<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<font size="+1"><i>August 5, 2018</i></font><br>
<br>
[That's about 118 F]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018/08/03/09/02/europe-heatwave-could-break-records-temperatures-rise">Europe
heatwave: Hottest day in Europe ever could come in the next week</a></b><br>
Hot air from Africa is bringing a new heatwave to Europe, which
forecasters say could break records as the continent continues to
swelter.<br>
Health warnings have been issued about Sahara Desert dust and
exceptionally high temperatures that are forecast to peak at 47
degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit) in some southern areas.<br>
The UK Met Office said parts of the Iberian peninsula could beat the
all-time continental European record of 48 degrees Celsius (118.4
degrees Fahrenheit) this week, with inland areas likely to be hotter
than the coast.<br>
That record was set in the Greek capital, Athens, in July 1977.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the record for
Spain is currently 47.3 Celsius, while for Portugal it's 47.4
Celsius.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018/08/03/09/02/europe-heatwave-could-break-records-temperatures-rise">https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018/08/03/09/02/europe-heatwave-could-break-records-temperatures-rise</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[worsening confounds, understanding still possible]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/04/world/climate-change-deadly-summer-wxc-intl/index.html">Our
climate plans are in pieces as killer summer shreds records</a></b><br>
By Angela Dewan, CNN August 5, 2018<br>
(CNN)Deadly fires have scorched swaths of the Northern Hemisphere
this summer, from California to Arctic Sweden and down to Greece on
the sunny Mediterranean. Drought in Europe has turned verdant land
barren, while people in Japan and Korea are dying from
record-breaking heat.<br>
Climate change is here and is affecting the entire globe -- not just
the polar bears or tiny islands vulnerable to rising sea levels --
scientists say. It is on the doorsteps of everyday Americans,
Europeans and Asians, and the best evidence shows it will get much
worse...<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/04/world/climate-change-deadly-summer-wxc-intl/index.html">https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/04/world/climate-change-deadly-summer-wxc-intl/index.html</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Low waters reveal the past]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.businessinsider.com/record-heat-in-europe-cause-forest-wildfires-and-explode-world-war-ii-2018-8">Record
heat is stoking wildfires in Europe - and it's setting off
leftover bombs from World War II</a></b><br>
Europe is wilting under record heat that has already sparked deadly
fires and looks unlikely to relent any time soon.<br>
The heat is exacerbating another problem that European countries
have long dealt with: Still-potent weaponry left over from World War
II.<br>
At the end of July, firefighters grappling with a forest fire
southwest of Berlin were further challenged by unexploded World War
II ammunition still buried there...<br>
- - - -<br>
The heatwave in Germany has driven water levels so low along the
Elbe River that weapons and ammunition from World War II have
started to emerge. At the city of Magdeburg, the water level is just
a few centimeters above the historic low measured in 1934.<br>
In Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany, police have warned people not
to touch the grenades, mines, or other weapons that have started to
appear. Munitions were found five places last week, and over the
past few weeks there have been 24 such finds , compared to 12 during
all of last year. Specialists are working overtime to deal with the
munitions - sometimes defusing them where they're found.<br>
A police spokeswoman from the region said most of the munitions were
discovered by people walking through areas usually covered by water,
but some people had gone out in search of leftover explosives. "This
is forbidden and dangerous," the spokeswoman said.<br>
Even after decades underwater, the weapons can still be active - in
some cases, sediment can build up and obscure rusted exteriors and
the dangerous components inside. "Found ammunition is always
dangerous," the spokeswoman said...<br>
- - - -<br>
On July 25, a Swedish Gripen fighter jet dropped a 500-pound
laser-guided bomb close to a fire approaching a military firing
range near Alvdalen, where tough terrain and unexploded ammunition
made traditional firefighting methods unviable.<br>
The bomb was used to "cut" the fire, as the explosion would burn
oxygen on the ground and starve the flames of fuel.<br>
It had a "very good effect," a Swedish official said.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.businessinsider.com/record-heat-in-europe-cause-forest-wildfires-and-explode-world-war-ii-2018-8">https://www.businessinsider.com/record-heat-in-europe-cause-forest-wildfires-and-explode-world-war-ii-2018-8</a></font><br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-extreme-weather-heat-wildfire-record-events-fddc7bcd43a4/">Extreme
