[TheClimate.Vote] August 21, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Wed Aug 21 10:13:33 EDT 2019

/August 21, 2019/

[Clips from reviews in the TheNewYorkReview of Books]
*Burning Down the House*
Alan Weisman AUGUST 15, 2019 ISSUE
*The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming*
by David Wallace-Wells
Tim Duggan, 310 pp., $27.00
*Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?*
by Bill McKibben
Henry Holt, 291 pp., $28.00
- - -
Environmental writers today have a twofold problem. First, how to 
overcome readers' resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when 
climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly 
profitable industry with its own television network (in this country, at 
least; state-controlled networks in autocracies elsewhere, such as Cuba, 
Singapore, Iran, or Russia, amount to the same thing). Second, in view 
of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep 
up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly 
ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much 
methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms 
will blow and fires will burn, how long imperiled species can hang on, 
and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast 
flooding from excessive rainfall). There's a real chance that an 
environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.

I'm not the only writer to wonder whether books are still an appropriate 
medium to convey the frightening speed of environmental upheaval. But 
the environment is infinitely intricate, and mere articles--much less 
daily newsfeeds or Twitter--can barely scratch the surface of 
environmental issues, let alone explore the extent of their 
consequences. Ecology, after all, is about how everything connects to 
everything else. Something so complex and crucial still requires books 
to attempt to explain it....
- - -
The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the 
underlying emotion of the day: fear. This book is meant to scare the 
hell out of us, because the alarm sounded by NASA's Jim Hansen in his 
electrifying 1988 congressional testimony on how we've trashed the 
atmosphere still hasn't sufficiently registered. "More than half of the 
carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has 
been emitted in just the past three decades," writes Wallace-Wells, 
"since Al Gore published his first book on climate."

Although Wallace-Wells protests that he's not an environmentalist, or 
even drawn to nature ("I've never gone camping, not willingly anyway"), 
the environment definitely has his attention now. With mournful 
hindsight, he explains how we were convinced that we could survive with 
a 2 degrees Celsius increase in average global temperatures over 
preindustrial levels, a figure first introduced in 1975 by William 
Nordhaus, a Nobel prize-winning economist at Yale, as a safe upper 
limit. As 2 degrees was a conveniently easy number to grasp, it became 
repeated so often that policy negotiators affirmed it as a target at the 
UN's 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. We now know that 2 degrees would be 
calamitous: "Major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will 
become unlivable." In the Paris Agreement of 2015, 1.5 degrees was 
deemed a safer limit. At 2 degrees of warming, one study estimates, 150 
million more people would die from air pollution alone than they would 
after 1.5 degrees. (If we include other climate-driven causes, according 
to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that extra half-degree 
would lead to hundreds of millions more deaths.) But after watching 
Houston drown, California burn, and chunks of Antarctica and Louisiana 
dissolve, it appears that "safe" is a relative statement--currently we 
are only at 1 degree above preindustrial temperatures...
- - -
Unfortunately, we're set to sail through 1.5 and 2 degree increases in 
the next few decades and keep going. We're presently on course for a 
rise of somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, possibly more--our 
current trajectory, the UN warns, could even reach an 8 degree increase 
by this century's end. At that level, anyone still in the tropics "would 
not be able to move around outside without dying," Wallace-Wells writes.

The Uninhabitable Earth might be best taken a chapter at a time; it's 
almost too painful to absorb otherwise. But pain is Wallace-Wells's 
strategy, as is his agonizing repetition of how unprecedented these 
changes are, and how deadly. "The facts are hysterical," he says, as he 
piles on more examples...
- -
Unfortunately, as Wallace-Wells notes:

The entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat 
suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or 
trade or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil 
fuels and all their raw power.

This is our daily denial, which now flies in our faces on hurricane 
winds, or drops as hot ashes from our immolated forests and homes: 
growth is how we measure economic health, and growth must be literally 
fueled. Other than nuclear energy, which has its own problems, no form 
of energy is so concentrated, and none so cheap or portable, as carbon. 
By exhuming hundreds of millions of years' worth of buried organic 
matter and burning it in a couple of centuries, we built our dazzling 
modern civilization, not noticing that its wastes were amassing 
overhead. Now we're finally paying attention, because hell is starting 
to rain down.

