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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>December 30, 2020</b></font></i> <br>
</p>
[Greta]<br>
<b>'We cannot make it without science': Greta Thunberg says climate
experts are being ignored</b><br>
Climate specialists not being listened to despite Covid showing
importance of following science, activist says<br>
<br>
Climate experts are not being listened to despite the coronavirus
pandemic highlighting the importance of following science, the
environmental activist Greta Thunberg has said.<br>
<br>
The Swedish teenager argued that the Covid-19 crisis had “shone a
light” on how “we cannot make it without science”, but people were
“only listening to one type of scientist”.<br>
<br>
Her comments came in a joint interview with the author Margaret
Atwood, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday as part of the two-times
Booker prize-winning writer’s guest-editing of the Today programme.<br>
<br>
Thunberg was asked if the pandemic’s impact on people’s appreciation
of science would have an effect on climate information.<br>
“It could definitely have. I think this pandemic has shone a light
on how … we are depending on science and that we cannot make it
without science,” Thunberg said.<br>
<br>
“But of course, we are only listening to one type of scientist, or
some types of scientist, and, for example, we are not listening to
climate scientists, we’re not listening to scientists who work on
biodiversity and that, of course, needs to change.”...<br>
- -<br>
Elsewhere in the interview, Thunberg said she tried to ignore
content on Twitter, adding: “If I were to spend my time trying to
defend myself, I wouldn’t be doing anything else.”<br>
<br>
She said it was great to be back at school after a period of
campaigning and that she loved studying.<br>
<br>
The coronavirus pandemic has in recent months prevented the Fridays
for Future movement that Thunberg inspired from holding its mass
rallies, which started as a solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament
in Stockholm in August 2018.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/29/we-cannot-make-it-without-science-greta-thunberg-says-climate-experts-are-being-ignored">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/29/we-cannot-make-it-without-science-greta-thunberg-says-climate-experts-are-being-ignored</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[lost news stories from DeSmogBlog]<br>
<b>These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020</b><br>
By Sharon Kelly - December 28, 2020<br>
At the start of December 2020, U.N. Secretary General António
Guterres spoke at Columbia University, appearing not before a packed
auditorium as in years past, but before a “virtual” audience, making
his annual State of the Planet address. “To put it simply,” he said,
“the state of the planet is broken.”<br>
<br>
“Today, we are at 1.2 degrees of warming and already witnessing
unprecedented climate extremes and volatility in every region and on
every continent,” Guterres said.<br>
<br>
“Let’s be clear: human activities are at the root of our descent
towards chaos,” he went on. “But that means human action can help
solve it.”<br>
<br>
The speech was a fitting postscript for a year that brought not just
the Covid-19 pandemic, but also a pummeling of catastrophes
worldwide, many related to climate change.<br>
<br>
But amid those disasters and under an openly hostile-to-science
Trump administration, momentum continued to quietly build — albeit
excruciatingly slowly — away from the burning of coal, oil, and
natural gas and towards, perhaps, meaningful action to slow the
climate crisis.<br>
<br>
The past year may be a difficult one to look back on — but amid the
crises, there are signs that long-entrenched powerful interests may
in fact be dug in on shaky ground.<br>
<br>
<b>Unprecedented Disasters</b><br>
2020 may well be the warmest year ever recorded, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in
mid-December.<br>
<br>
Amid that heat came a seemingly unending series of climate-linked
disasters, prompting the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain
to warn in November that “climate change will have a more
significant medium- and long-term impact on the human life and on
Earth” than even Covid-19.<br>
<br>
The U.S. was hit by a billion-dollar weather and climate disasters
16 times between January and September, according to NOAA — an
average of one major catastrophe every 2.5 weeks for 40 weeks.<br>
<br>
During this record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season that brought
30 named storms (the historic yearly average is 12), other
multi-billion-dollar disasters barely registered in the national
media. NOAA’s list includes eleven outbreaks of derechos, tornadoes,
hail, or “severe weather” in the central and southern U.S., along
with three named hurricanes (Laura, Sally and Isaias).<br>
<br>
“It was such a busy and crazy a year that a derecho that savaged the
Midwest somehow flew under the radar, despite damage nearing $10
billion, and is barely remembered,” the Associated Press reported of
