[TheClimate.Vote] October 16, 2018 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Tue Oct 16 08:58:34 EDT 2018
/October 16, 2018/
[new normal?]
*To Prevent Wildfires, PG&E Pre-Emptively Cuts Power To Thousands In
California
<https://www.npr.org/2018/10/15/657468903/to-prevent-wildfires-pg-e-preemptively-cuts-power-to-thousands-in-california?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social>*
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/15/657468903/to-prevent-wildfires-pg-e-preemptively-cuts-power-to-thousands-in-california?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
[two into one=dumb]
*APNewsBreak: US eyes military bases for coal, gas exports
<https://www.apnews.com/573a19c3d43643e5b2d961b46cd99c67>*
By MATTHEW BROWN
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- The Trump administration is considering using
West Coast military bases or other federal properties as transit points
for shipments of U.S. coal and natural gas to Asia as officials seek to
bolster the domestic energy industry and circumvent environmental
opposition to fossil fuel exports, according to Interior Secretary Ryan
Zinke and two Republican lawmakers.
The proposal would advance the administration's agenda of establishing
American "energy dominance" on the world stage and underscores a
willingness to intervene in markets to make that happen. It's tantamount
to an end-run around West Coast officials who have rejected
private-sector efforts to build new coal ports in their states...
https://www.apnews.com/573a19c3d43643e5b2d961b46cd99c67
- - - - -
[Washington Governor Jay Inslee calls Trump an idiot (sort of)]
*Inslee statement regarding Trump proposal to export coal out of West
Coast military bases
<https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-statement-regarding-trump-proposal-export-coal-out-west-coast-military-bases>*
October 15, 2018
*Story *
"This reckless, harebrained proposal undermines national security
instead of increasing it, and it undermines states' rights to
enforce necessary health, safety and environmental protections in
their communities. The men and women who serve at our military bases
are there to keep our country safe, not to service an export
facility for private fossil fuel companies.
"If the president is interested in national security, he should take
a look at the Pentagon reports that say climate change is a national
security threat itself. We're seeing that threat now in the form of
increasingly severe hurricanes, wildfires, floods and droughts. This
president's 'national security' response? Increase coal exports
using Washington state's military bases. This is outrageous.
"What's more, the administration's attempt to ignore and subvert
state environmental laws will fail -- miserably. Washington
maintains the right and obligation to enforce the laws protecting
Washingtonians' clean air and clean water.
"Our state has been left in the dark about the Administration's
latest scheme. We've seen the news reports but have yet to hear from
them in person. This effort is just the latest attempt at an end run
around Washington's authority to safeguard the health and safety of
our people."
*Media Contact *
Tara Lee
Governor Inslee's Communications Office
360.902.4136
https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-statement-regarding-trump-proposal-export-coal-out-west-coast-military-bases
[half empty, full and overflowing]
*New IPCC climate report actually understates threat, researchers say
<http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/10/new-ipcc-climate-report-actually.html>*
By Scott Waldman, first published at E&E News
15 October 2018
The United Nations climate report released this week had some stunning
revelations, claiming that the 2020s could be one of humanity's last
chances to avert devastating impacts. But some say its authors were
being too cautious.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states in
plain language that averting a climate crisis will require a wholesale
reinvention of the global economy. By 2040, the report predicts, there
could be global food shortages, the inundation of coastal cities and a
refugee crisis unlike the world has ever seen.
A number of scientists contend that the report wasn't strong enough and
that it downplayed the full extent of the real threat. They say it
doesn't account for all of the warming that has already occurred and
that it downplays the economic costs of severe storms and displacement
of people through drought and deadly heat waves.
The world has a smaller carbon budget--the amount of fossil fuels that
can be consumed before a critical tipping point is reached--than the
report states, said Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science and
director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State
University in Philadelphia. He published two papers with other
researchers in recent years to show that the "preindustrial" baseline
used for the report should not be based on late 19th-century data. The
Industrial Revolution was already underway by then, he said, and humans
had warmed the world by several tenths of a degree.
"We are closer to the 1.5C and 2.0C thresholds than they indicate and
our available carbon budget for avoiding those critical thresholds is
considerably smaller than they imply," Mann wrote in an email to E&E
News. "In other words, they paint an overly rosy scenario by ignoring
some relevant literature."
