[✔️] Dec 19, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Abandoning, 3.2 Million moves, Fake news disinformation, 66 Million years old CO2, 2007 Clean Air Act

[Richard Pauli]

/*December *//*19, 2023*/
/
[ evidence that people are moving ]/
*Americans abandoning neighborhoods due to rising flood risk, study finds*
BY SAUL ELBEIN - 12/18/23
Rising risk of floods is hollowing out counties across the United States 
— creating abandoned pockets in the hearts of cities, a new report has 
found.

These abandoned areas tend to map onto regions of historic disinvestment 
— and flight out of them is accelerating, according to findings 
published in Nature Climate Change
In cities across the country, but particularly concentrated in the 
Midwestern states such as Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota, 
increasing flood risk has driven this “climate abandonment” of 
individual census tracts, sometimes quite rapidly...
- -
In most cases, this decline is on the order of 10 percent.

But in the most extreme cases — such as Staten Island’s Midland Beach 
neighborhood — the drop in population was more like a collapse.

In that census block, First Street found that a 2000-era population of 
93 people had fallen by two-thirds, to 31 people by 2020...
- -
Areas in the second category, Porter argued, can be saved by timely 
investment in public infrastructure.

Without such intervention — and in some areas, even with it — the exodus 
may become unstoppable, he said.

The end state of this process is a situation where “the people that can 
afford to leave, leave, and people [who] can’t afford to leave end up 
staying in the community,” Porter said.

“You end up with a lot of vulnerable populations at risk.”
https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/4362948-americans-abandoning-neighborhoods-due-to-rising-flood-risk-study-finds/

- -

/[ gathering data makes more reports ]/
*Defining America's Climate Risk*
New Research Highlights the Emergence of “Climate Abandonment Areas

    PRESS RELEASE
    *Over 3.2 Million Americans Have Left High Flood Risk Neighborhoods
    Creating “Climate Abandonment Areas"*
    Today the First Street Foundation published new research in the
    journal Nature-Communications, which integrates observed historic
    trends of population change, along with flood risk information, to
    uncover climate migration trends that are occurring in many high
    flood risk areas across the country. The research highlights the
    emergence of “Climate Abandonment Areas”, which are locations that
    have lost population from 2000 - 2020 and can be directly attributed
    to climate change related flood risk.

https://firststreet.org/
- -
Full Press release PDF: 
https://assets.firststreet.org/uploads/2023/12/Climate-Abandonment-Areas-Press-Release.pdf
- -
/[ abandonment, the refugee, the migrant, desperadoes, ]/
*Climate migration may become "abandonment" as people flee flooding*
Andrew Freedman, author of Axios Generate

Climate migration is already taking place within American communities, 
new data finds, as people flee flood-prone areas, and create "climate 
abandonment" zones.

Why it matters: Fresh research published Monday morning from a team of 
scientists at the nonprofit First Street Foundation and their outside 
partners includes population data down to the census block level. It 
reveals climate change-related shifts underway, at a local scale.

Threat level: The study constitutes the latest warning sign of the 
effects of climate change. Population shifts, and a larger reckoning for 
real estate, are only expected to worsen as global average surface 
temperatures rise.

As the world warms, sea levels are increasing, causing more coastal 
flooding.
On Sunday, for example, a nontropical low pressure center flooded large 
parts of Charleston, S.C., bringing the city its fourth-highest tide on 
record.
Floods like this are now more likely as land subsidence combines with 
sea level rise to turn even nontropical storms into major flooding threats.
At the same time, storms are carrying more moisture, with the frequency 
and severity of heavy rainfall events on the increase as well. This is 
increasing the likelihood of inland flooding.
The big picture: At a macro level, Americans are leaving the Rust Belt 
in droves and heading to areas of greater climate risk in the South and 
Southwest, said Jeremy Porter, a study coauthor and head of climate 
change implications for First Street Foundation.

But this has masked other changes taking place at the local level, which 
is where more moves occur as people try to stay close to their support 
networks, Porter said in an interview.
The research was presented in a report on the foundation's website, with 
the underlying methodology published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal 
Nature Communications. It shows that during the 2000-2020 period, about 
818,000 Census blocks experienced flood-related population declines.
The researchers classify these areas as climate abandonment areas; they 
show that nationwide, about 3.2 million people have fled flood risk from 
these zones.
When counting risky areas expected to become abandonment areas, the 
researchers found those places are likely to lose a total of 7.5 million 
residents over the next 30 years due to flood risk (on top of the 3.2 
million they have already lost).
What they're saying: "This research is the first to find a systematic 
pattern in the historic population change data that shows climate 
migration is not something that will happen in the future, but it's 
something that is already happening in the case of the most likely type 
of migration (local moves)," Porter told Axios in an email.

"Our research is the first to dig into population change at that more 
micro scale... and when you do that, the narrative flips from 'People 
are moving to risk' to 'People are taking climate into account when 
choosing where to live.'"
Between the lines: The study is particularly significant since it 
examines both population "pull" and "push" factors, from flooding to the 
quality of school systems, to try to determine drivers of population shifts.

