[TheClimate.Vote] November 23, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Mon Nov 23 14:21:56 EST 2020
/*November 23, 2020*/
[BBC reports]
*Climate change: Covid pandemic has little impact on rise in CO2*
By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent
The global response to the Covid-19 crisis has had little impact on the
continued rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, says the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO).
This year carbon emissions have fallen dramatically due to lockdowns
that have cut transport and industry severely.
But this has only marginally slowed the overall rise in concentrations,
the scientists say.
The details are published in the WMO's annual greenhouse gas bulletin.
This highlights the concentrations of warming gases in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gas concentrations are the cumulative result of past and
present emissions of a range of substances, including carbon dioxide,
methane and nitrous oxide.
- -
CO2 levels are measured in parts per million (ppm) - an indication of
their overall atmospheric abundance.
According to the WMO, the global average in 2019 was 410.5ppm, an
increase of 2.6ppm over 2018. This was larger than the increase from
2017 to 2018 and bigger than the average over the past decade.
Thanks to lockdowns in early 2020, carbon emissions fell by 17% at their
peak, but the overall effect on concentrations has been very small.
Preliminary estimates suggest that CO2 will continue to increase this
year but that rise will be reduced by 0.08 to 0.23ppm...
- -
More than half of the methane emitted comes from human activities such
as raising cattle, growing rice and drilling for oil and gas.
Concentrations of nitrous oxide grew by about the average of the past
decade. Emissions come from agriculture, energy and waste management.
This gas damages the ozone layer as well as contributing to global warming.
While the Covid-19 pandemic hasn't slowed down the increase in
concentrations of all these warming gases in the atmosphere, the decline
in emissions in the early part of this year shows what's possible.
"The Covid-19 pandemic is not a solution for climate change," said Prof
Taalas.
"However, it does provide us with a platform for more sustained and
ambitious climate action to reduce emissions to net zero [balancing out
any emissions by absorbing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere]
through a complete transformation of our industrial, energy and
transport systems.
"The needed changes are economically affordable and technically possible
and would affect our everyday life only marginally."
Meteorologists expect CO2 levels to vary by 1ppm between years due to
natural fluctuations in the climate - for reasons other than human
releases of carbon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55018581
[For mountain climbers SMITHSONIANMAG.COM]
*Into Thicker Air and Onto Thinner Ice: How Climate Change Is Affecting
Mount Everest*
Researchers have documented that the high-altitude air is gaining more
oxygen and large glaciers are melting at rapid rates
By Rasha Aridi
NOVEMBER 20, 2020
Despite being the highest point on Earth, Mount Everest still can't
escape the effects of climate change. The only place that punctures the
stratosphere--Everest's peak reaches 29,035 feet above sea level--has an
atmosphere so thin that it leaves mountaineers gasping for breath and
glaciers so big that they stretch for miles on end. But both of those
elements are changing fast. According to two new studies published today
in iScience and One Earth, the air pressure near Everest's summit is
rising, making more oxygen available to breathe, and glaciers are
melting at unprecedented rates, leading to more meltwater. The changes
will impact climbers scaling the peak and local people who live in the
shadow of it.
"Some of the lower Himalayan regions are fairly well studied, but a
place like Everest is less studied because it's just so hard to do work
up there." says Aurora Elmore, a climate scientist at the National
Geographic Society. "There's a big gap in the research, especially above
5,000 meters [16, 404 feet]--and Everest is 8,850 meters [29,035 feet].
That huge three kilometers of elevation has been under studied."
To learn more about the highest reaches of the world, last year Elmore
helped organize an expedition that sent a team of 34 scientists to Mount
Everest to collect glaciological and meteorological data by installing
the highest weather stations in the world. The expedition provided the
data for both of the new studies, each of which Elmore co-authored.
In a study published in iScience, Elmore and a team of scientists set
out to document how the atmospheric pressure on Everest has fluctuated
since the 1970s. Each year, around 800 people attempt to summit Mount
Everest, but after ascending 21,325 feet, the air gets so thin that most
climbers turn to bottled oxygen to help them breathe. Only a handful of
mountaineers attempt to climb it without supplemental oxygen. But that
may get easier, as climate change is causing the air to slowly thicken,
which means more oxygen is available at higher altitudes.
