[TheClimate.Vote] December 8, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/December 8, 2017
/
*How Climate Change Fuels Wildfires in California 
<https://psmag.com/environment/how-climate-change-in-california-fuels-wildfires>*
Pacific Standard
As global warming continues to make California's climate hotter and 
drier, the state could become a perpetual tinderbox.
California has two distinct fire seasons: the summer season, when hot 
temperatures dry out vegetation providing fuel for wildfires; and the 
fall fire season, when hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow in over the 
mountains from the desert. Research shows that global warming is making 
both of them worse.
A 2015 study found that, over a 50-year period, fires in both seasons 
have become more frequent and more severe - though Santa Ana-fueled 
fires, which burn along the state's coast, tend to be more economically 
destructive. A 2014 study found that, between 1984 and 2011, the area 
burned by large fires increased by roughly 90,000 acres a year. While 
both studies looked at the effects of large-scale changes in climate on 
wildfires, neither directly implicated human-caused climate change. 
However, a 2016 study found that anthropogenic warming doubled the 
amount of area burned by forest fires between 1984 and 2015...
And California is only expected to get hotter and drier. New research 
shows that, as Arctic sea ice dwindles, precipitation in California 
could drop by as much as 15 percent over the coming decades. As such 
conditions become the new normal, California could become a perpetual 
tinderbox.
https://psmag.com/environment/how-climate-change-in-california-fuels-wildfires
-
*Did Climate Change Worsen the Southern California Fires? 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/what-climate-change-did-and-didnt-have-to-do-with-the-socal-fires/547712/>*
Seven of the state's 10 largest modern wildfires have occurred in the 
last 14 years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/what-climate-change-did-and-didnt-have-to-do-with-the-socal-fires/547712/
-
In a Warming California, a Future of More Fire - New York Times
California Today: A Special Fires Edition - New York Times
-
*Worst Ever Wildfire California Extreme Footage Compilation 
<http://climatestate.com/2017/12/07/worst-ever-wildfire-cali-extreme-footage-compilation/>*
December 7, 2017, Extreme Weather, USA, Wildfire
Dry weather and merciless winds, with gusts predicted to reach the 
strength of a Category 1 hurricane in mountainous areas, threaten to 
intensify the already devastating Southern California wildfires. A value 
of 48 is considered high danger, while 162 is extreme. Thursday's score: 
296, a record.   video https://youtu.be/bBkNejztEpU
http://climatestate.com/2017/12/07/worst-ever-wildfire-cali-extreme-footage-compilation/
-
*Fire and fear stretch across Southern California as wildfires roar from 
Ventura to San Diego 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/07/raging-wildfires-tear-through-southern-california-as-officials-warn-of-increasing-danger/>*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/07/raging-wildfires-tear-through-southern-california-as-officials-warn-of-increasing-danger/

KCRW Fire Coverage
http://www.kcrw.com/latest/ventura-fire-evacuee-i-lost-everything-45-years


*4 QUESTIONS ON THE CALIFORNIA FIRES AND CLIMATE CHANGE... 
<http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/4_questions_on_the_california_fires_and_climate_change>* 

