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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>February 18, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[Climate destabilization]<br>
<b>Heating Arctic may be to blame for snowstorms in Texas,
scientists argue</b><br>
The wintry weather that has battered the southern US and parts of
Europe could be a counterintuitive effect of the climate crisis<br>
<br>
Associating climate change, normally connected with roasting heat,
with an unusual winter storm that has crippled swaths of Texas and
brought freezing temperatures across the southern US can seem
counterintuitive. But scientists say there is evidence that the
rapid heating of the Arctic can help push frigid air from the north
pole much further south, possibly to the US-Mexico border.<br>
<br>
This week, a blast of winter weather has reached deep into the heart
of the US, causing several deaths and knocking out power for about 5
million people. Sleet and ice have battered Oklahoma and Arkansas,
while many people in Texas have been left marooned, amid unsafe
travel conditions, in homes with no electricity.<br>
<br>
“The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly
generational,” said Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal
forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this
can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural. This is
happening not in spite of climate change, it’s in part due to
climate change.”...<br>
- -<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/17/arctic-heating-winter-storms-climate-change">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/17/arctic-heating-winter-storms-climate-change</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[video talk 15 min]<br>
<b>Brutally Cold US Outbreak Connections to Climate Change Mangled
Jet Streams and Polar Vortex</b><br>
Feb 17, 2021<br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
The ongoing cold in the USA extending as far south as the Gulf of
Mexico and the Mexican border continues to wreak havoc on much of
the US, with Texas being affected the most due to its third world,
rickety, totally unreliable privately run electrical power grid.
Many millions of people are still without power (for days), and the
water treatment plants in places including Houston are not
operating. People in the suburbs of major cities are freezing in the
dark, with pipes in their homes bursting, no potable water from the
taps, while skylines in the nearby cities are still lit up like
Christmas trees. Completely dystopian.<br>
<br>
In this video I chat all about the polar vortex (this term refers to
the stratospheric polar vortex) and the role of the jet streams in
covering most of the USA with a persistent trough causing the brutal
cold snap. I show, using graphics from a website ironically called
Tropical Tidbits, how the surface temperature anomalies have changed
from Feb 14th to today, and how they are forecast to change in the
next 3 weeks. This thing is not over yet.<br>
<br>
I then introduce 3 peer reviewed scientific papers that I will
discuss in further videos, on the linkages between the stratosphere
and troposphere, leading to mangling of the jet streams and extreme
weather.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HcABNcc5x0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HcABNcc5x0</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[MIT touches economic-techno-optimist-solutionism]<br>
<b>Bill Gates and the problem with climate solutionism</b><br>
Science & Technology - Feb 16 -2021<br>
Focusing on technological solutions to climate change feels like an
attempt to dodge the harder political obstacles.<br>
- clips - <br>
<br>
As many others have pointed out, a lot of the necessary technology
already exists; much can be done now. Though Gates doesn’t dispute
this, his book focuses on the technological challenges that he
believes must still be overcome to achieve greater decarbonization.
He spends less time on the political obstacles, writing that he
thinks “more like an engineer than a political scientist.” Yet
politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on
climate change. And engineers ought to understand how complex
systems can have feedback loops that go awry.<br>
<br>
Yes, minister<br>
Kim Stanley Robinson does think like a political scientist. The
beginning of his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, is set
just a few years from now, in 2025, when a massive heat wave hits
India, killing millions. The book’s protagonist, Mary Murphy, runs a
UN agency tasked with representing the interests of future
generations and trying to align the world’s governments behind a
climate solution. Throughout, the book puts intergenerational equity
and various forms of distributive politics at its center. <br>
<br>
If you’ve ever seen the scenarios the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change develops for the future, Robinson’s book will feel
familiar. His story asks about the politics necessary to solve the
climate crisis, and he has certainly done his homework. Though it is
an exercise in imagination, there are moments when the novel feels
more like a graduate seminar in the social sciences than a work of
escapist fiction. The climate refugees who are central to the story
illustrate the way pollution’s consequences hit the global poor the
hardest. But wealthy people emit far more carbon.<br>
<br>
Reading Gates next to Robinson underlines the inextricable link
between inequality and climate change. Gates’s efforts on climate
are laudable. But when he tells us that the combined wealth of the
people backing his venture fund is $170 billion, we may be puzzled
that they have dedicated only $2 billion to climate solutions—less
than 2% of their assets. This fact alone is an argument for wealth
taxes: the climate crisis demands government action. It cannot be
left to the whims of billionaires.<br>
<br>
As billionaires go, Gates is arguably one of the good ones. He
chronicles how he uses his wealth to help the poor and the planet.
