[✔️] October 5, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*October 5, 2021*/

/[Nobel Prize awarded for climate modeling from the 60's]/
*Climate modelers awarded with the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics | DW News*
Oct 5, 2021
DW News
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded jointly to Syukuro 
Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi for "groundbreaking 
contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems."

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists whose 
cumulative work can be summed up in two words: Climate change. Half of 
the prize went to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical 
modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably 
predicting global warming." And the other half went to Giorgio Parisi 
"for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in 
physical systems from atomic to planetary scales." The Nobel Committee 
got Parisi on the line from his home in Rome to Stockholm, and when 
asked whether he had a message for politicians meeting at the COP26 
United Nations Climate Change Conference, he said simply: "We have to 
act now."

Syukuro Manabe, who in the 1960s began work to demonstrate how increased 
levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased 
temperatures at the surface of the Earth. Then about 10 years later, 
Klaus Hasselmann created a model that linked together weather and 
climate. This work explained why climate models "can be reliable despite 
weather being changeable and chaotic," writes the Committee. And perhaps 
most significantly for non-scientists, Hasselmann developed methods for 
identifying which natural phenomena and which human activities leave 
their mark on our global climate. "His methods have been used to prove 
that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human 
emissions of carbon dioxide," writes the Committee. Then in the 1980s, 
Giorgio Parisi discovered "hidden patterns in disordered complex 
materials." That work contributed to the general theory of complex 
systems. "They make it possible to understand and describe many 
different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena, not 
only in physics but also in other very different areas, such as 
mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning," the Committee 
writes. Parisi's work may seem unconnected to climate science, but our 
climate is one of our most complex systems, and we use mathematics and 
increasingly machine learning to understand it better. So, it all comes 
together.

Syukuro Manabe is a climatologist and meteorologist at Princeton 
University in the US. Manabe was one of the first to use computer 
modeling to study and explore the role of greenhouse gases in both 
maintaining and changing the thermal structure of the Earth's atmosphere.

Klaus Hasselmann is a meteorologist at the Max Planck Institute for 
Meteorology in Germany. Hasselmann is interested in the oceans and 
remote sensing of Earth's climate with satellite technology.

Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, is a theoretical 
physicist with more than 500 scientific papers to his name. Parisi's 
work has covered string theory, disordered systems and computer sciences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6-HH4uLwys



/[Because of climate and measurements]/
*Climate-proof Duluth? Why the city is attracting 'climate migrants'*
Dan Kraker
Duluth, Minn.October 4, 2021
Duluth native Karen Pagel Guerndt remembers when she first heard that 
her hometown had been singled out as an ideal location for people 
seeking refuge from the growing consequences of a warming world. It was 
January. And it was 20 degrees below zero.

"And so to me, the whole idea of climate migration, it kind of made me 
laugh," she said.

If anything, she and other locals mused, Duluth’s climate is going to 
keep people away. Winters, after all, can be notoriously frigid, long 
and unforgiving.

But Harvard lecturer Jesse Keenan, an expert on climate adaptation, had 
recently identified Duluth as a potential hotspot for future “climate 
migrants” — people escaping rising sea levels or extreme conditions like 
drought, heat waves and wildfire smoke fueled by climate change. Keenan 
described the city's climate as moderate, and he noted its access to 
abundant fresh water and room to grow.

When he traveled to Duluth to pitch his idea for the city to playfully 
market itself as "Climate-Proof Duluth," the media loved it. The New 
York Times did a big story; CNN visited. Pagel Guerndt got interviewed 
as well....
- -
But migrants bring challenges as well as opportunity. Like many cities, 
there's a shortage of affordable housing in Duluth. And housing prices 
are increasingly rapidly.

"We need to prioritize making sure that we're not displacing people 
locally for that,” Larson said, “that we're not making an even greater 
dent in our limited housing stock because of that."...
- -
Rose Chivers and her husband run an e-commerce company in Salt Lake 
City. Since they moved there nearly seven years ago, she's been bothered 
by winter air pollution, trapped by the surrounding mountains. But in 
the past few years she says wildfires have harmed air quality in the 
summer, too...
- -
Duluth was also a place where they could afford a mortgage.

They’re still working out the timeline, but Chivers said they’ve decided 
to move to Duluth, which is a painful decision for them.

“We've been talking a lot about how much grief we have, because we love 
the West. But we also are realists, and we were also pleasantly 
surprised by the beauty of Minnesota, and the prospects for having real 
winters.”

That’s not to say climate change isn’t impacting Duluth as well. Major 
floods caused severe damage in the city in 2012. And wildfire smoke from 
Canadian fires caused major air pollution for days at a time this summer.

Doug Kouma said that smoke triggered anxiety for him from the wildfires 
he experienced in California. He said it was a good reminder that you 
can’t totally escape climate change, even in “climate-proof Duluth.”

“But all things considered, you know, I have no desire to move back to a 
place with hot, sweltering, humid summers,” said Kouma. “And if winter 
gets a little more mild here in Duluth, Minn., I can live with that.”
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/10/04/climateproof-duluth-why-the-city-is-attracting-climate-migrants



/[Bring me back to Old Arizona]/
*Biosphere 2: The Once Infamous Live-In Terrarium Is Transforming 
Climate Research*
Despite its controversial past, the quirky desert facility is becoming 
increasingly relevant as it turns 30
By Keridwen Cornelius on October 4, 2021...
- -
Here in Biosphere 2, the world’s largest controlled environment 
dedicated to climate research, scientists can tinker with scaled-down 
ecosystems by switching off sprinklers and cranking up the thermostat to 
learn about the effects of global warming out in the real world.
The facility has long been shadowed by its ill-fated 1991 maiden mission 
to establish an analogue of a self-sustaining colony on another planet. 
But after some retooling and successful, high-profile studies—including 
one that revealed warming oceans are killing corals—the giant terrarium 
(led by the University of Arizona since 2011) is finally living up to 
its potential as a site for novel and risky research...
- -
*PAST STRUGGLES*
Biosphere 2 launched 30 years ago, on September 26, 1991, when a crew of 
eight—including a physician, botanist and marine biologist—began a 
two-year residency inside this 3.14-acre terrarium. The structure, a 
prototype for an extraterrestrial habitat, was conceived by a 
counterculture theater troupe that partnered with businesspeople to form 
a company called Space Biosphere Ventures. It was intended to be a 
hermetically sealed ecosystem where several biomes, 3,000 species of 
plants and animals, and a farm would provide the “biospherians” with all 
the air, water and food they needed. “At the time, a lot of scientists 
said it literally could not be done, that the whole thing was going to 
turn into green slime,” says Jane Poynter, one of the original 
biospherians and founder of spaceflight company Space Perspective.
- -
Scientists did, in fact, learn something important from what went wrong: 
the soil was too rich in organic matter, and its thriving bacteria 
gobbled up too much oxygen. At first, the researchers could not track 
down the excess carbon dioxide those microbes should have released as a 
byproduct of that oxygen consumption. Eventually they found it had 
chemically bonded with concrete in the building. “It was a light bulb 
moment,” says John Adams, Biosphere 2’s current deputy director. “They 
could trace, molecule by molecule, where [carbon] was going and where it 
was being stored in ways that they couldn’t outside” in the real world.

When Columbia University took over Biosphere 2 from 1996 to 2003, 
researchers realized that, inside this controlled mini world, they could 
tweak the CO2, heat and precipitation to predicted future levels and 
could measure the effects on varied biomes. “Quite a few people thought 
that this is an exquisite tool because you have a complicated system 
that you can completely close and risk damaging and learn how stressed 
systems behave,” says Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative 
Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, who is not affiliated with 
Biosphere 2. “The challenge is: you have to make sure it’s actually 
reflecting a real system. I think one can walk that walk, and some of 
that [research] is being done now.”

*UNDERSTANDING THE FUTURE*
Christiane Werner, an ecosystem physiologist at Germany’s University of 
Freiburg, used the facility’s rain forest to investigate how tropical 
plants and soil share nutrients to protect each other from climate 
change—and what happens when those support systems fail. Several recent 
studies have shown that deforestation and climate-related tree death are 
transforming rain forests such as the Amazon from carbon storage spaces 
into massive greenhouse gas emitters. Werner’s goal is to find what 
causes these tipping points. Doing so could help researchers make better 
climate predictions and develop more effective reforestation techniques.

Werner’s team released traceable forms of carbon and hydrogen into the 
glass-domed rain forest, then turned off the sprinklers to induce a 
9.5-week “drought” and tracked where the elements traveled. “That has 
never been done before,” she says, “and Biosphere 2 is the one place on 
Earth where you can do such an experiment because you have a fully grown 
forest you can manipulate.” In the Amazon, it would of course have been 
impossible to conjure a two-month dry spell, and the chemical tracers 
could have escaped anywhere, she notes.

