[TheClimate.Vote] September 8, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 8, 2020*/

[smoke, heat, fire]
*LA is used to apocalyptic scenes in films - but this heatwave shows 
real impact of climate change*
The Los Angeles neighbourhood of Woodland Hills saw almost 50C on 
Sunday, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city...
https://news.sky.com/story/record-heatwave-in-la-but-apathy-and-politics-drown-out-climate-change-fears-12066295
- -
Today alone, almost 300,000 acres in Washington have burned. Thousands 
of homes are without power. Many families have had to evacuate their 
homes and many homes have been lost. We're still seeing new fire starts 
in every corner of the state. #WaWILDFIRE
https://twitter.com/Hilary_FranzCPL/status/1303185240026824704

- -

[Washington State overnight]
*Fast-Moving Wildfire Destroys 80% Of Small Town In Eastern Washington 
State*
September 8, 2020
Updated at 8:35 a.m. ET

Almost every structure in the small farming town of Malden in eastern 
Washington state was destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire Monday as high 
winds created what officials described as a firestorm.

According to the Whitman County Sheriff's Office, 80% of the town's 
structures were destroyed. The town of about 200 people is 35 miles 
south of Spokane in an agricultural region known as the Palouse...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/08/910578980/fast-moving-wildfire-destroys-80-of-small-town-in-eastern-washington-state


[NYT looks West]
*California Wildfires: Extreme Heat Turns State Into a Furnace*
Fires burning from near the Mexico border to the forests of the Sierra 
Nevada spread a curtain of smoke over California on Monday.
By Jack Healy, Kate Taylor and Ivan Penn
Updated Sept. 8, 2020, 12:01 a.m. ET...
- -
"We lost our home," said Nettie Carroll, 40, who taught science and has 
lived in the area for 16 years. "It looks like everything is completely 
gone."

As California endures one of its worst wildfire seasons ever, a new rash 
of fires stoked by extreme heat has destroyed homes, cloaked much of the 
state in smoke, forced thousands of people to evacuate and threatened 
another round of rolling blackouts. One of the fires, a 7,000-acre blaze 
in San Bernardino County erupted after a family set off a 
"smoke-generating pyrotechnic device" to announce their baby's sex.
Late Monday night, military Chinook helicopters were reported to be 
attempting to rescue more people stranded behind the fire lines but were 
being thwarted by heavy smoke.
The Fresno Fire Department said on Twitter that choppers were trying to 
rescue people around Edison Lake, a popular camping and recreation spot 
in the Sierra National Forest, but smoke was preventing a safe approach. 
The Fire Department said the pilots would try again during the night 
using night-vision equipment.

Battalion Chief Tony Escobedo of the Fresno Fire Department said that 
one death had been reported, but there were no additional details...
- -
 From hotel rooms in Fresno and Modesto or family members' spare 
bedrooms where they had fled, Big Creek's evacuees spent Monday sending 
one another photographs of flames and char and comparing notes on what 
had survived and what had not.
The school, which has just 47 students, appeared to suffer some damage 
but was still standing, residents said. They said the community church, 
volunteer fire department and post office all apparently survived.

The fire forced workers to evacuate the 1,000 megawatt Big Creek 
hydroelectric project, which can power 650,000 homes and was America's 
first large-scale pumped hydro plant of its kind with the ability to 
produce power and store electricity. There was no immediate indication 
the plant had been damaged.

As the fire raged, a single worker at the plant remained in the area to 
help feed firefighters at the Shaver Lake Community Center before 
leaving Sunday as conditions worsened, said David Song, an Edison spokesman.

Chris Donnelly, the fire chief in nearby Huntington Lake, said one of 
the biggest challenges now was getting basic information about the 
fire's spread and how wind and weather were hampering efforts to contain 
it. Five cabins burned in his community.
"Cellphones are down, all the landlines are down," Chief Donnelly said. 
"My assistant chief has to drive to the top of a ski lift in order to 
get a cell tower. It's really hard to know what's going on."
With extreme heat roasting California on Monday, fire crews faced 
another difficult day.

Similar scenes were unfolding across parched Western states. A fire 
burned 70 to 80 percent of the homes in the tiny town of Malden, Wash., 
south of Spokane, Whitman County sheriff's officers told KXLY News.

