[TheClimate.Vote] July 14, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Jul 14 10:32:03 EDT 2020

/*July 14, 2020*/

[Washington Post Opinion - the Editorial Board]
***Democrats are getting ready to govern responsibly on climate change*
July 12, 2020
GLOBAL WARMING has not taken a break since the covid-19 outbreak struck. 
The Democrats, at least, are treating it like the emergency it remains.

House Democrats released late last month a massive climate plan, a 
package of bills that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has vowed to advance 
through her chamber. Meanwhile, a committee that presumptive Democratic 
presidential nominee Joe Biden and primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders 
(I-Vt.) convened to reconcile their views on climate policy has agreed 
on some top-line principles. If the Democrats win big in November, they 
would have a shelf fully stocked with pre-written climate policies from 
which to choose. That alone puts them far ahead of Republicans.

Still, the House's very detailed plan is a huge policy grab bag that 
would require refinement if it were close to becoming law, and Mr. Biden 
should be thinking now about how to winnow it down -- and how to avoid 
promising too much to fringe activists during the campaign.

House Democrats propose requiring that all electricity come from clean 
sources by 2040, by imposing a national clean-electricity mandate that 
would require utilities to derive a steadily rising percentage of 
electricity from renewables or emissions-free nuclear power. The plan 
calls for regulations and spending to require electric vehicles, promote 
super-efficient buildings, plug leaks in the nation's gas infrastructure 
and directly finance further deployment of renewables.

Curiously, the plan also proposes putting a price on greenhouse 
emissions, presumably through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, 
which would accomplish many of the same environmental goals that other 
policies in the plan are designed to tackle, but at a far lower cost. 
Where that is the case, duplicative policies should be removed.

It is not clear this will happen. Though pricing carbon dioxide is the 
best idea, it is buried deep in the report, in a section that contains 
far less detail than those promising new government mandates or 
spending. Mr. Biden himself similarly played down pricing carbon in the 
climate plan he released during his primary race. If Republicans were 
engaged, they could push for market-based policies such as carbon taxes 
and against unneeded mandates and spending. Instead, they have largely 
exiled themselves from the debate by refusing to accept the necessity to 
act vigorously. The result is a conversation largely about how far left 
climate policy should go, rather than how to make it more appealing to 
the center.

To be clear, Democrats deserve credit for listening to scientists on the 
level of ambition needed, and they have not surrendered to the left 
flank of the debate, refusing, for example, to strike nuclear power from 
the conversation. Moreover, the threat of climate change is so large 
that even second-best policies are better than nothing. But should he 
have the chance to govern, Mr. Biden should still aim higher than 
second-best.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-are-getting-ready-to-govern-responsibly-on-climate-change/2020/07/12/c247321a-c09d-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html

[another solution]
*A sprinkle of rock dust could help avoid catastrophic climate change*
- -
Rock dust may hold appeal over other CO2 removal options because it 
doesn't require changes to land use – such as growing energy crops for 
bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – and there is growing 
evidence that it has the side effect of boosting crop yields too, says 
Beerling.

"We need to clean up the [climate change] mess in sensible ways, over a 
time scale of decades to centuries," says team member James Hansen at 
Columbia University in New York. "One of the ways with multiple benefits 
is rock dust farming.  I particularly like it because it is more 
permanent than most CO2 draw-down schemes."...
Read more: 
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248222-a-sprinkle-of-rock-dust-could-help-avoid-catastrophic-climate-change/#ixzz6S8wmXLZ8

[solutions]*
****New proposal aims to address California housing crisis, climate 
change at same time*
SACRAMENTO, Calif. --
The greater Sacramento region is on a mission to fight climate change 
with a new effort called Green Means Go...
- -
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments said projects focus on 
reducing traffic congestion and make these designated areas more 
bikeable and walkable.

"People want more affordable housing, they want better access to 
transportation, they want clean air," said state Sen. Richard Pan, 
D-Sacramento. "This is something we are all working together to achieve, 
and we also want to use our resources as wisely as possible, including 
state resources."

At least 26 local governments have identified projects they would get 
started on right away if they had the funds from the Green Means Go 
pilot program...
https://www.kcra.com/article/green-means-go-california-housing-crisis-climate-change/33298513#

[Great visual report in FT.com]
*Climate change: what Antarctica's 'doomsday glacier' means for the planet**
*Thwaites Glacier is melting at an alarming rate, triggering fears over 
rising sea levels
- -
"We still don't know that much about Thwaites," says the geologist who 
is adamant that she will return to the glacier one day. "Most of our 
discoveries are yet to come."
https://www.ft.com/content/4ff254ed-960d-4b35-a6c0-1e60a6e79d91#comments-anchor 

[128F is 53C]
Death Valley sets record for planet's hottest temperature in years -- 
and the heat wave is forecast to spread
BY JEFF BERARDELLI
JULY 13, 2020 / CBS NEWS
The official weather observing station in Death Valley, California -- 
called Furnace Creek for obvious reasons -- reached a scorching 128 
degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. That is the hottest temperature anywhere 
on the planet since 2017 and only one degree behind what experts say is 
likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth...
- -
While heat waves of this magnitude are not unheard of in summer, climate 
experts expect them to become more common in the years ahead due to 
human-caused climate change. That's because as global temperature 
averages increase, simple statistics show that heat extremes increase at 
an even faster rate. This will likely lead to a large increase in heat 
wave days across much of the nation...
- -
Dr. Renee McPherson, university director of the South Central Climate 
Adaptation Science Center, says, "Our own projections indicate an 
additional 10-40 days per year of 100-[degree] days by mid-century, and 
up to two months (!) more of these extreme heat days each year by the 
end of the century, if we continue to increase our carbon emissions as 
we have in the past."

