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<font size="+2"><i><b>November 21, 2021</b></i></font><br>
<p><i>[ the really big question - clips from NYTimes article ]</i><br>
<b>To Breed or Not to Breed?</b><br>
In a world of pandemic chaos, political strife and climate
catastrophe, some would-be parents see the future as too dark to
procreate.<br>
By Alex Williams - Nov. 20, 2021<br>
- -<br>
Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Ms. Little feels “the
burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple sees mounting disaster
when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice
forums. Anxiety about having children has set in...<br>
- -<br>
“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a
decision, it’s not that far away,” she said. “But I don’t know how
I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there
are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not
the other way around.”<br>
<br>
Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes
with a carbon footprint.<br>
<br>
In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts
concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears
over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates
quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility
decline.”<br>
<br>
There is much debate, however, over the idea that having fewer
children is the best way to address the problem. In an interview
with Vox in April, Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and
co-author of a 2017 study of the most effective lifestyle changes
to reduce climate impact, said that population reduction is not
the answer...<br>
- -<br>
Another poll in 2018 by Morning Consult for The New York Times
found that among young adults in the United States who said they
had or expected to have fewer children than the number they
considered ideal, 33 percent listed climate change, and 27 percent
named population growth as a concern.<br>
<br>
While economic concerns remained paramount, with 64 percent citing
the high cost of child care, 37 percent cited global instability
and 36 percent, domestic politics. To some, those issues are all
rolled together. In 2020, the birthrate in the United States
declined for the sixth straight year, a dip of four percent
believed to be accelerated by the pandemic...<br>
- -<br>
Regardless, such questions are creeping into the cultural dialogue
in a manner that recalls the hippie-era “ecology” movement, when
“The Population Bomb,” the seismic 1968 best seller by the
Stanford University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, predicted a barren,
exhausted planet where hundreds of millions would die in famines
during the 1970s.<br>
<br>
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
both have broached the question in recent years, with Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez asserting “a scientific consensus that the lives of
children are going to be very difficult,” in a 2019 Instagram
Live, which leads “young people to have a legitimate question: Is
it OK to still have children?’”<br>
<br>
Celebrities have also raised the issue. “Until I feel like my kid
would live on an earth with fish in the water,” Miley Cyrus told
Elle magazine two years ago, “I’m not bringing in another person
to deal with that.”...<br>
- -<br>
“As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the
child’s life in an increasingly uncertain world,” said Michael
Ellsberg, 44, a writer in Berkeley, Calif. “Sure we might figure
out how to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. We
might figure out how to cooperate as a globe to prevent future
pandemics. We might figure out how to limit the risks of nuclear
war and terrorism. But we might not.”<br>
<br>
Mr. Ellsberg follows “The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast” and
other such outlets, and after two breakups in which his desire to
not have children was a major factor, he had a vasectomy to cement
his decision.<br>
<br>
Doomsday fears are hardly the only reason that some choose the
child-free lifestyle.<br>
<br>
“I was raised in a family that did not try to condition me as a
girl-mommy-to-be,” said LiLi Roquelin, 41, a married, French-born
singer-songwriter who lives in Queens. She counts herself a proud
member of the so-called childfree by choice movement, celebrated
on social media under hashtags like #childfree and #neverkids, and
recently posted a self-penned anthem of sorts called “Childfree.”<br>
<br>
Even so, she said that women who choose not to reproduce often
face intense social pressure from family, friends, even medical
professionals. “Over the years, I have been criticized as inhuman
or unloving,” she said. “In my mid-30s, my gynecologist kept
telling me that my hormones would run out.”<br>
<br>
For her, such pushback is merely the price you pay. Ms. Roquelin
said she enjoys a rich and fulfilling life without children, and
is now studying for a master’s degree in business administration
to capitalize on her music career. “I have many more things to
explore on my journey,” she said, “that do not involve raising
other suffering human beings on an out-of-supplies planet.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html</a></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Major tactics as uncovered by John Cook ] </i><br>
