[TheClimate.Vote] February 13, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 13, 2019/

[Important classic from Yale]
*Global Warming's Six Americas*
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas/
- -
CLIMATE NOTE · Feb 12, 2019
*Americans are Increasingly "Alarmed" About Global Warming*
Our prior research has categorized Americans into six groups - Global 
Warming's Six Americas - based on their climate change beliefs, 
attitudes, and behaviors. The "Alarmed" are the most worried about 
global warming and most supportive of aggressive action to reduce carbon 
pollution. In contrast, the "Dismissive" do not believe global warming 
is happening or human-caused and strongly oppose climate action. [A 
short "Six Americas" quiz is now publicly available online.]

Our latest survey in December 2018 finds that the Alarmed segment is at 
an all-time high (29%) - which is double that segment's size in 2013 and 
an 8-point increase since March 2018. Conversely, the Dismissive (9%) 
and Doubtful (9%) segments have both decreased over the last five years. 
The percentage of Americans in these two segments has declined by 12 
points since 2013.
Although the size of the Concerned segment has remained relatively 
consistent since 2013, this doesn't mean that those who were previously 
Concerned did not change their minds. Rather, it is likely that many who 
were previously Concerned became Alarmed, and many who were previously 
Cautious or Disengaged became Concerned. Over the past five years, the 
U.S. population as a whole has moved away from the Doubtful and 
Dismissive segments and toward the Alarmed and Concerned segments.
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans-are-increasingly-alarmed-about-global-warming/


[Los Angeles Times]
*As lawsuits over climate change heat up, oil industry steps up attacks 
on its critics*
The oil industry has been depicting itself lately as the target of a 
conspiracy by scientists, local government officials and climate change 
activists to make it look bad...
- -
The plaintiffs assert that the companies freely promoted the use of 
their products even though they were aware of the products' effect on 
global warming -- information the industry allegedly suppressed for 
years. The municipalities are asking that the companies be forced to 
help pay for the damage wreaked by climate change, including drought, 
wildfires, sea level rise and extremes of heat and precipitation. Since 
the filing of the California cases, similar lawsuits have been filed by 
Rhode Island, Washington's King County (that is, Seattle), Baltimore and 
New York City.
- - -
Oreskes and Supran were the authors of a 2017 study detailing the 
industry's determined, decades-long effort to suppress scientific 
evidence of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, 
despite warnings by its own scientific researchers that the phenomenon 
was genuine, dangerous and accelerating.

We reported here on their study, which focused on Exxon Mobil. They 
compared hundreds of Exxon Mobil's internal reports and peer-reviewed 
research papers with its advertising -- especially paid "advertorials" 
the company placed in the op-ed section of the New York Times from 1972 
through 2001. The authors concluded that Exxon Mobil had systematically 
"misled non-scientific audiences about climate science."..
- - -
The municipalities also are hoping to take advantage of California's 
"public nuisance" doctrine, which holds that business can be held 
responsible for damage done by its products even if their usage was 
standard practice at the time.

The public nuisance argument was central to a lawsuit brought by 
California municipalities against lead paint manufacturers that 
concluded in 2017 with an order that the companies pay to clean up 
residual lead in dwellings that could pose a health hazard to children 
in those homes.

There's no question that the cities and counties face a long and arduous 
road to saddling the oil industry with the responsibility for climate 
change and the expense of addressing its impacts. The lead paint lawsuit 
lasted 17 years before the verdict was made final.

But there's also no question that the industry did its best to hide what 
it knew about the prospects of global warming and its products' role in 
it. The latest misleading attack on its critics shows, if nothing else, 
that it still hasn't learned to tell the truth, the whole truth and 
nothing but the truth.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-climate-change-lawsuits-20190212-story.html


[Risk evaluation]
*Climate and economic risks 'threaten 2008-style systemic collapse'*
Environmental and social problems could interact in global breakdown, 
report says
The gathering storm of human-caused threats to climate, nature and 
economy pose a danger of systemic collapse comparable to the 2008 
financial crisis, according to a new report that calls for urgent and 
radical reform to protect political and social systems.

