[TheClimate.Vote] March 24, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/March 24, 2019/

[National Flood forecast - video]
*NOAA's spring 2019 flood and climate outlook for the United States*
NOAAClimate - Published on Mar 21, 2019
Following a wet winter, many parts of the United States are at risk of 
at least minor flooding this spring. In this video, the Climate 
Prediction Center's Mike Halpert explains what's behind NOAA's 
temperature, precipitation, and flood outlooks for spring 2019. For maps 
and more discussion, visit https://www.climate.gov/spring2019.
Video produced by the Climate.gov team in cooperation with climate 
scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 
Unless specifically stated otherwise, Climate.gov video productions can 
be freely republished or re-purposed by others.
https://youtu.be/_7nXBtnAQl0
- - -
[See flood from above]
*Drone Tour of Nebraska Flood Zon*e
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/03/23/drone-tour-of-nebraska-flood-zone/
**- -
*In the US Grain Belt: "I'm Looking at Climate Change"*
March 23, 2019
*Grist:*
Spring flooding happens nearly every year in the upper Midwest, but 
current flooding has far surpassed previous all-time records on 
Nebraska's major waterways. Climate change means springtime temperatures 
are arriving earlierwith more intense early-season rains, worsening the 
risk of damaging floods. In one location, the Missouri River broke its 
previous record by nearly four feet.

The most spectacular flooding resulted from the failure of the 
90-year-old Spencer Dam on the Niobrara River in north-central Nebraska 
when it unleashed an 11-foot wall of water on Thursday. Before the flood 
gauge on the river failed, "it looked like something incredible was 
happening that we couldn't believe," Jason Lambrecht, a Nebraska-based 
hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told the Lincoln 
Journal-Star. "And suddenly, everything went dark."

The flash flood destroyed roads, homes, and bridges before emptying into 
the Missouri River and joining with meltwater from South Dakota and 
Iowa. On Saturday, two levees breached on the Platte River, cutting off 
the town of Fremont, Nebraska -- the state's sixth-largest city. A 
volunteer airlift has been supplying the city over the weekend and 
performing rescues.

As of Monday, water levels have crested in most of the state, though 
major flooding will continue for several days. Offutt Air Force base 
near Omaha -- the home of U.S. Strategic Command -- remains inundated, a 
poignant sign of climate change as a national security risk. There are 
dozens of road closures across the area.

Eastern Nebraska is just the worst-hit region: Major flooding is 
currently underway in parts of seven states in the upper Midwest, with 
near-record flooding expected to spread northward into Minnesota and 
North Dakota in the coming weeks. In Minnesota, officials expect a 
greater than 95 percent chance of major flooding, possibly rivaling 
all-time records.

*New York Times:*
VERDIGRE, Neb. -- Ice chunks the size of small cars ripped through barns 
and farmhouses. Baby calves were swept into freezing floodwaters, 
washing up dead along the banks of swollen rivers. Farm fields were now 
lakes.

The record floods that have pummeled the Midwest are inflicting a 
devastating toll on farmers and ranchers at a moment when they can least 
afford it, raising fears that this natural disaster will become a 
breaking point for farms weighed down by falling incomes, rising 
bankruptcies and the fallout from President Trump's trade policies.

"When you're losing money to start with, how do you take on extra 
losses?" asked Clint Pischel, 23, of Niobrara, Neb., whose lowland 
fields were flooded by the ice-filled Niobrara River after a dam failed. 
He spent Monday gathering 30 dead baby calves from his family's ranch in 
this northern region of the state, finding their bodies under huge 
chunks of ice.

"There's no harder business to be in," Mr. Pischel added. "But with 
death and everything else, you've got to answer to bankers. It's not our 
choice."
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/03/23/in-the-us-grain-belt-im-looking-at-climate-change/
- - -
   ... Some farmers say they have been cut off from their animals behind 
walls of water, while others cannot get to town for food and supplies 
for their livestock.

The Ruzickas were still tallying the losses to their cattle herd. They 
scrambled to move cows to neighboring farms before the dam burst last 
week, but at least 15 newborn calves perished, and they believe the 
death toll is much higher.

"We didn't know what to do with them. We never, ever expected anything 
like this," Mr. Ruzicka said Monday. "We just ran out of time. It was 
either sacrifice them or sacrifice ourselves."

Crisis has grown all too familiar for some people in the region. In Knox 
County, Neb., Hannah Sucha, 25, helped coordinate efforts to deliver 
emergency supplies including minerals, antibiotics and salt blocks to 
farmers hurt by the floods. Just two years ago, Ms. Sucha said, farmers 
and ranchers in the area were busy donating bales of their hay to 
ranches in Kansas and Oklahoma devastated by wildfires.

"It's going to affect them for years," Ms. Sucha said. "You're not going 
to be able to sleep at night because you've got so much loss."

*New York Times:*
"I'm looking at global warming -- I don't need to see the graphs," said 
Hamburg's mayor, Cathy Crain, referring to the role of climate change in 
increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. After two 
record-setting floods in a single decade, Ms. Crain said, "I'm living it 
and everybody else here is living it."

