[TheClimate.Vote] August 31, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 31, 2020*/

[XR activism brief message ]
*Climate Crisis, and Why We Should Panic voiced by Keira Knightley | 
Extinction Rebellion*
Aug 28, 2020
Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion has relaunched a short animated film entitled 
Climate Crisis, and Why We Should Panic. Written, directed and animated 
by Miritte Ben Yitzchak and voiced by British actress Keira Knightley, 
it urges us all to Act Now before it is too late.

The animated short Climate Crisis, and Why We Should Panic, is the 
second of a two-part explainer video series for Extinction Rebellion, 
focusing on the climate and ecological crisis. Voiced by Keira 
Knightley, it explains what's causing climate change, why governments 
must enter crisis mode to tackle this issue, and what will happen if we 
don't do something about it now.

It follows the first part - Extinction Emergency, and Why We Must Act 
Now - which focuses on the ecological crisis. Voiced by Naomie Harris 
and scored by Brian Eno, it summarises the planet's biodiversity loss, 
runaway consumerism and the ecological crisis that now faces us, and how 
the consequences will affect millions of lives around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXYr9jhRqK8



[excellent video presentation 12 min]
*Antarctica : What happens if the 'Doomsday' Glacier collapses?*
Mar 15, 2020
Just Have a Think
Antarctica is home to some of the world's largest ice sheets and 
glaciers. They existed in a stable equilibrium of ebb and flow for 
millions of years until global warming started to melt them faster than 
the snow falls could replenish their ice. Now a new US / UK research 
collaboration has discovered that the rate of melt is even worse than 
scientists feared. What's driving this latest acceleration, and can we 
slow it down?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hax7EPFysqY

- -

[video]
*Latest Science on The Absolutely Staggering Amount of Ice Recently Lost 
>From Earth*
Aug 29, 2020
Paul Beckwith
A new scientific "Review Article: Earth's ice imbalance" by Slater et 
al. found that Earth lost a net 28 trillion tons of ice from 1994 to 
2017. Breakdown in trillions of tons, largest to smallest, is: Arctic 
sea-ice 7.6, Antarctic ice shelves 6.5, Mountain glaciers 6.2, Greenland 
ice sheet 3.8, Antarctic ice sheet 2.5, and Antarctic sea-ice 0.9. 60% 
is from the Northern Hemisphere, 40% from Southern Hemisphere. Rate of 
ice loss has increased 57% since the 1990's (from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion 
tons/year). 68% is from atmospheric melting, 32% is from oceanic 
melting. Overall, the ice melt has taken up 3.2% of the global energy 
budget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F86fvyalbPQ&t=192s



[pyroocene]
*'We're drying the fuels': How climate change is making wildfires worse 
in the West*
Ian James - Arizona Republic
As flames tore through California's Santa Cruz Mountains, Craig Clements 
drove toward the fire in a specialized radar-equipped Ford pickup, 
watching the plume of smoke billowing from the forest.

Clements is a professor who leads San Jose State University's Fire 
Weather Research Laboratory, and he chases wildfires to study their 
behavior...
- -
In the mix of factors that have influenced California's fires, Clements 
pointed out that the past winter brought little rain.

He's seen the dryness while snipping off branches from plants at three 
sites where he and his students take samples to monitor the fuel 
moisture. Beneath the green foliage in early August, he saw brush that 
was dying and gray.

Analyzing samples from the living plants, they found the moisture well 
below average for this time of year and on par with the levels in 
2014-2015 during California's severe drought. By this July, the 
vegetation was already as dry as it typically is in August, Clements 
said, "so we were a month ahead of the dryness."

Then in early August came record-breaking heat across the Southwest. The 
heat further compounded the drying.

"That exacerbates the fuel moisture and causes it to decrease even 
more," Clements said. "So, that sets the stage for higher intensity fires."

When the lightning storms struck, the dry vegetation was primed to burn.

