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Post by randy on Dec 15, 2018 9:41:55 GMT -6
It was pointed out on the radio today that Kerry predicted the polar ice cap would be entirely gone five years ago. Still there I believe.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 17, 2018 14:43:58 GMT -6
How I stave off despair as a climate scientistSo much warming, so many dire effects, so little action — Dave Reay reveals how dreams of soggy soil and seaweed keep him going.
By Dave Reay 17 December, 2018
There’s a curve that is quietly plotting our performance as a species. This curve is not a commodity price or a technology index. It has no agenda or steering committee. It is the Keeling curve. It is painfully consistent in its trajectory and brutally honest in its graphical indictment of our society as one that stands ready to stand by as islands submerge, cities burn and coasts flood.
Established by Charles David Keeling in 1958, the curve records how much carbon dioxide is in our atmosphere — fewer than 330 parts per million then, more than 400 today. Each month for the past decade, my geeky addiction has been to scan the latest data. To search for some hint that ‘Stabilization Day’ will come: when global emissions and global uptake are once more in balance. As yet another ‘last-chance’ United Nations climate-change meeting draws to a close, emissions are still rising.
In climate science, you can check out of the lab anytime you like, but you can never leave. The overheating Earth that our super-computers model is the one we all share and which our children will inherit. Dynamic, high-resolution representations of warming trends and weather patterns that delight me as a researcher chill my spine as a human being: I stare at the lines curving up and see the people who endure them.
There are days when refining another obscure step on the road towards climate catastrophe gets you down. Some colleagues reach for gallows humour to keep them going — the quip “we’re going to need a bigger boat” is common in the face of the latest damning assessment of global inaction. Others seek solace in uncertainty, grasping at the coolest strands of future projections: the green pathways of a rapid and sustained global response. Many of us — my younger self included, as I expounded in my book Climate Change Begins at Home — try to wrestle back an iota of control by cutting our personal carbon footprints and spending our salaries on solar panels, super-insulated homes and electric cars. A few of us have foregone air travel and openly questioned how those who work on climate change can justify a high-emissions lifestyle.
Every tonne of carbon emissions avoided does matter, but unless individual actions are replicated globally, we are pissing in a hurricane. By the middle of this century, the world must reach net zero emissions. So, what more is an academic to do? Write more Nature papers? Blockade the university car park? Knit our elbow patches from hemp?
For me, the most powerful response is to teach. By educating new waves of practitioners, policymakers and researchers, I can vicariously boost mitigation and adaptation capacity at scales and across time horizons I could never reach alone. On restless nights, when futures of famine and storm-surge devastation play out behind my eyelids, that’s what helps me sleep.
That, and a personal plot to pull a lifetime’s worth of carbon out of the atmosphere.
The dream with which I’ve bored my family to distraction for the past 20 years is going truly ‘net zero’: paring down emissions to the bare minimum, and then managing a chunk of land to try to sequester the remainder.
Last month, that dream came true. Years of saving, a large dollop of luck and an even larger loan made me and my wife the nervous owners of 28 hectares of rough grassland and wild rocky shores in the west of Scotland. The coming years will see us map every baseline carbon stock and flux, from the soil and vegetation, to the bemused sheep and ‘blue carbon’ of the seaweed beds. Each gnarled tree trunk will be hugged with a tape measure, every soggy field corner will be probed, sampled and analysed. We’ll then plant trees. Lots of them — native tree species that will boost biodiversity, draw down carbon dioxide and withstand the inevitably turbulent decades and centuries to come.
As a research project, it is a chance to verify the science, and test the concepts of climate-smart land use in the teeth of Atlantic storms and hungry deer. As our future home, it is the chance to finish life as we started it: with an atmospheric blank slate.
Of course, this dream of sustainability is not itself sustainable. My family and I are fortunate to be well-off people in a rich country. To replicate this for every person in the world would require many, many times the area of land that is actually available. We are embarking on a privileged journey that billions could never hope to take, and that, even at its emissions-trapping best, will hardly register in Scotland’s national carbon account. Hopefully, my students can magnify its impact — learn from our trials and errors and help to take such carbon-management expertise global.
We’ve long known that reaching ‘net zero’ globally will require our emissions to plummet, but that some emissions are unavoidable. Worldwide, this will necessitate large increases in tree planting, soil enhancement and other such carbon-capture strategies.
The Keeling curve might remain a monthly glimpse into the abyss, but alongside it will now be a personal emissions curve that holds a real possibility of hitting the x-axis. Field trips for my climate-change classes are about to get a whole lot more hands-on. As a carbon geek, I’ve never been so excited to take my work home with me
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07765-4
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Post by jcurio on Dec 17, 2018 15:09:36 GMT -6
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Post by jojustjo on Dec 18, 2018 0:13:30 GMT -6
Well if there is one thing human-kind is...it's resilient...for the most part. We may go running and screaming around but eventually...we'll start to figure out some plan of action and what may not be so cool for the universe at large...we will survive.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2018 9:58:49 GMT -6
Global warming may send a "Merry Christmas!" to those of you on the East coast of the U.S. Keep your gloves handy!Polar vortex may be on the horizon, scientists warnBy Bradford Betz | Fox News Dec. 18, 2018
Climate researchers are sounding the alarm on a polar vortex that’s predicted to sweep through the U.S.’ east coast later this month and inflict one of the harshest winters in years, The Washington Post reported.
Judah Cohen, a researcher from Atmospheric and Environmental Research, told the outlet his climate models indicate a vortex is likely to hit in late December or early January. A polar vortex disruption occurs when the stratosphere – where most weather occurs – suddenly warms, causing winds to decrease or change direction. The vortex will then be displaced and split apart, spilling cold air into the mid-latitudes.
“Confidence is growing in a significant PolarVortex disruption in the coming weeks. This could be the single most important determinant of the weather this winter across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen wrote on his blog and Twitter feed last week.
Last year a vortex that originated in Eurasia swept eastern North America, causing windstorms that lasted weeks.
“We were still feeling the impacts into the end of April,” Cohen said.
Still, models are notoriously unreliable. American models and European models, for instance, yield different conclusions on when exactly a disruption will occur.
Amy Butler, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tweeted: “Not all other models on board yet so still reason to be cautious.”
Scientists say the later a polar vortex occurs, the less severe its effects will be in the winter months.
