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<i><font size="+1"><b>August 12, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[James Hansen is the Grandfather of Climate Scientists]<br>
<b>Why Are You Optimistic?</b><br>
11 August 2020<br>
James Hansen<br>
Why are you optimistic, I have often been asked since I wrote Young
People's Burden, which describes the steep climate and energy hill
that we are leaving for young people to climb.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/8/577/2017/">https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/8/577/2017/</a><br>
<br>
Two weeks ago I noted
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200731_StudentLeadership.pdf">http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200731_StudentLeadership.pdf</a>
the Students Government Leaders' Statement on Carbon Dividends, a
bipartisan statement by 350+college student government presidents
from all 50 states. Scroll down their Statement
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.s4cd.org/statement">https://www.s4cd.org/statement</a> to see the impressive future leaders,
who support carbon fee & dividend, the essential underlying
policy needed to phase out fossil fuel emissions as rapidly as
possible.<br>
<br>
The essential adjunct to fossil fuel phaseout is a realistic
alternative for abundant affordable clean energy, which is needed to
provide a good standard of living for all people. Six years ago I
was at a United Nations meeting in Paris on sustainable development
organized by Jeff Sachs.<br>
<br>
There were teams from each of many individual nations examining
potential pathways to reach carbon-free emissions by mid-century.
In most cases it seemed that the pathway needed to include a role
for advanced generation nuclear power - otherwise the complement to
intermittent renewable energies would be gas, which is little better
than coal.<br>
<br>
My concern about nuclear power has been the effect of
backward-looking 1970s thinking that has poisoned public perception
of nuclear power. Rational scientific arguments that modern nuclear
power has the potential to be among the safest energies with the
smallest environmental footprint seem to be inadequate to overcome
the psychology of "nuclear fear" that has been promoted successfully
by various groups and eagerly supported by the media.<br>
<br>
Can young people overcome the obstacles that they are faced with? I
was encouraged by the dedication of the young people in the
sustainable development meeting. One of them was Jessica Lovering,
pictured on the left above. She is one of thousands of bright young
people coming out of our universities today. They are the basis for
my optimism.<br>
<br>
Look at this site and click on individual photos to see what some of
these people are about. They are smart, educated, idealistic,
determined to make our world a better, fairer place for all people.
Read about their progressive policy agenda... <br>
- - <br>
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monthly global temperature updates here
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You can sign up for my other Communications here
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-<br>
I opened a Twitter account @DrJamesEHansen,
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/drjamesehansen">https://twitter.com/drjamesehansen</a>), but I am focusing mainly on
finishing Sophie's Planet. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200811_Optimism.pdf">http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200811_Optimism.pdf</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Yale Climate Change Communications]<br>
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new research article
<b>"Personal Stories Can Shift Climate Change Beliefs and Risk
Perceptions: The Mediating Role of Emotion"</b> in the journal
Communication Reports. <br>
A key challenge in climate change communication is that many people
perceive the impacts of climate change to be far away in time and
space. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that climate change
impacts are here and now, and already harming people and local
ecosystems. One way to do this is to share the personal stories of
people who have experienced the effects of climate change. Our own
climate news service Yale Climate Connections, broadcasts a new
story each weekday on more than 600 radio stations and frequencies
nationwide, featuring diverse voices telling their own stories of
local climate impacts and solutions.<br>
<br>
In this study, we tested the persuasive effects of one such radio
story in two experiments. The story features Richard Mode, a North
Carolina sportsman, who describes his emotional response to the
impacts of climate change on his favorite places to hunt and fish.<br>
We found that listening to this radio story had significant positive
effects on the climate change beliefs and risk perceptions of both
conservatives in the U.S. (Study 1) and moderates and conservatives
in six southeastern U.S. states (Study 2). <br>
<br>
Prior research has found that emotions can play an important role in
the persuasiveness of climate change messages. So, in our second
experiment, we examined whether the persuasive effects of this radio
story could be explained by the activation of feelings of worry and
compassion. The results indicate that activated feelings of worry
and compassion accounted for much of the story's effects--i.e., that
the more people felt worry and/or compassion in response to the
story, the more they changed their climate change beliefs and risk
perceptions. <br>
<br>
Together, these findings highlight the importance of sharing
personal stories about how climate change is affecting people and
ecosystems, and underscore the importance of emotion as well as
facts in climate change communication. <br>
<br>
The full article is available here to those with a subscription to
Communication Reports. If you would like to request a copy, please
send an email to <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:climatechange@yale.edu">climatechange@yale.edu</a> with the subject line:
Request Personal Stories of Climate Impacts paper.<br>
<br>
We hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. And as always,
thank you for your interest and support.<br>
<br>
On behalf of my co-authors at Yale and NOAA: Abel Gustafson, Matthew
Ballew, Matthew Goldberg, Matthew Cutler, and Seth Rosenthal.<br>
Cheers,<br>
Tony<br>
-----<br>
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D.<br>
<p><br>
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<p><br>
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[32 page report]<br>
<b>Canary in the coalmine: A former senior fossil fuel executive
speaks out</b><br>
