[✔️] September 26, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

Richard Pauli Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Mon Sep 26 09:35:13 EDT 2022


/*September 26, 2022*/

/[ history and opinion -- thank you Esquire ]/
*In the End, Climate Change Is the Only Story That Matters*
To pretend otherwise is just to build the walls of your sandcastle higher.

By Charles P. Pierce  SEP 24, 2022
While we watch the disembowelment of various lawyers in the employ of a 
former president* and wrap ourselves in the momentum of the upcoming 
midterm elections, the climate crisis—its time and tides—waits for no 
one. Every other story in our politics is a sideshow now. Every other 
issue, no matter how large it looms in the immediate present, is 
secondary to the accumulating evidence that the planet itself (or at 
least large parts of it) may be edging toward uninhabitability.

All summer, the main climate story was the worldwide drought. Reservoirs 
dried up, rivers shrank, huge rock walls showed “bathtub rings” as 
markers of where all the water used to be. Lake Mead gave up its 
forgotten mob victims, and rivers in the Balkans gave up Nazi ships 
scuttled almost 80 years ago, one step ahead of the Red Army. All of 
which was fairly interesting, but when you’re thirsty, archaeology is no 
substitute for water.

Now, though, it’s fall again, running toward winter, and for people who 
live near the seacoast and on islands, that means it’s cyclonic storm 
season again; and cyclonic storm systems are now bigger and stronger and 
more relentless than they’ve ever been, strengthened every year by the 
accumulating dynamics of the climate crisis.

By the end of this week, Hurricane Fiona—which already had torn up 
Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda, and the Turks and 
Caicos—was building up strength again as it moved north and took dead 
aim at Nova Scotia and the rest of Atlantic Canada.

 From the Washington Post:

    Ahead of Fiona, the Canadian Hurricane Centre has issued a hurricane
    watch for portions of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
    Iles-de-la-Madeleine and Newfoundland. “Hurricane Fiona has the
    potential to be a landmark weather event in Eastern Canada this
    weekend,” the Centre tweeted.

Usually, Atlantic Canada gets battered by winter storms roaring in from 
the North Atlantic. Its encounters with tropical hurricanes usually 
consist of withstanding their remnants. At worst, a hurricane comes 
ashore in this region as a Category 2 storm, as was the case with 
Hurricane Juan. Even the legendary Nova Scotia Cyclone of 1873, which 
came up on roughly the same track as Fiona seems to be following, and 
which sank 1,200 boats and killed 500 people, probably came ashore as a 
Category 1 storm. If Fiona strikes as a Category 3 or 4, it will be a 
historic storm for that part of the world.

And Fiona has cousins lining up behind it.

    Fiona is one of five different systems that meteorologists are
    carefully tracking in the Atlantic, which has roared to life amid
    the peak of hurricane season. There’s also Tropical Storm Gaston,
    which is centered 375 miles west-northwest of the Azores over the
    northeast Atlantic. The Azores are under tropical storm warnings,
    and could see conditions deteriorate Friday and remain inclement
    through late Saturday. In addition, a tropical wave exiting the
    coast of Senegal in Africa could strengthen into a named storm in
    the next few days. There is also a disturbance midway between Africa
    and South America that could gradually develop. Of potentially high
    concern is another fledgling storm that could deliver a serious blow
    to the Gulf or Caribbean.

It will be maddening to see all the news stories about the damage done 
by these storms, and about the people left homeless and without 
electricity or clean drinking water, which will not put these facts in 
the context of the climate crisis. This is the only way any of the other 
stories make sense. The storms are bigger, stronger, and they maintain 
their strength for longer—and all of that is a consequence of the 
changes that we have wrought to the climate. At this point, to cover 
these massive weather events without mentioning the underlying dynamic 
that drives them is like covering a war without mentioning explosives.

But at the other end of the world, there was an even more catastrophic 
storm in which the climate crisis was directly involved. Climate has 
changed the weather in this place, and it has changed the history of it, 
too. It was a place in which human beings and polar bears depended for 
their livelihoods upon sea ice that isn’t there any more, at least not 
when it’s supposed to be.

In 1871, a fleet of 33 whaling ships in pursuit of bowhead whales became 
trapped in the ice off Point Belcher, a small outcrop in far 
northwestern Alaska that reaches out into the Chukchi Sea 100 miles 
south of Point Barrow. The captains agreed to abandon the ships, leaving 
behind goods estimated to be worth $1.6 million, including the entire 
season’s haul of whale oil and baleen from that year’s hunting. Then the 
1,200 men, women, and children (it was customary for captains to bring 
their entire families along on voyages these songs) made a harrowing 
journey across the Arctic wilderness as the pressure of the ice slowly 
crushed the ships they left behind.

And all of this happened…in August.

Once, the ice was strong enough for human beings and polar bears to go 
out and hunt on it every year before Labor Day. This was fortunate for 
all concerned, because the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea were the 
places that typhoons went to die. They would come roaring up the Western 
Pacific, bludgeoning the Philippines, or Taiwan, or Japan, or the 
Koreas. Then they would beat themselves to death on the sea ice or, if 
they managed to make it to shore, would exhaust their energy on the 
solid permafrost back behind the beaches.