“The longer it takes to happen, the bigger chance we have of a warmer winter,” Cohen said.
www.foxnews.com/weather/polar-vortex-may-be-on-the-horizon-scientists-warn
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Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2018 16:58:55 GMT -6
Don't know if this is related to the forecasted polar vortex or not, but it is impressive!Monster Waves Are Battering the West Coast. Here's Why.By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | December 18, 2018
A National Weather Service image shows a wave cresting over the top of Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, which sits off the coast of Oregon and has its light 134 feet (41 meters) above sea level. Credit: NWS Portland
Cyclonic winds, rushing down from Alaska had nothing else to batter against, so they smacked into the water across miles of open ocean. The winds pushed and ground and heaved against the waves, making them bigger, more sustained and more powerful. By the time these waves reached the U.S. shoreline, they were massive, prompting the National Weather Service (NWS) to issue high-surf alerts up and down the West Coast beginning Sunday (Dec. 16) and in many cases remaining in effect until midday today (Dec. 18).
In a tweet from NWS San Francisco, forecasters warned any adventurous Californians, "STAY WELL BACK FROM THE OCEAN OR RISK CERTAIN DEATH."
These winds, wrote Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia's Atmospheric Sciences program and a weather-science writer for Forbes, resulted from a low-pressure system centered in the Gulf of Alaska. In the Northern Hemisphere, he explained, wind whirls counterclockwise around systems like this. Because of the location of the low pressure system, those winds can build up huge waves across hundreds of miles before ramming them into the West Coast. These wind-driven waves can grow to dozens of feet high, though they don't drive themselves inland like tsunami waves of similar height do.
The worst-affected areas, according to The Washington Post, are around San Francisco, where waves have reached 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters), but the water has been dangerous as far north as places in Washington state and as far south as Los Angeles.
Those dangers, Shepherd wrote, extend to activities beyond actually playing in or surfing these monster waves. Simply going near the water, playing on rocks, jetties or beaches, would put people at risk of being swept into the turbulent sea by an especially large wave, Shepherd wrote. And that cold, rough water, he wrote, can trigger "cardiac arrest and involuntary gasp reflexes that lead to drowning."
www.livescience.com/64338-monster-waves-west-coast.html
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Post by swamprat on Jan 13, 2019 11:46:53 GMT -6
Miami-Dade’s septic tanks failing because of sea rise
Alex Harris The Miami Herald
MIAMI – Miami-Dade has tens of thousands of septic tanks, and a new report reveals most are already malfunctioning – the smelly and unhealthy evidence of which often ends up in people’s yards and homes. It’s a billion-dollar problem that climate change is making worse.
As sea level rise encroaches on South Florida, the Miami-Dade County study shows that thousands more residents may be at risk – and soon. By 2040, 64 percent of county septic tanks (more than 67,000) could have issues every year, affecting not only the people who rely on them for sewage treatment, but the region’s water supply and the health of anyone who wades through floodwaters.
“That’s a huge deal for a developed country in 2019 to have half of the septic tanks not functioning for part of the year,” said Miami Waterkeeper Executive Director Rachel Silverstein. “That is not acceptable.”
Septic tanks require a layer of dirt underneath to do the final filtration work and return the liquid waste back to the aquifer. Older rules required one foot of soil, but newer regulations call for double that. In South Florida, there’s not that much dirt between the homes above ground and the water below.
“All those regulations were based on the premise the elevation of groundwater was going to be stable over time, which we now know is not correct,” said Doug Yoder, deputy director of Miami-Dade County’s Water and Sewer Department. “Now we find ourselves in a situation where we know sea level has risen and continues to rise.”
Sea level rise is pushing the groundwater even higher, eating up precious space and leaving the once dry dirt soggy.
Waste water doesn’t filter like it’s supposed to in soggy soil. In some cases, it comes back out, turning a front yard into a poopy swamp.
High tides or heavy rains can push feces-filled water elsewhere, including King Tide floodwaters – as pointed out in a 2016 study from Florida International University and NOAA – or possibly the region’s drinking supply.
In total, there are about 108,000 properties within the county that still use septic, about 105,000 of which are residential. The vast majority (more than 65,000) of the septic systems are in unincorporated Miami-Dade.
Miami Gardens, North Miami Beach, Palmetto Bay and Pinecrest have the most of any city, at about 5,000 each.
Some of those cities will see hundreds more septic tanks experiencing yearly failures within the decade, like North Miami Beach, which has 2,780 homes with septic tanks with periodic issues now. By 2030, that is expected to jump to 3,751.
The report did not forecast past 2040, when the region is expecting around 15 inches of sea rise, a number that is predicted to creep exponentially upward over the decades.
“The best response is sewer extension, but obviously that infrastructure takes quite a bit of planning and time,” said Katherine Haggman, the county’s resilience program manager.
“And money,” County Chief Resilience Officer James Murley added. Ripping out every septic tank and laying down new pipes to connect the homes to the county’s sewer system won’t be cheap. The latest estimate put the price tag at $3.3 billion.
“Who has that?” said Commissioner Rebeca Sosa, who called for the study. “We need to act as fast as possible. We need to get as much assistance as we can from the federal government, from the state.”
That $3.3 billion price tag doesn’t cover commercial properties, an estimated $230 million cost, Yoder said. The county’s current general obligation bond includes $126 million to extend sewer services to businesses. Yoder said the plans are in the design phase.
For now, anyone who wants to connect their property to the county’s sewer system has to pay out of pocket. The report cites the average price as $15,000, but Yoder estimated that in septic-reliant areas like Pinecrest, it could cost around $50,000 per home to tap into the sewer system.
That’s cash most residents don’t have on hand, Haggman said, which is why the county is exploring other ways to help residents out.
“We have options, but I think that’s a good area for more conversation,” she said. Besides borrowing more money with another bond, the report pointed out the county’s best options would be continuing to collect the per-home fee or establishing special taxing districts and spreading the cost into a neighborhood. Silverstein said the findings raise significant concerns about impacts from septic tanks not just in 20 years, but now.
“Clearly the county is facing a major system failure here. Septic tanks are already compromised and will continue to be even more comprised with sea level rise and they need to take rapid action to address this and make the system more resilient,” she said.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 29, 2019 10:37:28 GMT -6
Do NOT be misled by the current "polar vortex" and bitter cold weather. We be in deep doodoo. Think twice before buying ocean-front.....New warning about Greenland ice meltBy EarthSky in EARTH | January 28, 2019
Greenland ice via Ohio State University.
A new study suggests that Greenland ice is melting 4 times faster than in 2003. “We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future,” these scientists said.
