[TheClimate.Vote] February 28, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 28, 2021*/






[keeping paintings dry]
*The Louvre moves its treasures as climate change brings more floods to 
Paris*
by Melissa Godin | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Friday, 26 February 2021
The Paris museum is relocating many artworks not on display to a storage 
facility in northern France designed to stand up to global warming 
impacts...
- -
The problem is not unique to Paris. Italy built flood barriers to 
protect Venice's historic city centre after salty sea water damaged St 
Mark's Basilica, while London's Tate galleries sit on flood-prone sites. [

"We have a lot of museums whose collections will be affected if they are 
not stored properly," said Mechtild Rossler, director of the UNESCO 
World Heritage Centre, which supports landmark buildings recognised by 
the U.N. cultural agency.

By mid-2021, Louvre officials hope 250,000 at-risk paintings, sculptures 
and tapestries - including the Venus de Milo - will be in their new, 
$120 million home, where they will be safe from floods, heatwaves and 
other extreme weather...
- -
The Seine has always been prone to flooding.

During the Great Flood of 1910, the river rose by 8.6m. Roads were 
submerged for two months, the metro flooded, and thousands were 
evacuated, with damage estimated by Louvre officials at $1.9 billion in 
today's currency.

With climate change, Parisians have seen more frequent flooding. Two of 
the worst floods since 1910 have been during the last five years. In 
2016, the river rose 6.1m and in 2018, by 5.8m - slightly less than 
during the floods of 1982 and 1955.

While the 2016 flood did not damage any art, it did force the Louvre to 
quickly shut and move 35,000 works from its basement storerooms to 
higher grounds in 48 hours, costing the museum approximately $1.8 
million in lost revenue.

"The teams at the Louvre were in panic mode," said Hamish Crockett, 
project architect of the centre. "It was a reminder that the need (for 
the centre) was very real."...
- -
Other major museums are taking note.

The British Museum is building storage space for archived artefacts in 
Shinfield, some 40 miles (64 km) west of London.

In the Netherlands, some 600,000 objects from four national collections, 
including the Rijksmuseum, will be housed in a centre in Amersfoort, 50 
km southeast of Amsterdam.

"We are seeing heritage sites disappear due to climate change," Crockett 
said. "This is the new reality."
https://news.trust.org/item/20210226085732-pyja5/



[Gallup polling matters]
FEBRUARY 26, 2021
*The Texas Power Crisis and American Public Opinion*
BY FRANK NEWPORT
The massive power outages and resulting disruptions (and deaths) in 
Texas after a period of extreme cold in mid-February have significant 
implications for the nation as a whole. The high-profile catastrophe 
could also affect U.S. public opinion on several key issues.

*Reconsider the Move to Alternative Energy Sources?*
The Texas disaster quickly led to discussions of "green" energy and the 
implications of shifts from traditional fuel sources to alternatives 
such as wind and solar. Most reviews show that a loss of wind power due 
to the extreme cold in Texas was no more significant than the loss of 
power from traditional sources that furnish the vast majority of power 
in the state. But several Texas officials used the occasion to deflect 
blame for the crisis to the state's use of alternative energy sources. 
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at one point during the crisis, "This shows 
how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of 
America. Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were 
collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into 
a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. ... It just 
shows that fossil fuel is necessary." And this week The Wall Street 
Journal editorialized, "More Green Blackouts Ahead."

Prior to the Texas outages, Americans were quite positive about 
alternative energy sources. As I pointed out in a recent review, 
"Americans are concerned about the quality of the environment and are 
sensitive to the environmental harm done by various energy sources. 
Given this, the significant majority of Americans appear amenable to the 
idea of de-emphasizing fossil fuels, whether through laws that beef up 
fuel efficiency standards or by discouraging the production of heavy 
polluters like coal." And my colleague Justin McCarthy noted in his 2019 
review of Gallup data that "most Americans support the general idea of 
dramatically reducing the country's use of fossil fuels over the next 
two decades as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address 
climate change."

Could these attitudes be changed if Americans read or hear about 
hypotheses that increased reliance on alternative energy made Texas more 
vulnerable to power outages (whatever the reality)? Forthcoming 
research, particularly Gallup's March Environment survey, will help 
answer that question.

