Home » Posts tagged 'climate change' (Page 3)

Tag Archives: climate change

World map logistic and supply chain network distribution Natural Gas

Climate scientists reveal data that earth’s heating is accelerating, heat extremes are increasing and 1.5C has been breached faster than forecast. We are failing to treat climate change as the single greatest threat to humanity.

At the same time our government has announced a gas strategy which increases emissions and the earth’s heating. Either we have misjudged the ability of government to understand climate change or they have been conned or captured by gas industries.

The danger is now so great that a majority of national initiatives must be directed to climate change. Yet ominously the Treasurer has been dancing under the falling leaves of deciduous trees muttering about economic and population growth which are already the shibboleths of failed climate and environmental policy.

The global average heating over February 2023 to January 2024 — exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) because governments have succumbed to a delusional policy-making narrative that warming to 1.5–2°C was still possible while continuing emissions to 2050.

One study consulted almost 400 senior authors from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost 80% expected a temperature rise of at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, unliveable temperatures for most of the world while only 6% thought it would stay within the 1.5C limit.

Data for extreme heat in Northern Australia presented by former Australian Defence Force chief Admiral Chris Barrie suggests that human life will be unviable in many areas of NT where defence bases are sited.

Such climate data are not included in the ADF’s security statement. Admiral Barrie and his team of security experts state that the federal government either doesn’t understand or is hiding from the public the risk of climate change to national security. They say mass migration, food insecurity and other climate risks must be addressed by government and the ADF.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

May 17, 2024

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

The direct air capture industry got a boost last week with the opening of Mammoth, the largest plant yet for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but questions remain about whether the technology can scale up.

Humanity has spent the past few centuries releasing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a state of affairs that must be reversed if we are to get to grips with climate change. Removing such CO2 in a process called direct air capture (DAC) has been on the cards for some time, but finally, after years of research and small-scale pilot projects, giant carbon-sucking facilities are becoming a reality. The question is, will the industry grow large enough, fast enough?

The Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland is the largest in the world
Climeworks

DAC got a big boost last week when Swiss company Climeworks switched on a new plant called Mammoth. This can extract up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere – living up to its name, at least when compared with its predecessor Orca, which boasted a maximum capture capacity of just 4000 tonnes per year.

The new plant instantly quadrupled global capacity for DAC and is a sign of a step change under way in the industry. Mammoth will only hold the title of world’s largest DAC plant until next year, when the Stratos plant, built by a subsidiary of energy firm Occidental Petroleum using technology from Canadian DAC company Carbon Engineering, comes online. It will be able to extract half a million tonnes of CO2 a year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culling for Climate

May 17, 2024

Culling for Climate

Climate research and its misanthropic sect

Over the weekend, Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, set X/Twitter afire with the following Tweet, which foresees the “culling of the human population” as the “only realistic” way to address climate change — a Tweet which he later deleted:

The issue of “overpopulation” is one that has long been present in the climate science community, but is rarely discussed in public in the stark terms employed by McGuire. Yes, I put the word “overpopulation” into scare quotes because it is not a meaningful analytical concept but it is one with a lot of symbolic baggage.1

I don’t want to be too harsh on McGuire as he simply articulated what some in the climate science community actually believe and had the unfortunate experience of committing a Kinsley gaffe. A view that climate change is really about overpopulation is not that uncommon among climate researchers.

Let’s go back in time.

Writing in 1990, only two years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created and two years before the Rio Earth Summit, atmospheric scientist and president of the National Academy of Engineering, Robert M. White2 warned that,

The climate warming issue has also become a surrogate for other agendas. . . [Proponents argue that] because population growth is at the root of the environmental pressures being experienced by the world, prospects for stabilizing the climate and arresting the deterioration of the habitability of the planet are hopeless, argue the proponents, without population control.

Indeed, writing just one year later, the late Stephen Schneider suggested several strategies for addressing climate change including “curtailing population growth” and

“in developing countries they involve forsaking fossil fuels as a basis for development, as well as dramatic slashing of population growth rates as a strategy for addressing climate change.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

India set to face hotter heatwaves amid preparation gaps, says study

May 16, 2024

India set to face hotter heatwaves amid preparation gaps, says study

The study advocates for the expansion of mandatory regulations alongside existing action plans to tackle the challenges posed by climate change

Photo: Bloomberg

As summer arrives, India braces for the onslaught of heatwaves, despite having substantial heat action plans in place. A recent study by the World Weather Attribution group reveals significant gaps in preparedness, including underfunded plans, inadequate consideration of local contexts, insufficient targeting of vulnerable groups, and a lack of periodic evaluations.

The incidents of extreme temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius in April, which affected billions of people across Asia, were intensified and made more probable by human-induced climate change, according to the rapid attribution analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution group.