When temperature rises, molecules move faster. And when these molecules
start to collide with each other, pressure increases. More pressure
means more molecules, making more oxygen available to breathe, says lead
author Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Loughborough University in
the U.K.
To analyze the changes in the atmosphere, Matthews and his team
collected data using those weather stations they installed on the
Everest expedition in 2019. They coupled their newly collected data with
analyses produced by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather
Forecasting to reconstruct what the climate was like on Everest from
1979 to 2020.
Matthews and his team then used the climate data to model how the
atmosphere around Everest has changed over time and how it will continue
to change as the planet warms. Their models suggest that if global
temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
levels--which the planet is on track to meet as early as 2050--the
maximum rate of oxygen consumption on Everest would increase by 5
percent. It may seem like a subtle shift, but that's enough to be the
difference between life and death for a mountaineer standing at
Everest's peak. "Some people would find [thicker air] as a good
consequence of climate change," Matthews says with a laugh. "I think
that's stretching it a little bit."
The real surprise of this study, Matthews says, is learning how
dramatically the atmospheric pressure on Everest can vary. From the 40
years of data, the team picked out the day with the lowest air pressure
on record and compared it to the day with the highest. The difference
was huge, Matthews says, with oxygen availability between the two days
being equivalent to an elevation change of 2,460 feet.
And the climate can vary remarkably within a span of a few days, he
says. On one day, the air at the summit can feel breathable without
supplemental oxygen; a few days later, the pressure can plunge to thin,
sharp, mid-winter-like air, making it unclimbable. This means that for
climbers planning to forego supplemental oxygen and push their bodies to
the absolute limits, they must pay close attention to oxygen forecasts.
For example, if climbers leave basecamp on a day when an oxygenless
summit would be physiologically possible and then arrive a week later
when the pressure has bottomed out, it could be a "real horror show,"
Matthews says.
"What really struck me about this study is that climate change may be
impacting the conditions on Mount Everest, and the acceptable conditions
on Mount Everest for climbers, in more ways that we have already
understood," says Kimberley Miner, a climate risk scientist at the
University of Maine who was not involved with this study. "Looking at
the way that oxygen is affected in the higher alpine environments [is]
something that probably doesn't strike people immediately when you talk
about climate change, but these secondary impacts could have very
specific effects on climbers and mountaineers [and are] also just as
significant."
Although atmospheric changes on Everest aren't visible to the eye, the
havoc that climate change is wreaking on glaciers is crystal clear to
those living in the region.
"The melting ice in the Himalayas is already alarming," says Pasang
Dolma Sherpa, the executive director of the Center for Indigenous
Peoples' Research and Development in Kathmandu, Nepal. A few weeks ago,
she went hiking in a nearby community, and the local people told her,
"Oh, by this time [of year] we used to have already white mountains, but
now you see all black." And the floods caused by melting glaciers--which
were once rare--are now happening more regularly and unpredictably, she
says.
The study published today in One Earth reports just how dramatically
glaciers have thinned since the 1960s--in some areas by as much as 490
feet. A team of scientists led by glaciologist Owen King, a research
fellow at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., used archived
satellite images and old surveys dating back to the 1960s to build a
baseline dataset from which to compare future glacier melt. The images
came from ten different years spread out between 1962 and 2019.
The team studied 79 glaciers--including the Khumbu Glacier, the highest
glacier in the world--and found that between 2009 and 2018, glaciers
thinned at nearly twice the rate that they did in the 1960s. And some
estimates suggest that a few glaciers have areas on them that have
likely lost half of their thickness since the 60s.
The average temperature from 2000 to 2016 is about 1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit warmer than the average between 1975 and 2000. Although
rising temperatures are the primary drivers of glacier thinning, other
big factors are at play, King says. As the glaciers retreat, they often
leave behind rocky debris and expose cliffs and troughs on the
mountainsides. The exposed rocks absorb more radiation from the sun,
melting the adjacent ice. The melted water then seeps into the troughs
created by the retreating glaciers, creating small ponds. The ponds melt
the surrounding ice, and more water fills the ponds. Ultimately,
clusters of ponds join up and form huge glacial lakes. As a result, more
than 400 new lakes formed between 1990 and 2015, King says.
