Hurricane forecasting is a casualty in the war on climate science, By DIANE CARMAN | The Denver Post
On May 25, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration checked their satellite data, crunched the numbers on ocean temperatures, water currents and weather patterns, and made a prediction. They said this would be an above-normal hurricane season, with 11 to 17 named storms and two to four major hurricanes churning through the Atlantic.
Then they really got to work. The first of the named storms, Arlene, had already jumped the gun in April, forming in the Atlantic weeks before the official opening of the hurricane season. The folks at NOAA knew if they applied the latest in science and technology, they could save lives.
The scientists at the NOAA offices in Boulder, at Princeton and around the country had a new tool — the Finite-Volume on a Cubed-Sphere (FV3) — which produces better models and helps them forecast hurricanes more accurately so that residents can be warned as early as possible on whether to shelter in place, evacuate or seek safe harbor.
So five days before Harvey hit, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory used the fabulous FV3 to predict that the storm would develop a second eyewall and produce extreme rainfall across the region. Both predictions as well as those about the path of the storm were spot on.
Residents and public officials relied on the forecasts, and as a result the death toll was remarkably low for a storm of such magnitude in the fourth-largest city in the U.S. Early reports are that 60 people died in Harvey, compared to 1,833 in Hurricane Katrina and 117 in Superstorm Sandy………
the high-powered computing and data-gathering technology also is essential for understanding climate change.
Which is why the Trump administration’s budget calls for crippling the program.
Under Trump’s plan, NOAA’s budget is to be slashed by one-fifth, including eliminating programs to improve the agency’s ability to predict tornadoes and to create a tsunami-warning program for the West Coast. The budget for weather satellites — vitally important in hurricane forecasting — is to be cut by 17 percent.
Irma: Florida governor’s climate change denial has made state even more vulnerable, warn experts
‘This is what happens when you build a major metropolitan area at sea level with a state government that is in denial…and supports polluters’, Independent, Mythili Sampathkumar New York @MythiliSk As Hurricane Irma ominously makes its way to Florida, experts have warned that the governor’s denial of climate change makes the state’s infrastructure more vulnerable to damage.
Florida Governor Rick Scott has warned all residents to evacuate because Irma “is wider than our entire state and is expected to cause major and life-threatening impacts from coast to coast”. The state is approximately 360 miles (580 km) wide.
“We can rebuild your home, we can’t rebuild your life,” he said.
In Florida, residents install storm shutters and wooden planks in an attempt to minimise inevitable damage to homes and storefronts, but the state may not have done enough to ensure public structures are equally prepared.
Mr Scott, along with Republican Senator Marco Rubio, have dodged questions on climate change over the years.
As recently as June 2017 after Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the global Paris Agreement on climate change, Mr Scott would not say whether he believed human action had an impact on climate despite scientific evidence.
Instead he focused on the President’s commitment to American jobs, saying: “You cannot invest in your environment without a good economy.”However, this attitude could result in preventable damage along the Florida coast and particularly for poorer communities in the state.
Julie McNamara, an energy analyst at the Union for Concerned Scientists, told The Independent that research done by the group indicated that electricity transformers in Miami-Dade county were at particular risk of flooding.
She said that these structures are “not required to build for the future” and so sea level rise and increasing intensity of storms are not taken into account.
State government regulations do not reflect that reality in Florida either. Ms McNamara pointed out that Florida Power and Light, a large public utility company serving almost 10 million people, has “doubled down” on nuclear power and has limited the state’s residents ability to have more resilient, renewable sources of power than nuclear plants that could also flood……
Nicole Hernandez Hammer, Climate Science and Community Advocate at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Independent that what Miami Beach has done is great, but those same funds are not available in lower income areas.“People [in these neighbourhoods and cities] deal with flooding frequently because of sea level rise on normal days,” so it is frightening to think what may happen with Hurricane Irma, she said……..
“This is what happens when you build a major metropolitan area at sea level with a state government that is in denial…and supports polluters,” Ms Hammer said.She has first-hand experience with Mr Scott’s aversion to even discussing climate change.
