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<i><font size="+1"><b>April 26, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Heat is up]<br>
<b>State of the climate: First quarter of 2020 is second warmest on
record</b><br>
This year is shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record --
if not the warmest. This is particularly noteworthy because 2020 is
likely to see neutral El Nino/La Nina conditions that will play
little-to-no role in boosting annual temperatures.<br>
<br>
The first three months of 2020 were the second warmest on record,
behind only the super-El Nino-fuelled 2016. The past 12 months were
also nearly tied for the warmest 12-month period on record.
Near-record sea surface temperatures have driven extensive coral
bleaching during the southern hemisphere summer.<br>
<br>
Global temperatures are currently running at or above the level
projected by the generation of climate models featured in the 2013
Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) fifth assessment
report (AR5)...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-first-quarter-of-2020-is-second-warmest-on-record">https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-first-quarter-of-2020-is-second-warmest-on-record</a>
<p><br>
</p>
[methane]<br>
<b>Some leaked US methane 'is double official figure'</b><br>
The leaked methane is a byproduct of fracking for oil, often burned
off or simply emitted instead of captured for use as fuel.<br>
NEW YORK, 25 April, 2020 -- Methane emissions from the Permian basin
of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, one of the largest
oil-producing regions in the world, are more than twice as high as
US federal estimates, a new study suggests. The findings, published
recently in the journal Science Advances, reaffirm the results of a
recently released assessment and further call into question the
climate benefits of natural gas...<br>
"I'm afraid there is all manner of mayhem happening out there"...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/some-leaked-us-methane-is-double-official-figure/">https://climatenewsnetwork.net/some-leaked-us-methane-is-double-official-figure/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Distinctly similar]<br>
<b>The Reason COVID-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation</b><br>
The disinformation industry has deployed these strategies across
multiple issues. <br>
amywestervelt<br>
For a long time, the story went that the tobacco industry cooked up
disinformation and then spread it to the fossil fuel guys, the
chemical industry, pharma, you name it. But one thing that became
incredibly clear when we began digging into PR firms and specific
publicists was that this version of history is not quite right; if
disinformation strategies were cooked up by any particular industry
it was the public relations industry, which put these strategies to
work on behalf of fossil fuels, tobacco, chemical manufacturers and
more, often all at the same time. The very first publicist, Ivy
Ledbetter Lee, worked on behalf of both Standard Oil and, shortly
after, American Tobacco, for example. Daniel Edelman developed
astroturf campaigns for both RJ Reynolds tobacco company and the
American Petroleum Institute, as did John Hill, who went so far as
to have tobacco folks join the API. He also worked with Monsanto,
juggling all three clients at the same time. E. Bruce Harrison
worked for the chemical guys first, then managed front groups for
tobacco and fossil fuels at the same time. You get the drift.<br>
<br>
These industries all surely learned from each other at various
points in time, but that was mostly because they were working with
the same publicists. The history is less that tobacco or oil
embraced disinformation first and then passed it on and more that a
handful of PR firms and consultants created the disinformation
industry, and then put it to work on behalf of whatever industry
needed it at any given time.<br>
<br>
Today, those same strategies are at work on behalf of those who
worry that the response to COVID-19 will undermine capitalism, which
is why climate folks keep noting how familiar the whole anti-science
component of the rightwing response to the pandemic feels. It's
familiar because the exact same strategies are being deployed, in
some cases by the same people. Here are a few key examples:<br>
<br>
<b>Disinformation Strategy #1: He who controls the language controls
the narrative.</b> Ivy Lee's big thing, way back 100+ years ago
when he was working with the Rockefellers... oh, and advising Hitler
and Goebbels too… was to take control of language. If the government
wanted to impose safety regulations on your industry, you described
them as "extra" or "additional" or "surplus". In climate, we've seen
language shift from "the greenhouse effect" to global warming to
climate change. When media finally seized the power to make its own
language choices, opting for "climate crisis" or "climate
emergency", it was deemed radical, even by other journalists. In the
COVID-19 context, we've seen this too. It's gone from a "flu" to "a
really bad flu" to "a pandemic" in a relatively condensed amount of
time. But you'll see those trading in disinformation continue to
refer to it as "just a bad flu" or point out how many people the flu
kills every year.<br>
<br>
<b>Disinformation Strategy #2: Leverage science illiteracy to create
doubt:</b> This has been a hugely effective tactic for multiple
industries because the vast majority of public don't spend a lot of
time reading scientific studies, nor do they understand that
scientific research has its own language. That makes it very easy to
point to something like the uncertainty inherent in any scientific
research and say "see, they don't really know." The best recent
example of this is the re-emergence of Michael Fumento, as Drilled
News contributor Paul Thacker pointed out recently. Fumento
questioned health models for the tobacco guys, climate models for
the oil guys, and has now returned to question public health models
used to predict the spread and likely death toll of COVID-19.