Greenland ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought — and will likely lead to faster-than-expected sea level rise — according to a new study. This study comes from an international team of scientists and was published January 21, 2019, in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists concerned about sea level rise have long focused on Greenland’s southeast and northwest regions, where large glaciers stream iceberg-sized chunks of ice into the Atlantic Ocean. Those chunks float away, eventually melting into seawater. But here is what’s unusual about the new study. It found that the largest sustained ice loss from early 2003 to mid-2013 came from Greenland’s southwest region, which is mostly devoid of large glaciers.
That melting means that – in the southwestern part of Greenland – growing rivers of water are streaming into the ocean during the summer. Michael Bevis, a professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University, is the study’s lead author. Bevis said in a statement:
"We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers. But now we recognize a second serious problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea."
The findings suggest that southwest Greenland, which previously had not been considered a serious threat, will likely become a major future contributor to sea level rise, Bevis said. This scenario could have serious implications for coastal U.S. cities, including New York and Miami, as well as island nations that are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Bevis added that, from his perspective as a scientist who studies Greenland ice melt, there is no turning back:
"The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming. It’s too late for there to be no effect. This is going to cause additional sea level rise. We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point."
Climate scientists and glaciologists have been monitoring the Greenland ice sheet as a whole since the 2002 launch of NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission. GRACE – and now a follow-up mission called GRACE-FO, launched in 2018 – consists of twin satellites that have the capability of tracking Earth’s water movement. According to NASA, the satellites can:
"… monitor changes in underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, soil moisture, ice sheets and glaciers, and sea level caused by the addition of water to the ocean."
Data from GRACE showed that – between 2002 and 2016 – Greenland lost approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, equivalent to 0.03 inches (.7 mm) of sea level rise each year.
But the rate of ice loss across the island was far from steady.
For the new study, the team used data from GRACE and from GPS stations scattered around Greenland’s coast to identify changes in ice mass. The patterns they found show an alarming trend, they said. By 2012, ice was being lost at nearly four times the rate observed in 2003. The researchers were surprised to discover that this acceleration was focused in southwest Greenland, a part of the island that previously hadn’t been known to be losing ice that rapidly.
Bevis said a natural weather phenomenon – the North Atlantic Oscillation, which brings warmer air to West Greenland, as well as clearer skies and more solar radiation — was building on human-caused climate change to cause unprecedented levels of melting and runoff. Global atmospheric warming enhances summertime melting, especially in the southwest. The North Atlantic Oscillation is a natural – if erratic – cycle that causes ice to melt under normal circumstances. When combined with man-made global warming, though, the effects are supercharged. Bevis said:
"These oscillations have been happening forever. So why only now are they causing this massive melt? It’s because the atmosphere is, at its baseline, warmer … Global warming has brought summertime temperatures in a significant portion of Greenland close to the melting point, and the North Atlantic Oscillation has provided the extra push that caused large areas of ice to melt."
Scientists have understood Greenland to be one of the Earth’s major contributors to sea-level rise mostly because of its glaciers. But these new findings, Bevis said, show that scientists need to be watching the island’s snowpack and ice fields more closely, especially in and near southwest Greenland. He said:
"We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future. Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?"
Bottom line: A new study finds that Greenland ice is melting four times faster than 15 years ago. The findings suggest that key southwest Greenland, which previously had not been considered a serious threat, will likely become a major future contributor to sea level rise.
earthsky.org/earth/new-warning-greenland-ice-melt-sea-level-rise
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Post by randy on Jan 29, 2019 10:45:26 GMT -6
Massive cold is coming down from Canada to the central US. People are being warned to prepare for this and to take shelter. mean while we being asked to pay taxes to stop global warming. Money is the big point in all this it would seem regardless of events
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Post by swamprat on Jan 29, 2019 14:41:50 GMT -6
Very true, Randy. Corporate and political greed muddies the water like crazy!
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Post by swamprat on Jan 30, 2019 10:20:59 GMT -6
That there global warming thing is gettin' nasty!Deadly polar vortex blasts Midwest with record-breaking cold, forecasters warn to 'minimize talking' outdoorsBy Travis Fedschun | Fox News January 30, 2019
A deadly and likely once-in-a-lifetime arctic deep freeze from the polar vortex settled in over the Midwest on Wednesday, shuttering schools and causing the U.S. Postal Service to suspend mail delivery in areas as forecasters warned people to keep their mouths closed if stepping out.
Wind chills of negative 54 degrees Fahreneit were reported in International Falls, Minnesota and minus 52 degrees in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning while Des Moines, Iowa reported a bitterly cold wind chill of minus 42 degrees and the aptly-named "Windy City" of Chicago had a wind chill of negative 52 degrees just before sunrise.
"The heart of the Arctic cold has arrived," the National Weather Service's Chicago office said on Twitter. "The combined effects of the cold & winds are at their peak today with wind chills of -45° to -60° continuing. The afternoon highs today...yes the highs...will only be -11° to -17°."
The cold snap also is causing travel disruptions throughout the region. United Airlines canceled about 500 flights at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport from Tuesday through Thursday, while Southwest Airlines canceled more than 700 flights at Midway International Airport in the same time period. Amtrak also canceled all trains out of Chicago on Wednesday and into Thursday.
The windchills impacting the Midwest on Wednesday morning.
The temperatures across the Midwest on Wednesday were colder than the likes of Greenland and Alaska. The temperatures in the Midwest were colder than at the McMurdo Station, the main U.S. station in Antarctica, where it was a balmy 23 degrees on Wednesday. A wind chill of minus 25 degrees can freeze skin within 15 minutes, according to the National Weather Service.
The temperatures across the Midwest on Wednesday were colder than the likes of Greenland and Alaska. The temperatures in the Midwest were colder than at the McMurdo Station, the main U.S. station in Antarctica, where it was a balmy 23 degrees on Wednesday. A wind chill of minus 25 degrees can freeze skin within 15 minutes, according to the National Weather Service.
The cold air will continue to blanket the region on Wednesday into Thursday, with some areas possibly reaching a minus 70-degree windchill overnight, Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean said. "The Midwest and Great Lakes are well into this Arctic blast, with dangerously low wind chills widespread across the region this morning," Dean said. "Air temperatures are well below zero, in the -10s to -30s for many. Wind chills of -20 to -70 will continue through early Thursday flirting with all-time record lows ever recorded."
www.foxnews.com/us/deadly-polar-vortex-blasts-midwest-with-record-breaking-cold-forecasters-warn-to-minimize-talking-outdoors
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Post by Princess Leia on Jan 30, 2019 21:49:48 GMT -6
I’m not complaining.