It's also possible that the image of the nation's oil and gas industry, 
already in the bottom half of the 25 industries measured in Gallup's 
annual update, will suffer further as a result of the Texas crisis.

*More Concern About Climate Change?*
The extreme weather conditions in Texas, last year's wildfires in 
California and 2012's Hurricane Sandy have all been portrayed as 
examples of the impact of climate change on our weather. As The 
Washington Post recently pointed out, "Some of the complex systems our 
society depends upon for basic necessities and economic growth, such as 
electricity, are unprepared even for the climate extremes of today, let 
alone more severe extremes climate scientists warn are coming." The 
question here is whether the Texas situation will help drive this 
realization home, and thus increase Americans' worry about climate 
change and its impact on earth's human societies.

Before the Texas situation, climate change was a relatively low-salience 
issue for Americans. Despite climate change being labeled an 
"existential threat" by politicians and others, very few Americans name 
it (or any aspect of the environment, for that matter) as the most 
important problem facing the nation (3% in Gallup's February update). 
Still, there is some evident concern when Americans are reminded about 
climate change in survey questions. Gallup's Lydia Saad reported last 
year on a segmentation of the public based on their views toward global 
warming, and concluded, "The largest group, describing 51% of Americans 
today, are what can be termed 'Concerned Believers.' They attribute 
global warming to human actions and take the threat seriously." And Pew 
Research in 2020 reported that a majority of Americans think the 
government is not doing enough to deal with climate change.

Additionally, a 2019 CBS News poll found that large majorities of 
Americans believed climate change contributed "a great deal" or "some" 
to a list of weather extremes. A Pew Research poll in 2019 similarly 
found that significant majorities of Americans at that point already 
said that extreme weather events were examples of the ways in which 
climate change was affecting their local community. Gallup asked 
Americans in 2019 if the temperatures in their local area had been 
colder or warmer than usual, and those who said yes were then asked if 
those temperatures were the result of climate change or normal 
variations. About a third of all Americans both said that the 
temperatures were either warmer or colder than usual and believed those 
changes were due to climate change.

The Texas situation is one in a long list of weather extremes in recent 
years, including floods, tornadoes, droughts, severe thunderstorms, 
winter storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures. At some point, all of 
these types of weather events may begin to increase Americans' 
recognition that climate change is affecting their daily lives.

*Lose Faith in State Governments?*
Another consequence of the Texas situation could be a diminution of the 
public's faith in state governments. Americans' trust in their state 
government has traditionally ranked higher than their trust in the 
legislative and executive branches of the federal government. This is a 
long-standing manifestation of the public opinion verity that things 
closer to home are viewed more positively than things further away. 
Indeed, it was Texas officials' antipathy toward the federal government 
that resulted in the decision decades ago to create the state's own 
power grid system, independent of federal regulation. This "go it alone" 
approach to power distribution obviously did not work well in the recent 
crisis.

A majority of Americans (54%) in Gallup's September Governance poll said 
that the federal government should do more to address the nation's 
problems. This is the highest such percentage since Gallup began asking 
the question in 1992 (this measure came in the middle of the COVID-19 
pandemic, which may have affected the responses). These data suggest the 
public may be more likely now than in the past to agree that the federal 
government has a legitimate role to play in providing for the public's 
basic infrastructure needs. The power grid situation and its regulation 
are thus playing out as the latest chapter in the historical conflict 
over exactly what role the federal government should have in Americans' 
lives, one of the critical issues we have faced as a nation since it was 
founded. The whole situation also raises questions about competence and 
the ability of government at any level to maintain the basic systems the 
nation needs to continue operating. If states lose credibility in the 
eyes of the public, the federal government may increasingly be seen as 
the entity best situated to address pressing energy concerns.

