[TheClimate.Vote] June 3, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Jun 3 11:14:08 EDT 2018
/June 3, 2018/
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[CNN]
*Thousands of acres ablaze in California, Colorado and New Mexico
<https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/03/us/west-coast-wildfires/index.html>**
* (CNN)Massive wildfires in California, Colorado and New Mexico have
torched thousands of acres and forced hundreds to evacuate their homes.
A vegetation fire in Laguna Beach, California, about 50 miles south of
Los Angeles has torched about 250 acres and is being fought by over 400
firefighters, according to the Orange County Fire Authority. There was
0% containment as of Saturday night.
No injuries or damaged structures have been reported in the fire that's
been dubbed the Aliso Fire, but evacuations are underway in the Top of
the World neighborhoods in Laguna Beach. By Saturday, about 2,000 Laguna
Beach residents had been evacuated.
Some of the mandatory evacuations were lifted Saturday night, but
mandatory evacuations remained in effect for the Top of the World
neighborhood, according to the Orange County Fire Authority.
- - - -
*Colorado fire prompts state of local disaster*
A blaze known as the 416 Fire in Colorado's La Plata County has burned
1,100 acres, US Forest Service spokesman Jim Mackensen told CNN on Saturday.
The fire, about 15 miles outside the town of Durango, is 0% contained
and has forced the evacuations of 1,500 residents, Mackensen said. No
structures have been destroyed, he added.
- - - -
*Hundreds of firefighters battling New Mexico fire*
And a massive fire in Colfax County, New Mexico, had grown to 27,290
acres by Saturday morning and was 0% contained, according to InciWeb.
Nearly 450 personnel were battling that fire.
A mandatory evacuation order was in place for the town of Cimarron,
where 296 structures were threatened by the blaze, called the Ute Park
Fire, InciWeb said.
Jim Smith told CNN he noticed the fire on a hill above his home in the
nearby village of Eagle Nest. At the time, he thought it was a small
trash fire.
"It's been so dry here that once a fire starts in our part of the
country, it expands rapidly," he said.
"By the time I got home, in about 15 minutes, it was covering probably
four square blocks. And half an hour later, almost a square mile."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/03/us/west-coast-wildfires/index.html
- - - - - - -
[Gov't site for wildfire preparation]
https://www.ready.gov/wildfires
- - - - - - -
[Red Cross]
*Wildfire Safety
<http://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/types-of-emergencies/wildfire>*
Learn how to keep your family and home safe during a wildfire
http://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/types-of-emergencies/wildfire
[Smithsonian]
*Ocean Heatwaves Are Getting Longer and More Intense
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ocean-heatwaves-longer-more-intense-180969221/#5Q77xhxLFHqq5MrP.99>*
If the past century is any indication, global warming may be
contributing to less stable marine ecosystems
On land, heatwaves can be deadly for humans and wildlife and can
devastate crops and forests.
Unusually warm periods can also occur in the ocean. These can last for
weeks or months, killing off kelp forests and corals, and producing
other significant impacts on marine ecosystems, fishing and aquaculture
industries.
Yet until recently, the formation, distribution and frequency of marine
heatwaves had received little research attention.
Climate change is warming ocean waters and causing shifts in the
distribution and abundance of seaweeds, corals, fish and other marine
species. For example, tropical fish species are now commonly found in
Sydney Harbour.
But these changes in ocean temperatures are not steady or even, and
scientists have lacked the tools to define, synthesize and understand
the global patterns of marine heatwaves and their biological impacts.At
a meeting in early 2015, we convened a group of scientists with
expertise in atmospheric climatology, oceanography and ecology to form a
marine heatwaves working group <http://www.marineheatwaves.org/> to
develop a definition for the phenomenon
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079661116000057>: A
prolonged period of unusually warm water at a particular location for
that time of the year. Importantly, marine heatwaves can occur at any
time of the year, summer or winter.
Over the past century, marine heatwaves have become longer and more
frequent around the world
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03732-9>. The number of
marine heatwave days increased by 54 per cent from 1925 to 2016, with an
accelerating trend since 1982...
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ocean-heatwaves-longer-more-intense-180969221/#5Q77xhxLFHqq5MrP.99
"It's just that in previous times, the empires that collapsed didn't
take the entire natural world with them."
