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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>December </b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>28, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font><br>
<i>[ because heated air holds more water ]</i><br>
<b>Widespread flooding in Thailand's south after heavy rain |
ABS-CBN News</b><br>
ABS-CBN News<br>
Dec 25, 2023 #ABSCBNNews #ABS #LatestNews<br>
Several provinces in southern Thailand were hit by severe flooding
on Monday after days of heavy rain, Thai local media reported.<br>
<br>
In Narathiwat province, flooded streams overflowed onto roads,
cutting off access to some of them, according to Thai PBS.<br>
<br>
The widespread flooding affected thousands of households, and
residents were advised to move their belongings to higher grounds,
said local media.<br>
<br>
Emergency services at three medical centers in Narathiwat were
affected by the floods but were able to stay up and running as of
Monday.<br>
<br>
The Thai government has ordered the army and health ministry to
provide assistance to those affected, while the Department of
Disaster Prevention and Mitigation was working with local
authorities to drain the flooded areas as quickly as possible.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpuKlGfXvQI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpuKlGfXvQI</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ Brazil has a heatwave - video report ]</i><br>
<b>Is unprecedented drought pushing the Amazon to the brink? | BBC
News</b><br>
BBC News<br>
Dec 26, 2023 #AmazonRainforest #ClimateChange #BBCNews<br>
In the past few months the Amazon rainforest has experienced the
worst drought on record. <br>
<br>
One of its main rivers reached its lowest level since records began
– 121 years ago. <br>
<br>
Villages became unreachable, wildfires raged in the middle of dense
forest and wildlife died. <br>
<br>
Many scientists are worried that events like these are helping to
push the world's biggest forest to a point of no return.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrA_MazD_WA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrA_MazD_WA</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
<i>[ make ready for more heat ]</i><br>
<b>Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm?</b><br>
Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s
off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.<br>
Monthly global temperature compared with average for the 20th
century
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-12-18-record-hot-year-embed/4055787d-f3af-401d-b252-1dfdff4811f4/_assets/chart_annotated-Artboard-1200.png">https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2023-12-18-record-hot-year-embed/4055787d-f3af-401d-b252-1dfdff4811f4/_assets/chart_annotated-Artboard-1200.png</a><br>
By Raymond Zhong<br>
Dec. 26, 2023<br>
Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and
very likely the past 125,000.<br>
<br>
Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged
across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice
cover in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows.<br>
<br>
This year’s global temperatures did not just beat prior records.
They left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury
spent month after month soaring off the charts. December’s
temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of the
Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions this
week.<br>
<br>
That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence — from
oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships — to see
whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and
what we are doing to it.<br>
One hypothesis, perhaps the most troubling, is that the planet’s
warming is accelerating, that the effects of climate change are
barreling our way more quickly than before. “What we’re looking for,
really, is a bunch of corroborating evidence that all points in the
same direction,” said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the
University of Leeds. “Then we’re looking for causality. And that
will be really interesting.”<br>
As extreme as this year’s temperatures were, they did not catch
researchers off guard. Scientists’ computational models offer a
range of projected temperatures, and 2023’s heat is still broadly
within this range, albeit on the high end.<br>
On its own, one exceptional year would not be enough to suggest
something was faulty with the computer models, said Andrew Dessler,
an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. Global
temperatures have long bobbed up and down around a steady warming
trend because of cyclical factors like El Niño, the climate pattern
that appeared in spring and has intensified since, possibly
signaling more record heat to come in 2024.<br>
<br>
“Your default position has to be, ‘The models are right,’” Dr.