The soon to be published results are being kept under wraps, but Werner 
says the main takeaway was the diverse ways various plant species coped 
with the stress. “Because they have different functional responses, it 
buffers the whole forest,” she explains, adding that biodiversity is 
therefore key to keeping forests stable in turbulent climatic times.

Other experimental results from Biosphere 2’s rain forest have been 
heartening. In a 2020 study published in Nature Plants, Michigan State 
University ecologist Marielle Smith and her colleagues dialed up the 
temperature and found that the tropical flora were more resilient to 
high heat than many had anticipated.

At the facility’s mini ocean, researchers are partnering with microbial 
sciences company Seed Health to dose corals with probiotics to see if 
this can deter bleaching (which occurs when heat-stressed corals expel 
the symbiotic algae that help feed them). The scientists are also 
developing a program to experiment with “super corals” that are 
bioengineered to be resistant to heat and acidity. “If you’re in Miami 
or Hawaii, you can’t get permits to do that research because there’s a 
fear that genetically modified corals will get into nature,” says Chris 
Langdon, a University of Miami marine biologist who is on Biosphere 2’s 
science advisory committee. “With Biosphere 2 being in the middle of the 
desert, there would be absolutely no risk if anything escaped.”

Langdon is no stranger to Biosphere 2’s ocean. In the 1990s he conducted 
research there, revealing for the first time that ocean acidification 
causes corals to dissolve from a lack of calcium. He says the giant tank 
would also be a good place to test a leading idea to achieve negative 
carbon emissions: raising the ocean’s pH by adding dissolved rocks, 
giving the water a greater capacity to pull carbon dioxide out of the 
atmosphere.

Not all of Biosphere 2’s projects focus on climate. Its so-called Space 
Analog for the Moon and Mars (SAM), currently under construction, “is 
very much, at a scientific level and even a philosophical level, similar 
to the original Biosphere,” says SAM director Kai Staats. Unlike other 
space analogues around the world, SAM will be a hermetically sealed 
habitat. Its primary purpose will be to discover how to transition from 
mechanical methods of generating breathable air to a self-sustaining 
system where plants, fungi and people produce a precise balance of 
oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Visiting researchers will hydroponically grow fruits and vegetables in 
SAM’s greenhouse, which is painted and tinted to block the sun and mimic 
the dimmer daylight on Mars. They will also experiment with transforming 
regolith (crushed rocks that resemble lifeless Martian basalt) into 
fertile soil. This could have implications for reviving some of Earth’s 
degraded terrains.

And in light of the precarious status of Earth’s climate, Staats hopes 
the scientists who live in SAM will experience the kind of epiphany he 
says was described to him by Linda Leigh, one of the original 
biospherians. “She said that, in such a closed environment, you can’t 
help but be aware of every breath you take, every drink of water you 
consume and every morsel of food you eat because it doesn’t go someplace 
where you never see it again,” he says. “It comes right back to you.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biosphere-2-the-once-infamous-live-in-terrarium-is-transforming-climate-research/

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/[ Activist author Bill McKibben on disinformation]/
*Facebook is to our minds as Exxon is to our air*
Getting serious about protecting our mental environment from 'the 
metaverse.'
Bill McKibben
What Exxon is to our air, Facebook is to our minds: an unparalleled 
source of pollution. Both are giant companies with deep political power 
whose products at one point offered a certain kind of liberation and now 
threaten whatever well-being we still enjoy. Both have lied and 
covered-up their evil: the Wall Street Journal’s accounts of the 
Facebook files (artfully reprised in the New Yorker and last night on 60 
Minutes) remind me of nothing as much as Inside Climate News’s chronicle 
of Exxon’s global warming prevarications, which helped cost us three 
decades in the global warming fight...
- -
We should figure out ways to stop the tech companies. Breaking up 
Facebook would be an excellent start—the company is almost sovereign in 
its power now, and so able to overwhelm debate and discussion. It’s 
begun to use its NewsFeed to bolster its image, which means this concept 
will be discussed about as rationally as, say, vaccines. Sometimes I 
think that if an outage like today’s at Facebook just lasted a week or 
two, it would break the spell it has cast, and we would blink, and 
resume life; the company’s engineers are probably good enough to get 
their enterprise restarted, so we’ll have to find other, more 
democratic, ways.

It’s true that we need energy, but we don’t need Exxon’s fossil fuel: 
instead, we can now supply our power locally and relatively benignly. We 
also need connection, some of it online: but we can learn to do that 
closer to home, and in limited ways that don’t threaten to overwhelm us. 
Allowing Exxon or Facebook this much power is foolish and lazy.