<b>Climate Deniers Are Using These Four Major Scare Tactics to Stop
Climate Action</b><br>
From doomsday scenarios to conspiracies totally removed from
reality, a Twitter analysis found the top fear-based narratives that
today’s climate deniers are spreading to prevent climate policy.<br>
OPINION - ANALYSIS<br>
By Stella Levantesi and Giulio Corsion - Nov 16, 2021 <br>
<br>
When fossil fuel companies found out about the link between their
product and climate change decades ago, they did everything they
could to hide it. They lied, manipulated, and deceived. <br>
- -<br>
To better understand today’s type of climate science denial we
analyzed over 300,000 tweets from the past five years. Our social
media analysis found that climate deniers have been promoting at
least four major narratives based on drumming up fears of government
control in order to prevent effective climate policies, particularly
in the United States. <br>
<br>
Our research found that climate denial has evolved into a softer,
more insidious type of misinformation, one that focuses on denying
urgency and action, one that targets the solutions more than
anything else. Key elements of this strategy include promoting
confusion, doomist perspectives, conspiracy theories, and
fabricating lies to convince the public that there is no real need
for climate change policy, certainly not at the scale of what
scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic impacts — basically,
supporting any effort to postpone or halt ambitious climate action
and protect business as usual.<br>
<br>
According to John Cook, research fellow at Monash Climate Change
Communication Research Hub in Australia, climate misinformation used
to be more focused on undermining the science, but over time, the
strategies have been moving more towards attacking solutions and
creating fear, as well as leaning towards “cultural-war” type
misinformation. <br>
<br>
“It’s about scaring people and ‘othering’ people who care about
climate change or who are concerned about climate change and
advocating for action,” said Cook...<br>
- -<br>
<b>“It polarizes the public and then that makes it harder to get
consensus and progress.”</b><br>
— John Cook, climate misinformation expert<br>
Of course, fear-mongering is as old as politics itself, but
developments in the reach and power of social media, paired with a
chaotic informational environment where disinformation runs amok,
have made it easier for climate deniers to tap into the average
person’s uncertainties. <br>
<br>
Through disinformation and scare tactics, climate change deniers
seek to create a sense of fear and insecurity around climate
policies — suggesting that they will cost too much, require giving
up personal freedoms, and enable the much-maligned system of
socialism. In this way, climate deniers have linked political action
on climate to the demise of conservative values, the loss of
freedom, and, in extreme cases, global conspiracy theories...<br>
- -<br>
The resulting data provides a clear snapshot of some of the most
significant elements of recent climate denier narratives, and in
particular, it shows how fear tactics have evolved to become central
to contemporary climate change denial, both on and off social media.<br>
<br>
<b>Doomsday Scenarios</b><br>
Mounting studies are finding that the costs of current and potential
future climate change are massive, including for the U.S. Indeed, in
2020 the U.S. experienced an unprecedented number of billion-dollar
disasters — 22 events wrought devastation across the country from
heatwaves and drought to seven hurricanes. <br>
<br>
In stark opposition to this fact, the first and most widespread
scare tactic we identified in the data — appearing in over 40
percent of all posts containing scare tactics — presents a doomsday
scenario narrative in which global economic systems are wrecked by
climate change policies. <br>
<br>
Exploiting widespread fears of recession, poverty, and higher
taxation, tweets within this group often claim that climate policies
will end up hurting the average household, which will be made poorer
by environmental regulations...<br>
- - <br>
A clear example of this blame-shifting game is evident in the Texas
blackouts of February 2019. When natural gas pipelines froze,
causing a state-wide blackout, the state saw nearly twice as many
power failures from natural gas, goal, and nuclear compared to
frozen wind turbines or solar panels. <br>
<br>
But this didn’t stop fossil fuels advocates and fear mongers from
trying to shift the blame onto renewable energies. Climate science
critic Alex Epstein, for example, claimed that “the root cause of
the TX blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized
the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.”<br>
<br>
<b>A Trojan Horse to Socialism</b><br>
Climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and is
caused by human activity, namely by burning fossil fuels and cutting
down forests. Scientific analyses also show that the world is on
track for “disastrous” heating across the planet if nations fail to
enact stronger climate policies. <br>
<br>
Nevertheless, the second scare tactic we analyzed from this slice of
tweets is based on the claim that climate change is a “trojan horse”
