Home » Posts tagged 'nature bats last'

Tag Archives: nature bats last

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Means of Extinction: Antarctic “Super Vortex” is Accelerating

Means of Extinction: Antarctic “Super Vortex” is Accelerating

From the Daily Mail in the UK comes an article titled Antarctica ‘super vortex’ is speeding up due to climate change – and it could melt thousands of square miles of sea ice, study reveals. The article was published on 27 March 2024. More sensationalist headlines appear in other outlets. From the Daily Star on 4 April 2024 is Antarctica ‘super vortex’ could put mankind underwater like an ‘apocalyptic film.’ From LAD Bible dot com on 1 April 2024 is Urgent warning over Antarctic ‘super vortex’ that could affect fate of humanity. In addition to serving as click-bait, these headlines might be more accurate than the one in the Daily Mail. Corporate media outlets tend to avoid articles about human extinction.

The story in the Daily Mail refers to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature. Here’s the lede from the article in the Daily Mail: “A massive vortex of ocean water encircling Antarctica, a swirling volume 100-times larger than all the world’s rivers combined, is getting faster due to  climate change.”

The vortex is known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. It slows during Earth’s cool periods, such as during Ice Ages. It hastens when the planet warms. Considering we are undergoing the fastest rate of environmental change in planetary history, according even to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 8 October 2018 report Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees, it comes as no surprise that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current represents a threat leading to the extinction of all life on Earth.

The article in the Daily Mail begins with three key points: (1) Antarctic Circumpolar Current churns 6 billion cubic-feet of water per second; (2) the vortex slows during cool eras, like the Ice Age, but speeds up with global warming; and (3) researchers drilled 500- to 650-ft-long deep sea sediment cores for the study.

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

Trillions of Tons of Carbon Are Missing from Climate Models

Trillions of Tons of Carbon Are Missing from Climate Models

Draft script:

From Popular Mechanics comes this headline on 22 April 2024: Trillions of Tons of Carbon Are Missing from Climate Models. The story begins with three bullet points: (1) While the world’s soils are home to lots of organic carbon—such as leaf litter and animal waste—inorganic carbon, which is often in the form of solid carbonates, can also leak into the atmosphere. And it isn’t accounted for by current climate models; (2) A new study focuses on the role of soils as both a storage for and emitter of carbon, and found that 23 billion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon could escape soil over the next 30 years; and (3) Good land management—as well as other practices, such as afforestation and improved rock weathering—can help slow down this significant source of CO2.

Here’s the lede: “The sole purpose of people and programs combating climate change is finding ways to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.” The first paragraph continues: “Planting trees is a big help, as their woody roots lock away carbon for decades, and companies are hard at work trying to find artificial means of sucking greenhouse gasses from the air and sequestering it underground. But in this obsession with tracking CO2 levels, one significant source of both emission and storage has been overlooked—the soil.” A minor detail is worthy of mention: Planting trees is not necessarily a big help, as I pointed out previously in this space.

The article goes on: “the top two meters of soil beneath our feet currently hold roughly 2.3 trillion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon—five times more than all of the terrestrial plants on Earth combined.”…

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

Will AMOC Kill Us All?

Will AMOC Kill Us All?

Draft script:

You’ve probably heard a lot about the AMOC, which is short for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current. Based on my awkward pronunciation of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, you can understand why I prefer the acronym, AMOC. With this video, I will provide an overview of the AMOC, including how it threatens to rapidly cool a significant portion of Earth. I will then explain why I’m skeptical of this outcome.

CNN published an article on 26 July 2023 titled A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet.’ The first two paragraphs follow:

“A vital system of ocean currents could collapse within a few decades if the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, scientists are warning – an event that would be catastrophic for global weather and ‘affect every person on the planet.’”

“A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current – of which the Gulf Stream in a part – could collapse around the middle of the century, or even as early as 2025.”

The paper was published in Nature Communications, not Nature. But I digress.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the AMOC is critical to the continued retention of habitat for life on Earth. It is a complex tangle of currents that, among other things, works like a giant conveyor belt that transports warm water from the tropics toward the North Atlantic. At this point, the water cools and becomes saltier. It therefore sinks deep into the ocean before spreading south. Importantly, the AMOC contributes to the regulation of global weather patterns. Its collapse would trigger extreme winters and rising sea levels in western Europe and the northeastern United States. Further from home, a collapsed AMOC would shift the timing and magnitude of the tropical monsoon.

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

The First Signs of Civilization’s Collapse?

The First Signs of Civilization’s Collapse?

New Video Link! Sorry!