the August events...<br>
And while major storms themselves made headlines, the toxic
pollution that followed in their wakes often barely registered in
the national press — and at times, went unmeasured because monitors
were offline.<br>
<br>
<b>Fires Around the World</b><br>
In January, as Wuhan entered its first lockdown and quarantine and
the first Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in the U.S., Australia was
battling deadly bushfires that ultimately raged across an area twice
the size of Florida.<br>
<br>
By summer, it was the U.S. Pacific coast that was burning. A
horrific fire season this year turned skies blood-red from
California to Washington state.<br>
<br>
As of December 18, the National Interagency Fire Center had tracked
56,914 wildfires in the U.S., which burned across more than 10.25
million acres.<br>
<br>
“We’re seeing fires in places that we don’t normally see fires,”
Crystal A. Kolden, a University of California, Merced professor of
fire science, told the New York Times in September. “Normally it’s
far too wet to burn.”<br>
<br>
That’s in part because 2020 also brought an extraordinary — but
relatively less discussed — drought that spread across a third of
the U.S.. “Compared to late 2019 and early 2020, when there was very
little drought in the continental United States, this is quite an
extreme single-year event that developed rapidly over the course of
2020,” Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, said. “But if you look over longer time
scales, I would argue this is really a continuation of a
multi-decadal event that began around 2000. There have been some
breaks, but the Southwest has been in more-or-less continuous
drought conditions since then.”<br>
<br>
Not only did California’s wildfires continue into December, but a
third major wildfire system further south also burned this year
while attracting less global attention. In Brazil, the Pantanal
wetlands — afflicted by drought — caught fire repeatedly this year
and burned rapidly, with the blazes consuming a quarter of the
tropical wetlands in what the World Wildlife Foundation calls “one
of the most biologically rich environments on the planet.”<br>
<br>
And this summer, the Arctic, which has seen climate heating at
roughly double average rates, not only experienced an abnormally hot
summer — with temperatures in the Siberian town Verkhoyansk hitting
100.4°F, the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic
circle — but the Siberian tundra then broke out in wildfires of its
own.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Plummeting Fossil Fuel Prices</b><br>
But amid all the crises, signs of a different shift have begun to
emerge — one that may have some potential to alter the climate
trajectory we’ve stayed on for decades.<br>
<br>
The oil, coal, and gas industries went into 2020 in rough financial
shape, generating the lowest returns in the S&P 500 in 2019
after underperforming compared to the rest of the economy for a
decade. That was before the price of oil plunged — and even, for a
very brief moment in April, dipped far below zero.<br>
Take, for example, ExxonMobil, which has continually doubled down on
fossil fuel expansions. “The company, for decades one of the most
profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in
the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about
35 percent this year,” The New York Times reported in December. “In
August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average,
replaced by Salesforce, a software company.”<br>
<br>
Also in December, Exxon’s former CEO Lee Raymond, incidentally, quit
the board of JPMorgan Chase, a role he’d held for more than three
decades. Divestment campaigners at 350.org took credit for an
ouster, calling it “a sign of the changing winds of financial
institutions taking climate action seriously.”<br>
<br>
<b>Cheap Renewables</b><br>
In contrast, renewable energy sources like solar and wind have
proved to be relatively resilient — or, in the words of Fatih Birol,
director of the International Energy Agency, in November, “immune to
Covid.”<br>
<br>
Utility-scale renewable energy saw costs continue to fall, making
renewable energy often cheaper than fossil fuels — and installations
reflected that competitiveness. “For solar, for example, new U.S.
residential installations will be basically flat for 2020, and new
non-residential (commercial, industrial, and institutional)
megawatts will be down from 2019’s tally,” The Union of Concerned
Scientists, an environmental organization, writes. “But large-scale
projects have mostly been able to keep happening, boosted by
favorable (but declining) tax incentives, and their successes will
be enough to actually propel solar to a record year: We look set to
have a total of more than 19,000 megawatts in new solar power
capacity, 43% above 2019’s installations, and 20% above the previous
record.”<br>
Building electrification efforts also spread in 2020. As of December
2, Sierra Club tracked 40 communities in California that had made
that commitment, and 50 more considering all-electric policies.
