[TheClimate.Vote] July 12, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/July 12, 2018/

[AccuWeather video]
*As blazes rage on, worst fire weather of season is ahead for California 
and much of western US 
<https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/as-blazes-rage-on-worst-fire-weather-of-season-is-ahead-for-california-and-much-of-western-us/70005453>*
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/as-blazes-rage-on-worst-fire-weather-of-season-is-ahead-for-california-and-much-of-western-us/70005453


[Kids at the bar]
*Court Will Hear Administration Plea to Release Trump from Kids Climate 
Suit 
<https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/07/11/kids-climate-case-trump/>*
By Karen Savage
A federal judge will hear oral arguments next Wednesday on a motion by 
the federal government seeking to dismiss President Trump from the 
landmark climate suit filed by 21 young people from across the country.
The Trump administration also contends that the case should proceed 
under the Administrative Procedures Act and not under federal common 
law. The APA provides procedures for judicial review if someone claims 
injury from the actions of a federal agency. This motion, the plaintiffs 
say, has already been rejected by the court.
Oral arguments - the first in the case since September 2016 - will be 
heard on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Ore. The 
motion was filed in May by Justice Department attorneys.
The case - Juliana v. United States - was originally filed in August 
2015 by 21 young plaintiffs who allege that by encouraging and promoting 
fossil fuel development, the federal government is contributing to 
climate change, is violating the public trust doctrine and is denying 
their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.
It is the first case in which a U.S. court has recognized the 
constitutional right to a safe climate and is currently scheduled for 
trial Oct. 29 in Aiken's court in Eugene.
The Trump administration has made several attempts to dismiss the case 
and thwart discovery, all to no avail.  In its latest filing - a second 
petition for writ of mandamus, an extraordinary appeal rarely granted 
before the outcome of a case - the federal government said it will 
appeal to the Supreme Court if the request is not granted.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/07/11/kids-climate-case-trump/
- - -
[fundamental arguments]
*Nobel-Winning Economist to Testify in Children's Climate Lawsuit 
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072018/joseph-stiglitz-kids-climate-change-lawsuit-global-warming-costs-economic-impact>*
Joseph Stiglitz writes in a court brief that fossil fuel-based economies 
impose 'incalculable' costs on society and shifting to clean energy will 
pay off.
By Georgina Gustin
One of the world's top economists has written an expert court report 
that forcefully supports a group of children and young adults who have 
sued the federal government for failing to act on climate change.
Joseph Stiglitz, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics 
in 2001 and has written extensively about environmental economics and 
climate change, makes an economic case that the costs of maintaining a 
fossil fuel-based economy are "incalculable," while transitioning to a 
lower-carbon system will cost far less.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072018/joseph-stiglitz-kids-climate-change-lawsuit-global-warming-costs-economic-impact


[Washington State wildfire TV report]
*Strong winds complicate battle against multiple brush fires in Central 
Washington 
<http://komonews.com/news/local/strong-winds-complicate-battle-against-multiple-brush-fires-in-central-washington>*
CENTRAL WASHINGTON - Two communities are on guard after a second 
wildfire forced people to drop everything and leave their homes in 
Central Washington on Tuesday evening.
A fast-moving fire broke out near Quincy, less than 24 hours after 
another fire forced the entire town of Vantage to evacuate.
The windy conditions have kept fire fighters busy all day, leaving 
families who had to be evacuated from Mansfield Road worried about the 
fire season starting early...
- - - -
As the wind-fueled flames moved swiftly across the hillside, fire 
fighters fought back from the air, dumping water on the smoldering grass 
and shrubs....
http://komonews.com/news/local/seattles-first-tiny-house-village-for-women-to-open-on-wednesday 
<http://komonews.com/news/local/strong-winds-complicate-battle-against-multiple-brush-fires-in-central-washington>


