A Dim Fictional Climate Future Turns Non-Fiction: The Flooding of Los Angeles - NYT

Hey, all you anti-abortionists and climate deniers --- if unborn fetuses are protected how about protecting future fetuses over the next hundreds of years?

 

I'm a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson sci-fi. The Mars trilogy, as in most of his books, deals with things that are theoretically possible based on understood science. They are long books and at times suffer from over information.

 

I am currently reading the latest, the very scary Ministry For the Future.   

The book follows an international organization named the Ministry for the Future in its mission to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation's. Beginning in 2025...

 

 Yesterday I came to a section about a massive rainstorm in California that totally flooded the entire Los Angeles basin and the description of how it happened is echoed by a major story in today's NY Times where fact echoes fiction - the chances of this happening now stand at 1 in 50. Another degree rise and it becomes 1 in 30. 

In this context, the new climate bill looks pitiful especially when you delve into the details -- which I will do later or tomorrow.

Here is the frightening NY Times piece and of course the right wing will say the science there is made up.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/12/climate/california-rain-storm.html

Even the West Coast woke are not woke enough:

Such perils had lurked at Oroville for so long because California’s Department of Water Resources had been “overconfident and complacent” about its infrastructure, tending to react to problems rather than pre-empt them, independent investigators later wrote in a report. It is not clear this culture is changing, even as the 21st-century climate threatens to test the state’s aging dams in new ways. One recent study estimated that climate change had boosted precipitation from the 2017 storms at Oroville by up to 15 percent. 

 

 

Yet California officials have downplayed these concerns about the capacity of Oroville’s emergency spillway, which were raised by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Such extreme flows are a “remote” possibility, they argued in a letter last year. Therefore, further upgrades at Oroville aren’t urgently needed.

In a curt reply last month, the commission said this position was “not acceptable.” It gave the state until mid-September to submit a plan for addressing the issue.

His findings, from 1982, showed that major floods hadn’t been exceptionally rare occurrences over the past eight centuries. They took place every 100 to 200 years. And in the decades since, advancements in modeling have helped scientists evaluate how quickly the risks are rising because of climate change.

For their new study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Huang and Dr. Swain replayed portions of the 20th and 21st centuries using 40 simulations of the global climate. Extreme weather events, by definition, don’t occur very often. So by using computer models to create realistic alternate histories of the past, present and future climate, scientists can study a longer record of events than the real world offers.

Dr. Swain and Dr. Huang looked at all the monthlong California storms that took place during two time segments in the simulations, one in the recent past and the other in a future with high global warming, and chose one of the most intense events from each period. They then used a weather model to produce detailed play-by-plays of where and when the storms dump their water.

Those details matter. There are “so many different factors” that make an atmospheric river deadly or benign, Dr. Huang said. 

In the high Sierras, for example, atmospheric rivers today largely bring snow. But higher temperatures are shifting the balance toward rain. Some of this rain can fall on snowpack that accumulated earlier, melting it and sending even more water toward towns and cities below.  

Climate Change -- Growing Right Wing Nationalism Spells Doom

With the election in Brazil going far right, one of the main bulwarks against climate change, the rain forest, becomes an endangered species.

The recent U.N. report has caused a stir. I've been writing that the political climate at a crucial junction is a tipping point on climate that will push us over the edge into runaway greenhouse territory.

Let's take the example of Australia where the crucial barrier reefs are disappearing based on two adjacent articles in the Oct. 9 NY Times:

New U.N. Climate Report Says Put a High Price on Carbon

Here is one interesting paragraph:

... a carbon tax that directly increases the price of gasoline at the pump or electricity rates brings more obvious pain, and hence is more likely to garner opposition.

A case in point: In 2012, the Australian government enacted a cap-and-trade program that effectively set a price on carbon of $23 per ton. Emissions fell nationwide under the program. Yet the policy faced a fierce political backlash from industry groups and voters, and when the nation’s more conservative Liberal Party swept into power in 2013, it quickly moved to repeal the program.