😎. It’s not -40 like it should be. It’s 18.
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Post by swamprat on Jan 31, 2019 10:52:15 GMT -6
How polar vortex blasts are tied to global warmingBy Jennifer Francis, Rutgers University, EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | January 30, 2019
How could global warming be bringing the life-threatening cold to the central US this week? Scientists don’t have all the answers, but, they say, the jet stream is the link.
A record-breaking cold wave is sending literal shivers down the spines of millions of Americans. Temperatures across the upper Midwest are forecast to fall an astonishing 50 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees C) below normal this week – as low as 35 degrees below zero. Pile a gusty wind on top, and the air will feel like -60 degrees F (-51 degrees C).
This cold is nothing to sneeze at. The National Weather Service is warning of brutal, life-threatening conditions. Frostbite will strike fast on any exposed skin. At the same time, the North Pole is facing a heat wave with temperatures approaching the freezing point – about 25 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees C) above normal.
Predicted near-surface air temperature differences (C) from normal, relative to 1981-2010. Image via Pivotal Weather.
What is causing this topsy-turvy pattern? You guessed it: the polar vortex. In the past several years, thanks to previous cold waves, the polar vortex has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary and served as a butt of jokes for late-night TV hosts and politicians. But what is it really? Is it escaping from its usual Arctic haunts more often? And a question that looms large in my work: How does global warming fit into the story?
Rivers of air
Actually, there are two polar vortices in the Northern Hemisphere, stacked on top of each other. The lower one is usually and more accurately called the jet stream. It’s a meandering river of strong westerly winds around the Northern Hemisphere, about seven miles above Earth’s surface, near the height where jets fly.
The jet stream exists all year, and is responsible for creating and steering the high- and low-pressure systems that bring us our day-to-day weather: storms and blue skies, warm and cold spells. Way above the jet stream, around 30 miles above the Earth, is the stratospheric polar vortex. This river of wind also rings the North Pole, but only forms during winter, and is usually fairly circular.
Dark arrows indicate rotation of the polar vortex in the Arctic; light arrows indicate the location of the polar jet stream when meanders form and cold Arctic air dips down to mid-latitudes. Image via L.S. Gardiner/UCAR.
Both of these wind features exist because of the large temperature difference between the cold Arctic and warmer areas farther south, known as the mid-latitudes. Uneven heating creates pressure differences, and air flows from high-pressure to low-pressure areas, creating winds. The spinning Earth then turns winds to the right in the northern hemisphere, creating these belts of westerlies.
Why cold air plunges south
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have warmed the globe by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree C) over the past 50 years. However, the Arctic has warmed more than twice as much. Amplified Arctic warming is due mainly to dramatic melting of ice and snow in recent decades, which exposes darker ocean and land surfaces that absorb a lot more of the sun’s heat. Because of rapid Arctic warming, the north/south temperature difference has diminished. This reduces pressure differences between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, weakening jet stream winds. And just as slow-moving rivers typically take a winding route, a slower-flowing jet stream tends to meander.
Large north/south undulations in the jet stream generate wave energy in the atmosphere. If they are wavy and persistent enough, the energy can travel upward and disrupt the stratospheric polar vortex. Sometimes this upper vortex becomes so distorted that it splits into two or more swirling eddies.
These “daughter” vortices tend to wander southward, bringing their very cold air with them and leaving behind a warmer-than-normal Arctic. One of these eddies will sit over North America this week, delivering bone-chilling temperatures to much of the nation.
Deep freezes in a warming world
Splits in the stratospheric polar vortex do happen naturally, but should we expect to see them more often thanks to climate change and rapid Arctic warming? It is possible that these cold intrusions could become a more regular winter story. This is a hot research topic and is by no means settled, but a handful of studies offer compelling evidence that the stratospheric polar vortex is changing, and that this trend can explain bouts of unusually cold winter weather.
Undoubtedly this new polar vortex attack will unleash fresh claims that global warming is a hoax. But this ridiculous notion can be quickly dispelled with a look at predicted temperature departures around the globe for early this week. The lobe of cold air over North America is far outweighed by areas elsewhere in the United States and worldwide that are warmer than normal.
Predicted daily mean, near-surface temperature (C) differences from normal (relative to 1979-2000) for January 28-30, 2019. Data from NOAA’s Global Forecast System model. Image via Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Change Institute, University of Maine.
Symptoms of a changing climate are not always obvious or easy to understand, but their causes and future behaviors are increasingly coming into focus. And it’s clear that at times, coping with global warming means arming ourselves with extra scarfs, mittens and long underwear.
Jennifer Francis, Visiting Professor, Rutgers University
Bottom line: A scientist explains how the frigid polar vortex of January 2019 is connected to global warming.
earthsky.org/earth/how-polar-vortex-connected-to-global-warming
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Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2019 10:56:58 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on Feb 1, 2019 15:35:22 GMT -6
Ha! Karma is indeed the B word! (But most of us Republicans still would not vote for the Hillary.....)US climate costs will be highest in Republican strongholdsDistricts where politicians have generally opposed climate policies will see the most economic damage this century.
Jeff Tollefson 30 January 2019
The bulk of the economic burden resulting from climate change in the United States this century will fall on Republican strongholds where politicians have traditionally opposed policies to curb greenhouse gases. And as the impacts mount, they could potentially alter the political dynamics, says an analysis released on 29 January by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC.
Researchers compared the projected economic impacts of global warming by the end of the century — including changes in mortality, agricultural yields and coastal damage driven by extreme weather and rising seas, for example — to recent voting patterns across the United States.
They found that vast swaths of the Republican-leaning southwest and southeast could see economic losses of 10–28% by the end of the century (see ‘Geography of impact’). Meanwhile, northern regions that include many Democratic-voting states, will experience fewer impacts and could even benefit from some of the results of climate change, including increases in agricultural yields.
Source: Brookings Institution
All told, 15 of the 16 states with the most to lose economically from global warming voted for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, according to the analysis (see ‘Voting climate’). Trump’s administration has worked aggressively to dismantle climate regulations put in place under former President Barack Obama.
Source: Brookings Institution
The US states at most risk are part of a “barricade” that opposes action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, says co-author David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “The politics are flipped upside down,” Victor says.
