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<i><font size="+1"><b>July 14, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[Washington Post Opinion - the Editorial Board]<br>
<b> </b><b>Democrats are getting ready to govern responsibly on
climate change</b><br>
July 12, 2020<br>
GLOBAL WARMING has not taken a break since the covid-19 outbreak
struck. The Democrats, at least, are treating it like the emergency
it remains.<br>
<br>
House Democrats released late last month a massive climate plan, a
package of bills that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has vowed to
advance through her chamber. Meanwhile, a committee that presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and primary rival Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) convened to reconcile their views on climate
policy has agreed on some top-line principles. If the Democrats win
big in November, they would have a shelf fully stocked with
pre-written climate policies from which to choose. That alone puts
them far ahead of Republicans.<br>
<br>
Still, the House's very detailed plan is a huge policy grab bag that
would require refinement if it were close to becoming law, and Mr.
Biden should be thinking now about how to winnow it down -- and how
to avoid promising too much to fringe activists during the campaign.<br>
<br>
House Democrats propose requiring that all electricity come from
clean sources by 2040, by imposing a national clean-electricity
mandate that would require utilities to derive a steadily rising
percentage of electricity from renewables or emissions-free nuclear
power. The plan calls for regulations and spending to require
electric vehicles, promote super-efficient buildings, plug leaks in
the nation's gas infrastructure and directly finance further
deployment of renewables.<br>
<br>
Curiously, the plan also proposes putting a price on greenhouse
emissions, presumably through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade
program, which would accomplish many of the same environmental goals
that other policies in the plan are designed to tackle, but at a far
lower cost. Where that is the case, duplicative policies should be
removed.<br>
<br>
It is not clear this will happen. Though pricing carbon dioxide is
the best idea, it is buried deep in the report, in a section that
contains far less detail than those promising new government
mandates or spending. Mr. Biden himself similarly played down
pricing carbon in the climate plan he released during his primary
race. If Republicans were engaged, they could push for market-based
policies such as carbon taxes and against unneeded mandates and
spending. Instead, they have largely exiled themselves from the
debate by refusing to accept the necessity to act vigorously. The
result is a conversation largely about how far left climate policy
should go, rather than how to make it more appealing to the center.<br>
<br>
To be clear, Democrats deserve credit for listening to scientists on
the level of ambition needed, and they have not surrendered to the
left flank of the debate, refusing, for example, to strike nuclear
power from the conversation. Moreover, the threat of climate change
is so large that even second-best policies are better than nothing.
But should he have the chance to govern, Mr. Biden should still aim
higher than second-best.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-are-getting-ready-to-govern-responsibly-on-climate-change/2020/07/12/c247321a-c09d-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-are-getting-ready-to-govern-responsibly-on-climate-change/2020/07/12/c247321a-c09d-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[another solution]<br>
<b>A sprinkle of rock dust could help avoid catastrophic climate
change</b><br>
- -<br>
Rock dust may hold appeal over other CO2 removal options because it
doesn't require changes to land use – such as growing energy crops
for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – and there is growing
evidence that it has the side effect of boosting crop yields too,
says Beerling.<br>
<br>
"We need to clean up the [climate change] mess in sensible ways,
over a time scale of decades to centuries," says team member James
Hansen at Columbia University in New York. "One of the ways with
multiple benefits is rock dust farming. I particularly like it
because it is more permanent than most CO2 draw-down schemes."...<br>
Read more:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248222-a-sprinkle-of-rock-dust-could-help-avoid-catastrophic-climate-change/#ixzz6S8wmXLZ8">https://www.newscientist.com/article/2248222-a-sprinkle-of-rock-dust-could-help-avoid-catastrophic-climate-change/#ixzz6S8wmXLZ8</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[solutions]<b><br>
</b><b> </b><b>New proposal aims to address California housing
crisis, climate change at same time</b><br>
SACRAMENTO, Calif. --<br>
The greater Sacramento region is on a mission to fight climate
change with a new effort called Green Means Go...<br>
- -<br>
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments said projects focus on
reducing traffic congestion and make these designated areas more
bikeable and walkable.<br>
<br>
"People want more affordable housing, they want better access to
transportation, they want clean air," said state Sen. Richard Pan,