weather just caused a fire tornado and the world's hottest
rainfall</a></b><br>
"We are now seeing the face of climate change."<br>
KYLA MANDEL<br>
AUG 3, 2018, 3:08 PM<br>
And last week at the end of July, we saw the hottest temperature
ever measured while rain was falling. Temperatures reached 119F in
southern California near the U.S-Mexico border on July 24. At the
same time clouds from the Gulf of California brought rain showers to
the area. As the website Weather Underground wrote, this "sets a new
record for the hottest rain in world history."...<br>
- - - - <br>
But on July 26 another extraordinary thing happened. That evening
there was a sudden extreme, upwards expansion in the fire. This
rapid vertical growth created an updraft, a so-called vortex of
wind, which eventually created what looked like a tornado. According
to estimates by the National Weather Service, this fire-tornado had
winds exceeding 143 miles per hour - equivalent to an EF3 tornado,
which is on the more intense side of the 0-5 scale...<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-extreme-weather-heat-wildfire-record-events-fddc7bcd43a4/">https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-extreme-weather-heat-wildfire-record-events-fddc7bcd43a4/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[not the heat, but the failure to cool down]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561266/summer-2018-heat-wave-japan-texas-weather-health">The
disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates</a></b><br>
It's not a record-high temperature that necessarily makes a heat
wave dangerous. It's whether you can cool off. <br>
By Umair Irfan Updated Aug 1, 2018<br>
These heat waves comport with what scientists expect from climate
change. The body of evidence shows that the world will face longer,
more intense heat waves as average temperatures go up, and that they
will be deadly.<br>
Already, at least 70 people have died in Canada from the recent
heat. Record temperatures in recent weeks killed more than 90 people
and injured more than 57,000 in Japan. In May, a heat wave killed 65
in Karachi, Pakistan.<br>
But it turns out that heat waves are often most dangerous not
necessarily where it's hottest, but where it's hardest to cool
off...<br>
- - - -<br>
A 105 F day in Phoenix may barely register for Arizona residents,
but 90 F weather in Portland, Oregon, could send people to the
hospital.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561266/summer-2018-heat-wave-japan-texas-weather-health">https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17561266/summer-2018-heat-wave-japan-texas-weather-health</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Gather 'round, kids]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-018-2253-8">Teaching
climate change in middle schools and high schools: investigating
STEM education's deficit model</a></b><br>
Authors and affiliations - Eric Plutzer, Lee Hannah<br>
Abstract<br>
<blockquote>Science teachers play an important role promoting civic
scientific literacy, but recent research suggests they are less
effective than they could be in educating the next generation of
citizens about climate change and its causes. One particular area
of concern is that many science teachers in the USA encourage
students to debate settled empirical findings, such as the role of
human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases in raising global
temperatures. A common reaction is to call for science teachers to
receive more formal training in climate science to increase their
knowledge, which will then improve teaching. Using a nationally
representative survey of 1500 middle school and high school
science teachers, we investigate each element in this argument,
and show that increased science coursework in college has modest
effects on teachers' content knowledge and on their teaching
choices, including decisions about debating "both sides." We also
find that teachers' personal political orientations play a large
role in their teaching strategies: right-leaning teachers devote
somewhat less time to global warming and are much more likely to
encourage student debate on the causes of global warming. We
discuss the implications of these findings and argue teacher
education might be more effective if informed by insights from the
emerging discipline of science communication. However, although
knowledge and ideology are predictive of pedagogy, a large number
of teachers of all ideological positions and all levels of subject
expertise encourage students to debate established findings. We
discuss this and highlight potential explanations.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-018-2253-8">https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-018-2253-8</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802102337.htm">Heatwave
and climate change having negative impact on our soil say
experts</a></b><br>
Date: August 2, 2018<br>
Source: University of Manchester<br>
<blockquote>Summary:<br>
The recent heatwave and drought could be having a deeper, more
negative effect on soil than we first realized say scientists.
