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<i><font size="+1"><b>April 9, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Opinion in Scientific American ]<br>
<b>We're Thinking about Climate Change the Wrong Way</b><br>
Rather than convince other nations to "do their part," the U.S.
should develop clean energy technologies and make them cheap enough
for everyone to adopt<br>
By Solomon Goldstein-Rose on April 8, 2020<br>
- - -<br>
The only way to solve climate change by anywhere near scientists'
2050 target is for the U.S. to treat this as an engineering
challenge: replacing all the systems that emit greenhouse gases with
ones that don't, then making these clean systems--many of which are
still in development--affordable enough to spread rapidly worldwide.<br>
We can do that through moonshot-style innovation projects: RD+D,
policy and public procurement to drive deployment and scale up
manufacturing, financing and other measures to bring every needed
technology to the "nth of a kind" cost that can outcompete fossil
fuels globally.<br>
- - -<br>
This mindset is the antidote to the voter's question of "Why should
we act massively when China isn't doing enough?" We can solve pretty
much the entire problem through domestic policy. We don't need China
to do much if we do enough. In fact, the more we invest in these
projects upfront, the larger share of the economic benefits we'll
reap compared to China.<br>
By communicating about solving climate change as an engineering
challenge, we can reassure voters and politicians that it is
achievable: if we act boldly enough with massive investments in the
next few years, we will solve the entire problem.<br>
But communicating from a technical perspective is also effective in
painting a picture for voters of what solving climate change
actually looks like. That's the subject of my new book, The 100%
Solution. It lays out five pillars that constitute the physical
transformation needed, nearly all driven by lowering the cost of
clean systems through manufacturing scale-up. Spoiler: solving
climate change means changing systems, not lifestyles. If we can
communicate to the average voter the fact that they'll be able to
heat their home the same amount, drive the same amount, fly when
necessary--only with different equipment powering those
processes--we can make the public (and therefore our political
leaders) more comfortable buying into the idea of a massive set of
projects.<br>
<br>
And finally, by creating a consensus among political and thought
leaders about what must physically be achieved and a strategy
encompassing the full range of innovation to achieve it, we can make
politics the trivial side of solving climate change. Who doesn't
like American innovation? Job creation? Manufacturing booms?
Healthier and cheaper equipment? That's what we're talking about
when we talk about solving climate change: we simply don't say it
often enough.<br>
<br>
With more technical voices speaking up, we can create a consensus
around what must be achieved and get people comfortable with the
(pretty awesome!) world that will be realized through this
transformation. And we can give hope to my fellow young people who
need to know that it is entirely possible--and although technical,
perhaps politically easy--to fully solve climate change.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/were-thinking-about-climate-change-the-wrong-way/">https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/were-thinking-about-climate-change-the-wrong-way/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Wallace-Wells clips will be distressing]<br>
<b>The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future</b><br>
By David Wallace-Wells<br>
COVID-19 is not a climate-change pandemic -- as far as we know,
nothing about the emergence or spread of the coronavirus bears the
recognizable imprint of global warming. But if the disease and our
utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future
staring down climate change, it should, not just as a "fire drill"
for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases
that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is
a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought
about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the
natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring
wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on
this planet for all of human history.<br>
<br>
Among the many unnerving lessons the two crises share is this one:
Nature is mighty, and scary, and we have not defeated it but live
within it, subject to its temperamental power, no matter where it is
that you live or how protected you may normally feel. As the
coronavirus has paralyzed much of the northern hemisphere, for
instance, 192 billion locusts, perhaps 8,000 times more than usual,
are swarming East Africa in clouds as big as whole cities, thanks to
weather patterns scrambled by climate change; a small swarm can
destroy the food supply of 35,000 people in a single day, and they
are now traveling in swathes as wide as 25 miles, imperiling the
food supply of tens of millions. In the U.S., it looks likely we
will now be sheltering in place into the beginning of hurricane
season. "We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort
and denial," as George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian.
"Living behind screens, passing between capsules -- our houses,
cars, offices and shopping malls -- we persuaded ourselves that
contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all
civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards."<br>
<br>
COVID-19 is one such hazard we believed, until a few weeks ago, we
were mostly invulnerable to. In the future, we may have to reckon
also with diseases we believed we already defeated, since in
addition to bringing about pandemics of the future, global warming
will revive plagues of the past. There are now, trapped in Arctic
ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of
years -- in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter
them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight
back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. Already, in
laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a
32,000-year-old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an
8-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a
3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of
curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018,
scientists revived something a bit bigger -- a worm that had been
frozen in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.<br>
<br>
The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times.
