[✔️] July 13, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Vermont drone footage, Antarctic scientist, Bernie, Bill, AOC and others live, Weather never normal, Anti-ESG stupidity, GW Bush obscured science.

[Richard Pauli]

/*July*//*13, 2023*/

/[ trend in local news has viewers sending in drone footage  ] /
*Viewers share devastating scenes of flooding, damage across our region*
WCAX-TV Channel 3 News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YHfbQdqe8E

- -

/[ Antarctic scientist giving a summary to CCAG - Climate Crisis 
Advisory Group - we need to consider RISK ]/
*Antarctica currently has very little sea ice – the lowest ever 
recorded. What are the causes and likely consequences of this reduction?*
Jun 29, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2WRb-MOFD0


/
/

/[ recorded archive of live event activist presentations Wednesday - 
video ]/
*CLIMATE CHANGE: Where do we go from here? (LIVE AT 8PM ET)*
Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  Bill McKibben, Senator 
Sheldon Whitehouse, David Wallce-Welles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzEKxRvhOuU



/[ from an informed journalist ]//
/*Floods, Heat, Smoke: The Weather Will Never Be Normal Again*
July 12, 2023
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
- -
A month ago, when orange skies blanketed New York, it was a sign to many 
that this particular climate horror could no longer be conceptually 
quarantined as a local phenomenon of the American West, where tens of 
millions had already acclimated to living in the path of fire and every 
year breathing in some amount of its toxic smoke. That was normal for 
them, we New Yorkers thought, even though San Francisco had turned a 
sunless dark amber for the first time only in 2020. It wasn’t normal for 
us, we told ourselves. Then, when the air quality index dropped from 405 
back into the 100s again, in the weeks after, the joggers hit the 
pavement at their routine times, glad the sky was merely unhealthily smoggy.

Last weekend, it was Hudson Valley streets turned into swimming pools by 
supercharged rain and ravines disgorging landslides that those in New 
York City watched with a mix of horror and false relief. The flooding 
was “upstate,” we told ourselves, though by “upstate,” of course, we 
meant not even 50 miles north of the city. It was so close that as late 
as Sunday morning, it seemed possible that the rains would bring a 
deluge to the city worse than anything in the past decade. The United 
States Military Academy at West Point was briefly flooded by a 
once-in-a-thousand-years climate event. And yet the deluge seemed so 
quotidian that you could’ve easily missed the alarm — as I did, not even 
noting the threat of a storm until a few hours before it hit.

It is always comforting to believe disasters are far away, unfolding 
elsewhere, but increasingly doing so means defining ever smaller 
increments of space as distant. In this case, New Yorkers drew comfort 
from the fickle path of a single local storm system. The rains had 
pulled just a few miles west, on Sunday, sparing New York City and 
instead pummeling Vermont, where government buildings acquired new 
moats, Main Streets became canal towns, and ski resorts were flattened 
by brown muddy rubble. People were kayaking through Montpelier, and the 
Winooski River rose to levels not seen since catastrophic flooding in 
1927. The governor had to hike his way to an open road.
It didn’t even seem that freakish, all things considered — we see so 
many more climate-fueled disasters now, with global average temperatures 
breaking records every day recently. There were terrifying floods this 
week in Himachal Pradesh, in India, where several bridges collapsed and 
others carrying dozens of cars and trucks seemed about to. Japan 
experienced the “heaviest rain ever,” and in Spain, floodwaters carried 
cars backward through traffic at rapid speeds, their drivers simply 
watching powerless from the roof, where they’d taken refuge when the 
water began filling the cabin. A monthslong heat wave centered on Texas 
and Mexico and spread outward as far as Miami, which, as of Monday, had 
reached heat indexes north of 100 degrees for 30 straight days. In Death 
Valley in California, this week temperatures may reach or surpass the 
global record of 130 degrees Fahrenheit, set just in 2021. In El Paso, 
there hasn’t been a day that didn’t hit 100 for weeks.

