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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>October 6, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[Associated Press]<br>
<b>Record-breaking California wildfires surpass 4 million acres</b><br>
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In a year that has already brought apocalyptic
skies and smothering smoke to the West Coast, California set a grim
new record Sunday when officials announced that the wildfires of
2020 have now scorched a record 4 million acres -- in a fire season
that is far from over.<br>
<br>
The unprecedented figure -- an area larger than the state of
Connecticut -- is more than double the previous record for the most
land burned in a single year in California.<br>
<br>
"The 4 million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it
takes your breath away," said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal
Fire. "And that number will grow."...<br>
<br>
So far, in this year's historic fire season, more than 8,200
California wildfires have killed 31 people and scorched "well over 4
million acres in California" or 6,250 square miles, Cal Fire said
Sunday in a statement. The blazes have destroyed more than 8,400
buildings...<br>
The astonishing figure is more than double the 2018 record of 1.67
million burned acres (2,609 square miles) in California. All large
fire years since Cal Fire started recording figures in 1933 have
remained well below the 4 million mark -- "until now," the agency
said Sunday in a Tweet.<br>
<br>
"This year is far from over and fire potential remains high. Please
be cautious outdoors."...<br>
<p>more at -
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-fires-california-archive-523a1c3e4a792972e0c5c2f4c59c07d0">https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-fires-california-archive-523a1c3e4a792972e0c5c2f4c59c07d0</a><br>
</p>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Exxon knew]<br>
<b>Exxon's Plan for Surging Carbon Emissions Revealed in Leaked
Documents</b><br>
Internal projections from one of world's largest oil producers show
an increase in its enormous contribution to global warming<br>
Exxon Mobil Corp. had plans to increase annual carbon-dioxide
emissions by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece,
an analysis of internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg shows,
setting one of the largest corporate emitters against international
efforts to slow the pace of warming.<br>
<br>
The drive to expand both fossil-fuel production and planet-warming
pollution has come at a time when some of Exxon's rivals, such as BP
Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, are moving to curb oil and zero-out
emissions. Exxon's own assessment of its $210 billion investment
strategy shows yearly emissions rising 17% by 2025, according to
internal projections.<br>
The emissions estimates predate the Covid-19 pandemic, which has
slashed global demand for oil and thrown the company's finances into
distress, making it unclear if Exxon will complete its plans for
growth. The internal figures reflect only some of the measures Exxon
would take to reduce emissions, the company said. The largest U.S.
oil producer has never made a commitment to lower oil and gas output
or set a date by which it will become carbon neutral. Exxon has also
never publicly disclosed its forecasts for its own emissions.<br>
<br>
But the internal documents show for the first time that Exxon has
carefully assessed the direct emissions it expects from the
seven-year investment plan adopted in 2018 by Chief Executive
Officer Darren Woods. A chart in the documents lists Exxon's direct
emissions for 2017--122 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent--as
well as a projected figure for 2025 of 143 million tons. The
additional 21 million tons is a net result of Exxon's estimate for
ramping up production, selling assets and undertaking efforts to
reduce pollution by deploying renewable energy and burying carbon
dioxide.<br>
<br>
In a statement released after the publication of this story, Exxon
said its internal projections are "a preliminary, internal
assessment of estimated cumulative emission growth through 2025 and
did not include the [additional] mitigation and abatement measures
that would have been evaluated in the planning process. Furthermore,
the projections identified in the leaked documents have
significantly changed, a fact that was not fully explained or
prominently featured in the article." Exxon declined to provide any
details on the new projections...<br>
The internal estimates reflect only a small portion of Exxon's total
contribution to climate change. Greenhouse gases from direct
operations, such as those measured by Exxon, typically account for a
fifth of the total at a large oil company; most emissions come from
customers burning fuel in vehicles or other end uses, which the
Exxon documents don't account for.<br>
<br>
That means the full climate impact of Exxon's growth strategy would
likely be five times the company's estimate--or about 100 million
tons of additional carbon dioxide--had the company accounted for
so-called Scope 3 emissions. If its plans are realized, Exxon would
add to the atmosphere the annual emissions of a small, developed
nation, or 26 coal-fired power plants. <br>
<br>
The emissions projections are "an early assessment that does not
include additional mitigation and abatement measures that would have
been considered as the next step in the process," Exxon said in an
earlier statement. "The same planning document illustrates how we
have been successful in mitigating emissions in the past."<br>
<br>
Exxon often defends its growth plans by citing International Energy