Fumento was also famously fired when Businessweek outed him for
accepting $60,000 from Monsanto one year to write GMO-friendly
pieces in his column, which was syndicated to dozens of papers
across the country. Of course models, like science in general, have
a bit of uncertainty baked in; they represent both the most extreme
outcomes and the most likely scenarios, they encapsulate multiple
variables. And if you know enough about them, it's quite easy to
cherry pick data and flaws and argue, as Fumento does, that modeling
in general is bunk that ought to be thrown out.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Disinformation strategy #3: Astroturfing </b>This weekend,
social media was awash in the news that those anti-lockdown rallies
in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado were all fomented by
rightwing donors. Someone on Reddit figured out all the "re-open the
economy" websites were made by one guy in Florida. This is
astroturfing 101, and it's a strategy that's been a key tool in the
disinformation toolbox for at least 100 years. When coalminers and
steelworkers were striking regularly back in the late 1800s and
early 1900s, publicists like Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays and John Hill
helped create fake protest groups that supposedly represented all
the coal miners who just wanted these strikes to be over so they
could get back to work. In more recent years, fossil fuel companies
have backed fake advocacy groups like the California Drivers
Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy to fight
against everything from emissions regulations to a carbon tax.
Astroturfing is fake activism meant to give the illusion of
grassroots opposition to policy. My favorite example is the Save the
Plastic Bag Coalition, a petrochemical and plastic
manufacturers-backed group that protests bag bans and bag taxes.
It's somewhat rare, however, to get a sitting U.S. President
supporting and promoting your astroturf campaign, as Trump has done
with the fake "re-open the economy" movement.<br>
<br>
Season 3 of Drilled gets into these strategies and more in great
detail, and you're bound to see in this history the roots of today's
pandemic disinformation machine.<br>
<br>
This week is Earth Week and a lot of media outlets are focused on
solutions to climate change, a conversation that COVID-19 has
certainly changed. Which got me thinking: often people act like
climate accountability is not a solution, like all we do is point
out problems or play the blame game. Sorry for harshing your mellow
about carbon capture occasionally, but for the team at Drilled News,
accountability is an absolutely necessary part of addressing climate
change. How can you move forward functionally if you don't know
where things went wrong in the past? How can any technological
solution possibly work if it's plugged into the same old system
(carbon capture is an excellent example of this, come to think of
it)?<br>
<br>
Our hope, of course, is that when people learn to recognize these
strategies and know what's behind them, they might become less
effective. Disempowering the disinformation industry is a necessary
part of any climate solution.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://drillednews.substack.com/p/the-reason-covid-19-and-climate-seem">https://drillednews.substack.com/p/the-reason-covid-19-and-climate-seem</a>
<p><br>
</p>
[Interview with a top climate scientist]<br>
<b>Climate Disaster: Greenland is Melting!--Kevin Trenberth on
global warming--Radio Ecoshock 2019-09-04</b><br>
Mar 26, 2020<br>
Stop Fossil Fuels<br>
Is the astounding melt on Greenland this summer due to a natural
atmospheric cycle rather than global warming?<br>
<br>
Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth specializes in the transport of heat, water
and energy in the atmosphere and ocean. He was a pioneer in the
study of El Nino and La Nina events, and a lead author for three
reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Originally from New Zealand, Dr. Trenberth is a Distinguished Senior
Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR).<br>
<br>
Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details
at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/09/climate-disaster-greenland-is-melting-new-show.html">https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/09/climate-disaster-greenland-is-melting-new-show.html</a><br>
<br>
Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies
and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible.
Learn more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://stopfossilfuels.org">https://stopfossilfuels.org</a> <br>
<br>
<b>MARINE HEAT WAVES KILL MILLIONS OF FISH, and DAMAGE THE ENTIRE
OCEAN FOOD WEB</b><br>
"Marine heat waves" like the hot blob in the North Pacific in
2015-2016 "led to the loss of over 100 million cod. It had profound
effects on the entire food web, from the phytoplankton to the
zooplankton, the small fish, large fish, all the things that prey on
the fish including the whales, sea otters, and marine animals."<br>
<br>
Trenberth: "The North Atlantic Oscillation is a weakening or a
strengthening of the overall Westerlies across the NA. In the
positive phase the Westerlies are active further north. The storm
track is further north. It's very warm in Europe and all of the
storms that go from Europe into Siberia have a particular track. In
the negative phase, the whole pattern tends to shift further south.
