When Will The Climate Crisis Start Impacting Elections?

A step backward by Nancy Ohanian

I guess New Hampshire Democrats are getting serious. The new poll from Gravis for this crucial first primary in the country-- Iowa is a caucus, important but not pollable-- shows Bernie in the lead with Elizabeth Warren close behind-- and closing in on-- second place Status Quo Joe.

• Bernie- 21%
• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• Elizabeth- 12%
• Mayo Pete- 8%
• Kamala- 7%
• Tulsi- 5%
• Klobuchar- 4%
• Yang- 4%
• Steyer- 4%
• Castro- 2%
• Beto- 2%
• Gillibrand- 1%
• Inslee- 1%

And all the top-ranked Democrats beat Trump-- who is 10 points underwater in the favorable/unfavorable question-- in head in head to head match-ups. Could it be because of the Climate Crisis that Trump and the GOP are ignoring... when not expressing hostility towards dealing with? Yesterday Dino Grandoni and Brady Dennis, reporting for the Washington Post wrote that "a coalition of more than two dozen states and cities sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its rollback of one of President Barack Obama’s signature regulations to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions, saying the White House is seeking to prop up the coal industry and hamper future administrations from tackling climate change. Attorneys general from 22 Democratic-led states, six cities and the District of Columbia filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The suit argues that the Environmental Protection Agency’s replacement for an Obama-era rule intended to push the nation toward cleaner forms of energy is illegal and should be struck down. The action, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, argues that the Trump regulation, which was finalized in July, does not 'meaningfully' reduce carbon dioxide emissions and that the EPA is negligent in its duties under the Clean Air Act. The Obama administration’s 2015 rule set specific targets for greenhouse gas reductions for each state. The Trump administration is instead allowing state regulators to determine how electric utilities can improve the efficiency of their plants."

At the same time, Post reporters Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens were writing about America's hot spots: Where extreme climate change has already arrived. There's no more ice fishing in New Jersey and the state's once-massive ice industry are just "black-and-white photographs at the local museum... New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1895-- double the average for the Lower 48 states. Over the past two decades, the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth’s average temperature increases 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.

The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), virtually all the world’s coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.

But global warming does not heat the world evenly.

A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) mark.

• Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans-- 34 million people-- are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) mark.
• Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Other parts of the Northeast-- New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts-- trail close behind.
• While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.

...The uneven rise in temperatures across the United States matches what is happening around the world.

In the past century, the Earth has warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). But that’s just an average. Some parts of the globe-- including the mountains of Romania and the steppes of Mongolia-- have registered increases twice as large. It has taken decades or in some cases a century. But for huge swaths of the planet, climate change is a present-tense reality, not one looming ominously in the distant future.

To find the world’s 2C hot spots, its fastest-warming places, The Post analyzed temperature databases, including those kept by NASA and NOAA; peer-reviewed scientific studies; and reports by local climatologists. The global data sets draw upon thousands of land-based weather stations and other measurements, such as ocean buoys armed with sensors and ship logs dating as far back as 1850.

In any one geographic location, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) may not represent global cataclysmic change, but it can threaten ecosystems, change landscapes and upend livelihoods and cultures.

In Lake Hopatcong, thinning ice let loose waves of aquatic weeds that ordinarily die in the cold. This year, a new blow: Following one of the warmest springs of the past century, harmful bacteria known as blue-green algae bloomed in the lake just as the tourist season was taking off in June.

New Jersey’s largest lake was shut down after the state’s environmental agency warned against swimming or fishing “for weeks, if not longer.”

The nation’s hot spots will get worse, absent a global plan to slash emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling climate change. By the time the impacts are fully recognized, the change may be irreversible.

Daniel Pauly, an influential marine scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) hot spots are early warning sirens of a climate shift.

“Basically,” he said, “these hot spots are chunks of the future in the present.”

Nationwide, trends are clear. Starting in the late 1800s, U.S. temperatures began to rise and continued slowly up through the 1930s. The nation then cooled slightly for several decades. But starting around 1970, temperatures rose steeply.

