[TheClimate.Vote] September 26, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Sep 26 09:00:46 EDT 2019
/September 26, 2019/
[PGE California wildfire power restoration to 48,000]
*Public Safety Power Shutoff event*
Power Restoration is Underway
At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, September 25, our crews began conducting safety
patrols and inspections in Butte, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sonoma
and Yuba counties, where power had been turned off for safety. In some
areas where patrols have been completed, we are beginning to re-energize
the power lines.
As of 4 p.m. on September 25, PG&E equipment in Napa, Sonoma, Placer and
Plumas Counties impacted by the PSPS had been patrolled and electric
service has been restored to essentially all customers in those counties.
Restoration activities can only take place during daylight hours...
https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natural-disaster/wildfires/public-safety-event.page
- - -
[testing fire risk]
*Researchers analyze wildfire ignition with almost 100 tests of
exploding targets*
Exploding targets have ignited numerous wildfires and are banned in many
areas
Researchers with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detonated almost 100 exploding targets
to gather information about how likely they are to ignite a wildfire.
Exploding targets consist of two ingredients that when mixed by the end
user explode when shot by a gun. They have caused many fires since they
became more popular in recent years, have been banned in some areas, and
caused the death of at least one person. In 2017 an exploding target
started what became the 46,000-acre Sawmill Fire southeast of Tucson,
AZ. After the ingredients are combined, the compound is illegal to
transport and is classified as an explosive by the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives...
- - -
*The researchers had some tips for fire cause and origin investigators:*
Informal observations during this research suggested that the use of
exploding targets may leave evidence in and around the blast seat. The
research team observed some shattered pieces of the plastic containers
in and around the blast seat following testing. This plastic, which
exhibited exposure to high temperatures, appeared to have embedded AN on
one side of the plastic. The team also observed unconsumed AN prills on
the ground around the blast seat during testing. While this in no way
means such evidence is present after all exploding target explosions,
fire investigators should be cognizant that potential forensic evidence
may be located around the blast seat that should be collected and
documented...
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/09/25/researchers-analyze-wildfire-ignition-with-almost-100-tests-of-exploding-targets/
- - -
[Source report from Study]
*Experiments on Wildfire Ignition by **Exploding Targets*
The experiments in 2018 were carried out with 5.56×45 mm ammunition,
which is used in some AR-15 rifles.The researchers' findings can be
found in "Experiments on Wildfire Ignition by Exploding Targets", by
Mark A. Finney, C. Todd Smith, and Trevor B. Maynard. September 2019.
(7.3 MB file)
*Abstract*
Tests were conducted using 97 exploding targets (ammonium nitrate
and aluminum
powder) to examine the effects of product formulation, environment,
and shooting on
wildfire ignition. Tests in 2015 produced no ignitions in cold and
humid weather conditions.
Ignitions in 2018 under warm and dry conditions were positively
related to the aluminum
concentration (expressed as a percentage of the ammonium nitrate
mass) and the placement
of the target on a straw fuel bed rather than on a 6 in (15 cm) high
steel pedestal. High speed
videography and peak overpressure measured for each explosion
suggested that differences
in explosive characteristics were also related to other
experimentally controlled variables and
could help explain how wildfire ignition results from elements of
product usage.
The most common ingredients of exploding targets are the oxidizer
ammonium nitrate (AN) and for fuel, aluminum powder (AL). Commercially
available exploding targets have various concentrations of aluminum
which is what actually burns during the explosion, which generates
temperatures of about 6,700 F...
https://wildfiretoday.com/documents/ExplodingTargetResearch_2019.pdf
[time for change in tactics]
*Ecocide Should Be Recognized as a Crime Against Humanity, but We Can't
Wait for The Hague to Judge*
Natasha Lennard
September 24 2019
THE IMAGE OF Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon Mobil, loomed over the climate
strike in New York last Friday afternoon. Rendered in cardboard, 15 feet
tall and clutching a bag of fake, bloodied money, the puppet of Woods
wore the label "Climate Villain." It bobbed among the 250,000-strong
crowd, joined by cutout versions of BP CEO Bob Dudley and Shell CEO Ben
Van Beurden. By the time the puppets were set down in Battery Park, the
terminus of the New York protest, the faces of the fossil fuel
executives had been daubed with marker-pen devil horns.