[Tampa Bay Times]
*Florida's summertime slime fueled by climate change as well as 
pollution 
<http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/Florida-s-summertime-slime-fueled-by-climate-change-as-well-as-pollution_169758168>*
Florida is awash in toxic algae right now.
Blue-green algae covers 90 percent of Lake Okeechobee. It's now grown 
thick in the canals connecting the lake to the St. Lucie River on the 
east coast, as well as in the Caloosahatchee River near Fort Myers on 
the west coast.
Meanwhile a long-running Red Tide algae bloom on the state's west coast 
has been killing sea turtles and manatees in the Boca Grande area, 
according to river advocates and fishing captains. Fishkills and 
respiratory complaints have been pouring into the state wildlife 
commission from four counties.
Both algae blooms are wrecking the coastal economy in the areas they're 
afflicting. And both are fueled by climate change as warmer water 
temperatures boost the likelihood of blooms.
"With higher average temperatures every summer ... it's just scary, " 
said Mike Connor, a Stuart charter fishing guide who also writes for 
Florida Sportsman magazine. "It's becoming the new normal."...
- - - - -
Algae blooms, particularly Red Tide, have been documented as occurring 
along Florida's shoreline dating back to the days of the Spanish 
conquistadors. But in Florida and around the nation, blooms are now 
occurring more frequently and are lasting longer.
The state's Red Tide bloom now stretches from Sarasota County's beaches 
all the way down to the ones in Collier County, and it began back in 
November, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Research scientist Kate 
Hubbard. (So far there is no sign it will migrate north to Tampa Bay.)...
- - - - -
Harmful algae tend to bloom during warmer months. As climate change 
turns up the heat around the globe, more months become warmer. Climate 
change also tends to produce more rain, which can wash more nutrient 
pollution into waterways and further fuel a bloom...
This past May ranked as the warmest May ever recorded in the United 
States, although the land temperatures in Florida "weren't remarkable at 
all," said state climatologist David Zierden of Florida State 
University. The water temperatures, though, are running about 1 degree 
warmer than usual, and May saw record rainfall hit the state.
  -- - - -
Cassani said that people in Southwest Florida affected by the algae 
blooms used to shy away from discussing them for fear of driving away 
tourists, anglers and potential real estate buyers. But this one, he 
said, is so bad that they're talking about it - and discussing the role 
played by climate change.
"You know we're almost in shock down here," he said, noting that the Red 
Tide bloom near Boca Grande has turned the waters into what he called "a 
killing zone."
According to Karl Havens, director of the Florida Sea Grant program, it 
could get even worse if the saltwater Red Tide just offshore collides 
with the freshwater blue-green algae in the river. The blue-green algae 
cells could "burst open," he wrote, "since they cannot tolerate salt 
water," which would release the nutrients fueling that bloom, making the 
Red Tide bloom grow even more....
http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/Florida-s-summertime-slime-fueled-by-climate-change-as-well-as-pollution_169758168


[Activism now]
Zero Hour July 21st <https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/07/11/zero-hour/>
Tamino -
We talk about climate change, about how necessary it is to do something 
about it. That's important, and I commend all of us who do.
But there's a group of kids who are going to march on Washington to 
press the issue. They need our help. Anything you can do will go a lot 
further than you might expect.
Because this is zero hour. They need our help. Let's not fail them.
One thing you can do is publicize. If you have a blog, post about it. If 
you're on twitter, tweet about it. I suggest the hashtag “#zerohour”
Don't just do it today. That will make people think “good for 'em!” Then 
they'll forget. Tweet about it every day. The march is set for July 
21st, so tweet about it at least 10 times - at least once every day. Get 
your twitter friends to do the same. Let everyone know that this is 
important, and that the kids need our help.
They are shouldering the burden of taking to the streets. We can make it 
easier for them, we can make them more successful, we can get them the 
notice they need, the notice we all need.
Now is not the time to sit back on your hands. Now is the time to push 
this like there's no tomorrow. Because this is zero hour.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/07/11/zero-hour/


[Past is prologue]
*Past warming shows 2°C brink may be close 
<https://climatenewsnetwork.net/past-warming-shows-2c-brink-may-be-close/>*
July 10, 2018, by Tim Radford
Once again, past warming warns of the power of climate change. The 
surprise is that it doesn't take much warming to raise sea levels six 
metres.