At the county level, the data reveals isolated 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) clusters: high-altitude deserts in Oregon; stretches of the western Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River; a clutch of counties along the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan-- home to the famed Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore near Traverse City.

Along the Canadian border, a string of counties from eastern Montana to Minnesota are quickly heating up.

The topography of warming varies. It is intense at some high elevations, such as in Utah and Colorado, and along some highly populated coasts: Temperatures have risen by 2C in Los Angeles and three neighboring counties. New York City is also warming rapidly, and so are the very different areas around it, such as the beach resorts in the Hamptons and leafy Westchester County.

The smaller the area, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause of warming. Urban heat effects, changing air pollution levels, ocean currents, events like the Dust Bowl, and natural climate wobbles such as El Niño could all be playing some role, experts say.

The only part of the United States that has not warmed significantly since the late 1800s is the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, where data in some cases shows modest cooling.

Scientists have attributed this “warming hole” to atmospheric cycles driven by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, along with particles of soot from smokestacks and tailpipes, which have damaging health effects but can block some of the sun’s intensity. Those types of pollutants were curtailed by environmental policies, while carbon dioxide remained unregulated for decades.

Since the 1960s, however, the region’s temperatures have been increasing along with the rest of the country’s. The Northeast is warming especially fast.

Anthony Broccoli, a climate scientist at Rutgers, defines an unusually warm or cold month as ranking among the five most extreme in the record going back to the late 1800s. In the case of New Jersey, he says, “since 2000, we’ve had 39 months that were unusually warm and zero that were unusually cold.”

Scientists do not completely understand the Northeast hot spot. But fading winters and very warm water offshore are the most likely culprits, experts say. That’s because climate change is a cycle that feeds on itself.

Warmer winters mean less ice and snow cover. Normally, ice and snow reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet relatively cool. But as the ice and snow retreat, the ground absorbs the solar radiation and warms.

NOAA data shows that in every Northeast state except Pennsylvania, the temperatures of the winter months of December through February have risen by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1895-1896. And U.S. Geological Survey data shows that ice breaks up in New England lakes nine to 16 days earlier than in the 19th century.

This doesn’t mean the states can’t have extreme winters anymore. Polar vortex events, in which frigid Arctic air descends into the heart of the country, can still bring biting cold. But the overall trend remains the same and is set to continue. One recent study found that by the time the entire globe crosses 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the Northeast can expect to have risen by about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), with winter temperatures higher still.

Climate change plays havoc differently in different places.

In Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay has warmed as much as 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past 50 years, and for want of cooler water, the state’s lobster catch has plummeted 75 percent in the past two decades.

Along the shoreline, the hotter and higher sea is shuffling the lineup of oceanfront homes.

Roy Carpenter’s Beach is a collection of summer cottages along a quarter-mile stretch that is eroding faster than any other part of the state-- an average of 3.3 feet a year.

Rob Thoresen’s great-grandfather bought the property nearly a century ago, and residents living in 377 cottages there now lease the land from the family business.

About a decade ago, the family tried-- in vain-- to persuade residents to move away from the encroaching ocean. Their reluctance was no surprise; the back of the property features a view of cornfields.

But then the coast took an indirect hit from Hurricane Sandy. It damaged 11 homes in the community’s front row, with three of them washing out to sea. The surf laps over the remains of concrete foundations and wooden pylons, knocking over construction fences.

In 2013, 28 families in the first and second rows started moving to the back of the development-- roughly 1,000 feet away. The community is planning to move another 20 houses.

It is expensive. Homeowners pay to physically move their cottages or demolish them and rebuild. Matunuck Beach Properties, the management company, must survey the properties and prepare new locations, laying out new roads and sewer pipes.

Tony Loura, who has summered in Roy Carpenter’s Beach for 15 years, is philosophical about his predicament. He is on the fourth row, where he has an unobstructed view of the ocean from his rocking chair. He estimates that he used to be 1,000 feet from the water. Now, the ocean is only about 150 feet away.

“I’m hoping that I’m back far enough that I won’t have to move to the back,” said Loura, 66. “Every time they say there’s a storm, I get worried.”

