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<font size="+2"><i><b>September 26, 2022</b></i></font><br>
<br>
<i>[ history and opinion -- thank you Esquire ]</i><br>
<b>In the End, Climate Change Is the Only Story That Matters</b><br>
To pretend otherwise is just to build the walls of your sandcastle
higher.<br>
<br>
By Charles P. Pierce SEP 24, 2022<br>
While we watch the disembowelment of various lawyers in the employ
of a former president* and wrap ourselves in the momentum of the
upcoming midterm elections, the climate crisis—its time and
tides—waits for no one. Every other story in our politics is a
sideshow now. Every other issue, no matter how large it looms in the
immediate present, is secondary to the accumulating evidence that
the planet itself (or at least large parts of it) may be edging
toward uninhabitability.<br>
<br>
All summer, the main climate story was the worldwide drought.
Reservoirs dried up, rivers shrank, huge rock walls showed “bathtub
rings” as markers of where all the water used to be. Lake Mead gave
up its forgotten mob victims, and rivers in the Balkans gave up Nazi
ships scuttled almost 80 years ago, one step ahead of the Red Army.
All of which was fairly interesting, but when you’re thirsty,
archaeology is no substitute for water.<br>
<br>
Now, though, it’s fall again, running toward winter, and for people
who live near the seacoast and on islands, that means it’s cyclonic
storm season again; and cyclonic storm systems are now bigger and
stronger and more relentless than they’ve ever been, strengthened
every year by the accumulating dynamics of the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
By the end of this week, Hurricane Fiona—which already had torn up
Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda, and the Turks and
Caicos—was building up strength again as it moved north and took
dead aim at Nova Scotia and the rest of Atlantic Canada.<br>
<p>From the Washington Post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ahead of Fiona, the Canadian Hurricane Centre has issued a
hurricane watch for portions of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward
Island, Iles-de-la-Madeleine and Newfoundland. “Hurricane Fiona
has the potential to be a landmark weather event in Eastern
Canada this weekend,” the Centre tweeted.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Usually, Atlantic Canada gets battered by winter storms roaring
in from the North Atlantic. Its encounters with tropical
hurricanes usually consist of withstanding their remnants. At
worst, a hurricane comes ashore in this region as a Category 2
storm, as was the case with Hurricane Juan. Even the legendary
Nova Scotia Cyclone of 1873, which came up on roughly the same
track as Fiona seems to be following, and which sank 1,200 boats
and killed 500 people, probably came ashore as a Category 1 storm.
If Fiona strikes as a Category 3 or 4, it will be a historic storm
for that part of the world.</p>
And Fiona has cousins lining up behind it.<br>
<blockquote>Fiona is one of five different systems that
meteorologists are carefully tracking in the Atlantic, which has
roared to life amid the peak of hurricane season. There’s also
Tropical Storm Gaston, which is centered 375 miles west-northwest
of the Azores over the northeast Atlantic. The Azores are under
tropical storm warnings, and could see conditions deteriorate
Friday and remain inclement through late Saturday. In addition, a
tropical wave exiting the coast of Senegal in Africa could
strengthen into a named storm in the next few days. There is also
a disturbance midway between Africa and South America that could
gradually develop. Of potentially high concern is another
fledgling storm that could deliver a serious blow to the Gulf or
Caribbean.</blockquote>
It will be maddening to see all the news stories about the damage
done by these storms, and about the people left homeless and without
electricity or clean drinking water, which will not put these facts
in the context of the climate crisis. This is the only way any of
the other stories make sense. The storms are bigger, stronger, and
they maintain their strength for longer—and all of that is a
consequence of the changes that we have wrought to the climate. At
this point, to cover these massive weather events without mentioning
the underlying dynamic that drives them is like covering a war
without mentioning explosives.<br>
<br>
But at the other end of the world, there was an even more
catastrophic storm in which the climate crisis was directly
involved. Climate has changed the weather in this place, and it has
changed the history of it, too. It was a place in which human beings
and polar bears depended for their livelihoods upon sea ice that
isn’t there any more, at least not when it’s supposed to be.<br>
<br>
In 1871, a fleet of 33 whaling ships in pursuit of bowhead whales
became trapped in the ice off Point Belcher, a small outcrop in far
northwestern Alaska that reaches out into the Chukchi Sea 100 miles
