[TheClimate.Vote] August 5, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/August 5, 2019/

[BBC Future]
*The animals that will survive climate change*
With one in every four species facing extinction, which animals are the 
best equipped to survive the climate crisis? (Spoiler alert: it's 
probably not humans).
By Christine Ro
5 August 2019
"I don't think it will be the humans. I think we'll go quite early on," 
says Julie Gray with a laugh. I've just asked Gray, a plant molecular 
biologist at the University of Sheffield, which species she thinks would 
be the last ones standing if we don't take transformative action on 
climate change. Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and 
adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won't be among the survivors.

This is partly because humans reproduce agonisingly slowly and generally 
just one or two at a time – as do some other favourite animals, like 
pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a 
better shot at avoiding extinction.

It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species 
are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly 
concrete. As a blockbuster biodiversity report stated recently, one in 
every four species currently faces extinction. Much of this 
vulnerability is linked to climate change, which is bringing about 
higher temperatures, sea level rise, more variable conditions and more 
extreme weather, among other impacts.

Some caveats are in order. While the seriousness of climate change is 
undeniable, it's impossible to know exactly how those effects will play 
out for species vulnerability, especially far into the future. Methods 
of forecasting vulnerability are ever evolving, while limited and 
inconsistent data, plus the complex interactions of policies, land-use 
changes, and ecological effects, mean that projections aren't set in 
stone. Climate change vulnerability assessments have had biases and 
blind spots (just as humans do more generally). (Read more about how our 
cognitive biases prevent climate action). Moreover, the indirect effects 
that are responsible for many climate change impacts on populations, 
such as in the food chain, are more complex to model than direct effects...
- -
The American bullfrog could be one of few species to benefit from global 
warming

And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts 
together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by 
adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for 
the purposes of these projections, we're assuming that's not going to 
happen...
- - -
Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts 
rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose 
seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or 
ocean currents (like coconuts), rather than by ants (like some acacias). 
Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to 
deal with higher temperatures. Jen Lau, a biologist at Indiana 
University Bloomington, suggests that this may give non-native plants 
the advantage when it comes to responding to climate change.

We also can look to history as a guide. The fossil record contains signs 
of how species have coped with previous climatic shifts. There are 
genetic clues to long-term survival too, such as in the hardy green 
microalgae that adapted to saltier environments over millions of years – 
a finding only made in September 2018 by Fatima Foflonker of Rutgers and 
colleagues.

Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current 
human-made climate crisis means that we can't fully rely on benchmarks 
from the past.

"The climate change that we see in the future will differ in many ways 
from the climate change that we've seen in the past", notes Jamie Carr, 
an outreach officer for the Climate Change Specialist Group of the IUCN 
Species Survival Commission.

The historical record does point to the tenacity of cockroaches. These 
largely unloved critters "have survived every mass extinction event in 
history so far", says Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biogeochemist at the 
University of California, Merced. For instance, cockroaches adapted to 
an increasingly arid Australia, tens of millions of years ago, by 
starting to burrow into soil....
- - -
This shows two characteristics, says Robert Nasi, the director general 
of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): an "ability 
to hide and protect in buffered conditions (e.g. underground)" and a 
long evolutionary history, as in general "ancient species appear more 
resilient than younger ones". These are among the traits that, Nasi 
says, are linked to surviving large catastrophic events which triggered 
major changes in climate...
- - -
Also vulnerable are species that depend on pristine environments.
That's compared to the "early successional" species that succeed in 
disturbed habitats, such as grasslands and young forest. These species 
"might do well under climate change because they thrive in states of 
change and transition", says Jessica Hellmann, who leads the Institute 
on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. "For example, deer 
(in the US) are common in suburban areas and thrive where forests have 
been removed or are regularly disturbed."

