Updates from the news #8 – 9 October 2023

Second to the stunning analysis of global September heat is the powerful Apostolic Exhortation from Pope Francis on the urgency of addressing climate change. Addressing the Bishops and the 1.3 billion-member Catholic Church, the pontiff bluntly calls out the U.S. for “irresponsible” Western consumption and pushing the world to “the breaking point” on climate. This is the most aggressive statement on climate change from Pope Francis since his landmark and stunning “Laudato Si” encyclical in 2015. As reported by Inside Climate News, this new statement includes acknowledging the rights of nature and indigenous peoples. He has especially strong language about climate change denialists, and he urges a much more aggressive program from the UN that would be “efficient, obligatory, and readily monitored.” “Those who will have to suffer the consequences of what we are trying to hide, will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.”

Jeff Berardelli, WFLA’s Climate Specialists reports that the recent “heat spike is so unusual, your chance of winning the Powerball is 1,400X greater.”

There has been quite a bit of back-and-forth in the TwitterX-verse about the significance of this spike. Some climate scientists have said things like: “Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking Bananas. Shocking. Mind Boggling.” Indeed, the global surface air temperature anomaly for September is more than 0.5C above the highest previous anomaly from any month of the years. I tend to agree with Michael E. Mann, who argues that while an extreme outlier, this does not portend a tipping point and is not entirely unexpected. He says: “…we’ve seen qualitatively similar anomalies before, and I’m unconvinced that there’s anything here that can’t be explained by (a) long-term warming, (b) a substantial El Nino (Nino3 index>3) & (c) internal variability.”

Florida’s corals are undergoing extreme mortality due to the massive marine heatwave that began in August and continued into September.  Jeff Berardelli interviews Dr. Liv Williamson, a coral marine ecologist at U Miami. This YouTube interview is worth watching to the end and spreading far and wide. Our situation is dire. More than 90% of warm water corals will be lost worldwide by 2050 (Peter Kalmus et al. 2022). For Florida the economic impact will be in the many billions just from the current die off. Tourism, hotels, real estate, fisheries, and many other industries will fail in the wake of this ongoing crisis. In his milestone paper, Peter Kalmus and colleagues state “2°C of global heating could render Earth essentially uninhabitable to warm water coral reefs.” We must act now.

George Monbiot examines the complexities of food production in the Anthropocene and how folks have fantasies of a return to a simpler, agrarian life. This is impossible and absurd. To reverse the present massive economies of scale of agricultural production cannot be done with a return to a “simpler” mode.

The article by The Center for Public Integrity looks at the disaster capitalism of the booming and mostly unregulated disaster recovery industry. This industry is fueled by immigrant labor, with few protections, exposure to toxins, and no salary standards.

Andrew Dessler in his substack The Climate Brink examines the pitfalls of adaptation to climate change. Instead of facing the hard reality of killing fossil emissions, many believe that we can adapt our way out of this mess. As the IPCC notes in its recent AR6, the limits to adaptation are real. “The easy way out is no way at all.”

The UN’s recent synthesis report on the global stocktake will form the basis for the COP28 conference. This report like dozens before it states that fossil fuel exploration must end by 2030.

Inside Climate News reviews a recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that notes that white wealthy residents are the most likely opponents of wind energy. It is arguable that this comes at the expense of minority communities who are more likely to live near fossil fuel plants.

Climate change is has become a fiscal disaster for local governments, especially those near the coasts in Florida. Hurricane Ian devastated communities in southwest Florida in September 2022 and Idalia shut down the Florida Panhandle last month. Florida is critically dependent on economic and physical development. This Storymap shows in painful detail the extreme fiscal stress and damages unfolding for these Florida communities. This news report describes the recovery in Fort Meyers Beach since Ian. I continue to be astonished by the rapid population and economic growth of Florida in the face of climate change.

FEMA has designated Community Disaster Resilience Zones for targeted resilience assistance. Thirty-two of these zones are in Florida. The White House just announced the first Climate Resilience Summit and released a National Climate Resilience Framework.

A likely-seminal review of the financial impact of the most common climate-change scenarios has been published by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries of the University of Exeter. The report echoes the common knowledge among climate scientists and ecologists that the hugely complex Integrated Assessment Models significantly underestimate the physical and economic damages from climate change (see here, here, here, and here). The IAMs are biased by economic and social trend data in an attempt to link disruption of the biosphere and atmosphere to the costs and benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation.

Higher education has been massively influenced by fossil-fuel funding of Centers and programs. The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has numerous fossil-fuel entanglements. The Coalition for a True School of Sustainability at Stanford has provided this detailed review of Big Oil funding of this so-called school of sustainability. The University of Florida and Florida State have received significant funding from the oil industry giant Koch Industries through the Charles Koch Foundation. At UF these gifts are mostly shielded from the Sunshine Law by the independent University of Florida Foundation.

This YouTube video describes the farce of the Doerr School.