The study says the combination of global warming, soil infertility, 
pollinator loss, chemical leaching and ocean acidification is creating a 
"new domain of risk", which is hugely underestimated by policymakers 
even though it may pose the greatest threat in human history...
- -
These processes amplify and interact with existing social and economic 
problems, potentially threatening systemic collapse similar to the 
2008-9 financial crisis. Back then, a subprime mortgage crisis in the US 
exposed excessive risk-taking and triggered a global panic and the 
deepest recession since the 1930s. The IPPR study envisages a similar 
breakdown could occur if the US suffers relentlessly worsening damage 
from hurricane floods and forest fires, which would prompt a rush of 
insurance claims and threaten the viability of financial institutions...
"In the extreme, environmental breakdown could trigger catastrophic 
breakdown of human systems, driving a rapid process of 'runaway 
collapse' in which economic, social and political shocks cascade through 
the globally linked system - in much the same way as occurred in the 
wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-08," the paper warns...

There are other potential cascades. The paper warns of the vulnerability 
of food systems that rely on just five animal and 12 plant species to 
provide 75% of the world's nutrition. The lack of diversity weakens 
resilience to the growing risks of climate disruption, soil 
deterioration, pollution and pollinator loss. Previous research - cited 
by the IPPR - estimates a one-in-20 chance per decade of a simultaneous 
failure of maize production in the US and China, which provide 60% of 
the global supply...
- - -
Studies of financial and social tipping points are scarcer, but concern 
is growing. Last month, the top three global risks identified by the 
World Economic Forum were extreme weather, climate policy failure and 
natural disasters. Water shortages, accelerating biodiversity loss and 
large-scale involuntary migration also ranked in the top 10.

"Of all risks, it is in relation to the environment that the world is 
most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe," its annual risk report 
warns. "The results of climate inaction are becoming increasingly clear. 
The accelerating pace of biodiversity loss is a particular concern."

The IPPR report, which launches a wider 18-month project on this topic, 
urges policymakers to grapple with these risks as a priority, to 
accelerate the restoration of natural systems, and to push harder on the 
"green new deal" transition towards renewable energy. In particular, it 
says, "the younger generations will need help in finding the energy and 
a sense of control that often eludes them as they begin to realise the 
enormity of inheriting a rapidly destabilising world".

Wider discussion is the first step, according to Laybourn-Langton, who 
said he was shocked by the paucity of public debate relative to the 
scale of the problems.

"People are not frank enough about this. If it is discussed at all, it 
is the sort of thing mentioned at the end of a conversation, that makes 
everyone look at the floor, but we don't have time for that now," he 
said. "It's appearing more in media, but we are not doing enough."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/12/climate-and-economic-risks-threaten-2008-style-systemic-collapse


[Bubbling up from below]
*The unlikely contributor to Minn.'s greenhouse gas emissions: Your 
favorite lake*
...Minnesota's lakes have always released greenhouse gases. But 
scientists have only recently realized just how significant those carbon 
dioxide and methane emissions are.

Listen to Story - Audio
https://www.mprnews.org/listen?name=/minnesota/news/features/2019/02/12/190212_dunbar_20190212_64.mp3

A close look at the state's most recent report on the sources of 
greenhouse gas emissions reveals a new category: Inland waters, like 
lakes and streams and rivers and wetlands. And because emissions in that 
category mostly come from methane -- a greenhouse gas much more potent 
than carbon dioxide -- they add up fast...
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/12/how-lakes-contribute-to-minnesotas-greenhouse-gas-emissions 



[Remember the Dakota Access Pipeline? - $38 million]
*North Dakota to sue feds over pipeline protest police costs*
Environment Associated Press ·    Feb 12, 2019
North Dakota will sue the federal government to try to recoup the $38 
million it spent policing the prolonged protests against the Dakota 
Access oil pipeline -- a tactic one expert believes has little chance of 
success.
The Army Corps of Engineers didn't respond to an administrative claim 
filed last July, so a lawsuit is the next step, Attorney General Wayne 
Stenehjem said Tuesday. He didn't have an estimate on the cost, which 
will be funded either through his department's existing budget or 
through a state fund set up for such litigation.

Justice Department spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle declined to comment.

Thousands of opponents of the $3.8 billion pipeline that's been moving 
North Dakota oil to Illinois since June 2017 gathered in southern North 
Dakota in 2016 and early 2017, camping on federal land and often 
clashing with police, resulting in 761 arrests over six months.

