[TheClimate.Vote] March 31, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Mar 31 08:58:12 EDT 2018
/March 31, 2018/
['Stupid' is a harsh term]
*'Among Stupidest Policies Yet Proposed,' Trump EPA to Lower Car
Emissions Standards
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/30/among-stupidest-policies-yet-proposed-trump-epa-lower-car-emissions-standards>*
"Weakening clean car standards is bad for the planet, public health, and
the auto industry itself."
by Jake Johnson, staff writer
After more than a year of aggressively lobbying
<https://www.fastcompany.com/40497293/automakers-say-theyre-going-electric-but-theyre-also-lobbying-for-weaker-fuel-standards>
the Trump administration to gut Obama-era fuel efficiency standards
aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, automakers are poised to
finally have their wish granted on Sunday, when EPA chief Scott Pruitt
is scheduled to officially declare the rules "not appropriate."
As Reuters reports
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autoshow-new-york-emissions/epa-poised-to-announce-rejection-of-obama-vehicle-fuel-efficiency-rules-idUSKBN1H5346>,
Pruitt is then planning to deliver a speech on Tuesday celebrating the
regulatory rollback from a Chevrolet dealership in Virginia-a fitting
location, given that representatives of Chevrolet's parent company
General Motors met with Pruitt frequently last year
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/us/politics/epa-scott-pruitt-calendar-industries-coal-oil-environmentalists.html>
to demand less stringent fuel standards.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, argued that Pruitt's plan to lower
emissions standards "ranks high among the stupidest policies yet
proposed" by the Trump administration.
"Weakening clean car standards is bad for the planet, public health, and
the auto industry itself. Ford Motor Company and other automakers...have
been actively fighting the clean car standards and have been
instrumental in pushing for this development," Natalie Nava, project
leader at Greenpeace USA, added in a statement on Thursday. "The current
iteration of fuel standards are based on sound science, which the EPA
should be using to make its decision-not pressure from the auto
industry."...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/30/among-stupidest-policies-yet-proposed-trump-epa-lower-car-emissions-standards
[video trailer]
*#Film4Climate 2018 - Trailer <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKgLREGGpD8>*
Connect4Climate
Mar 15, 2018
Film4Climate is a global campaign committed to developing a concrete
plan to mitigate the environmental impact of film production as well as
raising awareness about climate change through cinema.
The Film4Climate initiative is dedicated to greening the silver screen.
Watch the 2018 Film4Climate trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKgLREGGpD8
[1st Prize film Winner]
*Three Seconds - 1st Prize Short Film Winner #Film4Climate
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacc_x-XB1Y>*
Connect4Climate
Published on Aug 30, 2016
1st Prize Short Film Winner of the Film4Climate Global Video Competition
2016 presented by Connect4Climate and partners.
Author: Spencer Sharp featuring Prince Ea
Country: United States of America
Category: Short Film
About Three Seconds: An epic presentation of where humanity stands today
and how we must all work together to make it to the fourth second.
Climate Change is real.
Three Seconds is a short motivational piece to get younger and older
generations alike to stand up for trees and a clean future. This spoken
word piece by artist Prince Ea was designed to put into perspective our
existence on earth's timeline and to excite viewers for the fight
against the status quo that too often disregards Mother Nature.
The Film4Climate Competition was an activation under the Film4Climate
initiative of the Connect4Climate program that aims to use film and work
with the film industry to inspire climate action. The competition was
supported by the World Bank Group, United Nations (UNSDG, UNEP, UNFCCC),
Kingdom of Morocco, Sundance Institute,Carbon Pricing Leadership
Coalition, Vulcan Productions, Enel, The Global Brain, Concepter and
more than 70 partner organizations.
At the competition's announcement in Cannes, producer and jury member
Lawrence Bender said, "In every country, every city, people have
different stories on climate change...there are many stories that can be
told. If this worldwide film competition creates a critical mass of
ideas and energy, it could help tip the balance in terms of focusing
people's attention."
