Home » Posts tagged 'global warming' (Page 9)
Tag Archives: global warming
Climate Research Needs to Change to Help Communities Plan for the Future
Climate Research Needs to Change to Help Communities Plan for the Future
Climate change is a chronic challenge — it is here now, and will be with us throughout this century and beyond. As the U.S.government’s National Climate Assessment report made clear, it’s already affecting people throughout the United States and around the world.
Warmer temperatures are making heat waves more intense, with harmful effects on human health. More intense rainfall and higher sea levels are leading to more frequent and intense flooding, with ensuing damages to property, infrastructure, business activity and health. Higher temperatures and strained water supplies are requiring new agricultural approaches, while fisheries are shifting and in some cases shrinking; in some cases, stressed food systems are contributing to national instability.
This reality means society needs to think about climate change in different ways than the past, by focusing on reducing the risk of negative effects. And speaking as a climate scientist, I recognize that climate science research, too, has to change.
Historically, climate science has been primarily curiosity-driven — scientists seeking fundamental understanding of the way our planet works because of the inherent interest in the problem.
Now it’s time for the climate science research enterprise to adopt an expanded approach, one that focuses heavily on integrating fundamental science inquiry with risk management.
Flexible Infrastructure Design
Climate risk management strategies need to be broad, ranging from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to designing new infrastructure hardened against more frequent extreme weather, to policies that encourage development to shift to less exposed areas.
And these strategies must be flexible. In some cases, decisions made today affect people’s vulnerability for the rest of this century, even though there is much that remains to be learned about how climate change will unfold over the decades to come.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Arctic Permafrost No Longer Freezes … Even in Winter
Arctic Permafrost No Longer Freezes … Even in Winter
Global warming is starting to hit hard like there’s no tomorrow, and at current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there may not be a tomorrow, as emissions continue setting new records year-by-year, expected to hit a 62-year record in 2019. So much for the Paris 2015 climate agreement!
The most sensitive areas to global warming, (1) the Arctic (almost all of its multi-year ice, or old ice, is gone- already melted), and (2) East Antarctica, the coldest spot in the planet… strangely melting, and (3) Siberian ground that “no longer freezes in winter” are three occurrences that should keep world leaders up late into the night, blankly staring at the ceiling.
In fact, over the past couple of decades global warming has groomed ultra-dangerous climate upheavals that could destroy sizeable swaths of civilization. But how soon remains an open question?
Moreover, there are several ecosystem flashpoints with enough potential to massively destroy large segments of life right now, which, in fact, is already happening in real time, and scientifically documented, with nearly total loss of arthropods in the tropical rain forests of Mexico and Puerto Rico as a result of excessive global warming, which can destroy populations of arthropods by inhibiting reproduction and disorienting internal organ functionality (Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
According to the scientists that conducted the 40-year rainforests studies in Mexico and Puerto Rico, rainforests temperatures exceeded the dreaded 2° C post-industrial guardrail (Maybe the IPCC is on to something by insisting the world must not allow temps to exceed 2° C, post-industrial).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Change, Midwest Floods & Food Shortages
Climate Change, Midwest Floods & Food Shortages
The Great Flood of 1927, flooded the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927. It was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. More than 23,000 square miles of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and around 250 people died. The flooding impacted areas in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
Following that Great Flood of 1927, we then see the climate swing dramatically in the opposite direction into the extreme drought that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged agriculture in the Midwest prairies during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was a severe drought that came in three primary waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940. The entire event actually complied with our Economic Confidence Model when many regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for eight years.
Unfortunately, the global warming people are already out in force and blaming this on moms driving the kids to soccer matches. They always pretend these are catastrophic events never before seen. Cars were not really in wide use until post-1940s. They could care less about history or truth. The cycle is very clear. This major flooding which may destroy at least 6 billion bushels of wheat is a prelude to what is coming.
