[MCN] Assorted climate clippings

Mon Feb 22 08:41:06 EST 2021

U.S. must go ‘well beyond Paris commitments’ to avert catastrophic global warming, warns scientist <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEBSzo9ZM2AMv7gh3s5Z3F4sqGQgEKhAIACoHCAow2Nb3CjDivdcCMJ_d7gU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
Scientist Michael Mann explained why the U.S. must go “well beyond those Paris commitments” as President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement ...
CNBC <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMNjW9wow4r3XAg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

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Grist  Jan 16, 2021

2020 was the hottest year on record. We’ll remember it as one of the century’s coldest.
https://grist.org/climate/2020-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-well-remember-it-as-one-of-the-centurys-coldest/ <https://grist.org/climate/2020-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-well-remember-it-as-one-of-the-centurys-coldest/>

Excerpt :  For 44 years in a row <https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/november-2020-year-ending-it-began-hot-streak> now, the globe has been hotter than the 20th century average. The world’s hottest seven years <https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/14/2020-was-hottest-year-on-record-nasa-scientists-say/> on record have all taken place since 2014, the 10 warmest years have occurred in the past decade and a half.
Each year, these monumental milestones seize the spotlight for a moment or two and then quickly fade away.

Tired of this cycle, Andrew Dessler, a professor in the geosciences department at Texas A&M University, has created a template auto-response <https://twitter.com/AndrewDessler/status/1348672668552327171/photo/1> for the requests he receives from journalists to comment on these records each year. 

“Thank you for emailing me asking for comment about 20__ being one of the hottest years on record,” it reads. “Here is a comment you can use for your story: ‘Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest in the record. This means that 20__ will end up being among the coolest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.’”

Dessler isn’t trying to be curmudgeonly. He’s pointing out something scientists have known since the late 19th century <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html>: If you dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the climate warms. “It’s basic physics,” Dessler told Grist. 

https://grist.org/climate/2020-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-well-remember-it-as-one-of-the-centurys-coldest/ <https://grist.org/climate/2020-was-the-hottest-year-on-record-well-remember-it-as-one-of-the-centurys-coldest/>

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"Ongoing reductions to groundwater storage are drying groundwater wells in the western US, and this manifestation of water scarcity warrants innovative groundwater management transcending status quos."

D. Perrone and S. Jasechko. 
Dry groundwater wells in the western United States. 
Environmental Research Letters  12 (2017) 104002

OPEN ACCESS
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa8ac0 <http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa8ac0>

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Texas and California built different power grids, but neither stood up to climate change <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiECJMSgsEJckJao29V4So5cMqGQgEKhAIACoHCAow4Zn5CjCu8uACMLTRlgY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
Texas and California may be worlds apart in their politics and climate policies, but they have something in common: Extreme weather crashed their power grids ...
POLITICO <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMOGZ-QowrvLgAg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

How Texas’ Drive for Energy Independence Set It Up for Disaster <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEBXvJU4S7JnGLI7W5SD0LUYqFwgEKg8IACoHCAowjuuKAzCWrzwwloEY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
Texas has refused to join interstate electrical grids and railed against energy regulation. Now it's having to answer to millions of residents who were left without ...
The New York Times <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMI7rigMwlq88?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

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Page 181 : “if Americans were asked point blank whether they would agree to reduce their energy consumption by one-half, many would probably recoil in apprehension and reject the idea. Yet energy consumption in 1960 was about half of what is now [ 1970 ]. Many of us remember 1960. Surely we had a civilized country then, with roads, electricity, entertainment, and so on. Yet we we were consuming half the energy …. Have we, by doubling our energy consumption, doubled our happiness?”

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Iowa energy company explains why wind turbines don't freeze in Iowa cold <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEFqyNMFlElC2cMJ5T-2P75IqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowndaaCzDI4LIDMJLv2gY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
A spokesperson with MidAmerican Energy Company said they install cold-weather packages into their wind turbines to help them stay warm as temperatures get ...
KCRG <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMJ3WmgswyOCyAw?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
14 hours ago

Why wind turbines thrive in Antarctica and colder places than Texas <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEOD1sKtfFJ3Z76LNBOde44gqIwgEKhoIACIQd3d3Lm1hc2hhYmxlLmNvbSoECAowCDDfsoMG?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
Wind turbines, which weren't responsible for the Texas energy crisis, regularly operate in freezing conditions and can be weatherized for wintry places.
Mashable <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAiEHd3dy5tYXNoYWJsZS5jb20qBAgKMAg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
5 hours ago
 <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEMn2faqVA7fsxEnGN17Cz2IqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowyNj6CjDyiPICMJyFxQU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
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NEWS RELEASE 17-FEB-2021
Climate change and fire suppression
Researchers investigate the complex factors that will fuel the wildfires of the 21st century

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/uoc--cca021621.php <https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/uoc--cca021621.php>

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd78e/pdf <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd78e/pdf>

————————— Pull quote  —————————

"Forest-density reduction is often a favored approach in regions where decades of fire suppression have significantly increased fuel loads. However, density reductions sometimes have unintended consequences, as Tague and her colleagues detailed in a paper recently published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change <<https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.591162/full <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.591162/full>>>. Under certain conditions, this practice can encourage vegetation growth, which can lead to greater water use by plants and potentially increasing fire risks.”

