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

Mon May 17 12:28:30 EDT 2021

/*May 17, 2021*/

[even with a mask]
*How climate change is making allergy season even worse*
If you think this pollen season is bad, brace yourself.
Julia Jacobo -May 15, 2021,
No, your (itchy, red) eyes are not deceiving you -- allergy season is 
getting worse, and climate change is to blame.
- -
Human-caused climate change is responsible for more than 50% of the 
long-term trend of pollen season getting longer and pollen counts 
getting higher, a study published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences in February, co-authored by Anderegg, found.

"We all see it in our daily life," Sapkota said. "When the winter 
temperatures are warmer, the tulips start to bloom early. The trees 
start to bloom early. We have noticed that."...
- -
To alleviate allergy symptoms, Fatteh suggested taking preventative 
measures such as keeping windows closed, changing AC filters and using 
air purifiers. She also recommended wearing a hat and sunglasses when 
going outside to keep pollen off of hair and eyelashes...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/climate-change-making-allergy-season-worse/story?id=77505552

[click to see the cartoon]
*What do you even say to young people about climate change?*
First Dog on the Moon
I’M SO SORRY ABOUT HOW YOUR FUTURES HAVE TURNED TO DUST! I TRIED TO STOP IT!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/17/what-do-you-even-say-to-young-people-about-climate-change 

[Ooops!, time to recalculate]
*Extreme Heat Risks May Be Widely Underestimated and Sometimes Left Out 
of Major Climate Reports*
New studies sharpen warnings for unlivable heat in the tropics, and 
nearly unthinkable extremes in major Northern Hemisphere cities.
By Bob Berwyn - May 16, 2021
While scientists warn with increasing urgency that global warming is 
sharply increasing the likelihood of deadly heat waves, many regions are 
doing little to protect vulnerable populations.

Recent research shows that the global death toll from extreme heat is 
rising, but still, “Large parts of society don’t think of heat as a 
threat,” said University of Oxford University climate scientist Fredi 
Otto after researchers unveiled a series of new extreme heat studies at 
the European Geosciences Union online conference last month.

The research discussed at the conference suggests that many models are 
underestimating the short-term threat to the most vulnerable 
areas—densely populated tropical regions—and that the threats aren’t 
clearly communicated. And a study released in late April showed that, in 
the U.S., the risk of power failures during such heatwaves could 
increase the death toll.

Last week’s updates to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 
Climate Indicators website, which had been delayed for years by the 
Trump administration, showed that major U.S. cities experienced three 
times as many heat waves—four or more days with temperatures that should 
only occur every 10 years—in the 2010s as during the 1960s. The season 
in which heat waves occur has lengthened by 47 days. In addition to heat 
exhaustion, recent research also showed that extreme heat dramatically 
increases the chances of pre-term births...
- -
*The Worst Heat Wave Impacts Are Ahead*
The most dire projections are for tropical regions in Africa and South 
Asia, where tens of millions of people are vulnerable to extreme heat. 
By 2070 in those regions, a combination of extreme heat and humidity 
will put about 1.5 billion people at risk. Deadly heat waves, formed by 
the combination of temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity 
in excess of 90 percent, will start happening annually in those areas, 
instead of every 25 years, with conditions lingering near that lethal 
threshold for weeks on end.

“We are making the tropics unlivable,” she said. If warming continues 
unabated through 2050, “loads of people would die and it would lead to 
mass migration, and that is something we’re not really saying enough 
about.”

“The poorest people in society live in the most vulnerable areas, and 
they are often in rural areas working outside for long hours, exposed to 
the heat,” she added.

Even after a string of years with record global temperatures, “the 
really dangerous implications of having these extreme events more 
frequently, the way they can affect people and infrastructure, hasn’t 
really cut through,” said University of Oxford climate scientist Mike 
Byrne, whose ongoing research shows extreme heat intensifying over more 
tropical land areas, compared to heat over the globally averaged land 
surface.
The trend toward extreme heat is “amplified over land where the impacts 
on human health, wildfire risk and food production are most severe,” he 
said. His model shows that temperatures over tropical land areas are 
warming more than average temperatures over all land. The trend seems to 
be driven by drier soils, with less moisture that can evaporate from the 
earth to cool the air, he added.

His research was partly inspired by a 2019 study showing research gaps 
on the extreme impacts of climate change in Africa, the world’s hottest 
continent. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa may be the regions 
closest to having temperatures that rise above the limit of human survival.

“With this fast pace of warming of temperature extremes, we might 
actually pass a fundamental limit, beyond the human ability to cool 
itself,” he said. That could make human life in those areas impossible 
without air conditioning.

“Fredi Otto’s study was a motivation for me, showing a blank spot in our 
understanding of extreme events in Africa,” he said.

