[✔️] January 27, 2023- Global Warming News Digest -- Trade wars, defining a 100 year storm -- Climate anxiety - Rebecca Watson - Post Doom discussion - Calibri

[Richard Pauli]

/*January  27, 2023*/

/[ Slate looks at the culture of setting expectations ]/
*One Hundred Years of Certitude*
We thought we knew how often heavy storms and deadly floods were 
supposed to occur. We were wrong.
BY HENRY GRABAR
JAN 25, 2023
American infrastructure is designed around a simple idea: We can predict 
how often the worst storms will come. Take the benchmark that undergirds 
the $1.2 trillion National Flood Insurance Program: the 100-year flood. 
That’s a flood that’s supposed to occur once a century, on average. A 
once-in-a-lifetime event. Similar estimates govern basic stormwater 
infrastructure: Sewers might be designed for a two-year rainstorm 
(likely to occur once every two years) or culverts for a 25-year 
rainstorm (once every quarter-century).

These probabilities are also used in modeling the absolute worst cases, 
such as California’s ARkStorm scenario—a 2010 U.S. Geological Survey 
project that imagined how a month of constant rain might turn the 
Central Valley into a giant lake, flooding 1 in 4 of the state’s 
buildings, forcing the evacuation of 1.5 million people, and causing 
more than three times as much damage as the better-known nightmare 
earthquake popularly known as “The Big One.” In addition to offering a 
potent biblical allusion, ARk stands for “atmospheric river 1,000,” 
because scientists originally thought those levels of precipitation 
would occur once every 500 to 1,000 years.

But other estimates suggest that such a storm might occur once every 100 
to 200 years. And a more recent analysis concludes that climate change 
has caused the likely “recurrence interval” of an ARkStorm to creep 
closer to once each century—an ARcStorm. The last one was in 1862. 
“Climate change is dramatically upping the odds of a very high magnitude 
flood event happening in our lifetimes, specifically,” the authors wrote 
last August. This month’s record-breaking California rain, in other 
words, is a warmup. How did they come to that conclusion? By plugging 
more recent weather history into their simulation...
- -
It’s older data, however, that determines much about the way we plan 
cities, price flood insurance, and build infrastructure, because 
historical records determine the crucial benchmark of the “100-year” 
storm and all its derivatives. The idea of evaluating storms and floods 
by their likely interval of recurrence was adopted in the 1960s to help 
administer the newly created National Flood Insurance Program, and has 
been complained about ever since.
- -
The 100-year flood metric, wrote the geographer Rutherford Platt, is 
“unique in the annals of resource management policy for its durability 
over several decades … despite chronic griping and hand-wringing by 
three generations of floodplain managers.” In theory, Americans ought to 
want to prepare for the 100-year flood, which sounds frightening. But as 
Platt observed, if you were more likely to die than see one, why bother? 
Probabilities like this govern the design of everything from storm 
drains to levees to flood insurance, but they are probabilities from 
last century—and the storms are different now.

When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, it was the city’s third 
500-year flood in three years. Over four days, Harvey’s 30 to 40 inches 
of rain across the region made it a storm likely to occur just once 
every 3,000 to 20,000 years, at least according to the established 
metrics. Last summer, there were five “1,000-year” rain events in five 
weeks, in Dallas, eastern Kentucky, eastern Illinois, St. Louis, and 
Death Valley. California just broke a bunch of rainfall records this 
month, including in well-measured locations like Los Angeles and San 
Francisco.

The long-term trend is beyond dispute: Between 1958 and 2012, according 
to the 2014 National Climate Assessment, the amount of rain falling in 
the biggest storms grew by 37 percent in the Midwest, 27 percent in the 
South, and 71 percent in the Northeast. Do last century’s weather 
records still hold water? Some researchers have concluded they don’t. 
One study concluded that a 7.4-foot storm surge flood in New York City 
has progressed from a 500-year event before the industrial revolution to 
a 25-year event today, and will be a five-year occurrence in a few 
decades. Something similar is happening with heavy rain events.

Unfortunately, yesterday’s numbers are currently being used to plan 
tomorrow’s stormwater infrastructure, a burst of which will be funded by 
the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that President Joe Biden signed in 
2021. As NPR’s Lauren Sommer put it this month, “many cities aren’t 
constructing infrastructure to handle increasing amounts of water, 
because the rainfall records they use to design it are decades-old in 
most states.” Lacking money, expertise, or political will, they are 
preparing for a bygone world of weather.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been authorized 
to develop a more modern rainfall atlas, as well as one that takes 
climate change into account, but that work won’t be done in time for 
current projects. “There’s a timing disconnect for sure,” said Chad 
Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain 
Managers. “No doubt this infrastructure is not going to have as much 
benefit because it’s authorized at the same time as this NOAA update. 
But I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Better 
to build something, in other words.

