[TheClimate.Vote] September 19, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[Richard Pauli]

/*September 19, 2020*/

[click on a NYT interactive map]
*Every Place Has Its Own Climate Risk. What Is It Where You Live?*
By Stuart A. Thompson and Yaryna Serkez Sept 18, 2020

For most of us, climate change can feel like an amorphous threat -- with 
the greatest dangers lingering ominously in the future and the solutions 
frustratingly out of reach.

So perhaps focusing on today's real harms could help us figure out how 
to start dealing with climate change. Here's one way to do that: by 
looking at the most significant climate threat unfolding in your own 
backyard...
- -
The threat of climate change "will never be here-and-now in people's 
minds unless you're in California today or New Orleans during Katrina," 
said Mr. Steinberg, the research director at Four Twenty Seven. "It's 
got to be out your window for you to really say it's having an impact on 
your life, your livelihood, your retirement plan or whatever it might be."

We're bad at contending with threats we can't see. But with climate 
fires on one side of the country, climate hurricanes on another and a 
pandemic that has killed more than 900,000 people worldwide, it's clear 
that these threats are devastatingly real.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/18/opinion/wildfire-hurricane-climate.html



[a "climate convert" speaks - text- video]
*Former climate change denier says "it's insane to play dice with the 
planet"*
BY VICTORIA ALBERT
SEPTEMBER 18, 2020
President Trump made headlines this week when he said "I don't think 
science knows" about climate change and claimed that mitigating the 
wildfires raging through California was simply a matter of forest 
management. But Jerry Taylor, a former "climate skeptic" who is now the 
president and co-founder of the Niskanen Center, a public policy think 
tank, says "it's insane to play dice with the planet" by ignoring 
evidence that the climate is changing.

"We shouldn't be having a white-hot debate about the most likely outcome 
from climate change because that's not what risk management is about," 
Taylor said Thursday during the CBSN special "A Climate in Crisis." 
"Risk management is about looking at the full distribution of possible 
outcomes from climate change and weighing them accordingly."

Taylor said that while it's certainly possible that climate change will 
have a more modest impact, "it's also quite possible that it's going to 
be an extremely cataclysmic event."
"In fact, the possibility that that's what we have in store for our 
future is becoming more and more abundantly clear as we watch extreme 
weather events play out and the warming play out at a more dramatic pace 
than we had anticipated," he added. "And if we look at that full 
distribution of possible outcomes from climate change, it's insane to 
play dice with the planet like that, and to ignore the real risks that 
we're facing today and that our kids and grandchildren will face."

When asked what the climate denier community is hoping to accomplish 
with its rhetoric, Taylor said that it isn't aiming for the support of 
the average American -- instead, he said, its goal is "talking to the 
hard right of the Republican Party, and cementing climate denialism into 
the identity of conservative America."

"It wasn't always the case that the right-wing of the Republican Party 
was so hostile to mainstream climate science," he added. "But that is 
the fruits of what the climate denialist community has accomplished over 
the course of time."
When asked about Mr. Trump's recent comments on climate, Taylor 
highlighted that the vast majority of peer-reviewed articles published 
in recent years agree that climate change is occurring.

"To be skeptical of climate science today is to be skeptical of the 
Pythagorean theorem and to say, 'Well, it's just a theory,'" he said. 
"If mainstream climate science is as far off as Donald Trump argues, 
then mainstream atmospheric physics is premised on a whole bunch of hooey."
Taylor said there is hope for bipartisanship in the future. He said he 
believes that fossil fuels are rapidly disappearing and being replaced 
with green energy, which will eventually appeal to business-minded 
Republicans. He also noted that the GOP is "increasingly incapable of 
competing in suburban America today," which may force the party to adopt 
a more progressive position.

He also likened the effects of climate change to the coronavirus 
pandemic, and said he believes it may serve as a "wake up call."

"I think the price we pay when we ignore science, we ignore experts, we 
ignore the things we can see with our own eyes around us on a daily 
basis, and to believe things we wish were true rather than what are 
objectively true -- well, we know the wages we pay when we go down that 
road," he said. "We're paying them right now."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-climate-change-denier-says-its-insane-to-play-dice-with-the-planet/



[Cough, cough]
*Trump's climate change rollbacks to drive up U.S. emissions*
The cumulative additional amount of greenhouse gases would exceed the 
current annual output of Russia, the world's fourth-biggest carbon polluter.
By ZACK COLMAN and ALEX GUILLEN
09/17/2020
President Donald Trump's rollback of Obama-era climate regulations will 
cause the United States to pump an extra 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse 
gases into the atmosphere between now and 2035, at a time when 
scientists say the world needs to slash its carbon pollution 
dramatically to avoid catastrophe, researchers said Thursday.
The forecast from the climate research firm Rhodium Group is one of the 
most detailed and comprehensive estimates to date of how Trump's 
regulatory U-turn will affect the amount of planet-warming carbon 
dioxide coming from tailpipes, leaking oil and gas wells, power plants 
and refrigerants. It concludes that if Trump's rollbacks remain in 
place, U.S. climate pollution 15 years from now will be 3 percent higher 
than current projections indicate.
The cumulative additional amount of greenhouse gases would exceed the 
current annual output of Russia, the world's fourth-biggest carbon 
polluter. The United States is No. 2, behind China.

