[TheClimate.Vote] September 12, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 12, 2020*/

[USA Today]
*Climate Point: Big Oil battered by lawsuits. America battered by 
extreme weather.*
- -
Staring down threats from climate change, a groundswell of citizens, 
cities and states are taking Big Oil to court. Many of these lawsuits 
aim to force fossil fuel companies to pay costs associated with 
mitigating extreme weather, but they're also an attempt to break the 
industry's grip on global politics. It's been a big week climate 
litigation...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/09/11/big-oil-faces-lawsuits-west-faces-extreme-fires-amid-climate-change/5770041002/



[Calif Gov speaks]
*Newsom details 'climate emergency' as fires rage*
Sep 11, 2020
Reuters
California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke after surveying the damage caused 
by wildfires in the state, calling it part of a 'climate emergency'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bODhnSgwj0



[evacuations]
*'I have never seen anything like this': Oregon towns emptied and 
confusion spreads amid fires*
In Molalla and other western towns, fear, uncertainty and disinformation 
gripped residents as hundreds of thousands in the state evacuate..
Jason Wilson in Molalla, Oregon
Fri 11 Sep 2020
Hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon were ordered to leave their 
homes on Thursday as wildfires encroached on their properties. The 
evacuations clogged highways, emptied entire towns and sparked confusion 
in a state that has not grappled with wildfires of this size before.

Large-scale evacuations in the state began within the metropolitan area 
of Portland, Oregon's largest city. Clackamas county, home to some 
420,000 people in the metro's south, was already under varying levels of 
fire alert when officials on Thursday afternoon told residents of the 
city of Molalla to leave...
- -
As in other western towns, fear, uncertainty and disinformation gripped 
Molalla ahead of the evacuation.

In preceding days, Facebook pages associated with the town were filled 
with rumors of looters and Antifa raids. On its Facebook page overnight, 
Molalla police were forced to amend an earlier call for residents to 
report suspicious activity.

"This is about possible looters, not antifa or setting of fires," the 
edit read. "There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02am. 
Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense."...
- -
By late afternoon, more of the county, including southern parts of 
Oregon City, had been subjected to evacuation orders. Although Mulino 
and Molalla remained eerily empty, the highways and bridges leading over 
the Willamette River into Portland were at a virtual standstill around 
5pm, as a large proportion of Clackamas county residents fled the wildfires.

While they queued at the gateways to Portland, that city's mayor, Ted 
Wheeler, declared that city was in a state of fire emergency, and closed 
all city-owned outdoor areas, while opening evacuation sites for fire 
victims.

Wheeler's move on Thursday evening underlined the fact that the fires, 
which had wholly consumed several rural, mountain towns, were now 
reaching into the west's largest cities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/11/oregon-fires-towns-emptied-molalla



[Associated Press]
*Think 2020's disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future*
By SETH BORENSTEIN
September 9, 2020
Freak natural disasters -- most with what scientists say likely have a 
climate change connection -- seem to be everywhere in the crazy year 
2020. But experts say we'll probably look back and say those were the 
good old days, when disasters weren't so wild.

"It's going to get A LOT worse," Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb 
said Wednesday. "I say that with emphasis because it does challenge the 
imagination. And that's the scary thing to know as a climate scientist 
in 2020."

Colorado University environmental sciences chief Waleed Abdalati, NASA's 
former chief scientist, said the trajectory of worsening disasters and 
climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas is clear, and basic 
physics.

"I strongly believe we're going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20 
and definitely 50 and say, 'Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it,'" 
Abdalati said.

That's because what's happening now is just the type of crazy climate 
scientists anticipated 10 or 20 years ago.

"It seems like this is what we always were talking about a decade ago," 
said North Carolina State climatologist Kathie Dello.
Even so, Cobb said the sheer magnitude of what's happening now was hard 
to fathom back then. Just as the future of climate disasters is hard to 
fathom now.

