Massive heat waves present in most all of the western United States

From an Article by Jason Samenow and Matthew Cappucci, Washington Post, August 17, 2020

The weather in the West has gone off the rails. Since late in the past week, the blistering heat has set scores of high-temperature records. The heat has fueled violent thunderstorms unleashing a barrage of lightning strikes, igniting a rash of fires. Lightning even filled the sky over the San Francisco Bay area on Sunday and Monday, where such displays are rare.

The punishing heat forced rolling blackouts in California on Friday for the first time in 19 years, affecting up to 2 million people. More may be necessary this week as the punishing heat lingers.

The extreme weather stems from a massive, unusually intense heat dome over the Southwest. It developed late in the past week and is now near peak intensity. It is forecast to hold in place for at least another week, although its strength will gradually ease.

The heat is a “heat storm”

Excessive heat warnings and heat advisories smother the western United States, affecting much of California (except for the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada range); all of Nevada; much of western and southern Arizona, including Phoenix; western Utah, including Salt Lake City; central and eastern Oregon and Washington; and large parts of Idaho and Montana, all the way to the Canadian border. Over 56 million Americans are under some sort of heat alert.

Heat is the leading cause of the weather-related deaths in the United States in many years. “Long duration heat spells like this one can be extremely dangerous, be sure to limit your outdoor exposure and stay hydrated!” tweeted the National Weather Service forecast office serving Las Vegas, which is under an excessive-heat warning through at least Wednesday.

Heat wave ‘Hugo?’ New coalition seeks to name hot weather like hurricanes.

Since Friday, scores of long-standing heat records have fallen. Several of these records have not only met or exceeded previous marks for the day they occurred but also for the entire month of August. Some of the August records include:

>> Phoenix hit 117 degrees Friday, tying its highest temperature during the month.
>> Oakland hit 100 degrees Saturday for the first time on record during August.
>> Needles, in California’s southeastern desert, set an August record of 123 on Saturday.
>> Sacramento set an August record of 112 degrees Sunday.

The searing 130-degree high temperature in Death Valley on Sunday has captured international attention. If confirmed, it will become the highest temperature measured on the planet during August and the third-hottest in any month. It would also be the highest temperature observed on Earth since at least 1931. The only hotter two temperature measurements prior to that are disputed by some experts.

Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, potentially Earth’s highest temperature since at least 1931

Death Valley could flirt with 130 degrees again Monday afternoon. In fact, it is forecast to see highs at or above its previous August record of 127 degrees through Wednesday. Highs of at least 124 degrees are forecast through Sunday.

While not as extreme as Death Valley, the heat in Phoenix has also been unforgiving. After posting its hottest month on record in July, it has hit at least 110 degrees for five straight days. Highs are forecast to remain near or above 110 degrees for the entire week. It has reached at least 110 degrees on 40 days in 2020, crushing the previous record of 33 such instances in 2011.

In California, the heat resulted in scores of record highs over the weekend including around Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento. Early Sunday morning, a bizarre “heat burst” raised the temperature 20 degrees in two hours in Fairfield, about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco. The temperature shot from around 80 to 100 degrees in the hours around sunrise.

Because of the demand for cooling, California endured rolling power outages Friday. Utilities urged residents to conserve energy to reduce the chance of additional blackouts.

“Conservation is critical to help reduce the need for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to direct the state’s utilities, including PG&E, to implement rotating outages in order to reduce load,” wrote PG&E on its website Monday. “With the weather forecasted to be even hotter, PG&E urges customers to be prepared for power outages.”

Thunderstorms are occurring more frequently

Fueled by the heat, a round of booming thunderstorms that produced a spectacular lightning show early Sunday morning awakened residents in the Bay Area. A surge of moisture ejecting north from former Tropical Storm Fausto near the Baja Peninsula contributed to the rare summertime storms. The storms ignited a number of new wildfires through their pinpoint lightning strikes.

The National Weather Service in San Francisco issued an unusually large severe thunderstorm warning that covered more than 7,000 square miles from Monterey Bay to the Bay Area and north into Napa Valley. The office warned of “erratic outflow wind gusts of 50 to 70 mph wind gusts, [and] frequent lightning.” The warning, the largest ever issued by that office, was six times larger than the state of Rhode Island.

“This 20 year forecaster cant recall such a widespread [thunderstorm] event on the heels of such a heat wave,” wrote one meteorologist in the office forecast discussion late Sunday.

The storms were preceded by an extraordinary roll cloud, marking the leading edge of cool air associated with the storms working up the Santa Cruz Coast.

A second round of thunderstorms occurred early Monday morning but with considerably fewer lightning strikes. That’s because moisture at the mid-levels of the atmosphere was scant in comparison to Saturday night. Concern was growing that “dry thunderstorms” could spark lightning strikes with little to no rainfall to quell the flames.

“Any thunderstorms that do develop will move quickly with lightning strikes outpacing any (unlikely) wetting rains at the surface,” the National Weather Service wrote.

More thunderstorms, including some dry thunderstorms, were expected throughout the day Monday. One webcam revealed four small fires ignited by lightning in one area Monday morning.

Extreme fire behavior is now widespread

The anomalously hot and dry conditions have acted as a breeding ground for wildfire growth, supporting extreme fire behavior and making the concerns surrounding dry lightning that much more pressing.

National Weather Service offices in California blanketed much of the state in red flag warnings to account for fire danger exacerbated by the heat wave.

Hazards include a “high probability of fire starts with any lightning,” according to the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “Rapid spread of fire [is] possible depending on terrain and local wind conditions.”

Even after any thunderstorms pass, persistent hot, dry conditions will sap vegetation of moisture and litter the ground with fuel ripe for fire growth. A number of other wildfires continued to rage Monday, taking advantage of the parched conditions to blaze at full fury.

On Saturday, the rapidly expanding Loyalton Fire in Lassen County, Calif., between Reno, Nev., and Lake Tahoe, produced a barrage of extreme fire tornadoes that prompted a first of its kind “fire tornado warning.”

A freak fire tornado warning was issued in California on Saturday amid swarm of spinning blazes

The souped-up version of a tornado warning mentioned the potential of fire tornadoes and 60-mph winds, cautioning “this is [an] extremely dangerous situation for fire fighters.”

The Loyalton Fire had burned some 36,295 acres as of Monday morning, and was only 5 percent contained.

Farther south in Southern California, the Lake Fire was burning in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles. It had claimed more than 18,300 acres by Sunday night, and was still raging to kick off the workweek. The fire was 12 percent contained.

An extreme heat dome, likely made more intense by climate change

The exceptionally hot and dry conditions are made possible by a significant ridge of high pressure, colloquially referred to as a “heat dome.” Air inside the system sinks and warms, while drying out and eradicating any widespread shots of rainfall.

On weather maps, a rare number appeared as a testament to how significant the heat dome is: 600. That describes the height in dekameters, or tens of meters, that the halfway point of the atmosphere’s mass is above the surface.

When air warms, it expands. When it cools, a volume of air shrinks. An air mass this hot expands a lot, causing a column of air to grow and raising the atmosphere’s halfway point. With this particular system, that level is 6,000 meters — or about 19,700 feet — above the surface.

This level “represents a threshold that is coincident with record heat over the Western United States,” wrote Ryan Maue, a meteorologist who operates the website weathermodels.com, in a Twitter message.

Instances of heat domes exceeding this 6,000-meter level used to be rare but have increased dramatically in recent years. Maue examined data back to 1958 and found almost all of the high-powered heat domes have occurred since 1983 — with the overwhelming majority of them occurring since 1990.

“[T]he 6000-meter club “heat domes” are certainly becoming more frequent b/c of climate change, now a nearly annual occurrence,” he wrote in a Twitter message.

Scientists have found the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves worldwide are increasing because of human-caused climate change. A 2019 study found the planet has entered a “new climate regime” with “extraordinary” heat waves that global warming is worsening.