Draft script:

From Tom Dispatch on 17 August 2023 comes a story headlined Michael Klare, A World on the Edge of … Collapse? The article is short, and it introduces a much longer article by Michael Klare, professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. I’ll read the complete introductory article by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt:

“You can hardly turn on the TV news or go online these days without seeing… well, Donald Trump, of course, and his extreme version of American politics. Every indictment of him only seems to add to his strength in what’s no longer the Republican but the Trumpublican Party. Still, speaking of extremism (and disasters), I wouldn’t put him at the top of the list. This summer has offered us a scorchingly extreme version of climate change and a planet being burned, flooded, and melted in ever more unexpected and previously unimagined ways. Records are being set regularly with the year itself all too likely to take its place as the hottest ever — until, that is, next year on a planet where the last eight years have been the warmest in recorded history.

Oh, and if you happen to live on an island, here’s a little advice: get off it fast! Islands are going up in flames. Sardinia and Cyprus in the Mediterranean are now scorching messes and Hawaii’s Maui only recently became a first-class nightmare in which some residents had to plunge into the ocean to escape the flames. And if southern Europe, seemingly in an almost endless heatwave, continues to burn, northern Europe has been experiencing startlingly torrential rains and flooding.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Science Snippets: “If We Start Right Now …”

Science Snippets: “If We Start Right Now …”

Every day, I receive an email message from at least one person with this line, or something like it: “If we start right now …” The message then goes on to say that, if we start right now, we can fix the climate emergency. We can preserve habitat for human animals if we start taking action, collectively, right now.

The latest message came from Bill, of course. Bill knows the message from the corporate media is nonsense. In fact, the content of Bill’s message was one line, followed by a link to an article in Axios. The line written by Bill was, “More hopium soaked BS.” Sure enough, the article in Axios was, and is, hopium-soaked BS. Here’s the title of the paper published 13 June 2023, and then I’ll describe and quote from the article: “Climate extremes raise questions, concerns about faster warming.”

Nature Bats Last Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The article begins with a figure of daily global average sea surface temperatures plotted over time. Included in the graph is the 1982-2011 average, as if that’s a reasonable baseline. It includes the average for this period and it highlights sea surface temperature for all of 2022 and the first half of 2023.

Early on, the article includes a section called The big picture. Here’s the big picture, which includes embedded links to four additional stories: “Global surface air and ocean temperatures have spiked sharply in recent months, along with record low Antarctic sea ice, extreme heat events around the world, as Canada’s heat and wildfire crisis grips North America. Along with other developments, the combination of these factors have raised alarms regarding whether climate change is accelerating.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

When the Bullseye is the Wrong Target

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, MediumThe 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 eventsResults in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

 

Latest peer-reviewed journal article appears in the prestigious Elsevier series of journals:

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

Full text:

When the head of the conservative International Energy Agency admits we are in the midst of the “first truly global energy crisis,” then you know we’re in serious trouble. According to the chief of the International Energy Agency—the IEA—that’s the current situation. The story was published by Reuters on 25 October 2022.

Let’s turn back the clock a bit. According to the IEA, the extraction of conventional oil for the world peaked in 2006. Conventional oil refers to crude plus condensate, and it’s the relatively easy oil to extract and refine. The tough stuff comes next, which is why we have been rabidly pursuing shale and other petrochemicals that have a low energy return on investment, often called EROI. It comes as no surprise that 16 years after the conservative IEA concluded we had passed the peak of crude-plus-condensate, the most important element in the history of industrial civilization, we have similarly, and in a much worse state, passed the peak of all oil. All, as in the whole shebang.

According to the headline of a story published on January 15th, 2021 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Fossil fuel production expected to increase through 2022 but remain below 2019 peak.” Of course, the US EIA is referring to extraction, not production. It’s not as if humans are producing oil. Oil is not ice cream, after all. Even though we do not produce oil, we’re doing a great job sucking it out of the bowels of the planet and turning it into gasoline, diesel, and other energy-rich materials that make our lives easier..

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Science Snippets: Peak Oil Has NOT Gone Away

Science Snippets: Peak Oil Has NOT Gone Away

The video embedded below is scheduled to Premiere on YouTube at noon Eastern time on 13 June 2022. An online conversation will ensue shortly before, during, and slightly after the video is shown.

Professor Guy McPherson’s AVID Audio Course Described and Available Here

The Washington Post, 7 June 2022: World Bank warns global economy may suffer 1970s-style stagflation

Business Insider, 31 May 2022: IEA chief warns of summer fuel shortages and a triple energy crisis that will outstrip the oil shocks of the 1970s

CNN Business, 3 June 2022: 3 reasons high oil prices are here to stay

McPherson, Guy R. and Jake F. Weltzin. 2008. Implications of peak oil for industrialized societies. Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society 28:187-191.

United States Department of Energy, February 2005: Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management

 

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article:

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress