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Post by purr on Aug 6, 2019 19:49:28 GMT
Understand the game, select the best move...
Ya'all are making a lot of sense, even on opposing sides of this great mystery. What appeals to me most are reasoned arguments intended to show the fact of the matter. Calling climate dissidents Fake News interests me much less than reading all these points of view / scientific findings and think deeply (processes helped along by a glass or two of Eristoff Vodka) on which explanations feel more right. Like this source referenced in MrGorts posts (mind you, some reading power required):
In essence it argues that low cloud cover is a significant factor in global cooling/warming trends, maybe drowning out human industry's effects. I'm not smart enough to say the matter is settled one way or the other. The point here is we haven't figured this stuff out yet, not yet actually proven how climate change is CAUSED, yet committing billions in investments in Going Green (the Netherlands is transitioning to electric cars and limiting greenhouse emissions like crazy) in order to 'save the climate'. If we got it wrong all that money & effort might be better spent, say on globally transitioning to disaster hardened nuclear power and even cities and preparing for cosmic level catastrophe (like a new Ice Age).
Personally I'm not quite convinced (staying open minded toward new info and proof!) of a global warming trend, nor of mankind driving such phenomenon. I do see lots of 'weird', out of place extreme weather, ominous stuff, and I lean to a belief that Earth and the Cosmos throughout time have packed one hell of a punch. If Homo Sapiens isn't paying attention, if we allow ourselves to get suckered: we are out for the count. Or gone.
purr
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Post by Clifford on Aug 7, 2019 14:14:25 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Aug 8, 2019 15:44:30 GMT
Is it just me, or is it hot in here?Here’s how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the world
By Brady Dennis and Andrew Freedman
August 5, 2019
Icebergs are seen at the seashore of King's Point in July in Newfoundland. Formerly the center of cod fishing, the island province now sees more and more icebergs that made their last trip from Greenland to Newfoundland. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
During the hottest month that humans have recorded, a local television station in the Netherlands aired nonstop images of wintry landscapes to help viewers momentarily forget the heat wave outside.
Officials in Switzerland and elsewhere painted stretches of rail tracks white, hoping to keep them from buckling in the extreme heat.
At the port of Antwerp, Belgium, two alleged drug dealers called police for help after they got stuck inside a sweltering shipping container filled with cocaine.
On Monday, scientists officially pronounced July 2019 the warmest month the world has experienced since record-keeping began more than a century ago.
How hot was it?
Wildfires raged across millions of acres in the Arctic. A massive ice melt in Greenland sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels. And temperature records evaporated, one after another: 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Cambridge, England, and 108.7 in Paris. The same in Lingen, Germany.
“We have always lived through hot summers. But this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather’s summer,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told reporters as July gave way to August.
People cool off on a hot afternoon at Flushing Meadows park in New York City on July 21. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
The Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Union, calculated that last month narrowly edged out July 2016 for the ominous distinction of hottest month on record. The month beat July 2016 by about 0.07 degrees (0.04 Celsius).
Scientists found that the planet is headed for one of its hottest years, and the period from 2015 to 2019 is likely to go down as the warmest five-year period on record.
“July has rewritten climate history, with dozens of new temperature records at [the] local, national and global level,” Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in announcing the month’s historic implications. “This is not science fiction. It is the reality of climate change. It is happening now, and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action."
The Copernicus ranking was generated by taking millions of readings from weather balloons, satellites, buoys and other sources on an hourly basis and feeding them into a computer model.
The results still must be checked against data from thousands of temperature-measuring sites around the world. Those readings ultimately will be reported by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies in the coming weeks. While their rankings could vary, the final results are not likely to differ significantly, according to scientists.
Notably, July’s monthly temperature record comes without the added influence of a strong “El Niño” in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which adds heat to the oceans and atmosphere and helps boost planetary temperatures. The 2016 record, for example, occurred during a year with an extremely strong El Niño.
“While we don’t expect every year to set a new record, the fact that it’s happening every few years is a clear sign of a warming climate,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth.
From scorching heat in Europe to gargantuan wildfires in Siberia and Alaska, the record heat of July 2019 left its mark on people and the ecosystems they depend on.
