[✔️] June 14, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Mon Jun 14 12:39:35 EDT 2021

/*June 14, 2021*/

[Aspirational promises not enforceable]
*G7 to agree tough measures on burning coal to tackle climate change*
World leaders meeting in Cornwall are to adopt strict measures on 
coal-fired power stations as part of the battle against climate change.
The G7 group will promise to move away from coal plants, unless they 
have technology to capture carbon emissions...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-57456641

- -

[no fine print]
*Where's the detail? G7 nations agree to boost climate finance*
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/g7-leaders-commit-increasing-climate-finance-contributions-2021-06-12/

[Says the Financial Times]
*Storms await companies that err on climate*
Markets are increasingly willing to punish businesses that mismanage 
global warming risks
Market perceptions of adverse outcomes from such natural disasters have 
“changed from bad luck to bad management”,
https://www.ft.com/content/f02537ef-0cbd-4566-8f0c-a1dfe798f54a

[video of how a wildfires was covered in the news... Sunday ]
*Flats Fire: Mandatory evacuation issued for Pinyon Crest amid blaze*
Streamed live 10 hours ago
FOX 11 Los Angeles
Crews are working to contain a fire near Highway 74 in the Inland Empire.
What we know: https://bit.ly/3wnFdKH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0dTG1AOHyE

[we could have seen this coming]
*High cost of lumber, building materials halts rebuilding for some 
Oregon wildfire survivors*
A supply shortage coupled with high demand has sent construction costs 
skyrocketing during the pandemic.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/wildfire/high-cost-of-lumber-building-materials-halt-rebuilding-for-some-oregon-wildfire-survivors/283-f738e7c5-8d22-452a-b746-d7e0f6d6c455

[a curiously interesting book talk]
*Niall Ferguson: The Politics of Catastrophe*
Fundraiser
Jun 6, 2021
Commonwealth Club of California

Disasters are inherently inevitable in life. We cannot predict the next 
earthquake, wildfire, financial crisis, war or pandemic, but we can 
predict how to handle each situation better. Unexpected calamities have 
happened all throughout human history, yet even in the 21st century we 
are ill-prepared to recover from them. In the new book Doom: The 
Politics of Catastrophe, popular historian Niall Ferguson explores the 
reasoning behind this phenomena and offers solutions on how to handle 
unforeseen circumstances of mass misfortune.

Ferguson has spent his academic career lecturing on the international, 
financial, and economic history of British and American imperialism. In 
his new book, Ferguson uses centuries of knowledge to understand the 
complex pathologies at work that make societies fail in the face of 
disaster. He offers the lesson he says the West urgently needs to learn 
if we want to handle the next crisis better and avoid the ultimate doom 
of irreversible decline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miq_O6zVVSc

[Grist]
*Report: Climate action is a double-edged sword for nature*
Here’s why that matters.
By compiling existing research on the social impacts of climate change 
and biodiversity, the experts found that climate change and biodiversity 
are so intertwined that solving one without addressing the other would 
be next to impossible...
https://grist.org/science/study-climate-action-is-a-double-edged-sword-for-nature/

[Obscure. boring academic lecture NASA video]
*A Machine Learning Approach Toward a “Seamless” Understanding Droughts, 
Heatwaves and Fire Weather*
May 28, 2021

NASA Climate Change
The National Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC) aims to improve 
earth system prediction from sub-seasonal to decade scales, with 
emphasis on “seamless” prediction. Yet, our understanding of 
weather-climate connection, especially in a changing climate, is still 
in its infancy. For example, it is not clear what weather patterns are 
responsible for dry spells and heat waves during the warm season over 
continental United States (US), and which of these patterns are 
responsible for extreme droughts and stronger and longer fire season? 
How do decadal climate variability and anthropogenic forced climate 
change affect the intensity and frequency of extreme fire weather?

