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<font size="+2"><i><b>September 4, 2021</b></i></font><br>
<br>
[Let's not be surprised]<br>
<b>Overlapping Disasters Expose Harsh Climate Reality: The U.S. Is
Not Ready</b><br>
The deadly flooding in the Northeast, on the heels of destruction
from Louisiana to California, shows the limits of adapting to
climate change. Experts say it will only get worse.<br>
Updated Sept. 3, 2021...<br>
Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a
harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme
weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming
planet.<br>
<br>
“These events tell us we’re not prepared,” said Alice Hill, who
oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council
during the Obama administration. “We have built our cities, our
communities, to a climate that no longer exists.”. ..<br>
- -<br>
Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a
harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme
weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming
planet.<br>
<br>
“These events tell us we’re not prepared,” said Alice Hill, who
oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council
during the Obama administration. “We have built our cities, our
communities, to a climate that no longer exists.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/new-york-rain-floods-climate-change.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/new-york-rain-floods-climate-change.html</a><br>
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[a marvelous tweet two years ago]<br>
Kate Marvel<br>
@DrKateMarvel<br>
Jun 3, 2019<br>
<b>HUMANS PROBABLY WON'T GO EXTINCT BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE BUT WE
SHOULD SHOOT FOR SOMETHING BETTER THAN "NOT EXTINCT" COME ON
PEOPLE RAISE YOUR STANDARDS</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/DrKateMarvel/status/1135637164467863553">https://twitter.com/DrKateMarvel/status/1135637164467863553</a><br>
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[Polar Vortex is from climate destabilization]<br>
<b>Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather
in the United States</b><br>
JUDAH COHEN<br>
Cold weather disruptions<br>
Despite the rapid warming that is the cardinal signature of global
climate change, especially in the Arctic, where temperatures are
rising much more than elsewhere in the world, the United States and
other regions of the Northern Hemisphere have experienced a
conspicuous and increasingly frequent number of episodes of
extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades. Cohen et
al. combined observations and models to demonstrate that Arctic
change is likely an important cause of a chain of processes
involving what they call a stratospheric polar vortex disruption,
which ultimately results in periods of extreme cold in northern
midlatitudes (see the Perspective by Coumou). —HJS<br>
<blockquote>Abstract<br>
The Arctic is warming at a rate twice the global average and
severe winter weather is reported to be increasing across many
heavily populated mid-latitude regions, but there is no agreement
on whether a physical link exists between the two phenomena. We
use observational analysis to show that a lesser-known
stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) disruption that involves wave
reflection and stretching of the SPV is linked with extreme cold
across parts of Asia and North America, including the recent
February 2021 Texas cold wave, and has been increasing over the
satellite era. We then use numerical modeling experiments forced
with trends in autumn snow cover and Arctic sea ice to establish a
physical link between Arctic change and SPV stretching and related
surface impacts.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9167</a><br>
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[sigh]<br>
<b>EPA just detailed all the ways climate change will hit U.S.
racial minorities the hardest. It’s a long list.</b><br>
If the planet warms 2 degrees Celsius, new report warns, Black
people are 40 percent more likely than other groups to live in
places where extreme temperatures will cause more deaths.<br>
Racial minorities in the United States will bear a disproportionate
burden of the negative health and environmental impacts from a
warming planet, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday,
including more deaths from extreme heat and property loss from
flooding in the wake of sea-level rise.<br>
<br>
The new analysis, which comes four days after Hurricane Ida
destroyed homes of low-income and Black residents in Louisiana and
Mississippi, examined the effects of the global temperature rising 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial
levels. It found that American Indians and Alaska Natives are 48
percent more likely than other groups to live in areas that will be
inundated by flooding from sea-level rise under that scenario,
Latinos are 43 percent more likely to live in communities that will
lose work hours because of intense heat, and Black people will
suffer significantly higher mortality rates.<br>
<br>
The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius since the
Industrial Revolution began, and is on track to warm by more than
1.5 degrees by the early 2030s...<br>
- -<br>
Black people 65 and older would probably be profoundly affected by
poor air quality. They are 41 percent to 60 percent more likely to
die as a result of fine-particle pollution, or soot, depending on
how high temperatures rise.<br>
<br>
In 49 cities analyzed for the study, from Seattle to Miami, Black
people are 41 percent to 59 percent more likely to die as a result
of poor air quality.<br>
<br>
Black children 17 and younger would also suffer disproportionately,
the study found. They are 34 percent to 40 percent more likely to be
diagnosed with asthma depending on the range of temperature
increases based on where they live.<br>
<br>
Native Americans and Latinos are more likely to be affected by
extreme temperatures where they work. Latinos would be 43 percent
more likely than others to lose work hours and pay because it’s too
hot, while American Indians and Alaskan Natives are 37 percent more
likely to lose hours.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/02/ida-climate-change/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/02/ida-climate-change/</a><br>
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[Logically equal]<br>
<b>Climate denial? Flat Earth? What's the difference?</b><br>
People who deny that climate change is happening have something in
common with people who believe in a flat Earth.<br>
By Tim Radford<br>
<br>
LONDON, 30 August, 2021 − Dover, a town in the county of Kent in the
United Kingdom, was during the 1960s rich in eccentrics: one of them
was Mr Samuel Shenton, founder and secretary of the International
Flat Earth Research Society.<br>
<br>
He was regarded with affection and merriment by local and even
national newspaper reporters, and so was solemnly consulted during
the US Apollo programme, the race to the moon. In 1965 he refused to
believe that a photograph of the curvature of the Earth, taken by
astronauts on a Gemini mission, proved that the planet was a sphere.