Cynthia Travis
*THE WISDOM OF THE BREAKDOWN
<http://www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com/issues/May2018/articles/Cynthia_Travis-The_Wisdom_of_the_Breakdown.html>*
I must have muttered the requisite You're right and I'm so sorry but
really, what the hell do you say when your child recognizes that Life
itself is threatened and no one in charge seems to care? I have carried
this conversation like a stone in my heart ever since. It has become the
koan at the core of my life.
Multi-generational trauma has eroded our capacity to envision a
vibrant future and live accordingly. Empire, power, greed and
gambling are addicting and now it seems the survival of Life on
Earth is on the table. It is significant that men are leading this
reckless charge (more prominently than women): we would do well to
understand what makes males more prone to distorted judgment (along
with heart disease, autism, dyslexia and violence) and we need to
ask ourselves how we as parents - especially those of us who are
mothers-- have failed to ingrain in our children a love of the Earth
and the mandate to protect the Future.
Why are we participating in our own slow murder, and the murder of all
that we love? My outrage, my grief, cannot be met by marching, signing
petitions, voting, or calling my representatives.
Refugees of weather and war have, by some estimates, surpassed 65
million with projections for climate refugees alone to reach 150
million by 2020;1. Some refugee children in Sweden have lost the
will to live but do not die. As happens with plants that have been
too long without soil, the trauma of extended uprooting has pushed
these teenagers into impenetrable comas. One day they are fine, the
next day they are on life support. This new illness has been named
Uppgivenhetssyndrom - resignation syndrome.; We might consider that
the children's resignation, their apathy, mirrors that of the adults
who have failed them, in particular the governments of the countries
that have not (yet) fallen into chaos. Mahmoud Darwish's words
appear like images from a dream: Longing has a country, a family,
and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time
chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen
slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of
the boy who never witnessed a massacre.3 In my guilty heart, I give
silent thanks that my son did not fall into comatose despair. Given
the sheer numbers of refugees swelling humanity's edges, it may only
be a matter of time before the disease of resignation to a
futureless future becomes an epidemic.
Contrary to what we have been told, Time is not money. It is the sensory
experience of the rhythms of Life. Like Moses, we will practice the art
of the impossible. It may take five hundred years to learn it. Until
now, we have reserved our practice of the impossible to mean conquering
natural limits. Now it is time to add the understanding that it's
impossible for us to continue as we are.
http://www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com/issues/May2018/articles/Cynthia_Travis-The_Wisdom_of_the_Breakdown.html
[Rain and the Rhinoceros]
*Conscience and Resistance
<https://orionmagazine.org/article/conscience-and-resistance/>*
To find clarity in times of conflict, we must listen to the quiet voice
within.
by Scott Russell Sanders
And it sounds like what the rain says. We still carry this burden of
illusion because we do not dare to lay it down. We suffer all the
need that society demands we suffer, because if we do not have these
needs we lose our "usefulness" in society-the usefulness of suckers.
We fear to be alone, and to be ourselves, and so to remind others of
the truth that is in them. -Rain and the Rhinoceros by Thomas Merton
Of all Merton's works, none has had a greater impact on me than the
essay I encountered first. "Rain and the Rhinoceros" offered me guidance
at a time when I felt lost. It emboldened me to think critically about
dominant beliefs and behaviors in American society, and to challenge
those that violated my own ethics and affections. Merton himself must
have experienced such an awakening from something he had read, for in
The Sign of Jonas (1953) he remarked: "There are times when ten pages of
some book fall under your eye just at the moment when your very life, it
seems, depends on your reading those ten pages. You recognize in them
immediately the answer to all your most pressing questions. They open a
new road."
While "Rain and the Rhinoceros" did not answer all of my most pressing
questions, it did give me the courage to face them. It opened a road
that led from the self-preoccupation of youth to an adult concern for
the well-being of other persons and other species, and for the health of
our living planet. It spoke to my dismay about the contradictions
between the teachings of the Gospel, as I understood them, and the
conduct of those self-professed Christians who embrace racism,
militarism, and consumerism, who scorn refugees, neglect the poor, and
show little concern for the devastation of Earth. Merton's work affirmed
my reverence for nature, my sense that wildness is the divine creative
energy owing through every atom and cell and star.
