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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>February 9, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[Global Times]<br>
<b>Climate change has high cost</b><br>
Study finds global warming linked to slowing economy<br>
By AFP<br>
Increasingly erratic weather caused by global warming threatens
global economic growth, scientists warned Monday with a report
showing that even short-lived climate volatility can have a
significant impact. <br>
<br>
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is causing
planet-wide temperature rises that have intensified deadly droughts,
heat waves, floods and super storms. <br>
<br>
But researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
(PIK), Columbia University and the Mercator Research Institute on
Global Commons and Climate Change said impact studies often look at
annual averages, rather than the effects of day-to-day temperature
fluctuations. <br>
<br>
"The real problem caused by a changing climate are the unexpected
impacts, because they are more difficult to adapt to," said
co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and Columbia, adding that these
rapid changes work differently to long-term ones...<br>
- -<br>
In 2015, the world's nations vowed to cap global warming "well
below" 2 C, and 1.5 C if possible.<br>
<br>
A subsequent report from the UN's climate science advisory panel,
the IPCC, left no doubt that 1.5 C was the safer threshold. There
has been just over 1 C of warming so far.<br>
<br>
The six years since 2015 are the six warmest ever registered, as are
20 of the last 21, evidence of a persistent and deepening trend, the
EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service has said.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215434.shtml">https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1215434.shtml</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Enticement]<br>
<b>XPrize details Elon Musk's $100M prize to fight climate change</b><br>
Teams will develop a prototype system to remove at least a ton of
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per day.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/">https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/</a><br>
- -<br>
[ "Phase one, collect underpants...Step 3, Profit" - South Park ]<br>
<b>XPrize details Elon Musk's $100M prize to fight climate change</b><br>
Teams will develop a prototype system to remove at least a ton of
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per day.<br>
Last month, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO and richest person in the
world Elon Musk announced he'd put a small percentage of his
billions toward "a prize for best carbon capture technology." On
Monday, XPrize announced the broad outline of the competition.<br>
<br>
The nonprofit will run the contest, which it says will be the
largest incentive prize in history. Teams from anywhere in the world
are invited "to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull
carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it
away permanently in an environmentally benign way," according to a
post on YouTube...<br>
- -<br>
A new page on the XPrize website announces the basic outline of the
competition, which will last for four years and require teams to
build "a working carbon removal prototype that can be rigorously
validated and capable of removing at least one ton per day."<br>
<br>
Teams will be judged not only on a working prototype, but also on
their plan to economically scale the new technology to the gigaton
level. (That's a billion tons.)..<br>
- -<br>
Over the years, Musk has said his two main business ventures, Tesla
Motors and SpaceX, are motivated by his desire to address climate
change and to provide a backup plan for humanity (on Mars),
respectively.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/">https://www.cnet.com/news/xprize-details-elon-musk-100m-prize-to-fight-climate-change/</a><br>
- -<br>
[XPrize video]<br>
<b>$100M XPRIZE FOR CARBON REMOVAL FUNDED BY ELON MUSK TO FIGHT
CLIMATE CHANGE</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX1DAqxXEI8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX1DAqxXEI8</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Doomistic preaching from a Unitarian minister]<br>
<b>Unstoppable Collapse: How to Avoid the Worst (Dowd 1-8-21)</b><br>
Jan 8, 2021<br>
thegreatstory<br>
The first draft of this video -- "Irreversible Collapse: Accepting
Reality, Avoiding Evil": <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/iQeK04WOGaA">https://youtu.be/iQeK04WOGaA</a> -- garnered
8,000 views and 200 comments in one week, including suggestions for
improvement. So I revised it based on collective intelligence.
SUMMARY: The stability of the biosphere has been in decline for
centuries and in unstoppable, out of control mode for decades. This
“Great Acceleration” of biospheric collapse is an easily verifiable
fact. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. <br>
Evidence is also compelling that the vast majority of people will
deny this, especially those still benefitting from the existing
order and those who fear that “accepting reality” means “giving up.”
