[TheClimate.Vote] January 31, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Jan 31 07:46:47 EST 2021
/*January 31, 2021*/
[academic research paper]
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
*The Greta Thunberg Effect: Familiarity with Greta Thunberg predicts
intentions to engage in climate activism in the United States*
Leiserowitz, et al
First published: 25 January 2021 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12737
Abstract
Despite Greta Thunberg's popularity, research has yet to investigate her
impact on the public's willingness to take collective action on climate
change. Using cross‐sectional data from a nationally representative
survey of U.S. adults (N = 1,303), we investigate the “Greta Thunberg
Effect,” or whether exposure to Greta Thunberg predicts collective
efficacy and intentions to engage in collective action. We find that
those who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have higher intentions
of taking collective actions to reduce global warming and that stronger
collective efficacy beliefs mediate this relationship. This association
between familiarity with Greta Thunberg, collective efficacy beliefs,
and collective action intentions is present even after accounting for
respondents’ overall support for climate activism. Moderated mediation
models testing age and political ideology as moderators of the “Greta
Thunberg Effect” indicate that although the indirect effect of
familiarity with Greta Thunberg via collective efficacy is present
across all age‐groups, and across the political spectrum, it may be
stronger among those who identify as more liberal (than conservative).
Our findings suggest that young public figures like Greta Thunberg may
motivate collective action across the U.S. public, but their effect may
be stronger among those with a shared political ideology. Implications
for future research and for broadening climate activists’ appeals across
the political spectrum are discussed.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12737
[Hot shooters - personal images assembled into dramatic videos of
Wildfire Hotshots fire-season 2020]
*Fire crews and organizations produce videos summarizing their
activities in 2020; Volume 2*
Bill Gabbert - January 28, 2021
Mill Creek Hotshots, Idaho City Hotshots, Baker River Hotshots, &
Feather River Hotshots
Fire crews and organizations have produced some excellent videos showing
the highlights of their fire activities in 2020. We like to post them
each year, and we used to be able to do it with one article, but so far
this year we have found 28 — too many for one article. So this year we
will do it intermittently over a two-week period.
Here is Volume 2
*Mill Creek Hotshots | 2020 Fire Season*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6dMFe9TcK0&feature=emb_logo
- -
*IDAHO CITY HOTSHOTS 2020*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbwOEoEh8K4&feature=emb_logo
- -
*Baker River Hotshots 2020 Fire Season*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHgt1JuJCZk&feature=emb_logo
- -
*IDAHO CITY HOTSHOTS 2020*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm-s9aTOpD4&feature=emb_logo
https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/01/28/fire-crews-and-organizations-produce-videos-summarizing-their-activities-in-2020-volume-2/
[destabilization of climates]
*Forecast: Wild Weather in a Warming World*
The polar vortex is experiencing an unusually long disturbance this year
because of a “sudden stratospheric warming.” Bundle up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/climate/polar-vortex-weather-climate-change.html
- -
[warming oceans slowing currents]
*https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/currents/orthographic=-49.06,40.50,1066/loc=-69.142,30.741*
[ice melts, waters rise ]
*Global Ice Loss on Pace to Drive Worst-Case Sea Level Rise*
A new study combines ice melt data from all sources to reaffirm one of
the most serious climate change threats.
By Bob Berwyn
January 25, 2021
From the polar caps to the glaciers of Europe, Asia and South America,
global warming is melting the planet’s ice faster than ever and speeding
the inundation of the world’s coastlines.
New research shows the annual melt rate grew from 0.8 trillion tons in
the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons by 2017, and has accelerated most in the
places with the most ice—the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves and sheets.
Those massive systems of land and sea-based ice are melting as fast as
the worst-case climate scenarios in major global climate reports, said
Thomas Slater, a co-author of the new study in The Cryosphere that
measured the meltdown from 1994 to 2017, which covers a timespan when
every decade was warmer than the previous one and also includes the 20
warmest years on record.
It’s one of the first studies to gather estimates for all the planet’s
ice, except permafrost. Previous research has typically focused on
single elements of the cryosphere, like glaciers, sea ice or ice
shelves, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish
Meteorological Institute, who was not involved in the new study.