That's because organisms in soil are highly diverse and are
responsible not only for producing the soil we need to grow crops,
but also provide humans with many other benefits, such as cleaning
water and regulating greenhouse gas emissions.<br>
</blockquote>
"A major challenge is to understand how these complex microbial
communities respond to and recover from disturbances, such as
climate extremes, which are predicted to increase in frequency and
intensity with climate change.<br>
"These microbial communities within the soil play a crucial role in
any ecosystem. But it wasn't known how soil networks respond to such
disturbances until now."<br>
Sequencing of soil DNA for the study was conducted at the Centre for
Ecology & Hydrology (CEH). Dr Robert Griffiths, a molecular
microbial ecologist at CEH, said: "This study further identifies
those key organisms affected by drought, which will guide future
research to predict how future soil microbial functions are affected
by climate change."<br>
The research team tested the effects of summer drought on plant
communities consisting of four common grassland species. They found
that drought increased the abundance of a certain fast-growing,
drought-tolerant grass. With greater above ground vegetation comes
an increased rate of evapotranspiration, or cycling of water from
plants to the atmosphere, lowering the overall soil moisture.<br>
- - - -<br>
Unlike past research, this study considered the multitude of direct
and indirect interactions occurring between different microbial
organisms in soil. Rather than focusing on select attributes of
bacteria and fungi, this research takes a comprehensive approach to
studying soil ecosystems.<br>
Dr de Vries added: "This study allows soil ecologists to estimate
the current and future impacts of drought on belowground organisms,
helping to understand the complex interactions of species due to
climate change."<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802102337.htm">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802102337.htm</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[RollingStone in 2015, but it could be this year]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/what-megablazes-tell-us-about-the-fiery-future-of-climate-change-81547/">What
Megablazes Tell Us About the Fiery Future of Climate Change</a></b><br>
Pervasive drought and record temperatures have turned forests across
California into tinderboxes. And it's only getting worse<br>
By TIM DICKINSON <br>
The tragedy of climate-driven megafire is that the fires themselves
worsen global warming by pumping megatons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. This is especially true north of the Arctic Circle. For
the past 5,000 years, the Arctic Alaskan tundra was too frigid and
too wet to support significant wildfire. That changed in 2007, when
a massive blaze ripped through Alaska's North Slope. The fire burned
more than 400 square miles, not only charring a pristine landscape,
but setting off a greenhouse bomb, igniting organic matter in the
soil that had lain dormant for centuries. This single fire released
as much carbon dioxide into the air as the Arctic's entire tundra
ecosystem, including the northern reaches of Canada and Russia, had
absorbed in the previous quarter century. Scientists long considered
the tundra the "most secure storehouse of carbon - fixed carbon,
keeping it out of the atmosphere - that you could possibly think
of," says Juday. "It was frozen - and a thick mat of it. We never
thought a big chunk of it would burn. It's astounding." What's
worse: Tundra fire also thins the soil layer that insulates
permafrost, further destabilizing this terrifying reserve of
greenhouse gases...<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/what-megablazes-tell-us-about-the-fiery-future-of-climate-change-81547/">https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/what-megablazes-tell-us-about-the-fiery-future-of-climate-change-81547/</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
[Sunday: a good day to notice serious words about the future] (or is
this just a way to sell subscriptions?)<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/global-heatwave-is-symptom-of-early-stage-cycle-of-civilisational-collapse-efef3c1dd7eb">Global
heatwave is symptom of early stage cycle of civilisational
