Captain Obvious vs Major Surprise

Erratic temperatures causing more deaths than heatwaves, study finds

May 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-05-erratic-temperatures-deaths-heatwaves.html

Similar to the axiom, "It's not the crime that gets you caught; it's the coverup", and yet in opposition to "It's not the heat; it's the humidity", we've got another reason to be concerned about the climate apocalypse -- It's not the absolute heat that kills you, it's the rapid fluctuations in temperature. 

This is well-known in the occupational health world, where it is expected that businesses who send their workers to faraway places allow those workers to acclimate to that faraway environment for one to two weeks prior to starting work. 

That sounds like a lot of time, but that's how long it takes our bodies to adjust. From Death Valley to Denver? You better adjust to that mile-highness, otherwise you won't be able to get enough oxygen to your brain to avoid passing out. Minnesota to Miami? You better adjust, or your heart won't be able to pump your blood around your body fast enough to cool you off, and you could have a heart attack. 

Up to two weeks! Here the summer of New Jersey, the temperature went from a daily high of 85 F for a whole month to one week of temps above 95 (longest heat wave on record, until it got broken again the following week), with some days above 105. But it happened all of the sudden. When the temperatures, and entire seasons, jump back and forth like this, our body can't adjust fast enough, and your heart has to work a lot harder to keep you cool. And for some of us, that might be harder than we can handle. 

via Monash University: Yao Wu et al, Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with short-term temperature variability from 2000–19: a three-stage modelling study, The Lancet Planetary Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00073-0

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00073-0

Image credit: Theoretical Megastructures Dyson Sphere

New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted

May 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-reveals-climate-rapid.html

Storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.

via Weizmann Institute of Science: Rei Chemke, The intensification of winter mid-latitude storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere, Nature Climate Change (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01368-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01368-8

A fresh look into grasslands as carbon sinks

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-fresh-grasslands-carbon.html

"This is the first review which applies the new paradigm of soil organic matter formation and persistence to both discuss the effect of global changes on grasslands' soil organic carbon and estimate the potentials of soil organic carbon sequestration of global grasslands," 

Because "either the amount of carbon coming out of the atmosphere from the plants is wrong or the amount coming out of the soil is wrong".

And don't forget that "roughly a quarter of all human greenhouse gas emissions are from land use".

Also, Gabe Brown would like a word. 

via Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany and Colorado State University: Yongfei Bai et al, Grassland soil carbon sequestration: Current understanding, challenges, and solutions, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abo2380

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abo2380

Scientists evaluate Earth-cooling strategies with geoengineering simulations

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-scientists-earth-cooling-strategies-geoengineering-simulations.html

Solar radiation modification, i.e., injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, a la, Ministry for the Future and Terminal Shock.

"Anybody who has not heard of this strategy before, the first reaction should be 'Wow, you can't be serious. That sounds horrible,'" MacMartin said. "And it might be, but climate change isn't good either.

via Cornell University: D. G. MacMartin et al, Scenarios for modeling solar radiation modification, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2202230119

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202230119

A depiction of Trantor, a fictional ecumenopolis from Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire

Post Script: Heating and Cooling

Heat waves aren't going away. Here's how we can prepare

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-heat-waves-arent-going-away.html

A lack of shade in broad swaths of urban areas adds to the heat burden, making it harder for people to find relief. 

Cooling neighborhoods down by adding trees and vegetation and using more reflective outdoor materials could save up to nearly one in four lives currently lost to heat waves, and delay climate change-induced warming by approximately 40-70 years.

In Los Angeles, one project reducing heat in cities is Cool Streets LA. It focuses on the hottest and most-vulnerable neighborhoods in the city by planting 2,000 trees and adding 60 miles of cool pavement, using various special materials, including one known as CoolSeal. Originally developed by the military, CoolSeal was designed to keep spy planes cool and hide them from infrared cameras. The city reports that these cool pavements can lower surface temperatures by as much as 10 degrees on a summer afternoon.

Adding tree cover can provide much needed shade and help naturally cool the air. But it doesn't work everywhere. Urban planners should consider how to bring shade to areas like bus shelters, school playgrounds and other highly trafficked areas

"My team looked at municipal plans from the 50 largest cities in the U.S., and we found that the overwhelming majority don't even include shade in any of their heat planning documents," Turner says.