THIS YEAR 2020 Is Our Last, Best Chance to Save the Planet

From an Article by Justin Worland, TIME — America Must Change, July 9, 2020

From our vantage point today, 2020 looks like the year when an unknown virus spun out of control, killed hundreds of thousands and altered the way we live day to day. In the future, we may look back at 2020 as the year we decided to keep driving off the climate cliff–or to take the last exit. Taking the threat seriously would mean using the opportunity presented by this crisis to spend on solar panels and wind farms, push companies being bailed out to cut emissions and foster greener forms of transport in cities. If we instead choose to fund new coal-fired power plants and oil wells and thoughtlessly fire up factories to urge growth, we will lock in a pathway toward climate catastrophe. There’s a divide about which way to go.

In early April, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. and doctors urgently warned that New York City might soon run out of ventilators and hospital beds, President Donald Trump gathered CEOs from some of the country’s biggest oil and gas companies for a closed-door meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. The industry faced its biggest disruption in decades, and Trump wanted to help the companies secure their place at the center of the 21st century American economy.

Everything was on the table, from a tariff on imports to the U.S. government itself purchasing excess oil. “We’ll work this out, and we’ll get our energy business back,” Trump told the CEOs. “I’m with you 1,000%.” A few days later, he announced he had brokered a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to cut oil production and rescue the industry.

Later in April, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, in a video message from across the Atlantic, offered a different approach for the continent’s economic future. A European Green Deal, she said, would be the E.U.’s “motor for the recovery.”

“We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently,” she said. On May 27, she pledged more than $800 billion to the initiative, promising to transform the way Europeans live.

For the past three years, the world outside the U.S. has largely tried to ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate, hoping 2020 would usher in a new President with a new position, re-enabling the cooperation between nations needed to prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But there’s no more time to wait.

We’re standing at a climate crossroads: the world has already warmed 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass 2°C, we risk hitting one or more major tipping points, where the effects of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that threshold, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. Climate change has understandably fallen out of the public eye this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages.

Nevertheless, this year, or perhaps this year and next, is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate change. “We’ve run out of time to build new things in old ways,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. What we do now will define the fate of the planet–and human life on it–for decades.

The time frame for effective climate action was always going to be tight, but the coronavirus pandemic has shrunk it further. Scientists and policymakers expected the green transition to occur over the next decade, but the pandemic has pushed 10 years of anticipated investment in everything from power plants to roads into a monthslong time frame.

Countries have already spent $11 trillion to help stem the economic damage from COVID-19. They could spend trillions more. “It’s in this next six months that recovery strategies are likely to be formulated and the path is set,” says Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist known for his landmark 2006 report warning that climate change could devastate the global economy.

There’s No Substitute for EARTH

“You can get Time Magazine now at your newstand.”

Forced moves from the red areas to the blue areas

From an Article by Oliver Milman, The Guardian, September 24, 2018

A study published last year found that the economies of the southern states, along with parts of the west, will suffer disproportionately as temperatures rise. In what researchers called potentially one of the largest transfers of wealth in US history, the poorest third of counties are expected to lose up to 20% of their income unless greenhouse gas emissions are severely curtailed. Wealth, and potentially people, are expected to shift north and west.

Meanwhile, cities already struggling with heat will see wealthy residents head for cooler climes. Last year, 155 people died in Phoenix due to a particularly fierce summer. Increasing heat will start testing the durability of the populace, even those shielded by air conditioning. In the western states, wildfires are getting larger, razing homes in ever more spectacular ways and choking thousands of people with carcinogenic smoke.

Further to the south, at the border, there are suggestions that people from Central America are being nudged towards the US because of drought and hurricanes in their homelands, part of a trend that will see as many as 300 million climate refugees worldwide by 2050.

“People will get very grumpy and upset with very hot temperatures,” said Amir Jina, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago who co-authored the research on economic losses. “Even if you have air conditioning, some areas start to look less habitable. By the middle of the century parts of the south-west and south-east won’t look attractive to live in.