Species that Carr calls "mobile generalists", which can move and adapt 
to different environments, are likely to be more durable in the face of 
climate change. While this adaptability is generally positive, it might 
come at a cost to other parts of an ecosystem. Invasive species like 
cane toads, which are poisonous, have led to local extinctions of other 
species like quolls (carnivorous marsupials) and monitors (large 
lizards) in Australia. And Hellmann says that the versatility of 
invasive plant species "leads to the worry that, in addition to losing 
vulnerable species, a warmer world will be a weedier world". The weeds 
typically found along roadsides may be especially long-lasting in 
comparison with other plants...
- -
The good news is that some specialised species might have a buffer known 
as climate change refugia: areas that are relatively protected from 
climate change's consequences, such as deep sea canyons. Although deep 
sea zones are heating up and declining in oxygen concentrations, 
Jonathon Stillman, a marine environmental physiologist at San Francisco 
State University, suggests that deep sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, 
specifically, might be one bright spot in an otherwise mostly bleak 
situation.

"They are pretty much uncoupled from the surface of our planet and I 
doubt that climate change will impact them in the least," he says. 
"Humanity didn't even know they existed until 1977. Their energy comes 
from the core of our Earth rather than from the Sun, and their already 
extreme habitat is unlikely to be altered by changes happening at the 
ocean surface."...
- - -
The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more 
urban, human-altered spaces. So "resistant species would likely be the 
ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as 
urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, 
and so on", says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the 
Philippine National Museum of Natural History.

CIFOR's Nasi sums it up. "The winners will be very small, preferably 
endotherms if vertebrates, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live 
in extreme conditions."...
- - -
Of course, to some extent we already know what's needed to limit the 
bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse 
gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats 
(rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing 
interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species 
that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back 
from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of 
sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of 
species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the 
IUCN's Red List of threatened species.

The political barriers are daunting. But scaling them, it seems, would 
beat surrendering the planet to the microbes.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190730-the-animals-that-will-survive-climate-change


[Associated Press]
*Global warming brings increasing wildfire risk to rainy parts of the 
Pacific Northwest*
Posted Aug 4
By Tom James | The Associated Press
ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- Nestled in the foothills of Washington's Cascade 
Mountains, the bustling Seattle suburb of Issaquah seems an unlikely 
candidate for anxiety over wildfires.

The region, famous for its rainfall, has long escaped major burns even 
as global warming has driven an increase in the size and number of 
wildfires elsewhere in the American West.

But according to experts, previously too-wet-to-burn parts of the 
Pacific Northwest face an increasing risk of significant wildfires due 
to the same phenomenon: Climate change is bringing higher temperatures, 
lower humidity and longer stretches of drought.
- - -
"The only thing that's keeping it from going off like a nuclear bomb is 
the weather," said Chris Dicus, a California Polytechnic State 
University, San Luis Obispo professor and head of the Association for 
Fire Ecology, a national group that studies wildfire.

About 15% of Oregon is facing abnormally dry conditions, according to 
the U.S. Drought Monitor.

With historically short summers, the densely forested coastal territory 
stretching from northwestern Oregon to British Columbia has long been 
cloaked in a protective veil of moisture, making even medium-sized fires 
relatively rare.

But global warming is changing the region's seasons. A national climate 
assessment prepared by 13 federal agencies and released in 2018 said the 
Pacific Northwest had warmed nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900 and 
that trend would continue into the century, leading to warmer winters 
and less mountain snowpack.

Experts say these long-term changes create a special risk in Pacific 
Northwest forests: Even a modest increase in contributing factors, like 
days without rain, could make them much more prone to burning.
- - -
For instance, the region's fire danger this year reached above-normal 
levels three months earlier than at any time in more than 10 years, 
driven partly by an abnormally dry winter.

And fire counts are up: As of late June, western Oregon forests had seen 
double the average number of fire starts from the previous decade -- 48 
compared with 20. Washington jumped even further, with 194 starts 
compared with an average of 74.

Even the region around Astoria, Oregon, which frequently gets 100-plus 
rainy days per year, has seen a dozen small fires in 2018 and 2019, 
according to data from Oregon's Forestry Department. That compares with 
an average of just two per year over the previous decade.

Last year, 40% of Washington's wildfires were on its wetter western 
side, which was "alarming and a first for us," Janet Pearce, a 
spokeswoman for that state's natural resources agency, said in an email.

The risk is amplified by development patterns throughout the Pacific 
Northwest.
- - -
"The western slopes of the Cascades and the Northwest are just woefully 
unprepared," Ingalsbee said.