Ian Dunlop - 10 Aug 2020<br>
Download PDF <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature">https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature</a><br>
This post is the introduction, by Ian Dunlop, to the publication
this week by Breakthrough of a collection of Ian's media commentary
articles. Ian is is a senior member of the Breakthrough Advisory
Board and a Member of the Club of Rome. He was formerly an
international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the
Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of
Company Directors. He is co-author of "What Lies Beneath: the
understatement of existential climate risk", and of the Club of
Rome's "Climate Emergency Plan".<br>
<br>
This publication brings together some of my commentaries over the
last three years on the need for real action on climate change. Not
the normal variety of political action, but an emergency approach,
akin to a wartime level of response, which before long will have to
be adopted as impacts escalate around this hot, dry and vulnerable
continent, and around the world.<br>
<br>
Climate change is now an existential risk to humanity which, unless
addressed immediately as a genuine emergency, will likely destroy
civilisation as we know it within decades. We are not going to let
that happen. <br>
My life seems to have revolved around these types of risks. As a
toddler, I was hugely impressed with the appearance of four
duckponds in a line across my grandfather's farm in the east of
England as a German bomber jettisoned its cargo while trying to
avoid a pursuing Hurricane. Fortunately no-one was hurt, but it
could easily have been otherwise. It prompted my rapid evacuation to
Wales. Living on a former German airbase with my Royal Air Force
parents immediately after World War Two, school was shared with
displaced children who had lost everything in the war. Then came the
Cold War, with that same airbase on 24-hour alert keeping supply
lines open as part of the Berlin airlift, interrupted by regular
emergency alarms. <br>
<br>
Training as an engineer, and recognising in the 1950s that the world
ran on energy, not money, I joined the oil industry, which for years
was a hugely satisfying career, taking me to remote and fascinating
parts of the world. I was also fortunate early on to become involved
in long-term scenario planning which thought about issues like
climate change, and the unsustainability of an economic system
reliant upon perpetual economic growth. Not as immediate priorities,
but as issues which sooner or later would become a constraint on
global society, as the Club of Rome was identifying around the same
time. <br>
<br>
Risk-management experience was eventful. I was on the first
semi-submersible oil rig offshore of Scotland soon after it started
operations when the proverbial one-in-a-hundred year storm hit,
dragging the rig on an inadvertent voyage, 300 kilometres down the
North Sea. Then there was coal-mining in Australia, where
well-established geological conditions could suddenly change into
deadly working environments overnight. <br>
<br>
By the end of the 1980s, as James Hansen gave his first testimony on
climate change to the US Senate, climate science was becoming ever
more definitive and the evidence of climate impact was mounting. The
risks had reached the point where action to reduce carbon emissions
from fossil fuels was essential. Accordingly I left the industry in
the early 1990s, to work toward that end, and more broadly the
evolution of genuinely sustainable societies.<br>
<br>
After working constructively with other industry leaders in the late
1980s on responses of the coal industry to climate change, I rather
naively assumed that their successors would continue with a
progressive approach. But it was not to be. As the 1990s progressed,
the introduction in Australia of perverse short-term incentives,
combined with myopic conservative politics, ensured that climate
concerns took a back seat to the expansion of fossil fuels and
climate denialism reigned supreme. The same is true globally. Since
the UN climate negotiations were initiated in 1990, the world has
emitted as much carbon to the atmosphere as had occurred from the
Industrial Revolution till 1990. And global emissions are still
increasing. <br>
<br>
The result is an immediate existential threat to our civilisation as
irreversible climate tipping points begin to trigger. The drought
and bushfires devastating large parts of Australia are early signs
that these tipping points are starting to manifest themselves here.
<br>
<br>
The lesson I learnt from the energy industry is that the successful
management of high risks requires brutal honesty in assessing those
risks at the outset, otherwise inadequate solutions are adopted and
chaos ensues, as we are now seeing. <br>
<br>
The further lesson is that in a genuine emergency, early action is
essential, otherwise the impacts become so overwhelming that all
resources are devoted to addressing symptoms, particularly recovery
from disaster, rather than paying adequate attention to the
underlying cause. The result is a "death-spiral" toward social
collapse, as impacts escalate unconstrained. This is already evident
in our politicians' response to the growing bushfire threat, as they
perform ever more grotesque contortions to avoid emergency climate
action. <br>
<br>
After three decades of deliberate refusal to face reality, it is
clear that our political system is not prepared to learn these
lessons, rendering it incapable of managing the climate threat. Even
worse, the government and its conservative business and media
paymasters appear hellbent on maintaining their denialist,
pro-fossil fuel stance irrespective of the immense damage it will do
to global and local communities. <br>
<br>
We no longer have time for interminable royal commissions and
inquiries, whose conclusions are invariably ignored. The government
and opposition must make way for a new governance structure with
leadership and expertise capable of handling the immediate climate
emergency. <br>
<br>
This is a drastic step which I do not propose lightly. I hope these
articles will explain why it is now essential. The status quo is not
an option.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature">https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/specialfeature</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[estimates down from 2080]<br>
<b>End of Arctic sea ice by 2035 possible, study finds</b><br>
August 11th, 2020, by Alex Kirby<br>
How soon will the northern polar ocean be ice-free? New research
expects the end of Arctic sea ice by 2035.<br>
LONDON, 11 August, 2020 - The temperature of the Arctic matters to
the entire world: it helps to keep the global climate fairly cool.