Today, half a century after first reading the essay, I feel less
sanguine about rain. I still recognize that wind and clouds and
precipitation obey the laws of physics, not our wishes, but I no longer
imagine that rain is impervious to our actions. Sulfur and nitrous oxide
released from coal-fired power plants turn rain acidic, poisoning lakes
and vegetation. Radioactive particles spewed into the air from accidents
at nuclear power plants-such as those at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl,
and Fukushima-descend in raindrops. By burning fossil fuels, clearing
forests, plowing up carbon-rich soils, and raising methane-generating
livestock, we have altered the chemistry of the atmosphere in a way that
traps more heat. A warming atmosphere produces more extended droughts
and more violent downpours, turning arable regions into deserts and
forests into tinder for wild fires, burying villages in mudslides,
displacing more and more of the world's poorest people by rising sea
levels and floods.
Merton did not live to witness how thoroughly we have tainted the rain.
He died in 1968, just as scientists were beginning to document the
damage from acid rain, and as the average global temperature-which had
crept upward since the onset of the Industrial Revolution-was beginning
to rise more steeply. Well before his death, however, he noticed other
ways in which humans were despoiling our planetary home. He saw evidence
of the damage in Kentucky hillsides stripped of trees, heard it in the
roar of chainsaws and tractors clearing more of the monastery's land. He
learned with dismay that pesticides were poisoning birds. He agonized
over the ravaging of the Vietnamese people and countryside by American
bombs. Most alarming of all, he perceived in the escalating arms race a
threat to all life on Earth.
The military jets that Merton heard cruising overhead signified more
than preparation for war; they signified the industrial order, with its
scorn for natural limits, its assault on land and sea and sky, its
harnessing of technology to serve human appetites. "[P]erhaps our
scientific and technological mentality makes us war-minded," he
suggested in Faith and Violence. "We believe that any end can be
achieved from the moment one possesses the right instruments, the right
machines, the right technique." The hubris that has led us to devastate
our home planet now prompts us to imagine we can continue our plundering
and pollution by employing even more grandiose technology-by dumping
powdered limestone in the oceans to counter acidification, by covering
deserts and glaciers with reflective plastic sheets, by orbiting giant
mirrors to reflect the sun's rays, by mining asteroids or colonizing Mars.
Soon after the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Merton wrote in his
journal: "I have been shocked at a notice of a new book by Rachel Carson
on what is happening to birds as a result of the indiscriminate use of
poisons. . . . Someone will say: you worry about birds. Why not worry
about people? I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world
and part of it, and we are destroying everything because we are
destroying ourselves spiritually, morally, and in every way. It is all
part of the same sickness, it all hangs together."
In his writings from the 1960s, Merton traced this sickness to our false
sense of separation from nature and our unchecked appetite for power and
possessions. His diagnosis was grounded in the teachings of Jesus and
the Hebrew prophets, with their stern warnings against greed and the
piling up of material wealth; it drew on the Christian monastic
tradition, with its devotion to poverty and simplicity; and it was
informed in his later years by Asian philosophy, especially Zen
Buddhism. Beginning with "Rain and the Rhinoceros," his work has helped
me understand that our ecological crisis is, at root, a spiritual
crisis. We abuse and exploit Earth for the same reason we abuse and
exploit one another: because we have lost a sense of kinship with our
fellow human beings, with other species, and with our planetary home.
Merton felt this kinship keenly. "Here I am not alien," he wrote from
his cabin in the woods. "The trees I know, the night I know, the rain I
know. I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of
which I am a part, and the world goes on with me in it, for I am not
alien to it." His experience as well as his faith convinced him that the
waters and woods and fields and their myriad creatures, human and
nonhuman, all arise from the same divine source. "[T]he whole world is
charged with the glory of God," he exulted in The Sign of Jonas, "and I
feel fire and music in the earth under my feet." We are sparks of that
primordial re, notes of that music, each of us, all of us, along with
birds and butterflies, maples and monkeys, frogs and ferns. Whatever
power gave rise to the cosmos, to life, to conscious- ness, still
infuses and sustains all things. What we call nature is simply this
grand, evolving ow, which brings each of us into existence, bears us
along, and eventually reclaims us. Knowing this vividly, as Merton did,
how can we desecrate Earth? How can we keep from crying out in wonder
and praise?
https://orionmagazine.org/article/conscience-and-resistance/
- - - -
[the Merton essay]
*Rain and the Rhinoceros by Thomas Merton
<https://www.scribd.com/document/50263556/Rain-and-the-Rhinoceros>*
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and
distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand
that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think
that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not
real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on
the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.
