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Ozone Layer Recovers, Limiting Global Warming: UN Report

January 10, 2023

Ozone Layer Recovers, Limiting Global Warming: UN Report

A UN-backed scientific panel tasked with assessing the effects of the 1989 Montreal Protocol – an international agreement to phase out Ozone Depleting Substances – has found that the ozone layer continues to strengthen, and as a result, the earth will avoid 0.3 – 0.5°C of global warming by 2100.

Under the 1989 agreement, 99% of ozone-killing chemicals, including chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that once kept fridges cool, were banned due to a thinning of the ozone – also known as an ozone hole – above Antarctica.

In around four decades, the thinning of the Antarctic hole will be completely reversed, according to the report. The much smaller hole above the Arctic is expected to repair much sooner, DW reports.

By 2066, the Antarctic ozone hole is expected to reduce to its size in 1980, while the Arctic hole will do the same around 2045. Thinning around other areas of the globe should recover around 2040.

Beyond CFCs, ozone-eating chemicals including halons, methyl chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and methyl bromide were once abundant in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosols, solvents and pesticides. 

These compounds attack ozone by releasing chlorine and bromine atoms that degrade ozone molecules in the stratosphere.

Since the substances were banned, declining concentrations of chlorine and bromine have helped to limit human exposure to harmful UV rays from the sun that can cause skin cancer, cataracts and suppress the immune system. -DW

“Thanks to a global agreement, humanity has averted a major health catastrophe due to ultraviolet radiation pouring through a massive hole in the ozone layer,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last September 16, World Ozone Day.

Impacts on climate change?

Meanwhile, in a fringe benefit that won’t likely silence environmentalists, the panel affirmed the treaty’s positive impact on the climate.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Arctic Ocean overheating

December 8, 2022

Arctic Ocean overheating

Arctic sea ice extent was 10.31 million km² on December 4, 2022. At this time of year, extent was smaller only in two years, i.e. in 2016 and 2020, both strong El Niño years. With the next El Niño, Arctic sea ice extent looks set to reach record lows.

The NOAA image on the right indicates that, while we’re still in the depths of a persistent La Niña, the next El Niño looks set to strike soon.

The image below shows high sea surface temperature anomalies near the Bering Strait on December 2, 2022, with a “hot blob” in the North Pacific Ocean where sea surface temperature anomalies are reaching as high as 7°C or 12.6°F from 1981-2011. The Jet Stream is stretched out vertically from pole to pole, enabling hot air to enter the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean and from the Atlantic Ocean.

The image below shows a forecast for December 5, 2022, of 2m temperature anomalies versus 1979-2000, with anomalies over parts of the Arctic Ocean near the top end of the scale.
On December 6, 2022, the Arctic was 6.63°C or 11.93°F warmer compared to 1979-2000, as illustrated by the image below.
The image below shows the daily average Arctic air temperature (2m) from 1979 up to December 6, 2022.

Given that we’re still in the depth of a persistent La Niña, these currently very high air temperature anomalies indicate that ocean temperatures are very high and that ocean heat is heating up the air over the Arctic.

Additionally, ocean heat is melting the sea ice from below.

Accordingly, Arctic sea ice has barely increased in thickness over the past 30 days, as illustrated by the navy.mil animation on the right.

This leaves only a very short time for Arctic sea ice to grow back in thickness before the melting season starts again, which means that there will be little or no latent heat buffer to consume heat when the melting season starts.
…click on the above link to read the rest…

When the Bullseye is the Wrong Target

December 8, 2022

When the Bullseye is the Wrong Target

Guy R. McPherson, Beril Kallfelz-Sirmacek, and William M. Kallfelz, 30 November 2022, The largest elephant in the room: aerosol masking. arXiv:2211.16115

Guy R. McPherson, Beril Kallfelz-Sirmacek, and William M. Kallfelz, 30 November 2022, Medium: The largest elephant in the room: aerosol masking.

    Relevant articles:

Counterpunch, 25 November 2022:

Harper’s, December 2022: (This article ignorantly cheers for near-term human extinction, thereby ignoring the aerosol masking effect and the rapid rate of environmental change associated with the demise of humans from Earth)

AVID Audio Course Description (Conservation Biology)

 

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable

December 8, 2022

Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable

If you have not already seen it,  visitors to this blog  will have an interest in this 50-min documentary, “BBC Global Dimming Documentary”, via Gail Zawacki at her Wit’s End blog.

