Benjamin Franta, Stanford University

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis. The industry’s own words, as my research found, show companies knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.

On Oct. 28, 2021, a Congressional subcommittee questioned executives from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute about industry efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told lawmakers that his company’s public statements “are and have always been truthful” and that the company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change.”

Here’s what corporate documents from the past six decades show.

Surprising discoveries

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?

In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.

“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.” He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”

Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”

As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.

Secret research revealed the risks ahead

While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.

By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.

In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.

Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo observing that the company’s long-term business plans could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”

The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we’ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”

And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.

Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be “the greatest in recorded history,” including “destructive floods,” abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” and only brought to light in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.

In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware of global warming’s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.

Big Oil’s PR pivot

These companies had a choice.

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.

But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.

We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition – but it wasn’t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition’s chairman, William O’Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that “Climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,” contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl.

Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controls and promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather, shifting seasons, extreme heat waves and even wildfires like they’ve never seen before.

Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.

This article was updated Oct. 28, 2021, with quotes from the hearing.

Benjamin Franta, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From NOAA (Michelle L’Heureux):

When the climate doesn’t behave like we expect, whether it’s for an individual season or for several decades, we often hear scientists blaming internal variability. Scientists use this term a lot (even on Twitter) and I’ve noticed that I usually obtain a few blank faces depending on the audience. I also remember being a junior scientist in this field and wondering why everyone was going on about internal, or its counterpart, external variability. Internal/External what? And who cares? Me! And you should, too!

In our climate and weather there are:

(1) The things that are pushed around by other (external) things
(2) The things that would change or move (internally) without any push

Lions and tigers and variability

You, yourself, have your own internal variability when it comes to your behavior! But, at times, there may also be an external forcing that causes you to deviate from what you’d otherwise do. For example, I really enjoy taking walks in the woods and try to do so whenever I can. Because there are lots of trail options where I’m walking, my path will change from day to day based on pure randomness or a need for variety. But I also really don’t like running into bears (especially fat bears). As much as I’d like to pretend they don’t exist, if I see a bear, I will strongly deviate from my intended path and choose one that gives the bear a wide berth. So bears are an external forcing on my walking path.

Bears aside, why would we care whether variability is internal or external? Well, in the climate system, we might care a lot if we want to answer questions like “Is this rainstorm caused by El Niño?” Or “Did human-caused climate change cause the polar vortex to break down?”

In order to figure out the answers, we first have to examine the likelihood that the impact would have occurred without any push from an external force. To phrase it another way, we need to determine whether the rainstorm may have occurred without any influence from El Niño. Or whether that change in the polar vortex would have occurred without increasing greenhouse gases. Internal variability are changes that would have happened anyways, regardless of the presence of something else (footnote #1). There will always be some day-to-day variations in my walks even if every bear instantly disappeared.

For a scientist, it can be difficult to prove whether a weather or climate event occurred due to some external influence, like increasing greenhouse gases. This is because the observed weather—our reality—only occurs once! We can’t run an alternate reality where we remove the external influence because our observations are already history.

This is where a reliable climate model that simulates realistic weather and climate comes in handy. In model world, we can run an experiment that does not have the external forcing—for example, an atmosphere with no increases in greenhouse gases—and a second experiment that DOES have the external influence of greenhouse gases. The difference between the results is considered the part that is externally influenced by greenhouse gases. Going back to my walks, we can compare my path through the woods in a world with bears to my path in a world without bears.

Of bears and butterflies

But there’s a catch (there’s always a catch, darn it): the butterfly effect. Just like my different paths through the woods on different days, climate model simulations will evolve differently from each other based on small differences in their starting state. This is true in a world with bears (excess greenhouse gases) and without them. That’s why scientists prefer model studies that run “large ensembles.” These generate dozens—sometimes hundreds—of my simulated walks in the woods with bears versus dozens of simulated walks without bears.

Running a bunch of simulations results in a range of possible outcomes with bears (my random variability plus external forcing) and a range of outcomes without bears (only my random variability; no external forcing). We can compare these two ranges to get an idea of how much the odds of my following a given path (climate outcome) have changed. To build even more confidence, it is ideal to compare large ensembles among several different models.

Dr. Clara Deser, a senior scientist at NCAR, has been at the forefront of large ensemble studies, and she recently wrote a commentary on internal climate variability, which you should check out. In that piece, she provided an example of how external and internal variability can influence the trends in winter precipitation across the U.S. that we may experience over the next 50 years.

The top panel here shows what we’d expect if we averaged together the results of this particular climate model in order to identify the influence of human-caused climate change (an external forcing). It projects a much wetter future over the U.S. in response to climate change, especially over the eastern and western U.S. But the bottom panel shows two equally plausible outcomes drawn from the model ensemble with the exact same external forcing (footnote # 2).

Clearly, the two maps are very different—the bottom right panel showing a considerably drier winter over the U.S. and the one on the bottom left indicating a wetter winter. How can that be? Even though the human influence on the climate is exactly the same in all simulations within the model ensemble, internal variability is large enough to create a range of outcomes that can be rather distinct (footnote #3). The internal part is largely unpredictable—there is a certain amount of variability that is baked into the cake and will occur regardless of global warming.