Note: While it is illegal to rent an apartment in California that doesn't provide heat, there are no standards that require adequate cooling. The state legislature could soon take up the issue. Cooling will likely need to be subsidized.

via Applied Climatologists Inc, UCLA School of Medicine, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning at Arizona State University: Laurence S. Kalkstein et al, Increasing trees and high-albedo surfaces decreases heat impacts and mortality in Los Angeles, CA, International Journal of Biometeorology (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s00484-022-02248-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02248-8

Climate Remediation vs Climate Mitigation

In Science magazine, scholars call for more comprehensive research into solar geoengineering

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-science-magazine-scholars-comprehensive-solar.html

They use the term "climate mitigation" which is interesting in comparison to the former "climate remediation" that is now going out of favor. These terms are used almost interchangeably in the industrial hygiene and environmental health profession, but to remediate means you can completely remove the hazard, whereas to mitigate means to make it less worse. 

Three themes presented in the papers:

• Assessing and quantifying the costs and benefits of SG (solar geoengineering), and the potential for risk-risk trade-offs associated with its use.
• Understanding the "political economy of deployment," including the incentives for unilateral deployment and the potential multilateral governance of SG decision-making.
• Evaluating how SG may fit in a portfolio of policies, such as emission mitigation, and adaptation, to combat climate change, including closer study of public and expert perceptions of SG.

via Harvard University: David W. Keith, Towards more constructive disagreement about solar geoengineering, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj1587. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abj1587

Also: Joseph Aldy, Social science research to inform solar geoengineering, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj6517.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abj6517

Keeping track:

Here's a couple Google ngrams charts comparing common and not so common climate-related words:

Post Script:

Perhaps more importantly, let us not forget that during the pandemic, the year 2020-2021 (the pandemic is one big year by the way, don't try breaking it up), the world's two foremost science fiction writers, unbeknownst to each other, both wrote a book about solar geoengineering, and with at least one of them being credited with creating a new genre called non-fiction science fiction and also cli-fi. 

If you're trying to do some existential mitigation on yourself prior to the planetary apocalypse, read these books:

Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson, Nov 2021 (Harper Collins)

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, Oct 2020 (Orbit Books)

Falsely related image credit: That's not a picture of a planet, but it does look like it. Instead, it's two thumbnails in a row, one about cells and the other about neutrinos. I started collecting the accidental positioning of successive similar thumbnails. It's the small things that keep you going while you watch the downfall of traditional science journalism in the face of high-frequency algo-powered news aggregator feeds. 

Measure This

I studied sustainable design in graduate school. By the end of my courses, before I even graduated, I was already disillusioned. The moment came during my last final exam. I was asked to run a carbon footprint calculator, inputting variables as close as possible to my living conditions, get the verdict on my contribution to the climate apocalypse (I think we were still calling it global warming at that time), and then give a critical opinion on the utility of such a thing as a carbon calculator. 

Image credit: Calculator, Encyclopedia Britannica

The purpose of the carbon calculator is to give you an idea about how "sustainable" your life is, and as a by-product, to give you some insight into how you can reduce your footprint. (And as I have now come to understand, the real reason for such a thing, by our own deception of course, is to deflect and divert the blame and the responsibility for this mess from consolidated corporate entities to private individuals, like me and you.)

They ask you questions about the square footage of your dwelling, number of windows, wall thickness and insulation values, and a million other things. I ran my numbers, got my expected dose of existential guilt, and proceeded to bash the buttons out of this carbon calculator with my recently-acquired knowledge of building performance, environmental control systems, and life cycle assessments of building materials. 

The calculator had good intentions, but I was just finishing a graduate program -- 7 years of studying how buildings use energy -- and I was not impressed.

For one, the calculator was asking the thickness of my walls and the insulation value (these are the number one variable in your energy usage*), but I was living in a basement at the time, so my walls were half buried in the ground, surrounded by the most insulating thing there is -- year-round 55-degree earth. They asked about square footage, but my ceiling was 12 inches lower than usual, because I was in a basement, which makes the volume of the room that needs to be heated/cooled substantially smaller; no metrics for ceiling height in the calculator. But that was just the beginning. They were asking questions about appliances and Energy Star ratings; I didn't even have a full-sized refrigerator, or a freezer, as a single adult, which is unusual to say the least. There was no option for "no freezer".

