[TheClimate.Vote] October 25, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*October 25, 2020*/

[that's a millennia]
*It's been a thousand years since Colorado has burned like this*
Colorado's three largest wildfires in history have been in the past 
three months. Wildfires on this scale are exceedingly rare without a 
boost from climate change.
Eric Holthaus - Oct 25, 2020

We are in a climate emergency. And you were born at just the right 
moment to help change everything.

Today's newsletter is a continuation of a short three-part series on the 
Colorado wildfires that started with Tuesday's deeply emotional 
interview with Becky Bolinger, Colorado's Assistant State Climatologist.

If you like what you're reading, please subscribe to The Phoenix to 
support independent climate journalism at a critical moment in history.
*
**Colorado hasn't seen a fire season this bad in a very, very, very long 
time.*
The three largest fires in Colorado history - the Cameron Peak fire, the 
East Troublesome fire, and the Pine Gulch fire - have all burned this 
summer.

This week, the East Troublesome fire actually crossed over the 
continental divide through Forest Canyon Pass in Rocky Mountain National 
Park at an elevation of 11,320 feet - something meteorologists were 
speculating would be an unbelievable feat for any time of the year, let 
alone late October. The fire burned an area the size of Chicago in a 
day, at high elevation, at temperatures near freezing.

Decades of drought and beetle infestations worsened by rapidly warming 
temperatures have led to massive stands of dead forests across western 
North America - at least 100,000 square miles worth. In Colorado, more 
acres have burned this year than in any other *five year period* on 
record, combined. Fires are even slowly advancing through early winter 
snowstorms - with heavy snows posing new challenges for firefighting crews.

None of this is normal.

Before 2002, Colorado had never recorded a fire larger than 100,000 
acres. It now has three burning simultaneously. What's happening in 
Colorado isn't a coincidence, it's climate change.
https://thephoenix.substack.com/p/its-been-a-thousand-years-since-colorado

- -

[simultaneous]
*As Colorado wildfires burn, fears that climate change is causing 
"multi-level emergency" mount*
Heat, aridity, mega-fires and smoke are intensifying faster than projected
- -
Politicians including presidential candidate Joe Biden and Senate 
hopeful John Hickenlooper now refer to "an existential threat" and call 
for a shift off the fossil fuels they've supported in the past.

Yet efforts to help residents cope, and even draw down heat-trapping 
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by re-greening farmland and cities, 
have barely begun. A Denver Post examination found a $4.2 billion 
backlog of forestry work identified by the Colorado State Forest Service 
as critical to protect people and property from fires...
- -
What's the rational response?

"Rationality means getting really serious about GHG (greenhouse gas) 
reductions. It also means planning for the worst with respect to water 
supplies and fires. We're doing none of these things, although the water 
community at least realizes the threat and is making some efforts to 
think about it," Udall said.

"Climate change is the ultimate 'kick-the-can-down-the-road' game. To 
fix it you have to have pain now, and reap the benefits later. That's 
never a good setup for political action."...
- -
"The safety of our communities is at risk. Our water supply is at risk. 
And we provide water that leaves our high country and flows to 18 
different states and Mexico. All of Colorado is in drought now and 
you're not going to hang onto soil if you've burned all the vegetation 
off of it," he said. "It doesn't do any good to say you're going to do 
something. At some point, you have to actually do it."...
more at - 
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/25/colorado-wildfires-climate-change/



[deep science video with transcript -- from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder]
*How can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic?*
Oct 24, 2020
Sabine Hossenfelder
transcript concludes:

    Even though the system is chaotic, one clearly sees that the
    response of the system does
    have a predictable dependence on the input parameter.
    To see this better, I have calculated the average of these curves as
    a function of the
    "radiative forcing", for a sample of initial values.
    And this is what you get:
    You clearly see that the average value is strongly correlated with
    the radiative forcing.
    Again, the scatter you see here is because I am averaging over a
    rather arbitrarily chosen
    finite period.
    What this means is that in a chaotic system, the trends of average
    values can be predictable,
    even though you cannot predict the exact state of the system beyond
    a short period of time.
    And this is exactly what is happening in climate models.
    Scientists cannot predict whether it will rain on June 15th, 2079,
    but they can very
    well predict the average rainfall in 2079 as a function of
    increasing carbon dioxide
    levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5fwYtU7Rhg