But, he adds, public recognition of the problem could increase as global-warming effects accumulate.
Facts to the rescue
There is some recent evidence that information about climate impacts is already persuading the public. In a poll conducted in December by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 73% of US respondents said they understand that global warming is happening — an increase of ten percentage points since March 2015.
The number of people in the United States who say they have personally experienced the impacts of global warming has increased 15% over the same period, to 46%. And nearly two-thirds think that global warming is affecting the weather, while roughly half say that it made wildfires and/or hurricanes worse in 2018.
Climate change is not immune to the political divisions in the United States, but opinions do change in response to facts and personal experience, says co-author Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the institution. “That is what the new survey data is beginning to show.”
But translating public understanding of the influence of climate change into concrete — and potentially expensive — actions to curb greenhouse gases is a daunting challenge. Climate change remains a relatively low-priority issue among US voters, and the political leadership that is needed to build support for climate policies is missing, says Megan Mullin, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“People elect leaders, but leaders also affect people’s perceptions,” Mullin says. As long as mainstream politicians refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence on climate change, she says, making progress on meaningful climate policies will be difficult.
Still, Victor says that talking about economic impacts is more likely to persuade conservative voters of the need for action than is talking about environmental concerns. What’s needed, he says, is more scientific evidence that connects the dots between global warming and local costs to taxpayers.
“That’s what makes it all palpable,” he says. “Once you understand the local costs — that tells you what the public needs to do.”
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00327-2
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Post by swamprat on Feb 2, 2019 10:50:01 GMT -6
Lake Michigan Has Completely Frozen Over Amid Dangerous Temperatures — See the Incredible PhotosBy Helen Murphy February 1, 2019
Cold Chicago. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Lake Michigan has frozen over as extreme cold weather hit parts of the U.S. this week.
The Midwest, from the Dakotas to Western New York, is experiencing some of the coldest temperatures to hit the region in more than two decades, according to The Weather Channel — and the lake is feeling the effects.
As wind chill temperatures in Chicago dropped as low as -51 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service, parts of Lake Michigan turned to ice.
Source: Coastal Living
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Post by swamprat on Feb 2, 2019 11:51:40 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on Feb 20, 2019 15:29:09 GMT -6
Does NASA have any climate change skeptics?Michelle Thaller 23 November 2018
So your question is how widespread is it within NASA that scientists are convinced that human activity is responsible for climate change? And this is something that is important to say very, very clearly. I have known and worked with hundreds of earth scientists at many different locations in NASA, all of them, all of them believe that human activity is responsible for the current climate change that we see going so fast it's almost unprecedented. I want you to think about that.
One thing that I take really seriously and I'm very proud of is that NASA is not a political organization. We are scientists that work for the American people. We're funded by taxpayer's money. And what we do is we make measurements. We have many, many different satellites that are orbiting the earth right now they're looking at things like ice on the oceans and at the poles, they're looking for things like vegetation growth and the change of that, ocean level, is the ocean level rising? Yeah it turns out that it is. So we have many scientists all over the planet studying all of the different ramifications of climate change. We understand the causes. There actually is no scientific controversy about that. Humans are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and this is warming our planet.
Now what scientists are researching currently, and they don't all agree about, is what are the most important components of driving climate change. Is it carbon dioxide? Could it be something else like methane? When methane gets released that's an even more powerful greenhouse gas. We don't agree on how quickly things like the ocean level will rise. People have different estimates for how quickly that will happen. So there still is scientific controversy about what the most important aspects of climate change are and how quickly it will go in the future, but there is no scientific disagreement within NASA that humans are causing climate change.
Now I started this off by saying that one of the things I'm very proud of is that NASA is not political. And what that means for me is that I cannot advocate for any specific solution to climate change. That's not my job. That's up to policymakers. People might suggest things like having more solar energy or cutting carbon emissions or things like that, but at NASA we really understand that's not us, that's up to the American people, our leaders and leaders around the world. What we do is provide the facts to everybody on the planet. All of our data is actually free to any government, any person, any scientist all over the world that wants to use it. So we all know what's causing climate change, we can't tell you what to do about it but we can say it's time to do something about it.
(Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.)
bigthink.com/videos/does-nasa-have-any-climate-change-skeptics
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Post by lois on Feb 24, 2019 0:14:06 GMT -6
Does NASA have any climate change skeptics?Michelle Thaller 23 November 2018
So your question is how widespread is it within NASA that scientists are convinced that human activity is responsible for climate change? And this is something that is important to say very, very clearly. I have known and worked with hundreds of earth scientists at many different locations in NASA, all of them, all of them believe that human activity is responsible for the current climate change that we see going so fast it's almost unprecedented. I want you to think about that.
One thing that I take really seriously and I'm very proud of is that NASA is not a political organization. We are scientists that work for the American people. We're funded by taxpayer's money. And what we do is we make measurements. We have many, many different satellites that are orbiting the earth right now they're looking at things like ice on the oceans and at the poles, they're looking for things like vegetation growth and the change of that, ocean level, is the ocean level rising? Yeah it turns out that it is. So we have many scientists all over the planet studying all of the different ramifications of climate change. We understand the causes. There actually is no scientific controversy about that. Humans are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and this is warming our planet.
Now what scientists are researching currently, and they don't all agree about, is what are the most important components of driving climate change. Is it carbon dioxide? Could it be something else like methane? When methane gets released that's an even more powerful greenhouse gas. We don't agree on how quickly things like the ocean level will rise. People have different estimates for how quickly that will happen. So there still is scientific controversy about what the most important aspects of climate change are and how quickly it will go in the future, but there is no scientific disagreement within NASA that humans are causing climate change.
Now I started this off by saying that one of the things I'm very proud of is that NASA is not political. And what that means for me is that I cannot advocate for any specific solution to climate change. That's not my job. That's up to policymakers. People might suggest things like having more solar energy or cutting carbon emissions or things like that, but at NASA we really understand that's not us, that's up to the American people, our leaders and leaders around the world. What we do is provide the facts to everybody on the planet. All of our data is actually free to any government, any person, any scientist all over the world that wants to use it. So we all know what's causing climate change, we can't tell you what to do about it but we can say it's time to do something about it.
(Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.)
bigthink.com/videos/does-nasa-have-any-climate-change-skeptics thank you Paul. I often wondered what Nasa thought about all this. Too bad the government is into so much control over this matter. Seems other countries are doing more to help this planet. Science has taken us too far in certain areas. We must turn around and take a look at what we are doing. We can make a change.
