[✔️] July 17, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Task summary, 13 consecutive days of records, gift of an unstoppable future, McKibben, Strategize information battles, Israel considers it's future, 2012 Hiedi Cullen on MSNBC

Mon Jul 17 08:29:56 EDT 2023

/*July*//*17, 2023*/

/[ DW news outlet from Germany - summarizes out predicament  ] /
*'This is climate change and we just have to get used to it somehow' | 
DW News*
DW News
Jul 14, 2023  #climatechange #heatwaves #drought
A heatwave is hitting hard across southern Europe. Temperatures are 
expected to surpass 40C in parts of Italy, Spain, France, Greece, 
Croatia and Turkey.

In Rome, temperatures could reach as high as 43C, and a possible 47C on 
the island of Sardinia. In the Greek capital Athens, maximum 
temperatures could reach 45 degrees on Saturday. Sweltering heat has 
made life harder for people. Authorities are urging residents and 
tourists to be cautious. Extreme temperatures are likely to continue 
into the weekend.

Scientists say droughts, heat, wildfires, and other dangerous weather 
events are becoming more likely and severe due to climate change in most 
places worldwide. Extreme rainfall has become more frequent and intense 
because of man-made global warming – this is true for most places in the 
world, especially Europe, large parts of Asia, central and eastern North 
America, and parts of South America, Africa and Australia. However, it 
is not responsible for all weather disasters.

For more on this, we speak to Sjoukje Philip, a climate scientist at the 
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. We ask her: When can we 
blame extreme weather events on climate change?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emxbjK1sbpI

/[' Tweet from Prof. Eliot Jacobson ]/
@EliotJacobson
*For those who are keeping track, we are now at 13 consecutive days with 
record global (60S-60N) temperatures, since satellite era measurements 
began in 1979, likely the 13 hottest days on a global scale over the 
last 100,000+ years.*
And now temperatures are going back up again.
Jul 16, 2023
https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1680534942508281856

/[ video - about ethics - Just Have a Think - 15 min video ]/
*Are future humans really our problem?*
Just Have a Think
Jul 16, 2023
Is our short-term thinking risking the future prosperity and possibly 
even survival of our descendants? Many scientists say very emphatically 
yes! Now a new paper explores how we are breaking boundaries and setting 
up unstoppable feedback loops for future generations to deal with...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQss1IH3MFA

///[  Just where are we on the Titanic sinking?  Is the bow starting to 
rise?//  Is the band still playing? ]/
*Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?*
The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as 
scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.
By Bill McKibben
July 11, 2023
- -
"But it’s not fair to just pick on Canada. In the United States, 
President Biden has laid claim to a powerful environmental legacy by 
passing the Inflation Reduction Act, but his Administration also 
approved both a giant oil and a giant L.N.G. project, in Alaska; the 
Mountain Valley Pipeline, in the Virginias; and lots of offshore 
leasing—and it may back big L.N.G. terminals on the Gulf Coast. In Great 
Britain, the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was quoted in the 
Times of London on Sunday as saying that he “hates tree-huggers,” 
probably because they keep pushing for more action than his party wants 
to commit to. China is building huge amounts of renewable energy, but 
also more coal-fired power, because the government’s legitimacy depends 
on keeping economic growth hot at all times. And so on: politicians want 
to be seen doing a lot about climate change, but not so much that it 
lands them in any kind of real trouble with the industry. Their 
argument, invariably, is that the green infrastructure they’re building 
will eventually reduce emissions more than the fossil fuel they’re 
continuing to permit."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-it-hot-enough-yet-for-politicians-to-take-real-action

/[  Opinion from the Guardian ]/
*As heat records break, the climate movement has the right answers – but 
the words are all wrong*
The fossil fuel industry has spent billions on winning over the public. 
Green activists must learn from its tactics
Jonathan Freedland
Fri 14 Jul 2023
- -
You may think we have all the proof we need. More of it is in front of 
us right now, with heatwaves scorching through Europe, breaking records, 
wreaking havoc
- -
There is, too, the syndrome captured so well by the movie Don’t Look Up, 
namely the very human inability to contemplate our own destruction. We 
will find almost any excuse to look elsewhere, to find something 
immediate and diverting: in Britain this week, it was the alleged 
conduct of a BBC TV presenter. But there’s always something.

Those faults are in our stars; they are hard to change. And yet there 
are other explanations that are more susceptible to remedy. Most obvious 
is the fact that a vastly wealthy industry has spent billions to make 
people think the way they do. In just the three years following the 
Paris accords, five of the largest fossil fuel companies spent over $1bn 
on communications and lobbying.

But the effort goes back decades, centred on selling one commodity above 
all: doubt. Like the tobacco industry before it, oil and gas has sought 
to persuade the global public that they can’t be sure the climate crisis 
is real or human-made or that serious. It’s been hugely effective. To 
take just one number: only about one in seven Americans understand that 
there is a consensus among climate scientists, defined as more than 90% 
having “concluded that human-caused global warming is happening”.
- -
Start with the most basic terms. “Global warming” was rightly rejected 
by many some time ago, not least because, as Goodell writes, it “sounds 
gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil 
fuels will be better beach weather”. But talk of heat is not much more 
apt: “In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new.”

Yet “climate change” doesn’t work either. Mere “change” is too gentle: 
it doesn’t indicate whether the change will be negative or positive. It 
is not immediate: it hints that its consequences will be felt only in 
the future, when we are feeling them right now. Which is why this 
newspaper is right to speak of a climate crisis or emergency.