With 420 miles of coastline, Rhode Island is particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the Gulf Stream, a massive warm current that travels up the East Coast from the Gulf of Mexico before making a right turn toward Greenland and Europe.

The Gulf Stream is enormous, encompassing more water than “all of the world’s rivers combined,” according to NOAA. It is one part of an even larger global “conveyor belt” of currents that transport heat around the world.

A slowing of these currents, which scientists think is caused by the melting of Arctic ice, has pushed the Gulf Stream closer to the East Coast, bringing more warm water and, perhaps, hotter temperatures onshore. Offshore, it has become its own hot spot, helping to boost water temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more in some regions.

If the slowing continues, seas could rise farther and faster. That’s because when the current slows, water it was driving toward Europe drifts back across the Atlantic to the U.S. coastline. Scientists are trying to determine whether the Gulf Stream is already contributing to rapid sea level rise on the East Coast.

Tidal gauges show sea levels have risen roughly nine inches since 1930, and researchers at the University of Rhode Island have determined that the rate has quickened by about a third in recent years.

By 2030, sea level rise will flood 605 buildings six times a year, according to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council’s executive director, Grover Fugate.

Roy Carpenter’s Beach is especially vulnerable.

Some residents want the beach’s owners to fight off the sea, Loura said.

“They think they should build a sea wall, they should bring in tons of sand,” he said. “Last year, they spent a lot of money on sand. Guess what? It’s all gone.”

Thoresen’s family is moving a convenience store and office for the second time in a decade-- this time all the way back to the 18th row.

“We moved it back 100 feet, and it only bought us 10 years,” Thoresen said. “That’s crazy.”

That’s what people who live in 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) zones are discovering: that climate change seems remote or invisible, until all of a sudden it is inescapable.

...From the Jersey Shore to the shopping malls of Paramus, from hiking trails in the northwest to the Bayway oil refinery, the state faces exceptionally heavy and unpredictable rainfall-- even for New Jersey. Last year, it was inundated by a record 64.77 inches of rainfall statewide, 40 percent above average.

Pests, no longer eradicated by cold winters, are attacking people, crops and landscapes alike.

The ⅛ -inch-long southern pine beetle had been largely confined to southern U.S. forests-- hence its name. But the warmer temperatures have spurred the beetle’s migration north, where it has damaged more than 20,000 acres of the state’s Pine Barrens, a vast coastal forested plain that Congress has defined as a national reserve.

“They are changing the Pinelands,” says Matthew Ayres, a Dartmouth researcher who has studied the beetle. “It may not be too long before people are driving through the Pinelands saying, ‘Why do they call it the Pinelands?’”

Mosquitoes, once dubbed on postcards as New Jersey’s “air force,” have longer seasons. The Warren County Mosquito Control Commission, whose records date to 1987, uses fixed-wing aircraft to drop a granular, naturally occurring soil microbe on swamps to kill the mosquito larvae.

But the bugs may be winning the air war. The commission’s flights are more frequent, and the past eight years, led by 2018, have had the highest numbers of acres treated annually. Mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus came up from the South 20 years ago. Last year, Warren became the last county in the state to register human cases of the disease.

“Mosquito season used to start on June 1 and end on Sept. 30,” said Rutgers professor Dina Fonseca, an expert on insect-borne disease. But unless the air war starts earlier in the spring, “you’re not going to address the mosquito problem.”

Nate McMurray is running for the seat occupied by do-nothing Trump enabler and Climate Crisis denier Chris Collins (NY-27). Nate and people in the farming communities in the district know Climate Change is no hoax. "In Western New York," he told me last night, "our number one economic driver is agriculture-- farms! As lake water rises and climate changes, our farms continue to struggle. Some people wrote this off, but it’s not only an economic issue. It’s also a national security issue."

If J.D. Scholten beats white supremicist Steve King next year, he will represent a district even more dependent on a farm economy than Nate's. "Iowa’s fourth congressional district is the second most agricultural producing district in America," he explained. "The effects of climate change have already been seen with wetter planting and harvest seasons and dryer summers. The mass flooding this year really opened people’s eyes as Iowa is currently dealing with the displacement of climate refugees from southwestern Iowa."