I encourage people to read this book. Wallace-Wells has maniacally 
absorbed masses of detail and scoured all the articles most readers 
couldn't finish or tried to forget, or skipped because they just 
couldn't take yet another bummer. Wallace-Wells has been faulted for not 
offering solutions--but really, what could he say? We now burn 80 
percent more coal than we did in 2000, even though solar energy costs 
have fallen 80 percent in that period. His dismaying conclusion is that 
"solar isn't eating away at fossil fuel use…it's just buttressing it. To 
the market, this is growth; to human civilization, it is almost suicide."...
- - -
I'd long admired the clarity of McKibben's journalism. At some point, 
however, he apparently concluded that when a global existential crisis 
is bearing down, journalism can only go so far, and he became an 
activist. With his students at Middlebury, he cofounded 350.org, a 
grassroots advocacy group that has become a worldwide movement and whose 
name derives from the safe concentration of atmospheric CO2 in parts per 
million. We last saw 350 ppm thirty years ago, when The End of Nature 
was published. In Falter, he admits frankly to fearing that our "game, 
in fact, may be starting to play itself out." Until he got too busy 
traveling for 350.org, McKibben, a lifelong Christian, taught Sunday 
school. Given all he knows, his faith surely helps keep him going. 
Occasionally, it appears in his writing, such as The Comforting 
Whirlwind, his 2005 reflection on the Book of Job's enduring relevance. 
Believer and activist though he may be, McKibben doesn't preach, and 
still uses the tools of journalism to investigate, illustrate, and verify.

In a chapter that begins "Oh, it could get very bad," he discusses a 
study in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology concluding that by 2100 
the oceans may be too hot for phytoplankton to photosynthesize. (Another 
study I've seen, in Nature, suggests that since 1950 phytoplankton 
populations worldwide may have decreased by up to 40 percent, 
correlating to rising sea-surface temperatures.) Just as we fail to 
realize how much extra CO2 is in the air because it's invisible, it's 
hard to grasp how immense--and immensely bad--this news is. Tiny 
phytoplankton float in the ocean practically unnoticed, yet they 
constitute half the organic matter on Earth and provide, as McKibben 
notes, "two-thirds of the earth's oxygen." Their loss, he quotes the 
study's author, "would likely result in the mass mortality of animals 
and humans."

And that's just the effects from heat. Absorption of CO2 has already 
made the ocean 30 percent more acidic, with pH expected to decline "well 
beyond what fish and other marine organisms can tolerate" by the end of 
this century, he writes, citing another paper. According to the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current acidification rates 
of seas and lakes already may be the highest in 300 million years.

McKibben shares some other harrowing examples of threatened fauna, from 
insects to lions, but although it's been understood since Noah's time 
that we need other species, readers best relate to our own, so like 
Wallace-Wells McKibben soon circles back to humans. Major cities like 
Cape Town and São Paulo (and several in India and China) have come 
within mere days of running out of water; it's just a matter of time 
until one does. Outdoor work and maintenance will be halted more 
frequently as urban thermometers exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Grain 
harvests will drop as temperatures rise. Insurance companies will go 
bankrupt after successive biblical storms destroy trillions of dollars 
of property. Refugees running everywhere. This won't stop.

Even McKibben struggles for an adequate vocabulary to describe the 
duplicity of oil companies: "There should be a word for when you commit 
treason against an entire planet." As early as 1977, one of Exxon's own 
scientists explained to the company's executives that their products 
were causing a greenhouse effect, and that there would be only "five to 
ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy 
strategies might become critical." By 1982, McKibben writes, "the 
company's scientists concluded that heading off global warming would 
'require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion'" or risk 
"potentially catastrophic events." Exxon used predictions of ice retreat 
to lengthen their drilling season in the Arctic, and raised drilling 
platforms to accommodate sea-level rise. He recounts the deliberate 
strategy of oil executives and their pet politicians to, as one Exxon 
official put it, "emphasize the uncertainty" of climate science. "I've 
lived the last thirty years inside that lie," McKibben realizes, 
"engaged in an endless debate over whether global warming was 'real'--a 
debate in which both sides knew the answer from the beginning."...
- - -
This is where McKibben's spirituality infuses his clear intellect to 
show how we can, and why we must. Despite his detailed and documented 
outrage over the wreckage caused by an "unbelievably small percentage of 
people at the top of the energy heap," he--along with most humans, he 
maintains--still believes in humanity. He then describes two 
"technologies" that could be deployed to begin to reverse the damage.

