[TheClimate.Vote] November 12, 2017 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/November 12, 2017
/
*Alternative US group honouring Paris climate accord demands 'seat at 
the table' 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/11/alternative-us-group-honouring-paris-climate-accord-demands-seat-at-the-table-bonn>*
The America's Pledge group claims to represent US majority opinion on 
carbon emissions, despite Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement
The United Nations should give a "seat at the table" to a powerful group 
of US states, cities, tribes and businesses that are committed to taking 
action on climate change, Michael Bloomberg has urged.
In an apparent bid to circumvent US president Donald Trump's moves to 
withdraw from the Paris accord, the billionaire philanthropist also said 
the world body should accept an alternative set of US climate 
commitments alongside national pledges to reduce carbon emissions.
The former New York mayor was speaking at the UN's climate change 
conference in Bonn, Germany, during the launch of the America's Pledge 
report. The report has found that US states, cities and businesses that 
have signed up to reduce greenhouse gas emissions together represent a 
GDP of about $10tn. That is more than any nation except the US and China.
"If this group were a country, we’d be the third-biggest economy in the 
world. We should have a seat at the table," Bloomberg said. "If 
Washington won't lead, then mayors and governors will."...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/11/alternative-us-group-honouring-paris-climate-accord-demands-seat-at-the-table-bonn*


Pope blasts 'shortsighted human activity' for global warming 
<http://nypost.com/2017/11/11/pope-blasts-shortsighted-human-activity-for-global-warming/>*
Pope Francis is blasting "shortsighted human activity" for global 
warming and rising sea levels and is urging leaders at climate talks in 
Germany to take a global outlook as they negotiate ways to curb 
heat-trapping emissions.
Francis met Saturday with a delegation of leaders from the Pacific 
islands and told them he shares their concerns about rising sea levels 
and increasingly intense storms that are threatening their small islands.
He decried in particular the state of oceans, where overfishing and 
pollution by plastics are threatening fish stocks and sea life that are 
critical to Pacific livelihoods.
He said several causes were to blame, but that "sadly, many of them are 
due to shortsighted human activity connected with certain ways of 
exploiting natural and human resources, the impact of which ultimately 
reaches the ocean bed itself."
http://nypost.com/2017/11/11/pope-blasts-shortsighted-human-activity-for-global-warming/


*Global Climate Action at COP23: Full Programme 
<https://cop23.unfccc.int/cop23/global-climate-action-at-cop23-full-programme>*
https://cop23.unfccc.int/cop23/global-climate-action-at-cop23-full-programme


*Bill McKibben on Future of the Paris Climate Accord & U.S. Role at COP 
23 Climate Talks in Germany <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVnaGpb2wxk>*
https://democracynow.org - As Democracy Now! heads to the U.N. Climate 
Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, we speak with 350.org's Bill 
McKibben. Several U.S. delegations are scheduled to attend despite the 
fact that President Donald Trump says he is pulling the U.S. out of the 
landmark 2015 Paris climate accord. The Trump administration is sending 
officials to push coal, gas and nuclear power during a presentation at 
the U.N. climate summit. Meanwhile, a coalition of U.S. cities, 
companies, universities and faith groups have opened a 
2,500-square-meter pavilion outside the U.N. climate conference called 
"We are Still In"-an effort to persuade other countries that wide swaths 
of the United States are still committed to the landmark 2015 Paris 
climate accord. McKibben also discusses his newly published first novel, 
"Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVnaGpb2wxk


*New Delhi's 'gas chamber' smog is so bad that United Airlines has 
stopped flying there 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/11/new-delhis-gas-chamber-smog-is-so-bad-that-united-airlines-has-stopped-flying-there/>*
NEW DELHI - Citing toxic smog that one official said has turned India's 
capital city into a "gas chamber," United Airlines has canceled flights 
to New Delhi until the air gets better.
At least in United's eyes, the Indian capital's smog concerns are on par 
with environmental disasters such as hurricanes and volcanoes - a risk 
to be avoided. The company said it was letting passengers switch flights 
without charge or helping them find seats on other carriers.
It was unclear if other airlines would follow suit. Virgin Atlantic, KLM 
and Etihad Airlines all compete for business to New Delhi, according to 
CNN Money.
An advisory on United's website said travel to New Delhi was suspended 
through at least Monday.
This week, the smog was 10 times worse than reigning pollution champion 
Beijing, where air-quality problems have reached Olympic proportions. 
Some parts of New Delhi have pollution 40 times the World Health 
Organization-recommended safe level....
Smog has grounded planes in major cities before, but typically because 
the thick haze dangerously obscured pilots' vision.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/11/new-delhis-gas-chamber-smog-is-so-bad-that-united-airlines-has-stopped-flying-there/