When El Niño is the bear

Another reason internal versus external variability matters is because it helps us understand what we can or cannot predict (footnote #4). From day to day, the exact path I take for my walk in the woods is mostly unpredictable—there’s randomness to it. As much as a bear is scary to see, it imparts some predictability on the walk because I will go well out of my way, around the bear, to avoid it. The predictable part is looping around the bear, not walking right up to the bear and asking to be eaten. So, it helps to have external variability in the weather and climate system—without it, it would be difficult to predict at all. Maybe we should be thankful for some fat bears after all.

Side note: Clara and I were chatting about internal variability and how it may be time to come up with a less obscure term. She came up with inherent variability, which seems to better convey variability that is inherent to the climate system. So, blog readers, what do you think? Is it time to phase out “internal variability?” What do you think of “inherent variability” instead? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Personal Note: Geert Jan van Oldenborgh died earlier this month and with that climate science, and even more than that, climate services, has lost a great scientist, a pioneer, and a truly good person. He openly struggled with cancer even while pushing us forward. While I did not know him well, I was lucky enough to have been touched by his insights and passion in our collaboration on a relative SST index for ENSO monitoring. I think the best way we can uphold his legacy is to apply his level of enthusiasm to our work, be curious, be humble, and remember that science is ultimately about serving others so that we can be our best selves on this fragile planet. RIP Geert Jan.

Footnotes:

(1) Instead of “internal variability” you may sometimes hear “natural variability,” but this term might be a little confusing b/c, depending on context, both internal and external fluctuations could have some “natural origins.” For example, a volcanic eruption is a natural occurrence, but the emissions from the eruption are an external forcing on the climate system, with possible effects on ENSO.

(2) Primarily increasing greenhouse gases plus some other factors included in the RCP8.5 scenario of projected radiative changes.

(3) Model ensembles aren’t the only way to estimate internal variability. The two references below show that you can “scramble” the observed precipitation data to mimic a large ensemble, and obtain a similar spread of 50-year trends as those in the CESM1 model.

McKinnon, K. A and C. Deser, 2018: Internal variability and regional climate trends in an Observational Large Ensemble. J. Climate, 31, 6783–6802, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0901.1.

McKinnon, K. A. and C. Deser, 2021: The inherent uncertainty of precipitation variability, trends, and extremes due to internal variability, with implications for Western US water resources. J. Climate.

(4) As you can imagine, what is considered internal or external will change depending on the context and the particular question asked. For example, El Niño can be the “external thing” that is pushing rainfall around— how much of this storm due to El Niño? But different questions can be asked, like whether El Niño events are getting stronger due to increasing greenhouse gases. In this second example, greenhouse gases are now in the external forcing role and El Niño is the internal variability. As Tom pointed out, in the latest IPCC report scientists noted that El Niño has tremendous swings and variations even without changes in the amount of greenhouse gases. El Niño’s large internal variability and consequent lack of consistent changes in various model projections are one of the main challenges in determining whether greenhouse gas increases are changing its amplitude or frequency.

From The Nature Conservancy (Ciaran Clayton and Tom Jennings):

With just days to go until the start of UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow, UK, much uncertainty remains about the outcomes of this crucial summit.

The Paris Agreement, brokered at COP21 in 2015, urges countries to strengthen their national climate commitments every five years. Delayed for a year by the pandemic, COP26 represents the first of these key milestones when negotiators are expected to come to the table with enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that detail their domestic pathways towards fulfilling the Paris goals.

It is a chance for the world to take stock of where we are, and to raise our ambition at a pace that will effect real change.

Commenting on her hopes and expectations for COP26, The Nature Conservancy’s CEO Jennifer Morris said:

“Our planet faces the dual and interconnected crises of rapid climate change and biodiversity loss. We have years, not decades, to address these existential threats. It’s easy to look at the environment headlines that have dominated news cycles over this past year and conclude that hope is lost – but there’s still time for decisive action.

“This emergency requires myriad solutions, and science shows us that many of these are available here and now. To succeed, we will need to radically transform global economies in ways that reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors – particularly energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction and buildings, and land use. The U.S. alone, for example, is committed to cutting its domestic greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 by boosting vehicle efficiency, expanding renewable energy, and investing in nature-based solutions, among others.”

“Decisive political commitments are key – I want to see a COP where global leaders embrace the science and deliver implementation plans that will ensure Paris goals aren’t missed. But this is also a COP where corporations and financiers must show how they are helping to align the world economy with climate targets, and in doing so hastening a global transition towards a nature-positive, climate-neutral, and equitable future… Where Indigenous Peoples’ voices are prominent and afforded the platform they deserve as custodians of the Earth’s most climate-critical and biodiversity-rich ecosystems… Where nature’s solutions are given equal billing to technological ones… And where we can confidently say we stepped up for a brighter future.”

“Without action at scale, delivered in a transparent and equitable way, the world will not have the tools needed to effect change that helps, not harms, people and nature. For Glasgow to secure its place in the history books as the next great milestone in our climate turnaround, COP26 must deliver on the ambitions of those initial negotiations and ensure that, through radical collaboration, we turn promises into action.”