More research on heat extremes in the tropics is needed, Byrne said, 
because most of science’s current understanding of such events is based 
on study of cooler regions. ”We don’t have a basic picture of what 
drives extremes in the tropics,” he said. The research presented at the 
April conference will help reduce uncertainty to provide better warnings 
of extreme heat waves in Africa and elsewhere, he added.

In the United States, a 2019 study projected thousands of additional 
heat deaths in cities during the second half of the century, even if 
global warming is limited to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Fatalities increase 
even more steeply at higher levels of warming. The European Academy of 
Sciences projects up to 132,000 additional deaths by 2100 if warming 
exceeds 3.6 degrees Celsius.

In North America and Europe, extreme heat by far is the biggest killer 
driven by global warming, Otto said. That may be the case worldwide, but 
it’s hard to know because heat deaths still aren’t accurately counted in 
parts of the developing world, including in Africa, she added.

Part of the reason that the threat of extreme heat is still 
underestimated is because the deaths are slow and silent. “It’s a lot 
easier to assess impacts from, say, a tropical cyclone,” she said. “It 
happens quickly, and you can count the deaths almost immediately.” Heat 
deaths come at a much slower pace, over the course of weeks or months, 
and often aren’t tallied until the end of the year.

Media reports about extreme heat risks also can be misleading, she 
added, with heat “almost always presented as something nice.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16052021/extreme-heat-risks-climate-change/

[Nick Breeze interview]
*Glaciologist Dr Heidi Sevestre | Have We Crossed Arctic Permafrost 
Threshold?*
Nick Breeze - May 16, 2021
ChangeNow Summit:https://www.changenow.world
Transcript and more: https://genn.cc

In this episode of Shaping The Future, I am speaking with Glaciologist, 
Dr Heidi Sevestre, about the changing state of the Arctic, the outlook 
for the Russian Chairmanship of the Arctic Council, of which Heidi 
herself is an advisor, and how thawing permafrost could be past the 
threshold of irreversibility.

Heidi combines the spirit of the modern polar explorer with the weight 
of important scientific work. She is also an excellent communicator and 
will be speaking at the ChangeNow climate summit later this month in the 
company of Sir David Attenborough and world-renowned scientist, Johan 
Rockström, who will be premiering their new documentary, Breaking 
Boundaries, as part of the virtual summit.

Heidi also gives her perspective on why we literally must fight hard to 
limit global average warming to 1.5ºC, giving a rare insight into how 
someone who wanted to be a glaciologist from a very young age actually 
feels about the rate of loss of the world's glaciers.

Thank you for listening to Shaping The Future - please subscribe and 
share the podcast as we have many more episodes on the way exploring the 
change needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
https://youtu.be/F__Lho0Ggio

[none to drink]
*The Entire State of California Is in Drought—But the Impacts Are Just 
Beginning*
Jody Serrano - May 15, 2012
California is in trouble.
Drought has returned to the state in a major way, and bone-dry docks are 
just the tip of the devastating problems facing the state. Currently, 41 
of California’s 58 counties are in a drought state of emergency, 
affecting approximately 30% of the state’s population. As we move into 
the summer, experts anticipate the drought’s impacts will only get worse...
- -
Earlier this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought state of 
emergency in 39 additional California counties, bringing the total 
number of counties affected by the emergency to 41. Newsom originally 
declared a regional drought emergency in Sonoma and Mendocino counties 
in April. However, he was prompted to expand the emergency to additional 
counties after hot temperatures and extremely dry soils—both hallmarks 
of climate change in the Golden State—ate into the snowpack and expected 
runoff from the Sierra Nevadas. (Snowpack itself was already low this 
year after a subpar winter wet season.)

As a result, Newsom’s office stated, major reservoirs, including those 
along the Klamath River, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and Tulare Lake 
watershed, experienced “historic and unanticipated reductions in the 
amount of water flowing.”...
- -
Newsom’s drought emergency proclamation directs the California State 
Water Board to consider modifying requirements for reservoir releases 
and diversion limitations in order to conserve water upstream later in 
the year and maintain water supply, improve water quality, and protect 
cold water pools for salmon and steelhead. The order also moves to speed 
up the review and processing of water transfers so that water can go to 
areas where it is needed most.