In this lecture, I will report our recent and ongoing studies to explore 
these questions through machine learning approaches. To assess the 
influence of weather patterns on droughts and fire weather, we use 
multivariate Self-Organization Map to characterize the weather patterns 
responsible for dry and wet spells, their associated atmospheric 
thermodynamic condition and moisture transport, and their contributions 
to warm season droughts and decadal variability of the land surface 
aridity and fire weather. We also use a constructed flow analogue 
approach to determine the relative influence of natural climate 
variability and anthropogenic forced change on the increase of heatwaves 
and fire weather in recent decades over Western US, including those that 
contributed to the 2020 August Camp Fire, California’s largest wildfire 
on record.

The analyses suggest that, although many weather patterns can contribute 
to dry spells and moderate droughts, extreme droughts are largely caused 
by an increased frequency and persistence of a few leading weather 
patterns that are responsible for strong dry spells climatologically. 
Thus, understand the causes behind the changes of these few weather 
patterns is central for determining predictability of the extreme 
droughts. On the other hand, for the same weather patterns, the 
probability distributions of surface temperature and vapor pressure 
deficit (VPD) in the recent decades have changed significantly over the 
western US, leading to higher probability of heatwaves and fire weather, 
compared to earlier decades. Consequently, at least two-thirds of the 
increase of the fire weather over western US during recent decades is 
attributable to climate change, whereas only one third or less of the 
increase of fire weather is attributable to changing weather patterns. 
Thus, climate variability and changes can have significant impact on 
weather and sub-seasonal forecasts.

ABOUT THE LECTURER: Dr. Rong Fu is a climate research and a professor in 
the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of 
California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that 
control droughts, rainfall seasonality and variability over Amazonian 
and North American regions, and how changes of global climate, local 
vegetation and biomass burning, and oceanic decadal variability have 
influenced these processes in the recent past and will influence 
rainfall seasonality and droughts in the future. She has also developed 
a drought early warning for US Great Plains working with regional water 
resource managers. Her research is among the earliest to observationally 
uncover significant roles of tropical rainforests in determining 
rainfall seasonality over Amazonia and Tibetan Plateau in determining 
water vapor transport to global stratosphere; She received NSF CAREER 
and NASA New Investigator Awards, is an elected fellow of the American 
Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American 
Association For the Advancement of Science, respectively. She was the 
President of the Global Environmental Change Focus Group (2015-2016) and 
Leadership Team of the American Geophysical Union Council. She has 
served on many national and international panels, such as the National 
Research Council special committees on “Abrupt Impact of Climate Change” 
and “Landscapes on the edge”, the Climate Working Group for NOAA Science 
Advisory Board. She is a co-leader of NOAA Drought Task Force Phase IV 
and an Editor of Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmosphere.

Originally presented May 19, 2021, via webinar at NASA's Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory, Pasadena, California as part of the Center for Climate 
Sciences Distinguished Climate Lectures series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d1vBXEURNI

[The news archive - looking back]
*On this day in the history of global warming June 14 ,*

    Exxon hires Bush energy aide
    Published: June 14, 2005
    By Lisa Sanders and CBS.MarketWatch.com
    DALLAS (MarketWatch) -- Philip Cooney, a former White House official
    who resigned last week, will join Exxon Mobil in the fall,
    MarketWatch learned late Tuesday.

    Cooney, most recently the chief of staff to President Bush's Council
    on Environmental Quality, left amid claims by critics that he edited
    reports on global warming to downplay concerns raised by the
    scientific community.

    Scientists have raised concerns that emissions from fossil fuels
    such as oil and coal are being trapped in the earth's lower
    atmosphere, creating a "greenhouse" effect that is accelerating
    changes in the climate.

    An Exxon Mobil XOM, -0.92% spokesman acknowledged that Cooney would
    join the company but declined further comment on what role he would
    play.

    The spokesman also said Exxon takes global warming seriously but is
    not convinced about how greenhouse-gas emissions affect climate change.

    Before coming to the White House, Cooney worked as lobbyist at the
    American Petroleum Institute, which is the chief representative of
    the oil and gas industry.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-mobil-hires-former-bush-environment-aide

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