When she was assistant director of climate change research at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, Ms Hammer worked on a report regarding the state transportation infrastructure’s resilience to rising sea levels.
When her team submitted the report to the Florida Department of Transportation, the agency called to tell the team to scrub almost all mentions of the phrase “climate change,” even in the summary of the report.
Fundamental physical principles and observed weather trends mean we already know some of the answers — and we have for a long time.
Hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean waters, and the oceans are warming because of the human-caused buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of coal, oil and gas. The strongest hurricanes have gotten stronger because of global warming. Over the past two years, we have witnessed the most intense hurricanes on record for the globe, both hemispheres, the Pacific and now, with Irma, the Atlantic.
We also know that warmer air holds more moisture, and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has increased because of human-induced global warming. We’ve measured this increase, and it has been unequivocally attributed to human-caused warming. That extra moisture causes heavier rainfall, which has also been observed and attributed to our influence on climate. We know that rainfall rates in hurricanes are expected to increase in a warmer world, and now we’re living that reality.
And global warming also means higher sea levels, both because ocean water expands as it warms and because ice in the mountains and at the poles melts and makes its way into oceans. Sea level rise is accelerating, and storm surge from hurricanes rides on top of higher seas to infiltrate further into our coastal cities.
Heavier rain and higher sea levels can combine to compound flooding in major hurricanes, as the deluges cause flooding that must drain to the sea but can’t do so as quickly because of storm surges. Sadly, we saw this effect in play in the catastrophic flooding from Harvey.
We don’t have all of the answers yet. There are scientific linkages we’re still trying to work out. Harvey, like Hurricane Irene before it in 2011, resulted in record flooding, because of a combination of factors. Very warm ocean temperatures meant more moisture in the atmosphere to produce heavy rainfall, yes. But both storms were also very slow-moving, nearly stationary at times, which means that rain fell over the same areas for an extended period.
Cutting-edge climate science suggests that such stalled weather patterns could result from a slowed jet stream, itself a consequence — through principles of atmospheric science — of the accelerated warming of the Arctic. This is a reminder of how climate changes in far-off regions such as the North Pole can have very real effects on extreme weather faced here in the Lower 48.
These linkages are preliminary, and scientists are still actively studying them. But they are a reminder that surprises may be in store — and not welcome ones — when it comes to the unfolding effects of climate change.
Which leads us, inevitably, to a discussion of policy — and, indeed, politics. Previous administrations focused on adapting to climate change, with an eye to what the planet would look like in the future. But events such as Harvey, and probably Irma, show that we have not even adapted to our current climate (which has already changed because of our influence).
The effects of climate change are no longer subtle. We are seeing them play out before us here and now. And they will only worsen if we fail to act.
The Trump administration, however, seems determined to lead us backward. In recent months, we have witnessed a dismantling of the policies put in place by the Obama administration to (a) incentivize the necessary move from climate-change-producing fossil fuels toward clean energy, (b) increase resilience to climate change effects through sensible regulations on coastal development, and (c) continue to fund basic climate research that can inform our assessments of risk and adaptive strategies. Ironically, just 10 days before Harvey struck, President Trump rescinded flood protection standards put in place by the Obama administration that would take sea level rise and other climate change effects into account in coastal development plans.
And as Trump kills policies that would reduce the risks of climate disasters, our nation continues to support policies that actually increase our risks. For example, without the taxpayer-subsidized National Flood Insurance Program, banks would be less likely to provide mortgages for rebuilding houses in locations that have been flooded before, sometimes repeatedly. And the flood insurance program is itself underwater: badly in debt and set to expire at the end of this month unless Congress finds a way to keep it afloat, just as billions of dollars in claims from Harvey come pouring in.
Harvey and Irma are sad reminders that policy matters. At a time when damage from climate change is escalating, we need sensible policy in Washington to protect the citizens of this country, both by reducing future climate change and preparing for its consequences. We should demand better of our leaders.
