[✔️] October 29, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Chicago shrinks, Melting ice means sea level rise, Comfort of Crows, 2003 was 20 years ago

[Richard Pauli]

/*October *//*29, 2023*/

/[ Chicago reveals positive, can-do attitude - "Reset with Sasha-Ann 
Simons" 19 min audio.  I listened to this twice ]/
*Moving from eco-distress to resilience*
Therapists are pushing the mental health field to become more climate aware.
By Lynnea Domienik
Oct 26, 2023
Reset learns about the practice of climate aware therapy, and the way 
processing grief related to the climate can help move people to take 
action...
https://www.wbez.org/stories/moving-from-eco-distress-to-resilience/260bb116-d9de-4346-b791-82801f9d7f7c



/[  More NPR - has excellent reporters and superb messaging  ]/
*Antarctica is melting and we all need to adapt, a trio of climate 
analyses show*
October 27, 2023
Rebecca Hersher
A trio of new scientific analyses about the loss of ice in Antarctica 
paint a picture of a continent in trouble. Sea ice is disappearing, 
gigantic portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet are crumbling and even 
relatively stable East Antarctica is showing worrying changes.

That's a problem for humanity.
Let's begin with the sea ice. Each winter, the ocean water around 
Antarctica freezes. Because Antarctica is in the Southern Hemisphere, 
this happens during North American summer months – deep winter in 
Antarctica is in July, August and September.
At its most expansive, the sea ice covers an area the size of Antarctica 
itself, doubling the size of the frozen continent.

But the winter sea ice has been shrinking, in part because ocean water 
is warmer due to climate change. And this year there was less ice than 
ever before, going back to when satellites started tracking annual ice 
extent around 1980.

On September 10th, Antarctica's sea ice reached its largest extent of 
the year, but it was far smaller than average sea ice in decades past. 
In fact, it was nearly 350,000 square miles smaller than the previous 
record smallest amount, measured in 1986, according to a recent analysis 
by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a research center at the 
University of Colorado, Boulder that is also affiliated with the federal 
government...
- -
/[  The amount of sea ice around Antarctica fluctuates significantly 
year to year. But this year there is radically less ice than there has 
been at any point since 1981. 
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ ]/
- -
Disappearing sea ice is a problem for lots of reasons. While it doesn't 
directly add any extra water to the ocean, missing sea ice does 
contribute to global sea level rise in other ways. The sea ice around 
Antarctica shields glaciers on land, and massive ice shelves that extend 
out into the water, from storms and above-freezing ocean water. Without 
that protection, that ice can melt more quickly, and that leads to more 
sea level rise.

And it's difficult for sea ice to recover after a bad year like this 
one. The water that doesn't freeze — the exposed ocean water — absorbs 
more heat than ice does, and that makes it more difficult for ice to 
re-form the next year.

"There is growing evidence that the Antarctic sea ice system has entered 
a new regime, featuring a much stronger influence of warm ocean waters 
limiting ice growth," scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data 
Center write in their analysis of this year's record-shattering low sea 
ice extent...
Antarctica's glaciers are also melting rapidly, and humans have no 
choice but to adapt
New research also raises the alarm about how Antarctica's enormous ice 
shelves and glaciers are responding to a warming world.

The West Antarctic ice shelf is the part of Antarctica that is melting 
most rapidly in response to climate change. It contains enough water to 
raise global sea levels by about 10 feet.

Scientists have warned for decades that, once the ice in West Antarctica 
begins to disintegrate, it will gain momentum and be very difficult, if 
not impossible, to reverse within a human lifetime. A new study finds 
that the runaway melting process is already underway.

The rate of ice melt and ocean warming in a crucial part of West 
Antarctica is three times what it was in the 20th century, according to 
the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change this week...
And when the authors used a computer to simulate what would happen if 
humans immediately slashed greenhouse gas emissions, they found it would 
have basically no effect on the rate of melting in West Antarctica for 
the rest of the century.

"It appears that we may have lost control of the West Antarctic ice 
shelf melting over the 21st century," says Kaitlin Naughten of the 
British Antarctic Survey and one of the authors of the study. "Our 
actions today likely will make a difference further down the line, in 
the 22nd century and beyond, but that's a time scale that probably none 
of us here will be around to see."

