[TheClimate.Vote] February 28, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest -

[Richard Pauli]

/February 28, 2018/

[Daily Mail]
*Freak WARMING in the Arctic is to blame for the big chill over Europe: 
Experts warn it's 'never been this extreme' and predict it may happen 
more often due to climate change 
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5439325/Freak-warming-Arctic-stuns-scientists.html>*
- The freak warming around is sending a blast of Arctic cold over Europe
- It is a sign of 'wacky' weather that may happen more often, scientists 
claim
- One area has had a record-smashing 61 hours of temperatures above freezing
Europe has been buffeted by freezing temperatures in recent days and 
experts say this is the result of freak warming in the Arctic.
The Arctic is experiencing one of its hottest winters on record, with 
temperatures at the North Pole surging above freezing.
These unusual conditions, which scientists say have 'never been this 
extreme', are causing a disruption to the Arctic polar jet stream.
The jet stream carries winds east to west across the planet, at speeds 
of up to 200mph (320kph), in the upper atmosphere.
Warmer air in the Arctic has sent them off their usual course, blasting 
cold air over Europe - something likely to happen more often thanks to 
man-made global warming, researchers say.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5439325/Freak-warming-Arctic-stuns-scientists.html#ixzz58Jv5IhZE


[WAPO]
Capital Weather Gang Analysis
*Spring is running 20 days early. It's exactly what we expect, but it's 
not good. 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/02/27/spring-is-running-20-days-early-its-exactly-what-we-expect-but-its-not-good/>*
This is not surprising. In fact, it is exactly what we should expect as 
the climate warms, according to myriad peer-reviewed studies summarized 
succinctly by the 2017 National Climate Assessment. 
<https://science2017.globalchange.gov/> In technical terms, the growing 
season in North America is getting longer. You may also see it referred 
to as "frost-free" days, since the growing season is the span of time 
between the last frost and the first frost...
The longer growing season is inherently related to food shortages...
..."Plant productivity has not increased" alongside the number of 
growing season days, according to the National Climate Assessment. There 
are a number of reasons for this.
*Freeze damage caused by late-season frosts**
**Limits to growth because of lack of sunlight in early fall**
Plants need winter to thrive***/(dormancy)/
*They literally run out of water*/(extended need for water)/
Climate scientists and biologists are cautious about saying they do not 
know exactly how plant production will change in the future. Given that 
we have not been through this kind of change before, it is hard to say 
with certainty whether productivity will continue to decline. Risk 
management would suggest we should not bank on a comeback anytime soon.
Angela Fritz is an atmospheric scientist and The Washington Post's 
deputy weather editor. She has a BS in meteorology and an MS in earth 
and atmospheric science. Follow @angelafritz
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/02/27/spring-is-running-20-days-early-its-exactly-what-we-expect-but-its-not-good/
[data for Groundhog Day Prediction ]
*National Phenology Network <https://www.usanpn.org/data/spring>*
HOW DOES THIS SPRING COMPARE TO "NORMAL"? 
<https://www.usanpn.org/data/spring>
Spring continues to arrive early in the west and late in the east, 
compared to a long-term average (1981-2010). Spring is four weeks early 
in southern Utah and eastern Washington and 5-6 weeks early in the Grand 
Canyon. Spring is a few days late in Birmingham, AL, and Charleston, SC.
The timing of leaf-out, migration, flowering and other seasonal 
phenomena in many species is closely tied to local weather conditions 
and broad climatic patterns. The Spring Index maps offered by USA-NPN 
shed light on plant and animal phenology, based on local weather and 
climate conditions.
HOW DOES PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL'S PREDICTION MATCH WHAT WE'RE SEEING? 
<https://www.usanpn.org/data/spring>
Signs of Spring Map Groundhog day 2018
Punxsutawney Phil predicts six more weeks of winter. We agree - if we're 
talking about the eastern US. The southeast especially has been cool so 
far this year. A new forecast by collaborator Toby Ault also calls for 
an early spring in the west, late in the east...
https://www.usanpn.org/data/spring
[Real complex data]
*National Centers for Environmental Prediction 
<http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/>*
Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) Products
http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/


