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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>January 10, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[overlap tweets]<br>
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson <br>
@ayanaeliza<br>
<b>“The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate
denial has near-perfect overlap” — of both funders and followers.
</b><br>
Excellent piece from <br>
@blkahn<br>
connecting the dots between the GOP, white supremacy, and the
climate crisis.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/ayanaeliza/status/1347939148812922882">https://twitter.com/ayanaeliza/status/1347939148812922882</a>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[an amplifier]<br>
<b>The Climate Crisis Will Be Steroids for Fascism</b><br>
Brian Kahn<br>
Thursday 2:05PM<br>
The Capitol has a police force with a $500 million budget, and yet
it failed at its one job on Wednesday. Members of Congress, among
the most protected people on the planet, were forced to hide in
undisclosed locations as violent extremists overran the Capitol.<br>
<br>
The anti-democratic message Wednesday’s insurrection sent is
chilling. Far-right mobs incited by the president over baseless
conspiracy theories and a commitment to white nationalism breached
one of the most secure places in the U.S. and disrupted a basic
democratic process of certifying election results. But what it
portends for both the future of the Republican Party and its
response to the climate crisis is even more chilling.<br>
<br>
The ingredients for the toxic soup that stirred extremists to take
on one of the branches of government (as well as numerous
coordinated attacks at the state level) will only grow more
plentiful and powerful as the climate crisis worsens. If elected
officials aren’t ready to take a clear-eyed look at the damage done
on Wednesday and what awaits us in the coming hotter decades, we’ll
face even more extreme assaults on democracy and the most vulnerable
among us.<br>
<br>
The violent assault on the Capitol followed a pattern increasingly
familiar in the Trump era, though it’s been an undercurrent in
American society for much longer. Blatant lies about the election
being rigged were spread over social media and used as cover to
convene in Washington, DC, and storm the Capitol. Extremists clashed
with police, met minimal resistance outside, and were allowed to
mill about the building for hours, trashing offices and posing in
the Senate for Parler-worthy photos.<br>
<br>
Then they were allowed to politely file out of the building and only
a few dozen were arrested. That number may rise, but the initial
response pales in comparison to how Black Lives Matter protesters
were treated this summer. Not to mention climate-related protesters
like Fire Drill Fridays where police created a huge perimeter to
cordon off press and onlookers and brought in buses to process
protesters who were arrested.<br>
<br>
Wednesday’s insurrection and law enforcement’s frail response are
eerily similar to what happened this summer when right-wing militias
spread conspiracies about wildfires in Oregon. In that case,
extremists sowed confusion to assert control over regions engulfed
in smoke, setting up armed checkpoints and threatening journalists.
Law enforcement turned a blind eye, and in the case of one sheriff,
even briefed extremists. At the time, experts told me it was in part
an attempt by far-right figures to see what they could get away
with.<br>
<br>
The lesson in both cases is that the pushed boundaries didn’t snap
back. The permissive nature of law enforcement and people in
power—more than 120 Republican representatives and senators voted to
decertify state election results based on lies after the mob invaded
the Capitol Building—opens the door to further violent probing.<br>
<br>
Now, I’m a firm believer that an assault on democracy or unlawful
behavior during a climate-fueled disaster alone should be reason to
hold people to account. But looking at the two events in tandem and
seeing the climate future that awaits us is what really raises my
alarm bells—and should raise those of the people in power.
Pretending this will pass or offering broad platitudes that “we are
better than this” will ensure more terror.<br>
<br>
Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms,
more intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an
assault on the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing
mindset of small government have left the country with fewer
resources to deal with the fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show,
the far-right will be there to try to fill the power void. Those
fires occurred in a predominantly white region.<br>
<br>
There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran
through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will
happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly
Black, brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at
all. We’ve seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill
immigrants whom he falsely blamed for putting strain on the
environment. And we saw it in the white vigilante violence in the
vacuum after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so
frequently, it even has a name: ecofascism.<br>
<br>
After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now
expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate
instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists
literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When
climate change upends communities with far fewer
defenses—communities that hate groups already scapegoat—the results
will be catastrophic.<br>
<br>
It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top
Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and
hate. The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and
climate denial has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures
deny the climate crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the
end of the day, their goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build
and consolidate power.<br>
<br>
Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of
addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited
extremists is a good place to start. Emily Atkin of Heated noted on
Twitter in the wake of the Georgia special election that gave
Democrats the Senate that democracy reform is climate policy, and I
have to agree. Washington, DC, statehood, getting corrosive money
out of politics, and expelling seditionists are all good places to
start. A strong federal response to climate change that both draws
down emissions and protects people from the impacts already in the
pipeline is also crucial. Decades of weakening the federal
government and proselytizing about the power of the individual has
left millions exposed to calamity. Rebuilding the federal response
to climate change, and ensuring it also engages everyone in moving
the country forward through good-paying jobs and a just transition
for frontline and fossil fuel communities, are essential to beating
hate groups into the background.<br>
<br>
None of this will make the fascism on full display disappear
overnight. But doing nothing or insisting we turn the page opens the
door to something much worse.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-climate-crisis-will-be-steroids-for-fascism-1846009446">https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-climate-crisis-will-be-steroids-for-fascism-1846009446</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[but it might be smart to start today]<br>
<b>Our Best Chance to Slow Global Warming Comes in the Next Nine
Years</b><br>
By Bill McKibben - January 7, 2021<br>
- -<br>
Global warming has been a public problem since only about 1990.