Agency estimates that trillions of dollars of new oil and gas
investments are needed by 2040 to offset depletion from existing
operations, even under a range of climate scenarios. However,
experts say a reduction in global oil and production is necessary to
limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels...<br>
Exxon's ambitious growth plans, calling for higher cash flow and a
doubling of earnings by 2025, are a vestige of pre-pandemic times,
before global oil demand evaporated. In its earlier statement, Exxon
maintained its intention to pursue growth plans in the future: "As
demand returns and capital investments resume, our growth plans will
continue to include meaningful emission mitigation efforts."...<br>
- -<br>
Planning documents showing the surge in emissions that would result
from the investment strategy were widely circulated in internal
Exxon meetings as recently as early this year, before the
coronavirus spread beyond China. Unlike earnings targets, Exxon
never publicly announced its 2025 emissions goals, leading some
employees to question whether the company was committed to
reductions. More than a third of Exxon's self-help measures rely on
carbon capture, an expensive process that stores carbon dioxide
underground.<br>
<br>
Allegations of inadequate disclosures related to the dangers of
global warming have become a source of legal trouble for Big Oil. In
June, Minnesota sued Exxon, Koch Industries Inc. and the American
Petroleum Institute for allegedly withholding critical information
about the impact of fossil fuel use on climate change. All told,
Exxon and other oil companies are being sued by about a dozen
cities, counties and states seeking compensation for consumers and
taxpayers over the cost of adapting to climate change. (Exxon denies
wrongdoing in the suits, which it says are baseless and politically
motivated; at the end of last year, the company won a related case
brought by New York's attorney general.)...<br>
- -<br>
Just last month China pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060, a shift
that would set into motion a more than 65% drop in its oil
consumption and a 75% cut in gas, according to government-affiliated
researchers. The EU is aiming to reach neutrality across all
greenhouse gases by 2050, which will be partly funded by the Green
Deal that invests in electrification of transport and the promotion
of clean hydrogen. California announced a new plan to end the sale
of gasoline-powered cars by 2035, in a state that alone accounts for
1% of global oil demand.<br>
<br>
"It's past time for Exxon Mobil to take responsibility for the
harmful impacts of its oil and gas products," said Mulvey of the
Union on Concerned Scientists. "The world at large and its own
investors would benefit from Exxon redirecting its strategy toward
the energy we need in a low-carbon future."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Three states of Arctic ice]<br>
<b>The melting Arctic: how algal blooms change in rapidly warming
seas</b><br>
October 02, 2020<br>
Arctic environments are changing rapidly. Clearly this poses
challenges to ecosystems, but we do not yet understand the
consequences in their full complexity. However, we know that the
first response to sea ice decline, ocean acidification, and warmer
waters happens at the level of unicellular algae...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://framsenteret.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/eva_figure_edited-scaled.jpg">https://framsenteret.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/eva_figure_edited-scaled.jpg</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://framsenteret.no/forum/2020/the-melting-arctic-how-algal-blooms-change-in-rapidly-warming-seas/">https://framsenteret.no/forum/2020/the-melting-arctic-how-algal-blooms-change-in-rapidly-warming-seas/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[clips from the new book: "The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New
Yorker on Climate Change,"]<br>
<b>Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change</b><br>
By Elizabeth Kolbert...<br>
- -<br>
So how hot--which is to say, how bad--will things get? One of the
difficulties of making such predictions is that there are so many
forms of uncertainty, from the geopolitical to the geophysical. (No
one, for example, knows exactly where various "climate tipping
points" lie.) That being said, I'll offer three scenarios.<br>
<p><b>In one scenario</b>--let's call this "blue skies"--the world
will finally decide to "stop waffling" and start to bring
emissions down more or less immediately. In the U.S., proponents
of the Green New Deal have proposed a "ten-year national
mobilization" in order to meet a hundred per cent of the country's
power demand "through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy
sources." Such a timetable is obviously fantastically ambitious,
but not for this reason infeasible. According to a report by the
International Energy Agency, using technologies now available,
offshore wind turbines could provide the country with twice as
much electricity as it currently uses, and, according to some
estimates, weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels would create tens of
millions of jobs.</p>
Bending the emissions curve globally is an even more formidable
challenge. Leaders of many developing nations point out the
injustice in asking their countries to forgo carbon-based fuels just
because richer nations have already blown through the world's carbon
budget. India, which will soon overtake China as the world's most
populous country, gets three-quarters of its electricity from coal,
and that proportion has, at least until recently, been growing.
