"Covering Climate Now"

Particularly like the wind turbines. Donald Trump hates them--he recently claimed they cause cancer.

This is extremely important. Principally important to get stuff right, given the loud, aggressive Denialism to be overcome. "Investigative Journalism" in the climate science space had better be up to forensic speed.

Guardian joins major global news collaboration Covering Climate Now
The Guardian joins the Nation and Columbia Journalism Review in launching a new partnership among more than 250 news organizations to improve coverage of the climate crisis

Hundreds of newsrooms around the world are banding together this week to commit their pages and air time to what may be the most consequential story of our time: the climate emergency...

The network represents every corner of the media including TV networks (CBS News, Al Jazeera), newspapers (El País, the Toronto Star), digital players (BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Vox), wire services (Getty Images, Bloomberg), magazines (Nature, Scientific American), and dozens of podcasts, local publishers, radio and TV stations.

At the launch of the Covering Climate Now partnership in May, co-founders Mark Hertsgaard of the Nation and Kyle Pope, editor in chief of Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an impassioned oped calling for change in how the media covers the climate crisis.

“At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media,” Hertsgaard and Pope wrote. “Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time.”

See just one of my prior posts, "Climate change: What we know."

Also, "Baltimore Code Red." And, "More on climate change and health impacts," to cite just a couple more for now.

Everyone should also read this book:

 

Truthiness. Fake news. Alternative Facts. Since these Princeton Tanner Lectures were delivered in late 2016, the urgency of sorting truth from falsehood—information from disinformation—has exploded into public consciousness. Climate change is a case in point. In the United States in the past two years, devastating hurricanes, floods, and wildfires have demonstrated to ordinary people that the planetary climate is changing and the costs are mounting. Denial is no longer just pig-headed, it is cruel. The American people now understand—as people around the globe have already for some time—that anthropogenic climate change is real and threatening. But how do we convince those who are still in denial, among them the president of the United States, who has withdrawn the United States from the international climate agreement and declared climate change to be a “hoax”? [pg 245]

Even as we disagree about many political issues, our core values overlap to a great degree. To the extent that we can make those areas of agreement clear—and explain how they relate to scientific work—we might be able to overcome the feelings of skepticism and distrust that often prevail, particularly distrust that is rooted in the perception of a clash of values.

So let me be clear about my values.

I wish to prevent avoidable human suffering and to protect the beauty and diversity of life on Earth. I wish to preserve the joy of winter sports, the majesty of coral reefs, and the wonder of giant sequoia trees. I love thunderstorms, but I do not want them to become more dangerous. I do not want flooding and hailstorms and hurricanes to destroy communities and kill innocent people. I do want to make sure that all of our children and grandchildren and generations to come, both in the United States and around the globe, have the same opportunity to live well and prosper that I have had. I don’t want us all to become poorer, as we spend increasing sums of money repairing the damage of climate change, damage that could have been prevented at far lower cost. I don’t believe it is fair for the profits of a few corporations to become the losses of us all. I believe that government is necessary, but I have no desire to expand it unnecessarily...

If we fail to act on our scientific knowledge and it turns out to be right, people will suffer and the world will be diminished.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. On the other hand, if we act on the available scientific conclusions and they turn out to be wrong, well, then, as the cartoonist says, we will have created a better world for nothing. [pp 157-159]

Global warming, "the ultimate mental health issue?"

UPDATE

Story link.

And, The Real News Network has signed on.

Public awareness of the climate crisis has turned a corner. More people than ever understand not only that it’s real and human-caused, but also that it’s the world’s greatest existential threat. Climate action has become a key election issue, and movements are raising expectations of what that action could be.

In recent months, there’s been an uptick in climate coverage (thanks in large part, of course, to organizers). But we need so much more—and deeper, broader, and better—reporting on the climate crisis.

We need media that explains how carbon emissions create more hurricanes and heat waves and forest fires. We need media that explores how we can adapt. We need to hear from more kinds of people and about more kinds of solutions. We need to hear more about climate justice, because poor people, especially people of color and especially in the Global South, are often hit hardest. We need hyperlocal stories and global ones. And we need to hear more about the industries and policymakers who are responsible for the mess we’re in.

That’s why we’re proud to be a part of Covering Climate Now along with over 220 other news outlets...

Excellent. Kudos.

