[✔️] August 14, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*August 14, 2021*/

[why not?  Everything is connected]
*In the West, a Connection Between Covid and Wildfires*
- -
To arrive at their conclusion, the researchers used satellite data of 
smoke plumes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to 
identify the locations and days affected by wildfires. They paired those 
readings with PM 2.5 data from ground-level air quality monitors in each 
of the counties and Covid-19 cases and death rates from data compiled by 
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Their statistical model accounted for other factors such as weather and 
the amount of time people were at home, and included a four-week lag to 
capture the virus’s incubation period as well as the additional time it 
can take for infected people’s health to deteriorate.
- -
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/climate/wildfires-smoke-covid.html
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/09/12/us/12CLI-covidfires/merlin_177201186_fd791411-6c22-4fe0-8764-412d1bc2eee0-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp



[simple data]
*July 2021 was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded, NOAA finds*
The combined land and ocean-surface temperature this July was 1.67 
degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, NOAA found. This was 
0.02 degrees higher than the previous record tied in July 2016, July 
2019 and July 2020. The agency said 2021 will likely rank among the top 
10 warmest years on record.

Monthly surface temperatures analysis from NASA also showed the global 
mean temperature anomaly for this month was about 1.66 degrees above the 
1951-1980 July average.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/13/july-2021-hottest-record-month/



[to learn AND go stupid in the same gesture]
*Amid Extreme Weather, a Shift Among Republicans on Climate Change*
Many Republicans in Congress no longer deny that Earth is heating 
because of fossil fuel emissions. But they say abandoning oil, gas and 
coal will harm the economy...
- -
Still, the fact that Republicans recognize emissions as a problem marks 
progress, however incremental, said Tom Moyer, the Utah state 
coordinator for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which is trying to build 
bipartisan support for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. “They’re small 
bites at a solution, but it’s so much more than we could have gotten 
even a few years ago,” he said. “And hopefully the trend continues.”

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said of climate change 
last September, “I concur that it is happening and it is a problem. The 
argument is about how to best address it.”

Senator John Cornyn of oil and gas-rich Texas said in a July interview, 
“I have no doubt the climate is changing and people contribute to it.” 
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama said he thinks weather disasters 
simply happen, yet “a lot of it, I’m sure, with all the stuff we put in 
the air, is self-made.”

Even Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who famously once 
threw a snowball on the Senate floor to claim the planet is not getting 
hotter, insisted last month that he never called climate change a 
“hoax,” only that the dire consequences have been overblown. (Mr. Inhofe 
is the author of a book entitled “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global 
Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”)..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/climate/republicans-climate-change.html


[transition technology is empty]
*Big Oil’s New 'Clean' Fuel Is Dirtier Than They Say*
The much-hyped blue hydrogen actually has a shockingly large greenhouse 
gas footprint, according to new research.
- -
The methane findings in the IPCC report are especially worrisome when 
considering what a natural-gas-heavy process creating hydrogen from 
fossil fuel and storing the CO2 emissions is. In fact, making the 
hydrogen is so energy-intensive that blue hydrogen’s greenhouse gas 
footprint is bigger than that of natural gas. In other words, burning 
this supposed “clean” fuel actually is worse, greenhouse gas-wise, than 
just using natural gas itself.

“It takes a large amount of natural gas to make hydrogen, using the 
methane in the gas as the feedstock source, but also to burn it to power 
the steam-reforming process and the CO2 capture process,” Howarth said. 
“There are emissions of both CO2 and methane associated with this large 
use of gas.”..,.
- -
“We need to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible,” 
Howarth said. “The best way to do that is with 100% renewable 
electricity from solar, wind, and hydro sources, combined with 
beneficial electrification to provide heat from high-efficiency heat 
pumps and to provide transportation from electric vehicles. Blue 
hydrogen is a dangerous distraction, which, if actually employed at 
scale, would aggravate rather than help address climate change. Policy 
makers should be skeptical of such ideas until they are thoroughly 
vetted by independent full lifecycle analysis by scientists and 
engineers in a transparent and peer-reviewed framework.”
https://gizmodo.com/big-oil-s-new-clean-fuel-is-dirtier-than-they-say-1847474392

- -

[Great blue hope]
*Biden-backed ‘blue’ hydrogen may pollute more than coal, study finds*
Infrastructure bill includes $8bn to develop ‘clean hydrogen’ but study 
finds large emissions from production of ‘blue’ hydrogen
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/12/clean-fuel-blue-hydrogen-coal-study
- -

