[TheClimate.Vote] June 30, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/June 30, 2019/

[Heatwave]
*Heatwave - Climate Change Connections In One Simple Analogy*
Marshall Shepherd Contributor
A devastating heatwave is happening in Europe right now. Temperature 
records are falling and not just by a small margin. The death toll is 
starting to rise and is prompting memories of the 2003 European heatwave 
that killed 30,000 to 50,000 people according to most estimates. The 
World Meteorological Organization tweeted on Friday:

For the first time on record, #France sees a temperature above 45C. 
Villevieille measured 45.1C this afternoon at 1459, topping the previous 
record of 44.3C set just an hour previously, per @meteofrance #heatwave 
#climatechange

According to meteorologists at Weather.com, a large high pressure system 
over Europe is the "weather" factor responsible for the heatwave.  
Weather is, in part, governed by the space-time patterns of a series of 
waves in that fluid overhead called the atmosphere. It exhibits natural 
and day-to-day variability. An atmospheric "road block," if you will, 
near Greenland responsible for record melting there is also altering the 
aforementioned global wave pattern and causing extreme heat in Europe. 
Some voices will roll out the predictable narrative that heatwaves 
happen naturally. They do. However, an increasing body of scientific 
literature and simple common sense tells us that something else is going 
on too.
University of Georgia atmospheric sciences professor John Knox offered 
one of the most compelling and clear analogies to explain why an 
anthropogenic climate change signal is increasingly associated with 
events like the European heatwave. Knox wrote:

The old record for the nation was 44.1C (111.4F), from the deadly 2003 
heat wave in Europe. So, France just bested its high temperature by 3 
degrees Fahrenheit. That's a lot. As with, say, 100-meter dash records 
in seconds, national temperature records in degrees should be broken in 
tenths, really hundredths--not integer values.If this were the world of 
track and field, a new record of this extremity would prompt immediate 
concerns about doping. The runner is fast, but no way is he or she THAT 
fast.
- - -
The current heatwave is very dangerous. The combination of record high 
maximum and minimum temperatures is a double whammy for humans. Warm 
nighttime temperatures are particularly dangerous for vulnerable 
populations like the elderly, children, or people without sufficient air 
conditioning...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/06/28/heatwave-climate-change-connections-in-one-simple-analogy/#254aecc21dad


[Phys.org article from February]
*Too hot for comfort: the physiological dangers of extreme heat*
by American Physiological Society
A new review of more than 140 studies explores the physiological dangers 
that climate change will likely have on animal life, including humans. 
The review is published in the journal Physiology.

2018 was the fourth-warmest year on record, according to NASA 
scientists, and the majority of the hottest days on record occurred in 
the past decade. These data point to a trend of warmer temperatures and 
an increasing frequency and severity of heat waves well into the 21st 
century. The growing intensity of global warming increases the 
likelihood of heatstroke and related illnesses in people, as well as 
heat stress in animals on land, in the sea and in the air.

"Animal populations are likely to respond to increased frequency and 
severity of heat waves by several different modes: movement, adjustment 
and death (or selection)," wrote Jonathon Stillman, Ph.D., author of the 
review. Stillman describes how species--including humans--are adjusting 
migration patterns, behavior and physiological characteristics to cope 
with an increasingly hotter climate.

Migration: Many species alter their seasonal patterns of movement--also 
known as migration--to avoid locations that are too hot. Some migratory 
species of birds and fish may settle in areas that, due to global 
warming, are no longer too cold.

Behavioral changes: "Behavioral shifts in response to extreme heat in 
endothermic homeotherms (i.e., birds, mammals) are most likely to 
increase the time spent evaporatively cooling (e.g., sweating, panting, 
gular fluttering, swimming), with an [accompanying] increase in water 
demands," Stillman wrote. Through increased cooling methods, however, 
many small species lose more water than their body size can accommodate. 
Dehydration can become a major threat to survival.

Physiological changes: Shifts in proteins that regulate energy balance 
and gene expression may occur when ambient temperatures remain 
consistently higher than in previous years. These adjustments sometimes 
lead to inefficiency of the cells' energy centers (mitochondria) and may 
cause increased cellular stress. These and other physiological changes 
may also take place in future generations due to the parents' behavioral 
and physical shifts.