It relates to evidence obtained from the three-day aircraft grounding that occurred after 9/11 and the profound effects that just the U.S. Commercial Aircraft Flying has on Earth’s atmosphere. (One degree Centigrade increase  within three days.)
Quoting Professor Guy McPherson ;
“The impact of the aerosol masking effect has been greatly underestimated, as pointed out in an 8 February 2019 article in Science. As indicated by the lead author of this paper on 25 January 2019: “Global efforts to improve air quality by developing cleaner fuels and burning less coal could end up harming our planet by reducing the number of aerosols in the atmosphere, and by doing so, diminishing aerosols’ cooling ability to offset global warming.” The cooling effect is “nearly twice what scientists previously thought.” That this February 2019 paper cites the conclusion by Levy et al. (2013) indicating as little as 35% reduction in industrial activity drives a 1 C global-average rise in temperature suggests that as little as a 20% reduction in industrial activity is sufficient to warm the planet 1 C within a few days or weeks.”
Guy and I both believe a serious economic crash could be the end of us!
None of these risks operate in a vacuum, they are all connected.

Imagine what the carbon footprint of the largest most brutal military on the planet must be?
“According to its own study, in 2013 the Pentagon consumed fuel equivalent to 90,000,000 barrels of crude oil. This amounts to 80% of the total fuel usage by the federal government. If burned as jet fuel it produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of CO2…”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

November 21, 2022

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

https://youtu.be/cbH_o-96qZI

With thick ice gone, Arctic sea ice changes more slowly

November 18, 2022

With thick ice gone, Arctic sea ice changes more slowly

Beaufort Sea
Small remnants of thicker, multiyear ice float with thinner, seasonal ice in the Beaufort Sea on Sept. 30, 2016. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Alek Petty
› Larger view

The Arctic Ocean’s blanket of sea ice has changed since 1958 from predominantly older, thicker ice to mostly younger, thinner ice, according to new research published by NASA scientist Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. With so little thick, old ice left, the rate of decrease in ice thickness has slowed. New ice grows faster but is more vulnerable to weather and wind, so ice thickness is now more variable, rather than dominated by the effect of global warming.

Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn’t last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions.

Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn’t last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Growing concern over unseasonal warm spell in Europe

November 1, 2022

Growing concern over unseasonal warm spell in Europe

Warm October weather has seen many flock to the beach -- such as here at Hossegor, southwestern France -- but environmentalists see more evidence of climate change
Warm October weather has seen many flock to the beach — such as here at Hossegor, southwestern France — but environmentalists see more evidence of climate change GAIZKA IROZ AFP
Madrid (AFP) – October morning temperatures topping 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in Spain may have brought cheer to the tourists, but they are provoking concern among environmentalists.

The mercury has been rising well above the norm across vast swathes of Europe, from Spain to as far north as Sweden.

After a summer marked by repeated heatwaves across much of the continent, Europe is experiencing exceptional temperatures even as it heads into the start of autumn — a sign of accelerating climate change.

“The month has not yet ended but we can already say practically without fear of contradiction that it will be the hottest (in Spain) since 1961,” when records began to be collated, said Ruben del Campo of Spain’s meteorological service Aemet.

If extrapolated data from historical reconstructions is taken into account, he added, this past month will have been Spain’s warmest October for fully a century.

“One, two days above 30 degrees is normal” for Spain, said del Campo. “But so many days, no. These are summer temperatures, whereas we are already heading into autumn.”

On Friday morning, the northern resort of San Sebastian saw the temperature hit 30.3 Celsius at 8:30 am (0630 GMT) — well above the seasonal average.

With forest fires declared in recent days in the Basque region, of which San Sebastian is a part, authorities have banned barbecues and fireworks to keep risks to a minimum.

The unseasonal warm spell has brought a new word into the Spanish lexicon — “verono” — an amalgam of verano (summer) and otono (autumn).

