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

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 31, 2020*/

[Time Lapse video]
*Australia fires: State of emergency declared for Canberra region*
Authorities in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) have declared a 
state of emergency as massive bushfires rage south of Canberra.
It is the worst fire threat to the territory in nearly two decades, 
officials said.
The main blaze, in the territory's south, is burning over more than 
18,500 hectares.
Residents in suburbs of Canberra have been urged to "remain alert" for 
potential evacuations.

    "The ACT is now facing the worst bushfire threat since the
    devastating fires of 2003," Chief Minister Andrew Barr told
    reporters on Friday.
    "There's now no higher priority for the ACT government at this time
    than the bushfire threat."...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51320333
- - -
[news video and reports - very disturbing]
*Australia wildfire overruns firefighters in minutes as 'day turns to 
night' in dramatic video*
"This goes to show what happens in just over 3 minutes," the fire 
brigade said. "The crew continues for another 9 minutes on the ground 
bringing a massive positive outcome, with a complete safe crew, 
protected truck and property saved."...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/australia-wildfires-firefighters-overrun-speed-bushfire-currowan-dunmore-rural-brigade
- - -
[Same video in YouTube]
*Dashcam footage shows how fast bushfires can move when the wind changes*
Guardian News
Dashcam footage captured by the Dunmore Rural Fire Brigade on 4 January 
2020. The footage shows just how quickly a bushfire can move when the 
wind changes direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRDM3ir3l5M


[Washington Post]*
**We may avoid the very worst climate scenario. But the next-worst is 
still pretty awful.*
By Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman
January 30
The year is 2100, and the world's 12 billion people are still burning 
fossil fuels with abandon. Compared with preindustrial times, the planet 
has warmed by 4.5 degrees Celsius, or 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The 
atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases, and parts of the Earth 
sometimes experience temperatures too extreme for humans.

This bleak vision of the future has long played a significant role in 
scientific assessments of global warming. Sometimes called the "business 
as usual" scenario, it represents a worst case where countries continue 
to burn oil, gas and coal unabated -- in contrast with a world where 
emissions have been dramatically reduced, and global warming is more 
moderate...
- - -
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was a 
lead author of the 2018 National Climate Assessment, says there are 
still ample reasons for concern.

Even a scenario involving lower greenhouse gas emissions could bring the 
magnitude of global warming foreseen in RCP 8.5, she said. "The envelope 
of uncertainty surrounding the change that will result from a given 
amount of emissions is not symmetrical: it is weighted towards the 
'worse' side of the spectrum," she said in an email.

One key issue: climate feedbacks, or processes by which the Earth 
responds to warming by releasing more greenhouse gases. This may already 
be underway in the Arctic.

"It's not just our emissions: it's the response of the climate system to 
them, too," Hayhoe wrote. "We have to weigh the probability of both of 
those pieces together to come out with the right answer. And that's what 
keeps us climate scientists up at night."

Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University who 
is on a sabbatical in Australia, concurred, with a pointed reference to 
recent events.

"In the catastrophic fires here (which were enabled by climate change), 
twice as much carbon escaped into the atmosphere as was produced by all 
of fossil fuel burning in Australia over the last year," Mann wrote in 
an email. "These sorts of amplifying "carbon cycle" feedback mechanisms 
are not accounted for in the simple sorts of projections that 
[Hausfather] and others are using."
- - -
Meanwhile, scientists are already watching the West Antarctic ice sheet 
melt, which could raise sea levels by some 10 feet, were it to collapse 
entirely.

In this context, 3 degrees Celsius of warming would be "catastrophic 
anyway," Mann said.

Peters and Hausfather argue that RCP 8.5 should be largely ignored by 
policymakers.

In an interview, Peters said scientists who have used it in studies for 
years are fighting against efforts to de-emphasize this scenario, simply 
because they've based their work on it. "That's just human nature," he said.

Still, Hausfather agreed the issue of climate feedbacks remains 
important, and these could still potentially result in the level of 
global warming spelled out in the "business as usual" scenario.

"Our argument isn't that we should ignore the possibility of getting to 
4 or 5 degrees Celsius of warming this century," Hausfather said. "It's 
that you shouldn't be using unrealistic emissions scenarios to get there."
more at - 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/30/we-may-avoid-very-worst-climate-scenario-next-worst-is-still-pretty-awful/


[important message in animated philosophical video conjectures]
*Why Humanity Destroyed Itself*
Feb 6, 2017
The School of Life
The real reason we may destroy ourselves isn't really to do with 
politics or economics or even warfare. It has to do with our minds...

