[TheClimate.Vote] September 17, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 17, 2020*/

[learning from the storm]
*Hurricane Sally's Fierce Rain Shows How Climate Change Raises Storm Risks*
Staggering rain totals, fueled by a warming atmosphere that can hold 
more moisture, are being recorded from the storm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/hurricane-sally-climate-change.html


[performance activism]
*Join the Global Rebellion | Extinction Rebellion Global*
Sep 16, 2020
This is a climate and ecological emergency. We want to live, we have to 
act now. Join The Rebellion & Rebel for Life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUe3zFYxYac


[astounding photojournalism in the NYTimes]
*AZUSA, CALIF. The Ranch 2 Fire burned more than 4,200 acres, part of 
the worst wildfire season in California history.*
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/20/magazine/20mag-Climate2-Images/20mag-Climate2-Images-superJumbo.jpg
- -
*HOW CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL RESHAPE AMERICA*
Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?
By Abrahm Lustgarten
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in 
air-conditioning broke the state's electrical grid, leaving a population 
already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of 
their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the 
hottest temperature ever measured on earth -- 130 degrees in Death 
Valley -- and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the 
sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity 
exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already 
hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by 
the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire...
- -
This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms -- all of it 
making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. 
Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while 
destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to 
Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the 
Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making 
thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As 
California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 
150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th 
named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, 
meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat -- 20 more days than the 
previous record...
- -
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans 
finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? 
And if so -- if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing -- 
was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, 
I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, 
climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban 
planners, and I mapped out the danger zones that will close in on 
Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined 
exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent 
data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States 
Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America's shifting 
climate niches, an evolution of work first published by The Proceedings 
of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (See a detailed 
analysis of the maps.)

What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across 
the United States, some 162 million people -- nearly one in two -- will 
most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, 
namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes 
could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if 
carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least four million Americans 
could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside 
the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate 
reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that 
defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the 
nation's federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring 
that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across 
the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.

By 2070, some 28 million people across the country could face 
Manhattan-size megafires. In Northern California, they could become an 
annual event...
- -

There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans 
now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third 
in 2016, and three out of four now describe climate change as either "a 
crisis" or "a major problem." This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, 
where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked 
climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at 
Yale and George Mason Universities found that even Republicans' views 
are shifting: One in three now think climate change should be declared a 
national emergency.

Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what's next, now face 
brutal choices about which communities to save -- often at exorbitant 
costs -- and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably 
make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a 
nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will 
these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The 
wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the 
environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the 
physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the 
population. It begins when even places like California's suburbs are no 
longer safe.

It has already begun...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html



[video - "these are climate fires"]
*"These Are Climate Fires": Oregon Firefighter Ecologist Says 
Devastating Blazes Are a Wake-Up Call*
Sep 14, 2020
Democracy Now!
President Trump has said little about the wildfires raging in 
California, Oregon and Washington for three weeks, other than to suggest 
poor forest management was primarily to blame. But the states' governors 
are pushing back and directly linking the fires to the climate crisis. 
"These are climate fires," says Timothy Ingalsbee, an Oregon-based 
wildland fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter who now directs 
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. "Though some 
scientists hesitate to attribute a single event to climate change, these 
are exactly the conditions predicted by climatologists."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kwIg1Xl74



[CBS speaks openly]
*Large chunk of ice breaks off Arctic ice shelf in Greenland*
Sep 15, 2020
CBS News
A 42-mile stretch of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, the Arctic's largest 
remaining ice shelf, has broken off and shattered near Greenland. Recent 
record temperatures have hit the shelf particularly hard. CBS News' Ian 
Lee takes a look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIfVjQLwlfA


[the former governor of California]
*Jerry Brown, on talk of California exodus, says, 'Where are you going 
to go?'*
 From his ranch, the former California governor is experiencing the same 
smoky air wafting through much of the state. "We are causing this," he 
declared in an interview.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY - Sep. 14, 2020
The New York Times
LOS ANGELES -- Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, could 
barely make out the mountains in the distance from his ranch in the city 
of Williams on Sunday. Every few minutes, he picked up his phone to 
check the latest air quality reading. "Unhealthy," he said.

Brown, who served over 45 years in state government and politics, has 
been warning about this day for years. But he said by telephone from his 
ranch that he never expected this moment to come so soon. And he never 
thought the air around his home, which he built in the wilderness of his 
family ranch, an hour's drive north of Sacramento, would be this shrouded.