Some cities are going a step further. After Harvey, Houston officials 
amended the land use code to apply identical standards to the 100-year 
and 500-year flood plains—even though one is supposedly five times less 
likely to flood. In Seattle, planners looked at a climate impact tool 
and decided to expand a new stormwater tunnel from 14 feet in diameter 
to 18 feet. After Madison, Wisconsin, flooded in 2018, the city decided 
to raise its design standards for new development—a culvert under a 
road, for example, now must be built for the 100-year event, instead of 
the 25-year event. But many smaller jurisdictions do not have the 
expertise, money, or political will to go beyond what the federal 
government is recommending.
- -
“Right after the big floods in eastern Kentucky, I got the records from 
the U.S. Geological Survey,” Haneberg said. “People were talking about 
thousand-year floods; well I got those records from one stream gauge 
location, Whitesburg, and they had data only to 1957. So the question 
is: How do you determine that?”

Meteorologists counsel against looking too closely at such headlines as 
evidence that the climate has already gone haywire. For one thing, it’s 
a big country—there’s always a huge storm somewhere. For another, the 
number of broken records is a poor judge of a changing climate. For a 
third, we have more data than ever even across small geographic areas. 
“We weren’t slicing and dicing things so finely until recently,” 
cautions Bob Henson, a meteorologist and journalist with Yale Climate 
Connections. “It’s analogous to getting ever-more fine MRI scans and 
detecting phenomena you wouldn’t see before.” In Houston, for example, a 
500-year flood on Cypress Creek in 2016 was just a 50-year flood a few 
miles downstream. A hundred years ago we might have had just one gauge 
there, if that...

But the consequences of predicting the future on a flawed set of records 
are not abstract. Last year marked the 100th anniversary of one of 
America’s most consequential forecasting mistakes. The Colorado River 
Compact of 1922, which set the course for a century of infrastructure, 
agriculture, and development in the western United States, predicted how 
much water the mighty river would send toward the Gulf of California 
based on a small, and very wet, sample of years. The river has since 
receded to the historical mean and then some, as the western United 
States has faced repeated severe droughts. States are bickering over 
their river-water allocations. Hydroelectric dams are running low on fuel...
- -
But figuring out how much rain falls from the sky is only half the 
battle. You also have to figure out where it goes once it lands. Here, 
climate change brings additional problems that toy with our probability 
tables. Very wet soil, very dry soil, burn scars, or erosion can change 
the way a fixed quantity of rain hits the ground. Urbanization has also 
created new flood zones, shaped not by hills and valleys but by parking 
lots, undersized sewer lines, blocked storm drains, and broken pumps. In 
urban areas, runoff is increasing faster than rainfall, and urban 
flooding may be a harbinger of what stronger storms will bring to 
greener areas in the decades to come.

When the First Street Foundation mapped flood risk accounting for 
rainfall flooding and changing storm expectations, it found almost twice 
as many parcels in the 100-year flood zone as FEMA has in its maps—1 in 
10 U.S. properties. But even the idea of a 100-year flood zone doesn’t 
sit right with some scientists. You’re not in or out; danger comes on a 
spectrum. Moreover, some flood zones—a few feet from a crashing ocean, 
or in a steep and isolated river valley—are more dangerous than others.
All of it adds up to a sense that what happened in the last 100 years 
may not be the best predictor of the weather today—let alone tomorrow. 
How to adjust for changing rainfall and flooding expectations is 
complicated. Infrastructure, most people agree, should be designed to 
serve its purpose for many decades. (The Dutch have built the Maeslant 
Barrier for a 10,000-year storm.) Insurance, most people agree, should 
reflect current risk, not future risk. But how do you account for future 
flood risk in land use or building regulations? Often our expanded sense 
of risk winds up penalizing lower-income Americans on low-lying land 
with outdated infrastructure. You can choose to spare them the burden of 
adaptation, but is that fair to prospective buyers, or to their 
neighbors who will bail them out?

Ultimately, said Haneberg, the Kentucky geologist, the questions here 
are political. “What’s the point?” he asked. “Are we trying to help 
people rebuild or prevent flood damage?” When it comes to rainstorms, a 
hundred years ain’t what it used to be.

https://slate.com/business/2023/01/100-year-floods-california-rain-climate-change-infrastructure.html

/
/

/
/

/[ media psychologist  Britt Wray, PhD   - Gen Dread  - this is a useful 
and important communique  ]
/*Here’s a helpful new way to visualize your journey through climate 
distress*
A professor at the University of Helsinki has created a roadmap that 
shows how people mentally and emotionally move from climate denial to 
climate awakening, shock, adjustment, and transformation.
Britt Wray
Jan 242023

Think about where you’re currently standing in your awareness of the 
climate crisis.

