[✔️] July 17, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sat Jul 17 07:46:19 EDT 2021

/*July 17, 2021*/

[eyes to the horizon]
*Oregon wildfire causes miles-high ‘fire clouds’ as flames grow*
Pyrocumulus clouds viewable from 100 miles away as Bootleg fire grows 
beyond size of New York City

- - 
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/434ac38c1cd2b8d220c751fbd4141b5fe5fe0a34/0_0_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=230a8e9aee6132431b5f4da0858c88f4

Smoke and heat from a huge wildfire in south-eastern Oregon are creating 
giant “fire clouds” over the blaze – dangerous columns of smoke and ash 
that can reach up to six miles (10km) in the sky and are visible from 
more than 100 miles (160km) away.

Authorities have put these clouds at the top of the list of the extreme 
fire behavior they are seeing amid the Bootleg fire, the largest 
wildfire burning in the US. The inferno grew on Friday to about 377 sq 
miles (976 sq km), an area larger than New York City, and was raging 
through a part of the American west that is enduring a historic drought.

Extreme fire behavior, including the formation of more fire clouds, was 
expected to persist on Friday and worsen into the weekend. There are 
currently at least 70 wildfires burning in the western United States and 
dozens more in Canada...

image -- 
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/813549b9ade27eb46cb5422e3ba47d71ae892ad3/0_0_2000_1332/master/2000.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=a8fd51bfc129440f068940d4f62b98da

In Oregon, fire authorities say the clouds are forming between 3pm and 
5pm each day as the sun penetrates the smoke layer and heats the ground 
below, creating an updraft of hot air. Crews are seeing the biggest and 
most dangerous clouds over a section of wilderness made up mostly of 
dead trees, which burn instantly and with a lot of heat.

For four days in a row, the Bootleg fire has generated multiple fire 
clouds that rise nearly six miles into the atmosphere and are “easily 
visible from 100 to 120 air miles away”, authorities said on Friday. The 
conditions that create the clouds were expected to worsen over the weekend.

When a pyrocumulus cloud forms over a fire, meteorologists begin to 
watch carefully for its big brother, the pyrocumulonimbus cloud. Nasa 
has called the latter the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds” because it 
is so hot and big that it creates its own weather.

In a worst-case scenario, fire crews on the ground could see one of the 
monster clouds spawn a “fire tornado”, generate its own dry lightning 
and create dangerous hot winds below. The clouds can also send 
particulate matter from the smoke column up to 10 miles above Earth’s 
surface.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/16/bootleg-fire-oregon-fire-clouds-pyrocumulus

[Financial Times strong opinion]
*How the pandemic foretells the climate crisis*
‘The destruction of the Amazon is climate’s Delta variant. When 
Brazilian rainforests shrink, rich countries heat up too’
Simon Kuper -- July 15,2012
When England drops nearly all its Covid-19 restrictions on July 19, it 
won’t be the end of the pandemic. It may not even be the beginning of 
the end. But it is a foreshadowing of an ending of sorts. One day, rich 
countries will emerge from Covid-19 while poor countries remain stuck in 
it. And this isn’t just the scenario for the pandemic. It is probably 
also a preview of the climate crisis...
- -
If the only hope now is moral awakening, then there’s no hope. Based on 
what we’ve learnt from Covid-19, our best chance to avoid climate 
catastrophe is a tech fix developed in a rich country in its own 
self-interest that would save the world at modest additional cost. I’m 
told that sucking carbon out of the atmosphere at the scale required 
might not prove totally impossible.
https://www.ft.com/content/012afde2-a7d7-4e52-8937-4ddf973ebc18

[Lessons not learned, are being repeated]
*3 years ago, Paradise was destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in US 
history. Now, the town nervously watches one burning 10 miles away.*
Be prepared, not scared.

That's the mantra in the rural Northern California town of Paradise, 
virtually destroyed by a wildfire less than three years ago. Today 
Paradise sits 10 miles from the Dixie Fire, an uncontained blaze that 
has swept through more than 3½ square miles of mostly brush and timber 
since igniting Wednesday.

The fire is one of more than 70 in 12 states from California to 
Minnesota fueled by weeks of heat, drought and other factors in a 
relentless loop this summer...
- -
It already has been a hot summer. The nation has set 585 all-time heat 
records in the past 30 days, according to the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration. They include 349 daily high temperatures and 
236 warmest overnight lows.

Temperatures were expected to ease later next week, but don't look for 
cool weather anytime soon, Storm said.

"Extreme heat is expected to relent slightly as next week continues, but 
temperatures are still anticipated to remain well above normal," she said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/15/wildfires-west-more-extreme-heat-and-weather-weekend/7976468002/

[Science]
*Rockslides in the Arctic: Why do we care?*
Research notes

    Global climate warming is most severe in the Arctic. One consequence
    is a widespread reduction in permafrost. Continuous, stable
    permafrost can act as a physical glue that helps anchor unstable
    slopes. Increasingly, scientists are reporting collapse of rock
    slopes in the High Arctic.

https://framsenteret.no/forum/fram-forum-2021/rockslides-in-the-arctic-why-do-we-care/

[DeSmogBlog]
*The U.S. Shale Revolution Has Surrendered to Reality*
Fracking companies aren’t drilling as investment continues to dry up.
Justin Mikulka  -- Jul 16, 2021
“Drill, baby, drill is gone forever.”

