[TheClimate.Vote] June 21, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Jun 21 11:32:08 EDT 2020 

/*June 21, 2020*/

['ever' says CBS]
*Arctic records its hottest temperature ever*
Alarming heat scorched Siberia on Saturday as the small town of 
Verkhoyansk (67.5N latitude) reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, 32 
degrees above the normal high temperature. If verified, this is likely 
the hottest temperature ever recorded in Siberia and also the hottest 
temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle, which begins at 66.5N.

The town is 3,000 miles east of Moscow and further north than even 
Fairbanks, Alaska. On Friday, the city of Caribou, Maine, tied an 
all-time record at 96 degrees Fahrenheit and was once again well into 
the 90s on Saturday. To put this into perspective, the city of Miami, 
Florida, has only reached 100 degrees one time since the city began 
keeping temperature records in 1896...
- -
This heat is not an isolated occurrence. Parts of Siberia have been 
sizzling for weeks and running remarkably above normal since January. 
May featured astonishing warmth in western Siberia, where some locales 
were 18 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, not just for a day, but for the 
month. As a whole, western Siberia averaged 10 degrees above normal for 
May, obliterating anything previously experienced.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arctic-records-its-hottest-temperature-ever-2020-06-20/ 




[Morality]
*From Policing to Climate Change, a Sweeping Call for a 'Moral Revolution'*
A coalition modeled after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor 
People's Campaign released an ambitious agenda to help the working poor 
fight systemic racism and inequality...
- -
There are familiar proposals to address things like climate change 
through a reduction of the use of fossil fuels, but also more sweeping 
demands like funding rental assistance programs and the creation of 
affordable housing by leveling financial penalties against Wall Street 
institutions that profited from the housing crisis.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/poor-peoples-campaign-platform.html



[stress today and tomorrow]
*The Health Emergency of Climate Change*
As the global impact of climate change accelerates, there is increasing 
awareness that human health is severely threatened. Just what are these 
threats to health and what can we do about them?

In this series devoted to Climate Medicine, UCSF faculty and associates 
explore these questions and highlight the impact of global warming on 
major health conditions, and describe how actions that mitigate global 
warming also create opportunities to improve the health of all people.
https://www.uctv.tv/minimed-climate-health/
- - -
[YouTube video]
*Climate Psychiatry: The Diverse Challenges of Climate to Mental Health*
University of California Television (UCTV)
Climate instability is one of the most urgent public health threats of 
the 21st Century. Mental health is profoundly impacted by the 
disruptions associated with climate change. Drs. Robin Cooper and Alex 
Trope, Department of Psychiatry at UCSF, explore the harm and the 
affects on mental heath.  Recorded on 06/02/2020. [7/2020] [Show ID: 35925]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zpKgje9JHk


[Thursday, June 25th 5:00-6:00 PM PST]
*Washington State Clean Energy for Biden Fundraiser*
You are invited to join us in helping elect Joe Biden for President
Featuring a "fireside chat" with Maggie Thomas, a former climate advisor 
to the
presidential campaigns of Governor Jay Inslee and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Gregg Small, Executive Director of Climate Solutions is the moderator.
Virtual platform with opportunity for participant questions
To register for the event, go to https://www.givegreen.com/BBIDENEVT2006V



[Carbon sink or carbon source?]
*Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests*
Risks to mitigation potential of forests
Much recent attention has focused on the potential of trees and forests 
to mitigate ongoing climate change by acting as sinks for carbon. 
Anderegg et al. review the growing evidence that forests' climate 
mitigation potential is increasingly at risk from a range of adversities 
that limit forest growth and health. These include physical factors such 
as drought and fire and biotic factors, including the depredations of 
insect herbivores and fungal pathogens. Full assessment and 
quantification of these risks, which themselves are influenced by 
climate, is key to achieving science-based policy outcomes for effective 
land and forest management.

Structured Abstract
*BACKGROUND*
Forests have considerable potential to help mitigate human-caused 
climate change and provide society with a broad range of cobenefits. 
Local, national, and international efforts have developed policies and 
economic incentives to protect and enhance forest carbon sinks--ranging 
from the Bonn Challenge to restore deforested areas to the development 
of forest carbon offset projects around the world. However, these 
policies do not always account for important ecological and 
climate-related risks and limits to forest stability (i.e., permanence). 
Widespread climate-induced forest die-off has been observed in forests 
globally and creates a dangerous carbon cycle feedback, both by 
releasing large amounts of carbon stored in forest ecosystems to the 
atmosphere and by reducing the size of the future forest carbon sink. 
Climate-driven risks may fundamentally compromise forest carbon stocks 
and sinks in the 21st century. Understanding and quantifying 
climate-driven risks to forest stability are crucial components needed 
to forecast the integrity of forest carbon sinks and the extent to which 
they can contribute toward the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming 
well below 2C. Thus, rigorous scientific assessment of the risks and 
limitations to widespread deployment of forests as natural climate 
solutions is urgently needed.
*
**ADVANCES*
Many forest-based natural climate solutions do not yet rely on the best 
available scientific information and ecological tools to assess the 
risks to forest stability from climate-driven forest dieback caused by 
fire, drought, biotic agents, and other disturbances. Crucially, many of 
these permanence risks are projected to increase in the 21st century 
because of climate change, and thus estimates based on historical data 
will underestimate the true risks that forests face. Forest climate 
policy needs to fully account for the permanence risks because they 
could fundamentally undermine the effectiveness of forest-based climate 
solutions...
- -
*Abstract*
Forests have considerable potential to help mitigate human-caused 
climate change and provide society with many cobenefits. However, 
climate-driven risks may fundamentally compromise forest carbon sinks in 
the 21st century. Here, we synthesize the current understanding of 
climate-driven risks to forest stability from fire, drought, biotic 
agents, and other disturbances. We review how efforts to use forests as 
natural climate solutions presently consider and could more fully 
embrace current scientific knowledge to account for these climate-driven 
risks. Recent advances in vegetation physiology, disturbance ecology, 
mechanistic vegetation modeling, large-scale ecological observation 
networks, and remote sensing are improving current estimates and 
forecasts of the risks to forest stability. A more holistic 
understanding and quantification of such risks will help policy-makers 
and other stakeholders effectively use forests as natural climate solutions.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6497/eaaz7005