Off the coast of Florida, the water was nearly as warm as a hot tub — 95 
degrees according to one buoy, 97 degrees according to another. It was 
just last month when life-threatening heat indexes as high as 125 simply 
parked in Puerto Rico for days on end. According to a coral bleaching 
forecast published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration, there is likely to be bleaching across the entire 
Caribbean this summer. It’s not clear how much will survive. According 
to some estimates, as much as 50 percent of the world’s oceans will 
experience marine heat wave conditions this summer; normally the figure 
is about 10 percent.

There are also the Canadian fires, which continue burning along an 
off-the-charts trajectory, though the smoke has more recently dispersed 
to the north and across to Europe rather than directly into the airways 
of the American Northeast and Midwest. In the first 25 days of June, 
more land burned in Quebec than had burned there over the previous 20 
years combined. Across Canada as a whole, more than 22 million acres 
have now burned, more than five times the record-shattering California 
fire season of 2020 and more than double the totals from the most 
destructive American seasons of the past 60 years.

But with New York’s skies merely unseasonably gray, we’ve moved on. As 
my colleague David Gelles noted this week, writing from inside his own 
flooding home, recent research suggests we may come to accept weather 
extremes as normal within two years — a grim prophecy of accommodation 
to disaster as a form of adaptation.

A year ago, as potentially lethal wet-bulb temperatures swallowed parts 
of India and Pakistan where hundreds of millions lived, I wrote a long 
essay headlined “Can you even call deadly heat ‘extreme’ anymore?” This 
spring and summer, lethal heat swept the subcontinent again, delivering 
temperatures regularly above 110 degrees Fahrenheit but generating 
considerably less media attention in the West, though this time the 
official death toll was higher.
A new analysis of last summer in Europe suggested that heat was 
responsible for more than 61,000 deaths — an eye-popping figure all the 
more remarkable for approaching the 70,000 dead in the 2003 European 
heat wave, long described as a worst-case benchmark. In the aftermath, 
it was often said that those heat deaths had changed Europe, which would 
never again be quite so blindsided by extreme temperatures. But the 
61,000 deaths last year passed with barely a murmur. This summer is only 
halfway over, and Europe has been setting new temperature records almost 
by the week. Presumably we won’t even know the mortality impacts for 
some time, at which point even the extremes of this summer will have 
passed into the rearview mirror, where they’ll look like some form of 
familiar, too.

In fact, what has been perhaps most striking to me this summer is how 
often global warming has caused what appears to be an unthinkable 
extreme — and then is contextualized, by careful climate scientists, as 
merely normal and predicted. Normally extreme, that is, and predictably 
scary.

Last month, when mind-bending charts of anomalous ocean temperatures 
were feverishly circulated on social media, it produced a sort of “calm 
down” response from some of the world’s most esteemed and careful 
climate scientists.

This probably wasn’t a step change, they said, or a tipping point, or 
what is often called by those most gripped by apocalyptic climate panic 
a “termination shock.” The record-setting ocean temperatures didn’t need 
to be explained as a sudden impact of a 2020 ban on sulfur pollution, 
which has a locally concentrated cooling effect when emitted by cargo 
ships; or by a slowdown of the ocean’s temperature-regulating system; or 
by some other unexpected and therefore alarming turn in the path of the 
climate system as it marched farther outside the range of temperatures 
that have enclosed all of human history. It may have had something to do 
with the amount of Saharan dust circulating across the ocean. But in the 
main, they said, it was just climate change.

In the end, the message isn’t all that reassuring. The experience of the 
near future will mean quite regular encounters with seemingly 
unprecedented events, often quite precisely predicted, but which so few 
wanted to believe could ever become real. Fewer still want to believe 
they might strike so close to home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/opinion/floods-vermont-heat-fires.html