If anything, Rhodium researchers said their figures probably 
underestimate the increase because they could not accurately forecast 
how the effects from some Trump policies would play out. Those include 
the changes in carbon dioxide emissions from the nation's power plants 
allowed by the weakening of the Obama administration's pollution rules.

Despite scientific evidence that has grown only stronger in recent years 
that man-made pollution is driving up the Earth's temperatures and 
worsening disasters like the wildfires in the Western U.S., hurricanes 
battering the coasts and floods submerging the Midwest, Trump has 
steadfastly denied that climate change is real.
"It'll start getting cooler, you just watch," Trump told California 
officials this week on a visit to discuss the fires there. "I don't 
think science knows, actually."...
- -
Climate scientists warn that the planet is heading toward a tipping 
point, and that the industrialized nations responsible for the vast 
majority of greenhouse gas pollution haven't reduced emissions quickly 
enough to avoid baking in the worst effects of climate change. Many of 
those worst-case scenarios would be unavoidable once average global 
temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times. 
Temperatures have already climbed 1.1 degrees and are set based on 
current emissions rates to rise more than 3 degrees by the end of the 
century.

But Trump has taken the U.S. in the opposite direction, pressing for 
increasing oil, natural gas and coal output and eliminating rules that 
would impose costs on emissions of carbon dioxide.

"It seems to me that a president ought to be paying attention to 
something that is as big a threat to our way of life as this is, and 
doing something about it," said Janet McCabe, the former acting Obama 
EPA air chief who wrote many of the climate rules Trump has rolled back...
- -
Criticism over Trump's lack of action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution 
has come from Democrats and moderate Republicans alike. Christine Todd 
Whitman, the former Republican New Jersey governor and EPA administrator 
under President George W. Bush, said the worst effect has been 
"denigrating science and scientists" and "going backwards" on climate 
change, emboldening an anti-expert fringe within the GOP.
"Right now it's the party of Trump," she told POLITICO. "If the only 
Republicans left standing are the QAnon supporters or the far right 
supporters, that's how the party will be defined. It's a real worry."
Even Republicans who are wary of onerous regulations that they worry 
would stifle the economy acknowledge that Trump has had an unambiguous 
effect on efforts to rein in emissions.
"When it comes to regulating greenhouse gas emissions, either from 
stationary sources or mobile sources, they have not done very much," 
said Jeff Holmstead, who served as EPA's air chief during the George W. 
Bush administration. "Their actions won't result in significant 
greenhouse gas emission reductions that many people -- most people -- 
think are necessary."...
- -
The Trump EPA says that under its ACE rule, the power sector will 
achieve 35 percent reductions, on par with the Obama EPA's Clean Power 
Plan, which was significantly more ambitious and complex. But the ACE 
rule itself is responsible for 1.5 percentage points or less of those 
reductions, EPA has acknowledged. The rest are due to the trend of 
retiring the dirty, inefficient coal plants that the Obama-era Clean 
Power Plan capitalized on.

"I don't think they can legitimately claim that the cuts are achieved by 
the ACE rule," said Holmstead. However, while Trump's emissions 
reductions won't do much to stave off climate change, Holmstead said 
that the administration is acting within bounds set by Congress, and he 
added that any more stringent climate action should be directly mandated 
by new legislation.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/17/trump-climate-rollbacks-increase-emissions-417311 




[Classic Rand study]
*The Growing Risk of Wildfires*
Wildfires up and down the West Coast have burned more than five million 
acres, killing more than two dozen people and displacing tens of 
thousands more.

A recent RAND study zoomed in on two fire-prone areas in California to 
learn more about how climate change will continue to affect wildfire 
risk--and the potential consequences for insurance markets and 
homeowners. The authors project that, in one area, the Sierra Nevada 
foothills, the average number of acres burned each year could double by 
mid-century, and then double again by 2100, if more is not done to 
control greenhouse gas emissions. The researchers' findings could help 
policymakers, insurers, and homeowners better understand how to address 
growing risk..
*California Wildfires*
*Can Insurance Markets Handle the Risk?*
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA635-1.html



[Some smart data science]
*Climate change: Earthquake 'hack' reveals scale of ocean warming*
By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent
Scientists have found a clever new way of measuring ocean warming, using 
sound waves from undersea earthquakes.

The researchers say the "hack" works because sound travels faster in 
warmer water.

The team looked at sonic data from the Indian Ocean emitted by tremors 
over a 10-year period.

As the seas have warmed due to global heating, the scientists have seen 
the sound waves increase in speed.