[India's climate change]
*Simulations suggest changes in weather patterns coming to India due to 
global warming 
<https://phys.org/news/2018-02-simulations-weather-patterns-india-due.html#jCp>*
February 27, 2018 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org
To understand the weather impact India will likely experience, the 
researchers focused specifically on cyclonic atmospheric vortices, which 
are better known in western countries as low-pressure systems (LPSs) - 
they are important to India because they are responsible for bringing 
more than half of the rains, which give the monsoon season its name, to 
the Gangetic plains. To make predictions about such events in the 
future, the team looked at data from other research efforts that have 
predicted sea surface temperatures for the years 2071 to 2095. Sea 
surface temperatures have a dramatic impact on LPS activity, which in 
turn has a dramatic impact on where rain falls. The team used a 
high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model that realistically 
simulates the genesis distribution of LPS.
In their simulation, the researchers report, they saw shifts in 
low-pressure systems. More specifically, the simulation showed 60 
percent fewer such events over the Baby of Bengal and 10 percent more 
events in certain land areas. The net result, they report, is likely a 
drier mid-section and an increase in rain in northern areas. Such 
changes, they note, would have very serious implications for the weather 
cycle in South Asia, and for India in particular.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-simulations-weather-patterns-india-due.html#jCp


[Cli-Migration]
*Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/welcome-to-the-age-of-climate-migration-w516974>*
Extreme weather due to climate change displaced more than a million 
people from their homes last year. It could soon reshape the nation
By Jeff Goodell
"Harvey was it for us," Elliott added. "Too much water, we can't deal 
with this anymore. We are going to San Diego."
"What are you going to do there?" I asked.
"We don't know," McGowan said. "I'm gonna play some guitar and see what 
comes along."
As they piled back into their Subaru and headed toward the highway, I 
thought of the old Woody Guthrie song about the farmers fleeing the Dust 
Bowl: "We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in/We rattled down 
that highway to never come back again."...
Politicians inevitably vow to rebuild, to make their city stronger than 
before. But in the coming years, as the climate gets hotter, the seas 
keep rising and storms grow more intense, those vows will become less 
and less credible. Climate change is going to remap our world, changing 
not just how we live but where we live. As scientist Peter Gleick, 
co-founder of the Pacific Institute, puts it, "There is a shocking, 
unreported, fundamental change coming to the habitability of many parts 
of the planet, including the U.S.A."...
At a certain point you have to ask: How long can New Orleans, a city 
already below sea level, keep pumping?...
When I got back to Phoenix the next day, I couldn't help but notice all 
the for sale signs in suburban yards. President Trump was on the radio, 
talking about immigration reform, stoking fears of refugees and 
displaced people. By noon, the temperature had hit 110 degrees, and the 
sky was hazy with smoke from wildfires farther west. Hsiang's work 
projects a near-total collapse of agricultural yields in the region, 
part of a decline from searing heat and drought that will reduce 
economic output by 25 percent. As I drove, I wondered if future humans - 
or humanlike machines - would interpret the ruins of these shopping 
malls and car dealerships as 21st-century petroglyphs. What stories, if 
any, would they tell about the people who had once lived here?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/welcome-to-the-age-of-climate-migration-w516974


[MET Office 5 year forecast]
*Warming could breach 1.5C within five years: UK Met Office 
<http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/01/31/warming-breach-1-5c-paris-limit-within-five-years-says-uk-met-office/>*
The UK's meteorological agency has forecast the global temperature might 
flicker above 1.5C within the next five years.
That would be within a decade of the Paris climate deal setting 1.5C as 
an aspirational limit on global warming.
The Met Office's decadal forecast said the global average temperature 
was "likely" to exceed 1C above pre-industrial levels between 2018-2022 
and could reach 1.5C.
"There is also a small (around 10%) chance that at least one year in the 
period could exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels," the office said 
in a statement on Wednesday. "It is the first time that such high values 
have been highlighted within these forecasts."
Met Office scientists were quick to point out that this would not 
actually breach the Paris Agreement, as that limit refers to a long term 
average, rather than a yearly reading.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/01/31/warming-breach-1-5c-paris-limit-within-five-years-says-uk-met-office/
[video statement]
*Met Office 2018 Decadal forecast <https://youtu.be/4qhaR2KU0sA>*
Professor Adam Scaife explains what the latest Met Office decadal 
forecast could mean for global temperatures over the next five years.
https://youtu.be/4qhaR2KU0sA


