[✔️] July 23, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 23, 2022*/

/[ NYT issues ruling  ] /
*Climate Change Is Not Negotiable*
July 23, 2022,
By The Editorial Board - The editorial board is a group of opinion 
journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and 
certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

The American West has gone bone dry, the Great Salt Lake is vanishing 
and water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great life-giving 
reservoirs on the Colorado River basin, are declining with alarming 
speed. Wildfires are incinerating crops in France, Spain, Portugal and 
Italy, while parts of Britain suffocated last week in temperatures 
exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a single 
United States senator, Joe Manchin, to destroy the centerpiece of 
President Biden’s plans to confront these very problems — roughly $300 
billion in tax credits and subsidies aimed at greatly expanding wind, 
solar, electric car batteries and other clean energy technologies over 
the next decade. Had it survived, this would have been the single 
biggest investment Washington had ever made to combat the ravages of a 
warming climate.

This was more than another setback for Mr. Biden, who had already seen 
his climate ambitions threatened by the Supreme Court and rising oil and 
gas prices. It undercut American competitiveness in the global race for 
cleaner fuels and cars, and made a mockery of Mr. Biden’s efforts to 
reclaim the leadership role on climate change that Donald Trump squandered.

Mr. Biden made bold promises to America and the world in his early 
months in office, designed to honor, at long last, America’s commitment 
at the Paris climate summit in 2015 to keep global temperatures from 
rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That is the 
threshold, scientists believe, beyond which wildfires, floods, 
biodiversity loss, rising seas and human dislocation become 
significantly more devastating — and just a few tenths of a degree 
hotter than the world is today.

Reaching that 1.5 number or even staying below two degrees would require 
a radical transformation of the world’s energy systems, replacing fossil 
fuels with low carbon and ultimately carbon-free energy sources, and 
doing so not on a leisurely glide path but quickly, cutting greenhouse 
gas emissions in half by 2030 and effectively zeroing them out by 
midcentury.

Mr. Biden matched his ambitions to these goals: a 50 to 52 percent cut 
in American emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, and net zero emissions 
by 2050. Along the way, he said, he would eliminate fossil fuel 
emissions from power plants by 2035. This was anathema to Mr. Manchin, 
who has strong ties to West Virginia’s coal industry and has received 
generous campaign contributions over the years from oil and gas interests.

It must be said that Mr. Manchin was hardly alone in his opposition to 
Mr. Biden’s plans. His recent prominence owes much to Mitch McConnell 
and other Senate Republicans, not one of whom stepped forward to support 
the president or offer a plausible alternative. Had enough Republicans 
joined with the Democrats to construct a bipartisan climate bill, Mr. 
Manchin’s longstanding, entrenched opposition to necessary action on 
climate change would have been irrelevant. Instead, it was decisive. He 
became a necessary swing vote to get Mr. Biden’s program approved in an 
evenly divided Senate under a process known as budget reconciliation.

Without congressional backing, Mr. Biden has fewer tools to achieve his 
goals, which now seem out of reach. His best course is to take the same 
regulatory path President Barack Obama was forced to follow after the 
Senate’s last colossal climate failure — a cap and trade bill that 
passed the House in 2009 but died in the Senate the following year. 
Using his executive authority, Mr. Obama secured big improvements in 
automobile efficiency and ordered reductions in power plant emissions, 
which didn’t take effect, although the power companies managed to 
achieve them on their own by burning cleaner natural gas and closing 
inefficient coal-fired plants.

Major new improvements in the power sector, which still account for 
about one-quarter of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, may be 
constrained by the recent Supreme Court decision limiting the 
Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory flexibility, but Mr. Biden 
could devise a more modest and legally acceptable rule. He can and must 
push forward with new rules he has already ordered up to control 
emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as well as a suite of new 
mileage standards for cars and light trucks that would compel automakers 
to double down on their efforts to sell all-electric vehicles. The 
Interior Department can also continue its efforts to promote wind and 
solar power, which were jump-started under Mr. Obama’s interior 
secretary, Sally Jewell. Mr. Biden embraced this course in a speech on 
Wednesday in Massachusetts.