And it has left del Campo highlighting a “notable acceleration” in climate change over the past decade, exposing Spain to increasing creeping desertification.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’

October 29, 2022

Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’

Failure to cut carbon emissions means ‘rapid transformation of societies’ is only option to limit impacts, report says

A firefighter sets fire to land in an attempt to prevent wildfires from spreading in Gironde, south-west France.
A firefighter sets fire to land in an attempt to prevent wildfires from spreading in Gironde, south-west France. A rise in global temperature of 1C to date has already contributed to climate disasters. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images

There is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”, the UN’s environment agency has said, and the failure to reduce carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.

The UN environment report analysed the gap between the CO2 cuts pledged by countries and the cuts needed to limit any rise in global temperature to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. Progress has been “woefully inadequate” it concluded.

Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. A rise of 1C to date has caused climate disasters in locations from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.

If the long-term pledges by countries to hit net zero emissions by 2050 were delivered, global temperature would rise by 1.8C. But the glacial pace of action means meeting even this temperature limit was not credible, the UN report said.

Countries agreed at the Cop26 climate summit a year ago to increase their pledges. But with Cop27 looming, only a couple of dozen have done so and the new pledges would shave just 1% off emissions in 2030. Global emissions must fall by almost 50% by that date to keep the 1.5C target alive.

Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said: “This report tells us in cold scientific terms what nature has been telling us all year through deadly floods, storms and raging fires: we have to stop filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and stop doing it fast.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”

October 19, 2022

Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”

Preface. Thank goodness for world peak oil production in 2018. And peak coal in 2013. Since oil is that master resource that makes every product and activity possible, including oil itself and coal and natural gas, peak oil means peak everything.  Oil, specifically the 25% of a barrel that’s diesel, is used by nearly all heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships. Petroleum and natural gas are the for 500,000 products. And fossils are essential for products needing high heat in their manufacture, like cement, steel, iron, glass, ceramics, microchips, bricks and more — there are no electric or hydrogen substitutes and with peak oil in 2018, no time to invent them.

So I would argue we don’t have enough fossil fuels left to reach the hothouse world Ward proposes.  You might reply that tipping points have been or will be reached, methane from permafrost, the amazon rainforest turns into grass and so on.

Sure, but there are negative feedback loops. Diatoms evolved about 100 million years ago and consumed so much CO2 they created the polar icecaps for the first time.  They are doing very well with the increased CO2, dying, and sinking to the ocean floor in even greater numbers. Nor are methane hydrates likely to ever be exploited or released all at once.  And see these posts about why we may not be driven extinct by climate change and at worst reach low-medium IPCC projections.  And CO2 rates in the Permian and other extinctions were as high as today’s, so it’s not true that what’s happening now is unprecedented, and lasted for 10,000 to 20,000 years of volcanic pulses from deep in the earth, boiling their way to the surface via coal, natural gas and oil deposits…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Will Any Humans Become Post-Carbon?

October 19, 2022

Photo by Roxanne Desgagnés

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Risk of passing multiple climate tipping points escalates above 1.5°C global warming

September 11, 2022

Risk of passing multiple climate tipping points escalates above 1.5°C global warming

09/09/2022 – Multiple climate tipping points could be triggered if global temperature rises beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a major new analysis published in the journal Science. Even at current levels of global heating the world is already at risk of passing five dangerous climate tipping points, and risks increase with each tenth of a degree of further warming. An international research team synthesised evidence for tipping points, their temperature thresholds, timescales, and impacts from a comprehensive review of over 200 papers published since 2008, when climate tipping points were first rigorously defined.
Risk of passing multiple climate tipping points escalates above 1.5°C global warming
Tipping points world map. Figure by Biermann/PIK, based on Armstrong McKay et al, 2020

The research, published in advance of a major conference “Tipping Points: from climate crisis to positive transformation” at the University of Exeter (12-14th September), concludes human emissions have already pushed Earth into the tipping points danger zone. Five of the sixteen may be triggered at today’s temperatures: the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, widespread abrupt permafrost thaw, collapse of convection in the Labrador Sea, and massive die-off of tropical coral reefs. Four of these move from possible events to likely at 1.5°C global warming, with five more becoming possible around this level of heating.