[where do we go?]
*Waiting for the Debris Flows 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/26/waiting-for-the-debris-flows/>*
by JOHN DAVIS
So, the world ends not with a bang but with the weather: not with a 
thermonuclear Armageddon, but with the slow melting of glacial ice, with 
the creeping scourge of drought, with top soil blowing lazily away, with 
trees stressed and lightning stricken, with the soft lap of flood water, 
with the low buzz of disease carrying mosquitos that follow; with the 
almost imperceptible warming of the oceans, with their swelling, with 
their perturbation of the air into a violent cyclogenesis and with their 
slowly increasing acidification. The world ends with a fulsome wetness, 
debris flows, a coruscating dryness, extreme heat, fire storms, chilling 
polar cold, high pressures and lows and the violent winds that are 
whipped between them; it ends with incursions, as Andreas Malm frames 
it, into "the killing fields of extreme weather"...
America has adopted 'Fossil Capital' as its national ethos. ('Drill 
baby, drill.') It has been a part of the country's ideological 
infrastructure for at least a century and a half. America performs 
highly effective hierarchical command and control, a trait forged when 
it was a colonial outpost in the New World under constant threat from 
the indigenous peoples it re-cast as barbarians. America institutes 
heroic large-scale, technologically and logistically intense bravura 
acts of intervention (world wars and space exploration); but it is 
constitutionally ill-suited to take the steps necessary to contain the 
temperature rise inherent in the continued burning of fossil fuels (to 
the extent that the U.S. remains relevant to this effort).

    We can therefore expect increased militarization of federal, state
    and local emergency services battling the blowback from global
    warming, and an increased focus on geo-engineering solutions to
    mitigate solar radiation, a strategy backed by some of the world's
    richest men, including Bill Gates - all desperate to preserve the
    formula for added exchange value derived from the earth's store of
    prehistoric solar energy.

We should not expect rescue. So we sit and wait, knowing that the 
invasion has begun. As the rain falls (or not), the wind howls, the cold 
bites, the sun scorches, the wild fires rage and the debris flows, we 
are all under voluntary evacuation orders - but there is absolutely 
nowhere to go.
John Davis is an architect living in southern California. He blogs at 
Urban Wildland
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/26/waiting-for-the-debris-flows/


[Paris rules]
*Diplomats meeting in Japan focused heavily on the contentious rules for 
the Paris deal, which are due to be set by the end of this year 
<http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/02/24/unwritten-paris-rules-dominate-tense-year-climate-diplomacy-begins-japan/>*
By Karl Mathiesen
A critical year of climate talks began this week at a meeting in Tokyo, 
Japan, which was dominated by the contentious and unwritten rulebook for 
the Paris Agreement.
Negotiators who struck the landmark deal in the French capital in 2015, 
left a great deal of the detail to be sorted out later. The rules that 
govern the agreement are yet to be written and loom as a huge political 
fight to be resolved, or not, in Poland at the end of this year.
To ensure a successful outcome, negotiators have scheduled a packed year 
of talks. In the first major meeting of 2018, 30 countries came together 
in Japan this week.
That included the US. Despite the administration's insistence they 
intend to leave the Paris deal as soon as legally possible (in 2020) the 
state department has continued to engage with the talks...
In a statement, 
<http://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/press4e_001924.html> Japan's 
ministry of foreign affairs said the discussions had been "candid" and 
"fruitful". France's climate ambassador Brigitte Collet called them 
"intense".
The informal meeting, which is co-chaired each year by Japan and Brazil, 
was used as an opportunity to set up talks for the year. It ran over two 
days, ending Friday. By far the longest session was devoted to the 
contentious Paris rulebook, which will dominate discussions in Katowice. 
These rules will set how the commitments made to the deal are measured 
and verified.
Differences between some negotiating teams, especially the EU and China, 
over issues such as transparency have to date been irresolvable....
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/02/24/unwritten-paris-rules-dominate-tense-year-climate-diplomacy-begins-japan/