The monthly temperature spike was driven largely by record warmth in Western Europe, including the searing heat wave that made its way to the Arctic and culminated in one of the most significant melt events ever recorded in Greenland. The Greenland ice sheet poured 197 billion tons of water into the North Atlantic in July alone — enough to raise global sea levels by 0.5 millimeters, or 0.02 inches.
Alaska also saw its warmest month on record. There and elsewhere across the Arctic, simultaneous and massive wildfires erupted, consuming millions of acres and emitting startling amounts of greenhouse gases. Arctic sea ice was at a record low for the month.
In Canada, a military installation in Alert, Nunavut — the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth — recorded 69.8 degrees on July 14, breaking a record set in 1956. The average July high for the outpost, some 600 miles from the North Pole, is 44.6 degrees.
In Belgium, one zoo fed its tigers with chickens frozen in blocks of ice. In Paris, local officials set up impromptu “cooling rooms” in each neighborhood where people could find air conditioning and cold water.
In parts of Germany, authorities were forced to lower autobahn speed limits over concerns that the high-speed motorways might suffer heat damage. Undeterred, one motor scooter rider took to the roads of eastern Germany but was stopped after officers spotted him wearing nothing aside from a helmet.
Residents took matters into their own hands in the German capital of Berlin, circulating maps on social media that showed the locations of air-conditioned public spaces. Portable air conditioners and fans quickly sold out, and one company that installs air conditioners suspended its phone service. A recorded voice message cited a flood of calls that it was no longer able to handle.
Brighton beach in Brighton, Britain, on July 25. (Peter Nicholls/Reuters)
Damodhar Ughade, a cotton farmer in the village of Seeras in western India’s Vidarbha region, felt like he was reliving a nightmare in July after a devastating heat wave the month before.
While droughts due to delayed monsoons are not infrequent, this year was the worst since 1972, when scores of people left their arid villages and migrated to cities. As temperatures soared to 102 degrees, Ughade’s fields lay parched, his livestock starved, and the village ran out of drinking water.
“There were two-foot cracks in my field. It was impossible to even walk on it,” he said by phone. The lack of reliable water led women to walk two hours to other villages, carrying earthen pots on their heads in search of water. Men rented small vehicles and carried tankers to nearby cities to buy water.
The scarcity was so severe that there was not enough water to share with the oxen. About 15 died in the village, he said.
In England, 22-year-old Andrea D’Aleo had the unenviable job of shuttling passengers down the River Cam — the main river that flows through Cambridge, a scenic university town about 60 miles north of London. He was standing at the back of a long, flat-bottomed boat, digging a long pole against the river bed. Normally, he said, umbrellas are used to fend off rain showers, but on Thursday, tourists used them as parasols.
“It was challenging,” D’Aleo said of working as a tour guide in the intense heat. “I was talking to a bunch of umbrellas while dying in the sun.”
Four years ago in Paris, world leaders committed to doing all they could to prevent the globe from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (two degrees Celsius), with the goal of keeping warming to no more than 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius), compared with preindustrial levels.
But the commitments that countries made in Paris are far too modest to meet those targets. Last week, as the head of the United Nations recognized the likelihood that the world had just experienced its hottest month on record, he pleaded with national leaders to summon the will to take the kind of aggressive action that could put the globe on a more sustainable trajectory.
“This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide and to the Arctic Circle,” Guterres said. “If we do not take action on climate change now, these extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg. And, indeed, the iceberg is also rapidly melting.”
Amanda Coletta in Toronto, Michael Birnbaum in Prague, Niha Masih in New Delhi, Karla Adam in London, Rick Noack in Berlin and James McAuley in Paris contributed to this report.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/08/05/heres-how-hottest-month-recorded-history-unfolded-around-globe
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drwu
Full Member
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Post by drwu on Aug 8, 2019 20:33:19 GMT
I find it interesting that someone posts an interview from FOX and a man from the Cato Inst...a right wing/libertarian think tank....and then expects that to be the final word on climate change. The same reason that the right doesn't accept scientists on global warming from so-called liberal groups. They are both biased...probably. so where is the real truth?...somewhere in the middle most likely.
The simple fact is that we have been spewing crap into the air and water, and on the land , for over 200 years since the dawn of the Industrial Age. It should come as no surprise to any intelligent person if we haven't fucked up some things by now. Surely we have created some problems....is the jury out on how much? Yes...but we shouldn't try to deny that we have been affecting things. Let's do a good look with good science and not be biased because of asinine politics.
