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

[Richard Pauli]

/October 24, 2019/

[open thinking]
*Are Wildfires Caused by Utilities or Climate Change? Yes*
Wednesday: An expert writes that both contribute to California's 
increasingly dire problem.
- - -
The answer to all of these questions is yes.

A fire needs a spark. If PG&E's wires provide that, then the company is 
responsible, just as I would be if I started a fire with a tossed 
cigarette or an unattended campfire. Californians are right to try to 
hold PG&E accountable, and the evidence suggests that it has been poorly 
managed, deferring crucial maintenance for years.

At the same time, the fire wouldn't spread so far and be so catastrophic 
if the weather weren't right for it. And while the proximate causes of 
the National Weather Service's fire weather watches and red flag 
warnings lie in the more or less random fluctuations of day-to-day 
weather, there is compelling evidence that global warming has increased 
the risk substantially. Heat dries out what scientists who study the 
problem clinically refer to as "fuel" -- that is, trees and shrubs and 
such -- so that they burn more quickly and easily...
- - -
This situation is not specific to fire, either. It's generic to a wide 
range of increasing climate risks. Disasters happen when a geophysical 
hazard meets people. Floods, for example, occur not just because of 
storm surges or heavy rains, but also because of unwise development in 
flood plains, or failures of infrastructure, or both. And global warming 
always acts as an extra influence on top of natural variability that, in 
the short-term view, is often more important.

The important distinctions are ethical as much as they are scientific. 
Natural climate variability is out of human control. Building homes in 
dangerous places isn't. Neither are poorly maintained electric power 
lines. Or continued uncontrolled carbon emissions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/wildfires-utilities-climate-change.html



[Drive slowly]
*Climate change may see one in four US steel bridges collapse by 2040*
- - -
One of the most common problems involves expansion joints. These allow 
sections of a bridge to swell and shrink in warmer weather without 
weakening the structure. But they cause major structural problems if 
they malfunction.

Hussam Mahmoud at Colorado State University and his colleague decided to 
model the effects of increasing temperatures on steel bridges around the US.

In particular, they focused on what would happen when joints that are 
clogged with dirt and debris are exposed to the higher temperatures 
expected in the years ahead as the climate warms. Clogging is a common 
problem, especially in deteriorating bridges, but it is costly to address.

*Bridges at risk*
This clogging prevents sections from being able to safely expand and 
strains parts of the bridge that weren't designed to withstand the 
resulting load.

Mahmoud analysed data on the condition of around 90,000 bridges across 
the US and modelled how the expansion joints would be affected under 
temperatures predicted for the next 80 years.

They found that current temperatures aren't extreme enough to cause a 
problem, but one in four bridges are at risk of a section failing in the 
next 21 years, rising to 28 per cent by 2060 and 49 per cent by 2080. 
Almost all are set to fail by 2100...
- - -
Lihai Zhang at the University of Melbourne in Australia says that 
developed countries around the world are facing similar issues as their 
infrastructure ages. In the US, two in five bridges are 50 years old or 
older. Many were never designed to last for so long.

Zhang's work suggests that, in addition to heat problems, climate change 
could also make these deteriorating bridges even more vulnerable because 
of stronger winds, greater rainfall and the effects of corrosive carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere.

This is exacerbated by growing populations, more traffic and trucks much 
heavier than these bridges were first designed to accommodate, he says.
Read more: 
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2221040-climate-change-may-see-one-in-four-us-steel-bridges-collapse-by-2040/#ixzz63EP9Ilxd



[Water everywhere, but nary a drop to drink"]
*The World Can Make More Water From the Sea, but at What Cost?*
Worldwide, desalination is increasingly seen as one possible answer to 
problems of water quantity and quality that will worsen with global 
population growth and the extreme heat and prolonged drought linked to 
climate change...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/climate/desalination-water-climate-change.html




[significant Opinion in NYTimes]
*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?
By Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern
Dr. Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard. 
Professor Stern is chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate 
Change and the Environment.

