[TheClimate.Vote] August 8, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest..
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Aug 8 11:55:53 EDT 2020
/*August 8, 2020*/
[Average conditions feel mean]
2 degrees C: BEYOND THE LIMIT
*This giant climate hot spot is robbing the West of its water*
- -
Here, on Colorado's Western Slope, no snow means no snowpack. And no
snowpack means no water in an area that's so dry it's lucky to get 10
inches of rain a year. A few months after taking the photo, Kehmeier
stared across the land his family had tilled for four generations and
made a harsh calculation: He could make more money selling his ranch's
water than working his land...
- -
This cluster of counties on Colorado's Western Slope -- along with three
counties just across the border in eastern Utah -- has warmed more than
2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit], double the global average.
Spanning more than 30,000 square miles, it is the largest 2C hot spot in
the Lower 48, a Washington Post analysis found.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/climate-environment/climate-change-colorado-utah-hot-spot/
[Popular Science report]
*This worst-case climate scenario might be the most realistic*
Climate scientists are still debating what's the most likely outcome,
though none of them are looking good...
https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/worst-case-climate-scenario-realistic/
[video documentary worth viewing]
*Living in the Time of Dying*
Facing the truth about climate change
https://www.livinginthetimeofdying.com/documentary
[SNOPES corrects a disinformationist]
*Shellenberger's Optimistic, Viral Take on Climate Future Challenged by
Scientists He Cites*
Activist Michael Shellenberger argues that fears of a future
climate-driven apocalypse are unfounded. But several scientists he cites
told Snopes he misunderstands -- or mischaracterizes -- their research.
ALEX KASPRAK - 4 AUGUST 2020
On June 28, 2020, environmental activist and nuclear energy advocate
Michael Shellenberger published an article in the business magazine
Forbes titled "On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The
Climate Scare." In it, Shellenberger proffered a list of 12 "facts few
people know" that "will sound like 'climate denialism' to many people."
A day later, Forbes removed the article, which teased his new book
"Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All."
Shellenberger, a self-described "environmental humanist" who often casts
the demands of climate activists as oppositional to the economic needs
of impoverished populations, asserted that he was being censored. That
claim resonated with several conservative media outlets, including
Breitbart, Quillette, and the Daily Wire, who each republished all or
some of the article. In reality, as reported by multiple outlets, the
article was removed for violating Forbes' editorial policy against
self-promotion. The ensuing virality brought the situation to the
attention of several fact-checking organizations, including Climate
Feedback, where a panel of seven Ph.D. experts deemed the article's
credibility to be "low."
The scientific controversy initially created by the article turned into
a broader dispute over fact-checking and alleged censorship after
Shellenberger's article was temporarily flagged on social media as
misleading. In response, Shellenberger argued that his views had been
mischaracterized by fact-checkers, pointing to context from his book
that does not appear in the article. The office of at least one United
States congressman reached out to Facebook over the controversy. Since
then, Shellenberger has been hailed as a more rational kind of
environmentalist on various podcasts and cable news programs, including
an appearance on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
In this article -- which is based in part on a 90-minute Zoom interview
with Shellenberger -- Snopes explains both the controversy behind
Shellenberger's "apology" and analyzes the 12 facts it includes, which
range from "global warming is not making natural disasters worse" to
"adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor."..
[much of the citations pointed to a FOX archive (archive.vn) that no
longer carries the disputed content]
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/08/04/shellenberger-climate-change/
[a long distance view]
*Here's what Earth might look like to aliens*
https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_image_-_1280w__no_aspect_/public/earth_1280p.jpg?itok=EmwQ4FtO
The team started with about 10,000 images of our planet taken by NASA's
Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which sits at a
gravitational balance point between Earth and the sun, allowing it to
see only the daytime side of the planet. The images were taken at 10
specific wavelengths every 1 to 2 hours during 2016 and 2017.
To simulate an alien point of view, the researchers reduced the images
into a single brightness reading for each wavelength--10 "dots" that,
when plotted over time, produce 10 light curves that represent what a
distant observer might see if they steadily watched exoplanet Earth over
2 years.
When researchers analyzed the curves and compared them with the original
images, they figured out which parameters of the curves corresponded to
land and cloud cover in the images. Once they knew those relationships,
they picked out the parameter most closely related to land area,
adjusted it for the 24-hour rotation of the Earth, and constructed the
above contour map, soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal
Letters...