Scientists had worked on it for decades prior, and we now know that
the oil companies also had been studying the impact of their
products on the climate. But it was James Hansen’s congressional
testimony, in 1988, that brought the issue into the open, and it was
the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, that marked the first halting
attempts at something like international negotiations to address it.
2050 has now emerged as the consensus target for many countries to
go carbon-neutral. That date won’t mark the end of the climate
crisis, but it’s useful as a final deadline for the transition to a
new economic and energy regime that respects the physical limits of
the planet. So, three decades down and three to go.<br>
<br>
Of those decades, the two most important are the one we’ve just come
through and the one we’re now entering. The nineteen-nineties and
the two-thousands were essentially wasted: oil-company propaganda
and accompanying political muscle made sweeping action impossible.
The epic failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, in 2009, and
of the cap-and-trade climate legislation on Capitol Hill, in 2010,
closed that era.<br>
<br>
But, right around that time, three trends started to gather force.
First, by then we could see the effects of rising temperatures on
the world around us: fires, floods, and storms were so much more
frequent and intense that denying them became exponentially harder.
Second, engineers took us swiftly down the learning curve of
renewable energy, dropping the price of solar and wind power by an
order of magnitude. Third, global environmental movements arose,
which meant that politicians had someone to fear besides oil
tycoons; they couldn’t come back empty-handed from Paris, as they
had from Copenhagen, and they didn’t. The 2015 Paris agreement, and
especially its commitment to try and hold temperature increases to
1.5 degrees Celsius, brought a new level of seriousness to the
climate fight. Donald Trump was a big pothole in the road forward—he
was able to slow the momentum, but not to stop it.<br>
<br>
Yet the past decade only matters if this decade plays out perfectly.
The elements are now in place for truly rapid action, but success
will require going far faster than economics alone can push us, and
far faster than politicians will find comfortable. Never forget that
climate change is a timed test; our best chance to take the actions
that will end the trajectory of rising emissions comes this decade.
That’s why climate scientists talk so much about the change that
must happen between now and 2030: emissions must fall by at least
half. If civilization is to have a chance, we should be thinking of
the years from 2030 to 2050 as the mopping-up phase: the big, hard
breaks with the status quo have to come in the next nine years. What
does that look like in practice? An immediate end to new fossil-fuel
infrastructure, be it giant pipelines from the tar sands of Canada
or natural-gas hookups to new homes and businesses. A retrofitting
of buildings around the world to make them both efficient and fully
electrified, so that they can take advantage of what needs to be a
breathtaking rollout of renewable energy. An epic change in the way
that we move ourselves and our stuff around the world—electricity
and muscles need to replace hydrocarbons. An end to deforestation,
and rapid research into and development of ways to grow foods that
soak up, instead of spew, carbon. A halt to the flow of money to the
epically irresponsible fossil-fuel industry.<br>
<br>
These things have to happen everywhere; doing them in scattered
countries doesn’t get the job done. And they have to happen against
the backdrop—really, now, against the foreground—of a
climate-stressed world, where all the effects we’ve seen so far will
only get worse. It’s clearly physically and financially possible to
do what needs to be done. (Much of the cost of the transition can be
covered simply because each year we will be spending less to buy
fuel.) But beating both inertia and vested interests will be, as
usual, the trick. It should get easier as time goes on: ExxonMobil
is no longer the giant it was a decade ago, and each new electric
car cuts its power a little more. The world’s governments are
increasingly saying the right things, and none more so than the
incoming Biden team. But they will need the forces of the past
decade—the engineering triumphs and the movement-building—to keep
accelerating in order to provide the required push. Most people
alive today will see how this story comes out. A decade is a hundred
and twenty months. That’s about five hundred weeks. It’s all the
time we’ve got...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/our-best-chance-to-slow-global-warming-comes-in-the-next-nine-years">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/our-best-chance-to-slow-global-warming-comes-in-the-next-nine-years</a><br>
<br>
<p> </p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Inside Climate News]<br>
<b>Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively
Quickly After Emissions Go to Zero</b><br>
That’s one of several recent conclusions about climate change that
came more sharply into focus in 2020.<br>
By Bob Berwyn - January 3, 2021<br>
- -<br>
<b>Climate Justice and Science are Connected</b><br>
California, one of the wealthiest parts of the world, may be able to
adapt to sea level rise, but it’s a matter of life and death for
millions of other people in developing countries with small carbon
footprints that contribute little to global warming.<br>
<br>
But new research in 2020 showed that researchers have done
relatively little to study impacts of global warming extremes in
areas where the most people are affected. And this year, climate
