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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>June 17, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[the NYT now uses both terms - global warming and climate change]<br>
<b>Climate Change Batters the West Before Summer Even Begins</b><br>
Global warming has been fueling disasters in the region for years.
Now, an early heat wave and severe drought are threatening lives and
leaving water in perilously short supply...<br>
- -<br>
“We’re still a long way out from the peak of the wildfire season and
the peak of the dry season,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist
at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Things are likely to
get worse before they get better.”<br>
Global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has been
heating up and drying out the American West for years. Now the
region is broiling under a combination of a drought that is the
worst in two decades and a record-breaking heat wave...<br>
- -<br>
“The Colorado River basin is ground zero for climate-change impacts
on water supplies in the U.S.,” said Kevin Moran at the
Environmental Defense Fund. “We have to plan for the river that
climate scientists tell us we’re probably going to have, not the one
we want.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/climate/wildfires-drought-climate-change-west-coast.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/climate/wildfires-drought-climate-change-west-coast.html</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[high heat means shorter fuse]<br>
<b>Southwest heat wave intensifies, breaks records and worsens
drought</b> <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.axios.com/southwest-heat-wave-intensifies-records-drought-126078e5-b23b-464f-9d9c-665533d13ee1.html">https://www.axios.com/southwest-heat-wave-intensifies-records-drought-126078e5-b23b-464f-9d9c-665533d13ee1.html</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[clearly understood]<br>
<b>The West has all the ingredients for another terrible wildfire
season</b><br>
Extreme heat and extreme drought are combining to drive up fire
risks. But blazes aren’t inevitable.<br>
By Umair Irfan - Jun 16, 2021<br>
Summer has not officially started yet, but wildfire season has
already arrived in the US. Now an intense heat wave coupled with
extreme drought is threatening to make things worse.<br>
<br>
Large wildfires have already burned 981,000 acres this year to date,
more than the 766,000 acres burned by the same time last year,
according to the National Interagency Fire Center.<br>
<br>
In Arizona, more than 208,000 acres have burned, sending smoke into
Colorado. The 123,000-acre Telegraph Fire is now in Arizona’s top 10
largest fires in history.<br>
<br>
In Utah, blazes have charred more than 25,000 acres, with a new fire
ignited every day for three weeks. California has seen a fourfold
increase in year-to-date area burned compared to 2020.<br>
<br>
It’s poised to get worse as summer officially begins. While 2021 may
not beat the record-setting 2020 season, experts say it will be
severe. “It’s probably going to be above-average for sure, but it’s
not going to be off-the-charts,” said Craig Clements, director of
the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San Jose State
University...<br>
- -<br>
Over time, it’s possible to reduce the destructiveness of wildfires
— for example through controlled burns, regular thinning of trees
and brush that build up, and relocating homes and businesses away
from high-risk areas. But the current situation developed over more
than a century of poor planning, and it won’t be fixed overnight. So
wildfires in the West are likely to get worse before they get
better.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.vox.com/22527757/wildfires-heat-wave-drought-california-arizona-utah-colorado-climate">https://www.vox.com/22527757/wildfires-heat-wave-drought-california-arizona-utah-colorado-climate</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Unconscious cooperation]<br>
<b>How the U.S. Made Progress on Climate Change Without Ever Passing
a Bill</b><br>
A ‘green vortex’ is saving America’s climate future. <br>
By Robinson Meyer...<br>
Yes...sigh—America knows what it needs to do: Pass a carbon fee or
tax, some kind of policy that nudges people to reduce their use of
fossil fuels. Yet America refuses. And so the 2010s, once greeted as
a “new era” for climate action, now seem unexceptional, the third
decade in a row that the United States understood the dangers of
climate change but failed to act. Meanwhile the seas rose, wildfires
raged, and the Earth saw its hottest 10 years on record.<br>
<br>
You have probably heard this tale before; it is a popular and
undeniably accurate read of recent history. It has just one flaw:
America is decarbonizing anyway.<br>
- -<br>
What gives? America is supposed to be doing nothing right. Yet we’re
making progress anyway. How? Why?<br>
<br>
A group of scholars, engineers, and economists may have an answer.
