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<i><font size="+1"><b>May 29, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Zombie fires in the Arctic ]<br>
<b>Zombie fires could be awakening in the Arctic</b><br>
Some fires won't die.<br>
<br>
They survive underground during the winter and then reemerge the
following spring, as documented in places like Alaska. They're
called "overwintering," "holdover," or "zombie" fires, and they may
have now awoken in the Arctic Circle -- a fast-warming region that
experienced unprecedented fires in 2019. The European Union's
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service is now watching these
fires, via satellite. <br>
<br>
Zombie fires smolder underground for months, notably in dense
peatlands (wetlands composed of ancient, decomposed plants), and
then flare-up when it grows warmer and drier. "Zombie" is fitting. <br>
<br>
"It really does describe what these fires do," said Thomas Smith, an
assistant professor in environmental geography at the London School
of Economics. "They recover and they're difficult to kill."..<br>
- - <br>
Overall, fires in the Arctic Circle -- which can release colossal
amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane into the
atmosphere -- have been normal this year, but they're expected to
pick up steam in June. What's more, they'll likely be enhanced by
both Russia's hottest winter on record and recent Siberian heat
waves, where temperatures reached some 40 degrees Fahrenheit above
average...<br>
- -<br>
It's challenging to stop zombie fires. They can happen in extremely
remote places, without any roads or means of dousing them before
they erupt. "We have no way of fighting them," said McCarty.
"They're often fairly far-removed. How are we going to put them
out?"<br>
<br>
It's a question of profound importance in the decades ahead.
Preventing human-caused Arctic wildfires will be critical,
emphasized McCarty. That's because Arctic fires aren't just burning
trees, they're often burning through peatlands, which release
bounties of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas methane into the air.
When it comes to trapping heat, methane is 25 times more potent than
carbon dioxide over the course of a century.<br>
<br>
It's a vicious cycle. The warming Arctic produces more fires. More
fires burn more forests and peatlands. This releases more methane
and carbon dioxide into the air. This contributes to ever more
planetary heating.<br>
<br>
"Not stopping these zombie fires means further degrading these
Arctic ecosystems," said McCarty. "Further warming leads to more
zombie fires. It's not great."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mashable.com/article/zombie-fires-arctic/">https://mashable.com/article/zombie-fires-arctic/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[drought video lecture and commentary]<br>
<b>Abrupt Climate Change: Drought Projections in the Latest
State-of-the-Art Climate Models (CMIP6)</b><br>
May 28, 2020<br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
I talk Drought. A new science paper uses the latest state-of-the-art
climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project to
determine which parts of our planet will experience the worst
droughts as climate change rapidly accelerates. Most people know of
the greatly reduced precipitation drought (meteorological drought);
but there are two other types. Agricultural drought is from greatly
reduced soil moisture, and hydrological drought is from much greater
runoff occurring. Usually all three factors contribute in varying
degrees, and drought severity has very strong regional and seasonal
dependencies.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqMMPeE1nXI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqMMPeE1nXI</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[video commentary]<br>
<b>Cyclone Amphan: Coping with Coronavirus & Climate Change</b><br>
May 28, 2020<br>
ClimateAdam<br>
What happens when disaster hits in the middle of a pandemic? Cyclone
Amphan reminds us that climate change isn't a separate crisis - it's
woven into all the other challenges we face.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNTjqKsb98E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNTjqKsb98E</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Art smart]<br>
<b>The climate change clues hidden in art history</b><br>
By Diego Arguedas Ortiz - 28th May 2020<br>
Art historians are exploring their collections through a climate
lens, revealing overlooked connections between our past and present,
writes Diego Arguedas Ortiz.<br>
<br>
As the 1850s were drawing to a close, the artist Frederic Edwin
Church was navigating off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in
preparation for his next painting. The search for the Northwest
Passage had captured the public's imagination for much of that
decade and Church - America's best-known landscape painter - was
also lured. He chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice and
spent weeks among the frozen blocks before returning to his studio
in New York with about 100 sketches...<br>
- -<br>
If you go further back, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer
does in his book A Cultural History of Climate, you would notice
that prior to the 1500s there are very few occurrences of snowy
landscapes in Western European art. Behringer suggests that the
lower-than-usual temperatures during the so-called Little Ice Age
plunged European artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder into a new
branch of landscape painting: the winter landscape.<br>
images<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dp/p08fdpzk.jpg">https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dp/p08fdpzk.jpg</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dk/p08fdkqm.jpg">https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dk/p08fdkqm.jpg</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dq/p08fdqvz.jpg">https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/8f/dq/p08fdqvz.jpg</a><br>
Adamson makes a crucial, nuanced point: the elements we see in a
painting don't make up a climate on their own. These are
meteorological conditions, pictures of weather and a time and place.