Slater said that evaluating the data didn’t numb him to the staggering
amount of ice that melted during the study period, describing it as a
mountain towering higher than Mount Everest and covering
Manhattan—enough to raise global sea level 1.4 inches in 23 years.
“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming
scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” he
said. “Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on
coastal communities this century.”
Sea level has gone up about eight or nine inches since 1880. It’s likely
to rise at least 12 inches, and could rise by as much as 8.2 feet by
2100, according to recent estimates by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change estimates a rise of between two and three feet by 2100 if global
warming is kept well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit),
or three to five feet if temperatures rise past that.
*Sea Level Rise is a Matter of Life and Death*
Getting the projections right is critical because, by some estimates,
every centimeter of sea level rise threatens to displace about 1 million
people from low-lying towns and croplands. For cities near sea level,
knowing whether the ocean will rise two feet or five feet is literally a
billion dollar question, and in worse case scenarios, a matter of
survival and dislocation.
Mottram said the new findings don’t necessarily mean that global sea
level will continue to track the most dire predictions because there are
other factors involved, mainly the expansion of the oceans as they warm,
which until recently accounted for most of the sea level rise that’s
been measured.
Various studies show an “acceleration in sea level rise the last five
years or so, from about 1.2 inches per decade, to a rate of 1.9 inches
per decade,” she said. “We know it does vary a lot from year to year and
things like El Niño, or if Greenland has a warm summer, can have an
effect. But the deeper ocean is also getting warmer and that continues
to add thermal expansion too. So sea level rise will continue for
centuries.”
Analyzing glacial and polar ice melt at the same time helps distinguish
how much of the melting is caused by atmospheric warming compared to
ocean heat. The atmosphere reacts relatively quickly to changes in its
concentrations of greenhouse gases, which warm the Earth, and other
pollutants that can reflect heat away from the planet. Oceans respond
much more slowly to the drivers of global warming. Understanding those
dynamics sharpens projections of sea level rise, he said.
University of Liége ice researcher Xavier Fettweis, who was not involved
in the research, said the findings help reduce the uncertainties around
ice melt and sea level rise by adding new information from satellites to
update the datasets used in previous studies.
It covers a key period for the planet’s climate because the big surge in
polar ice melting started during the 1990s, “likely because we have
exceeded the temperature threshold of 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees
Fahrenheit) over large areas. The cryosphere is starting to change as
soon as this temperature threshold is reached,” he said. Climate models
looking back to 1950 robustly show there was “no significant and durable
change in melt,” before the 1990s.
The Numbers are Huge and Scary
However you measure it, the global ice loss numbers add up to trouble,
said glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre, who was not involved with the study.
The numbers are “becoming so huge and so astronomical, what more do we
need to act?” she asked. “We need to understand the human cost and the
economic cost of every ton of ice. I think if we knew the true cost of
every ton of ice that’s lost, if people knew this, we’d stop immediately.”
Sevestre worries that policymakers are seeing the accelerating melting
of the world’s ice as an opportunity rather than a threat.
“Last week I had a chance to speak to the French decision-makers, and
they see the Arctic as a big pie they want to get a piece of, the
fisheries and energy,” she said. “They believe it’s going to be an
Eldorado for fisheries, but as we lose sea ice and the Arctic Ocean
becomes more acidic, that’s definitely not going to happen.”
In her presentation to the decision-makers, she emphasized that a
worst-case sea level rise means that “we’re going to lose the main
French harbor, and we’re going to lose the cold water from glaciers that
we need to cool our nuclear power plants.”
“There have been so many studies about ice loss and sea level rise that
it’s easy to get numbed by the numbers,” she said. “But, of course, they
should never feel normal, and the fact that climate change is
accelerating should never feel normal.”
The new research is another warning that warming beyond 1.5 degrees
Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) will push the world’s ice past a
tipping point, leading to irreversible melting and destabilization of
ice sheets, she said.
“We should act as quickly as we can to prevent going beyond these
thresholds,” Sevestre said. “We’re in uncharted territory. We can’t
afford to lose one more ton of ice. We don’t have any other options.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012021/global-ice-loss-sea-level-rise/
[clips, the moving hand writes, and makes anxiety into action, grief
into gratitude]
*The Climate Journal Project Kickstarter*
Jan 20, 2021
Climate Journal
The Climate Journal Project is launching a project on Kickstarter to
create our first journal book!