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Post by swamprat on Aug 9, 2019 15:22:05 GMT
Animals adapt to climate heat, but too slowlyby Tim Radford | 09 Aug 2019
Great tit (Parus major) (By Luc Viatour from Bruxelles, Belgique - Parus major Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9504603)
German scientists have an answer to the great question of species survival: can animals adapt to climate change? The answer, based on close analysis of 10,000 studies, is a simple one. They may be able to adapt, but not fast enough.
The question is a serious one. Earth is home to many millions of species that have evolved – and adapted or gone extinct – with successive dramatic shifts in climate over the last 500 million years.
The rapid heating of the planet in a climate emergency driven by profligate fossil fuel use threatens a measurable shift in climate conditions and is in any case coincident with what looks like the beginning of a mass extinction that could match any recorded in the rocks of the Permian, or other extinctions linked with global climate change.
The difference is that climate is now changing at a rate far faster than any previous episode. So can those animals that cannot migrate to cooler climates adjust to changing conditions?
A team from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin and more than 60 colleagues from around the world report in the journal Nature Communications that they examined whether creatures could change either their physiology, size or behaviour to accommodate a rise in temperature accompanied by a change in the timing of the seasons. Biologists call this kind of response “phenotypic change.”
Questions like these are not easily answered. To be sure, the biologists needed reliable local records of temperatures across a number of locations. Then they needed sure information about the timing of migration, reproduction, hibernation and other big events in the lives of their subjects over a number of years.
And then they needed to find case studies where data had been collected over many generations in one population of creatures in one space.
And having found changes in the traits of their selected creatures, the biologists had to work out whether such changes led to higher levels of survival, or more offspring. They found reliable information about 17 species in 13 countries.
Pessimism alert
In the end, most of their data came from studies of birds, among them common and abundant species such as the great tit Parus major, the common magpie Pica pica or the European pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca.
The message is that even if bird populations can change with their environmental conditions, they may not be able to do so at the speed necessary to time migrations to coincide with ever-earlier spring flowering, or nesting to match the explosion of insect populations that provide food for nestlings.
“Even populations undergoing adaptive change do so at a pace that does not guarantee their persistence,” said Alexandre Courtiol of the Leibniz Institute. And the data available apply to species that are known to cope relatively well with changing conditions.
“Adaptive responses among rare or endangered species remain to be analysed,” said his colleague and co-author Stephanie Kramer-Schadt, a Liebniz ecologist. “We fear that the forecasts of population persistence for such species of conservation concern will be even more pessimistic.”
• This article first appeared at Climate News Network
Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988.
physicsworld.com/a/animals-adapt-to-climate-heat-but-too-slowly/
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Post by swamprat on Aug 14, 2019 14:40:07 GMT
REN21 on renewables: ‘much progress’ but world ‘not on track’ 14 Aug 2019 Dave Elliott
In its latest annual Renewables Global Status Report, REN21, the global renewable energy network, says that renewables are increasingly preferred for new electricity generation. Around 181 GW of renewable power capacity was added in 2018, setting a new record just above that of the previous year. Overall, renewable energy now accounts for around one-third of total installed power generation capacity worldwide and over 26% of global power supply. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of net installations in 2018 were from renewable sources of energy, marking the fourth consecutive year that net additions of renewable power were above 50%.
REN21 also notes that, as of 2017, renewable energy accounted for an estimated 18.1% of total final global energy consumption (TFEC). Modern renewables supplied 10.6% of TFEC. Traditional use of biomass for cooking and heating in developing countries accounted for the remaining share. The greatest portion of the modern renewable share was renewable thermal energy (an estimated 4.2% of TFEC), followed by hydropower (3.6%), other renewable power sources including wind power and solar PV (2%), and transport biofuels (about 1%).
Too slow
However, REN21 says it’s all going too slowly. “While there has been much progress on renewables, energy efficiency, and access to electricity and clean cooking facilities over the past decade, the world is not on track to meet international goals, most notably limiting the average rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius as stipulated under the Paris Agreement,“ the organization says. It warns that in terms of energy: “the overall share of renewable energy (both modern renewables and traditional biomass) in TFEC has increased only gradually, averaging 0.8% annually between 2006 and 2016. This modest rise is due to a negligible change in the traditional use of biomass coupled with overall growth in global energy demand since 2006 (annual average increase of 1.5%). Despite strong demand growth in modern renewables, especially renewable electricity, these two factors have slowed gains in the combined share of renewable energy in TFEC“.