Welcome to the New World of Wildfires,http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/41887-welcome-to-the-new-world-of-wildfires, September 09, 2017, By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report When one envisions the US Pacific Northwest, one thinks of green ferns, moss-covered trees in Olympic National Park, or the Hoh Rainforest, where annual rainfall is measured in the hundreds of inches. Moisture, greenery, evergreens, abundant rivers. It’s a large part of the reason why I live here.
But thanks to abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), this region is shifting at a rapid pace. On the Olympic Peninsula where I live, this has been the summer of wildfire smoke.
As I write this, Puget Sound, Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, are all engulfed by thick wildfire smoke and ash from fires burning in Eastern Washington and Montana. A local Seattle weatherman remarked that he had “never seen a situation like this.”
Smoke from various wildfires has been a near-constant in this part of the country for the past month. Roughly a week ago, we were enshrouded by smoke from multiple wildfires across Oregon, and before that, we spent nearly two weeks breathing in thick smoke from the over 1,000 wildfires that scorched British Columbia up the coast from us.
Stepping outside, the world appears a surreal yellow. The sun varies from not being visible, to emerging as a yellowish orange bulb even during the middle of the day. When it sets, it has often appeared blood red through the thick smoke.
NASA satellite photos show the smoke plume even reaching the East Coast.
Given past and recent scientific reports, this is apparently the world we, and much of the rest of the United States, had better prepare to live in from now on.
Extreme Heat, Extreme Drought
The smoke plume from all of these fires, at the time of this writing, extends from up into British Columbia all the way down into central Oregon.
A wildfire outside Portland has forced hundreds of residents to evacuate while it burned out of control in the Columbia River Gorge. That is just one of 81 wildfires burning across the US at the time of this writing, with 20 of those fires in Oregon alone.
Climate researchers have been warning us for a long time that increasing temperatures and more intense droughts will logically cause dramatic escalations in the number, heat and ferocity of wildfires.
A study published earlier this year showed that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have increased the likelihood of extreme heat events across more than 80 percent of the planet.
Last fall, researchers published the results of a study that showed ACD accounted for approximately half of the increase in wildfire fuel aridity (forest dryness) in the Western US since just 1979, causing the area of the US West affected by forest fires to double in size since 1984.
According to Inside Climate News: “Nine of the 10 worst fire seasons in the past 50 years have all happened since 2000, and 2015 was the worst fire season in U.S. history, surpassing 10 million acres for the first time on record. So far this year, wildfires in the US have burned 7.8 million acres, but the fire season is far from over. The average fire season is 78 days longer than it was in the 1970s and now lasts nearly seven months — beginning and extending beyond the typical heat of summer. By April of this year, wildfires had scorched more than 2 million acres in the US — nearly the average consumed in an entire fire season during the 1980s.
Extreme Heat
When it comes to hot weather — and relatedly, fire — this has been a summer for the record books in the West. During the first week of September, San Francisco saw a stunning record high temperature of 106°F, amid a heatwave that saw 36.5 million Californians (98 percent of the state population) living under a heat advisory issued by the National Weather Service.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles saw its largest wildfire on record scorch 7,000 acres before rains from a remnant tropical storm helped firefighters get the upper hand.
Yale Environment 360 warned of this likelihood last December. The magazine, published by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, reported that as the Arctic continues to warm twice as fast as the rest of the globe, winds in the upper atmosphere would be pulled into the polar zone and cause the jet stream to become wavier during extreme weather patterns. This is a more technical explanation for the fact that, as another study warned in March, these new weather patterns will generate record heatwaves and wildfires — precisely what we are seeing now across the West.
And given that there are no serious, large-scale ACD mitigation efforts happening, least of all within the United States, we can count on these trends to amplify and worsen with time.
n the fight against climate change, much of the focus rests on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and developing alternative energy sources. However, the results of a new study suggest that far more attention should be paid to deforestation and how the land is used subsequently – the effects of which make a bigger contribution to climate change than previously thought.
The research, conducted by Cornell University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters,shows just how much this impact has been underestimated. Even if all fossil fuel emissions are eradicated, if current rates of deforestation in the tropics continue through to 2100 then there will still be a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperature.