Wildfires get harder to fight when they penetrate neighborhoods, which 
happened last year in Paradise, California, where dozens died and 
thousands of homes burned.

Like Paradise, Issaquah has neighborhoods surrounded by dense forests, 
some with only a single road, and strong seasonal winds.

California's fires were a wake-up call, said Rich Burke, deputy fire 
chief with the Eastside Fire Department, which oversees fire protection 
in and around Issaquah, population 39,000.

Wildfire-oriented setbacks and less-flammable materials still aren't 
written into building codes on the city's edges. But Burke said the 
department now hosts preparedness trainings and has four wildland fire 
engines.

Jason Ritchie, who owns a home just north of Issaquah, said a nearby 
2015 fire drove home the risks.

"It grew so fast," Richie said, adding that he previously hadn't 
considered that his area has only two main routes out.

"Had the wind been blowing from the north to the south, it would have 
engulfed the neighborhood very, very quickly."
-- The Associated Press
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2019/08/global-warming-brings-increasing-wildfire-risk-to-rainy-parts-of-the-pacific-northwest.html
- - -
[Masks British design]
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protection. We call this the British Pollution Solution.

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such as dust and PM10, followed by the Three-Ply Micro Particulate 
Filter which stops nearly 100% of smaller particulate matter such as 
PM2.5 and PM0.3. The last layer has been developed by UK's Ministry of 
Defence and filters out viruses, bacteria and gas pollution such as 
Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Ozone, Benzathine and Formaldehyde.
https://cambridgemask.com/
- - -
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- - -
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[from the IPCC leaked draft report]
*We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report*
Cutting carbon from transport and energy 'not enough' IPCC finds

Attempts to solve the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions from 
only cars, factories and power plants are doomed to failure, scientists 
will warn this week.

A leaked draft of a report on climate change and land use, which is now 
being debated in Geneva by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
(IPCC), states that it will be impossible to keep global temperatures at 
safe levels unless there is also a transformation in the way the world 
produces food and manages land.

Humans now exploit 72% of the planet's ice-free surface to feed, clothe 
and support Earth's growing population, the report warns. At the same 
time, agriculture, forestry and other land use produces almost a quarter 
of greenhouse gas emissions...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/03/ipcc-land-use-food-production-key-to-climate-crisis-leaked-report



[ironic]
*Siberian wildfires turn up heat on Russian oil producers*
Maria Vasilyeva, Olesya Astakhova, Olga Yagova
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Raging Siberian wildfires are forcing Russian oil 
firms to evacuate workers and suspend drilling, industry sources said, 
adding to challenges facing the world's second-largest crude exporter 
which is already battling an oil contamination problem...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-wildfires-oil/siberian-wildfires-turn-up-heat-on-russian-oil-producers-idUSKCN1US1KC


[Edits from the Atlantic article]
*How Climate Change Could Trigger the Next Global Financial Crisis*
The Federal Reserve should act aggressively to reduce that risk, a 
leading economic historian argues.
ROBINSON MEYER AUG 1, 2019

A few years ago, Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now 
leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, 
could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis. He 
called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce 
the risk of climate-related catastrophe, taking the warming planet as 
seriously as they would a cooling economy.

Adam Tooze, a history professor at Columbia University, knows quite a 
bit about central banks--and the Great Recession. Last year he published 
Crashed, an award-winning account of the 2008 collapse and its 
aftermath. In that book, he argues that the U.S. Federal Reserve was the 
pivotal American institution in stopping a second Great Depression. Its 
actions were "historically unprecedented, spectacular in scale," he 
writes, and widely understood by experts to be the "decisive innovation 
of the crisis."

Now, in an article this month in Foreign Policy, Tooze asserts that the 
Fed needs to battle climate change in the same way. "If the world is to 
cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at 
their disposal," he writes. "Faced with this threat, to indulge in the 
idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit 
themselves to worrying about financial stability…is its own form of denial."
Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, would not call himself a climate-change 
denier. Indeed, he is probably the most powerful person in the American 
government who affirms climate science. Yet he has taken a subdued 
approach to mitigating climate change. In April, in a letter to Senator 
Brian Schatz, Powell wrote that "addressing climate change is a 
responsibility that Congress has entrusted to other agencies." The 
Federal Reserve, he added, is using its tools to "prepare financial 
institutions for severe weather." In England, by contrast, Carney has 
convened 33 central banks to investigate how to "green the financial 
system." According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with 
him--except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.