/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/opinion/floods-vermont-heat-fires.html?unlocked_article_code=tle6r721DpwzWOLQYez0k3l57WXbUQnvTq1imbWPgtWoFHAl9UtoMSlqTde2x0foghitLE4gqyltil9U29FgLwW72GhyfYGYJqnXpzF-dr7Q9efxlm2AEJBzm2Z3aoXCagPV8Ri0aRM9H3TzuoXoHajMIcisF3t1cw6tlNG2GnCYnPCeUpcC4hbVqS3wacS5YXicORxnExzF7J9IvXLk_kqNoup1zrSjFrtc8WKHrdaj4RDAhkBoQG5EbeHoez5lCCklVD4KGNDqEHhzQzmDGHlnYUCvgZPPfuzzPy8jdcG83zkAHOToyQGiZc_glH4yjTAkrT1biEtP_1mxiwwXwcM3SA&smid=url-share
/

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///[ if you follow the money, watch where you step - audio podcast   ]/
*The depthless stupidity of Republicans' anti-ESG campaign*
A conversation with Kelly Mitchell of the watchdog group Documented.

JUL 12, 2023
For the last few years, the fastest growing segment of the global 
financial services industry has been ESG (environmental, social, and 
governance) funds.

Here’s how it works: one of several ratings firms uses its own 
proprietary formula to rate how well a company is responding to 
environmental, social, and governance risks. An environmental risk might 
be: will the county where you’re locating your data centers have 
sufficient water supply in coming years? A governance risk might be: 
have you filed all the proper disclosures?

Fund managers like BlackRock then gather highly rated companies into ESG 
funds, which are sold to investors as socially responsible. Hundreds of 
billions of dollars flow into ESG funds every year.

Note that there’s a bit of a shell game at the heart of the enterprise. 
What customers and investors generally think is that a company gets high 
ESG ratings because it goes above and beyond in those areas, that it is 
trying to “do well by doing good.” But in reality, high ESG ratings 
simply mean that a company is responding to material risks — maximizing 
its profits, as public companies are bound by law to do.

So Tesla gets no ESG credit for accelerating the electric vehicle 
market, but it can pull a low ESG rating (and fall out of ESG funds) 
over vulnerability to lawsuits over working conditions. (This is why 
Elon calls ESG “the devil incarnate.”) McDonald’s loses no ESG points 
for the enormous carbon impact of its supply chain, but it gains points 
for reducing plastic in its packaging, because regulations against 
plastic packaging are imminent in Europe.

So investors get to feel like do-gooders and big companies are rewarded 
for carrying out their legal obligation to assess risks to their 
business. There’s not much social benefit to the whole thing, but 
everyone feels good and green and happy.

Except now there’s a problem: Republicans bought it. The whole sales 
pitch — they believe it. They believe that companies in ESG funds are 
going out of their way to do social and environmental good … and they’re 
furious about it.

Over the past year or two, an enormous, billionaire-funded backlash 
against ESG has consumed the GOP, leading to multiple congressional 
hearings, hundreds of proposed state bills, and red-state treasurers 
vowing never to do business with woke lefty activist funds like [checks 
notes] BlackRock.

It is stupid almost beyond reckoning. And I’m just brushing the surface. 
To dig into the deep layers of dumb and where it all might go, I called 
Kelly Mitchell. She’s a senior analyst at the journalistic watchdog 
group Documented, which uncovered emails and other communications 
between the architects of the anti-ESG campaign that led to a New York 
Times exposé...

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-depthless-stupidity-of-republicans?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=193024&post_id=132685761&utm_medium=email#details



/[The news archive - looking back at early misinformation skirmish ]/
/*July 13, 2003 */
July 13, 2003: Former EPA Climate Policy Adviser Jeremy Symons recounts 
the George W. Bush Administration's assault on climate science in a 
Washington Post op-ed.

    washingtonpost.com
    *How Bush and Co. Obscure the Science*
    By Jeremy Symons
    Sunday, July 13, 2003

    Christine Todd Whitman's tenure at the Environmental Protection
    Agency (EPA) ended last month much
    the way it began, amid controversy over the Bush administration's
    unwillingness to craft an effective
    response to global warming. Whitman arrived just before the
    president reversed a campaign promise to
    reduce global warming pollution from power plants. As she leaves,
    leaked EPA documents suggest that
    the White House attempted to rewrite an EPA report to play down the
    risks of global warming.
    Regardless of who replaces Whitman as EPA administrator, a change in
    direction is needed from the
    White House itself. What began with the Bush administration
    exercising its discretion over policy
    choices on global warming has devolved into attempts to suppress
    scientific information. These efforts
    jeopardize the credibility of federal agencies and the information
    they provide to Congress and the
    public.

