[✔️] February 23, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | dis-info, tampons, feedback loops, WION doomsday glacier, solutions

Thu Feb 23 08:07:43 EST 2023

/*February 23, 2023*/

/[ skirmish of dis-information ]/
*Republican Operatives Are Astroturfing Opposition to Solar Power*
A new report looks at a well-connected nonprofit that has been helping 
grassroots groups across the country fight local solar projects—with 
misinformation.
By Molly Taft
Feb 21, 2023
Several grassroots groups opposed to solar projects in local areas may 
have one thing in common: a Virginia-based group with powerful GOP 
connections advising them on strategy. National Public Radio and 
environmental news collective Floodlight published an expose Friday on a 
group called Citizens for Responsible Solar, a nonprofit founded in 
2019, and its substantial influence in fighting renewable energy across 
the country—and connections to polluters and prominent climate deniers.

The group, according to its website, says its purpose is to “advocate 
for responsible solar policies that balance the demand for renewable 
energy with the interests of counties and their residents.” But as NPR 
reports, the founder of Citizens for Responsible Solar, Susan Ralston, 
has a long resume in GOP politics and relationships with conservative 
heavy-hitters—she worked for both George W. Bush and Karl Rove. For her 
anti-solar groups work, Ralston has hired staff members and consultants 
with similarly strong ties to GOP political figures and dark money 
groups, including Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative 
Exchange Council...
- -
Some of the early advisors of this anti-solar group point to an interest 
in spreading misinformation about renewable energy projects. NPR 
reported that Ralston sought advice from well-known renewable energy 
critic John Droz when setting up the Citizens for Responsible Solar 
group. Droz is part of a Koch-backed climate denial group and has been a 
longtime opponent of offshore wind, drafting a memo in 2011 on PR 
tactics to push against renewables that was shared at a DC meeting of 
anti-renewable energy interests; the memo advised painting opposition to 
renewables as a “groundswell” of local opposition rather than a 
coordinated campaign. Echoes of misinformation detailed on Droz’s 
website is presented on the Citizens for Responsible Solar site, 
including unsubstantiated claims that solar projects ruin the land 
they’re cited on.

There’s been increasing scrutiny in recent months on who, exactly, is 
paying for the pushback against renewable energy deployment. Earlier 
this month, the newsletters HEATED and Distilled documented some fossil 
fuel-funded forces at work in Michigan fighting against renewable energy 
there. Meanwhile, groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which 
has long standing funding from polluters and connections with climate 
deniers, has been helping to drive a fight against offshore wind in—of 
all places—New England...
- -
“I think for years, there has been this sense that this is not all 
coincidence. That local groups are popping up in different places, 
saying the same things, using the same online campaign materials,” 
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center, told NPR and 
Floodlight. “What that reflects is the unfortunate politicization of 
climate change, the politicization of energy, and, unfortunately, the 
political nature of the energy transition, which is really just a 
necessary response to an environmental reality.”
https://gizmodo.com/citizens-for-responsible-solar-susan-ralston-npr-1850141936

/[  Cotton, tampons, global warming, climate meets economics.  NYTimes ] /
*How Climate Change Is Making Tampons (and Lots of Other Stuff) More 
Expensive*
Cotton farmers in Texas suffered record losses amid heat and drought 
last year, new data shows. It’s an example of how global warming is a 
“secret driver of inflation.”

By Coral Davenport
Published Feb. 18, 2023

When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, 
the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in 
Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold 
around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and 
other products.

In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of 
their planted crops — nearly six million acres — because of heat and 
parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.
- -
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, 
which in turn is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter 
of the fiber. That means the collapse of the upland cotton crop in West 
Texas will spread beyond the United States, economists say, onto the 
store shelves around the world.

“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a 
vice president at NielsenIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact 
crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to 
rise.”

Halfway around the world in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest producer 
of upland cotton, severe flooding, made worse by climate change, 
destroyed half that country’s cotton crop...
- -
Texas cotton offers a peek into the future. Scientists project that heat 
and drought exacerbated by climate change will continue to shrink yields 
in the Southwest — further driving up the prices of many essential 
items. A 2020 study found that heat and drought worsened by climate 
change have already lowered the production of upland cotton in Arizona 
and projected that future yields of cotton in the region could drop by 
40 percent between 2036 and 2065.