In fact, in a middle-of-the-road carbon emissions scenario, which 
assumes some efforts to limit heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere, 
the number of 100-degree days are expected to double, or even triple, in 
most areas by late this century.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-valley-hottest-temperature-record-heat-wave/

[World Economic Forum]
*COVID-19 creates a perfect storm for the extreme weather season*
COVID-19 will hamper preparations for and responses to extreme weather 
events this year.
Even a relatively small natural hazard event will place disproportionate 
stress on already overstretched systems.
Agility will be key to resilience. Here's a five-step strategy to help 
businesses prepare themselves...
more at - 
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-perfect-storm-extreme-weather/

[PHYS.ORG]
*New models show how species will be relocated by climate change*
by Tim Lucas, Duke University
Scientists at Duke University are harnessing the power of big data and 
geospatial analysis to create new ways to track the effects of climate 
change on species and food webs. Their work, which is funded by the 
National Science Foundation and NASA, began in 2018 and has already 
yielded two powerful new tools.

One of the tools is an interactive web portal that projects how a 
species could impact other species as it relocates and competes for 
suitable habitats in a warming world.

The other is a probabilistic framework that can be used to overcome gaps 
in data and identify direct and indirect impacts of environmental change 
on a community of species.

"These tools provide new approaches for assessing climate change's 
impacts on biodiversity, including its effects over time on interacting 
species, which can be very difficult to quantify," said James S. Clark, 
Nicholas Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and professor 
of statistical science at Duke, who is co-principal investigator of the 
project...
- -
"We need to consider who's living with whom to understand the larger 
impacts," she said.

The new Predicting Biodiversity with a Generalized Joint Attribution 
Model (PBGJAM) web portal is being developed to help scientists, 
landowners and decision makers see those larger impacts. It synthesizes 
decades of satellite, airborne and ground-based data on multiple 
species, along with climate predictions and ecological forecasts, to 
track how species' ranges are shifting in response to rising 
temperatures, more frequent droughts and other environmental changes.

Using information from the National Ecological Observatory Network and 
NASA's remotely sensed Earth data and climate data, Swenson and Clark's 
team recently used PBGJAM to project where the meadow vole could migrate 
in coming years as climate warming and development diminish its current 
habitat in the Midwest. By crunching tens of thousands of archived data 
points--including decades of information on surface temperatures, 
precipitation patterns, vegetation indices, land-cover changes, and 
evaporation and plant transpiration rates--the model found that voles 
will be forced to move north, bringing them into contact and competition 
with new and old species alike, and leaving a gap in the food webs of 
their former haunts...
- -
"These are far-reaching impacts that need to be considered when planning 
conservation strategies. When fully implemented, the PBGJAM web portal 
will make it much easier to do that for a multitude of species or 
ecosystem types in North America," Swenson said.

"A portal such as PBGJAM will enhance and enable focused science 
investigations by facilitating access, integration, understanding and 
visualization of disparate datasets," said Jacqueline Le Moigne, 
advanced information systems technology program manager at NASA.

The new probabilistic framework that Clark and his students have 
developed further boosts scientists' ability to account for such impacts 
by giving them a reliable statistical method for identifying the direct 
and indirect impacts of climate-species interactions across entire food 
webs or ecological communities--even when faced with gaps or disparities 
in species data.

"Traditionally, we've tried to understand climate change's effects on 
biodiversity by looking at where species live and relating that to the 
climate in those places. But that approach has limitations. We don't 
know for sure if it's the climate that's determining where they live or 
if it's their interactions with competing species, their natural enemies 
or food that determines it," Clark said.

"By looking at the change in abundance of the interacting species 
collectively as a community over time and quantifying the contributions 
of their effects on one another, as well as the effects of climate, this 
model allows us to make that distinction," Clark said.

"Just as species interactions depend on population abundances, so too do 
the effects of environment, as when drought is ampliﬁed by competition," 
Clark said. "Embedding dynamic environment-species interactions into a 
time-series framework that admits field data gathered on different 
scales lets us quantify changes that are induced indirectly through 
other species. So we can tell which changes are the apples and which are 
the oranges."

A key research gap is including biotic processes in models, said Betsy 
von Holle, program director at NSF. "This innovative approach of 
including biotic responses at the community level is a major step 
forward for predicting how species will respond to climate change at the 
landscape scale."

Clark created the framework with Lane Scher and Margaret Swift, doctoral 
students in his Biodiversity and Global Change Lab at Duke's Nicholas 
School of the Environment. They published a peer-reviewed paper about 
their work the week of July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy 
of Sciences...
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-species-relocated-climate.html
- - -
[Source Material]
*The emergent interactions that govern biodiversity change*
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2003852117

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - July 14, 2008 *
July 14, 2008: On MSNBC's "Countdown," fill-in host Rachel Maddow 
describes another controversy that has left the US feeling "Bushed":

"Number one, serial driller-gate.  President Bush today lifted an 
executive order banning off-shore drilling.  It's an order that dates 
back to the other President Bush.  The move accomplishes nothing, 
because Congress still has its own ban in effect.  But that's not the 
only way we know this is pure politics.  According to Mr. Bush's own 
Energy Information Administration, off-shore production could not even 
start until five years after the off-shore sites were leased.  So that's 
2013.  Off-shore sites could not significantly impact U.S. production 
until 18 years after leasing. So that's 2026.

"And the impact on prices from off-shore drilling when the oil finally 
starts flowing in 2026?  Because oil prices are set on a global market, 
the EIA says the offshore impact on prices would be, quote, 
insignificant.  But the political impact, priceless."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHvqjj3yeDA

/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no 
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages 
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20200714/c034f921/attachment.html>