The first is the simple photovoltaic solar panel. Wallace-Wells contends 
that, while hanging solar panels on our homes might make us feel better, 
we're kidding ourselves that it makes any meaningful dent in the 
continued growth of the fossil fuel industry. But McKibben argues that 
solar energy is already undermining that industry's expansion plans in 
Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. Coal and natural gas 
plants require complex, costly grids to deliver their energy, and 
customers who can afford to pay for them. McKibben visits colorful, 
unlikely places from rural Ghana to Ivory Coast where people with 
inexpensive solar cells are lighting villages, running hospitals, 
starting businesses, and marketing and manufacturing products--all 
without drilling or building networks involving power poles and miles of 
copper wiring. Likewise, the ubiquity of cell phones has eliminated the 
need to string expensive telephone lines. The next time you step 
outside, McKibben is urging, look at all the wires tethering us to an 
energy sector that's killing us. If Africa can dispense with them, why 
can't we? By 2050, according to data he cites, solar alone could provide 
two-thirds of the US's energy--with the rest coming from wind turbines 
and hydroelectric dams--and create thirty-six million jobs.

McKibben's second technology is what he calls "one of the signal 
inventions of our time": nonviolent protest and resistance. He tells 
how, on its very first try, 350.org's utterly quixotic strategy to 
"organize the world" ignited rallies in 181 countries in 2009. Inspired 
by Gandhi--McKibben is a Gandhi Peace Award laureate--and the Sermon on 
the Mount, he makes a surprisingly persuasive case for why the movement 
to stop using carbon-based fuels will ultimately win...[more]
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/08/15/climate-change-burning-down-house/

[The Guardian discusses future]
*Death, blackouts, melting asphalt: ways the climate crisis will change 
how we live*
 From power cuts to infrastructure failure, the impact of climate change 
on US cities will be huge - but many are already innovating to adapt
US cities, where more than 80% of the nation's population lives, are 
disproportionately hit by these changes, not only because of their huge 
populations but because of their existing - often inadequate - 
infrastructure.

Maybe in 50 or 60 years, living in some cities will be unbearable
Kurt Shickman, Global Cool Cities Alliance
In urban areas, heatwaves are exacerbated by vehicles, industrial 
processes and the presence of heat-retaining concrete and asphalt. And 
it is in cities - especially in low-lying poorer areas - where record 
rainfall often accumulates.

"People are coming into urban areas and they cannot be stopped," says 
Chandana Mitra, an associate professor of geosciences at Auburn 
University, who studies the impact of heat on cities. Mitra has 
experienced the impact of climate change in her hometown of Kolkata, 
India, and is now observing it in Auburn, Alabama, and nearby 
Birmingham. "Everyone aspires to be in an urban area and there is chaos."

While the impacts of climate change are fundamentally local, experts say 
heat is one of the most concerning, especially in cities...
- - -
With a string of subsequent record hot years and increasing flooding, 
cities are already dealing with the impacts of a changing climate:

    Deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
    an average of 658 people die every year from heat-related causes.
     From 1999 to 2010, 8,081 heat-related deaths were reported in the
    United States and occurred more commonly among older, younger and
    poorer populations. Urban heat islands retain heat overnight,
    preventing people from sleeping well and leading to even more health
    problems, says Lucy Hutyra, an associate professor of earth and
    environment at Boston University. Air pollution is often worst on
    hot days, and when people leaven windows open for air flow, the
    quality of the air can cause respiratory problems. Warmer, moister
    conditions also mean that heavy rainfall and subsequent flooding is
    on the rise; so far this year 78 people have died as a result,
    according to the National Weather Service.

    Power outages. As experienced by New Yorkers this year, excessive
    heat in conjunction with excess demand for electricity for air
    conditioning can cause the grid - or portions of it - to fail.
    "Energy demand is going to go up," says Shickman. "It's a
    substantial and nonlinear reaction. Our grid is going to be taxed in
    ways I don't think we are prepared for." Shickman says that going
    from an 80F day to a 90F day would require an additional 20-25%
    power. Going to 95F requires almost 40% more power. Excess heat can
    also evaporate water needed to cool power plants, forcing some out
    of commission.

    Infrastructure failures. In addition to electricity grid problems,
    asphalt can melt in excess temperatures; rail tracks expand; and can
    even affect airports - currently some airplanes can't take off from
    Phoenix airport, for example, when the temperature exceeds 118F
    because the air is too thin. Heat is a problem for all areas of city
    governance, said Shickman. "If you ask any sort of department head
    what is your biggest challenge, heat is probably not number one, but
    I guarantee you it's somewhere between number two and number five."
    But, he says, unfortunately there are no "heat czars" to manage the
    issue. Flooding, too, can wreak havoc on a city's infrastructure,
    from blowing out bridges and roads to inundating water treatment plants.