Santa Ana winds are whipping up wildfires in Southern California after a 
devastating season in wine country. Rising temps can make the West 
dangerously combustible...
The deadly fires that swept through California's wine country this fall 
made one of the state's most destructive fire seasons on record even 
worse, and the fierce Santa Ana winds now whipping up fast-moving blazes 
in the hills near Los Angeles 
<https://www.apnews.com/b14a99342d904285943a198f01b73d88/Southern-California-fire-forces-thousands-to-flee-homes> 
are adding to the year's damage. As global temperatures continue to 
rise, scientists say the risk of extreme fire seasons is rising across 
the West.
Wildfires are hugely complex events, complicated by human activity, 
including rampant development and decades of fire suppression strategies 
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17042017/wildfires-climate-change-global-warming-forests-controlled-burns-west> 
that left too much dry timber and underbrush for fires to burn.
Add the effects of climate change to the mix, and California's already 
fire-prone landscape grows increasingly combustible.
*1. What's the link between fires & climate change?*
An increasing body of research 
<http://www.pnas.org/content/112/13/3858.full#F1>finds that the hot and 
dry conditions that created the California drought were brought on in 
part by human-caused warming 
<http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/3258>.
Higher temperatures pull moisture out of soil and vegetation, leaving 
parched landscapes 
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05092017/west-wildfires-california-canada-forests-record-heat-climate-change> 
that can go up in flames with the slightest spark from a downed utility 
wire, backfiring car or embers from a campfire.
California's average temperature has risen about 2 degrees 
<https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7596> Fahrenheit 
during the second half of the 20th century. Altogether this has led to 
more "fuel aridity" - drier tree canopies, grasses and brush that can burn.
"There's a clear climate signal in these fires because of the drought 
conditions connected to climate change 
<http://www.pnas.org/content/112/13/3931.abstract>," said Daniel Swain, 
a climate scientist at UCLA.
*2. Why didn't the wet winter and spring help?*
After nearly five years of extreme drought, California finally got a lot 
of rain over the fall and winter. By the spring, snowpack in the Sierra 
Nevada was at a near-record level - higher than it had been in the 
preceding four years 
<https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6815> combined - and it 
helped put an end to the drought.
*3. Why do these fires spread so fast?*
When the first blazes began to spark in Napa and Sonoma counties late on 
Oct. 8, residents told firefighters they saw trees, uprooted by strong 
winds, toppled onto power lines. But it's still unclear if all of the 
fires were sparked that way.
What's clear is that the seasonal hot, dry Diablo winds, sweeping down 
from higher elevations, fanned the flames.
The Diablo winds are a known fire enabler, and the results this year 
were especially destructive. The National Weather Service reported that 
wind gusts hit nearly 79 miles per hour. Wind-driven fires can move 
quickly, and these leapt hundreds of feet in seconds.
*4. Will extremes get worse with climate change?*
Recent research from the Pacific Northwest National Labs and Utah State 
University scientists projects that extreme drought and extreme flooding 
in California will increase 50 percent by the end of the century - 
potentially triggering the growth of vegetation that quickly becomes 
fuel as temperatures rise in the summer.
If global carbon emissions continue at a high level, extreme dry periods 
will double, the study finds - going from about five extreme dry 
"events" during the decade of the 1930s, to about 10 per decade by the 
2070s.  Extreme wet periods will increase from about 4 to about 15 over 
the same periods, roughly tripling, it says.
By Georgina Gustin
http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/4_questions_on_the_california_fires_and_climate_change


*2017: THE YEAR IN CLIMATE... 
<http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/2017_the_year_in_climate>*
(numerous graphics and text )
http://www.joboneforhumanity.org/2017_the_year_in_climate


Sustainable Energy
*Global Warming's Worst-Case Projections Look Increasingly Likely 
<https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609620/global-warmings-worst-case-projections-look-increasingly-likely/#comments>*
A new study based on satellite observations finds that temperatures 
could rise nearly 5 degrees C by the end of the century.
Global warming's worst-case projections look increasingly likely, 
according to a new study that tested the predictive power of climate 
models against observations of how the atmosphere is actually behaving.
The paper, published on Wednesday in Nature, found that global 
temperatures could rise nearly 5 degrees C by the end of the century 
under the the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's steepest  
prediction for greenhouse-gas concentrations. That's 15 percent hotter 
than the previous estimate. The odds that temperatures will increase 
more than 4 degrees by 2100 in this so-called "business as usual" 
scenario increased from 62 percent to 93 percent, according to the new 
analysis....
But an emerging challenge is that the climate is changing faster than 
the models are improving, as real-world events occur that the models 
didn't predict. Notably, Arctic sea ice is melting more rapidly than the 
models can explain, suggesting that the simulations aren't fully 
capturing certain processes.
"We're increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what's going to 
happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened," Caldeira said.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609620/global-warmings-worst-case-projections-look-increasingly-likely/#comments
-
Markets Insider
*The world may actually get 15% hotter than scientists previously 
thought 
<http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/climate-may-be-15-warmer-than-previously-thought-by-2100-2017-12-1010424131>*
A new study says global-warming projections for the end of the century 
could be up to 15% higher than previously thought.
The authors found that the climate models that best represented the 
current situation showed the most warming in the future.
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/climate-may-be-15-warmer-than-previously-thought-by-2100-2017-12-1010424131
-
[nature.com]
*Greater future global warming inferred from Earth's recent energy 
budget <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672>*
Patrick T. Brown & Ken Caldeira
..In particular, we find that the observationally informed warming 
projection for the end of the twenty-first century for the steepest 
radiative forcing scenario is about 15 per cent warmer (+0.5 degrees 
Celsius) ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672
-
[NASA images]
*https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=91379*
Thick smoke was streaming from several fires in southern California when 
the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's 
Terra satellite acquired a natural-color image in the afternoon on 
December 5, 2017.
The largest of the blazes - the fast-moving Thomas fire in Ventura 
County - had charred more than 65,000 acres (24,000 hectares or 94 
square miles), according to Cal Fire. Smaller smoke plumes from the 
Creek and Rye fires are also visible.
On the same day, the Multi Spectral Imager (MSI) on the European Space 
Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite captured the data for a false-color image 
(below) of the burn scar. Active fires appear orange; the burn scar is 
brown. Unburned vegetation is green; developed areas are gray. The 
Sentinel-2 image is based on observations of visible, shortwave 
infrared, and near infrared light.
The fires mainly affected a forested, hilly area north of Ventura, but 
flames have encroached into the northern edge of the city. On December 
6, 2017, Cal Fire estimated that at least 12,000 structures were 
threatened by fire.
Powerful Santa Ana winds fanned the flames. Forecasters with the Los 
Angeles office of the National Weather Service warned that the region is 
in the midst of its strongest and longest Santa Ana wind event of the 
year. They issued red flag warnings for Los Angles and Ventura counties 
through December 8, noting that isolated wind gusts of 80 miles (130 
kilometers) per hour are possible.
A prolonged spell of dry weather also primed the area for major fires. 
This week's winds follow nine of the driest consecutive months in 
Southern California history, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 
climatologist Bill Patzert told the Los Angeles Times. "Pile that onto 
the long drought of the past decade and a half, [and] we are in 
apocalyptic conditions," he said.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=91379