CBS onboard:

Throwing a billion news consumers behind coverage of the climate crisis

A CBS News poll showing that most Americans want to tackle the climate crisis right away. A PBS interview with Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist from Sweden who recently arrived in the US on an emissions-free yacht. A story in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in West Virginia, mapping the growing conversation about climate change in the coal-rich state. A whole issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. A video by The Intercept in which Naomi Klein, the writer and activist, explains how the plastic straws hawked by the Trump campaign help explain wrongheaded conservative—and liberal—responses to the climate crisis. (“What we are witnessing is a temper tantrum against the mere suggestion that there are limits to what we can consume,” Klein says.) A Variety interview with Javier Bardem.

These are among the stories published as part of Covering Climate Now, a major new initiative from CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, that aims to increase the visibility of the climate crisis in our media. Covering Climate Now’s debut project—eight days of dedicated climate coverage by partner news organizations—launched yesterday and will end a week from today, to coincide with the Climate Action Summit at the United Nations in New York. The initiative isn’t limited to the US: in total, more than 250 outlets from around the world signed on, throwing a combined audience of more than 1 billion people behind the project. Our partners include Bloomberg; Agence France-Presse; the Toronto Star; La Repubblica, in Italy; Asahi Shimbun, in Japan; El País, in Spain; News18, in India; Daily Maverick, in South Africa, and the Daily Mirror, in the UK. (You can find a full list here.)...

I hope this initiative will have Legs.

UPDATE

GlobalClimateStrike.net

HEALTHCARE SPACE UPDATE

Just finished this book. Frank. Perceptive. Inspiring.

Will review it soon.
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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow#ClimateEmergency #globalwarming

"Covering Climate Now" - US Army War College Report

Executive Summary

Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army

Current conversations about climate change and its impacts are often rancorous and politically charged. As an organization that is, by law, non-partisan, the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges. This study examines the implications of climate change for the United States Army. This includes national security challenges associated with or worsened by climate change, and organizational challenges arising from climate change-related issues in the domestic environment. Given that, the study’s starting point is the implications of climate change for the U.S. Army, and the Army is therefore the focus of the analysis and recommendations. That said, much of the analysis involves DoD and other elements of the government, and most of the Army-specific recommendations have parallels that apply to other military services.

The study itself did not involve original research on the nature or magnitude of climate change. The analysis assumes, based on the preponderance of evidence available, that significant changes in climate have already occurred, likely to worsen in the years ahead. The study did not look to ascribe causation to climate change (man-made or natural), as causation is distinct from effects and not pertinent to the approximately 50-year horizon considered for the study. The study does, however, assume that human behavior can mitigate both the size and consequences of negative impacts that result from climate change…

Conclusion

The implications of significant, global, regional and local change produced by a general warming of the Earth’s climate are far too extensive to be addressed by this study. Therefore, the guiding principle of this study was to explore diverse areas of importance for the Army that are or will be likely affected by climate change and to develop reasonable, useful recommendations in connection with those areas. A larger and perhaps even more urgent lesson from this study is the importance of developing regular administrative and institutional structures and processes that allow the Army and the DoD to detect, evaluate, respond and regularly review the implications of systemic risk relevant to the Army’s missions and preparedness. Large scale threats like cli- mate change and mass migrations are systemic risks, with emergent features not captured by the simple summation of threat-by-threat-by-threat assessments. The Army must find governance mechanisms that generate greater flexibility, without risk of compromise to the integrity of the force, to deal with the various significant stresses on the Army inherent to a warming climate. These stresses are occurring for military and civilian institutions alike against the backdrop of exponential changes in technology, human population, resource consumption, urbanization, sea level rise, etc.

It is useful to remind ourselves regularly of the capacity of human beings to persist in stupid beliefs in the face of significant, contradictory evidence. Mitigation of new large-scale stresses requires a commitment to learning, systematically, about what is happening…

52-page report PDF link here.

Worth your time. Heavily sourced, 194 reference footnotes, many with hyperlinks. Props to the Naked Capitalism Blog for bringing it to our attention.

BTW, see also climate change related topics at the US Naval War College.

THE "PYROCENE?"

"The Age of Flames Is Consuming California"

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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow

"Covering Climate Now?" - or, just last month?

Well, this collaborative climate change media initiative launched to great fanfare during the second week of September. I've been posting topical updates ever since, given the importance of the issue.

