[✔️] Feb 1 2024 Global Warming News | Yale survey, Geothermal, Beckwith Arctic melt papers, Guestimating, 2003 effort

[Richard Pauli]

/*February*//*1, 2024*/

/[ Yale survey, challenges, video, 54% want change  ]
/*Dr. Jennifer Marlon explains the scientific consensus on climate change*
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Jan 31, 2024
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s Senior Research 
Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Marlon, talks to Scripps News about why there is 
still a disconnect between some American's views on the climate and the 
scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhr3YSJYd6g

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/[ Peter Sinclair video on simple geothermal ]/
*Wilson Ricks on Next Generation Geothermal*
greenmanbucket
Jan 31, 2024
Wilson Ricks is a researcher at Princeton University specializing in 
modeling low carbon futures and carbon free generation technologies.
He speaks here about the cutting edge of Geothermal technologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bipWVh2S3rs

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/[ Beckwith reads from 2 papers on melting Arctic  -  Russian scientists 
studying ]/
*Current state of subsea permafrost in the Kara, Laptev and East 
Siberian Seas: On the Methane Risk*
Paul Beckwith
Jan 31, 2024
A new paper by multiple Russian authors, including Shakhova and 
Semilitov (remember them) came out recently.
Key finding: Sediment temperatures are as high at +5.0 C in large 
regions.  Methane burst risks…
Here are the relevant links:
“Abstract

    Features of sediment temperature on the shelf and continental slope
    areas of the Russian Arctic seas and its physical properties are
    important for understanding the current state of subsea permafrost
    and the gas hydrates stability zone. New data are reported for the
    Kara Sea region where the bottom sediment temperatures are
    influenced by warming effects from great Siberian rivers and the
    Atlantic currents. The data collected during marine expeditions in
    2019–2022 are combined with results of earlier marine studies,
    drilling operations, and geophysical surveys in the Laptev and East
    Siberian seas, in order to identify major trends of in situ
    temperature and properties distribution of bottom sediments in the
    Russian Arctic region.

    Most (85%) of bottom sediments in the Kara Sea shelf, as well as in
    the Laptev and East Siberian shelves, consist of water-saturated
    silty clay and silt with rather uniform particle size distribution.
    The obtained thermal conductivity and heat capacity values for the
    Kara Sea sediments agree with the values of 1.0 W/(m·K) and 2900
    kJ/m3, respectively, obtained previously from other Arctic seas.
    Thermal conductivity becomes up to 40% higher depthward from 0 to 2
    m subbottom depth, possibly, because of lower moisture content and
    porosity in more lithified sediments.

    The bottom sediment temperatures in the Arctic seas are distributed
    unevenly, especially in the Kara Sea shelf (from +5.0 °C in the west
    to −1.4 °C in the east), where the high sediment temperatures in the
    western and central parts of the Kara Sea being due to the effect of
    warm water inputs. The distribution of bottom sediment temperatures
    correlates well with distribution of relic subsea permafrost.
    Ice-bearing permafrost in the Siberian Arctic shelf extends from the
    shoreline till sea depths of 80–100 m, within the respective
    offshore distances of ∼800–1000 km in some areas, but permafrost
    remnants may exist locally at sea depths within 120 m. Buried
    100–600 m thick continuous subsea permafrost may occur in the Kara,
    Laptev, and East Siberian shelves under unfrozen (cryotic) saline
    shallow sediments. However, subsea permafrost is discontinuous and
    sporadic at sea depths ∼70 m and more. Thus, the bottom sediment
    temperature features in the Arctic seas can be used as a proxy of
    subsea permafrost extent contenting intrapermafrost and
    subpermafrost gas and gas hydrate accumulations.”

    “Warming of the ESAS began over 12 thousand years (kyr) ago in the
    earliest Holocene after the area had been submerged as a result of
    sea level rise. The temperature of terrestrial permafrost in the
    Holocene Arctic changed as the mean annual air temperature has
    become 6–7 °C warmer since the last glacial maximum. Subsea
    permafrost has been subjected to additional warming induced by sea
    water which has much warmer mean annual temperatures than air in the
    ESAS area: −1 °C against −10 °C, respectively. Consequently, the
    subsea permafrost has grown up to 17 °C warmer for the last 12 kyrs.
    The evolution of subsea permafrost may have multiple controls: the
    time when it was submerged relative to the time of emergence;
    thermal state and thickness of permafrost before inundation; coastal
    morphology and hydro- and lithodynamics; shoreline configuration and
    retreat rate; pre-existing thermokarst (particular landforms
    produced by thawing of ice-rich permafrost or melting of ground ice)
    and thaw lakes; temperature and salinity of bottom water;
    composition of sediments, including ice content, etc.”

