[TheClimate.Vote] September 27, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/September 27, 2019/

[PHYS.ORG]
SEPTEMBER 25, 2019
*Potentially large economic impacts of climate change can be avoided by 
human actions*
by Jun'ya Takakura, National Institute for Environmental Studies
People are less motivated to take action if an outcome is uncertain, and 
this could be true for climate-related issues. The uncertainty in 
climate response to the increase in greenhouse gas concentration, which 
is often believed to be substantially large, makes it difficult to 
believe the benefit of reducing emissions or the effectiveness of making 
society more resilient to climate-related hazards. This could be one of 
the reasons for inaction even though urgent action is called for. A new 
study published in Nature Climate Change, conducted by a Japanese 
research team estimates economic impacts of climate change and suggests 
that mankind's decisions and actions can overwhelm the uncertainty in 
climate response in terms of reducing the impact of climate change.

Estimation of the economic impacts of climate change is itself extremely 
challenging because it can affect society in many ways. Collaboration 
between researchers in a diverse range of fields enabled the research 
team to conduct a global-scale assessment covering the economic impacts 
associated with climate change for nine impact sectors: the economic 
impacts arising from changes in agricultural productivity, 
undernourishment, heat-related excess mortality, cooling/heating demand, 
occupational health costs, capacity of hydroelectric power generation, 
capacity of thermal power generation, fluvial flooding, and coastal 
inundation.

Describing the novelty and significance of the study, Dr. Hijioka, the 
research managing director of Center for Climate Change Adaptation, 
National Institute for Environmental Studies states, "This is very 
special research, with no equivalent in the world."

The estimated value of the aggregated economic impacts had a large 
divergence depending on three assumptions: socioeconomic conditions, 
amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and climate responses to the 
increased greenhouse gas concentration. Under the most pessimistic 
combination of assumptions, the estimated economic impact will be 
equivalent to 8.6 percent of the global total GDP at the end of the 21st 
century, while it will be limited to around or less than 1 percent if 
the 2-degree target, which was adopted in the Paris Agreement, is 
achieved and societal resilience to climate-related hazards improves. 
More importantly, the results also indicated that the contribution of 
the uncertainty in the climate response to the divergence--or 
variance--of the estimates was minor compared to the contribution of the 
differences in the anthropogenically directed societal pathways (i.e., 
greenhouse gas emissions and socioeconomic developments). "This means 
that mankind has the potential to determine the scale of the economic 
impacts of climate change," explains Dr. Takakura, a researcher at 
National Institute for Environmental Studies.

According to the results of this study, the future is uncertain mainly 
because how we behave is uncertain, rather than because how the climate 
behaves is uncertain in terms of the economic impacts of climate change. 
"In other words, we can choose the future by taking or not taking 
actions,and have responsibility for the outcome," he added.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-potentially-large-economic-impacts-climate.html


[Beckwith video explanation of headed ocean]
*Return of the BLOB; aka Marine Heat Wave*
Sep 25, 2019
Paul Beckwith
In 2014 a phenomena appeared on which there is no history. The ocean 
temperature off the west coast of North America rose and destroyed 
marine diversity and wreaked havoc on weather patterns around the globe. 
Known as the "BLOB", this voracious spot raised water temperatures in 
the North Pacific between 4 and 5 degrees Celsius (7-8 F), killing off 
humpback whales, Pacific cod, and huge numbers of birds, among other 
creatures. Is the BLOB, otherwise known as a Marine Heat Wave (MHW) back 
to torture us? Water temperature is thus far up 2.8 degrees C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsTVQhsSAs0
- - -
*Marine Heat Waves Resulting in Severe Consequences: BLOB 2.0*
Sep 26, 2019
I continue chatting on the new "BLOB", this voracious spot of very high 
water temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean, otherwise known as a 
Marine Heat Wave (MHW). As abrupt climate change accelerates, the 
heating is highly non uniform across the planet. Most people know that 
Arctic Warming is 3x to 5x faster than the global average, but not that:
- land is warming 2x faster than oceans
- mountain regions 2x to 3x faster
- western ocean boundary currents 2x to 3x faster than the overall 
ocean, - - -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhR90OAGzsk
- - -
[See the NOAA data maps]
*PSD Map Room - Sea Surface Temperature (SST)*
Plots created from daily, weekly, and monthly NOAA Optimum Interpolation 
(OI) Version 2 SST data.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/clim/sst.shtml



[Foreign Affairs]
*Climate Change Is Already Killing Us*
How Our Warmer and Wetter Planet Is Getting Sicker and Deadlier by the Day
- - -
Climate change exacerbates chronic and contagious disease, worsens food 
and water shortages, increases the risk of pandemics, and aggravates 
mass displacement. The broad environmental effects of climate change 
have long been discussed as long-term risks; what's clear now is that 
the health effects are worse than anticipated--and that they're already 
being felt...
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-09-23/climate-change-already-killing-us 




[Heatwave in the ocean]
*Hotter, higher seas to worsen extreme floods without 'urgent and 
ambitious' action, United Nations warns*
The IPCC ocean report says huge investment and drastic cuts to emissions 
are needed to stave off disaster as glaciers melt, cities sink and Seas 
are heating and rising faster and faster, a definitive United nations 
report warns, with dire consequences for people and the planet.

