[✔️] April 30, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | El Niño, Anchorage preparing, German demonstrations, Ocean current collapses, 2015 Church divests

[Richard Pauli]

/*April*//*30, 2023*/

/[ El Niño -- coming heat nicely explained in video 12 min ]/
*This one could be a monster!*
Just Have a Think
Apr 30, 2023
After three years of La Niña in the South Pacific supressing the effects 
of global warming, the ENSO system is now turning towards El Niño 
conditions, which do the exact opposite. According to the worlds 
meteorological agencies, this El Niño is shaping up to become a 
potential record breaker – and not in a good way. So, what's happening 
and what can we expect?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwdxffEzQ9I



/[ what risk, what if? Or preparing for what is possible ] /
*Wildfires in Anchorage? Climate change sparks disaster fears*
Research on a flat spot for air evacuations
ByMARK THIESSEN  Associated Press
April 29, 2023
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Research on a flat spot for air evacuations. Talk 
of old-style civil defense sirens to warn of fast-moving wildfires. 
Hundreds of urban firefighters training in wildland firefighting 
techniques while snow still blankets the ground.

This is the new reality in Alaska's largest city, where a recent series 
of wildfires near Anchorage and the hottest day on record have sparked 
fears that a warming climate could soon mean serious, untenable blazes 
in urban areas — just like in the rest of the drought-plagued American West.

The risk is particularly high in the city's burgeoning Anchorage 
Hillside neighborhood, where multi-million dollar homes have pushed 
further and further up steep slopes and to the forest's edge. Making the 
challenge even greater is that many of these areas on the Hillside — 
home to about 35,000 people — have but one road in and out, meaning that 
fleeing residents could clog a roadway or be cut off from reaching 
Anchorage at all.

The prospect of a major wildfire there keeps Anchorage Fire Chief Doug 
Schrage awake at night when conditions are hot and dry.

“I’ve characterized this as probably the single largest threat to the 
municipality of Anchorage,” he said...
- -
Since 1950, there have been 14 years in which more than 4,687 square 
miles (12,139 square kilometers) — the equivalent of 3 million acres 
(1.2 million hectares) — have burned during Alaska's short but intense 
fire season. Half of those fire seasons have occurred since 2002, 
including the worst year on record — 2004 — when over 10,156 square 
miles (26,304 square kilometers) burned.
- -
For now, both the city and Schrage's fire department are focused on 
keeping things under control — implementing as many preventative 
measures as possible.

The city department has removed evergreen trees and reduced brush in 
strips of 100 feet (30 meters) next to neighborhoods to help contain any 
future fires and Anchorage has cleared trees and other hazards in parks 
and along greenbelts.

Firefighters have also conducted inspections at people's homes to 
identify fire hazards such as firewood kept too close to their homes or 
too much vegetation on their property — all in hopes of preserving 
homes, livelihoods and the community in a time of growing climate 
uncertainty.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wildfires-anchorage-climate-change-sparks-disaster-fears-98966085



/[ getting ready for demonstrations ]/
*German police union boss calls for crackdown on growing climate protests*
Union leader wants more preventive detention of activists across country 
to stop disruption
- -
Anger has been heightened over accusations that the blockades hold up 
emergency vehicles. During this week’s Berlin protests, the fire brigade 
said 15 of its vehicles had been held up in one day, seven of them on 
their way to an emergency.

Letzte Generation insists it always leaves space for emergency vehicles. 
It has said membership and general support for the group has only 
increased the longer it has been protesting.

Carla Hindrichs, a spokesperson for the group, said: “I don’t want to 
stick myself to roads. I’m not doing it for fun but because we can see 
from examples in history that disruptive, nonviolent action can be the 
most effective type of action. We are like a fire alarm, which is 
annoying but necessary.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/german-police-call-for-tougher-response-to-growing-climate-protests-letzte-generation


/
//[ cough, cough.  Ahem...  ]/
*Gas leaf blowers and lawn mowers are shockingly bad for the planet. 
Bans are beginning to spread.*
Advocates say using a commercial gas leaf blower for an hour produces 
emissions equal to driving from Denver to Los Angeles.
- -
Washington, D.C., has a much stricter ban, barring the use of 
gas-powered leaf blowers by anyone within the district as of Jan. 1, 
2022, and levying $500 fines for violators, unless they're on federal 
property. The D.C. ban also allows anyone who sees or hears a 
gas-powered leaf blower to file a complaint – they don't need a city 
inspector to witness it.