In addition, state agencies are partnering with local water suppliers to 
promote water conservation. Some municipalities have also implemented 
mandatory and voluntary water-saving measures. Officials from the 
California Natural Resources Agency directed residents to limit outdoor 
watering, take shorter showers, and turn off the water when brushing 
their teeth or doing the dishes, all orders reminiscent of the drought 
that racked the state in the mid-2010s...
- -
As of this week, the Drought Monitor declared the entire state of 
California is now experiencing some form of drought. Nearly 
three-quarters of the state is in exceptional or extreme drought, the 
worst categories...
- -
The worsening drought comes just a few years after the state had some of 
its wettest years on record. The flip-flop reflects a trend climate 
scientists have tracked: California’s average precipitation hasn’t 
changed much, but dry and wet years have become more extreme. This trend 
is expected to continue due to climate change, increasing the urgency 
for the state to figure out how to cope with drought and more snow 
depending on the year...
- -
Droughts can elevate the risk of wildfires, something California is 
unfortunately very accustomed to. Last year was the state’s worst 
wildfire season recorded in modern history. More than 4.2 million acres, 
or more than 4% of the state’s roughly 100 million acres, had burned by 
year’s end, according to Cal Fire. The state saw its first fire to burn 
more than 1 million acres in modern history as well as a host of other 
large, damaging blazes. There’s even signs that fires from last year 
overwintered and are still smoldering.

As of May 5, the state had already seen a significant increase in the 
number of wildfires and acres burned compared to the same time last 
year, Cal Fire said. In May of 2020, the state had registered 1,065 
fires and 1,726 acres burned. This year, there have already been 1,788 
fires and 13,604 acres burned...
- -
It’s not clear yet whether the 2021 fire season will be as devastating 
or worse than 2020. Experts are concerned the severe drought, dry 
vegetation, and an expected hot summer could be a recipe for disaster. 
Dry winter conditions, however mean there’s less overall vegetation. 
That could deprive fires of the fuel they need. Yet, when fires do spark 
in a drought, they tend to get bigger and be more destructive.

There is one thing we do know though: 2021 is off to a worse start than 
last year...
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-entire-state-of-california-is-in-drought-but-the-im-1846891039

[Rolling$tone]
*Big Oil Is Trying to Make Climate Change Your Problem to Solve. Don’t 
Let Them*
A new Harvard study highlights a decades-long trend — how industry 
creates systemic problems and then blames consumers for it
By AMY WESTERVELT
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-change-exxonmobil-harvard-study-1169682/
- -
[Earther.Gizmodo -- interesting tactic]
*Exxon Blames You for Climate Change*
https://earther.gizmodo.com/exxon-blames-you-for-climate-change-1846882224

[Center fro Climate Communicaitons]
*America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled 
Americans about climate change*
Over the past few decades, the fossil fuel industry has subjected the 
American public to a well-funded, well-orchestrated disinformation 
campaign about the reality and severity of human-caused climate change. 
The purpose of this web of denial has been to confuse the public and 
decision-makers in order to delay climate action and thereby protect 
fossil fuel business interests and defend libertarian, free-market 
conservative ideologies. The fossil fuel industry’s denial and delay 
tactics come straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. As a result, the 
American public have been denied the right to be accurately informed 
about climate change, just as they were denied the right to be informed 
about the risks of smoking by the tobacco industry. While fossil fuel 
companies attacked the science and called on politicians to “reset the 
alarm,” climate-catalyzed damages worsened, including increased storm 
intensities, droughts, forest damage and wildfires, all at substantial 
loss of life and cost to the American people.
https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/

[Doom discussed for new book - video]
*Niall Ferguson on Doom, Disaster and Democracy | Amanpour and Company*
May 11, 2021
Amanpour and Company
Renowned historian Niall Ferguson has bad news: We’re getting worse, not 
better, at handling disasters like the pandemic. This is the argument he 
lays out in his new book “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”, which sets 
2020 into wider context and asks why many countries’ initial responses 
to coronavirus were too slow. He speaks with Walter Isaacson about how 
we got here and what the next big disaster might be.
Originally aired on May 11, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDlBlHGT4rQ

[Book released May 18, 2021]
*White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism*
Andreas Malm (Author)  The Zetkin Collective (Author)
Description

    Rising temperatures and the rise of the far right. What disasters
    happen when they meet?
    In the first study of the far right's role in the climate crisis,
    White Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel
    political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots.
    Fossil-fuelled technologies were born steeped in racism. No one
    loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. Now
    right-wing forces have risen to the surface, some professing to have
    the solution--closing borders to save the nation as the climate
    breaks down.
    Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of
    political fronts that can only heat up.

Publish Date May 18, 2021
Pages 576
About the Author
Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology and author of, among other 
books, Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm.
The Zetkin Collective is a group of scholars, activists and students 
working on the political ecology of the far right.
https://bookshop.org/books/white-skin-black-fuel-on-the-danger-of-fossil-fascism/9781839761744 

[fast, fast sea level rise]
*‘Impossible to adapt’: Surprisingly fast ice-melts in past raise fears 
about sea level rise*
27 April 2021
Studies of ancient beaches and fossilised coral reefs suggest sea levels 
have the potential to rise far more quickly than models currently 
predict, according to geologists who have been studying past periods of 
warming.

At one point in a comparable period they were rising at three metres per 
century, or 30mm a year, according to Dr Fiona Hibbert, a geologist at 
York University in the UK. The current rate of rise is 3.2mm per year.