<br>
The history of scores of previous boom and bust (progress / regress)
societies clearly reveals how and why industrial civilization is
dying. Accepting that Homo colossus’ condition is incurable and
terminal may be key to not making a bad situation catastrophically
worse. <br>
<br>
APPLICATION — TO AVOID BECOMING EVIL on a geological timescale, we
must…<br>
1. Minimize deadliest toxicity (nuclear, methane, chemicals).<br>
2. Assist plants (especially trees) in migrating poleward.<br>
3. Invest time, energy, and resources in all things regenerative,
including thriving with LESS (less energy, stuff, stimulation),
learning from and supporting indigenous wisdom and experience, and
nurturing community eco-literacy and resilience.<br>
<br>
CORE MESSAGE: Without an understanding of ecology, energy, and
history, good people with the best of intentions will unknowingly
propose and support policies likely to make a bad situation
catastrophically worse. Or as an ecologist friend of mine likes to
say, “If you don’t 'get' overshoot, you’ll misinterpret or
misdiagnose virtually everything important.”<br>
<br>
PERSONAL NOTE: I consider this video to be the single most important
thing I've created. Thanks to all who helped me improve it!<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8lNTPlsRtI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8lNTPlsRtI</a><br>
- -<br>
[first draft of the above video]<br>
<b>Irreversible Collapse: Accepting Reality, Avoiding Evil</b><br>
Dec 29, 2020<br>
thegreatstory<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQeK04WOGaA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQeK04WOGaA</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Book review - a modern question]<br>
<b>'Under A White Sky' Examines What It Might Take For Humans To
Continue To Exist</b><br>
February 8, 2021<br>
ADAM FRANK<br>
<u>Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,</u> by Elizabeth
Kolbert<br>
What is the difference between a city and a wetland? How about a
factory and a forest? What separates the environments that "nature"
builds and the ones we humans build?<br>
<br>
While this might have been an abstract question for philosophers at
one point, it's not anymore. Decades into what is appropriately
called "the climate crisis," humans are now facing down a planet
that has been profoundly changed by our collective activities. In
our struggle to find a response, and hopefully save ourselves, the
relationship between humans and nature is being reconstructed.<br>
<br>
That ongoing reconstruction is the focus of Elizabeth Kolbert's new
book Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future. And, as she shows
us, it's a project that's neither clear, clean or certain.<br>
<br>
Kolbert is well-known as the best-selling author of The Sixth
Extinction. Her reporting brought the ongoing mass-extinction event
that we're inadvertently causing now from talk in scientific
literature to common knowledge. In this new book, Kolbert once again
looks down the barrel of the Anthropocene, the new geologic epoch
where human activity represents the most powerful force shaping the
machinery of Earth's planetary evolution. Early in the book, Kolbert
lists the startling facts of this new Anthropocene Earth:<br>
<br>
<blockquote> "People have, by now, directly transformed more than
half the ice-free land on earth — some twenty-seven million square
miles — and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or
diverted most of the world's major rivers. Our fertilizer plants
and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial
ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit
about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.
...humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with
the exception of fish. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go,
and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the
middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does not already bear our
Friday-like footprints."<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
The consequence of the extraordinary power we're exerting on the
Earth is that the planet is changing. It's sliding out of the state
we found it in 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. But
this new planet seems like it's going to be a lot less hospitable to
our "project of civilization" than the one we've started with. In
response to this sobering fact, communities across the world are
trying to shift from inadvertent impacts on the natural world to
conscious and intentional control. Kolbert's book is, essentially,
reporting from the front lines of these frenzied efforts.<br>
<br>
Under A White Sky is broken into three parts. The first, Down The
River, tells two stories: The first is the effort to manage and
control fish populations associated with rivers in the Midwest. The
story is really about the Chicago River but, as Kolbert takes pains
to show, the big problem in managing the Anthropocene is that
everything is connected to everything else. A species like silver
carp introduced into an Arkansas pond may eventually find their way
to taking over lakes in Illinois. In the second part of the section,
Kolbert tells of the equally complicated effort to deal with the
drowning of Louisiana's Mississippi River delta which, itself, is a
consequence of the last century's vast effort to tame that same
river. The second section of the book, Into The Wild, details the
attempts to save species and ecosystems from our impacts — while the
third, Up In The Air, tells the story of "geoengineering," where
global warming is countered not by reducing fossil fuels but by
literally rewiring the atmosphere. As Kolbert shows, the lurking,
unintended consequences geoengineering can be pretty frightening.
