[TheClimate.Vote] November 26, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/November 26, 2018/

[Gee whiz video of fire flight operations]
*747 Global Supertanker 'Camp' fire Day 6 UPDATE McClellan Load and 
Return <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW0XQI525UE>*
Published on Nov 14, 2018
Take a behind the scenes look at how these huge Supertankers are turned 
so quickly during the 'Camp' fire at McClellan Reload Base, Sacramento Ca.
LINKS:
http://globalsupertanker.com/
https://www.10tanker.com/
DONATE LINKS FOR FIRE VICTIMS:
United Way https://www.norcalunitedway.org/camp-fire
North Valley Community Foundation 
https://www.nvcf.org/fund/camp-fire-evacuation-relief-fund/
Red Cross https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation.html/
++ The following locations are in need of clothing, towels and personal 
hygiene items, the Placer County Sheriff's Office said in a tweet Friday:
The Salvation Army in Chico: 530-342-2192
Butte County Fairgrounds in Gridley: 530-846-3626
Yuba-Sutter Fairgrounds in Yuba City: 530-674-1280
Church of the Nazarene (FULL) in Oroville 530-533-7464
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW0XQI525UE


[The Atlantic]
*A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-black-friday/576589/>*
In a massive new report, federal scientists contradict President Trump 
and assert that climate change is an intensifying danger to the United 
States. Too bad it came out on a holiday.
ROBINSON MEYER - NOV 23, 2018
On Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, the federal government 
published a massive and dire new report on climate change. The report 
warns, repeatedly and directly, that climate change could soon imperil 
the American way of life, transforming every region of the country, 
imposing frustrating costs on the economy, and harming the health of 
virtually every citizen.
Most significantly, the National Climate Assessment--which is endorsed 
by nasa, noaa, the Department of Defense, and 10 other federal 
scientific agencies--contradicts nearly every position taken on the 
issue by President Donald Trump. Where the president has insisted that 
fighting global warming will harm the economy, the report responds: 
Climate change, if left unchecked, could eventually cost the economy 
hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and kill thousands of 
Americans to boot. Where the president has said that the climate will 
"probably" "change back," the report replies: Many consequences of 
climate change will last for millennia, and some (such as the extinction 
of plant and animal species) will be permanent.

The report is a huge achievement for American science. It represents 
cumulative decades of work from more than 300 authors. Since 2015, 
scientists from across the U.S. government, state universities, and 
businesses have read thousands of studies, summarizing and collating 
them into this document. By law, a National Climate Assessment like this 
must be published every four years.

It may seem like a funny report to dump on the public on Black Friday, 
when most Americans care more about recovering from Thanksgiving dinner 
than they do about adapting to the grave conclusions of climate science. 
Indeed, who ordered the report to come out today?

It's a good question with no obvious answer.

The report is blunt: Climate change is happening now, and humans are 
causing it. "Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in 
the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human 
activities," declares its first sentence. "The assumption that current 
and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer 
valid."

At this point, such an idea might be common wisdom--but this does not 
make it any less shocking, or less correct. For centuries, humans have 
lived near the ocean, assuming that the sea will not often move from its 
fixed location. They have planted wheat at its time, and corn at its 
time, assuming that the harvest will not often falter. They have 
delighted in December snow, and looked forward to springtime blossoms, 
assuming that the seasons will not shift from their course.

Now, the sea is lifting above its shore, the harvest is faltering, and 
the seasons arrive and depart in disorder.

The report tells this story, laying simple fact on simple fact so as to 
build a terrible edifice. Since 1901, the United States has warmed 1.8 
degrees Fahrenheit. Heat waves now arrive earlier in the year and abate 
later than they did in the 1960s. Mountain snowpack in the West has 
shrunk dramatically in the past half century. Sixteen of the warmest 17 
years on record have occurred since 2000.

Houses lay submerged in floodwaters caused by Tropical Storm Harvey in 
Houston in August 2017. The National Climate Assessment warns that 
climate change will make catastrophic floods more likely. (Adrees Latif 
/ Reuters)
This trend "can only be explained by the effects that human activities, 
especially emissions of greenhouse gases, have had on the climate," the 
report says. It warns that if humans wish to avoid 3.6 degrees of 
warming, they must dramatically cut this kind of pollution by 2040. On 
the other hand, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, then the 
Earth could warm by as much as 9 degrees by 2100.

"It shows us that climate change is not a distant issue. It's not about 
plants, or animals, or a future generation. It's about us, living now," 
says Katharine Hayhoe, an author of the report and an atmospheric 
scientist at Texas Tech University.

The report visits each region of the country, describing the local 
upheavals wrought by a global transformation. Across the Southeast, 
massive wildfires--like those seen now in California--could soon become 
a regular occurrence, smothering Atlanta and other cities in toxic smog, 
it warns. In New England and the mid-Atlantic, it says, oceanfront 
barrier islands could erode and narrow. And in the Midwest, it forecasts 
plunging yields of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice.