Most scientists believe that a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels will bring dangerous disruption to the world’s climate. Indeed, many already think this target may be unattainable.
“A lot of the emphasis of climate policy is on converting to sustainable energy from fossil fuels”, said Natalie M. Mahowald, the paper’s lead author. “It’s an incredibly important step to take, but, ironically, particulates released from the burning of fossil fuels – which are severely detrimental to human health – have a cooling effect on the climate. Removing those particulates actually makes it harder to reach the lower temperatures laid out in the Paris agreement.”
Mahowald argues that in addition to reducing reliance on fossil fuels, scientists and policymakers must pay more attention to deforestation and the subsequent changes in land use for agricultural and other human industry. The negative consequences of this process are manifold.
When deforestation occurs, the burning of trees and plants releases carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. The problem is compounded when the land is then converted to farming or other human usage, releasing large amounts of other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide. Furthermore, the deforested area can no longer function as a carbon sink – trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The research showed this process has double the overall warming contribution than previously thought making it “twice as important” in Mahowald’s eyes.
“Normally people only think about what’s happening right now when they think about the carbon budget,” Mahowald said. “But if you think about what’s going to happen over the lifetime of that land, long into the future, you should multiply that land conversion by two to understand the net effect of it.”
As agriculture expands in the tropics and pressure to turn rainforest into cropland increases, Mahowald advocates looking further forward in time to truly assess the impact that these practices have on the climate.
Why Nuclear Energy May Not Be Our Best Alternative Option To Fossil Fuel, Forbes, 9 Sept 17 , Michael Barnard, low-carbon innovation analyst, on Quora: “… From a carbon capture and sequestration perspective, there’s exactly one sequestration project associated with a coal generation plant which is actually sequestering any reasonable amount of carbon. It’s in Saskatchewan, Canada. It was operating at 40% of targets for months and nobody noticed. It’s very expensive.
I did an assessment of all sequestration efforts in Australia over the past 19 years recently and found that they had spent $4,300 AUD per ton to sequester a vanishingly tiny fraction of Australia’s emissions.
The US CCS projects have gone vastly over forecasts and are abandoned and no new ones are projected. The UK government has stopped funding them………
Hurricanes Blow Away Climate Change Denial, Consortium News The startling landfall of two giant hurricanes – feasting on especially warm water off Texas and Florida – crashes into the climate change denialism that has been politically popular on the Right, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
The loss of respect for truth is one of the most consequential features of public affairs in American today. The roots and causes of this tragic development are multiple. The spread of social media and the related ability to spread untruths cheaply at the speed of electrons are parts of the story. Another part is the phenomenon of fake news (real fake news, that is, not alleged fake news that is really real news that the alleger doesn’t welcome).
The advent of Donald Trump’s presidency has taken this sad story to new depths. The President lies copiously, flagrantly, unashamedly, and far beyond what had been the norm for political fibbing. He has shown how a political career, rising even to the highest office of the land, can be built on lying.
Correctives to this awful trend are difficult to identify. The tribal belief system that prevails in most of the American population, in which people chiefly listen to and believe sources they identify with politically or socially and had already been telling them what they want to hear, is so well entrenched it seems almost impossible to overcome. Many people reject factual corrections as a form of bias and unfair treatment by sources (such as the “left-wing media”) with which they do not identify politically or socially…….
the United States getting hit with two major hurricanes in rapid succession provides a teaching opportunity regarding the critical issue of climate change…
Like Smoking and Cancer
Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush, notes not only that the basic physical links involving global warming, greenhouse gases, and burning of fossil fuels are “as certain as the link between smoking and cancer.” She further observes that ”a broad consensus of scientists also warn of the influence of the warming climate on extreme weather events.”
The overall connections, in other words, in terms of cause, effect, and degree of risk are unquestionable, even if no one case of lung cancer can be blamed on any one pack of cigarettes……..
