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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>December 29</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ Records set - 3 minute listen ]</i><br>
<b>2023 will be the hottest year on record. Is this how it's going
to be now?</b><br>
DECEMBER 28, 2023<br>
HEARD ON MORNING EDITION<br>
Lauren Sommer<br>
<br>
As 2023 draws to a close, it's going out on top.<br>
<br>
"It's looking virtually certain at this point that 2023 will be the
hottest year on record," says Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at
Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that analyzes climate trends.<br>
<br>
Though temperature records from December have yet to be finalized,
climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration have found there's a more than 99% chance that 2023
will have the hottest recorded global average temperature, beating
out 2016, the previous leader.<br>
<br>
The record-breaking year helped fuel climate-driven disasters around
the globe – from extreme heat that plagued Arizona for weeks, to
devastating floods in Libya, to record-hot oceans that caused corals
to bleach off Florida. Scientists say the extreme temperatures are
in line with forecasts for how the planet will continue to warm...<br>
"If we don't change things, if we keep going on the trajectory that
we're going, we will look back at 2023 and think of it as: remember
that year that wasn't so bad?" says Tessa Hill, marine scientist at
the University of California Davis.<br>
<br>
Many months during 2023 topped the charts<br>
2023's record-breaking status was largely fueled by extremely hot
temperatures during the second half of the year. Every month from
June to November was the hottest ever recorded globally.<br>
<br>
The year will be the hottest in 174 years of record-keeping where
humans have directly measured the temperature of the planet. It's
also likely to be the hottest in the last 125,000 years, which
scientists measure by reconstructing temperature records from
physical evidence like tree rings and layers of polar ice that have
grown over time.<br>
<br>
The biggest driver of the heat is the buildup of greenhouse gasses
in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.<br>
<br>
"We know why this is happening," Hausfather says. "A year like this
would not have occurred without the trillion tons of carbon we've
put into the atmosphere over the last century."<br>
<br>
The past eight years are already the hottest eight on record. Some
scientists see evidence that the pace of climate change is
accelerating, though others say not enough years have passed to
confidently show that trend.<br>
2024 could vie for the top spot<br>
The hotter climate drove extremes around the world in 2023. Over the
summer, Phoenix, Arizona baked for weeks, spending 31 days above 110
degrees. More than 500 people died in the area from heat-related
causes. But it wasn't alone – China, southern Europe and Mexico also
saw intense heat.<br>
<br>
"The major lesson is how unprepared we are," says Kristie Ebi, who
studies the effects of heat at the University of Washington. "There
are places with heat wave early warning and response systems. They
certainly saved lives. They didn't save enough."<br>
<br>
Heat waves hit the ocean as well. Off the coast of Florida, the
water temperature reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the same
conditions as a hot tub. Heat-sensitive corals can't survive
prolonged heat, with many bleaching, turning a ghostly white color,
or dying outright.<br>
<br>
Even with the chart-topping heat this year, next year could be
equally as hot. A strong El Niño has already begun, where ocean
temperatures warm up in the eastern Pacific. El Niño years are
typically hotter, because a large amount of heat that's stored in
the ocean is released to the atmosphere.<br>
<br>
Even if 2024 doesn't take the top spot, climate scientists say the
years ahead will continue to rank highly, if humans keep burning
fossil fuels at the current rate.<br>
<br>
"There's absolutely still time to act," Hill says. "Everything we do
to change course today will make things better in the future."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1221827923/2023-hottest-year-record-climate-change">https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1221827923/2023-hottest-year-record-climate-change</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ Billionaire gives free suggestions -- this is a fascinating
conversation recorded Oct 24th, 2023) ]</i><br>
<b>Jeremy Grantham: "Pollution, Population & Purpose" | The
Great Simplification #99</b><br>
Nate Hagens<br>
Nov 29, 2023 The Great Simplification - with Nate Hagens<br>
On this episode, Nate is joined by co-founder of GMO Financial
Holdings, Jeremy Grantham, to discuss how finance, human population,
ecology, and pollution interact to shape current trends and what
they could tell us about the future. Mr. Grantham unpacks why the
expectations of perpetual growth - in the economy, standards of
living, and finance - are not so likely and that when looking at the
system holistically we should expect large paradigm shifts in the
coming decades. What can the pattern of super (stock market) bubbles
over the last century tell us about the larger resource bubble we
find ourselves in? How will rapidly changing population demographics
and fertility rates interact with the other global crises we face?
How might endocrine disrupting chemicals impact these other trends?