*Impact on the 2024 Presidential Race?*
One potential consequence of the Texas power situation is a possible 
ripple effect on the national political scene. The politician most in 
the spotlight is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who ran for the GOP presidential 
nomination in 2016 and by most accounts will be running again in 2024. 
Cruz got massive media attention when he left Texas for a vacation in 
Cancun in the middle of February's power outages, leaving his fellow 
Texans suffering back at home. Cruz quickly returned to Houston, did the 
usual mea culpas and attempted to atone for his sins by passing out 
bottled water at Houston-area aid stations. How all of this will affect 
his 2024 presidential bid is a major unknown. Clearly, if nothing else, 
this latest incident has helped raise Cruz's name identification 
nationwide and among the Republican base he needs to win the party 
nomination. (It used to be said that all publicity is good publicity as 
long as they spell the name right.) At this point, national horse race 
polls among Republicans put Cruz nowhere near front-runner status for 
the 2024 GOP nomination. But that means little; Jimmy Carter in 1973 and 
Barack Obama in 2005 were also nowhere near front-runner status for 
their party's nomination. Cruz's behavior in February 2021 at the least 
will likely provide his Republican opponents with campaign fodder as the 
national presidential campaign heats up in 2023.

*Bottom Line*
Prior to the Texas crisis, energy was not a top-of-mind concern for 
Americans. Few mentioned it as the nation's top priority, and only 28% 
of Americans in our latest update said they worried a great deal about 
the availability and affordability of energy, much lower than at 
previous times over the past two decades. It is likely respondents were 
thinking about gas for their cars rather than electricity in their homes 
in answering that question, but the Texas crisis may accelerate a focus 
on the nation's power grid when Americans contemplate the nation's 
energy situation. This will be particularly true if electric cars 
displace gas-powered autos in ever-increasing numbers, further 
increasing reliance on the power grid for basic transportation.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is a Gallup senior scientist
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/330389/texas-power-crisis-american-public-opinion.aspx



[political opinion about the future]
FEBRUARY 26, 2021
*Politics with Amy Walter: The Future of American Politics*

Chryl Laird, assistant professor of government and legal studies at 
Bowdoin College,
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444253/pri-the-takeaway
Play it starting about 48:15




[Snow falls, melts, gravity tugs]
*As Deaths Surge, Scientists Study the Link Between Climate Change and 
Avalanches*
There are clues globally that the avalanche threat is escalating in some 
regions as the planet warms, triggered by greater temperature swings and 
more intense rain and snow storms.
By Bob Berwyn
February 23, 2021
- -
Explosively Unleashing Frozen Climate Energy
Another way of looking at avalanches is to think of them as frozen 
packets of energy from different parts of the climate system that are 
all being intensified by global warming—tropical heat, moist atmospheric 
rivers and Arctic winds all stored in the form of snow on a 
mountainside. Avalanches often start with a boom or a crack, as all that 
energy suddenly releases kinetically. And the more explosives you pack 
into a bomb, the bigger the bang.

It’s almost impossible to say any one particular avalanche was caused by 
global warming, but it’s also not accurate to say that global warming is 
not a factor, since all of today’s weather is happening in a climate 
that’s already been fundamentally changed by global warming...
- -
Many avalanches simply release under the pull of gravity or a slight 
surface perturbation, like the temperature increase when clouds lift 
over a steep snow-covered slope. By its nature, snow is one of the 
substances most sensitive to climate, so it stands to reason that global 
warming will affect avalanches, said Perry Bartelt, a researcher with 
the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in 
Davos.

“A 1 to 2 degree Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in 
temperature will change the dynamics of how an avalanche will flow,” he 
said, explaining that the varied and complex effects are under scrutiny 
at a recently-founded research center for climate and extremes in 
Switzerland. “We want to know what this means for us and for 
avalanches,” he said.

It’s hard enough to find a global warming signal on something as big and 
devastating as hurricanes, which kill hundreds every year, and looking 
for it in avalanches is like trying to find a lost ski pole in the Vail 
parking lot on a busy Saturday. So for now, it’s still impossible to say 
exactly how global warming will affect avalanche hazards, Bartelt said.

What We Do Know About Avalanches and Climate Change
There are clues all over the world that avalanche patterns are changing 
on our warming planet, along with changes to other related extremes, 
including temperature swings and more intense rainstorms and snowstorms.