[The great clean hope is empty promise]
*For Many, Hydrogen Is the Fuel of the Future. New Research Raises Doubts.*
Industry has been promoting hydrogen as a reliable, next-generation fuel 
to power cars, heat homes and generate electricity. It may, in fact, be 
worse for the climate than previously thought...
- -
The hydrogen study showed that “the potential to keep using fossil fuels 
with something extra added on as a potential climate solution is neither 
fully accounting for emissions, nor making realistic assumptions” about 
future costs, he said in an email.
- -
For the foreseeable future, most hydrogen fuel will very likely be made 
from natural gas through an energy-intensive and polluting method called 
the steam reforming process, which uses steam, high heat and pressure to 
break down the methane into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Blue hydrogen uses the same process but applies carbon capture and 
storage technology, which involves capturing carbon dioxide before it is 
released into the atmosphere and then pumping it underground in an 
effort to lock it away. But that still doesn’t account for the natural 
gas that generates the hydrogen, powers the steam reforming process and 
runs the CO2 capture. “Those are substantial,” Dr. Howarth of Cornell said.

Amy Townsend-Small, an associate professor in environmental science at 
the University of Cincinnati and an expert on methane emissions, said 
more scientists were starting to examine some of the industry claims 
around hydrogen, in the same way they had scrutinized the climate 
effects of natural gas production. “I think this research is going drive 
the conversation forward,” she said.

Plans to produce and use hydrogen are moving ahead. National Grid, 
together with Stony Brook University and New York State, is studying 
integrating hydrogen into its existing gas infrastructure, though the 
project seeks to produce hydrogen using renewable energy.

Entergy believed hydrogen was “part of creating a long-term carbon-free 
future,” complementing renewables like wind or solar, which generate 
power only intermittently, said Jerry Nappi, a spokesman for the 
utility. “Hydrogen is an important technology that will allow utilities 
to adopt much greater levels of renewables,” he said.

National Grid referred to its net zero plan, which says hydrogen will 
play a major role in the next few decades and that producing hydrogen 
from renewable energy was the linchpin.

New York State was “exploring all technologies” including hydrogen in 
support of its climate goals, said Kate T. Muller, a spokeswoman for the 
state’s Energy Research and Development Authority. Still, its 
researchers would “review and consider the blue hydrogen paper,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html




[example salvo from the disinformation battleground]
*A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong*
In Unsettled, Steven Koonin deploys that highly misleading label to 
falsely suggest that we don’t understand the risks well enough to take 
action

By Gary Yohe on May 13, 2021
A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong

Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science of the Department of 
Energy in the Obama administration, but more recently considered for an 
advisory post to Scott Pruitt when he was administrator of the 
Environmental Protection Agency, has published a new book. Released on 
May 4 and entitled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It 
Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, its major theme is that the science about 
the Earth’s climate is anything but settled. He argues that pundits and 
politicians and most of the population who feel otherwise are victims of 
what he has publicly called “consensus science.”

Koonin is wrong on both counts. The science is stronger than ever around 
findings that speak to the likelihood and consequences of climate 
impacts, and has been growing stronger for decades. In the early days of 
research, the uncertainty was wide; but with each subsequent step that 
uncertainty has narrowed or become better understood. This is how 
science works, and in the case of climate, the early indications 
detected and attributed in the 1980s and 1990s, have come true, over and 
over again and sooner than anticipated.

This is not to say that uncertainty is being eliminated, but decision 
makers have become more comfortable dealing with the inevitable 
residuals. They are using the best and most honest science to inform 
prospective investments in abatement (reducing greenhouse gas emissions 
to diminish the estimated likelihoods of dangerous climate change 
impacts) and adaptation (reducing vulnerabilities to diminish their 
current and projected consequences).

Koonin’s intervention into the debate about what to do about climate 
risks seems to be designed to subvert this progress in all respects by 
making distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified 
statements about supposed uncertainties that he thinks scientists have 
buried under the rug. Here, I consider a few early statements in his own 
words. They are taken verbatim from his introductory pages so he must 
want the reader to see them as relevant take-home findings from the 
entire book. They are evaluated briefly in their proper context, 
supported by findings documented in the latest report of the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is important to note that 
Koonin recognizes this source in his discussion of assessments, and even 
covers the foundations of the confidence and likelihood language 
embedded in its findings (specific references from the IPCC report are 
presented in brackets).

