[TheClimate.Vote] January 16, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 16, 2019/

[49C = 120F]
*The world's 15 hottest sites on Tuesday were all in Australia*
16 January 2019
Australia was home to all 15 of the world's hottest temperatures on 
Tuesday, a feat it may well repeat on Wednesday and beyond as a huge 
swath of the nation bakes in 45-degree-plus heat.
A slew of records have already fallen during the current heatwave and 
more are likely to be broken before a cool change breaks up the furnace 
later this week...
- Tarcoola (Australia) 49.1C
- Port Augusta Aws (Australia) 49C
- Woomera Aerodrome (Australia) 48C
- Olympic Dam Aerodrome (Australia) 47.9C
- Hay Airport Aws (Australia) 47.8C...(more)
- - -
Jacob Cronje, a senior meteorologist with Weatherzone, said he "wouldn't 
be shocked" by a 50-degree reading during the current spell, given the 
scale and intensity of the heat...
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/the-world-s-15-hottest-sites-were-all-in-australia-amid-significant-heatwave-20190116-p50rmr.html
- - -
[it's summer in Australia]
*Fish kill risks mount as temperatures 'scream' in hard-hit Menindee*
The first of 16 machines aimed at keeping vital fish stocks alive in 
NSW's ailing rivers will be installed as soon as Wednesday as fears 
build of more large die-offs amid searing inland temperatures.
The solar-powered aerators will bring much-needed oxygen to pockets of 
the hypoxic waters of Darling River at Menindee...The first of the 
devices, which can raise dissolved oxygen levels over an area about the 
size of a basketball court, will go into Pooncarrie on the lower Darling 
not far from where up to a million fish died earlier this month near 
Menindee. Silver perch, Macquarie perch and Murray cod will be among 
targeted species...
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/fish-kill-risks-mount-as-temperatures-scream-in-hard-hit-menindee-20190115-p50rk4.html


[fully attributed]
*California storms bring fear of devastating mudslides, residents warned 
to evacuate*
Flash flood watches were issued for Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa 
Barbara counties, which could see as much as an inch of rain per hour 
into Tuesday evening.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-storms-bring-fear-devastating-mudslides-residents-warned-evacuate-n958716


[Bugs are gone]
*Insect collapse: 'We are destroying our life support systems'*
Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years 
to find 98% of ground insects had vanished
"We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days," said Brad 
Lister. "We were driving into the forest and at the same time both 
Andres and I said: 'Where are all the birds?' There was nothing."

His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was 
to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once 
provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national 
park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 
80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming.

"It was just astonishing," Lister said. "Before, both the sticky ground 
plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there 
for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would 
come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely 
insects trapped or none at all."

"It was a true collapse of the insect populations in that rainforest," 
he said. "We began to realise this is terrible - a very, very disturbing 
result."

Earth's bugs outweigh humans 17 times over and are such a fundamental 
foundation of the food chain that scientists say a crash in insect 
numbers risks "ecological Armageddon". When Lister's study was published 
in October, one expert called the findings "hyper-alarming"...
- -
The problem is that there were very few studies of insect numbers in 
past decades to serve as a baseline, but Lister is undeterred: "There's 
no time like the present to start asking what's going on."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems
- - -
[more bugs in the wrong places]
*Small engineers with a large impact: ecosystem consequences of moth 
outbreaks in sub-arctic forest*
January 15, 2019
Pest insect outbreaks in the subarctic birch forest of northern Norway 
are among the most abrupt and large-scale ecosystem disturbances 
attributed to recent climate change in Europe. But such outbreaks have 
occurred regularly as far back as historical records go. What is new and 
why are moth outbreaks a cause of concern?...
- - -
*Critical thresholds*
Forests are dynamic systems able to withstand a certain amount of 
disturbance such as drought, storms, insect outbreaks or wild fires. 
After a disturbance, forests recover to their previous state. This 
ability of an ecosystem to maintain its structure and function despite 
disturbances is referred to as resilience. However, if disturbances 
become more severe or more frequent, the ecosystem may no longer be able 
to recover; the system has reached a critical threshold. In such cases 
even small, gradual changes in disturbance level may result in 
disproportionally large and sudden impacts on the forest ecosystem. In 
the northern birch forest, we have found several indications that such 
thresholds exist. First, the forest can tolerate defoliation up to a 
certain level, but exceeding this threshold results in rapid 
mass-mortality of birch. Second, there is threshold also in the 
potential for forest regrowth, as recruitment of both saplings and basal 
sprouts is poor if the mature tree layer is too severely damaged.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/node/4887