“From Gaza to Delhi to Manila, people suffered and died when April temperatures soared in Asia,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute-Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. “If humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the climate will continue to warm, and vulnerable people will continue to die,” Otto further said.

The study advocates for the expansion of mandatory regulations alongside existing action plans to tackle the challenges posed by climate change.

“Some countries, such as India, have comprehensive heat action plans in place. Yet, to protect some of the most vulnerable people, these must be expanded with mandatory regulations. Workplace interventions for all workers to address heat stress, such as scheduled rest breaks, fixed work hours, and rest-shade-rehydrate programs (RSH), are necessary but have yet to become part of worker protection guidelines in the affected regions,” it stated.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bill Gates Wants to Block-Off the Sun

May 16, 2024

Bill Gates Wants to Block-Off the Sun

From the beginning, scientists, politicians and leading cabal figureheads of fake green persuasion, have spoken about “considering carrying out stratospheric geoengineering programs” to block sunlight and cool the planet.

The irony of such statements is that they are made even while such activities are being carried out on a daily basis – in plain sight – and have been for at least the past 25 years.

Then the decidedly deranged Bill Gates steps in to add a further sun dimming dimension to the geoengineered toxic chemtrails already blocking vital sunshine from getting through to all elements of life that depend on it, not least we humans.

The prestigious Forbes ‘millionaire’s magazine’ reports that billionaire Gates’s intervention involves financing Harvard University scientists to establish what is being called ‘The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment’ (SCoPEx) to examine if a sun dimming solution might be achieved by spaying calcium carbonate (CaCo3) dust into the atmosphere.

Forbes simply takes for granted this form of geophysical climate tampering to be a reality of life.

No doubt multi-millionaires don’t want to be unduly disturbed by investigations into the truth.

Calcium carbonate, the leaders of this project believe, will act as a sun reflecting aerosol that could offset the effects of global warming. It all sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Initial experiments, Forbes reports, would be done from near Kiruna in Sweden, from a high altitude balloon releasing some Ca Co3 into the atmosphere at the behest of the ‘Swedish Space Corporation’ (note ‘corporation’) the results being measured by scientific instruments carried by the balloon.

Such devilry, practised today by deviants of humankind like Gates, Schwab, Harari and Ceo’s of the United Nations, The World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum within the domains of Covid, Climate and the biosphere, is dark indeed.

No wonder they are scared of the sunlight!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

May 16, 2024

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

The Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland is the largest in the world
Climeworks

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

May 14, 2024

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

Earth just had its hottest year on record — climate change is to blame

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

I’m a British farmer. Here’s the scary truth about what’s happening to our crops

May 10, 2024

I’m a British farmer. Here’s the scary truth about what’s happening to our crops

The climate crisis is making the farming business unsustainable – and without support for us, food security will suffer too

Farming has always been a risky business. To the chaos of Brexit and the relentless squeezing of the supermarkets, we can add the rapidly escalating threats associated with climate change. In most industries, at the point where risk is judged to outweigh the potential commercial reward, both capital and people tend to make a swift exit, following economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of self-interest.

The problem with farming is that most farmers are emotionally invested in their work. An exit is seldom considered – perhaps we should be more like the bankers, but they wouldn’t be much good at growing potatoes.

Around the world, farming practice evolves in response to past success. Over 30 years, I’ve recorded planting and harvest dates, temperatures and yields, using data to guide my decisions, just like generations of farmers before me. But over the past decade, as the pace of change in weather patterns has accelerated, the value of that accumulated experience has become increasingly irrelevant. For most farmers, this last year has been about grabbing rare, good weather windows and trying to make the most of wet conditions as we repeatedly fail to get crops sown.

As the risk of crop failure has grown, margins have shrunk, meaning there’s nothing in the bank to pay for the bad years. Farm-gate prices have been driven down to levels which, in a good year, just about cover costs, but leave nothing to cover crops lost to adverse weather.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abrupt permafrost thaw found to intensify warming effects on soil CO₂ emission

May 8, 2024

Abrupt permafrost thaw found to intensify warming effects on soil CO₂ emission

Abrupt permafrost thaw intensifies warming effects on soil CO2 emission — Thermokarst landscape on the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: Wang Guanqin

According to a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, scientists have found that soil carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are more sensitive to climate warming in permafrost-collapsed areas than in non-collapsed areas.

This study, based on field warming experiments combined with laboratory incubation of soils from a large-scale sampling, provides new insights about permafrost carbon–climate feedback in the context of future climate warming.

Warmer temperatures have led to rapid permafrost thawing in high-latitude and high-altitude permafrost regions. Abrupt permafrost thaw, known as thermokarst, occurs in approximately 20% of the northern permafrost region, but this region stores about half of all below-ground organic carbon. This type of thawing can restructure land surface morphology, causing abrupt changes to the soil biotic and abiotic properties, which may significantly alter ecosystem carbon cycling.

