[✔️] May 8 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli richard at theclimate.vote
Sat May 8 21:01:31 EDT 2021 

/*May 8, 2021*/

[well known anyway]
*The World Is Waking Up to the Truth That Natural Gas Is Dirty*
The U.N.’s new Global Methane Report throws cold water on a longtime 
fossil fuel industry talking point.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162337/un-methane-report-natural-gas-dirty



[yes we know]
*‘Megadrought’ persists in western U.S., as another extremely dry year 
develops*
The long-running dry stretch rivals anything in the last 1200 years, a 
sign of climate-change induced "aridification."
- -
The situation is unlikely to improve in the near future, scientists say, 
as 2021 shapes up to extend the “megadrought” that researchers have 
found to be gripping the region mostly unabated since 2000.

The region would have been in a state of drought regardless, “but it’s 
really climate change that pushed this event to be one of the worst in 
500 years,” says Ben Cook, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont 
Doherty Earth Observatory...
- -
The previous megadroughts lasted decades—“20, 30, even 40 years, really 
eclipsing anything we’ve had to manage for in the last 100 years,” says 
Cook. In the past century, droughts like the 1920s Dust Bowl generally 
lasted only five to 10 years—devastating for those living through it, 
but significantly less disruptive than a multi-decade-long drought.

This current dry stretch is already long and intense by comparison. It 
comes in second in their record only to the 1500s drought, which 
occurred in a world unchanged by human-forced climate change. That 
should give us pause, says Cook, because it shows the West can swing 
into such drastic drought states naturally, without the extra nudge of 
climate change. An extra push from humans could make the effects far worse.

And, according to their analysis, that’s exactly what has occurred: This 
“megadrought” has been pushed into extreme territory by climate change. 
It would have been bad no matter what—their estimates suggest it would 
have been roughly the eleventh most intense in their record—but the 
added heat from climate change supercharged the drying, pushing it up to 
the second most intense drought in the last 1200 years.

*Climate futures*
Human-caused climate change, in tandem with human reshaping of the 
natural hydrological systems—by damming rivers, growing vast fields of 
crops, and more—have shifted the baseline conditions so thoroughly that 
there is no way to return to what used to be considered normal. The 
physics are simply too different.

Hotter air is thirstier than dry, capable of holding 7 percent more 
moisture for each degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer it 
gets. Climate change has bumped average air temperatures up 1.6 degrees 
Fahrenheit in the region since the early 1900s. The increase means the 
atmosphere more readily pulls water from streams and rivers, lakes and 
reservoirs, and plants and soils.

The effects can feed back on themselves, exacerbating drought under some 
conditions. Evaporation takes a lot of energy, which is used to 
transform water from liquid to gas, using up energy that would otherwise 
be absorbed into soil as heat. As soils dry out, there’s less water to 
evaporate—so solar radiation just heats the ground further.

“When we sweat, water evaporates from our skin, and that evaporation 
acts as a cooling mechanism for our body,” says Amir AghaKouchak, a 
climate scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “Earth’s 
surface works the same way.”

Crucially, hotter air also means the precipitation that arrives is more 
likely to fall as rain than snow. Snow in the high mountains acts like a 
water tower, storing winter precipitation until it melts in spring and 
summer, smoothing the boom-bust seasonal precipitation cycle. With 
hotter air, whatever snow does fall often melts earlier in the year. 
Both contribute to a “snow drought” effect. Agha Kouchak and a colleague 
Laurie Huning recently found that in the western U.S., snow droughts 
lasted 28 percent longer after 2000, compared with the previous 20 years.

And the effects cascade. Less snow can lead to drier soils, which can 
increase the chance of heat waves, which dry soils further.