I talked with Tooze last week about whether climate change could really 
cause another global crash, how to think about climate policy in 
history, and what the Fed could do to decarbonize the economy. Our 
conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    *Robinson Meyer*: In your Foreign Policy piece, you draw an analogy
    between the financial crisis of 2008 and what's happening now with
    climate change. You describe a crisis in a near-term future, one
    where climate change has taken hold but where much of the economy is
    still tied up in oil.
    I will say: I'm a little skeptical. I'm not sure you could get the
    kind of sudden financial stop through climate change that you got in
    2007 and 2008. What's the right way to think about that analogy?

    *Adam Tooze:* ...all I'm really observing is that Mark Carney, the
    governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has
    subsequently received massive coverage--and he is a man, after all,
    absolutely of the global financial establishment--coined the idea of
    a climate Minsky moment. [Editor's note: A Minsky moment is when an
    asset's price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]...

    Are we likely to see a financial Minsky moment? I think that is a
    reasonable question mark. We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be
    on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a
    fire-sale situation and who couldn't deal with a sudden revaluation.
    We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is
    what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008...
    *- - -*
    *Meyer:* You quote this astonishing statistic: "One-third of equity
    and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be
    classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction
    sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals,
    construction, and industrial goods firms."

    Who is in that group? Are those the oil majors such as Exxon, or
    does that encompass every construction firm?

    *Tooze:* It isn't just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn't
    get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn't big enough to get you to that
    kind of percentage. It's Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler
    and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.

    In Germany right now, there's a very serious conversation about
    whether BMW and Daimler are too big to fail. Americans don't have
    that sense of a manufacturing industry anymore--except, of course,
    we did end up bailing out GM in 2008. But Germany is far, far more
    exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about
    internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of
    those stocks, for sure.

    *Meyer:* And just to get back to the financial-crisis point, if
    there were some kind of immediate crunch, and all those stocks tanked …

    *Tooze:* Yes. If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity
    [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive,
    that's the sort of trigger that we might be looking at...
    - - -*
    **Meyer*: In your piece, you write: "Those in the United States who
    call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything,
    understating the scale of what is needed." Do you think climate
    action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World
    War II?
    *
    **Tooze:* ...
    *Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there's no
    happy end. There's no moment where you win and then everything goes
    back to the way it was before, but just better. That's a
    misunderstanding. This isn't crash dieting; this is a permanent
    change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it
    and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact
    that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.**
    ****
    **And furthermore--and much more fundamentally than any of those
    things--this isn't really about America. I mean, America can be an
    obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices
    needs to be made by America, and all the really hard choices need to
    be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh
    and Indonesia. Our choices are all trivially easy, because for all
    the assets that we're going to lose, we need to create $5 trillion
    worth of new ones.*

    *Meyer:* What's the closest analogy to what needs to happen? Is
    there a single historical analogy that we could think of--of a broad
    transition with no happy victory parades at the end?

    *Tooze:* I don't think I'm uncomfortable with saying that this is
    unprecedented, so I'm not sure that looking for analogies is all
    that helpful, to be honest. I don't write lessons-from-history-type
    pieces, because I really buy the hockey stick. [Editor's note: The
    "hockey stick" graph shows that economic growth over the past 300
    years has been unprecedented compared with human history before it.]
    In other words, we have never had to fundamentally rethink the
    energy basis of our way of life. I mean, we never have.

    *Meyer:* Industrialization has only happened once.

    *Tooze:* Exactly. And furthermore, it has turned out to be
    exponential--a hockey-stick-style process. So no, it's not obvious
    to me that [analogies are] a terribly helpful way of thinking about it.