The president and his interior secretary, Deb Haaland, could help 
further by bringing clarity to the administration’s policies on oil and 
gas drilling, which right now are confusing. Mr. Biden pledged in his 
campaign to halt new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, which is a 
significant cause of greenhouse gas emissions. That promise seems long 
ago and far away. Interior’s recent five-year offshore drilling plan 
opens the possibility of leasing in parts of the Gulf of Mexico, while a 
recent environmental impact statement does not foreclose, as 
environmentalists had hoped, the Willow Project, ConocoPhillips’s 
proposed development of oil and gas resources in the fragile Western Arctic.

Mr. Biden is obviously in a tough place on drilling, given the political 
peril of high gas prices and their toll on American household expenses, 
plus the possibility that Vladimir Putin’s hold on Russian oil and gas 
supplies could drive them even higher. The environmental community is 
beyond nervous about the potential for more drilling in the Gulf of 
Mexico and Alaska. Meanwhile, there are other protective measures that 
are still available to the president, including reforms of 
climate-intensive farming practices and nature-based solutions to 
climate change, which would involve putting large areas of land and 
water off limits to commercial activity.

One thing Mr. Biden has going for him is the economic tailwinds created 
by science and technology, private sector ingenuity and earlier 
government investment. That includes, prominently, the $90 billion in 
clean energy investments in the 2009 economic recovery act, which were 
maligned by Republicans because of the failure of one solar panel 
manufacturer but have helped yield a spectacular drop in the cost of 
renewable energy over the last decade — nearly 90 percent for solar 
power and about 70 percent for wind power, not to mention the emergence 
of the electric car. (Tesla benefited from a big federal loan from the 
2009 investments.)

Coupled with coal’s precipitous decline, these technological gains have 
helped cause a roughly 20 percent drop in emissions since 2005. This 
puts the United States on track to reduce emissions by 24 percent to 35 
percent below 2005 levels by 2030, according to a recent report by 
Rhodium Group, a research firm.

That, as they say, is not nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough to meet 
Mr. Biden’s pledge to the world. For that, we will need a huge infusion 
of federal money, which in turn means a concerned and engaged Congress. 
The threat posed by climate change to Americans’ lives and livelihoods 
is urgent and severe, and it requires significantly more commitment from 
those who are elected to protect them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/23/opinion/biden-climate-change.html



/[  MIT Explains ] /
*Do these heat waves mean climate change is happening faster than expected?*
General warming predictions are still on track, but recent heat waves 
are a stress test for the modeling of extreme events.
By James Temple
July 21, 2022
- -
For the most part, the computer models used to simulate how the planet 
responds to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere 
aren’t wildly off the mark, especially considering that they aren’t 
geared for predicting regional temperature extremes. But the recent 
pileup of very hot heat waves does have some scientists wondering 
whether models could be underestimating the frequency and intensity of 
such events, whether some factors are playing more significant roles 
than represented in certain models, and what it all may mean for our 
climate conditions in the coming decades...
- -
Let’s address these issues point by point.

*Is climate change largely to blame for these extreme heat waves?*
Yes. Global warming has established a hotter baseline for summer 
temperatures, which dramatically increases the odds of more frequent, 
more extreme, and longer-lasting heat waves, as study after study after 
study has clearly shown.

“Climate change is driving this heat wave, just as it is driving every 
heat wave now,” said Friederike Otto, co-lead of World Weather 
Attribution, in a press statement about the unprecedented temperatures 
across Europe in recent days. “Heat waves that used to be rare are now 
common; heat waves that used to be impossible are now happening and 
killing people.”

*Is climate change unfolding faster than scientists expected?*
The answer, at least in the broad sense, is no. In fact, the linked rise 
in greenhouse gas levels and global average temperatures has tracked 
tightly within the spread of model predictions, even dating back to 
cruder climate simulations from the 1970s.

Several researchers and studies, including the latest UN climate report, 
have highlighted just how closely observed temperatures have followed 
predicted increases. The resemblance is uncanny (almost as if the world 
should have heeded the warnings of climate scientists decades ago).

- -
In fact, the current concern among researchers is that the latest 
generation of models are collectively running too hot, potentially 
projecting excessive levels of warming from increased carbon dioxide 
concentrations, as Zeke Hausfather, Kate Marvel, Gavin Schmidt, and 
other scientists noted earlier this year in Nature...
- -
“When it comes to certain types of extreme events, I think there is some 
evidence that things are changing faster than had been expected, or are 
explicitly represented in global climate models,” says Daniel Swain, 
climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“But,” he adds, “maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising.”