Rachel Kyte, Tufts University

Glasgow sits proudly on the banks of the river Clyde, once the heart of Scotland’s industrial glory and now a launchpad for its green energy transition. It’s a fitting host for the United Nations’ climate conference, COP26, where world leaders will be discussing how their countries will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.

I’ve been involved in climate negotiations for several years as a former senior U.N. official and will be in Glasgow for the talks starting Oct. 31, 2021. As negotiations get underway, here’s what to watch for.

Ambition

At the Paris climate conference in 2015, countries agreed to work to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), aiming for 1.5 C (2.7 F). If COP21 in Paris was the agreement on a destination, COP26 is the review of itineraries and course adjustments.

The bad news is that countries aren’t on track. They were required this year to submit new action plans – known as national determined contributions, or NDCs. The U.N.’s latest tally of all the revised plans submitted in advance of the Glasgow summit puts the world on a trajectory to warm 2.7 C (4.86 F), well into dangerous levels of climate change, by the end of this century.

All eyes are on the G-20, a group of leading world economies that together account for almost 80% of global emissions. Their annual summit takes place in Rome on Oct. 30-31, immediately before COP26 begins.

Some key G-20 countries have not submitted their updated plans yet, including India. Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Russia have filed plans that are not in line with the Paris Agreement.

Details of how China will achieve its climate goals are now emerging, and the world is poring over them to see how China will strengthen its 2030 emissions reduction target, which currently involves cutting emissions 65% per unit of gross domestic product, moving up the date when the country’s emissions growth will peak, and setting industrial production targets for other greenhouse gases, such as methane.

A delicate dance between the United States and China, and deft diplomacy by France, was critical to reaching the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Six years later, a growing rivalry threatens to spiral down what had been a race to the top.

Meanwhile the world’s eyes are on the United States. Opposition from two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, appears likely to force the Biden administration to scrap a plan that would have incentivized utilities to switch to cleaner power sources faster. If their planetary brinksmanship guts that key part of President Joe Biden’s Plan A for how the U.S. will reach its 2030 emissions targets, the world will want to see details of Plans B, C or D in Glasgow.

Carbon markets

One leftover task from the Paris conference is to set rules for carbon markets, particularly how countries can trade carbon credits with each other, or between a country and a private company.

Regulated carbon markets exist from the European Union to China, and voluntary markets are spurring both optimism and concern. Rules are needed to ensure that carbon markets actually drive down emissions and provide revenue for developing countries to protect their resources. Get it right and carbon markets can speed the transition to net zero. Done badly, greenwashing will undermine confidence in pledges made by governments and companies alike.

Another task is determining how countries measure and report their emissions reductions and how transparent they are with one another. This too is fundamental to beating back greenwashing.

Also, expect to see pressure for countries to come back in a year or two with better plans for reducing emissions and reports of concrete progress.

Climate finance

Underpinning progress on all issues is the question of finance.

Developing countries need help to grow green and adapt to climate change, and they are frustrated that that help has been on a slow drip feed. In 2009 and again in 2015, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations by 2020, but they haven’t reached that goal yet.

With one week to go, the U.K. revealed a climate finance plan, brokered by Germany and Canada, that would establish a process for counting and agreeing on what counts in the $100 billion, but it will take until 2023 to reach that figure.

On the one hand it is progress, but it will feel begrudging to developing countries whose costs of adaptation now must be met as the global costs of climate impacts rise, including from heat waves, wildfires, floods and intensifying hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons. Just as with the global vaccine rollout, the developing world may wonder whether they are being slow-walked into a new economic divergence, where the rich will get richer and the poor poorer.

Beyond the costs of mitigation and adaptation is the question of loss and damage – the innocuous term for the harm experienced by countries that did little to contribute to climate change in the past and the responsibility of countries that brought on the climate emergency with their historic emissions. These difficult negotiations will move closer to center stage as the losses increase.

Public climate finance provided by countries can also play another role through its potential to leverage the trillions of dollars needed to invest in transitions to clean energy and greener growth. Expect big pledges from private sources of finance – pension funds, insurance companies, banks and philanthropies – with their own net zero plans, including ending finance and investments in fossil fuel projects, and financing critical efforts to speed progress.

It’s raining pledges

A cross section of the world will be in Glasgow for the conference, and they will be talking about pathways for reducing global carbon emissions to net zero and building greater resilience.

From emissions-free shipping to aviation, from ending coal financing to green steel and cement, from platforms to reduce methane, to nature-based solutions, the two-week conference and days leading up to it will see a steady stream of commitments and new groups of countries, nongovernmental organizations and businesses working together.

Keeping track and verifying achievements toward these pledges will be critical coming away from COP26. Without that, climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “blah blah blah” speech thrown at delegates to a pre-COP meeting in Milan a few weeks ago will continue to echo around the world.

[Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

This article was updated Oct. 26 with the release of the UNEP Emissions Gap report and trajectories chart.

Rachel Kyte, Dean of the Fletcher School, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From Yale Environment 360 (Jeremy Deaton):

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, talks with Yale Environment 360 about how climate change is hitting Native Americans especially hard and why protecting tribal sovereignty is critical for tackling the climate crisis.