The flood spoiled a time of cautious optimism in Hamburg, which like 
many rural Midwestern towns now has about half the population it once 
did. Next week, Dr. Wells, the school superintendent, was scheduled to 
ask state officials for permission to reopen the town's high school, a 
move seen as crucial to keeping young families in town. Before the water 
hit, Ms. Crain said, people were talking about building a new 
subdivision and finding new residents.

But as floodwaters receded in other places, Hamburg remained largely 
submerged on Wednesday. On the dry side of town, residents visited the 
school to pick up hot meals and donated clothes that filled the gym. Ms. 
Crain, who was operating from a makeshift City Hall in the school's home 
economics classroom, spoke hopefully about getting businesses back open, 
even as she coordinated more immediate concerns -- like hot showers and 
restoring gas service.
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/03/23/in-the-us-grain-belt-im-looking-at-climate-change/


[Sunday reading - book review ]
*Awakening from Climate Slumber*
Can Buddhist theology help save us from climate disaster? The Dalai Lama 
thinks so.
By Linda Heuman - SPRING 2019
Humanity faces an environmental crisis so critical that our survival on 
earth is in peril. Yet we have another even more urgent problem: most of 
us go on living as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening. What 
is wrong with us? Is there something religions could do to spur us to 
action? If so, what? Is there a role Buddhists could play? To address 
these questions, in 2011, at the request of the His Holiness the Dalai 
Lama, Mind & Life Institute convened a think tank of more than a dozen 
leading scientists, interdisciplinary scholars, and theologians at his 
private residence in Dharamsala, India. Other Buddhist luminaries joined 
in, including Roshi Joan Halifax, Thupten Jinpa, Matthieu Ricard, and 
His Holiness the 17th Karmapa. This meeting was the twenty-third Mind & 
Life dialogue with the Dalai Lama...
- -
  As is typical of these dialogues, it provided a forum both to educate 
the Dalai Lama and to solicit his input; it also provided a rare venue 
to introduce Buddhist perspectives to cutting-edge interdisciplinary 
scholarship, interfaith dialogue, and public discourse. (Atypically, it 
focused on a topic unrelated to cognitive science.) *Ecology, Ethics, 
and Interdependence: the Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading 
Thinkers on Climate Change*--a skillfully edited and easily readable 
transcript of the dialogue--shares that important conversation with a 
wider audience. (Interested readers can also watch videos of the meeting 
on YouTube.)...
- -
A reader might begin Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence imagining that 
the role for religions in motivating public response is a peripheral 
one--on the order of planting trees in monasteries, finding sutras that 
support environmental ethics, or preaching conservation from the pulpit. 
But by the end of the book, it is clear that is not the case. In the 
vision that comes forth from the conference, religion occupies center stage

And in this project, Buddhism could play a leading part. After all, 
don't Buddhists have experience developing a culture based on a kind of 
waking up? And how did the Buddha do it? He articulated the problem; 
identified its causes; established that the problem could be fixed by 
abandoning its causes; and taught a step-by-step path for doing that. 
Then he created a community and evolved institutions to support people 
undergoing that transformation. Might this example not serve as a 
parallel for how to awaken humanity from climate slumber? The Buddha 
provided a strategy to recognize and escape from a predicament so 
existentially dire that we are encouraged to respond as though our hair 
is on fire. Today, as the Dalai Lama says, in the sentence that closes 
the book, "The earth is our home, and our home is on fire."
https://tricycle.org/magazine/dalai-lama-on-climate-change/
- - -
[Live recording of conversation used for the book]
*Mind and Life XXIII - Session 1 - Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence*
Dalai Lama - Published on Oct 18, 2011
Session 1 of "Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence", the Mind and Life 
XXIII conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in dialogue with 
contemplative scholars, activists and ecological scientists who discuss 
the interconnection between individual choices and environmental 
consequences. The conference was held at His Holiness's office in 
Dharamsala, India, from October 17-21, 2011.
Session 1: Human Impact on Global Systems for Sustaining Life
Session 2: Interdependence Between the Environment and Our Health: Risk 
and Opportunities
Session 3: Industrial Ecology - Connecting Everyday Activity to 
Planetary Crisis
Session 4: Environmental Ethics - What is at Stake?
Session 5: A Role for Theology - Models of God, the World, and the Self
Session 6: A Buddhist Perspective and Open Discussion
Session 7: The Psychology of Action and Behavior Change
Session 8: A Buddhist Perspective on the Psychology of Action and 
Behavior Change
Session 9: The Skillful Means of Activism
Session 10, October 21st: To Be Determined
Produced by the Mind and Life Institute (www.mindandlife.org) and the 
Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (www.dalailama.com).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMWC1Bz2xA



[Ice falls move water levels up]
*Tall ice-cliffs may trigger big calving events--and fast sea-level rise*
March 22, 2019, Geological Society of America
Glaciers that drain ice sheets such as Antarctica or Greenland often 
flow into the ocean, ending in near-vertical cliffs. As the glacier 
flows into the sea, chunks of the ice break off in calving events. 
Although much calving occurs when the ocean melts the front of the ice, 
and ice cliff above falls down, a new study presents another method of 
calving: slumping. And this process could break off much larger chunks 
of ice at a quicker rate.

