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

Fri May 29 11:08:39 EDT 2020

/*May 29, 2020*/

[Zombie fires in the Arctic ]
*Zombie fires could be awakening in the Arctic*
Some fires won't die.

They survive underground during the winter and then reemerge the 
following spring, as documented in places like Alaska. They're called 
"overwintering," "holdover," or "zombie" fires, and they may have now 
awoken in the Arctic Circle -- a fast-warming region that experienced 
unprecedented fires in 2019. The European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere 
Monitoring Service is now watching these fires, via satellite.

Zombie fires smolder underground for months, notably in dense peatlands 
(wetlands composed of ancient, decomposed plants), and then flare-up 
when it grows warmer and drier. "Zombie" is fitting.

"It really does describe what these fires do," said Thomas Smith, an 
assistant professor in environmental geography at the London School of 
Economics. "They recover and they're difficult to kill."..
- -
Overall, fires in the Arctic Circle -- which can release colossal 
amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere 
-- have been normal this year, but they're expected to pick up steam in 
June. What's more, they'll likely be enhanced by both Russia's hottest 
winter on record and recent Siberian heat waves, where temperatures 
reached some 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average...
- -
It's challenging to stop zombie fires. They can happen in extremely 
remote places, without any roads or means of dousing them before they 
erupt. "We have no way of fighting them," said McCarty. "They're often 
fairly far-removed. How are we going to put them out?"

It's a question of profound importance in the decades ahead. Preventing 
human-caused Arctic wildfires will be critical, emphasized McCarty. 
That's because Arctic fires aren't just burning trees, they're often 
burning through peatlands, which release bounties of the heat-trapping 
greenhouse gas methane into the air. When it comes to trapping heat, 
methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a 
century.

It's a vicious cycle. The warming Arctic produces more fires. More fires 
burn more forests and peatlands. This releases more methane and carbon 
dioxide into the air. This contributes to ever more planetary heating.

"Not stopping these zombie fires means further degrading these Arctic 
ecosystems," said McCarty. "Further warming leads to more zombie fires. 
It's not great."
https://mashable.com/article/zombie-fires-arctic/

[drought video lecture and commentary]
*Abrupt Climate Change: Drought Projections in the Latest 
State-of-the-Art Climate Models (CMIP6)*
May 28, 2020
Paul Beckwith
I talk Drought. A new science paper uses the latest state-of-the-art 
climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project to 
determine which parts of our planet will experience the worst droughts 
as climate change rapidly accelerates. Most people know of the greatly 
reduced precipitation drought (meteorological drought); but there are 
two other types. Agricultural drought is from greatly reduced soil 
moisture, and hydrological drought is from much greater runoff 
occurring. Usually all three factors contribute in varying degrees, and 
drought severity has very strong regional and seasonal dependencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqMMPeE1nXI

[video commentary]
*Cyclone Amphan: Coping with Coronavirus & Climate Change*
May 28, 2020
ClimateAdam
What happens when disaster hits in the middle of a pandemic? Cyclone 
Amphan reminds us that climate change isn't a separate crisis - it's 
woven into all the other challenges we face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNTjqKsb98E

[Art smart]
*The climate change clues hidden in art history*
By Diego Arguedas Ortiz - 28th May 2020
Art historians are exploring their collections through a climate lens, 
revealing overlooked connections between our past and present, writes 
Diego Arguedas Ortiz.