Denver-area regulators are considering restrictions that primarily 
target large commercial and municipal users, but provide exemptions for 
homeowners. The Denver-area ban is focused on reducing ozone pollution, 
which causes breathing difficulties while also contributing to climate 
change.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/30/gas-leaf-blower-mower-bans-spread-us-fight-climate-change/11746893002/



/[ Mother Jones ]/
*Scientists: Critical Ocean Currents Could Collapse Within Decades*
Antarctic ice melt will halt circulation, new research predicts, with 
dire global impacts.
- -
It is being hailed as a sea change in scientific understanding of the 
global ocean circulation system and how it will respond as the world 
heats up. A doomsday scenario involving the collapse of the 
circulation—previously portrayed in both peer-reviewed research and the 
climate disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow—came a lot closer in the 
last month. But rather than playing out in the far North Atlantic, as 
previously assumed, it now seems much more likely at the opposite end of 
the planet.

A new analysis by Australian and American researchers, using new and 
more detailed modeling of the oceans, predicts that the long-feared 
turn-off of the circulation will likely occur in the Southern Ocean, as 
billions of tons of ice melt on the land mass of Antarctica. And rather 
than being more than a century away, as models predict for the North 
Atlantic, it could happen within the next three decades.
- -
Leading ocean and climate researchers not involved in the study who were 
contacted for comment praised the findings. “This is a really important 
paper,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer and head of earth system 
analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in 
Germany. “I think the method and model are convincing.”

“It is the most original research I have seen for some time,” says 
British polar researcher Andrew Shepherd of Northumbria University, 
Newcastle. “I was genuinely surprised by this work, but they have 
convinced me. It is agenda-setting. All the attention has been on the 
North Atlantic; but I expect there will now be a shift in attention to 
the Southern Ocean.”

Meanwhile the long-standing concern about a shutdown of the ocean 
circulation in the North Atlantic sometime in the 21th century appears 
to be subsiding. A Swiss study published this month found that, contrary 
to past belief, the circulation did not fail at the end of the last ice 
age, suggesting, the researchers say, that it was more stable than 
previously supposed, and less likely to collapse.

Taken together the two studies bring a dramatically new perspective to 
the likely impact of planetary heating on ocean circulation, which is 
one of the great stabilizing forces of the planet’s climate system.
- -
“The physics at play is pretty simple,” says England. “None of the steps 
is particularly surprising or complex. But until our study, we did not 
have the circulation model … to make confident predictions.” The 
slowdown itself, he says, “didn’t surprise me. But the pace of change—to 
see a 40 percent slowdown in under three decades—was definitely a surprise.”
“This is the first time I have seen such a compelling argument for the 
impact of Antarctic ice melting on the Southern Ocean,” says Shepherd. 
“They have convinced me that current rates of melting are big enough to 
affect ocean circulation.”

Disrupting deep-water formation might make the Southern Hemisphere drier 
and the Northern Hemisphere wetter.
Antarctica is by far the world’s largest repository of ice. So, Shepherd 
says, “we should expect the impacts of this melting to be far-reaching.” 
The paper’s authors agree. The slowing of ocean circulation will 
“profoundly alter the ocean overturning of heat, fresh water, oxygen, 
carbon, and nutrients, with impacts felt throughout the global ocean for 
centuries to come,” concludes lead author Qian Li, an oceanographer at 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Marine ecologists are especially concerned about the impact of a 
circulation shutdown on the cycling of nutrients in the ocean. 
Currently, nutrients fall to the ocean depths as dead marine creatures 
sink to the ocean floor but are brought back to the surface by the conveyor.