“That insidious climate migration is the one we should worry about. The big disasters such as hurricanes will be obvious. It’s the pressures we don’t know or understand that will reshape population in the 21st century.”

Prodded to name refuges in the US, researchers will point to Washington and Oregon in the Pacific north-west, where temperatures will remain bearable and disasters unlikely to strike. Areas close to the Great Lakes and in New England are also expected to prove increasingly attractive to those looking to move.

By 2065, southern states are expected to lose 8% of their US population share, while the north-east will increase by 9%. A recent study forecast that the population in the western half of the US will increase by more than 10% over the next 50 years due to climate migration, largely from the south and midwest.

But these population shifts are uncertain and are bound by a tangle of other factors and caveats. People will still largely follow paths guided by nearby family or suitable jobs. Even those who do want to move may find favoured locations too expensive.

Some will just grimly hang on. “With property rights as strong as they are in the US, some people may choose to go down with the ship,” said Harvard’s Keenan. “The question is whether they have the means and the options to do anything else.”

“People can usually cope with being a little less comfortable, but if you see repeated storms or severe damage to crops, that will trigger change,” said Solomon Hsiang, who researches how climate change will affect society at the University of California.

“There will be pressure to move a little north. It won’t be everyone, though, it won’t be like the great migration of wildebeest in Africa. Whole cities picking up and moving would be hugely expensive.”

Smaller towns are giving relocation a go, however. In 2016, the community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was the first place to be given federal money to replant itself. The population, situated on an island being eaten away by the sea, is looking to move to a former sugar cane farm 30 miles inland.

“We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said Chantal Comardelle, who grew up in the Isle de Jean Charles community.

“We will be the first ones to face this in the modern US but we won’t be the last. It’s important for us to get it right so other communities know that they can do it, too.”

About a dozen coastal towns in Alaska are also looking to relocate, as diminishing sea ice exposes them to storms and rising temperatures thaw the very ground beneath them. One, Newtok, has identified a new site and has some federal funding to begin uprooting itself.

A buyout of damaged and at-risk homes has already occurred in New York City’s Staten Island in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, while certain flood-prone houses in Houston, pummeled by Hurricane Harvey last year, are also being purchased and razed.

But the cost of doing this for all at-risk Americans would be eye-watering. Estimates range from $200,000 to $1m per person to undertake a relocation. If 13 million people do have to move, it seems fantastical to imagine $13tn, or even a significant fraction of this amount, being spent by governments to ease the way.

“As a country we aren’t set up to deal with slow-moving disasters like this, so people around the country are on their own,” said Joel Clement, a former Department of the Interior official who worked on the relocation of Alaskan towns.

“In the Arctic I’m concerned we’ve left it too late. Younger people have left because they know the places are doomed. These towns won’t be relocated within five years and I’m sure there will be a catastrophic storm up there. My hope is no lives will be lost.”

Ultimately, the US will have to choose what it wants to defend and hope its ingenuity outstrips the environmental changes ranged against it. Not everyone will be able to shelter behind fortifications like the ‘big U’ planned to defend lower Manhattan. Wrenching decisions will have to be made as to what and where will be sacrificed.

“We won’t see whole areas abandoned but neighborhoods will get sparse and wild looking, the tax base will start to crumble,” said Stoddard, mayor of South Miami. “We don’t have the laws to deal with that sort of piecemeal retreat. It’s magical thinking to think someone else will buy out your property.

“We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come with a solution. There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”

Fires ravaged parts of Southern California in December 2017, unusually late for fire season

HOST: Steve Curwood, Public Radio International, Living on Earth.