They never even got into food or food miles; 75% of my food at the time was coming from the bakery in town and the farm a half mile from my house. You eat a lot of food, which takes lots of energy, but the outsized bulk of that energy comes from moving it from the ground where it's grown to your mouth. I'm writing this from the New York metropolitan area; think how far that is from California, and how many miles per gallon, per pound of food you eat from Trader Joe's, and put that in your carbon calculator.

We had chickens; we fed them grain and they gave us eggs (and eventually chicken soup). Because so much of my food did not come from a supermarket, I had little garbage, and whatever garbage I had was composted or recycled; I didn't use the municipal garbage truck for 7 years. That wasn't measured in the calculator either. I rode my bike to get around as much as I could, and when I couldn't, I was driving a Honda Civic, one of the most fuel-efficient vehicles at the time. When I went on vacation, I took the bus instead of an airplane across the country. No vacation plans in the carbon calculator.  

I was into the challenge. I had joined together the nature-worshipping simplicity of Bodhi Thoreau with the science-based carbon accounting of the 21st century environmentalist movement. This wasn't just about buying an Energy Star refrigerator, this was about a way of life. I had rearranged in intricate detail myriad aspects of my life to lower my carbon impact, and yet my score on this calculator was pretty average.

I was pissed. And then I graduated. And then the American housing market collapsed, taking the world's economy with it, so I never did get a job as a sustainable architect. I survived nonetheless, and over the following decade, my unusual, low-impact, transcendental lifestyle changed by shades until I was putting ice cubes in my water (BTU points) and buying furniture from a store and not a garage sale (embodied energy points). I even had to start using an air conditioner because I moved out of the basement, and it got too hot sometimes, because you know, the climate apocalypse. 

I didn't give up on sustainability, but I did come to a realization about the individual approach to saving the planet -- it all evens out, and you're not making much of a difference. I'm not saying what you do has no effect, but I'll bet you don't realize that for just about every energy-saving task you commit yourself to, there's an energy-wasting by-product attached to that task on the other end that you don't even realize is there. You can't escape it; it's physics. The carbon calculator in the front of your mind is balanced by the calorie calculator in the back.

Just like the planet, we have limits too. And although we often ignore those limits, it doesn't make them go away. Keep filling that Solo cup at the backyard bbq, you know what I mean. Everything has to even out in the end. This report from the University of Geneva agrees:

Mental accounting is impacting sustainable behavior

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-mental-accounting-impacting-sustainable-behavior.html

"Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked."

Hanging your clothes out to dry means you might be less likely to separate your recycling; your "sustainability budget" has been all used up. You just bought a brand new super-efficient air conditioner, so you're leaving all the windows open in the house, thinking you can afford a bit more waste now, with all that Energy Star bling.

They call it mental accounting in this report, but it's actually your subliminal physiological calorie counter that's running in the background of your front-end carbon calculator. "Being sustainable" takes energy, both mental and physical. Where do you think single-serving silverware came from?

The point here is to take it easy. I mean, the planet it is going to kill us for sure, but you're not going to stop it on your own by becoming a low-impact warrior. An electric car might help, maybe a weekday vegetarian? But to sacrifice your way of life at the altar of sustainability is not going to do what you think it's going to do. Carbon in, carbon out.

*Solar geometry is actually the most important of all, but it's too unlikely that you won't be able to do anything about. If you can, put the long side facing the south, with awnings angled to block the sun in the summer but allow it in the winter, i.e., solar geometry. 

Just the Gulf of Mexico, on fire. July 2021.

Notes:

via University of Geneva: Ulf J. J. Hahnel et al. Mental accounting mechanisms in energy decision-making and behaviour, Nature Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-00704-6

Post Script, on equilibrium and sociothermodynamics:

If you change the order of the questions on a survey, respondents will change their answer, BUT when compiling all the answers, they will always cancel out; ALWAYS, an absolute measure that is almost never seen in social science research: Quantum Question Equality, Network Address, 2014.

Mostly unrelated post script:

Lots of people think astrology and astronomy are the same thing: Astronomological, Network Address, 2014.