[✔️] May 21, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Lakes shrinking, Flooding Italy, Floating power, Yale calls it the ignorosphere, Poetry

[Richard Pauli]

/*May*//*21, 2023*/

/[  NPR is new to climate journalism ] /
*More than half of the world's largest lakes are shrinking. Here's why 
that matters*
May 20, 2023
Nathan Rott
Human activities have caused more than half of the world's largest lakes 
to shrink dramatically over the last 30 years, according to a new study 
published in the journal Science. The implications pose risks to human 
health, economies and the natural world.

Combined, researchers found, the global decline in water storage 
equivalent to 17 Lake Meads — the largest reservoir in the U.S.

People overusing water for agriculture and development, and human-caused 
climate change are the primary drivers of the decline, particularly in 
natural lakes, said Fangfang Yao, the study's lead author. In 
reservoirs, dirt and sand piled up behind dams also played a major role 
in declining water levels.

The findings were staggering, the authors said.

"Roughly one-quarter of the world's population lives in a basin with a 
drying lake," Yao said. "So the potential impact could be significant."

The study looked at nearly 2,000 of the planet's largest lakes and 
reservoirs using three decades of satellite observations and climate 
models to measure how bodies of water have shrunk or grown over time, 
and to parse out what influenced the change. For example, did a lake 
shrink because of increased evaporation with hotter temperatures, or 
because it was diverted for agriculture?

The findings revealed "significant declines," the research paper said, 
across 53% of the lakes and reservoirs surveyed by the team from the 
University of Colorado Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in 
Environmental Sciences.

At least half of the decline in natural lakes was driven by human-caused 
climate change and overconsumption. That's a finding, Yao said, that 
should help water managers better manage and protect threatened lakes 
around the world.

"If you know a lake is falling and that loss was attributable to human 
activities, can we put more of an emphasis on conservation and improving 
water efficiency?" Yao said.

A climate change-driven megadrought and an ever-growing human thirst 
have continued to drain the two largest reservoirs in the U.S. — Lake 
Powell and Lake Mead, which the Colorado River feeds. Lake Chad, one of 
Africa's largest freshwater lakes which supplies nearly 40 million 
people with water, has shrunk by an estimated 90% since the 1960s.

The United Nations regards access to safe drinking water as a universal 
human right. But its own figures show roughly 2 billion people around 
the world do not have access to it and roughly half the world's 
population experiences severe water scarcity at least once a year.

"Uncertainties are increasing," said Richard Connor, the editor-in-chief 
of a U.N. water report published earlier this year at a press conference 
in late March, where world leaders met to try and find better strategies 
for managing the planet's rare freshwater. "If we don't address it, 
there will definitely be a global crisis."

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/20/1177221645/more-than-half-of-the-worlds-largest-lakes-are-shrinking-heres-why-that-matters

- -

/[ Research article ]/
*Satellites reveal widespread decline in global lake water storage*
Editor’s summary
The amount of water stored in large lakes has decreased over the past 
three decades due to both human and climatic drivers. Yao et al. used 
satellite observations, climate models, and hydrologic models to show 
that more than 50% of both large natural lakes and reservoirs 
experienced volume loss over this time (see the Perspective by Cooley). 
Their findings underscore the importance of better water management to 
protect essential ecosystem services such as freshwater storage, food 
supply, waterbird habitat, cycling of pollutants and nutrients, and 
recreation. —H. Jesse Smith
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo2812



/[  High aspirations  ]/
*The future of wind energy in the US is floating turbines as tall as 30 
Rock*
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
Fri May 19, 2023
Orono, Maine
CNN
  —
The first, full-sized floating offshore wind turbine in the United 
States will tower 850 feet above the waves in the Gulf of Maine – 
roughly as tall as New York City’s famed 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

The gigantic machine, with 774-foot diameter blades and tethered to the 
seabed with thick metal cables, is planned to be put into the water 20 
miles south of Maine’s tiny Monhegan Island by the end of the decade. It 
is expected to generate up to 15 megawatts of electricity – enough to 
power thousands of homes – and will be just one in an array of 10 such 
turbines that would together produce up to 144 megawatts of clean energy.