Without diminishing any immediate sympathy and support for those whose lives the hurricanes have upended, this is the time to shout from rooftops that dishonest climate-change-denying politicians are causing more such suffering in the future for Americans as well as others. And when Trump’s EPA destroyer (a.k.a. administrator) Scott Pruitt says that now is not the time to talk about climate change, the proper response is that now is an excellent time to talk about it.
Abandoned North Sea Wells May be Emitting ‘Significant’ Amounts of Methane, Study Warns, DESmog Blog, By Kyla Mandel • Monday, September 4, 2017 Abandoned offshore oil and gas wells in the North Sea may be a source of significant methane emissions finds a new study, which claims to be the first to measure the amount of methane leaking from offshore wells.
According to the study published recently in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, about one third of the region’s wells could be releasing between 3 and 17 thousand tonnes of methane into the North Sea each year. “This poses a significant contribution to the North Sea methane budget,” it states.
But despite the scale of emissions that may be leaking from abandoned wells, these emissions are not currently being monitored by regulators or operators.
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and – pound for pound – can trap much more heat in the atmosphere over the course of a couple of decades.
The study comes as operators begin planning for the end of oil and gas extraction from the North Sea – over the next couple decades hundreds of oil rigs will need to be decommissioned. Yet, under current rules, operators are not required to monitor inactive or abandoned wells, opening up a regulatory gap as the North Sea moves into a new phase.
As the study’s authors write: “Our and other recent studies clearly document strongly increased CH4 [methane] emissions in areas with oil and gas operations, which may counteract our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by switching supply from coal to gas.
“Therefore, it is important to improve our surveying and monitoring efforts and adapt the respective regulatory frameworks (national and international), because the regional aggregate of thousands of wells with fairly low gas flows can be substantial.”
The study measured three abandoned offshore wells in the Central North Sea where shallow gas pockets were releasing methane. From this they were able to create a model to measure the impact across the region at depths limited to the upper 1000 meters of the ocean sediment.
Due to the shallow depths at which the methane is released, not all of it remains in the oceans. The scientists found that a large portion — 42 percent — of the methane emissions leaking from the abandoned wells reach the atmosphere where they will contribute to rising temperatures………
More and better data is needed in order to start addressing this issue of so-called fugitive emissions, Haekel argued. He and his team plan to make another trip to the North Sea this month to continue gathering more data from other wells.
Hurricane Irma Poses Toughest Test for U.S. Nuclear Industry Since Fukushima, US News, Sept. 8, 2017 By Scott DiSavino and Timothy Gardner (Reuters) – Hurricane Irma will pose the toughest test yet for U.S. nuclear power plants since reactors strengthened their defenses against natural disasters following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan in 2011.
Irma was on course to hit South Florida early on Sunday as a Category 4 storm, packing winds of up to 145 miles (233 kilometers) per hour and bringing a storm surge of as much as 12 feet to a state that is home to four coastal nuclear reactors.
The National Hurricane Center’s forecast track shows Irma making landfall on the southwest side of the Florida Peninsula, west of the two nuclear reactors at the Turkey Point plant.
The operator, Florida Power & Light (FPL), has said it will shut Turkey Point well before hurricane-strength winds reach the plant. The reactors are about 30 miles (42 kilometers) south of Miami. FPL said it will also shut the other nuclear plant in Florida at St Lucie, which also has two reactors on a barrier island on the state’s east coast, about 120 miles (193 km) north of Miami. “We will shut the reactors down 24 hours before Category 1 force winds are forecast to hit,” FPL Chief Executive Eric Silagy told a news conference.
FPL said both Turkey Point and St Lucie were designed to withstand storms stronger than any ever recorded in the region and both plants are elevated 20 feet (6 meters) above sea level to protect against flooding and extreme storm surges.
But South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard said he was concerned about the potential for floods to damage power generators at Turkey Point, which in turn might threaten the ability of the plant to keep spent nuclear fuel rods cool. At Fukushima in Japan, an earthquake and tsunami disrupted power supplies and caused the fuel in some units to meltdown.
“The whole site is pretty well able to handle dangerous wind, the real problem from my perspective is water,” Stoddard said. He said he was more worried about the nuclear waste than the reactors.