For some time now it has been clear that the effects of climate change 
are appearing faster than scientists anticipated. Now it turns out that 
there is another form of underestimation as bad or worse than the 
scientific one: the underestimating by economists of the costs.

The result of this failure by economists is that world leaders 
understand neither the magnitude of the risks to lives and livelihoods, 
nor the urgency of action. How and why this has occurred is explained in 
a recent report by scientists and economists at the London School of 
Economics and Political Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate 
Impact Research and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

One reason is obvious: Since climate scientists have been 
underestimating the rate of climate change and the severity of its 
effects, then economists will necessarily underestimate their costs.

But it's worse than that. A set of assumptions and practices in 
economics has led economists both to underestimate the economic impact 
of many climate risks and to miss some of them entirely. That is a 
problem because, as the report notes, these "missing risks" could have 
"drastic and potentially catastrophic impacts on citizens, communities 
and companies."

One problem involves the nature of risk in a climate-altered world. 
Right now, carbon dioxide is at its highest concentration in the 
atmosphere in three million years (and still climbing). The last time 
levels were this high, the world was about five degrees Fahrenheit 
warmer and sea level 32 to 65 feet higher. Humans have no experience 
weathering sustained conditions of this type.

Typically, our estimates of the value or cost of something, whether it 
is a pair of shoes, a loaf of bread or the impact of a hurricane, are 
based on experience. Statisticians call this "stationarity." But when 
conditions change so much that experience is no longer a reliable guide 
to the future -- when stationarity no longer applies -- then estimates 
become more and more uncertain.

Hydrologists have recognized for some time that climate change has 
undermined stationarity in water management -- indeed, they have 
declared that stationarity is dead. But economists have by and large not 
recognized that this applies to climate effects across the board. They 
approach climate damages as minor perturbations around an underlying 
path of economic growth, and take little account of the fundamental 
destruction that we might be facing because it is so outside humanity's 
experience.

A second difficulty involves parameters that scientists do not feel they 
can adequately quantify, like the value of biodiversity or the costs of 
ocean acidification. Research shows that when scientists lack good data 
for a variable, even if they know it to be salient, they are loath to 
assign a value out of a fear that they would be "making it up."

Therefore, in many cases, they simply omit it from the model, assessment 
or discussion. In economic assessments of climate change, some of the 
largest factors, like thresholds in the climate system, when a tiny 
change could tip the system catastrophically, and possible limits to the 
human capacity to adapt, are omitted for this reason. In effect, 
economists have assigned them a value of zero, when the risks are 
decidedly not. One example from the report: The melting of Himalayan 
glaciers and snow will both flood and profoundly affect the water supply 
of communities in which hundreds of millions of people live, yet this is 
absent from most economic assessments.

A third and terrifying problem involves cascading effects. One reason 
the harms of climate change are hard to fathom is that they will not 
occur in isolation, but will reinforce one another in damaging ways. In 
some cases, they may produce a sequence of serious, and perhaps 
irreversible, damage.

For example, a sudden rapid loss of Greenland or West Antarctic land ice 
could lead to much higher sea levels and storm surges, which would 
contaminate water supplies, destroy coastal cities, force out their 
residents, and cause turmoil and conflict.

Another example: increased heat decreases food production, which leads 
to widespread malnutrition, which diminishes the capacity of people to 
withstand heat and disease and makes it effectively impossible for them 
to adapt to climate change. Sustained extreme heat may also decrease 
industrial productivity, bringing about economic depressions.

In a worst-case scenario, climate impacts could set off a feedback loop 
in which climate change leads to economic losses, which lead to social 
and political disruption, which undermines both democracy and our 
capacity to prevent further climate damage. These sorts of cascading 
effects are rarely captured in economic models of climate impacts. And 
this set of known omissions does not, of course, include additional 
risks that we may have failed to have identified.

The urgency and potential irreversibility of climate effects mean we 
cannot wait for the results of research to deepen our understanding and 
reduce the uncertainty about these risks. This is particularly so 
because the study suggests that if we are missing something in our 
assessments, it is likely something that makes the problem worse.