The Maine turbine array will join the ranks of only around 20 deepwater 
“floaters” around the world, located mostly in Europe. Developers, 
government officials and experts say these floating turbines are the 
future of the wind energy industry and are eyeing projects that could 
each deliver clean electricity to 750,000 homes.

“That number is set to explode,” Henrik Stiesdal, the Danish wind 
turbine inventor and pioneer, told CNN. Stiesdal was the first to 
pioneer the three-blade turbine that has become the icon of wind energy. 
In a sign of the times, his company is now focused on putting floating 
turbines in deeper water...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/19/us/floating-offshore-wind-energy-turbines-climate/index.html



/[  Serious flooding ]/
*Italy's deadly floods just latest example of climate change's 
all-or-nothing weather extremes*
Climate experts say the floods that sent rivers of mud tearing through 
towns in Italy’s northeast this week are the result of extreme weather 
phenomena that are becoming increasingly frequent around the world
By PAOLO SANTALUCIA, SETH BORENSTEIN and NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press
May 19, 2023
ROME -- The floods that sent rivers of mud tearing through towns in 
Italy’s northeast are another drenching dose of climate change's 
all-or-nothing weather extremes, something that has been happening 
around the globe, scientists say.

The coastal region of Emilia-Romagna was struck twice, first by heavy 
rain two weeks ago on drought-parched ground that could not absorb it, 
causing rivers to overflow overnight, followed by this week's deluge 
that killed 14 and caused damages estimated in the billions of euros.

In a changing climate, more rain is coming, but it’s falling on fewer 
days in less useful and more dangerous downpours.

The hard-hit Emilia-Romagna region was particularly vulnerable. Its 
location between the Apennine mountains and the Adriatic Sea trapped the 
weather system this week that dumped half the average annual amount of 
rain in 36 hours.

"These are events that developed with persistence and are classified as 
rare,'' Fabrizio Curcio, the head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, 
told reporters.

Authorities on Friday said that 43 towns were impacted by flooding and 
landslides, and that more than 500 roads had been closed or destroyed.

Antonello Pasini, a climate scientist at Italy’s National Research 
Council, said a trend had been establishing itself: “An increase in 
rainfall overall per year, for example, but a decrease in the number of 
rainy days and an increase in the intensity of the rain in those few 
days when it rains,” he said.

Italy’s north has been parched by two years of drought, thanks to 
less-than-average snowfall during the winter months. Melting snow from 
the Alps, Dolomites and Apennines normally provides the steady runoff 
through spring and summer that fills Italy's lakes, irrigates the 
agricultural heartland and keeps the Po and other key rivers and 
tributaries flowing.

Without that normal snowfall in the mountains, plains have gone dry and 
riverbeds, lakes and reservoirs have receded. They cannot recover even 
when it rains because the ground is essentially “impermeable” and the 
rain just washes over the topsoil and out to the sea, Pasini said.

“So the drought is not necessarily compensated for by these extreme 
rains,” he said, “Because in northern Italy, the drought depends more on 
snow being stored in the Alps than on rain. And in the last two years, 
we have had very little snow.”

Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci said the new normal of extreme 
weather events in the Mediterranean requires Italians to adapt and Italy 
to rethink its flood protections nationwide. He cited a fierce 
storm-triggered landslide last fall on the southern island of Ischia, 
off Naples, that left 12 dead.

“We can’t just pretend that nothing is happening,” he said Thursday. 
“Everything must change: the programming in hydraulic infrastructures 
must change, the engineering approach must change.”

He said those changes were necessary to prevent the types of floods that 
have left entire towns swamped with mud after two dozen rivers burst 
their banks.

The key going forward is prevention, he said, acknowledging that’s not 
an easy sell due to costs.