As the next five years will be critical to advancing and scaling up
climate action around the world as part of the SDGs, the COP22 climate
summit aims to encourage countries to implement ambitious climate
actions, with youth playing a vital role in the agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sacc_x-XB1Y
[More, hotter and longer-lasting]
*Study: Climate change to bring more deadly heat waves to the Great
Lakes by the mid-2030s
<http://michiganradio.org/post/study-climate-change-bring-more-deadly-heat-waves-great-lakes-mid-2030s>*
Audio report
<http://michiganradio.org/post/study-climate-change-bring-more-deadly-heat-waves-great-lakes-mid-2030s>
A new analysis of heat wave patterns published in Nature Climate Change
found changes could come to the Great Lakes region as soon as 15 years
from now. It found human-caused greenhouse gases will have more
influence on heat waves than natural variability.
Hosmay Lopez, lead author of that study, joined Stateside today to
explain how he predicts these heat waves will affect the Great Lakes
region. He explained what kind of heat waves we should expect, and just
how deadly they could get. He also explained what these heat waves could
do to our food supply, and how he knows his study's climate models are
accurate.
Listen <http://www.j.mp/2J7mICf> http://www.j.mp/2J7mICf.
http://michiganradio.org/post/study-climate-change-bring-more-deadly-heat-waves-great-lakes-mid-2030s
[Hakai magazine]
*The Impermanence of Permafrost
<https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/impermanence-permafrost/>*
The world's permafrost holds vast stores of carbon. What happens when it
thaws?
Authored by J. Madeleine Nash
March 27th, 2018
To those like Cory who know how to parse it, this slump is a source of
wonder. It offers a tantalizing portal into the hidden world of
permafrost, the broad band of perpetually frozen soils that undergirds a
circumpolar region more than twice the size of the continental United
States. This region is now warming at twice the rate of the global
average, with grave implications for the stability of permafrost and all
it holds. Both small and large things are poised to emerge from this
gelid domain, from common soil-dwelling bacteria, to the nearly intact
carcasses of Ice Age megafauna. The most important, however, is the
carbon stored in the frozen layers of leaves, stems, and roots that lie
beneath our feet.
- - - - -
The research Cory conducts on a meticulous, molecular scale is just part
of a larger body of work aimed at answering an increasingly critical
question. Globally, the frigid soils of the Far North store almost
double the amount of carbon already circulating in the atmosphere in the
form of heat-trapping carbon dioxide-enough to drive the climate system
into territory Earth has not experienced for millions of years....
Yet as the slump at Wolverine Lake illustrates, permafrost has a
geophysical Achilles' heel. Once subsurface temperatures creep above
freezing, the ice it contains melts and flows away. In the uplands, as
around Wolverine Lake, this ice is often a glacial legacy. Elsewhere it
comes from rain and snowmelt that have gradually worked their way down
through a network of surface cracks and refrozen. Some sections of
permafrost contain the merest flecks of ice, barely enough to moisten
thawing soils; others are larded with massive wedges that can measure
three or more meters across.
- - - - - - -
Almost anything that insulates the ground and blocks the flow of cold
winter air can do it: a road, a building, a big pile of snow. So can the
destruction of vegetation, which shades soils from the summer sun. In
2007, an intense North Slope tundra fire stripped the landscape bare,
creating a new landmark, the Valley of Thermokarsts. (Thermokarst is the
technical term for thaw slumps and related phenomena. Typically, karst
topography, riddled with sinkholes and caves, comes from rain and
snowmelt that trickles into the ground, dissolving underlying layers of
limestone. In the case of thermokarst, water from ice melted by heat
provides the erosive force.)...
Areas adjacent to sun-warmed bodies of water-coastal bluffs, the banks
of rivers and lakes-are prone to thermokarst, especially when undermined
by floods or the persistent action of waves.
- - - - - -
Thermokarst events are "the high-speed trains of permafrost thaw,"
observes Cory's colleague, University of Michigan ecologist George
Kling, and there are suggestions they may be increasing. In 2008, an
aerial census around Toolik counted nearly three dozen within a
600-square-kilometer area. Two-thirds did not exist prior to 1980. How
many of these might have occurred without the profligate burning of
fossil fuels is hard to gauge, but in the future, according to an
international team of scientists, an estimated 20 percent of the area
underlain by permafrost may become vulnerable to thaw-driven collapse as
gears in the climate system continue to shift, ratcheting Arctic
temperatures ever higher.
