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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>September 2, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[today Western US an orange full moon rises]<br>
<b>Wildfire smoke forecast for September 2, 2020</b><br>
Bill Gabbert - posted 9-1-2020<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-01-at-7.52.13-PM.jpg">https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-01-at-7.52.13-PM.jpg</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wildfiretoday.com/2020/09/01/wildfire-smoke-forecast-for-september-2-2020/">https://wildfiretoday.com/2020/09/01/wildfire-smoke-forecast-for-september-2-2020/</a><br>
- -<br>
[smoke map]<br>
<b>NOAA HRRR-Smoke</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://hwp-viz.gsd.esrl.noaa.gov/smoke/index.html#">https://hwp-viz.gsd.esrl.noaa.gov/smoke/index.html#</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[AXIOS gives us seven systemic changes]<br>
<b>How climate change feeds off itself and gets even worse</b><br>
Amy Harder, author of Generate<br>
August 31, 2020<br>
Climate change is like a snowball effect, except, well, hot.<br>
<br>
<b>Why it matters:</b> Like a snowball begins small and grows larger
by building upon itself, numerous feedback loops embedded in our
atmosphere and society are exacerbating climate change.<br>
<br>
<b>Driving the news:</b> Scientists are well acquainted with
feedback loops, but the often wonky topic doesn't break through into
the mainstream despite its importance to how much the world warms
and how much we respond to that warming.<br>
As we soak up the last of these hot summer days, and extreme weather
hits parts of the country, today seems a fitting time to break this
down for those of us without a Ph.D. Here are seven feedback loops
in science and beyond.<br>
<b>Air conditioning</b><br>
<b>How it works: </b>Climate change is making our summers hotter,
so we use more air conditioners, which emit greenhouse gases, which
heats up our planet more, so we use even more AC, which heats up our
planet even more ... You get the cycle.<br>
<br>
This is an easy-to-understand feedback loop, but it's not going to
have a big impact on our emissions, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate
scientist at the research group Breakthrough Institute.<br>
<br>
The bigger impact is likely to be population growth in developing
countries in hot parts of the world, like India, getting AC to
survive their ever-hotter weather.<br>
<b>Water evaporation</b><br>
This one's more technical but far more consequential for Earth's
temperature than the AC example.<br>
<br>
<b>How it works:</b> The atmosphere heats up as we emit
heat-trapping greenhouse gases.<br>
<br>
This warmer air leads to more water evaporation from water and land.<br>
This evaporation results in water vapor, which itself is a
greenhouse gas and traps heat.<br>
<br>
The increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere retains ever
more heat, which leads to more water evaporation, which results in
more water vapor, which...<br>
<b>Between the lines:</b> This type of feedback loop more than
doubles the amount of global warming, says Hausfather.<br>
<br>
<b>Permafrost</b><br>
This is a type of feedback that has only recently begun to be
included in climate models, says Philip Duffy, climate scientist and
president of the nonprofit Woodwell Climate Research Center.<br>
<br>
<b>How it works:</b> It's like a massive freezer thawing atop the
world, Duffy says. Nearly a quarter of Northern hemisphere land has
permafrost underneath it.<br>
<br>
As the world warms, organic matter -- plants and dead animals frozen
for tens of thousands of years -- starts to decompose. "Those
decomposition processes emit greenhouse gases," Duffy said.<br>
<br>
Scientists estimate that there's twice as much carbon locked up in
permafrost as is already in the atmosphere, Duffy says. "The
potential to amplify warming is huge."<br>
<b>Albedo feedback</b><br>
This is similar to permafrost. It's why you feel hotter in black
clothes compared to white clothes.<br>
<br>
<b>How it works: </b>Lighter surfaces reflect heat more, so as ice
and other cold places get warmer (i.e., the Arctic and other
permafrost), their ability to reflect heat diminishes and they soak
up more heat.<br>
<blockquote>- "As the world warms, expect a lot of ice and snow to
melt, which uncovers darker surfaces, which will result in more
warming," said Hausfather.<br>
</blockquote>
Between the lines: This phenomenon, combined with the permafrost
one, helps explain why the planet's poles warm faster than the rest
of the world.<br>
<br>
<b>Wildfires</b><br>
<b>How it works: </b>Trees, by definition, embody carbon. So when
wildfires burn them down, carbon dioxide is emitted.<br>
<br>
As the world warms, temperatures get hotter and places get drier,
creating tinderboxes for when wildfires do start.<br>
<br>
The hotter the world gets, the bigger wildfires will be (in some
places like California), the more CO2 emitted into the atmosphere,
which heats up the world more, which will exacerbate wildfires more
...<br>
<b>Policy and economic paralysis</b><br>