“We are not a nation inclined to prevention. We like to rebuild more 
than to prevent,” he told Sky TG24.

Italy is far from alone in lurching from dry to deluge. California and 
the United States West sloshed their way from a record-setting 
megadrought to at least a dozen atmospheric rivers dousing the region 
with so much rain that a long-dormant lake reappeared.

Scientists say flash floods of the kind seen in Germany and Belgium two 
years ago, which killed more than 220 people and caused billions of 
euros in damage, will become more likely as the planet warms.

“The rainiest events seem to be in many places getting rainier,” 
Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi said Thursday.

In 2021, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
scientific panel said it was “established fact” that humans' greenhouse 
gas emissions had made for more frequent and intense weather extremes. 
The panel called heat waves the most obvious, but said heavy 
precipitation events had also likely increased over most of the world.

The U.N. report said “there is robust evidence” that record rainfall and 
one-in-five, one-in-10 and one-in-20 year type rainfall “became more 
common since the 1950s.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/italys-deadly-floods-latest-climate-weather-extremes-99451031



/[ Paul Beckwith explains in a video lecture ]/
*Earth Likely to Breach UN 1.5 C Temperature GuardBand Within Five Years 
During El Niño*
Paul Beckwith
May 19, 2023
A few days ago the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published 
their annual assessment of what we can expect for 2023 and for the five 
year period 2023 to 2027.

There was a lot of mainstream news articles published on this in the 
last few days, and I want to explain why and the consequences that we 
can expect. It is not a pretty picture.

Basically, we are on the very edge of the 1.5 C precipice, relative to 
the 1850-1900 baseline, and the WMO calculates a 2 in 3 chance (66.66%, 
although all the press truncates to 66%) of passing this within 5 years. 
The odds of setting a new global temperature record, namely passing the 
peak of the last strong El Niño in 2016, is pegged at 98%. The three 
consecutive years of La Niña that we have just moved on from kept us 
from breaking global temperature records in the last few years.

Please be aware that the baseline used for these temperatures discussed 
are the 1850 to 1900 climatological average. Remember that when the UN 
first discussed the 2 C temperature, and then the 1.5 C temperature, it 
was relative to the originally defined preindustrial baseline of 1750. 
 From 1750 to the 1850 to 1900 average, the global average temperature 
increased between 0.2 C and 0.3 C so to reference to 1750 you need to 
add this rise to all of the above data. This, 2022 was 1.15 C above the 
1850 to 1900 baseline, meaning it was 1.35 C to 1.45 C above the year 1750.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uty7i45il8Y



/[ comically called the ignorosphere -- high and thin,  but Yale says 
there are changes in the structure of Earth's atmosphere ]/
*The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns*
A new study reaffirming that global climate change is human-made also 
found the upper atmosphere is cooling dramatically because of rising CO2 
levels. Scientists are worried about the effect this cooling could have 
on orbiting satellites, the ozone layer, and Earth’s weather.
BY FRED PEARCE • MAY 18, 2023
There is a paradox at the heart of our changing climate. While the 
blanket of air close to the Earth’s surface is warming, most of the 
atmosphere above is becoming dramatically colder. The same gases that 
are warming the bottom few miles of air are cooling the much greater 
expanses above that stretch to the edge of space.

This paradox has long been predicted by climate modelers, but only 
recently quantified in detail by satellite sensors. The new findings are 
providing a definitive confirmation on one important issue, but at the 
same time raising other questions.

The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft 
do more than confirm the accuracy of the models that identify surface 
warming as human-made. A new study published this month in the journal 
PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole 
Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the 
“signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by 
reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. 
Sander says the finding is “incontrovertible.”...
- -
But the new discoveries about the scale of cooling aloft are leaving 
atmospheric physicists with new worries — about the safety of orbiting 
satellites, about the fate of the ozone layer, and about the potential 
of these rapid changes aloft to visit sudden and unanticipated turmoil 
on our weather below.