At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity
and its meaninglessness.
https://www.scribd.com/document/50263556/Rain-and-the-Rhinoceros
http://piefurcation.blogspot.com/2006/04/rain-and-rhinoceros-by-thomas-merton.html
[For Canada this article is the new normal article]
*Environmental Disaster Is Canada's New Normal. Are We Ready?
<https://thewalrus.ca/environmental-disaster-is-canadas-new-normal-are-we-ready/>*
As parts of the country flood-again-an unprecedented audit reveals
serious flaws in our climate change policy
BY Anne Casselman
Updated May. 28, 2018
Canada was a pioneer in developing performance-audit methodology, but it
wasn't until the 1990s that the auditor general began to apply it to
environmental topics, eventually leading to the creation of the role of
commissioner of the environment and sustainable development in 1995. In
the words of Denis Desautels, auditor general of Canada at the time:
"Environment became the fourth e in our work, along with economy,
efficiency, and effectiveness."...
But, no matter what reductions in emissions we make today,
correcting the course of our climate will take centuries. In the
meantime, adaptation is compulsory.
The examination phase of a performance audit typically involves grinding
away on gargantuan files with auditing software, but the BC audit team
wanted to see climate adaptation for itself. "There's a lot of public
discussion around mitigation," says Carol Bellringer, auditor general of
British Columbia. "I think there's less conversation, and there should
be more around what is being done on adaptation." BC faces increased
risk of drought, flood, and forest fire, and Bellringer and her team saw
an opportunity to provide value to British Columbians, more than 65,000
of whom were evacuated last year during the province's worst wildfire
season on record, by making recommendations to government on how to
improve its climate resiliency...
https://thewalrus.ca/environmental-disaster-is-canadas-new-normal-are-we-ready/
*This Day in Climate History - June 3, 1977
<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15FC355D167493C1A9178DD85F438785F9>
- from D.R. Tucker*
June 3, 1977: The New York Times reports, *Climate Peril May Force
Limits On Coal and Oil, Carter Aide Says*
To avoid accumulation in the air of sufficient carbon dioxide to
cause major climate changes, it may ultimately be necessary to
restrict the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, according to
Dr. William D. Nordhaus of the President's Council of Economic
Advisers...
- - -
Dr. Nordhaus's argument was based in part on calculations by Dr.
Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont‐Doherty
Geological Observatory, who also presented a report. Each ton of
coal or other fossil fuel burned, he said, produces three tons of
carbon dioxide.
Gas Acts Like Greenhouse Glass
In the atmosphere carbon dioxide acts much like the glass of a
greenhouse. It readily permits the passage of sunlight, warming the
earth, but it inhibits the escape of heat into space as infrared
radiation....
- - -
*Serious Consequence Feared*
This would exceed the fluctuations of the last 100,000 years,
deduced from analysis of ocean sediments and cores from ice sheet
drill holes, and could have serious consequences. Dr. Nordhaus also
noted that the Princeton studies indicated a far more marked warming
in the polar regions than near the Equator.
In the long run, as noted by Dr. Broecker, this could melt polar
ice, raising sea levels enough to flood many coastal cities and food
producing areas.
To limit the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the air to an
increase of 100 per cent, he suggested an escalating tax schedule
that would impose 14 cents a ton of released gas in 1980, increasing
to $87.15 a ton by 2100.
This would force energy consumers to shift to other sources, such as
nuclear energy, which he termed presently “the only proven
large‐scale and low‐cost alternative.” The shift from carbon‐based
fuels would not reach major proportions until about 40 years hence.
By then energy sources now at an early stage of development, such as
solar power and atomic fusion, might be able to contribute electric
power and noncarbon fuels.
Since the United States contributes 10 to 20 percent of the carbon
dioxide, any solution must be international, Dr. Nordhaus said. It
will be “expensive, but not unthinkable,” he added.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15FC355D167493C1A9178DD85F438785F9
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