As millions of workers and students filled city streets around the world
last week, there was no shortage of bold and inventive protest signs.
While many expressed broad concerns about the burning planet and an
imperiled future, a number, like the CEO puppets, were unambiguous in
their antagonism towards the fossil fuel industry and its political
enablers. With the stakes of global heating intolerable, and the
fanglessness of international climate agreements undeniable, it is
little wonder that activists are calling for the major perpetrators of
environmental decimation to be seen as guilty parties in mass atrocity,
on a par with war crimes and genocide. The demand that ecocide -- the
decimation of ecosystems, humanity and non-human life -- be prosecutable
by The International Criminal Court has found renewed force in a climate
movement increasingly unafraid to name its enemies.
The push to establish ecocide as an international crime aims to create
criminal liability for chief executives and government ministers, while
creating a legal duty of care for life on earth. Its strength, however,
lies not in the practical or likely ability of The Hague -- a profoundly
flawed judicial body -- to deliver climate justice. The demand that
ecocide be recognized as a crime against humanity and non-human life is
most powerful as a heuristic: a framework for insisting that
environmental destruction has nameable guilty parties, perpetrators of
mass atrocity, against whom climate struggle must be waged on numerous
fronts.
Efforts around the recognition of ecocide, spearheaded for decades by
environmentalist lawyers and advocates like the late British barrister
Polly Higgins, reflect the desire to see environmental degradation
formally recognized as the highest order of atrocity. Equally, appeals
to the ICC suggest an understandable (if Sisyphean) scramble to find an
authority, some authority, capable of holding the fossil fuel industry
and its state partners accountable.
"Despite the existence of many international agreements - codes of
conduct, UN Resolutions, Treaties, Conventions, Protocols etc - the harm
is escalating. Not one of these international agreements prohibits
ecocide," reads the mission statement of Ecological Defense Integrity, a
U.K.-based non-profit, which aims to advance a law of ecocide at the
ICC. "The power of ecocide crime is that it creates a legal duty of care
that holds persons of 'superior responsibility' to account in a criminal
court of law."
The ICC has jurisdiction over four categories of crime, collectively
known as Crimes Against Peace, which are meant to constitute "the most
serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole."
Currently, these are: crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war
crimes, and crimes of aggression (the latter, only added in 2017,
narrowly covers military invasions and occupations in violation of the
United Nations charter). Efforts to see ecocide recognized by the ICC
are two-fold: either that ecocide be included under crimes against
humanity, or established as its own separate Crime Against Peace. The
strength of endowing ecocide with its own category would be that it
covers the decimation of ecosystems, as well as the destruction of
civilian populations, and thus recognizes the existential threat of
climate change to life on earth. Ecocide is a crime against humanity,
but also non-human life.
The moral grounds are clear for enumerating ecocide among the most
serious international crimes. The latest alarming reports from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear that climate
change could produce a death toll of hundreds of millions in coming
decades. A 2012 report commissioned by 20 governments determined that
already 400,000 annual deaths are attributable to climate change related
events; that figure is expected to reach 6 million per year by 2030
without drastic shifts to global modes of production and fossil fuel
reliance. And a fact that can not be emphasized enough: Just 100 fossil
fuel producers have been responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas
emissions released in the last 30 years.
WHEN IT COMES to narratives about environmental degradation, the
greatest lie of all is that people are not responsible. The second
greatest lie is that people are equally responsible...
- - -
Other terrains of social justice struggle, such as #MeToo, have also
shown the potential uses of criminal justice lexicon and narrative,
necessarily deployed outside of a problematic criminal justice
apparatus. Those of us who believe that no lasting justice can come from
carceral solutions (given the inherent violence of that system) see the
intolerable risks of relying on, or bolstering, criminal justice as a
path to social justice. The strength of #MeToo revelations lay not in
their ability to convince a judge, but to build consensus around the
need to unseat powerful perpetrators of sexual violence.