The key problem is that, in 2018, global energy demand increased an estimated 2.3%, the greatest rise in a decade. This was “due to strong global economic growth (3.7%) and to higher heating and cooling demand in some regions”, REN21 says. “China, the United States and India together accounted for almost 70% of the total increase in demand. Due to a rise in fossil fuel consumption, global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions grew an estimated 1.7% during the year.“
Best foot forward?
REN21 is not alone in warning that progress on energy, as opposed to just electricity, is too slow. Many others have said the same: see the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s comments below. Energy demand is booming so much, especially in transport, that emission savings in other sectors, and from the spread of renewables, are being overwhelmed. Ramping up renewables faster in all sectors will help, but we also have to get demand tamed — and cut back. Some, logically enough, want to focus on transport but that’s maybe the toughest nut to crack. Some progress is being made, with plans for banning fossil-fueled cars, but if the result is just more electric vehicles (EVs) that may not help too much. Private cars are much less efficient than public transport; do we really want to use precious green power to keep cars running?
Focusing on green heat might be an easier and more productive option. For solar especially, biomass maybe less so, given its eco/land-use issues, although if used in combined heat and power (CHP) plants, linked to heat stores and district heating networks, you get better efficiency. However, many plans at present look to using green power to run heat pumps: will there be enough for that and for EVs? Waiting in the wings, the nuclear industry sees all this as an opportunity to get back in the game, with power, but also maybe heat and hydrogen. While the fossil fuel lobby looks to carbon capture and storage (CCS), or even better carbon capture and utilization (CCU), to let them stay in business. The race goes on…
While renewables do seem to be winning in supply terms, as the IEA noted in a paper produced for the G20 Summit in Japan, that still means that “despite the large investments in wind and solar over the last ten years, these efforts have only compensated for the low growth in other sources such as nuclear and hydro“. The IEA continues: “even if wind and solar PV deployment could be accelerated, other low-carbon technologies like dispatchable renewables, nuclear power and CCUS also need to be expanded at massive scale to decarbonise the power sector“.
Well, maybe. Certainly, there would be room for more wind and solar and for firm power from biomass, hydro and geothermal, as well as cyclic, but predictable, power from tidal projects. The IEA, however, is not convinced. “The level of additional renewable generation sources required to achieve the Sustainable Development Scenario is already extremely high,” it says. “Expanding the level even more to make up for the lack of growth or decline in nuclear power or CCUS implies enormous challenges in terms of not only additional costs but also land availability and local acceptance.” Surely worth a try though, with, as I have reported regularly, several academic scenarios suggesting that a 100% renewable energy mix is credible by 2050.
It gets worse
That is not the message that you get from the new review of scenarios produced by Resources for the Future. Its Global Energy Outlook (GEO) compares forecasts through to 2040 from companies, government bodies, and expert organizations such as the US Energy Information Agency, BP, Exxon, Shell, the IEA and others. None of the “100% by 2050“ NGO/academic studies are, however, included. The result is that, even under the most optimistic scenario looked at, renewables only supply 31% of global primary energy by 2040.
And it gets worse. As Bloomberg has noted, investment in renewables is falling, though Bloomberg says it may pick up, and it’s worth pointing out that, cumulatively, there is still significant capacity growth. Indeed, REN21 says that, as a percentage of total energy consumption, modern renewables still expanded by an average of 4.5% over the last ten years, whereas global energy demand only rose by 1.5% over that period. It may be that continued renewable capacity growth can still be achieved with less investment, since technology costs are falling. Nevertheless, obviously enough, if investment was expanding again, capacity growth would be even faster. If demand keeps rising then that will be vital, but we should also be curtailing demand growth.