Long before there was the Global Warming crowd, there were the record-setting heat waves and drought of the 1930s that contributed to the Great Depression and wiping out agriculture that was employing 40% of the civil workforce at the start of the century. There were runs of extreme temperatures which broke all records. There was a stretch of 11 days straight in July with temperatures over 100. The two worst years were 1930 and 1936.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The methane menace
The methane menace
The concentration of methane in the atmosphere has been increasing for more than a decade and now appears to be accelerating. The rising concentration is worldwide, but is more pronounced in the tropics and northern mid-latitudes. What has caused this increase is not yet well understood. It is almost certainly due to rising emissions of the gas, but a decline in the ability of atmospheric oxidative mechanisms to breakdown methane is also possible.
What is alarming is that this increase in emissions was not anticipated in the preparation of the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios that are compliant with the targets of the Paris Agreement.
A research article just published by the American Geophysical Union paints a disturbing picture of the impact on global warming if atmospheric concentrations of methane continue to rise. At present rates, the additional global warming impact of the methane may significantly negate or even reverse progress in reducing global CO2 emissions. This effect may fatally undermine efforts to meet the target of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement on climate change to limit warming to no more than 2°C.
But strangely, the source of the rising levels of this powerful greenhouse gas is something of a mystery.
Where’s it coming from?
Methane is emitted from both anthropogenic sources (primarily the oil and gas industry and large-scale cattle production) and from natural sources such as wetlands. The table below shows the range of annual emissions from both groups of sources.[1]
By far the largest source of emissions of methane is from wetlands. Emissions from the oil and gas industries and from livestock are about equal in second place.
The article in the American Geophysical Union offers three possible explanations for the global increase in atmospheric levels of methane:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Who will Displace the Omniciders?
Who will Displace the Omniciders?
Citizens challenging the towering threat of climate crisis should never underestimate the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuel corporations. Real engagement with the worsening climate disruption means spending more of our leisure hours on civic action. The fate of future generations and our planet depends on the intensity of these actions.
This was my impression after interviewing Dahr Jamail, author of the gripping new book, The End of Ice, on my Radio Hour. Jamail, wrote books and prize-winning articles, as the leading freelance journalist covering the Bush/Cheney Iraq war and its devastating aftermath. For his latest book, Jamail went to the visible global warming hot spots to get firsthand accounts from victims of climate disruption. His gripping reporting is bolstered by facts from life-long specialists working in the regions he visited.
Readers of The End of Ice are taken on a journey to see what is happening in Alaska, the mountain forests of California, the coral reefs of Australia, the heavily populated lowlands of South Florida, the critical Amazon forest, and other areas threatened by our corporate-driven climate crisis.
Jamail, an accomplished mountaineer, precisely illustrates the late great environmentalist, Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology. Namely, that “everything is connected to everything else.” Jamail makes the connection between the rising sea levels and the untold catastrophes engulfing forests, mountains, and the wildlife on land and in the sea. Jamail is not relying on computer models. What he is seeing, photographing, and experiencing is often worse than what the models show in terms of accelerating sea level rises and the melting ice of the glaciers.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Carbon tax fine print
Carbon tax fine print
If the Paris agreement target of keeping global warming to well below 2°C is to be met, it is generally agreed that global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels and industry need to peak and then decline very soon–meaning before the end of next year, or very shortly after.
A recent study published in Nature Climate Change sheds light on how 18 countries have managed to achieve this feat: effectively reducing their emissions of CO2 over the period 2005 to 2015. The figure below shows emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels for the 18 countries in the ‘peak and decline’ group.
In spite of this positive performance by 18 countries representing almost 30 percent of total CO2 emissions, global emissions of energy-related CO2 rose in 2017– after a sluggish period from 2014 to 2016 when there was hope that emissions may have flatlined. That hasn’t happened, and estimates for 2018 indicate that CO2 emissions are continuing to rise.
It’s instructive to look more closely at how this group of ‘peak and decline’ countries have managed to reduce their CO2 emissions over the decade through to 2015. Are there lessons to be learned?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global Warming A “Hoax And Scam” Pushed By Greedy Government Scientists: Greenpeace Co-Founder
Global Warming A “Hoax And Scam” Pushed By Greedy Government Scientists: Greenpeace Co-Founder
The co-founder and former president of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, says that climate change is a “complete hoax and scam,” which has been “taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology.”