Or that it was moving in space at 30kms a second.<br>
<br>
“If we were going at such a tremendous speed through space you
wouldn’t be able to get out of your house,” he told a Guardian
colleague, “and you’d see the effects on the clouds and the
waterways.”<br>
<br>
Reportedly at his death his society had no more than 100 members.
Then it crossed the Atlantic, and something started to happen.<br>
<br>
<b>Shared rejection</b><br>
By 2018, Lee McIntyre, a researcher at Boston University in
Massachusetts, could attend a Flat Earth International Conference in
Denver, Colorado and use it as a starting point for an enjoyable and
even mildly sympathetic new book called How to Talk to a Science
Denier (MIT Press, $24.95).<br>
<br>
The event became his template for a study of that stubborn
phenomenon known as science denial, the outright refusal to accept
data, experimental evidence or patient explanation of findings that
you have already decided to reject.<br>
<br>
In the course of this reporter’s lifetime, such conspicuous refusals
have included the link between smoking and cancer and other health
conditions; the connection between HIV infection and illness and
death from Aids; the value of vaccination as a protection against
disease; and most conspicuously, the connection between human
exploitation of fossil fuels and the swelling climate crisis.<br>
<br>
And although each act of denial begins from an apparently different
starting point, the machinery of resistance − that determination not
to be persuaded − shares five common factors.<br>
<br>
<b>“You cannot change someone’s beliefs against their will, nor can
you usually get them to admit there is something they don’t
already know”</b><br>
One is a refusal to accept aspects of the evidence that do not suit
your beliefs, but seize upon those that might seem to. This is
called cherry-picking: you just believe the bits you like and ignore
the rest.<br>
<br>
The second factor is a commitment to the notion of massive
conspiracy: a global conspiracy if need be, to declare that Covid-19
isn’t a real disease; or alternatively that it is spread by
radiation from 5G radio masts; or that all the world’s science
academies, almost all the world’s meteorologists and even
governments, are in some monstrous plot to pretend that the climate
is changing dangerously, when it isn’t, or if it is, it’s because of
natural causes.<br>
<br>
The third factor is the denunciation of real experts and the
reliance on self-appointed experts. The fourth factor almost always
involves logical error (we have an example above from Mr Shenton).
And the last and − the deniers seem to think − the most clinching
tactic is to say: “But you cannot deliver 100% proof.”<br>
<br>
In the chapters that follow, McIntyre explores the different forms
that denial takes: he talks to coal-miners in Pennsylvania about
climate change; he talks to activists and campaigners about the
rejection of genetic engineering as a technique for improving crops;
to people who reject vaccination as a protection against disease,
and to climate deniers. In all cases, he identifies evidence of the
five techniques deployed to resist argument.<br>
<br>
<b>Selective acceptance</b><br>
However, not all forms of rejection are quite as uncompromising as
faith in Flat Earth. His miners know about climate change, and yes,
know the costs too, but they’re miners. Mining coal is what they do.<br>
<br>
Those against genetically-modified crops may turn out to be more
concerned about economics, or choice, or the growth of corporate
power. People can be vaccine-hesitant (“Is it safe? How do you
know?”) rather than flat-out deniers. In each case there are
separate issues underlying the unease.<br>
<br>
Greek astronomers worked out more than 2,000 years ago that they
lived on an orb; to believe the Earth is a stationary disc supported
on pillars, Flat Earthers must reject the physics, astronomy and
radiation science of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein, while
at the same time using cellphones and the Internet, products of that
science.<br>
<br>
Climate deniers have the slightly more tricky challenge of
acknowledging the value of science except when it’s climate science.<br>
<br>
<b>Oil money</b><b><br>
</b>Each group believes in a massive, worldwide conspiracy to
deceive. Two Flat Earthers told McIntyre that the conspiracy to
foist the globalist view of the planet was the work of “the
Adversary”, the Devil himself.<br>
<br>
