[✔️] July 6, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Jul 6 11:29:57 EDT 2021

/*July 6, 2021*/

[Bookmark these sites]
*Wildland Fire Open Data*
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has initiated this project 
through the nationally used NIFC ArcGIS Online Site. The purpose is to 
better share maps and data related to wildland fire activities across 
the country with all agencies and persons interested in such data.
https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/

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[ video of changes https://youtu.be/yMRktjA8jTY ]
*National Interagency Fire Center - Open Data Site Introduction - 
Updated June 23rd, 2021*
Jun 23, 2021
NIFC FireAviation
The National Interagency Fire Center Open Data site is designed to share 
wildland fire geospatial information with the public. Data can be used 
as services or downloaded and used in mapping applications of your 
choice. The Open Data site can be found at this link: 
http://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/
https://youtu.be/yMRktjA8jTY

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[US Drought Monitor]
*U.S. Drought Monitor*
The full functionality of the U.S. Drought Monitor Website has been 
restored, with the exception of map files for the years 2000 through 
2019. If you need a map from any of those years, please visit the Custom 
Map Request page.
> https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx

[Time to start thinking this way]
*Most buildings were designed for an earlier climate – here’s what will 
happen as global warming accelerates*
THE CONVERSATION on 07/04/2021
RAN BOYDELL
HOUSES WILL BE MORE PRONE TO OVERHEATING, PUTTING THE LIVES OF RESIDENTS 
AT RISK, WHICH IS WHAT HAS HAPPENED DURING THE RECENT “HEAT DOME” OVER 
NORTH AMERICA. FLOODING WILL HAPPEN MORE OFTEN AND INUNDATE GREATER 
AREAS, TO THE POINT THAT SOME PLACES MIGHT HAVE TO BE ABANDONED.
Climate change will affect every aspect of our lives – including the 
buildings we live and work in. Most people in the US, for example, spend 
about 90% of their time indoors. Climate change is fundamentally 
altering the environmental conditions in which these buildings are 
designed to function.

Architects and engineers design buildings and other structures, like 
bridges, to operate within the parameters of the local climate. They’re 
built using materials and following design standards that can withstand 
the range of temperatures, rainfall, snow and wind that are expected, 
plus any geological issues such as earthquakes, subsidence and ground 
water levels.

When any of those parameters are exceeded, chances are some aspect of 
the building will fail. If there are high winds, some roof tiles may be 
ripped off. If, after days of heavy rain, the water table rises, the 
basement might flood. This is normal, and these problems cannot be 
designed out entirely. After the event has passed, the damage can be 
repaired and additional measures can reduce the risk of it happening again.

But climate change will breed conditions where these parameters are 
exceeded more often and to a far greater degree. Some changes, like 
higher average air temperatures and humidity, will become permanent. 
What were previously considered once in a century floods may become a 
regular occurrence.

Some of these impacts are fairly obvious. Houses will be more prone to 
overheating, putting the lives of residents at risk, which is what has 
happened during the recent “heat dome” over North America. Flooding will 
happen more often and inundate greater areas, to the point that some 
places might have to be abandoned. The village of Fairbourne in Wales 
has already been identified as a likely candidate. Failure to act on 
both of these threats in the UK was highlighted in a recent report by 
the Climate Change Committee.

To some extent, these impacts will be localised and containable, with 
fairly simple remedies. For example, overheating can be reduced by 
shading windows with awnings or blinds, good insulation, and ample 
ventilation. Perhaps more worrying are the insidious effects of climate 
change which gradually undermine the core functions of a building in 
less obvious ways....

- -
TERMITES AND MELTING ASPHALT
More intense wind and rain will cause external cladding to deteriorate 
more rapidly and leak more often. Higher temperatures will expand the 
regions where some insects can live. That includes timber-eating 
termites that can cause major structural damage, or malaria-carrying 
mosquitoes which living spaces must be redesigned to protect us from.

Materials expand as they get hotter, especially metals, which can cause 
them to buckle once their designed tolerance is exceeded.

For one skyscraper in Shenzhen, China, high temperatures were partially 
blamed for causing the structure to shake, forcing its evacuation, as 
the steel frame stretched in the heat. Extreme temperatures can even 
cause materials to melt, resulting in roads “bleeding” as the surface 
layer of bitumen softens.

Subsidence – when the ground below a structure gives way, causing it to 
crack or collapse – is also expected to happen more often in a warmer 
world. Buildings with foundations in clay soils are particularly 
vulnerable, as the soils swell when they absorb water, then harden and 
shrink as they dry out. Changing rainfall patterns will exacerbate this. 
Over the next 50 years, for example, more than 10% of properties in 
Britain will be affected by subsidence.

