But you knew that.

What you may not have been thinking when you woke up this morning, and you are forgiven since there are some other important things going on in this world, is that this is the approximate tenth anniversary of the end of Watt’s credibility, which also coincides with the end of Roger Pielke Sr’s credibility, and a few other related casualties of ill intentioned fake science.

I’m reminded of this fact by my friend Victor Venema, who woke up this morning with a blog post: The 10th anniversary of the still unpublished Watts et al. (2012) manuscript .

The object lesson from this anniversary: Science marches on while pesudoscience withers and dies.

It sounds like a book based on Greta Thunberg, but in fact, the first edition of The Tantrum That Saved the World predated Greta.

The book starts out with the little girl inheriting a huge problem she didn’t ask for, reshaping her very strong emotions into positive and inspiring action. We then encounter information about climate change science presented in a way that is fully accessible to children. Finally, as all worthwhile things do, there is an action plan. My copy came with a nice poster.

Tantrums are bad. Except when they save the world.

If you are driving an electric car in the United States, the price of “fueling” your vehicle has skyrocketed due to petroleum supply change issues related to the fascist invasion of Ukraine exactly 0%.

There are a couple of places where there has been a slight increase, I think owing to some trading back and fort of petrolium supplies, or maybe for no reason at all. But, essentially, electric car owners have been insulated from this problem, insolated as they in fact are.

I heard that the state of Washingon will phase out the sales of new ICE cars by 2030.

You heard about the Conger Ice Shelf falling off Antarctica. It is said to be the size of Manhattan. If you have been following the Antarctica news over the last decade, you will be both alarmed and not as alarmed. First, the good news: An Antarctic ice sheet the size of Manhattan is a baby. The biggest one to ever break lose was something like 76 Manhattans, or approximately one Connecticut. Or, for you Minnesotans, between two and three norther counties. So, not so big. The bad news, though, is really bad. Two parts. First, this region of the Antarctic never sees temperatures above freezing, until very recently. Second, it took a geological instant (literally, days, maybe a couple of weeks) for above freezing temperatures to cause an ice sheet to break free, assuming that the warm air contributed (this remains to be seen).

New video from Climate Denial Crosk of the Week on the future of the US Western Drought is HERE.

Podcast will be with Mike, on Ikonokast, stay tuned.

Not hapless either!
This new book, targeted to kids 9-13 years of age (4-6th grade), addresses the climate crisis, and offers doable solutions and activities for kids to help address it.

Part of the book is a mini-course in earth system science, tarted to the specified age group. It is clear and detailed enough to be a good text in 6th grade, when many of these concepts are being covered. The authors outline pre-existing environmental disasters and how they have been fixed, to give hope to the kids, and describes what you can do. The readers are even encouraged to go into climate related fields whey the grow up!

If you are linked to a middle school (like, your kid goes to one) maybe give a copy to the science faculty there!

Highly recommended.

Commentary and excellent perspective by Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (Amazon associates link*) interviewed on CNN:

Notice Mann’s comment on Russia (and Saudi Arabia). I’m not sure if people realize the extent to which Russia has made itself, under Putin, a specialized economy based almost entirely on fossil fuels. See Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (Amazon associates link*), a must-read read, to read about that.

The opening of COP26:

See also this commentary in the Los Angeles Times.

I wish. It wasn’t quite that extreme, but nearly so. In certain social settings, a person ranting about climate change, say a decade ago, would be looked at as though they might have a lose screw. Me, for example, at a family gathering. But a few weeks ago, a matriarch in my extended family, whom I might have expected to give me the stern look during one of my own rants, began ranting herself about climate change, and how astonishing it was that people could not see that it is real. I had to get her a glass of water. Times have changed. The big storms have spoken, and American society has listened, and at the very least, the deniers now look like the ones with the loose screw.

However, storms are not the biggest problem with future climate change. Sure, a storm can cause floods that kill hundreds of people. Sure, storms can carve away large sections of the shoreline, including those on which humans have built towns and cities, more so especially as sea level rises. Sure, strong tornadoes can destroy a storm shelter as though it wasn’t there, or pick up a school bus and throw it into a ravine, or whatever they want.

But storms are whiny babies compared to their own mothers, the weather-mother that causes the storms to be worse to begin with, and that will eventually become recognized as the real problem with global warming: heat.