[CO2  emissions first heats the earth, then heats oceans]
*Climate Response to Carbon Dioxide Forcing and Solar Radiation Forcing 
on Different Time Scales*
Liu Wei, Cao Long - Department of Atmospheric Sciences,
Abstract
The HadCM3L climate model was used to investigate climate response to an 
abrupt quadrupling of atmospheric CO2 and 4% increase in solar 
irradiance. Modeling results show that a quadrupling of CO2 and 4% 
increase in solar irradiance cause approximately the same global mean 
surface temperature change by the end of 1000-year simulations, but the 
precipitation responses are substantially different. The difference is 
mainly due to the different fast response of the climate system, which 
occurs over a short time period (about one month) before sea surface 
warms significantly. During this period, over land, the physiological 
effect of CO2 reduces the plant transpiration. Over ocean, the radiation 
effect of CO2 leads to the increase of the temperature in the lower 
atmosphere, which occurs much faster than the warming of sea surface 
temperature. This increases vertical stability of the lower atmosphere, 
suppressing evaporation over ocean. Consequently, during the period of 
fast response (about one month), precipitation decreases in land and 
ocean areas. Compare to the effects of physiological effects of CO2, the 
radiation effect of CO2 has more important effect on the climate system 
at the time scale longer than a few years. But on a short time scale of 
one month, the physiological effect of CO2 has a greater impact over land.
http://www.climatechange.cn/EN/10.12006/j.issn.1673-1719.2016.143


[bookmark this serious lesson in climate model understanding]
CLIMATE MODELLING 15 January 2018  8:30
*Q&A: How do climate models work?*
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work


[Dr Kaitlin Naughten is an ocean modeller at the British Antarctic 
Survey in Cambridge.]
*Climate change and compassion fatigue*
Posted on Oct 12, 2018
I'm a climate scientist, and I don't worry about climate change very 
much. I think about it every day, but I don't let it in. To me climate 
change is a fascinating math problem, a symphony unfolding both slowly 
and quickly before our very eyes. The consequences of this math problem, 
for myself and my family and our future, I keep locked in a tiny box in 
my brain. The box rarely gets opened.
- - - -
"Compassion fatigue" is a term used to describe healthcare professionals 
who become desensitised to tragedy and suffering, and lose the ability 
to empathise with their patients. It begins as a coping strategy, 
because fully absorbing the emotional impact of such harrowing work 
would eventually make it impossible to get up in the morning. I think I 
have compassion fatigue with climate change. The more I study it, the 
less I actually think about it. The scarier it gets, the less I seem to 
care.

And maybe this is okay. Maybe compartmentalisation is the healthiest 
response for those of us close to the issue. Accept the problem, fully 
let it in, and decide what you're going to do to help. Then lock up that 
box in your brain and get on with your piece of the fight. Find joy in 
this wherever you can. Open up the box once in a while, to remind 
yourself of your motivation. But for the most part ignore the big 
picture and keep yourself healthy and happy so that you can keep going. 
Even if this, in and of itself, is a form of denial.
https://climatesight.org/2018/10/12/climate-change-and-compassion-fatigue/



[Your tomorrow will be different than mine]
*Today's children will inherit a climate-changed planet. Can they handle 
it?*
Children are already experiencing "eco-anxiety" -- and psychiatrists 
don't really know how to help them cope
MARION RENAULT - JANUARY 14, 2019
Ten-year-old Jonas Kaun witnessed the destructive potential of climate 
change when one of California's biggest-ever wildfires reduced his Santa 
Rosa neighborhood to a foot of ash last October.

At 2 a.m., his mom, Megan, scooped him out of bed and, choking through 
the thick smoke, got him into the car. They left behind his favorite 
books, his inhaler and the family cat.