Scientists now say that by 2035 there could be an end to Arctic sea
ice.<br>
<br>
The northern polar ocean's sea ice is a crucial element in the Earth
system: because it is highly reflective, it sends solar radiation
back out into space. Once it's melted, there's no longer any
protection for the darker water and rock beneath, and nothing to
prevent them absorbing the incoming heat.<br>
<br>
High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial - the
warm period around 127,000 years ago - have puzzled scientists for
decades.<br>
<br>
Now the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an
international research team to compare Arctic sea ice conditions
during the last interglacial with the present day. Their findings
are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.<br>
<br>
What is striking about the latest research is the date it suggests
for a possible total melt - 2035. Many studies have thought a
mid-century crisis likely, with another even carefully specifying
2044 as the year to watch. So a breathing space of only 15 years may
surprise some experts...<br>
<br>
During spring and early summer shallow pools of water form on the
surface of the Arctic sea ice. These "melt ponds" help to determine
how much sunlight is absorbed by the ice and how much is reflected
back into space. The new Hadley Centre model is the UK's most
advanced physical representation of the Earth's climate and a
critical tool for climate research, and it incorporates sea ice and
melt ponds.<br>
<br>
The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Climate
Change. Using the model to look at Arctic sea ice during the last
interglacial, they concluded that the impact of intense springtime
sunshine created many melt ponds, which played a crucial role in sea
ice melt. A simulation of the future using the same model indicates
that the Arctic may become sea ice-free by 2035.<br>
<br>
The joint lead author of the team is Dr Maria Vittoria Guarino, an
earth system modeller at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in
Cambridge. She says: "High temperatures in the Arctic have puzzled
scientists for decades. Unravelling this mystery was technically and
scientifically challenging. For the first time, we can begin to see
how the Arctic became sea ice-free during the last interglacial.<br>
<br>
"The advances made in climate modelling mean that we can create a
more accurate simulation of the Earth's past climate which, in turn,
gives us greater confidence in model predictions for the future."<br>
<br>
Dr Louise Sime, the group head of the palaeoclimate group and joint
lead author at BAS, says: "We know the Arctic is undergoing
significant changes as our planet warms. By understanding what
happened during Earth's last warm period we are in a better position
to understand what will happen in the future.<br>
<br>
Melt ponds crucial<br>
<br>
"The prospect of loss of sea ice by 2035 should really be focussing
all our minds on achieving a low-carbon world as soon as humanly
feasible."<br>
<br>
Dr David Schroeder from the University of Reading, UK, who co-led
the implementation of the melt pond scheme in the climate model,
says: "This shows just how important sea ice processes like melt
ponds are in the Arctic, and why it is crucial that they are
incorporated into climate models."<br>
<br>
The extent of the areas sea ice covers varies between summer and
winter. If more solar energy is absorbed at the surface, and
temperatures rise further, a cycle of warming and melting occurs
during summer months.<br>
<br>
When the ice forms, the ocean water beneath becomes saltier and
denser than the surrounding ocean. Saltier water sinks and moves
along the ocean bottom towards the equator, while warm water from
mid-depths to the surface travels from the equator towards the
poles.<br>
<br>
Scientists refer to this process as the ocean's global
"conveyor-belt". Changes to the volume of sea ice can disrupt normal
ocean circulation, with consequences for global climate. - Climate
News Network<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/end-of-arctic-sea-ice-by-2035-possible-study-finds/">https://climatenewsnetwork.net/end-of-arctic-sea-ice-by-2035-possible-study-finds/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Aug 7, 2020]<b><br>
</b><b>Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsKsaF-JcN4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsKsaF-JcN4</a><br>
<p>- - -<br>
</p>
[graduate student reports]<br>
<b>Coastal Erosion Variability: Permafrost Collaboration Team June
2020 Meeting</b><br>
IARPC Collaborations<br>
Coastal Erosion Variability at the Southern Laptev Sea Linked to
Winter Sea Ice and the Arctic Oscillation - presentation by David
Marcolino Nielsen, PhD student.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3a9kMGdiCY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3a9kMGdiCY</a><br>
<p>- - -<br>
</p>
[From 2018 - starts 5 min in. ]<br>
<b>Development of a Predictive Model for Arctic Coastal Erosion //
Diana Bull</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJCp3JpeMI4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJCp3JpeMI4</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
August 12, 2004 </b></font><br>
<p>August 12, 2004: Discussing a BusinessWeek story about the
business community's growing worries about global warming, the
Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum observes:<br>
<br>
"Like national healthcare, I suspect that global warming will
really get taken seriously only when the business community
finally demands it. What BusinessWeek documents is only the first
whispers of those demands, but the endgame is already in sight."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004498.php">http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004498.php</a>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20131216021452/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-08-15/global-warming">http://web.archive.org/web/20131216021452/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-08-15/global-warming</a>
<br>
</p>
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