[TheClimate.Vote] March 11, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 11, 2021*/

[Early season video report]
*Arizona wildfire season off to early start*
The Punkin Fire burning in the Tonto National Forest is a reminder that 
wildfire season in Arizona can be a year-round event. Meanwhile, crews 
are preparing for a tough fire season ahead. FOX 10 spoke with Tiffany 
Davila with the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/video/909609

- -

[California too]
*Mudslides Trigger Canyons Evacuations, Road Closures Following Brutal 
Wildfire Season*
Noah Biesiada - March 10, 2021
Residents of Silverado, Modjeska and Williams canyons are under 
mandatory evacuation orders this morning as mudslides began rolling in 
following a series of wildfires at the end of last year.

Silverado Canyon residents were the first to be ordered to evacuate. 
Modjeska and Williams canyons were initially under voluntary warnings, 
but those later became mandatory just before 11 a.m. An evacuation 
center at El Modena High School opened at noon.

Silverado Road is under nearly three feet of mud, according to the 
county Public Works department...
- -
The National Weather Service shows there’s a 70% chance of continued 
rain through the night, with a 40% chance of showers on Thursday and Friday.

Over half an inch of rain has already come down on Silverado alone in 
the last 24 hours. The latest rainfall totals are available from the 
National Weather Service.
https://voiceofoc.org/2021/03/mudslides-trigger-silverado-canyon-evacuations-road-closures-following-brutal-wildfire-season/



[Reuters answers the big question]
*Does smoking cannabis fuel the climate crisis?*
By Emma Batha
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Is a beer, a cup of coffee or a 
spliff more damaging for the climate? If the cannabis is cultivated 
indoors on a commercial scale, the answer is probably the joint.

That’s the finding of researchers at Colorado State University who say 
booming indoor marijuana production in the United States is a major and 
growing source of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The $13.6 billion industry has nearly quadrupled since 2012 when 
Washington and Colorado became the first states to open the doors to 
recreational use.

But policymakers and consumers have largely ignored the environmental 
cost of energy-hungry indoor cultivation, the researchers said in a study.

Nearly a third of U.S. states allow recreational use, while medical 
cannabis is legal in about two-thirds.
- -
The research revealed a large variation in emissions across the country, 
and within some states, with indoor cultivation in milder climates 
requiring less heating or air conditioning to maintain favourable 
temperatures and humidity.

Producing 1 ounce (28g) of dried cannabis in eastern O’ahu in Hawaii was 
roughly equal to burning 16 gallons (60 litres) of gasoline, creating 
more than twice the emissions from growing the same amount in southern 
California, the authors said.

They suggested states that had already legalised cultivation should 
steer indoor production towards regions with more optimal climates, 
while states legalising cultivation in the future should consider 
avoiding indoor production.

However, they said switching production outdoors could create security 
concerns and make it harder for growers to produce multiple harvests a 
year and ensure consistency.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-climate-cannabis-idUSL8N2L7460



[recalculations]
*Sea-Level Rise Affects Coastal Areas 4 Times Faster Than We Thought. 
Here's Why*
PETER DOCKRILL - 9 MARCH 2021
The sea is rising, but that's not all. Scientists say current 
assessments of global sea-level rise have disregarded an important 
phenomenon affecting coastal regions – an oversight that means the 
ongoing specter of sea-level rise is even more ominous than we knew...
"About 58 percent of the world's coastal population lives on deltas 
where land is subsiding."

In a new study, Nicholls and his team quantified what sea-level rise 
actually looks like in coastal areas, once subsidence – both natural and 
human-caused – is taken into account.

According to their calculations, relative sea-level rise in affected 
regions is effectively happening up to four times faster than the global 
average otherwise suggests: representing between 7.8 to 9.9 mm per year.
- -
Unfortunately, this same issue is happening in coastal regions all over 
the world, and it's something that vastly alters the outlook of what 2.6 
millimetres of annual sea-level rise actually means where it matters most.

"Rapid rates of subsidence in deltas and especially cities on deltas are 
also human-caused, mostly due to groundwater pumping, also oil and gas 
extraction, and sediment resupply prevented by upstream dams, flood 
defenses, sand extraction or mining," says coastal engineer Robert 
Nicholls from the University of East Anglia in the UK.
- -
It's not a far-off problem, either. Relative sea-level rise is already 
affecting millions of people living in the world today.

"The impacts of sea-level rise being experienced today are much larger 
than the global numbers being reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change (IPCC)," Nicholls says.

