[TheClimate.Vote] August 2, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News

[Richard Pauli]

/August 2, 2017/

*This video shows the extraordinary trend of global warming in more than 
100 countries 
<https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/1/16074956/global-warming-visualization-117-years-191-countries>*
117 years of data in 35 seconds. - video of graphic
This captivating video created by Antti Lipponen visualizes more than 
100 years of temperature change in 191 countries in just 35 seconds.
Lipponen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, used 
publicly available data from NASA to demonstrate the rising temperatures 
across the world.
This isn't the first time the story of global warming has been told with 
the help of a mesmerizing graphic. Last year, Brad Plumer wrote for Vox 
about a viral GIF created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, and David 
Roberts wrote about a set of clever climate GIFs inspired by the one 
Hawkins made.
Hawkins's 2016 GIF showed the rise in global temperature from 1850 to 
2016 but didn't disaggregate by country like Lipponen's does. Still, 
Plumer's description of it is useful for understanding what Lipponen's 
video shows:
Global warming isn't a smooth process, and there are fluctuations from 
year to year due to internal variability (e.g., changes in the sun's 
intensity, volcanic eruptions, or shifts in the amount of heat stored in 
deeper layers of the ocean). But as we keep adding greenhouse gases to 
the atmosphere and keep trapping extra heat on Earth, that effect 
eventually dominates, pushing overall temperatures higher and higher. 
The spiral moves outward.
In Lipponen's graphic, the color and length of a bar represent the same 
thing: the average temperature anomaly of each country each year.
By using anomaly data (instead of absolute temperature data), Lipponen 
makes it easy to see how each country's temperature at any given point 
differs from a baseline.
But a broad trend is startlingly clear, and Lipponen inserts a smaller 
graphic in the upper right-hand corner to show it: It's getting hotter 
all around the world.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/1/16074956/global-warming-visualization-117-years-191-countries


*It's Taken Time, But Electric Utilities Are Warming Up To Climate 
Change 
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2017/08/01/its-taken-time-but-electric-utilities-are-warming-up-to-climate-change/>*
The Energy and Policy Institute has issued a report pointing out that 
scientists first warned the electric power sector of the greenhouse 
effect at the Edison Electric Institute's annual convention in 1968. 
That's when Dr. Donald F. Hornig, a science advisor to President Lyndon 
B. Johnson, enlightened the gathering that rising temperatures could 
lead to aberrant weather patterns, melting ice caps and the erosion of 
crops that would lead to food shortages.
The aim of diverting capital to smart technologies, he adds, is to 
increase the network's utilization factor from around 40 percent to as 
much as 80 percent. Between 2010 and 2015, he says that the business 
either deferred or avoided $664 million worth of utility infrastructure.
The utility sector may have been slow to accept the science behind 
climate change. But market forces are now causing them to warm up to the 
cause.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2017/08/01/its-taken-time-but-electric-utilities-are-warming-up-to-climate-change/


*Climate change before your eyes: Seas rise and trees die 
<http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/seas-rise-trees-die-climate-change-eyes-48961148>*
In the past 100 years, Kirwan said, 100,000 acres of forest in the 
Chesapeake Bay has converted to marshland. Photographs show the rate of 
coastal forest loss is four times greater now than it was during the 
1930s, he said.
Seas off the East Coast have risen by 1.3 feet over the last 100 years, 
said Ben Horton, a Rutgers University professor and expert on sea level 
rise. That is a faster pace than for the past 2,000 years combined, he said.
Some of the most dramatic anecdotal evidence of the acceleration in 
ghost forest creation is along the Savannah River between Georgia and 
South Carolina, Noe said.
When his team first got there 10 years ago, "it looked like the trees 
were under a little stress, but they were all alive," he said. "But five 
years later, the vast majority of them were dead. That happened right in 
front of our eyes, much faster than we expected."
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/seas-rise-trees-die-climate-change-eyes-48961148


*We'll never tackle climate change if academics keep the focus on 
consensus 
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/aug/01/well-never-tackle-climate-change-if-academics-keep-the-focus-on-consensus>*
     Warren Pearce
In a democracy, we hope that science helps to inform the public about 
its problems. In the case of climate change, believe it or not, the 
evidence suggests this is going relatively well.
Climate science is a vast, sprawling field of knowledge that has 
achieved great success in occupying the public consciousness. According 
to Yale University's Climate Change in the American Mind project, six in 
ten Americans are worried about global warming, seven in ten think 
global warming is happening and eight in ten think humans have the 
ability to reduce global warming. These figures have fluctuated very 
little since 2012, suggesting that the US public is relatively well 
informed about the risk, reality and policy potential of climate change, 
even in the face of well-documented attacks by climate sceptics.
Nonetheless, we are left with a puzzle: if so few Americans appear to 
know the exact level of scientific consensus, why do so many of them 
think climate change is real and worrisome? The simplest explanation is 
that the public have already heard enough about the scientific evidence 
to make up their mind, without being fed increasingly esoteric 
information about levels of scientific agreement. The real question is 
not whether the US public think climate change is a problem (most of 
them do), but what should be done about it. Here it is the crucial 
non-scientific issues around climate change that should take centre 
stage. Instead, valuable media and political attention has been expended 
on boosting the 97% meme, crowding out deeper conversations about policy 
framing, coalition building, public values and morality which do not 
lend themselves to headline numbers.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/aug/01/well-never-tackle-climate-change-if-academics-keep-the-focus-on-consensus
*Beyond Counting Climate Consensus*
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524032.2017.1333965