Legal norms and rights can and do take on political life through direct
action, community consultation and protest. Even if the court's
signatories resist adopting ecocide as a crime, or as is likely, the
court fails to prosecute, let alone convict, the world's worst climate
criminals, we can and must take justice into our own hands. Collective
action -- like last week's mass climate strike, like voting for leaders
pushing a Green New Deal, like fighting for our lives against capitalism
-- must be pursued with vigor. This is how we take the fight against
ecocide to its perpetrators....
ttps://interc.pt/2mpn8wA
[Laphams Quarterly]
CHARTS & GRAPHS
Decline and Fall
*Where climate change threatens the future of the past.*
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/climate/charts-graphs/decline-and-fall
[Ocean predictions]
*The Oceans We Know Won't Survive Climate Change*
Sea-level rise will become unmanageable, and life will flee the world's
tropical oceans, if carbon pollution keeps rising, a new report from the
UN climate panel says.
ROBINSON MEYER
SEP 25, 2019
- - -
While the report covers how climate change is reshaping the oceans and
ice sheets, its deeper focus is how water, in all its forms, is closely
tied to human flourishing. If our water-related problems are relatively
easy to manage, then the problem of self-government is also easier. But
if we keep spewing carbon pollution into the air, then the resulting
planetary upheaval would constitute "a major strike against the human
endeavor," says Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the report and a
professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton...
- - -
We don't know how much climate change might trigger runaway
collapse--but generally, the less carbon pollution, the better. "If
there's a threshold out there, we're much better landing in
1.5-degree-Celsius trajectory," Oppenheimer said.
What's crucial is that decisions about these pathways are being made
now; the little girl's future is being locked in, even as we speak. In
the United States, President Donald Trump's campaign to repeal virtually
every climate regulation is nudging us toward the higher, more
disastrous path, and making climate action more expensive for other
countries.
"This [report] drives home the message that policies that curb
greenhouse gases today can have a strong effect on future sea-level
rise, particularly in terms of what happens after 2050," Dutton said. We
cannot abandon this Ice Age without risking a new, and far more
dangerous, epoch.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/ipcc-sea-level-rise-report/598765/
- - -
[Here's the report]
*Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate*
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/home/
The chapters posted are the Final Government Draft versions. They are
subject to correction, copy-editing, layout and "trickleback"
adjustments to the text of the full report to ensure consistency with
the approved Summary for Policymakers
In case of a suspected error in an IPCC report, please send a mail to
ipccerrorprotocol at wmo.int containing the following information: Complete
name, Telephone, Organization, Country, Publication, Chapter, Page,
Line, and Comments. The IPCC Protocol for Addressing Possible Errors is here
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/download-report/
- - -
[*Summary for Policmakers*]
The chapters posted are the Final Government Draft versions. They are
subject to correction, copy-editing, layout and "trickleback"
adjustments to the text of the full report to ensure consistency with
the approved Summary for Policymakers
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/
[Paleo]
*Humankind did not live with a high-carbon dioxide atmosphere until 1965*
by Leslie Lee, Texas A&M University
Humans have never before lived with the high carbon dioxide atmospheric
conditions that have become the norm on Earth in the last 60 years,
according to a new study that includes a Texas A&M University researcher.
Titled "Low CO2 levels of the entire Pleistocene Epoch" and published in
Nature Communications today, the study shows that for the entire 2.5
million years of the Pleistocene era, carbon dioxide concentrations
averaged 250 parts per million. Today's levels, by comparison, are more
than 410 parts per million. In 1965, Earth's carbon dioxide atmospheric
concentrations exceeded 320 parts per million, a high point never
reached in the past 2.5 million years, the study shows.
"According to this research, from the first Homo erectus, which is
currently dated to 2.1 to1.8 million years ago, until 1965, we have
lived in a low-carbon dioxide environment--concentrations were less than
320 parts per million," said Yige Zhang, a co-author of the research
study and an assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography in
the College of Geosciences. "So this current high-carbon dioxide
environment is not only an experiment for the climate and the
environment--it's also an experiment for us, for ourselves."...