"One of the main reasons that Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, is 
being moved to Borneo is because the city is sinking due to groundwater 
extraction from shallow wells… Jakarta might be just the beginning."
https://www.sciencealert.com/sea-level-rise-at-the-coast-is-happening-up-to-4-times-faster-than-we-thought

- -

[the journal Nature Chlimate Change]
*A global analysis of subsidence, relative sea-level change and coastal 
flood exposure*
Abstract
Climate-induced sea-level rise and vertical land movements, including 
natural and human-induced subsidence in sedimentary coastal lowlands, 
combine to change relative sea levels around the world’s coasts. 
Although this affects local rates of sea-level rise, assessments of the 
coastal impacts of subsidence are lacking on a global scale. Here, we 
quantify global-mean relative sea-level rise to be 2.5 mm yr−1 over the 
past two decades. However, as coastal inhabitants are preferentially 
located in subsiding locations, they experience an average relative 
sea-level rise up to four times faster at 7.8 to 9.9 mm yr−1. These 
results indicate that the impacts and adaptation needs are much higher 
than reported global sea-level rise measurements suggest. In particular, 
human-induced subsidence in and surrounding coastal cities can be 
rapidly reduced with appropriate policy for groundwater utilization and 
drainage. Such policy would offer substantial and rapid benefits to 
reduce growth of coastal flood exposure due to relative sea-level rise.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-00993-z

- -

[also]
*The Colossal Weight of Cities Is Making Them Sink, Even as Sea Levels 
Are Rising*
DAVID NIELD16 FEBRUARY 2021
Cities don't just have sea level rises to worry about – they're also 
slowly sinking under the weight of their own development, according to 
new research, which emphasises the importance of factoring subsidence 
into models of climate change risk.
Geophysicist Tom Parsons, from the United States Geological Survey 
(USGS) agency, looked at San Francisco as a case study of how large 
urban developments could be affecting and depressing the actual surface 
of the Earth.

By his calculations, San Francisco might have sunk as much as 80 
millimetres (3.1 inches) as the city has grown over time. Considering 
the Bay Area is under threat from as much as 300 mm (11.8 inches) of sea 
level rise by 2050, the extra variation added by slow subsidence is 
significant enough to be concerning.

"As global populations move disproportionately toward the coasts, this 
additional subsidence in combination with expected sea level rise may 
exacerbate risk associated with inundation," writes Parsons in his paper.
- -
"The specific results found for the San Francisco Bay Area are likely to 
apply to any major urban centre, though with varying importance," writes 
Parsons.

"Anthropogenic loading effects at tectonically active continental 
margins are likely greater than more stable continental interiors where 
the lithosphere tends to be thicker and more rigid."
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-weight-of-cities-is-sinking-urban-areas-at-the-same-time-sea-levels-are-rising

- -

[Peer review available]
AGU Advances Research Article
*The Weight of Cities: Urbanization Effects on Earth's Subsurface*
Tom Parsons -- 14 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1029/2020AV000277

    Abstract
    Across the world, people increasingly choose to live in cities. By
    2050, 70% of Earth's population will live in large urban areas. Upon
    considering a large city, questions arise such as, how much does
    that weigh? What are its effects on the landscape? Does it cause
    measurable subsidence? Here I calculate the weight of San Francisco
    Bay region urbanization, where 7.75 million people live at, or near
    the coast. It is difficult to account for everything that is in a
    city. I assume that most of the weight is buildings and their
    contents, which allows the use of base outline and height data to
    approximate their mass, which is cumulatively 1.6·1012 kg. I build a
    series of finite element models to study effects of pressure exerted
    by the weight distribution. Within the elastic realm, I look at
    compression, flexure, isostatic compensation, stress change,
    dilatation, and fluid flow changes. Within the nonlinear realm I
    show example calculations of primary and secondary settlement of
    soils under load. The combined modeled subsidence from building
    loads is at least 5–80 mm, with the largest contributions coming
    from nonlinear settlement and creep in soils. A general result is
    closing of pore space and redirection of pore fluids. While the
    calculated subsidence of the Bay Area is relatively small compared
    with other sources of elevation change such as pumping and recharge
    of aquifers, all sources of subsidence are concerning given an
    expected 200–300 mm sea level rise at San Francisco by the year 2050.