Dessler said. “I’m not willing to say that we’ve ‘broken the
climate’ or there’s anything weird going on until more evidence
comes in.”<br>
<br>
One thing researchers will be watching is whether something
unexpected might be happening in the interplay of two major climate
influences: the warming effect of greenhouse gases like carbon
dioxide and the cooling effect of other types of industrial
pollution<br>
For much of the past 174 years, humans have been filling the skies
with both greenhouse gases and aerosols, or tiny particles from
smokestacks, tailpipes and other sources. These particles are
harmful to the lungs when inhaled. But in the atmosphere, they
reflect solar radiation, partly offsetting the heat-trapping effect
of carbon dioxide.<br>
<br>
In recent decades, however, governments have begun reducing aerosol
pollution for public-health reasons. This has already caused
temperature increases to speed up since 2000, scientists estimate.<br>
<br>
And in a much-discussed report last month, the climate researcher
James E. Hansen argued that scientists had vastly underestimated how
much more the planet would warm in the coming decades if nations
cleaned up aerosols without cutting carbon emissions.<br>
<br>
Not all scientists are persuaded.<br>
Arguments like Dr. Hansen’s have been hard to square with patterns
in recent decades, said Reto Knutti, a climate physicist at the
Swiss university ETH Zurich. In recent years, scientists have also
discovered that global warming is shaped not just by how much heat
is trapped near Earth’s surface but also by how and where this heat
is distributed across the planet.<br>
This makes it even harder to conclude with confidence that warming
is poised to accelerate, Dr. Knutti said. Until the current El Niño
is over, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to make definitive claims,” he
said.<br>
<br>
Pinning down the precise scale of aerosols’ effect has been
difficult, too.<br>
<br>
Part of how aerosols cool the planet is by making clouds brighter
and deflecting more solar radiation. But clouds are devilishly
complex, coming and going and leaving few traces for scientists to
examine, said Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist with NASA and the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “That’s fundamentally why
it’s a hard problem,” he said.<br>
<br>
This year, aerosols have been of particular interest because of a
2020 international regulation that restricted pollution from ships.
Dr. Yuan and others are trying to identify how much the regulation
might have increased global temperatures in recent years by limiting
sunlight-reflecting aerosols.<br>
<br>
Dr. Hansen’s argument for faster warming leans in part on
reconstructions of climatic shifts between ice ages over the past
160,000 years.<br>
<br>
Using Earth’s distant past to make inferences about climate in the
coming years and decades can be tricky. Still, the planet’s deep
history highlights how extraordinary the present era is, said Bärbel
Hönisch, a scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.<br>
Fifty-six million years ago, for instance, geologic turmoil added
carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in quantities comparable to what
humans are adding today. Temperatures jumped. The oceans grew
acidic. Species died en masse.<br>
<br>
“The difference is that it took about 3,000 to 5,000 years to get
there” back then, Dr. Hönisch said, compared with a few centuries
today.<br>
<br>
It then took Earth even longer to neutralize that excess carbon
dioxide: about 150,000 years.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE0.KGNt.srLSeeWWC_DD&smid=url-share">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/climate/global-warming-accelerating.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE0.KGNt.srLSeeWWC_DD&smid=url-share</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ text and audio ]</i><br>
<b>Why Fake News About Climate Change is Still So Effective</b><br>
“It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push
certainty.”<br>
Kate Yoder<br>
Dec 18, 2023<br>
<br>
In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United
Nations declared that they had detected a “human influence” on
global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In
the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree
that burning fossil fuels had disrupted the Earth’s climate.<br>
<br>
Yet almost 30 years after that warning, during the hottest year on
Earth in 125,000 years, people are still arguing that the science is
unreliable, or that the threat is real but we shouldn’t do anything
about climate change. Conspiracies are thriving online, according to
a report by the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation
released last month, in time for the U.N. climate conference in
Dubai. Over the past year, posts with the hashtag #climatescam have
gotten more likes and retweets on the platform known as X than ones
with #climatecrisis or #climateemergency. <br>
<br>
By now, anyone looking out the window can see flowers blooming
earlier and lakes freezing later. Why, after all this time, do 15
percent of Americans fall for the lie that global warming isn’t
happening? And is there anything that can be done to bring them
around to reality? New research suggests that understanding why fake
news is compelling to people can tell us something about how to
defend ourselves against it.<br>
<br>
People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy
Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity
Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information.
