Climate Change Is Making Big Problems Bigger

New data compiled by the E.P.A. shows how global warming is making life harder for Americans in myriad ways that threaten their health, safety and homes.



Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner.

Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up.

The freshly compiled data, the federal government’s most comprehensive and up-to-date information yet, shows that a warming world is making life harder for Americans, in ways that threaten their health and safety, homes and communities. And it comes as the Biden administration is trying to propel aggressive action at home and abroad to cut the pollution that is raising global temperatures.

“There is no small town, big city or rural community that is unaffected by the climate crisis,” Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said on Wednesday. “Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity.”

The data released Wednesday came after a four-year gap. Until 2016, the E.P.A. regularly updated its climate indicators. But under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly questioned whether the planet was warming, the data was frozen in time. It was available on the agency’s website but was not kept current.

The Biden administration revived the effort this year and added some new measures, pulling information from government agencies, universities and other sources. The E.P.A. used 54 separate indicators which, taken together, paint a grim picture.

Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil's climate change communications


Highlights

• ExxonMobil's public climate change messaging mimics tobacco industry propaganda
• Rhetoric of climate “risk” downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change
• Rhetoric of consumer “demand” (versus fossil fuel supply) individualizes responsibility
• Fossil Fuel Savior frame uses “risk” and “demand” to justify fossil fuels, blame customers

Science for society

A dominant public narrative about climate change is that “we are all to blame.” Another is that society must inevitably rely on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. How did these become conventional wisdom? We show that one source of these arguments is fossil fuel industry propaganda. ExxonMobil advertisements worked to shift responsibility for global warming away from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers. They also said that climate change was a “risk,” rather than a reality, that renewable energy is unreliable, and that the fossil fuel industry offered meaningful leadership on climate change. We show that much of this rhetoric is similar to that used by the tobacco industry. Our research suggests warning signs that the fossil fuel industry is using the subtle micro-politics of language to downplay its role in the climate crisis and to continue to undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.

Summary

This paper investigates how ExxonMobil uses rhetoric and framing to shape public discourse on climate change. We present an algorithmic corpus comparison and machine-learning topic model of 180 ExxonMobil climate change communications, including peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and advertorials in The New York Times. We also investigate advertorials using inductive frame analysis. We find that the company has publicly overemphasized some terms and topics while avoiding others. Most notably, they have used rhetoric of climate “risk” and consumer energy “demand” to construct a “Fossil Fuel Savior” (FFS) frame that downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility. These patterns mimic the tobacco industry's documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations—which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms—and onto consumers. This historical parallel foreshadows the fossil fuel industry's use of demand-as-blame arguments to oppose litigation, regulation, and activism.

Climate emissions shrinking the stratosphere, scientists reveal

Humanity’s enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed.

The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometre by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.

The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe.

The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth’s surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract.

Do you find it odd that the Bloq, Liberals, and NDP score higher than the Greens?

Do you find it odd that the Bloq, Liberals, and NDP score higher than the Greens?

Environmental concerns top economics in Alberta coal survey, results show

Newly released results from a three-week survey about Alberta coal mining show respondents ranked environmental concerns much high than its economic impact, with about two-thirds ranking the latter as not at all important.

While not a question-by-question breakdown, the survey results released Monday offer a more complete look at the level of public opinion around coal development detailed in the government's survey.

The environmental impact of coal mining was the top-ranked issue in the survey, which received 25,000 responses before it closed last month.

Economic impact ranked last out of eight possible responses.

Economic impact ranked last out of eight possible responses.

Scientists track 'zombie fires' to predict where they'll rise from the earth



"Zombie fires" that smoulder underground through the winter and rise from the earth in the spring to set the boreal forest ablaze are expected to become more common in the North as the climate warms.

In a new study, Dutch and U.S. researchers have, for the first time, found a way to detect and track these remote fires. The research, published Wednesday in the science journal Nature catalogued such fires in Alaska and the Northwest Territories between 2002 and 2018 to estimate how much damage these fires do. They say what they found could help fire managers detect and deal with them sooner.

What are zombie fires?

Most wildfires in the North are started by lightning or humans in summer and extinguished by rain and snow by winter.

But some fires "somehow manage to survive winter by smoldering and thick organic layers under the snow and then re-emerge again and start a new forest fire in the next season," said Rebecca Scholten, lead author of the new study.

Such "zombie fires" in Siberia made headlines last spring, and were blamed for helping ignite some of the worst wildfires the region has ever known amid a record heat wave.