[✔️] October 28, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Instant hurricanes, Otis the nightmare storm, Yale turbo heat, Criminality watch, 2005 Exxon profits

Sat Oct 28 08:59:09 EDT 2023

/*October 28*//*, 2023*/

/[ "a future we need to prepare for" -- a totally new monster for our 
world -  Happy Halloween.  Audio ]
/*A New Threat: Surprise Hurricanes
*New York Times Podcasts
Oct 27, 2023  The Daily
Hurricane Otis, which killed more than two dozen people in southern 
Mexico this week, exemplified a phenomenon that meteorologists fear will 
become more and more common: a severe hurricane that arrives with little 
warning or time to prepare.

Judson Jones, who covers natural disasters for The Times, explains why 
Hurricane Otis packed such an unexpected punch.

Guest: Judson Jones... covers natural disasters and Earth’s changing 
climate for The New York Times.

Background reading:
   •  On Tuesday morning, few meteorologists were talking about Otis. By 
Wednesday morning, the “catastrophic storm” had left a trail of 
destruction in Mexico and drawn attention from around the globe. What 
happened? 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/americas/hurricane-otis-mexico-intensity-surprise.html)
   •  The hurricane, one of the more powerful Category 5 storms to 
batter the region, created what one expert called a “nightmare scenario” 
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7lfkQ7WquY) for a popular tourist 
coastline.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily 
(http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-t.... Transcripts of each episode 
will be made available by the next workday.

https://youtu.be/Qyszr5qHUzU?si=WFUg9vKaDFIWTfEn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyszr5qHUzU

- -

/[ NYTimes article ]
/*Why Hurricane Otis Caught Many By Surprise*
Storms don’t normally go from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane 
in a day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/americas/hurricane-otis-mexico-intensity-surprise.html?unlocked_article_code=1.50w.aAl-.JuyZ0YCDJdMp&smid=url-share
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/americas/hurricane-otis-mexico-intensity-surprise.html

- -

/[ NYTimes article ]/
*A ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Hurricane Batters Mexico’s Western Coast*
Hurricane Otis defied forecasts when it quickly transformed from a 
tropical storm into a Category 5 storm and slammed into the coastal city 
of Acapulco.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/americas/hurricane-otis-mexico-impact.html?unlocked_article_code=1.50w.hv1H.fepWW-eR8T8I&smid=url-share
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7lfkQ7WquY

/
/

/
/

/[ Yale Climate Connections ]/
*Have we turbo-charged heatwaves?*
YaleClimateConnections
Oct 27, 2023
Heatwaves are off the charts. And they're getting weird, too.

In this video, meteorologist Alexandra Steele explains what the deal is 
with these heatwaves and what a relatively new field in science can tell 
us about them.

This is Episode 4 of our YouTube series on the wild world of extreme 
weather with meteorologist Alexandra Steele. New episodes and shorts 
coming every three weeks on Fridays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7lfkQ7WquY

/[ Criminality watch ]/
*Environmental crime money easy to stash in US due to loopholes, report 
finds*
Secrecy and lax oversight mean illegal loggers and miners in Amazon can 
park billions in real estate and other assets
Jonathan Watts   @jonathanwatts
Thu 26 Oct 2023

Secrecy and lax oversight have made the US a hiding place for dirty 
money accrued by environmental criminals in the Amazon rainforest, a 
report says.

Illegal loggers and miners are parking sums ranging from millions to 
billions of dollars in US real estate and other assets, says the report, 
which calls on Congress and the White House to close loopholes in 
financial regulations that it says are contributing to the destruction 
of the world’s biggest tropical forest.

“We are trying to show that the US is the easiest place to hide dirty 
money, which is a major problem not just in terms of national security, 
drug trafficking and kleptocratic corruption but also environmental 
crime,” said Ian Gary, the executive director of the Financial 
Accountability and Corporate Transparency (Fact) Coalition, which 
produced the report...

For the first time in 2021, the US came top in the world financial 
secrecy index released by the Tax Justice Networks, as a result of money 
laundering and gaps in its financial transparency laws.

The study by Fact draws attention to the impact this has on 
environmental crime in the Amazon, a region of global importance due to 
its impact on the climate. The report lists six case studies of links 
between forest destruction and companies in the US...

Florida, which has strong cultural and linguistic connections to South 
America, was found to be a hotspot. The report cites the case of Goldex, 
formerly the second biggest gold exporter in Colombia, which supplied 
more than 45 tonnes of gold, worth $1.4bn, to two US refineries, 
including Republic Metals Corp (RMC) in Miami.

