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

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*October 17, 2021*/

[ inventive idea - integration ]
*Growing Crops Under Solar Panels? Now There’s a Bright Idea*
In the new scientific (and literal) field of agrivoltaics, researchers 
are showing how panels can increase yields and reduce water use on a 
warming planet.
- -
This kind of setup also cools the solar panels in two ways: Water 
evaporating from the soil rises up towards the panels, and plants 
release their own water. This is dandy for the panels’ efficiency, 
because they actually perform worse when they get too hot. They generate 
an electric current when the sun’s photons knock electrons out of atoms, 
but if they overheat, the electrons get overexcited and don’t generate 
as much electricity when they’re dislodged...
--
Barron-Gafford also points out that agrivoltaics need not be limited to 
the kinds of crops people eat. A farmer might let native grasses grow 
wild under the panels, providing food for livestock, which would also 
benefit from the shade. Or they might promote the growth of plants for 
native pollinators like bees. With the right management, that land could 
pull double duty as a synthetic forest—just because it’s shaded, doesn’t 
mean life can’t flourish underneath.

“I think everything likes a little bit of shade,” says Kominek. “There's 
quite a variety of crops that enjoy it. And when it's 100 degrees 
outside, I enjoy the shade.”
https://www.wired.com/story/growing-crops-under-solar-panels-now-theres-a-bright-idea 




/[ Yale Insights - hey, I live in Seattle ]/
*Is Seattle Prepared for Climate Change?*
Seattle is already seeing the impacts of climate change, including 
record-breaking heat and smoke from West Coast wildfires; in the coming 
decades, parts of the city will be periodically inundated with 
floodwaters. Ann Grodnik-Nagle ’06, climate policy advisor for Seattle 
Public Utilities, says that Seattle is focusing on both mitigation—the 
city is committed to reach carbon neutrality by 2050—and adaptation, 
prioritizing vulnerable communities of color.

*Q: Is Seattle prepared for climate change?*
Seattle is preparing. It’s a process. There are some areas where we are 
very strong and others we’re still trying to figure out. We’re making a 
lot of investments in reducing our carbon footprint city-wide. We’re 
working to cut emissions from large buildings. We’re investing in 
electrical vehicles for the city and charging infrastructure.

The City of Seattle, King County, and the Port of Seattle have 
overlapping jurisdictions. Everyone has their own roles and priorities, 
but there’s a lot of really good coordination and alignment. Still, it’s 
challenging to come up with an orchestrated strategy for climate 
adaptation and preparedness.
- -
We’re very strong in terms of investing in green infrastructure and 
natural assets. We have an extensive green storm water infrastructure 
system and have plans for even more. The approach reduces greenhouse gas 
emissions, provides cooling impacts for neighborhoods, and absorbs 
precipitation. It’s a multi-benefit solution that combines mitigation 
and adaptation. That’s wonderful.

Even within that strength, we have challenges. Creating open green space 
that’s also floodable can have unintended consequences such as making 
places that are already expensive even more expensive. To deal with 
that, we’re trying to tie climate adaptation together with 
anti-displacement work.

In the Duwamish Valley, the tidally influenced river is already 
over-topping its banks, impacting lower-lying neighborhoods that are 
communities of color. That will become more and more frequent as sea 
levels rise. Another layer of challenge is that the river itself is a 
Superfund site. There are substantial historical and existing health 
inequities in this area. The residential communities are bearing the 
burden of pollution being put out by the adjacent industrial areas.

“We’re trying now to establish policies that will allow us to do 
development differently so that as we invest in sea level rise 
adaptation, we’re also investing in community wealth building and 
community stabilization.”
We’re working on development of a resilience district around two 
neighborhoods that are particularly exposed to inundation. We’re trying 
now to establish policies that will allow us to do development 
differently so that as we invest in sea level rise adaptation, we’re 
also investing in community wealth building and community stabilization. 
The goal is for the benefits of improvements due to public investment to 
accrue to the incumbent communities. We want to avoid further 
displacement and making the neighborhoods less affordable in a city that 
has so few affordable options remaining.

The resilience district is extremely exciting. We’re able to do this 
project because we’ve received grant funding first from the Center for 
Community Investment and then from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 
through a program that supports climate health and equity in cities 
throughout the world. The philanthropic funding has enabled us to 
partner in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to had we just been 
relying on municipal funding and Seattle Public Utilities’ budget.

*Q: What are the barriers to making sure Seattle is as prepared as 
possible?*
There’s so much attention on the need for reducing emissions that it can 
obscure the importance of preparedness and adaptation. It all needs to 
happen. Preparedness and adaptation typically has a much longer 
timeline, especially when it involves big, complicated infrastructure. 
The projects are expensive; they require orchestration among different 
agencies and impacted communities. It gets tricky. It goes beyond 
electoral cycles and can span beyond the tenure of leaders of different 
city departments. And funding is always a challenge.

Along those lines, the federal government is taking great steps in the 
right direction with increased funding for some FEMA flooding mitigation 
programs and building resilient infrastructure.