[opinion]
*Climate change is the story you missed in 2017. And the media is to 
blame 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/07/climate-change-media-coverage-media-matters>*
Some of Trump's tweets generate more national coverage than devastating 
disasters.
As the weather gets worse, we need journalism to get better
Academic Jennifer Good analyzed 
<https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/09/18/putting-hurricanes-and-climate-change-into-the-same-frame.html> 
two weeks of hurricane coverage during the height of hurricane season on 
eight major TV networks, and found that about 60% of the stories 
included the word Trump, and only about 5% mentioned climate change...
Good's analysis lines up with research done by my organization, Media 
Matters for America, which found that TV news outlets gave far too 
little coverage to the well 
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/was-the-extreme-2017-hurricane-season-driven-by-climate-change/>-documented 
<http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/events/atlantic-hurricane-season-2017#/science%20at%20glance> 
links 
<https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-global-warming-weather/> 
between climate change and hurricanes. ABC and NBC both completely 
failed 
<https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/09/08/STUDY-ABC-and-NBC-drop-the-ball-on-covering-the-impact-of-climate-change-on-hurricanes/217881> 
to bring up climate change during their news coverage of Harvey, a storm 
that caused the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the continental US. 
When Irma hit soon after, breaking the record for hurricane intensity, 
ABC didn't do much better...
In the first nine months of 2017, the US was assailed by 15 weather and 
climate disasters <https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/>that each did 
more than a billion dollars in damage - in the case of the hurricanes, 
much more. The combined economic hit from Harvey, Irma and Maria could 
end up being $200bn 
<http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/news/economy/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-damage-estimate/index.html> 
or more, according to Moody's Analytics. And then in October, 
unprecedented wildfires in northern California did an estimated $3bn 
<https://www.npr.org/2017/11/07/562619809/after-assessing-the-damage-california-fire-officials-looking-into-who-is-at-faul> 
in damage.
If we are to fend off the worst possible outcomes of climate change, we 
need to shift as quickly as possible to a cleaner energy system. We 
could expect more Americans to get on board with that solution if they 
more fully understood the problem - and that's where the critical role 
of the media comes in. As the weather gets worse, we need our journalism 
to get better.
Lisa Hymas is the climate and energy program director at Media Matters
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/07/climate-change-media-coverage-media-matters


[MIT News]
*Researchers establish long-sought source of ocean methane 
<http://news.mit.edu/2017/researchers-establish-long-sought-source-ocean-methane-1207>*
An abundant enzyme in marine microbes may be responsible for production 
of the greenhouse gas.
Industrial and agricultural activities produce large amounts of methane, 
a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Many bacteria also 
produce methane as a byproduct of their metabolism. Some of this 
naturally released methane comes from the ocean, a phenomenon that has 
long puzzled scientists because there are no known methane-producing 
organisms living near the ocean's surface.
A team of researchers from MIT and the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign has made a discovery that could help to answer this 
"ocean methane paradox." First, they identified the structure of an 
enzyme that can produce a compound that is known to be converted to 
methane. Then, they used that information to show that this enzyme 
exists in some of the most abundant marine microbes. They believe that 
this compound is likely the source of methane gas being released into 
the atmosphere above the ocean.
Ocean-produced methane represents around 4 percent of the total that's 
discharged into the atmosphere, and a better understanding of where this 
methane is coming from could help scientists better account for its role 
in climate change, the researchers say...
They discovered a microbial enzyme that produces a compound called 
methylphosphonate, which can become methane when a phosphate molecule is 
cleaved from it. This enzyme was found in a microbe called 
Nitrosopumilus maritimus, which lives near the ocean surface, but the 
enzyme was not readily identified in other ocean microbes as one would 
have expected it to be.
Van der Donk's team knew the genetic sequence of the enzyme, known as 
methylphosphonate synthase (MPnS), which allowed them to search for 
other versions of it in the genomes of other microbes...
http://news.mit.edu/2017/researchers-establish-long-sought-source-ocean-methane-1207


