[TheClimate.Vote] December 23, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/December 23, 2018/

[Greta speaks out - "that our political leaders have failed us"]
*Teen climate activist: "We need to get angry"*
Fareed Zakaria, GPS
15 year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg says political leaders are 
failing the world's youth and calls on young people to use their anger 
as activism.Source: CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/12/22/exp-gps-1223-thunberg-on-her-message.cnn


[cryological studies ]
*Global sea level contribution from Arctic land ice 1971-2017*
Jason Box
Published on Dec 20, 2018
video abstract for study: Box, J.E., W.T. Colgan, B. Wouters, D.O. 
Burgess, S. O'Neel, L.I. Thomson, S.H. Mernild 2018. Global sea-level 
contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971-2017, Environmental Research 
Letters, ERL-105795, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf2ed
glacier mass balance (and sea level contribution) data are downloadable 
from https://tinyurl.com/Box-Arctic-MB
*Key messages*
The loss rate of Arctic land ice has increased threefold since 1986, 
from nearly 5000 tons of water per second during the "recent past" 
(1986-2005) to 14,000 tons per second in the present day (2005-2015).
If we divided the recent ice loss among the world's nearly 8 billion 
people, each person would get 160 litres (or 40 gallons) of water, each 
and every day of the year.
The present loss rate of Arctic ice is equivalent with 200 times the 
flow of the Thames river or nearly that of the Mississippi river.
We show that the sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice is one 
third of the global amount since 1992, making the Arctic the largest 
regional source of sea-level rise.
Greenland alone, the largest source, represents half (46%) of the Arctic 
ice loss contribution to sea-level rise.
https://youtu.be/v-jNm-5Uz5Y


[Washington Post 2 minute explanation]
*What is the 'Green New Deal?' - YouTube*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OMGQoXEVE0


[Villain was born or made?]
*Lamar Smith : "Science" Chairman Slathered in Oil. Surprised?*
December 22, 2018
E&E News:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AejtVQGTi4k
Lamar Smith: Trump Only Source of "Unvarnished Truth"
greenmanbucket
Published on Jan 25, 2017
Rep Lamar Smith is Chair of the House Science Committee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AejtVQGTi4k
- -
Michael E. Mann
@MichaelEMann
*And here's my favorite exchange with Lamar Smith from the March 2017 
House Science Committee Hearing I testified at: *pic.twitter.com/hVkXgUFXzt


[from Newburyport, MA]
*Port man pens children's book on global warming*
By Amanda Getchell agetchell at newburyportnews.com 18 hrs ago
https://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/port-man-pens-children-s-book-on-global-warming/article_1527c341-cd25-5263-8ac6-7eb93f074415.html
NEWBURYPORT -- In his first children's book, which features some unique 
Arctic animals telling a tale of melting polar ice caps, local resident 
Jean Pouliot is on a mission to teach young ones that they can be a part 
of the solution to global warming.

The Newburyport man never thought he would be an author, or an 
illustrator, for that matter. But after testing his graphic design 
skills in Microsoft PowerPoint and some rewriting of an idea he's had on 
his mind for 10 years, Pouliot self-published a book for third- and 
fourth-graders, "Bernie and the Day the Icebergs Melted."

Pouliot, who has been writing songs and stories for himself, thought if 
the book was something "good enough," he could publish it.

In the story, a walrus named Bernie and his Arctic mammalian friends 
must deal with rising temperatures that are melting their icebergs and 
glaciers, Pouliot said. Their adventures take the creatures to Indonesia 
and Washington, D.C., he added.

"It started as a book in verse," he said. "The crisis Bernie and his 
family run into in the beginning is they go clamming ... They come up 
and their bellies are full and they go to sleep, but when they wake up, 
the icebergs shrunk and they just barely make it home."

The rest of their journey is a quest to uncover why the glaciers are 
melting, said Pouliot, who noted the walrus family and their friends 
come up with some peculiar ideas.

"Are we sick? Do we have big fevers? Did we melt the ice ourselves? Did 
the sun get hotter all of a sudden?" These are some of the questions 
Pouliot said the animals start asking. "They started asking all their 
friends what they think."

Mayor Bear Claw, he said, doesn't see the melting ice caps as a problem 
down the line. A seagull named Bomber comes up with some crazy ideas to 
keep the town cold, Pouliot said.

One tactic was to have all of the animals blow air from their mouths at 
the same time since the wind is what keeps the planet cold. The 
creatures also purchase ice machines, fans and refrigerators to cool 
down the planet but with no luck, he said. From there, the only thing 
left to do was get the word out.

"They figure they're going to try to talk to the humans because the 
humans they know at this point have caused the problem," he said.