Lead author David Armstrong McKay from Stockholm Resilience Centre, University of Exeter, and the Earth Commission says, “We can see signs of destabilisation already in parts of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in permafrost regions, the Amazon rainforest, and potentially the Atlantic overturning circulation as well.”

“The chance of crossing tipping points can be reduced by rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions”

“The world is already at risk of some tipping points. As global temperatures rise further, more tipping points become possible.” he adds. “The chance of crossing tipping points can be reduced by rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions, starting immediately.”

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

As the planet warms, people are moving. Will Canada welcome them?

September 11, 2022

As the planet warms, people are moving. Will Canada welcome them?

Temporary foreign workers from Mexico plant strawberries on a farm in Mirabel, Que., on May 6, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

As droughts, deteriorating farmland and rising sea levels push people around the world from their homes, advocates in Canada are calling on the federal government to support those who are — and will be — displaced by the climate crisis.

Last week, Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac), a body of more than 100 environmental groups across the country, sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Immigration Minister Sean Fraser asking them to grant permanent residency to all 1.7 million migrants in Canada, including half a million undocumented people. This “regularization” process is key to climate justice, explained Caroline Brouillette, national policy manager for CAN-Rac.

“Fighting the climate crisis is not only about reducing our emissions, it’s about how we care for one another — and that’s why we’re asking for this,” she said.

Climate change is already a factor causing people to immigrate to Canada, said Syed Hussan, the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), which worked with CAN-Rac to send the letter. But while climate migrants come to the country as workers, students or refugees, they “may not even be able to describe their experiences having resulted from climate change.”

He said many migrants’ understanding of climate change is that it causes poverty.

“[Climate change is] actually closely linked to economic deterioration,” Hussan explained.

Take farmers, for example. Soil degradation is one of climate change’s greatest impacts, he said. Poor soil means poor crops, forcing farmers to move to towns and cities to find work. But many fail to find jobs in larger urban centres, he added, leaving them no choice but to leave their home country and seek opportunities in Canada.

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

‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?

August 4, 2022

‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?

Globe with steam rising from it. North and South America in view.
Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

Bill McGuire.
Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and was also an adviser to the UK government.

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

The Dawn of the Apocalypse

July 24, 2022

The Dawn of the Apocalypse

We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.

Our Climate Future – by Mr. Fish

 

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California. More than 73 percent of New Mexico is suffering from an “extreme” or “severe” drought. Thousands of people had to flee from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park on Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost power.

It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction. And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined…

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

Climate Impacts From a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions

March 23, 2022

Climate Impacts From a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions

Abstract

Limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2.0°C requires strong mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Concurrently, emissions of anthropogenic aerosols will decline, due to coemission with GHG, and measures to improve air quality. However, the combined climate effect of GHG and aerosol emissions over the industrial era is poorly constrained. Here we show the climate impacts from removing present-day anthropogenic aerosol emissions and compare them to the impacts from moderate GHG-dominated global warming. Removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating of 0.5–1.1°C, and precipitation increase of 2.0–4.6%. Extreme weather indices also increase. We find a higher sensitivity of extreme events to aerosol reductions, per degree of surface warming, in particular over the major aerosol emission regions. Under near-term warming, we find that regional climate change will depend strongly on the balance between aerosol and GHG forcing.

Plain Language Summary

To keep within 1.5 or 2° of global warming, we need massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, aerosol emissions will be strongly reduced. We show how cleaning up aerosols, predominantly sulfate, may add an additional half a degree of global warming, with impacts that strengthen those from greenhouse gas warming. The northern hemisphere is found to be more sensitive to aerosol removal than greenhouse gas warming, because of where the aerosols are emitted today. This means that it does not only matter whether or not we reach international climate targets. It also matters how we get there.

1 Introduction

If global warming is to be kept within 1.5 or 2.0°C, strong, and rapid mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is required (Matthews & Caldeira, 2008; Millar et al., 2017; Rogelj, Luderer, et al., 2015). As anthropogenic aerosols are often coemitted with long-lived GHG, such emissions will likely also see sharp decreases—compounded by present and future effort to improve air quality (Bowerman et al., 2013; Smith & Bond, 2014).

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

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