[✔️] December 3, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*December 3, 2021*/

/[  Wildfires in December ]/
*Wildfire potential to remain high this month in Montana, Carolinas, and 
Hawaii*
In February and March high fire potential expected for Southern Plains, 
Southeast Colorado, and Eastern New Mexico...
- -
Temperatures far above average have been breaking records the last few 
days across much of the West, but especially in Oregon, Washington, 
Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas. The heat combined with strong winds has 
resulted in a number of wildfires in Montana on Tuesday and Wednesday of 
this week.

https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/12/02/wildfire-potential-to-remain-high-this-month-in-montana-carolinas-and-hawaii/

- -

/[  Montana  ] /
*Prairies on Fire in Montana Amid a Record December Heat Wave*
Two dozen homes and businesses burned in the town of Denton as 
unseasonably warm temperatures descended from the Great Plains to the 
Mid-Atlantic...
- -
The fires came as an unusual heat wave broke records across large 
portions of the United States and Canada. Temperatures from the Great 
Plains to the Mid-Atlantic were 20 to 30 degrees above normal for early 
December, reaching into the 60s and 70s, the National Weather Service said.

In Colorado, firefighters only recently managed to contain a wildfire in 
the northern part of the state, near Estes Park, that had led to a wave 
of evacuations. And in North Carolina, firefighters were still battling 
a blaze at Pilot Mountain State Park that had burned more than 1,000 acres.
Fire season in Montana usually ends in September or October. Snow often 
falls in November, and can last on the ground until spring. But this 
year has seen almost no snow, and temperatures have climbed into the 
high 60s.

Cathy Whitlock, a paleoclimatologist at Montana State University, said 
the late-season fires and other extremes were a product of the global 
climate crisis. She said the current drought in Montana had exceeded all 
previous measurements and took the state into “uncharted territory” as 
the end of the year approaches.
“We’re looking at conditions we haven’t seen for a thousand years in 
Montana and probably longer in terms of the drought,” she said. 
“Temperatures are exceeding what we have seen for the last 11,000 years.”
- -
Three of four grain elevators went up in flames, including one owned by 
Mr. Linker, and the blaze took down power poles and knocked out 
electricity. It was the third wildfire this year in the area of Denton, 
a town of about 200 people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/us/montana-wildfire-drought.html

/
/

/[  words from New England  ] /
*The Ty-Rade: I am burning to talk global warming*
The Vantage  Dec 02, 2021
By: Ty Wilson, Staff Writer

Blue skies and 65 degrees has been the trend in weather over the last 
week. Students have had the opportunity to shed their jackets and enjoy 
the sunshine, a commodity that’s rare in December.

But why this sudden change in routine from cold and windy to warm and 
sunny? Is it just a coincidence, or have we finally depleted the last of 
our precious ozone layer?

Even if the ice caps are melting exponentially, we should reflect on how 
this isn’t really that bad. So yeah, we might lose a couple of polar 
bears, but you get to wear shorts on Christmas. I really don’t see a 
problem here. Coca-Cola will have to find a new animal to sell its 
drinks now, but it can manage.

“But Ty, if the ice caps melt, the world will flood.”

Anyone who believes this statement clearly has been hanging out with the 
Flat Earth Society too much. There’s no way a bunch of oversized ice 
cubes could melt and flood the planet. But on the off chance that these 
predictions are true, we’ll just have to deal with it. If watching the 
movie “Waterworld” has taught me anything, it’s that there’s a chance I 
could mutate and grow gills. So it appears there’s actually a huge 
upside to global warming. So far the list comes to warm, sunny weather 
and a fresh set of gills.

Keep in mind you’ll have to stock up on sunscreen for the summer since 
our sun will be scorching everything it touches. Lucky for you, Wal-Mart 
started carrying SPF 5,000 sunscreen last June. Make sure you reapply 
every half hour though. You wouldn’t want to run the risk of growing 
some new freckles.

Whether or not the sun boils our oceans or not is entirely up in the air 
at this point. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t let it get us down. 
So what? we’re never going to see snow again? I couldn’t wear my Gucci 
flip flops in the snow, anyway. As Jon Snow said in “Game of Thrones”: 
“Winter is coming.” What Jon left out is that winter is going to consist 
of beach balls and burn victims.
https://newmanvantage.com/2021/12/02/the-ty-rade-i-am-burning-to-talk-global-warming/



/[  a supposition ] /
*Venus could have been a paradise but turned into a hellscape. 
Earthlings, pay attention.*
900 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing pressure, and acid clouds. Venus, what 
the hell happened?
By Brian Resnick -- Dec 1, 2021
The origins of Venus could tell us a lot about our place in the universe
*Brian Resnick*
But we would need to keep this up for millions of years to match, right?

*Robin George Andrews*
Right.

