[✔️] June 16, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | New temps, Montana court case, optimistic youth, author, Monbiot on climate politics, McKibben heat records, MIT open course, 2008 Gore-Obama

Fri Jun 16 04:04:02 EDT 2023

/*June*//*16, 2023*/

/[it's a new world  - says AP ]/
*June temperatures briefly passed key climate threshold. Scientists 
expect more such spikes*
BERLIN (AP) — Worldwide temperatures briefly exceeded a key warming 
threshold earlier this month, a hint of heat and its harms to come, 
scientists worry.
- -
Researchers at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service 
said Thursday that the start of June saw global surface air temperatures 
rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels 
for the first time. That is the threshold governments said they would 
try to stay within at a 2015 summit in Paris...
https://apnews.com/article/global-warming-climate-change-el-nino-temperatures-d2d8d8f717237667bb408a486d7158bf

/[  Montana live court proceedings - via Zoom connection starting 9AM 
MT- this is tremendously innovative //
//for court cases in Montana -- It is being recorded, and likely will be 
posted for viewing ]/
*The Live Zoom connection   89337437466*
https://fishercourtreporting.zoom.us/j/89337437466#success/
/https://www.youthvgov.org/held-v-montana
And you might like the fairly readable filed complaint -
http://climatecasechart.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/case-documents/2020/20200313_docket-CDV-2020-307_complaint.pdf

- -

/[ Guardian clips from the trial ]/
*‘I’m a prisoner in my own home,’ asthma sufferer, 15, tells landmark US 
climate trial*
Montana teen Mica is one of 16 plaintiffs in historic trial, alleging 
state has violated residents’ right to healthy environment

Dharna Noor in Helena, Montana
Tue 13 Jun 2023
Mica, aged 15, learned about climate change at the young age of four, 
when his parents showed him the documentary Chasing Ice.

“I understood it more than my parents thought I would,” he testified in 
a groundbreaking trial on Tuesday. “I just knew something bad was 
happening, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.”...
- -
Mica is one of the 16 youth plaintiffs in the 2020 lawsuit Held v 
Montana, which is being heard in the state capital, Helena, this week. 
The challengers allege that state officials have violated their 
constitutional rights to a healthy environment. The trial, which began 
on Monday, marks the first ever constitutional climate trial in US history.

A lover of the outdoors, Mica, who lives in Missoula, Montana, said he 
was frequently bothered by smoke from wildfires. This makes it hard to 
go for runs, something the young plaintiff has enjoyed since he was five.

When he can’t train due to the smoke, Mica said, he feels “trapped”.

“I can’t get my mind off things,” he said...
- -
Despite their anxiety, both Mica and Badge said participating in the 
Held v Montana case has empowered them.

“I want to preserve this beautiful land for myself and future 
generations,” Badge testified.

Chillcott said she was moved by the young plaintiffs’ optimism.

“I hope that their hope will be met,” she said, “and that we will 
continue to make progress in mitigating climate change for them.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/13/montana-landmark-us-climate-trial?utm_term=6489abd04b4543b8762328d1b8acc3d0&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

/[ hmm, I know how you feel ]/
*How Writing About Climate Change Can Become a Form of Escapism*
Deborah Willis on the Existential Contradictions of Writing While Our 
Planet Is Imperiled
- -
But as a writer, do I indulge in the very bunker mentality that my novel 
criticizes? Do I want—more than I admit—to escape?

Graham Greene said, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder 
how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape 
the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a 
human situation.” It strikes me that I wrote a novel speaking against 
the bunker mindset while also using the novel—those hours of quiet, 
solitary creation—as my own temporary shelter.

I consider the word retreat, because I wrote the first draft at a 
writing residency. Is writing a form of retreat or of engagement? I 
consider the word escapism. Most of us, myself included, dissociate from 
the terror, grief and shame that the climate crisis invokes. Are 
books—the reading and writing of them—another form of avoidance?...
https://lithub.com/how-writing-about-climate-change-can-become-a-form-of-escapism/

/[  opinion by Monbiot  ] /*
* *The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is 
how*
George Monbiot
As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more 
refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues
Thu 15 Jun 2023
Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by 
climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its 
reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut 
down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. 
If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of 
our times.