Dr Hibbert is working on a project called ExTaSea, which predicts 
worst-case scenarios for sea level rise around the globe. The goal is to 
help policymakers take long-term decisions, for example about the siting 
of enduring infrastructure such as nuclear power stations.

Devising models that can make such predictions is notoriously difficult, 
she says.

‘We’re not entirely sure of all the processes involved. When you melt an 
ice sheet sometimes it’s really long-time scales that they operate over, 
which is quite difficult to put into a model.’

And melting itself alters the system – for example, by lightening the 
load on the Earth’s crust which then undergoes a slow-motion rebound 
over thousands of years.

A further issue is that data on recent sea levels dates back only 150 
years – for tide gauges – and just 20-25 years for satellite measurements.

Because of this, geologists such as Dr Hibbert, and Professor Alessio 
Rovere, a geoscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, are 
looking back to see what happened during the last interglacial period.

‘The geological record is great because it includes all the processes,’ 
said Dr Hibbert...
- -
‘This is really interesting because today we are in a warm period – 
naturally as well as because of climate change – and in the last 
interglacial, even without us giving warmth to the system, some data 
suggest that there was this jump.

‘Now this is a very debated idea but what if it is true? It means there 
is this possibility of rapid melting of ice, on top of what we do as 
humans.’

Prof. Rovere says that a 10mm a year sea level rise would be ‘almost 
impossible’ to adapt to with sufficient speed. ‘It means we just have to 
abandon our cities,’ he added.

Acceleration
The prospect of a sudden acceleration in ice melting is further 
supported by work done by Dr Yucheng Lin, a student of Dr Hibbert’s as 
part of the ExTaSea project.

This time the reference period is 24,000 to 11,000 years ago, Earth’s 
most recent deglaciation, which preceded the Holocene.

This period was substantially different from today which makes it ‘not 
so great for looking at the future,’ said Dr Hibbert. For example, there 
were huge ice sheets over North America and Europe.

But they found that, at the peak of the ice-melt, seas rose at 3.6 
metres per century.

‘Again, these are really high numbers, so ice sheets can lose mass 
really quite quickly,’ said Dr Hibbert.

She is now considering how such a rapid melting would play out this 
century on different coasts.
https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/impossible-adapt-surprisingly-fast-ice-melts-past-raise-fears-about-sea-level-rise.html

[across time]*
**Historical and future global burned area with changing climate and 
human demography*
Published:April 01, 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.03.002
Highlights
• We evaluate historical and future burned area (BA) trends and their 
drivers
• Recent BA has decreased in central South America and mesic African 
savannas
• High-latitude warming, (sub)tropical drying, and human ignitions will 
increase future BA
• Fire suppression near human settlements can offset large potential BA 
increases
*Science for society*
Wildfire is an important natural disturbance for many ecosystems, 
helping to shape biome distributions and controlling the carbon balance. 
Major changes in fire activity could also have a strong impact on human 
societies. Changes in fire activity are influenced both by climatic 
changes and by changes in human demography via, e.g., population growth 
and urbanization. We show that in recent decades, global burned area has 
actually decreased, especially in central South America and mesic 
African savannas. However, our future simulations indicate that future 
climate and demographic change will reverse this trend and that burned 
area is likely to increase due to accelerated high-latitude warming and 
tropical and subtropical drying and human ignitions. These projections 
will inform more detailed, local work to develop wildfire management 
strategies and to assess ecological responses to global change, and will 
contribute to the discussion of what constitutes a safe upper limit to 
global warming.
*Summary*
Wildfires influence terrestrial carbon cycling and represent a safety 
risk, and yet a process-based understanding of their frequency and 
spatial distributions remains elusive. We combine satellite-based 
observations with an enhanced dynamic global vegetation model to make 
regionally resolved global assessments of burned area (BA) responses to 
changing climate, derived from 34 Earth system models and human 
demographics for 1860–2100. Limited by climate and socioeconomics, 
recent BA has decreased, especially in central South America and mesic 
African savannas. However, future simulations predict increasing BA due 
to changing climate, rapid population density growth, and urbanization. 
BA increases are especially notable at high latitudes, due to 
accelerated warming, and over the tropics and subtropics, due to drying 
and human ignitions. Conversely, rapid urbanization also limits BA via 
enhanced fire suppression in the immediate vicinity of settlements, 
offsetting the potential for dramatic future increases, depending on 
warming extent. Our analysis provides further insight into regional and 
global BA trends, highlighting the importance of including human 
demographic change in models for wildfire under changing climate.
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(21)00129-9

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming  May 17, 2013 *
   Andrew Sullivan points to the root cause of US climate-change denial:

    "But the main reason many Americans still refuse to believe it is
    religious fundamentalism. That is immune to science and reason. But
    it is the bedrock belief of one of our political parties."

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/17/settled-among-scientists/

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