[✔️] October 16, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*October 16, 2021*/

[ 67% of US]
*Americans perceive a rise in extreme weather, Pew finds*
Americans are taking notice of extreme weather events, according to a 
new Pew Research Center survey.

Details: Two-thirds of Americans say extreme weather events in the U.S. 
have been occurring more frequently than in the past, while only 28% 
said they've been taking place about as often, and just 4% perceiving a 
dropoff in frequency.

    -- So far in 2021, the U.S. has seen a record 18 billion dollar
    extreme weather events.
    -- When it comes to extreme weather events in their backyards, 46%
    of U.S. adults say the area where they live has had an extreme
    weather event over the past year.
    -- The area with the greatest number of people reporting an extreme
    weather event was the South Central Census Division. It includes
    Louisiana, a state hit hard by Hurricane Ida and heavy rainfall events.

Yes, but: Even on perceptions of extreme weather events, there is a 
partisan split, the survey found, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning 
independents more likely to report experiencing extreme weather than 
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

    -- The survey of 10,371 Americans took place from Sept. 13–19, 2021,
    and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.

https://www.axios.com/americans-extreme-weather-pew-democrat-republican-6d2a45b1-56e1-491f-b2e4-6cdde6ba63f9.html

- -

[See it a the Pew Research Center]
OCTOBER 14, 2021
*67% of Americans perceive a rise in extreme weather, but partisans 
differ over government efforts to address it*
Two-thirds of Americans say extreme weather events across the country 
have been occurring more often than in the past. Far fewer say they’re 
happening about as often (28%), and only 4% say they are happening less 
often, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The findings come 
amid reports that climate change has contributed to an increase in 
weather-related disasters...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/14/67-of-americans-perceive-a-rise-in-extreme-weather-but-partisans-differ-over-government-efforts-to-address-it/ 



[different weather this season]
*La Niña is coming. Here's what that means for winter weather in the U.S.*
October 15, 2021
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate 
Prediction Center announced on Thursday that La Niña conditions have 
developed and are expected to continue, with an 87% chance that they 
will be in place from December to February.

La Niña (translated from Spanish as "little girl") is not a storm, but a 
climate pattern that occurs in the Pacific Ocean every few years and can 
impact weather around the world.

The U.S. is expected to feel its effects on temperature and 
precipitation, which could in turn have consequences for things such as 
hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts.
Forecasters point out that this is actually the second La Niña winter in 
a row, a not-uncommon phenomenon that they call a "double-dip." The most 
recent period lasted from August 2020 to April 2021.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-weather-us-temperatures-rainfall



/[ Qui n’avance pas, recule = Who does not move forward, recedes ] /
*France finds France guilty*
A French court has ordered the country to follow through on its 
commitments to addressing climate change.
Adam Mahoney - Reporter, Environmental Justice and Investigations
A French court has ordered the country to follow through on its 
commitments to addressing climate change. In the Thursday ruling, the 
Paris administrative tribunal found that France overshot its emissions 
targets by 15 million metric tons between 2015 and 2018 and ordered the 
government to take all necessary measures to “repair the damage” by the 
end of 2022.

The ruling is the latest development in a case brought by French 
environmental organizations in 2019 in an attempt to use the judicial 
system to force their country to take more concrete action against 
climate change. “Now the court system is becoming an ally in our fight 
against climate change,” Jean-François Julliard, director of Greenpeace 
France, told reporters following this week’s ruling...
https://grist.org/beacon/france-finds-france-guilty/


/[ for instance, Australia --- opinion ]/
*Australian politics’ hypocritical climate kabuki dance has nobody fooled*
Peter Lewis
The Murdoch press is proselytising, the business lobby is modelling a 
clean energy future while the PM is trying to tether colleagues to 
something approaching reality
As the planet prepares to flunk its latest performance review in 
Glasgow, Australian politics is threatening to reach peak bullshit with 
its cynically curated “towards net zero” kabuki dance.

After spewing toxic climate emissions into our civic ecosystem for over 
a decade, the Murdoch press is proselytising the need to act, the 
business lobby is modelling a clean energy future while the prime 
minister resolves to tether his nuttier outliers to something 
approaching reality.

Climate inertia is a totemic output of the bullshit industrial complex, 
an unhealthy alliance of the big tech gatekeepers commercially driven to 
privilege feels over facts, a fourth estate desperate for audience and a 
political class schooled in doing whatever it takes to win.’