D-Sacramento. "This is something we are all working together to
achieve, and we also want to use our resources as wisely as
possible, including state resources."<br>
<br>
At least 26 local governments have identified projects they would
get started on right away if they had the funds from the Green Means
Go pilot program...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.kcra.com/article/green-means-go-california-housing-crisis-climate-change/33298513#">https://www.kcra.com/article/green-means-go-california-housing-crisis-climate-change/33298513#</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Great visual report in FT.com]<br>
<b>Climate change: what Antarctica's 'doomsday glacier' means for
the planet</b><b><br>
</b>Thwaites Glacier is melting at an alarming rate, triggering
fears over rising sea levels<br>
- - <br>
"We still don't know that much about Thwaites," says the geologist
who is adamant that she will return to the glacier one day. "Most of
our discoveries are yet to come."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.ft.com/content/4ff254ed-960d-4b35-a6c0-1e60a6e79d91#comments-anchor">https://www.ft.com/content/4ff254ed-960d-4b35-a6c0-1e60a6e79d91#comments-anchor</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[128F is 53C]<br>
Death Valley sets record for planet's hottest temperature in years
-- and the heat wave is forecast to spread<br>
BY JEFF BERARDELLI<br>
JULY 13, 2020 / CBS NEWS<br>
The official weather observing station in Death Valley, California
-- called Furnace Creek for obvious reasons -- reached a scorching
128 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. That is the hottest temperature
anywhere on the planet since 2017 and only one degree behind what
experts say is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on
Earth...<br>
- -<br>
While heat waves of this magnitude are not unheard of in summer,
climate experts expect them to become more common in the years ahead
due to human-caused climate change. That's because as global
temperature averages increase, simple statistics show that heat
extremes increase at an even faster rate. This will likely lead to a
large increase in heat wave days across much of the nation...<br>
- - <br>
Dr. Renee McPherson, university director of the South Central
Climate Adaptation Science Center, says, "Our own projections
indicate an additional 10-40 days per year of 100-[degree] days by
mid-century, and up to two months (!) more of these extreme heat
days each year by the end of the century, if we continue to increase
our carbon emissions as we have in the past."<br>
<br>
In fact, in a middle-of-the-road carbon emissions scenario, which
assumes some efforts to limit heat-trapping carbon in the
atmosphere, the number of 100-degree days are expected to double, or
even triple, in most areas by late this century.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-valley-hottest-temperature-record-heat-wave/">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/death-valley-hottest-temperature-record-heat-wave/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[World Economic Forum]<br>
<b>COVID-19 creates a perfect storm for the extreme weather season</b><br>
COVID-19 will hamper preparations for and responses to extreme
weather events this year.<br>
Even a relatively small natural hazard event will place
disproportionate stress on already overstretched systems.<br>
Agility will be key to resilience. Here's a five-step strategy to
help businesses prepare themselves...<br>
more at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-perfect-storm-extreme-weather/">https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-perfect-storm-extreme-weather/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>[PHYS.ORG]<br>
<b>New models show how species will be relocated by climate change</b><br>
by Tim Lucas, Duke University<br>
Scientists at Duke University are harnessing the power of big data
and geospatial analysis to create new ways to track the effects of
climate change on species and food webs. Their work, which is
funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, began in 2018
and has already yielded two powerful new tools.<br>
<br>
One of the tools is an interactive web portal that projects how a
species could impact other species as it relocates and competes
for suitable habitats in a warming world.<br>
<br>
The other is a probabilistic framework that can be used to
overcome gaps in data and identify direct and indirect impacts of
environmental change on a community of species.<br>
<br>
"These tools provide new approaches for assessing climate change's
impacts on biodiversity, including its effects over time on
interacting species, which can be very difficult to quantify,"
said James S. Clark, Nicholas Distinguished Professor of
Environmental Science and professor of statistical science at
Duke, who is co-principal investigator of the project...<br>
- -<br>
"We need to consider who's living with whom to understand the
larger impacts," she said.<br>
<br>
The new Predicting Biodiversity with a Generalized Joint
Attribution Model (PBGJAM) web portal is being developed to help
scientists, landowners and decision makers see those larger
impacts. It synthesizes decades of satellite, airborne and