Visit our website: https://www.theclimatejournalproject.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbh0OmuzrWM&feature=youtu.be
[dare should not scare - clips from a real story]
*The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens
If You Try.*
A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to
the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s
no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to
shrink his carbon footprint.
by Elizabeth Weil - Jan. 25, 2021
Peter Kalmus, out of his mind, stumbled back toward the car. It was all
happening. All the stuff he’d been trying to get others to see, and
failing to get others to see — it was all here. The day before, when his
family started their Labor Day backpacking trip along the oak-lined dry
creek bed in Romero Canyon, in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, the
temperature had been 105 degrees. Now it was 110 degrees, and under his
backpack, his “large mammalian self,” as Peter called his body, was more
than just overheating. He was melting down. Everything felt wrong. His
brain felt wrong and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on
the planet felt wrong, off-kilter, in the wrong place.
Nearing the trailhead, Peter’s mind death-spiralled: What’s next summer
going to bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed
that the temperature would only rise per decade by a few tenths of a
degree Celsius. But those tenths would add up and the extreme
temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s big mammal body
could handle 100 degrees, sort of, 110 drove him crazy. That was just
not a friendly climate for a human. 110 degrees was hostile, an alien
planet.
Lizards fried, right there on the rocks. Elsewhere, songbirds fell out
of the sky. There was more human conflict, just as the researchers
promised. Not outright violence, not here, not yet. But Peter’s kids
were pissed and his wife was pissed and the salience that he’d so
desperately wanted others to feel — “salience” being the term of choice
in the climate community for the gut-level understanding that climate
change isn’t going to be a problem in the future, it is a crisis now —
that salience was here. The full catastrophe was here (both in the
planetary and the Zorba the Greek sense: “Wife. Children. House.
Everything. The full catastrophe”). To cool down, Peter, a climate
scientist who studied coral reefs, had stood in a stream for an hour,
like a man might stand at a morgue waiting to identify a loved one’s
body, irritated by his powerlessness, massively depressed. He found no
thrill in the fact that he’d been right...
- -
“WE NEVER EVEN TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE! DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT CLIMATE
CHANGE?” he said. This did not go well.
She threw a laundry basket. “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME,” she
shouted. “Our entire lives are about climate change.”
There it was, that gap we build around knowing and integrating, to
protect our own lives and minds. Yet after the fight, after finally
saying aloud what he’d been thinking for almost 15 years, Peter felt
better. Not because anything was different. Nothing was different. The
situation remained unshakably, cosmically wrong. The only reason to care
about insurance, books, paintings, the house, was if you believed that
there would be a stable planet on which to enjoy those things in 20 or
40 or 80 years. If you believe there’d be a “planet with seasons, where
you can grow food and have water, and you can go outside without dying
from heatstroke,” Peter said. “I don’t have that anymore, that sense of
stability.”
But he also knew, deep down, that Sharon could not, and should not, give
that up. She was a more anxious person than he was. They both knew that.
“For me to stay sane, there’s only so much I can take,” Sharon said.
Earlier on the night of their big fight they’d watched “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” as they did each Tuesday. Sharon often thought about the main
character, June. “You have to moderate how you think. You have to think
in little chunks, so you can endure, just like June does,” she told me.
“You have to make sacrifices so you can survive. If you can survive to
fight another day, then maybe the right opportunity will present itself.
You can’t kill yourself well, you can. But that’s not the option I want
to take.”
Maeby is now gone. Peter drives an electric car. The composting toilet
remains outside, though Peter admits, “The other three family members
are not interested in contributing at all.” Peter’s current project is
making climate ads. Is this how he can tell the story of what is
happening to the world in a way that will make people not just hear and
retreat but act? He thinks about this all the time. How do you describe
an intolerable problem in a way that listeners — even you, dear reader —
will truly let in?