    ...the strength to resist illusion and lies
    and square up to uncomfortable facts of all kinds.
    We don't need to be aliens of the future to understand all this.
    We can see the disaster scenario only too well right now.

    The fate of civilisation lies ultimately not in the law courts,
    at the ballot box or in the corridors of governments.
    It lies in our ability to master
    the most short-term, selfish and violent of our impulses
    active in the dense folds of organic matter between our ears;
    it lies in learning how relentlessly to try to compensate
    for the flawed architecture of the human mind...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk3QsGzAjKI


Posted on the 20th:
*Nobody Cared When Nashville Drowned*
A new exhibit marks the 10th anniversary of a national disaster the 
nation ignored.

By Margaret Renkl - Jan. 20, 2020

NASHVILLE -- On the Saturday I had set aside to visit a new exhibit at 
the Frist Art Museum, it rained so hard I was afraid to leave the house. 
Nashville was built on the Cumberland River, and even those of us who 
live far from its banks are invariably a stone's throw from at least one 
creek that drains into the great Cumberland or one of its tributaries. A 
deluge falling on saturated soil will flood the creeks and leave water 
pooling on low-lying roads. "Turn Around Don't Drown" is a truism I 
conscientiously heed.

The exhibit I planned to visit that day, ironically enough, was a 
retrospective of the devastating 2010 flood that dropped more than 13 
inches of rain on this area in 36 hours -- twice the amount of rain that 
fell during the previous two-day record. The Cumberland River crested 
more than 11 feet above flood level, leaving 10,000 people in the region 
displaced and 26 others dead, including an elderly couple who drowned 
when their car was swept off the road not far from my house. ....

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/2010-nashville-flood.html



[Bloomberg just now gets it]
*A 1988 Climate Warning Was Mostly Right*
NASA scientist James Hansen's famous global warming forecast ran through 
2019. It wasn't all that far off the mark.
On a 98-degree June day in Washington in 1988, physicist James Hansen 
told a U.S. Senate committee that "global warming is now large enough 
that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect 
relationship to the greenhouse effect." Hansen, at the time director of 
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute 
for Space Studies, elaborated that "with 99% confidence we can state 
that the warming during this time period is a real warming trend."

Those assertions made headlines around the world, and can be said to 
have started the public and political discussion over global warming 
(the scientific discussion was already well under way) that continues to 
this day. They also caught Hansen some flak from fellow climate 
scientists who thought he had expressed himself with more certainty than 
warranted. Indeed, the scientific paper on which Hansen based his 
testimony, which he wrote with seven co-authors and was published that 
August in the Journal of Geophysical Research, cautioned that it was not 
yet certain that the warm temperatures of the 1980s were the product of 
the greenhouse effect...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-30/1988-global-warming-forecast-by-james-hansen-proved-mostly-true
- - -
[Transcript of Hansen's testimony]
*Congressional Testimony of Dr. James Hansen, June 23, 1988*
The Greenhouse Effect: Impacts on Current Global Temperature and 
Regional Heat Waves; Presented to United States Senate Committee on 
Energy and Natural Resources, June 23, 1988
https://www.sealevel.info/1988_Hansen_Senate_Testimony.html
- - -
[Newspaper report]
*Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Threat*
Scientists like the attention thegreenhouse effect is getting on Capitol 
Hill, but they shun the reputedly unscientific way their colleagueJames 
Hansen went about getting that attention

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2015/Kerr.1989.HansenVsWorldOnGHThreat.Science.pdf
- - -
[video summary]
*James Hansen's 1988 testimony after 30 years. How did he do?*
Jun 20, 2018
YaleClimateConnections
James Hansen is known as the "Father of Global Warming", chiefly because 
of his 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate, in which he announced that 
"... the greenhouse effect has been detected, and is changing our 
climate now."
30 years later, Peter Sinclair asked senior climate scientists how those 
predictions have held up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVz67cwmxTM



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  - January 31, 1989 *
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"Secretary of State James A. Baker III, emphasizing the Bush 
Administration's concern about global environmental problems, said 
Monday that the nations of the world cannot wait for solid scientific 
confirmation of global warming before taking action.

"In the first remarks on global environmental issues by a senior Bush 
Administration official since the inauguration, Baker said that the 
United States and the world must 'focus immediately' on energy 
conservation, reforestation and reductions in harmful chemical emissions.

"'We can probably not afford to wait until all the uncertainties have 
been resolved before we do act. Time will not make the problem go away,' 
Baker told delegates from more than 40 nations to the newly formed 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-31/news/mn-1251_1_global-warming
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/science/joint-effort-urged-to-guard-climate.html

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