Heat is a problem now. There are regions of the world where, normally, decades ago, people would now and then die, or perhaps just die sooner, because of the heat. Americans hear about heat waves in major cities, during which elders die in dozens. In 2018, 82 North Americans died during a late June and early July heat wave, which also killed 22 people indirectly when the Great North American Derecho plowed through the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic over an 18 hour period from June 29th through June 30th. So right there, we see storms vs. heat, and heat wins the morbid game of death by weather this one time.

Historically, some hundreds (like 500?) of Americans die of heat each year, with a lot of variation across time. But, most of the United States is temperate, most people live in shelters of some sort (houses and such) that give varying degrees of protection, often with air conditioning. With recent global warming, this number has more than doubled, but on a per-capita basis, the United States is not feeling the heat-death that other parts of the world are experiencing.

A recent study suggests that temperature, heat or cold, kills more than 5 million people a year. According to the research, published in The Lancet, just under a half million temperature related deaths are due to heat (more people die of cold). Right now, it is estimated that about a third of these deaths are an upward departure from normal, as the result of global warming, according to a study in Nature Climate Change.

There are large regions of the world where only a major investment of technology will allow people to live during the hot months, and that will eventually have to become human-free. Lots of humans live in those areas. Lowland regions in the middle east, Africa, and the more arid parts of South America for example. Some of these areas are currently sparsely occupied because of heat. But those nearly inhabited regions have few people in them because it is impossible to grow plants or keep animals, mainly. The reason for disinabiting these zones in a decade or so will be because it is simply too hot to not die of the heat, and those no-live zones will expand.

If we have experienced a recent shift in understanding of the importance of, and belief in the existence of climate change across secular society in the United States, the recent storms have to be recognized as part of the reason. In a sense, we can name the cause of this change in perception, and there are really several names: Harvey, Dorian, Michael, Maria, and Irma. Perhaps the increasing realization that heat matters too, and eventually, more, also come with names: Jonathan Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their child Miju and their dog Oski. This was the family that went hiking in California, and then died of the heat while on the trail. They were almost done with the hike, and succumbed to the temperature. In this case, the air temperature was comfortable when they started out the hike, and they brought a couple of liters of water with them. Later in the day, the temperatures soared past 100F/38C. They probably needed a couple or few liters each, rather than less than three for all of them.

This is nothing, right? Three people and a dog died of the heat, compared to a half million or so across the world in the same year. The same summer this family died, hundreds of other Americans, presumably scores of Californians, also died of the heat. The Garrish-Chung family are in the news not because they died or, exactly, how they died, but rather because they were found dead but their cause of death not initially apparent. People seem to die hiking in California a lot, partly because there are a lot of Californians and they seem to spend much of their time hiking or biking on the trails. So, now and then, a lion eats a biker, or a bear mauls a hiker (as happened recently to someone from my fair town in Minnesota, while hiking in Cali). This was yet another death by hiking, but involving a mystery, and the fact that it was an entire family, all the witnesses to this tragedy gone. So we pay attention, and can give death by heat, an increasing phenomenon that will eventually reshape the global configuration of human society, a name.

We are paused, partly because of the comeuppance delivered by Harvey and his windy and wet friends, on the edge of a dramatic shift in action to address climate change. The US Senator representing Coalworld, Joe Manchin has temporarily stopped us in the United States (may he be forever haunted by the ghosts of the Garrish-Chung family), but we will eventually roll over him like dirt-bike on dog shit. We must and I think we will electrify everything, and make that electricity mostly with wind and sunlight. We will regenerate the massively destructive agricultural landscape, experience a global demographic transition that limits population size, and gain control over our waste stream, so instead of it being a waste stream, it is a cradle-to-cradle cycle of stuff.

But only if we keep cool, focus, and fight.

The “Third Pole” of the Earth, the high mountain ranges of Asia, bears the largest number of glaciers outside the polar regions. A Sino-Swiss research team has revealed the dramatic increase in flood risk that could occur across Earth’s icy Third Pole in response to ongoing climate change. Focusing on the threat from new lakes forming in front of rapidly retreating glaciers, a team, led by researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, demonstrated that the related flood risk to communities and their infrastructure could almost triple. Important new hotspots of risk will emerge, including within politically sensitive transboundary regions of the Himalaya and Pamir. With significant increases in risk already anticipated over the next three decades, the results of the study, published in Nature Climate Change, underline the urgent need for forward-looking, collaborative, long-term approaches to mitigate future impacts in the region.