meant to turn the United States into a communist or socialist
regime. This argument is the most pervasive in our data in terms of
both quantity and reach. <br>
<br>
This scare tactic claims that climate policy was never about
“fixing” the climate, but rather, about imposing a communist or
socialist agenda. This conspiracy theory exploits decades-old “red
threat” scares to polarize climate policy along political party
lines, and is often propagated by well-known anti-climate change
think tanks... <br>
- - <br>
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, together with the Rio
summit, led conservatives to substitute the disappearing “red
threat” for the new “green threat” — communists now overlapped with
environmentalists. The fossil fuel industry and conservative
activists set up various lobby groups to prevent the passing of
government regulation to curb climate pollution, such as the Global
Climate Coalition or the Information Council for the Environment to
name a couple.<br>
<br>
<b>A Threat to Hamburgers</b><br>
A major source of greenhouse gas emissions comes from agriculture,
including the methane from burping cows and their manure ponds. To
address this pollution, the Green New Deal resolution introduced by
Congressional Democrats in 2019 called for “working collaboratively
with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution
and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as
is technologically feasible.” There was no mention of banning
burgers.<br>
<br>
However, critics of the Green New Deal seized on a fact sheet about
it (that was later withdrawn), which mentioned it would be difficult
to “get rid of farting cows.” As a result, the third prominent fear
tactic we identified among tweets from over the past five years
centers on claims that climate policy will be used by “alarmists” —
which is how deniers brand environmentalists, climate scientists, or
anyone who pushes for climate action — to “take away America’s
burgers.” <br>
<br>
This narrative — the least common scare tactic in our data — is
based on the idea that climate policy will ultimately lead to a ban
on meat consumption. This argument is often used to radicalize the
denier front and further polarize political debate. In this
scenario, climate activists are oppressive, undemocratic, and keen
on dictating what citizens are and aren’t allowed to do or, in this
case, eat. <br>
<br>
Tweets containing this type of narrative are overcome with a clear
and immediate sense of fear: several Twitter users go as far as
urging others to “get an extra freezer and buy meat, as prices are
going to soar.” <br>
<br>
Other claims of this kind include racist arguments, such as one in
which the suggestion to eat less meat is actually an excuse to
reclaim land and replace it with low-income housing, serving to
motivate others to fight against this planned urban sprawl. <br>
<br>
According to Cook, cultural misinformation — such as the socialism
and the burger arguments — is probably the most dangerous because it
includes “tribal arguments” which “tap into very primal instincts of
people”. <br>
<br>
“The simple myths tend to resonate more rather than complicated
scientific myths or arguments,” said Cook. “It polarizes the public
and then that makes it harder to get consensus and progress.”<br>
<br>
<b>Full-on Conspiracy Theories</b><br>
Climate change deniers have often been shown to be attracted or
vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, and the final narrative we
detected is the most extreme, as it exploits a tendency to create an
alternative world which is very far from facts and allows deniers to
avoid facing reality. <br>
<br>
The fourth scare tactic we found relies on the assumption that the
ultimate goal of climate policies is to trigger a society-wide
“Great Reset,” which will, in turn, lead to a totalitarian new world
order...<br>
- -<br>
Denier discussions in this area include the idea that the public is
being brainwashed by “global elites” and that these efforts should
be criminalized. Conspiracy theories are also falsely claiming that
Covid-19 was a tool intended to reduce the world’s population as
part of a larger climate change plan. Depopulation is where Covid-19
and climate change denial conspiracy theories meet.<br>
<br>
While some of these scare tactics may sound imaginative at best —
and perhaps delusional at their worst — they do contain key insights
into the climate change denial of today. These days, the merchants
of doubt are seeding a different type of disinformation, focusing
less on denying the basic science, and more on creating unrealistic,
polarizing, and politicized debates to convince the public that
climate action is unnecessary and, most times, outright harmful. <br>
<br>
As our analysis demonstrates, narratives of denial and fear tactics
are deeply interlinked, making them a dangerous self-feeding
mechanism. This means that these tactics overlap within the tweets
themselves — one tweet may contain elements from more than one scare
tactic. <br>
<br>
Climate change, socialism, Covid-19, a new world order, and meat
bans are all different sides of the same denial coin. And the
message is a simple one: climate change is a dangerous plot to limit
individual liberty, depopulate the Earth, and destroy national
governments. In this scenario, discussing science is no longer