Climate deniers have the slightly harder task of persuading
themselves that climate scientists − Chinese, British, American,
Australian, Brazilian or from anywhere in the world − are all
conspiring to issue a false message confected for some kind of
pecuniary gain or political motive, or for the sake of a hoax, which
is a bit more complicated.<br>
<br>
There is another compounding factor addressed by this book: the big
oil companies decided in 1998 to actually systematically challenge
the science, with of course big money: altogether almost a billion
dollars a year now flows into an organised climate change
counter-movement.<br>
<br>
In the US, climate science, like the Covid-19 pandemic itself, has
become a party political issue. Nobody gets rich by denying that the
Earth is round. Quite a few already very rich people will be yet
richer because concerted global action on the climate emergency has
been delayed, by systematic cherry-picking, conspiracy theorising, a
small army of fake experts and some wilfully illogical reasoning. A
very large number are likely to become miserably and even
catastrophically poorer.<br>
<br>
<b>Winning ways</b><br>
Meanwhile, how do you talk to a science denier? McIntyre’s suggested
approach involves patience, courtesy, a willingness to listen, and
to address the denier’s arguments directly.<br>
<br>
“You cannot change someone’s beliefs against their will, nor can you
usually get them to admit there is something they don’t already
know. Harder still might be to get them to change their values or
identity.<br>
<br>
“But there is no easier path to take when dealing with science
deniers. We must try to make them understand … But first we have to
go out there, face-to-face, and begin to talk to them.” − Climate
News Network<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/climate-denial-flat-earth-whats-the-difference/">https://climatenewsnetwork.net/climate-denial-flat-earth-whats-the-difference/</a><br>
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[Activism tactics]<br>
<b>Extinction Rebellion eyes shift in tactics as police crack down
on protests</b><br>
Analysis: with latest action drawing smaller crowds and stunts
quickly shut down, questions asked about how group can retain
momentum<br>
When police drew batons and scaled a vintage open-top bus in London
Bridge on Tuesday, it symbolised a dramatic shift in the state’s
approach to Extinction Rebellion.<br>
<br>
Police officers smashed windows on the bus and wrestled with those
onboard, putting activists in headlocks and throwing punches at
them.<br>
<br>
A line of yellow-jacketed police encircled the melee, shouting at
another group of XR supporters arriving at the scene to stay back.
Protesters booed and chanted: “We’re non-violent; how about you?”<br>
<br>
It was a mark of the desperation in which XR now hold their cause
that they labelled their latest two-week campaign of civil
disobedience in London “the impossible rebellion”...<br>
- -<br>
But as the rebellion comes to a close, questions are being asked
about whether XR has lost momentum. Numbers on protests have been
fewer, media coverage has been far more critical and, save for the
Green party, politicians have paid little attention.<br>
<br>
It seemed even the most committed activists were fewer in number. As
of Thursday evening, 483 people had been arrested in connection with
the protests – compared with a total of 1,130 held during XR’s
action in April 2019, and 1,768 the following October. For a
movement that placed being arrested at the heart of its strategy,
the drop seemed sobering.<br>
<br>
XR’s latest protest campaign had been designed in two phases. First,
a week of “crisis talks”: protesters would occupy busy areas where
they could talk to passersby and discuss solutions to the climate
crisis. Then the focus would move to the City of London, to disrupt
the financial institutions they see as the key instigators of fossil
fuel projects.<br>
<br>
But as XR took to the streets, police were waiting. On the first
Monday, a pink table installation activists hoped to hold for days
in Covent Garden was isolated and removed by the next morning,
foiling plans to make it a centrepiece for outreach. It was a
similar story throughout the fortnight. XR would strike with a
roadblock, installation or a theatrical direct action, and police
would be hot on their heels.<br>
<br>
Where cordoning off protests entirely could not work, as in the West
End or Oxford Circus, officers would surround protest installations.