Human behavior: "Shifts in the behavior of human societies will also be 
required in response to increased severity of heat waves, especially in 
populations that have not historically experienced daily-activity 
routines during dangerous levels of extreme heat," Stillman wrote. This 
is especially true for people living in cities because they are less 
likely to have immediate access to bodies of water, which provide a 
source of cooling, he explained.

"Today's cohort of ecological, evolutionary and environmental 
physiologists, along with the next generation of scientists being 
mentored by them, have crucial roles to play in producing, communicating 
and translating the science-based evidence that responsible 
policy-makers require to address the effects of short- and long-term 
consequence of climate change on animals, including humans," Stillman wrote.
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-hot-comfort-physiological-dangers-extreme.html
- -
[recent academic paper]
*Heat Waves, the New Normal: Summertime Temperature Extremes Will Impact 
Animals, Ecosystems, and Human Communities*
Jonathon H. Stillman
6 Feb 2019 https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00040.2018
Abstract
A consequence of climate change is the increased frequency and severity 
of extreme heat waves. This is occurring now as most of the warmest 
summers and most intense heat waves ever recorded have been during the 
past decade. In this review, I describe the ways in which animals and 
human populations are likely to respond to increased extreme heat, 
suggest how to study those responses, and reflect on the importance of 
those studies for countering the devastating impacts of climate change.
Stillman wrote:
"Summertime is quickly becoming a deadly season for life on Earth."
https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/physiol.00040.2018


[ocean waters warming]
*Climate change blamed as huge mounds of rotten seaweed spoil pristine 
beaches in Mexico*
Piles of sargassum, which smells of rotting eggs and turns sea water 
brown, covers Rivera Maya coast
An infestation of rotting seaweed that is blighting many of Mexico's 
pristine white-sand beaches on its Caribbean coast is believed to be the 
result of climate change.
Mounds of sargassum, which smells of rotten eggs and turns clear sea 
water brown, has washed up on the shores of popular tourist destinations 
including Cancun, Playa del Carman and Tulum.
Mexico has already spent $17m so far this year in an attempt to clear 
500,000 tons of the plant from its coastline, but these efforts are 
proving futile.
The infestation was first reported in 2014 and has worsened every year 
since. Tourism chiefs fear it could severely affect the local industry 
as hotel occupancy rates start to drop.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rotting-seaweed-beaches-sargassum-mexico-carribbean-cancun-playa-del-carmen-tulum-a8978756.html


[Heatwaves - audio podcast]
*Back to back global warming heat waves w/ Jane Baldwin--Radio Ecoshock 
2019-06-05*
Stop Fossil Fuels
Published on Jun 29, 2019
Are you ready for back-to-back scorching heat waves? Probably not. New 
research from scientists at Princeton say heat waves are coming strong 
and closer together as the planet warms. Wherever you live, you are 
going to feel this.

Our guest is the lead author of the new paper "Temporally Compound Heat 
Wave Events and Global Warming: An Emerging Hazard". Jane Wilson Baldwin 
is a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Environmental 
Institute in New Jersey.

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at 
https://www.ecoshock.org/2019/06/abrupt-permafrost-thaw-repetitive-heat-waves.html
In our second interview, you hear how we will experience repeating heat 
waves more often as the world warms. That can affect global agriculture. 
We already have crop failure or smaller planting in many parts of the 
world. Due to drought, major producer Australia is importing wheat for 
the first time in 12 years. Floods have left over a million acres of 
crops partly or wholly destroyed in Argentina, another major 
international grain source. You may have heard about the crop failure in 
North Korea, bringing back extreme hunger there.

Some Canadian farmers have been unable to plant due to floods, or lost 
winter crops due to extreme and unstable weather this year. I've already 
covered major flooding damage to grain storage and fields in the 
Mid-western United States. Combined with the Tariff war, where China has 
cancelled soy bean purchases, while India stopped importing American 
Lentils, and countless U.S. farmers are not planting, and probably not 
staying in business.

Long periods of extreme heat are predicted for the Mediterranean this 
summer, at times moving even into northern Europe. There is some better 
news in Europe, where Greens won more seats in the European Union 
Parliament voting. Greens came in second in Germany, third in France and 
did better in the rest of Northern Europe. European voters are worried 
and want real climate action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP0f8ehQUjk



[Understanding the current science of permafrost]
*Abrupt Permafrost Thaw w/ Merritt Turetsky--Collapse & carbon 
release--Radio Ecoshock 2019-06-05*
Stop Fossil Fuels
Published on Jun 28, 2019
A faster permafrost thaw means even the worst scenarios underestimated 
the pace and severity of climate change.

