[TheClimate.Vote] July 13, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News

[Richard Pauli]

/July 13, 2017/

*(video 5 min) Larsen C Ice Sheet Breaks Off. What Next? 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDXr98pt0bg>*
It was inevitable ... a question not of If, but of When. Now that the 
Delaware-size iceberg has calved, scientists begin to explore what comes 
next. (Also read more at YaleClimateConnections.org)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDXr98pt0bg
-more:
*Larsen C calves trillion ton iceberg 
<http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/>*
A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded - has 
calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The calving 
occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July 2017, 
when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away. The 
iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, weighs more than a trillion 
tonnes.  Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes.
Map of Larsen C, overlaid with NASA MODIS thermal image from July 12 
2017, showing the iceberg has calved
The final breakthrough was detected in data from NASA's Aqua MODIS 
satellite instrument, which images in the thermal infrared at a 
resolution of 1km, and confirmed by NASA's Suomi VIIRS instrument.
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/
https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/885101922549727232
https://twitter.com/simon_rp84/status/885098754671620099
http://www.climatesignals.org/headlines/events/larsen-c-ice-shelf-calving-and-retreat-2017
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?p=antarctic&l=VIIRS_SNPP_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor,VIIRS_SNPP_DayNightBand_ENCC,Coastlines&t=2017-07-12&z=3&v=-2570154.5783290304,937557.1566580613,-1783722.5783290304,1313877.1566580613


*Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children>*
Next best actions are selling your car, avoiding flights and going 
vegetarian, according to study into true impacts of different green 
lifestyle choices
Overpopulation has been a controversial factor in the climate change 
debate, with some pointing out that an American is responsible for 40 
times the emissions produced by a Bangladeshi and that overconsumption 
is the crucial issue. The new research comes a day after researchers 
blamed overpopulation and overconsumption on the "biological 
annihilation" of wildlife which has started a mass extinction of species 
on the planet.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children


*Robert Mac on secrets of comedy <http://evidencesquared.com/ep17/>*
In our new podcast episode, stand-up comedian Robert Mac gives a master 
class on comedy and story-telling, explaining how to show-don't-tell, 
lay breadcrumbs, funnel your stories from wide to narrow, and understand 
your audience.
Video Robert Mac interview, part 1 <https://youtu.be/ASKDgH8SKxw>
Richard Pauli's comment:
A man sentenced to hang, slowly steps up the gallows, as the hangman 
puts the noose around his neck, he says "Gee I wish I had a good global 
warming joke."
http://evidencesquared.com/ep17/ https://youtu.be/ASKDgH8SKxw


*Scientist Michael Mann on 'Low-Probability But Catastrophic' Climate 
Scenarios* 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-michael-mann-on-climate-scenarios.html>
Shortly after this week's cover story was published, Mann took to 
Facebook to voice some criticism of it - primarily about its framing, 
which he described as counterproductively "doomist." Personally, I don't 
think we're doomed, just facing down a very big challenge. But I own up 
to the alarmism in the story, which I describe as an effort to survey 
the worst-case-scenario climate landscape. We have suffered from a 
terrible failure of imagination when it comes to climate change, I 
argue, and that is in part because most of us do not understand the real 
risks and horrors that warming can bring, especially with unabated 
carbon emissions. For the sake of clarity: I do not believe that the 
planet will become uninhabitable in 2100. As I write in the story, our 
complacency will surely be shaken before we get there. But I do believe 
that it is important to contemplate the possibility that parts of the 
tropics and equator will become cripplingly hot, for instance, or that 
our agriculture will suffer huge losses, so that we may be motivated to 
take action before we get to those eventualities. And I do believe that, 
absent a significant change in human behavior across the globe, they are 
plausible eventualities.
Mann also took issue with a few particular points of science. He 
stressed that the danger of the carbon frozen in the arctic permafrost 
was not a "game-changing arctic methane time bomb" and, separately, he 
suggested that the recent upward revision to a particular satellite data 
set on warming was less significant than I made it out to be. My purpose 
in raising the permafrost issue was to illustrate how uncertain much of 
our current modeling can be, not to suggest a sudden methane release 
would be the major cause of devastating warming: I based none of the 
warming scenarios described in the piece on a dramatic methane release 
effect but rather on the high end of the IPCC's business-as-usual 
estimate, which gave a roughly 5 percent chance of our hitting eight 
degrees of warming by 2100. Regarding the data set, I grant that the 
upward revision may have been less meaningful to the scientists close to 
the data, who understood it as a revision toward expectations, than it 
was to journalists covering the development from afar, who focused on 
the fact of the revision itself.
That seems like to me a really scary and also quite underappreciated by 
the broader public, the effect on food.
No, absolutely. Food, water, land, you know? The basic resources that we 
rely upon. All of them are adversely impacted by climate change and with 
a growing global population. So you've got more competition over fewer 
resources among a growing global population. It's a recipe for a 
conflict nightmare. And this is why when you talk to national-security 
experts, many of them will tell you that climate change may be the 
greatest security threat we face in the years ahead, it's what they call 
a threat multiplier. It heightens existing tensions, it heightens 
conflict, especially when you're talking about more competition for 
fewer resources. And interestingly enough, and this is not actually that 
widely appreciated, this is sort of a dystopian scenario that Hollywood 
imagined decades ago. The movie Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston - if 
you watch the very beginning of the movie, it's briefly mentioned, but 
the underlying cause of that dystopian future is global warming, is 
climate change. So there was - it was sort of an oddly prescient, some 
of these early-'70s dystopian novels and films and Soylent Green foresaw 
exactly the sort of future that we're talking about where climate change 
leads to decreased resources. In that case, it was about food for a 
growing global population, and it's a dystopian future. A worst-case 
scenario - a worst-case future does not look that different from the 
dystopian visions that Hollywood has already provided us...
It's really interesting to me to think that in the '70s we were starting 
to get an understanding that the climate was warming,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-michael-mann-on-climate-scenarios.html
*

