[TheClimate.Vote] October 6, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*October 6, 2020*/

[Associated Press]
*Record-breaking California wildfires surpass 4 million acres*
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In a year that has already brought apocalyptic 
skies and smothering smoke to the West Coast, California set a grim new 
record Sunday when officials announced that the wildfires of 2020 have 
now scorched a record 4 million acres -- in a fire season that is far 
from over.

The unprecedented figure -- an area larger than the state of Connecticut 
-- is more than double the previous record for the most land burned in a 
single year in California.

"The 4 million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes 
your breath away," said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the California 
Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire. "And that 
number will grow."...

So far, in this year's historic fire season, more than 8,200 California 
wildfires have killed 31 people and scorched "well over 4 million acres 
in California" or 6,250 square miles, Cal Fire said Sunday in a 
statement. The blazes have destroyed more than 8,400 buildings...
The astonishing figure is more than double the 2018 record of 1.67 
million burned acres (2,609 square miles) in California. All large fire 
years since Cal Fire started recording figures in 1933 have remained 
well below the 4 million mark -- "until now," the agency said Sunday in 
a Tweet.

"This year is far from over and fire potential remains high. Please be 
cautious outdoors."...

more at - 
https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-fires-california-archive-523a1c3e4a792972e0c5c2f4c59c07d0



[Exxon knew]
*Exxon's Plan for Surging Carbon Emissions Revealed in Leaked Documents*
Internal projections from one of world's largest oil producers show an 
increase in its enormous contribution to global warming
Exxon Mobil Corp. had plans to increase annual carbon-dioxide emissions 
by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece, an analysis of 
internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg shows, setting one of the 
largest corporate emitters against international efforts to slow the 
pace of warming.

The drive to expand both fossil-fuel production and planet-warming 
pollution has come at a time when some of Exxon's rivals, such as BP Plc 
and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, are moving to curb oil and zero-out 
emissions. Exxon's own assessment of its $210 billion investment 
strategy shows yearly emissions rising 17% by 2025, according to 
internal projections.
The emissions estimates predate the Covid-19 pandemic, which has slashed 
global demand for oil and thrown the company's finances into distress, 
making it unclear if Exxon will complete its plans for growth. The 
internal figures reflect only some of the measures Exxon would take to 
reduce emissions, the company said. The largest U.S. oil producer has 
never made a commitment to lower oil and gas output or set a date by 
which it will become carbon neutral. Exxon has also never publicly 
disclosed its forecasts for its own emissions.

But the internal documents show for the first time that Exxon has 
carefully assessed the direct emissions it expects from the seven-year 
investment plan adopted in 2018 by Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods. 
A chart in the documents lists Exxon's direct emissions for 2017--122 
million metric tons of CO2 equivalent--as well as a projected figure for 
2025 of 143 million tons. The additional 21 million tons is a net result 
of Exxon's estimate for ramping up production, selling assets and 
undertaking efforts to reduce pollution by deploying renewable energy 
and burying carbon dioxide.

In a statement released after the publication of this story, Exxon said 
its internal projections are "a preliminary, internal assessment of 
estimated cumulative emission growth through 2025 and did not include 
the [additional] mitigation and abatement measures that would have been 
evaluated in the planning process. Furthermore, the projections 
identified in the leaked documents have significantly changed, a fact 
that was not fully explained or prominently featured in the article." 
Exxon declined to provide any details on the new projections...
The internal estimates reflect only a small portion of Exxon's total 
contribution to climate change. Greenhouse gases from direct operations, 
such as those measured by Exxon, typically account for a fifth of the 
total at a large oil company; most emissions come from customers burning 
fuel in vehicles or other end uses, which the Exxon documents don't 
account for.

That means the full climate impact of Exxon's growth strategy would 
likely be five times the company's estimate--or about 100 million tons 
of additional carbon dioxide--had the company accounted for so-called 
Scope 3 emissions. If its plans are realized, Exxon would add to the 
atmosphere the annual emissions of a small, developed nation, or 26 
coal-fired power plants.

The emissions projections are "an early assessment that does not include 
additional mitigation and abatement measures that would have been 
considered as the next step in the process," Exxon said in an earlier 
statement. "The same planning document illustrates how we have been 
successful in mitigating emissions in the past."

Exxon often defends its growth plans by citing International Energy 
Agency estimates that trillions of dollars of new oil and gas 
investments are needed by 2040 to offset depletion from existing 
operations, even under a range of climate scenarios. However, experts 
say a reduction in global oil and production is necessary to limit 
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels...
Exxon's ambitious growth plans, calling for higher cash flow and a 
doubling of earnings by 2025, are a vestige of pre-pandemic times, 
before global oil demand evaporated. In its earlier statement, Exxon 
maintained its intention to pursue growth plans in the future: "As 
demand returns and capital investments resume, our growth plans will 
continue to include meaningful emission mitigation efforts."...
- -
Planning documents showing the surge in emissions that would result from 
the investment strategy were widely circulated in internal Exxon 
meetings as recently as early this year, before the coronavirus spread 
beyond China. Unlike earnings targets, Exxon never publicly announced 
its 2025 emissions goals, leading some employees to question whether the 
company was committed to reductions. More than a third of Exxon's 
self-help measures rely on carbon capture, an expensive process that 
stores carbon dioxide underground.