Their new method shows the decadal warming trend in the Indian Ocean was 
far higher than previous estimates...
- -
The team then looked for pairs of "repeaters", earthquakes with almost 
identical origins and power.

By measuring how long these slow-moving signals took to travel across 
the waters from Indonesia to a monitoring station on the island of Diego 
Garcia, they were able to work out the changes in temperature for the 
whole of the ocean over the 10-year period.

"It takes sound waves about half an hour to travel from Sumatra to Diego 
Garcia," lead author Dr Wenbo Wu from the California Institute of 
Technology told BBC News.

"The temperature change of the deep ocean between Sumatra and Diego 
Garcia causes this half-hour travel time to vary by a few tenths of a 
second.

"Because we can measure these variations very accurately, we can infer 
the small changes in the average temperature of the deep ocean, in this 
case about a tenth of a degree."

The author says the system has some major advantages, as it is able to 
provide a large-scale average temperature along the 3,000km path from 
Sumatra to Diego Garcia, which reduces the influence of local 
fluctuations, essentially making it more accurate over the ocean as a 
whole...
- -
To make the idea work on a global scale, the scientists will need access 
to more underwater receivers.

Right now, the research team is working with data collected by a 
hydrophone network operated by the United Nations Comprehensive 
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, which is listening for underwater 
nuclear explosions.

These hydrophones pick up signals from many of the 10,000 shallow 
submarine earthquakes that occur globally every year, explained Dr Wu.

"All this data contains information on the temperature change of the 
deep ocean -- it is just waiting for us to extract it."

The study has been published in the journal Science.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54193334


["substantially exceeds previous estimates"]
*Seismic ocean thermometry*
*Hearing the heat*
Most of the excess heat that causes global warming is absorbed by the 
oceans. Quantifying that heat increase is challenging because it 
requires many different temperature measurements over both the vertical 
and horizontal extent of the oceans. Wu et al. report success in this 
effort through the use of a different method: They inferred temperature 
changes from sound waves generated by repeating earthquakes (see the 
Perspective by Wunsch). The travel time of these earthquakes from source 
to receiver reflects changes in the average water temperature that they 
encounter. This technique should substantially enhance our ability to 
monitor ocean warming.

*Abstract*

    More than 90% of the energy trapped on Earth by increasingly
    abundant greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean. Monitoring the
    resulting ocean warming remains a challenging sampling problem. To
    complement existing point measurements, we introduce a method that
    infers basin-scale deep-ocean temperature changes from the travel
    times of sound waves that are generated by repeating earthquakes. A
    first implementation of this seismic ocean thermometry constrains
    temperature anomalies averaged across a 3000-kilometer-long section
    in the equatorial East Indian Ocean with a standard error of 0.0060
    kelvin. Between 2005 and 2016, we find temperature fluctuations on
    time scales of 12 months, 6 months, and ~10 days, and we infer a
    decadal warming trend that substantially exceeds previous estimates.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6510/1510



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - September 19, 2015 *
In a New York Times op-ed, Noah S. Diffenbaugh, an associate professor 
of earth system science at Stanford University, and Christopher B. 
Field, a director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie 
Institution for Science, observe:

    "As wildfires rage, crops are abandoned, wells run dry and cities
    work to meet mandatory water cuts, drought-weary Californians are
    counting on a savior in the tropical ocean: El Niño.

    "This warming of the tropical Pacific occurs about every five years,
    affecting climate around the globe and bringing heavy winter
    precipitation to parts of California. The state experienced two of
    its wettest years during two of the strongest El Niños, in 1982-83
    and 1997-98.

    "Now climatologists have confirmed that a powerful El Niño is
    building, and forecasts suggest a high likelihood that El Niño
    conditions will persist through the next several months. So we in
    California expect a rainy winter.

    "But before everyone gets too excited, it is important to understand
    this: Two physical realities virtually ensure that Californians will
    still face drought, regardless of how this El Niño unfolds.

    "The first is that California has missed at least a year's worth of
    precipitation, meaning that it would take an extraordinarily wet
    rainy season to single-handedly break the drought. Even if that
    happened, we would most likely suffer from too much water too fast,
    as occurred in the early 1980s and late 1990s, when El Niño
    delivered more rainfall than aquifers could absorb and reservoirs
    could store.

    "The second is that California is facing a new climate reality, in
    which extreme drought is more likely. The state's water rights,
    infrastructure and management were designed for an old climate, one
    that no longer exists.

    "Our research has shown that global warming has doubled the odds of
    the warm, dry conditions that are intensifying and prolonging this
    drought, which now holds records not only for lowest precipitation
    and highest temperature, but also for the lowest spring snowpack in
    the Sierra Nevada in at least 500 years. These changing odds make it
    much more likely that similar conditions will occur again,
    exacerbating other stresses on agriculture, ecosystems and people."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/opinion/a-wet-winter-wont-save-california.html?ref=opinion 


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