"A year like 2020 could have been the subject of a marvelous science 
fiction film in 2000," Cobb said. "Now we have to watch and digest 
real-time disaster after disaster after disaster, on top of a pandemic. 
The outlook could not be any more grim. It's just a horrifying prospect."

"The 2030s are going to be noticeably worse than the 2020s," she said.

University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, a climate 
scientist, said that in 30 years because of the climate change already 
baked into the atmosphere "we're pretty much guaranteed that we'll have 
double what we have now."

Expect stronger winds, more drought, more heavy downpours and floods, 
Abdalati said.

"The kind of things we're seeing are no surprise to the (scientific) 
community that understands the rules and the laws of physics," Abdalati 
said.

"A lot of people want to blame it on 2020, but 2020 didn't do this," 
Dello said. "We know the behavior that caused climate change."

Consider the world's environment like an engine: "We have injected more 
energy into the system because we have trapped more heat into the 
atmosphere," said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General 
Petteri Taalas.

That means more energy for tropical storms as well as changes to 
rainfall patterns that bring drought to some places and heavy rainfall 
to others, Taalas said.

In California, where more than 2.3 million acres have burned, the fires 
are spurred by climate change drying plants and trees that then go up in 
flames, said University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch. 
California is in the midst of a nearly 20-year mega-drought, the first 
of its kind in the United States since Europeans arrived, Overpeck said.

Scientists also make direct connections between heat waves and climate 
change.

Some disasters at the moment can't be directly linked to man-made 
warming, such as the derecho, Overpeck said. But looking at the big 
picture over time shows the problem, and it's one that comes down to the 
basic physics of trapped heat energy.

"I am not an alarmist. I don't want to scare people," Abdalati said. 
"It's a problem with tremendous consequences and it's too important not 
to get right."

And so even though the climate will likely get worse, Overpeck is also 
optimistic about what future generations will think when they look back 
at the wild and dangerous weather of 2020.

"I think we'll look back and we'll see a whole bunch of increasingly 
crazy years," Overpeck said. "And that this year, in 2020, I hope we 
look back and say it got crazy enough that it motivated us to act on 
climate change in the United States."
https://apnews.com/3570f775ee3007888cd651d37fcbd465



[Activism - book promo video]
*Erin Brockovich: Superman's Not Coming*
September 11, 2020
Climate One
Erin Brockovich was vaulted into national recognition in 2000, after the 
eponymous movie starring Julia Roberts made her a water activism icon. 
Famous for her focus on contamination, Brockovich says there is a larger 
threat facing water's very existence: climate change, and the impact it 
has on dwindling freshwater supplies, longer droughts, and hotter weather.

Superman isn't coming to protect our water or environment, writes 
Brockovich in her latest book -- and neither are corporations, 
politicians or the "gutted" EPA. How can individuals and communities 
take collective action to safeguard our environment and our resources? 
What are today's leading activists doing to create change that lasts?

Join us for a conversation on speaking truth to power with Erin 
Brockovich, author of Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis 
and What We the People Can Do About It.
https://youtu.be/axLNzz-P8MA?t=772



[Cough,cough]
*Portland's Air Quality Drops to the Worst in the World*
Sep 11, 2020
Bloomberg QuickTake News
Drone footage of Portland, Oregon, taken September 10 showed smoke 
settled over the city as wildfires raged across the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O7NwRtGBQ0

- -

[take better pictures]
*Your Phone Wasn't Built for the Apocalypse*
Why the orange sky looks gray
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/09/camera-phone-wildfire-sky/616279/


[for new med students]
*Doctors offer guide for teaching the health effects of climate change 
in medical residency*
By SHRADDHA CHAKRADHAR - SEPTEMBER 10, 2020
As massive wildfires, hurricanes, and record-breaking temperatures hit 
parts of the U.S., a group of doctors is urging medical residency 
programs to implement standardized curricula on the health impacts of 
climate change.