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Post by jojustjo on Feb 27, 2019 13:22:27 GMT -6
well...I hope mother nature just rears up and does a fix herself. We may not like it...but considering others don't want to do anything...maybe that's the only hope.
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Post by jcurio on Mar 3, 2019 11:25:35 GMT -6
....... welllll...... it’s taking “Mother Nature” to convince people that something IS happening.......
I find that it is SMALL COMFORT, that Whitley Strieber wrote/had a big hand in the movie “Day After Tomorrow” (the one with Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhal, Emmy Rossem, etc.). And that J.Allen Hynek’s son is a (behind the scenes’?) movie producer.
Where did these 2 guys get their ideas??
Ha!
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Post by jojustjo on Mar 4, 2019 0:46:28 GMT -6
I think a lot of science fiction writers aren't writing fiction
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Post by swamprat on Apr 2, 2019 9:11:09 GMT -6
2018 global CO2 growth 4th highest on recordBy EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | April 2, 2019
According to NOAA data, global growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2018 was the 4th-highest in 60 years of record-keeping.
Image via HuffPost.
By the end of 2018, NOAA’s atmospheric observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, recorded the fourth-highest annual growth in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 60 years of record-keeping.
Carbon dioxide grew by 2.87 parts per million (ppm) at the mountaintop observatory during 2018, jumping from an average of 407.05 ppm on January 1, 2018, to 409.92 on January 1, 2019, according to a new analysis of air samples collected by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division (GMD).
That means three of the four highest annual increases have occurred in the past four years, said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with GMD. Tans said: "At a time when there’s all this talk about how we should be decreasing CO2 emissions, the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere is clearly accelerating. It’s no coincidence that the last four years also had the highest CO2 emissions on record."
A chart showing the steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (in parts per million) observed at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory over the course of 60 years. Measurements of the greenhouse gas began in 1959. Image via NOAA.
NOAA captures and analyzes air samples from a network of observatories and collecting stations around the world. Situated close to the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory samples “background” samples of Northern Hemisphere air. Mauna Loa is the oldest in the network and has the longest record of CO2 measurements.
The increase observed in 2018 ranks behind only 2016’s record jump of 3.01 ppm, 2015’s near-record increase of 2.98 ppm and 1998’s growth of 2.93 ppm/yr in the modern record. The record dates to March 1958 when David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography started measuring atmospheric CO2 in what’s known as the Keeling Curve.
Globally averaged CO2 levels increased by a similar amount to what was observed on Mauna Loa during 2018.
Carbon dioxide is by far the most important of the five primary greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and ozone – both in total amount and the rate of increase. When the first Mauna Loa samples were analyzed in 1958, CO2 had already risen 35 ppm from the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. In the past 60 years, CO2 has increased by an additional 95 ppm to 410 ppm today.
In the last two decades, the rate of increase has been roughly 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.
Tans said: "Today’s rise of CO2 is dominated by human activities. It’s not from natural causes."
About NOAA greenhouse gas monitoring NOAA tracks five primary greenhouse gases that warm the planet by trapping heat from Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space, including two chlorofluorocarbons controlled by the Montreal Protocol that damage Earth’s ozone layer. All five gases account for about 96 percent of the atmosphere’s increased heat-trapping capacity since 1750, another climate indicator tracked by NOAA.
Bottom line: A NOAA report showed the 4th-highest growth in global atmospheric CO2 in 60 years of record-keeping.
earthsky.org/earth/2018-global-co2-growth-4th-highest-on-record
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Post by swamprat on Apr 5, 2019 9:46:27 GMT -6
Alaska’s mountain glaciers: A 10-year storyBy EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | April 5, 2019
Glaciers in Alaska are losing ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a team of researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009.
By María José Viñas/NASA’s Earth Science News Team
In Alaska, five percent of the land is covered by glaciers that are losing a lot of ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a small team of NASA-funded researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009.
In almost a decade of operations, the Operation IceBridge Alaska team has more than doubled the number of mountain glaciers surveyed in the state known as “The Last Frontier.” Data from the mission has put numbers to the loss of Alaskan glaciers from 1994 to 2013: 75 gigatons of ice every year. Measurements from the campaign have helped scientists determine that most of the mass loss in Alaska’s icy fields is due to surface melt rather than warming ocean waters.
NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne science campaigns have been measuring Earth’s changing glaciers and ice sheets since 2009. IceBridge was conceived to avoid a gap in measurements of ice height between two satellite missions: NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped collecting data in 2009, and its ICESat-2, which launched in 2018. While scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, managed the two larger yearly field campaigns in the Arctic and Antarctica, monitoring Alaskan glaciers fell on a smaller team based at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska.
Chris Larsen is lead scientist for Operation IceBridge Alaska and a research professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Larsen said:
"NASA wanted to find existing systems that were capable of doing these measurements from airplanes and get them going right away. University of Alaska Fairbanks had an ongoing altimetry program since 1991 and a system that was flight-ready – so we were good to go and started our flights in May 2009."
Challenging mountain flights Equal in size to six Yellowstone National Parks, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in southeastern Alaska is the largest national park in the United States. The remote site offers breathtaking views of extensive boreal forest, braided glacial rivers and towering mountains – and also provides optimal access to many of the main icefields in the region.
Sitting in the middle of the park, hundreds of miles away from the closest paved road, is a lodge that doubles as IceBridge Alaska’s main base of operations. From there, Larsen’s team conducts two flight campaigns every year: one at the end of the accumulation season, in May, and another toward the end of the melt season, in August. Larsen said:
"Both melt and ice flow both occur at much faster rates in general here than they do in Greenland and Antarctica. The difference between a glacier in May and that same glacier in August is huge."
Since the beginning of the mission, Larsen has used a laser altimeter – an instrument that fires pulses of light and times how long they take to bounce off the ice and return to the sensors – to measure changes in the surface of the ice. In 2012, he added a radar sounder to examine the bedrock beneath mountain glaciers – scientists are keen on measuring the topography near the terminus, or end, of a glacier because it often determines the glacier’s behavior.
But radar, it turns out, is tricky to use with Alaska’s mountain glaciers.
Martin Truffer is an expert in ice physics at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and IceBridge Alaska’s co-principal investigator. He said:
"It can be really hard to get the radar energy all the way to the bed of the glacier – it’s actually a much harder problem than I thought when I first started."