All through October and November, the Bobcat fire continued to burn. It
grew to 115,000 acres. Its 300-foot-high flames licked up against Mount
Wilson Observatory, where scientists first proved the existence of a
universe outside the Milky Way. The fire continued to burn well into
December, when UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged, with
middling effect, the nations of the world to declare a climate
emergency. So far, 38 have done so. The United States is not one of
them. In January, a team of 19 climate scientists published a paper,
“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” that
said, “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms
— including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp
for even well-informed experts.” The language of this sentence could not
be more dire. It makes the mind go numb.
So how, with our limited human minds, do we attend enough to make real
progress? How do we not flinch and look away? The truth of what is
happening shakes the foundations of our sense of self. It asserts a
distorting gravity, bending our priorities and warping our whole lives.
The overt denialists are easy villains, the monsters who look like
monsters. But the rest of us, much of the time, wear pretty green masks
over our self-interest and denial, and then go about our days. Then each
morning we wake to a new headline like: “The planet is dying faster than
we thought.”
While I was trying (and failing) to process it all, Peter called to make
sure I understood the importance of a comment he’d made: He’s no longer
embarrassed to tell people he would die to keep the planet from
overheating. He’s left behind the solace of denial. He’s well aware of
the cost. “What a luxury to feel that the ground we walk on and this
planet that is rotating around the sun is in some sense OK.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try
Elizabeth Weil is a reporter at ProPublica.
[innovation]
*Technological Breakthrough Allows Seamless Conversion of Ammonia to
Green Hydrogen*
By NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - JANUARY 28, 2021
Northwestern University researchers have developed a highly effective,
environmentally friendly method for converting ammonia into hydrogen.
Outlined in a recent publication in the journal Joule, the new technique
is a major step forward for enabling a zero-pollution, hydrogen-fueled
economy.
The idea of using ammonia as a carrier for hydrogen delivery has gained
traction in recent years because ammonia is much easier to liquify than
hydrogen and is therefore much easier to store and transport.
Northwestern’s technological breakthrough overcomes several existing
barriers to the production of clean hydrogen from ammonia...
- -
Haile predicts that the new technology could be especially
transformative in the transportation sector. In 2018, the movement of
people and goods by cars, trucks, trains, ships, airplanes and other
vehicles accounted for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. —
more than any other economic sector, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency.
“Battery-powered vehicles are great, but there’s certainly a question of
range and material supply,” Haile said. “Converting ammonia to hydrogen
on-site and in a distributed way would allow you to drive into a fueling
station and get pressurized hydrogen for your car. There’s also a
growing interest for hydrogen fuel cells for the aviation industry
because batteries are so heavy.”
Haile and her team have made major advances in the area of fuel cells
over the years. As a next step in their work, they are exploring new
methods to produce ammonia in an environmentally friendly way.
Reference: “Solid Acid Electrochemical Cell for the Production of
Hydrogen from Ammonia” by Dae-Kwang Lim, Austin B. Plymill, Haemin Paik,
Xin Qian, Strahinja Zecevic, Calum R.I. Chisholm and Sossina M. Haile, 3
November 2020, Joule.
DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2020.10.006
https://scitechdaily.com/technological-breakthrough-allows-seamless-conversion-of-ammonia-to-green-hydrogen/
[brief video opinion - how do we transition?]
*Saul Griffith on Kitchen Table Climate Issues*
Jan 30, 2021
greenmanbucket
There are a limited number of gadgets and appliances in your life that
are responsible for carbon pollution.
Most people replace these items about once every 10 years.
In the next 15-20 years, we're going to have to replace them all with
equivalents that do not pollute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDg_lxaE4jw
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - January 31, 1989 *
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"Secretary of State James A. Baker III, emphasizing the Bush
Administration's concern about global environmental problems, said
Monday that the nations of the world cannot wait for solid
scientific confirmation of global warming before taking action.
"In the first remarks on global environmental issues by a senior
Bush Administration official since the inauguration, Baker said that
the United States and the world must 'focus immediately' on energy
conservation, reforestation and reductions in harmful chemical
emissions.
"'We can probably not afford to wait until all the uncertainties
have been resolved before we do act. Time will not make the problem
go away,' Baker told delegates from more than 40 nations to the
newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-31/news/mn-1251_1_global-warming
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/science/joint-effort-urged-to-guard-climate.html
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