[✔️] April 13, 2023- Global Warming News Digest |How to change, NOVA wx future, SCOTUS Major Questions, Biggest cumulative log jam

[R.Pauli]

/*April*//*13, 2023*/

/[  How can we nurture change?   Or impose change?  answer from 
Anthropocene ]/
*Which tool best coaxes climate-friendly habits: Information, money, or 
social signals?*
A wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of over 400 studies set out to 
find the most effective interventions. Spoiler: It isn’t information.
By Sarah DeWeerdt
April 11, 2023
Offering financial benefits or creating social pressure by informing 
people about what others are doing are the most effective strategies to 
promote climate-friendly behaviors, according to a new study. These 
approaches are more effective than simply educating people and providing 
facts about how to shrink their carbon footprint.

The findings come from an analysis of data from more than 430 previous 
studies of interventions to promote conservation of water, electricity, 
or other resources; sustainable consumption habits such as buying 
organic products; recycling; sustainable transportation; and reducing 
littering.

The previous studies addressed six different types of climate 
interventions: appeals that urge people to act more sustainably; 
commitment interventions to get people to set goals or publicly commit 
to environmentally friendly behavior; educational interventions that 
provide facts through flyers, videos, energy labels, and the like; 
feedback that provides information about a person’s own behavior; social 
comparison that provides information about other people’s behavior; and 
financial incentives to reward people for sustainable behavior.

In the past, similar analyses have generally addressed only one type of 
sustainable behavior or one type of intervention. The new study is the 
most wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of its type yet conducted.

Overall, interventions to promote climate-friendly behaviors are 
effective, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences. On average, these efforts increase 
climate-friendly behavior by 12 percentage points compared to what it 
would have been without the intervention. That’s a relatively small 
effect, but about on par with interventions to promote health behaviors.

The researchers employed some statistical techniques to correct for the 
well-known tendency of scientists to publish only positive results, and 
found that this reduced the estimated effectiveness of climate 
interventions to 7 percentage points – still evidence that these 
strategies “are indeed a useful tool for mitigating climate change,” 
they argue.

An analysis of just the largest, most statistically robust studies 
suggested these interventions increase climate-friendly behaviors by 
just 2 percentage points. This means there might be a tradeoff between 
reach and effectiveness, the researchers say. “Large-scale interventions 
often target nonvoluntary participants by less direct techniques (e.g., 
“home energy reports”) while small-scale interventions often target 
voluntary participants by more direct techniques (e.g., face-to-face 
interactions),” they write.

Interventions that use social comparison or financial incentives have 
the largest effects, the researchers found. Interventions that use 
feedback or education have the smallest effects. And interventions that 
involve appeals or commitments are somewhere in the middle.

Some behaviors are easier to change than others. “Interventions 
targeting littering showed by far the strongest effects,” the 
researchers write. Interventions to promote recycling, resource 
conservation, or sustainable consumption habits were less effective, but 
still significantly increased climate-friendly behaviors. Interventions 
to promote sustainable transportation choices had the smallest effects.

But, the researchers note, behaviors differ in their climate change 
impact. A smaller increase in a high-impact behavior might have a 
greater impact on carbon emissions than a larger increase in a 
lower-impact behavior.

“For example, in terms of climate change mitigation, an increase of 7 
percentage points in recycling is not equivalent to an increase of 7 
percentage points in sustainable food consumption,” they write. “Even 
behaviors that are difficult to change might nonetheless have a large 
impact because even small changes in the behavior can have large effects 
on the outcome of interest.” How long the behavior change lasts is 
another important variable that’s not captured by the current analysis.

Future research should look at the effects of combining different 
interventions, the researchers say. More study of infrequent but 
high-impact behaviors such as forgoing air travel or installing solar 
panels is also necessary.

Source: Bergquist M. et al.  “Field interventions for climate change 
mitigation behaviors: A second-order meta-analysis.” Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences 2023.
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2023/04/which-tool-best-coaxes-climate-friendly-habits-information-money-or-social-signals/


/[ YouTube Premium does not play commercials - 53 min video ]/
*Weathering the Future | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS*
NOVA PBS Official
Premiered April 13, 2023  #NOVAPBS #climatechange #extremeweather
Americans use ancient wisdom and new technology to fight extreme weather.
Official Website: https://to.pbs.org/412ozPG | #NOVAPBS
It’s hard not to notice: our weather is changing. From longer, hotter 
heat waves, to more intense rainstorms, to megafires and multi-year 
droughts, the U.S. is experiencing the full range of impacts from a 
changing global climate. At the same time, many on the front lines are 
fighting back – innovating solutions, marshaling ancient wisdom, and 
developing visionary ideas. The lessons they're learning today can help 
all of us adapt in the years ahead, as the planet gets warmer and our 
weather gets more extreme...
- -
Join producers and experts from Weathering the Future for clips, a panel 
discussion, and audience Q&A on April 25th at 7PM ET.
Register for the event here: https://bit.ly/3Uufnl2
Chapters:

    00:00 Introduction
    05:33 Extreme Heat Solutions in Atlanta and Phoenix
    14:40 Drinking Water Solutions in Orange County
    21:58 Forest Fire Solutions in Northern California
    31:00 Soil Runoff Solutions in Iowa
    39:41 Megastorm Flood Solutions in Louisiana
    50:10 Future Action for Extreme Weather in America

© 2023 WGBH Educational Foundation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2udBaZJ22I



/[ "Major questions doctrine"?  An invention of law by SCOTUS -   Audio 
podcast ] /
*The importance of upcoming EPA regulations on power plants*
A conversation with Lissa Lynch of NRDC.
APR 12, 2023
A couple of weeks ago, the policy analysts at the Rhodium Group put out 
a new report showing that the Biden administration's legislative 
achievements are not quite enough to get it to its Paris climate goals. 
But those goals could be reached if the legislation is supplemented with 
smart executive action.

Some of the most important upcoming executive actions are EPA's 
greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants. The Supreme 
Court famously struck down Obama's Clean Power Plan — his attempt to 
address existing power plants — judging it impermissibly expansive. So 
now EPA has to figure out what to ask of individual plants.

The agency's decisions will help shape the future of the US power sector 
and determine whether the Biden administration gets on track for its 
climate goals.

To talk through those decisions in more detail, I contacted Lissa Lynch, 
who runs the Federal Legal Group at the NRDC’s Climate & Clean Energy 
Program. We discussed the options before the EPA, the viability of 
carbon capture and hydrogen as systems of pollution reduction, and 
whether Biden will have time to complete all the regulatory work that 
remains...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-importance-of-upcoming-epa-regulations


/
/

///[  World phenomena -- from the AGU ]/
*World's biggest cumulative logjam, newly mapped in the Arctic, stores 
3.4 million tons of carbon*
by American Geophysical Union
APRIL 11, 2023
Throughout the Arctic, fallen trees make their way from forests to the 
ocean by way of rivers. Those logs can stack up as the river twists and 
turns, resulting in long-term carbon storage. A new study has mapped the 
largest known woody deposit, covering 51 square kilometers (20 square 
miles) of the Mackenzie River Delta in Nunavut, Canada, and calculated 
that the logs store about 3.4 million tons (about 3.1 million metric 
tons) of carbon.
"To put that in perspective, that's about two and a half million car 
emissions for a year," said Alicia Sendrowski, a research engineer who 
led the study while at Colorado State University. "That's a sizeable 
amount of carbon," she said, but it's not a carbon pool we know much 
about. "We have great knowledge about carbon in other forms, like 
dissolved or particulate organic carbon, but not what we call 'large 
carbon'—large wood." That's starting to change.

Scientists have known for decades that driftwood can really get around 
in the Arctic, but they are just beginning to quantify how much wood 
there is and how much of its carbon storage we risk losing to climate 
change. The Arctic's cold, often dry or icy conditions mean trees can be 
preserved for tens of thousands of years; a tree that fell a thousand 
years ago might look just as fresh as one that fell last winter, 
Sendrowski said.

"There's been a lot of work on fluxes of carbon from water and sediment, 
but we simply didn't pay attention to the wood until very recently. This 
is a very young field of research that is developing quite fast," said 
Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva, a fluvial geomorphologist at the University of 
Lausanne who was not involved in the study. "And it's important to study 
this wood not only for the carbon cycle, but in general for our 
understanding of how these natural fluvial systems work, how the rivers 
mobilize and distribute the wood."

To get a snapshot of the logjams, Sendrowski and her colleagues focused 
on the Mackenzie River, which has exceptionally high-resolution imagery 
available and is known to have large wood deposits. Its delta is the 
third largest in the world by land area and drains about 20% of Canada. 
The team studied about 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles) of 
delta in the biggest attempt to map woody deposits so far.