In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that
infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million --
about 3 percent of the world's population, and more had died in the
world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome
capstone. Scientists suspect smallpox is trapped in Siberian ice,
among many other diseases that have otherwise passed into human
legend -- an abridged history of devastating sickness, left out like
egg salad in the Arctic sun. Many of these frozen organisms won't
actually survive the thaw; those that have been brought back to life
have been reanimated typically under fastidious lab conditions. But
in 2016, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released
when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer
killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; more than 2,000
present-day reindeer died.<br>
<br>
What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are
existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even reevolved by warming.
The first effect is geographical. Before the early modern period,
human provinciality was a guard against pandemic -- a bug could wipe
out a town, or a kingdom, or even in an extreme case devastate a
continent -- but in most instances it couldn't travel much farther
than its victims, which is to say, not very far at all. The Black
Death killed as much as 60 percent of Europe, but consider, for a
gruesome counterfactual, how big its impact might have been in a
truly globalized world.<br>
<br>
Today, even with globalization and the rapid intermingling of human
populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as
another limit -- we know where certain bugs can spread, and we know
the environments in which they cannot. (This is why certain vectors
of adventure tourism require dozens of new vaccines and prophylactic
medications, and why New Yorkers traveling to London don't need to
worry.)<br>
<br>
But global warming will scramble those ecosystems, meaning it will
help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortes did. The
footprint of every mosquito-borne illness is currently
circumscribed, for instance, but those borders are disappearing
rapidly as the tropics expand -- the current rate is 30 miles per
decade. In Brazil, for generations, yellow fever sat in the Amazon
Basin, where the Haemagogus and Sabethes mosquitoes thrived, making
the disease a concern for those who lived, worked, or traveled deep
into the jungle, but only for them; in 2016, it left the Amazon as
more and more mosquitoes fanned out of the rain forest, and by 2017,
it had reached areas around the country's megalopolises, São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro -- more than 30 million people, many of them
living in shantytowns, facing the arrival of a disease that kills
between 3 and 8 percent of those infected.<br>
<br>
Yellow fever is just one of the plagues that will be carried by
mosquitoes as they migrate, conquering more and more of a warming
world -- the globalization of pandemic disease. Malaria alone
already kills a million people each year, infecting many more, but
you don't worry much about it if you are living in Maine or France.
As the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you
may; over the course of the next century, more and more of the
world's population will be living under the shadow of diseases like
these. You didn't worry much about Zika before a couple of years
ago, either.<br>
<br>
As it happens, Zika may be a good model of a second worrying effect
-- disease mutation. One reason you hadn't heard about Zika until
recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda and Southeast Asia;
another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth
defects. Scientists still don't entirely understand what happened or
what they missed, even now, several years after the planet was
gripped by panic about microcephaly. It could be that the disease
changed as it came to the Americas, the result of a genetic mutation
or in adaptive response to a new environment, or that Zika produces
those devastating prenatal effects only when another disease is
present, possibly one less common in Africa, or that something about
the environment or immunological history in Uganda protects mothers
and their unborn children there.<br>
<br>
But there are things we do know for sure about how climate affects
some diseases. Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter regions,
which is one reason the World Bank estimates that by 2030, 3.6
billion people will be reckoning with it -- 100 million as a direct
result of climate change.<br>
<br>
Projections like those depend not just on climate models but on an
intricate understanding of the organism at play. Or, rather,
organisms. Malaria transmission involves both the disease and the
mosquito; Lyme disease, both the disease and the tick -- which is
another epidemiologically threatening creature whose universe is
rapidly expanding, thanks to global warming. As Mary Beth Pfeiffer
has documented, Lyme-case counts have spiked in Japan, Turkey, and
South Korea, where the disease was literally nonexistent as recently
as 2010 -- zero cases -- and now lives inside hundreds more Koreans
each year. In the Netherlands, 54 percent of the country's land is
now infested; in Europe as a whole, Lyme caseloads are now three
times the standard level. In the U.S., there are likely around
300,000 new infections each year -- and since even many of those
treated for Lyme continue to show symptoms years after treatment,
the numbers can stockpile. Overall, the number of disease cases from
mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas have tripled in the U.S. over just the
last 13 years, with dozens of counties across the country
encountering ticks for the first time. But the effects of the
epidemic can be seen perhaps most clearly in animals other than
humans: In Minnesota, during the aughts, winter ticks helped drop
the moose population by 58 percent in a single decade, and some
environmentalists believe the species could be eradicated entirely
from the state within the next few years.<br>
<br>
In New England, moose calves have been found suckling as many as
90,000 engorged ticks, which often kill the calves not through Lyme
disease but simple anemia, the effect of that number of bugs each
drawing a few milliliters of blood. Those that survive are far from
robust, many having scratched so incessantly at their own hides to
clear the ticks that they completely eliminated their own hair,
