[TheClimate.Vote] October 23, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Wed Oct 23 10:42:00 EDT 2019

/October 23, 2019/

[Fire risk response repeated]
*PG&E is about to cut power for some Californians again. The preemptive 
outages show how dire the wildfire crisis has gotten.*
California utility company Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) plans to 
preemptively shut off power to at least 200,000 Californians for as long 
as 48 hours starting Wednesday.
The shut-off is meant to reduce wildfire risk amid warm, dry, windy 
conditions.
Earlier this month, PG&E cut power to more than 1 million California 
residents ahead of a similar weather forecast.
As the climate warms, California's wildfire season is getting longer, 
and weather conditions that bring a high risk of wildfires are becoming 
more common.
PG&E says blackouts are the company's new strategy to minimize fire 
risk, but some scientists say other fire-prevention strategies would 
work better in the long term.
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-wildfire-crisis-getting-worse-climate-change-2019-10

[NYT Opinion from Naomi Oreskes]
*Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think*
Economists greatly underestimate the price tag on harsher weather and 
higher seas. Why is that?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/climate-change-costs.html

[Propaganda heats up]
*Fact-checking the American Petroleum Institute's New Ads Selling 
Natural Gas as a Climate Solution**
*By Justin Mikulka • Wednesday, October 16, 2019
In 1998, the U.S.'s largest oil and gas industry lobbying group, the 
American Petroleum Institute (API), was involved with a communications 
plan whose goal was promoting "uncertainties in climate science" among 
the American public. Over 20 years later, their communications plan 
looks a little different but still needs fact-checking.

In September, API began running TV, billboard, and social media ads 
promoting natural gas as a climate solution. "Thanks to natural gas, the 
U.S. is leading the way in reducing emissions," the ads claim, and 
"leading the world in cutting greenhouse gas emissions." But is all of 
that true?
In fact, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions actually rose 3.4 percent in 
2018. While API appears to be specifically referring to emissions from 
power generation -- attributing those savings to the switch from coal 
power to natural gas -- even the power sector saw emissions rise 1.9 
percent last year...
- - -
While the oil and gas industry -- or as API's new ads call it, "the 
natural gas and oil industry" -- is touting natural gas as a way to 
decrease emissions, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts 
that natural gas will have the greatest increase in carbon dioxide 
emissions growth of any fuel source through 2050. That would make the 
U.S. a world leader in increasing CO2 emissions from natural gas...
- - -
It isn't hard to understand why API is now marketing natural gas using 
language about emissions reductions and energy demand. Rising pressure 
is coming from a public concerned about the climate crisis and from the 
increasingly cost-competitive renewables and storage industry.

An excellent example of this economic pressure came earlier this month. 
A northwest power company owned by billionaire Warren Buffet's 
investment firm Berkshire Hathaway -- which has no problem investing 
heavily in oil and gas -- recently announced plans to shut down most of 
its coal plants serving Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, and Utah, and 
replace them with renewables and battery storage by 2038. That's despite 
the abundance of very cheap natural gas in the U.S.

API knows the industry is feeling the heat, and it looks to be employing 
the same misinformation playbook that it used to sow doubt about the 
well-supported science of climate change and the resulting action the 
science demands.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/10/16/fact-checking-american-petroleum-institute-gas-ads

[The other side of the calamity - ocean acidification]
*The Worst Day in Earth's History Contains an Ominous Warning*
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic

One of the planet's most dramatic extinctions was caused in part by 
ocean acidification, which has become a problem in our own era.

The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost 
exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of 
Manhattan slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula...
- - -
How does an asteroid prompt an extinction? It chooses the right 
location. The Yucatán Peninsula was an excellent one, says Pincelli 
Hull, an author of the paper and a geology professor at Yale. The 
peninsula is essentially an "old buried reef," she told me, an 
accumulation of dead coral and other sea life that is now more than a 
mile thick. When the asteroid hit, untold megatons of that old organic 
material--rich in nitrogen and sulfur--instantly became dust and shot up 
into the atmosphere.

Soon it began to fall back down, now as nitric oxide and sulfuric acid. 
"It was raining brimstone and acid from the sky," Hull said. The air 
would have reeked of acrid smog and burnt matches. The acid accumulated 
in the oceans, wearing away the shells of the small, delicate plankton 
that serve as the basis of the marine food chain. Within a few centuries 
of the impact, ocean acidity had jumped by at least 0.3 pH units.