Along the way I expressed one hope and concern--that the theme have "legs," and not turn out to be one more flashy yet transient press effort. While it's perhaps too early to draw a conclusion, I searched Google News just now for items on "Covering Climate Now."

Eighteen of the first 20 story citation returns said "Last Month," with two saying "Five Days Ago."

But, hey, how about those Green Bay Packers?

Thanks for your comment. At the NYT, climate coverage is year round. https://t.co/Q9izvisJSo pic.twitter.com/BCz5Rmpo5R

— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) October 8, 2019

UPDATE

Bloomberg, at Medium.com:

"One way to slow climate change: Pay CEOs to protect the planet."

ERRATUM

Teenage Girls Are Leading The Climate Movement—And Getting Attacked For It
A new movement of teenage climate activists — most of whom are girls — are getting dragged, doxed, hacked, and harassed online.

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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow

"Covering Climate Now" continues

Just watched a WHUT Amanpour & Co interview with Naomi Klein. Bought her book and have begun studying it.

ON A FRIDAY IN MID-MARCH 2019, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an illicit act of truancy. The little streams emptied onto grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting and chatting children and teens, dressed in leopard leggings and crisp uniforms and everything in between. 

Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal. 

Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! 

Some placards were more intricate. In New York City, a girl held up a lush painting of delicate bumble bees, flowers, and jungle animals. From a distance, it looked like a school project on biodiversity; up close, it was a lament for the sixth mass extinction: 45% OF INSECTS LOST TO CLIMATE CHANGE. 60% OF ANIMALS HAVE DISAPPEARED IN THE LAST 50 YEARS. At the center she had painted an hourglass rapidly running out of sand. 

For the young people who participated in the first ever global School Strike for Climate, learning has become a radicalizing act. In early readers, textbooks, and big-budget documentary films, they learned of the existence of ancient glaciers, dazzling coral reefs, and exotic mammals that make up our planet’s many marvels. And then, almost simultaneously—from teachers, older siblings, or sequels to those same films—they discovered that much of this wonder has already disappeared, and much of the rest of it will be on the extinction block before they hit their thirties. 

But it wasn’t only learning about climate change that moved these young people to march out of class en masse. For a great many of them, it was also living it. Outside the legislature building in Cape Town, South Africa, hundreds of young strikers chanted at their elected leaders to stop approving new fossil fuel projects. It was just one year ago that this city of four million people was in the clutches of such severe drought that three-quarters of the population faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out at all. CAPE TOWN IS APPROACHING DROUGHT “DAY ZERO,” read a typical headline. Climate change, for these kids, was not something to read about in books or to fear off in the distance. It was as present and urgent as thirst itself...

Klein, Naomi. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (pp. 1-2). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Video segment link here. Can't as yet find an iFrame video embed link, notwithstanding skulking around in the web page html source code. But, below, a recent related interview essentially covering the same ground:

I've been aware of her work since her Harper's piece "Baghdad Year Zero" (pdf).

…[G]overnments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists. 

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez- faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself...

Yeah. And, with respect to the global warming exigency, let's be clear: the barriers to mitigation and reversal are essentially entirely politico-economic. Multinational extractive dirty fuels purveyors and their associated incumbents will not go quietly.

From Why Trust Science?

Professor Oreskes agrees that more work is needed on how to move from science to policy. Yet she insists that when powerful actors to seek to undermine public trust in the science associated with progressive climate policy, the roots of their skepticism are typically not in distrust of science but rather in economic self-interest and ideological commitments. 

FROM THE NEUROLOGICA BLOG: "CLIMATE CHANGE IS ACCELERATING"


TANGENTIAL ERRATUM

I posted this stuff back in 2015 when I was living in the SF Bay Area, now has just a tad of "link rot."

UPDATE: NEW IPCC REPORT

Link (pdf)

The importance of the ocean and cryosphere for people
All people on Earth depend directly or indirectly on the ocean and cryosphere. The global ocean covers 71% of the Earth surface and contains about 97% of the Earth’s water. The cryosphere refers to frozen components of the Earth system1. Around 10% of Earth’s land area is covered by glaciers or ice sheets. The ocean and cryosphere support unique habitats, and are interconnected with other components of the climate system through global exchange of water, energy and carbon. The projected responses of the ocean and cryosphere to past and current human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and ongoing global warming include climate feedbacks, changes over decades to millennia that cannot be avoided, thresholds of abrupt change, and irreversibility…

As reported in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Earth’s oceans are under severe strain from climate change, a major new United Nations report warns, threatening everything from the ability to harvest seafood to the well-being of hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts.

Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the report issued Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking.

In addition, warmer ocean waters, when combined with rising sea levels, threaten to fuel ever more powerful tropical cyclones and floods, the report said, further imperiling coastal regions and worsening a phenomenon that is already contributing to storms like Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston two years ago.

“The oceans are sending us so many warning signals that we need to get emissions under control,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and a lead author of the report. “Ecosystems are changing, food webs are changing, fish stocks are changing, and this turmoil is affecting humans.”…

 Read all of it. Rather depressing, but read it all anyway.

UPDATE, FROM THE ATLANTIC

A Last Chance to Stop the Deluge
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s newest report lays out the troubles plaguing warming oceans and the ways in which they could get worse.

Today, a baby girl was born. Consider the years of her life—how she’ll think back to her childhood in the Twenties (the 2020s) and become a teenager in the Thirties. If she’s an American citizen, she’ll cast her first vote for president in the 2040 election; she might graduate from college a year or two later. In the year 2050, she’ll turn 31, and she’ll be both fully grown up and young enough to look to the end of the century—and imagine she may get to see it.

We hold the fate of that girl—and of the society she inhabits—in our hands. That’s the message of a blockbuster new report, also released today, from the United Nations-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While the report covers how climate change is reshaping the oceans and ice sheets, its deeper focus is how water, in all its forms, is closely tied to human flourishing…

Again, read all of it.

This release concludes a trilogy of special reports from the IPCC. The first came last October, when it warned that even “moderate” warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would generate irreparable damage; and the second was published last month, with a summary of how climate change will reshape the planet’s land surface. After this new report, the IPCC will fall silent until 2021, when it will publish its sixth major assessment of climate science.

ERRATUM, New York Times comment:

To the Editor: 

Re “Teen Activist Is Attacked From Right After Speech” (news article, Sept. 25):

While the rest of us are trying to clean up the planet, the right is spending its time insulting Greta Thunberg. If you are a Republican, it’s time to ask yourself the question: What, exactly, do I stand for? If the vast majority of scientists are right and Fox News is wrong, and the planet is really in trouble, how do I feel about jeering and mocking a solitary 16-year-old girl who made a stand for what she believed in?

How did the party of Lincoln become a group of people who are sarcastic and unserious? This is not the Republican Party I remember. We don’t stand with Greta because we like her pigtails. We don’t care about her Asperger’s. We don’t care that she’s young. We stand with her because she’s a leader. She’s relentless.

Jane Warden
Malibu, Calif.

DONALD TRUMP ON GRETA THUNBERG

"She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!"

Of course his day would not be complete without his sarcastically insulting someone.

UPDATE

The 21st century is the most important century in human history.

At least that’s what a number of thinkers say. Their argument is pretty simple: Mostly, it’s that there are huge challenges that we have to surmount this century to get any future at all, making this the most consequential of all centuries so far. Furthermore, a solution to those challenges would likely mean a future farther from the brink of destruction — which makes this century more pivotal than future centuries, too.

Not all that long ago — in 1945, with the first wartime use of nuclear weapons — humankind developed the ability to destroy ourselves. Since then, we’ve only gotten better at it. There are now tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and we’re proceeding at great speed toward other ways to endanger our civilization — from climate change to engineered pandemics to artificial intelligence to other, even more speculative future technologies…

A good read.
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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow

The Anthropocene Exigency.

It's not going to abate absent sustained globally cooperative human countermeasures.

 

See my 2021 post "anthropocene adversities advance." And my 2019 posts "covering climate now—or just last month?"

 

TWO NEW READS

 

THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST

…You probably think of heat on a temperature scale, either Fahrenheit or Celsius. You think of it as a gradual, linear thing, a quality of the air around you that moves up and down in increments, or that can be controlled by a thermostat. Seventy degrees is a little hotter than 68 degrees, which is a little hotter than 65 degrees. The change of seasons also plays into this incremental perception of heat—winter gradually warms into spring, spring into summer. Yes, there are some days that are noticeably hotter or colder than others, but we crank up the air-conditioning or throw on a sweater. We trust it will pass and things will return to normal. Temperature is a merry-go-round that we are used to riding.

This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the climate crisis. The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.