- -
While this is obviously no substitute for an actual image of an alien
world, it may allow future astronomers to assess whether an exoplanet
has oceans, clouds, and icecaps--key requirements for a habitable world.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/here-s-what-earth-might-look-aliens
[McKibben reviews Lynas]
*130 Degrees*
Bill McKibben AUGUST 20, 2020 ISSUE
/*Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency*/
*by Mark Lynas*
London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99
So now we have some sense of what it's like: a full-on global-scale
crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life--shopping for food,
holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents--shifts
dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about
safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die?
Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It's unlike anything
we've ever seen.
The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a
harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered
the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of
crises, many of them more dangerous than what we're living through now.
The main question is whether we'll be able to hold the rise in
temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering,
deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the
coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct
possibility, as Mark Lynas's new book, Our Final Warning, makes
painfully clear.
Lynas is a British journalist and activist, and in 2007, in the run-up
to the Copenhagen climate conference, he published a book titled Six
Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. His new volume echoes that
earlier work, which was by no means cheerful. But because scientists
have spent the last decade dramatically increasing understanding of the
Earth's systems, and because our societies wasted that decade by pouring
ever more carbon into the atmosphere, this book--impeccably sourced and
careful to hew to the wide body of published research--is far, far
darker. As Lynas says in his opening sentences, he had long assumed that
we "could probably survive climate change. Now I am not so sure."
The nations that use fossil fuel in large quantities have raised the
temperature of the planet one degree Celsius (that's about 1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit) above its level before the Industrial Revolution. We passed
the mark around 2015, which was coincidentally also the year we reached
the first real global accords on climate action, in Paris. A rise of one
degree doesn't sound like an extraordinary change, but it is: each
second, the carbon and methane we've emitted trap heat equivalent to the
explosion of three Hiroshima-sized bombs. The carbon dioxide sensors
erected in 1959 on the shoulder of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii
recorded a new record high in late May of this year, showing an
atmosphere of about 417 parts per million CO2, more than a hundred above
the levels our great-great-grandparents would have known, and indeed
higher than anything in at least the last three million years...
- -
A survey of the damage done at one degree is impressive and unsettling,
especially since in almost every case it exceeds what scientists would
have predicted thirty years ago. (Scientists, it turns out, are by
nature cautious.) Lynas offers a planetary tour of the current carnage,
ranging from Greenland (where melt rates are already at the level once
predicted for 2070); to the world's forests (across the planet, fire
season has increased in duration by a fifth); to urban areas in Asia and
the Middle East, which in the last few summers have seen the highest
reliably recorded temperatures on Earth, approaching 54 degrees Celsius,
or 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It is a one-degree world that has seen a
girdle of bleached coral across the tropics--a 90 percent collapse in
reproductive success along the Great Barrier Reef, the planet's largest
living structure--and the appalling scenes from Australia in December,
as thousands of people waded into the ocean at resort towns to escape
the firestorms barreling down from the hills...
- -
Consider what we've seen so far as a baseline: we're definitely not
going to get any cooler. But now consider the real problem, the news
that scientists have been trying to get across for many years but that
has not really sunk in with the public or with political leaders. As
Lynas puts it:
If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two
degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century,
and four degrees by 2075 or so. If we're unlucky with positive
feedbacks…from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical
rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by
century's end.
That's a paragraph worth reading again. It's an aggressive reading of
the available science (research published in early July estimates we
could cross the 1.5-degree threshold by 2025), but it's not outlandish.
And it implies an unimaginable future. Two degrees will not be twice as
bad as one, or three degrees three times as bad. The damage is certain
to increase exponentially, not linearly, because the Earth will move
past grave tipping points as we slide up this thermometer...
- -
At two degrees' elevated temperature, "scientists are now confident"
that we will see an Arctic Ocean free of ice in the summer--when already
the loss of ice in the North has dramatically altered weather systems,
apparently weakening the jet stream and stalling weather patterns in
North America and elsewhere. A two-degree rise in temperature could see
40 percent of the permafrost region melt away, which in turn would
release massive amounts of methane and carbon, which would whisk us
nearer to three degrees. But we're getting ahead of the story. Two
degrees likely also initiates the "irreversible loss of the West
Antarctic ice sheet." Even modest estimates of the resulting sea-level
rise project that 79 million people will be displaced, and protecting
vulnerable cities and towns just along the Eastern Seaboard of the US
behind dikes and walls will cost as much as $1 million per person. "I
suspect no one will want to pay for sea walls at such vast expense, and
the most vulnerable (and the poorest) communities will simply be
abandoned," Lynas writes.