Previous studies have come to similar conclusions, although this is the 
first major study to simulate both ice and ocean changes in West 
Antarctica. The authors note that, while it may be too late for 
emissions reductions to save large areas of ice in West Antarctica, they 
are not predicting that the entire West Antarctica ice shelf will 
collapse in the next century. And it is not too late to protect the 
even-more-massive East Antarctic ice sheet.
"This is one glimmer of hope," says Naughten. "West Antarctica is much 
smaller than East Antarctica. And East Antarctica we think is pretty 
stable [and] is likely to stay so."

However, a separate study published this week in the journal Science 
Advances suggests that massive glaciers in East Antarctica could also 
melt more quickly than previously thought, as warm ocean water mixes 
with meltwater under the ice. While scientists expect East Antarctica to 
remain relatively stable for 100 years or more, the new discovery could 
also have implications for how quickly glaciers disintegrate in West 
Antarctica.

Taken together, the new research paints a picture of a continent that is 
poised to drive multiple feet of sea level rise in the coming decades, 
and could cause catastrophic sea level rise longer term if humans don't 
shift away faster from fossil fuels.

"In this context, courage looks like adaptation," says Naughten, noting 
that cutting emissions is not enough on its own. "If we can plan ahead 
to reduce human suffering and to save human lives, that's better than 
closing our eyes until the ocean's at our doorstep."

Some American cities are already beginning to prepare for multiple feet 
of sea level rise this century, in part because official sea level rise 
predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
already factor in some Antarctic melting. Disappearing ice in West 
Antarctica disproportionately drives sea level rise on the East and Gulf 
Coasts of the United States, because of ocean currents and other ocean 
and ice dynamics.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1207159544/antarctica-is-melting-and-we-all-need-to-adapt-a-trio-of-climate-analyses-show 




/[  another NPR item - this book review is important to read  ]/
*'The Comfort of Crows' is fuel to restore spirts in dealing with 
ecological grief*
October 25, 2023
By Barbara J. King
After the death of her mother, Margaret Renkl tenderly placed in an 
antique jar the "soft white hair" left behind in her mother's hairbrush. 
Years passed. When it no longer carried the scent she cherished, Renkl 
laid the hair across a holly branch in her yard.

This act was meant as a direct invitation to the birds in her yard, and 
it was accepted: A chickadee flew off with the hair for the nest she was 
building.

Renkl devotes only a half-page to this story, but it conveys the 
beautiful tangle of human and other-animal lives at the heart of The 
Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. Starting in winter and continuing 
through the seasonal round, Renkl brings alive in 52 chapters her love 
for the animals and plants in her half-acre yard in Tennessee and in 
nearby parks. Equally moving, she confesses her despair at the 
human-caused crises the natural world faces, and her determination not 
to sit idle. "The very least I owe my wild neighbors is a willingness to 
witness their struggle, to compensate for their losses in every way I 
can, and to speak on their behalf about all the ways I can't," she writes.
Renkl makes good on that pledge. She medicates a neighborhood fox 
against mange, with the help of a trap, a bit of bacon, and advice from 
a veterinarian; ensures that leaves from the trees in her yard are left 
unraked so that insects overwinter and ground-foraging birds can dine 
there; fills a garden with milkweed in support of monarch butterflies; 
and creates a haven for tree frogs in the form of a 40-gallon tank 
filled with water and frog-friendly plants.

She even keeps a worm composter at the end of her writing table, filled 
with coffee grounds, banana peels, vegetable parings, and "several 
thousand red wigglers." I can picture Renkl at work writing her weekly 
New York Times column right there next to these industrious 
invertebrates, whose own labor fertilizes her outdoor pollinator garden.

With these steps, Renkl refuses to give up in the face of human-caused 
global warming that is altering our environment and harming other 
species. Just as many of us do, Renkl sees this harm primarily through 
absences. For two decades, Renkl hasn't seen a turtle or toad in her 
yard, and only one grasshopper has appeared in each of the last two 
years. Fewer birds come as well.

Renkl laments that our species has been "burning this world down" since 
the time of "the very first hominid to rise up on bare feet." From the 
perspective of anthropology, I think this statement misses the point. 
Around 4 million years ago, the period in which our ancestors began 
habitually to walk bipedally, no one was burning anything down either 
literally or metaphorically.

Our ancestors at that time, living in small groups, gathered foods from 
the land and much later began to hunt. Only very late in the ongoing 
course of human evolution did Homo sapiens veer into industrial levels 
of harm that wreck the climate in completely unprecedented ways.