collapse</a></b><br>
Welcome to a 1C planet: the precursor of an 8C catastrophe in 82
years if we keep burning up fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow<br>
Nafeez Ahmed<br>
- - - - [clips] - - - <br>
The extreme weather events of the summer of 2018 are not just
symptoms of climate breakdown. They are early stage warnings of a
protracted process of civilisational collapse as industrial
societies face some of the opening symptoms of having already
breached the limits of a safe climate. These events are a taste of
things to come on a business-as-usual trajectory. They elicit a
sense of how industrial civilisational systems are vulnerable to
collapse due to escalating climate impacts. And they highlight the
urgent necessity of communities everywhere undertaking steps to
achieve a systemic civilisational transition toward post-capitalist
systems which can survive and prosper after fossil fuels.<br>
Climate 'doom' is already here<br>
This summer's extreme weather has hit home some stark realities.<br>
Climate disaster is not slated to happen in some far-flung
theoretical future.<br>
It's here, and now.<br>
Droughts threatening food supplies, floods in Japan, extreme
rainfall in the eastern US, wildfires in California, Sweden and
Greece.<br>
In the UK, holiday-makers trying to cross the Channel tunnel to
France faced massive queues when air conditioning facilities on
trains failed due to the heatwave. Thousands of people were stranded
for five hours in the 30C heat without water.<br>
In southern Laos, heavy rains led to a dam collapse, rendering
thousands of people homeless and flooding several villages.<br>
The stories came in thick and fast, from all over the world.<br>
Most of the traditional media did not report these incidents as
symptoms of an evolving climate crisis.<br>
Some commentators did point out that the events might be linked to
climate change.<br>
<blockquote>None at all acknowledged that these extreme weather
events might be related to the fact that since 2015, we have
essentially inhabited a planet that is already around 1C warmer
than the pre-industrial average: and that therefore, we are
already, based on the best available science, inhabiting a
dangerous climate.<br>
The breaching of the 1C tipping point - which former NASA climate
science chief James Hansen pinpointed as the upper limit to retain
a safe climate - was followed this March by atmospheric carbon
concentrations reaching, for the first time since records began,
400 ppm (parts per million).<br>
Once again, the safe upper limit highlighted by Hansen and
colleagues - 350 ppm - has already been breached.<br>
</blockquote>
Yet these critical climate milestones have been breached
consecutively with barely a murmur from either the traditional and
alternative media.<br>
The recent spate of catastrophic events are not mere anomalies. They
are the latest signifiers of a climate system that is increasingly
out of balance - a system that was already fatally struck off
balance through industrial overexploitation of natural resources
centuries ago.<br>
Our sense-making apparatus is broken<br>
But for the most part, the sense-making apparatus by which we
understand what is happening in the world - the Global
Media-Industrial Complex (a network of media communications portals
comprised of both traditional corporate and alternative
outlets) - has failed to convey these stark realities to the vast
majority of the human population.<br>
We are largely unaware that 19th and early 20th century climate
change induced by industrial fossil fuel burning has already had
devastating impacts on the regional climate of Sub-Saharan Africa;
just as it now continues to have escalating devastating impacts on
weather systems all over the world.<br>
<blockquote>The reality which we are not being told is this: these
are the grave consequences of inhabiting a planet where global
average temperatures are roughly 1C higher than the pre-industrial
norm.<br>
</blockquote>
Sadly, instead of confronting this fundamentally existential threat
to the human species - one which in its fatal potential implications
point to the bankruptcy of the prevailing paradigms of social,
political and economic organisation (along with the ideology and
value-systems associated with them) - the preoccupation of the
Global Media-Industrial Complex is at worst to focus human mind and