Renewables in cities
Meanwhile, moving the scene to another part of the story, REN21 has produced a study of renewable energy use in cities. It says there are now over 100 cities that get 70% or more of their electricity from renewables. Of course, not all of that will be generated inside cities. Given the high population density, there will not be room for enough PV arrays and the like to meet all a city’s energy needs from sources within its boundaries. So much of it will have to be imported from rural or, if available, offshore projects. That will have some interesting implications. Cities are already dependent on rural, and offshore, areas for food, and must import water from rural/ mountainous areas. Now they will have to import a lot of their energy from them too. See my chapter in the new Routledge book Sustainable Cities Reimagined. This book, edited by Stanislav Shmelev, looks at urban sustainability performance using a multi-criteria approach, covering environmental, economic and social indicators, to assess progress and policies in cities around the world, with renewables and smart energy systems to the fore. With more people now living in cities and energy demand rising, for example to power high-rise building air-conditioning as global warming impacts more, the issues the book raises are going to become even more urgent.
physicsworld.com/a/ren21-on-renewables-much-progress-but-world-not-on-track/
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drwu
Full Member
Posts: 209
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Post by drwu on Aug 15, 2019 17:31:50 GMT
I'm telling you...there is no global warming....Drumpf says so.
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Post by HAL on Aug 15, 2019 20:32:21 GMT
Ironic that Mar-a-Lago will be one of the first places to go under water.
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Post by swamprat on Aug 16, 2019 15:48:31 GMT
Physics and the climate crisis by Susan Curtis, Managing Editor, PhysicsWorld
16 Aug 2019
The UK, France, Ireland and Canada have already taken the symbolic step of declaring a climate emergency, but many believe that the actions of these and other countries do not yet match the boldness of their rhetoric. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester speaks to Will Cook of Extinction Rebellion – a movement that wants governments to accelerate their response to the climate crisis – about the need for politicians around the world to commit to meaningful action.
Watch Podcast: content.blubrry.com/physics_world_science_podcast/PWStories-2019-08-16-ClimateEmergenecy.mp3
Glester also explores how academics and physicists are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint. He speaks to Anna Lewis, the sustainable labs officer at the University of Bristol – the first UK research institution to declare a climate emergency – who explains how the university plans to meet its pledge of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Lewis point out that science labs can be some of the biggest users of energy, and Glester talks to Caroline Jarrett, technical manager for the university’s school of science, about the practical measures that researchers can take to make their labs more sustainable. Finally, Glester tackles the thorny question of air travel, not least to academic conferences, and speaks to Matthew Tulley from Solid Carbon Storage about an innovative way to offset your carbon emissions on the occasions when you do need to fly.
physicsworld.com/a/physics-and-the-climate-crisis/
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Post by HAL on Aug 16, 2019 18:22:05 GMT
Carbon storage seems to me to be an absolutely silly idea. One is talking about billions of tons of the stuff. Better to stop it at source. Just don't create it.
Look at the problems with a few tons of nuclear waste.
HAL.
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drwu
Full Member
Posts: 209
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Post by drwu on Aug 16, 2019 19:04:38 GMT
Ironic that Mar-a-Lago will be one of the first places to go under water. Yes, but people like Trump don't care...he'll be dead in a few years at his age and family and friends will be rich enough to live wherever they want..in domes or whatever in the near future......while the middle class boobs that voted for him and his ilk will have to live with the pollution and problems caused by their greed and shortsightedness.
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Post by HAL on Aug 16, 2019 20:42:17 GMT
He could take the European route.
Shut down coal powered generation stations.
Ban Diesel Engine manufacture in the medium term.. In fact in the slightly longer term ban all combustion engines.
May not be popular with the voters.
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Post by swamprat on Aug 16, 2019 21:28:20 GMT
If you think carbon storage is crazy, wait 'till you read THIS: Artificial snow could save world’s coasts by Tim Radford
16 Aug 2019
• This article first appeared at Climate News Network
German scientists have proposed a startling new way of slowing sea level rise and saving New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam and Miami from 3.3 metres of ocean flooding − by using artificial snow.
They suggest the rising seas could be halted by turning West Antarctica, one of the last undisturbed places on Earth, into an industrial snow complex, complete with a sophisticated distribution system.
An estimated 12,000 high-performance wind turbines could be used to generate the 145 Gigawatts of power (one Gigawatt supplies the energy for about 750,000 US homes) needed to lift Antarctic ocean water to heights of, on average, 640 metres, heat it, desalinate it and then spray it over 52,000 square kilometres of the West Antarctic ice sheet in the form of artificial snow, at the rate of several hundred billion tonnes a year, for decades.
