Tag: Climate change

Trump says it’s obvious how to fix the problem of wildfires in California: just remove every scrap of vegetation from the entire state. One wonders, among other things, if he realizes how much of the state is devoted to agriculture.

Chris Wallace asks Trump about the purpose of his trip.

"Just to see the firefighters. Nobody's ever seen what's going on over there."

From there, it gets worse.

Listen, if you can. Only 85 seconds pic.twitter.com/Zr80dAfW3U

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) November 16, 2018

Shrubs, he says angrily, flailing his stubby little hands. He really seems to think that California needs to pave itself over right this second to avoid more wildfires. One wonders how he thinks that would even be possible, let alone desirable.

The BBC has a long, painful story on the eradication of Paradise, which makes it frighteningly clear how fast it happened.

06:15 November 8, a report of damage to a power line.

06:29

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) reports that a wildfire has started outside Pulga, about three miles north-east of Paradise.

07:30

Staff at the Adventist Health Feather River Hospital in Paradise, about 25 miles from Pulga in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, are warned that the Camp Fire is getting close to town and that they should evacuate their patients.

One nurse, Tamara Ferguson, is carrying out checks on new mothers in the maternity ward alongside a new trainee. She spots an orange glow out of the window and steps outside with her colleagues.

As they look up at the sky, ash starts to fall like snow.

…

09:26

The sky over Paradise is by now a deep sepia as the smoke starts to blot out the sun.

Within 10 minutes, it is as though night has fallen.

The only lights are those of the cars trying to make it out of town, but much of the traffic has ground to a halt. Ash falls on Paradise at a rapid rate.

“No, it is not six o’clock or seven o’clock at night, people,” William Hart says on a video he broadcasts on Facebook. “I don’t even know what the eff time it is.”

His is the last car in the queue leaving Paradise as the flames close in.

As she tries to leave town, nurse Karen Davis’ vehicle breaks down.

“Fire was coming on both sides. It was a fire tornado,” she later tells CBS. “All of a sudden, it filled with black smoke.”

It was fast.

And things like faults in power lines aren’t predictable. Unless you shave the whole state bald and then cover it in concrete (which would not be physically possible), you can’t prevent wildfires by cutting down the “shrubs.” Trump can flail his stupid hands all he likes, but that won’t make him right about the shrubs.

Reasonable people, who understand that other people have brains and knowledge, can grasp this point, but Trump, who understands nothing outside his own head, cannot.

This is without even touching on the question of what it would be like to live in a world stripped of vegetation, and how any life would survive.

Ah, North Carolina. Will you rethink at all?

In 2012, the state now in the path of Hurricane Florence reacted to a prediction by its Coastal Resources Commission that sea levels could rise by 39in over the next century by passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts.

Policies like…saying no to new building on the beaches?

North Carolina has a long, low-lying coastline and is considered one of the US areas most vulnerable to rising sea levels.

Long, low-lying, and made even longer by the barrier islands.

But dire predictions alarmed coastal developers and their allies, who said they did not believe the rise in sea level would be as bad as the worst models predicted and said such forecasts could unnecessarily hurt property values and drive up insurance costs.

As a result, the state’s official policy, rather than adapting to the worst potential effects of climate change, has been to assume it simply won’t be that bad. Instead of forecasts, it has mandated predictions based on historical data on sea level rise.

“The science panel used one model, the most extreme in the world,” Pat McElraft, the sponsor of the 2012 bill, said at the time, according to Reuters. “They need to use some science that we can all trust when we start making laws in North Carolina that affect property values on the coast.”

So what will property values on the coast look like now, do you suppose?

The law required the coastal resources commission to put out another study in 2015, looking at expected sea level rise.

That report looked only 30 years ahead, rather than a century. It found that the rise in sea level during that time was likely to be roughly 6in to 8in, with higher increases possible in parts of the Outer Banks.

Some outside studies have offered more dire warnings. A report last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists said 13 North Carolina communities were likely to be “chronically inundated” with seawater by 2035.

And temporarily inundated by 2018.

Orrin Pilkey, a retired Duke University coastal geologist, wrote in a recent op-ed in the News & Observer that the state has still failed to take the steps that communities in Virginia and New Jersey have taken, to prepare for rising sea levels.

