[✔️] October 21, 2022 - Global Warming News - daily selection

[Richard Pauli]

/*October 21, 2022*/

/[ It brought Seattle the worst air in the world -  NPR radio news -- 
text and audio  ]/
*Why haven't firefighters 'put out' the Bolt Creek fire?*
OCT 19, 2022
BY Paige Browning
The Bolt Creek Fire continues to smolder 14,000 acres of forest near 
Skykomish, on the northern edge of Highway 2. The exact cause of the 
human-sparked fire remains under investigation.

It's been 39 days since the fire started burning. Some residents are 
asking firefighters: Why haven't they put it out?

It's not so simple, officials say.

It's been a rough, smoky five weeks for Skykomish residents. People have 
had to cancel plans, schools and libraries have closed on and off, and 
doctors offices have seen more visits due to wheezing — or worse — from 
the smoke.

It's also bad for business.

Henry Sladek is the mayor of Skykomish. He also owns the historic 
Cascadia Inn.

"We're at about a quarter of the normal business we'd be doing this time 
of year," he said.

But despite the current outlook, things are going according to plan for 
the 277 firefighters on the job.

The goal is to stop the fire from spreading — not to put it out, said 
Don Ferguson, the public information officer for the Southeast 
Washington Interagency Incident Management Team, which is containing the 
fire.

"There have been a couple of fatalities in Western Oregon already this 
year, people being hit by trees, and that would be a very likely 
consequence of having people in the woods in those conditions," he said. 
"So we don't want to put firefighters at risk and where they're not 
going to be effective."

Ferguson added that crews are meeting the two big goals of containing 
wildland fires: protect people's lives and protect buildings from 
damage. They are letting the wilderness burn, a strategy widely adopted 
in the U.S.

It's up to nature to do the rest.

"We worked all day for two days to control seven acres," Ferguson said. 
"So that just kind of shows you dumping water from the sky is not a good 
way to put a fire out. What we need is season-ending weather."

They're also trying to keep the fire away from Highway 2 and towns, 
which has been more of a struggle.

The Bolt Creek fire is shaping up to be the fifth largest wildfire in 
Western Washington in recorded history, according to Ferguson.

For his part, Mayor Sladek said he's preparing himself for what fire 
experts have been warning about: the west-side of Washington could see 
more seasons like this.

"It's much wetter and damper over here, so this is the first time that 
that's really become and issue," Sladek said. "But it's probably a good 
reminder that we are in that kind of an area and increasingly so, 
probably, with climate change."

Firefighters estimate they'll have the Bolt Creek fire contained by 
Halloween.
https://kuow.org/stories/why-haven-t-firefighters-put-out-the-bolt-creek-fire
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/[ MIT Technology Review  -- oh save us Bill, please. ]/
*At Bill Gates’s climate conference, “amazing” progress and “depressing” 
trends*
Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and climate czar John Kerry also 
offered tempered optimism at the inaugural Breakthrough Energy Summit 
this week.
By James Temple
October 19, 2022
Bill Gates, John Kerry, and US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm all 
struck positive notes at an energy summit in Seattle this week hosted by 
Gates’s climate-focused venture fund, Breakthrough Energy. With caveats.

Government policy is accelerating clean energy projects. The cost of 
renewables continues to fall. Huge sums of private and public capital 
are pouring into climate technologies.

And yet, this progress hasn’t translated into steep reductions in 
greenhouse-gas pollution. Meanwhile, geopolitical conflicts and global 
economic headwinds are complicating efforts to keep rising global 
temperatures in check.

Gates was largely focused on the promising investment and industry 
trends he has seen. He said he and other investors in his initial $1 
billion fund, which include the likes of Jeff Bezos and Kleiner Perkins 
chairman John Doerr, were concerned when they launched in 2015 that they 
wouldn’t find enough promising startups to invest in. But the firm has 
now backed more than 100 companies working on long-duration energy 
storage, meat alternatives, efficient buildings, clean steel, and other 
means of driving down emissions.
Gates says he is “amazed” by the progress he’s seen on some of the 
hardest technical challenges of climate change in the past seven years.

Breakthrough Energy closed a second $1 billion fund in 2021, and Gates 
said the firm plans to “do several more.” It has also expanded its 
mission beyond investments by pushing policies, creating fellowships, 
and supporting other climate efforts.

Gates noted that venture capital investments in clean energy, which were 
close to their ebb around 2015, have come roaring back and that wind, 
solar, and lithium-ion batteries have continued to plummet in cost...
- -
But for all the progress that’s occurred, there are still major 
obstacles to slashing emissions rapidly enough to avoid the worst 
dangers of climate change.

Gates said that a hard look at nations’ progress toward near-term 
emissions targets under the Paris climate agreement would leave people 
“very depressed.” Indeed, global emissions set a new record last year 
and have continued to rise through much of 2022.

Gates also called it “very laughable” to think that the US will build 
out a clean electricity grid by 2035, despite the tens of billions of 
dollars earmarked for wind and solar projects, and the fact that it’s a 
stated goal of the Biden administration...
- -
A recent federal bill that included provisions to streamline such 
approvals failed to move forward in Congress.

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, echoed these 
concerns at a media briefing at the end of the day on Tuesday, stressing 
the need to pass permitting reform when Congress is back in session.

“There is no way we can meet our goals if it takes 10 years” to approve 
such projects, he said.