[Opinion The Tyee]
*The Curse of Energy Efficiency 
<https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/02/26/Energy-Efficiency-Curse/>*
The more 'efficient' our technology, the more resources we consume in a 
downward spiral of catastrophe.
By Andrew Nikiforuk Today - TheTyee.ca
As long as we define environmental, political and economic problems as 
essentially technical in nature, then we will proscribe energy 
efficiency as the solution. But if we were to admit that our problems 
were spiritual and political in nature and bedeviled by population and 
affluence, then we would endorse reductions in energy consumption and 
the inequalities that feed such appetites.
Politicians fear such change. No politician alive at the moment has 
proposed changing the ruinous and efficiently convenient way we live. No 
one is saying we could be happier consuming much less energy and owning 
fewer energy slaves - even though that's what the evidence clearly 
suggests. No political party claims that sacrifice and courage will get 
us to a leaner tomorrow. No political party has advocated that the rich 
drive less, fly less, live in smaller homes or own less shit.
Rather than question the tyrannical nature of technological society, 
almost every political party on earth has opted for more energy efficiency.
Alexa, play us some more energy efficiency.
This refusal to acknowledge the truth leaves the world but two options 
for change: collapse or revolution.
We may get both.  [Tyee]
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/02/26/Energy-Efficiency-Curse/


[Books]
*New Publications on Climate Change <http://www.springer.com/series/8740>*
New & Forthcoming Titles
http://www.springer.com/series/8740


*This Day in Climate History February 28, 2017 
<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-methane-obama-congress-20170227-story.html> 
   -  from D.R. Tucker*
The Los Angeles Times editorial page observes:

    "The risk of climate change from global warming has long since moved
    from abstract theory into reality, even if the ostriches surrounding
    President Trump won’t see it. Recently appointed Environmental
    Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is joined at the wallet
    to the industry, as a trove of recently released emails from his
    work as Oklahoma attorney general confirms, so don’t expect much
    from him. Conservative members of Congress also buy into the
    nonsense - as do Trump and Pruitt - that human activity has little
    to do with rising global temperatures, more severe weather patterns,
    stressed flora and fauna and what scientists believe is a looming
    mass extinction that is unfolding at a much faster pace than the
    five previously identified mass extinctions in history. In terms of
    Earth’s evolution, that is a split second.

    "But, oh, the jobs! We need the jobs! And the cheap fuel! The adage
    of missing the forest for the trees comes to mind. The overwhelming
    consensus by scientists is that the world needs to move away from
    fossil fuels and toward renewable sources such as wind and solar. In
    the meantime, we need to be even more aggressive, not less, in
    limiting the burning or release of methane and other harmful emissions.

    "To that end, the Obama administration regulations were a step in
    the right direction. Which brings Newton’s Third Law of Physics into
    play: For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
    Earlier this month, the Republican-led House of Representatives
    invoked the Congressional Review Act to kill the Obama regulations
    governing wells on federal land, and the bill is now before the
    Senate, with a vote possible this week.

    "The Senate should refuse to join the House in passing this
    irresponsible bill. The methane regulations, which are to be phased
    in, are good, sensible policy.  The federal Bureau of Land
    Management estimated that between 2009 and 2015, the oil and gas
    industry wasted, through emissions or flaring, 462 billion cubic
    feet of methane - enough to supply natural gas for 6.2 million
    households for a year - from wells in public and tribal lands. Not
    only was the gas lost, the unburned methane went directly into the
    atmosphere. And taxpayers missed out on $23 million a year in
    royalties that would have been due had the methane been captured and
    sold.

    "Fortunately, the EPA rules governing non-federal land wells are
    less likely to be rescinded. The rules were adopted long enough ago
    that they are no longer subject to the Congressional Review Act,
    which means that to roll them back, the Trump administration would
    have to go through a lengthy regulatory review process.
    Unfortunately, those rules only cover future wells, not existing
    ones. (The federal land rules cover both.) Instead of attacking the
    federal land rules, Congress should extend the same regulations to
    the existing wells on non-federal land. But don’t hold your breath.

    "The world should be weaning itself from fossil fuels as quickly as
    possible. That Trump and the Republican Congress disagree is not
    only disappointing, but dangerous."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-methane-obama-congress-20170227-story.html 

/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
//
/https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote//
///
Send email to subscribe <a%20href=%22mailto:contact at theClimate.Vote%22> 
to news clippings. /

        *** Privacy and Security: * This is a text-only mailing that
        carries no images which may originate from remote servers.
        Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
        sender.
        By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for
        democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
        commercial purposes.
        To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote with subject: 
        subscribe,  To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe
        Also youmay subscribe/unsubscribe at
        https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
        Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Paulifor
        http://TheClimate.Vote delivering succinct information for
        citizens and responsible governments of all levels.   List
        membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
        restricted to this mailing list.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20180228/046533ca/attachment.html>