    The administration's commitment to protecting the environment has
    been an issue from the outset, when
    the Bush team made a number of policy decisions on global warming
    that matched those advocated by
    the coal and oil industries.

    At EPA, where I was then serving as a climate policy adviser, we
    believed one of Whitman's first tasks
    would be to make good on the president's campaign promise to seek
    new laws to reduce pollution from
    power plants, the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide emissions
    that trap heat in the atmosphere. But as
    soon as Whitman publicly reiterated the president's pledge in late
    February 2001, a debate ensued within
    the administration. White House aides drafted a six-page memorandum
    to John Bridgeland, who was
    then the president's deputy assistant for domestic policy. It listed
    the potential impacts on the coal
    industry, but devoted only six sentences to the science of global
    warming. Two weeks later, the president
    sent a letter to Congress announcing that he would no longer support
    new controls on global warming
    pollution from power plants. His letter left no room for compromise.

    Whitman, who had argued throughout the brief but intense debate that
    the White House should at least
    leave its options open, had been publicly undermined. Secretary of
    State Colin L. Powell compared her
    to a "wind dummy," a military term for a dummy that is pushed out of
    an airplane to determine which
    way the wind is blowing. When Vice President Cheney noted that
    Whitman was being a "good soldier,"
    the tone for the EPA's role in the administration was set.

    Since U.S. power plants alone account for 10 percent of global
    carbon dioxide emissions, the Bush
    administration next had to address the issue on the international
    stage. A State Department options paper
    in March 2001 outlined potential next steps for dealing with our
    allies on the Kyoto Protocol, an
    international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that the
    president opposed. According to the
    paper, the United States could "repudiate the Kyoto negotiating
    process" altogether. Or, the
    administration could advance its own proposal in order to "give us
    time to develop a credible alternative
    approach to Kyoto, rather than simply blowing up the current
    negotiations." But the paper warned that
    leaving the door open to an alternative agreement "may not fully
    satisfy domestic groups that wish to
    drive the final stake in the heart of the Protocol." The United
    States subsequently walked away without
    offering an alternative.

    With more than 80 percent of the nation's global warming pollution
    coming from the use of fossil fuels,
    the Bush energy plan dashed all hope for proposals to ease global
    warming. The plan, released in May
    2001, made increased supplies of coal, oil and natural gas the
    priority in the coming decades.
    In the few months that I worked under Whitman, I represented the EPA
    on the interagency working
    group that had been charged by Cheney with drafting the energy plan.
    Cheney's staff refereed the
    meetings, which were attended by representatives from other federal
    agencies and the White House.
    During the sessions I attended, the Energy Department continually
    pushed plans to increase coal and oil
    supplies while paying little heed to promoting energy efficiency and
    clean energy sources, options that
    could help meet the nation's growing energy needs without increasing
    pollution.

    The issue of energy conservation came to a head at a Cabinet-level
    meeting hosted by Cheney on April 3,
    2001. Whitman recommended that the government set a national goal
    for energy efficiency measured as
    a reduction in the nation's energy use relative to the size of the
    economy over the next two decades.
    People who attended the meeting told me later that Secretary of
    Energy Spencer Abraham spoke against
    the proposal, noting that it would only invite unwelcome scrutiny of
    the energy plan's modest energy
    efficiency provisions. He prevailed.

    Within a few months of taking office, the administration had hung a
    "do not disturb" sign on U.S. policy
    toward global warming. But the administration's position -- that new
    regulations would harm U.S.
    industry -- is not shared by most Americans, who are optimistic
    about the ability of businesses to
    innovate and adapt.
    Concerned about public opinion, presidential counselor Karen Hughes
    called a White House
    communications strategy meeting on the environment in April 2001,
    declaring that green issues "are
    killing us," according to a Time magazine report. Having ruled out
    any significant policy change,
    however, the administration's only choice was damage control.