“Current state of subsea permafrost in the Kara sea vs laptev and East 
Siberian seas”: https://images.app.goo.gl/fPpEfocGWZcdMrPu5

Arctic region maps: 
https://encounteredu.com/multimedia/images/how-many-countries-border-the-arctic-ocean
https://encounteredu.com/multimedia/images

https://images.app.goo.gl/fPpEfocGWZcdMrPu5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLljFj55Fo/
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/[ very hard to count - it could be 4 million per year, or soon, 
measured by incident  ]/
*Climate change has killed 4 million people since 2000 — and that’s an 
underestimate*
“Nobody is counting it, and nobody is moving in the direction of 
counting it.”

Zoya Teirstein
Staff Writer
Published
Jan 30, 2024

In the early 2000s, as climate denialism was infecting political 
institutions around the world like a malevolent plague, an Australian 
epidemiologist named Anthony McMichael took on a peculiar and morbid 
scientific question: How many people were being killed by climate 
change? McMichael’s research team tallied up how many lives had been 
lost to diarrheal disease, malnutrition, malaria, cardiovascular disease 
(a proxy for heat-related illness), and flooding, worldwide, in the year 
2000. The researchers then used computer modeling to parse out the 
percentage of those deaths that were attributable to climate change. 
Climate change, they estimated, was responsible for 166,000 lives lost 
that year.

The world has changed a great deal since. Climate denialism is no longer 
the world’s de facto climate policy, in large part because the impacts 
of rising temperatures have become impossible to ignore. The field of 
climate research has grown apace, and the science behind how climate 
change affects everything from ultra-rare species of frogs to the 
velocity of baseballs to the intensity of heatwaves, droughts, floods, 
and hurricanes has become astonishingly precise. But the research 
assessing how many people are currently being killed by the climate 
crisis has remained conspicuously stagnant. While a small handful of 
studies have attempted to quantify the effect of climate change on 
mortality decades into the future, the McMichael standard, an ambitious 
relic of the early 2000s, is still the only estimate of its kind.

This week, a climate and health researcher published a commentary in the 
journal Nature Medicine that takes the McMichael standard to its logical 
conclusion. By the end of this year, Colin Carlson, a global change 
biologist and assistant professor at Georgetown University, wrote in the 
commentary provided exclusively to Grist, climate change will have 
killed roughly 4 million people globally since the turn of the century. 
That’s more than the population of Los Angeles or Berlin, “more than 
every other non-COVID public health emergency the World Health 
Organization has ever declared combined,” said Carlson, who also runs an 
institute focused on predicting and preventing pandemics.

And 4 million lives lost due to climate change, a breathtakingly high 
number, is still an underestimate — probably a big one. The McMichael 
standard doesn’t include deaths linked to climate-driven surges of the 
many non-malarial diseases spread by mosquitoes, like dengue and West 
Nile virus. It doesn’t incorporate deaths caused by deadly bacteria, 
fungal spores, ticks, and other diseases or carriers of disease that are 
shifting in range and breadth as the planet warms. It doesn’t examine 
the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on longevity. It doesn’t 
look at the mental health consequences of extreme heat and extreme 
weather and the related increase in suicides that have been documented 
in recent years. “At the time we were doing it, we already knew it was 
conservative,” said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a coauthor of McMichael’s 
2003 study who is now the head of the climate change and health unit at 
the World Health Organization.

The list of potential impacts that would need to be assessed in order to 
gain a complete picture of the climate death toll is long and, thus far, 
no researcher has endeavored to make a full accounting. “Climate change 
is killing a lot of people, nobody is counting it, and nobody is moving 
in the direction of counting it,” Carlson said. “If it were anything but 
climate change, we would be treating it on very different terms.”

Wael Al-Delaimy, a multidisciplinary epidemiologist at the University of 
California, San Diego, agreed that 4 million deaths since 2000 is 
“definitely an underestimate.” A significant lack of mortality data in 
low- and middle-income countries is one of the biggest obstacles 
standing in the way of a proper update to the McMichael standard. “The 
main challenge is mortality is not well documented and measured across 
the globe, and low- and middle-income countries suffer the most because 
they are not prepared, and there are no real epidemiological studies 
trying to link it to climate change,” Al-Delaimy said.

