[TheClimate.Vote] September 7, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Mon Sep 7 11:32:16 EDT 2020

/*September 7, 2020*/

[CBS news on heatwave - mentions global warming]
*Western U.S. facing weather whiplash this weekend*
Sep 6, 2020
CBS News
Three of California's four largest wildfires on record are still 
burning, with a dangerous heatwave expected across the western United 
States this weekend. CBS News meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff 
Berardelli spoke to CBSN's Lana Zak about heat and the snow in store for 
the region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-gAP4K16dQ

- -

[grid risk]*
**All-time record heat across Southern California fuels fires, threatens 
power supply *
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-06/southern-california-braces-for-more-record-breaking-heat-as-firefighters-battle-wildfires-across-the-state

[Wildfire News & Opinion articles]
https://wildfiretoday.com/

- -

*National Interagency Fire Center*
National Preparedness Level 5
This report will be updated daily.
September 6, 2020
Nationally, 72 new fires were reported which resulted in seven new large 
fires. Currently, 80 large wildland fires have burned 2.2 million acres. 
Even with the higher temperatures and humidities, firefighters contained 
two large fires.

Two hundred thirty-three soldiers from the 14th Brigade Engineer 
Battalion based out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington are deployed 
in support of the August Complex.

Three wildland fire suppression crews and three overhead personnel from 
Quebec, Canada are supporting fire suppression efforts in the Northern 
California Area.

One RC-26 aircraft with Distributed Real-Time Infrared (DRTI) capability 
and support personnel from the 141st Air Refueling Wing (Washington Air 
National Guard) has been deployed to Fairchild AFB (Spokane, WA), in 
support of wildland fire operations.

Two MAFFS C-130 airtanker and support personnel each from the 153rd 
Airlift Wing (Wyoming Air National Guard) and the 146th Airlift Wing 
(California Air National Guard) have been deployed to support wildland 
fire operations in California.
- -
*Weather*
Very hot, dry, and unstable conditions will be present along the West 
Coast states, southern Great Basin, and Arizona as the high pressure 
ridge begins to retreat to the West and weaken slightly. Overnight 
humidity recoveries in these areas will again be poor. To the northeast, 
the upper level winds will increase in response to an approaching 
trough. This will produce breezy conditions across eastern Oregon, 
Washington, Idaho, and Western Montana to go along with low afternoon 
humidity levels and will make today a borderline critical fire weather 
day. In the East, a breezy westerly flow will continue across the 
northern tier from Minnesota to New England. Slight cooling will occur 
across the Deep South as a very weak frontal boundary moves east from 
the Tennessee River Valley to the Atlantic Coast.
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm

- -

[Insurance Information Institute]
Facts + Statistics: Wildfires
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-wildfires

[Heated permafrost makes an explosive burp]
*Land in Russia's Arctic Blows 'Like a Bottle of Champagne'*
Since finding the first crater in 2014, Russian scientists have 
documented 16 more explosions in the Arctic caused by gas trapped in 
thawing permafrost.
By Andrew E. Kramer
Sept. 5, 2020
MOSCOW -- A natural phenomenon first observed by scientists just six 
years ago and now recurring with alarming frequency in Siberia is 
causing the ground to explode spontaneously and with tremendous force, 
leaving craters up to 100 feet deep...
- -
The pit plunged into darkness, surrounded by the table-flat, featureless 
tundra. As Mr. Chuvilin stood looking in, he said, slabs of dirt and ice 
occasionally peeled off the permafrost of the crater wall and tumbled in.

"It was making noises. It was like something alive," Mr. Chuvilin said.

While initially a mystery, scientists have established that the craters 
appearing in the far north of western Siberia are caused by subterranean 
gases, and the recent flurry of explosions is possibly related to global 
warming, Mr. Chuvilin said.Since the first site was found in 2014, 
Russian geologists have located 16 more on the Yamal and Gydansk 
peninsulas, two slender fingers of land stretching into the Arctic Ocean...

- -
"The permafrost is actually not very permanent, and it never was," Mr. 
Chuvilin said.

Within a year or two of erupting, the craters fill with water and appear 
no more suspicious than small lakes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/world/europe/russia-arctic-eruptions.html 

- -

[use Google Maps to see a random places in the Yamal pennisula, Siberia ]
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yamal+Peninsula/@68.5536718,71.5039684,15843m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x449055f4f8dea577:0x8ae223c41688bebf!8m2!3d70!4d70

[best estimate: uses about 0.6% of all electricity per year]
*The Harsh Truth About Bitcoin Mining And Climate Change*
By Alex Kimani - Sep 06, 2020, 12:00 PM CDT
- -
Energy magazine Joule has estimated it at 45.1TWh/year, or about 0.2% of 
all global electricity produced, with a carbon footprint at 22.0 to 22.9 
MtCO2.

Digiconomist uses the portion of mining revenues spent on electricity 
costs to estimate power consumption. Using this method, the organization 
estimates current consumption at 73.1 TWh/year. [terawatts per year]

Those figures, though, could be quite conservative with the Cambridge 
Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index placing the upper bound at 
104.3TWh. That is about 0.4% of global electricity production and enough 
to power Switzerland for two years with some change. The carbon 
footprint is ginormous, too--34.7 Mt CO2 per year, [million tons of CO2] 
comparable to the carbon footprint of Denmark.

