[✔️] April 3, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Why the worst comes to the US, Sea level rise, Greenland and McKibben, Faster ice sheet loss, Rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cronkite

[R.Pauli]

/*April*//*3, 2023*/

/[ Bad luck and more expensive targets ] /
*The US leads the world in weather catastrophes. Here's why*
The United States is Earth's punching bag for nasty weather
BySETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer
April 1, 2023
The United States is Earth's punching bag for nasty weather.

Blame geography for the U.S. getting hit by stronger, costlier, more 
varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere on the planet, several 
experts said. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, 
jutting peninsulas like Florida, clashing storm fronts and the jet 
stream combine to naturally brew the nastiest of weather.

That’s only part of it. Nature dealt the United States a bad hand, but 
people have made it much worse by what, where and how we build, several 
experts told The Associated Press.

Then add climate change, and “buckle up. More extreme events are 
expected,” said Rick Spinrad, head of the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration.

Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Flash floods. Droughts. Wildfires. Blizzards. Ice 
storms. Nor’easters. Lake-effect snow. Heat waves. Severe thunderstorms. 
Hail. Lightning. Atmospheric rivers. Derechos. Dust storms. Monsoons. 
Bomb cyclones. And the dreaded polar vortex...

It starts with “where we are on the globe,” North Carolina state 
climatologist Kathie Dello said. “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”

China may have more people, and a large land area like the United 
States, but “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as 
much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe 
weather,” said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and 
Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina...
The U.S. is by far the king of tornadoes and other severe storms.

“It really starts with kind of two things. Number one is the Gulf of 
Mexico. And number two is elevated terrain to the west,” said Victor 
Gensini, a Northern Illinois University meteorology professor.

Look at Friday's deadly weather, and watch out for the next week to see 
it in action: Dry air from the West goes up over the Rockies and crashes 
into warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s all brought 
together along a stormy jet stream.

In the West, it's a drumbeat of atmospheric rivers. In the Atlantic, 
it's nor'easters in the winter, hurricanes in the summer and sometimes a 
weird combination of both, like Superstorm Sandy.

“It is a reality that regardless of where you are in the country, where 
you call home, you’ve likely experienced a high-impact weather event 
firsthand,” Spinrad said.

Killer tornadoes in December 2021 that struck Kentucky illustrated the 
uniqueness of the United States.

They hit areas with large immigrant populations. People who fled Central 
and South America, Bosnia and Africa were all victims. A huge problem 
was that tornadoes really didn't happen in those people's former homes, 
so they didn't know what to watch for or what to do, or even know they 
had to be concerned about tornadoes, said Joseph Trujillo Falcon, a NOAA 
social scientist who investigated the aftermath.

With colder air up in the Arctic and warmer air in the tropics, the area 
between them — the mid-latitudes, where the United States is — gets the 
most interesting weather because of how the air acts in clashing 
temperatures, and that north-south temperature gradient drives the jet 
stream, said Northern Illinois meteorology professor Walker Ashley...
Then add mountain ranges that go north-south, jutting into the winds 
flowing from west to east, and underneath it all the toasty Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf injects hot, moist air underneath the often cooler, dry air 
lifted by the mountains, “and that doesn't happen really anywhere else 
in the world,” Gensini said.

If the United States as a whole has it bad, the South has it the worst, 
said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd, a 
former president of the American Meteorological Society.

“We drew the short straw (in the South) that we literally can experience 
every single type of extreme weather event,” Shepherd said. “Including 
blizzards. Including wildfires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes. Every 
single type. ... There's no other place in the United States that can 
say that.”

Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana also stick out in the water so are 
more prone to being hit by hurricanes, said Shepherd and Dello.

The South has more manufactured housing that is vulnerable to all sorts 
of weather hazards, and storms are more likely to happen there at night, 
Ashley said. Night storms are deadly because people can't see them and 
are less likely to take cover, and they miss warnings in their sleep.

The extreme weather triggered by America’s unique geography creates 
hazards. But it takes humans to turn those hazards into disasters, 
Ashley and Gensini said.