south of Point Barrow. The captains agreed to abandon the ships,
leaving behind goods estimated to be worth $1.6 million, including
the entire season’s haul of whale oil and baleen from that year’s
hunting. Then the 1,200 men, women, and children (it was customary
for captains to bring their entire families along on voyages these
songs) made a harrowing journey across the Arctic wilderness as the
pressure of the ice slowly crushed the ships they left behind.<br>
<br>
And all of this happened…in August.<br>
<br>
Once, the ice was strong enough for human beings and polar bears to
go out and hunt on it every year before Labor Day. This was
fortunate for all concerned, because the Bering Sea and the Chukchi
Sea were the places that typhoons went to die. They would come
roaring up the Western Pacific, bludgeoning the Philippines, or
Taiwan, or Japan, or the Koreas. Then they would beat themselves to
death on the sea ice or, if they managed to make it to shore, would
exhaust their energy on the solid permafrost back behind the
beaches.<br>
<p>Last week, the remnants of Typhoon Merbok slammed into hundreds
of miles of Alaskan coastline. There was no ice to slow it down
and most of the permafrost was gone, so the heavy rainfall made
the earth unreliable. Houses came off their foundations. One was
spotted sailing down a river until it snagged on a bridge. The
typhoon came ashore with the strength of a tropical storm, if not
an actual hurricane. From Alaska Public Radio:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>National Weather Service climatologist Brian Brettschneider
described the storm on Saturday as the “worst-case scenario.”
Forecasters had predicted earlier this week that it could be one
of the worst storms to hit Alaska’s western coast in recent
history. And it was. “In some places, this is clearly the worst
storm in living memory,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks
climatologist Rick Thoman. Hundreds of people across multiple
communities are sheltering in schools, which are serving as
emergency evacuation centers. In some communities, local
leaders’ early actions helped residents do what they needed to
move valuable vehicles and boats to higher ground. In other
communities, the storm overwhelmed efforts. “This is the first
time I’ve seen it this bad,” said Alvina Imgalrea in Chevak. In
Napakiak, Job Hale said, “It’s just a lake everywhere.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The climate crisis has taken away all of Alaska’s natural
defenses, so now it takes the full fury of storms that in earlier
days would never have made landfall intact. They would have
expended themselves on the frozen sea or shattered on the
rock-hard earth.</p>
A while back, I spent a week on Shishmaref, a barrier island in the
Chukchi Sea a little bit north of where the typhoon struck two weeks
ago. Because of the retreating sea ice and vanishing permafrost,
Shishmaref, which has been continuously occupied in one way or
another for 4,000 years, is itself vanishing into the ocean. One
day—if nothing changes, or perhaps even if something does—Shishmaref
will be gone.<br>
<br>
The people I met there have no doubt that the climate crisis is
real. They know they can’t hunt on the ice the way that they had for
millennia. The season is shorter and the ice less reliable. Every
winter now, somebody from the village or the surrounding area is
lost because they fell through the ice. The thawing permafrost means
the people of the village have lost what they called “the Eskimo
freezer,” the practice of burying seal meat to preserve it. When I
was there, the people in the village were working with state
officials to build a road to a gravel quarry from which they could
gather the material to build a road that would allow them to move
off the island. I found this almost unbearably poignant as well as
infuriating.<br>
<br>
To stand on the bluffs above the Chukchi Sea, looking down at a
series of broken and ruined seawalls that have already failed to
hold back the power of the ocean, and to consider that there are
politicians in this country who are unwilling to do anything about
the climate crisis, or who even deny it exists, is to wish they all
could come and stand on these bluffs and look out at the relentless,
devouring sea.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41355745/hurricane-fiona-climate-change/">https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41355745/hurricane-fiona-climate-change/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>[ maybe the harsh reality of looming deadline? plus all the greed
and physics? ] </i><br>
<b>What Many Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate
Change</b><br>
Wishful thinking hampers the clean-energy revolution.<br>
By Alec Stapp<br>
<br>
Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant
fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have
worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking
for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a
climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and