North Dakota contends the Corps allowed protesters to illegally camp 
without a federal permit. The Corps has said protesters weren't evicted 
due to free speech reasons.

University of St. Thomas law professor Gregory Sisk, an expert on civil 
litigation with the federal government, considers North Dakota's case "a 
long shot." He said lawsuits that essentially allege the government 
failed at its job typically don't succeed, and he gives North Dakota "a 
1 in 10 chance."
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/12/north-dakota-to-sue-feds-over-pipeline-protest-police-costs


[look to the past to see the future]
*Today's Earth looks a lot like it did 115,000 years ago. All we're 
missing is massive sea level rise.*
New research suggests the planet is already paralleling the most recent 
major warm period in its past. Now the only question is how fast 
Antarctica could collapse.
- -
The finding arose when a team of researchers working on Baffin Island, 
in northeastern Canada, sampled the remains of ancient plants that had 
emerged from beneath fast-retreating mountain glaciers. And they found 
that the plants were very old indeed, and had probably last grown in 
these spots some 115,000 years ago. That's the last time the areas were 
actually not covered by ice, the scientists believe...
- -
"It's very hard to come up with any other explanation, except that at 
least in that one area where we're working ... the last century is as 
warm as any century in the last 115,000 years," said Gifford Miller, a 
geologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who led the research 
on Baffin Island.

But if Miller is right, there's a big problem. We have geological 
records of sea levels from the Eemian. And the oceans, scientists 
believe, were 20 to 30 feet higher.

Some extra water likely came from Greenland, whose ice currently 
contains over 20 feet of potential sea level rise. But it couldn't have 
been just Greenland, because that entire ice sheet did not melt at the 
time. That's why researchers also suspect a collapse of the most 
vulnerable part of Antarctica, the West Antarctic ice sheet. This region 
could easily supply another 10 feet of sea level rise, or more...
- - -
"There's no way to get tens of meters of sea level rise without getting 
tens of meters of sea level rise from Antarctica," said Rob DeConto, an 
Antarctic expert at the University of Massachusetts.

Trying to understand how Antarctica will fall

Scientists are now intensely debating precisely which processes could 
have played out then -- and how soon they'll play out again. After all, 
West Antarctica has already been shown, once again, to be beginning a 
retreat.

Some researchers, including DeConto, think they have found a key process 
-- called marine ice cliff collapse -- that can release a lot of sea 
level rise from West Antarctica in a hurry. But they're being challenged 
by another group, whose members suspect the changes in the past were 
slow -- and will be again.

To understand the dispute, consider the vulnerable setting of West 
Antarctica itself. Essentially, it's an enormous block of ice mostly 
submerged in very cold water. Its glaciers sit up against the ocean in 
all directions, and toward the center of the ice sheet, the seafloor 
slopes rapidly downward, even as the surface of the ice sheet itself 
grows much thicker, as much as two miles thick in total...

As much as a mile and a half of that ice rests below the sea level, but 
there is still plenty of ice above it, too.

So if the gateway glaciers start to move backward -- particularly a 
glacier named Thwaites, by far the largest of them -- the ocean would 
quickly have access to much thicker ice.

  The idea is that during the Eemian, this whole area was not a block of 
ice at all, but an unnamed sea. Somehow, the ocean got in, toppling the 
outer glacial defenses, and gradually setting all of West Antarctica 
afloat and on course to melting.

DeConto, with his colleague David Pollard, built a model that looked to 
the Eemian, and another ancient warm period called the Pliocene, to try 
to understand how this could happen.

In particular, they included two processes that can remove glaciers. 
One, dubbed 'marine ice sheet instability,' describes a situation in 
which a partially submerged glacier gets deeper and thicker as you move 
toward its center. In this configuration, warm water can cause a glacier 
to move backward and downhill, exposing ever thicker ice to the ocean -- 
and thicker ice flows outward faster.

So the loss feeds upon itself.
Marine ice sheet instability is probably underway already in West 
Antarctica, but in the model, it wasn't enough. DeConto and Pollard also 
added another process that they say is currently playing out in 
Greenland, at a large glacier called Jakobshavn.

Jakobshavn is moving backward down an undersea hill slope, just in the 
way that it is feared the much larger Thwaites will drift. But 
Jakobshavn is also doing something else. It is constantly breaking off 
thick pieces at its front, almost like a loaf of bread, dropping slice 
after slice.