Just look where cities pop up in America and the rest of the world: near 
water that floods, except maybe Denver, said South Carolina's Cutter. 
More people are moving to areas, such as the South, where there are more 
hazards.

“One of the ways in which you can make your communities more resilient 
is to not develop them in the most hazard-prone way or in the most 
hazard-prone portion of the community,” Cutter said. “The insistence on 
building up barrier islands and development on barrier islands, 
particularly on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, knowing that that 
sand is going to move and having hurricanes hit with some frequency ... 
seems like a colossal waste of money.”

Construction standards tend to be at the bare minimum and less likely to 
survive the storms, Ashley said.

“Our infrastructure is crumbling and nowhere near being 
climate-resilient at all,” Shepherd said.

Poverty makes it hard to prepare for and bounce back from disasters, 
especially in the South, Shepherd said. That vulnerability is an even 
bigger issue in other places in the world.

“Safety can be bought," Ashley said. “Those that are well-to-do and who 
have resources can buy safety and will be the most resilient when 
disaster strikes. ... Unfortunately that isn't all of us.”

“It’s sad that we have to live these crushing losses,” said Kim Cobb, a 
Brown University professor of environment and society. “We’re worsening 
our hand by not understanding the landscape of vulnerability given the 
geographic hand we’ve been dealt.”

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-leads-world-weather-catastrophes-98298368



/[ true costs would mean instant transition to clean energy - 14 min 
video ]/
*When will fuel become unaffordable?*
Just Have a Think
7,080 views  Apr 2, 2023
The fuel crisis has affected all of, but it has hit the least well-off 
families the hardest. The fossil fuel industry received more than a 
TRILLION dollars in direct subsidies in 2022, and some say if the 
impacts on the climate and environment were factored in, that number 
would be nearly six times higher. But, if we take the subsidies away, 
asks the fossil fuel industry, then how will people be able to afford to 
heat their homes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2676LzY9CsU



/[ Brief video from Peter Sinclair - 90 seconds ]/
*Bill McKibben on Greenland's Changing Face*
greenmanbucket
2.62K subscribers
Apr 2, 2023
More from my 2018 interview with Bill McKibben, in Narsarsuaq, Greenland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qNtK_CITXw



/[ faster times now. ..]/
*Greenland Ice Sheet Ice Loss Accelerating with Numerous Amplifying 
Feedbacks Towards Tipping Points*
Paul Beckwith
1,472 views  Mar 31, 2023
In the last week or so, there have been a number of peer-reviewed 
scientific papers that show the stability of the enormous ice sheets on 
both Greenland and Antarctica are much less resilient than we previously 
thought.

In this video, I focus on Greenland Ice Sheet melt, and in the next 
video I switch poles and chat about the Antarctic Ice Sheet loss and the 
effects on the Global Ocean Overturning Circulation.

For Greenland, we are fast approaching a tipping point whereby we lose 
all the ice sheet in Southern Greenland. An Earth System Model of 
Intermediate Complexity (EMIC) that incorporates all the known feedbacks 
shows that when the cumulative carbon emissions reach 1000 GtC we lose 
the southern ice on Greenland. Since cumulative human emissions to date 
have reached 500 GtC, it means that we are already half way there. The 
study also shows that when cumulative carbon emissions reach 2500 GtC 
then we lose essentially all the Greenland ice, which results in 7 
meters of global sea level rise.

We also know that the increased melt rate on the surface of Greenland is 
greatly accelerating, and the meltwater is running through crevices and 
cracks in the ice, running downhill between the bottom of the ice sheet 
and the bedrock below, and entering the ocean. The turbulent flow of 
this meltwater is eroding away the ice at the bottom of the glacier, 
greatly increasing ice mass loss. I discussed this in great detail in 
some Greenland videos I published back in October and November.

Finally, a third crucial paper was just published online on March 29th, 
2023 that shows how there is increasingly extreme Greenland ice sheet 
melting in northeast Greenland. What is happening is that there are 
increasing numbers of powerful Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) hitting the 
northwest of Greenland, where they cause great summer melting there when 
they are rain on snow events. As these ARs deposit their rain (at low 
altitudes) and snow (at high altitudes) they cross the peak of the ice 
sheet and descend down the lee side as very dry, warm (adiabatically 
heated) fast winds (called foehn winds). On their way downhill across 
the northeast Greenland ice sheet they cause extreme melting events that 
erode away the ice extremely quickly.