behaviour on consumerist trivialities.<br>
<br>
At best, its focus is to pull us into useless, polarising left-right
dichotomies and forms of impotent outrage that tend to distract us
from taking transformative systemic action, internally (within and
through our own selves, behaviours psychologies, beliefs, values,
consciousness and spirit) and externally (in our relationships as
well as our structural-institutional and socio-cultural contexts).<br>
Collapse happens when the system is overwhelmed<br>
These are the ingredients for the beginning of civilisational
collapse processes. In each of these cases, we see how extreme
weather events induced by climate change creates unanticipated
conditions for which international, national and local institutions
are woefully unprepared.<br>
In order to respond, massive new expenditures are involved,
including emergency mobilisations as well as new spending to try to
build more robust adaptations that might be better prepared 'next
time'.<br>
<br>
But the reality is that we are already failing to avert an ongoing
trajectory of global temperatures rising to not merely a dangerous
2C (imagine a doubling intensity of the sorts of events we've seen
this summer happening year on year); but, potentially, as high as 8C
(the catastrophic impacts of which would render much of the planet
uninhabitable).<br>
<br>
In these contexts, we can begin to see how a protracted collapse
process might unfold. Such a collapse process does not in itself
guarantee the 'end of the world', or even simply the disappearance
of civilisation.<br>
<br>
What it does imply is that specific political, economic, social,
military and other institutional systems are likely to become
increasingly overwhelmed due to rising costs of responding to
unpredictable and unanticipated climate wild cards.<br>
<br>
It should be noted that as those costs are rising, we are
simultaneously facing diminishing economic returns from our constant
overexploitation of planetary resources, in terms of fossil fuels
and other natural resources.<br>
<br>
In other words, in coming decades, business-as-usual implies a
future of tepid if not declining economic growth, amidst escalating
costs of fossil fuel consumption, compounded by exponentially
accelerating costs of intensifying climate impacts as they begin to
erode and then pummel and then destroy the habitable infrastructure
of industrial civilisation as we know it.<b><br>
</b><b><br>
</b><b>Collapse does not arrive in this scenario as a singular point
of terminal completion. Rather, collapse occurs as a a series of
discrete but consecutive and interconnected amplifying feedback
processes by which these dynamics interact and worsen one another.</b><br>
<br>
Earth System Disruption (ESD) - the biophysical processes of
climate, energy and ecological breakdown - increasingly lead to
Human System Destabilisation (HSD). HSD in turn inhibits our
capacity to meaningfully respond and adapt to the conditions of ESD.
ESD, meanwhile, simply worsens. This, eventually, leads to further
HSD. The cycle continues as a self-reinforcing amplifying feedback
loop, and each time round the cycle comprises a process of collapse.<br>
This model, which I developed in my Springer Energy Briefs study
Failing States, Collapse Systems, demonstrates that the type of
collapse we are likely to see occurring in coming years is a
protracted, cyclical process that worsens with each round. It is not
a final process, and it is not set-in-stone. At each point, the
possibility of intervening at critical points to mitigate,
ameliorate, adapt, or subvert still exists. But it gets harder and
harder to do so effectively the deeper into the collapse cycle we
go.<br>
Insanity<br>
<br>
<b>One primary symptom of the collapse process is that as it
deepens, the capacity of the prevailing civilisational
configuration to understand what is happening becomes increasingly
diminished.</b><b><br>
</b><b> </b><b><br>
</b><b> Far from waking up and taking action, we see that the human
species is becoming increasingly mired in obsessing over
geopolitical and economic competition, self-defeating acts of
'self'-preservation (where the 'self' is completely
misidentified), and focused entirely on projecting problems onto
the 'Other'.</b><b><br>
</b><b> </b><b><br>
</b><b> A key signifier of how insidious this is, is in yourself.