CONCRETE CANCER
Perhaps the biggest concern is how climate change will affect reinforced 
concrete, one of the most widely used materials on Earth. Used in 
everything from skyscrapers and bridges to the lintels above windows in 
homes, reinforced concrete is made by placing steel rods within a mould 
and pouring wet concrete in. Once dry, this produces incredibly strong 
structures.

But a warmer wetter climate will play havoc with the durability of this 
material. When the steel inside the concrete gets wet it rusts and 
expands, cracking the concrete and weakening the structure in a process 
sometimes referred to as “concrete cancer”.

Buildings in coastal areas are especially susceptible as the chloride in 
salt water accelerates rusting.

Rising sea levels will raise the water table and make it saltier, 
affecting building foundations, while salt-spray will spread further on 
stronger winds.

At the same time, the concrete is affected by carbonation, a process 
where carbon dioxide from the air reacts with the cement to form a 
different chemical element, calcium carbonate. This lowers the pH of the 
concrete, making the steel even more prone to corrosion. Since the 
1950s, global CO₂ levels have increased from about 300 parts per million 
in the atmosphere to well over 400. More CO₂ means more carbonation.

The tragic recent collapse of an apartment building in Miami in the US 
may be an early warning of this process gaining speed. While the exact 
cause of the collapse is still being investigated, some are suggesting 
it might be linked to climate change.

The local mayor, Charles Burkett, summed up the bewilderment many felt:

It just doesn’t happen. You don’t see buildings falling down in America.

Whether or not the link to climate change proves to be true, it is 
nevertheless a wake up call to the fragility of our buildings. It should 
also be seen as a clear demonstration of a critical point: wealth does 
not protect against the effects of climate change. Rich nations have the 
financial clout to adapt more rapidly and to mitigate these impacts, but 
they can’t stop them at the border. Climate change is indiscriminate. 
Buildings are vulnerable to these impacts no matter where in the world 
they are, and if anything, the modern buildings of developed countries 
have more things in them that can go wrong than simpler traditional 
structures.

The only option is to begin adapting buildings to meet the changing 
parameters in which they are operating. The sooner we begin retrofitting 
existing buildings and constructing new ones that can withstand climate 
change, the better.
https://www.sixdegreesnews.org/archives/30351/most-buildings-were-designed-for-an-earlier-climate-heres-what-will-happen-as-global-warming-accelerates

[The Guardian]
*Small majority believe there is still time to avert climate disaster – 
survey*
Survey in 16 countries finds just over half of consumers believe their 
own behaviour can help
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/05/small-majority-believe-there-is-still-time-to-avert-climate-disaster-survey

[Wildfires]
*Cyprus: Nations send help to tackle worst wildfire in decades*
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57710048- -

[In the land of wildfires, a fireproof home is a castle ]
*‘Trying To Make Houses That Are Fireproof’: UC Davis Researchers Look 
To Prevent Wildfire With Mud*
By Tony LopezJuly 2, 2021

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – Millions of Californians live in high-risk wildfire 
areas, but now, there are some new down-to-earth ideas at UC Davis that 
could help keep homes from burning.

Each year, hundreds of California homes are destroyed by wildfires. 
Researchers at UC Davis are looking into ways to help reduce the risk.

“We are trying to make houses that are fireproof,” said Michele Barbato, 
a UC Davis engineering professor.

Mechanical engineers have designed these blocks made of mud – which 
could replace traditional wood and stucco homes that cannot withstand 
the intense heat of a wildfire. In the lab, the mud-made blocks were 
tested under extreme conditions – baked in a furnace for seven hours at 
more than 2,000 degrees.

“And as you can see, the brick is still there, it doesn’t burn,” Narnato 
said during a demonstration.

A side-by-side test shows wood easily igniting under a blowtorch, while 
the blocks built out of dirt show no visible damage.

“They can survive wildfire,” Barbato said.

The goal is to keep costs down by designing interlocking earth-made 
blocks that won’t require mortar and machines that can travel to the 
homebuilding site to press the blocks there using locally sourced dirt.

“You have something that is sustainable, affordable, and safe if you 
design it correctly,” Barbato said.

It’s an idea that’s intriguing to the home construction industry.

“We applaud the people that are out there looking for new ways and new 
materials,” said Mike Stretch, CEO of the Northstate Building Industry 
Association. “We’re interested, always interested in building a safe home.”

