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

[Richard Pauli]

/May 10, 2019/


[we know that]
*U.N. Secretary-General Warns of 'Total Disaster' If Global Warming 
Isn't Stopped*
http://time.com/5586121/un-climate-change-disaster-warming/



[darn, a new future - Yale study - a new type of storm]
*Fire-Induced Storms: A New Danger from the Rise in Wildfires*
Scientists are tracking an increase in a little-known phenomenon in 
which intense wildfires can spawn their own thunderstorms, known as 
pyroCbs. Lightning from these storms can spark additional blazes far 
away and send plumes of smoke and aerosols into the stratosphere.
Ed Struzik - May 8, 2019
Early in the evening of August 12, 2017, heat and smoke from an intense 
wildfire burning in the forests of British Columbia began mushrooming 
skyward, sucking up ash, blazing wood and vegetation, and water vapour 
from lakes and streams below.

Rick McRae, a researcher with Australia's Capital Territory Emergency 
Services Agency, was on site helping with fire management. Sensing that 
this conflagration was going to erupt into something extraordinary, he 
texted a group of scientists from around the world who since 2013 have 
been collaboratively studying fire-triggered thunderstorms -- 
technically known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or "pyroCbs."

"This is a very bad day all around in western Canada," he wrote. "Fires 
went 'pop' progressively on the leading edge." A pyroCb was forming in 
the southeast corner of British Columbia, near Kamloops, McRae added, 
noting,"Things could get worse if certain things 'align.' "

And align they did.

As fires that would eventually consume 4,700 square miles in British 
Columbia burned out of control, five fire-driven thunderstorms rose over 
the conflagration, shooting black smoke and carbon high into the lower 
stratosphere, spewing noxious gases that were eventually detected almost 
as far north as the North Pole, and touching off more fires.

At the same time, fires in neighbouring Washington State spawned yet 
another pyroCb.

"By later that night we were agape about the cluster of pyroCbs and the 
extremely impressive smoky anvil-shaped clouds," recalled Mike Fromm, a 
meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Later, Fromm and David Peterson, a colleague at the Naval Research 
Laboratory, labeled that day's cluster of pyrocumulonimbus clouds "the 
mother of all pyroCbs," surpassing even the events of Black Saturday in 
Australia in 2009 when monstrous bushfires killed 173 people, injured 
414 others, and burned 1,700 square miles. On that night in February, 
three clearly distinct pyrocumulonimbus storms erupted across the state 
of Victoria in southeastern Australia.

Yet another major pyroCb event occurred in May 2016 during a massive 
wildfire in Alberta that forced the evacuation of 88,000 people in the 
tar sands community of Fort McMurray. A pyroCb formed over the fire that 
day, and lightning from the firestorm ignited several new fires in the 
forest 22 miles northeast of the fire's front, astonishing wildfire experts.

"I have never heard of lightning causing new fires so far in advance of 
the main fire," said Cordy Tymstra, the wildfire science coordinator for 
the Alberta government.

As a warming world causes larger, more frequent, and more intense 
wildfires, fire-driven thunderstorm events are on the rise in places -- 
including Texas, Portugal, South Africa, and Argentina -- where they 
have never occurred before.

Mike Flannigan, director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire 
Science at the University of Alberta, says that pyroCbs seem to be on 
the rise because warmer temperatures are likely producing more intense 
fires with more vigorous plumes of smoke, black carbon, and water 
vapour, all of which increase the likelihood of pyroCbs.

Whatever the reason, these episodes can wreak havoc on fire-suppression 
strategies. Flannigan says that pyroCbs fires are extremely hot and 
chaotic, especially when the plume collapses.
Winds can reach the speed of a tornado. Embers shoot in all directions 
-- in some cases up to three miles. That means sending firefighters in 
to fight them on the ground is impossible, according to Flannigan.

"PyroCbs like the one that was associated with the Carr fire in 
California in 2018 can be catastrophic because they can generate 
tornado-strength vortexes," says Flannigan.

