[TheClimate.Vote] January 8, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*January 8, 2021*/

[Data into information]
*Research confirms increase in river flooding and droughts in U.S., Canada*
JANUARY 7, 2021
The number of "extreme streamflow" events observed in river systems have 
increased significantly across the United States and Canada over the 
last century, according to a study from Dartmouth College.
In regions where water runoff from snowmelt is a main contributor to 
river streamflow, the study found a rise in extreme events, such as 
flooding.

In drought-prone regions in the western and southeastern U.S., the study 
found that the frequency of extreme low-flow events has also become more 
common, particularly during summer and fall.

The research, published in Science Advances, analyzed records dating 
back to 1910 to confirm the effects of recent changes in precipitation 
levels on river systems.

"Floods and droughts are extremely expensive and often life-threatening 
events," said Evan Dethier, a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth and 
the lead author of the paper. "It's really important that we have good 
estimates of how likely extreme events are to occur and whether that 
likelihood is changing."

Although changes in precipitation and extreme streamflows have been 
observed in the past, there has been no research consensus on whether 
droughts and floods have actually increased in frequency.

Past research efforts have mostly focused on annual peak flows, 
potentially missing important seasonal changes to extreme low-flow 
events that can be pulled from daily streamflow records. Those efforts 
have also been hampered by the mixing of data from regions that have 
different precipitation patterns and natural seasonal cycles.

According to the research paper: The results demonstrate that "increases 
in the frequency of both high- and low-flow extreme streamflow events 
are, in fact, widespread."...
"Previous attempts to analyze regional pattern in streamflow were 
usually based on fixed geographical regions that were largely 
unsuccessful," said Carl Renshaw, a professor of earth sciences at 
Dartmouth. "The novel clustering approach used in this research defines 
regions based on the hydrology—not geographical or political 
boundaries—to better reveal the significant shifts occurring for both 
high and low streamflows."

The Dartmouth study combined 541 rivers in the U.S. and Canada into 15 
hydrological regions organized by seasonal streamflow characteristics, 
such as whether streams flood due to tropical storms or rain falling on 
melting snow. This grouping allowed for more sensitive detection of 
trends in extreme flow events on both an annual and seasonal basis.

Out of the 15 "hydro-regions" created, 12 had enough rivers to be 
analyzed in the study. The rivers studied were judged to be minimally 
affected by human activity and included extensive records that span 60 
or more years.

"The shifts toward more extreme events are especially important given 
the age of our dams, bridges, and roads. The changes to river flows that 
we found are important for those who manage or depend on this type of 
infrastructure," said Dethier.

According to the study, in the regions where streamflow changes were 
found to be statistically significant, floods and droughts have, on 
average, doubled in frequency relative to the period of 1950 to 1969.

Significant changes in the frequency of floods were found to be most 
common in the Canadian and northern U.S. regions where annual peak flows 
are consistently associated with spring snowmelt runoff.

The increase in flooding has come despite reduction in snowpack caused 
by warming winter temperatures. The research team believes that the 
increases in extreme precipitation during the high-flow season may make 
up for the reduction in snowpack storage.

Changes in drought and extreme low-flow frequency were found to be more 
variable.

While floods were found to be more localized, droughts were found to be 
"generally reflective of large-scale climatic forcing" and more likely 
to be widespread across a region.
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-river-droughts-canada.html



[Opinion Gizmodo]
*The Climate Crisis Will Be Steroids for Fascism*
Brian Kahn - Jan 7, 2021
The Capitol has a police force with a $500 million budget, and yet it 
failed at its one job on Wednesday. Members of Congress, among the most 
protected people on the planet, were forced to hide in undisclosed 
locations as violent extremists overran the Capitol.

The anti-democratic message Wednesday’s insurrection sent is chilling. 
Far-right mobs incited by the president over baseless conspiracy 
theories and a commitment to white nationalism breached one of the most 
secure places in the U.S. and disrupted a basic democratic process of 
certifying election results. But what it portends for both the future of 
the Republican Party and its response to the climate crisis is even more 
chilling.