Over the past few years, this group has puzzled together a powerful
thesis that explains why America and the world are decarbonizing—and
how they can get better at it. Decarbonization isn’t best
accomplished by fiat, they argue, but by feedback loop; it proceeds
by a self-accelerating process that I have called “the green
vortex.” The green vortex describes how policy, technology,
business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of
zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up
humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten
results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and
solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden
administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.<br>
- -<br>
In the American economy, she told me, two such industries tower
above the rest: automakers and electric utilities. Both sell a
product that contributes to climate change today but does not need
to. Ninety-eight percent of light-duty vehicles sold in the United
States in 2020 burned gasoline, but automakers could—with some
capital investment and reorganizing—sell electric cars instead.<br>
<br>
The green vortex also makes Biden’s climate and infrastructure
agenda, the American Jobs Plan, fit into place. Large swaths of
Biden’s plan, which has been criticized for a lack of focus and
unnecessary constraints, are devoted to beefing up industries. This
choice makes more sense in light of the green vortex. It focuses
much of its attention on industries that are crucial to
decarbonization but that remain in their early stages. So it spends,
for instance, $174 billion on “winning” the global EV market,
chiefly by building “domestic supply chains” for electric vehicles
and helping consumers buy specifically American-made vehicles.<br>
<br>
The Biden plan spends even more time on industries that don’t yet
have a plan to go zero-carbon. So it promises to invest in 15
industrial-scale demonstration projects to produce green hydrogen,
and to create another 10 factories that will pioneer new ways to
make zero-carbon steel, cement, and chemicals. And the plan promises
that the federal government will buy such zero-carbon products to
help fledgling firms...<br>
- -<br>
Could a dynamic like the one these policy wonks and academics
describe really save the world? According to Kelsey, it already
has—just not for climate change. The green vortex helped fix the
fraying ozone layer in the 1980s, she argues, when it allowed for
the global phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, called
chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. “The most important thing, the
underreported thing, is that the same companies that made the
polluting CFCs also made the substitute for CFCs,” she said.<br>
<br>
When major American chemical companies realized they could sell
those new chemicals, called hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, to the same
customers who once bought their CFCs, they lobbied a recalcitrant
Reagan administration to support a global ozone pact. The 1987
Montreal Protocol, which phased out use of CFCs, passed soon
afterward. Then, when demand for HFCs wasn’t as robust as those
companies had projected, they pushed the U.S. and the world to
toughen the Montreal Protocol. The agreement was tightened multiple
times in the ’90s and made stricter again in 2016<br>
<br>
And that vortex has continued forward on its own strength. In the
past decade, it has become clear that although HFCs do not deplete
the ozone layer, they do ravage the climate, trapping heat thousands
of times more effectively than carbon dioxide. (Humanity, you might
say, leapt from the atmospheric frying pan into the climatological
deep-fat fryer.) Yet again, the U.S. has moved swiftly to address
this problem. Last year, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to
keep phasing out the chemicals over the next 15 years, which will
prevent the equivalent of 900 million tons of carbon dioxide, more
than Germany’s annual emissions. President Trump signed the
phaseout, one of the most substantial pieces of climate policy in
American history, into law on December 27. Why did Trump, no climate
fan, approve the measure? Perhaps because it created another new
market for those same chemical companies to sell a new type of
replacement. Trump was, in other words, trapped in the green vortex.
In the next decade, we’ll find out if that feedback loop can work
the same for decarbonization more broadly—and whether American
policy makers can learn not just to live in the green vortex, but to
manipulate it.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/climate-change-green-vortex-america/619228/">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/climate-change-green-vortex-america/619228/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[always use fresh batteries]<br>
<b>Why Electric Planes are Inevitably Coming</b><br>
Jun 16, 2021<br>
Wendover Productions<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH4b3sAs-l8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH4b3sAs-l8</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Battle for influence]<br>
<b>Tailoring climate change messaging for conservatives could shift
understanding of crisis: Study</b><br>
Researchers studied how to make climate change communication more
persuasive.<br>
The key to easing partisanship on the topic of global warming may be
in the way the messages are conveyed, according to new research.<br>
<br>
Tailoring online messaging and advertising toward Republican voters
could shift their views on climate change, a new study published
Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests...<br>
As of 2020, 73% of Americans believed that global warming was
happening, and 62% think that it was caused by human activities. In
2010, only 57% of Americans thought that global warming was
happening, researchers said.<br>
<br>
But, the shift in public opinion on climate change has largely been
driven by Democrats. In previous research, when asked how high of a
priority global warming should be, just 22% of Republicans said it
should be a "high" or "very high" priority, compared to 83% of
Democrats, according to the study...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/tailoring-climate-change-messaging-conservatives-shift-understanding-crisis/story">https://abcnews.go.com/US/tailoring-climate-change-messaging-conservatives-shift-understanding-crisis/story</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[Source = Nature Climate Change]<br>
Published: 14 June 2021<br>
<b>Shifting Republican views on climate change through targeted
advertising</b><br>
Matthew H. Goldberg, Abel Gustafson, Seth A. Rosenthal & Anthony
Leiserowitz <br>
Nature Climate Change (2021)<br>
<blockquote>Abstract<br>
It is essential to increase public understanding of the existence,
causes and harms of climate change. In the United States,