Two centuries of forced removal and relocation onto often-marginalized lands have left Native Americans uniquely vulnerable to climate change. From northern Arizona, where the Hopi are facing a megadrought that is withering crops and killing livestock, to southern Louisiana, where the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw are seeing their ancestral lands succumb to rising seas, Native American tribes are at the forefront of the climate crisis.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, discusses how Indigenous people in the United States are imperiled by the impacts of climate change – including megafires, floods, heat waves, and drought – and where they are making progress. Sharp’s own Quinault Indian Nation in Washington, where she serves as vice president, is planning to relocate two seaside villages to higher ground to escape worsening floods — a move funded by revenue from a statewide carbon tax that the Quinault and other tribes negotiated for.

Sharp is seeking greater support to help tribes across the U.S. cope with climate change. She is also pushing federal and state officials to seek the consent of tribes when building new mines, pipelines, highways, and other infrastructure that will impact tribal lands, sacred sites, and burial grounds, which she says is key to empowering tribes to tackle climate change.

With President Biden restarting the White House Council on Native American Affairs and appointing Deb Haaland to lead the Department of the Interior, the first Native American to do so, Sharp is optimistic that “we’re going to be able to ensure that tribal sovereignty is not only respected, but implemented in a way that will allow us to effectively adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change.”

Yale Environment 360: Research shows that tribal nations are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Where are you seeing that play out?

Fawn Sharp: I’ve certainly seen it play out in my homeland. I was initially elected as a tribal president for the Quinault Nation back in 2006. And at that time, I convened a gathering of our tribal citizens to try to identify the top priorities within our nation, including the survival of our sockeye salmon. We call it a “blueback” salmon, which is unique to the Quinault River and its tributaries, and it was in sharp decline.

I gathered our [tribal] scientists and our staff to try to determine what was causing the decline. And I learned about ocean acidification and about warming ocean temperatures. Our scientists did an overlay of the different spikes in the ocean temperature, and it perfectly aligned with the sharp declines in salmon that we were witnessing.

The University of Washington had been monitoring the Anderson Glacier, which feeds the Quinault River. And I saw pictures showing — just over the course of about a 60-year period — a visual stark contrast in how rapidly this glacier was receding and disappearing. I took a helicopter flight, probably in my second term of office, and as we came over the ridge in the helicopter, the Anderson Glacier was completely gone. I had seen visuals of a glacial sheen, and I was expecting to see a glacier, or a remnant of a glacier. But when we came over the ridge, there was just a large pool of murky water and not a shred of a glacial sheen. And I cannot explain what that felt like to come face-to-face with a mountain, expecting to see a glacier, and there was nothing but murky water.

This summer, we had extreme heat. Temperatures here, at Lake Quinault, were as high as 109 degrees. And I saw reports that in the same window of four days of that heat wave, Mount Rainier lost three feet of snowpack. I dread to think what some of the heat waves that we’ve had to undergo here in the Pacific Northwest are doing to the remaining glaciers.

There was another instance when I stood on our shores and saw two and a half miles, as far as the eye could see, of dead marine life along our coastline, due to the oxygen depletion and The Blob [a mass of warm water in the Pacific Ocean from 2013 to 2016], as they called it.

In just my 15 years as president of the Quinault Nation, I’ve had to declare multiple states of emergency due to just about every climate-related event one can imagine [including coastal floods, severe rainfall, and landslides]. And we’re just one tribal nation.

e360: And other tribes in the U.S. are facing similar threats?

Sharp: I’ve made several trips to Alaska, and I’ve met with Alaska tribal leaders. They’ve done an excellent job of providing very comprehensive and detailed reports that address all the various impacts of climate change on Alaska natives — whether it’s their food security, their [traditional] medicines, the plants that they gather, the animals that they hunt, their life ways, their villages that are needing to relocate.

The tribes in Louisiana have had to confront the severe impacts of hurricanes and, of course, tornadoes and rising seas. Tribes in California are confronting megafires. I remember explaining it to my kids when we experienced one of the first megafires here in the Northwest, and now it seems there’s no end to fire season, and a megafire isn’t a rare occurrence. It’s an every-year occurrence.

And this is happening all across Indian country. At the National Congress of American Indians, we have regular board meetings where our regional vice presidents report on the issues affecting their people. And at our last annual convention, every region raised issues of climate change.

The tribes in the Great Lakes area, for example, are seeing impacts to their rice fields [from rising temperatures and extreme rainfall]. Tribes in the Northeast are confronting the impacts of climate change to their traditional foods and medicines. So, it’s widespread. It’s all across Indian country, and it’s becoming our top priority.

e360: You’ve said that tribal sovereignty is critically important to tackling climate change. Can you explain why that is?

Sharp: It’s important for people to understand that one of the attributes of our inherent sovereignty is our ability to have a decisive say when it comes to our land, territory, resources, and people. But there’s still a level of paternalism and a level of political inequality. When it comes to protecting our resources, the United States still will take unilateral action affecting our land, territories, and sacred sites.

