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<font size="+1"><i>July 21, 2018</i></font><br>
<br>
[BBC report]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44910435">Japan
heatwave: Warnings issued amid scorching temperatures</a></b><br>
People across Japan have been urged to take precautions against a
heatwave that has killed about 30 people.<br>
Thousands more have sought hospital treatment for heat-related
conditions over the past two weeks.<br>
Temperatures reached 40.7C (105F) in central Japan earlier this
week, a five-year nationwide peak.<br>
In the city of Kyoto temperatures have stood above 38C (100.4F) for
seven days in a row for the first time since records began in the
19th Century.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44910435">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44910435</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[ABC news video]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/27-reported-tornadoes-rip-iowa-devastating-towns/story?id=56707568">27
reported tornadoes rip through Iowa, devastating town</a></b><br>
Iowa, which usually averages about seven tornadoes in the month of
July, saw 27 reported twisters rip through the state Thursday night,
damaging buildings, overturning cars and rupturing gas lines.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/27-reported-tornadoes-rip-iowa-devastating-towns/story?id=56707568">https://abcnews.go.com/US/27-reported-tornadoes-rip-iowa-devastating-towns/story?id=56707568</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[91 degrees to you and me]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.severe-weather.eu/recent-events/record-breaking-heat-across-n-norway-and-kola-peninsula-july-19th/">Record
breaking heat across N Norway and Kola peninsula, July 19th</a></b><br>
Extreme heat brought new all-time records into N Norway and Kola
peninsula, Russia yesterday. Foehn winds pushed temps into 31-33 C.<br>
The maximum temperatures yesterday, July 19th. While western Norway
was refreshed by a frontal zone from the Norwegian sea, inland
Fennoscandia was experiencing scorching heat – northern parts were
extremely hot at Foehn winds from the south pushed temps up to 31-34
C before maritime airmass pushed in! The coastal station Slettnes
Fyr, Norway (71.2N lattitude) peaked at 31.4 C!<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.severe-weather.eu/recent-events/record-breaking-heat-across-n-norway-and-kola-peninsula-july-19th/">http://www.severe-weather.eu/recent-events/record-breaking-heat-across-n-norway-and-kola-peninsula-july-19th/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Bigger]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires">Wildfires
rage in Arctic Circle as Sweden calls for help</a></b><br>
Sweden worst hit as hot, dry summer sparks unusual number of fires,
with at least 11 in the far north...<br>
The European Forest Fire Information System warned fire danger
conditions were likely to be extreme across much of central and
northern Europe in the coming weeks.<br>
EU officials said many of this year's fires are outside the
traditional European fire zone of the Mediterranean, and are
increasingly taking place at unexpected times of year. 2017 was the
worst fire year in Europe's history, causing destruction to
thousands of hectares of forest and cropland in Portugal, Spain and
Italy, as late as November. "There are clear trends of longer fire
seasons and frequent critical periods in Europe that are leading to
dangerous fire situations," said a European commission official.<b><br>
</b><font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/18/sweden-calls-for-help-as-arctic-circle-hit-by-wildfires</a></font><b><br>
<br>
<br>
</b>[city and the lawsuit in battle with the future]<b><br>
<a
href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-baltimore-climate-change-lawsuit-20180719-story.html">
Baltimore plans suit against oil and gas companies for their
role in spurring climate change</a></b><br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-baltimore-climate-change-lawsuit-20180719-story.html">http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-baltimore-climate-change-lawsuit-20180719-story.html</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Wired]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.wired.com/story/climate-lawsuits-dismissed/">TURNS
OUT CITIES CAN'T SUE OIL COMPANIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE</a></b><br>
YOU CAN'T SUE your way to a solution for global warming. So says the
judge.<br>
On Thursday, Judge John Keenan of New York's Southern District
dismissed the City of New York's lawsuit against the international
oil and gas companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and
Royal Dutch Shell..<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.wired.com/story/climate-lawsuits-dismissed/">https://www.wired.com/story/climate-lawsuits-dismissed/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Follow the money]<br>
<b><a
href="http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/20/getting-climate-finance-wrong/">Are
we getting climate finance all wrong?</a></b><br>
Long term thinking about climate change challenges widely held
assumptions about how we spend money today<br>
By Jessica Brown and Ilmi Granoff<br>
It's widely accepted that by the year 2050, the world needs to be
approaching net-zero carbon if the goals of the Paris climate deal
are to survive...<br>
- - - -<br>
In a mid-century timeframe, however, delayed investment in sectors
with high emissions abatement costs, such as buildings or transport,
at best delays and at worst radically increases those high costs.<br>
This thinking is best argued by Vogt-Schlib, Meunier, and Hallegatte
who make a compelling case that in many high-cost abatement sectors
a late, rushed transformation will be more expensive than a
progressive, slow shift towards decarbonisation. This is primarily
due to "adjustment costs," such as the costs associated with
abruptly diverting the labor force to retrofit buildings, or
replacing infrastructure faster than its useful life.<br>
The researchers show another reason to start with the higher cost
interventions: Often, the more expensive options not only reduce
emissions today but also help lock in emissions reductions for the
future. Urban transport systems are a great example of this in
practice.<br>
These points complement an earlier, independent finding that
investing early in costlier technologies allows for
"learning-by-doing" over time, leading to reductions in the overall
cost of those technologies. Investment drives down technology costs,
which in turn helps achieve more investment...<br>
- - - - <br>
Typical models of maturing innovations tend to emphasise the role of
public investment at early stages of technology development, with
public efforts at later stages limited to setting the right policy
conditions to attract private investment. However, research by
Mariana Mazzucato and others suggests public investment can play a
critical role even at later stages in the innovation chain,
