[✔️] July 11, 2023 - Global Warming News Digest | Unprepared, Self Care, danger of calm, Since Nixon, Million year old climate, blame for H.W. Bush

[Richard Pauli]

/*July*//*11 , 2023*/

/[ DW News report  "We are not well prepared at all "] /
*El Nino, fires, global warming gang up to make hottest month on record 
| DW News*
DW News
Jul 9, 2023  #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #Heatwaves
Countries across the globe are grappling with extreme heatwaves. EU 
scientists say last month was the warmest June on record, by a 
substantial margin.
And the average temperature reached an unofficial record high this week. 
It's feared climate change and the El Nino weather pattern could push 
temperatures even higher. The United Nations is warning governments to 
take precautions to prevent deaths caused by the intense heat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTNazYHwx7Y

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///[ Self-care climate anxiety nicely explained by climate psychology 
educator //Leslie Davenport, //video 43 min -- highly recommended ]/
*Mental Health in the Climate Crisis: Why Your Self Care Matters to Viewers*
YEA! Impact
Jul 10, 2023
How climate stories are told impacts people’s mental health and 
influences their overall wellbeing and ability to take action in the 
face of the climate crisis. Content creators are critical to helping 
people move from despair to courageous action in the face of the climate 
crisis.This digital session is presented by Climate Mental Health 
Network in partnership with Pique Action as part of the 2023 Hollywood 
Climate Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCdqEL09kc



/[ For another point of view: don't be too calm...Opinion ]/
*Remaining “Calm” About Climate Change Will Kill Us*
Jul 10, 2023
Adam McKay
Anyone insisting that you “calm down” about climate change is living in 
denial about the catastrophes at our doorstep.
The “calm down” set fancy themselves professional and sober-minded, a 
tasteful levee protecting the marvel of our civilization from the 
uninformed and hysterical masses.

The “calm down” person’s business is business as usual.

They defend the status quo with a practiced rueful resignation: “Believe 
me, I wish things were different too, but it’s just the way things are.” 
Only “the way things are” is on a historic and murderous losing streak.

They love to second guess the “strategies” of those who are trying to 
actively change or challenge the “way things are.”
“Isn’t that kind of approach counterproductive?” the “calm down” type 
will ask.

They worry anger or a more direct approach will turn off their friends, 
like the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” lady or the 
“don’t let the horrible be the enemy of the atrocious” guy.

When you express alarm about how rapidly the climate is warming, the 
“calm down” crowd will correct you with the most remedial facts. They 
believe that for you to be so bothered when they are not, there must be 
a fundamental misunderstanding on your part.

“You do know the global warming temperature is taken from a multiyear 
average, not single extreme heat events, right?” they will say, like a 
bemused uncle gently letting the kids know that elephants don’t actually 
talk like they do in story books.

“Yes, I know. But is it possible these extreme heat events, because of 
the rapid rate of change, even if only lasting for months or weeks, 
could trigger other thresholds if —”

But they’ve already moved on.

The “calm down” crowd does not have time for questions in response to 
their answers.

After all, their answers have been approved by the large extended crowd 
of “calm down” friends, consultants, business leaders, journalists, 
politicians, pundits, financial analysts, and media personalities with 
whom they routinely lunch and work.

Their pronouncements rise above the din and clink of a downtown or 
uptown, or an across-the-bridge restaurant that used to be a school or a 
hospital with a name like “Waif” or “32 Defunct”:

“It’s a slam dunk.”

“Free trade creates value for everyone.”

“The models show the housing market has always been stable.”

“Market-based health care is the achievable solution for right now.”

“When it comes to climate, we’re actually doing a lot.”

“The models show this temperature spike is only an anomaly.”

God forbid you point out to the “calm down” guy the numerous conflicts 
of interest and moral hazards that have constellated around him or her 
for the past 30 years, a spirograph of wrong turns and straight up 
disasters his “calm down” crowd has cheered and supported.

Dark and soft money, advertising revenue, speaking fees, future jobs, 
board seats, university endowments, awards, hiring preferences, social 
media reach, financial markets, poll numbers, and on and on.

Economies form like barnacles on a ship’s hull these days, with so much 
money throwing its weight around every waking and sleeping moment.

How can the “calm down” expert not see this?

But be careful. Because by mentioning any of this you are committing the 
greatest sin there is for the “calm down” crowd: stating the obvious.

So adverse is this group to stating the obvious that after a while, “the 
obvious” or the “semi-obvious” pretty much never gets stated at all.

The oil industry and their attendant financial institutions’ almost 
preposterous hold on the government and its elected officials?

An economic system that has nurses paying a higher functional tax rate 
than billionaires?