Moore, who recently made headlines for calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “pompous little twit” and “garden-variety hypocrite” on climate change, sat down with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
The Greenpeace co-founder’s message echoes that of John Coleman, the late Weather Channel founder who called global warming “the greatest scam in history.”
Moore told Breitbart how fear and guilt are driving the climate change argument, reports Breitbart News.
Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign — well, fear and guilt — you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.
LISTEN:
According to Moore, the climate change movement has co-opted and corrupted politicans and bureaucracies in order to exert further control over people, Moore explained – noting that “green” companies only exist on the back of taxpayers.
And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber — fake news — repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children, and then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials, and then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this, and then of course you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As the World Burns: Hurtling Towards an Unlivable Planet
As the World Burns: Hurtling Towards an Unlivable Planet
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
The media and political establishments are diddling while the planet burns.
Are we really supposed to take their games seriously as humanity veers ever more dangerously off the environmental cliff?
In 2008, James Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and seven other leading climate scientists reported that we would see “practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss” if the planet’s average temperature rose above 1°Celsius (C) thanks to carbon dioxide’s (CO2) presence in the atmosphere reaching 450 parts per million (ppm).
CO2 was at 385 ppm when this report came out. It was “already in the dangerous zone,” Hansen and his team reported. They warned that deadly, self-reinforcing “feedbacks” could be triggered at this level. The dire prospects presaged included “ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and GHG [greenhouse gas] release from soils, tundra, or ocean sediments.”
The only way to be assured of a livable climate, Hansen and his colleagues warned, would be to cut CO2 to at least 350 ppm.
Here we are eleven years later, well past Hansen’s 1°C red line. We’ve gotten there at 410 ppm, the highest level of CO2 saturation in 800,000 years. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest climate report reflects the consensus opinion of the world’s leading climate scientists. It tells us that we are headed to 1.5°C in a dozen years. Failure to dramatically slash Greenhouse Gassing between now and 2030 is certain to set off catastrophic developments for hundreds of millions of people, the IPCC warns.
The IPCC finds that we are headed at our current pace for 3-4°C by the end of century. That will mean a planet that is mostly unlivable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Food supply falls as fish flee warmer seas
Food supply falls as fish flee warmer seas
Both jobs and food are at risk as fish evade rising warmth. Image: By Lalo on Unsplash
On the fishing grounds, they already know about global warming. As fish flee warmer seas there are winners – but many more losers.
LONDON, 4 March 2019 – Global warming has already begun to affect fishing worldwide as fish flee warmer seas, a new study says.
In the last 80 years, there has been an estimated drop of more than 4% in sustainable catches for many kinds of fish and shellfish. That is the average. In some regions – the East China Sea, for instance, and Europe’s North Sea– the estimated decline was between 15% and 35%.
In the course of the last century, global average temperatures have crept up by about 1°C above the average for most of human history, as a reaction to the unconstrained burning of fossil fuels. If the world continues to burn ever-greater volumes of coal, oil and natural gas, it could be 3°C warmer or more by the end of the century.
Last year was only the fourth warmest for air surface temperatures, but the warmest since records began for the world’s oceans.
“Fisheries around the world have already responded to global warming. These aren’t hypothetical changes some time in the future”
US researchers report in the journal Science that they looked at the impact of ocean warming in 235 populations of 124 species of fish, crustaceans and molluscs in 38 ecological regions between the years 1930 and 2010.
They then matched the world data on fish catches with ocean temperature maps to estimate what warming has done to the sustainable catch – that is, the biggest haul fishing crews can make without reducing breeding stocks for the seasons to follow.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Crisis Has Now Reached ‘Gold Standard’-Level Certainty, Scientists Say
Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Crisis Has Now Reached ‘Gold Standard’-Level Certainty, Scientists Say
“There’s a one-in-a-million chance humans are NOT warming the planet.