Right now we’re more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of warming from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought. But to nonscientists—which is to say, most humans on the planet—3.6 degrees of warming does not sound dangerous at all. Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day? Then there are folks who argue that extreme cold kills people and causes all kinds of weather-related problems too so maybe a hotter world isn’t such a bad thing after all.2 Even the phrase “global warming” sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.

The difficulty of understanding the consequences of heat is amplified by conventional notions of what it means to be hot. In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new. Websites publish “hot lists” of the latest books, movies, TV shows, and actors. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm as a hot-or-not website called FaceMash, which ranked the attractiveness of Harvard women. Heat is an expression of passion—you feel hot for the guy at the bar or engage him in a heated debate. A person who is quick to anger is hot-blooded. Near the house where I live in Austin is a gym called Heat Bootcamp. Here, sweat is purifying, a sign of inner strength (a throwback to medieval times, perhaps, when heat was linked to masculinity through what philosopher Thomas Aquinas called “the elemental heat of the semen”). In Miami, one of the hottest cities in the US, where heat is a lethal threat to outdoor workers and where the city regularly floods due to rising seas caused by the melting ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the basketball team is named, without irony, the Miami Heat.

Goodell, Jeff (2023-07-10). The Heat Will Kill You First (loc 196-222). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO

IN 1956, Time magazine and the New York Times had addressed science and the possibilities. That spring, Roger Revelle gave Time his first climate change interview—in an issue that documented the unnerving Soviet policy of smiles and an America that no longer had enough animal-act enthusiasm to support two circuses. (Since then, the remaining outfit has also folded its tent. Trained bears and top hats we’ve decided belong to our entertainment past.)

“In fifty years or so,” Time reported, summarizing Revelle’s research into the carbon exhalations of our machines, “this process may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.”

They had known even then about the tightness of terrestrial margins. You’d need only a one- or two-degree rise to start the ice melting, the climate changing. “When all the data have been studied,” Time explained, scientists “may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”

Five months later—cement sky, pavement leaves—the New York Times had speculated about “striking changes in climate.” A human-caused warmth that could “convert the polar regions into tropical deserts and jungles, with tigers roaming about and gaudy parrots squawking in the trees.”

A spicy thing to visualize, as light and weather thinned toward Christmas: the former frozen regions being lorded over by a mouthy bird.

And now it was here. Time magazine’s half-century waiting period elapsed. And a great international apparatus had sprung up to capture and examine the data. The IPCC, of course. Two hundred science organizations on record; from the Academy of Athens to the Zimbabwean Academy of Science. Climate change was human-caused, and real.

With three great repositories of the world’s temperature. One in Manhattan—Jim Hansen’s NASA office, six stories up from the Seinfeld coffee shop. Another amidst the Washington gridlock and founding-father statuary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. The third in Britain: the Jack Bauer-sounding Climatic Research Unit, at the University of East Anglia.

The Unit had amassed four million separate temperature readings, from four thousand sites on the planet, reaching back 150 years.

This was weather’s week-by-week episode guide—the sun-and-rain version of Ulysses. No characters, no Dublin, just sky. It had become the largest story in science.

It was 2009. To scientists, with their research accepted and agreed to, the climate fight now looked “winnable.” They weren’t following the politics. They had their eyes on their opponents, who they believed were done.

Relief can be misleading. Especially when it is anticipatory. That just-before moment then becomes the most hazardous. When you envision the glass of water so thoroughly you wonder if you’ve already drunk it. When you feel yourself breaking the tape so clearly you cease to run. When actually finishing the race begins to seem like a formality.

In his memoir of these years, climate scientist Michael Mann quotes an observation by General Douglas MacArthur: “It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”

Mann’s pasting this in tells the whole story: by 2009, the climate scientists believed they’d entered the wind-up phase, their long conflict behind them. Also, that Mann believed they had lost their killer instinct. The desire—sometimes salutary—to hear an enemy skeleton crunch beneath the boot. “By early 2009,” Mann writes in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, “a troubling complacency had emerged among the scientists.”

Lipsky, David. The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial (pp. 407-409). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

David Lipsky is killin' me. What a writer! And, the Snark... geez.

 

 

 

"Because the climate doesn’t care about politics, or experts, or warnings, and isn’t even aware there are people. We have our days and lists and hours, our schedules and emergencies; but the climate keeps its own time."  [David Lipsky, pp. 471-72]

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NPR WHILE IN THE CAR TODAY FETCHING MY GRANDSON CALVIN

apropos, see my recent post "Baltimore Code Red."

