutionally. It believes that NCBA uses 
Checkoff funds to benefit meatpackers at the expense of small ranches.

Surbhi Sarang, a lawyer at the public interest firm Public Justice that 
represents R-CALF USA, says that NCBA’s Checkoff-funded ads allow 
meatpackers to pay producers less for their beef. NCBA’s ads promote all 
beef as a sustainable dinner option — which makes it hard for smaller, 
more environmentally friendly ranches to market their beef as a better 
option.

“When they are making sustainability claims, it’s applying to all beef 
and they’re not differentiating between where that beef was produced, or 
how it was produced, or who it was produced by,” she says. “If the 
consumer has no reason to seek out anything different, then that’s 
really just empowering these meatpacking corporations to kind of, you 
know, increase their margins,” Sarang said.

The Checkoff programs “sell so well; they sound like great 
opportunities,” Matt Penzer, a lawyer with the Humane Society who has 
been working on Checkoff lawsuits for years, told DeSmog. “But then you 
get into the details of how they actually run and it turns out, these 
are largely private trade associations getting free runs.”

NCBA did not respond to a request for comment...
---
https://www.desmog.com/2023/04/18/meat-industry-advertising-big-oil-climate-change-ncba-nppc-checkoff/



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*April 22, 1970*/
April 22, 1970: "NBC Nightly News" anchor Frank Blair, covering the 
events of the first Earth Day, cites global warming as a concern.

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/icue/29901277
https://web.archive.org/web/20170428020604/http://www.nbcnews.com/video/icue/29901277

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