As that money funnels down to cities and utilities and we start making 
investments, a success in San Francisco, New York, or Boston is a 
success for the whole sector because there’s a lot of collaboration 
happening among peer cities and peer utilities, especially coastal 
cities which face a lot of the same impacts. No one has done this 
before, so we need to learn from each other.

*Q: What would it be like to do this work in a part of the country where 
there isn’t the same willingness to address climate change?*
The tenor of our approach might be different, but you can’t ignore 
repetitive losses to property. You can’t ignore the loss of life that 
we’re seeing. Climate impacts are affecting people. They’re affecting 
children; they’re affecting vulnerable communities.

When I look around the country, I’m more hopeful than you might expect 
because even in areas where the political momentum isn’t there around 
climate action, there are things happening anyway, among students, among 
communities that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts. I think 
that’s powerful.

I’ve seen awesome community-based work in Texas after the major freeze 
and resulting infrastructure failure, on the Gulf Coast in the 
resilience work following all the storms, and all along the East Coast 
in the rebuilding from storms. It’s super inspiring.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/is-seattle-prepared-for-climate-change



/[ The Four Ways  From Univ of California] /
*4 ways to avoid future megafires*
Thursday, October 14, 2021
Fuels reduction projects include thinning out trees, burning off woody 
debris and reducing “ladder fuels” like small trees and brush that can 
allow fire to reach the tree canopy. They create more open forests that 
are less likely to fuel severe megafires. They also create strategic 
areas where firefighters can more easily fight future blazes. And, 
because fires burn less intensely in thinned forests, they leave more 
intact forest after a fire for regenerating new trees and sequestering 
carbon. Prescribed fires and managed ignitions paid huge dividends for 
containing the Dixie and Caldor fires.
- -
To manage fires in an era of climate change, where drier, hotter weather 
creates ideal conditions for burning, experts estimate that the area 
treated for fuels reduction needs to increase by at least an order of 
magnitude. We believe government needs to accomplish these four things 
to succeed:

    *1.  Drastically increase funding and staff for agencies’ fuels
    reduction projects,* as well as outreach, cost-sharing and technical
    assistance for private forestland owners. Although the Biden
    administration’s proposal for a Civilian Climate Corps proposes
    funding to bring in more young and unskilled workers, funding more
    federal and state agency positions would recruit more natural
    resource professionals, provide career-track opportunities and
    better add forest restoration capacity for the long term.
    *2. Reduce regulations on forest and fuels management *efforts for
    both public and private land. While California and the federal
    government have made recent strides to streamline regulations, land
    management agencies need to acknowledge the biggest risk in frequent
    fire forests is doing nothing, and time is running out. Agencies
    need to drastically cut the time needed to plan and implement fuels
    reduction projects.
    *3. Invest in communities’ capacity to carry out local forest
    restoration* work by providing long-term support to local
    organizations that provide outreach, technical assistance and
    project coordination services. Funding restoration through
    competitive grants makes development of long-term community capacity
    challenging at best.
    *4. Provide funds and financial incentives for at risk communities
    *to retrofit homes to withstand wildfires and reduce fuels around
    homes, communities and infrastructure.
    Under a changing climate, we will have to learn to coexist with
    wildfires in the U.S. West, but this will require concerted action
    and a cultural shift in how we view and manage our forests and
    communities to be resilient.

This article was written by Susan Kocher and Ryan E. Tompkins, both 
cooperative extension forester and natural resources advisers at the 
University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. 
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative 
Commons license. Read the original article.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/4-ways-avoid-future-megafires



[ Acting wisely, US military that is... ]
*Troops to Get 'Climate Literacy' Education Under Pentagon's New Climate 
Change Plan*
A military of "climate literate" troops and bases powered by microgrids, 
that's the future envisioned by the Pentagon.

Its new climate change plan, ordered by President Joe Biden and released 
Thursday, would affect every level of command. It seeks to counter the 
damaging effects of a warming world by educating troops on the potential 
peril and hardening installations.
Rising sea levels, extreme heat, more severe hurricanes and wildfires 
are all hitting the military, either by threatening bases and hampering 
training or by fueling global instability.

"It's real, and no one in the department denies it, particularly the new 
people, the younger folks," Richard Kidd, deputy assistant secretary of 
defense for environment and energy resilience, said during a press 
conference Friday. "This is part of their life, and they're driving it. 
They're a force for change."

The Pentagon has factored the weather changes into strategic planning 
for years. But the new public fervor is part of the administration's 
wider push on climate change, and the DoD's plan was submitted this 
week, along with proposals from 22 other federal agencies following an 
executive order...
The new DoD Climate Adaptation Plan will broaden its efforts.

"We intend to adapt the entire department -- our decision-making 
processes, our training, our equipment, our supply chain, and our 
partnerships with others," Kidd said at the event hosted by George 
Washington University's Project for Media and National Security.
Troops will be educated to improve their "climate literacy," according 
to the report. The topic should be taught to all during professional 
development training and at advanced courses, it said.

"In order to properly respond, we need to have the knowledge, the tools 
and the ability to make climate-informed decisions at all echelons," 
Kidd said.

Climate change has been a political lightning rod in Washington, D.C., 
for decades. The Trump administration and other Republican 
administrations have largely ignored or downplayed the problem, arguing 
that increases seen in global temperatures are the result of a naturally 
occurring cycle.