Scientists have issued a new warning that greenhouse gas emissions from 
thawing permafrost in the North could be twice what we thought, as the 
world warms. Scientist Merritt Turetsky is lead author of the article in 
the journal Nature "Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release", 
published April 30, 2019.

Merritt is Associate Professor & Canada Research Chair, Tier 2 at 
Canada's Guelph University and head of the Turetsky Lab. Studying Arctic 
carbon cycles, northern fires, soils, and peatlands, she is author or 
co-author of almost 200 peer-reviewed papers. Merritt's Twitter handle 
is: "Queenofpeat".

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at .

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and 
tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more 
at https://stopfossilfuels.org

SHOW DETAILS
Scientists on Merritt's team warn that greenhouse gas emissions from 
thawing permafrost could be twice what current models expect. Formerly 
all estimates on the amount of carbon dioxide and methane coming out of 
thawing vegetative matter in the far north were based on a slow general 
warming. However, there are large areas which contain a lot of frozen 
water with that soil. These regions can thaw abruptly--and may result in 
the formation of millions of small ponds and lakes. When vegetation rots 
below water, the more powerful greenhouse gas methane rises up into the 
atmosphere. About one-quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere is 
frozen--that is a vast area that we ignore at our peril!

As Merritt's team write in Nature:
"Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that 
permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of 
organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some 
models are beginning to track these slow changes.

But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil 
doesn't just lock up carbon--it physically holds the landscape together. 
Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly 
as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimeters of soil 
thawing each year, several meters of soil can become destabilized within 
days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and 
wetlands."

A graphic with that paper says:
"One-fifth of frozen soils at high latitudes are thawing rapidly and 
becoming unstable, leading to landslides and floods that release carbon 
into the atmosphere."

Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change to advise governments, did not include this abrupt 
thaw and formation of gases. Keep in mind, in total there is twice as 
much carbon locked up in the Arctic than in the atmosphere now. If it 
was all released, or even a significant fraction, this would dwarf human 
emissions. There would be nothing we could do to stop it.

However, the IPCC's "Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a 
Changing Climate", expected later this year, should contain updated 
estimates including abrupt permafrost thaw, thanks in part to the 
Permafrost Carbon Network.

Nothing resembling a total thaw is going to happen in the next few 
hundred years. It takes time, but permafrost lands containing a lot of 
frozen water (ice) can melt within a decade (not all of it, but in 
places). One of those land-types is called "Yedoma". This is widespread 
in Russian Siberia, but also in northern Canada and Alaska.

In 2012, I recorded Merritt's co-author Charles Koven's presentation to 
the American Academy for the Advancement of Science conference in 
Vancouver. I then interviewed Professor Antoni Lewkowitcz. You can 
listen to both of those in my program "What If The Permafrost Thaws?".

My first impression was the study of permafrost in 2012 involved a 
relatively small group of scientists in North America. That was during 
the time of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who defunded climate 
change research. Merritt tells us the Arctic research situation improved 
in Canada, and in Russia--in fact over 20 countries have representatives 
in the Permafrost Carbon Network. It's become a "hot" topic, now that 
the world is more aware of the grave dangers coming from global warming.

Now we now that greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost become a 
serious positive feedback loop--where warming creates more gases that 
lead to more warming. What is needed now, these scientists suggest, is 
an urgent project to understand and measure greenhouse gases coming from 
the permafrost.
In permafrost news, Dr. Jaroslav Obu and colleagues from several 
countries have just released a new map of permafrost. This new tool can 
help a lot of researchers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QFb4cHIqA0