again.<br>
- -<br>
Yet we cannot succeed in the fight against global warming without
giving many alternatives to the status quo an opportunity to evolve
and prove themselves. In reality, the false solution to climate
change isn’t geoengineering or nuclear energy—it’s the belief that
we can decarbonize the economy only by upending our economic system,
categorically rejecting certain technologies, and spurning private
investment.<br>
Alec Stapp is a co-founder of the Institute for Progress.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/capitalism-clean-energy-technology-permitting/671545/">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/capitalism-clean-energy-technology-permitting/671545/</a><br>
<p><i><br>
</i></p>
<p><i><br>
</i></p>
<i>[ Great lesson in climate science - from RealClimate.org ]</i><br>
<b>Watching the detections</b><br>
25 SEP 2022 BY GAVIN <br>
The detection and the attribution of climate change are based on
fundamentally different frameworks and shouldn’t be conflated.<br>
<br>
We read about and use the phrase ‘detection and attribution’ of
climate change so often that it seems like it’s just one word
‘detectionandattribution’ and that might lead some to think that it
is just one concept. But it’s not.<br>
<br>
Formally, the IPCC definitions are relatively clear:<br>
<br>
Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that
climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined
statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change. An
identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of
occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined
to be small, for example, <10%.<br>
<br>
Attribution is defined as the process of evaluating the relative
contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with a
formal assessment of confidence.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/09/watching-the-detections/">https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2022/09/watching-the-detections/</a>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ One should wade carefully into a glossary - a deep forest of
definitions ]</i><br>
<b>Glossary</b><br>
This glossary defines some specific terms as the Lead Authors intend
them to be interpreted in the context of this report. Blue,
italicized words indicate that the term is defined in the Glossary.<br>
<blockquote>
<p>IPCC, 2018: Annex I: Glossary [Matthews, J.B.R. (ed.)]. In:
Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts
of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and
related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context
of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate
change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate
poverty<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
Note that subterms are in italics beneath main terms.<br>
<i>[Download a PDF and print it in 24 pages] </i><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/SR15_AnnexI.pdf">https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/SR15_AnnexI.pdf</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/glossary/">https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/glossary/</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Saturday CBS broadcast ]</i><br>
<b>Meet the last community to reside inside a national park</b><br>
Sep 24, 2022 About 100 full-time residents live in Wrangell-St.
Elias. It’s the last community to reside inside a national park. CBS
News correspondent Jeff Glor has more.<br>
"CBS Saturday Morning" co-hosts Jeff Glor, Michelle Miller and Dana
Jacobson...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UQLQgVWOcg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UQLQgVWOcg</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Aljazeera video - the Arctic Steppes -- Serengeti of the North
- Russian with subtitles ]</i><br>
<b>THE ZIMOV HYPOTHESIS</b><br>
349 views Apr 24, 2022 AlJazaeera <br>
WITNESS <br>
Film about Nature in Russia 2022<br>
THE ZIMOV HYPOTHESIS<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQW5g2NuLIl;;;l">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQW5g2NuLIl;;;l</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[The news archive - looking back at accidental truth telling ]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>September 26, 2004</b></i></font> <br>
September 26, 2004: In an apparent attack on his own bosses at the
Fox<br>
News Channel, Bill O'Reilly tells CBS News's Mike Wallace:<br>
<blockquote>"[The] government's gotta be proactive on [the]
environment. Global<br>
warming is here. All these idiots that run around and say it isn't<br>
here? That's ridiculous!"<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-oreilly-no-spin/">http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-oreilly-no-spin/</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://youtu.be/ZD39QY8ew3c">http://youtu.be/ZD39QY8ew3c</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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