Such action could slow or halt the apparently-inevitable collapse of the ice sheet: were this to melt entirely – and right now it is melting at the rate of 361 billion tonnes a year – the world’s oceans would rise by 3.3 metres.
“The fundamental trade-off is whether we as humanity want to sacrifice Antarctica to save the currently inhabited coastal regions and cultural heritage that we have built and are building on our shores,” said Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“It is about global metropolises, from New York to Shanghai, which in the long term will be below sea level if nothing is done. The West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the tipping elements in our climate system. Ice loss is accelerating and might not stop until the West Antarctic ice sheet is practically gone.”
The Potsdam scientists report in the journal Science Advances that their simulations of ice loss from West Antarctica and the measures needed to halt such loss are not an alternative to other steps. Their calculations would be valid “only under a simultaneous drastic reduction” of the global carbon dioxide emissions that drive global heating, and sea level rise, in the first place.
That is, the world would need to abandon fossil fuels, agree to switch to renewable energy, and then use that renewable energy to in effect destroy the Antarctic’s unique ecosystem but save the great cities of the world from the advancing waves later in this millennium.
The researchers acknowledge that the solution is somewhere between impractical and impossible (in their words, it would have to be undertaken “under the difficult circumstances of the Antarctic climate”). But the mere fact that they could write such a proposal is itself an indicator of the accelerating seriousness of the planetary predicament.
In Paris in 2015, 195 nations agreed to take steps to limit global temperature rise to “well below” 2°C above the level that obtained for most of human history. Such steps for the most part have yet to be taken.
3°C rise possible
Carbon dioxide emissions are increasing, the Arctic ice cap is diminishing, the oceans are warming and the loss of ice in Antarctica is increasing.
By 2100, on present trends, the world will be at least 3°C above the historic average.
“The apparent absurdity of the endeavour to let it snow in Antarctica to stop an ice instability reflects the breathtaking dimension of the sea level problem,” Professor Levermann said.
“Yet as scientists we feel it is our duty to inform society about each and every potential option to counter the problems ahead.
“As unbelievable as it might seem, in order to prevent an unprecedented risk, humankind might have to make an unprecedented effort, too.”
physicsworld.com/a/artificial-snow-could-save-worlds-coasts/
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Post by swamprat on Sept 16, 2019 19:20:22 GMT
Act now and avert a climate crisis Nature joins more than 250 media outlets in Covering Climate Now, a unique collaboration to focus attention on the need for urgent action.
Editorial | 15 September 2019
There isn’t much that focuses the mind like a deadline. Just ask any journalist, or indeed anyone working for a government. The story of politicians and climate change is partly one of decision makers putting off hard choices. But that can’t go on for much longer. As zero hour approaches, there can be no more kicking of climate cans. The time to act is now.
That’s why Nature has joined Covering Climate Now, a collaboration between the world’s media organizations. For one week, starting on 15 September, Nature and more than 250 other outlets — with a combined audience of more than one billion — have committed to a week of intensive climate coverage (scroll down to see a list of our coverage, which will be updated throughout the week).
Along with many other journals, Nature and other publications in the Nature family have reported the science and policy of climate change for decades. Our reporters covered the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1988, and our journalism, expert commentary and research continues to reveal the consequences of a warming planet and explore options for how humanity could adapt.
Last year, the IPCC warned that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels would be a colossal undertaking, requiring greenhouse-gas emissions to be cut in half by 2030. The transition to renewable energy alone would cost US$2.4 trillion annually. And yet, without such drastic measures, the world is likely to exceed 3 °C of warming by the end of the century, and will experience more frequent and more severe catastrophic effects, including weather extremes, rising seas and drought. Scientists on the meteorological front line see temperature records continually broken, and this is leading to despair: from watching the natural world deteriorate before their eyes, and from continued inaction by heads of government despite compelling evidence of the importance of intervention.
World leaders — to a large extent constrained by a desire to protect fossil-fuel industries — continue to play for time. But the window for action is shrinking, so something different and more urgent must be done. Covering Climate Now leads up to the United Nations climate summit in New York on 23 September. This meeting will be hosted by UN secretary-general António Guterres, and his instructions to world leaders are to come only if they have concrete commitments for a full transition to sustainable development. The UN summit coincides with a week of global strike action organized by climate activists and young people.