Heidi Steltzer, a mountain scientist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado
who wasn't involved in the study, says the results are concerning, given
the persistent ice loss across the study area.
In addition to the 18 Indigenous communities residing in the Himalayas,
nearly two billion people depend on the mountain range for a source of
freshwater. As melting accelerates, it puts that once-steady source of
water in jeopardy, threatening the lives and livelihoods of nearly a
fifth of the world's population.
And although faster melting might mean more water, "it's only a good
thing for a little bit of time," Elmore says. If water melts too fast,
it arrives in the form of floods, which communities in the region are
already experiencing. "They are reaping the repercussions of a global
climatic change that they are not major contributors to," she says.
But despite being on the frontlines of climate change, the Indigenous
peoples in the Himalayas are often left out of research, climate
strategy dialogues and policy making, Sherpa says. "The studies that
help people understand the resources they have and the choices [they
have] to adapt are just as important as a study of ice loss," Steltzer
says. "And maybe that's the next study to come."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/thicker-air-and-thinner-ice-how-climate-change-affecting-mount-everest-180976360/
- -
[Source material VOLUME 3, ISSUE 5, P608-620, NOVEMBER 20, 2020]
*Six Decades of Glacier Mass Changes around Mt. Everest Are Revealed by
Historical and Contemporary Images*
Open Access DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.10.019
Highlights
- Glaciers around Mt. Everest have thinned by more than 100 m since the
1960s
- The rate of ice mass loss has consistently accelerated over the past
six decades
- Glacier thinning has occurred at above 6,000 masl
- Surge-type glacier behavior has been identified for the first time in
the region
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(20)30549-2
[First idea from Scientific American]
*We Need a National Institute of Climate Change and Health*
The NIH has a budget of over $40 billion--but spends a measly $9 million
on this looming public health emergency
By Howard Frumkin, Richard J. Jackson on November 22, 2020
If there was any lingering doubt that climate change threatens human
health and well-being, this year put it to rest. Wildfire smoke
aggravated heart disease and lung disease up and down the West Coast and
across the country. A record-breaking hurricane season killed and
injured people from North Carolina to Texas, and left tens of thousands
homeless and at risk of PTSD and other mental health problems.
Oppressive heat across the Southwest imperiled outdoor workers and
athletes, the elderly and the poor, and people with underlying health
problems, with risks ranging from heatstroke to heart attacks and even
death.
2020 reinforced another lesson: If we don't prepare for health disasters
and manage them skillfully, informed by the best evidence, then people
suffer and die needlessly. In confronting a novel virus, the United
States failed in its response, and we continue to have one of the
world's highest COVID-19 death rates.
What is true for Covid-19 is true for climate change. We're not
prepared. Part of the gap is a knowledge gap: We haven't done the needed
research, and we lack critical information. As former directors of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...
Read more at:
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/we-need-national-institute-of-climate-change-and-health-918863.html
[video 25 min]
*Zero Emission Trucks : Can we afford to go there? Can we afford not to??*
Nov 22, 2020
Just Have a Think
As our world transitions rapidly to remote working and online shopping,
road freight, powered mainly by diesel fuel, continues to increase
rapidly. There is hope on the horizon though and it's not just Tesla's
much anticipated heavy duty battery electric semi truck. All of the
world's biggest truck making firms are racing to get their hydrogen or
battery electric vehicles to market in the next couple of years. The
question is - will we have the infrastructure ready to accommodate them?
And can we afford it?
Video Transcripts available at our website
http://www.justhaveathink.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiFArDAJC8
[The New Yorker]
*How Close Is Humanity to the Edge?*
Toby Ord, a philosopher who studies our species's "existential risk,"
has been both frightened and encouraged by our response to the pandemic.