DATE: January 12, 2018, WEB-SITE: www.loe.org

CURWOOD: From PRI, and the Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – tells us America suffered a record amount of damage in 2017 from natural disasters, with a tab of more than 306 billion dollars. And to put that 306 billion in perspective, consider that it’s more than the interest on the US national debt, and twice the federal budget for health, Medicare, and education. Extreme weather hit almost every state this year: wildfires out west, Hurricanes Irma, Maria and Harvey in the South, and disasters that got less press coverage but still cost of over a billion dollars — events like the Minnesota hailstorm and drought in the mid-west. Here to discuss these steep costs and how they relate to climate disruptions is Kendra Pierre-Louis from the New York Times Climate Desk. Welcome to Living on Earth Kendra!

PIERRE-LOUIS: Thanks, Steve. I’m so glad to be here.

CURWOOD: So, 2017 was only the third hottest year on record in the US, but at 306 billion dollars, disaster damage broke all records.
PIERRE-LOUIS: When you go back to 1980 when they first started keeping records, there were only 3 natural disasters that topped a billion dollars. This year it was 16. The only other year where there are 16 events that topped a billion dollars was in 2011. So what we’re seeing is it’s not just that we’re having severe weather events, we’re having more of them.

CURWOOD: So, $306 billion dollars. Just how unprecedented is this figure record-wise compared to previous years?
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yes, it’s record-breaking. The next closest disaster year was in 2005, and that was the year of Hurricane Katrina and that was $91 billion dollars less.

CURWOOD: Now, of course, we’re not saying that climate caused all of this, but climate amplifies these disasters.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Right. We can definitely say that climate change amplified these disasters, and that we can see especially when it comes to, like, the western fires or the hurricanes that happen this year, we can definitely see the fingerprints of climate change. Researchers found that when it came to Hurricane Harvey that 38 percent of the rain can be attributed to climate change. That means in some places where as much as 50 percent of the rain fell, almost 20 of those inches you can blame on climate change.

The Tubes Fire, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, destroyed parts of Napa, Sonoma, and Lake Counties in the Northern part of the state.

CURWOOD: Now, what kinds of natural disasters account for the largest portion of these costs?
PIERRE-LOUIS: Hurricanes account for the largest portion of these costs, but it was also the most costly fire year on record as well. And then when you start digging into the data it’s just the sheer number of incidences. When you go back to 1980 when they first started keeping records, there were only three natural disasters that topped a billion dollars. This year it was 16. The only other year where there were 16 events that topped a billion dollars was in 2011. So, what we’re saying is it’s not just that we’re having severe weather events. We’re having more of them.

CURWOOD: It seems that there are many disasters that cost a billion dollars or more that didn’t surface in the national consciousness in a big way this year, but nonetheless had a fairly staggering impact collectively. Talk to me about some of those.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Sure, you have the Missouri and Arkansas floods and severe weather. That was $1.7 billion dollars. You have hail storms and high winds in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee…that was $2.6 billion dollars. One of the ones that I think did not get a ton of attention was the drought, for example, in South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. And droughts are really tricky because there are so slow moving that we don’t notice them. But for the farmers who it impacted, a lot of them like cattle ranchers, it caused them a tremendous lot of financial loss.

CURWOOD: Talk to me a bit more about how climate change may have aggravated all this damage.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yes, so it was unusually warm across the country. NOAA came out with that release the same day they came out with the disaster data, and so it’s a threat multiplier. A really good example is the hurricanes. The oceans were warmer than usual, so that warm water fed the hurricanes. The wildfires out west, California was wetter in the winter and then it was really really dry, so all of that moisture created a ton of grass that grew really quickly, then the grass died off because it was so dry and then when the fire started it fed on all of that dry grass, and so that was all amplified by climate change.

A hailstorm in Minnesota racked up $2.4 billion in damage for the state.

CURWOOD: And how does 2017 figure on warming … on the warming record?
PIERRE-LOUIS: It’s the third warmest year in the United States on record. The global data isn’t out yet, but it should be out next week.

CURWOOD: So, things are really heating up.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Yeah, the Earth has a fever.