But there are multiple other terms favoured by the climate cognoscenti 
that fall at a more basic hurdle: they are simply not understood by the 
wider public. Net zero, decarbonisation. 1.5C – when tested, they meet 
blank faces. People either don’t know what they mean or find them 
confusing. David Fenton, a longtime PR specialist for progressive 
causes, cites as one example the phrase “climate justice”. When most 
voters hear the word “justice”, he tells me, they think of courts or 
police; bolt it to “climate”, and people are not moved, just confused.

Of course, this connects to a perennial problem for the left – which so 
often makes its case using statistics and abstract concepts, rather than 
simple images and emotion. (Think of the remain campaign.) Fenton urges 
the climate community to speak of pollution – a word everyone gets – and 
to settle on the image of a “blanket of pollution trapping heat on 
Earth”. Every oil and gas emission makes that blanket thicker – and all 
that trapped heat helps cause floods and start fires, he says.

Once settled on, that metaphor has to be deployed again and again, 
repeated so often it becomes exhausted – and exhausting – to those using 
it. This too clashes with progressive habit, which tends to hold to the 
“enlightenment fallacy”: the belief that the facts will persuade all by 
themselves. They don’t need to be repeated or simplified or embedded in 
moral or emotional stories: their sheer truth will prevail.

Perhaps this is why the climate movement has devoted relatively few 
resources to reaching or persuading the public, outside of periodic 
fundraising drives – certainly nothing to compete with their polluting 
opponents, who hire ad men steeped in marketing science to push their 
message relentlessly. “We’re in a propaganda war, but only one side is 
on the battlefield,” says Fenton.

To enter the fight will require serious donors to dig deep, but also a 
change of mindset. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of 
the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, who now hosts the aptly 
named Outrage + Optimism podcast, admits that the climate community has 
recoiled from marketing, which it regarded as “sort of tainted. It’s 
icky. You know, ‘We’re too good for marketing. We’re too righteous’… 
hopefully we’re getting over it.”

It needs to do that fast, deploying whatever tools work to push a double 
message: both fear and hope. Fear for all the beauty, life and lives 
that will be lost from a parched planet – and hope that we still have 
time to avert the worst.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/14/big-oil-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel-public

/
/

/
/

///[  Newspaper article - a fairly interesting read  ]/
*Israel’s hotter than hell: Can climate change be reversed?*
Heatwaves continue to become longer, more frequent and more extreme as 
the years progress.
Israelis who feel like they are living in a modern-day version of 
Dante’s Inferno might want an exit strategy just so they can breathe 
without sweating. Unfortunately, climate change is like COVID-19 without 
a vaccine. The best one can hope for is to flatten the curve while 
minimizing economic damage and death.

The international greenhouse gas emission agreements are meant to 
“flatten the curve of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere,” said Prof. Yoav 
Yair. “If we can do that, we can curb climate change and keep the global 
warming average at less than two degrees Celsius.

“If not, our grandchildren will inherit a much hotter planet that is 
much harder to live on.”
Yair, dean of the School of Sustainability at Reichman University, IDC 
Herzliya, and UNESCO chair for sustainability, spoke to The Jerusalem 
Post on Sunday, four days into another burning heatwave that 
meteorologists have said is likely to last until Tuesday. However, the 
current heatwave is not breaking any records like in parts of 
Mediterranean Europe where temperatures reached over 45 degrees Celsius 
– so hot that the weather people gave it a name: Cerberus, for the 
three-headed dog in ancient Greek mythology who guarded the gates to the 
underworld.

France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain face significant heatwaves. 
Last Monday, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said 
global temperatures recorded in early July were among the hottest on record.

“On the one hand, the extreme weather event we are having in Israel is 
not so extreme,” said Hadas Saaroni, a climatologist at the Porter 
School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Tel Aviv University. “We 
have to be careful not to exaggerate, because when there are real 
extremes, no one will react or take it seriously. Israel has always had 
extreme summer heatwaves.”

According to Amos Porat, head of climatic services at the Israel 
Meteorological Service, the first 10 days of July were the eighth 
hottest recorded in Israel.
On the other hand, Porat said that if one looks at this heatwave and 
compares it and other recent waves to 20 or 30 years ago, there is a 
significant increase in the maximum temperature, in the number of 
heatwaves, and in their lengths.

“We are getting more and more extreme,” he said. “In the next decade or 
two, we can expect an average of five heatwaves per year that each last 
as long as five days.”

And this is whether or not we stop polluting the Earth.

*What will happen if the world can stop pollution?*
“Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases, this instant, it would 
still take a couple of decades for the atmosphere to stop warming – and 
I am not saying anything about it cooling,” Yair said. “That is not on 
the horizon.”

When looking at the projections for climate change in Israel made by the 
Israel Meteorological Service, there are two scenarios based on the 
level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. In one scenario, there 
would be 4.5 watts per square meter of additional heat on Earth, and the 
country would warm by around 0.9 degrees Celsius by 2050. In another 
scenario, there would be an extra 8.5 watts per square meter of heat, 
and Israel warms by 1.2 degrees.

Israel already averages 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer in peak seasons 
compared to the average temperature between 1951 and 1980. Add to it the 
1.2 degrees, and in 2050 the country would experience temperatures an 
average of 2.7 degrees Celsius warmer than in the previous period.

“I don’t want to think further than this because it gets worse,” Yair said.

The projections are based on the country and its neighbors meeting their 
Paris Agreement commitments. In Israel’s case, that is achieving an 85% 
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 relative to 2015 emission 
levels. All recent reports by the Environmental Protection Ministry, the 
State Comptroller, and the United Nations indicate that Israel will not 
meet its targets.
https://www.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-change/article-750282

/[The news archive - looking back at a summary made a decade ago]/
/*July 17, 2012 */
July 17, 2012: On MSNBC's "NewsNation with Tamron Hall," Heidi Cullen of 
Climate Central discusses the extreme drought tormenting the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0eCaBV-osI

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