[TheClimate.Vote] February 10, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 10, 2019/

[about the Green New Deal]
*With the Green New Deal, Democrats Present a Radical Proposition for 
Combatting Climate Change*
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/with-the-green-new-deal-democrats-present-a-radical-proposition-for-combatting-climate-change
- - -
[video explanation]
*The Green New Deal (w/ Varshini Prakash and Brad Johnson) - 
Hotpocalypse - Episode 5*
Hotpocalypse
Published on Feb 8, 2019
Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement joins us to discuss all the 
excitement around the Green New Deal, the most ambitious plan for 
climate action in our nation's history. Also, Climate Brad Johnson of 
End Climate Silence also joins us to discuss how climate change is 
destroying all of the places listed by Trump in his State of the Union 
speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94o4LeNdAGw

[The New Yorker]
*As Climate Change Returns to Capitol Hill, Disagreements Remain Among 
Democrats*
n Wednesday morning, Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science 
for the Union of Concerned Scientists, sat before the House Committee on 
Energy and Commerce and calmly, firmly, testified about the high cost of 
climate change. "During the recent outbreak of extreme cold weather that 
gripped large parts of the nation," she said, "a University of Iowa 
student and a University of Vermont student were counted among at least 
twenty-one people who perished from consequences likely related to the 
dangerous cold temperatures and wind chill." Recent studies, she 
explained, indicate that the warming global climate can, 
counterintuitively, "cause unusually cold temperatures at mid-latitudes 
by disrupting the normal winter-season polar vortex in the 
stratosphere." She compared the phenomenon to "a weak seal on a freezer 
door that periodically allows frigid air to flood into the room while 
warmer air rushes into the freezer." The icy blast broke wind-chill 
records in the Midwest and Eastern U.S.; meanwhile, above-freezing 
temperatures and rainfall in Alaska forced the cancellation of 
qualifying races for the Iditarod.

The hearing was the first on climate change that the committee had held 
since 2013, when Republicans hosted one critical of President Barack 
Obama's Climate Action Plan. Simultaneously, the House Committee on 
Natural Resources held its own climate-change hearing--its first since 
2009. With the Democrats back in power, everyone was suddenly elbowing 
for their patch of the long-desiccated turf. "We need to identify the 
practical ways to stop climate change," Representative Scott Peters, a 
Democrat from California, said. "Whether it's deregulation in 
hydropower, putting a price on carbon, carbon capture, research and 
development--feasible is not a euphemism for lack of ambition. But we 
have to do this in a bipartisan way. If not, it won't pass, and it won't 
last." The committee chairman, Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New 
Jersey, also emphasized the need for bipartisan backing. "In New Jersey, 
there's all kinds of pipelines being built, and different people are for 
it or against it." He suggested that repairing and replacing old, leaky, 
and dangerous natural-gas pipelines was one area where there should be 
consensus support, "not only because of the pollution they can save but 
also because it leads to high-quality job creation."

While the hearings signalled some degree of new momentum, the repeated 
calls for bipartisanship were telling. The Democratic leadership seemed 
willing to go only so far in advancing climate talks on Capitol Hill. On 
Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the names of the new 
Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which will have no legislative 
or subpoena power. (Pelosi created the committee in 2007, after she 
became the House Speaker, and Republicans disbanded it in 2011, when 
they regained control.) The chairwoman will be Kathy Castor, of Florida, 
who has a mostly unknown record, outside her district, for environmental 
and emissions-reduction policy. Forty-one of the House's four hundred 
and thirty-five members have pledged "to not take contributions from the 
oil, gas, and coal industry, and instead prioritize the health of our 
families, climate, and democracy over fossil fuel industry profits." But 
only one pledge-taker in that group, the freshman representative Mike 
Levin, from California, is on the new climate committee. The rest, as 
E&E News reported, have fossil-fuel connections; during the 2018 
election cycle, they or their political-action committees received two 
hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars from the oil, gas, and 
electric-utilities industries, and many, including Castor, 
Representative Ben Ray Luján, of New Mexico, and Representative Suzanne 
Bonamici, of Oregon, also have investments in fossil-fuel assets.