Where should investors be focusing energy and resources towards to
make the largest and most positive impact on human and planetary
futures? <br>
<br>
About Jeremy Grantham:<br>
Jeremy Grantham co-founded GMO in 1977 and is a member of GMO’s
Asset Allocation team, serving as the firm’s long-term investment
strategist. He is a member of the GMO Board of Directors, a partner
of the firm, and has also served on the investment boards of several
non-profit organizations. Prior to GMO’s founding, Mr. Grantham was
co-founder of Batterymarch Financial Management in 1969 where he
recommended commercial indexing in 1971, one of several claims to
being first. He began his investment career as an economist with
Royal Dutch Shell. Mr. Grantham earned his undergraduate degree from
the University of Sheffield (U.K.) and an MBA from Harvard Business
School. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a
CBE from the UK and is a recipient of the Carnegie Medal for
Philanthropy.<br>
For Show Notes and More visit: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/99-jeremy-grantham">https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/99-jeremy-grantham</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvN9iFJ0fY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTvN9iFJ0fY</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Collapse Q & A before wise activists -- video meme text on
facing disruption ]</i><br>
<b>Collapse chat with Gail Bradbrook, Jem Bendell, Indra
Donfrancesco, Rachel Donald & Amisha Ghadiali</b><br>
Jem Bendell<br>
Dec 26, 2023 GLASTONBURY<br>
During 2023, the small English town of Glastonbury hosted (sometimes
controversial) discussions about the environment and society. One
conference explored how we might become more 'collapse ready' in
emotional, practical, and political ways. This 'deep adaptation'
event was organised by local residents and included an afternoon
panel with the Green Party Mayor of Glastonbury, Indra Donfrancesco,
the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Gail Bradbrook, the host of
Planet Critical, Rachel Donald, the host of All That We Are, Amisha
Ghadiali, and author of 'Breaking Together', Professor Jem Bendell.
Joining them midway was Shambo, the Chihuahua.<br>
<br>
Discussions ranged from the science and politics of climate change,
to caring for loved ones, to whether localisation needs a
complementary effort at international political influence. It
demonstrated what a wide, compassionate and creative agenda can
emerge from accepting the gravity of our ecological crisis. <br>
<br>
The video was filmed and edited by Kevin Redpath and made possible
by proceeds from sales of the book that was launched on the day. You
can read a review of #BreakingTogether from Indra in the Morning
Star: <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/it-takes-village">https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/it-takes-village</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEkntfQCc44">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEkntfQCc44</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Washington Post on current science and future risks ]</i><br>
<b>Is climate change speeding up? Here’s what the science says.</b><br>
This year’s record temperatures have some scientists concerned that
the pace of warming may be accelerating. But not everyone agrees.<br>
By Chris Mooney and Shannon Osaka<br>
December 26, 2023<br>
For the past several years, a small group of scientists has warned
that sometime early this century, the rate of global warming — which
has remained largely steady for decades — might accelerate.
Temperatures could rise higher, faster. The drumbeat of weather
disasters may become more insistent.<br>
<br>
And now, after what is poised to be the hottest year in recorded
history, the same experts believe that it is already happening.<br>
<br>
In a paper published last month, climate scientist James E. Hansen
and a group of colleagues argued that the pace of global warming is
poised to increase by 50 percent in the coming decades, with an
accompanying escalation of impacts.<br>
<br>
According to the scientists, an increased amount of heat energy
trapped within the planet’s system — known as the planet’s “energy
imbalance” — will accelerate warming. “If there’s more energy coming
in than going out, you get warmer, and if you double that imbalance,
you’re going to get warmer faster,” Hansen said in a phone
interview.<br>
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, has
similarly called the last few months of temperatures “absolutely
gobsmackingly bananas” and noted, “there is increasing evidence that
global warming has accelerated over the past 15 years.”<br>
<br>
But not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania climate
scientist Michael Mann has argued that no acceleration is visible
yet: “The truth is bad enough,” he wrote in a blog post. Many other
researchers also remain skeptical, saying that while such an
increase may be predicted in some climate simulations, they don’t
see it clearly in the data from the planet itself. At least not yet.<br>
<br>
The Washington Post used a data set from NASA to analyze global
average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2023.<br>
<br>
The record shows that the pace of warming clearly sped up around the
year 1970. Scientists have long known that this acceleration stems
from a steep increase in greenhouse gas emissions, combined with
efforts in many countries to reduce the amount of sun-reflecting
pollution in the air. But the data is much more uncertain on whether
a second acceleration is underway...<br>
The increased rate of global warming<br>
Values are relative to the 1951-1980 global mean temperature, in
degrees <br>
Between 1880 and 1969, the planet warmed slowly — at a rate of
around 0.04 degrees Celsius (0.07 Fahrenheit) per decade. But
starting around the early 1970s, warming accelerated — reaching 0.19
C (0.34 F) per decade between 1970 and 2023.<br>
<br>
That acceleration isn’t controversial. Prior to the 1970s and 1980s,
humans were burning fossil fuels — but also were releasing huge
amounts of air pollution, or aerosols. Sulfate aerosols are lightly
colored particles that have the ability to temporarily offset part
of the warming caused by fossil fuels. They reflect sunlight back to
space themselves, and also influence the formation of reflective
clouds.<br>
<br>
The more aerosols in the air, the slower the planet will heat up: a
trade-off that Hansen calls a “Faustian bargain.” The idea is that
because the aerosol pollutants have dangerous health effects on
people, eventually societies decide to clean them up — causing
dramatic warming to reveal itself in the process.<br>
In the early and mid-20th century, developed countries were so
heavily polluted that the world was warming slowly. “This was the
era of the London fogs and of very extreme pollution in the U.S.,”
said Gabi Hegerl, a climatologist at the University of Edinburgh. A
recent study in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems,
for instance, found that in the 1980s these particles offset
approximately 80 percent of climate warming.<br>
<br>
Since the 1970s and 80s, however, the influence of aerosol pollution
has leveled off, thanks in part to policies like the U.S. Clean Air
Act Amendments of 1990. As the figure above shows, at the same time,
greenhouse gas emissions have climbed — leaving aerosols unable to
keep up. The result is a planet that is warming much faster now than
in the first half of the 20th century.<br>
<br>
But the data is murkier when it comes to whether the pace of warming
over the past few decades has quickened even more — an increase that
could accelerate the wildfires, floods, heat waves and other impacts
around the globe. It may require more years of evidence to clear the
statistical hurdles that climate science demands.<br>
“I think we probably need maybe three or four more years" of data,
said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds.