CURWOOD: How are insurance companies dealing with this? How much of the damage are they paying for?
PIERRE-LOUIS: A lot. This was a very expensive insurance year. It was the most expensive disaster year on record for insurers according to Munich RE, one of the world’s largest reinsurers. They’re recently the insurers of insurance companies. A lot of it was fueled by the disasters in United States, but there was also significant flooding in Asia. Obviously, what they’re going to do is they’re going to start passing those costs on to people. So, if you’re living in places that are at high risk for flooding or high risk for fires, you’re going to end up seeing increased costs because that’s the only way that they’re doing it. The one exception is in Florida because a lot of Florida flooding insurance and hurricane insurance is backed by the federal government. So, actually taxpayers are on the hook for those costs, and so there’s going to be sort of a reckoning when it comes to Florida about how they handle the insurance.

CURWOOD: Beyond the bottom line, what kind of toll is this taking on people’s psychological well-being?
PIERRE-LOUIS: There was a study that basically suggested that when these kinds of disasters happens, it’s actually really psychologically traumatic because not only do you lose your home in many cases, but you also lose your social connections, you don’t have your neighbors, you don’t have this breadth of support system. How you’ll deal with it really depends on whether it’s the first time you’ve gone through this or if it’s multiple occurrences. But basically it’s really traumatic and that’s ignoring, for example, the death toll rate. Like, if you’ve lost a loved one in one of these disasters that’s obviously going to be even permeate even further.

CURWOOD: So, does it get worse the more times you go through it or do you become more resilient…you say, ‘Oh all right, here it is again.’
PIERRE-LOUIS: It seems like people get worse. The one researcher that I talked to that looked at the flooding in Lafayette, I believe in 2016, said that after the rains happened in Lafayette the children whenever it rained a little bit too hard, the children would freak out. They really thought they were going to lose their homes again, they thought the floods were coming back. They really didn’t know how to deal with it.

CURWOOD: Kendra, what’s the lesson that we should be taking from this?
PIERRE-LOUIS: The lesson is two-fold. The first is that we should be taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon emissions that we’re releasing into the atmosphere so we can stave off the worst effects of these natural hazards. The other thing is we need to go deep into planning for the future, which is to accept that these kinds of occurrences are more likely to happen. When you look at Harvey in particular, we have people who are moving into flood zones, moving into places that were designed to flood and so it’s hard to say that that’s natural, right? We need to think really through in terms of where we are putting our communities and how we’re planning our communities, so that we are more resilient when these kinds of weather events happen.

CURWOOD: Kendra Pierre-Louis is a Climate Desk reporter for The New York Times. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
PIERRE-LOUIS: Thanks so much for having me.

Storms, Drought, Sea-Level Rise Crises

Military and national security experts are sounding the alarm about tens of millions of climate refugees

From an Article by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams, December 1, 2016

Climate change—and resultant natural disasters, droughts, and sea level rise—”could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” senior military figures told the Guardian.

Specifically, the experts echoed a recent warning from the United Nations that without radical action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “we will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy,” as the number of global climate refugees climbs.

“We’re going to see refugee problems on an unimaginable scale, potentially above 30 million people,” Maj. Gen. Munir Muniruzzaman, chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on climate change and a former military adviser to the president of Bangladesh, told the Guardian.

“Climate change could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” added Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney, a member of the U.S. State Department’s foreign affairs policy board and CEO of the American Security Project. “We’re already seeing migration of large numbers of people around the world because of food scarcity, water insecurity, and extreme weather, and this is set to become the new normal.”

Such a crisis would serve “as an accelerant of instability,” Cheney said—even more so than it has already.

As Forbes explained on Tuesday:

Natural disasters displaced 36 million people in 2009, the year of the last full study. Of those, 20 million moved because of climate-change related factors. Scientists predict natural disaster-related refugees to increase to as many as 50 to 200 million in 2050. This will cause increasing social stress and violence, mostly in developing nations without the resources to cope, such as in poorer coastal countries in Asia, and in regions of Africa subject to desertification.

Dozens of military and national security experts, including former advisers to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, issued a similar admonition in September, in the form of a Briefing Book for A New Administration (pdf) that warned of “the potential for ongoing climatic shifts to contribute to near and/or over-the-horizon instances of instability,” including mass migration.