In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have 
suggested that using the word “drought” for what’s happening now might 
no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages 
may end. Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in 
water availability all over the West.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/megadrought-persists-in-western-us-as-another-extremely-dry-year-develops




[Conjecture]
*Climate change: how bad could the future be if we do nothing?*
May 6, 2021 8.59am EDT
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-how-bad-could-the-future-be-if-we-do-nothing-159665


[battlegrounds of information warfare]
*‘Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation*
Social and psychological forces are combining to make the sharing and 
believing of misinformation an endemic problem with no easy solution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/world/asia/misinformation-disinformation-fake-news.html



[Potholer the debunker in the battle of information warefare]
*Another side-effect of Covid-19: Stupidity*
May 8, 2021
potholer54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5inXVPS1Is

- -

[Classic from 2013]
*Climate Changes, But Facts Don't: Debunking Monckton*
Mar 13, 2013
Collin Maessen
*On the 19th of July in 2011 the National Press Club of Australia held a 
debate on climate change.***In this video I will be analysing the claims 
Monckton made during the debate and if they are correct or not.

The reason I'm doing this is that Monckton challenges his critics to 
check his sources, or like he put it in this debate "to do your 
homework". I'm going to follow him up on this to see if the scientific 
literature, and other available sources, corroborate what he's saying.

A full transcript of this video is available on my website 
RealSkeptic.com. The transcript has been split up in the different 
claims made by Monckton and are listed in chronological order. On the 
page for each individual claim you will also find a full listing of all 
the sources I used for that particular section of the video.

I hope you will find this video interesting and informative.
Please note that this is the main release of the full length analysis. 
The individual sections/chapters of this video will be uploaded in the 
coming days/weeks. Please keep an eye on my YouTube channel if you 
prefer a more manageable length for your videos.
Personal website:
http://www.realskeptic.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXS8l3_Yhh0



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 8, 1989 *

May 8, 1989: The New York Times reports that the Office of Management 
and Budget in the George H. W. Bush administration altered NASA climate 
scientist James Hansen's upcoming Senate testimony to emphasize alleged 
uncertainties in climate science.

    In his original testimony, he said that computer projections of
    climatic changes caused by carbon dioxide and other gases released
    into the atmosphere would cause substantial temperature increases,
    drought, severe storms and other stresses that will affect the
    earth's biological systems.

    The text of his testimony was edited by the budget office to soften
    the conclusions and make the prospects of change in climate appear
    more uncertain, Dr. Hansen said in an interview.

    - -

    Dr. Hansen's testimony, before it was changed, would have given
    strong support to the position that while there are still many
    uncertainities, enough is known now about the general and even
    regional effects of the global warming trend to start acting now to
    mitigate and prepare for those effects. Dr. Hansen concluded, for
    example, ''We believe it is very unlikely that this overall
    conclusion - drought intensification at most middle- and
    low-latitude land ares, if greenhouse gases increase rapidly - will
    be modified by improved models.''

    At the end of the section of his testimony dealing with regional
    effects of global warming, however, the Office of Management and
    Budget, over Dr. Hansen's objections, added this paragraph: ''Again,
    I must stress that the rate and magnitude of drought, storm, and
    temperature change are very sensitive to the many physical processes
    mentioned above, some of which are poorly represented in the
    G.C.M.'s [ general climate models ] . Thus, these changes should be
    viewed as estimates from evolving computer models and not as
    reliable predictions.'' Scientists Criticizes Change

    Dr. Hansen said in an interview that the additional paragraph served
    to ''negate'' the entire point of that part of his testimony, which
    was that scientific understanding has now reached the stage where
    ''we can begin to draw significant conclusions about droughts,
    storm, temperature - conclusions which are unlikely to change as the
    models and observational data become more detailed.''

    - -

    ''It distresses me that they put words in my mouth; they even put it
    in the first person,'' Dr. Hansen said, adding that he had tried to
    ''negotiate'' with the budget office over the wording but ''they
    refused to change.''

    ''I should be allowed to say what is my scientific position; there
    is no rationale by which O.M.B. should be censoring scientific
    opinion,'' Dr. Hansen insisted. ''I can understand changing policy,
    but not science.''


http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/08/us/scientist-says-budget-office-altered-his-testimony.html


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

/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/20210508/2b4df80d/attachment.htm>

More information about the TheClimate.Vote mailing list