The intrigue: Some cities with high flood risks, like Miami and Houston, 
are still pulling in more people than they are losing, the research 
shows. But these areas are growing more slowly than they would be if 
flooding weren't such a threat, the study shows.

First Street Foundation calculated that 34.5% of the U.S. population 
lives in census blocks that are already being affected by flood–related 
population declines, or slowed growth.
Future projections show abandonment areas expanding, particularly in the 
Midwest and Northeast. In fact, metro areas of Minneapolis, Milwaukee 
and Washington, D.C. (specifically, Alexandria, Va.) were identified as 
being among the top 10 counties with the largest increase in climate 
abandonment areas through 2053.
How they did it: Researchers took census block data, First Street 
Foundation's high-resolution flood model and information from actual 
flood events. They incorporated data on social, political and economic 
characteristics of an area to better understand what may attract people 
and keep them in a particular geographic area.

What's next: During the next three decades, some risky growth regions — 
like Miami — could pass points where they become climate abandonment 
zones, as sea levels increase and the threat of flooding goes up as 
well, the data suggests.

The study did not look at insurance prices, which is another factor that 
may force people to move as insurers consider key markets like Florida 
and California too risky to conduct business.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/18/climate-change-migration-us

- -
Full Press release PDF: 
https://assets.firststreet.org/uploads/2023/12/Climate-Abandonment-Areas-Press-Release.pdf



/[ an important question -- article in Grist ]/
*Why people still fall for fake news about climate change*
It was the hottest year on Earth in 125,000 years, and #climatescam is 
taking off.
Kate Yoder, Staff Writer
Dec 18, 2023
/[ clips from text and full audio 
https://www.adauris.ai/?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=internal&utm_content=narration_widget_aa_logo 
]/
In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United Nations 
declared that they had detected a “human influence” on global 
temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming 
decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree that burning 
fossil fuels had disrupted the Earth’s climate.

Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on Earth 
in 125,000 years, people are still arguing that the science is 
unreliable, or that the threat is real but we shouldn’t do anything 
about climate change. Conspiracies are thriving online, according to a 
report by the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation released 
last month, in time for the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. Over the 
past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have gotten more likes 
and retweets on the platform known as X than ones with #climatecrisis or 
#climateemergency.

By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming earlier 
and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15 percent of 
Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t happening? And is 
there anything that can be done to bring them around to reality? New 
research suggests that understanding why fake news is compelling to 
people can tell us something about how to defend ourselves against it.

People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy Norman, 
an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, 
which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Due to 
quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking inconvenient facts 
when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you 
rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unhinged 
your thinking becomes,” Norman said. Another reason people are drawn to 
conspiracies is that they feel like they’re in on a big, 
world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers think they’re seeing past the 
illusions that the vast majority don’t.

The annual U.N. climate summits often coincide with a surge in 
misleading information on social media. As COP28 ramped up in late 
November, conspiracy theories circulated claiming that governments were 
trying to cause food shortages by seizing land from farmers, supposedly 
using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about global warming 
like these can further social divisions and undermine public and 
political support for action to reduce emissions, according to the 
Climate Action Against Disinformation report. It can also lead to 
harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists who regularly appear 
in the media have experienced online abuse.

Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent study 
in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change disinformation was 
more persuasive than scientific facts. Researchers at the University of 
Geneva in Switzerland had originally intended to see if they could help 
people fend off disinformation, testing different strategies on nearly 
7,000 people from 12 countries, including the United States, India, and 
Nigeria. Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their 
mental defenses — reminders of the scientific consensus around climate 
change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral responsibility 
to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a barrage of 20 real 
tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the “wavy” jet stream, spouted 
conspiracies about “the climate hoax devised by the U.N.,” and warned 
that the elites “want us to eat bugs.”

The interventions didn’t work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an author 
of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University of Geneva. 
The flood of fake news — meant to simulate what people encounter in 
social media echo chambers — had a big effect. Reading the tweets about 
bogus conspiracies lowered people’s belief that climate change was 
happening, their support for action to reduce emissions, and their 
willingness to do something about it personally. The disinformation was 
simply more compelling than scientific facts, partly because it plays 
with people’s emotions, Spampatti said (eliciting anger toward elites 
who want you to eat bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped 
people recognize falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the 
accuracy of the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some 
people back to reality.

The study attempted to use “pre-bunking,” a tactic to vaccinate people 
against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that doesn’t 
mean it shows “inoculation” is ineffective. Spampatti and other 
researchers’ effort to fortify people’s mental defenses used a new, 
broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against a bunch of 
lines of disinformation at once, that didn’t work as well as 
tried-and-true inoculation techniques, according to Norman.

Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of 
disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to 
help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For 
example, when the Biden administration learned of Russia’s President 
Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White House 
began warning the world that Russia would push a false narrative to 
justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic video of a 
Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video came out, it was 
quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly successful attempt to 
inoculate much of the world against Putin’s preferred narrative about 
Ukraine,” Norman said.

For climate change, that approach might not succeed — decades of 
oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the public. 
“It’s really hard to think about someone who hasn’t been exposed to 
climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel industries,” said 
Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of 
Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive. They have talking heads who 
go on news programs, they flood media publications and the internet, 
they pay lobbyists.”

Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that 
simply telling the people who fall for it that there’s a scientific 
consensus isn’t enough. “They’re doubting climate change because they 
doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They’re making 
decisions about the environment, not based on the facts or the science, 
but based on their values or other things that are important to them.”

While political identity can explain some resistance to climate change, 
there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as Bloomfield 
outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for 
Science Communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, 
or at least partially blameworthy for what’s happening to the 
environment, and it requires us to make a lot of sacrifices,” Bloomfield 
said. “That’s a hard story to adopt because of the role we’re playing 
within it.” Accepting climate change, to some degree, means accepting 
inner conflict. You always know you could do more to lower your carbon 
footprint, whether that’s ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing 
your old clothes until they’re threadbare and ratty.

By contrast, embracing climate denial allows people to identify as 
heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything differently, and 
might even see driving around in a gas-guzzling truck as part of God’s 
plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than wrestling 
with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.

Those seeking to amplify tensions around climate change or spread doubt, 
such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls, and countries like 
Russia and China, get a lot of bang for their buck. “It’s a lot easier 
and cheaper to push doubt than to push certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil 
companies including Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP spent about $4 million to 
$5 million on Facebook ads related to social issues and politics this 
year, according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To 
sow doubt, you only need to arouse some suspicion. Creating a 
bullet-proof case for something is much harder — it might take thousands 
of scientific studies (or debunking hundreds of counterarguments one by 
one, as Grist did in 2006).

The most straightforward way to fight disinformation would be to stop it 
from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even if 
regulators were able to get social media companies to try to stop the 
spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dislodging them is a 
different story.  One promising approach, “deep canvassing,” seeks to 
persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations. The 
outreach method, invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, involves hearing people’s 
concerns and helping them work through their conflicted feelings. 
(Remember how accepting climate change means accepting you might be a 
tiny part of the problem?)

Research has shown that deep canvassing isn’t just successful at 
reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months, a 
long time compared to other interventions. The strategy can work for 
other polarizing problems, too, based on one experiment in a rural 
metal-smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing several local 
governments across the West Kootenay region to shift to 100 percent 
renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit Neighbors United kept 
running into difficulties in the town of Trail, where they encountered 
distrust of environmentalists. They spoke to hundreds of residents, 
listening to their worries about losing jobs, finding common ground, and 
telling personal stories about climate change like friends would, 
instead of debating the facts like antagonists. A stunning 40 percent of 
residents shifted their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 
to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For conservative 
audiences, she suggests that climate advocates move away from talking 
about global systems and scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless, nebulous group of people” — and 
toward local matters and people they actually know. Getting information 
from friends, family, and other trusted individuals can really help.

“They’re not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” Bloomfield said. 
“But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust that 
person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”
https://grist.org/politics/why-people-fall-for-climate-conspiracies-fake-news/



/[ Following the scientists  - ]/
*What a record of Atmospheric CO2 Levels over Last 66 million years 
tells us about our Future*
Paul Beckwith
Dec 18, 2023
A new peer reviewed paper published gives us the most up-to-date and 
accurate record of atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 66 million years.

Knowing what has happened in the past gives us information as to what we 
can expect as GHG levels continue to rise at accelerating rates.

For example, 51 million years ago CO2 levels peaked at 1600 ppm and 
global average temperature was over 12C warmer than today.

Today’s CO2 levels in the atmosphere (420 ppm) are higher than anything 
until we go back to near the Miocene Climate Optimum (MCO) about 16 
million years ago. When we surpass 480 ppm, we will have to go back to 
roughly 28 million years or so.

By comparing these paleo-CO2 findings with global temperatures we can 
see that the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Equilibrium 
System Sensitivity (ESS) were higher in the past.

I should note that this paper used the mainstream IPCC ECS of 3C (for 
doubling of CO2) when the latest work from James Hansen argues that the 
sensitivity is a much higher 4.8C (with a range from 3.6C to 6.0C) which 
is a closer match to the higher sensitivities in the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_6W-Tb3qT0



/[The news archive -  2007 Bush protects pollution. ]/
/*December 19, 2007 */
December 19, 2007:
EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, under orders from the Bush White 
House, denies a request by seventeen states, including California, for a 
Clean Air Act waiver that would allow the states to cut carbon pollution 
from vehicles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/19/AR2007121902012.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/washington/20epa.html

http://youtu.be/hf_HYL92rgQ

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/05/19/174039/waxman-white-house-epa/



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