But it’s not clear these words of caution will be absorbed or acted on by the incoming Trump administration.

As Scientific American pointed out this week, “[t]he military and intelligence communities may soon turn a blinder eye toward some climate change-related threats, indicated by President-Elect Donald Trump’s recent choices of climate-change skeptics for national security jobs, along with his own dismissive comments.”

With climate skeptics like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) nominated for high-profile national security positions, University of Texas at Austin professor Joshua Busby told the magazine, “some of the gains made by the Pentagon and other executive agencies to prepare for the security consequences of climate change could be undone.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term healing.

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

“It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.” — Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’ politicians everywhere should listen.” —Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

A video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Not ‘If’ But ‘How’: New Study Shows Why All Extreme Weather Is Climate Related

From an Article by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

New research explains why people debating whether or not specific events are caused by climate change have it all wrong

The debate over climate change has long focused on determining attribution—whether rising greenhouse gases and global warming caused a particular storm, drought, flood, or blizzard. Now, a new study in Nature Climate Change published Monday seeks to shift the underlying question from “if” to “how.”

“The climate is changing,” wrote National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo and University of Reading physicist Theodore Shepherd in their study, Attribution of Climate Extreme Events. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.”

Activities Sept. 19th thru 24th

Climate Activists to Converge on NYC for UN Summit, People’s Climate March (9/21/14) and More

From an Article by Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatch.com, September 9, 2014

For one week surrounding the UN Climate Summit 2014, the focus of the environmental movement will be in New York City. A dizzying array of events will take place, sponsored by hundreds of nonprofit organizations, businesses and religious groups all demanding immediate climate action.

One of the most high-profile events of the week that will capture widespread international attention is the People’s Climate March on September 21st.

Busloads of marchers are coming from all parts of the country and international participants are expected as well. With more than a thousand partnering groups, including nonprofits, religious groups, advocacy organizations, schools and businesses, tens of thousands—maybe more—could show up, with expectations of this event being the largest climate action in world history.

March organizers hope to impress on the world leaders who will be meeting at the UN on September 23rd that there is mass public demand for action on climate change and to take that level of public engagement to an even higher level.

“We believe that world leaders will only act (or be able to act) on climate change when everyday people express the desire, and create the political mandate for them to do so,” said organizers of the march. “Therefore, we aren’t opposed to this summit happening, and it is generally a good thing for heads of state to discuss climate change. We don’t have blind faith that the summit will solve the crisis either. We think that organizing, mobilizing and building social movements are ultimately what changes the course of history.”

While the UN Climate Summit on September 23rd is not open to the public (although it will be broadcast for public viewing), the schedule of activities is so dense that finding time to sleep that week might be a concern for any activist heading to NYC.

There are many small preliminary events including sign-making parties, rallies, meetings, concerts, forums and social gatherings. There are conferences, lectures, meetings and other events, both public and invitation only, listed at Climate Week NYC.

Here is a small sampling of some of the events going on in NYC that week:

NYC Climate Convergence from Sept. 19 – 21, an alternative to the UN Climate Summit. It will feature speakers like The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein, workshops, teach-ins, music and more.

Join Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance as part of NYC Climate Convergence Sept. 20 at St. Johns University in Room 112 from 10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Hudson Riverkeeper Paul Gallay will moderate an all-star panel of leaders and experts on the climate-water nexus.

Religions for the Earth Conference: This event will gather together more than 200 international religious and spiritual leaders at the Union Theological Seminary.

Solutions Grassroots Tour: Nightly music and theater performance and film screening at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. Sept. 22-26, it’s “an interactive music, theater and film event that motivates towns to adopt renewable energy solutions.” Watch the trailer here.

People’s Climate Justice Summit hosted by the Climate Justice Alliance will feature workshops, interactive panels and other activities to provide an alternative voice to the UN Climate Summit. This event is at the New School University Auditorium & UN Church Center from Sept. 22-23.

Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) is hosting “Women Leading Solutions on the Front Lines of Climate Change” with an international panel of women leaders at the UN Church Center on Sept. 22. The following day it’s co-sponsoring “Rights of Nature and Systemic Change in Climate Solutions” with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature on Sept. 23.

Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting: The theme of this four-day event, Sept. 21-24, is “Reimagining Impact” and it will stress the effectiveness of various climate strategies. It features plenary sessions, breakout groups, workshops and a star-studded lineup of speakers including President Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Matt Damon.

The UN Climate Summit itself will be broadcast online Sept. 23. “The Summit will consist of an opening ceremony; announcements by heads of state and governments; announcements by the private sector; and the launch of new initiatives that address key action areas by coalitions of governments, businesses and civil society organizations,” according to the UN. The Secretary-General will summarize the outcome of the day at the closing ceremony.”

See also: China and UK Join Forces on Climate Change Agreement

Union of Concerned Scientists

As Hurricane Sandy passes away, people are asking what role climate change plays in influencing such storms.

Oceans have absorbed much more of the excess heat from global warming than land and scientists understand that when hurricanes form, higher water temperatures can energize them and make them more powerful. Warming is also causing the atmosphere to hold more moisture and concentrate precipitation in stronger storms, including hurricanes. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, it retained much of its strength as it tracked across ocean water that was 9 degrees (F) warmer than average for this time of year.

However, the evidence is unclear when it comes to how frequently major late-season hurricanes such as Sandy may form in a warming world. Several factors, including differences in wind speed and direction, can break up hurricanes.

More broadly climate change is increasing sea levels globally, which affects all coastal storms, including hurricanes. Locally, sea level rise along the Mid-Atlantic and New England coasts has been among the highest in the world. Additionally, Hurricane Sandy made landfall during a full-moon high tide, which further drove storm surges that caused extensive coastal flooding. With continued warming, such high tides will become higher and more damaging.

“Human-caused climate change is delivering a one-two punch that is chipping away at our coasts,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “Sea-level rise and more intense precipitation from a warmer, moister atmosphere make coastal storms more damaging.”

New York City, which has integrated aspects of climate change into its disaster-response planning, is currently grappling with flooded streets and subways. Ekwurzel said that climate change and aging infrastructures challenge many coastal cities.

“For the most part, our sewers, roads and transportation networks were built for our grandparents’ climate,” said Ekwurzel. “When it comes to climate change, city planners need to be our first responders.”

The link between extreme weather and climate change is the subject of much ongoing research. A special report on extreme weather from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released this summer concluded that coastal flooding and more extreme precipitation were strongly linked to human-induced climate change and are expected to get worse in the future. By contrast, scientists can have only “low confidence” when it comes to the historical link between hurricanes and climate change. In the future, the report said, it’s likely that heavy rainfalls associated with hurricanes will become more intense. Overall, hurricane strength—measured as wind speed—is likely to increase while the frequency of hurricane formation is likely to either remain unchanged or decrease.

UCS created an infographic that puts the report’s conclusions about weather extremes and climate change since 1950 in context.

Last year, UCS prepared a backgrounder on Hurricane Irene which broadly applies to Sandy, too. It covers global sea-level rise, increasing rainfall for hurricanes and the hard economic choices coastal communities face in a warming world.

Earlier this month, UCS released a letter from more than 120 city and county officials and scientists in Florida calling on the presidential candidates to discuss sea-level rise.

So, what role does climate change play in altering the characteristics and impacts of extreme weather and climate events? What approaches exist for reducing vulnerability and exposure and for managing impacts and disasters associated with extreme events? Scientists discuss the findings of a new international report that brings together, for the first time, expertise in climate science, disaster risk management and adaptation. Watch the video below:

>>> NOTE: Regarding the above figure. The size of the circles relate to the strength of the evidence for the connections to climate change of observed extreme events since 1950. Assessment based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SREX Report (2012). Figure source: Union of Concerned Scientists. <<< 

>>> NOTE: The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices. The USC was started in 1969. <<<

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