throughout commercialisation and deployment stages. Green investment
banks, loan guarantee programmes, and other "industrial strategy"
tools have helped accelerate the commercialisation of low-carbon
innovations.<br>
Moreover, other research shows that the return expectations of
venture capital – which typically comes in at early stages of
commercialisation – do not always match actual returns, and
therefore the underlying investment needs, of clean technologies at
that point in their development.<br>
These trends buck traditional thinking on where what types of
capital are best deployed, begging us to consider whether the
climate finance community needs a new framework for financial actors
along the technology development spectrum.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/20/getting-climate-finance-wrong/">http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/20/getting-climate-finance-wrong/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[true cost accounting - carbon cost is the most important number]<br>
<b><a
href="https://www.marketplace.org/2018/07/18/sustainability/why-group-updating-social-cost-carbon">Why
is this group updating the "social cost of carbon"?</a></b><br>
By Jed Kim<br>
July 18, 2018<br>
"This is the first time where we're using large amounts of
real-world data to compute what the cost of carbon is to society,"
said Solomon Hsiang, the lab's UC Berkeley lead.<br>
This estimate won't be completely based on models, like the original
was, but rather on historical data.<br>
That's daunting because the researchers want to gather data at a
super granular level. Earlier models divided the globe into 14
regions. This team is breaking it down into roughly 25,000
county-sized parcels. That'll give a much clearer picture of who
climate change's winners and losers will be.<br>
They're making a tool anyone can use, one that'll redefine
scientific understanding. Everything else is just politics...<br>
- - - - <br>
The team is a few years away from releasing an overall estimate for
the social cost of carbon, but they're just about ready to begin
releasing initial results on mortality. Greenstone said one thing
they've found is that climate change's impacts will be felt very
differently even within the United States.<b> For instance,
additional hot days will impact death rates in Seattle more than
they will in Houston.</b><br>
"Precisely because people in Houston have taken preparations to
protect themselves against hot temperatures that people in Seattle
have not seen the need to," Greenstone said.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.marketplace.org/2018/07/18/sustainability/why-group-updating-social-cost-carbon">https://www.marketplace.org/2018/07/18/sustainability/why-group-updating-social-cost-carbon</a></font><br>
- - - -<br>
[Climate Impact Lab]<br>
<b><a href="http://www.impactlab.org/">Measuring the Real-World
Costs of Climate Change</a></b><br>
Climate Impact Map<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.impactlab.org/">http://www.impactlab.org/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[opinion]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1">Survival
of the Richest</a></b><br>
The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind<br>
douglas rushkoff - Jul 5<br>
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver
a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so
investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been
offered for a talk - about half my annual professor's salary - all
to deliver some insight on the subject of "the future of
technology."<br>
I've never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions
always end up more like parlor games, where I'm asked to opine on
the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for
potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The
audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies
or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or
not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.<br>
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green
room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a
stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was
brought to me: five super-wealthy guys - yes, all men - from the
upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I
realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared
about the future of technology. They had come with questions of
their own.<br>
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into
their real topics of concern.<br>
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New
Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for
his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition,
or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of
a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building
his own underground bunker system and asked, "How do I maintain
authority over my security force after the event?"<br>
For all their wealth and power, they don't believe they can affect
the future.<br>
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse,
social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot
hack that takes everything down.<br>
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew
armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the
angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was
worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own
leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks
on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear
disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or
maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers - if that
technology could be developed in time.<br>
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were
concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking
their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the
aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds
into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that
had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than
it did with transcending the human condition altogether and
insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate
change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics,
nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of
technology is really about just one thing: escape.<br>
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how
technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a
post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the
wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a
quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence,
compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology
philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the
transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data,
concluding that "humans are nothing but information-processing
objects."<br>
It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone
wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs
come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg?