Compared to the tone of her earlier collections of essays, Late 
Migrations and Graceland, there's an extra wistfulness in Renkl's 
writing now. That's not solely owing to what's happening to the natural 
world. Renkl's parents have died and her three sons have all left home, 
"packed off to their own lives"; Renkl is "a little bit lost and a 
little bit ragged."

She's in her 60s now, "an old woman" who has entered the "last third" of 
her life "if what we mean by last third is whatever happens after 
everything you were working toward has already happened." Endings, 
though, are also beginnings: "This is what I tell myself again and again."

An older woman's freely sharing a yearning for her adult children is as 
welcome as it is poignant. So too is Renkl's resistance to our society's 
preference for a positive attitude no matter what. Yet I do want to ask 
Renkl, why label an age in the 60s (an age I share with her) as old? 
Healthy living at 60-something is a privilege many people around the 
world do not get to have. Might it be better framed as a fresh 
opportunity to help the ailing world in exactly the ways Renkl pledges?
In these days of climate crisis, the phenomenon of ecological grief is 
real. In order to seize opportunities to help, many of us do require 
fuel to restore our spirits. Find that fuel in Renkl's chapters like 
"The Bobcat Next Door," "Praise Song for the First Red Leaf of the Black 
Gum Tree," and "Loving the Unloved Animals."

Find it as well in illustrator Billy Renkl's lovely drawings including 
those of a winter garden, a pileated woodpecker gazing at a housing 
development and, of course, crows.

The animals and plants so cherished by Renkl need us now more than ever.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist emerita at William & 
Mary. Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in 
Captivity is her seventh book. Find her on Twitter @bjkingape.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1206739932/book-review-margaret-renkl-the-comfort-of-crows?ft=nprml&f=1167



/[The news archive - looking back 20 years and seems like very little 
has changed in defining political power  ]/
/*October 29,  2003*/
October 29, 2003: The New York Times reports:
"Motivated by environmental and economic concerns, states have become 
the driving force in efforts to combat global warming even as mandatory 
programs on the federal level have largely stalled."

    *The Warming Is Global but the Legislating, in the U.S., Is All Local*
    By Jennifer 8. Lee
    Oct. 29, 2003
    Motivated by environmental and economic concerns, states have become
    the driving force in efforts to combat global warming even as
    mandatory programs on the federal level have largely stalled.

    At least half of the states are addressing global warming, whether
    through legislation, lawsuits against the Bush administration or
    programs initiated by governors.

    In the last three years, state legislatures have passed at least 29
    bills, usually with bipartisan support. The most contentious is
    California's 2002 law to set strict limits for new cars on emissions
    of carbon dioxide, the gas that scientists say has the greatest role
    in global warming.

    While few of the state laws will have as much impact as
    California's, they are not merely symbolic. In addition to caps on
    emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that can cause the atmosphere
    to heat up like a greenhouse, they include registries to track such
    emissions, efforts to diversify fuel sources and the use of crops to
    capture carbon dioxide by taking it out of the atmosphere and into
    the ground.

    Aside from their practical effects, supporters say, these efforts
    will put pressure on Congress and the administration to enact
    federal legislation, if only to bring order to a patchwork of state
    laws.

    States are moving ahead in large part to fill the vacuum that has
    been left by the federal government, said David Danner, the energy
    adviser for Gov. Gary Locke of Washington.

    ''We hope to see the problem addressed at the federal level,'' Mr.
    Danner said, ''but we're not waiting around.''

    There are some initiatives in Congress, but for the moment even
    their backers acknowledge that they are doomed, given strong
    opposition from industry, the Bush administration -- which favors
    voluntary controls -- and most Congressional Republicans.

    This week, the Senate is scheduled to vote on a proposal to create a
    national regulatory structure for carbon dioxide. This would be the
    first vote for either house on a measure to restrict the gas.

    The proposal's primary sponsors, Senator John McCain, Republican of
    Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut,
    see it mainly as a way to force senators to take a position on the
    issue, given the measure's slim prospects.

    States are acting partly because of predictions that global warming
    could damage local economies by harming agriculture, eroding
    shorelines and hurting tourism.

    ''We're already seeing things which may be linked to global warming
    here in the state,'' Mr. Danner said. ''We have low snowpack,
    increased forest fire danger.''

    Environmental groups and officials in state governments say that
    energy initiatives are easier to move forward on the local level
    because they span constituencies -- industrial and service sectors,
    Democrat and Republican, urban and rural.

