Hands down, the most prominent news in the month of November was the presidential election and its long tail. Poll watchers have been debating the role that global warming played in the vote. Many see climate as key to victory, while other analysts aren’t so sure, pointing to mixed messages from the electorate. Whatever the poll parsing ultimately concludes, this was certainly the first presidential election in which climate played such a prominent role. Furthermore, November was a month when even more large American institutions – including conservative institutions with a history of denial – saw the climate handwriting on the wall … and united around its mandate. 

We hope you enjoy this month’s roundup of climate news and welcome your feedback and questions.

Warmly,
The C-Change Conversations Team

Notable Video
Let’s start with a win-win. Take a look at this “new” food that will please our palate while helping save the planet. 

News of Hope
It is extremely promising to anticipate a U.S. administration mobilizing to battle climate change from every cabinet department simultaneously.

It’s equally promising to see groups that have previously denied anthropogenic global warming (or that have resisted efforts to address it) now suiting up for action. The American Farm Bureau Federation is the latest big organization to agree that the impacts are just too profound to ignore. And this month the Federal Reserve for the first time identified global warming as a risk to financial stability. (Readers might remember that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did an about-face on climate last year and President Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission released a report with warnings of grave financial consequences last month.)

As these institutions turn their attention to climate, renewable energy sources look increasingly robust as economic pillars. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has upped its growth projections for the renewables sector and now sees wind and solar installations setting records. The IEA also issued a detailed report with a clear bottom line: sector growth is outpacing expectations even through the COVID downturn.

And in one of those wonky details that may be critically important, a new look at the efficiency of burning fossil fuels suggests that transitioning to renewables may not be as big a reach as previously thought. That’s because only about 1/3 of the energy stored in coal is converted to power on average and only about 1/5 of the energy stored in gasoline is converted to auto propulsion. The rest ends up as waste heat. Renewables pack a much better punch. So that means we will need less “new” energy to replace the work of the “old” energy – though it’s still a daunting task.

News of Concern
The hard work of transitioning, of course, is still ahead – and the harsh impacts of global warming aren’t slowing down. New research shows the inland damage of hurricanes is greater than before because tropical storms no longer lose as much force when they hit the shore. And homeowners in the paths of climate disasters are having more trouble getting insurance, threatening local communities with economic disaster. The choice ahead could be painful, allowing climate-endangered communities to decline as insurance costs get out of reach or asking the rest of the country to foot the escalating bill.

Meanwhile, on the health front, a new study predicts that a warmer climate will dramatically increase the spread of diseases among wildlife over the next five decades. This is also bad news for humans because 75% of our new diseases start in the wild. COVID-19 is an example of how deadly these diseases can be. The International Red Cross, while on the front lines of the disease spread, this month declared climate change a greater danger than the pandemic and demanded a similar urgency from world leaders to coordinate a response. 

And speaking of animals, National Geographic reports that methane flares in America’s 2,627 landfills are causing widespread destruction to bird populations around the country. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas released by decomposing landfill waste (and by other natural and human processes including leakage from oil and gas production facilities).

Notable Quote
“There are three categories of truth: personal truth, political truth and objective truth that shape our understanding of the universe. The interesting thing about objective truth is that it is true no matter what.”

Science communicator and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Welcome to the fall edition of our quarterly newsletter. As you will see below, we are committed to reaching new audiences – even during the pandemic – and extending our impact far and wide.
 
In the Northeast, the leaves are beginning to turn, splashes of vibrant colors erupt across the tree-scape, and we are reminded of the ever-constant flow of seasons, the consistent and comforting rhythms of nature. Yet, at the same time, we are experiencing nature in ways that are no longer consistent or comforting – whether it’s the hottest temperature ever recorded earlier this year, running out of traditional names for tropical storms because we’ve had so many, or the behemoth “gigafire” (an unprecedented 4 million acres) burning in California. These events underscore that our world is evolving, made more dangerous by climate change.
 