The paucity of epidemiological data limits the methods researchers use 
to calculate climate-linked mortality in the first place.

Researchers who want to investigate how many deaths from a particular 
disaster are due to climate change typically employ a method called 
attribution science. To understand the effect climate change has on 
mortality, scientists will use statistical methods and computer models 
to determine how climate change has influenced the drivers of a discrete 
event, such as a heatwave. Then, they’ll quantify the portion of 
heat-related deaths that can be attributed to climate change-related 
factors, using observed mortality data. As Al-Delaimy noted, mortality 
data isn’t always available. Attribution science, in the context of 
climate-related mortality, is a tool that’s useful, specialized, and — 
in the view of experts like Carlson — limited by patchy data.

McMichael did not rely on attribution science to reach his conclusions, 
partly because the technique was still in its infancy when he was 
conducting his mortality work. Instead, he used existing climate models 
to approximate how climate change was affecting specific illnesses on a 
global scale. His research team figured out how diarrheal disease, 
malnutrition, and the other factors they chose to include were 
influenced by warming — for example, they estimated a 5 percent increase 
in cases of diarrhea per every degree Celsius change in temperature — 
and then based their calculations on those findings. “To be honest, 
nobody had been arrogant enough to ask that question before — what is 
the total burden of disease from climate change? — because obviously 
it’s a very huge and difficult question,” Campbell-Lendrum said.

Carlson thinks the path forward builds on this work. Success hinges on 
predictive computer modeling, he said: research that can simulate 
disease spread and climate conditions and make predictions about how 
these patterns may change in the future. Predictive modeling doesn’t 
require researchers to track down mortality data counting every single 
person who died in a particular extreme weather event. The answer to the 
question of how many people have been killed by climate change, Carlson 
said, can be answered by developing a predictive modeling-based protocol 
for how researchers measure climate change-related deaths. He aims to 
gather the world’s leading climate and health experts together this year 
to build out exactly such a system. Getting researchers “baking to the 
same recipe,” he said, could ultimately produce an updated, more 
accurate climate mortality estimate.

Developing something resembling a universal climate mortality protocol 
won’t be simple, but it could accomplish what McMichael set out to do in 
the 2000s: furnish the public with a rough understanding of the full 
climate death toll, not 50 years into the future, but as it is happening 
right now. “If you don’t know how big the challenge is, you can justify 
not investing in the challenge,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a climate and 
health researcher at the University of Washington. Mortality data drives 
policy, and more policy is needed to protect the public from what’s 
coming — and what’s already here.

In the summer of 2022 — a cooler summer than the summer of 2023, which 
is on track to be eclipsed by the summer of 2024 — extreme heat in 
Europe caused over 60,000 deaths between the end of May and the 
beginning of September. Since early 2023, clouds of mosquitoes, spurred 
by unusual flooding and an intensifying monsoon season, have spread 
dengue fever across huge swaths of the world, infecting nearly 5 million 
people and causing more than 5,000 deaths. Last year’s extreme weather 
events killed 492 people in the U.S. — one of the countries that is 
best-equipped to deal with the fallout from extreme weather.

A deadly trend is underway. As McMichael put it in an open letter 
published just weeks before he died in 2014, “Our mismanagement of the 
world’s climate and environment is weakening the foundations of health 
and longevity.” And yet, a very small proportion of the 4 million deaths 
caused by climate change so far, Carlson wrote in his commentary, “will 
have been recognized by the victims’ families, or acknowledged by 
national governments, as the consequence of climate change.” What would 
happen if people knew the true scope of the risk at hand? Carlson aims 
to find out.
https://grist.org/health/climate-change-has-killed-4-million-people-since-2000-and-thats-an-underestimate/


/[The news archive -  efforts in 2003 ]/
/*February 1, 2003:
*/In the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim DiPeso of Republicans
for Environmental Protection urges the Senate to pass the Climate
Stewardship Act of 2003 (a/k/a McCain-Lieberman), noting:

    "Deep emissions reductions will be needed over the next several
    decades to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
    But the McCain-Lieberman bill would be an excellent start and a clear
    signal that the United States, at last, is moving off the climate
    change sidelines."

http://web.archive.org/web/20030228174145/http://www.rep.org/opinions/op-eds/33.htmuary 
1, /**/




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