Researchers once hoped that modest warming of two degrees might actually
slightly increase food production, but "now these rosy expectations look
dangerously naïve." He cites recent studies predicting that two degrees
will reduce "global food availability" by about 99 calories a
day--again, obviously, the pain will not be equally or fairly shared.
Cities will grow steadily hotter: current warming means everyone in the
Northern Hemisphere is effectively moving southward at about 12.5 miles
a year. That's half a millimeter a second, which is actually easy to see
with the naked eye: "a slow-moving giant conveyor belt" transporting us
"deeper and deeper towards the sub-tropics at the same speed as the
second hand on a small wristwatch."
But that statistical average masks extremes: we can expect ever-fiercer
heatwaves, so, for instance, in China hundreds of millions of people
will deal with temperatures they've never encountered before. The
natural world will suffer dramatically--99 percent of coral reefs are
likely to die, reducing one of the most fascinating (and productive)
corners of creation to "flattened, algae-covered rubble."
As we head past two degrees and into the realm of three, "we will stress
our civilization towards the point of collapse." A three-degree rise in
temperature takes us to a level of global heat no human has ever
experienced--you have to wind time back at least to the Pleistocene,
three million years ago, before the Ice Ages. In his last volume, Lynas
said scientists thought the onset of the collapse of the West Antarctic
ice sheet would take place at four degrees; now, as we've seen above, it
seems a deadly concern at two, and a certainty at three. Higher sea
levels mean that storm surges like those that marked Superstorm Sandy in
2012 could be expected, on average, three times a year. The
record-setting heatwaves of 2019 "will be considered an unusually cool
summer in the three-degree world"; over a billion people would live in
zones of the planet "where it becomes impossible to safely work outside
artificially cooled environments, even in the shade." The Amazon dies
back, permafrost collapses. Change feeds on itself: at three degrees the
albedo, or reflectivity, of the planet is grossly altered, with white
ice that bounces sunshine back out to space replaced by blue ocean or
brown land that absorbs those rays, amplifying the process.
*And then comes four degrees:*
Humans as a species are not facing extinction--not yet anyway. But
advanced industrial civilisation, with its constantly increasing levels
of material consumption, energy use and living standards--the system
that we call modernity…is tottering.
In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, peak
temperatures each year will be hotter than the 120s one now finds in
Death Valley, and three quarters of the globe's population will be
"exposed to deadly heat more than 20 days per year." In New York, the
number will be fifty days; in Jakarta, 365. A "belt of uninhabitability"
will run through the Middle East, most of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
and eastern China; expanding deserts will consume whole countries "from
Iraq to Botswana."
Depending on the study, the risk of "very large fires" in the western US
rises between 100 and 600 percent; the risk of flooding in India rises
twenty-fold. Right now the risk that the biggest grain-growing regions
will have simultaneous crop failures due to drought is "virtually zero,"
but at four degrees "this probability rises to 86%." Vast "marine
heatwaves" will scour the oceans: "One study projects that in a
four-degree world sea temperatures will be above the thermal tolerance
threshold of 100% of species in many tropical marine ecoregions." The
extinctions on land and sea will certainly be the worst since the end of
the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, when an asteroid helped bring the
age of the dinosaurs to an end. "The difference," Lynas notes, "is that
this time the 'meteor' was visible decades in advance, but we simply
turned away as it loomed ever larger in the sky."
I'm not going to bother much with Lynas's descriptions of what happens
at five degrees or six. It's not that they're not plausible--they are,
especially if humanity never gets its act together and shifts course.
It's that they're pornographic. If we get anywhere near these levels,
the living will truly envy the dead: this is a world where people are
trying to crowd into Patagonia or perhaps the South Island of New
Zealand, a world where massive monsoons wash away soil down to the rock,
where the oceans turn anoxic, or completely deprived of oxygen. Forget
the Cretaceous and the asteroids--at six degrees we're approaching the
kind of damage associated with the end of the Permian, the greatest
biological cataclysm in the planet's history, when 90 percent of species
disappeared. Does that seem hyperbolic? At the moment our cars and
factories are increasing the planet's CO2 concentration roughly ten
times faster than the giant Siberian volcanoes that drove that long-ago
disaster...
