[✔️] August 28, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Aug 28 10:36:21 EDT 2021
/*August 28, 2021*/
[Water, water,...]
*40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River. It’s Drying Up Fast.*
By Abrahm Lustgarten - Aug. 27, 2021...
Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and
where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced
to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which
wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from, and which small towns cannot
afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do
in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of
water may turn out to be the first among those choices.
- -
Making a bad situation worse, leaders in Western states have allowed
wasteful practices to continue that add to the material threat facing
the region. A majority of the water used by farms — and thus much of the
river — goes to growing nonessential crops like alfalfa and other
grasses that feed cattle for meat production. Much of those grasses are
also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia. Short of
regulating which types of crops are allowed, which state authorities may
not even have the authority to do, it may fall to consumers to drive
change. Water usage data suggests that if Americans avoid meat one day
each week they could save an amount of water equivalent to the entire
flow of the Colorado each year, more than enough water to alleviate the
region’s shortages.
Water is also being wasted because of flaws in the laws. The rights to
take water from the river are generally distributed — like deeds to
property — based on seniority. It is very difficult to take rights away
from existing stakeholders, whether cities or individual ranchers, so
long as they use the water allocated to them. That system creates a
perverse incentive: Across the basin, ranchers often take their maximum
allocation each year, even if just to spill it on the ground, for fear
that, if they don’t, they could lose the right to take that water in the
future. Changes in the laws that remove the threat of penalties for not
exercising water rights, or that expand rewards for ranchers who
conserve water, could be an easy remedy.
A breathtaking amount of the water from the Colorado — about 10 percent
of the river’s recent total flow — simply evaporates off the sprawling
surfaces of large reservoirs as they bake in the sun. Last year,
evaporative losses from Lake Mead and Lake Powell alone added up to
almost a million acre feet of water — or nearly twice what Arizona will
be forced to give up now as a result of this month’s shortage
declaration. These losses are increasing as the climate warms. Yet
federal officials have so far discounted technological fixes — like
covering the water surface to reduce the losses — and they continue to
maintain both reservoirs, even though both of them are only around a
third full. If the two were combined, some experts argue, much of those
losses could be avoided.
- -
The bureau’s projections mean we are close to uncharted territory. The
current shortage agreement, negotiated between the states in 2007, only
addresses shortages down to a lake elevation of 1,025 feet. After that,
the rules become murky, and there is greater potential for fraught legal
conflicts. Northern states in the region, for example, are likely to ask
why the vast evaporation losses from Lake Mead, which stores water for
the southern states, have never been counted as a part of the water
those southern states use. Fantastical and expensive solutions that have
previously been dismissed by the federal government — like the
desalinization of seawater, towing icebergs from the Arctic, or pumping
water from the Mississippi River through a pipeline — are likely to be
seriously considered. None of this, however, will be enough to solve the
problem unless it’s accompanied by serious efforts to lower carbon
dioxide emissions, which are ultimately responsible for driving changes
to the climate.
Meanwhile, population growth in Arizona and elsewhere in the basin is
likely to continue, at least for now, because short-term fixes so far
have obscured the seriousness of the risks to the region. Water is still
cheap, thanks to the federal subsidies for all those dams and canals
that make it seem plentiful. The myth persists that technology can
always outrun nature, that the American West holds endless possibility.
It may be the region’s undoing. As the author Wallace Stegner once
wrote, “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native
home of hope.”
This article is copublished with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative
newsroom.
Abrahm Lustgarten is an environmental reporter for ProPublica.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/sunday-review/colorado-river-drying-up.html
[good idea, but how do I get there? and how do I leave the country?
Perhaps the world should be carbon free. ]
*Denmark and Costa Rica Want to Make a No Fossil Fuels Allowed Club*
The proposed alliance would only allow in countries that have made steps
to ban the production of fossil fuels.
https://gizmodo.com/denmark-and-costa-rica-want-to-make-a-no-fossil-fuels-a-1847566220
- -
[The Queen goes there Nov 1 - 12]
*COP26: Queen to attend climate conference in Glasgow*
(BBC) — The Queen will attend the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow,
organisers have confirmed.
The 95-year-old monarch will join world leaders at the event which was
originally due to take place in November last year but was postponed due
to the Covid pandemic.