The irony of his writing a book on climate change when he flies in a
private jet and owns a 66,000-square-foot mansion is not lost on the
reader—nor on Gates, who calls himself an “imperfect messenger on
climate change.” Still, he is unquestionably an ally to the climate
movement.<br>
<br>
But by focusing on technological innovation, Gates underplays the
material fossil-fuel interests obstructing progress. Climate-change
denial is strangely not mentioned in the book. Throwing up his hands
at political polarization, Gates never makes the connection to his
fellow billionaires Charles and David Koch, who made their fortune
in petrochemicals and have played a key role in manufacturing
denial.<br>
<br>
For example, Gates marvels that for the vast majority of Americans,
electric heaters are actually cheaper than continuing to use fossil
gas. He presents people’s failure to adopt these cost-saving,
climate-friendly options as a puzzle. It isn’t. As journalists
Rebecca Leber and Sammy Roth have reported in Mother Jones and the
Los Angeles Times, the gas industry is funding front groups and
marketing campaigns to oppose electrification and keep people hooked
on fossil fuels. <br>
<br>
These forces of opposition are more clearly seen in Robinson’s novel
than in Gates’s nonfiction. Gates would have done well to draw on
the work that Naomi Oreskes, Eric Conway, and Geoffrey Supran—among
others—have done to document the persistent efforts of fossil-fuel
companies to sow public doubt on climate science. (I also tackled
this subject in my own book, Short Circuiting Policy, which explains
how fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities have resisted
clean-energy laws in a number of American states.)<br>
<br>
One thing Gates and Robinson do have in common, though, is the view
that geoengineering—massive interventions to treat the symptoms
rather than the causes of climate change—may be inevitable. In The
Ministry for the Future, solar geoengineering, or spraying fine
particles into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s heat back
into space, is used after the deadly heat wave with which the novel
opens. And later, some scientists take to the poles and devise
elaborate methods for removing melted water from underneath glaciers
to prevent it from flowing into the sea. Despite some setbacks, they
hold back sea-level rise by several feet. We might imagine Gates
showing up in the novel as an early financial backer of these
efforts. As he notes in his own book, he has been funding solar
geoengineering research for years.<br>
<br>
The Thick of It<br>
The title for Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, is a
reference to this nascent technology, since implementing it on a
large scale could turn the sky from blue to white. <br>
<br>
Kolbert notes that the first report on climate change landed on
President Lyndon Johnson’s desk way back in 1965. This report did
not argue that we should cut carbon emissions by moving away from
fossil fuels. It advocated changing the climate through solar
geoengineering instead, though that term had not yet been invented.
It is disturbing that some would jump immediately to such risky
solutions rather than addressing the root causes of climate change.<br>
<br>
In reading Under a White Sky, we are reminded of the ways that
interventions like this could go wrong. For example, the scientist
and writer Rachel Carson advocated importing nonnative species as an
alternative to using pesticides. The year after her 1962 book Silent
Spring was published,<br>
the US Fish and Wildlife Service brought Asian carp to America for
the first time, to control aquatic weeds. The approach solved one
problem but created another: the spread of this invasive species
threatened local ones and caused environmental damage. <br>
<br>
As Kolbert puts it, her book is about “people trying to solve
problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Her reporting
covers examples including the ill-fated efforts to stop the spread
of Asian carp, the pumping stations in New Orleans that accelerate
that city’s sinking, and attempts to selectively breed coral so that
it can withstand hotter temperatures and ocean acidification.
Kolbert has a keen awareness of unintended consequences, and she’s
funny. If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have
you laughing while Rome burns.<br>
<br>
By contrast, though Gates is aware of the potential pitfalls of
technological solutions, he still praises plastics and fertilizers
as life-giving inventions. Tell that to the sea turtles swallowing
plastic garbage, or the fertilizer-driven algal blooms destroying
the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. <br>
<br>
With dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
geoengineering might indeed prove necessary, but we shouldn’t be
naïve about the risks. Gates’s book has many good ideas and is worth
reading. But for a fuller picture of the crises we face, make sure
to read Robinson and Kolbert too.<br>
- -<br>
Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef<br>
<br>
Bill Gates and the problem with climate solutionism<br>
Focusing on technological solutions to climate change feels like an
attempt to dodge the harder political obstacles.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/16/1017832/gates-robinson-kolbert-review-climate-disaster-solutionism/">https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/16/1017832/gates-robinson-kolbert-review-climate-disaster-solutionism/</a>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[Nobel speech on climate change solutionism]<br>
<b>Dr. Mike Hulme Presenting at Nobel Conference 55</b><br>
Streamed live on Sep 25, 2019<br>
Gustavus Adolphus College<br>
Beyond Climate Solutionism<br>
Lecture by Dr. Mike Hulme<br>
Professor of human geography and fellow of Pembroke College,
University of Cambridge<br>
Climate change is not only a natural phenomenon; it is also a
cultural and social phenomenon. How do we reframe the adjustments
that climate change demands of us by drawing upon the work of
researchers beyond the sciences?<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>[clips from an imperfect transcript]<br>
<br>
But my central point in the talk is this: all five ideologies<br>
require science and technology to be placed in a subservient
role to these<br>
normative visions of how the world should be ordered -- whether
this ordering<br>
be around economic growth, human dignity, ecological integrity,
eco-socialism or<br>
spiritual renewal. Merely offering climate solutions is not the
point --<br>
It is which solutions emerging from which visions that matters.