That’s because, for the most part, climate models were not designed to 
predict regional extreme events. Their main task is to simulate average 
temperature changes across long time periods and wide areas...
- -
But, to be clear, scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, 
in every way they could, that climate change will make the planet 
warmer, weirder, harder to predict, and in many ways more dangerous for 
humans, animals, and ecosystems. And they've been forthright about the 
limits of their understanding. The chief accusation they’ve faced until 
recently (and still do, in many quarters) is that they are doomsday 
fearmongers overstating the threat for research funding or political 
reasons.

Real-world events highlighting shortcomings in climate models, to the 
degree they have, don’t amount to some “aha, gotcha, scientists were 
wrong all along” kind of revelation. They offer a stress test of the 
tools, one researchers eagerly use to refine their understanding of 
these systems and the models they’ve created to represent them, Lehner says.

Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the 
Environment, put it bluntly, in a letter responding to the New York 
Times’ assertion that “few thought [climate change] would arrive so 
quickly”: “The problem has not been that the scientists got it wrong. It 
has been that despite clear warnings consistent with the evidence 
available, scientists dedicated to informing the public have struggled 
to get their voices heard in an atmosphere filled with false charges of 
alarmism and political motivation.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/21/1056291/do-these-heatwaves-mean-climate-change-is-worse-than-we-thought/



/[  Looking at history ]
/*Lake Mead Is Now Drier Than Before the Reservoir Was Filled*
The drought-stricken body of water has dropped to its lowest level since 
April 1937, when it was still filling to capacity post-completion of the 
Hoover Dam.
By Lauren Leffer  July 22, 2022
Every day, Lake Mead seems to be less deserving of its title. The 
waterbody has officially reached yet another historic low. The reservoir 
is now less full than in April 1937, when it was still being filled for 
the first time. It is hovering around 27% of its full capacity, 
according to NASA Earth Observatory. Satellite images from NASA, 
released today, are a stark illustration of Mead’s plight.

Before Lake Mead was a lake, it was simply a stretch of the Colorado 
River. Then the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation initiated the construction of 
the Hoover Dam, which was built between 1931 and 1935. And slowly, the 
river became a reservoir—filling to capacity over the course of years.

The reservoir reached a benchmark in May 1937, when the surface water 
level became higher than the elevation of the Hoover Dam’s upper outlet, 
which allows the dam to release water into the Lower Colorado River. 
Until this summer, Lake Mead hadn’t fallen below that threshold since it 
was first crossed. But the dam’s upper outlet sits at 1,045 feet above 
sea level, and currently the water is at just 1,040 feet.

This time last year, the lake level was nearly 27 feet higher. In 2020, 
the water level was over 1,085 feet. Lake Mead’s water level has been 
consistently trending downward for the past 22 years, but the present 
culmination of that trend is startling to see.

The ongoing, record drought across much of the western and southwestern 
U.S. and climate change are big contributing factors in the reservoir’s 
most recent benchmark of decline. It’s dry, it’s hot, and both municipal 
and agricultural demand for water from the Colorado River has remained 
high, even amid increasing water restrictions.

Some of the low levels though, are because federal officials decided to 
reduce water releases to Lake Mead, in favor of preserving the levels at 
Lake Powell upstream—which has also been heavily impacted by the drought 
and is also at just 27% of its capacity. The entire Colorado River is at 
35%.

In addition to providing water across the arid West, both reservoirs are 
a critical hydroelectric energy source. But Lake Mead is inching 
dangerously close to “dead pool” levels, where there won’t be enough 
water to power the dam. Dead pool happens at a water elevation of 950 
feet. Because of low water, the Hoover Dam’s electricity production has 
already been reduced by about one third.

https://gizmodo.com/lake-mead-is-now-drier-than-before-the-reservoir-was-fi-1849319626



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*July 23, 1979*/

July 23, 1979: The National Academy of Sciences begins work on a 
groundbreaking report regarding the risks of carbon pollution. The 
report makes it clear that the consequences of a warming world will be 
severe.

  http://web.archive.org/web/20150820002948/http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf

http://youtu.be/XB3S0fnOr0M


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