It's rather the cultural ways in which humans live in those
climates, and their representations of them in art, that we should
be observing.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200528-the-climate-change-clues-hidden-in-art-history">https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200528-the-climate-change-clues-hidden-in-art-history</a><br>
- - <br>
[Book blurb]<br>
<b>A Cultural History of Climate</b><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
Book:<br>
<b>A Cultural History of Climate</b><br>
Wolfgang Behringer<br>
London, Polity Press, 2009, ISBN: 9780745645292; 280pp.; Price:
£17.99<br>
Reviewer:<br>
Professor Mike Hulme<br>
University of East Anglia<br>
Citation:<br>
Professor Mike Hulme, review of A Cultural History of Climate,
(review no. 925)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925">https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925</a><br>
Date accessed: 28 May, 2020<br>
- - -<br>
He observes that our efforts to reconstruct histories of physical
climate can never be separated from the meanings that become
attached to such reconstructions, and that these meanings emerge
from particular political and cultural contexts. For Behringer, this
key observation would seem to provide the rationale and motivation
for his book. As he concludes on p. 217: 'We cannot leave the
'interpretation' of climate change to people ignorant of cultural
history'...<br>
- - -<br>
In the 200 or so pages between these opening and closing remarks,
Behringer offers an account of how changes in physical climates over
10,000 years have influenced human societies and how such changes
have been understood by those societies. He is concerned to show not
only the changeability of physical climate and the adaptiveness of
societies to such change, but also how the ways people think about
and make sense of climate and its variations - the 'behaviour' of
climate we might say - are themselves mutable. Our present moment at
the beginning of the 21st century offers a particularly powerful
narrative about climate change, its causes and its consequences. Yet
it is a narrative which, as well as being powerful, is sufficiently
plastic to allow many different knowledge, policy and moral
entrepreneurs to work with and exploit the idea of climate change in
different ways. It is a plasticity that I explore in my own book Why
We Disagree About Climate Change...<br>
- - -<br>
This is all very good, but we have heard a lot of it before. Where
Behringer is perhaps at his most distinctive is in his narration of
the cultural engagement of European societies with the cooling
climate of the early-modern period, an era he has written about
elsewhere especially on the subject of witchcraft and climate. And
his account of the changing moral economy of European climate during
the 15th to 17th centuries is pertinent to our current discourse
about climate change and morality. For Behringer, the strong link
between the 'little ice age' and witch persecutions 'came neither
from the church nor from the state; it came 'from below' (p. 132).
It came from the populace through their search for accountability
and meaning. What we are seeing at work today in our own society is
a struggle between elitist and popular presentations of climate
change and of its moral and political meanings...<br>
- - -<br>
There remains much work still to be done in gaining richer
understandings of how the changing contours of climate - both
changes in physical climate and changes in our imaginative ideas of
climate - interact with cultural life around the world. We have far
from exhausted investigations into how such ideas from different
historical, geographical and contemporary cultures work with and
against each other. A Cultural History of Climate is largely a
cultural history of European climate, although Behringer
occasionally visits non-European cultures from time-to-time. It
would be good to see companion studies from outside the boundaries
of Europe. Tim Sherratt and colleagues have attempted one such
effort for Australia (8) and William Meyer similarly for North
America (9), but neither of these extend further back than the early
19th century. But if our ideas of climate and climate change are
indeed culturally inflected, then we need accounts that emerge from
Brazil, China, India and Kenya before we can claim to have a world
history of climate and culture. For example, I would like to know
how the new Moghul rulers of India in the early 16th century
understood and managed the variability of the Indian monsoon and
how, as the Spanish set about establishing their New World empire at
a similar time, the weather of central America was talked about.<br>
<br>
We know that the weather and, by extension, our climate are
important to us. And we know that this importance changes, just as
we change. In reflecting on the place that climate has in our
interior and exterior worlds we are too easily tempted to reduce
climate to simple physical descriptive indices and/or to reduce the
importance of climate to a simple determining role. Behringer's A
Cultural History of Climate falls tantalisingly short of giving us
the conceptual and analytical tools we need to resist these
temptations, although he shows us why it matters that we do.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925">https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/925</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Book review May 27m 2020]<br>
<b>CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NATION STATE: The Case for Nationalism in
a Warming World - </b>by Anatol Lieven <br>
What would happen if we treated climate change as a war? If nation
states deemed this ecological crisis the largest national security
threat to their people and their power? That's what international
relations academic Anatol Lieven asks us to consider in his
controversial new book on how to combat the socio-political impact
of a warming world.<br>
<br>
Taking a disparaged view of the left's idealised utopian mass
movement to save our planet and armed with evidence of how global
liberalism's blind eye to sky-rocketing mercury is damaging their
political base, Lieven reveals a manifesto that offers a
refreshingly realist scope on how to solve the looming crisis.