relevant — climate change becomes exclusively a political matter,
completely removed from science or facts. <br>
<br>
The more we see climate action become a part of serious policymaking
discussions, the more we can expect these types of fear tactics to
become relevant. In fact, we saw in our data that use of these fear
tactics always spiked around climate protests and key political
moments, such as the 2019 proposal for the Green New Deal in the
U.S. Senate and the September climate strikes that same year, also
known as the Global Week for Future. <br>
<br>
Whenever climate policy is under the spotlight, deniers fight back
by spreading fear and uncertainty. It is fundamental to work towards
breaking this link and expose the mechanisms behind these fabricated
narratives, ultimately avoiding climate policy from being seen as
catastrophic and divisive and making climate action more resilient
to the disruption efforts of the climate denial machine. <br>
<br>
“The general strategy against any form of misinformation is to
explain to people how they’re being misled because, no matter where
people sit on the political spectrum, everyone is averse to being
tricked,” said Cook. “No one likes being deceived. So if you explain
why there is a strategy that is being used to manipulate you, you
can neutralize the strategy.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.desmog.com/2021/11/16/four-major-climate-denial-scare-tactics-twitter/">https://www.desmog.com/2021/11/16/four-major-climate-denial-scare-tactics-twitter/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ science lecture for kids ]</i><br>
<b>Christmas Lectures 2020: Water World - with Helen Czerski</b><br>
Nov 8, 2021<br>
The Royal Institution<br>
In the second lecture of the 2020 Christmas Lectures, physicist and
oceanographer Helen Czerski unpicks the Earth’s heating and plumbing
systems, showing how shifting ocean water creates an engine that
distributes heat and nutrients around our planet.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg4IzxDs_0Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg4IzxDs_0Y</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ opinion -- seems obvious -]</i><br>
<b>Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass
Popular Action,” Not Politicians</b><br>
AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY<br>
Noam Chomsky talks about US hypocrisy in stoking needless conflict
with China, the unnecessarily bloody and grinding war in
Afghanistan, and why the United States could easily solve climate
change.<i><br>
</i><br>
Despite rapidly approaching his ninety-third birthday, Noam Chomsky
shows few signs of slowing down. The world-famous public
intellectual has published two books in 2021 — Consequences of
Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (with Marv
Waterstone) and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the
Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou) — and his
willingness to sit down for interviews on wide-ranging topics
remains unflagging.<br>
<br>
Chomsky spoke with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson from the
Danish magazine Eftertryk in October 2021 about the war in
Afghanistan, ongoing US-instigated conflicts with China, climate
change, and anarchism. You can watch the conversation on YouTube
here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<i><br>
</i>
<blockquote>Full video interview with Noam Chomsky. Eftertryk
Magazine. (Oct. 2021)<br>
Oct 17, 2021<br>
Eftertryk Magasin<br>
On 8th October 2021, Eftertryk Magazine interviewed professor Noam
Chomsky on four issues of our times: <br>
<blockquote>1) The justification for the Afghanistan war in the
immediate wake of 9-11 <br>
2) AUKUS and the new cold war with China <br>
3) The climate crisis<br>
4) The principles and values of socialist anarchism. <br>
</blockquote>
We hope you enjoy the video, press the like button, and engage us
with a comment down below.<i><br>
</i><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Xm3h-EAAY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Xm3h-EAAY</a><br>
</blockquote>
There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel
companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe
and the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over
the summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation.
It was a very dire warning — much more than before.<br>
<br>
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either
start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it
systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century.
That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of
organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach
irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are
the options...<br>
- -<br>
The Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Nothing. [They] won’t
accept anything. The Democrats do have a swing vote. The so-called
moderate Democrats, who should be called “ultra-reactionaries,” are
the swing vote. One of them is the chair of the Senate Energy
Committee, [who] also happens to be the champion in Congress of
receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry — which is quite an
achievement, because they pay off everyone — but he’s the champion.