Its projections of sea-level rise are just as ominous. If carbon 
pollution continues to rise, a huge swath of the Atlantic coast--from 
North Carolina to Maine--will see sea-level rise of five feet by 2100. 
New Orleans, Houston, and the Gulf Coast could also face five feet of 
rising seas. Even Los Angeles and San Francisco could see the Pacific 
Ocean rise by three feet.

Even if humanity were to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, the report 
forecasts that New Orleans could still see five feet of sea-level rise 
by 2100.

Andrew Light, another author of the report and a senior fellow at the 
World Resources Institute, said that although the report cannot make 
policy recommendations, it might be read as an endorsement of the Paris 
Agreement on climate change.

"If the United States were to try and achieve the targets in the Paris 
Agreement, then things will be bad, but we can manage," he said. "But if 
we don't meet them, then we're talking about hundreds of thousands of 
lives every year that are at risk because of climate change. And 
hundreds of billions of dollars."

If you think the Friday after Thanksgiving seems like an odd day to 
publish such a major report, you're right. The assessment was originally 
scheduled to be released in December at a large scientific conference in 
Washington, D.C. But earlier this week, officials announced that the 
report would come out two weeks early, on the afternoon of Black Friday. 
When politically inconvenient news is published in the final hours of a 
workweek, politicos call it a "Friday news dump." Publishing a dire 
climate report in the final hours of Black Friday might be the biggest 
Friday news dump of them all.

So who ordered such a dump? During a press conference on Friday, the 
report's directors in the government repeatedly declined to say. "It's 
out earlier than expected," said Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA. 
"This report has not been altered or revised in any way to reflect 
political considerations."

Yet the change in scheduling took the report's authors by surprise. John 
Bruno, an author of the report and a coral biologist at the University 
of North Carolina, told me that he only learned last Friday that the 
report would be released today. "There was no explanation or 
justification," he said. "The [assessment] leadership implied the timing 
was being dictated by another entity, but did not say who that was."

Hayhoe told me she only learned on Tuesday that the report would be 
released on Friday. At the time, she was preparing three pies for a 
family Thanksgiving. She put the pies aside and picked up her laptop  to 
submit any final revisions to the document.

The White House did not respond directly when asked who had ordered such 
a change. It also did not respond directly when asked if the report 
would lead President Trump to reconsider his beliefs.

But a White House spokeswoman did send me a lengthy statement saying 
that "the United States leads the world in providing affordable, 
abundant, and secure energy to our citizens, while also leading the 
world in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions." (This is only true if you 
start counting in 2005, when U.S. emissions peaked.) The spokeswoman 
said this new assessment was based on the "most-extreme scenario," and 
promised any future report would have a "more transparent and 
data-driven process."

Not that Hayhoe ever had high expectations about President Trump's 
reaction to the report. "It wasn't the hope that the federal government 
would look at it and go, 'Oh my goodness! I see the light,'" she told me.

Rather, she said, she hoped the report would inform the public: "This 
isn't information that's only for the federal government. This is 
information that every city needs, every state needs, increasingly every 
business needs, and every homeowner needs. This is information that 
every human needs."

"It's not that we care about a 1-degree increase in global temperature 
in the abstract," she said. "We care about water, we care about food, we 
care about the economy--and every single one of those things is being 
affected by climate change today."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-black-friday/576589/


[McKibben Essay + audio listen to article]
November 26, 2018 Issue
*How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet>*
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the 
earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel 
industry continues its assault on the facts.
By Bill McKibben
- - -
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that 
conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars 
are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better 
prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer 
signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our 
environmental deterioration, it's now reasonable to ask whether the 
human game has begun to falter--perhaps even to play itself out.
- - -
The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to 
the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of the one that was 
dropped on Hiroshima...
- - -
When I say the world has begun to shrink, this is what I mean. Until 
now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, 
out across the globe--slowly at first, and then much faster. But a 
period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable 
earth. Sometimes our retreat will be hasty and violent; the effort to 
evacuate the blazing California towns along narrow roads was so chaotic 
that many people died in their cars. But most of the pullback will be 
slower, starting along the world's coastlines. Each year, another 
twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam's sublimely fertile Mekong 
Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt. As sea ice melts along the 
Alaskan coast, there is nothing to protect towns, cities, and native 
villages from the waves. In Mexico Beach, Florida, which was all but 
eradicated by Hurricane Michael, a resident told the Washington Post, 
"The older people can't rebuild; it's too late in their lives. Who is 
going to be left? Who is going to care?"..
- - -
We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is nothing 
inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among 
the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are 
cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose 
to, but we'd need to opt for solidarity and coordination on a global 
scale. The chances of that look slim....
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet


*This Day in Climate History - November 26, 2006 
<http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA> - from D.R. Tucker*
November 26, 2006: In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gov. 
Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) notes that fellow Republican Sen. James 
Inhofe of Oklahoma is someone who has his "thinking in the Stone Age" on 
climate.
http://youtu.be/gcZ7DWMeyQA
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