This is yet another reason it's urgent to pursue a new, greener economic 
path for growth and development. If we do that, a happy ending is still 
possible. But if we wait to be more certain, the only certainty is that 
we will regret it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/climate-change-costs.html



[Classic music]
*A Legendary Collaboration Continues: Neil Young And Crazy Horse Reunite 
For 'Colorado'*
October 23, 20195:01 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
The message on Colorado is unambiguous about climate change.

"I saw white guys trying to kill Mother Nature," he sings on the 
13-minute track "She Showed Me Love." Elsewhere, on "Green Is Blue," he 
laments, "We heard the warning calls / Ignored them."

"Mostly I would like a lot of people to see what's going on [with] the 
planet -- that's so obvious to me," he says. "I just don't know why 
people don't get it. Or if they do get it, then why don't they get with it?"
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772055382/a-legendary-collaboration-continues-neil-young-and-crazy-horse-reunite-for-color


[Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist, climate modeler and Director of 
the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and co-founder 
of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate.]
=======================================
*Under the Sun*
One of the world's leading climate scientists has written a work of 
fiction about his latest blockbuster paper--on the possibility that 
intelligent life may have preceded humans on Earth.
By Gavin Schmidt
Apr 16 2018...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kj4y8/gavin-schmidt-fiction-under-the-sun
- - -
[links to full paper]
The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial 
civilization in the geological record?
Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2018
*Abstract*
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of 
years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would 
they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint 
of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not 
differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the 
geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly 
distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring 
climate event.
=========================
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6/core-reader

- - -

[video explains]
*The Silurian Hypothesis*
May 4, 2018
Ancient Astronaut Archive
What if another industrial civilization had existed on Earth tens of 
millions of years ago, long before humans, but all traces of it have now 
been lost?

While it may seem like an absurd idea, this thought experiment is the 
focus of a new scientific paper authored by Adam Frank, an 
astrophysicist from the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, 
director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

They have named the paper "The Silurian Hypothesis" after a fictional 
race of intelligent, bipedal reptiles from the British sci-fi series 
Doctor Who--known as the Silurians--that supposedly lived on Earth 
hundreds of millions of years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qALtewod0oM
- - -
[it was Dr Who, who first met the Silurians]
*A Silurian Unmasked | The Hungry Earth | Doctor Who*
Doctor Who Feb 22, 2016
The Doctor speaks to a Silurian named Alaya. Taken from the episode "The 
Hungry Earth."
Welcome to the Doctor Who Channel! Travel in the TARDIS with clips 
dating back to the Doctor's first incarnation in 1963, all the way 
through dozens of regenerations. Including behind-the-scenes footage, 
exclusive videos and our very own show Doctor Who: The Fan Show - this 
is the place to find all the best official clips from all 54 years of 
Doctor Who history.
WATCH MORE:
Regenerations: http://bit.ly/DWRegenerations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqCK86fM_GQ



[something more to ponder about civilization extinctions]
Christopher R. Moore, CC BY-ND
*New evidence that an extraterrestrial collision 12,800 years ago 
triggered an abrupt climate change for Earth*
October 22, 2019
https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-that-an-extraterrestrial-collision-12-800-years-ago-triggered-an-abrupt-climate-change-for-earth-118244



*This Day in Climate History - October 24, 2003 - from D.R. Tucker*
At the University of Chicago, Jim DiPeso of Republicans for 
Environmental Protection discusses the McCain-Lieberman Climate 
Stewardship Act and the urgent need to combat carbon pollution:

    "We have two choices. We can ignore what the scientists are telling
    us, convince ourselves that nothing can be done, and abrogate the
    inter-generational contract we have with unborn generations. Or, we
    can accept what the scientists are telling us, roll up our sleeves,
    and take on the climate challenge."

http://web.archive.org/web/20031124102135/http://www.rep.org/opinions/speeches/33.html
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