By Corinne Purtill - November 21, 2020
In mid-January, Toby Ord, a philosopher and senior research fellow at
Oxford University, was reviewing the final proofs for his first book,
"The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity." Ord works
in the university's Future of Humanity Institute, which specializes in
considering our collective fate. He had noticed that a few of his
colleagues--those who worked on "bio-risk"--were tracking a new virus in
Asia. Occasionally, they e-mailed around projections, which Ord found
intriguing, in a hypothetical way. Among other subjects, "The Precipice"
deals with the risk posed to our species by pandemics both natural and
engineered. He wondered if the coronavirus might make his book more topical.
In February, the U.S. leg of Ord's book tour, which was scheduled for
the spring and was to include stops at Stanford, M.I.T., and Princeton,
was cancelled. "The Precipice" was published in the United Kingdom on
March 5th; two weeks later, Ord was sheltering in place at home. His
wife, Bernadette Young, an infectious-disease specialist at John
Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford, began working overtime, while he cared
for their daughter, Rose, who was then five. "I'd already known that,
during a crisis, the unthinkable can quickly become the inevitable," Ord
told me, earlier this year. "But, despite having this intellectual
knowledge, it was still quite something to see such a thing unfold
before my eyes."
For someone with Ord's interests, living through a pandemic is an
opportunity to contemplate alternate histories...
- -
A study conducted last year, by three experimental psychologists at
Oxford, found that individuals considered total human extinction to be
only slightly worse than a catastrophic event that wipes out eighty per
cent of the population. Respondents' opposition to extinction rose when
they were asked to consider the specific consequences of all of human
culture being extinguished forever. Still, without that prompt, it was
hard to grasp how much worse total obliteration would be compared with
merely cataclysmic death.
There is a term for this outlook: "scope neglect," the cognitive bias
that makes it harder to understand the full scale of problems the larger
those problems get. It's the struggle, as Ord puts it, to care ten times
as much about something that's ten times more important than an
alternative. "One of the aspects in which I'm an outlier is that I take
scale really seriously, and always have," Ord told me. "You can see that
all through the book, really, including taking the scale of the universe
seriously."
As "Precipice" closes, Ord zooms out to the cosmos and, against the
backdrop of its unfathomable vastness, asks us to grasp the scale of
what we risk losing if the human story ends prematurely. He writes that,
just as our early forebears, huddled around some Paleolithic fire,
couldn't have imagined the creative and sensory experiences available to
us today, we, too, are ill-equipped to conceive of what is possible for
those who will follow us. Humanity's potential is worth preserving, he
argues, not because we are so great now but because of the possibility,
however small, that we are a bridge to something far greater. "How
strange it would be if this single species of ape, equipped by evolution
with this limited set of sensory and cognitive capacities, after only a
few thousand years of civilization, ended up anywhere near the maximum
possible quality of life," he writes. "I think that we have barely begun
the ascent."...
- -
The challenge is to adopt a new frame of mind in which distant threats
aren't confused with impossible ones.
Ord proposed "a simple piece of mathematics" that, for him, "has helped
make it all visceral": even a once-in-a-century catastrophe has a
five-per-cent chance of happening during any five-year Parliamentary
term in the U.K., and a four-per-cent chance of occurring during any
single Presidential term in the U.S. This risk calculus may seem
commonsensical to us now, because we are living through such an event.
Still, he said, "we'll forget it!" He laughed. "We have five years or so
where we are really protected from things like this, because we're
conscious of it," he went on. "Beyond that, it relies on us to create
institutions." It's for this reason, especially, that being consumed
with dread serves no purpose. Fear must be motivating, or it's
pointless. Safeguarding the future requires believing in one.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-close-is-humanity-to-the-edge
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 23, 2014 *
The New York Times reports:
"A warming climate is melting [Glacier National Park's] glaciers, an
icy retreat that promises to change not just tourists' vistas, but
also the mountains and everything around them.
"Streams fed by snowmelt are reaching peak spring flows weeks
earlier than in the past, and low summer flows weeks before they
used to. Some farmers who depend on irrigation in the parched days
of late summer are no longer sure that enough water will be there.
Bull trout, once pan-fried over anglers' campfires, are now caught
and released to protect a population that is shrinking as water
temperatures rise."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/climate-change-threatens-to-strip-the-identity-of-glacier-national-park.html?mwrsm=Email
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