A new report offers “gold standard”-level certainty that humans are contributing to the climate crisis, leading to rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and extreme weather events. (Photo: Christopher Michel/Flickr/cc)
Most Americans now recognize the scientific community’s consensus that human activity is fueling the climate crisis, according to polls—but for those who are still unconvinced of the conclusion reached by 97 percent of climate scientists, a new study makes an even more definite assertion.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California found that the information available can now be classified as “five-sigma”—a standard in the scientific community meaning that there is a one-in-a-million chance that the same data would be observable if humans were not causing the planet to grow warmer through activities like fossil fuel extraction. The classification represents a “gold standard” level of certainty.
There’s a one-in-a-million chance humans are NOT warming the planet.#climate#climatechange https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1QE1ZU?__twitter_impression=true …
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” Benjamin Santer, who led the study, told Reuters. “We do.”
Scientists applied the same “five-sigma” measure to research confirming the existence of the Higgs boson subatomic particle in 2012, a finding that was received with applause from the science community and the press.
The report, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change, builds on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2013, which found that it was “extremely likely” that humans were causing the climate crisis—with a 95 percent chance.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global Warming’s Monster Awakens
Global Warming’s Monster Awakens
The planet’s biggest nightmare is coming to life. It may be a bigger threat much sooner than ever before realized simply because it’s accelerating!
East Antarctica, the world’s largest body of water trapped in ice, is knocking the socks off expectations. Along the way, it’s the world’s most horrifying surprise, yet nobody really knows how it will play out because the science is still in early stages.
Nevertheless, a formidable issue is at hand: Vincennes Bay in East Antarctica is home to humongous glaciers, like Totten Glacier (2,400 square miles), which is the largest glacier in the bay and equivalent to at least 11 feet of sea level rise alone, but it is only one of several glaciers in Vincennes Bay.
Recent NASA research indicates that four glaciers west of Totten Glacier in Vincennes Bay have receded by 9 feet since 2008. Heretofore, there was no measured change in these glaciers… period!
Surprisingly, within one decade there’s measurable loss of 9 feet after years and decades and centuries upon centuries of East Antarctica stability. This is disturbing and begs the question of what if the melting accelerates more, and more, and keeps on accelerating more than previous rates of acceleration. Then what?
According to NASA: “East Antarctica has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world through sea level rise, but scientists have long considered it more stable than its neighbor, West Antarctica. Now, new detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning one-eighth of East Antarctica’s coast have begun to lose ice over the past decade, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean.” (Source: More Glaciers in East Antarctica Are Waking Up, NASA, Dec. 10, 2018).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate change stokes mayhem in several ways
Climate change stokes mayhem in several ways
Syria: Glimpse of the future as rapid climate change continues? Image: By Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash
Three outcomes could follow if climate change stokes mayhem, conflict and violence. It might be helpful to think about the strains to come.
LONDON, 22 February, 2019 − Stand by for long hot summers marked by riot and racial tension. As climate change stokes mayhem, global warming is likely to see a direct rise in human irritability.
Climate change accompanied by natural disaster such as flood or drought could lead to harvest failure and food and water shortages for which people must compete.
And the same natural disasters could lead to a generation of babies, children and adolescents more likely, because of disadvantage and deprivation, to become more prone to violence in adulthood.
Researchers in the US have been thinking carefully about the links between climate change and conflict. This, they write in Current Climate Change Reports, has a long history, and a huge range of studies have addressed the hazard.
And they see more civic strife and conflict on the way. Some of it is likely to involve climate refugees, or ecological migrants: persons driven from their homes by climate change. The steady rise in global temperatures could also help incubate the conditions for global terrorism.
“Syria offers us a glimpse of what the future might look like as the climate continues to change rapidly”
“This is a global issue with very serious consequences. We need to plan for ways to reduce the negative consequences,” said Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University in the US.
“An inadequate food supply and economic disparity make it difficult to raise healthy and productive citizens, which is one way to reduce long-term violence. We also need to plan for and devote resources to aid eco-migrants in their relocation to new lands and countries.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Our Food Is Killing the Planet — But It Doesn’t Have To
Our Food Is Killing the Planet — But It Doesn’t Have To
A new book asks, “Can we feed the world without destroying it?” The answers might surprise you.