Allegations of inadequate disclosures related to the dangers of global 
warming have become a source of legal trouble for Big Oil. In June, 
Minnesota sued Exxon, Koch Industries Inc. and the American Petroleum 
Institute for allegedly withholding critical information about the 
impact of fossil fuel use on climate change. All told, Exxon and other 
oil companies are being sued by about a dozen cities, counties and 
states seeking compensation for consumers and taxpayers over the cost of 
adapting to climate change. (Exxon denies wrongdoing in the suits, which 
it says are baseless and politically motivated; at the end of last year, 
the company won a related case brought by New York's attorney general.)...
- -
Just last month China pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060, a shift that 
would set into motion a more than 65% drop in its oil consumption and a 
75% cut in gas, according to government-affiliated researchers. The EU 
is aiming to reach neutrality across all greenhouse gases by 2050, which 
will be partly funded by the Green Deal that invests in electrification 
of transport and the promotion of clean hydrogen. California announced a 
new plan to end the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035, in a state 
that alone accounts for 1% of global oil demand.

"It's past time for Exxon Mobil to take responsibility for the harmful 
impacts of its oil and gas products," said Mulvey of the Union on 
Concerned Scientists. "The world at large and its own investors would 
benefit from Exxon redirecting its strategy toward the energy we need in 
a low-carbon future."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output



[Three states of Arctic ice]
*The melting Arctic: how algal blooms change in rapidly warming seas*
October 02, 2020
Arctic environments are changing rapidly. Clearly this poses challenges 
to ecosystems, but we do not yet understand the consequences in their 
full complexity. However, we know that the first response to sea ice 
decline, ocean acidification, and warmer waters happens at the level of 
unicellular algae...
https://framsenteret.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/eva_figure_edited-scaled.jpg
https://framsenteret.no/forum/2020/the-melting-arctic-how-algal-blooms-change-in-rapidly-warming-seas/



[clips from the new book: "The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New 
Yorker on Climate Change,"]
*Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change*
By Elizabeth Kolbert...
- -
So how hot--which is to say, how bad--will things get? One of the 
difficulties of making such predictions is that there are so many forms 
of uncertainty, from the geopolitical to the geophysical. (No one, for 
example, knows exactly where various "climate tipping points" lie.) That 
being said, I'll offer three scenarios.

*In one scenario*--let's call this "blue skies"--the world will finally 
decide to "stop waffling" and start to bring emissions down more or less 
immediately. In the U.S., proponents of the Green New Deal have proposed 
a "ten-year national mobilization" in order to meet a hundred per cent 
of the country's power demand "through clean, renewable, and 
zero-emission energy sources." Such a timetable is obviously 
fantastically ambitious, but not for this reason infeasible. According 
to a report by the International Energy Agency, using technologies now 
available, offshore wind turbines could provide the country with twice 
as much electricity as it currently uses, and, according to some 
estimates, weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels would create tens of 
millions of jobs.

Bending the emissions curve globally is an even more formidable 
challenge. Leaders of many developing nations point out the injustice in 
asking their countries to forgo carbon-based fuels just because richer 
nations have already blown through the world's carbon budget. India, 
which will soon overtake China as the world's most populous country, 
gets three-quarters of its electricity from coal, and that proportion 
has, at least until recently, been growing. Still, it's possible to 
imagine that global emissions could peak in the next decade or so. (At 
the U.N. last month, China's President, Xi Jinping, pledged that his 
country's emissions would crest by 2030.) Owing to the pandemic, 
emissions worldwide are expected to drop by about five per cent this 
year, compared with 2019. This would be the largest year-to-year drop 
since the Second World War, and it could mark an inflection point. Were 
it to be sustained, the increase in global temperatures could be held to 
less than two degrees Celsius. The world in 2050 would still be hotter 
than it is now, but it would also be less polluted, less given over to 
vast concentrations of oil wealth, and, in all likelihood, more just. As 
Narasimha Rao, a professor at Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental 
Studies, put it in the Times, it's hard to see how serious 
global-emissions cuts could take place without "increased attention to 
equity."

*Alternatively, *global emissions could continue to grow through the 
middle of the century and, along with them, global inequality. In this 
scenario, by 2050 a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius would, 
for all intents and purposes, be locked in. Developed nations would have 
constructed storm-surge barriers to keep out the sea and erected border 
walls to keep out refugees. They would also have started to 
air-condition the outdoors. Developing nations, meanwhile, would have 
been left to fend for themselves. To a certain extent, all of this is 
already happening. A study published in 2019 by Noah Diffenbaugh and 
Marshall Burke, both of Stanford University, found that in the past 
fifty years warming had slowed economic growth in those parts of the 
world which have emitted the least carbon, perhaps by as much as 
twenty-five per cent. "Not only have poor countries not shared in the 
full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already been made 
poorer (in relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy 
countries," the two wrote. Qatar, one of the world's hottest countries 
and also one of the richest, already cools its soccer stadiums and its 
outdoor malls.