This machine diminishes science and nuanced policy to assuage the urges 
and biases of the audience, turning science into muck, weaponising even 
relatively benign climate measures such as electric vehicles into a war 
on the weekend.

“Climate action” is but one of a steaming pile of policy the Coalition 
is fermenting as it prepares its case for re-election. There’s its 
integrity laws, the blame-shifting on hospital funding and, if all else 
fails, a face-off with China.

Politics has always run on artifice, controlled by a professional class 
schooled in the relativity of student debating clubs and culture war 
theatrics to argue for any point, regardless of its merit. Hawkie was 
the good bloke, Howard was the every man, Rudd the fiscal conservative.

But our current prime minster is deploying the full repertoire of old 
and new media tools to transform himself from a puritan careerist from 
the eastern suburbs into ScoMo, the Sharkies-loving beer-guzzling bloke 
of simple means.

Now, in an unlikely twist, the same man who proudly fondled a lump of 
coal to prove his fossil fuel cred is being forced to respond to the 
reality of a global consensus that action can no longer be delayed and a 
local public who have now been through one bushfire season too many.

This week’s Guardian Essential Report shows the majority of Australians 
are done with the climate bullshit, although there is a stubborn rump in 
the PM’s own backyard and, notably, to his right flank, continuing to 
luxuriate in the muck....
- -
It’s easy to be cynical about the motivations of these players, but like 
coalminers embracing climate change, you can’t change the system until 
the primary beneficiaries of a toxic pipeline recognise the status quo 
is no longer tolerable.

A bipartisan consensus to disarm the bullshit industrial complex would 
transform Australian politics and give us a fighting chance of clearing 
out our public sewers and meeting our broader responsibilities to the 
future.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/australian-politics-hypocritical-climate-kabuki-dance-has-nobody-fooled


/[ with a garden, the work is clear -- weed and water.  With activism 
discovering tasks is difficult ]/
*Why activism needs to be part of any meaningful climate education*
By Nick Engelfried, originally published by Waging Nonviolence
October 15, 2021
Unless handled carefully, climate change can be one of the most 
discouraging topics an educator could ever cover with students, who need 
to be able to see a viable path for them to make a difference unless 
they are to come away feeling paralyzed. That is why for this subject, 
more than perhaps any other, the approach of trying to make 
environmental education apolitical is bound to fail. Climate is, 
unfortunately, a political issue, and has been made so by decades of 
fossil fuel industry lobbying. Given that individual behavior changes 
are too small to make a tangible difference on such a huge global issue, 
the main viable path for students to have a meaningful impact is through 
activism. This is a reality they will need to grapple with sooner or later.

As for how educators can best empower students to attack the climate 
crisis, the answer will vary from one situation to another. In some 
parts of the country, an approach modeled after Portland students and 
teachers’ push for climate literacy may work well. Educators whose 
subjects may not directly overlap with the climate crisis can still 
contribute by helping students understand the dynamics of historical 
social movements. Third-party organizations like Reconnect Earth, which 
are not subject to the policies of school boards or colleges, also have 
a role to play.

“A huge part of what we have to do as educators is help students make 
that initial leap to believing in activism, to knowing it’s a path for 
change and an important part of making the world what it is today,” 
Swinehart said. “Once they understand that, they can take the next step 
to where they see themselves as the ones taking action.”

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-10-15/why-activism-needs-to-be-part-of-any-meaningful-climate-education/


/[Cryo science ]/
Earth Research Findings
Oct 12, 2021
*Icy ‘Glue’ May Control Pace of Antarctic Ice-Shelf Breakup*
As the ice-and-snow rubble known as mélange melts in Antarctica’s ice 
shelves, rifts can grow and icebergs break off even in the brutal cold 
of winter.

Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California 
and the University of California, Irvine, have discovered an ice process 
that may have caused a Delaware-size iceberg to break off Antarctica’s 
immense Larsen C ice shelf in the Southern Hemisphere winter of 2017. 
The finding that mélange – a mixture of windblown snow, iceberg bits, 
and sea ice lodged in and around ice shelves – is critical in holding 
ice shelves together implies that the these ice shelves may break up 
even faster than scientists had expected due to rising air temperatures.