*Pyro clouds continue to puzzle scientists*
The physics behind pyroCbs are complex and continue to puzzle 
meteorologists and atmospheric scientists. What we know is that when 
super-heated updrafts from an intense fire suck smoke, ash, burning 
materials, and water vapour high into the sky, these elements cool and 
form "fire clouds" that look and act like those associated with classic 
thunderstorms.

The heat and the particulates in the smoke almost always trigger a 
dynamic reaction that arrests the ability of the cloud to produce 
precipitation. What's then left is a lightning storm that moves across 
the surrounding landscape, triggering more fires, as happened near Fort 
McMurray.

Interest in pyroCbs is increasing among wildfire scientists.
Last month, an entire session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 
meeting in Washington, D.C. was devoted to the subject of pyroCbs and 
how they can potentially impact weather and climate in the same way 
volcanic eruptions have in the past.

Fromm of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been instrumental in 
proving that pyroCbs -- a long-known, but relatively rare meteorological 
phenomenon -- have as much energy and impact as moderate-sized volcanic 
eruptions.

Fromm and others have shown that smoke and aerosols from wildfires can 
rise high into the stratosphere, where they can linger for months, 
scattering the rays of the sun. The impact is similar, though on a much 
smaller scale, to volcanic eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo in the 
Philippines, which occurred in 1991. That eruption spewed massive 
quantities of sulphate aerosol emissions that blocked some of the sun's 
rays and cooled the climate globally by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for 15 
months.

Penfei Yu, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in 
Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado reported at the AGU meeting 
that simulations he and his colleagues conducted show that smoke and 
black carbon from the August 2017 pyrocumulonimbus clouds in British 
Columbia and Washington may have lingered for eight months because there 
is no rain that high in the stratosphere to wash the clouds away.

What goes up must eventually come down, which explains what happened 
when Canadian scientists at a High Arctic air monitoring station on 
Ellesmere Island, 700 miles from the North Pole, detected 
extraordinarily high levels of ammonia, carbon monoxide, hydrogen 
cyanide, and ethane -- chemical compounds that are consistent with what 
the 2017 pyroCb event injected into the stratosphere.

"This was a very unusual event," says Kimberly Strong, chairwoman of the 
physics department at the University of Toronto.

"We saw something like this following the massive 2010 fires in Russia, 
but not anywhere near the concentrations we saw in 2017. Our colleagues 
in Greenland recorded the same thing happening there."

*To the troposphere and beyond*
Fromm's interest in pyroCbs began in 1998 when the satellite instruments 
he was using were homing in on strange-looking clouds in the 
stratosphere in the summer. Strange, because clouds like these usually 
only form in winter.

This wasn't the first time that scientists had seen summer clouds like 
these in the stratosphere. Puzzling images of aerosol clouds appeared 
periodically over the boreal regions of North America in the summers 
from 1989 to 1991.

But the scientists who identified them then concluded that they must 
have come from volcanic eruptions because the researchers, like everyone 
else in the scientific community, believed that pyroCbs didn't have the 
energy to get past the troposphere, which contains most of the Earth's 
atmosphere and where weather is generated.

There was, however, just one problem, according to Fromm. There was no 
documentation of a volcanic eruption anywhere in the world during that time.

That's when Fromm began doing some detective work to determine whether 
pyroCbs might be responsible.

Among the first people he called was René Servranckx of the Canadian 
Meteorological Center. Servranckx, according to Fromm, was crucial to 
making the case for the pyroCb explanation because he demonstrated that 
they had enough energy to send smoke into the stratosphere.

Using satellite image data and laser-based LIDAR imaging, Fromm 
eventually linked clouds in the stratosphere detected in the summer of 
2001 to extreme pulses of smoke from the Chisolm fire in Alberta, which 
burned 287,000 acres and was one of the hottest fires on record.

The smoke from a pyroCb generated by that fire drifted completely around 
the world more than once.