- - -

[Source to Sink]
*Tropical forests may flip into carbon sources sooner than feared, study 
finds*
An expansive study traced the growth of 300,000 trees over three decades 
in Africa and the Amazon and compared how forests on the two continents 
were faring.
The researchers estimate that intact tropical forests absorbed 46 
billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the 1990s, but 
this figure plummeted to 25 billion tons in the 2010s.
If these tropical forests turn into net carbon sources, it will 
accelerate climate change, which in turn will be detrimental to the 
health of these forests, kicking off a downward spiral.
The study also found that forests in the Amazon are weakening as a 
carbon sink faster than those in Africa.
Traditionally undisturbed tropical forests in Africa and the Amazon are 
losing their ability to stash away carbon -- and it's happening much 
faster than scientists anticipated, according to a new study in Nature.

"Intact tropical forests remain a vital carbon sink, but this research 
reveals that unless policies are put in place to stabilize Earth's 
climate, it is only a matter of time until they are no longer able to 
sequester carbon," study co-author Simon Lewis, from the School of 
Geography at University of Leeds, U.K., said in a statement.

The wide-ranging study traced the growth of 300,000 trees over the 
course of three decades in 565 forests in Africa and the Amazon, and 
compared how forests on the two continents were faring.

In 2019, fires in the Amazon raised alarm bells and brought attention to 
the critical role forests play in maintaining the carbon budget by 
removing CO2 from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass that 
remains locked in standing trees. Intact tropical rainforests are even 
more critical in safeguarding against runaway climate change than other 
types of forest...
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/03/tropical-forests-may-flip-into-carbon-sources-sooner-than-feared-study-finds/

- - -

[future risk - even now tropical forests are carbon source ]
*Tropical forests are now carbon source, not carbon sinks*
Tropical forests are now carbon source, not carbon sinks. The world's 
tropical forests are no longer carbon sinks because of human activity, 
and these forests now emit more carbon than these are able to absorb 
from the atmosphere as a result of the dual effects of deforestation and 
land degradation, finds a new study.Mar 5, 2020
The world's tropical forests are no longer carbon sinks because of human 
activity, and these forests now emit more carbon than these are able to 
absorb from the atmosphere as a result of the dual effects of 
deforestation and land degradation, finds a new study.

The study tracking 300,000 trees over a period of 30 years finds: The 
ability of the world's tropical forests to remove carbon from the 
atmosphere is decreasing.

The research report – "Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African 
and Amazonian tropical forests" – published in research journal Nature 
on March 4, 2020, (Hubau, W., Lewis, S.L., Phillips, O.L. et al. 
Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical 
forests. Nature 579, 80–87, 2020, 
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2035-0) challenges the decades-long 
consensus that tropical forests are a moderate carbon sinks by storing 
more carbon than they emit due to natural processes and human activity.

The international scientific collaboration, led by the University of 
Leeds, reveals that a feared switch of the world's undisturbed tropical 
forests from a carbon sink to a carbon source has begun.
https://countercurrents.org/2020/03/tropical-forests-are-now-carbon-source-not-carbon-sinks/



[graphs from Climate Mind ]
*Climate Mind consists of a web application and a knowledge base.*
https://climatemind.org/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 21, 2011 *
NPR reported:
"The American public is less likely to believe in global warming than it 
was just five years ago. Yet, paradoxically, scientists are more 
confident than ever that climate change is real and caused largely by 
human activities.

"Something a bit strange is happening with public opinion and climate 
change.

"Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale University Project on Climate 
Change Communication, delved into this in a recent poll. He not only 
asked citizens what they thought of climate change, he also asked them 
to estimate how climate scientists feel about global warming.

"'Only 13 percent of Americans got the correct answer, which is that in 
fact about 97 percent of American scientists say that climate change is 
happening, and about a third of Americans just simply say they don't 
know,' he said.

"Most Americans are unaware that the National Academy of Sciences, known 
for its cautious and even-handed reviews of the state of science, is 
firmly on board with climate change. It has been for years."
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137309964/climate-change-public-skeptical-scientists-sure

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