Increases in CO2 are now “manifest throughout the entire perceptible 
atmosphere,” a physicist says.
Until recently, scientists called the remote zones of the upper 
atmosphere the “ignorosphere” because they knew so little about them. So 
now that they know more, what are we learning, and should it reassure or 
alarm us?

The Earth’s atmosphere has a number of layers. The region we know best, 
because it is where our weather happens, is the troposphere. This dense 
blanket of air five to nine miles thick contains 80 percent of the mass 
of the atmosphere but only a small fraction of its volume. Above it are 
wide open spaces of progressively less dense air. The stratosphere, 
which ends around 30 miles up, is followed by the mesosphere, which 
extends to 50 miles, and then the thermosphere, which reaches more than 
400 miles up.

 From below, these distant zones appear as placid and pristine blue sky. 
But in fact, they are buffeted by high winds and huge tides of rising 
and descending air that occasionally invade our troposphere. And the 
concern is that this already dynamic environment could change again as 
it is infiltrated by CO2 and other human-made chemicals that mess with 
the temperature, density, and chemistry of the air aloft.

Climate change is almost always thought about in terms of the lowest 
regions of the atmosphere. But physicists now warn that we need to 
rethink this assumption. Increases in the amount of CO2 are now 
“manifest throughout the entire perceptible atmosphere,” says Martin 
Mlynczak, an atmospheric physicist at the NASA Langley Research Center 
in Hampton, Virginia. They are “driving dramatic changes [that] 
scientists are just now beginning to grasp.” Those changes in the wild 
blue yonder far above our heads could feed back to change our world below.

The story of changing temperatures in the atmosphere at all levels is 
largely the story of CO2. We know all too well that our emissions of 
more than 40 billion tons of the gas annually are warming the 
troposphere. This happens because the gas absorbs and re-emits solar 
radiation, heating other molecules in the dense air and raising 
temperatures overall.

But the gas does not all stay in the troposphere. It also spreads upward 
through the entire atmosphere. We now know that the rate of increase in 
its concentration at the top of the atmosphere is as great as at the 
bottom. But its effect on temperature aloft is very different. In the 
thinner air aloft, most of the heat re-emitted by the CO2 does not bump 
into other molecules. It escapes to space. Combined with the greater 
trapping of heat at lower levels, the result is a rapid cooling of the 
surrounding atmosphere.

The cooling of the upper air also causes it to contract, which concerns 
NASA. The sky is falling — literally.
Satellite data have recently revealed that between 2002 and 2019, the 
mesosphere and lower thermosphere cooled by 3.1 degrees F (1.7 degrees C 
). Mlynczak estimates that the doubling of CO2 levels thought likely by 
later this century will cause a cooling in these zones of around 13.5 
degrees F (7.5 degrees C), which is between two and three times faster 
than the average warming expected at ground level.

Early climate modelers predicted back in the 1960s that this combination 
of tropospheric warming and strong cooling higher up was the likely 
effect of increasing CO2 in the air. But its recent detailed 
confirmation by satellite measurements greatly enhances our confidence 
in the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperatures, says Santer, who 
has been modeling climate change for 30 years.

This month, he used new data on cooling in the middle and upper 
stratosphere to recalculate the strength of the statistical “signal” of 
the human fingerprint in climate change. He found that it was greatly 
strengthened, in particular because of the additional benefit provided 
by the lower level of background “noise” in the upper atmosphere from 
natural temperature variability. Santer found that the signal-to noise 
ratio for human influence grew fivefold, providing “incontrovertible 
evidence of human effects of the thermal structure of the Earth’s 
atmosphere.” We are “fundamentally changing” that thermal structure, he 
says. “These results make me very worried.”

Much of the research analyzing changes aloft has been done by scientists 
employed by NASA. The space agency has the satellites to measure what is 
happening, but it also has a particular interest in the implications for 
the safety of the satellites themselves.