While electricity is still mostly generated by fossil fuels, those
efforts lay the groundwork for renewable energy and proponents claim
they will help reduce a single-family home's emissions by up to 90
percent within 30 years.<br>
<br>
<b>Exposing Risk</b><br>
This year also saw investigative reporting into ways that, for
example, automakers GM and Ford have known for a half-century that
climate change was underway and failed to act. Journalists have also
exposed the ways that PR firms like FTI Consulting used deceptive
campaigns and front groups to spread pro-fossil fuel propaganda.<br>
<br>
The impacts of climate change drew closer scrutiny from large
financial institutions. “More banks are getting buyers in coastal
areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of
the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that
lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of
their own money at risk,” the New York Times reported this summer.
“And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about
global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off
their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like
Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any
of the loans fail.”<br>
<br>
That, of course, isn’t exactly a heartwarming story of hope — but it
is a sign that efforts by fossil fuel companies to sow confusion and
doubt on climate change are becoming less and less compelling to
decision-makers.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Moving Forward</b><br>
The year also saw Black Lives Matter protests become what the New
York Times called the “largest movement in U.S. history” in the wake
of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This summer's
uprisings across the U.S. brought growing attention to widespread,
institutionalized racial injustice — and echoed with the idea that,
as marine biologist and Urban Ocean Lab founder Ayana Elizabeth
Johnson put it in a June column in Time magazine, “we can't solve
the climate crisis unless Black lives matter.”<br>
<br>
In 2021, in addition to taking a more intersectional approach
towards environmental justice, climate activists have vowed to keep
the pressure on the incoming Biden administration — which has
promised to move the U.S. towards a net zero pathway. If it does so,
the U.S. will join China, Japan, and South Korea which all announced
net zero emission targets this year.<br>
<br>
This shift, according to the Financial Times, means that the Paris
goals aren’t entirely out of reach. “‘If all these countries meet
their long-term targets of net zero, then the Paris agreement goals
are within reach again,’ says Niklas Höhne, professor of
environmental systems at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,”
as the FT reported in December. “Warming of 2.1C is now likely by
the end of the century — much lower than seemed likely only a few
years ago, according to analysis he has done with colleagues at the
NewClimate Institute and at Climate Analytics, both non-profit
research groups.”<br>
<br>
The picture, of course, looks a lot more grim when you take into
account countries’ questionable records of delivering on Paris
pledges, the FT adds.<br>
While this was a year of compounding and overlapping crises and
tragedies, there is perhaps some glimmer of hope to be found in the
fact that some of the past year’s under-reported stories could
signify — depending on what we all do in the coming days — that
structural shifts may be underway and that, as U.N. Secretary
Guterres suggested, as 2020 comes to an end, some elements of the
climate crisis remain unwritten.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/12/28/2020-end-year-underreported-climate-news">https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/12/28/2020-end-year-underreported-climate-news</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[The big think]<br>
<b>American Individualism Is My Climate Fear</b><br>
The stories we tell dismiss the collective. And collective action is
all that can save the planet’s many inhabitants.<br>
Lydia Millet - July 14, 2020<br>
For years you were a bore and a doomsayer if you mentioned climate
change at a party. It wasn’t even the elephant in the room: There
were no elephants. Just people.<br>
<br>
When an unapologetic denier of reality took over the White House,
and media outlets finally decided to run with those little climate
change end-times features that had been cooking along on a back
burner for roughly a half-century, the elephant finally shuffled in.
Now everyone acts like its presence is completely normal. What
climate change eleph—oh, you mean Stan? Well yeah, of course Stan’s
here. Stan’s always here. He makes a mess in the corner, I mean
Stan’s a big guy, but we’ll clean it up later. Wait, I see him
now—hey, Stan! Stan the Man! He’s over at the finger-food table,
picking up crab puffs with his trunk. Um, does he actually know
that’s crab? I thought he was a vegetarian!<br>
<br>
That’s how it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, anyway. While we
still went to parties. A few people still do, sure, but they’re
either wearing MAGA hats and possibly packing, or frat-boyish hordes
whose anti-mask rebellion looks like Daytona at spring break. The
partiers’ sense of entitlement appears so immense that it leaves no
space for elephants—figurative or otherwise.<br>
<br>
When I think of the future under climate change, I think of
populations in migration, sea-level rising, weather patterns
morphing, and crops and nation states failing. I think of diseases
in migration, as mosquitoes and ticks and other vectors spread to
new territories. Uncertainty and instability on a scale we can
barely imagine, though we’re getting a sneak peek with the Covid
pandemic. I think of chaos and strife—forms of social disorder,
unjust and tragic in their own right, whose effects can’t be undone.