When asked how rising inflation, a weakening global economy, and the 
energy crisis sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine are 
complicating efforts for nations to meet and raise emissions targets 
ahead of the UN climate conference next month in Egypt, Kerry said: 
“Putin’s illegal invasion of another county has had an impact on the 
overall economic situation, globally.” That has boosted energy prices 
and exacerbated rising inflation, putting nations in a “tough spot,” he 
said...
- -
“I’m convinced we will get to a low carbon/no carbon economy, a clean 
energy economy,” Kerry said. “But I’m not convinced that we will get 
there in time to avoid the worst consequences of what may take place on 
our planet as a result of the climate crisis.”

Gates ended on a more squarely positive note.

He remains hopeful, he says, that the world will begin to significantly 
accelerate emissions reductions in the coming years, as the private 
sector and government continue to drive down the cost of clean 
technologies. He added that to keep activists, entrepreneurs, 
researchers, and others engaged in solving big problems, it’s crucial to 
point out the progress we are making in areas that will pay off in real 
ways for the climate.

“You can’t have people giving up,” he said.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/19/1061910/at-bill-gates-climate-conference-amazing-progress-and-depressing-trends//
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/[ COP report from Reuters ]/
*'Massive gaps' seen in countries' plans to tackle climate change -study*
By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The latest pledges by countries to tackle 
global warming under the Paris Agreement are "woefully inadequate" to 
avert a rise in global temperatures that scientists say will worsen 
droughts, storms and floods, a report said on Wednesday.

The 2015 pact launched at a U.N. global climate summit requires 194 
countries to detail their plans to fight climate change in what are 
known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs.
In pledges made through September, the NDCs would reduce global 
emissions of greenhouse gases only 7% from 2019 levels by 2030, said the 
report titled "The State of NDCs: 2022." It was written by the World 
Resources Institute (WRI) global nonprofit research group.

Countries must strengthen their targets by about six times that, or at 
least 43%, to align with what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change says is enough to reach the Paris Agreement's goal of 
limiting the global temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees 
F), it said.
"It really looks like we're hitting a bit of a plateau," Taryn Fransen, 
a senior fellow at WRI and author of the report said in an interview. 
She added that the COVID-19 pandemic and economic woes may have mostly 
capped countries' ambitions to boost their NDCs since 2021.

Current NDCs propose to reduce emissions by 5.5 gigatonnes compared with 
the initial NDCs from 2015, nearly equal to eliminating the annual 
emissions of the United States. But only 10% of that planned reduction 
has been pledged since 2021.
On the bright side, Australia and Indonesia did boost their NDCs this 
year. "That got us some progress," Fransen said, "but there hasn't been 
a lot beyond that." Countries in the Paris Agreement are required to 
update their NDCs by 2025.

"If the pace of improvement from 2016 to today continues, the world will 
not only miss the Paris Agreement goals, but it will miss them by a long 
shot," the report said.

Much of the focus of this year's global climate talks, to be held next 
month in Egypt, will center on reducing emissions of methane, a 
greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 
years in the atmosphere. In an example of the work yet to be done, WRI 
found that only 15 of the 119 countries that signed a Global Methane 
Pledge launched last year included a specific, quantified methane 
reduction target in their NDCs.

Fransen said economic and health benefits of reducing emissions, such as 
the build-out of the energy transition and reduced air pollution, can 
help build momentum to deeper cuts. "Seeing those benefits can only help 
drive more ambitions, but it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem," she 
said.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/massive-gaps-seen-countries-plans-tackle-climate-change-study-2022-10-19/

- -

/[ UN Climate Change ]/
* "A wonderful recovery"*
As #COP27 in Egypt approaches, take a look back to the powerful speech 
Sir David Attenborough delivered in Glasgow last year.

https://twitter.com/UNFCCC/status/1583052254504169473



/[ more from AP ]/
*Florida sees rise in flesh-eating bacteria amid Ian concerns*
FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — Florida has seen an increase in cases of 
flesh-eating bacteria this year driven largely by a surge in the county 
hit hardest by Hurricane Ian.

The state Department of Health reports that as of Friday there have been 
65 cases of vibrio vulnificus infections and 11 deaths in Florida this 
year. That compares with 34 cases and 10 deaths reported during all of 2021.

In Lee County, where Ian stormed ashore last month, the health 
department reports 29 cases this year and four deaths...
https://apnews.com/article/hurricanes-health-florida-storms-hurricane-ian-6785d07506378030d50305c9d8ed928a



/[The news archive - looking back at 1984 ]/
/*October 21, 1984*/
October 21, 1984: In the second presidential debate between President 
Ronald Reagan and Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, Reagan is asked 
by panelist Marvin Kalb:

"Mr. President, perhaps the other side of the coin, a related question, 
sir. Since World War II, the vital interests of the United States have 
always been defined by treaty commitments and by Presidential 
proclamations. Aside from what is obvious, such as NATO, for example, 
which countries, which regions in the world do you regard as vital 
national interests of this country, meaning that you would send American 
troops to fight there if they were in danger?"

Reagan responds:

"Ah, well, now you've added a hypothetical there at the end, Mr. Kalb, 
about where we would send troops in to fight. I am not going to make the 
decision as to what the tactics could be, but obviously there are a 
number of areas in the world that are of importance to us. One is the 
Middle East, and that is of interest to the whole Western World and the 
industrialized nations, because of the great supply of energy upon which 
so many depend there."

(15:00-15:52)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF73k5-Hiqg


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