One plan to cool the planet by spraying tiny sunlight-reflecting
particles high into the air would turn the sky from blue to white.<br>
<br>
What unites Kolbert's reporting in all these stories is the sense of
scale that comes with the problems we face targeting a reasonable
outcome for our Anthropocene — a "good Anthropocene" as some call
it. For more than a decade, I have been thinking about the
Anthropocene from my astronomer's perspective; this means I see it
from a 10,000-light-year view where it appears as planetary
transition much like the other huge transformations Earth and its
life have gone through before. What was so illuminating about
Kolbert's writing was to see planetary transformation brought down
to the human scale. Reaching a good Anthropocene, if such a thing
exists, would only happen as a result of millions of people in
millions of communities doing experiments. They will be trying
millions of ways to alter, adjust and adjudicate the natural
processes we already altered by mistake. With considerable humor,
Kolbert shows us just how fraught that project will be.<br>
<br>
What makes Under A White Sky so valuable and such a compelling read
is Kolbert tells by showing. Without beating the reader over the
head, she makes it clear how far we already are from a world of
undisturbed, perfectly balanced nature — and how far we must still
go to find a new balance for the planet's future that still has us
humans in it.<br>
<br>
Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of
Rochester and author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the
Fate of the Earth. You can find more from Adam here: @adamfrank4.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965306203/under-a-white-sky-examines-what-it-might-take-for-humans-to-continue-to-exist">https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965306203/under-a-white-sky-examines-what-it-might-take-for-humans-to-continue-to-exist</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[the essential human in Grist]<br>
<b>Interview: Elizabeth Kolbert on why we’ll never stop messing with
nature</b><br>
By Shannon Osaka on Feb 8, 2021<br>
<br>
In Australia, scientists collect buckets of coral sperm, mixing one
species with another in an attempt to create a new “super coral”
that can withstand rising temperatures and acidifying seas. In
Nevada, scientists nurse a tiny colony of one-inch long “Devil’s
Hole pupfish” in an uncomfortably hot, Styrofoam-molded pool. And in
Massachusetts, Harvard University scientists research injecting
chemicals into the atmosphere to dim the sun’s light — and slow down
the runaway pace of global warming.<br>
<br>
These are some of the scenes from Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book,
Under a White Sky, a global exploration of the ways that humanity is
attempting to engineer, fix, or reroute the course of nature in a
climate-changed world. (The title refers to one of the consequences
of engineering the Earth to better reflect sunlight: Our usual blue
sky could turn a pale white.)<br>
<br>
Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, has been covering the
environment for decades: Her first book, Field Notes from a
Catastrophe, traced the scientific evidence for global warming from
Greenland to Alaska; her second, The Sixth Extinction, followed the
growing pace of animal extinctions.<br>
<br>
Under a White Sky covers slightly different ground. Humanity is now,
Kolbert explains, in the midst of the Anthropocene — a geologic era
in which we are the dominant force shaping earth, sea, and sky.