This spike in ocean acidification may have lasted for less than 1,000 
years. But even that pulse "was long enough to kill off entire 
ecosystems for sure," Hull said. Ocean acidification also likely 
worsened other sweeping environmental changes wrought by the impact, 
such as the years-long darkness caused by orbiting debris and ash from 
the global wildfires...
- -
...the oceans are acidifying again today. Carbon dioxide--the same air 
pollutant that causes global warming--also dissolves in the oceans and 
increases the acidity of seawater. Since the late 1980s, the planet's 
oceans have become about 0.02 pH units more acidic every decade, 
according to a report last month from the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change. More than a fifth of all modern carbon pollution has 
already dissolved into the oceans, the report also found.
Modern acidification is not yet at the same magnitude as the K-T pulse. 
It's "moving toward that scale, but it's not quite there yet," Hull 
said. What unites our world and the K-T period, she said, is that a 
number of environmental catastrophes can overlap with ocean 
acidification to produce a major upheaval...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/the-worst-day-in-earths-history-contains-a-warning-for-us/600466/

[it did seem too good to be true]
*Sorry--organic farming is actually worse for climate change*
The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the 
inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.
by James Temple
Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from 
farming – which would be fantastic if they didn't also require more land 
to produce the same amount of food.

Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up 
for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the 
practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.

Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces 
more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional 
land required is taken into account...
- -
The world does need to find ways to cut the emissions and environmental 
pollution from synthetic fertilizers. But the trick is to clean up these 
practices in ways that don't require converting more land to 
agriculture, or forcing large parts of the world to go hungry.

Among other paths, a number of researchers and startups are trying to 
develop novel agricultural inputs that could cut emissions without 
reducing yields, crops that take up more of the nitrogen in soil, and 
various meat and milk alternatives.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614605/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/
- - -
[Source paper from Nature Communications]
*The greenhouse gas impacts of converting food production in England and 
Wales to organic methods*
Laurence G. Smith, Guy J. D. Kirk, Philip J. Jones & Adrian G. Williams
Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 4641 (2019)
Abstract
Agriculture is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) 
emissions and must feature in efforts to reduce emissions. Organic 
farming might contribute to this through decreased use of farm inputs 
and increased soil carbon sequestration, but it might also exacerbate 
emissions through greater food production elsewhere to make up for lower 
organic yields. To date there has been no rigorous assessment of this 
potential at national scales. Here we assess the consequences for net 
GHG emissions of a 100% shift to organic food production in England and 
Wales using life-cycle assessment. We predict major shortfalls in 
production of most agricultural products against a conventional 
baseline. Direct GHG emissions are reduced with organic farming, but 
when increased overseas land use to compensate for shortfalls in 
domestic supply are factored in, net emissions are greater. Enhanced 
soil carbon sequestration could offset only a small part of the higher 
overseas emissions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12622-7

[new study]
*Climate Change Could Lead to More Extreme El Nino Events: Study*
A new study with major implications for India claims that El Nino events 
could get more devastating in coming years due to climate change.

The international team of climate researchers that wrote the study 
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal 
analysed 33 El Nino events from 1901 to 2017. El Nino, an 
ocean-atmospheric phenomenon characterised by the unusual warming of the 
waters in the equatorial Pacific, is associated with weather extremes 
like drier conditions in India, Australia and the Middle East, and 
floods in places like Peru, England and parts of western USA like 
California.

The team found that since 1978, climate change has been driving the 
onset location of El Ninos further and further westward in Pacific 
waters. Before this, onset mainly occurred in the eastern part of the 
Pacific. The westward shift of El Nino, which is likely happening due to 
warming waters of the western Pacific among other factors, also 
signifies a tendency for the El Nino events to become more severe, 
causing widespread damage across the world.

The research team, led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii's 
International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), also classified the 33 El 
Nino events into 4 categories based on onset location of the warming, 
its evolution and its ultimate strength. Based on this, they found that 
three of the 5 'extreme' El Nino events happened after 1970--in 1982, 
1997 and 2015 respectively.

Continued global warming will create ideal conditions for more such 
events, the team found. "If the observed background changes continue 
under future anthropogenic forcing [human-induced warming], more 
frequent extreme El Nino events will induce profound socioeconomic 
consequences," they write.

Take for example the recent 2015-16 El Nino event. It was characterised 
by massive global impacts: huge crop losses across Africa, drought and 
wildfires in Australia, below-average monsoon rains in India in 2015 
(the year over 2000 people died in heatwaves) and flooding and mudslides 
in South American countries like Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, 
Brazil, and Argentina. The next year, between December 2016 and March 
2017, floods linked to El Nino killed 80 people in Peru and displaced 
110,000 others.