“It’s just a bit too early right now.”<br>
Scientists are wary, in part, because some had reached the opposite
conclusion roughly a decade ago. Back then, a few scientists and
many political commentators suggested that the rate of climate
change had stalled or was slowing down. The case for what some
called a warming “hiatus” was never especially strong — and in
retrospect it does not appear that the rate of warming substantially
changed — but it serves as a cautionary note about declarations that
warming is getting faster or slower.<br>
<br>
To see why matters are currently ambiguous, consider the following
“trend of trends” figure, based on an analysis by Mark Richardson, a
climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who published
a statistics paper last year that found that an acceleration of
warming is not yet clearly detectable.<br>
<br>
Richardson looked at each 30-year trend in the NASA temperature
record, starting with the period from 1880 to 1909 and ending with
the period from 1994 to 2023. Higher values indicate higher rates of
global warming. Here, we show the result from the period between
1941 and 1970 onward, to better tease out how the rate of warming
changed in the second half of the 20th century, and whether it is
still changing...<br>
While there is a hint of an increasing warming rate at the very end
of the record, it is nowhere nearly as pronounced as the shift since
1970. This helps explain why many scientists are remaining
noncommittal, for now, on acceleration.<br>
<br>
“The temperature near the Earth is only a thin layer, and it’s easy
for the temperatures to swing about a lot,” Richardson said. For
this reason, it takes longer for scientists to be sure that a change
is outside what you would normally expect, he said.<br>
<br>
But some scientists believe that the temperature data is simply not
yet showing an impending acceleration.<br>
<br>
Hansen argues that recent changes in aerosols will cause a strong
increase in the warming rate in just the next few years. In 2020,
the International Maritime Organization instituted a rule requiring
a substantial reduction in the sulfur content of fuel oil. Sulfate
aerosol pollution from ocean shipping plunged.<br>
<br>
Much of the current debate over whether warming is getting faster
turns on the consequences of these maritime changes, which have the
potential to affect how much heat is being absorbed over enormous
stretches of the world’s oceans. Hansen and his co-authors argue
that the change in ship emissions is contributing to a major
increase in the Earth’s energy imbalance — the extra amount of heat
that is staying within the Earth system rather than escaping to
space. But not all scientists agree that the pollution regulations
for oceangoing vessels have had such an outsize impact.<br>
“There won’t be any argument [by] late next spring, we’ll be way off
the trend line,” Hansen said.<br>
<br>
Some climate models also predict an acceleration of warming in the
years to come, as aerosols decline. “While there is increasing
evidence of an acceleration of warming, it’s not necessarily ‘worse
than we thought’ because scientists largely expected something like
this,” said Hausfather.<br>
<br>
Most agree that it’s too early to tell if the second acceleration is
underway. “Trying to estimate the underlying rate of warming from a
short time period is really hard,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate
scientist at Texas A&M University.<br>
<br>
“Just because you get a trend that looks like it’s really rapid —
that doesn’t tell you what the underlying rate of warming is.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/26/global-warming-accelerating-climate-change/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/26/global-warming-accelerating-climate-change/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ clips from NYT agree with heat news ]</i><br>
<b>Earth Was Due for Another Year of Record Warmth. But This Warm?<br>
</b>Scientists are already busy trying to understand whether 2023’s
off-the-charts heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating...<br>
- -<br>
December’s temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of
the Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions
this week...<br>
- -<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>
- -<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>
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?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><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - Ezra Klein spoke up in
2009 ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>December 29, 2009</b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> December 29, 2009: Washington Post
writer Ezra Klein excoriates members of the US Senate who have
developed cold feet about addressing global warming:<br>
<blockquote> "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are
waving off the idea of serious action in 2010. But not because
they're opposed. Oh, heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns
over the political difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent
Conrad (D-N.D.), for instance, avers that 'climate change in an
election year has very poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true,
though it is odd to say that the American system of governance can
only solve problems every other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says
that 'we need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,' but
wants to wait until the economy is fixed.<br>
<br>
"Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing
this, Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying
things like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation
as legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and
goodwill built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money
on TV ads in their state, talking directly into the camera,
explaining to their constituents that they don't like having to
face this problem, but see no choice. That effort might fail --
probably will, in fact -- but it's got a better chance of success
than not trying. And this is, well, pretty important."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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