**Are Humans Doomed? A Q and A With The Author Of NY Mag's Terrifying 
Climate Change Story 
<http://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/climate_change_ny_mag.php>*
  I guess my first question is, is there any hope?
Oh, I would say there's quite a lot of hope. The conceit of the piece 
was to survey worst case scenarios in order to ultimately motivate 
people to action. But one of the things that I worried about as I put it 
together was that readers would have a fatalistic response to it and I 
don't really think that that's appropriate. At some point in the piece, 
I talk about almost all of the damage that we've done to the planet, in 
the sense that global warming has occurred over the course of the 
lifespan of the Greatest Generation. So ultimately, I think, this could 
be as short a story as a story of two generations. But at the very least 
we have another lifespan to figure it out, and to take the necessary 
actions to forestall at least the gruesome worst case scenarios that I 
sketched out in the piece....
It's interesting, it's something that a handful of scientists that I 
talked to in researching and reporting this piece mentioned to me, the 
risk that alarmism would lead to fatalism. While basically everybody 
that I talked to was on board with the idea that the public should be 
more scared than they are and should know more about these fears than 
they do, a number of them also expressed that reservation to me. Since 
the piece has come out, a couple of them and a couple of scientists I 
didn't speak to have said similar things on Twitter and elsewhere.
First of all, I should say, I'm going to be publishing a bunch of 
interviews with some of these scientists over the course of the week. 
They're interesting in their own right, and they're all fascinating, 
interesting people. I stand in awe of all of them. But my feeling all 
along, as a civilian, as an amateur observer of this issue, it didn't 
seem plausible to me that there was more risk at scaring people too much 
than there was at not scaring them enough. I may be in a little bubble, 
and the people I talked to may have a very different reaction to the 
public at large, and it's possible that some of these scientists are 
right and people will shut down. But my feeling was, and is, if there's 
a one percent chance that we've set off a chain reaction that could end 
the human race, then that should be something that the public knows and 
thinks about.
http://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/climate_change_ny_mag.php


*'The Models Are Too Conservative': Paleontologist Peter Ward on What 
Past Mass Extinctions Can Teach Us About Climate Change Today 
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/what-mass-extinctions-teach-us-about-climate-change-today.html>*
By David Wallace-Wells
People always think the intensity of a mass extinction should be related 
to the extinction - what percentage of creatures were extinct. 
Increasingly, we're thinking that's a metric, but a more important 
metric that tells you something about the nature of the devastation is 
how different is the fauna that comes afterward.
I think people really don't appreciate how much, over the coming 
decades, nature will be at war with the way that we live.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look at the storms that are taking place now. 
You talk about habitability. I've been talking about heat. At what point 
do hurricanes in the tropics make living there just not worth it? You're 
being mowed down by these huge number of tornadoes. Sooner or later 
people are going to get the hell out of Dodge. But this is the sort of 
storm ferocity that's coming.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/what-mass-extinctions-teach-us-about-climate-change-today.html


*Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature 
increase of four degrees and its implications* 
<http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/4>
Mark New
Published 29 November 2010    DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2010.0304
The idea of an international symposium focused on 'Four degrees and 
beyond' germinated in late 2008 after discussions with colleagues who 
were concerned that there was a large gap between the emerging policy 
target of keeping global warming below two degrees and some of the 
emissions-reduction scenarios that were being proposed in both the 
academic and policy literature. Many emissions-policy scenarios had (i) 
underestimated the rate of increase of emissions in the last decade and 
(ii) been unrealistically optimistic about when global emissions might 
peak, given the time it takes to transition out of carbon-based energy 
systems. A pessimistic, or some might say realistic, appraisal of the 
slow progress of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate 
Change (UNFCCC) process, also suggested that avoiding two degrees would 
be highly unlikely, and that the chances of warming by four degrees in 
this century much less unlikely than previously thought. At the same 
time, the Oxford-based author Mark Lynas had just published his book 
'Six degrees: our future on a hotter planet', and he had often commented 
on the scarcity of any scientific literature on the nature and impacts 
of climate changes larger than four degrees...
So, the Four degrees and beyond conference took place in September 2009, 
where we asked participants to specifically address the questions of (i) 
how probable a warming of four degrees or higher might be, (ii) what the 
consequences of such a warming might be for ecosystems and society, 
(iii) how to adapt to such large changes, and (iv) how to keep the risk 
of high-end climate change as low as possible.
..The papers in this issue that look at impacts and adaptation 
challenges in a four degrees world are sobering: the possible impacts 
are large, in some cases, transformational, and the challenges in 
understanding and developing responses to these impacts considerable. 
Hopefully, this Theme Issue will stimulate much-needed further research 
that explores the implications of and solutions to high-end climate warming.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/4


*FloodList UN – 1995 to 2015, Flood Disasters Affected 2.3 Billion and 
Killed 157,000 <http://floodlist.com/>*
The European Environment Agency recently published a report on flooding 
in Europe, "Floodplain management: reducing flood risks and restoring 
healthy ecosystems", where researchers examined data on floods dating 
from 1980 to 2010, and found significant increases in flooding – which 
will only get worse as time goes on.
http://floodlist.com/


Opinion Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/doomsday-scenarios-are-as-harmful-as-climate-change-denial/2017/07/12/880ed002-6714-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html>
It is important to communicate both the threat and the opportunity in 
the climate challenge. Those paying attention are worried, and should 
be, but there are also reasons for hope. The active engagement of many 
cities, states and corporations, and the commitments of virtually every 
nation (minus one) is a very hopeful sign.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/doomsday-scenarios-are-as-harmful-as-climate-change-denial/2017/07/12/880ed002-6714-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html


*(opinion) The Right Calls Climate Change a Leap of Faith. But Denial Is 
a Leap into the Abyss. 
<http://inthesetimes.com/article/20321/climate-change-right-wing-religion-environmentalism>*
To prevent the kind of runaway warming that will unravel human 
civilization, we're left with two options: sharp and immediate 
reductions in our carbon emissions, or a game-changing technological 
solution at some future point, such as capturing carbon and storing it 
underground. More or less by default, we're betting "our collective 
future on being able to bury millions of tons of carbon," as David 
Roberts notes in Vox.
The Right is correct that it requires an element of faith to accept such 
facts, since most of us don't have the expertise or resources to verify 
them. But the alternatives involve a much greater leap of faith, and 
land us on wild theories about the total incompetence of climate 
scientists or a global, leftist conspiracy that has successfully duped 
the entire world, save for one political movement and one political 
party in the United States.
There is a priceless, disquieting passage in which Jesus says that 
whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood "remains in me, and I in 
him." To which, as the account has it, his disciples replied, "This is a 
difficult teaching. Who can accept it?" Many of them then abandoned him. 
And not without reason-a lot of what he said sounded pretty much insane. 
Taking him seriously would raise basic questions about our ways of being 
the world, and would force a revolution in our ways of relating to one 
another and sharing resources...
The same is true of climate change. At its core, there is a teaching as 
difficult as that of prophets and revolutionaries, and no less difficult 
to get your mind around. We face a crisis that demands a revolution in 
our traditional ways of thinking-a conversion, if you will. The stakes 
may not be eternal life, but they are substantial: life on this planet 
for this species, and for the millions of other species whose fate 
depends on our behavior and choices. These things are true. They demand 
action and focus. Whether we're up to that challenge is another matter...
You can say that the idea that carbon emissions will destroy human 
civilization is a secular substitute for sin, as Michael Crichton 
thought. Really, it's just a matter of physics that presents us with the 
most fearsome spiritual challenge of all: Not whether a divine being 
will transform and save our souls, but whether we can find the political 
imagination and will to transform and save ourselves.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/20321/climate-change-right-wing-religion-environmentalism


*This Day in Climate History July 13, 2008 
<http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/07/13/26102/schwarzenegger-bush-2/>-  
from D.R. Tucker*
July 13, 2008: In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, 
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denounces the Bush 
administration's stubborn refusal to recognize the risk of human-caused 
climate change.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/07/13/26102/schwarzenegger-bush-2//


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