Arguing that the true crisis is lack of mobilisation (rather than a
lack of technological know-how or financial capabilities), he
suggests the only way to re-orientate our economies around so-called
'green new deals' and resist the dominance of emissions-heavy
industries on political action is by reimaging a word that's become
unsavoury in modern discourse: nationalism.<br>
<br>
Touching on migration and mass unemployment caused by automation,
Lieven argues that climate change's threat lies not in its capacity
to create wars, but in the likelihood of it producing internal
collapse within developed states. Our current polarised political
landscape must be brought together by recognising that only through
national-level organisation can we take steps to mitigate emissions.
Resilience in the face of climate change will, according to Lievan,
demand a blitz-spirit-style sacrifice of our materialist economy,
only possible by strengthening individual country's societies
through so-called 'progressive nationalism'.<br>
<br>
At times, the book seems misty-eyed over the longevity of the
Chinese government- which eases its abilities to ensure lasting
climate policy - skipping over the more problematic questions that
surround the country's governance. His discussion of buoyant
nationalism within states also avoids difficult questions on how we
prevent the talismans of nationalist discourse, including xenophobia
and racism, from flourishing. But largely, Lieven provides an
energizing new voice on our climate crisis and a blueprint that, if
not perfect, then at least offers a pragmatic outline of how actual
communities, rather than imagined ones, can combat this very real
and urgent threat.<br>
Written by Lucy Kehoe <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/3704-climate-change-and-the-nation-state-by-anatol-lieven-book-review">http://geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/3704-climate-change-and-the-nation-state-by-anatol-lieven-book-review</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
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<br>
[Unique humor - news satire ]<br>
<b>BREAKING NEWS: Where are the mimes?</b><br>
May 28, 2020<br>
Julie Nolke<br>
Tonight's top story delves into the silent disappearance of the
world's mime population. <br>
Writer: Julie Nolke<br>
Actors: Gina Phillips & Julie Nolke<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/DT6tyFObpeY">https://youtu.be/DT6tyFObpeY</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
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[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
May 29, 2009 </b></font><br>
Washington Post writer Ezra Klein excoriates members of the US
Senate who have developed cold feet about addressing global warming:<br>
<blockquote> "Amidst all this, conservative Senate Democrats are
waving off the idea of serious action in 2010. But not because
they're opposed. Oh, heavens no! It's because of abstract concerns
over the political difficulties the problem presents. Sen. Kent
Conrad (D-N.D.), for instance, avers that 'climate change in an
election year has very poor prospects.' That's undoubtedly true,
though it is odd to say that the American system of governance can
only solve problems every other year. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) says
that 'we need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,' but
wants to wait until the economy is fixed.<br>
<br>
"Rather than commenting abstractly on the difficulty of doing
this, Conrad and Bayh and others could make it easier by saying
things like 'we simply have to do this, it's our moral obligation
as legislators,' and trying to persuade reporters to write stories
about how even moderates such as Conrad and Byah are determined to
do this. They could schedule meetings with other senators begging
them to take this seriously, leveraging the credibility and
goodwill built over decades in the Senate. They could spend money
on TV ads in their state, talking directly into the camera,
explaining to their constituents that they don't like having to
face this problem, but see no choice. That effort might fail --
probably will, in fact -- but it's got a better chance of success
than not trying. And this is, well, pretty important."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/climate_change_is_bad_but_the.html</a>
<br>
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