- - -- - -
Throughout this vast realm of frozen soil, thermokarst serves as a
source of ecological disturbance and renewal. On steep terrain it causes
landslides, bulldozing new clearings and replenishing the nutrients in
waterways. (Along with carbon, permafrost also contains nitrogen,
phosphorus, and calcium.) On the flat, it creates depressions that
evolve into ponds, lakes, and wetlands. In the boreal zone, along the
Tanana River, successive episodes of thermokarst are now converting a
birch forest into bogland. Thermokarst is impacting the built landscape
as well. In Alaska, one of the most serious impacts of climate change
will be the billions of dollars in damage, already extensive, that
thermal erosion deals to infrastructure.
- - - - -
But until warmth awakens it, permafrost remains inert. The biological
and chemical action takes place in the layer of seasonally thawed soil
above it, the "active layer," as it's called. This is where the root
zone is, where microorganisms live, where rain and snowmelt circulate,
blocked from following pathways that would lead to deeper drainage.
Along with the chilly air, which stymies evaporation, the impermeability
of permafrost is the reason the Far North can be so dry-Prudhoe Bay gets
less precipitation than Phoenix, Arizona-and yet so waterlogged.
- - - - -
But microbes are just part of the story. In a study of more than 70
lakes, streams, and rivers, including the Sag, Cory and her colleagues
have established that exposure to sunlight alone can turn carbon into
CO2, without any microbial involvement. The rate at which this happens
varies with the cloudiness of the sky, the thickness of the ice cover,
and the depth and clarity of the water. But on average, they found, this
abiotic conversion may account for about a third of all the carbon
dioxide currently released by Arctic surface waters. It's a
photochemical pathway that will increase in importance as rising
temperatures accelerate the thawing of permafrost and the melting of
sunlight-occluding ice.
- - - - -
The good news, says Northern Arizona University ecologist Ted Schuur,
lead investigator for the Permafrost Carbon Network, is that a sudden,
catastrophic release of CO2 from permafrost seems unlikely. The bad news
is that a steady, incremental leak is plenty problematic on its own.
Under the current warming trajectory, Schuur and his colleagues
estimate, between five and 15 percent of the carbon stored in the Far
North's soils is likely to make it into the atmosphere by the start of
the 22nd century.
This might not sound like much, but 15 percent is equal to the jump in
atmospheric CO2-from 280 to more than 400 parts per million (ppm)-that
has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. To avoid courting danger,
any additional rise in global mean temperature would wisely be kept
below 1 degree C, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). That, in turn, means stabilizing carbon dioxide levels at
450 ppm, leaving little time to dawdle. This is why permafrost carbon is
such a wild card. Even a modest release will complicate efforts to step
back from the brink.
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/impermanence-permafrost/
[Ideology and wealth]
*About half of Americans don't think climate change will affect them -
here's why
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17173166/climate-change-perception-gallup-poll-politics-psychology>*
It's a mixture of politics and psychology
By Alessandra Potenza at ale_potenza Mar 29, 2018, 11:34am EDT
More than half of Americans seem to think that climate change won't
affect them personally,a new poll shows
<http://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-steady-despite-partisan-shifts.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosgenerate&stream=top-stories>.
Only 45 percent think that global warming will pose a serious threat in
their lifetime, and just 43 percent say they worry a great deal about
climate change. Butclimate change is/already/affecting us
<https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16116198/climate-change-report-extreme-weather-co2-donald-trump>-
so why don't people realize that? The reason has to do with a mixture of
politics and psychology.
- - - - - - - -
The poll, conducted by Gallup, shows that many Americans "perceive
climate change as a distant problem," saysAnthony Leiserowitz
<http://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz/>, director of the Yale
Program on Climate Change Communication. A lot of people think that we
won't bear the brunt of climate change until 2050 or 2100, and that
other parts of the world will be affected, not the US, not their state,
their city, or their community. "As a result, it becomes psychologically
distant. It's just one of thousands other issues that are out there." If
I have to worry about paying my hospital bills, I'm less concerned about
melting sea ice in the Arctic.