*Stanford professor files $10 million lawsuit against scientific journal 
over clean energy claims 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/01/stanford-professor-files-libel-suit-against-leading-scientific-journal-over-clean-energy-claims/?utm_term=.7506ee92ca07>*
Chris Mooney
Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University professor who has prominently 
contended that the United States can fully power itself with wind, water 
and solar energy, is suing the National Academy of Sciences and the lead 
author of a study published in its flagship journal that criticized 
Jacobson's views - pushing an already bitter academic dispute into a 
courtroom setting.
The dispute turns on Jacobson's idea, itself published in the PNAS and 
other journals, that it is feasible to construct a grid for the entire 
country that would be powered entirely by wind, solar and water energy 
(hydropower), with additional help from forms of energy storage. "No 
natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are 
needed," Jacobson and his colleagues wrote in 2015.
But Clack argued in PNAS earlier this year that Jacobson's idea was not 
only infeasible but also that his work used "invalid modeling tools, 
contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately 
supported assumptions." He and his co-authors said the transition toward 
cleaner energy will require "a broad portfolio of energy options," which 
presumably includes nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and more.
This claim is "particularly harmful and damaging to Dr. Jacobson's 
reputation because his primary expertise is in computer modeling," the 
suit asserts.
Clack and his colleagues published a lengthy response 
<http://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdf> 
to Jacobson's complaints in June, disagreeing about the point on 
hydropower and much else. Jacobson's study "has been shown very clearly 
to contain a large number of fundamental errors," the response said...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/01/stanford-professor-files-libel-suit-against-leading-scientific-journal-over-clean-energy-claims/?utm_term=.7506ee92ca07
-
*100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 
Countries and States 
<http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-50-USState-plans.html>*
Roadmaps to convert 139 countries of the world to 100% Wind, Water, and 
Sunlight (WWS) for all purposes
http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-50-USState-plans.html


*Congo basin's peaty swamps are new front in climate change battle 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/12/congo-basin-swamps-peatlands-carbon-climate-change>*
The need to protect the forests above the peatlands was emphasised last 
week by a major report showing that there is 40% more carbon stored in 
forested lands than in known fossil-fuel deposits worldwide.
"Releasing this carbon into the atmosphere through continuing 
deforestation not only commits us to the worst impacts of climate 
change, but also results in the loss of a globally important carbon sink.
"Protecting the carbon stored in forests is no different than taking 
action to ensure fossil deposits like coal stay underground," said the 
report's lead author, Martin Herold of Wageningen University in the 
Netherlands.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/12/congo-basin-swamps-peatlands-carbon-climate-change

Scared Scientists   Photo Portraits 
<http://nickbowers.com/work/personal/scared-scientists/>  (Australia)
http://nickbowers.com/work/personal/scared-scientists/