Scientific research has shown that dryness has been intensifying in the 
West in recent years with climate change. As global temperatures have 
risen, the heat has contributed to drier conditions...
- -
Over the past few decades, people in Western states from Arizona to 
Colorado have lived through fires that have grown bigger, more 
destructive and costlier in lives and property lost.
*A 'Fire Age'*
Since 2000, much of the West has been plagued by intense heat-driven dry 
spells that have persisted for years.

In a recent study based on tree rings in areas from Montana to northern 
Mexico, scientists found that the 19 years from 2000 to 2018 ranked as 
the worst "megadrought" since the 1500s, and that global warming has 
turned what would have been a period of moderate aridity into one of the 
most extreme two-decade droughts of the past 1,200 years.

The dryness has put growing strains on water supplies, contributing to 
the need for water cutbacks along the overallocated Colorado River, and 
it has also stoked the fires.

During the past year, drought has spread and worsened in Western states 
from Oregon to New Mexico. As of this week, 83% of the region is now 
classified as being abnormally dry or in drought, according to the U.S. 
Drought Monitor website, compared to 28% a year ago...
- -
Traditionally, some of the driest conditions fuel big fires in September 
and October. That's when California's hot and dry Santa Ana winds, or 
Diablo winds, often feed the flames.
This fall, the National Weather Service's latest forecasts point to 
continuing drought conditions in much of the West through November, 
indicating the fire dangers will persist.

And in the years to come, scientists predict the risks of large, intense 
wildfires will continue to grow.

As temperatures have risen, scientists have found the fire season has 
grown longer on average. Researchers wrote in a 2016 report for the 
organization Climate Central that with fires now occurring during much 
of the year in the American West, the situation "is approaching the 
point where the notion of a fire season will be made obsolete."
- -
Stephen Pyne, an author and emeritus professor at Arizona State 
University, has written that humanity is entering a "Fire Age." He calls 
it the "Pyrocene."

In an article last year, Pyne wrote that the warming of the planet from 
burning fossil fuels "acts as a performance enhancer on all aspects of 
fire on Earth."

"What we are seeing is the cumulative effects of a fossil fuel 
civilization aggravating it," Pyne said in an interview. He said those 
effects include not only the heating of the planet but also other 
patterns based on our reliance on fossil fuels, including how people 
have fought fires and shaped the landscape and how suburban sprawl -- 
enabled by gas-powered commuting -- has pushed deeper into what 
previously were rural areas and wildlands.

"Fire has no vaccine. We're going to have to live with it. And right 
now, we're doing things to make it worse," Pyne said. "And we could 
certainly be reversing a lot of that. This is mostly a problem of our 
making. So, the good news is that it's possible for us to begin 
unwinding things."...
- -
"There are things that we can and should be doing to address the fire 
problem and fire risk in California, and to get ahead of it, and to make 
ourselves more resilient," said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser 
with the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of 
the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.

She said efforts should include landscape-level projects, such as more 
prescribed burns or forest-thinning, as well as changes by individual 
homeowners to reduce fire risks...
- -
Those risk-mitigation efforts, she said, range from forest restoration 
programs to investments by homeowners' associations to create firebreaks 
or install sprinklers. Individual property owners, she said, can also 
make a big difference in reducing risks around their homes.

"Climate change makes it even more imperative that we are restoring our 
fire-deprived systems, making room for prescribed fire," Stasiewicz said 
in an email, "and doing everything we can on private property to enhance 
the survivability of our homes."

Those "home hardening" precautions can include a variety of measures, 
such as pruning trees, clearing vegetation in a zone around the house or 
cleaning out gutters that are filled with leaves.

When burning embers float in the wind, they can enter a house through a 
vent and spark a fire inside. To guard against that, Quinn-Davidson 
said, people can replace their vents with smaller-mesh vents that meet 
new fire-resistant standards.