Maybe you’ve had your eyes painfully wide open for years now, organizing 
protests, writing to politicians, and devouring George Monbiot (the 
books, not the man himself). Or maybe the gravity of what we’re facing 
has only recently started to hit you.

Either way, what’s important here is that you have spanned some serious 
ground. You’ve changed. At some point, you started moving from a place 
of indifference, disavowal, or denial into a place of understanding, 
acceptance, and adaptation. That’s an incredibly uncomfortable and 
courageous thing to do, especially while so many people around you just 
continue to shrug.

If you tried to draw your feelings about the climate crisis, what would 
they look like?
So, here’s a question: what has your evolution felt like? Has it been 
sudden or gradual? What emotions has it brought up for you? When you 
first began to realize that life on earth is facing a profoundly grave 
and rapidly worsening threat, did you feel angry? Despondent? Or did it 
energize you and propel you into activism? What colour were your 
feelings when the realization first crept in? Has that colour shifted 
over time, or stayed the same?

As more and more people begin to awaken to the severity of the climate 
crisis, we need language to name and describe that transformation and 
the emotional challenges it ignites. Imagine we had a visual depiction 
of this vibrant, painful, life-changing experience, a road map for how 
to move through it ourselves while also reminding us to hold space and 
deepen our empathy for people who might be behind us or ahead of us in 
the journey.

Dr. Panu Pihkala has just given us this very thing.

Dr. Pihkala, a Professor in Environmental Theology at the University of 
Helsinki, has just unleashed “The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological 
Grief”...    [more... ]
https://gendread.substack.com/p/heres-a-helpful-new-way-to-visualize/
/

/- -/

/[ Britt Wray YouTube 40 min video - general distress - worth viewing, 
worth bookmarkign  ]
/*Protecting Blue Nature/Protégeons la nature bleue- Episode 3 - Britt Wray*
IMPAC5Canada
Jan 18, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXsl8-xveN8/
/

/- -
/

/[ Academic paper helps with analysis of our predicament ]/
*The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and 
a New Proposal*
by Panu Pihkala
Faculty of Theology, HELSUS Sustainability Science Institute, University 
of Helsinki, P.O. Box 4, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16628; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628
Received: 28 October 2022 / Revised: 2 December 2022 / Accepted: 8 
December 2022 / Published: 12 December 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Psychology of 
Sustainability: Expanding the Scope)
*Abstract*

    As the ecological crisis grows more intense, people experience many
    forms of eco-anxiety and ecological grief. This article explores the
    broad process of encountering eco-anxiety and ecological grief, and
    engages in the constructive task of building a new model of that
    process. Eco-anxiety and grief are here seen as fundamentally
    healthy reactions to threats and loss, and only the strongest forms
    of them are seen as problems. The aim is to help researchers,
    various professionals and the general public by providing a model
    which is (a) simple enough but (b) more nuanced than stage models
    which may give a false impression of linearity. The article uses an
    interdisciplinary method. The proposed new model includes both
    chronological and thematic aspects. The early phases of Unknowing
    and Semi-consciousness are followed potentially by some kind of
    Awakening and various kinds of Shock and possible trauma. A major
    feature of the model is the following complex phase of Coping and
    Changing, which is framed as consisting of three major dimensions:
    Action (pro-environmental behavior of many kinds), Grieving
    (including other emotional engagement), and Distancing (including
    both self-care and problematic disavowal). The model predicts that
    if there is trouble in any of these three dimensions, adjusting will
    be more difficult. The model thus helps in seeing, e.g., the
    importance of self-care for coping. The possibility of stronger
    eco-anxiety and/or eco-depression is always present, including the
    danger of burnout. The ethical and psychological aim is called
    Adjustment and Transformation, which includes elements of, e.g.,
    meaning-finding and acceptance. The need for Coping and Changing
    continues, but there is more awareness and flexibility in a
    metaphase of Living with the Ecological Crisis, where the titles and
    subtitles of the three dimensions of coping are switched.

https://pub.mdpi-res.com/sustainability/sustainability-14-16628/article_deploy/html/images/sustainability-14-16628-ag.png?1670917107

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/24/16628

- -

/[ May 28 //Written By Trevor Lehmann]/
*An Imperfect Guide to Career and Climate*
There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now.
Uncertainty about the economy
Uncertainty about the ecosystem
Uncertainty about our health

More than anything, we are worried that the future is going to be a lot 
worse than the present…and we want to do something about it!

