[✔️] October 19, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Exception kills data, South Africa collapsing, Michael Dowd predicament, AMOC collapse by 2025, Greta detained, Methane events, Goodell on fire and wx interactions, 1992 debates

[Richard Pauli]

/*October *//*19, 2023*/

/[ cough, cough, hack, and spit -- yes - both governments and US press 
seem to have overlooked this news story - thank you Guardian ]
/*Revealed: how a little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for 
millions of Americans*
Major investigation shows local governments are increasingly exploiting 
a loophole in the Clean Air Act, leaving more than 21 million Americans 
with air that’s dirtier than they realize

What you need to know about loophole hiding extent of US wildfire pollution
Molly Peterson, Dillon Bergin and Emily Zentner with graphics by Andrew 
Witherspoon
Mon 16 Oct 2023

A legal loophole has allowed the US Environmental Protection Agency to 
strike pollution from clean air tallies in more than 70 counties, 
enabling local regulators to claim the air was cleaner than it really 
was for more than 21 million Americans.

Regulators have exploited a little-known provision in the Clean Air Act 
called the “exceptional events rule” to forgive pollution caused by 
“natural” or “uncontrollable” events – including wildfires – on records 
used by the EPA for regulatory decisions, a new investigation from the 
California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian reveals.

In addition to obscuring the true health risks of pollution and swerving 
away from tighter control on local polluters, the rule threatens the 
potency of the Clean Air Act, experts argue, at a time when the climate 
crisis is posing an unprecedented challenge to the health of millions of 
Americans.

*More than 70 counties have successfully used a little-known law to have 
pollution removed from EPA records
*
[See also https://github.com/MuckRock/air-quality-exceptional-events ]

Where the EPA – the US agency monitoring air quality – has agreed to 
exclude bad air days from analysis, “we may have a sort of stable, 
relatively rosy picture when it comes to our regulatory world in terms 
of air-quality trends,” said Vijay Limaye, a climate and health 
epidemiologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a 
non-profit advocacy group.

The truth is more complicated, and the air dirtier.

“The true conditions on the ground in terms of the air that people are 
breathing in, day after day, week after week, year after year, is 
increasingly an unhealthy situation,” Limaye said.

For the summer of 2023, more than 20 states so far, from Wyoming to 
Wisconsin to North Carolina, have flagged air-quality readings that were 
far higher than normal. Most of these days came in June, as skies in the 
midwest and eastern US were blanketed with Canadian wildfire smoke.

We pored over thousands of pages of regulatory documentation, 
correspondence and contracts, and analyzed hard-to-find public data to 
better understand how local regulators make use of the exceptional 
events rule, as global heating sparks extreme wildfires more often.

We found that, since 2016, when the EPA last revised the guidance on 
exceptional events:

Local regulators in 21 states filed requests with the agency to forgive 
pollution and, in 20 of those states, had them approved.
In total, local regulators made note of almost 700 exceptional events. 
The EPA agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
The adjustments came in more than 70 counties across 20 states. The 
affected areas stretched from the forested Oregon coast to the Ohio rust 
belt, from the craggy Rhode Island coastline down to the bayous of 
Louisiana.
In more than half of the states where exceptional events were forgiven, 
industry lobbyists and business interests pressed to make that happen, 
sometimes as the only public voice in the regulatory process. Also, to 
protect the status quo, some regulators spent millions of taxpayer 
dollars doing research for and making exceptional events requests, 
sometimes working hand in hand with industry stakeholders.
Meeting air-quality standards matters a lot to industry and politicians. 
Violations can add up to stricter, more costly and potentially unpopular 
pollution controls.

Critics say the growing use of the exceptional events rule for wildfires 
is of deep concern. “You need to level with the public about the number 
of days when the air quality was unhealthy,” said Eric Schaeffer, a 
former regulator who directs the Environmental Integrity Project.

“We have saved more lives in this country because we cleaned up the air 
than almost any other environmental policy,” said Michael Wara, the 
director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford’s Woods 
Institute for the Environment. “And that’s what’s being undermined.

“The world has changed,” he said. “We are living in a different world 
when it comes to wildfire and all of its consequences, including air 
pollution.”

In response to written questions, the EPA said it takes all air 
pollution seriously.