Without activist support, protesters who had chained themselves in
place were vulnerable; police could get removal teams in, cut them
loose and arrest them. Dispersal orders would be issued and officers
would begin by targeting XR’s drummers and music: kill the vibe, the
strategy seemed to be, and the protest would melt away.<br>
“[Police] seemed intent to limit the time and the opportunity for
the public to witness our protests as early as they can, so
essentially not enabling a protest installation or the centre of the
protest to become the focus for the public to interact with,” said
Richard Ecclestone, a former inspector with Devon and Cornwall
police who is one of XR’s police liaisons. The apparent urgency of
police interventions – as at London Bridge – had led to safety
issues, he said, with many activists hurt.<br>
<br>
“They would charge into action, almost like going over the top from
the trenches, and acting just so unsafely and then inevitably they
use force – disproportionately, in my view – against non-violent
protesters. And I think that’s a significant escalation.”<br>
<br>
Challenged over claims of unreasonable force in the policing of XR’s
demonstrations, the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner Matt Twist
told the Today programme on Radio 4 on Friday that groups “have
absolutely the right to protest and the right to assemble” but no
right “to cause very serious disruption to the public”.<br>
<br>
“Of course again, this [the climate crisis] is a hugely important
cause,” Twist said. “But the police can’t take a view on the
importance of the cause, we have to deal with this without fear or
favour, we have to be impartial.”<br>
<br>
As much as the police’s tactics had changed, so had XR’s. In 2019,
the group seized control of major junctions and bridges,
establishing campsites in the heart of London. This time actions
were designed to be more fluid. Broadcasts issued via Telegram
channels told supporters where to go each morning, with marches
coalescing at pop-up occupations intended to catch police – who were
no longer given advance warning of actions – off guard.<br>
<br>
But without semi-permanent protest sites, XR could not draw passing
crowds as it had previously. Committed activists could get involved,
but fewer casual visitors could find a way to take part.<br>
<br>
“It’s not the same as holding a space and really feeling like you
are blocking and causing civil disruption,” said Jayne Forbes, 65,
from north London, as she walked with a small protest march past
Downing Street on Wednesday.<br>
<br>
Forbes, a former chair of the Green party, felt the message – and
the media coverage – was still getting out, and she still believed
XR was crucial. But, she added: “It’s interesting how we are going
to progress it now. I do think we will have to go to another level
to get the government to notice.”<br>
<br>
The XR protests have been heavily criticised by some commentators,
but Sara Vestergren, a social psychologist at Keele University who
specialises in protests, said: “Regardless of what you think about
the tactics, I don’t think anyone can deny that they’ve done a
fantastic job in raising awareness. If we didn’t have any active
groups fighting for the environment, God knows where we’d be.”<br>
She agreed with accusations the protests may alienate some: “But I
don’t know if those people would be interested in environmentalism
in general.”<br>
<br>
Leo Barasi, a campaign consultant and author of The Climate
Majority: From Apathy to Action, agreed XR had transformed the
debate around the environment. “But they’re running into diminishing
returns,” he said. “Climate change is already the second-top
priority for the UK public, ahead of the economy, immigration and
crime. Media coverage of climate change is more widespread than it
was before the 2019 protests, and what XR are doing isn’t so novel
now.”<br>
There are also significant questions about how much XR has been able
to influence real policy. Currently, as one protest speaker pointed
out this week, the most significant XR-inspired piece of legislation
making its way through parliament is a bill to severely curtail
protest.<br>
<br>
XR’s activists know change is needed. “There’s definitely been a
contraction in XR,” Gail Bradbrook, the movement’s co-founder, told
the Guardian. “But I see it stabilising and getting stronger.”<br>
<br>
Support for the group remains strong in other ways. XR point out
that ahead of the latest actions, they raised £100,000 from
supporters in just 24 hours. A recent poll showed 81% of people in
the now UK regard the ecological situation as a “global emergency” –
the highest proportion the world.<br>
<br>
Bradbrook sees XR as undergoing a shift in emphasis. “A really
important pivot that we have done this year is from talking about
there is an emergency and sounding the alarm to talking about why
there is not an emergency response, that that pivot has been about
focusing on the political economy,” she said.<br>
<br>
Now it was time to get out into communities, she added. In the
social interregnum of the Covid pandemic, local XR groups had
morphed into mutual aid networks. “It’s what we build from that,”
Bradbrook said. “What do you do that’s part of the change you want
to see?”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/03/extinction-rebellion-tactics-police-crack-down-on-protests">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/03/extinction-rebellion-tactics-police-crack-down-on-protests</a>
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<br>
[The news archive - looking back]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
September 4, 2001</b></font><br>
<br>
In the Boston Globe, Theodore Roosevelt IV--the great-grandson of
President Theodore Roosevelt--declares:<br>
<br>
"We Americans are heading into a carbon-constrained, ecologically
fragile future for which we are ill prepared. Under the present
leadership we are dragging our feet, willing to sacrifice vital
natural resources instead of making real investments in current
efficiency and future energy technologies. This is hardly a
conservative agenda. <br>
<br>
"Moderate Republicans, and I am one, are distressed that an
administration that strenuously claims to be conservative is instead
intent on maintaining undisciplined and wasteful consumption. This
is unsustainable public policy, and I doubt that it will go far in
achieving victory in the midterm elections. Bad public policy and
bad politics are a lethal combination."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020619223452/http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0904-01.htm">http://web.archive.org/web/20020619223452/http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0904-01.htm</a><br>
<br>
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