A study published in early February recreated a record of avalanches in 
northwestern Montana going back to the 1600s by looking at tree rings. 
The true long-term picture is partly skewed because not that many old 
trees survive. But the study’s findings showed the greatest number of 
avalanche scars since the 1980s, and especially since 2000...
- -
“This has to do with climate change,” he said. “It gets cold, it gets 
very warm, then very cold again. Thermal forcing is changing the 
property of the snowpack and that changes expectations.” ...
- -
Urban Avalanche Threat in Alaska
Avalanches also constitute an active threat in Juneau, Alaska, where 
entire neighborhoods, as well as the important subarctic harbor, are 
vulnerable, said snow and avalanche scientist Gabriel Wolken, manager of 
the Climate & Cryosphere Hazards Program with the Alaska Department of 
Natural Resources.

Projected warming, increased precipitation intensity and rain-on-snow 
events “could significantly impact the extent, behavior, and 
predictability of snow avalanches … which are the most deadly natural 
hazard in the state,” he said. “As climate warming continues, there is 
an expectation of an increase in Alaska’s vulnerability to avalanche 
hazards.”

Juneau has the highest avalanche danger of any urban area in North 
America, with some existing neighborhoods at the base of the nearby 
mountains threatened by more than a dozen existing slide paths off Mt. 
Juneau and Mt. Gastineau, and new development sprawling into potential 
new danger zones from stronger avalanches fueled by global warming...
- -
Rosemary Randall, a psychologist in the United Kingdom researching 
climate anxiety, said it’s possible that the Covid lockdowns have 
exacerbated other mental and emotional stress that can lead to riskier 
behavior, including lack of sleep, and work or home demands.

But she said people suffering from depression related to Covid-19 are 
not the most likely “to see skiing as a solution to their difficult 
feelings. “Anxious and depressed people tend to stay home. Risk is 
usually the last thing they seek out.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23022021/avalanche-climate-change-coronavirus/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 28, 2017 *

The Los Angeles Times editorial page observes:

“The risk of climate change from global warming has long since moved 
from abstract theory into reality, even if the ostriches surrounding 
President Trump won’t see it. Recently appointed Environmental 
Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is joined at the wallet to 
the industry, as a trove of recently released emails from his work as 
Oklahoma attorney general confirms, so don’t expect much from him. 
Conservative members of Congress also buy into the nonsense — as do 
Trump and Pruitt — that human activity has little to do with rising 
global temperatures, more severe weather patterns, stressed flora and 
fauna and what scientists believe is a looming mass extinction that is 
unfolding at a much faster pace than the five previously identified mass 
extinctions in history. In terms of Earth’s evolution, that is a split 
second.

“But, oh, the jobs! We need the jobs! And the cheap fuel! The adage of 
missing the forest for the trees comes to mind. The overwhelming 
consensus by scientists is that the world needs to move away from fossil 
fuels and toward renewable sources such as wind and solar. In the 
meantime, we need to be even more aggressive, not less, in limiting the 
burning or release of methane and other harmful emissions.

“To that end, the Obama administration regulations were a step in the 
right direction. Which brings Newton’s Third Law of Physics into play: 
For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Earlier this 
month, the Republican-led House of Representatives invoked the 
Congressional Review Act to kill the Obama regulations governing wells 
on federal land, and the bill is now before the Senate, with a vote 
possible this week.

“The Senate should refuse to join the House in passing this 
irresponsible bill. The methane regulations, which are to be phased in, 
are good, sensible policy.  The federal Bureau of Land Management 
estimated that between 2009 and 2015, the oil and gas industry wasted, 
through emissions or flaring, 462 billion cubic feet of methane — enough 
to supply natural gas for 6.2 million households for a year — from wells 
in public and tribal lands. Not only was the gas lost, the unburned 
methane went directly into the atmosphere. And taxpayers missed out on 
$23 million a year in royalties that would have been due had the methane 
been captured and sold.

“Fortunately, the EPA rules governing non-federal land wells are less 
likely to be rescinded. The rules were adopted long enough ago that they 
are no longer subject to the Congressional Review Act, which means that 
to roll them back, the Trump administration would have to go through a 
lengthy regulatory review process. Unfortunately, those rules only cover 
future wells, not existing ones. (The federal land rules cover both.) 
Instead of attacking the federal land rules, Congress should extend the 
same regulations to the existing wells on non-federal land. But don’t 
hold your breath.

“The world should be weaning itself from fossil fuels as quickly as 
possible. That Trump and the Republican Congress disagree is not only 
disappointing, but dangerous.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-methane-obama-congress-20170227-story.html 



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