It is worth noting that Cambridge's estimated consumption of 65 TWh/year 
tallies favorably with Digiconomist's figure, which works out to ~0.4% 
of global electricity output. These sources were chosen not least 
because Digiconomist seems to have been validated by Cambridge and 
possibly won a long-running diatribe against Marc Bevand (publisher of 
the 2017 estimates) regarding whose methodology is more accurate.
- -
That would place total energy by cryptocurrency mining at ~100TWh/year, 
or about 0.6% of global electricity consumption in 2019. Even with more 
efficient rigs being constantly pressed into action, electricity costs 
will probably continue to hover at ~60% of mining revenue over the 
long-term according to some estimates, meaning energy consumption by 
crypto mining will only continue to climb in the foreseeable future. 
Emerging mining technologies like merged mining, however, could possibly 
mitigate some of that.

Regarding CoinShare's bold claim that the bitcoin network sources nearly 
three-quarters of its energy from renewable sources, the actual figure 
is closer to 30%.

The long and short of it: Bitcoin and crypto mining are definitely 
playing a part in global warming, but nowhere near the scale of the 
transport sector, which consumes ~25% of the world's energy output, 
mostly in the form of fossil fuels.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Harsh-Truth-About-Bitcoin-Mining-And-Climate-Change.html
- -
[source data Joule]
*The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin*
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7
- -
*Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index*
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the 
total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- -
*Bitcoin's energy consumption is underestimated: A market dynamics approach*
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629620302966?via%3Dihub 

[instead try "Que sera, sera"]*
**'That's the Way It Is': Trump's Dismissal of Hurricane Laura and 
Climate Crisis Echoes Remarks on COVID-19 Deaths*
By Sharon Kelly • September 1, 2020
At an August 30 briefing in Orange, Texas, during a visit to tour damage 
from Hurricane Laura, President Trump answered a question about climate 
change and hurricanes. Texas has had big storms for a long time, he 
said, and "that's the way it is."

The phrase carried echoes of his remarks on COVID-19 -- made at a time 
when the coronavirus had killed over 156,000 and infected over 4.7 
million in the U.S. -- that the virus's death toll "is what it is."

In the month since Trump spoke those words to Axios, over 26,600 more 
people have died in the U.S. from COVID-19, federal numbers show. Each 
death represents its own specific tragedy for those close by and, for 
those tasked with responding to the pandemic, each one represents 
another difficult reminder that the novel virus's death toll yesterday 
is not what it is today.

Similarly, when it comes to the climate crisis, the questions the world 
faces aren't only about what natural hazards like droughts and 
hurricanes looked like yesterday. Nor are they simply about how those 
hazards, now worsened by the climate crisis, are affecting us today -- 
as wildfires continue to blaze in California and forecasters keep tabs 
on tropical storms Nana and Omar.

The question President Trump was asked in Texas was about the risks that 
stronger hurricanes pose to the fossil fuel industry and the ways that 
climate change is beginning to endanger the oil refineries and 
petrochemical plants clustered along the U.S. Gulf Coast, that is, the 
industry responsible for a sizable contribution to the climate emergency 
itself...
- -
"A number of decades ago, people like me would still talk about climate 
change as something in the future that we could prevent with appropriate 
action," said Prof. Tornqvist. "Now we're at the point where we can 
still prevent the worst outcomes, but there are certain things we are 
not going to be able to prevent any more."

"There's still many things that we can save, but that's going to require 
action," he said, "and that action is going to have to happen soon."
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/09/01/trump-hurricane-laura-climate-change-way-it-is-louisiana

[video with Beckwith-the-Alarmed]
*How Atmospheric Rivers Will Cause a Biblical Flood that will Drown 
California: Part 1 of many*
Sep 4, 2020
Paul Beckwith
In November of 1861 it started to rain in California, and continued to 
rain for 45 days. There was so much water that it essentially filled up 
the entire Central Valley, submerging cities such as Sacramento under 15 
to 20 feet of water. It took many months for the waters to subside. As 
bad as this megaflood was, recent research on riverbed soil core samples 
shows that in the 1800 years prior to 1861, there were 6 megafloods even 
larger, and 3 about the same magnitude. Megafloods occurred about every 
100-200 years. With climate change, and a much warmer and energetic 
atmosphere with at least 7% more water vapour, the Atmospheric Rivers 
(ARs) causing these catastrophes are 3 times more frequent, so every 35 
to 65 years. Today, an inundation of the Central Valley in California 
would wipe out 25% of US food supply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxA26VrnGMs

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 7, 2011 *

On MotherJones.com, investigative journalist Brad Friedman, in part two 
of his report on a secretive June 2011 meeting in Colorado held by 
billionaire climate-change deniers Charles and David Koch, notes that 
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at the meeting--and that David Koch 
called him "my kind of guy."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/audio-chris-christie-koch-brothers-seminar/ 

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