That was the recent assessment of Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman of 
the American oil industry’s future potential. As Saudi Arabia’s energy 
minister, Prince Abdulaziz is one of the most influential voices in the 
global oil markets. Fortune termed it a “bold taunt,” and a warning to 
U.S. frackers to not increase oil production.

The response by the U.S. producers — to shut up and take it — quietly 
confirms this reality. Shale oil’s era of growth appears to be over. The 
reason is that even as global oil demand and prices rise, the economics 
of the shale oil business model continue to not work. The U.S. shale 
industry has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in the past decade 
producing oil and selling it for less than it cost to produce.

This was possible because despite the losses, investors kept giving the 
industry money. But now investors appear to have grown tired of losing 
money on U.S. shale companies and new lending to the industry has 
dropped dramatically.- -

https://www.flickr.com/photos/coloradochris/22444880389/in/photolist-AcnSYn-R9cBW2-R9cB5c-R9czDX-QXFtr2-R9cBua-QyZHBY-R9cAic-PUxY8p-R9cESH-R9cD2i-R9cFd2-QXB1ix-PRNhXE-R9cCkt-R9cDoF-PRNj7U-R9cE4D-QXFtEZ-R9cztB-PRNia3-R9cCBF-R5KMZQ-PRNgnL-R9cDFV-QXDsxn-PRNjtf-R9cALg-R9czTK-QXAZtX-R9cFSP-PRNhKf-PRNjCy-QyV58h-PRNhjW-PUxUwr-QXB15M-PRNgQ9-2iTBN5w/

- -

Some estimates are that the U.S. shale industry has lost half a trillion 
dollars of investor money during the U.S. fracking boom. That is the 
amount of money required to fund the capital destruction machines that 
produced oil above and beyond what the industry was able to earn and 
re-invest from selling oil. There is very little chance the industry 
will ever make that money back.

The history of market booms is full of claims that “this time is 
different,” that normal market economics no longer apply. This was 
certainly the case in the U.S. housing boom that caused the Great 
Recession. As DeSmog explained in 2018, these booms are driven by U.S. 
monetary policy which allows them to go on for much longer than would 
seem reasonable.

 From that perspective, the U.S. shale oil boom has been pretty 
standard. However, like the dot-com boom of the 1990s and the housing 
boom of the 2000s, eventually investors tire of losing money, and the 
old rules of investing — where investors expect to get a return on their 
investments — become attractive once again.

The U.S. shale oil boom seems to have reached that moment. This isn’t 
the outcome the industry and its supporters promised to investors. The 
reality that the industry has never made money is finally sinking in.
https://www.desmog.com/2021/07/16/us-shale-revolution-no-fracking-investment/

[Low pay jobs]
*Building Solar Farms May Not Build the Middle Class*
Some of the wealthiest companies in the world are investing in the green 
economy. But they’re not investing in paying union wages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/business/economy/green-energy-jobs-economy.html

[compare and contrast]
*So far the drought is far worse than last year*
Bill Gabbert  - July 16, 2021
As @NOAANCElclimate pointed out, the Drought Monitor shows that the 
severity of the drought is far worse than it was at about the same date 
in 2020. Most of the areas in the 11 western states are in Severe, 
Extreme, or Exceptional Drought.

So far this year the 49 states outside Alaska have burned almost 2.2 
million acres, about the same that burned in all of 2019. The 10-year 
all-year average for those 49 states is 6.4 million acres. In 2020 9.9 
million acres burned in the lower 49 states.

Drought monitor comparison, similar dates in 2020 & 2021.
https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Drought-monitor-comparison-2020-2021.jpg

https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/07/16/so-far-the-drought-is-far-worse-than-last-year/

[polite, insightful rant]
*Chris Hedges "American Sadism"**
**Jul 7, 2021*
mediasanctuary
Author, activist, teacher and dissident Chris Hedges spoke at The 
Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY on June 27, 2021.  In this 
talk Chris speaks about sadism, which he says:

-Now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in 
the United States.
-Is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its 
wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country 
has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.
-Is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as 
Minneapolis.
-Is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed 
Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and 
our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
-Is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites.
-Is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented 
parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.

Chris Hedges goes on to say that...

    The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the
    Middle Ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as
    a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No
    longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into
    the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall
    Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic
    traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and
    self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for
    lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or
    guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else
    gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,”
    Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in
    which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And
    this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted,
    sadistic pleasure.the cultural and social forces that have given
    rise to extremism in the United States.

Please support The Sanctuary for Independent Media!  For more 
information and to donate, visit: https://www.mediasanctuary.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGCFVc-5yTM

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming July 17, 2012*
On MSNBC's "NewsNation with Tamron Hall," Heidi Cullen of Climate 
Central discusses the extreme drought tormenting the United States.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0eCaBV-osI

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