Notably not named to the committee was Representative Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez, who arguably has played the biggest role in jumpstarting 
the government's renewed focus on climate change. (Pelosi did invite 
Ocasio-Cortez to serve on the panel, but she declined due to "timing and 
logistics.") Instead, Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, a Democratic senator 
from Massachusetts, introduced a much-hyped resolution for a Green New 
Deal. Ocasio-Cortez began to push the idea when she appeared, in 
November, at a sit-in in Pelosi's office, which was led by the Sunrise 
Movement, a group of teen-agers and college students calling for a 
hundred per cent renewable energy and an end to fossil-fuel money in 
politics. The Green New Deal resolution, a non-binding document, 
outlines an ambitious plan for a "ten-year national mobilization" on "a 
scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era." The central 
goal is to achieve net-zero carbon emissions through funding and 
investments in community-led projects; repairs and upgrades to 
infrastructure; and a vast expansion in clean and renewable energy to 
meet a hundred per cent of national demand. Although conservatives have 
blasted the proposal as an impossible fantasy--a Wall Street Journal 
editorialist called it a "Dem parody bill"--the proposal dialled back 
some of the Sunrise Movement's original demands, most notably by 
omitting a deadline for the complete phase-out of coal, oil, and gas, 
and by acknowledging the need for a fleet of energy sources, not only 
renewables but nuclear power and hydropower as well. In that regard, the 
resolution's most substantive and granular clauses are not far-fetched 
but a statement of what's feasible to avoid catastrophe.

The point of the declaration is to put increasing pressure on the 
Democratic Party, especially Presidential candidates, to treat climate 
change with the urgency it demands. Since the Sunrise Movement and 
Ocasio-Cortez first raised the idea, the Green New Deal has mostly 
functioned as a rallying cry with little actual substance. Thursday's 
resolution provided the political manifesto, a first offer on what 
should be a top priority if Democrats take back the White House next 
year. For now, President Trump, who did not mention climate change once 
during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, is not going to 
sign a Green New Deal bill that looks anything like what Ocasio-Cortez 
and Markey laid out. But the House Democrats are taking other steps. In 
January, for example, they sent a letter to the Pentagon asking for a 
revised report on climate vulnerabilities, saying that the report the 
Department of Defense recently published did not address what Congress 
had requested: a list of the military installations most vulnerable to 
climate, and the costs of mitigating potential damages.

As the House deliberates an approach to climate policy, global 
conditions continue to deteriorate. Also on Wednesday morning, 
scientists from NASA and NOAA--two keepers of the world's temperature 
and climate data--announced their analyses of 2018 trends. According to 
each of their independent conclusions, 2018 was the fourth-warmest year 
on record since 1880. (2016 holds the record for warmest overall, 
followed by 2017 and 2015, which were nearly equal.) "The global 
temperature series resembles someone riding up an escalator over time, 
but jumping up and down while on that escalator," Deke Arndt, the head 
of climate monitoring for noaa, said. In the Arctic, the rate of warming 
was between two and three times faster than the global mean, and, at 
both poles, Greenland and Antarctica lost mass from their ice sheets, 
contributing to sea-level rise.

The United States had its third-wettest year in history, and nine states 
east of the Appalachian Mountains had their wettest ever. Drought 
persisted all year in the Southwest, around the Four Corners, and in 
parts of North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Arndt and his counterpart 
at nasa, Gavin Schmidt, also reported that there were fourteen 
weather-related disasters that each cost more than a billion dollars in 
this country, double the average of the end of the turn of the century. 
"Looking at those billion-dollar disasters, it seems every part of the 
country was affected by something," Betsy Weatherhead, a climate 
scientist at Jupiter Intelligence, which analyzes climate risks to 
infrastructure assets and properties, told me. "Hailstorms in the middle 
of the country. Fires in the West. Tropical storms on the East Coast. 
Every part of the country has its exposure, which makes it so important 
to look at this regionally."

But, when it comes to mitigating looming disasters and achieving carbon 
neutrality, state and local officials can only do so much. This week's 
progress in Washington is promising, but deep fractures remain in the 
Democratic Party on how to aggressively pursue solutions to the issue. 
Pelosi said that the select climate committee was not specifically 
tasked with pursuing the Green New Deal, and, as Politico reported, she 
referred to the resolution from Ocasio-Cortez and Markey as a 
"suggestion." "The green dream, or whatever they call it," Pelosi said, 
"nobody knows what it is but they're for it, right?" Without a unified 
front, the Democrats risk wasting valuable time that should be devoted 
to enacting federal policies to reduce emissions by as much as three per 
cent a year over the next several years--the necessary amount if the 
U.S. is to meet its climate targets under the Paris Agreement. If 
emissions are an accelerator on the climate, Schmidt said during his 
presentation, "We still collectively have our foot on that accelerator. 
While there are some indications in some parts of the world that people 
are working quite hard to reduce those emissions, collectively, we are 
not doing so."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/as-climate-change-returns-to-capitol-hill-disagreements-remain-among-democrats


[baby steps]
*Obscure Wisconsin board reverses climate change ban*
MADISON, Wis. - A ban on employees of an obscure Wisconsin board that 
prevented them from addressing climate change has been lifted.

The state Board of Commissioners of Public Lands instituted the ban in 
2015, driven by concerns from two Republican office holders. Newly 
elected Democrats who replaced them joined with Democratic Secretary of 
State Doug La Follette on Monday voted unanimously to reverse the ban.

