[TheClimate.Vote] June 29, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Mon Jun 29 10:26:55 EDT 2020

/*June 29, 2020*/

[Brazil redefines the future - video]
*Bolsonaro : How quickly is he destroying the Amazon Rainforest?*
Jun 28, 2020
Just Have a Think
Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil in October 2018. Since that time he 
has waged a relentless war on one of the most delicate and essential 
ecosystems on the planet. The damage is now so severe and irreversible 
that the majority of the Amazon may well be nothing more than dry 
savannah land within 3 decades. This video looks at the scale of the 
challenge and what can be done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TfPVzl0btA

[new yorker $ clips]
*A Disastrous Summer in the Arctic*
By Carolyn Kormann
- -
"This has been an unusually hot spring in Siberia," Randy Cerveny, the 
World Meteorological Organization's rapporteur of weather and climate 
extremes, said. "The coinciding lack of underlying snow in the region, 
combined with over-all global temperature increases, undoubtedly helped 
play a critical role in causing this extreme." Siberia, in other words, 
is in the midst of an astonishing and historic heat wave...
- -
Toward the end of May, as the sun stopped dropping below the horizon, 
the heat continued. In the town of Khatanga, far north of the Arctic 
Circle, the temperature hit seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, or 
forty-six degrees above normal, topping the previous record by 
twenty-four degrees...
- -
On May 29th, outside Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, the 
thawing ground buckled, causing an oil-storage tank to collapse and spew 
more than a hundred and fifty thousand barrels, or twenty-one thousand 
tons, of diesel fuel into the Ambarnaya River. The spill was the largest 
to ever occur in the Russian Arctic...
- -
And yet the Kremlin continues to incentivize increased oil and gas 
development in eastern Siberia and the Arctic, which will lead to more 
greenhouse-gas emissions, which will continue speeding up the permafrost 
thaw...
- -
The permafrost found in the area surrounding Verkhoyansk is some of the 
deepest and oldest in the world, descending as much as five thousand 
feet. Closer to the surface, a type of ice-rich permafrost known as 
yedoma is particularly vulnerable to rapid thaws. The result is 
thermokarst, the strange and sometimes shocking topography that forms as 
the land slides, sags, and sinks. Mysterious sinkholes suddenly appear, 
drunken forests fall, and hillocks destroy farmland...
- -
One of Russia's most extreme examples of thermokarst, known as the 
Batagay megaslump, is a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot-deep, half-mile-wide 
depression, situated just outside Verkhoyansk...
- -
Some locals call it a gateway to the underworld, which seems 
appropriate, as the slump releases more and more methane. Researchers 
who have been to the slump say that they can hear the thuds, booms, and 
cracks of the thawing ice. This summer, the sound will be especially loud.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/a-disastrous-summer-in-the-arctic 

[A superb lesson in journalism - skewering analysis of one 
disinformation item]
*Are we headed for a Grand Solar Minimum?*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjgCaF9BGUo
[Potholer 54 video explains an information warfare battlefield]

[NYMagazine clips]
*Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time*
By David Wallace-Wells
- -
The extreme weather of the last few summers has already inured us to 
temperature anomalies like these, though we are only just at the 
beginning of the livable planet's transformation by climate change -- a 
transformation whose end is not yet visible, if it will ever be, and in 
which departures from the historical record will grow only more dramatic 
and more disorienting and more lethal, almost by the year. At just 1.1 
degrees Celsius of warming, where the planet is today, we have already 
evicted ourselves from the "human climate niche," and brought ourselves 
outside the range of global temperatures that enclose the entire history 
of human civilization. That history is roughly 10,000 years long, which 
means that in a stable climate you would only expect to encounter an 
anomaly like this one if you ran the full lifespan of all recorded human 
history ten times over -- and even then would only encounter it once.
- -
The arctic numbers from June 20 are terrifying enough; with more context 
they become only more so. It was warmer there than it was that same day, 
in Miami, Florida. In fact, it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle 
than it has ever been, on any June day, in the entire recorded history 
of Miami, which has only once, in the whole tropical century for which 
temperatures there have been registered, reached 100. It was about 30 
degrees Fahrenheit warmer, in Verkhonaysk, than the average high 
temperature in the region for June, which means the arctic record was 
the equivalent, in terms of temperature anomaly, of a 110-degree June 
day in New York or a 115-degree June day in Washington, D.C. According 
to preliminary satellite data, land surface temperature in parts of 
arctic Siberia reached that level last week, too -- 45 Celsius, or 113 
Fahrenheit. In terms of temperature anomaly, that's the equivalent of a 
130-degree day in D.C. On Capitol Hill, that would be, very comfortably, 
lethal heat...
- -
One academic quoted in the story, Jesse Kennan of Tulane, painted the 
picture even more starkly: "Conventional mortgages have survived many 
financial crises," he said, "but they may not survive the climate 
crisis."...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/global-warming-is-melting-our-sense-of-time.html

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - June 29, 2011 *

Entercom Communications, the radio conglomerate perhaps best known for 
running right-wing talk radio stations whose hosts regularly promote 
climate-change denial, announces that it will run a 350.org PSA 
featuring actor Ellen Page on its stations.

http://350.org/about/blogs/ellen-page-records-psa-350org

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