Climate Change - SF

A map on the website of Pacific Gas & Electric showing locations impacted by the blackout on Wednesday morning. The purple icons represent areas where the power was shut off preemptively.  Credit pgecurrents.com

CLICK HERE - PG&E - Outage Map

Pacific Gas & Electric is cutting electricity as a precaution against sparking wildfires in high-wind conditions.

nytimes.com - by Thomas Fuller - October 9, 2019

A deliberate power outage that spanned large parts of Northern California on Wednesday sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for gasoline and other essentials as strong, gusty winds and months of dry weather put the state on alert for wildfires.

The state’s largest power utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, said it had cut power to 500,000 customers soon after midnight. A second round of cuts affecting 250,000 more customers in the hills surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area had been scheduled for noon but was delayed. . . .

 . . . Once the two phases are complete, around 2.5 million people will be without electricity, according to one estimate.

A helicopter drops water to a brush fire at the Holy Fire in Lake Elsinore, California, on Saturday. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images

The fires have scorched states from Washington to New Mexico, with California among the hardest hit

theguardian.com - August 12, 2018

Six large new wildfires erupted in the United States, pushing the number of major active blazes nationwide to over 100, with more expected to break out sparked by lightning strikes on bone-dry terrain, authorities said on Saturday.

More than 30,000 personnel, including firefighters from across the United States and nearly 140 from Australia and New Zealand, were battling the blazes that have consumed more than 1.6m acres (648,000 hectares), according to the National Interagency Coordination Center . . .

 . . . The fires have scorched states from Washington to New Mexico, with California among the hardest hit.

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Credit:  AP Photo/Jim Cole, File

washingtonpost.com - Associated Press - May 27, 2017

 . . . In an attempt to understand what could happen to the planet if the U.S. pulls out of Paris, The Associated Press consulted with more than two dozen climate scientists and analyzed a special computer model scenario designed to calculate potential effects.

Scientists said it would worsen an already bad problem, and make it far more difficult to prevent crossing a dangerous global temperature threshold.

 . . . “The U.S. matters a great deal . . . That amount could make the difference between meeting the Paris limit of two degrees and missing it” . . . 

While scientists may disagree on the computer simulations they overwhelmingly agreed that the warming the planet is undergoing now would be faster and more intense.

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huffingtonpost.com - by Dr. James Hansen - July 27, 2015

. . . 2°C global warming, rather than being a safe "guardrail," is highly dangerous. . . .

. . . My conclusion, based on the total information available, is that continued high emissions would result in multi-meter sea level rise this century and lock in continued ice sheet disintegration such that building cities or rebuilding cities on coast lines would become foolish. . . .

. . . A startling conclusion of our paper is that effects of freshwater release onto the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic are already underway and 1-2 decades sooner in the real world than in the model (Fig. 2). 

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics - Earth's energy imbalance and implications

CLICK HERE - Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2°C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous

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