Pouliot writes about Marunda Beach in Indonesia, which he describes as a 
place where "all the garbage goes" because of the ocean current. There 
are a few children playing on the beach who get washed out to sea and 
rescued by Harriet, a humpback whale from the Arctic town.

Eventually, Pouliot said, the Arctic animals are able to give humans a 
taste of their own medicine of what it feels like to be affected by 
global warming by flooding the Capitol building.

The book ends with the possibility of a greener kind of an ecology, he 
said, describing a picture he created with wave generators, electric 
vehicles, trees and windmills.

"It's an anecdote to a picture I had earlier on...how human beings had 
made the awful mess," he said. "It shows what the world might look like 
aside from what we're doing to it currently."

There isn't a definitive solution to global warming determined by the 
end of Bernie's journey, Pouliot said, but the goal is to make young 
readers feel they have a role in thinking of solutions.

He's hoping to inspire children to become active and work together to 
find a compromise.

"This is not just something that adults have to take care of, this is 
something that (children) can do something about and learn about," 
Pouliot said. "Human beings are both the cause of the problem and 
potentially the solution. That's where the balance is. We dirtied it up, 
but we can clean it up."

Pouliot's book was self-published, written and illustrated. It's 
available on Amazon and Kindle. In addition, the book is being sold in 
Jabberwocky Book Shop at 50 Water St. in Newburyport and The Book Rack 
locations in Newburyport, Andover and Marblehead.

Staff writer Amanda Getchell covers Newburyport and Seabrook. Follow her 
on Twitter @ajgetch.
https://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/port-man-pens-children-s-book-on-global-warming/article_1527c341-cd25-5263-8ac6-7eb93f074415.html


[Hail the size of tennis balls, grapefruit and golf balls]
*2018-12-20 -- major and damaging storms across Sydney*
Thursday 20th Dec, will be known for one the most costly storm damage 
days in Sydney area in the last 20 years. One insurance company alone 
has stated it had so far received ~ 125,000 claims for hail, wind and 
flooding damage. Hail up to grapefruit size, golfball and tennis ball 
size was common in some areas other fellow Sydney chaser hail pix .....
Reference 
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/2018-12-20-major-and-damaging-storms-across-sydney.962794/


[USA Today video documentary]
*Ancient Antarctic ice sheet collapse could happen again, triggering a 
new global flood*
December 21, 2018 by Doyle Rice,
Read more at: 
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-ancient-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse.html#jCp
- - -
[Plenty of explorations]
*The Machines That Spy on Antarctica's Hidden Lakes*
Maddie Stone
EXTREME FIELD WORK
- -
Researchers are left to their own devices for weeks to months on end, 
sleeping in unheated tents and surviving off a stash of snow-preserved 
food while racing to collect as much data as physically possible in the 
time allotted.
Siegfried and his team members--three scientists and one 
mountaineer--are in the midst of a six-week sojourn on West Antarctica's 
Siple Coast, living out of an unsupported field camp 375 miles from the 
South Pole. The group is there to study subglacial lakes, mysterious 
basins thousands of feet underground that are scattered across 
Antarctica. The highlight comes in a few weeks, when they meet up with a 
crew of about 50 others and attempt to melt a hole through 4,000 feet of 
ice to tap into subglacial Lake Mercer. But tending to the region's 
long-term GPS array is also critical...
- -
Fricker realized the anomalous signal was the result of something truly 
wild: a network of lakes buried far below the Whillans and Mercer ice 
streams that were moving huge amounts of water, causing the ground above 
to rise and fall like bread dough as they filled and drained.
"These lakes are super dramatic," Siegfried said.
The discovery of such dynamic buried lakes--and the realization that 
ICESat could be used to hunt for more of them--landed Fricker's weird 
signal in a paper in Science the following year...
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-machines-that-spy-on-antarcticas-hidden-lakes-1831084705
- -
[What kind of life?]
*The hunt for life below Antarctic ice*
12 DECEMBER 2018
In the next few weeks, researchers in Antarctica will drill through 
1,100 metres of ice into a lake that has remained sealed for millennia. 
Here's what they hope to find.
- -
Evidence pulled up from the drilling project at Lake Whillans has 
spawned a series of discoveries that have shaped the current programme 
at Lake Mercer, 40 kilometres to the southeast. The water from Lake 
Whillans teemed with 130,000 microbial cells per millilitre -- a 
population 10-100 times bigger than some researchers expected. Many of 
the microorganisms obtained their energy by oxidizing ammonium or 
methane, probably from deposits at the bottom of the lake. That was a 
key insight, because it suggested that this ecosystem -- seemingly cut 
off from the Sun and photosynthesis as an energy source -- was still 
dependent on the outside world in an indirect way.