But how? With so many problems these situations can feel overwhelming

The gap between awareness of climate change as a threat and a sense of 
how to respond both individually and collectively has been referred to 
as the “hope gap.”

As a career counsellor, I have worked for years helping adults at all 
stages of their career, especially young adults. I write this guide in 
the hopes that these exercises will help you start moving towards 
building a brighter future and closing the hope gap. To find moments of 
climate empowerment amidst the climate-crisis and over time, to expand 
that empowerment to a greater portion of your life.

This guide is far from comprehensive, but my hope is that the resources 
ahead will get you moving and engaged in meaningful action. While 
self-reflection is important as well as emotional processing, there is a 
limit on what can be know before you set out to do something and it is 
this second point I work to address.

If you are someone concerned about the planet and uncertain of your 
place in, my hope is the writing ahead will help you take steps towards 
a brighter future.

I recommend reading the guide in the following sections in order:

    What is a Career?
    Assessments Part 1: Interests
    Assessments Part 2: Values
    Assessments Part 3: Personality
    Researching Occupations
    The Truth About Green Jobs
    Managing our Emotions
    Cultivating Hope
    Acting Local
    Exploring Activism

As the name implies, this guide is a work in progress. If you have 
suggestions, please contact me with any I would love to hear from you.
https://trevorlehmann.squarespace.com/an-imperfect-guide-to-career-and-climate/home



/[ Opinionista //Rebecca Watson is one of my favorite video bloggers//-- 
dis and mis-information and propaganda watch    ]/
*Big Oil Bought my Favorite Science Influencer*
Rebecca Watson
23,149 views  Jan 26, 2023
SUPPORT more videos like this at http://patreon.com/rebecca
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg81dHXEGMc



/[ A video opinion -- assume, post-doom, bloom, etc...  ]/
*Michael Dowd -- Is Human Survival Possible?*
Facing Future
549 views  Jan 26, 2023  #MichaelDowd #PeterFiekowsky #ClimateCrisis
In this excerpt from "The Interview of the Century" ,  the full version 
of which can be found at VitaSapien.org,  #MichaelDowd and 
#PeterFiekowsky discuss the burning question of whether or not it will 
be possible to prevent the #ClimateCrisis from becoming catastrophic.
Hosted by Guy Lane
For more information on the state of our planet, visit the FacingFuture 
Library at https://facingfuture.earth/library
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmaJOsw30e4

- -

/[ Michael Dowd's Post Doom Web Site ]/
Post Doom
*Regenerative conversations exploring overshoot grief, grounding, and 
gratitude.*

A foreboding sense of climate chaos, societal breakdown, and economic 
and ecological “doom” is now widespread. Acknowledging our predicament 
and working through the stages of grief takes one only to the midpoint: 
acceptance. What lies beyond? Michael Dowd (with occasional co-hosts) 
invites 75 guests to share their personal journeys along this trajectory 
and especially the gifts they have found on the other side.

‘Post-doom’ means living, loving, and relating honorably with awareness 
that…
     •  Our inescapable predicament encompasses all aspects of life.
     •  There are aspects of abrupt climate change and global pandemics 
beyond our control.
     •  Climate chaos is a symptom of ecological overshoot of Earth’s 
carrying capacity.
     •  Human-centered measures of progress and wellbeing are ecocidal 
and self-terminating.
     •  Human-centered technology and the market are false gods, 
creating hell on Earth.
     •  The extinction of rapacious industrial humanity (Homo colossus) 
is inevitable and necessary.
     •  The extinction of Homo sapiens this century or next cannot be 
ruled out.
https://postdoom.com/


/[The news archive - looking back at instructional moments ]/
/*January  27, 1995*/
January 27, 1995: The New York Times reports:

    "Whatever happened to global warming? The question was on many lips
    a year ago, when the northeastern United States suffered through its
    bitterest winter in years. Now an exceptionally warm winter has
    whipsawed perceptions about the world's climate once again.

    "An answer has become apparent in annual climatic statistics in the
    last few days: global warming, interrupted as a result of the
    mid-1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, has resumed
    -- just as many experts had predicted.

    "After a two-year cooling period, the average temperature of the
    earth's surface rebounded in 1994 to the high levels of the 1980's,
    the warmest decade ever recorded, according to three sets of data in
    the United States and Britain.

    "The earth's average surface temperature last year closely
    approached the record high of almost 60 degrees measured in 1990.
    That was the last full year before the Pinatubo eruption, which
    cooled the earth by injecting into the atmosphere a haze of
    sulfurous droplets that reflected some of the sun's heat."

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/27/us/a-global-warming-resumed-in-1994-climate-data-show.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm


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