Cotton is “a bellwether crop,” said Natalie Simpson, an expert in supply 
chain logistics at the University at Buffalo. “When weather destabilizes 
it, you see changes almost immediately,” Dr. Simpson said. “This is true 
anywhere it’s grown. And the future supply that everyone depends on is 
going to look very different from how it does now. The trend is already 
there.”...
- -
Barry Evans, a fourth-generation cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas, 
doesn’t need a scientific report to tell him that. Last spring, he 
planted 2400 acres of cotton. He harvested 500 acres.

“This is one of the worst years of farming I’ve ever seen,” he said. 
“We’ve lost a lot of the Ogallala Aquifer and it’s not coming back.”

When Mr. Evans began farming cotton in 1992, he said, he was able to 
irrigate about 90 percent of his fields with water from the Ogallala. 
Now that’s down to 5 percent and declining, he said...
- -
“Since the 1930s, government programs have been fundamental to growing 
cotton,” Dr. Sumner said. “But there’s not a particular economic 
argument to grow cotton in West Texas as the climate changes. Does it 
make any economic sense for a farm bill in Washington, D.C., to say, 
‘West Texas is tied to cotton?’ No, it doesn’t.”

In the long run, it could just mean that cotton is no longer the main 
ingredient in everything from tampons to textiles, said Mr. Sumner, “and 
we’re all going to use polyester.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/climate/climate-change-cotton-tampons.html

- -

/[ see source materials ]/
*Forum for the Future - Cotton 2040*
https://www.forumforthefuture.org/cotton-2040

/[  future examination of physical reality  ]/
*Ecologists Find Unexpected Feedback Loops Could Complicate Fighting 
Climate Change*
They could make it impossible to reverse.
WRITTEN BY JON KELVEY
FEB. 20, 2023
- -
“Climate models may be underestimating the acceleration in global 
temperature change because they aren’t fully considering this large and 
related set of amplifying feedback loops,” Oregon State University 
postdoctoral researcher and study co-author Christopher Wolf said in a 
statement.

In their paper, Wolf and his co-author, Oregon State University 
professor of ecology William Ripple, led an international team in 
examining 47 different types of feedback loops that could affect future 
climate change, some of which increase warming, and some of which create 
a cooling effect, and some of which have uncertain effects.

The overall result of these interacting loops is too hard to predict at 
this point, but Wolf and Ripple worry that warming feedback loops could 
push the Earth's climate past one or more tipping points that could 
“result in tragic climate change outside the control of humans,” they write.
- -
Ripple and Wolf studied and created a table of 41 climate feedback 
loops, geophysical and biological processes that are driven by climate 
and which, in turn, drive climate change in one way or another.

An example of a physical feedback loop might be Arctic sea ice, where 
”warming in the Arctic leads to melting sea ice, which leads to further 
warming because water has lower albedo (reflectance) than ice,” Ripple 
and Wolf write in the paper. The pair consider permafrost thawing, which 
releases carbon dioxide and methane, as a biological feedback loop.

Some of the major positive feedback loops (positive here meaning 
something that amplifies, not something that has a positive outcome) 
they examined, loops that increase global warming, are the 
aforementioned loss of Arctic sea ice, the loss of glaciers, increasing 
water vapor in the atmosphere —which has a greenhouse effect itself — 
and sea level rise, which further lowers Earth's albedo. They found 27 
positive feedback loops in total.

There are some negative feedback loops (meaning things that promote 
stability), primarily the Planck loop, where the more infrared energy 
escapes Earth into space the warmer the climate becomes. Chemical 
weathering of rocks occurs when atmospheric carbon dioxide mixes with 
rainwater, acidifying it and removing atmospheric carbon, and this 
increases with carbon dioxide levels. Increasing rainfall in places like 
the Sahara desert, and increasing carbon dioxide levels worldwide, can 
lead to more plant growth, which in turn sequesters carbon dioxide. They 
found seven of these negative feedback loops that act to balance climate 
change.