The physical tolls of climate change -- uncontrollable wildfires, brutal 
storms and inexhaustible heat waves among them -- are the stuff of 
nightmares for children like Jonas.  They're also part of the reality 
he'll face as an adult.

"They will be affected by climate change more than we will be," says 
Megan Kaun, "and they can't be as strong as they have to be to deal with 
it if they're plagued by anxiety."

We know a warming planet, left unchecked, will violently transform 
ecosystems and profoundly impact the physical and mental health of 
humans. But we know far less about how climate change will impact 
children's inner landscapes or how professionals should help them cope 
with the altered world they will soon inherit, according to a study 
published last May in the journal Current Psychiatry Reports.

"It's a dimension of global warming issues that we don't think about," 
says Daniel Schechter, who studies the effect of trauma on children and 
adolescents at New York University's Langone Child Study Center and was 
not involved in the study. "Parents can't protect them. The government 
can't protect them. Scientists can't protect them."

"There needs to be more research, more clinical focus on what helps them 
feel empowered in a world that feels out of control," Schechter says.

One of the things we do know is how much a child's healthy physical and 
mental development hinges on stability, says Susan Burke, the paper's 
lead author and a senior psychologist at the Australian Psychological 
Society.

Water or food scarcity, rising sea levels and extreme weather put 
children at higher risk of mental health consequences such as 
post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and phobias, 
according to Burke. In turn, "eco-anxiety" can stunt a child's ability 
to control emotions, acquire language or perform in school, which can 
cascade into further mental health issues in adulthood.

Young people are already battling environmental dread, according to 
Burke's study and others.

In one U.S. study, four out of five of the 10- to 12-year-olds surveyed 
expressed strong feelings of fear, sadness and anger about environmental 
problems. A majority of the survey's 50 participants shared apocalyptic 
pessimism about the planet's future.

Things that are out of their guardian's control -- for example, images 
from natural disaster movies or news footage of floods and fires -- sap 
them of the comfort that their caregivers can protect them, Schechter says.

"They may not understand that if they're living in New York City, the 
tsunami in Indonesia won't affect them, that it's very far away," he 
says. "Their world becomes less safe. They wonder if it's some kind of 
punishment."

Psychiatrist Elizabeth Haase, who teaches at the University of Nevada, 
has begun to warn her patients about the impact of air pollution on the 
brain, the importance of nutrition for mental health and the potential 
effect of heatwaves on psychiatric medications.

On the whole, though, the psychiatric field is unprepared to guide a 
generation of young people through potentially crippling environmental 
despair and anxiety, Haase says.

"But what does it mean for children to live in a world where things will 
be changing faster than the human brain can absorb? There's extremely 
little research," says Haase, who is also a committee member for the 
Climate Psychiatry Alliance.

One of the few researchers who has studied how children respond to 
sustainability issues is Maria Ojala, an associate professor of 
psychology at Orebro University in Sweden. Over the past 15 years, her 
research has shown that young people -- much like grown-ups -- handle 
the looming threats of climate change in a variety of ways.

Some opt for denial, insisting that it's an exaggerated problem, while 
others become utterly consumed by worry and fear. Still others channel 
their eco-anxiety by studying climate change or volunteering for 
environmental organizations. Those in the latter group best cope with 
environmental challenges, Ojala's research demonstrates.

For a study published last year, 700 Swedish high school students 
completed questionnaires about their attitude toward climate change, 
pro-environment habits and conversations with friends and family about 
ecological issues.

Ojala discovered a strong relationship between environmental optimism 
and young people who quell their fears and anxiety by engaging with 
climate change: reading about it, discussing it with loved ones or 
reducing their environmental impact.

"What I have shown is that worry can be something very positive. It does 
not need to be related to low wellbeing and helplessness," Ojala says. 
"It's not worry or hope; it's both."

It just so happens that problem-solving is Megan Kaun's parenting strategy.

This fall, Jonas and his six-year-old sister Wrenna made care packages 
for families affected by California wildfires. As a family, the Kauns 
chart household water use and attended town council meetings to support 
a local ban on the use of synthetic pesticides in public spaces.