Too much mansplaining in climate conversations? http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/09/07/news/too-much-mansplaining-climate-conversations , By Clothilde GoujardSeptember 7th 2017 #710 of 711 articles from the Special Report: Race Against Climate ChangeIn the catastrophic 2004 Boxing Day Asian tsunami, four times more women died than men. In the worst affected village, Indonesia’s Kuala Cangkoy, 80 per cent of the victims were female, according to Oxfam International. The number was so disproportionate, reported the humanitarian agency, because men were generally fishing or away from home, and many were able to flee while women at home tried to save children.
It’s an imbalance that disturbs the World Meteorological Organization’s Elena Manaenkova, who addressed the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Montreal earlier this week.
“Women couldn’t run because of their long clothes and they didn’t know how to swim,” she toldNational Observer in an interview.
The 56th session of the IPCC, which is tasked with providing sound climate science assessments to governments and policy makers, began in Montreal on Wednesday. At a closed-door workshop on Tuesday night however — held between the IPCC and Environment Canada — Manaenkova emphasized the importance of including more women in the world’s response to climate change.
She and a team of other climate experts are urging organizations and governments to recruit for women scientists to help improve sensitivity to gender issues in climate-related policy. Natural disasters, she explained, are just one example of how a warming world can have different impacts on women and men.
Women have to walk further for water
As temperatures rise and droughts become more frequent, for instance, women in some countries who are traditionally tasked with fetching water face more problems, including sexual violence.
According to the United Nations, women in Africa and Asia walk an average of six kilometres to get water but the distance can be much longer with droughts.
The delegate for Kenya, Patricia Nying’uro, has made note of that situation in her own country.
“If there’s a drought, (women) have to find water and in some areas they have to walk really far,” she said in an interview. “Even though everyone feels (climate change), these women feel it a bit more.”
As a senior meteorologist at the Kenyan Meteorological Department, she said whenever there are new seasonal forecasts for rain, they hold information forums and women are particularly interested.
“You will find that’s it’s mainly women who attend, one because they have the time and two, because they’re the most impacted,” she said.
To her, it’s important that more women participate in the climate change conversation because she feels not enough is being done to look at the impact on women.
“Women would be sensitive in general to things that happen to fellow women and the impacts on them,” she said.
In the catastrophic 2004 Boxing Day Asian tsunami, four times more women died than men.
In the worst affected village, Indonesia’s Kuala Cangkoy, 80 per cent of the victims were female, according to Oxfam International. The number was so disproportionate, reported the humanitarian agency, because men were generally fishing or away from home, and many were able to flee while women at home tried to save children.
It’s an imbalance that disturbs the World Meteorological Organization’s Elena Manaenkova, who addressed the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Montreal earlier this week.
“Women couldn’t run because of their long clothes and they didn’t know how to swim,” she toldNational Observer in an interview.
The 56th session of the IPCC, which is tasked with providing sound climate science assessments to governments and policy makers, began in Montreal on Wednesday. At a closed-door workshop on Tuesday night however — held between the IPCC and Environment Canada — Manaenkova emphasized the importance of including more women in the world’s response to climate change.
She and a team of other climate experts are urging organizations and governments to recruit for women scientists to help improve sensitivity to gender issues in climate-related policy. Natural disasters, she explained, are just one example of how a warming world can have different impacts on women and men.
Women have to walk further for water
As temperatures rise and droughts become more frequent, for instance, women in some countries who are traditionally tasked with fetching water face more problems, including sexual violence. According to the United Nations, women in Africa and Asia walk an average of six kilometres to get water but the distance can be much longer with droughts.
The delegate for Kenya, Patricia Nying’uro, has made note of that situation in her own country.
“If there’s a drought, (women) have to find water and in some areas they have to walk really far,” she said in an interview. “Even though everyone feels (climate change), these women feel it a bit more.”
As a senior meteorologist at the Kenyan Meteorological Department, she said whenever there are new seasonal forecasts for rain, they hold information forums and women are particularly interested.
“You will find that’s it’s mainly women who attend, one because they have the time and two, because they’re the most impacted,” she said.