- - - - - -
But temperatures are going up everywhere, not just in the Arctic; cities
are especially hard-hit and heat waves are becoming more
frequent.Extreme weather events
<https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16295000/extreme-weather-climate-change-wildfires-heat-waves-hurricanes>-
like wildfires and hurricanes - are also becoming more extreme. These
changes are consistent with a warming world,scientists say
<https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/12/16295000/extreme-weather-climate-change-wildfires-heat-waves-hurricanes>.
That sort of makes sense: though theGallup poll found that while only 64
percent of Americans
<http://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-steady-despite-partisan-shifts.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosgenerate&stream=top-stories>think
that global warming is caused by human activities,97 percent of climate
scientists
<http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002>believe
that.
Though we're starting to feel the effects of climate change, those
effects are not dramatic enough on a day-to-day basis to convince the
majority of Americans that climate change should be taken seriously,
saysMagali Delmas <https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/person/magali-delmas/>, a
professor at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Human beings aren't great at dealing with situations that are high-risk
but don't happen that often. Think of earthquake insurance, for
instance. Though there's a99 percent chance
<https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4652305&page=1>that there's
going to be a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the next 30 years in
California, the probability that it's going to happen in the next year
and is going to affect/me/is much lower. As a result, only 13 percent of
people in California have purchased insurance from the California
Earthquake Authority, Delmas says...
- - - - -
But attitudes on climate change have shifted recently - mostly due to
politics, Leiserowitz says. In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama,
there was a clear shift in the public's perception of climate change.
The percent of Americans who believed climate change is real dropped
precipitously from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009. The
culprit? Politics, according to a study Leiserowitz published in
Environmental Politics last year. He found that the shift in how
Americans perceived climate change overlapped with the rise of the tea
party, which is known for its denial of global warming. Americans who
strongly identify as Republicans or Democrats and pay attention to
politics, "tend to listen to what their leaders say," Leiserowitz says...
- - - - - - - -
In fact, the election of Donald Trump - who's called climate change a
"hoax" and said on Twitter that climate change isn't real because it's
cold out - also altered attitudes further. Right after the 2016
presidential election, belief that global warming is happening dropped 2
percentage points among all Republican registered voters, compared to
spring 2016, Leiserowitz says. And the polarization has continued,
something Gallup's survey shows. Democrats and Republicans are becoming
more polarized on climate: 69 percent of Republicans said they think
"the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated," an
increase from 66 percent last year. In comparison, 4 percent of
Democrats think that, down from 10 percent in 2017. And the perception
of climate change varies widely along party lines: only 18 percent of
Republicans think global warming will pose a serious threat in their
lifetime, compared to 67 percent of Democrats. And 33 percent of
Republicans worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming,
versus 91 percent of Democrats.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17173166/climate-change-perception-gallup-poll-politics-psychology
Letter to the editor
*Manasota Key discovery prompts thoughts of global warming
<http://www.bradenton.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article207451844.html>*
March 30, 2018 12:46 PM
Recently, an ancient burial ground estimated to be 7,200 years old
was discovered off Manasota Key. It is now under 20 feet of water,
but experts say it originally was 10 feet above sea level. Natural
sea-level rise since the last ice age is continuing, and human
activities are not responsible for that.
The global warming/climate change people want to blame humans. There
is some truth in that, but it has also been happening naturally for
thousands of years.
During the past 200 years, we have gone from 1 billion people to
nearly 8 billion, and we add another 140,000 people daily. In the
same 200 years we have cut down 65 percent of the world's forests
and destroy another 40,000 forested acres daily. Most of this is in
an attempt to produce more food, and yet millions are starving. Our
future path is unsustainable and we are irresponsible.
ROBERT W. LUBBERS
BRADENTON
http://www.bradenton.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article207451844.html
*This Day in Climate History - March 31, 2010
<http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/36126598> - from D.R. Tucker*
March 31, 2010: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviews DeSmogBlog's James
Hoggan regarding the anti-science track record of the Koch Brothers.
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/36126598
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