    While the coal, oil and automobile industries have big lobbies in
    Washington, the industry presence is diluted on the state level.
    Environmental groups say this was crucial to winning a legislative
    battle over automobile emissions in California, where the automobile
    industry did not have a long history of large campaign donations and
    instead had to rely on a six-month advertising campaign to make its
    case.

    Local businesses are also interested in policy decisions because of
    concerns about long-term energy costs, said Christopher James,
    director of air planning and standards for the Connecticut
    Department of Environmental Protection. As a result, environmental
    groups are shifting their efforts to focus outside Washington.

    Five years ago the assumption was that the climate treaty known as
    the Kyoto Protocol was the only effort in town, said Rhys Roth, the
    executive director of Climate Solutions, which works on global
    warming issues in the Pacific Northwest states. But since President
    Bush rejected the Kyoto pact in 2001, local groups have been
    emerging on the regional, state and municipal levels.

    The Climate Action Network, a worldwide conglomeration of
    nongovernment organizations working on global warming, doubled its
    membership of state and local groups in the last two years.

    The burst of activity is not limited to the states with a
    traditional environmental bent.

    At least 15 states, including Texas and Nevada, are forcing their
    state electric utilities to diversify beyond coal and oil to energy
    sources like wind and solar power.

    Even rural states are linking their agricultural practices to global
    warming. Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wyoming have all passed initiatives
    in anticipation of future greenhouse-gas emission trading, hoping
    they can capitalize on their forests and crops to capture carbon
    dioxide during photosynthesis.

    Cities are also adopting new energy policies. San Franciscans
    approved a $100 million bond initiative in 2001 to pay for solar
    panels for municipal buildings, including the San Francisco
    convention center.

    The rising level of state activity is causing concern among those
    who oppose carbon dioxide regulation.

    ''I believe the states are being used to force a federal mandate,''
    said Sandy Liddy Bourne, who does research on global warming for the
    American Legislative Exchange Council, a group contending that
    carbon dioxide should not be regulated because it is not a
    pollutant. ''Rarely do you see so many bills in one subject area
    introduced across the country.''

    The council started tracking state legislation, which they call
    son-of-Kyoto bills, weekly after they noticed a significant rise in
    greenhouse-gas-related legislation two years ago. This year, the
    council says, 24 states have introduced 90 bills that would build
    frameworks for regulating carbon dioxide. Sixty-six such bills were
    introduced in all of 2001 and 2002.

    Some of the activity has graduated to a regional level. Last summer,
    Gov. George E. Pataki of New York invited 10 Northeastern states to
    set up a regional trading network where power plants could buy and
    sell carbon dioxide credits in an effort to lower overall emissions.
    In 2001, six New England states entered into an agreement with
    Canadian provinces to cap overall emissions by 2010. Last month,
    California, Washington and Oregon announced that they would start
    looking at shared strategies to address global warming.

    To be sure, some states have decided not to embrace policies to
    combat global warming. Six -- Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Oklahoma,
    West Virginia and Wyoming -- have explicitly passed laws against any
    mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

    ''My concern,'' said Ms. Bourne, ''is that members of industry and
    environment groups will go to the federal government to say: 'There
    is a patchwork quilt of greenhouse-gas regulations across the
    country. We cannot deal with the 50 monkeys. We must have one
    800-pound gorilla. Please give us a federal mandate.' '' Indeed,
    some environmentalists say this is precisely their strategy.

    States developed their own air toxics pollution programs in the
    1980's, which resulted in different regulations and standards across
    the country. Industry groups, including the American Chemistry
    Council, eventually lobbied Congress for federal standards, which
    were incorporated into the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.

    A number of states are trying to compel the federal government to
    move sooner rather than later. On Thursday, 12 states, including New
    York, with its Republican governor, and three cities sued the
    Environmental Protection Agency for its recent decision not to
    regulate greenhouse-gas pollutants under the Clean Air Act, a
    reversal of the agency's previous stance under the Clinton
    administration.

    ''Global warming cannot be solely addressed at the state level,''
    said Tom Reilly, the Massachusetts attorney general. ''It's a
    problem that requires a federal approach.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/us/the-warming-is-global-but-the-legislating-in-the-us-is-all-local.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6Uw.u5OR.RaTdbnEl8jU9&smid=url-share

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/national/29CLIM.html




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