To her, it’s important that more women participate in the climate change conversation because she feels not enough is being done to look at the impact on women.
“Women would be sensitive in general to things that happen to fellow women and the impacts on them,” she said.
IPCC aims to increase female participation
Manaenkova, the climate expert leading the World Meteorological Organization, shares Nying’uro’s position that more women experts need to participate in the conversation. During the gender workshop on Tuesday night, Manaenkova and other leaders working with IPCC gathered to discuss the situation and see how more women scientists could be included in IPCC’s work.
As a major organization assessing climate change to guide scientists and policy makers, the IPCC is trying to be more gender balanced, said Fatima Driouech, who spoke at the evening meeting. She is vice-chair of the IPCC Working Group 1, which deals with the physical science basis of climate change.
“Within IPCC, there’s good will to improve (gender balance) for the future. In this cycle, we feel there’s an improvement compared to the previous one,” Driouech told National Observer.
The Moroccan scientist is one of 10 women of the IPCC’s 34-member bureau, which includes chairs and vice-chairs of the organization and its working groups and task force. She was also a lead author of the IPCC’s previous climate change assessment report.
“It’s important to include (women) in climate research and in science because there’s a need for different viewpoints, different visions and different ideas,” she said.
According to numbers released at the workshop and confirmed by IPCC, there are more female authors of special reports currently in the works than in previous years. The IPCC is nearly 30 years old, and was first established by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization to “provide a scientific basis for governments at all levels to develop climate-related policies.”
Thirty-eight per cent of the 86 authors of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 per cent — scheduled for publication next year — are women, compared with 21.5 per cent of 1,001 authors who participated in the IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report released in 2014. In a subreport of the fifth Assessment Report, all 33 authors from African countries were men.
In two other reports underway that are due in 2019, just under a third of the authors are women. That’s out of 101 authors for a report on climate change and oceans, the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and 103 authors for the Special Report on Climate Change and Land.
While there’s some global improvement, Driouech said some countries are still struggling to be more gender-balanced: “There are some regions where there’s a little imbalance to fix for everyone’s good.”
For that reason, at the opening of the IPCC session on Wednesday morning, where representatives of member countries were present, Manaenkova mentioned the need for “active debate on the gender sensitivity of the issues” reflected in the IPCC reports.
Despite growing understanding that gender balance can inform better research and decision-making in climate science, she said organizations like the World Meteorological Organization, as well as the IPCC and other UN bodies, have had to put a lot of effort to convince “skeptics” who didn’t understand why more women need to be included. That persuasion effort is still underway.
Countries must nominate more women scientists
At IPCC, she said, some countries do not nominate enough women scientists to be authors.
“In some cases, (IPCC) has to positively discriminate, they prefer a woman to maybe ten men because she was the only one nominated,” she said.
At her own organization, she said they are thinking about enforcing nominations of women. As it stands, female nominations are encouraged and welcomed, rather than enforced.
Manaenkova believes that because IPCC focuses not just on physical climate change, but also socio-economic impacts and adaptation, it is even more important to have input from women. She said it would even be better to have reports with statistics separated by gender.
“(IPCC) says there’s some women nominated who could be lead authors and their competence is very high, and high enough to be coordinating author,” said Manaenkova. “We need to look for these women, find them, and pull them in.”
The IPCC will be in Montreal until Sunday to discuss their reports on the impacts of global warming, and to develop the outline for their main and sixth publication on the topic, which scheduled for release in 2022.
Independent 7th Sept 2017, Hurricane Irma, like Hurricane Harvey, was not caused by climate change.
But the horrifying destruction it has sent across the Atlantic might have
been. Scientists say that asking whether global warming was the reason for
the extreme weather is the wrong question. Instead, we should be focusing
on how global warming has helped turn the hurricanes into even more
destructive forces than they ever would have been before. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/irma-climate-change-what-cause-hurricane-global-warming-caribbean-florida-a7933721.html
Two Florida nuclear power plants in the path of Hurricane Irma are shutting down to brace for the Category 5 storm’s devastating wind and rain.