Ice shelves, the floating tongues of glaciers that extend over the 
ocean, slow the rate at which Antarctica’s glaciers contribute to global 
sea level rise. As a glacier’s ice shelf flows out over the Southern 
Ocean, it eventually snags on an island, undersea ridge, or the wall of 
the bay that encloses the glacier. The snag slows the glacier’s forward 
movement in the same way a highway accident slows down the traffic 
behind it – except that an ice-shelf snag can hold back the flow of ice 
into the sea for thousands of years.

But in recent decades, ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have been 
moving and disintegrating more rapidly. Cracks deepen into rifts that 
cut through the shelf from top to bottom and widen across, finally 
releasing icebergs into the ocean. If this process continues until 
enough of an ice shelf breaks off (as with Larsen B in 2002), the 
glaciers that the shelf was holding back begin flowing more rapidly from 
the land into the sea. This increases the rate of sea level rise.

Climate warming is the underlying cause for this change of ice-shelf 
behavior, because it has raised the temperatures of both the air above 
and the ocean water beneath the glaciers. But the way the ice shelves 
are responding to warming is not fully understood. Scientists have 
suggested that freeze-and-thaw cycles of meltwater pooling on top of the 
ice are making the rifts grow. But if that’s the case, how could Larsen 
C release its giant iceberg in winter, when the ice had been frozen 
solid for months?

To answer that question, the JPL and UC Irvine researchers focused on 
mélange. This messy, chunky mixture has natural properties similar to 
glue or grout, filling cracks or gaps and sticking to ice and rock. When 
it accumulates in a crack in an ice shelf, it creates a thin layer as 
hard as the surrounding ice that holds the crack together. At the sides 
of ice shelves, layers of mélange glue the ice to the rock walls around 
it. “We always suspected that this mélange played a key role, but until 
recently we did not have good observations of its characteristics,” said 
Eric Rignot, a professor at UC Irvine and co-author of the study, 
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers modeled the entire Larsen C ice shelf using NASA’s 
Ice-sheet and Sea-level System Model with observations from NASA’s 
Operation IceBridge and European and NASA satellites. They first 
assessed which of the hundreds of rifts in the ice shelf were most 
vulnerable to breaking, selecting 11 rifts for in-depth analysis. They 
modeled what happened to these rifts if only the ice shelf grew thinner 
because of melting, if only the mélange grew thinner, and if both grew 
thinner.

“A lot of people thought intuitively, if you thin the ice shelf, you’re 
going to make it much more fragile and it’s going to break,” explained 
Eric Larour, a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study. Instead, 
the model showed that simply thinning the ice shelf without changing the 
mélange actually closed the rifts, with average widening rates dropping 
from 259 to 72 feet (79 to 22 meters) per year. Thinning both the ice 
shelf and the mélange also closed the rifts. So the melting of glacial 
ice alone can’t explain why the shelves are breaking up more rapidly.

When the researchers thinned only the mélange in the model, however, 
without reducing the thickness of the glacial ice itself, the rifts in 
the ice shelf widened more quickly, accelerating from an average rate of 
249 to 367 feet (76 meters to 112 meters) per year. When the narrow 
layers of mélange thinned to about 30 to 50 feet (about 10 or 15 
meters), they completely lost their ability to hold rifts together. The 
rifts could rapidly gape open and large icebergs break loose – just as 
happened on Larsen C.

Why does this matter? Because, Larour said, “We’ve put a finger on a 
physical process that is capable of destabilizing the ice shelf prior to 
a large warming of the atmosphere.” Scientists have often used the 
predicted rise in air temperature to estimate how fast Antarctic ice 
shelves will break up and, as a result, how rapidly global sea levels 
will rise. But the narrow layers of mélange are melting mainly by 
contact with ocean water below, which continues year round. At any time 
of of the year, they may become too thin to keep holding the ice shelf 
together.

“We think that this process might explain why ice shelves in the 
Antarctic peninsula started to break up decades before meltwater began 
to accumulate on their surface,” Rignot said. “That implies that 
Antarctic ice shelves might be more vulnerable to climate warming – and 
sooner than previously thought.”