“Wildland fire and smoke pose increasing challenges and human health 
impacts in communities all around the country,” Khanya Brann, an EPA 
spokesperson, wrote. “EPA works closely with other federal agencies, 
state and local health departments, tribal nations, and other partners 
to provide information, tools, and resources to support communities in 
preparing for, responding to, and reducing health impacts from wildland 
fire and smoke.”

The EPA also pointed to “mitigation plans”, in which air districts that 
have experienced repeated exceptional events must create plans for 
educating and notifying the public about the pollution risk, as well as 
“steps to identify, study, and implement mitigating measures” like 
limiting the use of wood-burning stoves and wetting down unpaved roads 
before dust storms.
*
More ‘toxic soup’ and more paperwork*
In the US, clean-air policy long allowed local governments to write off 
some wildfire smoke on a case-by-case-basis as “unrealistic to control” 
or “impractical to fully control”. But in 2005, the Republican senator 
Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has long denied the climate crisis, won a 
years-long battle to amend the Clean Air Act. The new rule gave local 
officials more opportunity to exclude pollution from regulatory 
consideration for an array of events, from fireworks displays and 
volcanic eruptions to wildfires and even unusual traffic events.

At first, the rule was used most successfully in a handful of 
south-western communities where high winds created a recurring problem 
of dust pollution. Over time, local regulators have turned to 
exceptional events for wildfires more and more often to reach 
air-quality goals.

Our analysis of local and EPA records found that in 2016, air agencies 
flagged 19 wildfire events as potential exceptional events. In 2018 and 
2021, 52 and 50 wildfire events were flagged. In 2020, 65 were.

“The uptick in exceptional events is absolutely consistent with what we 
see in the air pollution data,” said Marshall Burke, an associate 
professor of global environmental policy at the Stanford Doerr School of 
Sustainability. Smoke is accounting for a higher proportion of overall 
air pollution, and it’s going up quickly, Burke said – not just in the 
western US, but nationwide.
No state is blamed more for smoke pollution than California, followed by 
Oregon and Canadian provinces, according to our analysis. Western states 
are more likely to point fingers at each other, while states in the 
midwest and north-east place the blame on Canadian provinces such as 
Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Wildfire smoke is a dirty and complicated polluter. Limaye, of the NRDC, 
called it a “toxic soup of air pollution”. It carries soot and ash, 
regulated as particulate pollution, as well as hydrocarbons and other 
gases that, cooked in sunlight, help form ground-level ozone. It’s a 
growing concern for public health, both near the source and thousands of 
miles away. Smoke, especially from a long-burning fire, can travel long 
distances and linger at dangerous levels for weeks at a time.

We analyzed data recorded at air monitors nationwide. For every US 
county, on a day where the EPA excluded any data, we counted that day. 
Our analysis found that the total number of wildfire-related bad air 
days erased from regulatory consideration in counties nationwide was 
nearly double that of bad air days related to high winds: 236 compared 
with 121.
- -
When wildfire caused air pollution, the rule was applied to more monitor 
readings over multiple days, not just to exclude particulate pollution 
but also smog or ozone.

“It is a lot of time,” said John Walke, a lawyer for the NRDC.

One or two violations at a single air monitor can flip an area from 
meeting air standards to missing the mark, according to Walke. Three or 
four violations over several years can prompt increasingly strict local 
pollution controls. “So a lot is riding on one, or two, or three 
violations,” he said.

*A smokier future*
The recent experience of California’s Nevada county may offer a glimpse 
of a smokier future. So far, the exceptional events rule has removed 16 
days from the record there in the last five years.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/16/epa-local-governments-dont-report-air-pollution-wildfire-smoke-data-across-us


/[ Video - viewing a current collapse -  an experiment - first admit the 
problem ]/
*South Africa's Slow, Inevitable March Towards Collapse*
Wendover Productions
944,716 views  Oct 17, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM



/[ collapse lectures from the late Michael Dowd -- video ]/
*Our Inescapable Predicament*
Facing Future
Jul 13, 2023  #ClimateChange #MichaelDowd
We are grateful for Michael Dowd's many contributions to humanity, and 
for this conversation.  He was a force of nature, and his passing on 
October 7, 2023 was a great loss.

Industrial civilization has overshot the capacity of our planet to 
sustain it, putting us in an inescapable predicament.  #RupertRead, 
#MichaelDowd and Dale Walkonen seek to answer the questions of how we 
can face reality and still live full, useful lives, taking compassionate 
and effective action, without doing more damage to our planet.

