[✔️] August 12, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Hawaii factors, Hurricane predictions, Republican denial, GeoEngineering, 2004 worries

[Richard Pauli]

/*August *//*12, 2023*/

/[ factors - stronger winds, downed power line ignitions, flammable dry 
fuels, fast dangers, unrecognized risks  ]/
*The Real Prof. Katharine Hayhoe*
@KHayhoe
Amid the devastating Maui fires, I see many arguing, "it's weather, 
arson--anything but climate change."
Let's set the record straight. Climate change doesn't usually start the 
fires; but it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn + making 
them much more dangerous. 🧵
https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/1689631703701078016
//

/
/

/
/

///[ preparing to hunker down ]/
*Atlantic hurricane season is now predicted to be 'above-normal' this 
year, NOAA says*
August 10, 2023
By Jeff Brady, Rebecca Hersher
The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is now projected to have 
"above-normal level of activity" according to the annual forecast update 
by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The above-normal prediction is a change from NOAA's May outlook, which 
showed that for the first time in eight years, there would be a 
"near-normal" number of storms.

Earlier in the season, NOAA forecast 12 to 17 named storms. Now the 
agency projects 14 to 21 storms. The prediction includes tropical storms 
and hurricanes. About half of those are expected to be full-blown 
hurricanes. Not all storms make landfall.

"During active years, there's a doubling in the chance of a hurricane 
hitting the East Coast of the U.S. compared to an average or 
below-average season," said Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane season 
outlook forecaster, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center...
- -
Federal officials warn people who live in hurricane-prone areas to not 
focus too much on the total number of storms, because just one storm can 
cause significant damage.

That means making a plan for how to evacuate if a storm is headed your 
way, getting ready for power outages and thinking about how to care for 
elderly family members, people with disabilities, children and pets.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1192095594/atlantic-hurricane-season-is-now-predicted-to-be-above-normal-this-year-noaa-say



/[ Rebecca Leber cuts-loose  opinion ]/
*An insidious form of climate denial is festering in the Republican Party*
The GOP’s only “climate policy” is actually bad for the environment.

By Rebecca Leber at rebleberrebecca.leber@vox.com  Aug 11, 2023, 7:00am EDT
When Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) questioned US climate envoy John Kerry at 
an oversight hearing in July — a month that became the hottest ever 
recorded — he sidestepped that the country was in the grip of repeated 
heat waves, fires, and a looming hurricane season. Over a six-minute 
interrogation, the House Freedom Caucus chair claimed Kerry wanted to 
charge taxpayers a “quadrillion dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t 
exist” and accused him, along with thousands of scientists and the 195 
governments signed onto the Paris climate accord, of “grifting.”

Kerry shook his head when Perry concluded. “That’s a pretty shocking 
statement,” he said, “that you believe all the scientists of the world 
are grifters.”

The shock from the emotionally charged attack may have been the point. 
“There’s a longstanding history of climate deniers going after the 
messenger as well as the message,” Geoffrey Supran, a University of 
Miami associate professor who studies climate disinformation, told Vox. 
“The harder it is to dismantle the message, the easier it is to go after 
the individuals most prominently communicating it.”

Collective climate change denial in the Republican Party is not new. But 
the Perry-Kerry exchange illustrates how the GOP’s claims are becoming 
increasingly audacious — as signals from human-caused climate change 
become all the more apparent.

Record heat? “Normal”: “It’s hot, hot, hot all right,” said Laura 
Ingraham on her Fox News show. “After all, we’re in the middle of a 
season called ‘summer.’” (Fact check: More than 3,000 temperature 
records were shattered in the US for the month of July alone, something 
scientists say would be “virtually impossible” without human-caused 
climate change.)

Forest fires? “Nature naturally burns itself off every 11 years with 
natural disaster forest fires,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK). “This 
is a forest fire.” (Fact check: The severity of wildfires such as the 
historic blazes in Canada this year are fueled by complex conditions 
including forest management and drought primed by climate change.)

Stronger hurricanes? Just a part of life: “This is something that is a 
fact of life in the Sunshine State,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a 
Fox News interview. “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the 
weather.” (Fact check: Climate change drives the warming of ocean 
waters, which provide fuel for more devastating hurricanes and typhoons.)

More Americans are impacted by climate change; 62 percent of all voters 
recognize climate change is caused by human activity, according to a 
Gallup poll from this spring. Yet, climate change denial is not only 
alive and well in the GOP, it’s become “a lot more insidious and 
polarizing,” said John Cook, a University of Melbourne researcher who 
has tracked the path of climate disinformation online using artificial 
intelligence.

Here is what has made climate change denial worse.

*Climate change denial is becoming more personal*
Americans increasingly care about climate change, unless you’re asking 
the Republican voter base. The GOP’s obsession that liberal elites want 
to worsen the average person’s way of life through climate action has 
chipped away at their voters’ support for solutions and belief that the 
planet is warming. Party leaders and presidential candidates have 
insisted, wrongly, that Democrats’ climate solutions will mean bans on 
laundry machines, hamburgers, and gas stoves and that unabated “wokeism” 
has infiltrated the corporate world.

It’s a useful scare tactic, employed to delay action. Supran, who has 
conducted research on historical oil industry ads, found those in the 
1990s “trotting out the same rhetoric, with different wording: ‘No more 
SUVs, no more driving around freely,’” to stave off new energy 
efficiency standards.