But Biden, a Democrat, has made it a top priority for his 
administration. The Pentagon has experienced the likely consequences of 
climate change firsthand in recent years.

Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska was hit by unprecedented flooding in 
2019, and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida suffered $3 billion in 
hurricane damage in 2018. California military bases face an increasing 
threat from wildfires.

The DoD's plan aims to defend installations against such devastation, 
partly by making them energy self-sufficient.

"We will be building and fielding microgrids with onsite power 
management, energy generation onsite and power storage," Kidd said. "Our 
intent over time is to reduce the fossil fuel component, and get to the 
point that we can operate independently off the grid for 14 days."

He said there also may come a time to "ask some hard questions" and 
consider whether some military installations are no longer viable for 
training or operations.

The Defense Department consumes roughly 80% of the federal government's 
energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and is 
a significant global contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

But the report does not include specifics on reductions. Those targets 
will be set by a forthcoming White House executive order, Kidd said. A 
separate plan and report will follow that will spell out the 
department's proposals for slashing its own emissions.

"The science is very clear: We have to reduce our greenhouse gas 
emissions to zero, and we have to do it before 2050 if we want to avoid 
the most pronounced effects of climate change," he said.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime at military.com. Follow 
her on Twitter @patriciakime.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/10/09/troops-get-climate-literacy-education-under-pentagons-new-climate-change-plan.html

- -

[related]
*Climate Change Could Make 'Military Equipment Useless,' Experts Warn*
10 Sep 2021
Stars and Stripes | By David Choi
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea -- Leaders from defense institutes across 
the world converged in Seoul this week to raise the alarm on military 
threats posed by "irreversible and abrupt climate change."
- -
Tom Middendorp, Netherlands' former chief of defense and chairman of the 
International Military Council on Climate and Security, warned Wednesday 
that nations had "a responsibility to prepare" for the implications of 
climate change.
"I cannot remember any other conflict in my military experience where we 
had this level of scientific foresight," he said during the virtual 
portion of the seminar. "We know what's coming to us."

The Netherlands, according to Middendorp, appropriates a significant 
amount of its defense budget for "protection against the sea," because 
much of its population lives below sea level.
- -
Climate change's biggest impact on national defense is the way it 
"undermines and destabilizes societies," said Sharon Burke, a former 
U.S. assistant secretary of defense for operational energy. She told the 
panel that while the military is unable to fight climate change through 
conventional means, it "may well result in military missions" ranging 
from humanitarian, disaster relief and combat.

"If the nations of this world are unable to cut greenhouse gas emissions 
... if we fail, then militaries should be planning for profound 
insecurity and more military missions later in this century, or possibly 
sooner, if we hit certain tipping points," Burke said.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/09/10/climate-change-could-make-military-equipment-useless-experts-warn.html 




/[ come on Wired. Why is the individual charged with this task? 
Shouldn't government do this?] /
*Actions You Can Take to Tackle Climate Change*
These apps and resources can help you manage your eco-anxiety—and take 
steps to tread more lightly on the planet.
https://www.wired.com/story/actions-you-can-take-to-tackle-climate-change/



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming October  17, 2000*
In the third presidential debate, Vice President Al Gore declares:

"I spend a good deal of time talking to young people, and in my standard 
speech out there on the stump, I usually end my speech by saying, 'I 
want to ask you for something, and I want to direct it especially to the 
young people in the audience,' and I want to tell you what I tell them. 
Sometimes people who are very idealistic and have great dreams, as young 
people do, are apt to stay at arm's length from the political process, 
because they think their good hearts might be brittle, and if they 
invest their hopes and allow themselves to believe, then they're going 
to be let down and disappointed. But thank goodness, we've always had 
enough people who have been willing in every generation to push past the 
fear of a broken heart and become deeply involved in forming a more 
perfect union. We're America, and -- and we believe in our future, and 
we know we have the ability to shape our future.

"Now, we've got to address one of the biggest threats to our democracy, 
and that is the current campaign financing system. And I know they say 
it doesn't rank anywhere on the polls. I don't believe -- I don't 
believe that's a fair measure. I'm telling you, I will make it -- I will 
make the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill the very first 
measure that I send to the Congress as president. Governor Bush opposes 
it. I wish that he would consider changing his mind on that, because I 
think that the special interests have too much power and we need to give 
our democracy back to the American people.

"Let me tell you why. Those issues you mentioned, Social Security, 
prescription drugs--the big drug companies are against the prescription 
drug proposal that I've made. The HMOs are against the patients' rights 
bill, the Dingell-Norwood bill, that I support and that Governor Bush 
does not support. The big oil companies are against the measures to get 
more energy independence and renewable fuels. They ought to have their 
voices heard, but they shouldn't have a big megaphone that drowns out 
the American people. We need campaign finance reform, and we need to 
shoot straight with young and old alike and tell them what the real 
choices are. And we can renew and rekindle the American spirit and make 
our future what our founders dreamed it could be. We can."

(64:40--67:22)
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PresidentialCandidatesDebate


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


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