Imperative for action
Covering Climate Now is unusual, ambitious, timely and welcome, not least because it is rare to see often highly competitive media groups collaborating for a shared purpose.
One of our articles reveals how countries are progressing towards their obligations under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Sadly, greenhouse-gas emissions continue to climb, even as nations pledge to make substantial reductions. The one glimmer of hope is that energy from renewable sources is now growing faster than that supplied by fossil fuels. However, fossil-fuelled power continues to rise at a rapid rate, and its share of the global energy supply far eclipses that of renewables.
Countries also pledged to make substantial climate investments — but here, too, the scorecard is mixed. In 2017, more than half a trillion dollars was spent on climate finance, but most of this was expended by governments and businesses in wealthy countries, on behalf of wealthy countries. By contrast, $57 billion of public money flowed from developed to developing countries in the same year — around three-quarters of which was in loans, not grants. Without more financial support, those in countries that have contributed the least carbon pollution are projected to suffer the most.
An urgent situation demands urgent solutions, and new ideas continue to emerge. Across the world, lawmakers are coalescing around Green New Deal plans — including massive public investment in decarbonizing all economic sectors, not just energy. The Green New Deal is ambitious, not least because it promises a swift end to fossil fuels and requires the state to reclaim those parts of the economy — notably energy and infrastructure finance — in which the public sector of many countries has been less active for something approaching 40 years.
The idea is controversial. Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center in University Park, Pennsylvania, is sympathetic to the Green New Deal, but is not quite ready to downplay the contribution of the market. By contrast, Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, UK, thinks that time has run out for what he calls “incremental decarbonizing of the free-market economy”. Farhana Yamin, an environmental lawyer, has gone a step further. After three decades as an academic, adviser to governments and the UN, and a member of the IPCC, she has joined Extinction Rebellion, a movement that organizes non-violent civil disobedience, and explains why direct action is now the only solution.
Individuals and organizations worldwide, including Springer Nature, Nature’s publisher, are wrestling with how to cut their carbon emissions, through travel and other means. Biologists Olivier Hamant, Timothy Saunders and Virgile Viasnoff lay out a seven-point plan for making conferences more sustainable, including a recommendation for organizers to consider holding fewer, longer and more in-depth meetings. They also have advice for principal investigators: take slower forms of transport, and let younger colleagues travel instead.
Last month, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg did just that by sailing into New York harbour after a two-week transatlantic crossing to attend the UN climate summit. One sail featured the phrase ‘Unite Behind the Science’. Along with our colleagues in Covering Climate Now, we are united with all those who stand behind the consensus view of researchers. But there can be no more delay. The time to act is now.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02734-x
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Post by swamprat on Sept 16, 2019 19:23:43 GMT
Dramatic sea-ice melt caps tough Arctic summer From raging wildfires to melting ice in Greenland, the top of the world is screaming for help.
Alexandra Witze | 13 September 2019
Chelsea Wegner was shocked when she landed in Anchorage, Alaska, in July, on her way to a research cruise in the Bering Sea. Smoke from wildfires across the state had darkened the skies, and Anchorage was in the midst of a heatwave that saw temperatures soar past 32 °C for the first time in recorded history.
Wegner, a marine biologist at the University of Maryland in Solomons, also knew that the unusual warmth had melted away nearly all of the sea ice in the Bering Sea. “It was a really surreal moment,” she says.
Later, while sailing aboard a Canadian icebreaker off the coast of Alaska, Wegner watched walruses swimming in open water — without the ice floes they normally use as a platform to rest, give birth and nurse their young during the Arctic summer.
Any day now, scientists will tally the final numbers on this summer’s annual sea-ice melt. The ice seems headed for one of the lowest extents measured since satellite record-keeping began in 1979.
Here, Nature explores the myriad challenges that the Arctic is facing as an unprecedented summer winds to a close in the far north.
Sea ice spiralled down
Arctic sea ice freezes each winter after a long summer melt. But surprising warmth during the Arctic winter and spring hampered its build-up — setting the stage for this summer’s dramatic ice loss.
