November 2019 – Page 3 – This is Not Cool

Escanaba in da Sunlight: Solar in the Great North

I spent a few days in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a talk on Solar Energy, then ran down to Northern Central Michigan College in Petoskey for a Climate presentation. All just in time to get hammered by the latest polar vortex and lake effect snow squalls.

What’s really cool is I’ve been fortunate enough to be joined by the Land and Liberty Coalition, a politically conservative, but climate-and-energy aware group that’s pitching in with renewable energy across the midwest. Great outreach across boundaries to work for something we all need.

WLUC Escanaba:

ESCANABA, Mich. (WLUC) – Videographer and climate educator Peter Sinclair gave a presentation on the future of solar Wednesday night in Escanaba.

The session, called ‘Sun 101,’ talks about the benefits and realities of solar energy for the future.
It came directly after the UP Energy Task Force meeting about propane, in which some task force members remained to listen.
Sinclair gathers research from scientists and presents it to communities considering solar. Escanaba Township has been debating the implementation of a solar farm for months.
“It has a tremendous number of advantages in terms of flexibility,” says Sinclair. “It can be home scale, business scale, it can be community scale.”
Sinclair says other advantages include the fact that it creates energy without creating carbon – a major contributor to climate change.

Below, Michigander Jeff Daniels discusses the magic that is the UP.

Climate Disruption Animal Video of the Week: Cows in Chaos

Today:

It turns out the massive storm surge from Hurricane Dorian didn’t entirely wipe out the wild horses and cows that lived on North Carolina’s Cedar Island when it made landfall in September.

Three of the wild cows simply changed addresses.

Residents and national park officials were surprised to find three castaway cows living at Cape Lookout National Seashore park on the Outer Banks, about 3 miles from where the animals had been living before Hurricane Dorian hit.

“The cows surviving has just been a blessing,” local resident Rhonda Hunter told Kerry Sanders on TODAY Friday.

National park officials believe the cows swam about 3 miles to their new home as they fought the surge from the Category 1 storm.

“It’s an amazing story,” BG Horvat of the Cape Lookout Parks Department said. “To be swept up by a 9-foot-plus surge of water that’s coming back and filling up the sounds, and it’s just coming. It’s not stopping. It’s just moving forward with a lot of force.”

A group of 28 wild horses and at least 20 wild cows that had been living on Cedar Island simply disappeared in the wake of the storm. Finding at least three cows still alive was heartening for local residents.

Ohio Snowflakes Seek Safe Space from Science

WKRC Cincinnati:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WKRC) – Ohio lawmakers are weighing in on how public schools can teach things like evolution.

The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the “Student Religious Liberties Act.” Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs.

Instead, students are graded on substance and relevance.

Every Republican in the House supported the bill. It now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate.

House Bill 164 by Local12WKRC on Scribd

Climate Change’s Threat to the Military

Motherboard:

According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.

The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.

The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)

The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army’s Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn’t get a lot of attention at the time.

The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within “the next 20 years,” and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes.

“Increased energy requirements” triggered by new weather patterns like extended periods of heat, drought, and cold could eventually overwhelm “an already fragile system.”

The report also warns that the US military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world.

“The permanent displacement of a large portion of the population of Bangladesh would be a regional catastrophe with the potential to increase global instability,” the report warns. “This is a potential result of climate change complications in just one country. Globally, over 600 million people live at sea level.”

Darwin Called it. Deniers Pay more for Climate-Endangered Real Estate

Anthropocene Magazine:

Want to buy a house by the sea? If your neighbors are climate deniers, you’ll pay a premium, according to a new study.

The analysis focuses on houses that are likely to be inundated by sea level rise in the year 2100. It suggests that such houses sell for higher prices in neighborhoods inhabited by a relatively large percentage of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change than they do in neighborhoods inhabited by people who accept climate science.

A growing body of research investigates how climate risk affects asset prices, including real estate. The new study is among the first to explore how beliefs about climate risk affect the real estate market, and the role of future risk in shaping current home prices.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Chicago assembled data on sales of more than 10 million homes from the real estate database company Zillow covering the period between 1997 and 2017. They focused on homes within 50 kilometers of the U.S. Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts.

They cross-referenced the home sale information with data on climate change beliefs from the Yale Climate Opinion Survey and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map of areas likely to be inundated by six feet of sea level rise.