The world needs to change the way it eats, not just as individuals but as a society.
That’s the message from a groundbreaking report issued last month by the EAT-Lancet Commission, which made a series of societal recommendations to help the world’s ever-increasing human population ensure its food security in the face of global warming.
The recommendations are all designed to accommodate a planet that is projected to contain 10 billion people by the year 2050. They include switching to a diet that’s low in meat and sugar but higher in whole grains, fruits and vegetables; cutting food waste; reducing fossil fuel use and emissions; and incentivizing small and medium farming.
The changes, the report said, would lead to a healthier planet and healthier people, while also helping the more than 820 million people currently suffering from chronic hunger.
Coincidentally, the report came out the same week as a challenging new book that makes many of the same recommendations, while also presenting some contrasting and complementary ideas.
According to Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, written by food activist Eric Holt-Giménez and published by Polity Press, we already produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, and we’re gearing up to grow even more to accommodate the projected increase in human population.
All that food comes with multiple costs, including climate change, drought, water contamination, habitat loss and species extinctions — which themselves put the very future of food at risk. Holt- Giménez writes, “our greenhouse-gas-spewing industrial food system has entered a dangerous negative feedback loop. The way we produce and consume food is undermining our ability to produce food at all.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Al Gore’s Global Warming Deliberate Fraud to Increase Governmental Power
Al Gore’s Global Warming Deliberate Fraud to Increase Governmental Power
There is a serious question that no one wants to address. How did Al Gore create the global warming scare and earn hundreds of millions of dollars in the process? Before Al Gore, science was worried deeply about what we are experiencing today — global cooling. On April 28, 1975, Newsweek magazine published an article in which they sounded the alarm bell and proposed solutions to deliberately melt the ice caps:
“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting thearcticc ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing variables of climate uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.”
This sounds very similar to today’s proposed solution of putting particles in the atmosphere to deflect the sunlight to reduce global warming. Indeed, TIME magazine’s January 31, 1977, cover featured the cover story, “The Big Freeze.” They reported that scientists were predicting that Earth’s average temperature could drop by 20 degrees fahrenheit. Their cited cause was, of course, that humans created global cooling. Then suddenly the climate cycles shifted and it began to warm up.
There was this core group of people who seemed to enjoy all the attention they were gathering by predicting the end of civilization caused by humans. As the temperatures began to warm, suddenly they had to switch the dire forecasts from global cooling caused by humans to global warming caused by humans.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
World is halfway through its hottest decade
World is halfway through its hottest decade
Chile’s wall-to-wall solar panels will help as 1.5°C approaches. Image: By Antonio Garcia on Unsplash
Things are warming up: already the world is halfway through its hottest decade on record, if predictions prove correct.
LONDON, 13 February, 2019 – Here is a climate forecast that climate scientists, meteorologists, politicians, voters and even climate sceptics can check: the next five years will be warm, and will probably help to complete the hottest decade ever.
They will on a global average be at least 1°C higher than the average temperature of the planet 200 years ago, before the accelerating combustion of fossil fuels.
That is because the planet is already midway through what may well prove to be its warmest 10 years since records began on a planetary scale in 1850. There is even a possibility that within the next five years, the global temperature rise could tip 1.5°C above the long-term average for human history.
This is the ambitious limit to global warming that the world set itself at an historic meeting in Paris in 2015, for the year 2100.
And the forecasters can make such predictions with some confidence because tomorrow’s temperature chart is already inscribed in the air we breathe: the pattern of warming over the last century is consistent with the steady rise in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and these are still increasing because fossil fuel use is still going up.
“Predictions now suggest around a 10% chance of at least one year between 2019 and 2023 temporarily exceeding 1.5°C”
Adam Scaife, who heads long-range prediction research at the UK Met Office, said: “2015 was the first year that global annual average surface temperatures reached 1.0°C above pre-industrial levels and the following three years have all remained close to this level.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