Record-setting temperatures eased slightly on Monday from a day earlier, 
but highs in Southern California were predicted to soar above 110 
degrees, and meteorologists warned residents from Los Angeles to the San 
Francisco Bay Area to guard against another day of oppressive heat and 
dangerously foul air.
A quick update from one of our short-term smoke models. Note that most 
of the smoke overhead is due to several wildfires in Northern California 
and the Central Valley, while smoke from the Dolan fire down in Big Sur 
is also picked up on this run. #CaliforniaWildfires
https://twitter.com/i/status/1302984418588385280
The triple-digit temperatures and the Creek Fire nearly overwhelmed 
Southern California Edison's electric system, threatening outages as 
people turned up their air-conditioners and sought refuge at cooling 
centers.

The electricity demand in Southern California broke records at Edison, 
the state's second largest investor-owned utility. Saturday's 
electricity use reached 22,877 megawatts, beating the previous record of 
21,092 megawatts on July 22, 2006. Then on Sunday, electricity demand 
topped the day before, setting a record for Edison at 23,066.

The California Independent System Operator, which manages 80 percent of 
the state's electricity system, said during a news conference on Monday 
that cooler temperatures had eased demand but wildfires and strong winds 
were still causing concern.

The agency issued its third straight day of alerts on Monday to conserve 
electricity as temperatures remained high and fires engulfed areas near 
electrical equipment.
High in the Sierra Nevada and 200 feet below Shaver Lake, the Edison 
plant has long been the center of life in Big Creek. Workers lived in 
Edison-owned houses and sent their children to the local school, which 
served kindergartners through eighth graders. High schoolers had to take 
a 90-minute bus ride to the nearest school.

"It was like a little throwback to the 1950s," said Erik Larson, a 
pastor at the community church. "It's an oasis. You're up in the 
mountains. It was just a great place."...
- -
"The women worked together, the men worked together, and when we got to 
high school, we were all living together," Ms. Krueger, who now lives in 
Michigan, said. "We were more like brothers and sisters."...
- -
Military helicopters landed on Saturday night and evacuated most of the 
roughly 200 people who had been trapped at the reservoir, but Mr. Ziff 
and Mr. Meyers assumed the helicopters were for people who had been 
burned, so they stayed behind with roughly 15 other people.
So many people had left belongings behind that they weren't worried 
about food or water, they said. But by Sunday morning, the smoke had 
become suffocating, and in the late afternoon, they lost cell service.
"We were essentially beyond stranded," Mr. Ziff said.

He was overjoyed when, in the evening, he saw three people with 
flashlights, who turned out to be from the U.S. Forest Service, walking 
down the hill from the parking lot. They had cleared the road, which had 
been blocked by burned trees and cars, and they led the stranded campers 
in a car caravan on a three-hour trip over back roads to Bass Lake. Mr. 
Ziff and Mr. Meyers then went to a Red Cross center in Oakhurst, and 
they were given a hotel room in Oakhurst.

By the time they got to their hotel, it was midnight, and Mr. Ziff's 
birthday. They celebrated with a few beers and a shower.

"The best part of it was the shower," Mr. Meyers said.
Christina Morales contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/ca-wildfires-heatwave.html


[more Beckwith alarms - part 2]
*Category 5 Atmospheric River Event in California Would Wipe out 25% of 
USA Food Supply*
Sep 7, 2020
Paul Beckwith
California's Central Valley is as important to eaters as Hollywood is to 
moviegoers and Silicon Valley is to smartphone users. This jewel of the 
USA farm system produces almost all US almonds, walnuts, and pistachios; 
over 90% of broccoli, carrots, garlic, celery, grapes, tangerines, and 
artichokes; over 75% of cauliflower, apricots, lemons, strawberries, and 
raspberries; over 40% of lettuce, cabbage, oranges, peaches, and 
peppers; as well as more than 20% of milk production. Comprising only 1% 
of all US farmland, the Central Valley supplies over 25% of total US 
farm production. A Category 5 Atmospheric River event in California 
would essentially inundate the Central Valley and wipe out this food 
supply for years. Even people living in California are not aware of the 
risks of this catastrophic event, which is higher than that of a major 
California earthquake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34YThcffPM

- -

[more video explanations]
*How Low Will the Big Arctic Ocean Slushy Go; We Will Find Out Very Soon...*
Paul Beckwith
In this third of a new series of Arctic sea ice demise videos I continue 
to chat about the demise of the big slushy in the Arctic Ocean. I 
discuss in detail the recent peer reviewed scientific papers on how 
Atlantic Water (dense, warmer water a couple hundred of meters below the 
sea ice) has moved to within 80 meters of the bottom of the sea ice in 
the Eastern Euro Basin, and will likely keep the ocean from freezing up 
there in the winter. The heat in their Atlantic Water is enough to 
completely melt out the entire Arctic Ocean ice three or four times 
over, as it eventually makes it near the surface over the entire basin. 
This already happens in the Barents Sea region, and is spreading 
eastward into the rest of the Arctic. I am also discussing how the so 
called "chimneys" where the Arctic Ocean water descends to complete the 
AMOC (Arctic Meridional Overturning Circulation), and how this process 
is being disrupted by Atlantification, thereby weakening the 
thermohaline process leading us closer to a complete shutoff and then 
redistribution of global ocean circulation patterns. 2020 is continuing 
to be full of unpleasant surprises for the teeming masses of humanity on 
Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0d9sTijFpk