This interest arises because the cooling of the upper air also causes it 
to contract. The sky is falling — literally.

The depth of the stratosphere has diminished by about 1 percent, or 
1,300 feet, since 1980, according to an analysis of NASA data by Petr 
Pisoft, an atmospheric physicist at Charles University in Prague. Above 
the stratosphere, Mlynczak found that the mesosphere and lower 
thermosphere contracted by almost 4,400 feet between 2002 and 2019. Part 
of this shrinking was due to a short-term decline in solar activity that 
has since ended, but 1,120 feet of it was due to cooling caused by the 
extra CO2, he calculates.
Microplastics are filling the skies. Will they affect the climate?

This contraction means the upper atmosphere is becoming less dense, 
which in turn reduces drag on satellites and other objects in low orbit 
— by around a third by 2070, calculates Ingrid Cnossen, a research 
fellow at the British Antarctic Survey.

On the face of it, this is good news for satellite operators. Their 
payloads should stay operational for longer before falling back to 
Earth. But the problem is the other objects that share these altitudes. 
The growing amount of space junk — bits of equipment of various sorts 
left behind in orbit — are also sticking around longer, increasing the 
risk of collisions with currently operational satellites.

In 2020, the Arctic had its first full-blown ozone hole, with more than 
half the ozone layer lost in places.
More than 5000 active and defunct satellites, including the 
International Space Station, are in orbit at these altitudes, 
accompanied by more than 30,000 known items of debris more than four 
inches in diameter. The risks of collision, says Cnossen, will grow ever 
greater as the cooling and contraction gathers pace.

This may be bad for business at space agencies, but how will the changes 
aloft affect our world below?

One big concern is the already fragile state of the ozone layer in the 
lower stratosphere, which protects us from harmful solar radiation that 
causes skin cancers. For much of the 20th century, the ozone layer 
thinned under assault from industrial emissions of ozone-eating 
chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Outright ozone holes 
formed each spring over Antarctica.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol aimed to heal the annual holes by eliminating 
those emissions. But it is now clear that another factor is undermining 
this effort: stratospheric cooling.

Ozone destruction operates in overdrive in polar stratospheric clouds, 
which only form at very low temperatures, particularly over polar 
regions in winter. But the cooler stratosphere has meant more occasions 
when such clouds can form. While the ozone layer over the Antarctic is 
slowly reforming as CFCs disappear, the Arctic is proving different, 
says Peter von der Gathen of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and 
Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. In the Arctic, the cooling is 
worsening ozone loss. Von der Gathen says the reason for this difference 
is not clear.

In the spring of 2020, the Arctic had its first full-blown ozone hole 
with more than half the ozone layer lost in places, which von der Gathen 
blames on rising CO2 concentrations. It could be the first of many. In a 
recent paper in Nature Communications, he warned that the continued 
cooling means current expectations that the ozone layer should be fully 
healed by mid-century are almost certainly overly optimistic. On current 
trends, he said, “conditions favorable for large seasonal loss of Arctic 
column ozone could persist or even worsen until the end of this century 
… much longer than is commonly appreciated.”

This is made more concerning because, while the regions beneath previous 
Antarctic holes have been largely devoid of people, the regions beneath 
future Arctic ozone holes are potentially some of the more densely 
populated on the planet, including Central and Western Europe. If we 
thought the thinning ozone layer was a 20th century worry, we may have 
to think again.

Chemistry is not the only issue. Atmospheric physicists are also growing 
concerned that cooling could change air movements aloft in ways that 
impinge on weather and climate at ground level. One of the most 
turbulent of these phenomena is known as sudden stratospheric warming. 
Westerly winds in the stratosphere periodically reverse, resulting in 
big temperatures swings during which parts of the stratosphere can warm 
by as much as 90 degrees F (50 degrees C) in a couple of days.