“Instead coastal development flourishes as more beachfront buildings, highways and bridges are built to ease access to our beautiful beaches,” he wrote. “Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond.”

Welp, that day may have arrived.

What’s one of the bad effects of global warming? Crop failures. Who is having crop failures right now?

Germany for one.

In Germany, record temperatures and no rainfall since early April have led to a drought and thousands of farms are facing bankruptcy because of crop failure.

This week, the government pledged $390 million in federal and state aid, but for many farmers, it’s not enough. Many of the country’s farmers are starting to question whether they can cope with climate change.

…

According to the German Farmers Association, 10,000 farms are facing financial ruin, dairy farmers are slaughtering cows because there’s not enough feed for them and while the national average grain shortfall this year is 26 percent, in some areas arable farmers have lost up to 70 percent of their grain crops, officials announced during a recent press conference.

Crop failures end up as famines. The world doesn’t have a plan for this.

Germany’s Agriculture Minister, Julia Klöckner has promised farmers up to 340 million euros in financial aid. It’s a far cry from the billion euros demanded by the farmers’ lobby, but the minister says she has to justify it to tax payers, who could end up paying extra for food.

In an attempt to calm consumers, Klöckner told reporters last week “there’s no need for panic. Supermarket shelves are still full.”

Just so a firefighter might attempt to calm residents by telling them the fire hasn’t reached their house yet, it’s still six whole inches away.

NPR basically does the same thing by ending on a facetious note.

It’s not only French fries that are set to go up in price. Breweries are worried about a poor barley yield and have warned that the shortfall will be reflected in the price of that other German staple, beer.

Haha yes prospective famines are hilarious.

Rupert Read just said no.

ike most Greens, I typically jump at opportunities to go on air. Pretty much any opportunity: BBC national radio, BBC TV, Channel 4, Sky – I’ve done them all over the years, for good or ill. Even when, as is not infrequently the case, the deck is somewhat stacked against me, or the timing inadequate for anything more than a soundbite, or the question up for debate less than ideal.

But this Wednesday, when I was rung up by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and asked to come on air to debate with a climate change denier, something in me broke, and rebelled. Really? I thought. This summer, of all times?

So, for almost the first time in my life, I turned it down. I told it that I will no longer be part of such charades. I said that the BBC should be ashamed of its nonsensical idea of “balance”, when the scientific debate is as settled as the “debate” about whether smoking causes cancer. By giving climate change deniers a full platform, producers make their position seem infinitely more reasonable than it is. (This contributes to the spread of misinformation and miseducation around climate change that fuels the inaction producing the long emergency we are facing.)

This idea that they need to let “the other side” have a turn is like thinking hurricanes and earthquakes should get to present their case in the news. Deniers can’t stop climate change by skepticaling about it on the BBC, they can only bollix up attempts to delay and mitigate it. Is that part of the mission of journalism? I wouldn’t think so.

In the end, the broadcast went ahead without me. Much of it wasn’t bad. The scientists interviewed were excellent. But the framing of the debate was awful, and framing is everything, so far as the message that most listeners receive is concerned. The presenter introduced the segment by asking, “Is climate change real?” The journalist doing vox pops bombarded ordinary people with canards such as, “Maybe it’s just a natural cycle?” And, of course, a climate change denier was given a huge and undeserved platform on an equal basis to his opponent.

In August 2018, this is unacceptable and it seems that quite a lot of people agree with me.

However, here’s the exciting thing. If we get more momentum behind the idea of refusing to participate, it will force a change of coverage methods by the BBC, which experts have been calling for for years. For if we all refuse to debate with the climate change deniers on public platforms, and press the BBC to catch up with the 21st century, it will be forced to change its ways, because the BBC cannot defend the practice of allowing a climate change denier to speak unopposed. If we truly want to see change on this issue, we need to be willing to let it know exactly how we feel. So, now I’m going to get on with filing my official complaint to the BBC …

So spread the word. (Rupert Read asked people to do just that on Facebook, so seriously, spread the word.)

There was a big die-off in Northern Europe in 1258.

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.

Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years.

It was a big famine, but it was a big famine caused by a Very Damn Big Volcano that threw sulfuric gases so high into the atmosphere that they veiled the whole planet and ruined the crops.