*Plain Language Summary*
By the year 2050, 70% of Earth's population will live in cities. The 
belongings and needs of these growing populations concentrate mass over 
relatively small areas. In this paper, I calculate the weight of a 
metropolitan region and study the changes to the solid earth beneath it 
using numerical modeling techniques. I find that the subsidence under 
this weight is not insignificant and that it adds to other causes of 
urban subsidence, such as ground water pumping. As global populations 
move disproportionately toward the coasts, this additional subsidence in 
combination with expected sea level rise may exacerbate risk associated 
with inundation.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020AV000277



[The Hill notices...]
*Frightening' data show two-thirds of world's rainforest now damaged or 
destroyed*
Tropical rainforests cover 6.5 percent of the Earth’s surface, yet hold 
more than half of the planet’s biological diversity.
By Joseph Guzman | March 10, 2021

    Story at a glance
    -- An analysis from nonprofit the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN)
    found 34 percent of the world’s original tropical rainforest cover
    is gone.
    -- Thirty percent is in various forms of degradation, and just 36
    percent remains intact.
    -- Researchers lay the blame on human consumption, as agriculture,
    logging and mining are primary drivers of deforestation across the
    globe.
    -- A new report claims that two-thirds of the Earth’s original
    tropical rainforest cover has been destroyed or degraded by humans.

The Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) analysis released this month 
found that of the approximately 14.5 million square kilometers of 
tropical rainforest that once covered the planet, 34 percent is gone, 30 
percent is in various forms of degradation and just 36 percent remains 
intact.

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your 
Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.

Of the 9.5 million square kilometers that remain, nearly half, 45 
percent, is considered degraded, according to the Norwegian nonprofit. 
Researchers lay the blame on human consumption, as agriculture, logging 
and mining are primary drivers of deforestation across the globe.

According to the report, the area of rainforest lost between 2002 and 
2019 was larger than the size of France. The RFN called the current rate 
of destruction "frightening."

“The good news is that we have an area half the size of Europe that is 
still completely intact. However, the remaining tropical rainforests are 
either severely damaged or increasingly fragmented,” Anders Krogh, a 
tropical forest researcher and author of the report, said in a news 
release...
- -
More than 70 percent of the world’s intact tropical rainforests is 
located in the Amazon, with 42 percent in Brazil. Asia ranks second in 
terms of forest destruction and holds just 7 percent of the world’s 
rainforests today.

Deforestation has spiked in Brazil since far-right President Jair 
Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and has weakened environmental enforcement 
and pushed for more mining and farming in the country.

Deforestation in the Brazilian amazon hit a 10-year high between August 
2018 and July 2019, with nearly 10,000 square kilometers lost.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/environment/542556-frightening-data-show-two-thirds-of-worlds




[Opinion and a little history makes for a great idea, let's start tomorrow]
*The Civilian Climate Corps Is a Big-Government Plan That All Americans 
Can Embrace*
By Jim Lardner
It was a rare case of Presidential understatement in the unveiling of a 
program: the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, 
according to a paragraph buried in Joe Biden’s long executive order on 
climate change, had been directed to make plans for a Civilian Climate 
Corps, modelled on the Civilian Conservation Corps—the C.C.C.—of the 
nineteen-thirties. It would put underemployed Americans to work on 
projects intended “to conserve and restore public lands and waters, 
bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon 
sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve 
access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”

That is plenty of justification for such an initiative in the country’s 
current circumstances. But the potential of this idea, if the record of 
the original C.C.C. is any guide, goes far beyond the advertised 
purposes. A modern-day C.C.C. could be an attention-getting reminder of 
something that a great many Americans seem to have forgotten: the 
capacity of government to be an instrument of the common good.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the spring of 1933 at the 
behest of the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave jobs to an 
eventual three million young men, before the Second World War took over 
the task of fighting unemployment. (Roughly eighty-five hundred women 
participated in a “She-She-She” program, belatedly established at 
Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistence.) The C.C.C. left a legacy of trees, 
trails, shelters, footbridges, picnic areas, and campgrounds in local, 
state, and national parks across the country. It had equally notable 
effects on the health and outlook of the men who served. Most were 
undernourished as well as unemployed when they signed up. They came home 
with muscles, tans, and, according to a letter sent to corps 
headquarters, in Washington, by a resident of Romeo, Colorado, an “erect 
carriage” that made them easy to pick out from the rest of the young 
male population.

