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The world of just a few lifetimes ago

Watching the climate change is like waiting for your hair to grow. You know it’s happening, but you can’t really tell from day to day. However, from a greater chronological distance, the damage humanity is inflicting on our planet is clear.

Where I live, bats have disappeared over the past couple decades. I remember watching them swoop at the evening insects, a couple even finding their way into my house. Now I never see them.

Others speak about fireflies that no longer dance at night. Or windshields bare of insect residue.

While insects are still a significant portion of global biomass, we’ve increasingly become a planet of humans, human food and anthropogenic mass.

We’ve terraformed the planet to feed our insatiable needs, at nature’s expense. This myopic stewardship pushes the planet to the edge. Robust systems are diverse and redundant. Ours is monolithic and fragile.

Source: Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass

Wild animals are vanishing because humans are pushing them out and replacing them with domesticated animals. Today, it’s difficult to imagine what the world looked like hundreds of years ago, before we chopped down the old growth trees and overfished the oceans. Luckily, we have documented evidence from centuries past.

The photo below illustrates the sheer destruction humans can inflict.

“At the close of the 18th century, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the continent. By the time of this photograph, that population was reduced to only 456 wild bison.” Source: The Conversation

Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892.

I recently found several accounts from the first Europeans that explored and settled in the Chesapeake bay area. There were more fish to catch than could be preserved.

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

Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie

May 24, 2024

Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie

Refuting lies takes far more time and energy than making them

Spitting oil? An excellent illustration by Jim Cooke perfectly illustrates this article. We are enveloped by disinformation every day.

This article is longer than usual. Slapping down lies takes extra time and work. It may need to be read in the app or in your browser if it’s too long for email.

A few weeks ago, I read an article talking about the potential for the slowing Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to eventually tip Europe into an ice age. I’ve been aware of this scenario for a long while. On an intuitive level, it’s bewildering to consider as global temperatures inexorably rise. In fact, currently the European continent is warming faster than the world as a whole at 2.3° C above pre-industrial levels compared to 1.3° C globally. Another reader of the article who apparently didn’t understand the importance of AMOC’s role in regulating global temperature (or likely the basics of climate science) jumped on this possibility to share a movie promoting the lie that CO2 as a driver of climate change is a hoax, and posted a link to Climate: The Movie, a slick piece of disinformation posted on YouTube produced by Martin Durkin, a notorious climate change denier. Durkin sees the environmental movement as a threat to personal freedom and in favor of crippling economic development.

Many of you likely know such a denier in your life. The most important thing I can do as a writer is give you the facts needed to persuade others of the dilemma we face. You are my ambassadors. I watched this film as a necessary exercise to understand what this person believes…

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

Future Gas Strategy is a betrayal of promised Climate and Environmental Policies

May 17, 2024

Future Gas Strategy is a betrayal of promised Climate and Environmental Policies

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…

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…

North America’s biggest city is running out of water

May 11, 2024

North America’s biggest city is running out of water

Mexico City is staring down a water crisis. It won’t be the last city to do so.

A boat stranded on the dry floor of the Miguel Alemán dam on February 28, 2024, in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. — Mexico City is being threatened by a water crisis after the main reservoirs remain under 40 percent of their full capacity due to low rainfall, geography, and lack of infrastructure.

Mexico City is parched.

After abysmally low amounts of rainfall over the last few years, the reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system that supplies over 20 percent of the Mexican capital’s 22 million residents’ usable water are running out.

“If it doesn’t start raining soon, as it is supposed to, these [reservoirs] will run out of water by the end of June,” Oscar Ocampo, a public policy researcher on the environment, water, and energy, told my colleagues over on the Today, Explained podcast.

Already, some households receive unusably contaminated water; at times, others receive none at all. It’s stoking tensions over obvious inequities: Who gets water and who doesn’t?

The crisis is also leading Mexico City to siphon more from the underground aquifers on which the city sits, a decision that’s not just unsustainable without replenishment but also causes the ground to sink — at a rate of almost five inches each year, Ocampo said.

While many factors that led to this moment might be specific to Mexico City, or CDMX (including the Spanish colonists’ decision hundreds of years ago to drain the lake on which the city originally sat), or this moment in time (see: El Niño exacerbating droughts), the bigger issue is not.

Bogotá, Colombia, is rationing water amid a drought that has pushed reservoirs to “historically low” levels. And you might remember Cape Town staring down its own Day Zero crisis in 2018. A few years earlier, Sao Paulo, Brazil confronted a similar situation.

…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…

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

Source: © Getty Images

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…

Science Snippets: Planting Trees in Some Locations Warms Earth

April 28, 2024

Science Snippets: Planting Trees in Some Locations Warms Earth

Draft script:

A paper in Phys.Org published 31 March 2024 is titled Planting trees in wrong places heats the planet: Study. The study referenced in the title appeared in Nature Communications on 26 March 2024. It was produced by 11 scholars.

One of the study’s co-authors was quoted in the Phys.Org article: “There are some places where putting trees back leads to net climate negative outcomes.” In fact, the peer-reviewed paper indicates that reforestation projects that failed to include albedo in the analysis overestimated the benefit to the climate by 20 to 80%.

Hot, humid environments such as the Amazon Basin and central Africa store abundant carbon with little change to albedo. These are ideal places for reforestation. On the other hand, temperate grasslands and savannas sequester and store relatively little carbon and can negatively alter albedo. As a result, promises of enhanced carbon capture tend to be overblown in these areas.

The co-author quoted above indicated in the Phys.Org article that even projects in the best locations were probably delivering 20% less cooling than estimated when albedo changes are included in the analysis. Although there are good reasons beyond carbon sequestration to plant trees, it is important to focus reforestation efforts in proper locations. Given the limited money available for reforestation projects throughout the world, the Phys.Org article and the peer-reviewed paper indicate the importance of prioritizing projects.

The peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature Communications is titled Accounting for albedo change to identify climate-positive tree cover restoration. It was published 6 March 2024. I’ll read the entire Abstract: “Restoring tree cover changes albedo, which is the fraction of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. In most locations, these changes in albedo offset or even negate the carbon removal benefits with the latter leading to global warming…

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

‘We were in disbelief’: Antarctica is behaving in a way we’ve never seen before. Can it recover?

April 27, 2024

A small boat glides around patches of sea ice in the water off Deception Island in Antarctica. Sea ice in the region grows from a minimum in summer to a maximum in winter, but in the last several years, the sea ice extent has been shrinking in summer. (Image credit: karenfoleyphotography / Alamy Stock Photo)

Look out over Antarctica in the summer, and time seems frozen. The South Pole’s midnight sun appears to hover in place, never dropping below the horizon for weeks between November and January.

But the Antarctic’s timelessness is an illusion. Only a decade ago, on summer nights across the coast, the sun would glide ever so slightly over the ocean, dusting its ice floes in golden light.

Yet today, much of this sea ice is nowhere in sight. And scientists are increasingly alarmed that it may never come back.

“Antarctica feels very distant, but the sea ice there matters so much to all of us,” Ella Gilbert, a polar climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, told Live Science. “It’s a really vital part of our climate system.”

Until recently, Antarctic sea ice fluctuated between relatively stable summer minimums and winter maximums. But after a record minimum in 2016, things began to shift. Two record lows soon followed, including the smallest minimum ever in February 2023 at just 737,000 square miles (1.91 million square kilometers).

As winter began in March of that year, scientists hoped the ice cover would rebound. But what happened instead astonished them: Antarctic ice experienced six months of record lows. At winter’s peak in July, the continent was missing a chunk of ice bigger than Western Europe.

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

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration

April 27, 2024

The Politics and Policy of a National Climate Emergency Declaration

If climate and energy policy matter, then here are the three questions to ask instead

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the Biden Administration is once again considering declaring a national “climate emergency,” explaining that such a declaration could be used to “halt [fossil fuel] exports, drilling.” Today, I have extensively updated a 2022 piece I wrote on such a declaration. The consideration of such a declaration reveals a stark divergence between election-year politics and effective climate and energy policies. Rather than asking whether a “climate emergency” declaration makes sense, I recommend the three other questions to ask instead. Comments welcomed!

“A significant feature of American government during the last fifteen years is the expansion of governmental activity on the basis of emergency.” That is the opening line in a 1949 academic paper on “Emergencies and the Presidency.” The role of the president in declaring a state of emergency to achieve policy goals has been a policy issue that dates back at least to President Abraham Lincoln.

Today, President Biden is once again being called upon by his supporters to declare a national emergency on climate change. Rather than argue for or against it, in this post I’m going to explain the history of such declarations, what recent experience says about their effectiveness in policy, and suggest the three questions we should be asking instead.

A national emergency declaration may be a political end, but it is also supposed to be a policy means — a mechanism intended to achieve certain outcomes in the national interest. Apart from the politics of using an emergency declaration to signal affinity with certain political interests, below I recommend the policy questions that we should be asking instead.

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

Scientists Terrified by How the Climate is Falling Apart

April 27, 2024

Scientists Terrified by How the Climate is Falling Apart

“If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it!”

“While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not,” he wrote. “And this is a problem — a big one.”
Scientists Terrified by How the Climate is Falling Apart
The above embedded article elicited the video response below from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson.

I’ve been saying this for over a decade. A lost decade of preparation time, especially for our youth!
Abrupt Climate Change Denial has squandered an opportunity to prepare. The New Climate Denial Position is to deny Abrupt Climate Change.

I have curated a number of articles below showing the orchestrated litany of lies from people pretending to cover the climate and extinction crises.
As always, the technique is to shift the baseline dates so that they can pretend that we’ve had much less anthropogenic warming than we’ve in reality triggered. I covered this issue previously, Baseline Temperature dishonesty at the Edge of Extinction
Sam Carana at the Arctic News Blogspot is one of the few prepared to address the science and be realistic about the severity of our predicament. We’ll start with the truth and then get to the lies.

“It’s time to stop denying how precarious the situation is.”

“Remember the Paris Agreement? In 2015, politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pledged they would try and limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Well, an analysis by Sam Carana shows that it was already more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial when the Paris Agreement was reached.” 2C Crossed

The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within

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

On the Move

April 16, 2024

‘On the Move’ examines how climate change will alter where people live

Abrahm Lustgarten zooms in on how global warming will affect the United States

As the risk of wildfires grows in the American West (the 2020 Blue Ridge Fire in California, shown), some residents may look for other places to live.

DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES

On the Move
Abrahm Lustgarten
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30

Ellen Herdell’s nerves were nearing a breaking point. The fortysomething, lifelong Californian had noticed her home was increasingly threatened by wildfires. After relatives lost their house to a blaze and the constant threat traumatized her 9-year-old daughter, Herdell found herself up at 3 a.m. one night in 2020 searching Zillow for homes in Vermont.

She’s not alone. Across the United States, people facing extreme fires, storms, floods and heat are looking for the escape hatch. In On the Move, Abrahm Lustgarten examines who these people are, where they live, where climate change may cause them to move and how this reshuffling will impact the country (SN: 5/12/20).

At about 300 pages, the book is a relatively quick read, but Lustgarten’s reporting is deep. Leaning on interviews with such high-profile sources as former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and on published research, Lustgarten explains the scientific and political sides of climate migration. Anecdotes from people across the socioeconomic spectrum reveal the mind-sets of people at the front lines of the climate crisis…

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

The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What”

April 14, 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…

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