Overall, 72.32 percent of people in the study area professed to believe that climate change is happening. And 8.5 percent of the properties analyzed could be flooded by future sea level rise. But both of those numbers vary a lot from place to place. Some parts of the U.S. coastline are hotspots of climate denial, and some are hotspots of sea level rise risk.

The researchers fed their data into a mathematical model of the real estate market. The upshot of this analysis: homes likely to be inundated in 2100 currently sell for about 7% more in neighborhoods with a high percentage of climate deniers than similar homes in climate believer neighborhoods.

The result remains even after controlling for a host of other variables such as home size and amenities, distance from the coast, zoning, housing supply, and income and political affiliation of local residents.

Fox News Pushing Explicit Climate Racism

Tucker Carlson says admitting more migrants to America is a way to "despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn't want to live" pic.twitter.com/AKht7fRCjm
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) November 12, 2019

Heated:

On Monday night, with more than 2.8 million people watching, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he really, truly cares about the environment. (Amazing!)

And because he really, truly cares about the environment, Carlson added, he doesn’t want a bunch of brown people coming into America, as they would “pollute” and “despoil” the country. (Oh wow! Ok!)

Carlson made these comments in a conversation with Justin Haskins, the editorial director for the right-wing climate denial group The Heartland Institute. The two were speaking about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ recently-released immigration plan—which, among other things, says the Senator would allow at least 50,000 climate refugees into America during his first year in the White House.

(That part of Sanders’ plan is taken directly from Senate bill 2565, Senator Ed Markey’s bill “to establish a Global Climate Change Resilience Strategy, to authorize the admission of climate-displaced persons, and for other purposes.”)

Responding to scientific estimates that anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion people around the world will be displaced by climate change by 2050, Carlson asked Haskins: “Why would a climate migrant have the right to come to my country?”

Haskins responded by … well, you can just read it.

John Oliver on the Death of Murray Coal

Yes, Hurricanes are Getting Stronger

Hurricanes are relatively rare events, in that you only get about 90 of them globally each year, and only a dozen or so of those will be in the Atlantic. Thus there has been some fuzziness about whether we have a long enough data set to talk about increasing strength of storms.
New study from Aslak Grinsted, who I’ve interviewed several times in Greenland, uses a novel approach. Yes, hurricanes are getting more destructive.

I had brought this topic up with Jim Kossin of NOAA (who was not involved in the current study) when I interviewed him a few months ago. I asked him if we had a long enough data set for a signal to rise above the tropical storm noise.
In a word, yes. See above.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

We present an approach to normalize hurricane damage, where damage is framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction. This has some advantages over customary normalization schemes, and we demonstrate that our record has reduced variance and correlates marginally better with wind speeds and pressure. That is, it allows us to better address climatic trends. We find that hurricanes are indeed becoming more damaging. The frequency of the very most damaging hurricanes has increased at a rate of 330% per century.

Phys.org:

A new study by researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Aslak Grinsted, Peter Ditlevsen and Jens Hesselbjerg shows that hurricanes have become more destructive since 1900, and the worst of them are more than three times as frequent now than 100 years ago. A new way of calculating the destruction, compensating for the societal change in wealth, unequivocally shows a climatic increase in the frequency of the most destructive hurricanes that routinely raise havoc on the North American southern and east coasts. The study is now published in PNAS.

In order to compare hurricanes and follow their development over time, the traditional way of calculating hurricane damage was to survey the subsequent cost of the damage done by each storm. In other words, what would a hurricane from the 1950s cost if it made landfall today? Using this method, a typical finding is that the majority of the rising tendency in damage can be attributed to the fact that there are more of people with greater wealth, and there is quite simply more costly infrastructure to suffer damage. But evidence of a climatic change in destructive force by hurricanes has been obscured by statistical uncertainty.

Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an “area of total destruction,” meaning how large an area a storm would have to destroy completely in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: the size of the “area of total destruction.”In previous studies, it proved difficult to isolate the climate signal. The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It was hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth, and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method, this doubt has been cleared. The weather has, indeed, become more dangerous on the south and east coasts of the U.S. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team is more congruent with the climate models used to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes.

Climate-Gate at 10

10 Years ago, emails hacked from a climate research center, were selectively edited and released strategically to a credulous, ignorant and click-seeking media.

Sound familiar? I think it was the opening shot in the global fossil oligarchy’s war on democracy.