It will now be held at the Scottish Events Campus from 1-12 November.
The summit is expected to attract 120 heads of state, including US
President Joe Biden.
Others expected to travel to Scotland include Pope Francis and climate
campaigner Greta Thunberg.
COP26 president Alok Sharma tweeted that he was "absolutely delighted"
that the Queen will attend the summit.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-58360381
- -
[Radical actions]
*Why the United States Is Killing the World*
Aug 27, 2021
Our Changing Climate
Why United States imperialism is causing climate change, explained. Help
me make more videos like this via Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/OurChangingCl...
In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at how
United States imperialism is causing climate change and killing the
world. Specifically, I look at how the United States is responsible for
a large amount of the world's cumulative emissions, the birthplace of
the oil industry, and now fosters a growing natural gas industry. While
the United States has promised substantial. emissions cuts, they are too
slow and too late. The United States' imperialist endeavors abroad have
also worked to destabilize regions and prevent resilience in the face of
climate change. From protecting oil fields and fossil fuel interests in
the Gulf and Iraq Wars to various attempted coups, United States
imperialism has made it that much harder to deal with climate change. In
addition, United States-backed sanctions have also dealt crushing blows
to countries try to build resilience in the face of COVID-19 and the
climate crisis. In short, driven by profit and territorial expansion,
the United States is not only causing climate change but also making it
worse for those on the frontlines...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYu_WOrL_gM
[writer Rebecca Leber is cool]
*It’s time to rethink air conditioning*
Air conditioning warms the planet. Here’s how to break a vicious cycle.
By Rebecca Leber -- Aug 26, 2021, 2:20pm EDT
What if the most American symbol of unsustainable consumption isn’t the
automobile, but the air conditioner? In cool indoor spaces, it’s easy to
forget that billions of people around the world don’t have cooling — and
that air conditioning is worsening the warming that it’s supposed to
protect us from.
There are alternatives: We can build public cooling spaces and smarter
cities, with fixes like white paint and more greenery. Some experts have
hailed heat pump technology as a more efficient option. But as the
planet warms and more of its inhabitants have spare income, AC sales are
increasing. Ten air conditioners will be sold every second for the next
30 years, according to a United Nations estimate. Access to air
conditioning can literally mean life or death for the young, elderly,
and those with medical conditions such as compromised immune systems.
The rise of ACs has an enormous cost: Over time, chemicals known as
refrigerants leak out of AC units and accelerate climate change...
- -
It’s easier for us to understand climate violence in terms of things
like hurricane damage or wildfires. They’re very spectacular. But what’s
actually happening is a lot more tedious and really difficult to narrate.
I realized air conditioning was a way to get at the very material nature
of the climate crisis — but in a way that is quite unspectacular,
because the refrigerant is literally invisible to all the senses. The
paradox is that we’re surrounded by air conditioning, but hardly anybody
thinks about it.
What I hoped to do with the book was by tracing this history people
could consider a radically different way of living, one that doesn’t
have to be suffering. It can actually be pleasurable. I think a lot of
people are too afraid to even try that because they think they have to
give something up. I hope that it can open the door just a little bit
for people to really re-contextualize what it means to be comfortable. I
think there’s something to be said about making us a bit more
comfortable with the discomfort of outside air...
- -
Many of the people reading this may be sitting in an air-conditioned
space right now. So what is the alternative vision?
I’m interested in more radical changes so that the same technology that
was bred in the United States, and that same definition of comfort,
doesn’t just get carbon-copied and spread to the rest of the world.
When you have open asphalt, which often falls in sections of the city
with the working poor, you have hotter cities. Planting more trees and
green space can lower the urban heat island effect by several degrees.
You can also have better-designed buildings, but that’s tricky because
you need new materials and lots of money. You can provide heat pumps,
but you also need to redesign the building’s air systems. And we also
need more access to publicly cooled spaces so that we’re not all,
individually, cooling our homes.
And then there are the cultural solutions: It’s really worth looking at
why heat waves cause so many deaths. We don’t treat heat waves like the
emergency they are. In a heat wave, people assume you just keep working.
It’s not just that people die because they get too hot. It’s often
because the medical infrastructure is not there. It’s often that even
the people who have air conditioning are too afraid to turn it on
because they can’t afford it. It’s often because people are left alone.
https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
[A reasonable idea]
*How We End Consumerism*
Jun 4, 2021
Our Changing Climate
How we end consumerism, explained. Help me make more videos like this
via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OurChangingCl...