The ingredients for the toxic soup that stirred extremists to take on 
one of the branches of government (as well as numerous coordinated 
attacks at the state level) will only grow more plentiful and powerful 
as the climate crisis worsens. If elected officials aren’t ready to take 
a clear-eyed look at the damage done on Wednesday and what awaits us in 
the coming hotter decades, we’ll face even more extreme assaults on 
democracy and the most vulnerable among us.

The violent assault on the Capitol followed a pattern increasingly 
familiar in the Trump era, though it’s been an undercurrent in American 
society for much longer. Blatant lies about the election being rigged 
were spread over social media and used as cover to convene in 
Washington, DC, and storm the Capitol. Extremists clashed with police, 
met minimal resistance outside, and were allowed to mill about the 
building for hours, trashing offices and posing in the Senate for 
Parler-worthy photos.

Then they were allowed to politely file out of the building and only a 
few dozen were arrested. That number may rise, but the initial response 
pales in comparison to how Black Lives Matter protesters were treated 
this summer. Not to mention climate-related protesters like Fire Drill 
Fridays where police created a huge perimeter to cordon off press and 
onlookers and brought in buses to process protesters who were arrested.
Wednesday’s insurrection and law enforcement’s frail response are eerily 
similar to what happened this summer when right-wing militias spread 
conspiracies about wildfires in Oregon. In that case, extremists sowed 
confusion to assert control over regions engulfed in smoke, setting up 
armed checkpoints and threatening journalists. Law enforcement turned a 
blind eye, and in the case of one sheriff, even briefed extremists. At 
the time, experts told me it was in part an attempt by far-right figures 
to see what they could get away with.

The lesson in both cases is that the pushed boundaries didn’t snap back. 
The permissive nature of law enforcement and people in power—more than 
120 Republican representatives and senators voted to decertify state 
election results based on lies after the mob invaded the Capitol 
Building—opens the door to further violent probing.

Now, I’m a firm believer that an assault on democracy or unlawful 
behavior during a climate-fueled disaster alone should be reason to hold 
people to account. But looking at the two events in tandem and seeing 
the climate future that awaits us is what really raises my alarm 
bells—and should raise those of the people in power. Pretending this 
will pass or offering broad platitudes that “we are better than this” 
will ensure more terror.

Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms, more 
intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an assault on 
the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing mindset of small 
government have left the country with fewer resources to deal with the 
fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show, the far-right will be there to 
try to fill the power void. Those fires occurred in a predominantly 
white region.

There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran 
through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will 
happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, 
brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve 
seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom 
he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it 
in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina 
hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: 
ecofascism.

After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now 
expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate 
instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists 
literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When 
climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses—communities 
that hate groups already scapegoat—the results will be catastrophic.

It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top 
Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and hate. 
The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial 
has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures deny the climate 
crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the end of the day, their 
goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build and consolidate power.

Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of 
addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited 
extremists is a good place to start. Emily Atkin of Heated noted on 
Twitter in the wake of the Georgia special election that gave Democrats 
the Senate that democracy reform is climate policy, and I have to agree. 
Washington, DC, statehood, getting corrosive money out of politics, and 
expelling seditionists are all good places to start. A strong federal 
response to climate change that both draws down emissions and protects 
people from the impacts already in the pipeline is also crucial. Decades 
of weakening the federal government and proselytizing about the power of 
the individual has left millions exposed to calamity. Rebuilding the 
federal response to climate change, and ensuring it also engages 
everyone in moving the country forward through good-paying jobs and a 
just transition for frontline and fossil fuel communities, are essential 
to beating hate groups into the background.

None of this will make the fascism on full display disappear overnight. 
But doing nothing or insisting we turn the page opens the door to 
something much worse.
Brian Kahn - Managing editor, Earther
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-climate-crisis-will-be-steroids-for-fascism-1846009446


[Wired]
*Climate Change Is Turning Cities Into Ovens*
A new model estimates that by 2100, cities across the world could warm 
as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius. It’s a deadly consequence of the “heat 
island” effect.
MATT SIMON - 1.07.2021
- -
Cities are but a blip. Researchers are more interested in the dynamics 
of things like the ocean, ice, and air currents. “We're closing this 
kind of gap,” says Lei Zhao, a climate scientist at the University of 
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lead author on a recent paper published 
in Nature Climate Change describing the modeling. “We provide 
urban-specific projections for the future.”...
His team’s model suggests that hotter cities could be catastrophic for 
urban public health, which is already suffering from the effects of 
increasing heat. Between 2000 and 2016, according to the World Health 
Organization, the number of people exposed to heat waves jumped by 125 
million, and extreme heat claimed more than 166,000 lives between 1998 
and 2017. And while at the moment half the world’s population lives in 
urban areas, that proportion is expected to rise to 70 percent by 2050, 
according to the authors of this new paper. People in search of economic 
opportunity are unknowingly rushing into peril.