Mass deaths required capacious burial pits, as recorded in contemporary accounts. In 1258, a monk reported: “The north wind prevailed for several months… scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared, whence the hope of harvest was uncertain… Innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were found lying all about swollen from want… Nor did those who had homes dare to harbour the sick and dying, for fear of infection… The pestilence was immense – insufferable; it attacked the poor particularly. In London alone 15,000 of the poor perished; in England and elsewhere thousands died.”

It was just one of those things – a bad year for the crops.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the volcano’s exact location has yet to be established.

This Guardian piece is from 2012. Last night I watched a new Nova about the famine, the mystery, and the solution of the mystery. It’s pretty fascinating. Step one was pinning down the chemical composition of the gas cloud via ice cores from Greenland – they did that and found a massive spike in 1257 that made the one from Krakatoa look puny. Step two was checking both poles – they did that and found the spike on both, which meant the volcano had to be near the equator. Step three was checking on Indonesia to see if there were any likely-looking culprits, and finding one on Lombok island. Step four was going there to check out the pumice fields around the volcano, which are much deeper than any others they knew of, indicating a huge pyroclastic flow. Final step was comparing a sample to the ones from the ice cores: bingo. The Mount Samalas eruption. At least three of the authors on that Nature article were talking heads on the Nova. Here’s the abstract:

Large explosive eruptions inject volcanic gases and fine ash to stratospheric altitudes, contributing to global cooling at the Earth’s surface and occasionally to ozone depletion. The modelling of the climate response to these strong injections of volatiles commonly relies on ice-core records of volcanic sulphate aerosols. Here we use an independent geochemical approach which demonstrates that the great 1257 eruption of Samalas (Lombok, Indonesia) released enough sulphur and halogen gases into the stratosphere to produce the reported global cooling during the second half of the 13th century, as well as potential substantial ozone destruction. Major, trace and volatile element compositions of eruptive products recording the magmatic differentiation processes leading to the 1257 eruption indicate that Mt Samalas released 158 ± 12 Tg of sulphur dioxide, 227 ± 18 Tg of chlorine and a maximum of 1.3 ± 0.3 Tg of bromine. These emissions stand as the greatest volcanogenic gas injection of the Common Era. Our findings not only provide robust constraints for the modelling of the combined impact of sulphur and halogens on stratosphere chemistry of the largest eruption of the last millennium, but also develop a methodology to better quantify the degassing budgets of explosive eruptions of all magnitudes.

Their version of my crude summary of Nova’s adventure storytelling version of how they figured it out:

The 1257 eruption of Mt Samalas, a part of the Rinjani volcanic complex (Fig. 1) on Lombok Island (Indonesia), has been recognized as the “mystery eruption”⁷ associated with the largest sulphate spike of the last 2.3 ky recorded in cores from both Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets⁸. This continuous four-phase eruption evacuated 40 ± 3 km³ of trachydacitic magma during tens of hours, producing plinian plumes that rose up to 43 km in the stratosphere and tephra fingerprinted up to 660 km from the source, thus standing as the most powerful eruption of the last millenium⁹. Archaeologists recently determined a date of 1258 for mass burial of thousands of medieval skeletons in London¹⁰, that could be linked in some respect to climatic perturbations in the Northern Hemisphere by the 1257 Samalas eruption. Indeed, medieval chronicles in Northern Europe⁷ document the occurrence of initial warming in the early winter of 1258 just following the eruption, that was followed by extensive wet and cold climatic conditions in 1259 that may have impacted crops and contributed to the onset and magnitude of famines at that time for some regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The 1257 Samalas eruption might also have contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age¹¹.

It’s damn interesting. Also tragic – a third of the population of London died.

Phil Plait reports on yet another spike in global warming.

February 2016 was the hottest February on the planet on record, a staggering 1.35° C hotter than the average. The previous hottest Februaries were 1998 (0.88° above average) and 2015 (0.87°). That’s a huge jump.

Those numbers are from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the premier centers for keeping tabs on our ever-warming globe. They are from temperature measurements over land and ocean going back to 1880. They representtemperature anomalies, that is, deviations from an average. In this case, the average is taken over the range of 1951–1980. That makes comparing temperatures easier, and shows that February 2016 was the hottest recorded February for 136 years.