All of these mechanisms mean that global sea level will rise much faster 
than anybody thinks (apart from me).
All of these mechanisms mean that the Greenland Ice Sheet is 
destabilizing, and melting much faster than anybody has expected, apart 
from myself, of course (see my series of videos; Can Global Sea Level 
Rise 7 meters by 2070?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYY0eJt6Ano


/[ rising tides and filling the bathtub ]/
*The UK’s first climate refugees: why more defences may not save this 
village from rising sea levels*
Published: March 31, 2023...
- -
Fairbourne is a small village on the west coast of Wales and is the 
first place in the UK to have been assigned the long-term policy of “no 
active intervention” regarding its coastal defences. That is when a 
decision is made not to invest in providing or maintaining sea defences.

This has led to Fairbourne’s inhabitants being described as “the UK’s 
first climate change refugees” by news media...
- -
Fairbourne is built on a low-lying floodplain. The village lies between 
cliffs and a natural gravel barrier which houses a sea wall, and is at 
risk from both coastal and river flooding. As the sea level around the 
Welsh coast rises, the village is at increased risk from coastal flooding...
- -
There are two main factors which drive global mean sea level rise, both 
related to climate change. First, the addition of freshwater to our 
oceans from melting glaciers and ice sheets. And second, the expansion 
of ocean water as it warms up, which is a consequence of higher 
atmospheric temperatures.

The global mean sea level rose higher in the 20th century than in any 
other century during the last 3,000 years. The rate of global mean sea 
level rise in 2021 was the highest ever recorded. Uncertainty remains in 
the projections of future sea level rise but the latest estimate is that 
a global rise of up to approximately 1 metre by 2100 is possible.

https://theconversation.com/the-uks-first-climate-refugees-why-more-defences-may-not-save-this-village-from-rising-sea-levels-197206

- -

/[ classics from Kim Stanley Robinson ]/
*Sea-level rise: writers imagined drowned worlds for centuries – what 
they tell us about the future*
Published: January 28, 2021
- -
And overcoming the rising seas will mean more than adjusting to flooded 
coasts. Some works of fiction consider how a rise in sea level will 
limit food production, as in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Others 
depict the consequences of mass migration to the remaining habitable 
parts of the planet, as in EJ Swift’s The Osiris Project.

These stories explore a sea-level rise as an existential threat to human 
life that’s exacerbated by the paralysis and inaction of individuals. 
Recent offerings of climate fiction, such as Robinson’s New York 2140 or 
The Ministry for the Future go further, and operate at the level of 
utopian imagination implicit in Ballard’s earlier dystopian vision, 
asking: what if we do something about it?...
https://theconversation.com/sea-level-rise-writers-imagined-drowned-worlds-for-centuries-what-they-tell-us-about-the-future-151804

--

/[ an older lecture from 2020  -- video of talk discussion ]/
*Adapting to Sea Level Rise: The Science of "New York 2140" | Kim 
Stanley Robinson*
Long Now Foundation
2,206 views  May 10, 2020  THE INTERVAL AT LONG NOW
Legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson: 
http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/ returns to The Interval to discuss 
his just released novel New York 2140. Robinson will discuss how 
starting from the most up to date climate science available to him, he 
derived a portrait of New York City as "super-Venice" and the resilient 
civilization that inhabits it in his novel. In 02016 Robinson spoke at 
The Interval about the economic ideas that inform "New York 2140": 
http://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02.... He will be joined by futurist 
Peter Schwartz: http://longnow.org/people/board/schwa... in conversation 
after his talk.

Kim Stanley Robinson: http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/ is an American 
novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of 
science fiction...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC7Cr8g-ru0



/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*April 3, 1980*/
April 3, 1980: "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" reports on 
the role coal plays in fueling global warming.

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/


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