A world climate plan that after hundreds of forums, treaties, and 
“net-zero pledges,” still saw emissions reach their highest levels ever 
this past year?

All of it risks not only upsetting the “calm down” guy’s well-developed 
delicate late-twentieth-century aesthetic taste, but worst of all, it 
might just get “the people” riled up or in the worst of all possible 
outcomes, actually demanding change and accountability.

Freak storms, fires, mass inhalation events, and megadroughts?

“A troubling look into our climate future,” the “calm down” expert 
intones, with vague ideas of a three-part series and who knows, maybe an 
award or two, running through his mind in an instant.

“But it’s all happening right now at the same time,” you say, scratching 
your head with an almost manic fervency.

“It’s happened before. Winter tornados, El Niño, droughts. Let’s not 
overreact,” he says or posts or op-edifies. “Calm down.”

And it is then that you realize this perfectly smooth stone of a person 
will get a lot of people killed. And after it happens, they will let us 
all know there was no way anyone could have ever known.
https://www.levernews.com/remaining-calm-about-climate-change-will-kill-us/



/[  Early slip  ]/
*Declassified docs: U.S. resisted calls for climate aid since Nixon*
By Sara Schonhardt   7/06/2023
The United States has long resisted compensating poorer countries for 
environmental damages, boding ill for global negotiations to bolster 
climate aid, according to an analysis of declassified records published 
Thursday.

The briefing from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit watchdog 
group at George Washington University, finds that U.S. opposition to 
such international support stretches back to the early 1970s, starting 
with an intelligence report commissioned under President Richard Nixon.

“These records shed light on the various ways that the U.S. government 
has tried to avoid getting what President George H. W. Bush called a 
‘big bill’ for its environmental impacts in talks about compensation, 
liability, and reparations programs meant to alleviate the impacts of 
climate change,” the analysis states.

The report comes as a U.N.-backed committee works to hammer out the 
details of a fund for so-called loss and damage, which would compensate 
developing countries for the irreparable harms of human-caused climate 
change. Countries agreed to establish that fund last year at global 
climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt — though settling on its 
outlines has been no easy task.

But the arc of U.S. history on climate reparations complicates future 
loss and damage negotiations, the National Security Archive analysis 
concludes.

“Although the adoption of the Loss and Damage Fund was historic, recent 
events, and the declassified record, suggest that developed countries 
will continue to resist practical efforts to implement climate finance 
programs,” it states.

The 17 documents cited in the analysis come from various sources, 
including presidential libraries, the State Department’s Foreign 
Relations of the United States series and previous National Security 
Archive briefing books on White House climate change policy. Some were 
only recently declassified.

One of the earliest documents is a 1972 State Department intelligence 
note released ahead of a U.N. environment conference in Stockholm. It 
assesses calls by a coalition of African nations for reparations from 
developed countries that have “partially based (and continue to base) 
their growth” on the exploitation of natural resources.

The document interprets the African group’s position as a push for 
increased foreign aid rather than reparations. But it also asserts that 
the group’s views linking environment and development will “be with us 
in the years to come” and reflect “an increasing African militancy.”

At the Stockholm conference, the United States pledged up to $40 million 
for a voluntary $100 million U.N. environment fund — a proposal 
suggested by Russell Train, then-head of the White House Council on 
Environmental Quality, and Henry Kissinger, who at the time was Nixon’s 
assistant for national security affairs. In a memo to Nixon, they said 
it would give the conference the chance “to produce a substantive 
international program.”

But the U.S. delegation opposed a principle calling for the development 
of international law “regarding liability and compensation for the 
victims of pollution and other environmental damage,” according to a 
declassified roundup of actions taken at the conference.

A summary memo by Train states that the delegation opposed 
“politicizing” the conference and “consistently opposed using the 
conference as an excuse for new development ‘add-ons.'”

Train also noted, however, that “it is not possible to discuss 
environmental protection with the LDCs [least-developed countries] 
completely outside the context of development objectives.”

Train later went on to head EPA, where he faced a death threat for 
helping to institutionalize federal environmental policy in the agency’s 
early days.

*‘We don’t want a big bill’*
Developing countries began calling for reparations during the 1970s as 
environmental concerns entered international forum discussions, 
according to the National Security Archive’s analysis of the 
declassified documents. That prompted the State Department and other 
government officials to ready a strategy in anticipation of further 
calls for compensation.

“It really does reveal such a long, charged history of no admittance of 
responsibility for environmental impacts,” said Rachel Santarsiero, a 
research analyst at the National Security Archive.

Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to a request 
for comment Wednesday.

A recently declassified 1989 State Department document — which 
considered financial measures to limit or adapt to climate change — said 
proposals for a global climate fund were “premature and raise serious 
concerns.”