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The unprecedented and deadly blazes that engulfed the American West in 2020 attest to the increasing number, size and severity of wildfires in the region. And while scientists predict the climate crisis will exacerbate this situation, there's still much discussion around its contributing factors.

With this in mind, scientists at five western universities, including UC Santa Barbara, investigated the effects of human-driven climate change and more than a century of fire suppression, which has produced dense forests primed to burn. Their research, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters <<https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd78e/pdf <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd78e/pdf>>>, confirms the importance of both factors in driving wildfires, but revealed that their influence varies, even within the same region of the Western U.S.

"We wanted to know how climate change and fire suppression, each in different ways, can influence fire regimes," said coauthor Naomi Tague, a professor of ecohydrology and ecoinformatics at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

The scientists, led by Assistant Professor Erin Hanan at the University of Nevada, integrated three research methods to tackle these questions. They employed remote sensing data to characterize past fires. They harnessed climate models to determine the role climate change has played in local meteorological patterns, including temperature, rainfall and humidity. And they used an earth-system model to simulate how climate, water, vegetation and wildfire interact over space and time.

The scientists drew on climate records developed through a National Science Foundation-funded initiative called FireEarth and a watershed model called RHESSys-Fire that originated in the Tague Team Lab at UC Santa Barbara. Funding from another NSF initiative had enabled Tague's lab to incorporate advances to this model that represent the climate impacts on fire, as well as hydrology and vegetation growth. The authors applied these techniques to data gathered across complex terrain in two mixed-conifer watersheds in the Idaho Batholith and the Central Rocky Mountains.

The results were clear, but far from straightforward. "For some locations, we found that climate change increased fire activity," said Tague, who led the SERI-Fire initiative, "but surprisingly, in other locations, climate change actually decreased fire activity."

The team found that climate change increased burn probability and led to larger, more frequent fires in wetter areas while doing the opposite in more arid locations. In areas of intermediate soil moisture, the effects of climate change and fire suppression varied in response to local trade-offs between flammability and fuel loading.

The scientists were surprised that climate change could decrease the severity of fires under certain conditions, but Tague offers an explanation. "Climate change can reduce the growth and development of fuels," she said, "particularly in more arid sites."

These are crucial insights in our efforts to understand and manage wildfires. "This paper presents one of the first wildfire attribution studies at the scale of actionable management," said lead author Erin Hanan, "and shows that local responses to climate change and fire suppression can be highly variable even within individual watersheds."

"This study is really the first to directly compare the independent effects of climate change versus fire suppression, which you can only do using dynamic models," added UC Merced Assistant Professor Crystal Kolden, who led the FireEarth initiative. "We were actually surprised that the climate change signal was so clear; that's kind of rare. And even though our study was limited to Idaho, the forest types and climate we modeled are found throughout the western U.S., so they are good analogs for many other watersheds."

In addition to illuminating the roles of major wildfire factors, the research also boosts methodology. "This paper moves fire modeling and prediction forward by looking inside watersheds and disentangling the many factors that influence how fire regimes will evolve in the coming decades," said Tague.

While climate change remains a major component -- increasing the frequency and intensity of large wildfires across the globe -- there are many regions where past suppression efforts still play an important role. Forest-density reduction is often a favored approach in regions where decades of fire suppression have significantly increased fuel loads. However, density reductions sometimes have unintended consequences, as Tague and her colleagues detailed in a paper recently published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Under certain conditions, this practice can encourage vegetation growth, which can lead to greater water use by plants and potentially increasing fire risks.

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“The emphasis on consensus in IPCC reports, however, has put the spotlight on expected outcomes,…"

“...it is now equally important that policy-makers understand the more extreme possibilities that consensus may exclude or downplay.”

Michael Oppenheimer,  Brian C. O’Neill, Mort Webster,  Shardul Agrawala . The Limits of Consensus. Science  SEPTEMBER 14 2007

 <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEBVvS_LE-q1HC6vkwkvjgpIqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowyNj6CjDyiPICMK_dxAU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

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Page 181 : “if Americans were asked point blank whether they would agree to reduce their energy consumption by one-half, many would probably recoil in apprehension and reject the idea. Yet energy consumption in 1960 was about half of what is now [ 1970 ]. Many of us remember 1960. Surely we had a civilized country then, with roads, electricity, entertainment, and so on. Yet we we were consuming half the energy …. Have we, by doubling our energy consumption, doubled our happiness?”

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