Since both thermokarst and non-thermokarst areas are simultaneously experiencing ongoing warming, an important but so far overlooked consideration is whether the warming effects on soil CO₂ flux might differ between these two distinct landforms.

To fill this knowledge gap, a collaborative research group led by Prof. Yang Yuanhe from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has investigated how thermokarst formation influences the responses of soil CO₂ fluxes to climate warming, using multiple approaches.

In a well-replicated warming experiment conducted simultaneously in thermokarst and non-thermokarst areas, the researchers found that the warming-induced increase in soil CO₂ release was about 5.5 times higher in thermokarst features than in adjacent non-thermokarst landforms.

They then analyzed over 30 potential drivers of the warming effects on CO₂ release using soil physicochemical analyses, solid-state ¹³C nuclear magnetic resonance, and metagenomic sequencing…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

24 ORGANIZATIONS AND EXPERTS CALL ON GOOGLE TO STOP AMPLIFYING AND PROFITING FROM CLIMATE DENIAL CONTENT

May 3, 2024

24 ORGANIZATIONS AND EXPERTS CALL ON GOOGLE TO STOP AMPLIFYING AND PROFITING FROM CLIMATE DENIAL CONTENT

Climate groups and academics call on Google to extend its climate disinformation policy, demonetize and stop amplifying climate denial content, and collaborate with NGOs and academic experts to update its policies.

Download report Find out more

In a letter to Google’s CEO Mr. Sundar Pichai, 24 organizations and academics call on Google to demonetize and stop amplifying climate denial content.

Organization signatories:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate
Association québécoise des médecins pour l’environnement (AQME)
Centre for Citizens Conserving Environment & Management (CECIC)
The Climate Coalition
ClimateMama
Équiterre
Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth (England, Wales & Northern Ireland)
Global Action Plan
Kairos Fellows
One Earth Sangha
Stand.earth
Texas Campaign for the Environment
TIAA-Divest!
QuotaClimat
The Working Class Climate Alliance
350 Conejo / San Fernando Valley

Individual signatories:

Constantine Boussalis, Trinity College Dublin
John Cook, University of Melbourne
Marie-Eve Carignan, Université de Sherbrooke / Chaire UNESCO en prévention de la radicalisation et de l’extrémisme violents
Mirjam O. Nanko, University of Exeter
Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge
Stanley Rothbardt, Climate Reality Project
Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol

Climate Change Causing 60% of Plants and Insects to Fall Out of Sync

May 3, 2024

Climate Change Causing 60% of Plants and Insects to Fall Out of Sync

And so what?

So maybe the climate is changing, I haven’t noticed it (but I’ve read about it). Plants grow in the spring, some flower, and winter comes in the temperate regions. On average, the beginning and ending a flowering plant’s lifecycle changes.

Some insects specialize in serving only one species, and some are slow to evolve, to change the timing of when their population emerges, looks for food, has sex, and goes away for a year. But if the timing of their plant changes (a climate dependent thing), the insect’s population, having fallen out of sync, declines. As a recent study estimates, 60% of plants and insects have been adversely affected. If the out of sync condition is too out of sync, the solution is simple: they go extinct.

So, what plants? Well, like the 84% of European crops that depend on the “free” services of bugs. Good thing I don’t live in Europe. I remember back in the 1960s when we travelled from California to Ohio (and back each year) to visit relatives who still hadn’t dispersed to the ends of the earth.

My older brother’s job was to clean the windshield off when we stopped so my dad could see to drive (except when we stopped at service stations, now called gas stations, back in the day when a smiling attendant would pump your 25 cent/gal gas, clean your windshield, and at least offer to check the oil and air the tires at no added cost).

But things are different now.

The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”

May 2, 2024

The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”

The complex, contradictory and heartbreaking process of American climate migration is underway.

This article is an excerpt from the book “On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” about climate migration in the U.S. For more, see abrahm.com.

Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.

A couple of miles west of downtown Slidell, Louisiana, and just upstream from the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain — the 40-by-24-mile-wide brackish estuary separating what is now the mainland from New Orleans — a five-room shotgun house sits on a plot of marshy lawn near the edge of Liberty Bayou. Colette Pichon Battle’s mother had been born in that house. Colette, bright-eyed and ambitious, devoutly Catholic, a force on the volleyball court, was raised in the house until the day she left for college. The family’s very identity had grown from the waters of the marsh around it. From a humble rectangle of wood, framed onto brick stanchions that kept it hovering several feet above the ground, shaded by the long beards of Spanish moss hanging from the limbs of towering oaks and a hardy pine, a family was born. Its Creole heritage near the acre of low-lying land goes deeper than the trees, deeper than the United States as a nation, to around 1770. Those roots withstood the tests of centuries: slavery, war and more than their share of storms.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s what record-breaking temperatures looked like around the globe

May 2, 2024

Here’s what record-breaking temperatures looked like around the globe

Climate change is affecting every continent and the oceans.