In other places, the report fails to highlight some major risks from
climate change, said Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the
London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. In the summary for
policymakers, the section that receives the most attention, it does not
mention population displacements or conflict, he said. It also does not
describe any risks except for destabilization of the Greenland and West
Antarctic ice sheets, he said.
"The danger of omitting these big risks is that policymakers
underestimate the scale and urgency of the situation," Ward wrote in an
email. "The authors may have left them out because they are uncertain.
However, policymakers may misinterpret their omission as a sign that the
authors examined the risks and decided either that the impacts would be
unimportant or that the probabilities are zero. It is the difference
between an academic literature review and a professional risk assessment."
The IPCC report downplays the real costs of climate change, and its
contribution to natural disasters, because it can be difficult to tease
out the exact role of human-caused climate from a hurricane or other
disaster, said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist in the Climate
Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colorado.
He said the IPCC could make stronger statements about attribution of
human-caused climate change to extreme weather. The report could also be
stronger in connecting the costs of more extreme storms with
human-caused climate change, he said.
Another challenge is that the report relies on too many studies or
reports that explore a single country, such as Iran or Romania, without
looking at larger regional trends, Trenberth said.
"The IPCC tends to be quite conservative both in terms of the way in
which they do things but because you're dealing with the lowest common
multiple of a large number of people from many different countries who
have a more limited background in terms of dealing with the material
they're actually assessing," he said.
The report also ignores "wild cards" in the climate system, or
self-reinforcing feedbacks, said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of
climate sciences at the University of California, San Diego. That
includes thinning Arctic sea ice, which allows the ocean to absorb more
heat, causing even more ice loss and diminished reflectivity in the
region, he said. Such feedback loops have a real possibility of pushing
the planet into a period of chaos that humans cannot control, he said.
Ramanathan said the report also takes solid research, such as his
finding that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming could be reached by 2030 to
2035, and downplays it in favour of being overly cautious.
"I am a little bit concerned policymakers who are skeptical about all
this are going to say, 'They're talking about half a degree difference;
I'm not going to worry about that,'" he said.
Other scientists criticized the report. Some said it's understated,
while others described it as overly alarming. One area that deserves
more attention is the higher-risk scenarios, which have more uncertainty
but also hold more devastating implications, said Andrea Dutton, a
sea-level-rise expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
"The take-away message is this: The scientists who have been studying
climate change and writing these reports are some of the very same
people who have the highest concern about the potential impacts," she
said. "If those most knowledgeable about the situation are also the most
concerned, then it is time for the general public not just to start
paying more attention but convert this concern and despair to action."
The research is presented in an appropriate and evenhanded way,
evaluating risks and highlighting uncertainties where appropriate, said
Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies. It's also something that will be verifiable
in the lifetimes of many of the scientists who contributed to it, he
said. That shows the degree of confidence they have in their
predictions, he said.
"This is climate scientists really putting their predictions where their
mouth is. This isn't something that is going to happen in centuries;
this is what we're predicting is going to happen within decades,"
Schmidt said. "I think that's a statement about our confidence in what
the trajectory is for many of these aspects and a warning to the people
who are going to have to deal with it."
http://www.climatecodered.org/2018/10/new-ipcc-climate-report-actually.html
[the New Yorker magazine]
October 22, 2018 Issue
*What Is Donald Trump's Response to the U.N.'s Dire Climate Report?
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-donald-trumps-response-to-the-uns-dire-climate-report>*
The U.N.'s scientific advisory board sounds a piercing alarm on climate
change, but the President doesn't seem to hear it.
By *Elizabeth Kolbert*
- - - -
The Paris agreement calls for "holding" warming below two degrees, while
"pursuing efforts" to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Last week, the United Nations' scientific advisory board delivered its
assessment of those numbers. The findings of the group, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally--and
justifiably--described as "dire." Even 1.5 degrees' worth of warming,
the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that
include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world's coral
reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a
decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of
emissions, the world will have run through the so-called carbon budget
for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. "It's like a deafening,
piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen," Erik Solheim, the
executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington
Post.
But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone's watching "Fox
& Friends" in the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last
week, Donald Trump said, "I want to look at who drew it--you know, which
group drew it." ...