leaving behind a spooky gray skin that has earned them the name
"ghost moose."<br>
<br>
Lyme is still, in relative terms, a young disease, and one we don't
yet understand all that well. We attribute a very mysterious and
incoherent set of symptoms to it, from joint pain to fatigue to
memory loss to facial palsy, almost as a catchall explanation for
ailments we cannot pinpoint in patients who we know have been bitten
by a bug carrying the bug. We do know ticks, however, as surely as
we know malaria -- there are not many parasites we understand
better. But there are many, many millions we understand worse, which
means our sense of how climate change will redirect or remodel them
is shrouded in a foreboding ignorance. And then there are the
plagues that climate change will confront us with for the very first
time -- a whole new universe of diseases humans have never before
known to even worry about.<br>
<br>
"New universe" is not hyperbole. Scientists guess the planet could
harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses -- many of
them, like COVID-19, for now "quarantined" in particular susceptible
species, but which could evolve or "jump" into humans, either as the
result of changing climatic conditions or because the scrambling of
native ecosystems and habitats brings the host species into contact
with humans in a much more direct way that ever before. The more we
pave over and log and deforest the natural world, disrupting stable
ecosystems and turning those organisms living happily within them
out into the human world, the more diseases, and pandemics, we'll
produce. That is what it means to be living entirely outside the
window of climate conditions that enclose all of human history --
everything we have ever taken to be stable about our relationship to
the planet is thrown into chaos. That chaos will confront us, again
and again, with undiscovered disease.<br>
<br>
Bacteria are even trickier, and so we probably know about even fewer
of them. Perhaps scariest are those that live within us, peacefully
for now. More than 99 percent of even those bacteria inside human
bodies are currently unknown to science, which means we are
operating in near-total ignorance about the effects climate change
might have on the bugs in, for instance, our guts -- about how many
of the bacteria modern humans have come to rely on, like unseen
factory workers, for everything from digesting our food to
modulating our anxiety, could be rewired, diminished, or entirely
killed off by an additional few degrees of heat.<br>
<br>
Overwhelmingly, of course, the viruses and bacteria making homes
inside us are nonthreatening to humans -- at present. Presumably, a
difference of a degree or two in global temperature won't
dramatically change the behavior of the majority of them -- probably
the vast majority, even the overwhelming majority. But consider the
case of the saiga -- the adorable dwarflike antelope, native to
Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global
population died in the span of just days -- every single saiga in an
area the size of Florida, the land suddenly dotted with hundreds of
thousands of saiga carcasses and not one lone survivor. An event
like this is called a "megadeath," this one so striking and
cinematic that it gave rise, immediately, to a whole raft of
conspiracy theories: aliens, radiation, dumped rocket fuel. But no
toxins were found by researchers poking through the killing fields
-- in the animals themselves, in the soil, in the local plants. The
culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella
multocida, which had lived inside the saiga's tonsils, without
threatening its host in any way, for many, many generations.
Suddenly, it had proliferated, emigrated to the bloodstream, and
from there to the animals' liver, kidneys, and spleen. Why? "The
places where the saigas died in May 2015 were extremely warm and
humid," Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic. "In fact, humidity levels
were the highest ever seen in the region since records began in
1948. The same pattern held for two earlier, and much smaller,
die-offs from 1981 and 1988. When the temperature gets really hot,
and the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger,
Pasteurella is the bullet."<br>
<br>
This is not to say we now understand what precisely about humidity
weaponized Pasteurella, or how many of the other bacteria living
inside mammals like us -- the one percent we have identified, or
perhaps more worryingly the 99 percent we house without any
knowledge or understanding -- might be similarly triggered by
climate, friendly symbiotic bugs with whom we've lived in some cases
for millions of years transformed suddenly into contagions already
inside us. That remains a mystery. But ignorance is no comfort.
Presumably climate change will introduce us to some of them.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/the-coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-climate-change-future.html">https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/the-coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-climate-change-future.html</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[A great young voice - from a disasterologist]<br>
Dr. Samantha Montano<br>
@SamLMontano<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/samlmontano/">https://twitter.com/samlmontano/</a><br>
<a href="https://twitter.com/SamLMontano/status/1213131182877093889">https://twitter.com/SamLMontano/status/1213131182877093889</a><br>
- - -<br>
[Hot Take audio podcast with transcript]<br>
<b>Disaster Denialism with Guest Co-Host Dr. Samantha Montano</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://megaphone.link/ADL3388618773">https://megaphone.link/ADL3388618773</a><br>
- - <br>
[Samantha Montano video talk in 2017]<br>
<b>From Acts of God to Disasterology | Dr. Samantha Montano |
Skepticon 10</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_wM657RJK0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_wM657RJK0</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
April 9, 2007 </b></font><br>
<p>Environmental activist Laurie David and singer Sheryl Crow begin
a brief tour of colleges and universities across the United States
to raise awareness about climate change. Later in the month, the
Washington Post reports on the David/Crow tour.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041900650.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041900650.html</a><br>
</p>
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