 

 NY TIMES' DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:

 

Floods, Heat, Smoke: The Weather Will Never Be Normal Again

Global warming is accelerating, with temperatures not just rising but rising faster than ever. Every day, it seems, we get better at normalizing extreme weather. But it is simultaneously proving harder to compartmentalize — even in places such as New York City that once looked to residents like concrete fortresses against nature.

A month ago, when orange skies blanketed New York, it was a sign to many that this particular climate horror could no longer be conceptually quarantined as a local phenomenon of the American West, where tens of millions had already acclimated to living in the path of fire and every year breathing in some amount of its toxic smoke. That was normal for them, we New Yorkers thought, even though San Francisco had turned a sunless dark amber for the first time only in 2020. It wasn’t normal for us, we told ourselves. Then, when the air quality index dropped from 405 back into the 100s again, in the weeks after, the joggers hit the pavement at their routine times, glad the sky was merely unhealthily smoggy...

Yeah...

 

Other relevant random stuff of mine: "Global warming: the ultimate health issue?" "Climate science speaks: Act now."

 

RETROSPECTIVE. FROM AN APRIL 2021 POST OF MINE:

THE MORAL CASE FOR GLOBAL WARMING MITIGATION

 

I read this a number of months back. Good read. Sound argument.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.

Drawing on over a decade of research,The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. [Amazon blurb]

Well worth your time.

BILL MCKIBBEN

…There’s a rally planned for mid-September in New York City, when the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called a Climate Ambition Summit, to make a case that Biden, who may address the General Assembly, should meet Guterres’s demands to end fossil-fuel expansion, particularly because this country still leads the world in oil and gas production. But this moment feels as if it calls for something larger—comparable to the Earth Day demonstrations of a half century ago, which brought ten per cent of the American population into the streets. It’s eruptions on that scale that change the political reality. And those eruptions are usually rooted not just in fear and anger but also in love and resolve.

The massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, which was caused by a rig six miles off the California coast, was one of the sparks for the first Earth Day, in April, 1970. People were raging over the sight of dead seabirds soaked in oil, but they were also fighting for things that they loved: the ocean, the beach, the chance to sit peacefully on the sand. The incredible warming of these current weeks should strike fear, but it should also remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. The crazily raging river a quarter mile from my door scares me, but it also makes me think how stunning it is in its usual form. This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce: we can take the deadly power of the sun and, with a panel, convert it into the electrons that help cool our homes in a heat wave. If all of that sounds overblown, scientists say that this past week broke records for the hottest days in about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us back to the bare edge of the human story. We’re at a hinge point in that story if ever there was one.

Yeah. Below, a long-time rant of mine.

 

And, yeah, I realize that solar voltage / amperage / wattage capture is but one component. Storage, conversion, practical & equitable distribution (incl. integration w/currrent electrical grids, etc).—None of those are free or effortless to scale up. But deniers can spare me the endless "yes, but" Perfectionism Fallacy line dance.

Moreover, the "consumption unsustainability" / "degrowth" argument is a separate issue (and a gnarly one in its own right). Conflation is not Our Friend.

PERSONAL ERRATUM

 

We went to Deep Creek Lake in far western Maryland on July 1st for a big family vacation. This is what we hit just west of Cumberland MD on I-68.

 

That was Cheryl and I, in a rental SUV, with our now-3 yr old great-grandson Kai in the car seat in the back. More excitement than I needed.

 

SUNDAY JULY 16TH UPDATE

 

 

DAVID LIPSKY INTERVIEW

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"Covering Climate Now." Why should you care?

Those are just the looming individual and "population health" risks (which also map overlappingly to concomitant economic and geopolitical adversities).

I was born in 1946. The U.S. population has doubled since then. World population has more than tripled across that span. We comprise only about 4% of that world population, yet consume 32 times per capita the resources of the poorest nations on the planet. It cannot continue.

Children Know It’s Time to Panic About Climate Change
Teen activist Greta Thunberg has taken on anxieties far beyond her years. Adults should listen.
Franklin Foer

I used to think that one of the gifts of growing older was that anxiety slowly abates with time. When the mind gravitates to the worst-case scenario, the years suggest that it rarely arrives. Experience teaches the brain to stave off its tendency to catastrophize. This is the wisdom that a parent whispers into a child’s ear after a nightmare. Everything will be alright.

Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg, the Scandinavian climate activist in fleece and braids, decries this adult capacity to self-soothe. Grown-ups claim to have a monopoly on realism—to possess a superior capacity for assessing risk—but it’s precisely that supposed realism which has led them to delusion. With their rationalizations, and their armor against anxiety, they have failed to grasp the greatest threat of them all, the warming of the planet…

"When I think about climate change, my mind loops in the direction of hope. It generates a thousand reasons to feel reassured. Humans have an incredible capacity to innovate and to band together in the face of crisis, I tell myself—and then order another hamburger."

 'eh?

I am soon to again be a grandfather. My worries are persistent.

UPDATE

The "Anthropocene" villain? The "Capitalocene?"

You and I have the unfortunate honor of facing down a crisis the likes of which our species has never before seen. Rapid climate change of our own making is transforming every bit of ocean and land, imperiling organisms clear across the tree of life. It’s killing people by way of stronger storms and hotter heat waves and unchecked pollution.

You can and should do your part—fly less if you can, buy local foods that haven’t been shipped thousands of miles, get solar panels and an electric car. But let’s not lose sight of the root cause of this crisis: rampant capitalism. Capitalism has steamrolled this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, overexploiting fish stocks, and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and enrich a fraction of humanity. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions...

...I would just remind everyone that climate change is bad for ruling classes. It's miserable for all the rest of us over the time spans of 10 and 20 and 30 years, that we're all going to be living through very difficult times. But there will also be times at which the 1 percent, in whatever form that takes, will be thoroughly and radically destabilized. I don't think ruling classes are at all prepared for the kinds of political and cultural transformations that will occur in this period...

Yeah. It could get ugly. I am recurrently reminded of Peter Frase's Quadrant IV.

See also "Money is the oxygen of global warming."

UPDATES

Of course, there's this sentiment:

No less fatuous for its utterly clownish straw man predictability.

TIME MAGAZINE

If I'm still alive in 2050 (doubt it) I'll be 104.

FROM A POST I WROTE ELSEWHERE MORE THAN 11 YEARS AGO

"0.0143%" -- 1/7,000th, ~ 0.000142857143.

According to Alun Anderson of New Scientist" (as seen in a post entitled "The Sunlight-Powered Future" in response to the question "what makes you optimistic, and why?" at Edge.org),

"I'm optimistic about…a pair of very big numbers. The first is 4.5 x 10ˆ20. That is the current world annual energy use, measured in joules. It is a truly huge number and not usually a cause for optimism as 70 per cent of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.

Thankfully, the second number is even bigger: 3,000,000 x 10ˆ20 joules. That is the amount of clean, green energy that pours down on the Earth totally free of charge every year. The Sun is providing 7,000 times as much energy as we are using, which leaves plenty for developing China, India and everyone else. How can we not be optimistic? We don't have a long-term energy problem. Our only worries are whether we can find smart ways to use that sunlight efficiently and whether we can move quickly enough from the energy systems we are entrenched in now to the ones we should be using. Given the perils of climate change and dependence on foreign energy, the motivation is there..."

I've checked a few other sources (e.g., here and here, among others), and his "7,000x" assertion seems well within the ballpark, certainly precise enough for the point I wish to proffer here.

Which is simply this: anyone arguing that we cannot relatively rapidly achieve a net aggregate large-scale solar energy capture-conversion-production-distribution efficiency rate of less than two one-hundreths of one percent (worldwide energy consumption per unit period divided by total solar energy accrual per the same period) is either ignorant or lying…

Even adjusting for approximate cumulative global energy use increase across the past 11 years since these data were published (I estimate ~30%), still, ~99.98% of the solar energy hitting our planet annually remains uncaptured and converted for human use.

MO' HEADLINES

America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys
Mass migration begins as coastal homes are bulldozed in the state facing the biggest threat from climate-driven inundation.

Climate Protestors and World Leaders: Same Planet, Different Worlds

UNITED NATIONS — This is the world we live in: Punishing heat waves, catastrophic floods, huge fires and climate conditions so uncertain that children took to the streets en masse in global protests to demand action.

But this is also the world we live in: A pantheon of world leaders who have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions, are hostile to protests or use climate science denial to score political points…

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More to come... #CoveringClimateNow