This is typically accompanied by a rapid sinking of air that pushes onto 
the Atlantic jet stream at the top of the troposphere. The jet stream, 
which drives weather systems widely across the Northern Hemisphere, 
begins to snake. This disturbance can cause a variety of extreme 
weather, from persistent intense rains to summer droughts and “blocking 
highs” that can cause weeks of intense cold winter weather from eastern 
North America to Europe and parts of Asia.

This much is already known. In the past 20 years, weather forecasters 
have included such stratospheric influences in their models. This has 
significantly improved the accuracy of their long-range forecasts, 
according to the Met Office, a U.K. government forecasting agency.

“If we don’t get our models right about what is happening up there, we 
could get things wrong down below.”
The question now being asked is how the extra CO2 and overall 
stratospheric cooling will influence the frequency and intensity of 
these sudden warming events. Mark Baldwin, a climate scientist at the 
University of Exeter in England, who has studied the phenomenon, says 
most models agree that sudden stratospheric warming is indeed sensitive 
to more CO2. But while some models predict many more sudden warming 
events, others suggest fewer. If we knew more, Baldwin says, it would 
“lead to improved confidence in both long-term weather forecasts and 
climate change projections.”

It is becoming ever clearer that, as Gary Thomas, an atmospheric 
physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, puts it, “If we don’t 
get our models right about what is happening up there, we could get 
things wrong down below.” But improving models of how the upper 
atmosphere works — and verifying their accuracy — requires good 
up-to-date data on real conditions aloft. And the supply of that data is 
set to dry up, Mlynczak warns.

Most of the satellites that have supplied information from the upper 
atmosphere over the past three decades — delivering his and others’ 
forecasts of cooling and contraction — are reaching the ends of their 
lives. Of six NASA satellites on the case, one failed in December, 
another was decommissioned in March, and three more are set to shut down 
soon. “There is as yet no new mission planned or in development,” he says.

Mlynczak is hoping to reboot interest in monitoring with a special 
session that he is organizing at the American Geophysical Union this 
fall to discuss the upper atmosphere as “the next frontier in climate 
change.” Without continued monitoring, the fear is we could soon be 
returning to the days of the ignorosphere.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/climate-change-upper-atmosphere-cooling



/[ From the New Straits Times --  some poetry ]/
*Odes to love gained and lost in the time of climate change*
By Roli Srivastava - May 20, 2023
Indian poet Amandeep Singh turned to the peace of the mountains for 
inspiration in the past, but the idea for his latest poem was born in a 
workshop on climate change in busy Mumbai.

His poem, She Came Back — which references a drying lake, solar panels 
and the girl he loves riding an electric scooter — was the result of a 
unique collaboration between poets and researchers to create new works 
on love and climate change.

The "Love in the Times of Climate Change" campaign by the Council on 
Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) features videos of seven poets 
reciting poems intended to make climate change easier to understand and 
more relatable.

"If we only talk about how things have changed, or that there is climate 
change, people may not even notice it," said Singh, 28, whose climate 
change-themed poem garnered more than 30,000 views on YouTube in less 
than two months.

"But if we talk about how we are experiencing climate change and not 
just what is happening, people will register it better."

He credited the workshop with helping him notice that rising heat in 
April and May was keeping him homebound more, and how he no longer wore 
warm woollen clothes during Deepavali which is celebrated in the col-
der months of October or November.

Other poems in the campaign feature a grandmother noticing the 
disappearance of sparrows from her courtyard as climate change affects 
nature, and lovers thanking untimely rains for allowing them a few more 
moments of intimacy.

In recent years, India has recorded frequent heatwaves, rising sea 
levels and recurring droughts and cyclones that scientists say are 
fuelled by climate change.

Concern is growing that rising global temperatures will bring even more 
severe impacts, with scientists predicting that 1.5°C of warming — 
considered a guardrail limit — is likely to be passed within five years.

Efforts to communicate the urgent need for action have largely come from 
climate activists and scientists, with warnings about cities going 
underwater due to worsening floods and sea level rise grabbing some 
headlines.