In language that echoes arguments from developed countries today, the 
paper adds: “Substantial work would need to be done to identify 
activities which might be supported. Any resources would need to be 
raised on a voluntary basis. The compatibility of a separate fund with 
existing assistance programs would also have to be demonstrated.”

While each presidential administration has approached climate action 
with varying degrees of ambition, they all appear to share a reticence 
to support calls for compensation.

Twenty years after the Stockholm conference, George H.W. Bush told 
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl he had a “major problem” with a summit 
marking its anniversary in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Bush, facing a rocky 
election, said he wouldn’t commit to things that would halt the economy.

“Maybe our experts can resolve these problems. But we don’t want a big 
bill at the end of the day,” he said, according to a White House record 
of the conversation.

None of the resistance stopped developing countries from continuing to 
push for compensation measures — with some small success. Climate talks 
in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007 led to the first formal mention in a U.N. 
document of the term “loss and damage.” At climate talks in 2013, 
countries agreed to create the Warsaw International Mechanism, making 
loss and damage a formal pillar of U.N. climate negotiations.

But efforts continued to avoid any mention of liability or compensation 
under the administration of President Barack Obama.

A declassified State Department communications package in the run-up to 
the 2015 Paris climate change conference states that “demands for 
massive sums and for ‘compensation’ are simply not feasible.”

The document includes talking points and questions and answers, 
including advice for officials on how to respond if pressed on why the 
United States opposes the creation of a fund for loss and damage. The 
suggested response: “We don’t think it appropriate or feasible to 
suggest that unknown, unlimited liability should be imposed on certain 
countries.”

“These documents are particularly interesting because they show 
snapshots of the U.S. hardline right before the Paris climate summit,” 
Santarsiero said.

The agreement to create a loss and damage fund last year still includes 
a caveat that those arrangements do not constitute liability, 
compensation or reparations. That’s a signal that the United States and 
other wealthy nations will continue to oppose such language into the 
future, the analysis concludes.

“Questions like, ‘Who will contribute to the fund?’ ‘Will only developed 
countries contribute?’ and ‘Will developing countries like China and 
India, or other non-state actors have to contribute?’ will surely 
dominate future climate summits — but any acceptance of responsibility 
is unlikely,” it states.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/declassified-docs-u-s-resisted-calls-for-climate-aid-since-nixon/



/[  exuberant talk ]/
*One Million Years into Climate Change's Past*
ClimateAdam
Jul 10, 2023  #ClimateChange #iceage
How can scientists dig up the secrets to Earth's climate past? These 
ancient records reveal the history of our planet: From ice ages, to 
dramatic sea level rise. So what do the past one million years tell us 
about climate change today, and where global warming might take us tomorrow?

Support ClimateAdam on patreon: http://patreon.com/climateadam
#ClimateChange #iceage

twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ClimateAdam
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClimateAdam
instagram: http://instagram.com/climate_adam
- -
==DATA==
Temperature data: IPCC AR6 mean (historical), Kaufman, Shakun, Hansen
CO2 data: IPCC dataset, Figure 2.4a WG1 AR6
Sea Level Rise data: Spratt & Lisieck, 2016

Future CO2 concentrations from Meinshausen et al., 2020
Future temperatures from IPCC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa0ZHAcPHew



/[The news archive - looking back George H. W. Bush]/
/*July 11, 1990 */
July 11, 1990: The Los Angeles Times observes that President George H. 
W. Bush seems to have dissociative identity disorder when it comes to 
climate:

    "The tension is often explained as a dispute between Bush's
    strong-willed chief of staff, John H. Sununu, who is deeply
    suspicious of environmentalists, and his Environmental Protection
    Agency chief, William K. Reilly.

    "That explanation, however, is an inaccurate characterization,
    Administration officials say. Although Reilly has advocated a
    stronger environmental policy, he has neither the clout nor the
    access to Bush to challenge Sununu, the officials say. In fact,
    Reilly has been conspicuous by his absence from the economic summit,
    virtually the only senior Administration official with an interest
    in the summit issues whom Bush left in Washington.

    "Instead, the disputes within the Administration reflect Bush's own
    ambivalence about the issues. Throughout his Administration, he has
    been pulled in opposite directions on the environment, tugged
    between his desire to placate environmentally-conscious voters on
    the one side and his instinct to protect business people from
    government regulation on the other."

    The Times also notes:
    "Bush's top aides are unanimous in believing that the scientific
    evidence is shaky on all aspects of global warming--the problem's
    dimensions, its potential effects and its causes."

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-07-11/news/mn-224_1_global-warming-issue


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