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 8, 2008 *
Thomas Friedman's book*"Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green 
Revolution--And How It Can Renew America" *is released.
Eco-nomics
By Jonathan Freedland
Oct. 3, 2008
Thet environmental movement reserves a hallowed place for those books or 
films that have stirred people from their slumber and awoken them to the 
fragility of the planet: Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Bill 
McKibben's "End of Nature" and, most recently, Al Gore's Oscar-winning 
documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Thomas L. Friedman's new book, 
"Hot, Flat, and Crowded" may lack the soaring, elegiac qualities of 
those others. But it conceivably just might goad America's wealthiest to 
face the threat of climate change and do something about it.

Friedman, the thrice-Pulitzered foreign affairs columnist of The New 
York Times, has built a following beyond readers with an interest in 
international relations. His last book, "The World Is Flat," made him a 
best-selling author in business class, the kind of writer that those who 
turn left when boarding a plane feel they ought to be seen reading. 
Friedman does not shy away from this audience; indeed he sometimes seems 
to be writing especially for it. "Do half your employees use computers 
and half use paper, pencils and abacuses?" he asks in one passage, 
apparently confident that he is addressing a chief ­executive.
For that very reason, Friedman could perhaps touch those who have so far 
eluded the green movement's reach: the hardheaded executives more 
worried by projections of receding profits than retreating glaciers. 
That constituency listened to Friedman on globalization and they might 
be ready to listen to him again on global warming...
- -
What will appeal to can-do business types is that Friedman's book does 
not dwell, as, say, Gore's movie did, on describing the problem, but 
concentrates most on sketching possible solutions. It is in these 
passages that Friedman's argument really takes off, allowing him to give 
vent to his enthusiasm and unabashed idealism. Non-Americans might find 
his wide-eyed patriotism a touch saccharine if not naïve, but it's hard 
not to be carried along by his evident passion.
To be sure, the book begins with a diagnosis of "where we are" and "how 
we got here" that is short on good cheer. We live, Friedman explains 
with reference to his previous work, in a world that is flat -- a level 
economic playing field with fewer barriers between countries and 
individuals -- but that is now also becoming crowded, thanks to rising 
population.
And the problem is not just that the raw number of people is increasing, 
it's that many more are gaining access to an American level of 
consumerism. With the world's population of "Americans" heading toward 
two or three billion -- all desiring the ­middle-class comforts of a 
car, a fridge and an air-conditioner -- the global demand for energy is 
soaring to new heights. That, Friedman says, is unsustainable.

This hunger for energy is dangerous not only because it means belching 
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so pushing the temperature to 
dangerously high levels, but also because it is robbing the world of 
precious, and beautiful, bio­diversity, destroying a unique species 
every 20 minutes. It also means we're lining the pockets of the 
autocrats who tend to control the world's reserves of fossil fuel, the 
"petrodictators." And we are opening an ever wider gap between the 
energy haves and the energy have-nots, those who cannot take part in the 
"flat" world because they cannot switch on a light bulb, let alone a laptop.
Friedman knows what is to be done. The United States needs to set an 
example for the world to follow, by starting over and constructing an 
entirely new Clean Energy System, one that will send "clean electrons" 
into its homes, offices and cars -- generated not by dirty old oil or 
coal, but by solar, wind and nuclear power -- and that will use many 
fewer of those electrons, thanks to greater efficiency. In the book's 
most arresting passage, Friedman plays futurist and looks ahead -- to 
"20 E.C.E." -- imagining a world where an Energy Internet puts each one 
of your home appliances in touch with the power company, drawing out 
only the minimal power it needs to function and at the cheapest, 
off-peak times. Even your car, by now a plug-in hybrid that gets the 
equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, can charge its battery with solar 
power, which it then sells back to the grid...
- -
These companies need to be fundamentally rewired so that their rewards 
come from persuading us all to use less, not more, of their product...
- -
The way to do that, Friedman explains, is by "reshaping the market," not 
only to make us use less electricity, but to make the power companies 
buy energy from cleaner sources. It will take an entirely new regime of 
taxes, incentives and price signals, all set by the federal government. 
Oh, says the ideological free marketeer, we couldn't possibly meddle in 
the market like that. But guess what, Friedman replies: we already do. 
Washington has tilted the energy playing field for years -- subsidizing 
oil, gas and coal and giving only puny, halting help to wind and solar 
power. It is, Friedman writes, "a market designed to keep fossil fuels 
cheap and renewables expensive and elusive."
What's needed is the presidential leadership of an Abraham Lincoln or a 
Franklin Roosevelt to command enough authority to face down the fossil 
fuel lobbies and create a single, national system that would instantly 
release the pent-up innovation and creativity that is ready to get to 
work, cleaning up America's energy supply and reducing its demand. Once 
the United States has done that, and shown that there's money to be made 
from the new industry of "greening," the rest of the world will, as a 
matter of self-interest, follow suit. In the process, America will have 
discovered a national mission for itself once more.