Colombian prosecutors later alleged that the gold was illegally mined, 
transferred through shell companies and ultimately used to launder money 
for organised crime groups. The company was hit with sanctions by the 
Colombia government and one of its suppliers was extradited to the US to 
face charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. After an 
investigation by the US attorney’s office, RMC agreed to tighten its 
internal money laundering guidelines. Goldex has since filed for bankruptcy.

A still more lucrative case linking Miami with Amazon nations was that 
of NTR Metals, which pleaded guilty to charges that it failed to 
maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering programme after revelations 
that it dealt with $3.6bn (£3bn) of illegal gold and fake ingots from 
Peru...

The problem was not isolated to Florida. In Maryland, the former 
Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo allegedly bought properties to hide 
and launder $1.2m he received in bribes from the Brazilian construction 
company Odebrecht for a contract to build the cross-Amazon interoceanic 
highway and other projects. Odebrecht has admitted paying bribes and a 
US court has ordered funds to be sent back to Peru. Toledo denies any 
wrongdoing.

Other case studies linked a Nevada firm to purchases of illegal timber 
from the Loreto region of the Peruvian Amazon, and a Connecticut company 
to forest clearance for a palm oil plantation in indigenous land.

Government regulators and watchdog groups in Peru said it was common for 
their investigations into environmental crime to run into a dead end 
with shell companies in the US. “We have had cases where we can directly 
trace the dirty money route to US company involvement,” Daniel Linares 
Ruesta, the director of Peru’s financial intelligence unit, was quoted 
as saying.
- -
The report identifies two principal flaws in the US regulation of 
financial flows from other countries: permissive rules on identification 
that allow the use of anonymous shell companies; and gaping holes in the 
anti-money-laundering framework that enable estate agents and refineries 
to accept payments without checking and disclosing the origin of funds.

Earlier this year, the Igarapé Institute estimated that environmental 
crime in the Amazon generated annual profits of between $110bn and 
$281bn, though it has been a relatively low priority for financial 
authorities in Latin America. Investigations by the Insight Crime 
website suggest the problem may be growing as links build between 
environmental crime, narco-trafficking and money-laundering networks in 
Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.

The Fact report urges the US to take more responsibility because it is 
the primary destination for illegal funds, followed by the UK and its 
crown dependencies such as the Cayman Islands.

Among its recommendations are for the US administration to establish 
anti-money-laundering obligations in the real estate market, to provide 
support for Amazon nations to improve financial oversight, and to 
implement the Corporate Transparency Act, which would establish a 
database of true “beneficial” owners of all companies. It also calls on 
the US Congress to pass the Forest Act, which would add illegal 
deforestation to the US money-laundering statute.

Gary said he was encouraged that the Biden administration had called out 
the threat posed by corruption. Now, he said, it needed to act.

“The US needs to step up,” Gary said. “Our report shows the importance 
of the US cleaning up its own financial secrecy house and the need to 
collaborate with law enforcement partners in the Amazon region to combat 
illegal financial flows … for the US to have such financial secrecy is a 
problem for the whole world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/26/environmental-money-easy-to-stash-in-us-due-to-loopholes-report-finds

/[ disinformation war ]/
*MICROSOFT ERROR OR EXTERNAL ATTACK CAUSING DISRUPTION TO EMAIL 
COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNITY
*27 Oct 2023
Since 17 October, to our knowledge any email with the NewClimate URL 
(newclimate dot org) in the email body, link, signature, reply header or 
contained anywhere in an attachment is unjustifiably quarantined by 
Microsoft email servers without any notice, regardless of who sends or 
receives the email.

That our own email flow is disrupted is the least of our problems: all 
Microsoft tenants are afflicted by the same issue when this URL appears 
in their emails, or any attachments they share, even when we are not a 
party to the communications.

Hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organisations working on 
climate change appear to be experiencing disruption to email 
communication when their communications contain any reference to the 
NewClimate URL.

For example, as per our understanding:

    -- No organisation using Microsoft email services can currently send
    the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group 3 as an attachment
    to anyone else (newclimate dot org URL appears 11 times in the
    report). The same applies to hundreds of other relevant scientific
    papers and reports from any organisations, where NewClimate URLs
    appear on the reference lists.

    -- Any multi-organisation email chain where any of the participants
    uses Microsoft email services is breaking down in the case that
    NewClimate URLs are included. This could arise either because a
    NewClimate colleague is on the mailing list in the chat history, or
    if a NewClimate publication is linked to, in the email or the chat
    history.

    -- Even a link to this article on the NewClimate website cannot be
    spread by email if the sender or recipient uses Microsoft as email
    service.