Joseph Kaptur, of Toledo, Ohio, treasured the memory of his corps 
service, spent reforesting the shores of the Miami and Erie Canal. His 
gratitude stuck in the mind of his daughter Marcy Kaptur, now an Ohio 
congresswoman and the sponsor of one of seven C.C.C. bills introduced in 
Congress last year. “I don’t know anybody who wasn’t changed and 
uplifted by that experience,” she says.

Although Roosevelt sold the C.C.C. as a jobs program first and foremost, 
it was shaped by his strong interest in timber and soil management, 
acquired over the course of efforts to revitalize hundreds of acres of 
badly tended farmland attached to his family estate in Hyde Park, New 
York. The C.C.C., in turn, raised the conservation consciousness of many 
of its participants, according to “Nature’s New Deal,” a book from 2009 
about the program, by the historian Neil Maher. C.C.C. camps had 
lectures and night classes, as well as libraries. A corpsman named 
Robert Ross, assigned to a camp near Crystal Springs, Arkansas, used his 
off-hours to investigate matters that he “had been totally ignorant 
of—soil erosion, restoration, protection of the forests, the uses of 
land, the damage of forest fires.” Less than ten per cent of the 
enrollees had graduated from high school. Many of them learned to read 
and write during their time in the corps, however, and hundreds went on 
to jobs with the National Park Service, the forestry-service unit of the 
Department of Agriculture, and other federal, state, and local 
conservation programs.

The C.C.C. had educational value for the people living alongside its 
camps, too. Many communities, Maher writes, objected mightily to the 
anticipated arrival of “street-slum foreigners,” “corner holders,” and 
“bums.” The hostility tended to evaporate once corpsmen came to town in 
person, proved unthreatening, and began spending their wages at local 
diners, shops, and movie theatres.

The program was hugely popular everywhere, and Roosevelt promoted it as 
a morale booster in a time of extreme hardship—and as a vote-getter in 
election years. Among his Administration’s many groundbreaking policies, 
only this one escaped the anti-New Deal fulminations of Alf Landon, the 
Republican governor of Kansas, when he ran for President, in 1936. 
Landon, like other Republicans, praised the corps; he even tried to take 
credit for getting Congress to extend its operations to state parks. 
Despite his claim, the presence of C.C.C. camps flipped several Kansas 
counties blue and helped F.D.R. win the state in his landslide 
reëlection victory.

The revival of interest in the idea can be traced to two loose groups of 
C.C.C. champions. One, whose ranks include the retired General Stanley 
McChrystal and the Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who are among the 
backers of an initiative called Serve America Together—sees a way to 
overcome the “political, social, economic and religious barriers causing 
such divisiveness in our country,” as McChrystal and Schultz put it in a 
joint op-ed last summer. The other group, composed mainly of academic 
economists, is more concerned about the job-replacing effects of robots 
and computers, and the marketplace’s chronic failure to meet important 
social needs. Those two streams of thinking converged and gained force 
last spring, after the pandemic abruptly terminated the employment of 
some twenty million Americans.

In addition to the White House plan and Representative Kaptur’s measure, 
bills have been introduced by Colorado’s Joe Neguse and Illinois’s Bobby 
Rush, in the House, and by Delaware’s Chris Coons, Illinois’s Dick 
Durbin, and Oregon’s Ron Wyden, in the Senate. Thinking separately, they 
have come to common conclusions about what a new C.C.C. should be 
like—and what it shouldn’t be like. The original corps, besides 
excluding women, was racially segregated, with camps for 
African-Americans often placed in remote areas, according to Maher, 
“because of local protests in every region of the country, including the 
North.” A twenty-first-century C.C.C. would correct those fundamental 
defects. Most of the idea’s backers agree that it should also pay a 
living wage, in contrast to Roosevelt’s program, which offered room and 
board and thirty dollars a month (about six hundred dollars in today’s 
money), with most of it earmarked for families back home.

Another difference: cities and suburbs could be major work sites this 
time around. Openlands, a Chicago-based nonprofit that collaborated with 
Durbin on his plan, has drawn up a list of project categories, including 
brownfield remediation, the greening of schoolyards, the repair of 
biking and walking trails, and the planting of urban vegetable gardens 
and orchards. Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania with his own 
C.C.C. proposal in the works, imagines a corps that would build and 
improve parks in green-starved inner-city neighborhoods and reverse the 
loss of tree canopy that has made cities especially vulnerable to global 
warming.