[not a surprise, but still disturbing]
*Exxon Spends Millions on Facebook To Keep the Fossil Fuel Industry Alive*
Aided by a right-wing political consulting firm, the company is rallying 
supporters to fight for oil and gas interests at every level of government.
CHRISTINE MACDONALD OCTOBER 20, 2020
...
An In These Times inves­ti­ga­tion, sup­port­ed by a year-long 
fel­low­ship from the Leonard C. Good­man Insti­tute for Inves­tiga­tive 
Report­ing, exam­ined 11,622 Exxon social media ads con­tain­ing around 
350 dis­tinct mes­sages that ran in the two-year peri­od from June 1, 
2018, to May 31, 2020, and appeared on U.S. Face­book and Insta­gram 
users' screens as many as 265 mil­lion times. Face­book (which owns 
Insta­gram) has allowed access to the ads it serves through its Ad 
Library since May 2018, cre­at­ed by Face­book after a num­ber of 
trans­paren­cy scan­dals.
- -
Exxon has spent more than any oth­er major cor­po­ra­tion on ​"social 
issues, elec­tions, or pol­i­tics" Face­book ads (out­side of Face­book 
itself), and is the coun­try's ninth-largest buy­er of such ads 
over­all: $15.6 mil­lion from May 7, 2018, to Octo­ber 8, 2020. Almost 
every oth­er top spender is an orga­ni­za­tion relat­ed to 
pres­i­den­tial cam­paign­ing. The top 100 pages are pri­mar­i­ly 
politi­cians, non­prof­its and oth­er mis­sion-dri­ven orga­ni­za­tions: 
The only major cor­po­ra­tion out­side of Exxon, Face­book and 
Insta­gram is Gold­man Sachs, which spent less than a quar­ter of 
Exxon's total...
- -
Exxon's use of social media to lobby the public goes way beyond the rest 
of the industry.
- -
As GOP dig­i­tal strate­gist Mindy Finn explained to Politi­co: 
"[Dig­i­tal orga­niz­ing is] not just raw num­bers. It's ana­lyz­ing and 
deter­min­ing who those peo­ple [who are engag­ing] are and match­ing 
them back to vot­er pro­files. … It's not hav­ing the most Face­book 
likes and clicks, because the ​'who' matters."

While only age, sex and state infor­ma­tion for each ad is pro­vid­ed by 
the Face­book Ad Library, Face­book allows ad buy­ers to tar­get ads 
based on actu­al online behav­ior, in addi­tion to self-report­ed 
char­ac­ter­is­tics like work and edu­ca­tion. It can tar­get using 
online shop­ping and brows­ing his­to­ry, for exam­ple, and whether a 
per­son is like­ly to engage with con­ser­v­a­tive or lib­er­al 
polit­i­cal content.
- -
Stephanie Prufer, an oceans cam­paign­er at the Cen­ter for 
Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty, says she does­n't think Exxon's strat­e­gy 
will work for the com­pa­ny, espe­cial­ly among youth.

"I'm not sur­prised that Exxon is tar­get­ing the demo­graph­ic that 
they are," she says, refer­ring to the fact that Exxon ads 
dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly appear on the screens of old­er social media 
users. ​"They know they are not going to be able to get the sup­port of 
peo­ple who are afraid for their own futures. I'm 24 and I wor­ry every 
sin­gle day about what will become of my future if the oil com­pa­nies 
keep drilling."

"The sci­ence is so clear," she adds. ​"We need to keep oil in the 
ground. We need to end drilling on our coast, not revive it."