Then, in July 2008, Fromm and an international group of more than 100 
scientists descended on a NASA-led research base site at Cold Lake, 
Alberta to track smoke from wildfires that were burning in western 
Canada. In a research plane, a small group of them made the first-ever 
flight into an active pyrocumulonimbus cloud to get measurements in the 
updraft core.
Unlike conditions found in the core of any other cloud, this one 
produced total darkness, courtesy of the abundance of smoke and small 
cloud droplets.

Flying into a suspected pyroCb that day, Fromm could smell forest fire 
smoke at 34,000 feet inside the NASA aircraft.

It underscored the fact that wildfires could send smoke from the 
troposphere, where the pollution it generates is a regional problem, 
into the stratosphere, where it becomes a global phenomenon.

*More fire-induced storms in our future*
PyroCb events appear to be increasing dramatically, producing more 
energy, and erupting in places where they have never been seen before. 
No one knows what the rate of increase is for pyroCbs. But there is 
little doubt they will occur more frequently in parallel with the larger 
and hotter wildfires we are already witnessing as the world warms.

Since the turn of the century, an average of 73,200 wildfires have 
burned roughly 6.9 million acres in the U.S. each year. This is nearly 
double the 3.3 million acres burned annually in the 1990s.

"Figuratively, we have a map pinpointing the location of pyroCbs 
events," says Fromm. "It's been filling up fast. Maybe we're better at 
detecting them, but I think they're increasing."

Researchers say they are now documenting an average of 25 single-pyroCb 
events a year in western North America.

The thing to watch out for in the future, says Fromm, is what will 
happen if we see more of the multiple pyroCbs events, like the ones that 
occurred in 2017, which were an order of magnitude larger than previous 
benchmarks for extreme pyroCb activity. One pyroCb may not have the 
weather and climate-altering capacity of a significant volcanic 
eruption, but several clusters occurring in a year might.

"PyroCbs are not in the Pinatubo category," says Fromm. "But the thing 
to consider is that volcanos occur sporadically. PyroCbs occur every year."
https://e360.yale.edu/features/fire-induced-storms-a-new-danger-from-the-rise-in-wildfires
- - -
[Video talks on pyro-storms]
*Pyro Storms (Fire-Triggered Thunderstorms): Climate Mayhem Part 1 of 2*
Paul Beckwith - Published on May 9, 2019
Firenados, fire whirls, megafires, and fire-triggered thunderstorms are 
a new, terrifying reality turning wildfires from local to globally 
significant events in our faster-than-expected, extremely rapid climate 
change world.  Fire-triggered thunderstorms are called Pyrocumulonimbus 
Clouds (pyroCbs) or PyroStorms, for short. Tornado-like winds can occur, 
flaming embers can be cast across a 3 mile radius, volcanic levels of 
energy loft black smoke, carbon, gases, water up into the stratosphere, 
and lightning from these fire-clouds can ignite more fires 22 miles 
away. We get 25 pyroCBs a year now in North America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKgXitwjzns
- - -
[Beckwith second video]
*Fire Triggered Thunderstorms: A New Reality of Climate MAYHEM: Part 2 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgeFsU_bu8Y
-- -
[The classic, famous, horrific AND hilarious fire video]
*Fire tornado snatches firefighter's hose in Canada*
Published on Sep 20, 2018
A rare fire tornado snatched a Canadian firefighter's hose in British 
Columbia in August as the province experienced more than 500 wildfires 
across the region.…
Let the pictures do the talking: subscribe to No Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PenQAlKInM
- -
[Bookmark this site]
*Wildfire Today - Wildfire News and Opinion*
https://wildfiretoday.com/



[long winded, yet breathless - academic exclamations and exhortations]
*Climate Change: What it Means for Our Agriculture and Our Health - 
Future Thought Leaders*
University of California Television (UCTV)
Video Published on May 6, 2019
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/) A panel of experts discusses climate change 
and its effects on our agriculture and our health, while also offering 
insights into how we as individuals can work to limit its negative 
impacts and create positive change. Series: "The UC Wellbeing Channel " 
[5/2019]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvLLGcb96k



[new words to add to your spell check dictionary]
*'Climate denial' just made it into the dictionary. Wait, what?*
By Kate Yoder on May 2, 2019
The world is on fire, and so is our vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added 
640 new words to its online dictionary last week. The additions include 
swole ("extremely muscular"), new meanings for snowflake (someone who is 
"treated as unique or special" or "overly sensitive") and, you guessed 
it, a whole batch of neologisms tied to the environment.