Their framework, published in a paper Wednesday in Academic Medicine, 
includes a breakdown of high-risk populations, including the elderly and 
low-income families, and a review of the current understanding on how 
climate impacts health -- such as the relationship between air quality 
and respiratory illness. The framework also encourages consideration of 
the health impacts of displacement due to extreme weather events: Those 
who lose their home due to a hurricane, for instance, often develop 
post-traumatic stress disorder or face other mental health challenges; 
they are also at a higher risk for developing other conditions such as 
food insecurity that could in turn affect their physical and mental health.

"We wanted to link the content to what residents are supposed to learn 
anyway," said Rebecca Philipsborn, a pediatrician at the Emory 
University School of Medicine and lead author of the new paper...
- -
Physicians have been sounding the alarm on the health effects of climate 
change for years, and the need to train future physicians how to treat 
patients accordingly. In 2017, the American Medical Association and more 
than 25 other health organizations created the Medical Society 
Consortium on Climate and Health, which called climate change "one of 
the most important issues of our time." And earlier this year, a group 
of medical students from more than 50 U.S. medical schools founded 
Medical Students for a Sustainable Future, an organization working to 
"recognize climate change as an urgent threat to health and social justice."
The AMA passed a resolution last year that supported including climate 
change in medical training curricula at the undergraduate, graduate, and 
postgraduate levels. While there have been some efforts to offer climate 
change and health as an elective course at medical schools, the authors 
of the new paper argue that there still isn't a standardized way that 
climate change is incorporated into medical training...
- -
Do you think climate change training ought to be just for residencies? 
And have schools expressed interest in adopting this framework?

I think it's important across all levels of medical training, and it's 
about continuing effort. This paper is specific to residency education, 
but there are learning points across all levels. Our hope is that this 
can serve as a starting point for residency program directors, as I 
think that inclusion of climate change-related content in the future is 
somewhat inevitable. What we want to do is prepare doctors who are 
graduating now, so we have also discussed offering this as part of 
continuing medical education for those who already have their degree.

The framework has not been disseminated widely yet, so we're looking 
forward to hearing what our program director colleagues think.
more at - 
https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/10/doctors-offer-guide-for-teaching-the-health-effects-of-climate-change-in-medical-residency/

- -

[Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges]
*Climate Change and the Practice of Medicine*
Essentials for Resident Education
Philipsborn, Rebecca Pass MD,
Academic Medicine: September 8, 2020 - Volume Publish Ahead of Print - 
Issue -
doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000003719
Abstract

    Despite calls for including content on climate change and its effect
    on health in curricula across the spectrum of medical education, no
    widely used resource exists to guide residency training programs in
    this effort. This lack of resources poses challenges for training
    program leaders seeking to incorporate evidence-based climate and
    health content into their curricula. Climate change increases risks
    of heat-related illness, infections, asthma, mental health
    disorders, poor perinatal outcomes, adverse experiences from trauma
    and displacement, and other harms. More numerous and increasingly
    dangerous natural disasters caused by climate change impair delivery
    of care by disrupting supply chains and compromising power supplies.
    Graduating trainees face a knowledge gap in understanding, managing,
    and mitigating these many-faceted consequences of climate change,
    which--expected to intensify in coming decades--will influence both
    the health of their patients and the health care they deliver. In
    this article, the authors propose a framework of climate change and
    health educational content for residents, including how climate
    change (1) harms health, (2) necessitates adaptation in clinical
    practice, and (3) undermines health care delivery. The authors
    propose not only learning objectives linked to the Accreditation
    Council for Graduate Medical Education core competencies for
    resident education, but also learning formats and assessment
    strategies in each content area. They also present opportunities for
    implementation of climate and health education in residency training
    programs. Including this content in residency education will better
    prepare doctors to deliver anticipatory guidance to at-risk
    patients, manage those experiencing climate-related health effects,
    and reduce care disruptions during climate-driven extreme weather
    events.

https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Abstract/9000/Climate_Change_and_the_Practice_of_Medicine_.97003.aspx 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 12, 2007*

US District Judge William Sessions III issues a 240-page decision 
upholding Vermont's right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from 
vehicles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/12/AR2007091202391.html

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