[Feminist professor]
*Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: 'The disorder of our era isn't 
necessary'*
Moira Weigel
Cyborg Manifesto author and philosopher who explores the nature of 
reality discusses the science wars and climate activism
- - -
Haraway was part of an influential cohort of feminist scholars who 
trained as scientists before turning to the philosophy of science in 
order to investigate how beliefs about gender shaped the production of 
knowledge about nature. Her most famous text remains The Cyborg 
Manifesto, published in 1985. It began with an assignment on feminist 
strategy for the Socialist Review after the election of Ronald Reagan 
and grew into an oracular meditation on how cybernetics and digitization 
had changed what it meant to be male or female - or, really, any kind of 
person. It gained such a cult following that Hari Kunzru, profiling her 
for Wired magazine years later, wrote: "To boho twentysomethings, her 
name has the kind of cachet usually reserved for techno acts or new 
phenethylamines."...
- - -
Haraway's other most influential text may be an essay that appeared a 
few years later, on what she called "situated knowledges". The idea, 
developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such 
as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of 
particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a 
laboratory don't simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for 
instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and 
manipulating it. Ideas like these have a long history in American 
pragmatism. But they became politically explosive during the so-called 
science wars of the 1990s - a series of public debates among "scientific 
realists" and "postmodernists" with echoes in controversies about bias 
and objectivity in academia today...
- - -
The science warriors who attacked us during the science wars were 
determined to paint us as social constructionists - that all truth is 
purely socially constructed. And I think we walked into that. We invited 
those misreadings in a range of ways. We could have been more careful 
about listening and engaging more slowly. It was all too easy to read us 
in the way the science warriors did. Then the rightwing took the science 
wars and ran with it, which eventually helped nourish the whole 
fake-news discourse.

Your PhD is in biology. How do your scientist colleagues feel about your 
approach to science?

To this day I know only one or two scientists who like talking this way. 
And there are good reasons why scientists remain very wary of this kind 
of language. I belong to the Defend Science movement and in most public 
circumstances I will speak softly about my own ontological and 
epistemological commitments. I will use representational language. I 
will defend less-than-strong objectivity because I think we have to, 
situationally.

Is that bad faith? Not exactly. It's related to [what the postcolonial 
theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called] "strategic 
essentialism". There is a strategic use to speaking the same idiom as 
the people that you are sharing the room with. You craft a good-enough 
idiom so you can work on something together. I go with what we can make 
happen in the room together. And then we go further tomorrow.

In the struggles around climate change, for example, you have to join 
with your allies to block the cynical, well-funded, exterminationist 
machine that is rampant on the Earth. I think my colleagues and I are 
doing that. We have not shut up, or given up on the apparatus that we 
developed. But one can foreground and background what is most salient 
depending on the historical conjuncture.

What do you find most salient at the moment?

What is at the center of my attention are land and water sovereignty 
struggles, such as those over the Dakota Access pipeline, over coal 
mining on the Black Mesa plateau, over extractionism everywhere. My 
attention is centered on the extermination and extinction crises 
happening at a worldwide level, on human and non-human displacement and 
homelessness. That's where my energies are. My feminism is in these 
other places and corridors.

What kind of political tactics do you see as being most important - for 
young climate activists, the Green New Deal, etc?

The degree to which people in these occupations play is a crucial part 
of how they generate a new political imagination, which in turn points 
to the kind of work that needs to be done. They open up the imagination 
of something that is not what [the ethnographer] Deborah Bird Rose calls 
"double death" - extermination, extraction, genocide.

Now, we are facing a world with all three of those things. We are facing 
the production of systemic homelessness. The way that flowers aren't 
blooming at the right time, and so insects can't feed their babies and 
can't travel because the timing is all screwed up, is a kind of forced 
homelessness. It's a kind of forced migration, in time and space.

This is also happening in the human world in spades. In regions like the 
Middle East and Central America, we are seeing forced displacement, some 
of which is climate migration. The drought in the Northern Triangle 
countries of Central America [Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador] is 
driving people off their land.

So it's not a humanist question. It's a multi-kind and multi-species 
question.

What's so important about play?

Play captures a lot of what goes on in the world. There is a kind of raw 
opportunism in biology and chemistry, where things work stochastically 
to form emergent systematicities. It's not a matter of direct 
functionality. We need to develop practices for thinking about those 
forms of activity that are not caught by functionality, those which 
propose the possible-but-not-yet, or that which is not-yet but still open.

It seems to me that our politics these days require us to give each 
other the heart to do just that. To figure out how, with each other, we 
can open up possibilities for what can still be. And we can't do that in 
a negative mood. We can't do that if we do nothing but critique. We need 
critique; we absolutely need it. But it's not going to open up the sense 
of what might yet be. It's not going to open up the sense of that which 
is not yet possible but profoundly needed.