Other feedback loops are more uncertain in Ripple and Wolfs’ analysis 
such as how much the ocean can absorb carbon dioxide by acidifying, or 
the effects of human-created aerosols and mineral dust in the 
atmosphere. Some other studies suggest aerosols and dust cool the 
climate, but predicting future dust levels is difficult and humans are 
reducing levels of industrial aerosols in the air, otherwise known as 
pollution, because they are unhealthy for us. The researchers found 
seven of these uncertain feedback loops...
- -
First, scientists need to get much better at measuring and modeling all 
of the Earth systems involved in climate change, an effort that will 
require major changes of approach within the scientific community, 
according to Ripple.

“We need a rapid transition toward integrated Earth system science 
because the climate can only be fully understood by considering the 
functioning and state of all Earth systems together,” he said in a 
statement. “This will require large-scale collaboration, and the result 
would provide better information for policymakers.”

Second, the work needs to get serious about the wide-ranging shifts in 
land management, agriculture, energy, and transportation necessary to 
reduce emissions to slow the pace of climate change, particularly since 
feedback loops could present us with unpleasant surprises.

“It’s too late to fully prevent the pain of climate change, but if we 
take meaningful steps soon while prioritizing human basic needs and 
social justice, it could still be possible to limit the harm,” said in a 
statement.

https://www.inverse.com/science/ecologists-find-unexpected-feedback-loops-that-could-complicate-fighting-climate-change

/[ Sustainability Week -- video of an enthusiastic gathering  ]/
*Solutions to save a dying planet*
Grantham Imperial
Feb 22, 2023
On Imperial's Sustainability Week 2023's biodiversity day, Grantham 
Institute brought together staff and student speakers from across 
Imperial's four Faculties to discuss the state of our natural world, why 
nature is so important to our mental well-being, how nature can help 
cities both mitigate and adapt to a warming climate, how greater 
financial investment in nature can be generated and what happened at the 
recent international biodiversity conference, COP15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4DsNFloqPI

/[ //video //WION report -- impact of climate change on sea level  7:30 ]/
*Antarctica's 'doomsday glacier' is in trouble | WION Climate Tracker*
WION
7.29M subscribers
Feb 16, 2023  #DoomsdayGlacier #Antarctica #WIONClimateTracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7IGngEJq4

- -

/[  See the photos, and watch out for rising waters ]/
*In Pics: Doomsday glacier to crumble anytime now, will lift global sea 
level by 3 metres*
Feb 21, 2023
A new study has revealed that Antarctica’s doomsday glacier can crumble 
anytime soon which could lift the sea level by 3 metres. The 192,000 
sq/km Thwaites Glacier is holding on “by fingernails today”, warns 
British Antarctic Survey marine geophysicist Robert Larter. Its 
implications for the world population will be much greater-than-expected 
due to the lack of satellite data and scientific resources in developing 
nations. The glacier is increasingly getting weaker as warm water 
reaches its cracks and crevices half a kilometre below its surface. 
However, scientists are not sure when will this catastrophe happen.

The Thwaites glacier is expected to collapse anytime between the next 5 
to 500 years. And once this collapses, it will lead the sea level to 
rise by 65 cm within 100 years. However, that would be just the start of 
a much bigger problem. The collapse of the glacier will likely set a 
chain reaction in motion that will further lift the sea level by 3 metres...

https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-doomsday-glacier-to-crumble-anytime-now-will-lift-global-sea-level-by-3-metres-564228/#asia-and-africa-among-the-worst-hit-continents-564227

/[The news archive - looking back at the moment when wildfire funding 
became necessary]/
/*February 23, 2014*/
February 23, 2014:
The New York Times reports:

"President Obama’s annual budget request to Congress will propose a 
significant change in how the government pays to fight wildfires, 
administration officials said, a move that they say reflects the ways in 
which climate change is increasing the risk for and cost of those fires.

"The wildfire funding shift is one in a series of recent White House 
actions related to climate change as Mr. Obama tries to highlight the 
issue and build political support for his administration’s more muscular 
policies, like curbing carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. On 
Monday, Mr. Obama plans to describe his proposal at a meeting in 
Washington with governors of Western states that have been ravaged 
recently by severe drought and wildfires."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/us/obama-to-propose-shift-in-wildfire-funding.html

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