The researchers who studied Lake Whillans suspect that the ammonium and 
methane seep up from the lake's muddy floor from the rotting corpses of 
marine organisms that accumulated during warm periods, millions of years 
ago, when this region was covered by ocean rather than ice. Evidence of 
this food source came from Reed Scherer, a micropalaeontologist at 
Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who was part of the Whillans 
project. He found the shells of diatoms (single-celled algae) and the 
skeletal fragments of sea sponges littered throughout the lake's mud. 
"There is a marine-resource legacy that the microbes are still tapping 
into," he says.

When they drilled into Lake Whillans, researchers thought it had been 
covered by ice for at least 120,000 years, or possibly up to 400,000 
years, coinciding with the last time the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was 
thought to have melted so dramatically that the lake area had been 
exposed to the ocean. But in June, Scherer reported evidence that Lake 
Whillans was connected to the ocean possibly as few as 5,000-10,000 
years ago.

This relatively recent delivery of food has big implications. "It's 
probably part of the reason we saw such a productive ecosystem" in the 
lake, says Brent Christner, a microbiologist from the University of 
Florida in Gainesville who was part of the 2013 expedition and is also 
involved in the current programme.
- -
"We need to start building our knowledge, because it turns out that this 
is a vast ecosystem that's completely unexplored."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07669-3


[Opinion]
*Commentary: What if climate change deniers and skeptics are wrong?*
Stan Chrzanowski, P.E., Naples  Dec. 19, 2018
If you Google the phrase "Bell Science Hour Unchained Goddess," you'll 
find a TV show about weather and climate from 1958 (60 years ago). In 
one segment, the narrator talks about global warming melting the polar 
ice caps. This was not a progressive liberal conspiracy in 1958 -- it 
was just plain science.

If you Google the phrase "the decade we almost stopped climate change," 
you'll find a long piece by Nathaniel Rich written in 2018 that starts 
with events in 1979 (almost 40 years ago). It prints out at almost 100 
pages and begins with Rafe Pomerance and Jim Hansen starting to convince 
people that mankind's production of carbon dioxide may be changing the 
Earth's climate. Other familiar names in the narrative are Ronald 
Reagan, John Sununu, Al Gore, James Watt, et al. It's comforting that 
their roles are documented for posterity.

In early 2016, Drs. Rob DeConto and Dave Pollard published an article in 
Nature magazine about the accelerated melting of the Antarctic ice cap. 
The article was mentioned in all the major media. I contacted DeConto 
and Pollard at the time because their projections spelled doom for the 
Everglades. They referred me to Dr. Ben Strauss of Climate Central. 
Strauss is presently a consultant for Collier County. Much research and 
scholarship have been done since the DeConto-Pollard report. There are a 
lot of scientists visiting cold climates these days.

Recently, all the president's men (scientists) published a report titled 
"The Fourth National Climate Assessment." It's a fascinating read. The 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was created by 
the United Nations in 1988, is about to publish its sixth report (in 
2019), and it will be its first report since the DeConto-Pollard study. 
There is much interest in how high their sea level rise (SLR) 
projections will be. It's generally considered that their last 
projections (pre-DeConto-Pollard) were too conservative.

How does this all affect us? Probably not that much in the immediate 
future, or maybe not at all if you're my age or older -- unless 
increased hurricane strength and frequency cause us local harm. But it 
will affect our children and grandchildren. I may live to see the start 
of it but my grandkids will actually live to see the "restored" 
Everglades become a shallow bay.

I used to think there were two great questions about SLR -- How fast? 
How high? -- but there's really only one question. We're approaching a 
tipping point. Warming and melting will continue even after this century 
and the sea level will continue to rise. The only real question is, "How 
fast?"

As the former Collier County engineer and a member of the Collier County 
Planning Commission, I'm naturally curious whether we should allow 
improvements with possibly a very limited useful life to be constructed 
in areas where we will eventually have to absorb the cost of their 
removal as part of a "retreat" from SLR scenarios. I wonder who will 
bear the cost of removing existing improvements as the sea level rises? 
I wonder what effect SLR will have on our tax base?

It would be nice if the skeptics and deniers are correct and nothing 
happens, but how long can we wait to see if they are? And, what if 
they're not?

Chrzanowski, of Naples, is a retired professional engineer, former 
Collier County engineer, member of the Collier County Planning 
Commission and the county's Floodplain Management Planning Committee, 
and a former member of the county's Development Services Advisory 
Committee. He is also a former officer in the Army Corps of Engineers.
https://www.naplesnews.com/story/opinion/2018/12/19/commentary-what-if-climate-change-deniers-and-skeptics-wrong/2337129002/


*This Day in Climate History - December 23, 2004 - from D.R. Tucker*
December 23, 2004: Proving that climate-change deniers always stick 
together, syndicated columnist George Will praises Michael Crichton's 
novel "State of Fear."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20998-2004Dec22.html

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