The classic example of that is the conflict at Standing Rock [Indian Reservation in South and North Dakota]. There, a tribal nation was attempting to protect their water source, their sacred sites, and they objected, along with tribes all across the country and allies globally, [to the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline]. Over those objections, over that science, over the legal objections, over the policy objections, the United States unilaterally permitted that activity.

When we get to the point where there’s not only an embracing of the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but we implement them in a way that respects tribal sovereignty, then tribes will be fully armed and able to adopt both adaptation and mitigation strategies to defend their people, their homelands, and their traditional ways of life against the imminent threat of climate change.

The White House Council on Native American Affairs has restarted under the Biden administration. They added an international committee. We’ve also had direct engagement with the United States State Department. And we think, with this administration, with this Secretary of the Interior [a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico], we’re going to be able to ensure that tribal sovereignty is not only respected, but exercised in a way that will allow us to effectively adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

e360: The federal government currently has a responsibility to consult with tribes in making decisions that affect their lands, but you’re pushing for the government to have to seek tribal nations’ consent. Can you explain the distinction, and why you think it’s important?

Sharp: Consultation is the mechanism by which the United States has related to tribal nations up to this point. And that’s just a matter of checking an administrative box that says, “Yes, we did consult with a tribal nation.” But over our objections, agencies will then take unilateral action and say, “We consulted, but this is our decision,” as they did with Standing Rock. And oftentimes it appears to be a predetermined course of action. We come to the table in good faith. We consult. We put our best science forward, our best legal arguments, but oftentimes we will walk away with a sense that we don’t have political equality. We have faith and we have hope, but time and time again, we get disappointed that, even over our objections, agencies will take unilateral action.

The idea of consent, in contrast, is one in which we would have a level of political equality. And just as the United States would never engage with the government of Canada or Mexico, sit down, and talk, and then proceed with unilateral action, we hope that at some point the United States will begin to implement the idea of having consent with us.

e360: Besides Standing Rock, where else do you see consent as being a tool for protecting tribal lands and sacred sites?

Sharp: Oak Flat [where a copper mine is being proposed on land sacred to the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona] is another area that highlights the level of objection to development activities directly on sacred sites. And if a tribe does not have decisive say over something as central and as sacred and as important as these places where our ancestors have engaged in cultural and religious activities from time immemorial, under what circumstances will we?

[The San Carlos Apache people] have absolutely no say, and they’ve had to litigate and go to court and try to defend those rights that were gifted to their ancestors when time began. Those rights are inherent. Those are rights that nearly every other country around the world, in signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have recognized. So, we’re left asking ourselves, if we cannot have a decisive say over something as sacred as Oak Flat, under what circumstances can we?

e360: You’ve argued that the funds that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and FEMA currently provide for tribal climate resilience and to protect communities from disasters are insufficient. Why is that?

Sharp: The scale of the climate crisis far exceeds the public treasury. When you consider all of the dollars that are spent in dealing with megafires, hurricanes, flooding — those are mere symptoms of climate change. And as apocalyptic as they may seem, we aren’t even getting to the actions that are minimally necessary to contend with the impacts of climate change: restoring our salmon habitat, restoring balance to our ecosystems.

In the beginning of August, President Biden announced a deployment of $3.4 billion through FEMA to address climate change. And as those dollars are being implemented at an agency level, at FEMA, 50 states will be eligible for funding, six territories, and only three tribal nations. Which means 99 percent of Indian country is excluded from that significant deployment of those new dollars.

Because the scale of the climate crisis far exceeds the public treasury, we’ve been aggressively going after those who are directly responsible. In Washington state, the policy points that we tribal nations negotiated in [the state’s recent climate bill] were ultimately legislated into law with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act this year through the Washington State Legislature and, of those statewide dollars that will now result from pricing carbon, 10 percent are going to go to tribal nations.

We secured $50 million to relocate our villages to higher ground. We secured dollars for tribal nations to address megafires and forest fires. So, we did not wait for the state or the United States Congress to hold industry accountable. We’re well aware that the scale of the crisis is exceeding the public treasury, and the only way we are going to secure the necessary resources to defend our lands, our territory, and people is by holding those who are directly responsible accountable.

In the absence of leadership and against an overwhelming lobby from the fossil fuel industry, tribal nations have been able to succeed. And we’re going to continue on that course.

e360: Why do you think that Indigenous people are well positioned to tackle climate change?

Sharp: We stand on the shoulders of so many of our ancestors and generations that have gone before us. And while we have multi-generational trauma, multi-generational poverty, multi-generational political, economic, and social marginalization, we also have multi-generational strength and resilience, and wisdom, and teachings.

Our ancestors have foretold of a time where there will be a day of reckoning. Humanity cannot continue to live the way it’s been living and survive. And we’ve known that when that day of reckoning comes, tribal nations will be positioned to share with the world, as full participants, our knowledge and our standing and moral authority to bring life back into balance. And not just for humanity, but for all things living and the spiritual connection that we have.

Our ancestors have taught us the salmon cannot get out of the rivers and march to the halls of Congress and lobby for legislation. So, we are the champions, and have been the champions, for the natural world when others have been so willing and so arrogantly able to exploit the natural world for shortsighted, short-term, very narrow interest, profits, and gain. While we’ve relinquished millions of acres of land across the United States, we’ve never relinquished our spiritual connection. And this new generation, this generation of young people, are being born into that.