LONDON, 10 July, 2018 – Even if the world's nations keep their promise 
to contain global warming to within 2°C, past warming shows that the 
Earth will still change visibly – and perhaps sooner than science 
currently expects.
Sea levels could rise by six metres.  Large tracts of the polar ice caps 
could collapse. The Sahara could become green. The edges of what are now 
tropical forests could turn into savannah, to be seared and maintained 
by regular outbreaks of fire. The northern forests could move 200 km 
nearer the north pole and, ahead of them, the tundra.
That is what will happen, if the past is a sure guide to the present. A 
2°C rise in temperature is the maximum agreed by 195 nations when they 
met in Paris in 2015, a promise that can be maintained only by reducing 
carbon dioxide emissions, chiefly by switching rapidly from fossil fuels 
to renewable sources such as solar and wind power.
Three times in the last 3.5 million years, the planetary thermometer has 
risen, to up to 2°C higher than those temperatures humans enjoyed for 
most of the last 2,000 years. And three times the global climate has 
changed in response.
What is less certain is the rate of change: a six metre rise in sea 
levels fuelled by the thermal expansion of the oceans and the loss of 
the world's glaciers, and the retreat of the Greenland and Antarctic ice 
caps, could take thousands of years. But once such changes began it 
would be very difficult to halt or reverse them.
“The carbon budget to avoid 2°C warming may be far smaller than 
estimated, leaving very little margin of error”
All geology is based on an axiom that the present is the key to the 
past: landscape around us tells a story of the conditions under which 
the rocks were formed. It follows that the past should also foretell the 
possibilities of the future, and researchers from 17 nations report in 
the journal Nature Geoscience that they looked again at three recent 
intervals when the world was warmer.
One of these began at the close of the Ice Age, 9000 to 5000 years ago; 
one between the last two ice ages 129,000 to 116,000 years ago; and one 
from a warm period known as the mid-Pliocene 3.3 to 3 million years ago. 
The first two were responses to very subtle but predictable shifts in 
the planet's orbit.
But the oldest of these warmings was driven by an increase of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere to between 350 and 450 parts per million. 
These are levels that match those of today, as a consequence of 200 
years of fossil fuel exploitation.
The research raises questions about the completeness of the climate 
models now used by scientists to predict future change.
*Slow to act*
As ice retreats and vegetation cover changes, so does the traffic in 
carbon between living things and the rocks, ocean and atmosphere. And 
the catch – for climate modellers – is that although the world's nations 
promised to act, action so far has been slow. Fossil fuel is still 
“business as usual”. And this inevitably will play into the calculations 
in unpredictable ways.
“While climate model predictions seem to be trustworthy when considering 
relatively small changes over the next decades, it is worrisome that 
these models likely underestimate climate change under higher emission 
scenarios, such as a 'business as usual' scenario, and especially over 
longer time scales,” said one of the scientists, Katrin Meissner, of the 
University of New South Wales, in Australia.
And Hubertus Fischer, of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, who led 
the study, said: “Observations of past warming periods suggest that a 
number of amplifying mechanisms, which are poorly represented in climate 
models, increase long-term warming beyond climate model projections.
“This suggests the carbon budget to avoid 2°C warming may be far smaller 
than estimated, leaving very little margin of error to meet the Paris 
targets.” – Climate News Network
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/past-warming-shows-2c-brink-may-be-close/