David DeMaris served as a tech­nol­o­gy con­sul­tant on this sto­ry. 
Juan Caice­do con­tributed fact-checking.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/exxon-facebook-instagram-advertising-fracking-climate-fossil-fuels


[Labor understands global warming]
*Why labor unions support Mike Siegel*
Premiered Oct 13, 2020
Sunrise Movement
What use is a good job if you don't have a home to come home to? What 
use is a country if you can't work to better the lives of yourself and 
your neighbors?
Unions have a saying, if you're not at the table you're on the menu. 
That's why an unprecedented coalition of unions are backing Green New 
Deal champion, Mike Siegel because any deal he'll make in congress, 
starts with workers. Mike Siegel is a democrat running for congress in 
Texas's 10th district, to unseat the incumbent republican, Michael 
Mccaul. Mike also supports Housing and Healthcare for All, Police 
Reform, and Gun reform. You can learn more about his platform at 
siegelfortexas.org.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgRw4cRm5k&feature=youtu.be


[Climate and Capitalism]
*Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean.*
Part Three: The Heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs
by Ian Angus - October 24, 2020
- -
Scientists measure the ocean's heat content in joules -- the amount of 
energy required to produce one watt of power for one second. In a 
commentary on the latest data, Lijing Cheng of China's Institute of 
Atmospheric Physics calculates that the increase in ocean heat content 
over the past 25 years required the addition of 228 sextillion joules of 
heat -- that's 228 followed by 21 zeroes.

"That's a lot of zeros indeed. To make it easier to understand, I did a 
calculation. The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 
63,000,000,000,000 Joules. The amount of heat we have put in the world's 
oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb 
explosions."

That's about five Hiroshima bombs a second -- and the rate is accelerating.
Since 1987 the ocean has warmed 4.5 times as fast as in the previous 
three decades.[iii] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 
projects that even if emissions are substantially reduced, by 2100 the 
ocean will heat 2 to 4 times as much as it has since 1970 -- and if 
emissions are not cut, it will heat 5 to 7 times as much...
- -
The sudden growth of scientific interest in marine heatwaves is no 
accident. It reflects a real shift in the ocean's climate in the past 
two decades: a radical increase in the frequency, intensity and duration 
of periods of when water temperatures are much higher than normal. Such 
extreme events can have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems: 
organisms that have evolved to live within a limited temperature range 
must adapt, flee or die when that range is exceeded...
- -
All by itself, ocean warming is a major threat to the stability of the 
world's largest ecosystem -- but ocean warming does not occur "all by 
itself." The deadly trio of ocean warming, loss of oxygen and 
acidification are all consequences of disrupting the global carbon 
cycle. Burning massive amounts of long-buried carbon has changed the 
ocean's chemistry, heated the water and driven out oxygen. Those 
processes take place simultaneously and reinforce each other, making the 
ocean increasingly inhospitable, even deadly, for living things from 
microbes to whales.

Worse, the deadly trio isn't acting alone. Overfishing has wiped out 
many species, and it's predicted that most wild fish populations will be 
90% depleted by 2050. Pollutants, including tons of plastics that 
essentially last forever, are poisoning marine life from coastlines to 
the deepest trenches. Nitrogen fertilizer run-off has created a thousand 
or more dead zones in coastal waters and estuaries. Off-shore oil wells 
are leaking deadly hydrocarbons, and mining companies are preparing to 
dredge rare minerals from the deep sea floor, destroying some of the few 
remaining undamaged parts of Earth's surface.

As environmental geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams write, "a 
wholesale refashioning of the marine ecosystem" is now underway. If 
business as usual continues, "pervasive changes in the physical, 
chemical and biological boundary conditions of the sea … [will] 
transform, irreversibly, and for the worse, the Earth and its oceans."

The effect of that transformation was summed up by Agence France-Presse, 
in its account of the IPCC's 2019 report on the oceans: "The same oceans 
that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global 
scale unless the carbon pollution destabilizing Earth's marine 
environment is brought to heel."

This article continues my series on metabolic rifts. As always, I 
welcome your comments, corrections and constructive criticism.--IA
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2020/10/24/triple-crisis-in-the-anthropocene-ocean-part-three-the-heat-of-3-6-billion-atom-bombs/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 25, 2013 *

On MSNBC's "The Cycle," writer David Gessner discusses the grotesque 
legacy of Superstorm Sandy.

http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/hurricane-sandy-one-year-later-56848963789#


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

/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 mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can 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. 
Messages have no tracking software.
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/20201025/6c88be6b/attachment.html>