I’m witnessing not only native youth, but youth across the planet rise to the level of being that generation of leaders that is going to take decisive action. They are going to respect inclusivity. They are very active in wanting to ensure that any climate strategy that this generation will undertake will be aggressive. It will be inclusive. It will respect the rights of all.

I recognize that as a tribal leader, as do many tribal leaders across the country. And we facilitate that. While our generation may develop the strategies to address climate change, it’s going to be that next generation and those that follow that will implement and execute much of the work that we are doing today.

From Avaaz.org (Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Dominika Lasota):

To world leaders:

“Betrayal.”

That’s how young people around the world are describing our governments’ failure to cut carbon emissions. And it’s no surprise.

We are catastrophically far from the crucial goal of 1.5°C, and yet governments everywhere are still accelerating the crisis, spending billions on fossil fuels.

This is not a drill. It’s code red for the Earth. Millions will die as our planet is devastated — a terrifying future that will be created, or avoided, by the decisions you make. You have the power to decide.

As citizens across the planet, we urge you to face up to the climate emergency. Not next year. Not next month. Now:

Keep the precious goal of 1.5°C alive with immediate, drastic, annual emission reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen.

End all fossil fuel investments, subsidies, and new projects immediately, and stop new exploration and extraction.

End creative carbon accounting by publishing total emissions for all consumption indices, supply chains, international aviation and shipping.

Deliver the $100bn promised to the most vulnerable countries, with additional funds for climate disasters.

Enact climate policies that protect workers and the most vulnerable, and reduce all forms of inequality.

It only takes one inspiring leader to make the difference. Climate change is a golden opportunity to radically transform our societies for good. It’s also an opportunity for determined, visionary leadership. It will take immense courage — but know that when you rise, billions will be right behind you.

Sincerely,

Greta from Sweden, Vanessa from Uganda and Dominika from Poland

From The Washington Post (Ruby Mellen):

Intense rainfall, raging wildfires and deadly heat waves. The effects of climate change are no longer an abstraction. They are happening now, and with greater frequency.

At least 85 percent of the world’s population has felt its effects, according to research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The devastations from the past 10 months alone have stunned climate experts.

“This was a really extreme year,” said Radley Horton, a research professor focused on climate extremes at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Right now we’re seeing the climate extremes changing so fast that that alone is demonstrating that going past 1.5 Celsius will be something we won’t adapt to.”
Despite the 2015 Paris climate conference promise to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, country commitments have not come close to that goal. The United Nations says the world is on pace to experience an average temperature rise of 2.7 Celsius by the end of the century.

As leaders descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for this year’s climate conference, most of the world is already feeling the repercussions of their inaction.

From China to Germany, California to Siberia, the extreme weather events of 2021 have broken records and destroyed lives.

Precipitation

“It’s way beyond what our aging infrastructure was designed for.” — Radley Horton, research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Parts of the world were inundated with deadly, record-breaking precipitation. Infrastructure buckled under torrential downpours. Hundreds of people died in the ensuing floods.

In July, Germany’s heaviest rainfall in a century left over 150 people dead.

“We have never experienced something like this,” said Franz-Josef Molé, head of the German Weather Service’s Forecast and Advisory Center. “It’s beyond comprehension.”

Scientists linked the heavy rainfall to climate change, since a warmer atmosphere retains more water…

In South Sudan, October flooding from torrential rain affected more than 700,000 people, according to the United Nations refugee agency. The organization described people “marooned on islands on islands surrounded by water, sheltering under trees and unable to cross to safety.” There were also fears that waterborne diseases would spread.

UNHCR stressed that the impacts of climate change are “profoundly felt in East Africa,” where communities “are facing unprecedented floods and storms, unreliable rainfall, and distress under hotter and drier conditions as their basic needs and rights to water, food, livelihoods, land, and a healthy environment are hit hard.”

China and New York City also saw extreme rainfall this year. In July, a deadly downpour fell on the city of Zhengzhou, the heaviest rains ever recorded in the country with nearly 8 inches of rain falling in one hour. More than 300 people died in the floods and landslides. Rain cascaded down on the city, turning Metro stations into to swamps and highways into rivers.

In New York City, Central Park experienced record rainfall on Sept. 1, with 3.15 inches coming down in just one hour. The deluge filled up basements and tunnels within minutes. More than 40 people were killed.

In October, more than 29 inches of rain fell in northwestern Italy in just 12 hours setting a record for all of Europe.

The extreme flooding proved the effects of climate change were taking hold “faster than our climate models predicted,” with effects “way beyond what any of our aging infrastructure was designed for,” Horton said.

Heat

“Human bodies are really resilient. But there are thresholds for what we can withstand.” — Kristie Ebi, epidemiologist at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington

Other places saw unexpected heat waves that left many dead and showed that even regions accustomed to cooler weather are not immune from the effects of a warming world.

Brutal temperature spikes swept through the Pacific Northwest this summer, killing hundreds of people in the United States and Canada. Streetcar cables in Portland melted. Pavements in Washington cracked from the pressure…

The waves pushed many into cooling centers for shelter and emergency rooms for care. They also drew lines between the privileged and the vulnerable: Access to air conditioning and proper health care were, for some, the difference between life and death.