"In the case of wind-driven fires, where there's a lot of embers coming 
down, those things can really help," Quinn-Davidson said. "Things like 
that can really protect a lot of homes."
Reach reporter Ian James at ian.james at arizonarepublic.com or 
602-444-8246. Follow him on Twitter: @ByIanJames
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2020/08/28/how-climate-change-making-wildfires-worse-across-west/5643391002/

- -

[larger picture]
*California and Colorado Fires May Be Part of a Climate-Driven 
Transformation of Wildfires Around the Globe**
*Wildfires from Australia to Siberia are not just larger, hotter and 
faster, but burning in areas and seasons where they were previously rare.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082020/california-colorado-wildfires-climate-change-global-transformation



[As we knew]
*Rampant destruction of forests 'will unleash more pandemics'*
Researchers to tell UN that loss of biodiversity enables rapid spread of 
new diseases from animals to humans
- -
"When workers come into rainforests to chop down trees they don't take 
food with them," said Andy Dobson, professor of ecology and evolutionary 
biology at Princeton University. "They just eat what they can kill. So 
that exposes them to infection all the time."

This point was backed by Pimm. "I have a photograph of a guy 
slaughtering a wild pig deep in the Ecuadorian jungle. He was an illegal 
logger and he and his fellow workers needed food so they killed a boar. 
They got splattered with wild pig blood in the process. It's gruesome 
and unhygienic and that is how these diseases spread."

However, not every emerging disease is caused by a single, major 
spillover event, stressed zoologist David Redding, of University College 
London. "In places where trees are being cleared, mosaics of fields, 
created around farms, appear in the landscape interspersed with parcels 
of old forest.

"This increases the interface between the wild and the cultivated. Bats, 
rodents and other pests carrying strange new viruses come from surviving 
clumps of forests and infect farm animals - who then pass on these 
infections to humans."

An example of this form of transmission is provided by Lassa fever, 
which was first discovered in Nigeria in 1969 and now causes several 
thousand deaths a year. The virus is spread by the rodent Mastomys 
natalensis, which was widespread in Africa's savannahs and forests but 
now colonises homes and farms, passing on the disease to humans....
"The crucial point is that there are probably 10 times more different 
species of viruses than there are of mammals," added Dobson. "The 
numbers are against us and the emergence of new pathogens inevitable."

In the past many outbreaks of new diseases remained in contained areas. 
However, the development of cheap air travel has changed that picture 
and diseases can appear across the globe before scientists have fully 
realised what is happening.

"The onward transmission of a new disease is also another really 
important element in the pandemic story," said Professor James Wood, 
head of veterinary medicine at Cambridge University. "Consider the swine 
flu pandemic. We flew that around the world several times before we 
realised what was going on. Global connectivity has allowed - and is 
still allowing - Covid-19 to be transmitted to just about every country 
on Earth."

In a paper published in Science last month, Pimm, Dobson and other 
scientists and economists propose setting up a programme to monitor 
wildlife, reduce spillovers, end the wildlife meat trade and reduce 
deforestation. Such a scheme could cost more than $20bn a year, a price 
tag that is dwarfed by the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has 
wiped trillions of dollars from national economies round the world.

"We estimate that the value of prevention costs for 10 years to be only 
about 2% of the costs of the Covid-19 pandemic," they state. In 
addition, reducing deforestation - which is a major source of carbon 
emissions - would also have the benefit of helping the battle against 
climate change, add the researchers.

"The rate of emergence of novel disease is increasing and their economic 
impacts are also increasing," states the group. "Postponing a global 
strategy to reduce pandemic risk would lead to continued soaring costs. 
Society must strive to avoid the impacts of future pandemics."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/30/rampant-destruction-of-forests-will-unleash-more-pandemics



[since 1996]
***Capitalism And Monopolies: How Five Companies Control All US Media*
Aug 28, 2020
Second Thought
You're probably aware that Disney owns Marvel and Lucasfilm, but do you 
really know how consolidated the American media landscape is? In this 
episode, we're looking at how just five mega-corporations control the 
entirety of US media.
https://youtu.be/A1_lCe3vyyc



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 31, 1988 *
Vice President and GOP presidential candidate George H. W. Bush declares 
that those who think people are powerless to combat the "greenhouse 
effect" are forgetting about "the White House effect." (Twenty-one years 
later, James Hansen would note in his book "Storms of My Grandchildren" 
that Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, tried to have him fired from NASA.)

http://c-spanvideo.org/x1mc/
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-01/news/mn-4551_1_george-bush

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