In India, studies have shown "longer, more frequent and extensive 
heatwave conditions" in the years following an El Nino event. Earlier 
this year, a study by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology 
(IITM) said that El Nino Modoki events (a phenomenon characterised by 
warm waters in the Central Pacific) and soil moisture depletion are 
likely to double the number of heatwaves in the country, from 54 between 
1961-2005 to 138 between 2020-2064.

Last month, the United Nations said in a report that climate change had 
raised ocean temperatures, making them more acidic and less fertile, and 
meaning that meteorological phenomena like hurricanes and El Nino are 
bound to become more severe and frequent.

https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-10-22-climate-change-more-extreme-el-nino-events-study
- - -
[Here's the paper]
*Historical change of El Nino properties sheds light on future changes 
of extreme El Nino*
Bin Wang, Xiao Luo, Young-Min Yang, Weiyi Sun, Mark A. Cane, Wenju Cai, 
Sang-Wook Yeh, and Jian Liu
PNAS first published October 21, 2019 
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911130116
Edited by Brian John Hoskins, Imperial College London, London, United 
Kingdom, and approved September 19, 2019 (received for review June 28, 2019)
*Significance*
How the magnitude of El Nino will change is of great societal concern, 
yet it remains largely unknown. Here we show analysis of how changing El 
Nino properties, due to 20th century climate change, can shed light on 
changes to the intensity of El Nino in the future. Since the 1970s, El 
Nino has changed its origination from the eastern Pacific to the western 
Pacific, along with increased strong El Nino events due to a background 
warming in the western Pacific warm pool. This suggests the controlling 
factors that may lead to increased extreme El Nino events in the future. 
If the observed background changes continue under future anthropogenic 
forcing, more frequent extreme El Nino events will induce profound 
socioeconomic consequences.
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/10/15/1911130116

[Yale Climate Change Communications book announcement]
Today we're pleased to announce the publication of a short chapter 
entitled "Building Public and Political Will for Climate Action" in a 
new edited book: *A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable 
Future.*
The science is clear: the threat of global warming requires system-level 
change, fast. Fortunately, we do not lack a supply of solutions, ranging 
from technological innovation to government policies. What we lack is 
public demand for these solutions and the political will to enact them. 
In the face of powerful special interests, many elected officials will 
not prioritize climate change until there is strong public demand for 
government policy. How then do we build public and political will for 
climate action?

Drawing on more than a decade of public opinion research, the chapter 
lays out a big-picture strategy to help shift the political climate of 
climate change. It was written over a year ago, but in the wake of 
massive climate marches around the world, the essay is even more 
relevant today. How do we channel this rising tide of human energy into 
public and political will for climate action?

The book hits bookstores today and features 40 big ideas for a 
sustainable future by an amazing set of authors. To request a copy of 
just the Public and Political Will chapter, please send an email to 
climatechange at yale.edu, with the Subject Line: Request Chapter.

[press release]
*THE WEATHER CHANNEL TO INTERVIEW PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IN "2020: RACE 
TO SAVE THE PLANET" ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7*
Primetime special will take Democratic and Republican contenders to 
communities directly impacted by severe weather to discuss climate change
On Thursday, November 7, The Weather Channel television network will air 
"2020: Race to Save the Planet," a one-hour, primetime special featuring 
conversations with the network's meteorologists and nine Democratic and 
Republican presidential candidates on climate change and produced in 
partnership with The Climate Desk, a media consortium.

Viewers will hear from Senator Cory Booker, Senator Kamala Harris, 
Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Governor Mark 
Sanford, former Governor Bill Weld, former Congressman Beto O'Rourke, 
former Congressman Joe Walsh, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how climate 
change is impacting jobs, the economy, national security, extreme 
weather, and more and how their administrations would address these 
issues directly.
http://weathergroup.com/newsroom/2019/10/21/weather-channel-interview-presidential-candidates-2020-race-save-planet-thursday

[Classic fundamentals lesson of climate science from TED 2014]
Gavin Schmidt
*The Emergent Patterns of Climate Change*
https://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change/discussion

*This Day in Climate History - October 23, 1989 - from D.R. Tucker*
New Jersey Governor Tom Kean issues an executive order calling upon the 
state to put together a plan to deal with the consequences of carbon 
pollution.

    In 1989 -- just one year after NASA's James Hansen testified before
    Congress about the looming threat of climate change -- New Jersey's
    Republican Governor Thomas Kean issued an executive order calling on
    his state to recognize the "scientific consensus" of climate change
    and to prepare for rising sea levels, intensifying storms, and other
    threats posed by a warming planet. (link to the documents .

https://thinkprogress.org/in-1989-nj-republican-governor-issued-climate-order-warning-of-increase-in-the-intensity-of-major-d96266e2acd7/
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