The researchers spent three weeks in the field measuring river driftwood 
with colleagues at Colorado State University, mapping logjams and 
sampling the wood to date using radiocarbon dating. After fieldwork, 
Sendrowski used remote imagery to identify wood at the river's surface 
and estimate the areal extent of the logjam. She then estimated the 
volume of wood within the logjam and how much carbon it's storing, based 
on her field measurements.
Sendrowski found that the deposit, comprising more than 400,000 
miniature caches of wood, is storing about 3.4 million tons (3.1 million 
metric tons) of carbon. The largest single deposit, which covers around 
20 American football fields, stores 7,385 tons (6,700 metric tons) of 
carbon alone. But because there are even more logs buried in soil, 
submerged underwater and hidden from aerial imagery under vegetation, 
the total amount of carbon stored in the delta's wood could be about 
twice as large, she said.

The Mackenzie River Delta is a "hotspot" of carbon storage thanks to 
incredibly carbon-rich soils, Sendrowski said, so the logs' carbon 
storage makes up a relatively small fraction of the delta's total carbon 
storage, which is around 3 quadrillion grams of carbon. "But we think 
it's still important because as changes in the basin occur, like logging 
or damming, and as climate change alters precipitation patterns and 
warming, wood preservation will decrease. It's a significant amount of 
carbon, so there's a potentially significant loss of carbon storage," 
she said.

The Mackenzie logjam also reflects only one basin in the Arctic; at 
least a dozen deltas larger than 500 square kilometers dot the north, so 
all together, large woody deposits throughout the Arctic could add up to 
be a significant carbon storage pool, and one we know little about.

The researchers were also interested in how long a tree can last in the 
Arctic, which is important when modeling how "active" a carbon pool 
is—that is, how rapidly material is moved around. Carbon dating revealed 
that while many of the trees they sampled began growing around or after 
1950, some were much older, reaching back to around 700 CE. (A study in 
the 1960s carbon-dated wood from a tree preserved in an icy mound to 
about 33,000 years ago.)

The Mackenzie River Delta was a good place to start. "The exciting 
aspect for me isn't just the scale, but also the potential to apply this 
to other places where large wood hasn't been focused on," Sendrowski 
said. It's a burgeoning field, she added, and there's still much to be 
learned.
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-world-biggest-cumulative-logjam-newly.html

- -

/[ More information]/
More information: Alicia Sendrowski et al, Wood‐Based Carbon Storage in 
the Mackenzie River Delta: The World's Largest Mapped Riverine Wood 
Deposit, Geophysical Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2022GL100913
Provided by American Geophysical Union 
https://phys.org/partners/american-geophysical-union/



/[ Currently neutral, the strongest El Nino is now developing -- says 
recent research papers from Nature Climate Change  ]/*
**ENSO Variability to Increase Antarctica Ice Sheet and Ice Shelf Melt 
Rates: Heading to an El Niño*
Paul Beckwith
Apr 12, 2023  #ENSO
After three years of the cooling La Niña phase of the ENSO 
(El-Nino-Southern-Oscillation) variability, we have reached the neutral 
state. Usually, we stick around in a neutral state for a while, but 
unusually, that does not seem to be the case this time.

An ensemble (collection) of models by various agencies around the planet 
are projecting large equatorial warming in the Pacific Ocean and thus we 
appear to be already heading into an El Niño state. I show you many maps 
and graphs that indicate this, and you can easily find this information 
real-time as it is posted by searching for #ENSO on Twitter. Already, 
the eastern-most part of the equatorial Pacific Ocean is showing 
significant warming anomalies up to 2.6 C.

A very reliable source of information on the state of the ENSO can be 
found in a PowerPoint presentation by a group within NOAA known as NCEP; 
Google their ENSO report. I step through this presentation in my video.

OK, so an El Niño is coming rapidly and will be here soon. Many people 
think that it will be very strong, rivalling the previous large El 
Nino’s in 1998 and 2015-16. If this pans out, which seems likely to me, 
then we may surpass the 1.5 C warming relative to the 1850-1900 baseline.

How will an increase in ENSO variability affect Antarctica; a fairly 
recent peer-reviewed scientific paper addresses this very question. 
Results indicate that the water on the shallow Antarctica Continental 
Shelf will warm, and thus increase melting of the ice shelf’s and ice 
sheets around Antarctica.

I’m not sure I believe it, but the paper indicates that the loss of 
Antarctica sea ice may slow with increased ENSO variability. Maybe it’s 
would happen if the meltwater from the continent cools the surface 
waters in the vicinity of the ice sheets and floating ice shelves? Not sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTlB4fxkORY

- -


/[The news archive - looking back at when we knew what]/
/*April 13, 2013*/
April 13, 2012: In the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review, "Democracy 
Now" host Amy Goodman observes: "The Pentagon knows it. The world’s 
largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of 
it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the U.S. National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March 
on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first 
kept, with average temperatures of 8.6 degrees above average. More than 
15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, 
wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already 
plaguing the country."

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/apr/13/climate-change-a-hot-issue/


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