Board chairwoman and state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski said in an 
interview Friday that the ban prevented staff from considering factors 
that affect the value of state investments, including 77,000 of timber land.

The ban was put in place when the board's executive director was Tia 
Nelson, the daughter of Earth Day founder, former U.S. Sen. Gaylord 
Nelson. Tia Nelson left the job three months after the ban was enacted.
https://www.channel3000.com/news/obscure-wisconsin-board-reverses-climate-change-ban-1/1006341661


[Beckwith discusses isostatic rebound - video 15 mins]
*Surprising Effects from Rapid Glacier Melt in Greenland and Antarctica: 
2 of 2*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Feb 9, 2019
Glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are rapidly melting due to Abrupt 
Climate Change, and melt rates are doubling with a period of roughly 7 
years. This is exponential, after 7 years melt rates are double (2x), 
after 14 years rates are 4x, after 21 years rates are 8x, etc...In this 
video and the next I discuss consequences that are rarely considered, 
like reduced gravitational pull near the glaciers, isostatic rebound, 
and reduction of vertical ocean mixing from surface freshwater lensing 
effects, leading to increased basal ice sheet melting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA1y73Dje4U
- - -
[research paper published in Nature]
*Global environmental consequences of twenty-first-century ice-sheet melt*
Abstract
Government policies currently commit us to surface warming of three to 
four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, which will 
lead to enhanced ice-sheet melt. Ice-sheet discharge was not explicitly 
included in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5, so effects on 
climate from this melt are not currently captured in the simulations 
most commonly used to inform governmental policy. Here we show, using 
simulations of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets constrained by 
satellite-based measurements of recent changes in ice mass, that 
increasing meltwater from Greenland will lead to substantial slowing of 
the Atlantic overturning circulation, and that meltwater from Antarctica 
will trap warm water below the sea surface, creating a positive feedback 
that increases Antarctic ice loss. In our simulations, future ice-sheet 
melt enhances global temperature variability and contributes up to 25 
centimetres to sea level by 2100. However, uncertainties in the way in 
which future changes in ice dynamics are modelled remain, underlining 
the need for continued observations and comprehensive multi-model 
assessments.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0889-9#data-availability


[more by 2100]
*Two sea level studies have some good news, bad news*
A second look at a shocking 2016 study, plus the climate impacts of 
melting ice.
SCOTT K. JOHNSON -
One of the most shocking climate science studies in recent years came in 
2016. That study, from David Pollard at Penn State and Rob DeConto at 
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, showed that adding a couple 
physical processes to their model of the Antarctic ice sheets caused it 
to produce significantly more sea level rise this century. In their 
simulation, shrinking Arctic glaciers raised sea level by a full meter 
by 2100--and things only picked up from there.

New model shows Antarctica alone could raise sea level a meter by 2100
These simulations were much closer to hypotheses than to iron-clad 
predictions. The model showed these processes--the collapse of ice 
cliffs above a certain height and pressure-driven wedging apart of ice 
crevasses by meltwater--could make a huge difference. But such scenarios 
haven't been studied well enough in the real world to know if the model 
was representing them well. Luckily, that task climbed the priority list 
after the work was published.

A newly published study led by Tamsin Edwards at King's College London 
first dove into DeConto's and Pollard's simulations for some clarity. 
This team thought they had a better way of characterizing the range of 
results in the simulations to find the highest probability answers. They 
didn't have the supercomputer time to repeat the simulations and add new 
ones, so instead they "emulated" the simulations by representing the 
existing ones with some statistics. That allows them to fill in the gaps 
between the limited number of simulations.

The original study had applied a common method of varying the numbers 
for factors that aren't precisely known, generating different model 
versions spanning the possibilities. They had then used those different 
versions to simulate different periods of sea level rise in the past. 
Versions that couldn't match the past were thrown out before simulating 
the future.
- -
In their model, the Atlantic conveyor belt slows by about 15 percent by 
2100. This is well short of the total halting of the conveyor depicted 
in the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow (which also gets the 
consequences of such a change completely wrong), but 15 percent is very 
significant. The change actually reduces the average global temperature 
by about 0.3 Celsius, but more importantly, it greatly increases the 
year-to-year variability of air and ocean temperatures in the region. 
That implies that global climate models can't leave out this meltwater, 
as it could have a surprisingly large influence this century.

So while it would be great comfort to rule out some of the worst-case 
scenarios for future sea level rise, lower sea level rise scenarios may 
carry more risk than initially thought.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/studies-question-worst-case-sea-level-rise-but-lower-rise-aint-great/


[Some call it compost]
*These probiotics for plants help farms suck up extra carbon dioxide*
A mix of fungi and bacteria added to the soil makes agriculture more 
productive–and helps stop climate change.
On thousands of acres of orange groves in Florida, farmers are adding 
beneficial fungi and bacteria to the soil, which makes the oranges grow 
bigger and sweeter–and makes the soil suck up enough extra CO2 so that 
each acre offsets the emissions from a passenger car. Call it probiotics 
for soil.