Readers of Friedman's earlier books may well pause at this point and 
wonder what has happened to their favorite evangelist for globalization. 
For it's hard not to detect a slight shift leftward in this conversion 
to radical, government-led action to save the planet.

Friedman is at pains to insist that there's nothing leftie about caring 
for the environment: it's no longer "yoga mats, Birkenstock sandals, 
tofu." Indeed, in a fascinating section, he meets United States Army 
officers who have gone green, converted by the realization that the need 
to transport oil to generators in the Iraqi desert left their men 
needlessly exposed to enemy attack. They understood that if they could 
use less energy, or even generate their own, they would be safer.

Nevertheless, Friedman inevitably finds himself making arguments -- 
urging a muscular federal government to push aside the selfish interests 
of the big corporate lobbies -- that were once confined to the left. It 
can lead him into contradictory terrain. Thus, he is committed to 
praising the globalizing forces that have flattened the world, but he 
despairs at their consequences. He mourns, for example, the burning of 
rain forests, quoting the noted entomologist Edward O. Wilson that it is 
"like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner." Yet he 
does not address the fact that multinational companies are able to come 
in and lay waste to these forests only because of the global trading 
rules Friedman once so admired.

He deplores the nationalization of companies, seeing privatization as an 
index of freedom on a par with a free press and democratic elections -- 
yet he also looks longingly at the well-resourced mass transit systems 
of Europe, which keep cars off the road and emit less carbon dioxide, 
and which are only possible thanks either to state ownership or to 
enormous, taxpayer-­supported subsidies.  He knows that we cannot simply 
consume more and more from a finite planet; he understands that 
prosperity is threatened by the very "nature of American capitalism"; he 
quotes approvingly the Norwegian oil executive who warns, "Capitalism 
may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological 
truth."

But Friedman does not surrender to these dark thoughts; he pulls himself 
together and recovers his faith in the American economic model. The free 
market will be fine, he says, so long as it's tweaked to start telling 
the truth, reflecting the true cost to the earth of all that we consume.
These intellectual tensions are not the only flaws in "Hot, Flat, and 
Crowded." Scholarly types will doubtless find the first-person examples 
excessive: they will surely want to remind Friedman that the plural of 
"anecdote" is not "data." General readers, too, may wish for a slightly 
leaner manuscript, lighter on complex technical detail, which can be 
overwhelming. Some of the inter­viewee quotations are either too baggy 
or too dense, as if Friedman has moved large sections of transcript into 
his text. The writing style, with constant new coinages and shorthand 
phrases -- "I call this the 'Naked Gun 2 1/2 rule' " -- while winning in 
a column, can grate over the distance of a book. Whole sentences are 
repeated or italicized for emphasis, in the style of a spoken lecture. 
And there are some horribly mixed metaphors: "The demise of the Soviet 
Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical 
and political roadblock on the global economic playing field."

But these are minor infelicities when set against a book that will be 
accessible outside the eco-converted, is grounded in detailed research 
and repeatedly hits its target. It contains some killer facts -- the 
American pet food industry spends more on research and development than 
the country's power companies; Ronald Reagan stripped from the White 
House the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed as a symbolic 
step toward energy independence. Above all, it is fundamentally right on 
the biggest question of our age. If Friedman's profile and verve take 
his message where it needs to be heard, into the boardrooms of America 
and beyond, that can only be good -- for all our sakes.

*HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED**
**Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America*
By Thomas L. Friedman
438 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.95

Jonathan Freedland is a former Washington correspondent and now an 
editorial page columnist for The Guardian.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Freedland-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


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