*Climate change: who is tackling global warming? 
<http://www.theweek.co.uk/checked-out/90212/climate-change-who-is-tackling-global-warming>*
The countries doing the most - and the least - to address environmental 
issues
How is progress measured and compared?
The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) 
<https://germanwatch.org/en/14639%20>, published by the Climate Action 
Network and the German non-profit environmental organisation 
Germanwatch, ranks 56 countries and the EU according to their greenhouse 
gas emissions, renewable energy development, energy use and climate policy.
Similar work is being done by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) 
<http://climateactiontracker.org/countries>, a consortium of European 
research groups, which monitors and analyses the latest emissions data 
from 32 countries.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/checked-out/90212/climate-change-who-is-tackling-global-warming
-
The Climate Change Performance Index 2018 
<https://germanwatch.org/en/14639%20>
https://germanwatch.org/en/14639%20
-
Climate Action Tracker <http://climateactiontracker.org/countries>
http://climateactiontracker.org/countries


*The Big Bad Fix: The case against geoengineering 
<https://www.boell.de/en/2017/12/01/big-bad-fix-case-against-geoengineering>*
It calls for an urgent and immediate ban on the deployment and outdoor 
testing of Solar Radiation Management technologies for their potential 
to suspend human rights, democracy, and international peace. It argues 
for a governance of geoengineering that is participatory and 
transparent, grounded in international law, built on the precautionary 
principle and informed by a rigorous debate on real, existing, 
transformative and just climate policies and practices.
https://www.boell.de/en/2017/12/01/big-bad-fix-case-against-geoengineering


*THE APPALLING MEANINGLESS OF BEING IN A POST-MODERN, PRE-APOCALYPTIC 
WORLD... 
<https://ecointernet.org/2017/12/06/the-appalling-meaningless-of-being-in-the-post-modern-pre-apocalyptic-world/>*
By Dr. Glen Barry, EcoInternet
December 3, 2017
Nothing really seems to matter much when your Planet is needlessly 
collapsing and dying. Big important ideas to base your life upon are in 
short supply. Pretty much god myths, stuff, and tribes are all we got. 
There is nature. And she needs us...
Sadly, this living global ecological system is collapsing and dying as 
human industrial growth systematically destroys the very habitat 
necessary for our shared survival and well-being....
Who can blame opioid addicts for seeking to numb the existential horror 
of meaninglessness found in the post-modern era? This terrible epidemic 
is but the most recent attempt at self-medication to numb the pain of 
fewer opportunities for personal gratification as profoundly inequitable 
consumer violence murders a living Earth....
How tragic that relentless modern techno-optimism's quest for human 
comforts has spawned an ecological apocalypse...
How is one even able to find any sort of profound meaning, sense of 
purpose, and righteous intent and action in a post-modern, 
pre-apocalyptic world? What can possibly matter when the mere act of 
being is destroying your host and 3.5 billion years of naturally evolved 
life, the only life of which we are currently certain?...
Bathe in the forest. Grow plants. No more burning. Stop bulldozers. Howl 
at the moon. Know how much is enough.
Be one with nature or die...
by Dr. Glen Barry · Published December 6, 2017
https://ecointernet.org/2017/12/06/the-appalling-meaningless-of-being-in-the-post-modern-pre-apocalyptic-world/


*This Day in Climate History December 8, 2005 
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EEDC1031F93BA35751C1A9639C8B63> 
   -  from D.R. Tucker*
December 8, 2005: New York Times columnist David Brooks observes that 
American conservatives "...have not effectively addressed the 
second-generation issues. Technological change has really changed the 
economy, introducing new stratifications. Inequality is rising. Wage 
stagnation is a problem. Social mobility is lagging, and globalization 
hurts hard-working people. Global warming is real (conservatives 
secretly know this). The health care system is ridiculous. Welfare 
reform is unfinished. Conservatives have not addressed these 
second-generation issues as effectively as their forebears addressed the 
first-generation ones."

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