Last week, the remnants of Typhoon Merbok slammed into hundreds of miles 
of Alaskan coastline. There was no ice to slow it down and most of the 
permafrost was gone, so the heavy rainfall made the earth unreliable. 
Houses came off their foundations. One was spotted sailing down a river 
until it snagged on a bridge. The typhoon came ashore with the strength 
of a tropical storm, if not an actual hurricane. From Alaska Public Radio:

    National Weather Service climatologist Brian Brettschneider
    described the storm on Saturday as the “worst-case scenario.”
    Forecasters had predicted earlier this week that it could be one of
    the worst storms to hit Alaska’s western coast in recent history.
    And it was. “In some places, this is clearly the worst storm in
    living memory,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks climatologist
    Rick Thoman. Hundreds of people across multiple communities are
    sheltering in schools, which are serving as emergency evacuation
    centers. In some communities, local leaders’ early actions helped
    residents do what they needed to move valuable vehicles and boats to
    higher ground. In other communities, the storm overwhelmed efforts.
    “This is the first time I’ve seen it this bad,” said Alvina Imgalrea
    in Chevak. In Napakiak, Job Hale said, “It’s just a lake everywhere.”

The climate crisis has taken away all of Alaska’s natural defenses, so 
now it takes the full fury of storms that in earlier days would never 
have made landfall intact. They would have expended themselves on the 
frozen sea or shattered on the rock-hard earth.

A while back, I spent a week on Shishmaref, a barrier island in the 
Chukchi Sea a little bit north of where the typhoon struck two weeks 
ago. Because of the retreating sea ice and vanishing permafrost, 
Shishmaref, which has been continuously occupied in one way or another 
for 4,000 years, is itself vanishing into the ocean. One day—if nothing 
changes, or perhaps even if something does—Shishmaref will be gone.

The people I met there have no doubt that the climate crisis is real. 
They know they can’t hunt on the ice the way that they had for 
millennia. The season is shorter and the ice less reliable. Every winter 
now, somebody from the village or the surrounding area is lost because 
they fell through the ice. The thawing permafrost means the people of 
the village have lost what they called “the Eskimo freezer,” the 
practice of burying seal meat to preserve it. When I was there, the 
people in the village were working with state officials to build a road 
to a gravel quarry from which they could gather the material to build a 
road that would allow them to move off the island. I found this almost 
unbearably poignant as well as infuriating.

To stand on the bluffs above the Chukchi Sea, looking down at a series 
of broken and ruined seawalls that have already failed to hold back the 
power of the ocean, and to consider that there are politicians in this 
country who are unwilling to do anything about the climate crisis, or 
who even deny it exists, is to wish they all could come and stand on 
these bluffs and look out at the relentless, devouring sea.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41355745/hurricane-fiona-climate-change/




/[ maybe the harsh reality of looming deadline? plus all the greed and 
physics?  ] /
*What Many Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate Change*
Wishful thinking hampers the clean-energy revolution.
By Alec Stapp

Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant 
fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked 
to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for 
natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate 
challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.
- -
Yet we cannot succeed in the fight against global warming without giving 
many alternatives to the status quo an opportunity to evolve and prove 
themselves. In reality, the false solution to climate change isn’t 
geoengineering or nuclear energy—it’s the belief that we can decarbonize 
the economy only by upending our economic system, categorically 
rejecting certain technologies, and spurning private investment.
Alec Stapp is a co-founder of the Institute for Progress.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/capitalism-clean-energy-technology-permitting/671545/

/
/

/
/

/[  Great lesson in climate science - from  RealClimate.org ]/
*Watching the detections*
25 SEP 2022 BY GAVIN
The detection and the attribution of climate change are based on 
fundamentally different frameworks and shouldn’t be conflated.

We read about and use the phrase ‘detection and attribution’ of climate 
change so often that it seems like it’s just one word 
‘detectionandattribution’ and that might lead some to think that it is 
just one concept. But it’s not.

Formally, the IPCC definitions are relatively clear:

Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that 
climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined 
statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change. An 
identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of 
occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined to 
be small, for example, <10%.

Attribution is defined as the process of evaluating the relative 
contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with a 
formal assessment of confidence.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/09/watching-the-detections/ 


- -

/[  One should wade carefully into a glossary - a deep forest of 
definitions ]/
*Glossary*
This glossary defines some specific terms as the Lead Authors intend 
them to be interpreted in the context of this report. Blue, italicized 
words indicate that the term is defined in the Glossary.

    IPCC, 2018: Annex I: Glossary [Matthews, J.B.R. (ed.)]. In: Global
    Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global
    warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global
    greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening
    the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable
    development, and efforts to eradicate poverty

Note that subterms are in italics beneath main terms.
/[Download a PDF and print it in 24 pages] 
/https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/SR15_AnnexI.pdf
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/glossary/



/[ Saturday CBS broadcast ]/
*Meet the last community to reside inside a national park*
Sep 24, 2022  About 100 full-time residents live in Wrangell-St. Elias. 
It’s the last community to reside inside a national park. CBS News 
correspondent Jeff Glor has more.
"CBS Saturday Morning" co-hosts Jeff Glor, Michelle Miller and Dana 
Jacobson...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UQLQgVWOcg



/[ Aljazeera video - the Arctic Steppes -- Serengeti of the North - 
Russian with subtitles ]/
*THE ZIMOV HYPOTHESIS*
349 views  Apr 24, 2022  AlJazaeera
WITNESS
Film about Nature in Russia 2022
THE ZIMOV HYPOTHESIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQW5g2NuLIl;;;l



/[The news archive - looking back at accidental truth telling ]/
/*September 26, 2004*/
September 26, 2004: In an apparent attack on his own bosses at the Fox
News Channel, Bill O'Reilly tells CBS News's Mike Wallace:

    "[The] government's gotta be proactive on [the] environment. Global
    warming is here. All these idiots that run around and say it isn't
    here? That's ridiculous!"

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-oreilly-no-spin/

http://youtu.be/ZD39QY8ew3c


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