His name is Joe Manchin. He has a policy — he’s made it explicit —
that’s taken from the playbook of the oil companies. He made it very
clear; he said: “No elimination, only innovation.” So, no cutbacks
on the use of fossil fuel. If you can make up something new, it’s
okay. So, he’s blocking it. There are climate change provisions in
it. They’re already out. Blocked.<br>
- -<br>
The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing
to do with the markets or anything else. Just class war. This is
another form. Do we want to hand the future of our children and
grandchildren to elements that want to make as much profit as
possible and then don’t care what happens tomorrow? That’s one
choice. The other choice is to move onto a livable and better world.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ 40 min video- goes over the fundamentals ]</i><br>
<b>"Halting Climate Change: Why Zero Emissions Is Only the
Beginning" by Joeri Rogelj</b><br>
Aug 4, 2021<br>
Aspen Global Change Institute<br>
The 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement has set a goal of keeping global
warming well below 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C. In this lecture,
Dr. Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College London looka at what that means
for the amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted, the
emissions pathways we need to follow, and why reaching net-zero
emissions is only the beginning of a much longer journey.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mYSiGBPYmM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mYSiGBPYmM</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ powerful documentary video by DW 1:28 ]</i><br>
<b>Girls for Future and their fight against the global climate
crisis | DW Documentary</b><br>
Nov 19, 2021<br>
DW Documentary<br>
<br>
‘Girls for Future’ follows four girls as they fight for a better
future. Aged between 11 and 14 years, they are all directly affected
by environmental destruction - from air pollution to water shortage
- and its consequences.<br>
<br>
The protagonists are from India, Australia, Indonesia and Senegal,
respectively. In Senegal, we see the global water crisis; in
Indonesia, it’s plastic waste pollution; we look at the agricultural
crisis in India; and in Australia, we witness the fatal destruction
in the oceans and on land through climate change. All four of the
girls are directly affected by the consequences of environmental
destruction. <br>
<br>
In Senegal, 14-year-old Fatou has to spend hours fetching water.
This leaves her with little time to study for school. Lack of access
to water affects two billion people around the world. As Fatou
testifies, it’s a lack that impacts every aspect of life.<br>
<br>
In Punjab, India, twelve-year-old Gagan faces the fatal effects of
industrial agriculture. Burning crop residues in the fields is
causing enormous air pollution, and the use of chemical fertilizers
is ruining the soil. <br>
<br>
In Australia, eleven-year-old Sabyah witnesses how the largest coral
reef on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, has already lost more than
half of its corals forever. Sabyah sees the connection to the coal
industry. Australia is the second-largest exporter of this most
climate-damaging fuel. <br>
<br>
In Indonesia, we meet twelve-year-old Nina. She lives surrounded by
mountains of plastic waste. Not only Nina’s country, but all of
Southeast Asia has become a dumping ground for the Western
industrialized countries. <br>
<br>
The global climate crisis is multi-faceted and complex. When media
or government officials speak of possible solutions, these are often
described as so complex that they can hardly be implemented. Yet in
this documentary, we meet four young girls, each of which it finding
ways to protect and restore our climate. Their resilience is a
testimony of strength and patience. Their energy and enthusiasm will
inspire viewers of all ages.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Fn_MZ1iZ8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Fn_MZ1iZ8</a><br>
<p> </p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><i>[ Time for new targets on the misinformation battlegrounds ]</i><br>
<i> </i><b>Climate change deniers are over attacking the science.
