My friend Chris Gloninger, who recently left KCCI in Des Moines following death threats aimed at his climate reporting.
Also, Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone.
In the interview, Gloninger spoke about the benefits of clean energy in his adopted state of Iowa – something I chatted about with him a year or so ago, because of course I did, and that’s why you’re a reader here.
UPDATE: Below, Gloninger’s farewell broadcast on KCCI
This is Spain yesterday. It will happen where you are soon. We can’t say we weren’t warned over and over and over again, but these people have stopped action: https://t.co/ZWITHNnTtihttps://t.co/S7OYLGljxX
You saw it here, first, of course – but now researcher Kai Kornhuber, who I’ve been following since I interviewed him at the American Geophysical Union some years ago, has a new paper about the potential impacts of “co-occurring”, simultaneous, climate extremes.
Covid taught us all about the importance of global supply chains. We are going to learn a whole lot more.
Weather and climate extremes, such as prolonged drought, heavy rainfall and heatwaves, can lead to harvest failures. These are occurring with increased magnitude and frequency on a warming planet.
In addition, such events can disrupt supply chains, decreasing food supply and leading to price spikes.
Our previous work shows that when extreme weather events happen simultaneously – such as a heatwave and drought at the same time – this can negatively affect crop yields in major crop-producing regions, known as “breadbaskets”.
This co-occurrence constitutes a growing food security risk.
In our latest paper, published in Nature Communications, we highlight factors that can lead to low crop yields in several breadbasket regions simultaneously. We also examine how well state-of-the-art climate and crop models are able to reproduce observed relationships.
We find that climate models tend to underestimate the risks of concurrent extreme weather events, potentially leading to “blind spots” in our understanding of future implications.
Ensuring global food security under changing climate conditions is a global challenge.
Meeting this challenge relies on reliable projections of future climate conditions, in order to establish reasonable and preventive adaptation measures.
Such assessments are not trivial. They rely on “coupled” experiments that combine both climate models and crop models. The projections must also be done for a range of emissions scenarios in order to fully understand the risk.
Climate extremes are rare, but impactful, events. The accuracy with which we can determine future climate risks for agriculture depends on the skill of climate models in accurately reproducing their frequency and magnitude, as well as the crop models’ accuracy in simulating crop responses.
Research shows that increasingly complex climate risks, in which several extremes interact, are a direct consequence of rising extreme weather trends.
More and longer-lasting extremes translate to higher likelihoods of consecutive climate disasters.
Climate denial is the master misinformation narrative that is at the heart of the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years campaign to destroy the idea that there is even such a thing as objective facts that can be known, and should be a guide for policy in a democracy.
Pence, as a cog in that misinformation machine, spent decades as a radio host, and then a politician, serving the Petro-Putinists meta-narrative that facts, science, and truth are some kind of partisan hoax, and the only imperatives for governance are the will of the wealthy and powerful.
Now, in trying to defend his actions on January 6, Pence is running into the blowback of a Republican base now so far down the conspiracist rabbit hole that no response of fact can sway them – see video above. The Republican base refuses to acknowledge the one act of bravery in Pence’s misbegotten, misspent life.
Above, Chief Meteorologist Chris Vickers, at WTOL in Toledo, has begun a “Climate Friday” segment, where he puts the week’s events into climate context, in a simple but accurate way. Can not emphasize enough how much these folks need to be supported.
We recently saw my friend Chris Gloninger, of KCCI in Des Moines, resign after death threats related to his climate context reporting.
TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger didn’t just want to warn people about the latest record-breaking storm — he wanted to talk about the changing climate behind it.
Scientists have been able to draw ever-clearer connections between climate change and extreme weather events, and Gloninger believes weather forecasts should explain that to viewers.
“I truly believe it is the existential crisis of our lifetime,” he says. “And that’s why I think it’s so important to do it.”
Gloninger — the chief meteorologist for CBS affiliate KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa — has brought that mindset to seven television stations across five states during his 18-year career, earning him both praise and pushback.
And now, he’s pivoting.
Gloninger announced on Wednesday that he is “bidding farewell to TV to embark on a new journey dedicated to helping solve the climate crisis.”
The reasons, he said, were “a death threat stemming from my climate coverage last year and resulting PTSD, in addition to family health issues.” –
Below, see how Gloninger, just prior to his exit, explained wildfire smoke to Iowans in climate context.
The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.
“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”
On Tuesday, global average temperatures climbed to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17 Celsius, making it the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that, according to an analysis by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Since that was an average, parts of the globe felt that extra heat more forcefully. For instance, in the Southern United States and Northern Mexico, where the heat index has reached triple digits, climate change has made the ongoing heat wave about 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would have been otherwise, according to scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The overall warming of the planet is “well within the realm of what scientists had projected would happen” as humans continue to pump vast amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe.
On the whole, Earth has warmed roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century and will continue to grow hotter until humans essentially halt all emissions from fossil fuels and stop deforestation.
But other factors layered on top of human-caused warming may have helped temperatures accelerate dramatically in recent months. For instance, a cyclical phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation causes year-to-year fluctuations by shifting heat in and out of deeper ocean layers. Global surface temperatures tend to be cooler during La Niña years and hotter during El Niño years.
“A big reason we’re seeing so many records shattered is that we’re transitioning out of an unusually long three-year La Niña, which suppressed temperatures, and into a strong El Niño,” Dr. Hausfather said.
That likely portends even more heat is coming. The current El Niño is just getting underway and many researchers don’t expect it to peak until December or January, with global temperatures seeing another surge in the months thereafter. That means that next year could be even hotter than this year, scientists said.
In his rant above, he includes, as examples of Truth with a Capital T, “Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity”, but somehow left out “Joe Biden won the 2020 election and is President of the United States”.
This guy can’t be serious about the Presidency, – has to be angling for a talk show on Fox, a book deal, or a seat on some fossil fuel company’s board.