For more conversations with Michael Dowd: 
https://postdoom.com/conversations/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=433oiO0Cw3I



/[ possible says Smithsonian magazine ]
/*A Vital Ocean Current System Could Collapse as Soon as 2025, Study 
Predicts*
Climate change could halt the Atlantic Meridional Overturning 
Circulation sooner than thought, per a new paper, but some scientists 
are skeptical
Margaret Osborne
Daily Correspondent
July 27, 2023
- -
In the study, the team assumed that global greenhouse gas emissions 
would continue to rise, as they have been since the Industrial 
Revolution, per the New York Times’ Raymond Zhong. They based their 
analysis on sea surface temperatures in a specific area of the North 
Atlantic from 1870 to the present. These data suggested how strong the 
AMOC had been during that time, since direct measurements of the 
system’s strength began only 15 years ago. Yet, sea surface temperatures 
in this area are “not a clear indicator of the state of the AMOC,” Penny 
Holliday, head of marine physics and ocean circulation at the National 
Oceanography Center in England, says in a statement. “A collapse of the 
AMOC would profoundly impact every person on Earth, but this study 
overstates the certainly in the likelihood of it taking place within the 
next few years.”

Still, Stefan Rahmstorf, a physicist and physical oceanographer at the 
University of Potsdam in Germany, says the new paper adds to existing 
evidence that the tipping point could be sooner than previously thought.

“As always in science, a single study provides limited evidence, but 
when multiple approaches lead to similar conclusions, this must be taken 
very seriously,” Rahmstorf says in a statement. “Especially when we’re 
talking about a risk that we really want to rule out with 99.9 percent 
certainty. The scientific evidence now is that we can’t even rule out 
crossing a tipping point already in the next decade or two.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-vital-ocean-current-system-could-collapse-as-soon-as-2025-study-predicts-180982605/



/[ Activism AP report Great Greta ]/
*Greta Thunberg was among climate activists detained at a protest to 
disrupt oil executives’ forum
*BY SYLVIA HUI
Updated 10:39 AM PDT, October 17, 2023

LONDON (AP) — Greta Thunberg was detained by British police on Tuesday 
alongside other climate activists who gathered outside a central London 
hotel to disrupt a major oil and gas industry conference.

Thunberg was among dozens of protesters who chanted “oily money out” and 
sought to block access to the luxury InterContinental Hotel on Park 
Lane, which is hosting the Energy Intelligence Forum. The conference 
features speakers including the chief executives of Shell, Saudi 
Arabia’s Aramco and Norway’s Equinor, as well as the U.K.’s energy 
security minister.

An Associated Press photographer saw officers speaking with Thunberg 
before leading her away and taking her into a police vehicle...
- -
Protesters attempted to block access to the conference venue by sitting 
on the sidewalk by the entrance. They held aloft banners and chanted 
“oily money out” and “cancel the conference,” while some lit yellow and 
pink smoke flares...
Two Greenpeace activists abseiled down from the roof of the hotel to 
unfurl a giant banner reading “Make Big Oil Pay.”

London’s Metropolitan Police said a total of 29 people were arrested at 
Tuesday’s protests, including six on suspicion of obstructing a highway 
and 21 others for breaching protest conditions. One person was detained 
on suspicion of criminal damage and a further for breaching court bail 
conditions. All were in custody.

Police said they engaged in conversations with the protesters on 
allowing people to access the venue safely and prevent serious 
disruption to the hotel and guests, but some of the activists refused to 
move from the road.

No charges have been issued yet.

’We were linking arms when the police forced their way in and singled 
out Greta. She was dragged down the street at speed to a police van 
where they refused to say where she was being taken,” said Joanna 
Warrington, an organizer with Fossil Free London who was at the 
demonstration.

The protesters accuse fossil fuel companies of deliberately slowing the 
global energy transition to renewables in order to make more profit.

They also oppose the British government’s recent approval of drilling 
for oil in the North Sea, off the Scottish coast. U.K. authorities have 
defended the move, saying it is necessary for the country’s energy security.

“The world is drowning in fossil fuels. Our hopes and dreams and lives 
are being washed away by a flood of greenwashing and lies,” Thunberg 
told reporters before she was detained. “It has been clear for decades 
that the fossil fuel industries were well aware of the consequences of 
their business models, and yet they have done nothing.”