On the opposite page in that edition of the NY Times is this article which discusses the economic impact of the death of corals in Australia that will go far beyond the costs of a carbon tax:

Australia’s Other Great (and Threatened) Coral Reefs

MELBOURNE, Australia — The United Nations issued a dire alert on Monday, warning that many of the world’s coral reefs could die as soon as 2040 as a result of climate change.

Already, warming waters have bleached more than two-thirds of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, which covers more than 130,000 square miles and is visible from space.

But the Great Barrier Reef, despite its status, is not the only unique or threatened marine ecosystem in Australia.

Stretching 27,000 square miles along Australia’s southern coast, this life-sustaining seaweed forest could be decimated by the end of the century, according to a recent study. The researchers found that warming waters could kill up to 100 percent of the reef’s kelp species, which provide a habitat for sponges, crustaceans and fish. The reef also supports two of Australia’s most valuable commercial fishing products: abalone and rock lobster.

Together with tourism at the Great Southern Reef, these fisheries contribute roughly 10 billion Australian dollars, or about $7 billion, to the Australian economy per year. (By some estimates, this is more than the revenue generated annually by the Great Barrier Reef.) And though about 70 percent of Australians live within about 30 miles of the southern reef, many have never heard of it.

“The southern coastline is one of the most species-rich, temperate ecosystems in the world,” said Thomas Wernberg, a senior lecturer in marine science at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and the lead author of the recent paper. “It’s important to not forget these other ecosystems.”

Shark Bay

Shark Bay, on Australia’s west coast, is the largest and most diverse sea grass ecosystem in the world. These seagrasses provide habitat for fish, endangered green turtles and dugongs, the only vegetarian marine mammal, which rely on the sea grass for food. Shark Bay is also one of only two places in the world with living ancient deposits of algae, called stromatolites.

But in the summer of 2011, a huge ocean heat wave killed off roughly a quarter of Shark Bay’s seagrasses. Aside from the loss of a valuable ocean habitat, this die-off also meant the release of up to nine million tons of carbon dioxide, according to a paper published earlier this year. It was an “unprecedented event,” said Oscar Serrano, a postdoctoral research fellow in marine ecosystems at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, and one of the study’s lead authors.

“It’s a big loss, but the oceans are dynamic and sea grass meadows have the capacity to adapt,” he added. “What worries me the most is these heat waves are predicted to increase both in magnitude and length. If there is another big heat wave, this may have a more severe impact.”

Ningaloo Reef

Every year, hundreds of whale sharks congregate at Ningaloo Reef, off the country’s west coast. Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo is a near-shore reef: “You can just snorkel off the beach and see coral in a few minutes,” said Verena Schoepf, a research fellow in marine science at the University of Western Australia.

So far, Ningaloo has escaped the kinds of bleaching events that have devastated the Great Barrier Reef and left the coral there weak and susceptible to attack by crown of thorns starfish. But global warming puts Ningaloo at risk of a die-off, according to the United Nations report, and rising sea levels may also reduce the reef’s capacity to protect coastal communities from waves and erosion.

Gulf of Carpentaria

The Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia’s Far North, is a remote and sensitive ecosystem of mangroves, coral, sea grass beds, mud crabs, fish and shrimp. The mangrove trees — which grow in salty water — provide a nursery habitat for fish and wildlife and help prevent shoreline erosion.

But in the summer of 2016 — the same summer that the Great Barrier Reef experienced one of the worst bleaching events in history — extreme heat, drought and low sea levels led to an unprecedented die-off of mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in which about 6 percent of the forest was lost. Like seagrasses, mangroves also sequester carbon, and during the die-off, millions of tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere.

“The view has been that mangroves are tough and resilient and survive most things and indeed they can, but there are limits,” said Norman Duke, a professor and mangrove ecologist at James Cook University in Queensland. “It’s a wake-up call,” he said.