We’re coming close to cutting the connection to our former earth, the 
one with icecaps and winter; that horror should be the most powerful 
incentive not to also cut the connection with our former selves, the 
ones that moved through the ‘world’ on our own terms instead of 
marinating in a corporate ‘metaverse.’ We fight to save the climate in 
part to save the humans, in part because we are such an interesting, 
vivid, and difficult species. Let’s surrender neither.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/facebook-is-to-our-minds-as-exxon


/[an interesting, heartfelt discussion]/
*Katharine Hayhoe with Forrest Inslee, Saving Us*
Oct 1, 2021
Village Books
In SAVING US: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a 
Divided World Hayhoe demonstrates that whether you’re a parent or a 
person of faith, a beachgoer or a dedicated foodie, climate change 
affects someone or something you already care about. While others offer 
doomsday scenarios and point fingers of blame, Hayhoe approaches this 
topic with optimism and inclusivity. She argues that climate action 
isn’t about being a certain type of person or voting a certain way. It’s 
about connecting the values we already have, to act for our future. A 
leading expert on the science, impacts, and communication of climate 
change, Hayhoe has been profiled in The New York Times, the Washington 
Post, People, and Rolling Stone, and her TED Talk titled “The most 
important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it” has 
been viewed almost 4 million times. She gives nearly a hundred talks a 
year to audiences ranging from corporate symposiums, top-tier 
universities, and global climate summits to local churches, schools, and 
city council meetings.
In addition to serving as Chief Scientist for TNC, Katharine Hayhoe is 
the Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law and Paul W. Horn 
Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University. She served as a lead 
author for the Second, Third, and Fourth US National Climate Assessment 
and hosts the PBS digital series Global Weirding. She is the Climate 
Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and has been named one of 
Time’s “100 Most Influential People,” Fortune’s “50 Greatest Leaders,” 
and Foreign Policy’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers.”

Dr. Forrest Inslee is the editor of Christ & Cascadia, a journal focused 
on innovative faith praxis in the Pacific Northwest and a curriculum 
design consultant at The Seattle School. In his role as Associate 
Director of Circlewood, a faith-based environmental advocacy nonprofit, 
he hosts the Earthkeepers podcast, and helps to develop creation care 
education initiatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzYXq5oQDUk



/[using available technology ] /
*Mapping wildfires and relaying communications from 62,000 feet*
Bill Gabbert -- October 2, 2021
Using stratospheric balloon systems
- -
It was operated by Raven Aerostar, a company based near Sioux Falls, 
South Dakota, which has been working with lighter than air technologies 
since 1956. We contacted the Communications Manager for the company, 
Lisa McElrath, who told us that in June, July, and August they launched 
one of their Thunderhead Balloons from South Dakota and flew it west to 
monitor wildfires. While traveling more than 16,000 miles during its 
70-day flight it engaged in station-seeking  above four active fires — 
the Robertson Draw Fire (Mont.), the Dixie Fire (Calif.), the 
Dixie-Jumbo Fire (Idaho), and the Dry Gulch/Lick Creek fire (Wash.) — 
collecting visible and thermal imagery for extended periods of time...
- -
/High tech and informative video https://youtu.be/C0xXKrLCDd8/
*Raven Aerostar - Thunderhead Balloon System*
Jul 17, 2020
Raven Aerostar
https://youtu.be/C0xXKrLCDd8
- -
There are at least half a dozen companies in the U.S. that are working 
with high altitude balloons. Google Loon was one of them until they shut 
down a few months ago. Their goal was to help provide internet 
connectivity to the last one billion residents on the Earth, beaming it 
down from balloons. The company announced that it could not become 
commercially viable, around the time that thousands of SpaceX’s internet 
satellites were appearing in orbit.

The high altitude balloons navigate to locations by changing altitude to 
find wind directions that serve their needs.
https://fireaviation.com/2021/10/02/mapping-wildfires-and-relaying-communications-from-62000-feet/

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/[Sen Sinema and climate and other issues ]/
*Last Week Tonight With John Oliver S08E25 10/03/2021 | HBO Oct 3, 2021 
FULL SHOW*
Oct 3, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDu1Ta0_qc (pirated video may not persist)


/[The news archive - looking back - it was so quaint]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October 5, 1988*

October 5, 1988: Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D) and Indiana Senator
Dan Quayle (R) discuss global warming in the Vice Presidential debate,
with both men agreeing that the problem must be addressed during the
next four years; Bentsen suggests that natural gas and ethanol might
be alternatives to oil dependence. (49:33-52:45)

http://youtu.be/99-v2Farbjs


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