Look to see how your critical preoccupations are not with yourself
or those with which you identify; but that and those whom you
oppose and consider to be 'wrong.'</b><b><br>
</b><b> At core, the critical precondition for effective action at
this point is for each of us to radically subvert and challenge
these processes through a combination of internal introspection
and outward action.</b><b><br>
</b><b> </b><b><br>
</b><b> In ourselves, the task ahead is for each of us to become the
seeds of that new, potential civilisational form - 'another world'
which is waiting to be birthed not through some far-flung
'revolution' in the future, but here and now through the
transformations we undertake in ourselves and in our contexts.</b><br>
<b><br>
</b><b>We first wake up. We wake up to the reality of what is
happening in the world. We then wake up to our own complicity in
that reality and truly face up to the intricate acts of
self-deception we routinely undertake to conceal ourselves from
this complicity. We then look to mobilise ourselves anew to undo
these threads of complicity where feasible, and to create new
patterns of work and play that connect us back with the Earth and
the Cosmos. And we work to connect our own re-patterning with the
re-patterning work of others, with a view to plant the
seed-networks of the next system - a system which is not so much
'next', but here and now, emergent in the fresh choices we make
everyday.<br>
<br>
</b>So… welcome. Welcome to a 1C planet. Welcome to the fight to
save ourselves from ourselves.<br>
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed <font size="-1">is the founding editor of INSURGE
intelligence. Nafeez is a 16-year investigative journalist,
formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of
social, economic and environmental crises. Nafeez reports on
'global system change' for VICE's Motherboard, and on regional
geopolitics for Middle East Eye. He has bylines in The Independent
on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer,
The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other
places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his
investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening
Standard's top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won
the Naples Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award created
by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a
widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying
complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence.</font><br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/global-heatwave-is-symptom-of-early-stage-cycle-of-civilisational-collapse-efef3c1dd7eb">https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/global-heatwave-is-symptom-of-early-stage-cycle-of-civilisational-collapse-efef3c1dd7eb</a></font><br>
<font size="-1">This story was 100% reader-funded. Please support
our independent journalism and share widely.</font><br>
<br>
<br>
['Stay cool' is the slogan of the future]<br>
<b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzscnQqCAiM">Human Core
Body Temperature Limits Adaptability to Heat Stress</a></b><br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
Published on Aug 4, 2018<br>
Many people think that as global temperatures and humidity rises the
human body will physically adapt to the new conditions. FALSE. Since
human core body temperature is 37 C (98.6 F), with skin temperature
a few degrees lower (35 C, 95 F) when air temperature reaches 35 C
and humidity is 100% (known as wet-bulb temperature) the body no
longer loses heat to the environment. Even at rest, the 100 Watts of
metabolic heat produced by an adult human thus builds up in the
body, raising core body temperature leading to heat exhaustion, heat
stroke, and death. Other mammals, and birds have higher core body
temperatures than humans, and thus may fare better.<br>
<font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzscnQqCAiM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzscnQqCAiM</a></font><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b>This Day in Climate History - August 5, 1996 -
from D.R. Tucker</b></font><br>
August 5, 1996: The New York Times profiles climate scientist Ben
Santer, who had just become the target of a lavishly-financed
defamation campaign by the fossil fuel industry. <br>
<blockquote><b>Believer Finds Himself At Center of Hot Debate</b><br>
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS<br>
LIVERMORE, CALIF. -- Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, a shy, even-spoken,
41-year-old American climatologist who climbs mountains, runs
marathons and enjoys a reputation for careful and scrupulous work,
is the chief author of what may be the most important finding of
the decade in atmospheric science: that human activity is probably
causing some measure of global climate change, as
environmentalists have long assumed and skeptics have long denied.<br>
<br>
The finding, issued for the first time in December 1995 by a panel
of scientists meeting under United Nations sponsorship in Madrid,
left open the question of just how large the human impact on
climate is. The question is perhaps the hottest and most urgent in
climatology today.<br>
<br>
Dr. Santer is in the forefront of a rapidly unfolding effort to
answer it..<br>
<br>
Dr. Santer graduated with top honors in 1976 from the University
of East Anglia in Britain with a degree in environmental sciences.<br>
<br>
To his dismay, his British education availed him little in the job
market when he returned to his parents' home, then in the
Baltimore area. He bounced around for the next few years, working
at various times as a soccer teacher, a German teacher for Berlitz
and an assembler in a zipper factory, at which point, he says, he
found himself "down and out in Seattle." He made two stabs at a
doctorate at East Anglia, abandoning both.<br>
<br>
He soon made a third attempt to earn a doctorate at East Anglia,
which boasts one of the world's top climatology departments, and
this time he succeeded.<br>
<br>
Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, author of a crucial chapter of a U.N.