Casey has allied himself with the coalition of more than a hundred 
organizations behind an economic-policy package called “Reimagining 
Appalachia.” It proposes a C.C.C. that would restore wetlands and areas 
scarred by coal-mining while making room for ex-prisoners, victims of 
opioid addiction, and others unlikely to be hired by private employers. 
Along the way, Casey says, such a program could have the salutary effect 
of reminding rural and urban Americans that “they have very similar and 
overlapping problems,” including cycles of community decay set off by 
the exodus of well-paid jobs, whether in mining or manufacturing.

The White House effort is focussed, for now, on developing an 
administrative structure (it is likely to build on AmeriCorps, a 
Clinton-era national-service program) and finding funds in the existing 
budgets of the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department, and 
other federal agencies to get a fledgling corps up and running. Putting 
more serious money into such a program would require Congress’s 
coöperation and, perhaps, a degree of bipartisanship.

That might not be outside the bounds of possibility. Although Democrats 
have been the principal instigators of legislation so far, there are 
signs of Republican enthusiasm for the idea, aligning as it does with 
the party’s preference for work over cash relief. Seven G.O.P. 
senators—including Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; Roger Wicker, of 
Mississippi; and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana—signed on as co-sponsors of 
the Coons bill, which was comparatively modest in scale and tailored to 
Republican tastes (omitting all mention of climate change, for example). 
With that show of bipartisan support, it came close to being included in 
the pandemic-relief package passed in December.

The prospects for some version of a revived C.C.C. are favorable. To 
realize an ambitious version of the idea, the Biden Administration would 
have to bring a sense of urgency to the effort. It should. The 
Administration, with its $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” hopes to 
accelerate the pace of vaccinations, expedite the reopening of schools, 
give tens of millions of stressed-out Americans the wherewithal to pay 
their bills, and get a frozen economy moving. There is little in this 
measure, however, to lift a vast number of Americans—including roughly 
four million who have been unemployed for more than six months, and more 
than fifty million low-wage workers whose annual median income, 
according to the Brookings Institution, is eighteen thousand dollars—who 
were already feeling disheartened and undervalued when the pandemic came 
along.

Trumpist Republicans, fixated for the moment on settling intra-party 
scores, will turn their attention back to Biden and the Democrats before 
long. The backward elements of corporate America and Wall Street have 
been quiet lately, perhaps out of a sense of pandemic-induced propriety, 
but they, too, can be counted on to get back to obstruction mode. The 
best things that the new Administration has said and done—its 
commitments to racial and gender equity, its welcoming attitude toward 
immigrants, its seriousness about climate change—guarantee blowback.

Biden and his party can take comfort in opinion surveys that show 
overwhelming support for many of their proposals. To go by the polls, 
however, wide majorities of Americans have come down on the side of 
progressive policies for years. Meanwhile, mounting distrust of 
government has led many of those same people to consistently not vote 
for candidates committed to putting progressive policies into effect.

That dynamic will probably be with us until Americans without wealth or 
privilege see convincing evidence (more convincing than checks in the 
mail, however badly they are needed) of the government working zealously 
and effectively on their behalf. The old C.C.C. told that story in 
Roosevelt’s time. A new one could tell it in ours.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-civilian-climate-corps-is-a-big-government-plan-that-all-americans-can-embrace



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - March 11, 2009 *

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann rips Paul Dellegatto, meteorologist for Tampa, 
Florida Fox affiliate WTVT, for failing to forecast the facts about 
human-caused climate change:

"[I]n the middle of a forecast [Dellegatto] declared global warming was 
no longer a threat.  [Dellegatto stated,] 'Athens, Georgia, just about a 
week ago, and they had up to half a foot of snow.  Las Vegas got snow.  
It actually snowed in New Orleans this winter.' Dellegatto went on to 
say the current warming trend peaked in 1998 and, quote, 'I just think 
the whole global warming doomsayer theory is tough to see, based on 
recent calculations.'

"Once again, this is science‘s fault.  Never should have used the phrase 
'global warming.'  'Weather disaster' would have worked. The mistake was 
they thought even the dimmer folks would realize during global warming, 
it could get colder from time to time, especially in the places where 
it‘s not supposed to, like Tampa last month, when it got down to 28 
here.  This guy missed it, obviously because he was more worried about 
putting in global warming denial propaganda into the local freaking 
weather forecast on the local freaking Fox station!"

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/countdown/29645384#29645384


/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only.  It does not carry 
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.  A 
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes. 
Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20210311/9ad93cff/attachment.html>