*In a third scenario*, global warming could by 2050 produce global 
conflict that draws in poor nations and rich ones alike. This, too, 
already seems, to a certain extent, to be taking place. A significant 
body of research suggests that the Syrian civil war was caused, at least 
in part, by a drought that pushed more than a million people out of 
their villages. The war, which has claimed some four hundred thousand 
lives, has, in the course of nearly a decade of bloodshed, involved the 
U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. Future droughts in the 
Middle East are apt to be even more severe and prolonged, as are 
droughts in other volatile regions, like the Horn of Africa. It doesn't 
seem that it would take too many more Syrian-scale conflicts to 
destabilize large swaths of the globe. At the very least, climate change 
"will endanger the stability of the international political order and 
the global trading networks upon which American prosperity rests," 
Michael Klare, an expert on resource competition and a professor at 
Hampshire College, has written. "As conditions deteriorate, the United 
States could face an even more perilous outcome: conflict among the 
great powers themselves."

If all these scenarios appear to be either too unrealistic or too 
unpleasant, I invite readers to write their own. Here's the one 
stipulation: it must involve drastic change. At this point, there's 
simply no possible future that averts dislocation. The horrific fires 
this fall in California and Oregon, which were, in a manner of speaking, 
stoked by climate change, serve as a preview of the world to come. As 
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A. & M. 
University, recently put it, "If you don't like all of the climate 
disasters happening in 2020, I have some bad news for you about the rest 
of your life." Billions of people will have to dramatically change the 
way they live or the world will change dramatically or some combination 
of the two. My experience reporting on climate change, which now spans 
almost twenty years, has convinced me that the most extreme outcomes 
are, unfortunately, among the most likely. As the warnings have grown 
more dire and the consequences of warming more obvious, emissions have 
only increased that much faster. Until the coronavirus hit, they were 
tracking the highest of the so-called pathways studied by the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If this continues, the 
I.P.C.C. projects that, by the end of this century, global temperatures 
will have risen by almost eight degrees Fahrenheit. Let's just say that 
at that point no amount of outdoor air-conditioning will be sufficient.

A few years ago, I interviewed James Hansen for a video project that I 
was working on. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but he has continued 
to speak out about climate change--and to get arrested protesting 
projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. He was blunt about the world's 
failure. When I asked him if he had a message for young people, he said, 
"The simple thing is I'm sorry we're leaving such a fucking mess."

This excerpt was drawn from the afterword of "The Fragile Earth: Writing 
from The New Yorker on Climate Change," which is out October 6th, from Ecco.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-climate-change

- -

[OK, I'll bite]
*Climate Manifesto*
Sustainability is forfeit
Survival no longer assured
All journeys are new.
http://climatemanifesto.org



[Climate sensitivity worse than thought]
*New Peer-Reviewed Research: Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is Worse 
that We Thought: Part 2 of 3*
Oct 5, 2020
Paul Beckwith
Part 2: I chat in detail in a three video series on how today's climate 
and rate of change of climate related to the Eocene and PETM 
(Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). Despite recent advances, the link 
between evolution of atmospheric CO2 and climate during the Eocene 
greenhouse period remains unclear. Modelling studies suggest that to 
achieve the global warmth that characterised the early Eocene, warmer 
climates must be more sensitive to CO2 forcing than colder climates. In 
other words, climate sensitivity (temperature vs CO2 level) depends on 
the starting conditions. In the new peer-reviewed paper that I discuss, 
they test this assertion in the geological record by combining a new 
high-resolution boron isotope-based CO2 record with novel estimates of 
Global Mean Temperature. They find that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity 
(ECS) was indeed higher during the warmest intervals of the Eocene, 
agreeing well with recent model simulations, and declined through the 
Eocene as global climate cooled. These observations indicate that the 
canonical IPCC range of ECS (1.5 to 4.5 C per doubling) is unlikely to 
be appropriate for high-CO2 warm climates of the past, and the state 
dependency of ECS may play an increasingly important role in determining 
the state of future climate as the Earth continues to warm. In other 
words, we are fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRs-ezjwkBE



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 6, 2008 *

DeSmogBlog's Jeremy Jacquot praises the 2008 vice-presidential debate 
between Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) for 
its focus on climate change and energy issues:

"Palin made a big show of her ticket's emphasis on 'energy independence' 
- even ducking a question about bankruptcy laws to cheer for more 
offshore drilling - and McCain's 'all of the above' policy. Though she 
went through the motions, I have my doubts that she supports mandatory 
caps - or, frankly, that she supports any real meaningful action on 
climate change. Now if only the next debate moderator can get the 
presidential candidates arguing about climate policy…"

http://www.desmogblog.com/biden-palin-finally-a-real-debate-about-climate-change-and-energy


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