As the 1850s were drawing to a close, the artist Frederic Edwin Church 
was navigating off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in preparation for 
his next painting. The search for the Northwest Passage had captured the 
public's imagination for much of that decade and Church - America's 
best-known landscape painter - was also lured. He chartered a schooner 
to approach the sea ice and spent weeks among the frozen blocks before 
returning to his studio in New York with about 100 sketches...
- -
If you go further back, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer does 
in his book A Cultural History of Climate, you would notice that prior 
to the 1500s there are very few occurrences of snowy landscapes in 
Western European art. Behringer suggests that the lower-than-usual 
temperatures during the so-called Little Ice Age plunged European 
artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder into a new branch of landscape 
painting: the winter landscape.
images
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dp/p08fdpzk.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dk/p08fdkqm.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dq/p08fdqvz.jpg
Adamson makes a crucial, nuanced point: the elements we see in a 
painting don't make up a climate on their own. These are meteorological 
conditions, pictures of weather and a time and place. It's rather the 
cultural ways in which humans live in those climates, and their 
representations of them in art, that we should be observing.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200528-the-climate-change-clues-hidden-in-art-history
- -
[Book blurb]
*A Cultural History of Climate*

Book:
*A Cultural History of Climate*
Wolfgang Behringer
London, Polity Press, 2009, ISBN: 9780745645292; 280pp.; Price: £17.99
Reviewer:
Professor Mike Hulme
University of East Anglia
Citation:
Professor Mike Hulme, review of A Cultural History of Climate, (review 
no. 925)
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925
Date accessed: 28 May, 2020
- - -
He observes that our efforts to reconstruct histories of physical 
climate can never be separated from the meanings that become attached to 
such reconstructions, and that these meanings emerge from particular 
political and cultural contexts. For Behringer, this key observation 
would seem to provide the rationale and motivation for his book. As he 
concludes on p. 217: 'We cannot leave the 'interpretation' of climate 
change to people ignorant of cultural history'...
- - -
In the 200 or so pages between these opening and closing remarks, 
Behringer offers an account of how changes in physical climates over 
10,000 years have influenced human societies and how such changes have 
been understood by those societies. He is concerned to show not only the 
changeability of physical climate and the adaptiveness of societies to 
such change, but also how the ways people think about and make sense of 
climate and its variations - the 'behaviour' of climate we might say - 
are themselves mutable. Our present moment at the beginning of the 21st 
century offers a particularly powerful narrative about climate change, 
its causes and its consequences. Yet it is a narrative which, as well as 
being powerful, is sufficiently plastic to allow many different 
knowledge, policy and moral entrepreneurs to work with and exploit the 
idea of climate change in different ways. It is a plasticity that I 
explore in my own book Why We Disagree About Climate Change...
- - -
This is all very good, but we have heard a lot of it before. Where 
Behringer is perhaps at his most distinctive is in his narration of the 
cultural engagement of European societies with the cooling climate of 
the early-modern period, an era he has written about elsewhere 
especially on the subject of witchcraft and climate. And his account of 
the changing moral economy of European climate during the 15th to 17th 
centuries is pertinent to our current discourse about climate change and 
morality. For Behringer, the strong link between the 'little ice age' 
and witch persecutions 'came neither from the church nor from the state; 
it came 'from below' (p. 132). It came from the populace through their 
search for accountability and meaning. What we are seeing at work today 
in our own society is a struggle between elitist and popular 
presentations of climate change and of its moral and political meanings...
- - -
There remains much work still to be done in gaining richer 
understandings of how the changing contours of climate - both changes in 
physical climate and changes in our imaginative ideas of climate - 
interact with cultural life around the world. We have far from exhausted 
investigations into how such ideas from different historical, 
geographical and contemporary cultures work with and against each other. 
A Cultural History of Climate is largely a cultural history of European 
climate, although Behringer occasionally visits non-European cultures 
from time-to-time. It would be good to see companion studies from 
outside the boundaries of Europe. Tim Sherratt and colleagues have 
attempted one such effort for Australia (8) and William Meyer similarly 
for North America (9), but neither of these extend further back than the 
early 19th century. But if our ideas of climate and climate change are 
indeed culturally inflected, then we need accounts that emerge from 
Brazil, China, India and Kenya before we can claim to have a world 
history of climate and culture. For example, I would like to know how 
the new Moghul rulers of India in the early 16th century understood and 
managed the variability of the Indian monsoon and how, as the Spanish 
set about establishing their New World empire at a similar time, the 
weather of central America was talked about.