*Here's (Another) Study That Will Give You Global Warming Nightmares 
<http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/heres-another-study-that-will-give-you-global-warming-nightmares/>*
Temperatures are rising fast.
With each passing year, the odds get worse that climate change 
mitigation efforts will be able to stave off catastrophic warming of 
more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A new study 
published on July 31 in Nature Climate Change is the opposite of 
reassuring when it comes to this math. Using statistical tools, the 
authors found that there's a 5 percent chance Earth will warm 2 degrees 
or less by the end of this century and a 90 percent chance that 
temperatures will increase from 2.0 to 4.9C if historical trends 
continue unabated. The other 5 percent, well that's worst-case scenario 
runaway global warming—the kind of thing that keeps geoengineers up at 
night.
What matters a lot more for future warming is actually carbon intensity. 
According to the study, even though carbon intensity has dropped in 
recent decades as countries increase energy efficiency and enact 
carbon-reducing policies, it will need to drop much more to see the kind 
of progress the global climate community is aiming for with the Paris 
Agreement targets.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/heres-another-study-that-will-give-you-global-warming-nightmares/ 



*2017 is so far the second-hottest year on record thanks to global 
warming 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jul/31/2017-is-so-far-the-second-hottest-year-on-record-thanks-to-global-warming>*
2017 is behind only El Niño-amplified 2016.
  View of the cracked riverbed scorched by heat waves at the Nanchang 
section of the Ganjiang river in Nanchang city, east China's Jiangxi 
province.
Dana Nuccitelli
Monday 31 July 2017 06.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 31 July 2017 07.29 EDT
With the first six months of 2017 in the books, average global surface 
temperatures so far this year are 0.94C above the 1950–1980 average, 
according to NASA. That makes 2017 the second-hottest first six calendar 
months on record, behind only 2016.
That's remarkable because 2017 hasn't had the warming influence of an El 
Niño event. El Niños bring warm ocean water to the surface, temporarily 
causing average global surface temperatures to rise. 2016 – including 
the first six months of the year – was influenced by one of the 
strongest El Niño events on record.
Reality has debunked the 'warming stopped' myth
For a long time one of the favorite climate denier myths involved 
claiming that we hadn't seen any global surface warming since 1998. That 
myth has fallen by the wayside since 2014, 2015, and 2016 each broke the 
global surface temperature records previously set in 2010 and 2005 
(which were also both hotter than 1998). Yet the myth persisted for 
years because 1998 was anomalously hot due to the monster El Niño event 
that year, which meant that global temperatures weren't much hotter than 
1998 until 2014 to today.
Now the first six months of 2017 have been 0.3C hotter than 1998, 
despite the former having no El Niño warming influence and the latter 
being amplified by a monster El Niño. In 1998, there was also more solar 
energy reaching Earth than there has been in 2017.
Today's remarkably hot temperatures, caused by human carbon pollution, 
are a sign of what's to come. If we don't get global warming under 
control, the consequences will indeed be bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jul/31/2017-is-so-far-the-second-hottest-year-on-record-thanks-to-global-warming


*Surviving the Bleakness of The News 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPzJyFTNlHQ>*
University of California Television (UCTV)
Published on Aug 1, 2017
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)
Journalist Ari Shapiro shares his healthy approach to an onslaught of 
bleak world news. Shapiro's passion for literature has inspired him to 
find and report great stories in Washington, Europe and elsewhere around 
the world in his remarkable rise from radio intern to co-host of NPR's 
flagship news program, All Things Considered. Shapiro is the featured 
speaker at the 2016 Dinner in the Library event at the Geisel Library at 
UC San Diego.   Series: "The Library Channel" [Show ID: 32726]
Watch the Entire Program Here: 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPzJyFTNlHQ> 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPzJyFTNlHQ


*This Day in Climate History August 2, 2006 
<http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/08/03/6719/robertson-global-warming/>-  
from D.R. Tucker*
August 2, 2006: Republican televangelist Pat Robertson calls for action 
on human-caused climate change, a position he would abandon several 
years later.
*Pat Robertson: I'm 'A Convert' On Global Warming, 'It Is Getting Hotter'*
Yesterday on the 700 Club, evangelical Pat Robertson declared himself "a 
convert" on global warming. Robertson said that he has "not been one who 
believed in global warming in the past.” But now, Robertson said, he 
believes "it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is 
a build up of carbon dioxide in the air." Robertson implored, "we really 
need to do something on fossil fuels." Watch it:
Robertson talked briefly about global warming again on today’s edition 
of the 700 club. Alternet has the video.
Today's transcript:
/They are defending the society. But I tell you stay in doors ladies and 
gentleman. Stay cool. Get fans or whatever. And the poor, they need 
emergency fans and ice to cool down - the number of people dead. I have 
not been one who believed in the global warming. But I tell you, they 
are making a convert out of me as these blistering summers. They have 
broken heat records in a number of cities already this year and broken 
all-time records and it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting 
and there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to 
address the burning of fossil fuels. If we are contributing to the 
destruction of the planet we need to do manage about it./
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/08/03/6719/robertson-global-warming/
http://youtu.be/zxT0Nug1XqY
/
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