Still, it's possible to imagine that global emissions could peak in
the next decade or so. (At the U.N. last month, China's President,
Xi Jinping, pledged that his country's emissions would crest by
2030.) Owing to the pandemic, emissions worldwide are expected to
drop by about five per cent this year, compared with 2019. This
would be the largest year-to-year drop since the Second World War,
and it could mark an inflection point. Were it to be sustained, the
increase in global temperatures could be held to less than two
degrees Celsius. The world in 2050 would still be hotter than it is
now, but it would also be less polluted, less given over to vast
concentrations of oil wealth, and, in all likelihood, more just. As
Narasimha Rao, a professor at Yale's School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies, put it in the Times, it's hard to see how
serious global-emissions cuts could take place without "increased
attention to equity."<br>
<br>
<b>Alternatively, </b>global emissions could continue to grow
through the middle of the century and, along with them, global
inequality. In this scenario, by 2050 a temperature increase of two
degrees Celsius would, for all intents and purposes, be locked in.
Developed nations would have constructed storm-surge barriers to
keep out the sea and erected border walls to keep out refugees. They
would also have started to air-condition the outdoors. Developing
nations, meanwhile, would have been left to fend for themselves. To
a certain extent, all of this is already happening. A study
published in 2019 by Noah Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke, both of
Stanford University, found that in the past fifty years warming had
slowed economic growth in those parts of the world which have
emitted the least carbon, perhaps by as much as twenty-five per
cent. "Not only have poor countries not shared in the full benefits
of energy consumption, but many have already been made poorer (in
relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy countries," the
two wrote. Qatar, one of the world's hottest countries and also one
of the richest, already cools its soccer stadiums and its outdoor
malls.<br>
<br>
<b>In a third scenario</b>, global warming could by 2050 produce
global conflict that draws in poor nations and rich ones alike.