That's because Jakobshavn no longer has an ice shelf, a floating 
extension that used to grow out over the ocean at the front of the 
glacier and stabilize it. The shelf collapsed as Greenland warmed in the 
past two decades. As a result, Jakobshavn now presents a steep vertical 
front to the sea. Most of the glacier's ice is under the water, but more 
than 100 meters extend above it -- and for DeConto and Pollard, that's 
the problem. That's too much to be sustained.

Ice is not steel. It breaks. And breaks. And breaks.
This additional process, called 'marine ice cliff collapse,' causes an 
utter disaster if you apply it to Thwaites. If Thwaites someday loses 
its own ice shelf and exposes a vertical front to the ocean, you would 
have ice cliffs hundreds of meters above the surface of the water.

DeConto and Pollard say that such cliffs would continually fall into the 
sea. And when they added this computation, it not only recreated Eemian 
sea level rise, it greatly increased their projection of how much ice 
Antarctica could yield in this century -- more than three feet.

Since there are other drivers of sea level rise, like Greenland, this 
meant that we could see as much as six feet in total in this century, 
roughly double prior projections. And in the next century, the ice loss 
would get even worse.

"What we pointed out was, if the kind of calving that we see in 
Greenland today were to start turning on in analogous settings in 
Antarctica, then Antarctica has way thicker ice, it's a way bigger ice 
sheet, the consequences would be potentially really monumental for sea 
level rise," DeConto said.

Moreover, the process, he argues, is essential to understanding the past 
-- and thus how we could replicate it.

"We cannot recreate six meters of sea level rise early in the Eemian 
without accounting for some brittle fracture in the ice sheet model," 
said DeConto.

A massive debate over marine ice cliffs
Tamsin Edwards is not convinced. A glaciologist at Kings College London, 
she is lead author -- with a number of other Antarctic experts -- of a 
study published Wednesday in Nature (the same journal that published 
DeConto and Pollard in 2016) that disputes their model, in great detail.

Using a statistical technique to examine the results, Edwards and her 
collaborators find that the toppling of ice cliffs is not necessary to 
reproduce past warm periods after all. They also present lower sea level 
rise possibilities from Antarctica in this century. If they're right, 
the worst case is back down to about 40 centimeters, or a little over a 
foot, rather than three to four feet.

"Things may not be as absolutely terrible as that last study predicted," 
Edwards said. "But they're still bad."

It is a new science, she said, and without more modeling it's unclear 
how ice cliffs will ultimately affect sea level rise.

But then what happened in the Eemian? Edwards thinks it just took a long 
time to lose West Antarctica. That it wasn't fast. After all, the entire 
geologic period was thousands of years long.

"We're an impatient lot, humans, and the ice sheets don't respond in a 
decade, they're slow beasts," she said.

DeConto says he's learned something from the critique.
"The Edwards study does illustrate the need for more in-depth statistics 
than we originally applied to our 2016 model output, but the models are 
evolving rapidly and they have already changed considerably since 2016," 
he said in a written statement.

But he's not backing down on marine ice cliffs. The new critique, 
DeConto said, implies that "these processes aren't important for future 
sea level rise. And I think to me, that's kind of a dangerous message."

He certainly has his allies. Richard Alley, a well known glaciologist at 
Penn State University who has published with DeConto and Pollard, wrote 
in an email that "cliff retreat is not some strange and unexpected 
physical process; it is happening now in some places, has happened in 
the past, and is expected wherever sufficiently high temperatures occur 
in ocean or air around ice flowing into the ocean."

The Eemian -- but worse?
There's one important thing to consider -- the Eemian occurred without 
humans emitting lots of greenhouse gases. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was 
far lower than it is today. The event was instead driven by changes in 
the Earth's orbit around the sun, leading to more sunlight falling on 
the northern hemisphere.

The big difference, this time around, is that humans are heating things 
up far faster than what is believed to have happened in the geologic past.

And that makes a key difference, said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic 
researcher who is leading the U.S. side of an international multimillion 
dollar mission to study Thwaites Glacier, and who is a senior researcher 
at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.

"The current pace of climate change is very fast," Scambos said, and the 
rate of warming might cause glaciers to behave differently than they did 
in the past.