    One example was its effort to raise doubts about the international
    scientific consensus that carbon
    dioxide pollution is causing global warming. In May 2001, the White
    House asked the National Research
    Council, part of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for a second
    opinion. But the effort backfired.
    The council's report confirmed the scientific consensus that
    greenhouse gas emissions are major
    contributors to global warming,

    Then a June 2002 report by the EPA and the State Department
    concluded that "continuing growth in
    greenhouse gas emissions is likely to lead to annual average warming
    over the United States that could
    be as much as several degrees Celsius (roughly 3 to 9 degrees
    Fahrenheit) during the 21st century." The
    report also detailed deleterious effects on public health and the
    environment in each region of the
    country, warning, for example, that "drought is likely to be more
    frequent and intense" in the Great
    Plains.

    Pressed to respond, Bush dismissed the report as a product of "the
    bureaucracy," denigrating years of
    work by scientists throughout the federal government.

    Afterward, the administration took a much bolder approach to dodge
    such embarrassment by trying to
    minimize awareness of the threat of global warming. In September
    2002, it stripped a global warming
    section from an annual EPA report on trends in air pollution. An
    annual update had been included for
    years.

    Most recently, internal EPA documents obtained by the National
    Wildlife Federation show that White
    House officials tried to force the EPA to alter the scientific
    content of a report in order to play down the
    risks of global warming. The EPA has billed the report, released in
    June, as "the first-ever national
    picture of environmental quality and human health in the United
    States." An internal EPA decision paper
    noted that White House officials were insisting on "major edits" to
    the climate change section and were
    telling the EPA that "no further changes may be made" beyond the
    White House edits. In the internal
    paper, EPA staff warned that the report "no longer accurately
    represents scientific consensus on climate
    change." The EPA ultimately pulled the global warming section from
    the report to avoid publishing
    information that is not scientifically credible.

    Former EPA administrator Russell Train responded in a letter to the
    New York Times. "Having served as
    EPA administrator under both Presidents Nixon and Ford, I can state
    categorically that there never was
    such White House intrusion into the business of the EPA during my
    tenure," he wrote. "The EPA was
    established as an independent agency in the executive branch, and so
    it should remain. There appears
    today to be a steady erosion in its independent status."

    Perhaps the most disturbing element of the leaked papers is that so
    far the White House has been
    unapologetic.

    The leaked EPA memo provides only one glimpse into the
    administration's recent efforts to control
    information on global warming. The Washington Post reported this
    month that the EPA scrubbed its
    analysis of a congressional plan to require power plants to reduce
    emissions of carbon dioxide and other
    air pollutants. The EPA estimated the cost of the proposal, but
    withheld information that it would result
    in 17,800 fewer premature deaths every year than would the
    president's air pollution plan (dubbed "Clear
    Skies" by the administration's spin doctors). The EPA recently
    turned down Arizona Sen. John McCain's
    request for an analysis of a global warming plan that he and
    Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman intend
    to add to pending energy legislation, breaking the agency's long
    tradition of providing such assistance to
    Congress.

    The administration's conduct illustrates a broader pattern of
    managing information to fend off criticism
    on environmental initiatives such as weakening the Clean Air Act and
    lifting Clean Water Act
    protections for wetlands. For example, the administration postponed
    an analysis requested by an EPA
    advisory group reviewing toxic mercury emissions from power plants
    for fear it would discredit Bush's
    proposed changes in the Clean Air Act.

    When President Reagan pursued a more overt agenda of undermining the
    EPA's ability to regulate
    industry, aggressive congressional oversight led to the resignation
    of the EPA head, Ann Gorsuch
    Burford. Despite the similarly far reaching impact of the current
    administration's proposed rollbacks in
    clean water and air protections, Congress has been largely held at
    bay by the White House's adept control
    of information.

    Soon Bush will pick a new head for the EPA. In the confirmation
    hearings, it will be incumbent upon
    senators to demand accountability not just from the nominee, but
    from the White House itself.
    Author's e-mail: symons at nwf.org

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Symons.pdf?language=printer


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