It's a lot weaker in the north and you get very cold conditions in
that case in Europe."<br>
<br>
<b>OCEAN HEATING, HOT PATCHES & HURRICANES</b><br>
Heat transfer from a hotter atmosphere to the ocean is "pretty
regular, and the best single indicator that the planet is warming.
2018 is the warmest year for the global oceans, 2017 2nd warmest,
2015 3rd warmest and 2016 4th warmest."<br>
<br>
2016 was slightly less warming for the ocean due to the El Nino
event that year. During an El Nino, large amounts of heat are
released in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, meaning a transfer of heat
from the ocean to the atmosphere, rather than the other way around.
2016 was the warmest year for the land surface temperatures, due
mainly to the El Nino. But 2018 stands out as the year of the
warmest oceans so far.<br>
<br>
<b>ROAMING OCEAN HOTSPOTS CAN BIRTH KILLER STORMS</b><br>
"Where the hot spots occur from one year to the next can vary,
partly because of things like El Nino and maybe the North Atlantic
Oscillation or the weather more generally. So where the hotter spot
occurs can vary, but as a whole the oceans are certainly warming
up."<br>
<br>
"Some of the biggest warming is occurring in the southern oceans.
But the difference is that there are very strong winds there and a
lot of that heat gets carried down to greater depths in the ocean."
Those winds can drive sea ice further offshore, as happened a few
years ago, increasing the extent. The sea ice extent in Antarctica
is not a good indicator of global warming, compared to Arctic sea
ice coverage. Yet in the last few years, we have seen "remarkably
low" sea ice in Antarctica.<br>
<br>
The oceans have absorbed most of the abnormal heat energy from
humans loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Up to 90% of
the real warming went into the oceans, and water holds heat better
than land.<br>
<br>
All the record hot years in the seas were in the last four years,
with 2018 the hottest ever recorded. This extra heat is not evenly
distributed. Hot spots and marine heat waves can pop up anywhere in
the world.<br>
<br>
The warmest patches in the ocean move around. In 2017 one of the
warmest patches of ocean was in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to
Harvey, Irma & Maria. In 2018, one of the warmest patches of the
ocean was off the Carolinas, adding to the destructive power of
Hurricane Florence. Hot patches occurred in the Indian Ocean,
leading to two "very unusual" cyclones, Idai & Kenneth, that
devastated Mozambique and neighboring countries in March 2019.
Trenberth credits ocean hot patches for cyclone Fani that struck
India and Pakistan in May 2019. And the waters were hot in the
Caribbean as Hurricane Dorian powered up from a Category 2 to Cat 5
storm in just two days.<br>
<br>
TV weather experts explain a hotter ocean can add energy to
hurricanes, as both added rains to drop and higher wind speeds. But
they never connect that to the big picture of warming oceans all
over the world.<br>
<br>
Our hotter ocean pops up as strong and unusual storms half a world
away from countries emitting the most greenhouse gases. This is one
of the way our pollution spreads damage to countries with tiny
emissions. There's been a lot of talk about rising seas overcoming
island nations, but very little about devastating storm damage.
Random ocean hot spots sound like a weapon in a climate war against
the world, a kind of carbon terrorism.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywwDSWtdtE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywwDSWtdtE</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[Ross Gelbspan opines on hope from 2015]<br>
<b>The Climate Movement and the Liabilities of Hope</b><br>
Ross Gelbspan <br>
The inner fire of hope propels perseverance and, occasionally in the
face of overwhelming odds, breathtaking resolve.<br>
<br>
In all those contexts, hope was the seed of collective heroism...<br>
- -<br>
Unfortunately activists today continue to funnel virtually all their
time and energy into defeating the carbon lobby.<br>
<br>
The longer they cling to that misleading hope, the less likely we
are to prepare to manage -- as effectively and humanely as possible
-- the period of coming chaos. <br>
Honest hope comes from looking a hard reality in the
eye. <br>
[more at]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=8714&method=full">http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=8714&method=full</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
April 26, 1978 </b></font><br>
The Supreme Court explicitly gives private-sector<br>
entities (including polluters) 1st Amendment rights in the First<br>
National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=435&invol=765">http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=435&invol=765</a><br>
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