- - --
To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the
I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion
tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to
zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough. All the scenarios that
the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees rely on
some kind of "carbon-dioxide removal": essentially, technologies to suck
CO2 out of the air. Such technologies exist, but so far only in the
sense that flying cars exist--as expensive-to-produce prototypes. A
leaked draft of the report noted that there was a "very high risk" of
exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed from the final
report, the message is clear.
Thus, it is tempting, following the Trump Administration's lead, to
simply give up. But, as Edgar puts it in "King Lear," the "worst is not,
so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.' " Perhaps the most important
takeaway from the report is that every extra half a degree is
world-altering. According to the I.P.C.C., between 1.5 degrees and two
degrees of warming, the rate of crop loss doubles. So does the decline
in marine fisheries, while exposure to extreme heat waves almost
triples. As always, it's the poor who are apt to suffer most. Friederike
Otto, the acting director of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute,
recently told the Web site Carbon Brief that "half a degree of
additional warming makes a huge difference. For people who are already
marginalised, this can be an existential difference."
Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per the Trump
Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic possibilities.
Indeed, based on recent trends, the last figure seems the most likely.
Globally, emissions rose last year, and they're expected to rise still
further this year. This disaster is going to be as bad--as very, very
bad--as we make it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-donald-trumps-response-to-the-uns-dire-climate-report
[paradigm shift]
Capital Weather Gang
*Michael's second wind: A rare case of a tropical storm that
strengthened over land
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/10/15/hurricane-michaels-second-wind-rare-case-tropical-storm-that-strengthened-over-land/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f5f507d61c0f>*By
Jeff Halverson
October 15 at 2:17 PM
When Tropical Storm Michael tracked inland from Florida through Georgia
and South Carolina, it weakened, as tropical systems passing over land
tend to do. But then, it suddenly intensified after bolting through
central North Carolina, creating violent winds in Virginia that left
half a million people in the dark.
Michael's rejuvenation over land was a meteorological rarity, but its
merger with a sharp fall cold front may have resulted in its anomalous
intensification and surprising burst of wind.
Meteorologists had expected the core winds to weaken through the
Carolinas and Virginia. Only after the storm emerged back over the warm
Atlantic were the winds expected to rebound -- as a storm that had fully
transitioned from a tropical system into a mid-latitude ocean storm.
- - - - -
But as Michael progressed through North Carolina, its pressure slowly
began to fall -- signaling an intensifying storm. Its big leap of
strength came once it exited North Carolina; in a three-hour period, the
pressure fell from 989 to 986 millibars over southeastern Virginia. And
winds cranked up mightily in response...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/10/15/hurricane-michaels-second-wind-rare-case-tropical-storm-that-strengthened-over-land/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f5f507d61c0f
[TV weather]
*Climate without Borders: putting changing climate into a new
perspective
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/10/climate-without-borders-putting-changing-climate-into-a-new-perspective/>*
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/10/climate-without-borders-putting-changing-climate-into-a-new-perspective/>Filed
under: Communicating Climate -- rasmus @ 14 October 2018
Guest post by Mike Favetta
The goal of "Climate without Borders" (CwB) is to unite TV weather
presenters from all over the world and bring scientific knowledge to a
broader public. This, in turn, creates climate awareness and creates
support for the urgent climate action needed. Although the name suggests
a kind of connection with Doctors without Borders, members of Climate
without Borders won't be traveling to island nations about to be
submerged, like Tuvalu, or areas sub and physically volunteering in the
refugee efforts. Rather, Climate without Borders is a network of TV
weathercasters around the world who aim to communicate the science, and
impact of climate change, and give warnings to their local viewing
populations. This makes the organization unique in the world. TV
weathercasters are trusted sources of information, and they know the
nuances of their audience's cultures to make messages more
understandable. Exploiting this relationship is an effective way of
sharing climate information that people will listen to and comprehend...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/10/climate-without-borders-putting-changing-climate-into-a-new-perspective/
- - - -
[http://climatewithoutborders.org/]
*SAVING LIVES FROM CHANGING WEATHER <http://climatewithoutborders.org/>*
Climate without Borders is a new Foundation that unites weather
presenters from all over the world.
Weather presenters are working in media, and are used to bringing
scientific knowledge to a broader public. They are trusted
communicators, on the barricades of the changing weather. Their warnings
can save human lives. But more is needed...
