[✔️] Dec 28, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Rains in Thailand, Brazil heatwave, New heat record for Earth, Fake News is effective, 2007 350.0rg

[Richard Pauli]

/*December *//*28, 2023*/

/[ because heated air holds more water ]/
*Widespread flooding in Thailand's south after heavy rain | ABS-CBN News*
ABS-CBN News
Dec 25, 2023  #ABSCBNNews #ABS #LatestNews
Several provinces in southern Thailand were hit by severe flooding on 
Monday after days of heavy rain, Thai local media reported.

In Narathiwat province, flooded streams overflowed onto roads, cutting 
off access to some of them, according to Thai PBS.

The widespread flooding affected thousands of households, and residents 
were advised to move their belongings to higher grounds, said local media.

Emergency services at three medical centers in Narathiwat were affected 
by the floods but were able to stay up and running as of Monday.

The Thai government has ordered the army and health ministry to provide 
assistance to those affected, while the Department of Disaster 
Prevention and Mitigation was working with local authorities to drain 
the flooded areas as quickly as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpuKlGfXvQI

- -

/[ Brazil has a heatwave - video report ]/
*Is unprecedented drought pushing the Amazon to the brink? | BBC News*
BBC News
Dec 26, 2023  #AmazonRainforest #ClimateChange #BBCNews
In the past few months the Amazon rainforest has experienced the worst 
drought on record.

One of its main rivers reached its lowest level since records began – 
121 years ago.

Villages became unreachable, wildfires raged in the middle of dense 
forest and wildlife died.

Many scientists are worried that events like these are helping to push 
the world's biggest forest to a point of no return.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrA_MazD_WA

- -

/[ make ready for more heat ]/
*Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm?*
Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s 
off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.
Monthly global temperature compared with average for the 20th century 
https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-12-18-record-hot-year-embed/4055787d-f3af-401d-b252-1dfdff4811f4/_assets/chart_annotated-Artboard-1200.png
By Raymond Zhong
Dec. 26, 2023
Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very 
likely the past 125,000.

Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged 
across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice cover 
in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows.

This year’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records. They 
left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury spent 
month after month soaring off the charts. December’s temperatures have 
largely remained above normal: Much of the Northeastern United States is 
expecting springlike conditions this week.

That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence — from 
oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships — to see 
whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what 
we are doing to it.
One hypothesis, perhaps the most troubling, is that the planet’s warming 
is accelerating, that the effects of climate change are barreling our 
way more quickly than before. “What we’re looking for, really, is a 
bunch of corroborating evidence that all points in the same direction,” 
said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. “Then 
we’re looking for causality. And that will be really interesting.”
As extreme as this year’s temperatures were, they did not catch 
researchers off guard. Scientists’ computational models offer a range of 
projected temperatures, and 2023’s heat is still broadly within this 
range, albeit on the high end.
On its own, one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest 
something was faulty with the computer models, said Andrew Dessler, an 
atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. Global temperatures have 
long bobbed up and down around a steady warming trend because of 
cyclical factors like El Niño, the climate pattern that appeared in 
spring and has intensified since, possibly signaling more record heat to 
come in 2024.

“Your default position has to be, ‘The models are right,’” Dr. Dessler 
said. “I’m not willing to say that we’ve ‘broken the climate’ or there’s 
anything weird going on until more evidence comes in.”

One thing researchers will be watching is whether something unexpected 
might be happening in the interplay of two major climate influences: the 
warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and the cooling 
effect of other types of industrial pollution
For much of the past 174 years, humans have been filling the skies with 
both greenhouse gases and aerosols, or tiny particles from smokestacks, 
tailpipes and other sources. These particles are harmful to the lungs 
when inhaled. But in the atmosphere, they reflect solar radiation, 
partly offsetting the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide.

In recent decades, however, governments have begun reducing aerosol 
pollution for public-health reasons. This has already caused temperature 
increases to speed up since 2000, scientists estimate.

And in a much-discussed report last month, the climate researcher James 
E. Hansen argued that scientists had vastly underestimated how much more 
the planet would warm in the coming decades if nations cleaned up 
aerosols without cutting carbon emissions.

Not all scientists are persuaded.
Arguments like Dr. Hansen’s have been hard to square with patterns in 
recent decades, said Reto Knutti, a climate physicist at the Swiss 
university ETH Zurich. In recent years, scientists have also discovered 
that global warming is shaped not just by how much heat is trapped near 
Earth’s surface but also by how and where this heat is distributed 
across the planet.
This makes it even harder to conclude with confidence that warming is 
poised to accelerate, Dr. Knutti said. Until the current El Niño is 
over, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make definitive claims,” he said.

Pinning down the precise scale of aerosols’ effect has been difficult, too.

Part of how aerosols cool the planet is by making clouds brighter and 
deflecting more solar radiation. But clouds are devilishly complex, 
coming and going and leaving few traces for scientists to examine, said 
Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist with NASA and the University of Maryland, 
Baltimore County. “That’s fundamentally why it’s a hard problem,” he said.

This year, aerosols have been of particular interest because of a 2020 
international regulation that restricted pollution from ships. Dr. Yuan 
and others are trying to identify how much the regulation might have 
increased global temperatures in recent years by limiting 
sunlight-reflecting aerosols.

Dr. Hansen’s argument for faster warming leans in part on 
reconstructions of climatic shifts between ice ages over the past 
160,000 years.

Using Earth’s distant past to make inferences about climate in the 
coming years and decades can be tricky. Still, the planet’s deep history 
highlights how extraordinary the present era is, said Bärbel Hönisch, a 
scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Fifty-six million years ago, for instance, geologic turmoil added carbon 
dioxide to the atmosphere in quantities comparable to what humans are 
adding today. Temperatures jumped. The oceans grew acidic. Species died 
en masse.

“The difference is that it took about 3,000 to 5,000 years to get there” 
back then, Dr. Hönisch said, compared with a few centuries today.

It then took Earth even longer to neutralize that excess carbon dioxide: 
about 150,000 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE0.KGNt.srLSeeWWC_DD&smid=url-share 




/[  text and audio ]/
*Why Fake News About Climate Change is Still So Effective*
“It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push certainty.”
Kate Yoder
Dec 18, 2023

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/



/[ The news archive - start of 350.Org   ]/
/*December 28, 2007 */
December 28, 2007: In a Washington Post op-ed, Bill McKibben, citing a 
recent speech by NASA scientist James Hansen, states that the worldwide 
CO2 level must remain below 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic 
global warming. Further, McKibben writes: "Hansen [has] called for an 
immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, 
the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high 
enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. 
To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your 
cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122701942.html


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