The report, prepared by more than 100 scientists and published as a 
summary on Wednesday, found warmer oceans and icy places are killing off 
marine life and speeding up climate change.

Even in best-case scenarios for reducing greenhouse gas emissions this 
century, extreme floods that hit once every hundred years will, by 2050, 
be expected to strike some coastal cities and small-island nations annually.

"Although the oceans and cryosphere [frozen parts of the world] seem to 
be far away from most people, they are linked to everyone," said Lijing 
Cheng, an oceanographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a lead 
author of the report.extreme weather batters coasts harder...
https://www.dw.com/en/hotter-higher-seas-to-worsen-extreme-floods-without-urgent-and-ambitious-action-united-nations-warns/a-50565483



[Follow the money]
*Goldman Sachs released a 34-page analysis of the impact of climate 
change. And the results are terrifying.*
A Goldman Sachs report on the impact of climate change on cities across 
the world makes for grim reading.
Rising temperatures would lead to changing disease patterns, more 
intense and longer-lasting heatwaves, more destructive weather events, 
and pressure on the availability and quality of water for drinking and 
agriculture.
Major cities were also highlighted at risk of flooding with parts of New 
York, Tokyo, and Lagos all at risk of being partially submerged.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/goldman-sachs-climate-change-threatens-new-york-tokyo-lagos-cities-2019-9-1028552494
- - - -
[Here's a bit of it]
*Taking the Heat: Making Cities Resilient to Climate Change*
5 SEP 2019
GLOBAL MARKETS INSTITUTE
Cities will be on the frontlines of climate adaptation. Building up 
their resilience has the potential to drive one of the largest 
infrastructure build-outs in history and will likely require innovative 
sources of financing.

Although the timing, scope and magnitude of the consequences of global 
warming remain uncertain, the potential risks are significant. Attention 
has focused on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and far more 
work will be needed here. Even as this work progresses, however, there 
will also be a need for adaptation efforts that can help the world 
withstand the potential effects of climate change.
Climate change could reshape the earth. Negative outcomes that could 
make adaptation critical in coming years include higher temperatures, 
more intense storms, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, shifting 
agricultural patterns, pressure on food and water and new threats to 
human health.
Cities will be on the frontlines of climate adaptation. Although the 
need for adaptation is likely to be widespread, we focus here on cities. 
Because they are home to more than half the world's population and 
generate roughly eighty percent of global GDP, cities will find 
themselves at the epicenter of this challenge. Rapid urbanization in 
some developing countries will also likely sharpen the focus on cities.
Urban adaptation could drive one of the largest infrastructure 
build-outs in history. Greater resilience will likely require extensive 
urban planning, with investments in coastal protections, 
climate-resilient construction, more robust infrastructure, upgraded 
water and waste-management systems, energy resilience and stronger 
communications and transportation systems. Despite the uncertainty 
around the timing and scale of the impact, it may be prudent for some 
cities to start investing in adaptation now and to do so in ways that 
allow for maximum flexibility in the future - without committing to any 
one specific climate projection.
Given the scale of the task, urban adaptation will likely need to draw 
on innovative sources of financing. Even the most economically 
prosperous cities will likely need to look beyond tax revenues to other 
sources of funding, including central-government funds, public-private 
partnerships, institutional investors, insurance and, in developing 
economies, international financial institutions. "Soft" infrastructure, 
such as laws, regulations and markets that support financing, will 
matter too.
Adaptation may raise questions of fairness. Urban adaptation may raise 
questions of fairness - such as which cities can support adaptation and 
which cannot, or where limited resources should be directed within 
cities. This is likely to be true even in the most prosperous cities; 
the fact that many of the problems could prove to be local and specific 
could exacerbate this dynamic.

Full report at 
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/gs-research/taking-the-heat/report.pdf
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/taking-the-heat.html



[Sept. 25, 2019]
*Current climate change models might be overestimating how much carbon 
dioxide plants can suck from the atmosphere.*
by Igor Houwat And Tom Sharkey, Michigan State University
Thanks to molecular research on photosynthesis done at the MSU-DOE Plant 
Research Laboratory (PRL), non-MSU atmospheric scientists have factored 
in a lesser understood photosynthetic limitation into their models.

The result: models suggest that atmospheric carbon dioxide 
concentrations might increase more rapidly than previously expected.

Photosynthesis supports life on Earth. Photosynthetic organisms capture 
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and process it through a series of 
reactions known as the Calvin-Benson cycle.

Specifically, the carbon is used to make triose phosphate, a molecule 
which eventually turns into sucrose, the energy currency that powers 
plants and the food chain above them. The process is referred to as TPU 
(triose phosphate utilization).

But there is a limit to how much carbon plants can use.