The Hindu Kush-Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges are widely known as the Third Pole of the Earth. Due to global warming, the widespread and accelerated melting of glaciers over most of the region has been associated with the rapid expansion and formation of new glacial lakes. When water is suddenly released from these lakes through failure or overtopping of the dam, glacial lake outburst floods can devastate lives and livelihoods up to hundreds of kilometres downstream, extending across international borders to create transboundary risks. Despite the severe threat that these extreme events pose for sustainable mountain development across the Third Pole, there has been a lack of understanding regarding where and when related risks would evolve in the future.

Himalayan hotspot

Swiss and Chinese climatologists used satellite imagery and topographic modelling to establish the risk associated with 7,000 glacial lakes presently located across the Third Pole. This approach allowed us to accurately classify 96% of glacial lakes known to have produced floods in the past as high or very high risk. “We then compared our results with a catalogue of past glacial lake floods, which allowed us to validate our approaches”, explains Simon Allen, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences of the UNIGE and co-director of the study. “Once we confirmed that the approaches accurately identified current dangerous lakes, we could then apply these methods to future scenarios.” Overall, the study revealed that one in six (1,203) of current glacial lakes posed a high to very high risk to downstream communities, most notably in the eastern and central Himalayan regions of China, India, Nepal, and Bhutan.

New threats in new places

Looking to the future, glacial retreat, lake formation and associated flood risk were considered under three different CO2 emission scenarios. Under the highest emission scenario (sometimes referred to as the “business-as-usual” scenario), the study shows that much of the Third Pole could already be approaching a state of peak risk by the end of the 21st century, or even mid-century in some regions. In addition to the larger potential flood volumes resulting from the expansion of more than 13,000 lakes, over time the lakes will grow closer towards steep unstable mountain slopes that can crash into the lakes and provoke small tsunamis. “The speed at which some of these new hazardous situations are developing surprised us”, says Markus Stoffel, Professor at the Institute for Environmental Sciences of the UNIGE. “We are talking a few decades not centuries – these are timeframes that demand the attention of authorities and decision-makers.”

If global warming continues on its current path, the number of lakes classified as high or very high risk increases from 1,203 to 2,963, with new hotspots of risk emerging in the Western Himalaya, Karakorum and into Central Asia. “These regions have experienced glacial lake outburst floods before, but these events have tended to be repetitive and linked to advancing glaciers. Authorities and communities will be less familiar with the types of spontaneous events we consider here in a deglaciating landscape, so this calls for awareness raising and education on the new challenges that will emerge”, adds Stoffel.

Complex political challenges

The mountain ranges of the Third Pole span eleven nations, giving rise to potential transboundary natural disasters. Findings of the study show that the number of future potential transboundary glacial flood sources could roughly double (an additional 464 lakes), with 211 of these lakes classified in the highest risk categories. The border region of China and Nepal will remain a major hotspot (42% of all future transboundary lake sources), while the Pamir mountains between Tajikistan and Afghanistan emerge as a major new transboundary hotspot (currently 5% of transboundary lake sources increasing to 36% in the future). “Transboundary regions are of particular concern to us”, says Allen. “Political tensions and lack of trust can be a real barrier that prevent timely data sharing, communication and coordination needed for effective early warning and disaster mitigation.”

Researchers stress the importance of exploring disaster risk management strategies to reduce the exposure of people and property and minimise the vulnerability of society. “The findings of this research should motivate relevant nations and the international research communities to urgently work together to prevent future glacial flood disasters in the Third Pole region”, concludes Stoffel.

Since then a lot has been happening on the Cranky Uncle front, and I thought I should catch you up.

John, in cooperation with Facebook and Yale Climate Connection, has created the Facebook Climate Science Information Center. It is HERE. There is an article about this effort HERE.

There is a Cranky Uncle game for your smart phone, which you can get HERE.

Teachers can use the Cranky Uncle game in their classroom (K12 through College) by filling out THIS HERE form.

Also, related, there is a new version of The Conspiracy Handbook by Lewandowsky and Cook, which you can get HERE.

John Cook, author of Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change: How to Understand and Respond to Climate Science Deniers, is a George Mason University expert in climate communication working with Facebook, said research shows that simply saying information is wrong is not enough. “You also have to explain why or how it is wrong. That is important from a psychological point of view,” Cook said of the new “myth-busting” section of the climate portal.

This is a great summary of the current state of concern, by the top scientists working in the area.