Chiefly I’m preoccupied with what we call mass extinction, which is
irreversible and closely tied to climate change. Collective action
is the only thing that may be able to stop either.<br>
<br>
At the moment—a sustained, tormented moment—it doesn’t look like
collective action is our strong suit, here in the United States.<br>
<br>
What I fear, when it comes to climate change, is the war between the
self and the community.<br>
There’s been a curious loneliness, for people like me, in working on
climate and species extinction threats these past decades. At first,
it felt like gaslighting: The scientific evidence for both of these
ongoing crises was overwhelming, and their relevance and urgency,
not merely to one narrow interest group but to every interest group
that lives and will live, seemed painfully clear. (Some sectors of
the military, for instance, have been trying to plan for climate
change for ages, recognizing it as a clear and present danger to
national security.) Yet the mainstream gave the crises minimal
attention. The matter of planetary life support was a bit of a
boutique concern, in many people’s eyes. Like quilting or collecting
vinyl, it had its adherents—often poignantly committed to their
arcane hobbies—but their doings were of little general interest.<br>
<br>
There’s a kind of desperate fierceness that grows from such
isolation, from such commitment to an unpopular idea. I’ve seen it
with other ideas that are widely held to threaten the American way
of life—socialism and atheism, say, though each of those cases has
its own history and scope. “But can’t you see?” plead their
proponents from the sidelines. “Can’t you see?”<br>
<br>
These days the extended disinformation campaign over what should
properly be seen as a life-support emergency has retreated from
public and social spaces to the halls of Congress—specifically
Republican lawmakers and their constituent donors in a range of
fossil-fuel-related industries—where it’s making a last stand in
very, very bad policy. It’s also thriving—temporarily, I like to
hope—in an anti-government executive branch and its
Cabinet-for-hire, a willfully ignorant cadre of inverted Chicken
Littles who run around claiming the sky isn’t falling, even as
sizable chunks of it rain down awkwardly on their heads.<br>
<br>
Climate anxiety should probably be called climate fear. “Anxiety,”
after all, is a condition we believe we can and should manage and
subdue, maybe with therapy or pills. Fear, on the other hand, is a
motivator—a reflex we developed over the span of deep time through
painful trial and error, to avoid what can hurt or kill us. When we
wish to survive and thrive, we take coordinated, strategic action to
keep the object of that fear at bay.<br>
<br>
The human capacity for self-preservation through social
collaboration is often named as one of our primary and unique
attributes, along with the complex language we command and can use
to achieve it. In climate change and mass extinction, we’re facing
down the most powerful adversaries our kind has ever known. These
are clearly enemies of our own making. As the once-famous political
cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote in the 1970s and put in the mouth of a
fictional possum: We have met the enemy and he is us.<br>
<br>
These are vast, systemic problems that demand a vast, systemic
solution. A touch of personal nervousness won’t produce an adequate
defense. Only our superpowers of cooperation will be able to save
the day.<br>
<br>
What I fear, when it comes to climate change, is the war between the
self and the community. That war is nothing new—in this country, the
self has been winning the fight since Ronald Reagan and probably
before—but with climate and extinction at stake, and a time frame
that’s acutely limited, we’re at a crucial inflection point.<br>
<br>
The current commander in chief is an absurdly perfect embodiment, in
fact a caricature, of the side that’s pulling for the self. More
than any other factor that has been cited to explain his
popularity—including his commitment to a broad corporate license to
pollute, profit, and kill; to white supremacy; to sexism; or to an
anti-choice posture—that perfect embodiment is what accounts for the
die-hard loyalty of about a third of the voting populace. He
represents and repeatedly enacts, with a zealous and triumphal
abandon, the notion that one man, an individual and by extension the
individual—driven by no impulse or thought beyond pure,
inexhaustible self-interest—should spin like the sun at the center
of all being.<br>
<br>
On the other side, pulling for community, are arrayed the forces of
reason. And whether or not you find this particular commander in
chief to be charismatic (speaking for myself: no), the problem with
the forces of reason is that they don’t lend themselves to a
rebel-hero narrative.<br>
<br>
We choose, in the stories we tell, to omit or dismiss the collective