Each of these<br>
ideologies may and they do mobilize science and technology in
different ways --<br>
perhaps very different ways to bolster their ambitions. But
they illustrate why<br>
it's profoundly inadequate to suggest that tackling climate
change is all<br>
about quote, "uniting behind the science" or quote "listening to
scientists"<br>
<br>
There is no possibility that merely uniting behind the science
will arrest climate<br>
change or deal with its consequences.<br>
<br>
Science on its own offers no moral vision; no ethical stance; no
political<br>
architecture for the sort of world that people desire... <br>
- -<br>
So in conclusion, governing climate change thru our metrics for
me is<br>
another form of reductionism. It reduces the future to climate
even more<br>
dangerously. It masks the contested politics and values
diversity that lie<br>
behind different personal and collective choices of who wins,
who loses, whose values<br>
count. It's a form of moral attenuation. Metrics are alluring
because they<br>
simplified complex realities into objective numbers. <br>
<br>
As Jerry Miller in his book <u>The Tyranny of Metrics</u> says
metrication may make a troubling<br>
situation more salient without making it more soluble. The
circulation of<br>
ubiquitous carbon metrics operates as a facilitative, an
imminent mode of power<br>
morality by numbers -- also marginalizes other forms of moral
reasoning which<br>
cannot be reduced to calculation. But these latter offer richer
narrative<br>
contexts that enable the wisdom of different choices to be
deliberated,<br>
interpretive, interpreted, and judged.<br>
<br>
Wise governance of climate -- as indeed in the application of
wisdom and everyday life -- <br>
emerges bests when rooted in larger and thicker stories about
human purpose,<br>
identity, duty, and responsibility. Such stories are what
traditional and<br>
religious knowledge can offer. <br>
<br>
Carbon metrics should only be used as a compliment to experience
and to wider<br>
modes of moral reasoning not as a substitute. thank you<br>
Auto transcript from <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/IBEJ2fq7Ir4">https://youtu.be/IBEJ2fq7Ir4</a><br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBEJ2fq7Ir4&feature=youtu.be">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBEJ2fq7Ir4&feature=youtu.be</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
October 14, 2020<br>
<b>The Sugar Daddy of Geoengineering</b><br>
Bill Gates’ fossil fuel interests and funding for global climate
engineering<br>
Aerial photograph of tar sands fields in Canada<br>
ETC Group contributes to a new Global Citizen’s Report ‘Gates to a
Global Empire’ which explores the many ways in which the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation wield immense influence across the globe,
driving a form of “techno-solutionism” that prioritizes corporate
power and profit and ignores over strengthening communities and
sustainable solutions. Here we examine Bill Gates’ well-known
promotion and funding of untested and potentially devastating
geoengineering technologies, which provide cover for his less-known
financial investments in fossil fuel technologies. Gates and his
engineering-for-everything mentality is an obstacle to keeping
fossil fuels in the ground.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.etcgroup.org/content/sugar-daddy-geoengineering">https://www.etcgroup.org/content/sugar-daddy-geoengineering</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Mountain video 3 mins]<br>
<b>Massive Shockwave - Everest region Avalanche</b><br>
Jan 20, 2021<br>
David Snow<br>
World's largest and biggest Avalanche-not caused by set charges.<br>
No hikers you hear and see were injured by the shockwave. <br>
Filmed from Kapuche Lake, Nepal. Avalanche slide from the face of
Annapurna<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgv7ntfRUQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgv7ntfRUQ</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 -
February 18, 2004 </b></font><br>
<p>Sixty scientists, including several Nobel laureates, issue a
joint statement denouncing the George W. Bush administration for
distorting, downplaying and disregarding scientific findings on
such issues as human-caused climate change.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html">http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html</a>
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
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