"The work of revising a dictionary is constant, and it mirrors the 
culture's need to make sense of the world with words," the dictionary's 
announcement reads.

Many of the new arrivals reflect the creative ways big corporations have 
found to trash the place. Our plastic pollution problem has brought us 
microplastic, "a piece of plastic that is five millimeters or smaller in 
size." The natural gas industry (the folks who gave us "fracking") 
introduced flowblack, "liquid used in fracking that returns to the 
surface after being injected into shale." Then there's omnicide, "the 
destruction of all life or all human life (as by nuclear war)."

Great, you say, any other downers? Of course! Bioaccumulation for the 
gradual buildup of contaminants, like pesticides and heavy metals, in an 
organism over time. And chronic wasting disease is an illness that 
afflicts deer, leading to weight loss, drooling, and listlessness.

For a more cheerful phrase, take bluebird day, "a day marked by 
cloudless blue skies." Sounds lovely until you learn about the potential 
cloudpocalypse (not an official dictionary entry, I just made that up) 
in which a lack of climate-regulating cloud cover brings about a scary 
global-warming feedback loop.

Another nice one: petrichor, the name for that pleasant, earthy smell 
that fills the air after a rain. Contributing to that odor is geosmin -- 
an organic compound created by soil- and water-dwelling bacteria.

The ever-expanding agricultural lexicon brought us a few new selections, 
such as the verb hydroseed, for the spraying of a liquid 
seed-mulch-fertilizer mix, along with the easy-to-pronounce insecticide 
called imidacloprid.

The big surprise for me was that Merriam-Webster's new additions 
included two compound nouns, climate change denial and climate change 
denier. Wait, haven't those phrases been in frequent use for a long 
time? The reason for their inclusion gives us a glimpse into the inner 
workings of the dictionary and the painstaking process of deciding what 
makes the cut.

"Traditionally, we limited the entries for compounds because we were 
always trying to conserve space in the printed dictionary," Peter 
Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, wrote in an email. The 
online dictionary lifts this limitation, enabling more space for 
compounds like screen time and go-cup.

But not all compounds make it into the dictionary. Sokolowski pointed to 
a "longstanding rule not to enter terms that we consider to be 
self-evident or self-explanatory."

Consider the phrase cattle ranch. You can look up the definitions for 
cattle and ranch and deduce the compound's meaning. That's why the 
phrase isn't in the dictionary. But dude ranch? A large farm for raising 
… men? Hence, dude ranch gets an entry.

Whereas the meaning of climate change denial is self-evident, the 
shortened form climate denial could be confusing for those who don't 
spend their days thinking about our planetary crisis. Climate, after 
all, is just a word for the prevailing weather conditions of an area 
over time. Why would anyone deny the rain dropping on their head?

"Therefore, because the variant needed entry, the expanded form gets an 
entry even though its meaning is transparent," Sokolowski said.
Speaking of transparent, one thing couldn't be clearer: The climate is 
changing and humans are the cause, as sure as petrichor after a rain.
https://grist.org/article/climate-denial-just-made-it-into-the-dictionary-wait-what/



*This Day in Climate History - May 10, 2005 - from D.R. Tucker*
May 10, 2005: The US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of 
Columbia rules that the White House does not have to disclose 
information regarding the infamous 2001 Cheney Energy Task Force.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/politics/10cnd-cheney.html?_r=0
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4647599
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/05/11/court_backs_cheney_on_energy_meetings/
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

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