    It strikes me, perhaps, as an indication of the poverty of our
    democratic imagination right now that we go backwards so much. One
    of the striking things about the American left is its nostalgia.
    There's always some moment that you can handily pick up, a lesson
    you can learn from the New Deal. Or if not the New Deal, then the
    Progressive era. Or if not from the Progressive era, then the
    Homestead Strike. Like there's some heritage of struggle that you
    want to draw on. And that backwards move is--even among the
    smartest, smartest people on the American left--is a compulsion,
    almost. It seems to me, in some sense, a mirror image of the strange
    practice of originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The
    sheer fact of the continuity of the American political argument,
    back to the founding, sucks people into this line of thinking...
    - - -
    I do like your point that this is a forever problem--at least for
    all conceivable futures--like working through that problem of racism
    and the legacies of slavery is a forever problem in the United States.
    - -
    *Meyer:* So basically it should say: If the government were to issue
    a bunch of new debt to fund green investment and no one was buying
    it, then the Fed would?

    *Tooze:* And there isn't the slightest evidence [it wouldn't sell],
    because the U.S. Treasury is issuing unprecedented quantities of
    debt right here and right now. But the Fed would view [the issue of
    new debt tied to infrastructure] as in no way alarming. It is indeed
    a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low
    interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co.
    would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the
    state of secular stagnation that we're in.

    Then you could get into the technicalities of thinking how the Fed
    addresses issues of finance and green bonds. That would be another
    avenue to go down--for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a
    classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also
    to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of
    American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance
    sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the
    business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.
    *- - -*
    *Meyer:* Has the Fed ever done something like this before? Where
    it's said, "We need to move the economy in this direction, so we're
    going to treat certain asset classes favorably?"
    *
    **Tooze:* Yeah, this idea of neutrality comes up: Isn't the Fed
    supposed to be neutral? It's an attractive idea, and goes along with
    the idea of Fed independence--except it's completely ahistorical. I
    mean, the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued
    debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business,
    the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting
    fiscal action.

    It hasn't historically done that--and there've been moments where
    the Fed acted as a goad, notably in the early stages of the Clinton
    administration. But with regards to the broader economy, the entire
    federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of
    home ownership in the United States and the promotion of
    suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need
    is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.

    *Meyer:* But without the crisis at the end of Fannie Mae and Freddie
    Mac, I guess.

    *Tooze: *Of course. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became vehicles for
    truly toxic modes of leverage and intermediation. But if the
    question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies
    of government in the United States biasing the property structure in
    the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes--all
    the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial
    apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban
    space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.

    The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in
    this argument. It's a question of where we want to be biased. If you
    look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively
    fossil-biased. [Editor's note: Quantitative easing, or QE, is when
    central banks buy stocks and bonds to boost the economy.] The assets
    that were bought as part of the asset-purchasing program had heavy
    carbon contact.

    That's not surprising: The bonds of the European energy majors have
    very high ratings, and so they tend to be part of the process of
    asset purchases. So in the same way as QE is believed to have an
    effect on inequality through the way in which it drives asset-market
    prices, it also underwrites the existing biases of the financial
    system toward fossil fuels. So monetary policy is not neutral with
    regards to the environment. There's no safe space here. The only
    question is whether you're going to lead in the right way.

    *Meyer:* Last question. With any of this, is there a role for
    interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to
    the financial- or monetary-policy elite?
    *
    **Tooze:* Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did
    in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago. [Editor's Note:
    Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether
    inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed
    has long argued.] Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions.
    That's exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of
    monetary policy is a fact. I mean, I write these pieces because I
    personally think this is eminently suitable for political
    conversation. If we don't raise these questions, the de facto
    politics is, more often than not, conservative and status
    quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where
    citizens--whether they're educated and informed or not--need to wise
    up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions. So
    applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing
    in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most
    hopeful scenes I've seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to 
the editor or write to letters at theatlantic.com.
ROBINSON MEYER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers 
climate change and technology.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/how-fed-could-fight-climate-change-adam-tooze/595084/


*This Day in Climate History - August 5, 3007- from D.R. Tucker*
August 5, 2007: Newsweek releases it's August 13, 2007 cover-dated 
issue--an in-depth look at the extensive, well-funded efforts by the 
fossil-fuel industry to convince gullible Americans that human-caused 
climate change is a "hoax."
http://www.sharonlbegley.com/global-warming-deniers-a-well-funded-machine
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/08/05/newsweek-cover-story-focuses-on-the-global-warming-denial-machine/
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