Republicans are one important audience, as the bipartisan support
needed for ambitious and durable climate policy is currently
lacking. An important limitation of most climate change message
testing is that it is usually based on controlled experiments,
which may or may not be equally effective in the real world. Here
we report the effects of a one-month advertising campaign field
experiment (N = 1,600) that deployed videos about the reality and
risks of climate change to people in two competitive congressional
districts (Missouri-02 and Georgia-07). The videos were designed
to appeal to Republicans and were targeted to this audience via
online advertisements. The study finds that, within the targeted
congressional districts, the campaign increased Republicans’
understanding of the existence, causes and harms of climate change
by several percentage points.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01070-1">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01070-1</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[yes, they are. Older study should be remembered]<br>
<b>Are Earthquakes Linked To Drought?</b><br>
Monday, August 25, 2014<br>
By Amita Sharma, Patty Lane, Tom Fudge<br>
The loss of an estimated 63 trillion gallons of water in West, most
of it groundwater, was reported in a study done by researchers at
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. [2014] The loss of the
water has caused the ground to actually rise more than a half-inch
in California's mountains...<br>
video <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/x1oKf6vK1zc">https://youtu.be/x1oKf6vK1zc</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/aug/25/landrise-connected-drought-linked-earthqukes/">https://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/aug/25/landrise-connected-drought-linked-earthqukes/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[discussion of the darkest places]<br>
<b>Civilization might collapse at any moment | Sheldon Solomon and
Lex Fridman</b><br>
Aug 21, 2020<br>
Lex Clips<br>
Full episode with Sheldon Solomon (Aug 2020):
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKyN">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfKyN</a>...<br>
Clips channel (Lex Clips): <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/lexclips">https://www.youtube.com/lexclips</a><br>
Main channel (Lex Fridman): <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman">https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3HygCi20Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3HygCi20Y</a><br>
<br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[Four year old anger and despair]<br>
<b>Why everything will collapse</b><br>
Dec 25, 2017<br>
The 4th monkey<br>
If you sense that the future looks bleak, that there is little
chance that this whole mess will end in joy and good humor, that
there is a tiny chance that we will escape a systemic collapse of
the thermo-industrial civilization, you are not far from reality. In
this video, based on the available data, we try to explain why we
think the situation is inextricable and that a systemic collapse is
now inevitable. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8</a>
<p>- -</p>
[deserves calm assessment]<br>
<b>Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?</b><br>
Mar 19, 2013<br>
Macquarie University<br>
"For the first time an array of interconnected problems is moving a
global civilization toward collapse. Driven by increasing
overpopulation and over consumption by the rich, these dilemmas
include climate disruption, loss of ecosystem services, global
poisoning, depletion of resources (especially soils and
groundwater), and the threat of vast famines, epidemics and resource
wars. Only a concerted effort to reduce the scale of society and
focus much more attention on agriculture and equity seems likely to
much improve the human prospect. Growth is the disease;
sustainability is attainable, but only with unprecedented
rethinking, effort, and cooperation."<br>
<br>
This seminar consists of a short presentation given by Professor
Paul Ehrlich based on his recent paper Can a collapse of global
civilization be avoided? and will be followed by an extended
interactive Q&A session with the audience.<br>
<br>
Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, and
President, Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.
His research interests are in the ecology and evolution of natural
populations of butterflies, reef fishes, birds and human beings.<br>
<br>
Anne Ehrlich is a Senior Research Scientist in Biology at Stanford
and focuses her research on policy issues related to the
environment. She has carried out research and coauthored many
technical articles in population biology. She also has written
extensively on issues of public concern such as population control,
environmental protection, and environmental consequences of nuclear
war and is coauthor of ten books.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.mq.edu.au/">http://www.mq.edu.au/</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtaGNQqUWo0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtaGNQqUWo0</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[The news archive - looking back]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming June
17, 2011</b></font><br>
June 17, 2011: Syndicated columnist Steve Chapman notes that at some
point, Republicans will have to knock it off with climate-change
denial and propose solutions to the problem:<br>
<blockquote>"Conservatives fear liberals will use climate change to
justify heavy-handed intrusive regulation and wasteful subsidies,
and they are right to worry. But that’s no excuse for pretending
global warming is a myth or refusing to do anything about it. It’s
an argument for devising cost-effective, market-based remedies
that minimize bureaucratic control.<br>
<br>
"If today’s Republican attitude had prevailed four decades ago,
Americans would not have such vital measures as the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act. Then, many people worried that
environmentalism would strangle economic growth and personal
freedom. But both have survived and even flourished.<br>
<br>
"Conservatives once understood that corporations are not entitled
to foul the environment, any more than individuals have the right
to dump garbage in the street. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP
presidential nominee, wrote, 'When pollution is found, it should
be halted at the source, even if this requires stringent
government action.'"<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20110617-steve-chapman-republicans-must-return-to-pro-environmental-roots-.ece">http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20110617-steve-chapman-republicans-must-return-to-pro-environmental-roots-.ece</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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