The ice-cliff research was spurred by a helicopter ride over Jakobshavn 
and Helheim glaciers on Greenland's eastern coast. Helheim ends abruptly 
in the ocean, in near-vertical ice-cliffs reaching 30-stories high (100 
meters). On the flight, scientists viewed large cracks (called 
crevasses) on top of the ice that marched towards the end of the glacier.

"Geologists have spent decades--centuries--worrying about slumps," says 
Richard Alley, co-author of the new paper in Geology. A slump occurs 
when mass of rock or sediment loses some of its strength, breaks away 
from its neighboring land, and slides down a slope. Typically, slumps 
are marked by a steep scarp where the material broke away, followed by a 
block of material moved downslope.
- - -
Removing the weight of the upper ice by slumping encourages the 
underlying ice to pop upward. "Because it's still attached at the back, 
it's going to rotate a little bit," says Alley. The rotation causes a 
crack to form at the bottom of the glacier as the ice flexes. In turn, 
the crack can weaken the ice, creating a large calving event--all 
triggered by the initial slump on top of the ice cliff.

After observing the slump-triggered calving event, the team modeled when 
slumping events were most likely to occur on an ice cliff. The modeling 
looked at tensile, shear, and compressive failure for ice cliffs, and 
included characteristics of the ice. The scientists found that cliffs 
reaching more than 100 meters of ice above water were likely to have 
slumping occur.

Alley says regular calving events happen relatively slowly, such as when 
the ice front melts over time, undercutting the ice and weakening the 
cliff. "But that's not going to go really, really, really fast because 
you have to wait for the melting to undercut it," he says.

With slumping, the calving occurs without waiting for the melt. "We'll 
go slump... basal crevasse... boom," he says, noting that when the 
calving happens it will take the 100 meters of ice above the water--and 
the 900 meters below the water--very quickly.

And 1000 meters of ice calving at once isn't the limit. Alley says that 
in some places in Antarctica, the glacial ice bed can be 1500 to 2000 
meters below sea level, creating a much taller cliff above water. He 
says the worry is that taller cliffs are even more susceptible to 
slumping. "The scary thing is that if pieces of west Antarctica start 
doing what Helheim is doing then over the next hundred years models 
indicate that we get rapid sea level rise at rates that surpass those 
predicted," says Alley.

Understanding the slump-break process has been a collaborative effort, 
Alley says, and more investigations are planned for the near future. "We 
want to understand what are the rules for [ice] breakage by this process 
and others," says Alley, adding that they hope to collect more 
observational data as well as refine their models to better understand 
the slump-break process. "There's still work to be done."
Read more at: 
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-tall-ice-cliffs-trigger-big-calving.html#jCp




[A point-by-point argument with skeptic and denier statements -- 
passionate and almost entertaining]
*Debunking: "Climate Change Model Predictions Are Unreliable!"*
A Skeptical Human - Published on Mar 16, 2019
Climate change deniers are wrong when they claim that the predictions 
made by climate models are unreliable. As I show here, most of them are 
very accurate--and where they get it wrong, they're more likely to 
*underestimate* the warming (or associated consequences) than 
overestimate it. The most inaccurate predictions are actually those made 
by climate change "skeptics."

I also show some of the problems in the data and graphs used to support 
this viewpoint, and I debunk a variety of related arguments, including 
one made by Jordan Peterson about whether can measure the impact of our 
climate-related actions.

Support my videos on Patreon!: https://www.patreon.com/askepticalhuman
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aSkepticalHuman
Text or audio version of this content is available on my website: 
https://askepticalhuman.com/science/2019/3/16/debunking-climate-change-model-predictions-are-unreliable
https://youtu.be/oGMPNrrZ7mU


*This Day in Climate History - March 24, 1989 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 24, 1989: The notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill takes place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znotiZ-N-oc
[from Wikepedia: The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince William 
Sound, Alaska, March 24, 1989, when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by 
Exxon Shipping Company, bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince 
William Sound's Bligh Reef, 1.5 mi (2.4 km) west of Tatitlek, Alaska, at 
12:04 am. local time and spilled 10.8 million US gallons (260,000 bbl) 
(or 37,000 metric tonnes) of crude oil over the next few days. It is 
considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental 
disasters. The Valdez spill is the second largest in US waters, after 
the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume released. 
Prince William Sound's remote location, accessible only by helicopter, 
plane, or boat, made government and industry response efforts difficult 
and severely taxed existing response plans. The region is a habitat for 
salmon, sea otters, seals and seabirds. The oil, originally extracted at 
the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, eventually impacted 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of 
coastline, of which 200 miles (320 km) were heavily or moderately oiled 
with an obvious impact.]
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