Unlike most policy challenges, climate change gets worse the longer
we take to address it.<br>
<br>
<b>How it works:</b> The longer we wait to address climate change
with major government action, the bigger the policy needed and the
bigger economic impact that policy will have.<br>
<blockquote>- But the bigger the policy and economic hit get, the
harder the politics get.<br>
- So we wait longer still, making the required policy and economic
impact ever bigger, which makes the politics even more difficult.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<b>Yes, but:</b> Plausible future scenarios also exist where the
impacts of a warming world grow so intense and/or clean-energy
technologies become so cheap that eventually these aforementioned
feedback loops are broken.<br>
<b>Geopolitics</b><br>
<b>How it works:</b> It takes global cooperation to address climate
change, given its global nature. But climate change impacts
different countries differently, so they're more likely to act on
their own, and in their own self-interest.<br>
<blockquote>- But if there's no global cooperation, climate change
continues to get worse -- prolonging the adverse impacts on
different countries, and giving them even less incentive to
cooperate with other countries and more incentive to act on their
own.<br>
</blockquote>
<b>The bottom line:</b><br>
<blockquote>"The possible scenario that is a real nightmare is if we
don't control human emissions, nature takes over and we lose
control of the warming, because of these emissions from natural
systems."<br>
-- Philip Duffy, climate scientist<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.axios.com/climate-change-feedback-loops-e6cfd8d6-56fe-449b-a856-e8f97717c44c.html">https://www.axios.com/climate-change-feedback-loops-e6cfd8d6-56fe-449b-a856-e8f97717c44c.html</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[try citizens assembly]<br>
<b>If democracy looks doomed, Extinction Rebellion may have an
answer</b><br>
John Harris<br>
At the heart of a new climate emergency bill lies a simple idea to
cut through Westminster groupthink: a citizens' assembly<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/30/extinction-rebellion-democracy-climate-emergency-bill-citizens-assembly">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/30/extinction-rebellion-democracy-climate-emergency-bill-citizens-assembly</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Snappy 30min video lesson-suitable for sharp young minds]<br>
<b>Climate Change Is An Absolute Nightmare - This Is Why</b><br>
Jul 9, 2020<br>
UpIsNotJump<br>
<br>
So. What is Climate Change? Do you know the facts? No?<br>
<br>
Well I personally had no idea. One day it just hit me, I knew very
little about climate change. Even with a useless degree in
chemistry, climate change is a confusing mess of strange and
difficult to understand information.<br>
<br>
I made this video to gather all the facts I could find about climate
change, in a fun way, and without any bias on my part. I wanted
anyone who watched this video (and myself too!) to understand all
the important facts relating to climate change. Non-scientists
welcome. <br>
<br>
Science is exciting! It's just school and most of our education
systems aren't…<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqwvf6R1_QY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqwvf6R1_QY</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[complexity below]<br>
<b>Everything Is Extremely Normal and Totally Fine</b><br>
Brian Kahn - Sept 1. 2020<br>
The tundra is exploding in Siberia. Again.<br>
A 165-foot-deep (50-meter) crater has ripped open in the northwest
region of what's normally one of the coldest places on Earth. The
past year, though, it's been anything but, and the crater is just
the latest sign of Siberia's summer of hot discontent.<br>
<br>
Journalists on assignment to cover something else entirely on the
Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia happened upon the perfectly
concentric wound in the Earth. The footage showing the uninterrupted
tundra marred by a pit to hell was shot in July but released over
the weekend.<br>
<br>
It looks like a bomb crater, but the reason for the hole isn't an
explosive dropped from above but rather what's happening beneath the
surface. The tundra of Siberia and in other parts of the world is
undergird by permafrost, a frozen soil rich in the greenhouse gas
methane. Unfortunately, the climate crisis is causing that soil to
thaw, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Bad news for the
planet, to be sure, since methane is a greenhouse gas roughly 30
times more potent than carbon dioxide (permafrost can also release
that, too, because of course it can). But changes in permafrost can
also cause Earth to occasionally yeet a hunk of tundra into the sky.<br>
<br>
Methane is also the main ingredient in natural gas, which, as you
may happen to know, can catch fire or explode under pressure. Sue
Natali, Arctic program director at Woodwell Climate Research Center,
said in an email that the gas can build up in pockets of unfrozen
soil in the permafrost known as cryopegs.<br>
<br>
The Yamal Peninsula has seen a spate of these craters since 2014.