This, too, already seems, to a certain extent, to be taking place. A
significant body of research suggests that the Syrian civil war was
caused, at least in part, by a drought that pushed more than a
million people out of their villages. The war, which has claimed
some four hundred thousand lives, has, in the course of nearly a
decade of bloodshed, involved the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
and Turkey. Future droughts in the Middle East are apt to be even
more severe and prolonged, as are droughts in other volatile
regions, like the Horn of Africa. It doesn't seem that it would take
too many more Syrian-scale conflicts to destabilize large swaths of
the globe. At the very least, climate change "will endanger the
stability of the international political order and the global
trading networks upon which American prosperity rests," Michael
Klare, an expert on resource competition and a professor at
Hampshire College, has written. "As conditions deteriorate, the
United States could face an even more perilous outcome: conflict
among the great powers themselves."<br>
<br>
If all these scenarios appear to be either too unrealistic or too
unpleasant, I invite readers to write their own. Here's the one
stipulation: it must involve drastic change. At this point, there's
simply no possible future that averts dislocation. The horrific
fires this fall in California and Oregon, which were, in a manner of
speaking, stoked by climate change, serve as a preview of the world
to come. As Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at
Texas A. & M. University, recently put it, "If you don't like
all of the climate disasters happening in 2020, I have some bad news
for you about the rest of your life." Billions of people will have
to dramatically change the way they live or the world will change
dramatically or some combination of the two. My experience reporting
on climate change, which now spans almost twenty years, has
convinced me that the most extreme outcomes are, unfortunately,
among the most likely. As the warnings have grown more dire and the
consequences of warming more obvious, emissions have only increased
that much faster. Until the coronavirus hit, they were tracking the
highest of the so-called pathways studied by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. If this continues, the I.P.C.C. projects
that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have
risen by almost eight degrees Fahrenheit. Let's just say that at
that point no amount of outdoor air-conditioning will be sufficient.<br>
<br>
A few years ago, I interviewed James Hansen for a video project that
I was working on. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but he has
continued to speak out about climate change--and to get arrested
protesting projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. He was blunt
about the world's failure. When I asked him if he had a message for
young people, he said, "The simple thing is I'm sorry we're leaving
such a fucking mess."<br>
<br>
This excerpt was drawn from the afterword of "The Fragile Earth:
Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change," which is out October
6th, from Ecco.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-climate-change">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-climate-change</a><br>
<p> - - <br>
</p>
[OK, I'll bite]<br>
<b>Climate Manifesto</b><br>
Sustainability is forfeit<br>
Survival no longer assured<br>
All journeys are new.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://climatemanifesto.org">http://climatemanifesto.org</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Climate sensitivity worse than thought]<br>
<b>New Peer-Reviewed Research: Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity is
Worse that We Thought: Part 2 of 3</b><br>
Oct 5, 2020<br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
Part 2: I chat in detail in a three video series on how today's
climate and rate of change of climate related to the Eocene and PETM
(Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). Despite recent advances, the
link between evolution of atmospheric CO2 and climate during the
Eocene greenhouse period remains unclear. Modelling studies suggest
that to achieve the global warmth that characterised the early
Eocene, warmer climates must be more sensitive to CO2 forcing than
colder climates. In other words, climate sensitivity (temperature vs
CO2 level) depends on the starting conditions. In the new
peer-reviewed paper that I discuss, they test this assertion in the
geological record by combining a new high-resolution boron
isotope-based CO2 record with novel estimates of Global Mean
Temperature. They find that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS)
was indeed higher during the warmest intervals of the Eocene,
agreeing well with recent model simulations, and declined through
the Eocene as global climate cooled. These observations indicate
that the canonical IPCC range of ECS (1.5 to 4.5 C per doubling) is
unlikely to be appropriate for high-CO2 warm climates of the past,
and the state dependency of ECS may play an increasingly important
role in determining the state of future climate as the Earth
continues to warm. In other words, we are fucked.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRs-ezjwkBE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRs-ezjwkBE</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
October 6, 2008 </b></font><br>
<p>DeSmogBlog's Jeremy Jacquot praises the 2008 vice-presidential
debate between Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Governor Sarah
Palin (R-AK) for its focus on climate change and energy issues:<br>
<br>
"Palin made a big show of her ticket's emphasis on 'energy
independence' - even ducking a question about bankruptcy laws to
cheer for more offshore drilling - and McCain's 'all of the above'
policy. Though she went through the motions, I have my doubts that
she supports mandatory caps - or, frankly, that she supports any
real meaningful action on climate change. Now if only the next
debate moderator can get the presidential candidates arguing about
climate policy…"<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.desmogblog.com/biden-palin-finally-a-real-debate-about-climate-change-and-energy">http://www.desmogblog.com/biden-palin-finally-a-real-debate-about-climate-change-and-energy</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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