Faced with that reality, humans have gotten more creative at using
technology to fix the problems that we unwittingly spawned: Stamping
out Australia’s cane toad invasion with genetic engineering, for
example, or using giant air conditioners to suck carbon dioxide out
of air and turn it into rock. As Kolbert notes, tongue-in-cheek:
“What could possibly go wrong?”<br>
<br>
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Q. Under a White Sky is about a lot of things — rivers, solar
geoengineering, coral reefs — but it’s also about what “nature”
means in our current world. What got you interested in that topic?</b><br>
<br>
A. All books have complicated births, as it were. But about four
years ago, I went to Hawaii to report on a project that had been
nicknamed the “super coral project.” And it was run by a very
charismatic scientist named Ruth Gates, who very sadly passed away
about two years ago. We have very radically altered the oceans by
pouring hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 into the air — and we
can’t get that heat out of the oceans in any foreseeable timescale.
We can’t change the chemistry back. And if we want coral reefs in
the future, we’re going to have to counter what we’ve done to the
oceans by remaking reefs so they can withstand warmer temperatures.
The aim of the project was to see if you could hybridize or
crossbreed corals to get more vigorous varieties.<br>
<br>
This idea — that we have to counteract one form of intervention in
the natural world (climate change) with another form of intervention
(trying to recreate reefs) — just struck me as a very interesting
new chapter in our long and very complicated relationship with
nature. And once I started to think about it that way, I started to
see that as a pretty widespread pattern. That’s really what prompted
the book.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Q. Some of these human interventions to save nature seem
hopeful and positive — and others go wrong in pretty epic ways.
How do you balance those two types of stories?</b><br>
<br>
A. The book starts with examples that probably will strike many
Grist readers as “OK, that makes sense. That makes sense.” But it
goes from regional engineering solutions through biotechnology,
through gene editing, and all the way up to solar geoengineering. So
it kind of leads you down what we might call “a slippery slope.” And
one of the interesting things about these cases is that they will
divide up people differently. Even people who consider themselves
environmentalists will come down on different sides of some of these
technologies. The bind we’re in is so profound that there’s no right
answer.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. So someone who accepts what we’re doing to save the Devil’s
Hole pupfish might not necessarily accept gene-editing mosquitos
or dimming the sun through solar geoengineering.</b><b><br>
</b><br>
A. Exactly. And I think sometimes those lines seem clearer than they
are once you start to think about it.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. At one point in the book, there’s a quote that is
(apocryphally) attributed to Einstein: “We cannot solve our
problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” But
you don’t say whether you agree with that sentiment or not. Is
that on purpose?</b><b><br>
</b><br>
A. Yeah, you can read the book and say, “I’m really glad people are
doing these things, and I feel better.” Or you can read the book and
say, as one scientific quote does, “This is a broad highway to
hell.” And both of those are very valid reactions.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. When you write about geoengineering, you point out that many
scientists conclude that it’s necessary to avoid catastrophic
levels of warming, but that it could also be a really bad idea. Do
you think that in 15 or 20 years you’ll be writing about a
geoengineering experiment gone wrong, much as you’re writing now
about failed attempts to protect Louisiana from flooding?</b><br>
<br>
A. I might argue about the timescales. I’m not sure I’ll be
reporting on it in 15 years, but I think you might be reporting on
it in 30 years.<br>
<br>
At the moment, it’s still the realm of sci-fi, and I’m not claiming
to have any particular insight into how people are going to respond
in the future. But the case that’s made in the book by some very
smart scientists is that we don’t have very many tools in our
toolbox for dealing with climate change quickly, because the system
has so much inertia. It’s like turning around a supertanker: It
takes literally decades, even if we do everything absolutely right.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>Q. You’ve reported on climate change for a long time. How
does it feel to see geoengineering being explored as a more
valuable — and potentially necessary — option?</b><br>
<br>
A. Well, one thing I learned in the course of reporting the book was
that what we now refer to as “geoengineering” was actually the very
first thing that people started to think about when they realized we
were warming the climate. The very first report about climate change
that was handed to Lyndon Johnson in 1965 wasn’t about how we should
stop emitting — it was: “Maybe we should find some reflective stuff
to throw into the ocean to bounce more sunlight back into space!”<br>