Still, such warnings have failed to move large numbers of people to 
demand adequate political action, and this has led to a search for new, 
more effective, messages and messengers.

Climate change discourse needs to "break out of the clutches of 
academicians, researchers and policymakers", said Anjal Prakash of the 
Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business.

"The more informed the people are, the more they will demand from the 
government in terms of climate action."

In recent years, some schools have introduced lessons on extreme weather 
and rising sea levels, while art festivals have showcased climate change 
to raise awareness.

But when Simar Singh, 23, created an online platform for poets called 
UnErase Poetry six years ago, highlighting climate threats was not on 
his radar.

"I love poetry and I wanted to talk about different causes.

"I was climate conscious, but I never consumed facts or research around 
climate change, nor did I ever look for it," he said.

With 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 million on Instagram, 
UnErase Poetry was a natural choice as CEEW's partner for its campaign.

Singh said the climate change-based poems will be performed at colleges, 
where the theme of love should resonate.

"People in that age group are falling in love and going through 
heartbreak. So, if you can talk about love and give (another) message 
too, that's great."

Nitin Bassi, a programme lead at CEEW, said the poems could make people 
feel in a more visceral way the need to act on climate change "without 
making the conversation too heavy and guilt-driven".

"The idea was to showcase how our loved ones can be impacted by climate 
change."

That was a fresh lesson for another poet in the campaign, Helly Shah, 
24, who had collaborated with non-profits in the past to write about 
financial empowerment for women and the country's voiceless poor.

Shah's new poem, When Will You Come Home, explores flash floods in a 
city that compound the growing distance in a relationship.

"We often use imagery and metaphors from nature to talk about love. But, 
nature is changing now. The climate is not the same any more," said Shah.
https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2023/05/911606/odes-love-gained-and-lost-time-climate-change


/[The news archive - looking back early understanding ]/
/*May 21, 2010*/
May 21, 2010: In the New Republic, Al Gore notes:

    "During the last 22 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
    Change has produced four massive studies warning the world of the
    looming catastrophe that is being caused by the massive dumping of
    global-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, this
    process has been vulnerable to disruption and paralysis by a cynical
    and lavishly funded disinformation campaign. A number of large
    carbon polluters, whose business plans rely on their continued
    ability to freely dump their gaseous waste products into the global
    atmospheric commons—as if it is an open sewer—have chosen to pursue
    a determined and highly organized campaign aimed at undermining
    public confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the global
    scientific community. They have attacked the scientific community by
    financing pseudo-studies aimed at creating public doubt about
    peer-reviewed science. They have also manipulated the political and
    regulatory process with outsized campaign contributions and legions
    of lobbyists (there are now four anti-climate lobbyists for every
    single member of the House and Senate).

    "This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a
    small but powerful special interest has taken place during a time
    when American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in
    our politics has exploded to a dangerous level. Our democratic
    conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second television
    commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets of
    candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of
    such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members
    of the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are
    forced to spend several hours each day asking special interests for
    money to finance their campaigns. Instead of participating in
    committee hearings, floor debates, and Burkean reflection on the
    impact of the questions being considered, they spend their time as
    supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the influence their
    donors intend to have on their decision-making process, all too
    frequently human nature takes its course.

    "Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day
    watching television—which is, of course, why campaigns in both
    political parties spend most of their money on TV advertising.
    Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special
    interests that are wining and dining and contributing to their
    elected officials. The largest carbon polluters have, for the last
    17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and
    continuing propaganda campaign, using TV advertisements and all
    other forms of mass persuasion. It is a game plan spelled out in one
    of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising
    reporter, that stated: 'reposition global warming as theory rather
    than fact.' In other words, they have mimicked the strategy
    pioneered by the tobacco industry, which undermined the scientific
    consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes with diseases of the
    lung and heart—successfully delaying appropriate health measures for
    almost 40 years after the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore


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