    Economic Impact. According to a 2018 study by Texas A&M University:
    "The growing number of extreme rainfall events that produce intense
    precipitation are resulting in -and will continue to result in -
    increased urban flooding unless steps are taken to mitigate their
    impacts." The 2017 National Climate Assessment concluded: "Heavy
    downpours are increasing nationally, especially over the last three
    to five decades …[and that] … increases in the frequency and
    intensity of extreme precipitation events are projected for all U.S.
    regions." Between 2007 and 2011 alone, urban flooding in Cook
    County, Illinois, resulted in over 176,000 claims or flood losses at
    a cost of $660m (545m).

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/aug/20/death-blackouts-melting-asphalt-ways-the-climate-crisis-will-change-how-we-live
- - -
[Interactive map displays your city]
*What will climate feel like in 60 years*
What will climate where you live feel like in 60 years?
Over the next few decades, global climate is expected to undergo a 
dramatic transformation in an ongoing response to greenhouse gas 
emissions. What do we expect future climate to feel like and how might 
this change if we reduce emissions?
We answer these questions by finding the present-day location that has a 
climate most similar to that expected by the 2080's in each of 540 
cities (shown as purple dots on the map). We do this for different rates 
of emissions and a variety of climate models.
We used 12 different measures to describe climate, including minimum and 
maximum temperature and total precipitation for winter, spring, summer 
and fall. We considered two emissions scenarios - one that assumes high 
current emissions continue and one that assumes emissions peak 
mid-century and then decline. We also considered numerous future climate 
forecasts as generated by 27 different climate models.
An interesting, but not necessarily surprising finding is that there are 
no perfect matches. In other words, for no city did we find a 
present-day climate that is identical to a city's climate in 2080. In 
fact, because of the magnitude of expected climate change, for many 
cities the "best" match is not all that similar. This means that many 
cities could experience a future climate unlike anything present in 
North America today, especially if rates of greenhouse gas emissions are 
not reduced.
Select a map type
Select an emissions level
Select level of detail
Average & 27 individual forecasts
https://fitzlab.shinyapps.io/cityapp/

[long article by Dave Roberts]
*Fracking may be a bigger climate problem than we thought*
The mysterious recent spike in methane emissions? It just might be US 
fracking.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/15/20805136/climate-change-fracking-methane-emissions

[Tamino is the expert on global warming statistics]
*Global Warming: How Fast?*
Posted on August 20, 2019 | 1 Comment
Here's the annual average temperature for the planet Earth, from 1880 to 
now, according to data from NASA:..
- -
Clearly, Earth got hotter. Just as clearly, it doesn't just follow a 
smooth trend over time, it also fluctuates from year to year, 
substantially, apparently randomly. Just as clearly, the trend it has 
followed has not been a straight line. Sometimes it was warming slowly, 
or even cooling off (especially during the early years), other times it 
was warming rapidly (especially recently)...
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/global-warming-how-fast/

[One area examined]
*How hot, exactly, is LA going to get?*
Don't be fooled by this year's mild weather--blistering heat waves will 
likely become a lot more frequent
By Elijah Chiland  Aug 19, 2019,
- -
A Washington Post analysis released last week found that average annual 
temperatures in Los Angeles County rose 2.3 degrees celsius--or 4.1 
degrees Fahrenheit--between 1895 and 2018. LA is one of 71 counties 
nationwide where temperatures jumped more than 2 degrees celsius during 
that time--a threshold that climate scientists have warned could be 
disastrous on a global scale.

The warming isn't slowing down. By 2050, the number of days per year 
when temperatures in the Downtown area climb higher than 95 degrees 
could nearly triple, according to UCLA study released in 2015.
- -
In 2006, temperatures in Woodland Hills eclipsed 100 degrees on 21 
consecutive days, reaching 119 degrees on July 22--the hottest 
temperature ever recorded within LA city limits. The heat wave was 
eventually linked to more than 350 deaths across Southern California.

Residents of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys will likely 
continue to weather far more extreme heat days than those living in the 
LA Basin in coming decades.
- - -
https://la.curbed.com/2019/8/19/20726773/los-angeles-hotter-temperature-climate-change

[tax laws suppress speech]
*Canada election: Charities warned against climate change ads*
Canada's election watchdog has warned environmentalists that saying 
climate change is real could break the law.

The issue arose because one party running in October's election denies 
climate change is a threat.
That has led Elections Canada to warn groups that running paid 
advertisements about climate change could be considered partisan activity.

Advocates called the guidance "ludicrous" and say it will dampen urgent 
climate discussions.

The UN has called for decisive political action by 2020 to put an end to 
climate change.