Florida Power & Light announced on Thursday it will shut down the Turkey Point and St. Lucie nuclear plants ahead of Irma’s expected arrival this weekend. The two facilities are Florida’s only operating nuclear power plants. Both are on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, which is bracing to get hit very hard by Irma’s ferocious winds.
“This is an extremely dangerous storm,” Rob Gould, chief communications officer at Florida Power & Light, told reporters. Gould said the nuclear sites are among the strongest in the United States and are designed to withstand heavy wind and storm surge. Turkey Point’s nuclear reactors are enclosed in six feet of steel-reinforced concrete and sit 20 feet above sea level, the Miami Herald reported.Nuclear plants also have significant redundancies that serve as back-ups to back-ups.
Turkey Point, located just south of Miami in Homestead, survived a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. However, the facility did suffer $90 million in damage from that Category 5 storm, according to press reports.
“This storm has the potential to eclipse Hurricane Andrew,” Gould said.
Chocolate company Mars to spend $1 billion on fighting climate change, Techly, By Stefan Kostarelis, 7 Sept 17, Mars, one of the largest chocolate companies in the world, has pledged $1 billion ($AUD 1.25 billion) to fight climate change.
The money will be spent on renewable energy initiatives, sourcing sustainable ingredients, and supporting farmers that use more environmentally sound methods of production. As a result, the company is hoping to reduce its greenhouse emissions by over 60% by 2050…….
Mars was among the 28 major companies that signed a letter asking U.S. President Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Trump of course did, but that hasn’t stopped companies and U.S. states from continuing to fight climate change.
“We’re not interested in the politics here — this is about policy. We believe in the scientific view of climate science and the need for collective action,” Parkin added. “We’re clearly disappointed that the US administration has chosen to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.”
Mars’ bold plan comes ahead of the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week NYC, which will both take place later this month. According to Climate Week NYC, the summit “will bring together international leaders from business, government and civil society to showcase the unstoppable momentum of global climate action.”
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the world is getting warmer and we have to do something about it.
In other news, Trump has nominated Oklahoma politician Jim Bridenstine to run NASA.
Both islands were blasted by Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest ever to charge across the Atlantic Ocean, packing winds of 180 miles per hour (290 kilometers per hour).
Irma damaged 95 percent of Barbuda’s properties and left the island covered in rubble and “barely habitable,” said Prime Minister Gaston Browne.
“These storms are more ferocious, they are coming in greater frequency — evidence that climate change is real,” Browne said in an interview with CNN.
“We’re living the consequences of climate change.”
Irma has packed sustained winds of over 180 mph (295 kph) for more than 33 hours, making it the longest-lasting top-intensity cyclone ever recorded, France’s national weather service said.
It comes on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which drenched Texas with deadly floods.
The next big storm, Hurricane Jose, is already churning in the Atlantic behind Irma.
“Those who do not believe in climate change, we’re hoping that when they would have looked at these natural disasters that they’ll change (their) position,” Browne said.
“All of us need to believe in it and take collective action.”
Edinburgh Reporter 6th Sept 2017, Environmental groups applauded the new Programme for Government announced in Holyrood yesterday, which contains a host of ‘green’ measures.
Friends of the Earth believe such steps will improve the lives of people in
Scotland through cleaner air, reduced waste, investment in green energy and
ensuring the transition to a low carbon economy is fair.
Key measures announced in the PFG: phasing out diesel and petrol vehicles from 2032;
tackling air pollution with 4 Low Emission Zones across Scotland by 2020;
new Just Transition Commission to help Scotland move to a low-carbon
economy fairly; new National Investment Bank to fund long term, patient
projects; deposit return scheme for bottles and cans; decision on fracking
in the coming weeks http://www.theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2017/09/scottish-governments-programme-hailed-as-greenest-ever/
n the fight against climate change, much of the focus rests on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and developing alternative energy sources. However, the results of a new study suggest that far more attention should be paid to deforestation and how the land is used subsequently – the effects of which make a bigger contribution to climate change than previously thought.
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