While heat is not officially deemed a disaster like fire or flooding, it can be even more deadly. Sixty-four percent of Americans lived in places that saw multiday heat waves this summer, according to a Post analysis.

July was the earth’s hottest month on record for the planet. The United States and Europe recorded their hottest summers ever in 2021.

The temperature swelled to nearly 120 degrees in Sicily which, if confirmed, would be the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe.

Fires

“It’s a global year of fire.” — Merritt Turetsky, professor of ecology at University of Colorado Boulder

Heat waves left landscapes dry and brittle, paving the way for an apocalyptic fire season in the northern hemisphere as well.

“We knew this was coming,” said Merritt Turetsky, professor of ecology at University of Colorado Boulder. “Fire was going to follow those heat waves.”

Wildfires in North America, Siberia and the Mediterranean contributed to record-high carbon emissions in the months of July and August, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s atmospheric monitoring service.

The Dixie Fire became the second-largest in California history, destroying almost 1 million acres of land. More than three months later that fire is still burning.

In September, evacuations were ordered in Old Station, as strong winds in the area created a “fire whirl,” a tornado-like phenomenon that can fling flaming embers miles ahead of its wake.

In northeast Siberia, blazes swelled to become larger than all of the world’s active fires combined in August. The cloud of smoke it created traveled over the north pole. It consumed more than 40 million acres of land, according to Greenpeace Russia, and resulted in the worst fire season ever recorded in the country.

Wildfires also broke out in densely populated tourist destinations along the Mediterranean Sea, prompting evacuations of thousands of people. Blazes raged in Greece, Italy and Turkey, after prolonged heat waves in southeast Europe.

The year of extreme weather presented a devastating new reality as leaders meet in Glasgow.

“The climate system is going to keep shocking us,” Turetsky said. It’s going to happen again.”

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

As a major U.N. climate conference gets underway on Oct. 31, 2021, you’ll be hearing a lot of technical terms tossed around: mitigation, carbon neutral, sustainable development. The language can feel overwhelming.

“It sounds like you’re talking over people,” one person said of the terminology during a recent study colleagues and I conducted through the USC Dornsife Public Exchange.

Climate reports are often written at a scientific level. So we thought it would be helpful to clarify some of the most common terms.

To do that, we interviewed 20 people about common terms used by climate scientists and climate journalists. We then used their feedback to explain those terms in everyday language. With the help of the United Nations Foundation, we chose eight terms from reports written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Here’s a guide that may help you to follow the news about climate change. The explanation of each term starts with the technical definition from the IPCC. The text that follows puts it into plain language.

1. Mitigation

IPCC definition: Mitigation (of climate change): a human intervention to reduce emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.

Translation: Stopping climate change from getting worse.

When people talk about “mitigation” they often focus on fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – used to make electricity and run cars, buses and planes. Fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. When these gases are released, they linger in the atmosphere. They then trap heat and warm the planet.

Some ways to mitigate climate change include using solar and wind power instead of coal-fired power plants; making buildings, appliances and vehicles more energy efficient so they use less electricity and fuel; and designing cities so people have to drive less. Protecting forests and planting trees also help because trees absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and lock them away.

2. Adaptation

IPCC definition: In human systems, the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In natural systems, the process of adjustment to actual climate and its effects; human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.

Translation: Making changes to live with the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is already happening. Heat waves, wildfires and floods are getting worse. People will have to find ways to live with these threats. Los Angeles, for example, is planting trees to help people stay cooler. Coastal cities like Miami may need sea walls to protect against floods. More “adaptation” actions will be needed as climate change gets worse.

3. Carbon dioxide removal

IPCC definition: Carbon dioxide removal methods refer to processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere by either increasing biological sinks of CO2 or using chemical processes to directly bind CO2. CDR is classified as a special type of mitigation.

Translation: Taking carbon dioxide out of the air.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been increasing for many years. In 2019, there was 50% more more of it than in the late 1700s. Planting trees and restoring grasslands can remove carbon dioxide from the air. There are also carbon dioxide removal technologies that store it underground or in concrete, but these are new and not widely used.

4. Carbon neutral

IPCC definition: Carbon neutrality is achieved when anthropogenic CO2 emissions are balanced globally by anthropogenic carbon dioxide removals over a specified period. Carbon neutrality is also referred to as net-zero carbon dioxide emission.

Translation: Adding no net carbon dioxide into the air. This does not have to mean that you can’t add any carbon dioxide. It means that if you do add carbon dioxide into the air you take out the same amount.

The IPCC warns that the world needs to be carbon neutral by 2050 to avoid a serious climate crisis. This means using both “mitigation” to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide added to the air and “carbon dioxide removal” to take carbon dioxide out of the air.

5. Tipping point

IPCC definition: A level of change in system properties beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly, and does not return to the initial state even if the drivers of the change are abated. For the climate system, it refers to a critical threshold when global or regional climate changes from one stable state to another stable state.

Translation: When it is too late to stop effects of climate change.