Due to quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking
inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their
beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true
beliefs, the more unhinged your thinking becomes,” Norman said.
Another reason people are drawn to conspiracies is that they feel
like they’re in on a big, world-transforming secret: Flat Earthers
think they’re seeing past the illusions that the vast majority
don’t.<br>
<br>
The annual U.N. climate summits often coincide with a surge in
misleading information on social media. As COP28 ramped up in late
November, conspiracy theories circulated claiming that governments
were trying to cause food shortages by seizing land from farmers,
supposedly using climate change as an excuse. Spreading lies about
global warming like these can further social divisions and undermine
public and political support for action to reduce emissions,
according to the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. It
can also lead to harassment: Some 73 percent of climate scientists
who regularly appear in the media have experienced online abuse.<br>
<br>
Part of the problem is the genuine appeal of fake news. A recent
study in Nature Human Behavior found that climate change
disinformation was more persuasive than scientific facts.
Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland had
originally intended to see if they could help people fend off
disinformation, testing different strategies on nearly 7,000 people
from 12 countries, including the United States, India, and Nigeria.
Participants read a paragraph intended to strengthen their mental
defenses — reminders of the scientific consensus around climate
change, the trustworthiness of scientists, or the moral
responsibility to act, for example. Then they were subjected to a
barrage of 20 real tweets that blamed warming on the sun and the
“wavy” jet stream, spouted conspiracies about “the climate hoax
devised by the U.N.,” and warned that the elites “want us to eat
bugs.” <br>
<br>
The interventions didn’t work as hoped, said Tobia Spampatti, an
author of the study and a neuroscience researcher at the University
of Geneva. The flood of fake news — meant to simulate what people
encounter in social media echo chambers — had a big effect. Reading
the tweets about bogus conspiracies lowered people’s belief that
climate change was happening, their support for action to reduce
emissions, and their willingness to do something about it
personally. The disinformation was simply more compelling than
scientific facts, partly because it plays with people’s emotions,
Spampatti said (eliciting anger toward elites who want you to eat
bugs, for example). The only paragraph that helped people recognize
falsehoods was one that prompted them to evaluate the accuracy of
the information they were seeing, a nudge that brought some people
back to reality.<br>
<br>
The study attempted to use “pre-bunking,” a tactic to vaccinate
people against fake news. While the effort flopped, Norman said that
doesn’t mean it shows “inoculation” is ineffective. Spampatti and
other researchers’ effort to fortify people’s mental defenses used a
new, broader approach to pre-bunking, trying to protect against a
bunch of lines of disinformation at once, that didn’t work as well
as tried-and-true inoculation techniques, according to Norman.<br>
<br>
Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of
disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine,
to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying. For
example, when the Biden administration learned of Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine in late 2021, the White
House began warning the world that Russia would push a false
narrative to justify the invasion, including staging a fake, graphic
video of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory. When the video
came out, it was quickly dismissed as fake news. “It was a wildly
successful attempt to inoculate much of the world against Putin’s
preferred narrative about Ukraine,” Norman said.<br>
<br>
For climate change, that approach might not succeed — decades of
oil-funded disinformation campaigns have already infected the
public. “It’s really hard to think about someone who hasn’t been
exposed to climate skepticism or disinformation from fossil fuel
industries,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor
at the University of Nevada, Los Vegas. “It’s just so pervasive.