ground-based data on multiple species, along with climate
predictions and ecological forecasts, to track how species' ranges
are shifting in response to rising temperatures, more frequent
droughts and other environmental changes.<br>
<br>
Using information from the National Ecological Observatory Network
and NASA's remotely sensed Earth data and climate data, Swenson
and Clark's team recently used PBGJAM to project where the meadow
vole could migrate in coming years as climate warming and
development diminish its current habitat in the Midwest. By
crunching tens of thousands of archived data points--including
decades of information on surface temperatures, precipitation
patterns, vegetation indices, land-cover changes, and evaporation
and plant transpiration rates--the model found that voles will be
forced to move north, bringing them into contact and competition
with new and old species alike, and leaving a gap in the food webs
of their former haunts...<br>
- -<br>
"These are far-reaching impacts that need to be considered when
planning conservation strategies. When fully implemented, the
PBGJAM web portal will make it much easier to do that for a
multitude of species or ecosystem types in North America," Swenson
said.<br>
<br>
"A portal such as PBGJAM will enhance and enable focused science
investigations by facilitating access, integration, understanding
and visualization of disparate datasets," said Jacqueline Le
Moigne, advanced information systems technology program manager at
NASA.<br>
<br>
The new probabilistic framework that Clark and his students have
developed further boosts scientists' ability to account for such
impacts by giving them a reliable statistical method for
identifying the direct and indirect impacts of climate-species
interactions across entire food webs or ecological
communities--even when faced with gaps or disparities in species
data.<br>
<br>
"Traditionally, we've tried to understand climate change's effects
on biodiversity by looking at where species live and relating that
to the climate in those places. But that approach has limitations.
We don't know for sure if it's the climate that's determining
where they live or if it's their interactions with competing
species, their natural enemies or food that determines it," Clark
said.<br>
<br>
"By looking at the change in abundance of the interacting species
collectively as a community over time and quantifying the
contributions of their effects on one another, as well as the
effects of climate, this model allows us to make that
distinction," Clark said.<br>
<br>
"Just as species interactions depend on population abundances, so
too do the effects of environment, as when drought is amplified by
competition," Clark said. "Embedding dynamic environment-species
interactions into a time-series framework that admits field data
gathered on different scales lets us quantify changes that are
induced indirectly through other species. So we can tell which
changes are the apples and which are the oranges."<br>
<br>
A key research gap is including biotic processes in models, said
Betsy von Holle, program director at NSF. "This innovative
approach of including biotic responses at the community level is a
major step forward for predicting how species will respond to
climate change at the landscape scale."<br>
<br>
Clark created the framework with Lane Scher and Margaret Swift,
doctoral students in his Biodiversity and Global Change Lab at
Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. They published a
peer-reviewed paper about their work the week of July 6 in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences... <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://phys.org/news/2020-07-species-relocated-climate.html">https://phys.org/news/2020-07-species-relocated-climate.html</a><br>
- - -<br>
[Source Material]<br>
<b>The emergent interactions that govern biodiversity change</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2003852117">https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/02/2003852117</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
July 14, 2008 </b></font><br>
July 14, 2008: On MSNBC's "Countdown," fill-in host Rachel Maddow
describes another controversy that has left the US feeling "Bushed":<br>
<br>
"Number one, serial driller-gate. President Bush today lifted an
executive order banning off-shore drilling. It's an order that
dates back to the other President Bush. The move accomplishes
nothing, because Congress still has its own ban in effect. But
that's not the only way we know this is pure politics. According to
Mr. Bush's own Energy Information Administration, off-shore
production could not even start until five years after the off-shore
sites were leased. So that's 2013. Off-shore sites could not
significantly impact U.S. production until 18 years after leasing.
So that's 2026. <br>
<br>
"And the impact on prices from off-shore drilling when the oil
finally starts flowing in 2026? Because oil prices are set on a
global market, the EIA says the offshore impact on prices would be,
quote, insignificant. But the political impact, priceless."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHvqjj3yeDA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHvqjj3yeDA</a><br>
<p> </p>
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