*What a new report on climate science portends for the West 
<http://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-change-why-the-new-federal-report-on-climate-science-matters-for-the-west>*
 From wildfires to drought, a look at a warming world.
Last week, the government released the first part of its 2018 
assessment. Focusing on the science of climate change, the report 
describes how greenhouse gas emissions are affecting the U.S. already 
and will continue to do so in future if we continue on the current 
trajectory.
*Here are the takeaways for the West:*
The West has warmed by an average of some 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. While 
the entire nation has warmed in the past century, the West has warmed 
faster than almost anywhere else. Only the northern Great Plains region 
has warmed as fast. What's more, the West is seeing big weather shifts: 
Both extreme hot and cold temperatures have gotten warmer, and the 
region has lost about two weeks of cool nights over the past century. 
Today's extreme hot temperatures are expected to become average 
temperatures over the next few decades, so get ready for more broken 
records in the future. In the Northwest, the warmest day of the year 
will be about 6 degrees warmer by mid century than it was about a decade 
ago, for example. Cities in particular are warming more because of the 
urban heat island effect.
Western wildfires have gotten worse, and will continue to do so, because 
of increasing temperatures and drought. New ecosystems will grow where 
wildfires burn. The complicating role of diseases and insect outbreaks 
in wildfires is not fully understood. But both diseases and insect 
outbreaks have increased because of climate change, and will continue to 
do so.
Alaska is in trouble. Because of its high latitude, Alaska has its own 
issues. Its glaciers, snow packs, and sea ice are melting. Its thawing 
permafrost releases even more of the greenhouse gas methane into the 
atmosphere, and its coastlines are eroding. Its boreal forests and even 
its tundra are burning. By the end of the century, the state will warm 
by more than 12 degrees on average.
Much of the West relies on declining winter precipitation for water. In 
the Northwest, decreased snow packs have meant lower streams for 
decades. By the end of the century, snow packs in the southernmost 
mountains of the West will have virtually disappeared. Less water 
combined with higher temperatures may lead to more frequent droughts, 
especially in the Southwest - including chronic, long-term droughts. In 
places where the amount of precipitation hasn't changed, the way that 
precipitation falls is changing. The West is seeing more intense storms 
and less gentle rainy days, which can still lead to drought conditions. 
In cities, intense storms overwhelm sewage systems, causing flooding and 
damage.
The West Coast is changing in profound ways. The sea is rising, getting 
warmer and becoming more acidic. Storm waves reach higher, which means 
more erosion. How much the oceans will rise depends in part on what 
happens to the Antarctic Ice Sheet: Will it hold, or melt away, raising 
sea levels still more? A phenomenon called an atmospheric river will 
cause more flooding along the West Coast, although it's unknown how much 
different sections of the coastline will flood.
*So what do we do?
*The report points out what we've known for as long as we've known about 
greenhouse gas emissions: We have choices. To that end, each report 
section shows what would happen if greenhouse gas emissions continued 
along the current trajectory and what would happen if we reduced our 
emissions to meet the standards set by the 2015 U.N. Paris Climate 
Agreement. After all, everything listed here - from wildfires to ocean 
acidification to drought - is merely a symptom. Many Westerners are 
leading the way in managing these symptoms to preserve lives and 
landscapes. But the root causes of these symptoms remain societal and 
personal choices that lead the average American to burn more than twice 
as much fossil fuel as the global average. As California Gov. Jerry 
Brown and others have demonstrated, the West also could lead the way in 
addressing these root causes.
Brown, along with representatives from states, tribes, higher education 
institutions, faith organizations and businesses throughout the West and 
across of the nation will be representing the U.S. at the U.N.'s 23rd 
International Climate Summit in Germany, through a coalition named We 
Are Still In. The coalition has a simple message for the world: 
Americans are already rolling up their sleeves and building climate 
change solutions, with or without federal leadership.
Maya L. Kapoor is an associate editor for High Country News.
http://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-change-why-the-new-federal-report-on-climate-science-matters-for-the-west