There is just so much vying for our attention – the pandemic, the election, racial injustice, to name just a few – and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But we’ve got to keep our eye on the biggest threat of all – the one that has so clearly crossed from the future into the present – that nature is now playing by new and dangerous rules. Our economy and civilization are built on the premise that nature acts a certain way. There is a good chance that this premise will no longer hold true if we continue on our current emissions path. We are changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere, which, in turn, is changing our natural systems at a breathtaking rate.
 
So, what can we do?
 
Scientists say we need to pull together, to forge social consensus for action, to face this threat successfully and overcome it. But we can only pull together if enough people care. People will only care if they understand the scope and scale of the risk and how it will impact them personally. C-Change Conversations provides that understanding – in a clear, science-based, non-partisan, non-threatening way. And we bring that message across the country, including to conservative groups and to conservative places where this message isn’t often heard. We are successfully opening minds and hearts and pulling people together so we can meet this threat.
 
We are working hard to provide valuable information to empower you, our C-Change family, to influence others and help build the consensus, too. Thank you for being on this journey with us.
 
Best,
Kathleen Biggins
Founder and President

Land Trust Alliance National Conference Features C-Change Speakers
C-Change returned to a national stage on October 6th with Kathleen Biggins and C-Change co-founder Katy Kinsolving speaking during “Rally 2020,” the annual conference of the Land Trust Alliance. More than 3,600 land conservation trustees and practitioners virtually attended the 3-day conference that examined issues critical to the future of land conservation. Kathleen and Katy presented “How to Talk to Moderates and Conservatives about Climate Change” to an audience of 500. Their talk featured excerpts of the C-Change Primer presentation and examined how land preservation and use, and agricultural practices, can mitigate climate change. After the taped presentation, Kathleen and Katy fielded questions from the audience. You can watch the presentation here.

In her introduction to the presentation, Lisa Ott, President of the North Shore Land Alliance in Oyster Bay, New York and a member of the Garden Club of America, notes that C-Change Conversations team members were “just the right people to bring this message” about climate change to her colleagues and that they presented the risks and opportunities of climate change “factually … in a science-based way … and they were not threatening to the people of our community.”

New Primer Presenters Extend Our Reach
A handful of C-Change volunteers have presented the Primer to about 10,000 people in 29 states since 2018. The demand for non-partisan, science-based information about climate change spurred us to expand our ranks, and over time, we developed a robust presenter-training program that will enable us to reach even more people.

Ask a Scientist

Here are some questions we recently asked our science advisors. Be sure to check out more Q&A on our website and submit your questions here.

Bernadette Woods Placky, Climate Central’s Chief Meteorologist and Climate Matters Program Director

How is climate change impacting hurricanes now and what’s expected in the future?

Hurricanes get their strength from warm water, and those waters are getting warmer.

Scientific research shows that more of the hurricanes forming these days are rising to the level of a major hurricane – category 3-5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. And more storms are rapidly intensifying – when storms go through an explosive growth period of 35 mph in 24 hours. This is particularly dangerous when it happens close to landfall, limiting time for proper preparations. When storms do make landfall, they are more damaging due to more heavy rain and higher storm surges that push farther inland.

Nadir Jeevanjee, Princeton University

What argument is used by the 3% of scientists who don’t agree that climate change is happening/human-caused?

My impression is that this “3%” generally consists of scientists who acknowledge that CO₂ is rising due to human activities, and who also acknowledge that this rising  CO₂  will cause some global warming, but who disagree on the amount of warming it will cause. These scientists might be suspicious of estimates from computer climate models due to their complexity, and may have other explanations for some of the warming we’ve observed so far, such as natural fluctuations. Such skepticism and formulation of alternative hypotheses is natural, and is moreover an essential part of a healthy scientific enterprise. But the accumulated evidence, as documented in ever-expanding reports by the IPCC  and other bodies, continues to point to human-emitted CO₂ as the main driver of observed climate changes.

Liz Sikes, Rutgers University

What factors triggered the end of the last ice age?