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-humankind-high-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere.html
[study released of 1000 CEOs]
*UNGC - Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability*
SEPTEMBER 24, 2019
RESEARCH REPORT
In brief
This joint research is the world's most comprehensive to-date on
business contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (also
known as the Global Goals).
Despite the opportunity of sustainability, CEOs believe business
execution is not measuring up.
CEOs believe that systemic change is key to influencing the broader
business community to deliver real progress against the Global Goals.
To break through the status quo, CEOs need businesses to raise corporate
ambition, collaborate in new ways and elevate the responsibility of
leaders...
- - -
While CEOs acknowledge the opportunity for competitive advantage through
sustainability efforts and report pockets of progress, they recognize
that the business community could--and should--be making a far greater
contribution to achieving a sustainable global economy by 2030...
In fact, the global community has reached a clear inflection point on
the journey to 2030. CEOs agree that business must play a more critical
role in advancing the Global Goals. They point to the barriers that are
preventing business from doing more and the enablers that would unlock
the potential of the private sector...
*Time for a reality check*
In 2016, business leaders' attitudes toward sustainability reached a
peak as CEOs saw opportunity to recalibrate their sustainability efforts
in line with global milestones. This is not exactly the case three years
later. Despite clear opportunity, CEOs in 2019 acknowledge that business
execution is not measuring up to the size of the challenge of the Global
Goals--or to their previous ambition.
Anxious for a course correction, CEOs are renewing calls for the
business community to step up impact. In fact, 71 percent of CEOs
believe that--with increased commitment and action--business can play a
critical role in contributing to the Global Goals.
[See the infographic
https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-109/accenture-ungc-ceo-study-infographic.pdf]
[video explains it so well]
*Arctic Sea Ice Reaches 2019 Minimum Extent*
Sep 23, 2019
NASA Goddard
Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2019 minimum extent of 1.60 million
square miles (4.15 million square kilometers) on Sept. 18, tied for
second lowest summertime extent in the satellite record, according to
NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The Arctic sea ice cap is an expanse of frozen seawater floating on top
of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas. Every year, it expands and
thickens during the fall and winter and grows smaller and thinner during
the spring and summer. But in the past decades, increasing temperatures
have caused marked decreases in the Arctic sea ice extents in all
seasons, with particularly rapid reductions in the minimum end-of-summer
ice extent. The shrinking of the Arctic sea ice cover can ultimately
affect local ecosystems, global weather patterns, and the circulation of
the oceans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XKYdSqf2ss
[SF6 explanation Sulfur hexafloride and H2O]
*The Worst Greenhouse Gas Might Surprise You | Answers With Joe*
Sep 23, 2019
Joe Scott
We hear a lot about carbon dioxide in discussions about climate change,
but it's not the main driving factor when it comes to the warming of the
atmosphere. That's something else entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdhnhknaJOg
*This Day in Climate History - September 26, 2015 - from D.R. Tucker*
The New York Times reports:
"When President Obama tried to tackle climate change in his first
term, he pushed Congress to limit and put a price on carbon
pollution, but the so-called cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate
in 2010. Among the chief reasons: Lawmakers from both parties feared
that any law to cut greenhouse gas emissions would harm the nation's
competitiveness compared with China, which was then emerging as the
world's largest polluter.
"Since then, Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates have
repeatedly cited China's lack of action on climate change as the
chief reason that the United States should not take stronger action.
"On Friday in the Rose Garden, the story of how Washington and
Beijing will fight climate change took a stunning turn as President
Xi Jinping of China stood with Mr. Obama and announced that China
would put in place its own national cap-and-trade system in 2017.
Environmentalists hailed the announcement as historic and said that
China's move should effectively end Republicans' main objection to
enacting a domestic climate change policy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/world/asia/beijing-puts-ball-back-in-washingtons-court-on-climate-change.html
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