In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at how
we end consumerism. Specifically, I unpack how degrowth and ecosocialism
can work in tandem to stop consumerism and overconsumption and reduce
emissions in order to transition to a zero-carbon, post-climate change
world. Degrowth is a response to the rampant growth/profit capitalist
paradigm that fuels consumerism and is causing climate change. Degrowth
de-centers capitalism and consumerism and instead argues for a world
wherein there's a planned contraction of rich economies to allow for the
well-being of everyone in the world. Degrowth, however, can't function
well without ecosocialism. Ecosocialism recognizes that the climate
crisis is a capitalist crisis and vice versa. In order to degrowth to
work it needs to incorporate full democratic control of the means of
production and the state in order to avoid draconian measures of
austerity. Degrowth and ecosocialism represent an end to consumerism and
overconsumption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omcUaD8pxaY
[Yale Climate Change Communications harkens back]
*Study: Extreme weather may not lead to increased support for climate
action*
Many people aren’t making the connection between global warming and
weather disasters.
by JENNIFER MARLON - JUNE 16, 2021
Climate scientists have been warning for decades that global warming
will lead to more extreme weather. And so as more Americans start to
personally experience disastrous weather events, it’s reasonable to ask
whether they will support aggressive climate action.
The short answer is already clear: not necessarily.
The signal of climate change is difficult for people to notice against
the noisy background of day-to-day and seasonal changes in weather.
But even when a neighborhood, city, or region experiences truly unusual
weather, some will see it as clearly connected to global warming while
for others, the connection won’t even occur to them. Just as two people
can respond completely differently to political events, current
fashions, or to a football game, two individuals can share what seems to
be an identical experience and yet come away with completely different
conclusions about what happened, what caused it, and what to do about it...
*We do not simply use our senses to record information about our
surroundings and daily events – we interpret those events*
“Experience” is much more slippery than most of us realize. We do not
simply use our senses to record information about our surroundings and
daily events — we interpret those events and filter them through our
emotions, memories, culture, and in the case of weather and climate, our
politics. We then combine our beliefs, attitudes, and evaluations of our
past experiences to form new opinions, construct new cause-and-effect
models in our minds, and to ultimately build narratives about events
that allow us to make sense of the world and how we fit into it...
- -
In our study, people did not link local increases in heavy rainfall with
global warming. Given that the connections between global warming and
precipitation patterns are more complex than those for temperature
alone, perhaps this is not surprising. Yet the relationship is important
and has major consequences for our economy and health. Scientists
recently calculated that the impact of global warming on Hurricane Sandy
includes a price tag of $8 billion from the flooding damage. But many
Americans don’t understand how carbon pollution could cause an increase
in flooding and hurricane damage. For them, the dots have not been
connected yet between cause and effects.
Many are working to connect these dots, showing how climate change is
already shaping our lives, and explaining the causal chains between
burning fossil fuels, heating the planet, and increasing extreme
weather. Kenton Gewecke, chief meteorologist at KOMU 8 in Columbia,
Missouri, is just one example. He hosts a series called “Show Me
Climate,” in which he talks to scientists and explains how temperatures,
rainfall patterns, storms, and other events are changing in Missouri.
Gewecke says many viewers appreciate the information. If other broadcast
meteorologists follow Gewecke’s lead, they’ll serve as trustworthy and
knowledgeable guides to help Americans understand and learn from our
experiences.
Jennifer Marlon, Ph.D., is a research scientist and lecturer at the Yale
School of the Environment and the Yale Program on Climate Change
Communication.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/06/study-extreme-weather-may-not-lead-to-increased-support-for-climate-action/
- -
[experience teaches]*
* *Hot dry days increase perceived experience with global warming*
Abstract
Public perceptions of climate change in the United States are deeply
rooted in cultural values and political identities. Yet, as the
public experiences extreme weather and other climate change-related
impacts, their perceptions of the issue may shift. Here, we explore
whether, when, and where local climate trends have already
influenced perceived experiences of global warming in the United
States. Using a large national survey dataset (n = 13,607), we
compare Americans’ experiences of climate with corresponding trends
in seven different high-resolution climate indicators for the period
2008 to 2015. We find that increases in hot dry day exposure
significantly increases individuals’ perceptions that they have
personally experienced global warming. We do not find robust
evidence that other precipitation and temperature anomalies have had
a similar effect. We also use multilevel modeling to explore
county-level patterns of perceived experiences with climate change.