[A unique lake]
*A Japanese lakebed gives scientists a perfect climate record 
<https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/A-Japanese-lakebed-gives-scientists-a-perfect-climate-record>*
Sediment samples shed light on conditions 180,000 years in the past
YUTAKA IKEBE, Nikkei staff writer
May 18, 2017 10:00 JST
The varves of Lake Suigetsu are an extremely precise timescale and were 
adopted in 2012 as the international standard for dating geological and 
archeological phenomena up to 50,000 years in the past.
*What makes Lake Suigetsu unique is its special combination of 
topographic features.*
Most lakes are subject to an erratic inflow of soil and sediment from 
rivers, so the layers do not accumulate in an orderly fashion. But in 
the Mikata-goko drainage basin, all this sediment is deposited in Lake 
Mikata, which is upstream of Lake Suigetsu. The bottom of Lake Suigetsu, 
meanwhile, has no oxygen, so there is no life to stir up the bottom and 
disturb the varves. What's more, the lake is ringed by mountains that 
block the wind and prevent the formation of waves. Finally, the lake has 
slowly and continually subsided over time due to the effect of 
surrounding faults. This means the lake has never become completely 
filled with sediment, allowing varves to continue piling up.
- - - - -
"This is a rare combination of conditions for a lake anywhere in the 
world," explained Takeshi Nakagawa, director of the Research Centre for 
Palaeoclimatology at Ritsumeikan University and leader of the group that 
collected the varve samples from the lake.
Gordon Schlolaut from Jamstec determined that Lake Suigetsu experienced 
a frigid climate roughly 12,000 years ago. Schlolaut came to this 
conclusion by analyzing pollen and other organic matter in the varves 
and calculating how their ratios changed from layer to layer due to the 
influence of changes in the climate.
Scientists already knew from records of vegetation and other evidence 
that Europe was experiencing a temperate climate at that time. Because 
the cold climate around Lake Suigetsu has been dated with a margin of 
error of around 50 years, Schlolaut says, it is fair to say that the two 
climates were happening at basically the same time....
- - - - -
Paleoclimatology has shown that changes to the Earth's climate have 
occurred repeatedly, in patterns with periodicities ranging from roughly 
a thousand years to hundreds of thousands of years. Analytical methods 
have advanced to such a degree that it is now possible to estimate 
climate conditions with a precision measured in years. Combining this 
with computer modeling may improve the accuracy of predictions regarding 
future climate change...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/A-Japanese-lakebed-gives-scientists-a-perfect-climate-record