Guardian:

The email that appeared on Phil Jones’s computer screen in November 2009 was succinct. “Just a quick note to encourage you to shoot yourself in the head,” it said. “Don’t waste any more time. Do it today. It is truly the greatest contribution to mankind that you will ever make.”

Nor was it very different from the other emails that were arriving in Jones’s inbox. Others described the climate scientist as the scum of the earth. Some authors promised to kill him themselves. Most of the messages were riddled with obscenities. All made troubling reading.

As to the cause of this outpouring of hatred, that was straightforward. Jones headed the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, from which a tranche of emails had just been hacked and made public. These, it was claimed, showed that he and fellow researchers were faking the evidence that suggested our planet was heating up dangerously.

The affair was dubbed Climategate by those who deny the existence of global warming and it remains one of modern society’s most troubling affairs. Many observers believe it helped delay measures that might have slowed climate change and given humanity more time to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, its key cause.

Climategate marks its 10th anniversary this month – an opportune moment to reflect on just how serious was its impact on society, and to look at the effect it had on those who were trying to stop Earth from being ravaged by rising seas, spreading deserts, disappearing coral reefs and suffocating heat.

At the time, climate-change deniers were desperate to find ways to undermine the idea that global warming was real, and as Jones’s unit had provided key data that supported this notion – by showing how land temperatures on Earth had been rising sharply in recent decades – his work was considered fair game. So they responded gleefully by ransacking his hacked emails for signs he may have been fiddling results and asserted, in blogs, they had found telltale signs.

These claims were then picked up by media outlets hostile to global warming. “Scientist in climate cover-up told to quit” ran one headline. “Scientists broke law by hiding climate data”, claimed another.

Continue reading “Climate-Gate at 10”

Climate and Coastal Flooding Will “Blow a hole” in Mortgages

CBS News:

Climate change could punch a hole through the financial system by making 30-year home mortgages — the lifeblood of the American housing market — effectively unobtainable in entire regions across parts of the U.S.

That’s what the future could look like without policy to address climate change, according to the latest research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The bank is considering these and other risks on Friday in an unprecedented conference on the economics of climate change.

For the financial sector, adapting to climate change isn’t just an issue of improving their market share. “It is a function of where there will be a market at all,” wrote Jesse Keenan, a scholar who studies climate adaptation, in the Fed’s introduction.

The housing market doesn’t yet factor in the risk of climate change, which is already affecting many areas of the U.S., including flood-prone coastal communities, agricultural regions and parts of the country vulnerable to wildfires. In California, for instance, 50,000 homeowners can’t get property or casualty insurance because of the increased risk to their homes.

Yet for now, no mortgage lender, portfolio manager or buyer of mortgages takes into account climate-induced floods, except to determine if a house sits in a 100-year floodplain at the time the mortgage is issued, said Michael Berman, a former official with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and former chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Once lenders and housing investors do start pricing in such risks, “There may be a threat to the availability of the 30-year mortgage in various vulnerable and highly exposed areas,” Berman wrote in a recent San Francisco Fed report. He predicts lenders could “blue-line” entire regions where flood risks are high — a reference to redlining, the practice of refusing mortgages to minorities.

The result: Entire neighborhoods would empty out, leaving cities unable to shore up their crumbling roads and bridges just as severe weather events become more extreme and more frequent. Home values would fall, potentially depleting the budgets of counties and states.

For most people, being unable to get a mortgage in a given neighborhood would rule it out as a place to live. But population flight is a best-case scenario when it comes to the financial system.

If banks don’t recognize the danger of flood risk and keep lending only to have flooded homeowners default on their mortgages, the events could lead to a cascade of negative events akin to the housing collapse in 2008, which set off the worst recession in 70 years.

“Nobody denies that [climate change] is happening, that it’s real, that it is going to have a material effect. But by and large, there is such an inertia in our financial system that this isn’t even on the radar of people,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “The market is short-sighted. You have a three- to five-year horizon.”

MarketWatch:

Some banks are cutting their own climate-change exposure by selling riskier disaster-area mortgages to taxpayer-supported entities.

That puts the health of the mortgage market at risk, a potential repeat of the financial conditions at the root of the banking crisis a decade ago, a research paper published in September argues.

Continue reading “Climate and Coastal Flooding Will “Blow a hole” in Mortgages”