"I'm trying to teach them there's a lot of things that are upsetting, 
but there's ways to fix them," Kaun says. "You can't just shield them 
from it. If there's something you can do, that's better than feeling 
helpless."
https://scienceline.org/2019/01/todays-children-will-inherit-a-climate-changed-planet-can-they-handle-it/


[maybe]
*Can imagined futures of drowned cities and solar utopias help us grasp 
the complexity of climate change? *
Diego Arguedas Ortiz takes a look.
By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
15 January 2019
It's the year 2140 and two kids ride their skimboards in the heart of 
Manhattan, near the point where Sixth Avenue meets Broadway. If you are 
familiar with this junction you would know it is far from the US' 
current coastline. But in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140, 
Manhattan is flooded after unabated climate change causes the sea level 
to rise by 50ft (15.25m). The amphibian city is now a SuperVenice, a 
grid of canals populated by vaporettos where characters must learn how 
to deal with a world both familiar and unrecognisable to us. 
Mid-Manhattan skimboading is all too possible in this future.

What our science fiction says about us
Art made by AI is selling for thousands - is it any good?
Ten books to read in 2019
Robinson's 2017 climate-fiction novel belongs to a growing cadre of 
works about drowned nations, wind farm utopias or scarred metropolises 
decades into the future. As diplomats draft the rulebook for the global 
response to the climate crisis and engineers race to produce better 
solar panels, writers have found their role, too: telling what Robinson 
calls "the story of the next century". In doing that, they might be 
helping readers across the world comprehend the situation in which we 
currently find ourselves.
Climate change is a notoriously elusive crisis to make sense of, 
particularly compared to other human-impact catastrophes. Drop some 
toxic chemicals in a river now and you will see dead fish within days, 
but what do you witness when you release carbon dioxide? And while, in 
2018, a report by UN climate scientists stated that we are heading 
towards a catastrophe, who can truly imagine what that looks like?

This is where fiction comes in: it brings the abstract data closer to 
home by focusing on the faces and stories in these futures. Show readers 
a detailed and textured account of a climate-changed future, says 
Robinson, and they have an easier time imagining it. It feels real: 
characters in these novels worry about the welfare of their children, 
meddle in extra-marital affairs and grapple with train schedules, just 
as readers would on their daily lives.

Abstract futures

"Science fiction gets people thinking in a way that another report on 
climate change doesn't," says Shelley Streeby, a Professor of Literature 
and Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. "It helps people feel about what 
might be coming, but also about the present."

The numbers for climate fiction, or cli-fi as some people call it, are 
hard to pinpoint - but they are growing fast. A 2016 review tallied 50 
novels dealing specifically with man-made climate change and its 
effects, with 20 appearing in the five previous five years, although 
this number includes all types of novels. That includes John 
Lanchester's new environmental fable, The Wall, which has been described 
as "disquieting and quite good fun at the same time".
Science fiction's penchant for extrapolation gives the genre an extra 
appeal, says Streeby. It is about taking certain conditions that exist 
nowadays, extending them into the future and throwing a bunch of 
characters into their midst.
It might be hard, for instance, to imagine the implications of a world 
where temperature has risen by more than 2C, an increase scientists 
conclude would disrupt much of life on Earth. It is also hard to make 
sense of the fact that our current lifestyle, without changes, can lead 
to such a situation. With sci-fi you can take current conditions forward 
by several decades and imagine what commuting or buying bread in 2080 
looks like.

But the current movement also deals differently with the possible 
futures. Whenever climate change filters into mainstream culture, 
particularly in Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrowor 2012, it 
often does so as catastrophe. Most of the fictional literature about 
climate change looks beyond that and asks: 'How is the world after the 
crisis?'
A hopeful future?

One possible answer comes from 'solarpunk', a movement of writers that 
actively imagine a better future through their work. Authors like the 
New Mexico-based Sarena Ulibarri dislike the doom-and-gloom tone of 
dystopian literature, deciding instead to show what a fairer world - 
powered by renewables - could look like. The genre took its first steps 
in 2012 when a Brazilian publisher edited a short story compilation and 
since then it has flourished, mostly in blogs and on Tumblr.