[drama]
*CHANTAL BILODEAU BRINGS CLIMATE CHANGE TO THE THEATER 
<https://psmag.com/environment/chantal-bilodeau-bringing-climate-change-to-the-theater>*
Through a cycle of eight plays, the Canadian playwright explores the 
inner lives of the Arctic's inhabitants during a time of dramatic change.
Playwright Chantal Bilodeau first visited the Arctic in 2007. She had 
not thought much about climate change in the past, but seeing Alaska's 
melting glaciers firsthand and hearing stories of forced migration 
propelled the crisis to the top of her mind. She decided to write a play 
about the high north, its people, and the challenges they're facing.
Bilodeau, a Canadian, has lived in New York since 2002, and knew she'd 
have to research the play carefully. Much of her inspiration for the 
play arose from a three-week trip she subsequently made to Baffin 
Island, Nunavut, where she spoke to and interviewed local people about 
their experiences and traditions. In addition, she spoke to coastguards 
and climate scientists, including NASA's Gavin Schmidt.
Sila, set on the island, is the result. The play's characters include an 
Inuk climate change activist, a scientist, a coast guard, a poet, a 
goddess, and two polar bears. It deals with themes such as melting sea 
ice, climate activism, and teenage suicide. But rather than satisfying 
her urge to write about climate change, Bilodeau found that Sila 
deepened her curiosity about the environmental transformations taking 
place in the high north.
"I learned so many interesting things and I thought there was so much to 
explore that I decided I wanted to write more than one play," Bilodeau 
says. She resolved that a series of eight plays, each located in one of 
the eight member states of the Arctic Council, would afford her the 
space she needed to dramatize the challenges of the Arctic in the 21st 
century.
Following Sila, Bilodeau wrote Forward, a play set in Norway about the 
polar explorations of Fridtjof Nansen, and is currently working on 
another piece set in Alaska. That leaves her with Iceland, Russia, 
Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Together, the plays are called The Arctic 
Cycle. So far, Sila has been staged at the University of New Hampshire, 
the University of Oregon, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
and by Cyrano's Theatre Company in Anchorage, Alaska. Forward was 
performed at Kansas State University in 2016.
Bilodeau's Alaska play will deal with the themes of human and animal 
migration in the face of environmental change, though she's unsure 
exactly how the series will pan out, since her work is guided by the 
extensive field trips she makes in each country.
Bilodeau initially traveled to Baffin Island planning to write about the 
opening of the Northwest Passage. But when she arrived, she found her 
most compelling material in the day-to-day concerns of those in the 
region, and how these concerns contradict and overlap with one another. 
For instance, the play deals with a climate activist who, in fighting 
for her grandson's future, ignores the causes of present-day unhappiness 
within her family. There's also a dedicated climate scientist who weighs 
the promise of industry money that will enable him to conduct his 
research against the damage that industrial developments could cause in 
the Arctic Ocean. "It was the complexity of the issue I decided I wanted 
to capture," Bilodeau says.
Including indigenous people in her research was particularly important. 
It was unthinkable not to include them in the play, Bilodeau says, but 
doing so also meant striking a careful balance: incorporating their 
knowledge and stories without appearing to appropriate them. As an 
outsider, Bilodeau was aware that she would have to tread carefully to 
ensure that her Inuit sources didn't feel that she was simply using and 
exoticizing their stories for the entertainment of mainstream American 
audiences.
Conversations in the play are peppered with words in the Inuktitut 
language; "sila" itself is the word for "the breath that circulates into 
every living thing." The plot hinges on the anger of Nuliajuk, the 
wild-haired Inuit goddess of the ocean and underworld, whose rage comes 
to stand in for the indiscriminate destruction that we invite when we 
disturb the natural world.
In one scene, finding themselves drifting to sea on an ice floe, an 
innocent polar bear cub asks her mother: "Who broke the ice, Anaana? ... 
Was it the human who tried to kill us? He didn't look very dangerous. I 
bet I could kill him with one swipe of the paw." Her mother, more aware 
of the danger, responds: "The ice broke because Nuliajuk is angry. And 
Nuliajuk is angry because humans have angered her."
Climate change doesn't necessarily lend itself easily to art. In his 
non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the 
Unthinkable, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh suggests that the modern novel 
is ill-equipped to deal with the subject. "The mere mention of the 
subject," he writes, "is often enough to relegate a novel or a short 
story to the genre of science fiction."
Plays about climate change are dismissed as "issue-based" or "political" 
theater, Bilodeau says, subgenres that tend to be regarded as less 
artistically serious. But Bilodeau has embraced the label of "climate" 
playwright, hoping that, as audiences become more familiar with the 
idiom, they'll come to have respect for it. Some plays address climate 
change in all but name: Wallace Shawn's Grasses of a Thousand Colors or 
Caryl Churchill's Far Away, for instance, both deal with themes of 
ecological destruction. More recently, The Handmaid's Tale has brought 
themes of environmental apocalypse onto television, even if the show is 
coy about the causes of the crisis.
Sterling Matthew Oliver, Sam Massey, and Jacob Edelman-Dolan in the 2016 
Kansas State University production of Forward, directed by Jennifer 
Vellenga.
These developments can help critics take such drama seriously, Bilodeau 
says, and given that she's dedicated her last decade to the topic of 
climate change, she plans to keep facing it head-on.
- - - -
"It's like women's theater," she says. "It used to be very separate, so 
there was women's theater and then there was theater, but the more women 
wrote plays, and the more writers write plays about climate change, the 
less it's going to be a niche category, and it will become part of the 
mainstream."
Then there's the difficulty of translating science and policy into 
something that people want to spend their Friday nights watching. 
Climate change can be an abstract topic, but for Bilodeau, theater 
offers an opportunity to dramatize the human reaction to this insidious 
threat.
"Because it's theater, it's always about bodies on stage, so all of this 
information has to be translated into human stories; it has to be 
translated into relationships. You're watching how human beings are 
navigating that problem, rather than just explaining what the science 
is," she says. "In Sila in particular, it's stories that people have 
told me. Some of the characters are a combination of different people 
I've met, some are a mixture of fact and fiction. These plays are 
fact-based, but they're fictional."
In directing audiences away from the data and toward human stories, 
Bilodeau hopes to influence people to think differently about climate 
change, maybe to live a little more sustainably, or simply to feel more 
empowered to confront the problem.
New Landscapes is a regular series investigating how environmental 
policies are affecting communities across America.
https://psmag.com/environment/chantal-bilodeau-bringing-climate-change-to-the-theater


*This Day in Climate History - July 12, 2013 
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/11/climate-change-energy-disruptions/2508789/> 
- from D.R. Tucker*
July 12, 2013: USA Today reports:

    "U.S. energy supplies will likely face more severe disruptions
    because of climate change and extreme weather, which have already
    caused blackouts and lowered production at power plants, a
    government report warned Thursday.

    "What's driving these vulnerabilities? Rising temperatures, up 1.5
    degrees Fahrenheit in the last century, and the resulting sea level
    rise, which are accompanied by drought, heat waves, storms and
    wildfires, according to the U.S. Department of Energy."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/11/climate-change-energy-disruptions/2508789/


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