*Brian Resnick*
This is weirdly reassuring that humans are unlikely to break the Earth 
completely.
*
**Robin George Andrews*
Yeah. I think it would be a terrible idea to pay homage to what happened 
to Venus.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22807575/venus-hot-hellscape-climate-change-earth



/[  clips from a deep analysis in Foreign Policy ]/
*Fossil Fuel’s Downfall Could Be America’s Too*
How U.S. polluters might drag the country’s economy down with them.
By Adam Tooze - DECEMBER 3, 2021,
- -
Glasgow completed the process begun at the 2015 Paris conference, under 
which nations progressively raised their national commitments to 
decarbonization. All the major economies of the world are now notionally 
committed to reaching net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. As a 
result, Glasgow also marked the moment when climate politics began to 
focus on the energy transition as a matter of industrial policy. It was 
symptomatic that a prominent commitment to reduce coal burning was 
included in the final resolution. It was not enough, but it was a 
significant first. It was also symptomatic that Britain’s conservative 
government put the emphasis on businesses. That dismayed many activists, 
but it was a prompt eagerly seized on by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry...
- -
But if a large part of known oil, gas, and coal reserves are now 
destined to stay in the ground, this has daunting implications for the 
energy industry. Europe and Asia are the world’s major energy importers. 
It is their demand that decides the balance in global oil and gas 
markets. If they decarbonize rapidly over the next few decades, that 
will dramatically shrink demand and unleash a fight to the finish among 
producers. And that puts the United States’ oil and gas sectors in the 
crosshairs...
- -
Realizing decarbonization is a one-way bet for Europe and Asia changes 
the oil and gas industry’s competitive game. So long as they could plan 
for the long term, OPEC and Russia could afford to contemplate a modus 
vivendi with shale. Once Eurasian decarbonization begins to accelerate 
in earnest, it will no longer makes sense for OPEC and Russia to 
continue the game. Faced with the fossil fuel endgame, a final price war 
is their best strategy. The result will be a massive shock to oil and 
gas prices. And this time, as demand for fossil fuels progressively 
shrinks, low prices will be permanent.
The losers in that ferocious competition will be high-cost producers 
around the world. But the largest loser will be North American oil and 
gas producers: the United States and Canada...
- -
On the consumer side, cost incentives are increasingly unambiguous. 
Within five to 10 years, the case for fossil fuel consumption will be 
harder and harder to make. Once decarbonization takes hold, what will 
dominate the remaining oil and gas markets is leading OPEC members’ 
ultra-low cost base...
- -
In short, as Kerry declares, the world is undoubtedly facing an 
industrial revolution, but for the United States, the consequences are 
highly ambiguous. This is not a question that can be separated from 
politics...
- -
This, however, is about to change. The kernel of truth in Kerry’s 
boosterism is the renewable revolution is coming to the United States too...
--
Even electricity utilities can no longer be counted on as loyal allies 
of fossil fuel producers. Some will go along with Manchin, but others 
see their future in clean power. After decades of stagnation, 
electricity demand is about to surge.

This is what gives business optimists hope. Indeed, they can even turn 
fossil fuel holdouts into an opportunity. A recalcitrant polluter is an 
opportunity for the creation of carbon markets. So-called carbon offsets 
will give high emitters the chance to reverse the damage done by funding 
remediation and large-scale carbon capture. Business, the optimists 
promise, will lead the United States out of its climate policy impasse...
- -
In 2012, economist David Autor and his co-authors published a famous 
paper on what they called the “China syndrome.” They showed how China’s 
integration into the world economy and a surge of imports to the United 
States raised incomes overall but, at the same time, irreparably damaged 
many manufacturing communities across the United States. Ahead of COP26, 
Autor and his co-authors released an updated paper, which compared the 
China shock with the impact of coal’s rundown. Damage to local economies 
from the coal industry’s decline was even worse. If the China shock is 
widely blamed for unhinging the blue-collar coalition that once 
supported Democrats, the effect of the coal industry’s collapse was even 
more unambiguous: 2016 saw a heavy pro-Trump swing across America’s coal 
regions.

The answer from the Democratic Party’s left wing, after they won control 
of the House of Representatives in 2018, was the Green New Deal. It 
sought to address this challenge by combining gigantic investment in 
renewables with an alliance with organized labor and marginalized groups 
to create a “just transition.” It was a head-on effort to win the 
argument for an energy transition, not just as an opportunity for green 
growth but as a moment of social reconstruction as well. It was a grand 
vision adequate to the scale of the climate crisis. When Sen. Bernie 
Sanders folded his presidential bid in 2020, many of his key advisors 
were incorporated into Biden’s policy team—and with good reason. Given 
the dislocation an energy transition is likely to cause, the industrial 
revolution Kerry advocates would be political poison were it not backed 
by a Green New Deal vision...
- -
We are thus back at the impasse. The idea that economic logic by itself 
will deliver an unambiguous case for ambitious climate policy in the 
United States is naive. But so too is the idea that a Green New 
Deal-style program will carry a progressive Democratic Party to 
triumphant victory. The possibility of a deepening sociopolitical divide 
around the climate issue and inconsistent and incoherent policy cannot 
be denied. While individual eco-entrepreneurs like Musk may get rich, 
the fear must be that the United States never develops a coherent social 
response to the energy transition...
- -
American Clean Power Association’s message is clear: “As a 
trilliondollar industry, we need to make the economic argument for 
ourselves, not only the environmental one.”

When Kerry as Biden’s climate tsar evokes a green industrial revolution, 
one thinks of breakthroughs in battery technology and green steel, 
answering the U.N. climate conference’s global challenge. But if the 
energy transition is actually to take root in the United States’ unique 
political economy, it may be better to envision it in rather different 
terms divorced from the climate issue. It could be an agro-industrial 
transformation, offering ultra-cheap electricity from wind and solar as 
a new common denominator of rural and urban America.

Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and 
director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His latest 
book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and 
he is currently working on a history of the climate crisis. Twitter: 
@adam_tooze
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/03/fossil-fuels-downfall-could-be-americas-too/


/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming December 3, 2009*
December 3, 2009: MSNBC host Keith Olbermann calls out the hosts of the 
Fox News Channel program "Fox and Friends" for selectively editing a 
segment of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" to imply that host Jon 
Stewart rejected the evidence of human-caused climate change.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/olbermann-names-fox-frien_n_380473


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