[GWSG] Whitehouse's fix; faster currents; insurance rates; ghg tariff; ClimatView; food insecurity

[Tilley, Al]

1. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the national government’s best informed and most tenacious climate activist, describes our situation. He believes that our most effective move now would be to remove the cloak from dark money so that the fossil fuel industry would have to attempt to manipulate us in plain sight—and might more often fail. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/25/senator-sheldon-whitehouse-climate-crisis

2. The geological record indicates that higher temperatures cause ocean currents to speed up. Satellite observation indicates that they are indeed accelerating. That is good news—the ocean becomes more efficient at storing carbon. Though the story does not mention it, greater circulation should also counteract the formation of anoxic zones with their threat of hydrogen sulfide emissions. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-global-currents-ocean-abyss.html

3. Of course coastal property owners and people who live in flammable woods are facing rising or unavailable property insurance. The news is that everyone is in for bad news (though some worse than others). The pic from Elizabeth Kolbert links to the full WA Post story excerpted below it. https://climatecrocks.com/2022/03/26/climate-change-is-coming-for-your-property-values/

4. Eugene Linden warns that the retail insurance industry has been so slow to acknowledge climate risk that they have led us into a crisis when they might have acted to avert it. He proposes a global tariff on greenhouse gas emissions, collected by the importing nations and expended to support nations suffering climate damage. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/27/insurers-could-have-been-climate-heroes-instead-they-have-risked-a-crisis-to-dwarf-2008

5. The Japan Meteorological Agency’s ClimatView site tracks weekly and monthly climate data with a global scope. https://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/climatview/frame.php?&s=1&r=0&d=0&y=2019&m=2&e=8&t=0&l=0&k=0&s=1

6. An overview of climate research with regard to food production indicates that we are approaching widespread food insecurity sooner than we had anticipated. Not discussed is the impact of the change of diet to plant-based food and the steep decline of animal raising, with the associated decline in the corn and soy beans grown to feed them now. If we do not achieve the diet transition, we will have failed to avoid climate catastrophe and food will be just another of our problems; if we have achieved the diet change generally, the stress on the food supply will be eased. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27032022/climate-change-food-production-famine/

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