A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature identifies the “human 
climate niche”: the range of temperatures and rainfall within which 
human societies thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with 
a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many of these places the 
niche is shrinking. Already, around 600 million people have been 
stranded in inhospitable conditions by global heating. Current global 
policies are likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this 
trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the niche by 2030, 
and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments limited heating to their agreed 
goal of 1.5C, the numbers exposed to extreme heat would be reduced 
fivefold. But if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead to 
around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the century around 
5.3 billion people would face conditions that ranged from dangerous to 
impossible.

These conditions include extreme disruption, morbidity and death through 
heat-shock, water stress, crop failure and the spread of infectious 
disease. The figures do not take into account the effect of rising sea 
levels, which could displace hundreds of millions more.

Already, weather stations in the Persian Gulf have recorded wetbulb 
measurements – a combination of heat and humidity – beyond the point 
(35C at 100% humidity) at which most human beings can survive. At other 
stations, on the shores of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of 
Mexico, the Gulf of California and the western side of south Asia, 
measurements have come close. In large parts of Africa there is almost 
no monitoring of extreme heat events. People are likely to have been 
dying of heat stress in high numbers already, but their cause of death 
has not been registered.

India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua 
New Guinea, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and central America face 
extreme risk. Weather events such as massive floods and intensified 
cyclones and hurricanes will keep hammering countries such as 
Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Haiti and Myanmar. Many people will have to move 
or die.

In the rich world we still have choices: we can greatly limit the damage 
caused by environmental breakdown, for which our nations and citizens 
are primarily responsible. But these choices are being deliberately and 
systematically shut down. Culture war entrepreneurs, often funded by 
billionaires and commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent 
attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms. 
Everything becomes contested: low-traffic neighbourhoods, 15-minute 
cities, heat pumps, even induction hobs. You cannot propose even the 
mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers 
leaping up to announce: “They’re coming for your ...” It’s becoming ever 
harder, by design, to discuss crucial issues such as SUVs, meat-eating 
and aviation calmly and rationally.

Climate science denial, which had almost vanished a few years ago, has 
now returned with a vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners 
are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills, communists, 
murderers and paedophiles.

As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands of miles away, and 
people come to our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis they 
played almost no role in causing – a crisis that might involve real 
floods and real droughts – the same political forces announce, without a 
trace of irony, that we are being “flooded” or “sucked dry” by refugees, 
and millions rally to their call to seal our borders. Sometimes it seems 
the fascists can’t lose.

As governments turn rightwards, they shut down policies designed to 
limit climate breakdown. There’s no mystery about why: hard-right and 
far-right politics are the defensive wall erected by oligarchs to 
protect their economic interests. On behalf of their funders, 
legislators in Texas are waging war on renewable energy, while a 
proposed law in Ohio lists climate policies as a “controversial belief 
or policy” in which universities are forbidden to “inculcate” their 
students.

In some cases, the cycle plays out in one place. Florida, for example, 
is one of the US states most prone to climate disaster, especially 
rising seas and hurricanes. But its governor, Ron DeSantis, is building 
his bid for the presidency on the back of climate denial. On Fox News, 
he denounced climate science as “politicisation of the weather”. At 
home, he has passed a law forcing cities to continue using fossil fuels. 
He has slashed taxes, including the disaster preparedness sales tax, 
undermining Florida’s capacity to respond to environmental crises. But 
the hard right thrives on catastrophe, and again you get the sense that 
it can scarcely lose.