"The guidance is extremely troubling," Stephen Cornish, the CEO of the 
David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental charity, told the BBC.

"We would have to bury the scientific consensus around climate change 
when we should be ramping up our activities."...
- -
f an environmental group decides to register, it could threaten their 
charitable status, since tax-exempt non-profits are not supposed to 
engage in partisan activity...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49400492

[irony or compartementalization? - some clips from the article]
*What Greenland Might Have Taught Trump about Warming*
The ice-covered island, which is not for sale, is on the front lines of 
climate change
By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on August 19, 2019
- - -
Trump is said to have developed the idea in part over an interest in 
Greenland's vast natural resources--an abundance of minerals, oil and 
teeming fish stocks, not to mention its breathtaking natural landscapes. 
Greenland's strategic location in the north Atlantic Ocean is also 
thought to appeal to national security interests...
- -
Minerals and melting
Anyone interested in Greenland's natural wealth would be forced to take 
note of its rapidly vanishing ice. As the ice sheet melts and recedes, 
there's increasing access to the island's stores of zinc, copper, iron, 
uranium and certain rare earth minerals, sparking increasing national 
discussions about the territory's economic future...
- - -
Ice in the ocean
Recent surveys have suggested that the waters off the Greenland coast 
may also hold potential for oil production. It remains controversial, 
with strong opposition from environmental groups citing the impacts of 
drilling. Nonetheless, some companies have already planned or commenced 
exploratory drilling in the region...
- -
Warming, by land and by sea

Rising temperatures are contributing to noticeable changes in the Arctic 
ecosystem, with implications for the hunting and fishing industries in 
Greenland.

Fishing is of particular importance. Greenland's government estimates 
that the industry accounts for about 85% of the country's exports and 
employs more than a fifth of the workforce.

Warming waters are expected to affect the region's fisheries in a few 
different ways. Some species that have previously been scarce in the icy 
waters, such as mackerel, already seem to be increasing. On the other 
hand, scientists have predicted that other types of catch, such as 
shrimp, may begin to decline...
- -
Altogether, if Trump's interest in Greenland was primarily linked to its 
considerable natural resources, it would be nearly impossible to ignore 
or deny the influence of climate change. The effects of global warming 
are apparent in every aspect of the island's life and economy, and its 
natural landscape is one of the most dramatically shifting places on Earth.

On the other hand, these are all lessons Trump might have already 
learned at home in the United States. Thawing permafrost and melting 
glaciers in Alaska, raging wildfires in California, rapid erosion in 
Louisiana, extreme flooding in the Midwest, the destructive power of 
intensifying hurricanes on the coasts--they're all affecting the daily 
lives of U.S. residents and the national economy.

If these issues haven't already taught the president a thing or two 
about climate change, it's possible that even buying Greenland might not 
have done the trick, after all.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-greenland-might-have-taught-trump-about-warming/

[Documentary - check it, it may be available now]
*Bonus trailer*
Next Tuesday, a documentary called Blowout will be released on Amazon 
Video by Newsy, in partnership with the Associated Press, the Texas 
Tribune, and the Center for Public Integrity. The producers claim to 
have some new information about the local health impacts of living near 
oil and gas infrastructure, including increased incidence of cancers, 
childhood leukemia, preterm births, and upper respiratory problems. 
Should be worth checking out.
"Blowout" (Trailer)
Newsy
Published on Aug 12, 2019
Reporters, scientists, and citizens trace the fallout of a new American 
fossil fuel boom. From the oil fields of West Texas to tanker traffic 
busting the Panama Canal at its seams to an energy revolution in Asia, 
"Blowout" takes a deep dive into American energy's global impacts on 
profits, public health, and climate change.
Coming to Newsy and Amazon Prime August 20.
Visit newsy.com/go for all the ways to watch Newsy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=54&v=VsqEw2NTf5g

*This Day in Climate History - August 21, 2007- from D.R. Tucker*
August 21, 2007: U.S. District Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong rules that 
the George W. Bush administration violated the 1990 Global Change 
Research Act (signed into law, ironically enough, by Bush's father) by 
not producing a legally required climate assessment report. The report 
would finally be released in May 2008.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/08/22/court-rules-that-bush-admin-unlawfully-failed-to-produce-scientific-assessment-of-global-change/ 

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PRESS/global-warming-08-21-2007.html 

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PROGRAMS/policy/energy/complaint-national-assessment.pdf 

http://web.archive.org/web/20080705212954/http://www.usda.gov/oce/global_change/sap_2007_FinalReport.htm 

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