We know that the weather and, by extension, our climate are important to 
us. And we know that this importance changes, just as we change. In 
reflecting on the place that climate has in our interior and exterior 
worlds we are too easily tempted to reduce climate to simple physical 
descriptive indices and/or to reduce the importance of climate to a 
simple determining role. Behringer's A Cultural History of Climate falls 
tantalisingly short of giving us the conceptual and analytical tools we 
need to resist these temptations, although he shows us why it matters 
that we do.
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925

[Book review May 27m 2020]
*CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NATION STATE: The Case for Nationalism in a 
Warming World - *by Anatol Lieven
What would happen if we treated climate change as a war? If nation 
states deemed this ecological crisis the largest national security 
threat to their people and their power? That's what international 
relations academic Anatol Lieven asks us to consider in his 
controversial new book on how to combat the socio-political impact of a 
warming world.

Taking a disparaged view of the left's idealised utopian mass movement 
to save our planet and armed with evidence of how global liberalism's 
blind eye to sky-rocketing mercury is damaging their political base, 
Lieven reveals a manifesto that offers a refreshingly realist scope on 
how to solve the looming crisis. Arguing that the true crisis is lack of 
mobilisation (rather than a lack of technological know-how or financial 
capabilities), he suggests the only way to re-orientate our economies 
around so-called 'green new deals' and resist the dominance of 
emissions-heavy industries on political action is by reimaging a word 
that's become unsavoury in modern discourse: nationalism.

Touching on migration and mass unemployment caused by automation, Lieven 
argues that climate change's threat lies not in its capacity to create 
wars, but in the likelihood of it producing internal collapse within 
developed states. Our current polarised political landscape must be 
brought together by recognising that only through national-level 
organisation can we take steps to mitigate emissions. Resilience in the 
face of climate change will, according to Lievan, demand a 
blitz-spirit-style sacrifice of our materialist economy, only possible 
by strengthening individual country's societies through so-called 
'progressive nationalism'.

At times, the book seems misty-eyed over the longevity of the Chinese 
government- which eases its abilities to ensure lasting climate policy - 
skipping over the more problematic questions that surround the country's 
governance. His discussion of buoyant nationalism within states also 
avoids difficult questions on how we prevent the talismans of 
nationalist discourse, including xenophobia and racism, from 
flourishing. But largely, Lieven provides an energizing new voice on our 
climate crisis and a blueprint that, if not perfect, then at least 
offers a pragmatic outline of how actual communities, rather than 
imagined ones, can combat this very real and urgent threat.
Written by  Lucy Kehoe
http://geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/3704-climate-change-and-the-nation-state-by-anatol-lieven-book-review

[Unique humor - news satire ]
*BREAKING NEWS: Where are the mimes?*
May 28, 2020
Julie Nolke
Tonight's top story delves into the silent disappearance of the world's 
mime population.
Writer: Julie Nolke
Actors: Gina Phillips & Julie Nolke
https://youtu.be/DT6tyFObpeY

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - May 29, 2009 *
Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates members of the US Senate 
who have developed cold feet about addressing global warming:

    "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are waving off the
    idea of serious action in 2010. But not because they're opposed. Oh,
    heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns over the political
    difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), for
    instance, avers that 'climate change in an election year has very
    poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true, though it is odd to say
    that the American system of governance can only solve problems every
    other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says that 'we need to deal with
    the phenomena of global warming,' but wants to wait until the
    economy is fixed.

    "Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing this,
    Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying things
    like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation as
    legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
    about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
    do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
    them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and goodwill
    built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money on TV ads
    in their state, talking directly into the camera, explaining to
    their constituents that they don't like having to face this problem,
    but see no choice. That effort might fail -- probably will, in fact
    -- but it's got a better chance of success than not trying. And this
    is, well, pretty important."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html 

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

/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/20200529/c2e5c982/attachment.html>