Jane J. Lee / Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307
jane.j.lee at jpl.nasa.gov / ian.j.oneill at jpl.nasa.gov

Brian Bell
University of California, Irvine
949-565-5533
bpbell at uci.edu

Written by Carol Rasmussen
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/icy-glue-may-control-pace-of-antarctic-ice-shelf-breakup



/[get ready]/
*If you hate Houston's heat now, a new study shows how bad it could get*
Southeast Texas is one of the worst places for flooding, new research finds
By Nick Natario
October 14, 2021
video 
https://abc13.com/texas-climate-change-houston-flood-risk-galveston-coastal/11126864/
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- New reports show how bad heat and flooding 
could get in southeast Texas over the coming years.

IT'S ABOUT TO GET EVEN HOTTER MORE EXTREME WEATHER COULD HEAD TO TEXAS

The report also discovered Texas could receive more extreme weather. 
Extreme rain events could increase by 50% compared to 1950-1999.

Storm surge could also be a bigger problem with rising sea levels.

"Basically, by the year 2050, given the sea level rise we expect and the 
subside we've already seen along the coastline, the risk of storm surge 
at a given level will have doubled since the beginning of the 20th 
century," Nielsen-Gammon said.

If you live near the coast, Nielsen-Gammon said be prepared to deal with 
more issues more frequently. If you want to avoid problems, move further 
away from flood-prone areas.

"There's nothing that's going to make Texas uninhabitable, but it's 
going to be an increasing set of tradeoffs," Nielsen-Gammon explained.

SOUTHEAST TEXAS ONE OF THE WORST PLACES FOR FLOODING

Another study conducted by First Street Foundation took a nationwide 
look at how at-risk areas are from flooding. It discovered a quarter of 
all critical infrastructure nationally is at-risk, as well as roads.

In parts of southeast Texas, it's even worse. Galveston County ranked 
12th in the country for at-risk counties.

The study shows 84% of the counties' roads are at risk for flooding, and 
81% of its critical infrastructure is at risk of becoming inoperable.

"I was not surprised to see Galveston there coming in at number 12," 
said Dr. Hal Needham, a Flood Information Systems climate data and 
natural hazard scientist.

Needham said Galveston County's problem is below your feet.

"Globally, sea-level-rise was an average of seven inches last century," 
Needham explained. "Here in Galveston, it was over two feet. That's 
because not only are sea levels rising, but our land is sinking."

Houston came in as the 16th most at-risk city. The report shows 770 of 
hospitals, public utilities and water treatment plants in Harris County 
are at risk of flooding.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO BLAME

Nielsen-Gammon said they reviewed prior years where temperature changed 
in Texas, but nothing like this. He said greenhouse gases are to blame 
for the hotter weather the state will experience.

"There's still a lot that can be done but in the meantime, we're going 
to have to live with more climate change also," Nielsen-Gammon said.

Climate change is also linked to increase flood risks across the 
country. The new study shows over the next 30 years, an additional 1.2 
million residential properties, 66,000 commercial properties, 63,000 
miles of roads, 6,100 pieces of social infrastructure and 2,000 pieces 
of critical infrastructure will also have flood risks that would render 
them inoperable, inaccessible or impassible.

"One of the biggest concerns would be impassible roads as a hurricane 
approaches," Needham explained. "If your evacuation route is under 
water, you can't go anywhere."
https://abc13.com/texas-climate-change-houston-flood-risk-galveston-coastal/11126864/



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October 16, 1988*
Discussing the role of global warming in the 1988 presidential election, 
Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman observes:

"Last summer, one of the hottest and driest on record, the nation was 
roused by alarms about the 'greenhouse effect'--the gradual warming of 
the globe that threatens to turn coastal cities into underwater ruins 
and corn fields into salt flats.

"The problem is that for the last century or so industrial societies 
have been releasing substances into the air that capture heat and erode 
the Earth`s shield against the sun. The villains? Carbon dioxide from 
the burning of fossil fuels, methane from natural and man-made sources 
and aerosol propellants.

"But as soon as the heat dissipated, so did interest in the issue. In 
the campaign, the greenhouse effect has gone almost unmentioned...

"Both candidates pretend the solutions will be painless and free. Both 
pass over the obvious remedies in favor of the politically appealing ones.

"The nations of the world have taken one step by agreeing on a treaty to 
reduce the use of aerosol propellants. But any serious attempt to slow 
the warming of the Earth requires at least three additional measures: 
discouraging the use of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas; big 
improvements in energy efficiency; and greater reliance on nuclear power."

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-10-16/news/8802080029_1_greenhouse-effect-global-warming-environmentalism


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