“It plays into this elitist narrative, that these are the elites and 
they aren’t like us and they’re trying to tell us all these cultural 
changes they’re trying to bring about,” explained Bob Inglis, a 
Republican and former South Carolina member of Congress who now runs the 
advocacy group RepublicEn to promote climate solutions among 
conservatives. Inglis said it’s helpful for the politicians who sell 
doubt on climate change to make it seem like people who support 
solutions “have their heads in the clouds trying to solve things the 
rest of us practical people don’t need.”
Inglis pointed out the problem with this narrative. “The thing about 
climate change is we’re all experiencing it right now,” he said. “We’re 
all in the midst of it.”

The party is making climate a culture war issue
Republicans have spent years hammering this message to the electorate 
and it has made a major difference to the average Republican voter. 
Research shows that the GOP politicians’ cues do impact how voters see 
the issue.

We can measure the effect of their rhetoric in the polling: A recent 
Gallup survey looked at partisan divides on a number of issues every 10 
years from 2003 to 2023. One of the starkest shifts in the polling was 
around party views on global warming and environmental issues, ranking 
alongside gun laws and abortion as having the highest polarization. 
Republicans have become less concerned with global warming, even as the 
effects have grown more pronounced since 2013. And fewer Republicans 
think global warming is a result of human activity today than they did 
20 years ago.

There are serious consequences to all this, and the far right plans to 
translate climate denial into official federal policy that encourages 
fossil fuels and blocks a clean energy transition, should Donald Trump 
win the next presidential election.

The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has drawn a 920-page 
blueprint called Project 2025 to unravel all of the US’s efforts so far 
to tackle climate change. It is a methodical, systematic undoing of the 
federal bureaucracy, Politico first reported, shuttering key programs 
from the Environmental Protection Agency, slashing climate and clean 
energy solutions, blocking the expansion of wind and solar on the grid, 
and turning over pollution oversight to the fossil fuel industry and 
handpicked Republican officials.

*The GOP’s only “climate” policy is actually bad for the environment*
Cook has found in his research that Republicans are increasingly 
concerned with spreading misinformation about solutions, grossly 
oversimplifying what needs to be done to avoid addressing fossil fuel 
emissions. One of those misleading ideas is a House Republican push for 
the Trillion Trees Act, which has not come up for a vote.

When Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) first proposed the Trillion Trees Act 
in 2020, environmentalists said the bill “would significantly increase 
logging across America’s federal forests, convert millions of acres into 
industrial tree plantations, increase carbon emissions, increase 
wildfire risk, and harm wildlife and watersheds.” The idea was a wolf in 
sheep’s clothing, effectively giving loggers more allowances as long as 
they planted seedlings which are decades away from delivering climate 
benefits.

But the GOP has come to champion the idea as their climate plan. “We 
need to manage our forests better so our environment can be stronger,” 
said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). McCarthy proposed planting 
trees so the US could focus on its natural gas industry, one of the 
world’s leading methane polluters. “Let’s replace Russian natural gas 
with American natural gas, and let’s not only have a cleaner world, 
let’s have a safer world,” he said.

Trump was in favor of a tree initiative while president, even while he 
was dismantling government action on climate change. And other leading 
climate deniers have focused on “forest management” or the timber 
industry as an easy fix for worsening wildfires. In a CNN town hall in 
June, presidential candidate Mike Pence said, “We’ve got to be able to 
tell some of the radical environmentalists that you’ve got to harvest 
some trees in the forest to keep the forest healthy.”

Planting a trillion trees to save us from climate change is not a 
serious proposal on its own. The authors of the 2019 study that has 
inspired the GOP’s talking point have themselves said that planting 
trees alone does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions.”

As Inglis put it, “trees can be part of the solution, but they’re not a 
solution on the scale of the problem. ... What we’re looking for is a 
worldwide solution to the challenge of climate change.” Inglis’s group 
advocates for what he calls a conservative approach that does address 
the scale of the problem, a revenue-neutral carbon tax along with a 
border tax adjustment that works across the economy.

The GOP idea to plant more trees may seem innocuous compared to calling 
climate change a hoax, but the outcome is the same. They will try 
“anything that pushes the problem downstream,” said Supran, to shut down 
more immediate action. Invariably, inertia on climate change benefits 
the status quo — which just so happens to benefit fossil fuel 
industries, a major benefactor of the Republican Party.

“There’s so much talk but so little commitment to action both from the 
GOP and fossil fuel interests,” Supran said. “I feel like we’re in some 
kind of twilight zone, the talking points go round and round. The end 
result is just the same as it’s always been, which is lackluster action."

https://www.vox.com/climate/23815966/republicans-climate-change-denial-trees



/[ Hank Green video rant ]/
*Climate Scientist reacts to @vlogbrothers on Geoengineering | feat. 
@zentouro*
ClimateAdam
Aug 10, 2023 #ClimateChange #vlogbrothers
On his latest video for the Vlog Brothers, Hank Green spoke about the 
accidental experiment that cleaning up ship fuel has carried out on the 
climate, in a video titled "The Biggest Science Story of the Week". 
Among other things, Hank argues that this could be a crucial opportunity 
to learn about geoengineering. Geoengineering - according to this Vlog 
Brother - could be a "giant step forward". So what could geoengineering 
actually achieve to combat climate change? And why are many climate 
scientists far more skeptical than Hank lets on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71jlEyIc1Pk



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*August 12, 2004 */
August 12, 2004: Discussing a BusinessWeek story about the business 
community's growing worries about global warming, the Washington 
Monthly's Kevin Drum observes:

"Like national healthcare, I suspect that global warming will really get 
taken seriously only when the business community finally demands it. 
What BusinessWeek documents is only the first whispers of those demands, 
but the endgame is already in sight."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004498.php

http://web.archive.org/web/20131216021452/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-08-15/global-warming 





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