Accordingly, Scambos says he sees the current debate as fruitful -- 
"it's the discussion that needs to happen" -- but that it doesn't lessen 
his worry about the fate of Thwaites Glacier if it retreats far enough.

"There's no model that says the glacier won't accelerate if it gets into 
those conditions," said Scambos. "It  just has to."

Humans were nowhere near the Antarctic in the Eemian -- and we have 
never, in the modern period, seen a glacier as big as Thwaites retreat. 
It's possible something is going to happen that we don't have any 
precedent or predictions for.

Just last week, for instance, scientists reported a large cavity opening 
beneath one part of the glacier -- something they said models could not 
have predicted.

There is a massive stake involved now in at least trying to figure out 
what could happen -- before it actually does. It will help determine 
whether humans, now organized and industrialized and masters of fossil 
fuels, are poised to drive a repeat of our own geological history.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/02/06/todays-earth-looks-lot-like-it-did-years-ago-all-were-missing-is-massive-sea-level-rise/?utm_term=.726ac166c7a6&wpisrc=nl_green&wpmm=1



[critters]
*Climate Change is Killing off Earth's Little Creatures*
Climate change gets blamed for a lot of things these days: inundating 
small islands, fueling catastrophic fires, amping-up hurricanes and 
smashing Arctic sea ice.

But a global review of insect research has found another casualty: 40% 
of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. It confirms 
what many have been suspecting: in Australia and around the world, 
arthropods - which include insects, spiders, centipedes and the like -- 
appear to be in trouble.

The global review comes hard on the heels of research published in the 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that suggests a 
potent link between intensifying heat waves and stunning declines in the 
abundance of arthropods.

If that study's findings are broadly valid - something still far from 
certain - it has chilling implications for global biodiversity...
- - -
*Arthropod Armageddon*
In the mid-1970s, researchers on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico 
conducted a large-scale study to measure the total biomass (living mass) 
of insects and other arthropods in the island's intact rainforests, 
using sweep nets and sticky-traps.

Four decades later, another research team returned to the island and 
repeated the study using identical methods and the same locations. To 
their surprise, they found that arthropod biomass was just one-eighth to 
one-sixtieth of that in the 1970s - a shocking collapse overall.

And the carnage didn't end there. The team found that a bevy of 
arthropod-eating lizards, birds and frogs had fallen sharply in 
abundance as well.
- - -
*Killer heat waves*
The researchers who documented the arthropod collapse in Puerto Rico 
considered a variety of possible causes, including pesticides and 
habitat disruption. But the evidence kept pointing to another driver: 
rising temperatures.

Weather stations in Puerto Rico indicate that temperatures there have 
risen progressively in the past several decades - by 2C on average.

But the researchers are far less worried about a gradual increase in 
temperature than the intensification of heat waves--which have risen 
markedly in Puerto Rico. This is because nearly all living species have 
thresholds of temperature tolerance.

For example, research in Australia has shown that at 41C, flying foxes 
become badly heat-stressed, struggling to find shade and flapping their 
wings desperately to stay cool.

But nudge the thermometer up just one more degree, to 42C, and the bats 
suddenly die.

In November, heat waves that peaked above 42C in north Queensland killed 
off almost a third of the region's Spectacled Flying Foxes. The ground 
beneath bat colonies was littered with tens of thousands of dead 
animals. Dedicated animal carers could only save a small fraction of the 
dying bats...
- - -
*Beyond heat waves*
Puerto Rico is certainly not the only place on Earth that has suffered 
severe declines in arthropods. Robust studies in Europe, North America, 
Australia and other locales have revealed big arthropod declines as well.

And while climatic factors have contributed to some of these declines, 
it's clear that many other environmental changes, such as habitat 
disruption, pesticides, introduced pathogens and light pollution, are 
also taking heavy tolls.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-02-12/climate-change-is-killing-off-earths-little-creatures/


*This Day in Climate History - February 13, 2013 - from D.R. Tucker*
February 13, 2013: On the Fox News Channel program "Hannity," Daryl 
Hannah discusses the anti-Keystone XL movement. In addition, Hannah 
discusses the risks of KXL in an interview for CBSNews.com.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/2163423203001/
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/climate-change-action-a-moral-obligation-says-daryl-hannah/ 


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