Whereas the individual-level analysis describes a likely causal
relationship between a changing climate and individuals’ perceived
experience, the multilevel model depicts county-level changes in
perceived experience resulting from particular climate trends.
Overall, we find that exposure to hot dry days, has a modest
influence on perceived experience, independent of the political and
socio-demographic factors that dominate U.S. climate opinions today.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378021000261?via%3Dihub
[Free cooling, just add water - thanks Dave ]
*Install a Cooling Tower on Your Property*
BROWSE OUR SOLAR COOLING TOWER SELECTION IN TUCSON & PHOENIX, AZ
If you want to fully cool your home with solar power, you should install
a solar cooling tower. This option uses even less energy than a swamp
cooler. Choose Southwest Solar Inc. when you're looking for a solar
cooling solution in Tucson and Phoenix, AZ. Our owner can help you pick
the best option for your property. If you want lower energy bills, solar
cooling is the right choice to make.
http://southwest-solar.com/cool-towers
"I have been goosebump chilled at Tucson airport at the Environmental
Research labs cooling tower on a 100 degree day with 60-65 degree air
pouring down on me as a wind at the patio outside the bottom of the
tower. Only electric consumption was a small water pump lifting water
to top of tower and spraying onto media pads. The airflow is pulled in
through the pads even when there is no exterior wind by the cold wet air
dropping by gravity down the tower. The rush of accelerating cold wet
air creates way more airflow than a fan would as the tower is very large
in diameter as well as tall. Solar to power the small pump is easy. Only
a decent water supply is a requisite and my experience with a limited
water supply gravity fed to our AZ home was that our swamp coolers in
non monsoon dry heat cooled very effectively and used surprisingly
little water. The water drains down through the pads and is repumped
with comparatively little lost to actual evaporation. In hot dry
climates the old Arab cooling towers updated with some but not massive
water usage can REALLY cool large interior spaces. Only got wet areas
don’t allow this kind of cooling. Also cooling mostly or only at night
where there are large day/night differentials, again more in deserts or
near the ocean coasts, followed by closing up heavily insulated
buildings during the hot daytime. Also the mid afternoon siestas
practiced in Mediterranean countries followed by working more into the
cooler evenings has been a good practice. Eating the evening meal later
as a result also works. But that also requires going to bed later for
digestive reasons. Big cultural differences." Dave Martin
http://southwest-solar.com/cool-towers
- -
[Free cool]
*Cooling towers: a bibliography*
You are accessing a document from the Department of Energy's (DOE)
OSTI.GOV.
This site is a product of DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical
Information (OSTI) and is provided as a public service.
Abstract
This bibliography cites 300 selected references containing information
on various aspects of large cooling tower technology, including design,
construction, operation, performance, economics, and environmental
effects. The towers considered include natural-draft and
mechanical-draft types employing wet, dry, or combination wet-dry
cooling. A few references deal with alternative cooling methods,
principally ponds or spray canals. The citations were compiled for the
DOE Energy Information Data Base (EDB) covering the period January to
December 1980. The references are to reports from the Department of
Energy and its contractors, reports from other government or private
organizations, and journal articles, books, conference papers, and
monographs from US originators.
Whitson, M. O.. Cooling towers: a bibliography. United States: N. p.,
1981. Web. doi:10.2172/6616286.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6616286
[video report on the victory https://youtu.be/Evy2EgoveuE do not miss
this video ]
*Exxon Lobbyist Caught on Camera Going Full Cartoon Villain*
Aug 10, 2021
Climate Town
Oh my god! He admit it!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ClimateTown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE
[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming August 28, 2008*
August 28, 2008: Al Gore and Barack Obama address the Democratic
National Convention, with Gore denouncing the Bush administration for
denying the climate crisis and Obama promising to make clean energy a
priority in his administration.
http://youtu.be/dYdV1wszqhM (Gore)
http://youtu.be/nmEI9Doctqs (Obama)
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