We believe that the fundamental trigger for the end of the last ice age was increasing insolation (more heating from the sun) over the northern hemisphere, where the main glacial ice cap sat. Increasing insolation happens as the earth’s orbit changes shape naturally – sometimes a component of this is referred to as the “wobble of the poles.”  These changes have timescales of about 20,000 and 40,000 years and have a slow-paced influence on climate. These shifts in solar radiation can initiate carbon feedback loops, which causes more rapid changes within the climate system. Scientific evidence shows that as the increased solar radiation warmed the oceans, circulation patterns changed and CO₂ that had been sequestered in the deep ocean was released into the atmosphere. These increased CO₂ levels heated the atmosphere up further and were an important driver in the last deglaciation, the ice loss that ended the last ice age. We are seeing the same thing happening today. As we raise CO₂ levels through our greenhouse gas emissions, we are seeing increased deglaciation in our polar regions.

“I have had such good fortune in experiencing the profound beauty of our world, and learning how critically reliant we are on the health of our planet.  I want to address these issues for the sake of my children and all future generations – and for the sake of our imperiled earth.”

Nancy’s career has spanned investment banking, community development, and non-profit management. She spent 15 years with JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch in New York as an investment banker and then as head of their Community Development Corporations. After moving to St. Louis, she headed Bellefontaine, a non-profit historic cemetery and arboretum. Nancy is the board chair for the Nature Conservancy in Missouri and serves on the board of the Harris World Ecology Center,  the Conservation Mission Council of the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Finance Committee of the Garden Club of America. Nancy also is starting a C-Change team in St. Louis. She recently completed a post-graduate program at Yale in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy.

Sometimes it is difficult not to get depressed. On the surface, this election cycle has laid bare that the polarization around climate change created in the early 2000’s continues to divide us at a time when we must come together to stay safe. But delve deeper and there are glimmers of hope.
 
More Americans, including conservatives, say they believe climate change is happening and that they want government action to address it. In fact, latest polls show that 65% of Americans believe climate legislation should be a key priority. And the steady drumbeat of recent devastating natural disasters, which scientists say have been exacerbated by climate change, is making the concern more visceral and immediate.
 
In addition, we’re also seeing a groundswell of alarm about climate change from businesses, investment groups, regulators, and the military. A growing contingent of sober-minded leaders find it impossible to ignore the costs of climate change. They’re calling for immediate action to protect our economy, our homes, and our national security against systemic risk. Among these leaders is H. R. McMaster, a three star General who was President Trump’s National Security Advisor for 13 months and who considers climate change a top security threat to our nation and the world. 
 
If you’re a returning reader, thank you for revisiting this newsletter and please let us know how we can improve upon it. Our format presents a sampling of non-partisan news grouped in two moods: hope and concern. As we all know, both are in large supply this election season.
 
Please let us know what you think — and please share this newsletter with others.
 
Appreciatively,
The C-Change Conversations Team

Notable Graph
We don’t know where 2020 will end up, but it is in the running to be one of the hottest years ever.

Notable Quote

“So what should be the goal? To effectively decarbonize the U.S. and the global economies by mid-century without shock and disruption. It will be hard, but so was going to the moon.”

Rear Admiral David W. Titley, U.S. Navy, (Ret.)
(Calling for an Apollo-scale, public-private program to address climate change;
C-Change Conversations speaker, 2016)

News of Hope
Even the highly polarized U.S. Senate has found some common ground. Senate Republicans and Democrats joined forces earlier in September to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons — refrigerants that are considered ‘super greenhouse gases’ and among the most powerful drivers of climate change.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission released a seminal report concluding that “climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy.” The report proposes 53 climate change solutions, including a price on carbon and a Securities and Exchange Commission mandate for companies to fully disclose climate risk. Bob Litterman, who spoke at a 2017 C-Change Conversations event, chaired the subcommittee that produced the report. The subcommittee was made up of diverse interests like Morgan Stanley, ConocoPhillips, and the Environmental Defense Fund.
 
The Business Roundtable, a business lobbying group composed of CEOs from more than 200 of the largest US corporations, now supports market-based carbon pricing to fight climate change.
 
And an investing group managing more than $47 trillion in collective assets has ratcheted up pressure for net zero emissions among companies it holds. Led by investment giants like BlackRock and PIMCO, Climate Action 100+ sent a letter this month advising companies to set concrete objectives to reduce emissions by 45% within 10 years to try to meet the 1.5℃ goal set at the Paris Agreement.