If you want to know what one possible future – a future in which this 
cycle is allowed to accelerate – looks like, think of the treatment of 
current refugees, amplified by several orders of magnitude. Already, at 
Europe’s borders, displaced people are pushed back into the sea. They 
are imprisoned, assaulted and used as scapegoats by the far right, which 
widens its appeal by blaming them for the ills that in reality are 
caused by austerity, inequality and the rising power of money in 
politics. European nations pay governments beyond their borders to stop 
the refugees who might be heading their way. In Libya, Turkey, Sudan and 
elsewhere, displaced people are kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, raped and 
murdered. Walls rise and desperate people are repelled with ever greater 
violence and impunity.

Already, the manufactured hatred of refugees has helped the far right to 
gain or share power in Italy, Sweden and Hungary, and has greatly 
enhanced its prospects in Spain, Austria, France and even Germany. In 
every case, we can expect success by this faction to be followed by the 
curtailment of climate policies, with the result that more people will 
have no choice but to seek refuge in the diminishing zones in which the 
human climate niche remains open: often the very nations whose policies 
have driven them from their homes.

It is easy to whip up fascism. It’s the default result of political 
ignorance and its exploitation. Containing it is much harder, and 
never-ending. The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and 
preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no 
choice but to fight both forces at once.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/15/hard-right-climate-catastrophe-extreme-weather-refugees

/[  always covering this issue ]/
*The Mercury is Off the Charts*
And the Fossil Fuel Industry is Off its Meds
BILL MCKIBBEN

JUN 15, 2023
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/the-mercury-is-off-the-charts?r=10305&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
- -
We’ve reached the scariest moment yet in the climate saga: I noted in 
mid-April that there were all kinds of signs that a rapid increase in 
global warming was underway, and every day since has borne out that 
warning. We now have truly remarkable data about sea surface 
temperature—across the world’s oceans, and especially in the north 
Atlantic, we’re seeing numbers that aren’t just off the charts, they’re 
off the wall the chart is tacked to. It seems increasingly likely that 
2023 will turn out to be the hottest year yet, even though a true El 
Niño won’t be fully underway till late summer or autumn.

All of this is terrifying—but far far worse is the fact that the world 
isn’t reacting rationally to it. The fossil fuel industry and its 
financial backers are, if anything, backsliding: tearing up their modest 
promises to make some kind of actual change. The rapid warming over the 
next couple of years is likely to be our last opportunity to really act 
coherently as a civilization to reduce the magnitude of this crisis, and 
so far we are blowing it...
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-mercury-is-off-the-charts

/[ basic course from MIT ]/
*Lecture 1: Cities and Climate Action: Or, Why Take This Class?*
MIT OpenCourseWare
Jun 15, 2023  MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
MIT 11.165 Urban Energy Systems and Policy, Fall 2022
Instructor: Prof. David Hsu
YouTube Playlist:
  • MIT 11.165 Urban Energy Systems and Policy, Fall 2022 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63SEOB1q95TFs0hwyf1d7BG
In this video, Prof. Hsu introduces the main topics and the primary text 
for the course, and discusses the first set of assigned readings.
This video has been dubbed using an artificial voice via 
https://aloud.area120.google.com to increase accessibility. You can 
change the audio track language in the Settings menu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axV4oIluQwY

- -

*Sustainable Energy - without the hot air*
https://www.withouthotair.com/

- -

*MIT 11.165 Urban Energy Systems and Policy, Fall 2022 *
Instructor: Prof. David Hsu
View the complete course: 
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/11-165j-urban-energy-systems-and-policy-fall-2022/
- -
This class is about figuring out together what cities and users can do 
to reduce their energy use and carbon emissions. Many other classes at 
MIT focus on policies, technologies, and systems, often at the national 
or international level, but this course focuses on the scale of cities 
and users. It is designed for any students interested in learning how to 
intervene in the energy use of cities using policy, technology, 
economics, and urban planning.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63SEOB1q95TFs0hwyf1d7BG

/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*June 16, 2008*/
June 16, 2008: Former Vice President Al Gore endorses Illinois Senator 
Barack Obama for president.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmeJaKZwHI&sns=em

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