Climate without Borders wants to educate, motivate and activate weather
presenters so that they can unfold their capacity for saving people's
lives from the changing weather, induced by climate disruption (that is
the human impact on the changing long-term weather patterns).
In the near future more people will die and flee because of extreme
weather events. The time to act is now, with our time window closing fast.
Here we keep you informed about our stories and projects. A warm welcome!
http://climatewithoutborders.org/
[video]
*Gas is not a "bridge fuel" – it's a climate disaster.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=869tgS6bzZs>*
Oil Change International
Published on Oct 13, 2018
Gas isn't "clean" or a "bridge fuel" – it's a climate disaster! We need
to move away from ALL fossil fuels immediate – and that includes natural
gas, more accurately called "fossil gas."
It's time the myth of fossil gas as a climate solution be burned up for
good. We need real climate solutions, not more fossil-fueled lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=869tgS6bzZs
[see the graphics]
*Flirting with Disaster: Greenhouse Gas Report
<https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/flirting-with-disaster-greenhouse-gas-report/>*
Posted on October 15, 2018
We need to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and we need to do
it quickly. The main ones increased by humans are carbon dioxide (CO2),
methane (CH4, the main component of natural gas), and nitrous oxide (N2O).
How are we doing?
Let's start with CO2. Here's the atmospheric concentration (in ppm, or
"part-per-million") according the the atmospheric observatory at Mauna
Loa -
- - - - -
Bottom line: we haven't stopped CO2 growth, we haven't even slowed it.
- - - -
Again, no sign that we've stopped increasing or even slowed down.
There is, as yet, no sign of any slowdown in the growth of greenhouse
gases. That emphasizes how hard this is going to be. But it's worth it
to stave off destruction, destitution, injury and death. That's what's
at stake.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/flirting-with-disaster-greenhouse-gas-report/
[Yikes! amateur conjecture]
*This Civilisation is Finished…
<http://greentalk.org.uk/this-civilisation-is-finished/>*
June 8, 2017
We need to start seeding the next civilisation, because this one is finished
Summary: This civilisation (meaning: the vast majority now of human life
on Earth) will be transformed:
It will either collapse utterly.
Or it (we) will manage to seed a future successor-civilisation, as this
one collapses.
Or this civilisation will somehow manage to transform itself radically
and rapidly, in an unprecedented manner, in time to avert collapse...
more at - http://greentalk.org.uk/this-civilisation-is-finished/
[Humor - SNL climate change video Weekend Update]
*Weekend Update: U.N.'s Climate Change Report - SNL
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07oe1m67eik&feature=youtu.be>*
Saturday Night Live
Published on Oct 13, 2018
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week's
biggest news, including the United Nations' report on climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07oe1m67eik&feature=youtu.be
*This Day in Climate History - October 16, 1988
<http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-10-16/news/8802080029_1_greenhouse-effect-global-warming-environmentalism>
- from D.R. Tucker*
October 16, 1988: Discussing the role of global warming in the 1988
presidential election, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman observes:
"Last summer, one of the hottest and driest on record, the nation
was roused by alarms about the 'greenhouse effect'--the gradual
warming of the globe that threatens to turn coastal cities into
underwater ruins and corn fields into salt flats.
"The problem is that for the last century or so industrial societies
have been releasing substances into the air that capture heat and
erode the Earth`s shield against the sun. The villains? Carbon
dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, methane from natural and
man-made sources and aerosol propellants.
"But as soon as the heat dissipated, so did interest in the issue.
In the campaign, the greenhouse effect has gone almost unmentioned...
"Both candidates pretend the solutions will be painless and free.
Both pass over the obvious remedies in favor of the politically
appealing ones.
"The nations of the world have taken one step by agreeing on a
treaty to reduce the use of aerosol propellants. But any serious
attempt to slow the warming of the Earth requires at least three
additional measures: discouraging the use of fossil fuels like coal,
oil and gas; big improvements in energy efficiency; and greater
reliance on nuclear power."
- - - -
So much for all those unread position papers. What is clear is that
neither candidate grasps the importance of the greenhouse effect or
has any idea what to do about it. Like Mark Twain, they believe you
should never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after
tomorrow.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-10-16/news/8802080029_1_greenhouse-effect-global-warming-environmentalism
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