They have talking heads who go on news programs, they flood media
publications and the internet, they pay lobbyists.”<br>
<br>
Bloomfield argues that disinformation sticks for a reason, and that
simply telling the people who fall for it that there’s a scientific
consensus isn’t enough. “They’re doubting climate change because
they doubt scientific authorities,” Bloomfield said. “They’re making
decisions about the environment, not based on the facts or the
science, but based on their values or other things that are
important to them.”<br>
<br>
While political identity can explain some resistance to climate
change, there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as
Bloomfield outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative
Strategies for Science Communicators. “In the climate change story,
we’re the villains, or at least partially blameworthy for what’s
happening to the environment, and it requires us to make a lot of
sacrifices,” Bloomfield said. “That’s a hard story to adopt because
of the role we’re playing within it.” Accepting climate change, to
some degree, means accepting inner conflict. You always know you
could do more to lower your carbon footprint, whether that’s
ditching meat, refusing to fly, or wearing your old clothes until
they’re threadbare and ratty.<br>
<br>
By contrast, embracing climate denial allows people to identify as
heroes, Bloomfield said. They don’t have to do anything differently,
and might even see driving around in a gas-guzzling truck as part of
God’s plan. It’s a comforting narrative, and certainly easier than
wrestling with ethical dilemmas or existential dread.<br>
<br>
Those seeking to amplify tensions around climate change or spread
doubt, such as fossil fuel companies, social media trolls, and
countries like Russia and China, get a lot of bang for their buck.
“It’s a lot easier and cheaper to push doubt than to push
certainty,” Bloomfield said. Oil companies including Shell,
ExxonMobil, and BP spent about $4 million to $5 million on Facebook
ads related to social issues and politics this year, according to
the Climate Action Against Disinformation report. To sow doubt, you
only need to arouse some suspicion. Creating a bullet-proof case for
something is much harder — it might take thousands of scientific
studies (or debunking hundreds of counterarguments one by one, as
Grist did in 2006).<br>
<br>
The most straightforward way to fight disinformation would be to
stop it from happening in the first place, Spampatti said. But even
if regulators were able to get social media companies to try to stop
the spread of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, dislodging them is
a different story. One promising approach, “deep canvassing,” seeks
to persuade people through nonjudgmental, one-on-one conversations.
The outreach method, invented by LGBTQ+ advocates, involves hearing
people’s concerns and helping them work through their conflicted
feelings. (Remember how accepting climate change means accepting you
might be a tiny part of the problem?)<br>
<br>
Research has shown that deep canvassing isn’t just successful at
reducing transphobia, but also that its effects can last for months,
a long time compared to other interventions. The strategy can work
for other polarizing problems, too, based on one experiment in a
rural metal-smelting town in British Columbia. After convincing
several local governments across the West Kootenay region to shift
to 100 percent renewable energy, volunteers with the nonprofit
Neighbors United kept running into difficulties in the town of
Trail, where they encountered distrust of environmentalists. They
spoke to hundreds of residents, listening to their worries about
losing jobs, finding common ground, and telling personal stories
about climate change like friends would, instead of debating the
facts like antagonists. A stunning 40 percent of residents shifted
their beliefs, and Trail’s city council voted in 2022 to shift to
100 percent renewable energy by 2050.<br>
<br>
Both facts and stories have a place, Bloomfield said. For
conservative audiences, she suggests that climate advocates move
away from talking about global systems and scientists with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a “nameless, faceless,
nebulous group of people” — and toward local matters and people they
actually know. Getting information from friends, family, and other
trusted individuals can really help.<br>
<br>
“They’re not necessarily as authoritative as the IPCC,” Bloomfield
said. “But it helps you connect with that information, and you trust
that person, so you trust that information that they’re resharing.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://grist.org/politics/why-people-fall-for-climate-conspiracies-fake-news/">https://grist.org/politics/why-people-fall-for-climate-conspiracies-fake-news/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[ The news archive - start of
350.Org ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>December 28, 2007 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> December 28, 2007: In a Washington
Post op-ed, Bill McKibben, citing a recent speech by NASA scientist
James Hansen, states that the worldwide CO2 level must remain below
350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic global warming. Further,
McKibben writes: "Hansen [has] called for an immediate ban on new
coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of
old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make
sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the
medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol;
we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122701942.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122701942.html</a><br>
<br>
<p><font face="Calibri"> </font><font face="Calibri"><br>
=== Other climate news sources
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--------------------------------------- <br>
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