Now they attack the solutions.</b><br>
A new study charts the evolution of right-wing arguments.<br>
Believe it or not, it’s nearly 2022 and some people still think we
shouldn’t do anything about the climate crisis. Even though most
Americans understand that carbon emissions are overheating the
planet and want to take action to stop it, attacks on clean energy
and policies to limit carbon emissions are on the rise. <br>
<br>
In a study out this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports,
researchers found that outright denying the science is going out
of fashion. Today, only about 10 percent of arguments from
conservative think tanks in North America challenge the scientific
consensus around global warming or question models and data. (For
the record, 99.9 percent of scientists agree that human activity
is heating up the planet.) Instead, the most common arguments are
that scientists and climate advocates simply can’t be trusted, and
that proposed solutions won’t work...<br>
- -<br>
That came as a surprise to the researchers. Scientists get called
“alarmists,” despite a history of underestimating the effects of
an overheating planet. Politicians and the media are portrayed as
biased, while environmentalists are painted as part of a
“hysterical” climate “cult.”<br>
<br>
“It kind of dismayed me, because I spent my career debunking the
first three categories — ‘it’s not real, it’s not us, it’s not
bad’ — and those were the lowest categories of misinformation,”
said John Cook, a co-author of the study and a research fellow at
the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University
in Australia. “Instead, what they were doing was trying to
undermine trust in climate science and attack the actual climate
movement. And there’s not much research into how to counter that
or understand it.”...<br>
- -<br>
Researchers found that attacks on “climate solutions” are also on
the rise. People who want to delay action often argue that
renewable energy can’t replace fossil fuels. They also say that
climate policies will hurt working families, ruin the economy, and
raise prices. Typically such arguments overlook how pollution from
burning fossil fuels shortens lifespans and how climate-charged
disasters like wildfires, flooding, and heat waves are already
ruining people’s lives and costing billions. They tend to ignore
estimates that the changing climate could cost the U.S. 10.5
percent of GDP by the end of the century. <br>
<br>
“Climate solutions misinformation is really the future of climate
misinformation,” Cook said. It has been the predominant argument
from conservative think tanks since 2008 and recently became the
second-most common point made on anti-climate blogs, beating out
the increasingly unbelievable claim that the Earth isn’t
warming...<br>
- - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-claims-hierarchy.png">https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-claims-hierarchy.png</a><br>
For the study, researchers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and
Australia used machine learning to categorize arguments against
taking climate action, tracking how they evolved over time. Using
material from 33 prominent blogs and 20 think tanks, they analyzed
more than 255,000 documents from 1998 to 2020, the majority of
them from the United States.<br>
<br>
It took Cook and his team about five years to create a machine
learning model that was able to reliably detect real-life climate
misinformation claims. “Misinformation is messy and doing content
analysis is messy, because the real world is always a bit blurry,”
Cook said. First, they developed a taxonomy to sort arguments into
broad categories — say, “climate change isn’t bad” — narrower
claims (“carbon dioxide is not a pollutant”) and even more
specific points (“CO2 is food for plants!”). Then they fed common
climate myths into the machine until it was able to recognize each
one consistently out in the wild. <br>
<br>
The study also tracked how arguments against taking action changed
over time. In general, misinformation around solutions ramped up
before international climate conferences or at times when Congress
debated climate legislation, such as the American Clean Energy and
Security Act in 2009. After the announcement of a big climate
bill, conservative think tanks argue that the policy will take a
toll on the economy, followed by another spike right before the
bill goes up for vote...<br>
<br>
- - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-misinformation-claims.png">https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/climate-misinformation-claims.png</a><br>
That means there’s also “an air of predictability” around
misinformation, Cook says. “If we’re proactive enough, we can get
ahead of it and inoculate the public,” he said.<br>
<br>
Last year, Cook released a free game that “vaccinates” people
against fake news. A cartoon character called Cranky Uncle —
representing conspiracy-prone uncles everywhere — uses his
favorite techniques to teach you to become a science denier like
him. In the process of learning how to create fake news, people
learn how to spot logical fallacies and other techniques used to
dismiss scientific evidence, like cherry-picking temperature data
or citing fake experts. This approach, called “pre-bunking,” has
been shown to be effective — playing a similar kind of game can
reduce people’s susceptibility to misinformation for three months,
one study found.<br>
<br>
Cook believes Cranky Uncle-style games could also help counter
arguments against climate solutions or attacks on the movement,
too. “Pre-bunking is kind of a universal template,” he said.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/politics/study-charts-show-rising-attacks-on-clean-energy-and-climate-policy/">https://grist.org/politics/study-charts-show-rising-attacks-on-clean-energy-and-climate-policy/</a><br>
- -<br>
<i>[ Academic studies ]</i><br>
<b>Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about
climate change</b><br>
Travis G. Coan, Constantine Boussalis, John Cook & Mirjam O.
Nanko <br>
Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 22320 (2021) Cite
this article<br>
</p>
<blockquote><b>Abstract</b><br>
A growing body of scholarship investigates the role of
misinformation in shaping the debate on climate change. Our
research builds on and extends this literature by (1) developing
and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of climate contrarianism,
(2) conducting the largest content analysis to date on contrarian
claims, (3) developing a computational model to accurately
classify specific claims, and (4) drawing on an extensive corpus
from conservative think-tank (CTTs) websites and contrarian blogs
to construct a detailed history of claims over the past 20 years.