"When photosynthesis gets too much carbon dioxide, it can't process it 
into sugars fast enough," says Tom Sharkey, University Distinguished 
Professor at the PRL. "Photosynthesis cannot indefinitely increase its 
productivity levels. It reaches a ceiling, and more carbon dioxide won't 
help. In fact, plants sometimes absorb less carbon dioxide as levels 
increase in the atmosphere."...
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-climate-carbon-air-fast.html




[Opinion]
*The Illusion of Saving the World*
by Kirkpatrick Sale
Sept 26, 2019
The tragedy is that we have already increased temperatures so much that 
there is nothing that science can do that will reduce temperatures in 
ten years.

At the end of this month, as you probably know by now, an extraordinary 
hoopla event will descend on Manhattan in the form of a "Climate Action 
Summit," summoned by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, to get the 
nations of the world finally to take seriously the threat of "global 
warming" and pledge to actually take serious action to save the world 
from catastrophe.

The chances of that happening are nil.

Oh, yes there will be speeches and promises. Under increasing pressure 
from alarmed citizens, led by the enlightened youth of the world who 
know they will be the primary victims of the coming environmental 
disaster, most national leaders will toss around ideas like carbon 
taxes, bans on coal mining and nuclear energy, building "retrofitting," 
renewable solar fuels, carbon dioxide entrapment, and "net zero" 
greenhouse gas emissions. Some will be willing to start doing something 
about one or another, while simultaneously asking for somebody else to 
pay for the astronomic costs.

But the whole thing is an illusion. The problem is too big, the 
solutions too imperfect, and the timing, even if everything got fixed in 
a decade, is too late.

Most scientists believe, with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change, that if the earth's temperature should increase by 2 
degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Farenheit) the rise in sea levels would 
engulf 280 million people, earthquakes could wipe out 17.6 million, and 
subsequent droughts and famines would like result in another 231 
million, not to mention uncontrolled worldwide migrations, the collapse 
of many fragile states, and the threat of civil disorder throughout the 
developed world.

This is why the last global climate gathering, in Paris in 2015, set a 
goal of reducing global gas emissions enough by 2050 so as to avoid 
reaching a world temperature of a 1.5 Celsius increase This would mean 
reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and virtually 100 per cent by 
the target date.

And what is happening? Global gas emissions have increased every year 
for the last 20 years, with a record set in 2018 (to which the U.S. 
contributed a record 3.4 per cent), and at this rate, unless miracles 
occur, we'll reach 1.5 Celsius by 2030, 2 Celsius shortly thereafter.

Here are two hard truths. In order to reach the Paris Accord goals, 
according to the Intergovernmental Panel, the world would need to see 
"rapid and far-reaching" changes in energy systems (immediate end of 
fossil fuels), land use (agricultural land replanted with trees), city 
layouts and transportation (to reduce car use), buildings (all 
retrofitted to renewable energy), vast reduction or elimination of road 
and air travel, and worldwide checks on human material consumption. In 
other words, the end of capital civilization as we know it and its 
replacement by low-energy, pre-industrial, self-sufficient local and 
regional economies--within a decade.

And two, even those miracles would probably be too late. The ten hottest 
years on earth, since quasi-global records began to be kept in 1850, 
have been between 2005 and 2019, and the hottest by far have been the 
last five years. (July was the hottest month since record-keeping 
began.) Hot temperatures cause melting ice, at the poles, in Greenland, 
and at glaciers worldwide, thus reducing reflection of sunlight back 
into the atmosphere and increasing the amount that warms the surface. 
Melting permafrost layers release massive amounts of methane gas, a far 
more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, increasing temperatures worldwide.

The tragedy is that we have already increased temperatures so much, and 
created conditions so that they will inevitably increase further, that 
there is nothing that science--or any United Nations mandate of any 
kind--can do that will reduce temperatures in ten years. Period.

Last year an English scientist named Jem Bendell wrote a paper that 
shocked many of his fellow scholars by coming out and saying what 
everyone knew the data pointed to but no one wanted to admit. He had 
devoted decades to "sustainable development," he said, but had to 
conclude that " the whole field of sustainable development research…is 
based on the view that we can halt climate change and avert catastrophe. 
By returning to the science, I discovered that view is no longer 
tenable," and there was very little prospect that any kind of social 
change would save the world from an imminent environmental disaster and 
"the likelihood of near term societal collapse."

It is still not a generally accepted scientific position, and its 
implications are so far-reaching that a great many people prefer simply 
to ignore it; his fellow scientists criticize it as excessively gloomy, 
which of course it is. But it is hardly surprising that in the last few 
years there have grown up several organizations that have confronted 
that truth head-on. For example, something called the Near Term Human 
Extinction Support Group started a Facebook group in 2013 and has since 
added a Near Term Human Extinction Evidence Group, both flourishing with 
new material every day to comfort or discomfort their adherents.

It's not necessary to side with the NTHers, but I would advise you not 
to fall into the delusions that will be offered in the next few days by 
the Summitists.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books over fifty years and 
lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/26/the-illusion-of-saving-the-world/



*This Day in Climate History - September 27, 1988 - from D.R. Tucker*
September 27, 1988: In a speech to the Royal Society in London, Margaret 
Thatcher addresses the environmental threats of global warming, the 
ozone layer and acid rain, noting the risk of rising sea levels to the 
Maldives.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346
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