"Any near-future science fiction that does not engage with climate 
change is fantasy," says Ulibarri, who believes you can take up the 
challenge on your own terms.
Because the what-could-happen opens so many doors, science fiction 
writers often engage in political critique as an alternative to climate 
dystopia. In a scene from Robinson's New York 2140, one of the 
characters is bashing the economic system, arguing that "the world is a 
mess because of the assholes who think they can steal everything and get 
away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice."

After his interlocutor asks him whether conditions are ripe for such a 
move, he replies: "Very ripe.People are scared for their kids. That's 
the moments things can tip." One could wonder whether the characters are 
talking about concerned parents in 2140 or in 2018 and, as with most 
good dialogue in science fiction, it is hard to know. Robinson calls his 
approach "angry optimism": it can get better, yes, but only if people 
are ready to shake things up.

An intersectional future?

But some people have more shaking up to do than others. For much of 
science fiction's history, white men have dominated the genre - with the 
figure of the male scientist or the white explorer commonplace - and the 
voices of women, indigenous groups and people of colour have been 
marginalised, even if they were also writing and publishing. Just as 
important as the story, it becomes relevant who writes it and who is 
featured in it, Streeby argues in her recent book. She claims that 
decolonising the imagination, in this case related to climate change, is 
a crucial task ahead.
We need to consider the multiple versions of the future we get from 
different groups," explains Streeby, who prefers the plural 'futures' to 
the singular 'future'. "If we let these stories proliferate and we hear 
them, they will give us a lot more possibilities and answers than if we 
imagine that there is only one."

She mentions the African-American novelist Octavia E Butler as an 
example. Her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower follows a black teenager as 
she navigates a drought-ravaged California in the mid-2020s. By placing 
a black female character in the midst of her climate future, Butler 
paved the way for other writers and readers to do the same. The future 
could be female and it could be black, Butler showed.
Voices from indigenous communities or people of colour, like that of 
Butler, are not a novelty. They have been writing about their futures 
for decades, says British writer and curator Angela Chan, even if 
mainstream Western narratives have only begun paying attention to them 
recently. In a society where climate change disproportionately impacts 
marginalised groups, imagining the future through climate fiction 
becomes an act of resistance. "People have been speculating about the 
future because they are oppressed," says Chan.

Part of the Chinese diaspora in the UK, Chan has recently explored how 
science fiction writers in China make sense of present realities and 
future challenges through climate change stories. Chan cautions against 
looking at Chinese literature through a Western lens: China has a huge 
scene on its own, including the magazine Science Fiction World, which 
lays claim to being the world's most popular sci-fi periodical.Rather, 
she wants to explore who climate fiction is speaking for and whether it 
can open doors and spaces for those excluded.

In the quest to adopt climate change as a topic, writers are doing what 
they do best: trying to tell a good story. Sometimes they write with a 
touch of optimism as they negotiate the current crisis. But even with 
this optimism, these writers want to make sure the world knows they, at 
least, are paying attention. As one character in Robinson's New York 
2140 concludes, the scientists "published their papers, and shouted and 
waved their arms, a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote 
up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization 
went torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really."

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have 
seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on 
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And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features 
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Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190110-how-science-fiction-helps-readers-understand-climate-change


[presenter makes a video summary]
3 Climate Stories You Might Have Missed in 2018 | Hot Mess
Hot Mess
Published on Dec 20, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxSDI_qzD4


[Trending terminology]
*Climate Refugees*
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=climate%20refugee

*This Day in Climate History - January 16, 2006 - from D.R. Tucker*
January 16, 2006: At a speech in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C., 
former Vice President Al Gore declares:

    "[T]he American people, who have a right to believe that its elected
    representatives will learn the truth and act on the basis of
    knowledge and utilize the rule of reason, have been let down.

    To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic
    consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a
    political appointee in the White House with no scientific training
    whatsoever.

    "Today one of the most distinguished scientific experts in the world
    on global warming, who works in NASA, has been ordered not to talk
    to members of the press; ordered to keep a careful log of everyone
    he meets with so that the executive branch can monitor and control
    what he shares of his knowledge about global warming.

    "This is a planetary crisis. We owe ourselves a truthful and
    reasoned discussion."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600779.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_2e1dIl2s
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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