The established disorder of our present era is not necessary. It exists. 
But it's not necessary.
A longer version of this conversation will appear in a forthcoming issue 
of Logic, a magazine about technology. To learn more, or subscribe, 
visit logicmag.io.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth




[March 2018 video lecture]
*Update on the State of the Planet: How Then Shall We Live? *
Dahr Jamail
Environmental Journalist
Dahr Jamail is a journalist who has spent several years researching what 
he labels "anthropogenic climate disruption," also referred to as 
human-caused climate change. In this presentation, he shares some 
findings of his research, which will be included in his 
soon-to-be-published book, "The End of Ice." He presents compelling - 
and sobering - information about the rise in the Earth's surface 
temperature, the melting of the polar ice caps, and sea level rise. 
Jamail then talks about the human response to these very serious 
problems, and how people can cope and cooperate with each other in the 
face of them...
- - -
"The oceans thanks to the oceans they've trap ninety three percent of 
the extra heat that we've introduced into the atmosphere they've 
absorbed it if if we did not have oceans on the planet the average 
temperature on the planet would be ninety seven degrees Fahrenheit 
hotter than it is right now so all almost all of the heat is going into 
the oceans and despite that we're seeing these really really dramatic 
changes on the surface of the land. And again when people talk about geo 
engineering in changing climate change or stopping it you don't get 
ninety three percent of the heat back out of the oceans two thousand and 
seventeen was the warmest year yet for the oceans and that was the fifth 
year in a row that that's happened there's been seven one thousand year 
flood events in the U.S. since May of two thousand and ten. "...
-- -
"I mentioned I went up there for research for my book about the 
permafrost thawing and CO2 releasing from that as well as see methane 
being released and I was just up there this past August and just some 
anecdotal evidence to give you an idea of how much things are changing 
up there yeah I think it's the northernmost. Settlement in the United 
States and it's I I was up there and I sat down with this guy named 
Wesley Aiken and he was over ninety years old and he is the elder of the 
town and we sat down and he said, "When I when I was a teenager we could 
sit in my house on the shore and look out into the Arctic Ocean in late 
summer when the Arctic sea ice is at its minimum and I could see still 
see the ice maybe ten fifteen miles offshore and because of that we 
never had to worry about waves and erosion and things like this." And 
now when I was sitting there talking with him, I had spoken with a 
researcher who was up there doing overflights -- they were doing 
atmospheric testing and he showed me his change in the sea ice (that) 
was between one hundred fifty and one hundred eighty miles offshore. So 
in one lifetime in one man's lifetime I've seen this dramatic change -- 
I'll get into how that melting is actually speeding up right now. This 
past winter has been exceptional, another item of some anecdotal 
evidence is -- I spoke with a man who dug graves for the village and he 
said, "You know it used to take me five days to dig a six to seven foot 
grave, because of the permafrost. It was usually about a no more than 
one foot below the surface and I had to basically take an ice pick and 
it took me that long to dig a grave." And he said, "Now the permafrost 
is thawed and melted enough that it's so far down. That I can dig a 
grave in about five hours." So again, you know, that's just two of 
countless anecdotal stories of native cultures being impacted in just 
what they're seeing in very very short amounts of time..."
- -
"...predictions and their analysis all the trends are pointing 
dramatically upwards. All of these including from the Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change are only the impact of CO2 this is not factoring 
in methane nor any of the impacts of several dozens and dozens now of 
positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops for those who don't 
know the most famous that most of you have probably heard of is the 
shrinking summer sea ice in the Arctic -- when it's there it reflects 
solar radiation back into space protect protecting the ocean keeping it 
cool as it shrinks it explode exposes more dark ocean which absorbs more 
sunlight which melts the ice faster, and so it goes.  We know there are 
at least 60 self-reinforcing feedback loops..."
https://media.csuchico.edu/media/0_2ljujwjg


*This Day in Climate History - June 30, 2002 - from D.R. Tucker*
June 30, 2002: Republican-turned-Independent Senator Jim Jeffords of 
Vermont calls out President George W. Bush in a New York Times piece for 
his administration's reckless disregard of climate science.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/opinion/unhealthy-air.html

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