News of Concern
National Geographic says that science has “incontrovertibly shown” that historic fires like those raging across the American West have everything to do with climate change. In California alone, more than 3 million acres have burned so far. And fire season is just beginning. The LA Times aptly describes this year as “The worst fire season ever. Again.” And record-setting fires also bring record-setting health threats. Washington, Oregon, and California suffered “the worst air quality on earth” this month due to the fires.
 
Fires aren’t the only climate-related disaster the West had to endure in September. CBS News described a simultaneous heat wave of “insane” and “unprecedented” levels with temperatures “never before seen in modern history.”
 
Meanwhile, scientists report that rising sea levels caused by melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are in sync with the ‘worst case scenarios’ projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
 
Despite it all, the federal government remains dangerously out of step with the scientific consensus. So much so that six former directors of the Environmental Protection Agency from both Republican and Democratic administrations issued an appeal this month for an agency ‘reset’ after the election. They were endorsing hundreds of pages of recommendations by a bipartisan group of more than 500 former EPA senior managers and employees.

What a month … The California wildfires. The Iowa derecho. And now, Hurricane Laura. Back-to-back, high intensity natural disasters are exactly what we’ve been warned about and are harder to respond to due to the pandemic. Each is a sobering reminder why C-Change Conversations makes it a priority to understand and discuss climate change and demand more from our elected officials at all levels to address it.

To assist in that effort, we offer this month’s curated list of non-partisan articles that focus on important developments in the story of global warming.

You may be struck, as we are, by the sense that the issue of climate change is gathering velocity on all fronts. The stories shared below describe acceleration in the speed of planetary warming and in the impacts that warming is having on people, businesses, and ecosystems. At the same time, the stories also suggest acceleration in humanity’s response to those challenges — even amid the overshadowing immediacy of the COVID pandemic.

As we did last month, we’re offering you this collection in two groups: developments that inspire hope and those that cause concern. You will find an equal number of both — but we look forward to the day when the balance tips toward optimism.  

We welcome your feedback and invite you to share this newsletter with others.
 
With gratitude for your support and interest,
The C-Change Conversations Team

Notable Quote
“Don’t live in your own echo chamber. A lot of the polarization starts with us. And it’s because we’ve been afraid to engage with people with whom we don’t agree … I tell my students this all the time, ‘If you constantly find yourself in the company of people who say “amen” to whatever you say, find different company.'”

— Condoleezza Rice
Former U.S. Secretary of State
Faculty Member, Stanford University

News of Hope
A substantial majority of Americans think the government should do more about climate, according to a Pew Research Center report …

And a MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner makes a convincing case that the transition to a low carbon economy now could supercharge the economy for the future. 

Fossil fuel companies wonder about exploring for new oil and whether even tapping known fields makes business sense. 

And BP announced that it is radically cutting back its oil and gas business and basically rethinking its business model.

There’s good news in bad: COVID-19 hasn’t caused the financial sector to backpedal its climate focus. Instead, there’s evidence that the pandemic may be galvanizing money managers to be more proactive on the crisis. And …

One large investor group just launched the world’s first step-by-step plan to help pension funds and others align their portfolios to bring us to net zero emissions by 2050.

News of Concern
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a methane regulation rollback unpopular with fuel companies,  climate scientists, Wall Street, and public opinion …

While at the same time, projections for planetary heating are getting worse.

As if on cue, California’s Death Valley hit an unfathomable 130 degrees earlier this month, and Baghdad’s temperatures were close to that a few weeks before. The descriptions and images of the Iraqi experience are breathtaking.

Some 19% of the world might face hot zones with similarly uninhabitable temperature peaks by 2070, fueling massive waves of human migrations that some say have already begun …

And experts believe even the Earth’s more temperate zones will be facing the overwhelming challenge of overlapping crises on an ongoing, rolling basis.

Notable Graph
CHARTING PROGRESS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY

To end on an optimistic note, the amount of solar energy generated around the world, led by Asia and the Pacific, has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Wind generation shows a similarly sharp upward curve, with Europe and the United States generating a larger proportion.