“When I read these papers, I just don't know what's wrong with humanity, 
to be honest with you. Because this is like the same song being sung by 
different people,” says climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University 
of Hawaii at Manoa, who wasn’t involved in the work. “Come on, man! When 
are we going to get serious about this problem? This is another person 
ringing the bell. We just for some reason refuse to hear this thing.”

To calculate how much city temperatures might rise, Zhao and his 
colleagues from a number of institutions, including Princeton University 
and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, built a statistical model for 
the climate of urban regions, focusing on changing temperatures and 
humidities. These two factors are the conspiring menaces of extreme 
heat: Our bodies respond to high temperatures by perspiring, which is 
more fancily known as evaporative cooling. But humidity makes this 
process less efficient, because the more moist the air is, the less 
readily it accepts evaporating sweat from our bodies. That’s why humid 
heat feels so much more uncomfortable than dry heat.

Heat and humidity are not only uncomfortable; they can be dangerous. 
Mora has identified 27 different ways heat can kill a person. When your 
body detects that it’s overheating, it redirects blood from the organs 
at your core to your skin, thus dissipating more heat into the air 
around you. (This is why your skin turns red when you’re hot.) In 
extreme heat, this can spiral out of control, resulting in ischemia, or 
the critically low flow of blood to the organs. This can damage crucial 
organs like the brain or heart. In addition, a high body temperature can 
cause cell death, known as heat cytotoxity. Humidity compounds the risk 
of overheating and organ failure, since you can’t sweat as efficiently 
to cool down.
- -
To model how these two forces might affect cities, Zhao and his team 
turned their statistical model into an “emulator,” which mimics complex 
climate models, but focuses on urban areas. They could then apply the 
emulator to results from over two dozen global climate models, assuming 
either intermediate or high emission levels going forward, to translate 
coarse climate model outputs to the city level. When they assumed an 
intermediate level of emissions, they found that, on average, the 
planet’s urban regions could warm 1.9 degrees C over the next 80 years; 
when they assumed a high level, the figure became an astonishing 4.4 
degrees C...
https://www.wired.com/story/climate-change-is-turning-cities-into-ovens/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 8, 2003 *
Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) introduce the 
bipartisan Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, which would establish a 
federal cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (The 
bill would be defeated in the Senate in October 2003.)...

    Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of
    the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the causes of
    global warming were still open to question. He indicated that he had
    a fundamental difference with the McCain-Lieberman approach by
    noting that the Congressional Budget Office had found that
    cap-and-trade programs amounted to ''an energy tax on consumers.''

    Many people at the hearing rejected the idea that the White House
    was doing something serious about global warming and criticized the
    administration for saying it needed to do more research.

    Mr. Lieberman, the first witness, said the administration's approach
    would ''allow greenhouse-gas emissions to keep increasing
    indefinitely, presenting this country and the world with a bigger
    and bigger environmental crisis to tackle down the road,'' hurting
    the economy and America's stature in the world.

    Of his bill, he said, ''we do less than is explicitly called for
    under the Kyoto agreement, but we sure do a lot more than nothing.''

    Speaking for the administration at the hearing was James R. Mahoney,
    assistant commerce secretary and deputy administrator of the
    National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    Dr. Mahoney said, ''We do have evidence of global change,'' but he
    added, ''There are substantial uncertainties about causes, and
    because of that uncertainty about causes, there's also substantial
    uncertainty about mitigation methods that might be effective.''...

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/us/politics-economy-environment-mccain-lieberman-offer-bill-require-cuts-gases.html 


http://www.edf.org/news/environmental-defense-praises-new-mccain-lieberman-climate-bill 


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