But still, for all the fire and the smoke, Brown presented himself as 
the resolute chief ambassador for the state that has so long been 
associated with the Brown family name. He declared he was not going 
anywhere and dismissed the latest round of talk about people fleeing 
California.
"You might say, 'We are getting out of here -- we are going someplace 
else,' " Brown, 82, said. "No. There are going to be problems everywhere 
in the United States. This is the new normal. It's been predicted, and 
it's happening. This is part of the new long-term experience."

"Tell me: Where are you going to go?" Brown continued. "What's your 
alternative? Maybe Canada. You're going to go to places like Iowa, where 
you have intensifying tornadoes? The fact is, we have a global crisis 
that has been mounting and the scientists have been telling us about. 
For the most part, it's been ignored. Now we have a graphic example."
Brown, a Democrat, served twice as California's governor. He retired to 
make way for Gavin Newsom, his lieutenant governor, who took office in 
January 2019.

Newsom has inherited the burden of managing a state besieged by the 
coronavirus pandemic and the worst wildfires in its history.

As governor, and after his departure, Brown became an international 
environmental advocate, pushing back against President Donald Trump and 
other Republicans who sought to roll back environmental protections 
enacted in Washington and in California. Since leaving office, Brown has 
run the California-China Institute at the University of California, 
Berkeley, and served as the executive chair of the Bulletin of the 
Atomic Scientists.

Brown said the fast-moving fires made it clear that a global effort was 
needed to reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gases. California, 
which has over the years sought to wean itself from fossil fuels, and 
the United States cannot deal with the scope of the problem alone, he 
said, adding that Trump's election, and his efforts to undo 
environmental laws and regulations, had been a major setback.

Brown acknowledged that the devastating fires were partly the result of 
the failure of the state and the federal government to thin forests, 
which are now filled with trees that died in the drought -- fuel for the 
fires.
And he said that ingrained policies in states like California, with its 
sprawl, devotion to single-family houses and reliance on automobiles, 
had also contributed to the crisis.

"California for 10,000 years had no more than 300,000 people," he said. 
"In the last 100 years, we have gone to a couple of million people to 40 
million, and over 30 million vehicles spilling out 18 million tons of 
fossil fuels. We are assaulting the environment. We are causing this."

He added: "To change all this -- well, it's like telling people who live 
in a flood zone that they can't rebuild their homes after a flood. 
You're talking about shaping the behavior of millions of free human 
beings, getting them to change their behavior. It's not easy."
Brown's ranch is not near any of the wildfires, but the smoke has 
settled over it.

"I see the oak trees," he said, "but it's very hard to see the mountains."

Checking the weather app on his phone, Brown compared the air quality 
index of Williams with that of Los Angeles, which had long been a 
national symbol of smog.
"That's better," he said after looking at the Los Angeles figure. 
"You're at 144 for unhealthy air for some individuals. We're unhealthy 
for everybody. We have 191." (A reading of 151 or over is considered 
unhealthy for the general population.)

Brown declined to share what, if any, advice he might have for Newsom in 
managing the twin crises plaguing the state. But he did have some ideas 
for what he might say to Trump, who was visiting Monday to tour the fire 
damage, if he were still governor.

"He's presiding over a demolition derby on our environment that's got to 
stop," Brown said. He paused a moment. "Whether you tell him that now 
when you are asking for billions of dollars -- I think I'd wait a couple 
of days."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/jerry-brown-on-a-california-exodus-tell-me-where-are-you-going-to-go.html



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 17, 2014*
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman observes:

    "There remain several possible responses to climate change. One is
    stupidity: 'There is no crisis.' (A subset of this is to acknowledge
    the crisis privately, but deny it or choose to ignore it publicly.)
    A second is hopelessness: 'It's all over.' (Sadly, many of my
    friends fall into this category.) A third is blind faith in
    technology, as if it were easier to modify the power of nature than
    to change a system that resists not only radical change but even
    tinkering.

    "But a fourth is action, a fight to regain democracy (a.k.a. 'who is
    government for?') and begin to remember quaint little slogans like
    'the greatest good for the greatest number,' to recognize that the
    payoff for seriously fighting climate change is not only the
    survival of our species (and others) but a better society. As Naomi
    Klein says, 'Climate change isn't just a disaster. It's also our
    best chance to demand and build a better world.'

    "That's what makes this march important. To paraphrase Bill
    McKibben, it's not so much about changing light bulbs as it is about
    changing the system that's powering our destruction."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/mark-bittman-lets-reject-the-inevitable.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone


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