<br>
It’s odd, it’s kind of almost freakish, and I can’t explain it,
except to say that it sort of fits the pattern of the book.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. There’s been a longstanding fight in environmentalism between
a “technology-will-save-us” philosophy and a “return-to-nature”
philosophy. Based on the reporting in this book, do you think that
the technology camp has won?</b><br>
<br>
A. I think the book is an attempt to take on both of those schools
of thought. On some level, technology has won — even people who
would say “don’t do geoengineering” still want to put up solar
panels and build huge arrays of batteries, and those are
technologies! But where does that leave us? It goes back to Ruth
Gates and the “super coral project”. There was a big fight among
coral biologists about whether a project like that should even be
pursued. The Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy — even if you
have some replacement coral, how are you going to get them out on
the reef? But Gates’s point was, we’re not returning. Even if we
stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, you’re not getting the Great Barrier
Reef back as it was in a foreseeable timeframe.<br>
<br>
My impulse as an old-school environmentalist is to say “Well, let’s
just leave things alone.” But the sad fact is that we’ve intervened
so much at this point that even not intervening is itself … an
intervention.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. Now that we have a U.S. president who takes climate change
seriously, do you think we could actually start cutting carbon
emissions quickly?</b><br>
<br>
A. I really do want to applaud the first steps that the Biden
administration has taken. I think they show a pretty profound
understanding of the problem. But the question, and it’s a big one,
is “What are the limits?” Will Congress do anything? What will
happen in the Supreme Court? The U.S. is no longer the biggest
emitter on an annual basis, but on a cumulative basis we’re still
the biggest. And we still don’t have resolution on how much CO2 we
can put up there to avoid 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Those
are questions with big error bars. If we’re lucky, I think we can
avoid disastrous climate change. But if we’re not lucky, we’re
already in deep trouble.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. Is there anything else you want to say about the book?</b><br>
<br>
A. It sounds kind of weird after our conversation, but the book was
actually a lot of fun to write. It sounds odd when you’re talking
about a book where the subject is so immensely serious.<br>
<br>
<b>Q. You mean like when the undergraduates in Australia are tossing
each other buckets of coral sperm?</b><br>
<br>
A. Yes! There is always humor in all these situations. I hope that
sense of fun comes through.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/climate/interview-elizabeth-kolbert-on-her-book-under-a-white-sky-and-why-well-never-stop-messing-with-nature/">https://grist.org/climate/interview-elizabeth-kolbert-on-her-book-under-a-white-sky-and-why-well-never-stop-messing-with-nature/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[The history of ice core science is barely 100 years]<br>
<b>Drilling for Climatology: Antarctica's Deep Bore Ice Cores</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BmjeVItGIM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BmjeVItGIM</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 -
February 9, 2003 </b></font><br>
<br>
February 9, 2003: In a speech at Harvard University, Democratic
presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
declares:<br>
<blockquote> "We should be the world's environmental leader. Our
global environmental policy should be driven by our convictions,
not our constraints. America has not led but fled on the issue of
global warming. The first President Bush was willing to lead on
this issue. But the second President Bush's declaration that the
Kyoto Protocol was simply Dead on Arrival spoke for itself - and
it spoke in dozens of languages as his words whipped instantly
around the globe. What the Administration failed to see was that
Kyoto was not just an agreement; it represented the resolve of 160
nations working together over 10 years. It was a good faith effort
- and the United States just dismissed it. We didn't aim to mend
it. We didn't aim to sit down with our allies and find a
compromise. We didn't aim for a new dialogue. The Administration
was simply ready to aim and fire, and the target they hit was our
international reputation. This country can and should aim higher
than preserving its place as the world's largest unfettered
polluter. We should assert, not abandon our leadership in
addressing global economic degradation and the warming of the
atmosphere that if left unchecked, will do untold damage to our
coastline and our Great Plains, our cities and our economy."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/issues/kerr020903spenv.html">http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/issues/kerr020903spenv.html</a>
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticPolicy">http://c-spanvideo.org/program/DemocraticPolicy</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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