climate report. (Darcy Padilla for The New York Times)<br>
"I found it fascinating," he said, "the idea that humans could
have a potentially large impact on climate." In his dissertation,
Dr. Santer used statistical techniques to investigate the accuracy
with which computerized models of the climate system simulated
regional climates.<br>
<br>
He soon moved to another leading climatological laboratory, the
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he worked
for the first time on the problem of detecting the signal of
human-caused climate change, especially global warming -- the
"greenhouse fingerprint." He also met his wife, Heike, in Hamburg,
and they now have a 3-year-old son, Nicholas.<br>
<br>
Since moving to Livermore in 1992, Dr. Santer has grappled with
the related problems of testing the validity of climate models and
searching for the greenhouse fingerprint. His strategy is to
examine observed patterns of temperature change to see whether
they matched the unique patterns expected to result from the
combination of growing industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases
like carbon dioxide, on one hand, and sulfate aerosols that cool
some parts of the planet, on the other. According to this
reasoning, the pattern produced by the combination of greenhouse
gases and aerosols would be markedly different from that produced
by any natural cause.<br>
<br>
Climate models have been widely criticized for, among other
things, failing to adequately represent natural variability. One
critic, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, says the models are so flawed as to be no more
reliable than a Ouija board.<br>
<br>
"I think that's garbage," said Dr. Santer, part of whose job is to
assess how good the models are. "I think models are credible tools
and the only tools we have to define what sort of greenhouse
signal to look for. It's clear that the ability of models to
simulate important features of present-day climate has improved
enormously." He says that if the models are right -- still a big
if -- the human imprint on the climate should emerge more clearly
in the next few years. All in all, he says, he expects "very
rapid" progress in the search for the greenhouse fingerprint.<br>
<br>
When might it become clear enough to be widely convincing?<br>
<br>
"Even if New York were under six feet of water, there would be
people who would still say, 'Well, this is a natural event,' " he
said.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/120197believe.html">http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/120197believe.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><i>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
</i></font><font size="+1"><i><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html">Archive
of Daily Global Warming News</a> </i></font><i><br>
</i><span class="moz-txt-link-freetext"><a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote">https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote</a></span><font
size="+1"><i><font size="+1"><i><br>
</i></font></i></font><font size="+1"><i> <br>
</i></font><font size="+1"><i><font size="+1"><i>To receive daily
mailings - <a
href="mailto:subscribe@theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request">click
to Subscribe</a> </i></font>to news digest. </i></font>
<blockquote>
<blockquote><small> </small><small><b>** Privacy and Security: </b>
This is a text-only mailing that carries no images which may
originate from remote servers. </small><small> Text-only
messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
</small><small> </small><br>
<small> By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used
for democratic and election purposes and cannot be used for
commercial purposes. </small><br>
<small>To subscribe, email: <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
href="mailto:contact@theclimate.vote">contact@theclimate.vote</a>
with subject: subscribe, To Unsubscribe, subject:
unsubscribe</small><br>
<small> Also you</small><font size="-1"> may
subscribe/unsubscribe at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote">https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote</a></font><small>
</small><br>
<small> </small><small>Links and headlines assembled and
curated by Richard Pauli</small><small> for <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://TheClimate.Vote">http://TheClimate.Vote</a>
delivering succinct information for citizens and responsible
governments of all levels.</small><small> L</small><small>ist
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously
restricted to this mailing list. <br>
</small></blockquote>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>