The dynamic was especially apparent in the Bering Sea. “From about January to May the sea ice in the Bering Sea just didn’t happen,” says Alice Bradley, a polar scientist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “We haven’t seen that before.” A low-pressure weather system hovered over the sea for much of February, funnelling warm air from the south and pushing the little ice that did manage to form into northern waters.
Throughout the spring and summer, Arctic sea ice melted away faster than it usually does in areas such as the Beaufort Sea and the central Arctic Ocean. Ice extent and volume hit record monthly lows in July, and by early August there was no sea ice within 240 kilometres of the Alaskan coast.
Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center
Researchers are still waiting for Arctic sea ice to bottom out this year. The 2019 melt season doesn’t look likely to eclipse the record minimum of 3.387 million square kilometres measured on 17 September 2012, but it adds to evidence that sea ice is caught in a downward spiral.
For each of the past five years, September sea-ice extent has tracked well below the 1981–2010 median. And Arctic sea-ice volume is also dwindling rapidly. The level recorded in July — 8,800 cubic kilometres — is 47% below the mean value for 1979–2018.
Now the annual freeze is almost ready to begin. But much of the ice that forms will be the thin, 'first-year' variety that is especially vulnerable to melting away next year.
Greenland melted
Extreme heat also baked Greenland’s enormous ice sheet this summer. Temperatures across the island soared up to 12 °C hotter than the average in late July.
At Summit Station, a research camp at the highest point on the ice sheet, temperatures darted above the freezing point on 30 and 31 July. Ice-core records suggest how rare this is: between the years 500 and 1994, the ice at Summit melted only eight times.
During the five-day heatwave, Greenland shed about 55 billion tonnes of ice — including an estimated 13 billion tonnes on 1 August alone. That's the most in a 24-hour period since records began in 1950.
Source: Xavier Fettweis/University of Liège
All told, about 60% of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melted at least a little bit this summer. That’s second only to the summer of 2012, when about 98% of the ice sheet underwent some sort of surface melting.
Between water melting off the ice sheet’s surface and breaking off into icebergs, Greenland likely contributed a little over 1.5 millimetres to global sea-level rise this year, according to polar scientist Xavier Fettweis at the University of Liège in Belgium. When researchers eventually compare the mass lost during this summer’s melt to the mass gained during winter snowfall, Greenland is likely to come out as having lost at least as much in 2019 — or even more — than in the extreme year of 2012.
Temperatures soared
July 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded worldwide, according to the European Union′s Copernicus Climate Change Service and the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Each of the last five Julys has ranked among the top five hottest months on record.
The Arctic portions of Alaska, western Canada and central Russia all experienced temperatures at least 2 °C warmer than average from January to July. Heat records fell in many southern Alaska cities during the first week of July. And seabirds died by the thousands in July and August, mainly from starvation, in warmer-than-average waters off the state’s coast; it is the fifth year in a row this has happened.
Alaska was still breaking temperature records in early September, with several towns in the state’s far north setting record highs for the month.
In Sweden, the village of Markusvinsa reported a temperature of 34.8 °C on 26 July — the hottest ever recorded in the country above the Arctic circle. And the heatwave that melted Greenland in late July wreaked havoc on western Europe before it got there, causing temperatures to climb past 40 °C in Belgium and the Netherlands for the first time in recorded history.
Fires flared
All that heat transformed northern forests into tinderboxes ready to light.
More than 1 million hectares burned in Alaska this summer, mostly in the southern and central parts of the state. The fire season began unusually early, in April, and has lasted longer than usual. State officials had to extend the end of the official fire season for a month, from the end of August to the end of September, to ensure they had enough firefighters to battle the ongoing blazes.
And more than 2.6 million hectares have burned in Siberia since July, blanketing cities across eastern Russia in smoke. High temperatures, winds and thunderstorms helped to spark and spread the blazes. Russia declared a state of emergency in late July for several Siberian regions.
Many of the Alaskan and Siberian wildfires began dwindling in August, but they still rank among the longest-lived Arctic wildfires ever recorded. In June alone they emitted 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — roughly equal to the annual CO2 emissions of Sweden, and more than the total emitted by all Arctic wildfires in the last nine Junes, according to the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service of the European Commission.
Even Greenland, which rarely sees wildfires, experienced several during its record heatwave this summer.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02653-x
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