- -
But--and this is the terrible sticking point--economics itself won't
move us nearly fast enough. Inertia is a powerful force--inertia, and
the need to abandon trillions of dollars of "stranded assets." That is,
vast reserves of oil and gas that currently underpin the value of
companies (and of countries that act like companies--think Saudi Arabia)
would need to be left in the ground; infrastructure like pipelines and
powerplants would need to be shuttered long before their useful life is
over...
- -
What Lynas's book should perhaps have made slightly more explicit is how
little margin we have to accomplish these tasks. In a coda, he writes
valiantly, "It is not too late, and in fact it never will be too late.
Just as 1.5C is better than 2C, so 2C is better than 2.5C, 3C is better
than 3.5C and so on. We should never give up." This is inarguable, at
least emotionally. It's just that, as the studies he cites makes clear,
if we go to two degrees, that will cause feedbacks that take us
automatically higher. At a certain point, it will be too late. The first
of these deadlines might be 2030--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, in 2018, told us we needed a "fundamental transformation" of
energy systems by that date or the targets set in Paris would slip
through our grasp. (By "fundamental transformation," it meant a 50
percent fall in emissions.) That is, the period in which we retain the
most leverage to really affect the outcome may be measured in years that
correspond to the digits on your two hands...
- -
The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale--some sense of how much
we're going to have to change to meet the climate challenge. We ended
business as usual for a time this spring, pretty much across the
planet--changed our lifestyles far more than we'd imagined possible. We
stopped flying, stopped commuting, stopped many factories. The bottom
line was that emissions fell, but not by as much as you might expect: by
many calculations little more than 10 or 15 percent. What that seems to
indicate is that most of the momentum destroying our Earth is hardwired
into the systems that run it. Only by attacking those systems--ripping
out the fossil-fueled guts and replacing them with renewable energy,
even as we make them far more efficient--can we push emissions down to
where we stand a chance. Not, as Lynas sadly makes clear, a chance at
stopping global warming. A chance at surviving.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/climate-emergency-130-degrees/
- -
[RealClimate reviewed the 2007 edition of the book]
*Six Degrees*
eric @ 25 November 2007
"Alarmism" is a term that gets bandied about a lot. It is often said
that one should not call out "fire" in a crowded building. But it really
depends, one might say, on whether the "calling out" is done in such a
way as to simultaneously prevent a stampede and prevent anyone getting
burned...
- -
If a reading of the published scientific literature paints such a
frightening picture of the future as Six Degrees suggests - even while
it honestly represents that literature - then are we being too
provocative in the way we write our scientific papers? Or are we being
too cautious in the way we talk about the implications of the results?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/11/six-degrees/
- -
[I published a web site based on first edition of the *Six Degrees* book]
[Interactive chart to tell us the effect of new heat - from 2009]
*How bad can it be? ...and when?*
The chart.. has linked hotspots. In the lower right corner of the
chart notice the temperature line for the current year. There are
seven future projections plotted.
The graphic IPCC Chart uses data from special report emissions
scenario for the IPCC. Links below in blue are summarized
projections for each degree change taken from the book "Six Degrees,
Our Future on a Hotter Planet" - Mark Lynas and videos segments from
National Geographics.
For an excellent video introduction to the global warming problem
see the National Geographic video of Global Warming 101
http://localsteps.org/howbad.html
[video talk]
*Collapse 101: The Inevitable Fruit of Progress (Dowd)*
Jul 24, 2020
thegreatstory
This stand-alone 75-minute video is also the first in a two-part series,
"Collapse and Adaptation Primer". The second video in the series is
titled, "Post Gloom: Deeply Adapting to Reality". See
https://postdoom.com/ for more information. Additional resources here:
https://postdoom.com/resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml9uJNF_kXk
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 8, 2005 *
President George W. Bush signs the pro-fracking Energy Policy Act into
law. Six days later, Mark Hertsgaard discusses the legislation on Air
America's "EcoTalk with Betsy Rosenberg."
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/USEnergyPolicy7
http://www.radio4all.net/files/pub/archive/09.01.05/philippe@bainbridge.net/1374-1-20050814-aaet081405mark.mp3
https://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/
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