If there was no new deep water plunging to the ocean depths, however, 
there would be nothing to bring the nutrients back to the surface. 
Instead, the waters of the deep ocean would accumulate nutrients and 
become stagnant, while the supply of nutrients to sustain marine life at 
the surface would be drastically reduced, says one of the paper’s 
co-authors, Adele Morrison of the Australian National University. Marine 
ecosystems could collapse. This would not happen instantly. It might 
take centuries, but once in train could not be prevented.

A shutdown would also accelerate global warming, says Rahmstorf. “The 
deep-water formation sites are conduits where carbon dioxide is brought 
down to the ocean abyss, where it is locked away safely from the 
atmosphere for centuries [and] currently helps slow down global warming. 
However, this mechanism is set to be weakened.” The IPCC estimates that 
the oceans altogether capture a quarter of our CO2 emissions, much of it 
through deep-water formation.

Disrupting deep-water formation in the Southern Ocean would change 
global climate patterns in other ways that are currently hard to 
predict. It might shift tropical rainfall systems, says England, and 
perhaps make the Southern Hemisphere, as a whole, drier and the Northern 
Hemisphere wetter.

The Antarctic study suggests that the Southern Ocean could be about to 
have its own Day After Tomorrow moment. But meanwhile, for some 
scientists, concern about the risks of the original doomsday scenario in 
the far North Atlantic is abating. A Swiss study published at the start 
of April analyzed the climate record of marine sediments to assess the 
vulnerability of the North Atlantic deep-water formation to a breakdown. 
Lead author Frerk Pöppelmeier of the University of Bern found that the 
circulation “has historically been less sensitive to climate change than 
thought.” In particular, the circulation did not, as once believed, 
collapse 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. It “weakened 
much less than assumed,” he says.

Pöppelmeier didn’t say the findings give us an all-clear for Atlantic 
circulation collapse. It is far from certain how relevant his research 
is to the situation today. But he did conclude that “melting of 
Greenland’s ice in the near future will have less of a negative impact 
on the Atlantic circulation than previously thought.”

Even if emissions don’t rise as much as predicted, it is “irrelevant” to 
the near-term fate of the ocean conveyor, says a researcher.
So have oceanographers been guilty of scare-mongering? Could those 
involved in the Antarctic study be exaggerating the implications of 
their findings?
- -
None of the researchers contacted by Yale Environment 360 criticized the 
new modeling of the impact of ice-melt in the Southern Ocean itself. But 
some questioned the use in the model projections of an unrealistic 
scenario for future carbon dioxide emissions. This “business-as-usual” 
projection has been adopted by the IPCC as a worst-case scenario and is 
widely used by researchers. But it assumes continued big increases in 
global coal burning. Mark Maslin, an Earth scientist at University 
College London, says many researchers now believe this is “deeply 
unlikely,” as low-carbon energy sources become ever cheaper and 
governments and corporations remain under pressure to deliver net-zero 
emissions by mid-century. One study published this month predicted that 
carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity may 
have peaked in 2022 and be set for a long-term decline as renewables 
take over.

But Rahmstorf says such optimism is ill-founded. Even if future 
emissions don’t rise as much as predicted, it is “irrelevant” to the 
near-term fate of the ocean conveyor, he says. The extent of deep-water 
formation in the next few decades has already been largely determined by 
past emissions and won’t be impacted quickly by any recent changes. 
“Which scenario we follow will only start to make a big difference 
beyond the 2040s,” he says. By then, the 40-percent weakening of 
bottom-water formation may be all but baked in

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/04/research-ocean-currents-circulation-collapse-climate-impacts/ 




/[The news archive - looking back at moral acts ]/
/*April 30, 2015*/
April 30, 2015:
• The Guardian reports:

"The Church of England has pulled its money out of two of the most 
polluting fossil fuels as part of what it called its moral 
responsibility to protect the world’s poor from the impact of global 
warming.

"In a move approved by the church’s board on Thursday, it divested £12m 
from tar sands oil and thermal coal – the first time it has ever imposed 
investment restrictions because of climate change."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/30/church-of-england-ends-investments-in-heavily-polluting-fossil-fuels?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it



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