impacts were compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. Together, they
affected at least 50 million people worldwide, mostly in developing
countries in Asia and Africa, as well as Central America. <br>
<br>
But the impacts have mostly been measured in the developed world by
scientists in wealthier nations, raising a fundamental issue of
climate justice in science, said University of Oxford climate
scientist Fredi Otto, co-author of a recent study that outlines the
challenges of understanding climate extremes in lower income
countries.<br>
<br>
Soon after starting work on the study, she said, “It became very
obvious that scientists research what’s in their backyard, but not
in Africa, large parts of Asia, or South America.” As climate
extremes intensify, the information gaps become “a lot more
obvious,” she said.<br>
<br>
The reason it’s important is that a lack of accurate information
about extreme climate impacts puts more lives at risk, she said. “We
don’t know what we need to adapt to and build resilience for … or
what should trigger a heat warning,” she added. <br>
<br>
<b>Making it Stop</b><br>
Some scientists punctuate their alarming warmings with hopeful
messages because they know that the worst possible outcome is
avoidable. <br>
<br>
Recent research shows that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will
break the vicious cycle of warming temperatures, melting ice,
wildfires and rising sea levels faster than expected just a few
years ago.<br>
<br>
There is less warming in the pipeline than we thought, said Imperial
College (London) climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, a lead author of
the next major climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. <br>
<br>
“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net
zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within
a decade or two,” he said. “There will be very little to no
additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.”<br>
<br>
The widespread idea that decades, or even centuries, of additional
warming are already baked into the system, as suggested by previous
IPCC reports, were based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of
experiments done with climate models that never assumed zero
emissions.” <br>
<br>
Those models assumed that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere would remain constant, that it would take centuries
before they decline, said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann,
who discussed the shifting consensus last October during a segment
of 60 Minutes on CBS.<br>
<br>
The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after
emissions go to zero was described as a “game-changing new
scientific understanding” by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration
of news organizations covering climate.<br>
<br>
“This really is true,” he said. “It’s a dramatic change in the
paradigm that has been lost on many who cover this issue, perhaps
because it hasn’t been well explained by the scientific community.
It’s an important development that is still under appreciated.”“It’s
definitely the scientific consensus now that warming stabilizes
quickly, within 10 years, of emissions going to zero,” he said.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03012021/five-aspects-climate-change-2020/</a>
<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 -
January 10, 2006 </b></font><br>
<br>
The New York Times interviews MIT's Kerry Emanuel regarding his
research on climate change and hurricanes.<br>
<blockquote>For decades, Kerry Emanuel, the meteorologist and
hurricane specialist from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, was known as a cautious centrist on questions of
global warming and hurricane ferocity.<br>
<br>
Professor Emanuel asserted often that no firm link had been
established between warming and the intensity and frequency of
hurricanes.<br>
<br>
But in August, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf
Coast, Professor Emanuel wrote in the journal Nature that he had
discovered statistical evidence that hurricanes were indeed
affected by global warming. He linked the increased intensity of
storms to the heating of the oceans.<br>
<br>
"His paper has had a fantastic impact on the policy debate," said
Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford. "Emanuel's this
conservative, apolitical guy, and he's saying, 'Global warming is
real.' "...<br>
- -<br>
Q. Because last year's hurricane season was so intense, many
people declared: "Ah, ha! Global warming!" Were they right?<br>
<br>
A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor.
But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of
chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally
remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has
been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably
because of global warming.<br>
<br>
There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been
warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any
natural process we know about.<br>
<br>
We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor,
the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to
global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the
intensity of hurricanes.<br>
<br>
I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a
degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5
percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a
larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature
increase of only one-half degree Centigrade...<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10conv.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10conv.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0</a><br>
<br>
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