“We cannot let this continue. The elite of the oil and money conference, 
they have no intention of transition,” she added. “We have no other 
option but to put our bodies outside this conference and to physically 
disrupt. And we have to do that every time, we have to continue showing 
them that they are not going to get away with this.”...
- -
Environmental groups say they will continue to protest throughout the 
planned forum, which is expected to last three days.

Thunberg inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to 
fight climate change after staging weekly protests outside the Swedish 
Parliament starting in 2018. She was recently fined by a Swedish court 
for disobeying police during an environmental protest in Sweden.

https://apnews.com/article/uk-climate-protest-greta-thunberg-b6eaf08ceb08075d2a51121a448735e1
https://apnews.com/article/uk-climate-protest-greta-thunberg-b6eaf08ceb08075d2a51121a448735e1?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=278828768&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--1NU-7w4aQ3Je4QxsZxq66gbQ_gHjOKgEvzNyvFmt3C2YTabT8zotcmu5DbwZH5ZQrP9s6Ut5cAvJ-H4eGb66fA-XxEw&utm_content=278828768&utm_source=hs_email



/[  See also the sudden warming during the Younger-Dryas some 28,000 
years ago  ]/
// *Dr Euan Nisbet - Methane Climate Termination Event - Wetlands are 
turning on (summary version)*
Nick Breeze ClimateGenn
Oct 17, 2023  ClimateGenn #podcast  produced by Nick Breeze
Episode contents:

    1. Comparisons between methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
    2. Working out the methane budget.
    3. Atmosphere getting richer in Carbon 13 isotope from fossil fuel
    industry.
    4. Something happened in 2006 as Carbon 12 started to rise.
    5. Rising methane from biological sources.6. Regional increases are
    spiking.
    7. Different types of biological sources.
    8. Feedbacks switching on
    .9. Wetlands are “turning on”.
    10. Historic precedent: “huge rapid change”
    11. Events known as a “Terminations”
    12. A rapidly changing planet.
    13. Should we use geoengineering?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDwxFS0KeQY


/[ video discussion on heat trauma and other destabilizations ]/
*Living on Borrowed Time*
GBH Forum Network
  Sep 11, 2023  CAMBRIDGE
“And as the summer unfolded, it became evident that it’s not just smoke, 
and not just Canada. This has been the summer from climate hell all 
across the Earth, when it ceased being possible to escape or deny what 
we have done to our planet and ourselves” says Professor Michael 
Flannigan, of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, 
who has been studying the interaction of fire and climate for over 35 
years. “Temperatures are rising at the rate we thought they would, but 
the effects are more severe, more frequent, more critical. It’s crazy 
and getting crazier.” NYT August 23, ’23

In this program, Cambridge Forum talks to Jeff Goodell, NY bestselling 
author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone; and Dr. Mike Flannigan, 
Research Chair for Predictive Services, Emergency Management and Fire 
Science at Thompson Rivers University and the Scientific Director of the 
Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science.

Goodell has covered climate change for more than two decades for Rolling 
Stone. His latest book, “The Heat will Kill You First” presents a 
searing examination of the impact that rising temperatures will have on 
our lives and on our planet.

Dr. Flannigan has been studying fire and weather/climate interactions 
including the potential impact of climatic change and lightning-ignited 
forest fires for over 40 years.

    0:00:00 - Introduction
    0:00:33 - Welcoming Remarks
    0:03:17 - Jeff Goodell Interview
    0:17:07 - Michael Flannigan Interview
    0:29:25 - Group Discussion and Q&A
    0:56:59  - Closing Remarks

GBH Forum Network ~ Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29qEGs0xxAY



/[The news archive - looking back at an unusual time ]/
/*October 19, 1992*/
October 19, 1992: In the third presidential debate, President George H. 
W. Bush accuses Democratic challenger Bill Clinton and his running mate, 
Senator Al Gore, of pandering to "the spotted owl crowd or the extremes 
in the environmental movement" by supporting an increase in fuel 
efficiency standards. Clinton defends the idea of raising fuel 
efficiency standards; in addition, he states, "We also ought to convert 
more vehicles to compressed natural gas. That's another way to improve 
the environment."

(26:30-29:00)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCGtHqIwKek




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