in favor of the lone fighter.<br>
Our cultural meaning-making is so profoundly vested in this one
story, which we tell over and over again, that we don’t truly
believe in any other. Movies, TV, and even video games focus on one
person who triumphs over the odds to save either the world or simply
him- or (more rarely) herself. Our mainstream fiction is that of an
individual under fire, who fights to vanquish evildoers. Sometimes
the individual joins up with a merry band or love interest, and
sometimes at the end we’re presented with a neat, attractive
nuclear-family unit, standing with their arms around each other amid
the smoldering ashes. But this is mostly a wink and a nod: We
understand the merry band or love interest is largely window
dressing. You need them for dialogue and drama.<br>
<br>
We make a crucial choice when we decide our meaning-making vehicles
will all be about one person’s victory over others. We choose, in
the stories we tell, to omit or dismiss the collective in favor of
the lone fighter. So we shouldn’t be surprised when that rebel-hero
narrative rises up to crush other, less established fables beneath
its shiny boot heel.<br>
<br>
Storytelling is everything. Actually being a rebel or hero isn’t a
requirement for the position of boss of these United States;
possessing literally no rebellious or heroic characteristics doesn’t
have to be a problem. If you can tell a tale of yourself as a rebel
and a hero loudly and confidently enough, using simple, reductive
words, some people will listen, hearing in your egotistical fantasy
the tolling bell of their personal liberation.<br>
<br>
I worry that our failure to tell a new story just as loudly—of love
and respect for the natural world that sustains us, of an embrace of
science by secular and religious groups alike, of sacrifice for the
common good, of the nobility of putting a livable and beautiful
future before the indulgent pleasures and reliable sameness of the
present—will lock us onto a path of desperate loss.<br>
<br>
The trick with the elephant in the room is not to befriend it, all
the while drinking and talking pleasantly as before, but to confront
it and wrestle it down. (This is the problem with extended
analogies, since real-life elephants deserve far kinder treatment.)
The metaphorical elephant is gigantic. No single guest at the feast
can possibly prove sufficient to the task: All partygoers are
needed.<br>
<br>
Lydia Millet is chief editor at the Center for Biological Diversity.
She is also a novelist whose latest book is A Children’s Bible.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/158483/american-individualism-climate-fear">https://newrepublic.com/article/158483/american-individualism-climate-fear</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[lessons not learned will be repeated]<br>
Plos One<br>
<b>Increased winter drownings in ice-covered regions with warmer
winters</b><br>
Published: November 18,
2020https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241222<br>
<blockquote>Abstract<br>
Winter activities on ice are culturally important for many
countries, yet they constitute a high safety risk depending upon
the stability of the ice. Because consistently cold periods are
required to form stable and thick ice, warmer winters could
degrade ice conditions and increase the likelihood of falling
through the ice. This study provides the first large-scale
assessment of winter drowning from 10 Northern Hemisphere
countries. We documented over 4000 winter drowning events. Winter
drownings increased exponentially in regions with warmer winters
when air temperatures neared 0°C. The largest number of drownings
occurred when winter air temperatures were between -5°C and 0°C,
when ice is less stable, and also in regions where indigenous
traditions and livelihood require extended time on ice. Rates of
drowning were greatest late in the winter season when ice
stability declines. Children and adults up to the age of 39 were
at the highest risk of winter drownings. Beyond temperature,
differences in cultures, regulations, and human behaviours can be
important additional risk factors. Our findings indicate the
potential for increased human mortality with warmer winter air
temperatures. Incorporating drowning prevention plans would
improve adaptation strategies to a changing climate.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241222">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241222</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 -
December 30, 2014 </b></font><br>
<p>"NBC Nightly News" reports on NOAA's finding that 2014 is the
hottest year on record.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/2014-officially-warmest-year-record-n277121">http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/2014-officially-warmest-year-record-n277121</a>
<br>
</p>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/<br>
</p>
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