Natali said there haven't been enough to peg them to any specific
feature there, but the structure of the permafrost with a thick icy
layer and widespread presence of cryopegs and methane-rich natural
gas deposits could be one possible explanation for why it's the
crater capital of the Arctic.<br>
<br>
Conditions aboveground this year certainly have increased the odds
of blowouts. Across Siberia, things have been extremely hot and on
fire. Temperatures raced to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees
Celsius) in June, an exclamation point in what has been the hottest
year on record for Russia so far. Wildfires have torn across the
landscape since April, with some of them raging back to life after
overwintering in carbon-rich peat soil. Temperatures in Russia
averaged 7.2 to 12.4 degrees Fahrenheit (6 to 8 degrees Celsius)
above normal this winter, with hotter pockets over Siberia. The heat
likely weakened permafrost, priming it for all sorts of weird
behavior this summer. In addition to the explosion, permafrost
collapse contributed to a huge diesel spill that contaminated a
pristine Siberian lake.<br>
<br>
And honestly, while the crater is certainly worthy of staring at in
slack-jawed wonder, it's the other permafrost impacts that are the
most scary. Scientists have found millions of methane hot spots
dotting the landscape, and the Arctic has become a net carbon
dioxide emitter for the first time on record. That's bad news for
the climate. The less explosive forms of permafrost destruction are
also wreaking havoc for those who call the Arctic home. As
permafrost thaws, it can slump, erode, or simply flood the landscape
by creating marshy formations known as thermokarst. That wrecks
infrastructure from apartment buildings to traditional ice cellars,
upending life there. As many as 4 million people could see their
lives directly altered by midcentury if permafrost continues its
more liquid and sometimes explosive transformation. And those
changes will be permanent unless we act to cut emissions and slow
the planet from warming ASAP.<br>
<br>
"I think it is very likely that heat waves can and are triggering
abrupt events in the Arctic," Natali said. "This is pretty
important, because these events (craters, thermokarsts) are largely
irreversible."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://earther.gizmodo.com/everything-is-extremely-normal-and-totally-fine-1844909673">https://earther.gizmodo.com/everything-is-extremely-normal-and-totally-fine-1844909673</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Book review in the New Yorker]<br>
<b>Why Hurricane Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster</b><br>
Fifteen years ago, New Orleans was nearly destroyed. A new book
suggests that the cause was decades of bad policy--and that nothing
has changed.<br>
By Nicholas Lemann<br>
August 26, 2020<br>
- -<br>
It is not possible to make New Orleans completely hurricane- and
flood-proof, but if one wanted to try there would be two over-all
approaches. One would be to depopulate the city and deindustrialize
southern Louisiana, creating a small-footprint eco-paradise--the New
Orleans that nature seems to want. That violates the strong
preferences of the residents and a poor area's hunger for money. The
other option would be to invest in a protective infrastructure so
mighty that, at least plausibly, New Orleans could survive anything.
After Katrina, as after Betsy, such plans were drawn up, but nobody
wanted to pay for them. New Orleans had to settle for levee
enhancements that fell far short of providing invulnerability to a
Category 5 hurricane, and wound up returning to something not too
different from its pre-Katrina state. The city is an irresistibly
alluring place that does far better by its white citizens than its
Black ones. Life is sweet when it isn't tragic. Lodged somewhere in
everyone's consciousness is the knowledge that what happened in 2005
is going to happen again.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-hurricane-katrina-was-not-a-natural-disaster">https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-hurricane-katrina-was-not-a-natural-disaster</a><br>
<br>
<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 -
September 2, 2005 </b></font><br>
Climate scientist Stephen Schneider appears on "Real Time with Bill
Maher" to discuss climate change's role in Hurricane Katrina.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ">http://youtu.be/H9mWZZ2U6EQ</a><br>
<br>
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