*Scale of 'nitrate timebomb' revealed 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41945650>*
Huge quantities of nitrate chemicals from farm fertilisers are polluting 
the rocks beneath our feet, a study says.
Researchers at the British Geological Survey say it could have severe 
global-scale consequences for rivers, water supplies, human health and 
the economy.
They say the nitrate will be released from the rocks into rivers via 
springs.
That will cause toxic algal blooms and fish deaths, and will cost 
industry and consumers billions of pounds a year in extra water treatment.
In a paper in Nature Communications, the scientists from BGS and 
Lancaster University estimate that up to 180 million tonnes of nitrate 
are stored in rocks worldwide - perhaps twice the amount stored in soils.
They say this is the first global estimate of the amount of nitrate 
trapped between the soil layer and the water-bearing aquifers below. 
They warn that over time the nitrate will inevitably slowly seep into 
the aquifers.
This is what's known as the nitrate timebomb.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41945650*
**A Brief History of Our Deadly Addiction to Nitrogen Fertilizer 
<http://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/04/history-nitrogen-fertilizer-ammonium-nitrate/>*
Nitrogen is one of the nutrient elements plants need to grow. Every 
apple or ear of corn plucked represents nutrients pulled from soil, and 
for land to remain productive, those nutrients must be replenished. 
Nitrogen is extremely plentiful-it makes up nearly 80 percent of the air 
we breathe. But atmospheric nitrogen (N2) is joined together in an 
extremely tight bond that makes it unusable by plants. Plant-available 
nitrogen, known as nitrate, is actually scarce, and for most of 
agriculture's 10,000-year-old history, the main challenge was figuring 
out how to cycle usable nitrogen back into the soil. Farmers of yore 
might not have known the chemistry, but they knew that composting crop 
waste, animal manure, and even human waste led to better harvests.
In 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber developed a 
high-temperature, energy-intensive process to synthesize plant-available 
nitrate from air. And so agriculture's millennia-old nitrogen-cycling 
problem was solved. Today's industrial-scale farms would not be possible 
without it.
Of course, agriculture wasn't the only reason Germany and other European 
countries wanted to generate tons of nitrate. As we just tragically saw 
in Texas, the stuff can also make a massive explosion. Before it made it 
onto farm fields in a big way, Haber's breakthrough fueled the US and 
European munitions industry, particularly in World War II. In that way, 
the industrialization of farming shares roots with the industrialization 
of killing represented by modern war.
Today's fertilizer plants, reports Vaclav Smil in his seminal book on 
nitrogen fertilizer, Enriching the Earth, rely on a scaled-up, refined 
version of the same process developed by Haber.
By the end of World War II, the United States had built 10 large-scale 
nitrate factories to make bombs. With Europe's and Japan's production 
facilities in ruins, the US entered the postwar period as the undisputed 
global champion of nitrogen production. The industry quickly shifted 
from munitions to fertilizer and domestic consumption began to 
skyrocket, driven, Smil writes, by the rise of new hybrid strains of 
corn, "the first kind of high-yielding grain cultivar dependent on 
higher fertilizer applications."
Industrial agriculture's reliance on plentiful synthetic nitrogen brings 
with it a whole bevy of environmental liabilities: excess nitrogen that 
seeps into streams and eventually into the Mississippi River,feeding a 
massive annual algae bloom that blots out sea life 
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dead-zone-pollutant-grows-despite-decades-work>;emissions 
of nitrous oxide 
<http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/04/02/fertilizer-use-responsible-for-increase-in-nitrous-oxide-in-atmosphere/>, 
a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon; and thedestruction 
of organic matter in soil 
<http://grist.org/article/2010-02-23-new-research-synthetic-nitrogen-destroys-soil-carbon-undermines/>.
As I also noted in that article, the US fertilizer industry increasingly 
relies on cheap natural gas extracted by hydrofracturing, or 
fracking-the  controversial process of extracting gas from rock 
formations by bombarding them with water spiked with toxic chemicals. 
"If Big Ag becomes hooked on cheap fracked gas to meet its fertilizer 
needs," I warned, "then the fossil fuel industry will have gained a 
powerful ally in its effort to steamroll regulation and fight back 
opposition to fracking projects."
Our future doesn't have to be drenched in vast quantities of synthetic 
nitrogen, with all its liabilities both subtle and spectacular. A 2012 
Iowa State University study found that by simply shifting to more 
diverse crop rotations, Midwestern farmers could radically reduce their 
reliance on added nitrogen while maintaining current levels of overall 
food production. Another recent study by Cornell researchers found 
similar crop rotations also reduced nitrogen runoff.
Yet instead of weaning us from from our huge reliance on nitrogen, 
federal and state agencies are underwriting the construction of new 
plants and the expansion of old ones. Meanwhile, federal farm and 
"renewable fuel" policies continue to prop up corn-in 2013, the USDA 
expects farmers to plant the most since 1936: 97.3 million acres, 
covering an area nearly the size of California. We won't be kicking our 
nitrogen habit anytime soon.
http://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/04/history-nitrogen-fertilizer-ammonium-nitrate/


*This Day in Climate History November 12, 2012 
<http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/13/1182511/grover-norquist-abruptly-reverses-position-on-carbon-tax-after-facing-criticism-from-koch-backed-group/>  
-  from D.R. Tucker*
November 12, 2012: Powerful conservative activist Grover Norquist is
quoted in the National Journal as saying that a federal
revenue-neutral carbon tax would not violate the Republican Party's
"no new taxes" position. After being viciously criticized by
representatives from Koch Industries, Norquist abruptly flip-flops.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/13/1182511/grover-norquist-abruptly-reverses-position-on-carbon-tax-after-facing-criticism-from-koch-backed-group/

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