Most glaciers in Alaska are temperate, meaning they are at their melting point from surface to base and contain large pockets of water within the ice that scatter radar waves. To further complicate things, the tall mountains encasing the narrow glacier valleys reflect radar waves as frequently as the bedrock does. This muddles the signal and makes it challenging for scientists to define the glacier’s base. Truffer said:
"Radar energy just comes back from everywhere, from the mountains all around the plane, and then we have to decipher what’s coming from the glacier bed. There used to be these solar hotdog cookers, made of this U-shaped mirror that would focus all the sunlight on the hotdog. It turns out that our airplane is often where the hotdog would be."
A tale of three glaciers On a bright morning on August 17, 2018, Larsen, Truffer and University of Texas undergraduate student Michael Christoffersen were ready to launch their summer campaign of science flights. The IceBridge scientists and their instruments would be traveling aboard their usual ride: a bright red, single-engine De Havilland Otter.
The Otter belongs to Paul Claus, a bush pilot who’s logged more than 35,000 flight hours, mostly in the wilderness. Claus hand-flies all of IceBridge’s data collection lines along Alaskan glaciers, because said paths are often meandering and close to ridge lines, which does not allow for autopilot. Claus’s intimate knowledge of Alaska’s tricky mountain weather is priceless for the mission’s safety and efficiency. Larsen, who is himself a commercial pilot who assists in the cockpit during flight, said:
"Whenever a problem comes up, Paul has already been through it or knows how to get around it and often before it happens because he can see it coming."
Larsen was moderately optimistic about the day’s forecast. He said:
"The weather looks like it’s going to be good for us, but you can get the best forecast in the world for this region and still get out there and have it be totally different. We won’t know until we check it out. Paul and I have a saying: It’s easy when it’s easy, and I’m hoping we’ll get to say that today."
The day’s goals included flying over three glaciers that, though relatively close by, exhibit different behaviors – something very common among Alaskan glaciers.
One of the first targets was Yahtse Glacier, a tidewater glacier. These types of glaciers sit on deep water and have a built-in cyclicity: they naturally alternate between advancement and retreat. And currently, Yahtse is the most rapidly advancing glacier of its type in Alaska.
Soon afterward, the Otter flew over other glaciers along Icy Bay, a breathtaking body of water in southeast Alaska that presents one of the greatest coastal reliefs (difference between the highest and lowest elevation) in the world. Only a century ago, the now open waters were covered in ice.
Among the final targets of the day was Malaspina Glacier. Malaspina is North America’s largest piedmont glacier: a confluence of large valley glaciers that meet to form an almost stagnant lobe crisscrossed by psychedelic patterns of sediments. The glacier, so huge it’s visible from space, is thinning at the state-wide average of 2.3 feet (.7 meters) per year. But its massive ablation zone makes it vulnerable to future warming. Larsen said:
"Malaspina has the potential for being one of the bigger geographic evolutions in Alaska of our time. Certainly, my son could be able to witness some big geography changes there, as it could open up a large lake or bay."
With a dozen glaciers surveyed on August 17, the inaugural flight of IceBridge Alaska’s summer campaign was a success. Later on, an atmospheric river drove a lot of rain to southeast Alaska, grounding Larsen’s team for several days – still, they managed to complete 50 hours of science flights. Larsen said:
"August can be this way in Alaska. Our May campaign is generally better weather and more stable at that. We didn’t get it this year, but in years past it’s been wonderful – then the world is your oyster and you can choose where you want to go based on the scientific priorities."
The following month, on September 15, 2018, NASA’s ICESat-2 launched and the gap in measurements of ice height in the polar regions was finally bridged. Larsen expects the new spacecraft to perform well with mountain glaciers. Larsen said:
"What is great about ICESat-2 is that it has multiple laser beams, so each pass of the satellite in effect covers multiple ground tracks – and this will help with smaller targets, such as Alaskan glaciers."
Larsen will continue to carry on IceBridge Alaska flights until summer 2020 and thus contribute to the validation of the new satellite’s measurements of ice height in the region.
Bottom line: Flying low over some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet, a cadre of scientists and pilots have been measuring changes in Alaskan glaciers as part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge for almost a decade. The team has seen significant change in ice extent and thickness over that time.
earthsky.org/earth/alaska-mountain-glaciers-icebridge-video
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Post by swamprat on Apr 9, 2019 9:33:52 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on Jan 15, 2021 9:37:07 GMT -6
The planet is dying faster than we thoughtBy Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer, 15 January 2021
A triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and overpopulation is bearing down on Earth.
Charred trees are seen along Pallet Creek Road during the Bobcat Fire in Valyermo, California, September 18, 2020. Climate change is poised to exacerbate the frequency and intensity of annual wildfires. (Image: © Kyle Grillot/ Getty)
Humanity is barreling toward a "ghastly future" of mass extinctions, health crises and constant climate-induced disruptions to society — one that can only be prevented if world leaders start taking environmental threats seriously, scientists warn in a new paper published Jan. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.
In the paper, a team of 17 researchers based in the United States, Mexico and Australia describes three major crises facing life on Earth: climate disruption, biodiversity decline and human overconsumption and overpopulation. Citing more than 150 studies, the team argues that these three crises — which are poised only to escalate in the coming decades — put Earth in a more precarious position than most people realize, and could even jeopardize the human race.
The point of the new paper isn't to scold average citizens or warn that all is lost, the authors wrote — but rather, to plainly describe the threats facing our planet so that people (and hopefully political leaders) start taking them seriously and planning mitigating actions, before it's too late.
"Ours is not a call to surrender," the authors wrote in their paper. "We aim to provide leaders with a realistic 'cold shower' of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future."
What will that future look like? For starters, the team writes, nature will be a lot lonelier. Since the start of agriculture 11,000 years ago, Earth has lost an estimated 50% of its terrestrial plants and roughly 20% of its animal biodiversity, the authors said, citing two studies, one from 2018 and the other from 2019. If current trends continue, as many as 1 million of Earth's 7 million to 10 million plant and animal species could face extinction in the near future, according to the new paper. Such an enormous loss of biodiversity would also disrupt every major ecosystem on the planet, the team wrote, with fewer insects to pollinate plants, fewer plants to filter the air, water and soil, and fewer forests to protect human settlements from floods and other natural disasters, the team wrote.
Meanwhile, those same phenomena that cause natural disasters are all predicted to become stronger and more frequent due to global climate change. These disasters, coupled with climate-induced droughts and sea-level rise, could mean 1 billion people would become climate refugees by the year 2050, forcing mass migrations that further endanger human lives and disrupt society.