These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital
economy - the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's
fueling most of this speculation to begin with.<br>
Of course, it wasn't always this way. There was a brief moment, in
the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for
our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the
counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more
inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established
business interests only saw new potentials for the same old
extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs.
Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton
futures - something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every
speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as
relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future
became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or
hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our
venture capital but arrive at passively.<br>
This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities.
Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing
than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to
any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the
market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.<br>
So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and
exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics,
journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much
more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader
to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign
languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of
pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars
colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my
identity? Should robots have rights?<br>
Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining,
is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries
associated with unbridled technological development in the name of
corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already
exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even
more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware
of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy,
and the demise of local retail.<br>
The future became less a thing we create through our present-day
choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on
with our venture capital but arrive at passively.<br>
But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital
capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture
of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of
slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company
called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market
ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company's founder
now sadly refers to their products as "fairer" phones.)<br>
Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our
highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them
with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant
children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the
manufacturers.<br>
This "out of sight, out of mind" externalization of poverty and
poison doesn't go away just because we've covered our eyes with VR
goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything,
the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental
repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn,
motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic
fantasy - and more desperately concocted technologies and business
plans. The cycle feeds itself.<br>
The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we
come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the
solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated
less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases,
technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in
us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It's as if some
innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the
inefficiency of a local taxi market can be "solved" with an app that
bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human
psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.<br>
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human
future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or,
perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary
successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next
transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and
leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.<br>
Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us.
Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better
than the undead - and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite
viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the
remaining humans, where one group's survival is dependent on another
one's demise. Even Westworld - based on a science-fiction novel
where robots run amok - ended its second season with the ultimate
reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the
artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us
can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we're incapable
of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show
want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of
their lives in a computer simulation.<br>
The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a
feature than bug.<br>
The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal
between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption
that humans suck. Let's either change them or get away from them,
forever.<br>
Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into
space - as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire's
capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach
escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars - despite
our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either
of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials - the result will be
less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the
elite.<br>
When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority
over their security forces after "the event," I suggested that their
best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They
should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were
members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos
of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain
management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the
less chance there will be of an "event" in the first place. All this
technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but
entirely more collective interests right now.<br>
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn't really buy it. They
were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they're convinced we
are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don't believe
they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of
all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they
can employ to insulate themselves - especially if they can't get a
seat on the rocket to Mars.<br>
Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our
own humanity have much better options available to us. We don't have
to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become
the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms
want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human
doesn't go it alone.<br>
Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team
sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1">https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/23/on-the-hottest-june-on-record-most-media-missed/200183">This
Day in Climate History - July 21, 2014</a> - from D.R. Tucker</b></font><br>
July 21, 2014: "ABC World News Tonight" connects the climate dots in
a report on recent extreme weather events. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/23/on-the-hottest-june-on-record-most-media-missed/200183">http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/23/on-the-hottest-june-on-record-most-media-missed/200183</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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