We understand that the majority of our partner organisations within the 
climate community use Microsoft email services, including the United 
Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It came as a surprise to us that this is even possible. It remains 
unclear whether this is the result of a targeted attack on Microsoft’s 
infrastructure against NewClimate, or simply a highly unfortunate error 
on the part of Microsoft. In our consultations with Microsoft and a 
number of independent IT experts, we have confirmed that we are not on 
any blacklist and our website is also free of malware.

We are fully dependent on Microsoft to prioritise and solve the issue, 
but Microsoft support agents have been difficult to engage and – to our 
understanding – disinclined to prioritise the issue. It is not clear 
whether Microsoft is aware of the inconvenience and disruption beyond 
our own organisation.

Beyond being an existential threat to our own organisation, this issue 
could significantly disrupt communication within the climate community 
at a time when it is most critical in the run up to COP28 in at the end 
of 2023 in Dubai. We greatly appreciate any support to bring this issue 
to the attention of Microsoft’s senior management so that it can be 
prioritised and resolved.

This is extremely unfortunate and we apologise for any inconvenience 
that this may cause or may have caused.

We understand that partner organisations who use Microsoft email 
exchange services and that are experiencing email deliverability 
problems because of this issue may be able to apply a band-aid fix for 
email flow, by reporting to Microsoft that the NewClimate URL should not 
be blocked (see ‘Submission form for reporting false positives for 
Microsoft’s URL detonation policy’, available in the Microsoft admin 
center). This may help individual organisations to improve issues with 
their own incoming and outgoing email flow, but it does not help to 
resolve communication issues with other organisations that use Microsoft.

Emails are only quarantined when the text “newclimate(dot)org” appears 
in the email and not if a diverted link to the NewClimate website 
through e.g. tinyurl is included instead.

https://bit.ly/NewClimate_MicrosoftStatement
https://newclimate.org/news/microsoft-error-or-external-attack-causing-disruption-to-email-communication-across-the 

/[The news archive - looking back at oil production and economics ]/
/*October 28, 2005*/
October 28, 2005: The New York Times reports:

"A sudden interruption in oil supplies sent prices and profits 
skyrocketing, prompting Exxon's chief executive to call a news 
conference right after his company announced that it had chalked up 
record earnings.

'I am not embarrassed,' he said. 'This is no windfall.'

"That was January 1974, a few months after Arab oil producers cut back 
on supplies and imposed their short-lived embargo on exports to the 
United States. Oil executives, including J. K. Jamieson, Exxon's chief 
executive at the time, were put on the defensive, forced to justify 
their soaring profits while the nation was facing its first energy crisis.

"Three decades later, their successors are again facing contentions that 
oil companies are making too much money and have failed to expand 
production.

"Politicians and other critics are asking why the industry allowed its 
refining capacity to tighten.

"Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, said yesterday that its 
third-quarter net income jumped 75 percent, to $9.92 billion. Its profit 
in the first nine months of this year - $25.42 billion - already equals 
its full-year earnings for 2004. This year's sales, which topped $100 
billion in the last quarter, are expected to exceed those of Wal-Mart.

"Another oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell, reported a 68 percent jump in 
profits yesterday, to $9.03 billion. Chevron is expected to post a 
profit of more than $4 billion today.

"This year is shaping up as an exceptionally lucrative one for the oil 
industry, thanks to strong global demand, tight supplies and high prices 
for oil and natural gas. While the idea that the Bush administration was 
considering imposing a windfall profits tax was knocked down yesterday 
by officials, longstanding resentments against Big Oil are resurfacing 
and could end up imposing some additional burdens on the industry.

"The sense that government should step in to curb the phenomenal wealth 
and power often enjoyed by oil companies goes back to Exxon Mobil's 
corporate ancestor from the late 19th century, the Rockefeller oil trust 
known as Standard Oil.

"Today, Republicans and Democrats alike, aware of the politically 
sensitive issue of high energy prices, are putting increasing pressure 
on the oil and gas industry to return some of its profits. The ideas 
include forcing the industry to invest in more refining capacity, to 
increase inventories to cushion energy shocks, or to provide money 
directly to the government program that helps low-income people pay 
heating bills."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/business/28oil.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

=== Other climate news sources ===========================================
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Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News summarizes the 
most important climate and energy news of the day, delivering an 
unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant reporting. It also provides 
original reporting and commentary on climate denial and pro-polluter 
activity that would otherwise remain largely unexposed.    5 weekday
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Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon Brief 
sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to thousands of 
subscribers around the world. The email is a digest of the past 24 hours 
of media coverage related to climate change and energy, as well as our 
pick of the key studies published in the peer-reviewed journals.
more at https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief
==================================
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