An orange sky in New York City. — (Photo credit: Anthony Quintano / CC BY 2.0 DEED)

You probably know that 2023 was a very warm year for our planet — and that this heat is continuing into 2024. And you likely know some effects of this heat in your own region or continent — in the U.S., for instance, the Canadian wildfire smoke that covered the U.S. East Coast, the Midwest’s unusually warm winter, or the recent million-plus-acre wildfire in the Texas Panhandle.

If you live in the U.S. and happen to get most of your news from national broadcast channels ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, these big stories may be most of what you know about recent climate events. During the record-smashing year of 2023, these four TV stations spent less than 1% of their news time addressing climate change.

If you get your news from other sources, you’ll likely know more. For instance, you may have seen this stunning comment from the Deputy Director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Samantha Burgess: “2023 was an exceptional year with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Not only is 2023 the warmest year on record, but it is also the first year with all days over 1°C warmer than the preindustrial period. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”

Still, you may sometimes lose sight of the global picture — and the critical fact that the whole planet’s climate is under stress. It’s not just the heat itself, either, but also the droughts and floods that can come with higher temperatures.

So here are some quick snapshots and summaries of what these hot months have meant around the world. In many cases, the headlines alone tell the basic story.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warning that solar geoengineering could cause unexpected regional heating

May 2, 2024

Warning that solar geoengineering could cause unexpected regional heating

A recent modelling study has raised new concerns about the unpredictability of solar geoengineering, questioning our ability to reliably manage the outcomes of this approach in reducing the impacts of climate change.

Earth atmosphere

As efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are progressing more slowly than hoped, some are looking to geoengineering as a way to slow rising global temperatures

Solar geoengineering aims to cool the planet by reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, reproducing the dimming effect observed after volcanic eruptions. This seems like a plausible solution on paper, especially given current efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be enough to avoid surpassing the 1.5°C threshold in the next decade. But since entering the mainstream scientific discourse, geoengineering approaches to climate change have been a divisive topic.

Depending on who you ask, solar geoengineering is seen as a threat to meaningful climate action, a remote fallback, or an essential piece of the puzzle. What most people can agree on is that we don’t yet understand its geophysical and political consequences well enough.

To address this, the team modelled regional effects of injecting sulfur aerosols into the tropical stratosphere. They used a global aerosol-chemistry climate model that links the chemistry and microphysics of sulfate aerosols within complex climate systems, specifically how aerosols absorb heat emitted by the Earth called longwave radiation.

‘We found that some detrimental effects of this injection are of a similar magnitude to those from climate change itself in some regions,’ the team writes. ‘This includes a strong warming 15km above the tropics, which alters large-scale weather patterns in the atmosphere … enhanced surface warming in the polar regions, and modification in regional precipitation patterns over land, therefore not completely alleviating the warming of the high-emission scenario in high northern latitudes.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Indian Ocean headed for a near-permanent state of marine heatwave

April 30, 2024

Indian Ocean headed for a near-permanent state of marine heatwave

Marine heatwaves are events where ocean temperatures rise to extreme levels and hold steady for at least five days.
These heat waves, that occur over the ocean, are likely to extend to 220-250 days a year by 2050, warns a new study.
With increasing marine heat waves, cyclones can intensify, putting fisheries and people living along the coastline, at risk.

In the peak of summer, with heat waves sweeping several parts of India, seven-phase general elections are underway in the world’s biggest democracy. The weather department and the government agencies have been regularly issuing alerts and warnings, to ensure the safety of citizens who step out to cast their votes, amid fear of heat strokes and heat-related illnesses as temperatures rise and heat waves turn deadlier.

But heat waves are rising not just on land. Globally, marine heat waves are registering a growing trend. A recent study titled Future Projections for the Tropical Indian Ocean has found that the Indian Ocean is warming rapidly and moving towards a state of near-permanent marine heat waves, with 220-250 days of heat waves projected in a year until 2050.

The findings of this new research, led by Roxy Mathew Koll, scientist with Climate Research Lab, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, are published in a recent book, The Indian Ocean and its Role in the Global Climate System, released on April 26.

“In the present-day climate scenario, where we are experiencing 1.2-degree Celsius warming, marine heat waves have already emerged in the Indian Ocean and are rising; at present, they range up to 20 days a year,” said Koll, talking to Mongabay India about the implications of prolonged marine heatwaves in the Indian Ocean…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: climate change

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

Organization signatories:

Individual signatories:

Post navigation

Latest Posts