But they say how you plan a home is just as important.

“The best way to prevent a fire from impacting a home is to make sure 
that the vegetation that the yard choices the landscaping is engineered 
in a way to keep the flames away from the home,” Stretch said.

Digging up new ideas made from mud, it’s groundbreaking research that 
could one day help reduce the threat of wildfires. Researchers say the 
mud blocks also hold up well during tornados and hurricanes.
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/07/02/uc-davis-looks-to-fireproof-homes/
- -
[or that is another way]
*How PG&E is fighting its massive wildfire problem with microgrids, 
power shutoffs and cutting down trees*

"Five of the ten most destructive fires in California since 2015 have 
been linked to PG&E equipment..."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/03/how-californias-pge-is-fighting-its-massive-wildfire-problem.html

[Google *Books Ngram Viewer* search for use of the term "*a wake up 
cal*l" peaked in 2005]
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+wake+up+call&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ca%20wake%20up%20call%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ca%20wake%20up%20call%3B%2Cc0

[physical and social tipping points in academic discussion]
*Cascading Interactions Between Tipping Elements in the Anthropocene 
Earth System - Jonathan Donges*
May 6, 2021
issibern
Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system are continental-scale 
subsystems that are characterized by a nonlinear threshold behavior. 
These include biosphere components (e.g. the Amazon rainforest and coral 
reefs), cryosphere components (e.g. the Greenland and Antarctic ice 
sheets) and large-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulations (e.g. the 
thermohaline circulation, ENSO and Indian summer monsoon). Once 
operating near a threshold or tipping point that may be approached due 
to anthropogenic climate change, these components can transgress into a 
qualitatively different state by small external perturbations. The 
large-scale environmental consequences could impact the livelihoods of 
millions of people.

In this webinar, Jonathan Donges reports on recent research on 
individual tipping elements such as the Antarctic Ice Sheet, reinforcing 
(positive) feedbacks on anthropogenic global warming mediated by 
cryospheric tipping elements, interactions between climate tipping 
elements and the risk for resulting tipping cascades. Finally, he will 
present work on the potentials for positive social tipping dynamics that 
could help to achieve the rapid decarbonization of the world’s 
social-economic systems needed to stabilize the Earth’s climate in line 
with the Paris climate agreement.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/5/2354.long
Jonathan Donges is co-leader of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the 
Anthropocene (www.pik-potsdam.de/earthresilience) at the Potsdam 
Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK, Germany), leader of the PIK 
working group on Whole Earth System Analysis and co-speaker of the COPAN 
collaboration (www.pik-potsdam.de/copan). He also holds a researcher 
position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, 
Sweden, and is Visiting Research Collaborator at High Meadows 
Environmental Institute, Princeton University, both in the scope of the 
Earth Resilience and Sustainability Initiative 
(www.earthresiliencesustainability.org). Jonathan holds a PhD in 
Theoretical Physics from Humboldt University Berlin and has published on 
a variety of topics including Earth system analysis, climatology, 
paleoclimate, social-ecological systems, complex networks, complex 
systems theory, nonlinear dynamics, and time series analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ESYJlXXWT4
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[source]
*The Parallel Ice Sheet Model PISM v1.2 is open source and capable of 
high resolution. It has been widely adopted as a tool for doing science.*
https://pism-docs.org/wiki/doku.php?id=home
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/5/2354.long

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming July 6, 2010*

July 6, 2010: Washington Post writer Ezra Klein observes:

"There's a range of likely outcomes from a tax on carbon, and we can 
handle most of them. There's also a range of outcomes from radical 
changes in the planet's climate, and we've really no idea which we can 
handle, and which we can't. We don't even really know what that range 
looks like. And although a tax can be undone or reformed, there's no 
guarantee that we can reverse hundreds of years of rapid greenhouse gas 
buildup in the atmosphere. If you want proof, look at our inability to 
deal with an underwater oil spill, and consider how much more experience 
we have repairing oil rigs than reversing concentrations of gases in the 
atmosphere.

"One of the oddities of the global warming debate, in fact, is that the 
side that's usually skeptical of government intervention is potentially 
setting up a future in which the government is intervening on a 
planetary scale. I don't think of myself as particularly skeptical of 
the feds, but I'm a lot more comfortable with their ability to levy a 
tax than their capacity to reform the atmosphere. That's why, when faced 
with the choice between being risk averse about a tax or about the 
planet, I tend to choose the planet."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/the_case_for_being_careful_wit.html

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