Two such statements by Koonin followed the simple preamble “For example, 
both the literature and government reports that summarize and assess the 
state of climate science say clearly that…”:

“Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and 
that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty 
years.” (Italics in the original.) This is a questionable statement 
depending on the definition of “heat wave”, and so it is really 
uninformative. Heat waves are poor indicators of heat stress. Whether or 
not they are becoming more frequent, they have clearly become hotter and 
longer over the past few decades while populations have grown more 
vulnerable in large measure because they are, on average, older [Section 
19.6.2.1]. Moreover, during these longer extreme heat events, it is 
nighttime temperatures that are increasing most. As a result, people 
never get relief from insufferable heat and more of them are at risk of 
dying.
“The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty 
years.” According to what measure? Highest annual global averages? 
Absolutely not. That the planet is has warmed since the industrial 
revolution is unequivocal with more than 30 percent of that warming 
having occurred over the last 25 years, and the hottest annual 
temperatures in that history have followed suit [Section SPM.1].
Here are a few more statements from Koonin’s first two pages under the 
introduction that “Here are three more that might surprise you, drawn 
from recently published research or the latest assessments of climate 
science published by the US government and the UN”:

“Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it 
was eighty years ago.” For a risk-based approach to climate discussions 
about what we “should do,” this statement is irrelevant. It is the 
future that worries us. Observations from 11 satellite missions 
monitoring the Arctic and Antarctic show that ice sheets are losing mass 
six times faster than they were in the 1990s. Is this the beginning of a 
new trend? Perhaps. The settled state of the science for those who have 
adopted a risk management approach is that this is a high-risk 
possibility (huge consequences) that should be taken seriously and 
examined more completely. This is even more important because, even 
without those contributions to the historical trend that is 
accelerating, rising sea levels will continue to exaggerate coastal 
exposure by dramatically shrinking the return times of all variety of 
storms [Section 19.6.2.1]; that is, 1-in-100 year storms become 1-in-50 
year events, and 1-in-50 year storms become 1-in-10 year events and 
eventually nearly annual facts of life.
“The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal 
through at least the end of this century.” It is unconscionable to make 
a statement like this, and not just because the adjective “minimal” is 
not at all informative. It is unsupportable without qualification 
because aggregate estimates are so woefully incomplete [Section 
19.6.3.5]. Nonetheless, Swiss Re recently released a big report on 
climate change saying that insurance companies are underinsuring against 
rising climate risks that are rising now and projected to continue to do 
so over the near term. Despite the uncertainty, they see an imminent 
source of risk, and are not waiting until projections of the end of the 
century clear up to respond.
The first of these misdirection statements about Greenland is even more 
troubling because the rise in global mean sea level has accelerated. 
This is widely known despite claims to the contrary in Chapter 8 which 
is described in the introduction as a “levelheaded look at sea levels, 
which have been rising over the past many millennia.” Koonin continues: 
“We’ll untangle what we really know about human influences on the 
current rate of rise (about one foot per century) and explain why it’s 
very hard to believe that surging seas will drown the coasts any time soon.”

The trouble is that while seas have risen eight to nine inches since 
1880, more than 30 percent of that increase has occurred during the last 
two decades: 30 percent of the historical record over the past 14 
percent of the time series. This is why rising sea levels are expected 
with very high confidence to exaggerate coastal exposure and economic 
consequences [Section 19.6.2.1].

His teaser for Chapter 7 is an equally troubling misdirection. He 
promises to highlight “some points likely to surprise anyone who follows 
the news—for instance, that the global area burned by fires each year 
has declined by 25 percent since observations began in 1998.” Global 
statistics are meaningless in this context. Wildfires (if that is what 
he is talking about) are local events whose regional patterns of 
intensity and frequency fit well into risk-based calibrations because 
they are increasing in many locations. Take, for example, the 2020 
experience. Record wildfires were seen across the western United States, 
Siberia, Indonesia and Australia (extending from 2019) to name a few 
major locations.

Take a more specific example. From August through October of 2020, 
California suffered through what became the largest wildfire in 
California history. It was accompanied by the third, fourth, fifth and 
sixth largest conflagrations in the state’s history; and all five of 
them were still burning on October 3. Their incredible intensity and 
coincidence can only be explained by the confluence of four climate 
change consequences that have been attributed to climate changes so far: 
record numbers of nighttime dry lightning strikes during a long and 
record-setting drought, a record-setting heat wave extending from July 
through August, a decade of bark-beetle infestation that killed 85 
percent of the trees across enormous tracks of forests, and long-term 
warming that has extended the fire season by 75 days.

So, what is the takeaway message? Regardless of what Koonin has written 
in his new book, the science is clear, and the consensus is incredibly 
wide. Scientists are generating and reporting data with more and more 
specificity about climate impacts and surrounding uncertainties all the 
time. This is particularly true with regard to the exaggerated natural, 
social and economic risks associated with climate extremes—the 
low-probability, high-consequence events that are such a vital part of 
effective risk management. This is not an unsettled state of affairs. It 
is living inside a moving picture of what is happening portrayed with 
sharper clarity and more detail with every new peer-reviewed paper.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-book-manages-to-get-climate-science-badly-wrong/


[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 14 , 2008*
August 14, 2008: GOP presidential candidate John McCain discusses his 
views on energy and climate change in Aspen, Colorado.
http://youtu.be/BqqZzY0fjC0


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