Overpopulation will not make anything easier.
"By 2050, the world population will likely grow to ~9.9 billion, with growth projected by many to continue until well into the next century," the study authors wrote.
This booming growth will exacerbate societal problems like food insecurity, housing insecurity, joblessness, overcrowding and inequality. Larger populations also increase the chances of pandemics, the team wrote; as humans encroach ever farther into wild spaces, the risk of uncovering deadly new zoonotic diseases — like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — becomes ever greater, according to a study published in September 2020 in the journal World Development.
While we can see and feel the effects of global warming on a daily basis — like record-setting heat across the world and increasingly active hurricane seasons, for instance — the worst effects of these other crises could take decades to become apparent, the team wrote. That delay between cause and effect may be responsible for what the authors call an "utterly inadequate" effort to address these encroaching environmental threats.
"If most of the world's population truly understood and appreciated the magnitude of the crises we summarize here, and the inevitability of worsening conditions, one could logically expect positive changes in politics and policies to match the gravity of the existential threats," the team wrote. "But the opposite is unfolding."
Indeed, just last week a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that humans have already blown past the global warming targets set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, and we are currently on track to inhabit a world that is 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than average global temperatures in the pre-industrial era — slightly more than halfway to the United Nation's "worst-case scenario." Nations have similarly failed to meet basic biodiversity targets set by the U.N. in 2010, the authors note.
The dark future described in this paper is not guaranteed, the authors wrote, so long as world leaders and policymakers start immediately taking the problems before us seriously. Once leaders accept "the gravity of the situation," then the large-scale changes needed to conserve our planet can begin. Those changes must be sweeping, including "the abolition of perpetual economic growth … [and] a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use," the authors wrote.
But the first step is education.
"It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to … avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and 'tell it like it is,'" the team concluded. "Anything else is misleading at best … potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst."
www.livescience.com/ghastly-future-global-crises.html
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Post by swamprat on Jan 29, 2021 17:19:41 GMT -6
Scientists solve a major climate mystery, confirming Earth is hotter than it's been in at least 120 centuriesBy Chelsea Gohd, 29 January 2021
Scientists have resolved a controversial but key climate change mystery, bolstering climate models and confirming that Earth is hotter than it's been in at least 12,000 years, and perhaps even the last 128,000 years, according to the most recent annual global temperature data.
This mystery is known as the "Holocene temperature conundrum," and it describes a debate that has gone on over how temperatures have changed during the Holocene, an epoch that describes the last 11,700 years of our planet's history. While some previous proxy reconstructions suggest that average Holocene temperatures peaked between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago and the planet cooled after this, climate models suggest that global temperatures have actually risen over the past 12,000 years, with the help of factors like rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
This "conundrum" has "cast doubts among skeptics about the efficacy of current climate models to accurately predict our future," lead author Samantha Bova, a postdoctoral researcher associate at Rutgers University, told Space.com in an email.
The new research puts this uncertainty to rest, however, demonstrating that current climate projections are right on the money. The study "eliminates any doubts about the key role of carbon dioxide in global warming and confirms climate model simulations that show global mean annual temperature warming, rather than cooling, across the Holocene period," Bova said.
Specifically, the team demonstrated "that late Holocene cooling as reconstructed by proxies is a seasonal signal," Bova told Space.com.
To do this, the team developed a new method that allowed them to "use seasonal temperatures to come up with annual averages. Using our new method, we demonstrate that Holocene mean annual temperatures have been steadily rising," Bova added. The scientists analyzed previously published sea surface temperature data, which used information about the fossils of foraminifera — single-celled organisms that live on the surface of the ocean —and other biomarkers from marine algae. This allowed them to reconstruct temperatures through history.
With this data, "we show that the post-industrial increase in global temperature rose from the warmest mean annual temperature recorded over the past 12,000 years," Bova said, adding that this is contrary to recent research. "Earth’s global temperatures have therefore reached uncharted territory that has not been observed over at least the past 12,000 and perhaps the past 128,000 years."
"Given that 2020 is tied for the warmest year on record based on the new NASA/NOAA data release, our results demonstrate that average annual temperatures in 2020 were the warmest of the last 12,000 years and possibly the last 128,000 years," Bova concluded. (NOAA is the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
By confirming temperature records throughout this time period, the team didn't just provide additional evidence for "the efficacy of current climate models in accurately simulating climate over the past 12,000 years," Bova said. The work also "gives confidence in their ability to predict the future."
This work was published Jan. 27 in the journal Nature.
www.space.com/scientists-solve-climate-mystery-holocene-temperature-conundrum
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Post by swamprat on Apr 26, 2021 10:53:17 GMT -6
And, the other side of the argument: You have to love “REAL” science and “TRUE” facts.
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published 130 scientific papers, six books and edited the Encyclopedia of Geology. Born 12 February 1946 Residence Australia Nationality Australian Fields Earth Science , Geology, Mining Engineering Institutions University of New England, University of Newcastle, University of Melbourne, University of Adelaide Alma mater University of New South Wales ,Macquarie University Thesis The pipe deposits of tungsten-molybdenum-bismuth in eastern Australia(1976) Notable awards Eureka Prize (1995, 2002),Centenary Medal(2003), Clarke Medal (2004) Where Does the Carbon Dioxide Really Come From? Professor Ian Plimer could not have said it better! If you've read his book, you will agree this is a good summary.
PLIMER: "Okay, here's the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland. Since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet - all of you. Of course, you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress - its that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow, and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life.
I know.... it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kids "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs..... well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days. The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just four days - yes, FOUR DAYS - by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time - EVERY DAY.
I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth. Yes, folks, Mt. Pinatubo was active for over one year - think about it. Of course, I shouldn't spoil this 'touchy-feely tree-hugging' moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change.
And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year. Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus 'human-caused' climate-change scenario. Hey, isn't it interesting how they don't mention 'Global Warming' anymore, but just "Climate Change" - you know why?
It's because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century, and these global warming bull**** artists got caught with their pants down. And, just keep in mind that you might yet be stuck with an Emissions Trading Scheme - that whopping new tax - imposed on you that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer.
It won't stop any volcanoes from erupting, that's for sure.
But, hey, relax...give the world a hug, and have a nice day!"
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Post by swamprat on May 26, 2021 8:17:46 GMT -6
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Post by swamprat on May 26, 2021 9:06:20 GMT -6
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