Our study finds that the claims utilized by CTTs and contrarian
blogs have focused on attacking the integrity of climate science
and scientists and, increasingly, has challenged climate policy
and renewable energy. We further demonstrate the utility of our
approach by exploring the influence of corporate and foundation
funding on the production and dissemination of specific contrarian
claims.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4/figures/1">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4/figures/1</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ Oh why not just pile on? ] </i><br>
<b>The Plague Is More Likely Now Thanks to Climate Change</b><br>
A new study examines how rising temperatures in the western U.S.
have influenced plague outbreaks. Yes, that plague.<br>
ByMolly Taft - Nov 19, 2021<br>
The risk of the plague spilling over from humans to animals in the
western U.S. has increased since 1950 thanks to climate change, a
new study has found. Importantly, the research gives valuable
insights into how this deadly disease has historically moved and
developed in the U.S., which can help us understand more about its
future.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://gizmodo.com/the-plague-is-more-likely-now-thanks-to-climate-change-1848092533">https://gizmodo.com/the-plague-is-more-likely-now-thanks-to-climate-change-1848092533</a>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ go ahead, read the boring academic article ] </i><br>
<b>Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of
environmental change</b><br>
Colin J. Carlson,Sarah N. Bevins,Boris V. Schmid<br>
First published: 18 November 2021 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15966">https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15966</a><br>
<br>
<b>Abstract</b><br>
After several pandemics over the last two millennia, the wildlife
reservoirs of plague (Yersinia pestis) now persist around the world,
including in the western United States. Routine surveillance in this
region has generated comprehensive records of human cases and animal
seroprevalence, creating a unique opportunity to test how plague
reservoirs are responding to environmental change. Here, we test
whether animal and human data suggest that plague reservoirs and
spillover risk have shifted since 1950. To do so, we develop a new
method for detecting the impact of climate change on infectious
disease distributions, capable of disentangling long-term trends
(signal) and interannual variation in both weather and sampling
(noise). We find that plague foci are associated with high-elevation
rodent communities, and soil biochemistry may play a key role in the
geography of long-term persistence. In addition, we find that human
cases are concentrated only in a small subset of endemic areas, and
that spillover events are driven by higher rodent species richness
(the amplification hypothesis) and climatic anomalies (the trophic
cascade hypothesis). Using our detection model, we find that due to
the changing climate, rodent communities at high elevations have
become more conducive to the establishment of plague reservoirs—with
suitability increasing up to 40% in some places—and that spillover
risk to humans at mid-elevations has increased as well, although
more gradually. These results highlight opportunities for deeper
investigation of plague ecology, the value of integrative
surveillance for infectious disease geography, and the need for
further research into ongoing climate change impacts...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15966">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15966</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[The news archive - looking back]</i><br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
November 21, 2015</b></font><br>
November 21, 2015:<br>
In a New York Times op-ed, Jeff Biggers observes:<br>
<blockquote>"Negotiators en route to the United Nations conference
on climate change in Paris, scheduled to begin later this month,
should take a detour on rural roads here in Johnson County. A new
climate narrative is emerging among farmers in the American
heartland that transcends a lot of the old story lines of denial
and cynicism, and offers an updated tale of climate hope.<br>
<br>
"Recent polls show that 60 percent of Iowans, now facing flooding
and erosion, believe global warming is happening. From Winneshiek
County to Washington County, you can count more solar panels on
barns than on urban roofs or in suburban parking lots. The state’s
first major solar farm is not in an urban area like Des Moines or
Iowa City, but in rural Frytown, initiated by the Farmers Electric
Cooperative.<br>
<br>
"In the meantime, any lingering traces of cynicism will vanish in
the town of Crawfordsville, where children in the Waco school
district will eventually turn on computers and study under lights
powered 90 percent by solar energy. Inspired by local farmers, who
now use solar energy to help power some of their operations, the
district’s move to solar energy will not only cut carbon emissions
but also result in enough savings to keep open the town’s once
financially threatened school doors."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/iowas-climate-change-wisdom.html?ref=opinion">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/iowas-climate-change-wisdom.html?ref=opinion</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/</p>
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