One of the most talked-about tipping points involves the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Some research suggests it may have already started happening. West Antarctica alone holds enough ice to raise sea levels worldwide by about 11 feet (3.3 meters). If all glaciers and ice caps melt, sea levels will end up rising about 230 feet (70 meters).

6. Unprecedented transition

IPCC definition for “transition”: The process of changing from one state or condition to another in a given period of time. Transition can be in individuals, firms, cities, regions and nations and can be based on incremental or transformative change.

Translation: Making big changes together to stop climate change – in a way that has not been seen before.

In 2015, countries around the world agreed to try to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F). Among the biggest sources of global warming are coal-fired power plants. Quickly shifting the world to renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, would be an unprecedented transition. Without big changes, climate change could make the world unlivable.

7. Sustainable development

IPCC definition: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and balances social, economic and environmental concerns.

Translation: Living in a way that is good for people alive today and for people in the future.

The United Nations has shared “sustainable development goals.” These goals aim to help countries grow in ways that are healthy for both people and the environment. Producing more carbon dioxide than the planet can manage is an example of unsustainable development that’s causing climate change.

8. Abrupt change

IPCC definition: Abrupt climate change refers to a large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.

Translation: A change in climate that happens much faster than it normally would.

Our world is changing quickly as a result of climate change. Wildfires are raging in parts of the Western U.S. that were once too wet to burn. Coral reefs are dying as the ocean is getting warmer. These changes would not have happened so quickly – or at all – were it not for climate change.

Lance Ignon, a former communications adviser for the IPCC and now senior associate dean for strategic initiatives and communication at USC Dornsife and a co-author of the paper with Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Lila Rabinovich, Kate Weber Marianna Babboni and Monica Dean, contributed to this article.

[Get our best science, health and technology stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter.]

This article was updated to correct the percentage to 50% more carbon dioxide than before the industrial era.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology and Behavioral Science, USC Price School of Public Policy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From The Guardian (Damian Carrington):

Economists have failed to take account of ‘immense risks and potential loss of life’, says author of landmark review

Many economic assessments of the climate crisis “grossly undervalue the lives of young people and future generations”, Prof Nicholas Stern warned on Tuesday, before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Economists have failed to take account of the “immense risks and potential loss of life” that could occur as a result of the climate crisis, he said, as well as badly underestimating the speed at which the costs of clean technologies, such as solar and wind energy, have fallen.

Stern said the economics profession had also misunderstood the basics of “discounting”, the way in which economic models value future assets and lives compared with their value today. “It means economists have grossly undervalued the lives of young people and future generations who are most at threat from the devastating impacts of climate change,” he said. “Discounting has been applied in such a way that it is effectively discrimination by date of birth.”

Youth protests around the world, sparked by the school strike of Greta Thunberg, have been a key factor in increasing demands for action in recent years, along with rising extreme weather events. Recent research shows people born today will suffer many times more extreme heatwaves and other climate disasters over their lifetimes than their grandparents.

However, Stern said: “The move to net zero [emissions] can be the great driver of a new form of growth – the growth story of the 21st century. This growth will be more resource-efficient, more productive, and healthier, and will offer greater protection to our biodiversity.”

Renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically and electric cars are moving to scale, he said, while 75% of global emissions are now covered by national commitments to net zero emissions by the middle part of century, though “some of those commitments are more credible than others”.

Stern’s remarks are based on a paper to be published in the Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society and made to mark the 15th anniversary of the landmark Stern review on the economics of the climate crisis in 2006. It concluded that the costs of inaction on climate were far greater than the costs of action and that the climate crisis was the biggest market failure in history.

Since the publication of the report, carbon emissions have risen by 20% and Stern was scathing about much of the economic analysis that has informed policymakers. “Cavalier treatment of risk, and the missing of the very rapid technical progress, means the models have been profoundly misleading,” he said. The theory of discounting had not been related to its ethical foundations, he added, or allowed for the risk that global heating will make future generations poorer.

Political action has been slow since 2006, Stern said, because of the persistence of the “damaging” idea that climate action cuts economic growth and also because of the global financial crisis, which diverted attention and cut middle-class incomes, making politics more “fractious”.

“The economic question now is: how do we manage the radical transformation we have to make in the world economy in the next 20 or 30 years?” he said. “How do we promote the 2% or 3% extra investment we’ll need – which is a very valuable investment, not a cost.”

A whole range of policies are needed, Stern said, including carbon pricing, regulation, product standards, investment in research and reform of capital markets. A critical factor is the provision of large-scale, low-cost finance to fund the low-carbon transition, especially in developing countries…

The Stern review was criticised by some when published as exaggerating the risks of the climate crisis. “The idea that I was alarmist is just laughable in retrospect. We underestimated the dangers. The costs of inaction were very worrying 15 years ago – they are immensely worrying now.”

Denver School Strike for Climate, September 20, 2019.

Youth activists rally for climate justice in front of the US Capitol in Washington,DC (photo from earlier in the year). Image: Lorie Shaull,CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The youth plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States attended the Ninth Circuit hearing in December. Photo credit: Robin Loznak

Local youth participate in the production of chicos del horno at Corpus A. Gallegos Ranch. San Luis, CO Photograph by Devon G. Peña