"Agricultural soils are one of the world's largest carbon sinks," says 
Paul Zorner, CEO of Locus Agricultural Solutions, the startup that makes 
the particular combination of probiotics in use on the farms. "If 
they're treated right, you're going to absorb a lot of carbon dioxide 
out of the atmosphere."

Unlike the ocean, which has absorbed the brunt of human emissions so 
far–becoming more acidic and hotter and threatening marine life as that 
happens–soil can benefit from extra carbon. "Soil is the exact 
opposite," Zorner says. "Soil actually enriches its productivity when 
you're sequestering carbon, and so the soil and crop and ultimately the 
growers benefit by sucking as much CO2 from the atmosphere to the plant 
into the soil as possible."
When plants take up CO2 during photosynthesis, creating sugar that they 
use for growth, they also release sugars through their roots, attracting 
microbes. Healthy soil is full of these microbes, which then keep the 
carbon in the ground. But conventional farming–including the 
overapplication of chemical fertilizer–has destroyed the microbial 
balance. Adding "probiotics" helps restore it...
-- - -
The product, called "Rhizolizer," increases production; on one 38-acre 
orange grove where the company tested it last year, the grove saw a 14% 
increase in yields by weight. Other tests showed that it increases 
"brix," a measure of sweetness, in fruit like oranges and strawberries. 
For farmers, the immediate benefit may be better sales. But there are 
longer-term benefits for the climate. In another 2018 test at a 
different Florida orange grove, the part of the farm treated with the 
product took up an extra 4.38 metric tons of CO2 per acre. Farmers could 
eventually be paid in the form of carbon credits for making the change; 
Locus is working on the first steps to try to make it possible to sell 
this service in carbon markets.
"I think people are really waking up to the fact that agricultural soils 
really are a remarkable part of the solution [to climate change]," says 
Zorner. "We need to empower growers to do this."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90303108/these-probiotics-for-plants-help-farms-suck-up-extra-carbon-dioxide


[Washington Post]
*The glaring hole in Trump's address: Climate change – "Trump and, more 
to the point, the fossil fuel interests whose bidding he is doing, have 
weaponized the public's poor understanding of science"*
Trump amid the flames: 'This is fine'. President Trump's State of the 
Union address on 5 February 2019 zigzagged between paeans to unity and 
sops to his hardcore base. He eulogized World War II soldiers and then 
wheeled on immigrants and leftist rivals at home. But absent amid the 
nativist demagoguery and partisan jockeying was any reference to the 
threat looming above all others: climate change. Graphic: Al Drago - The 
Washington Post
By Ishaan Tharoor
6 February 2019
(The Washington Post) – President Trump's State of the Union address 
Tuesday night zigzagged between paeans to unity and sops to his hardcore 
base. He eulogized World War II soldiers and then wheeled on immigrants 
and leftist rivals at home. But absent amid the nativist demagoguery and 
partisan jockeying was any reference to the threat looming above all 
others: climate change.

That's no surprise. Trump is an avowed climate skeptic who casts 
environmentalist efforts as challenges to American sovereignty, not ways 
to stave off a planet-wide disaster. As much of the United States 
endured a deep freeze last month, Trump took to Twitter to plead for 
more "global warming."

Experts quickly noted that the president was confusing weather with 
climate -- and that the warming of the Arctic could lead to sharper, 
snowier cold spells in the North American winter.

"Only with an ill-informed citizenry could you plausibly dismiss the 
consensus of the world's scientists based upon a single cold spell," 
wrote climate scientist Michael E. Mann. "Trump and, more to the point, 
the fossil fuel interests whose bidding he is doing have weaponized the 
public's poor understanding of science."

Trump is certainly at odds with the global scientific community -- 
including leading scientists in the United States and even in his own 
government. In November, the Trump administration tried to bury the 
terrifying findings of its own National Climate Assessment by releasing 
it the day after Thanksgiving. In that report, researchers affiliated 
with a number of federal agencies offered alarming conclusions about the 
increased risk of natural catastrophes because of the changing climate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/02/06/glaring-hole-trumps-address-climate-change/?utm_term=.2db917137be5


*This Day in Climate History - February 10, 2007 - from D.R. Tucker*
February 10, 2007:
Announcing his bid for the White House, Illinois Senator Barack Obama 
declares, "Let us be the generation that finally frees America from the 
tyranny of oil."
http://youtu.be/1xFCPn84mK0
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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