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Category Archives: Climate Change

The Simplest Explanation Of Global Warming Ever

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Ethan Siegel Senior ContributorStarts With A BangSenior Contributor

ScienceThe Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

Earth energy budget diagram, with incoming and outgoing radiation (values are shown in W/m^2). Satellite instruments (CERES) measure the reflected solar, and emitted infrared radiation fluxes. The energy balance determines Earth’s climate.

Let’s play pretend for a moment. Pretend, if you can, that you’ve never heard about the idea of global warming before. Pretend you’ve never heard anyone else’s opinions on the matter, including from politicians, scientists, friends or relatives. Pretend that there are no related concerns, like the economy, our energy needs, or the environment.

If you were going to make a genuine inquiry, there would instead be only two questions to ask and answer:

  1. is the Earth warming or not,
  2. and if so, what’s the main cause?

This is a question that was tailor-made for the enterprise of science to answer. Here’s how we can figure it out for ourselves.

There are really only two things that determine the Earth’s temperature, or the temperature of any object that’s heated by an external source. The first is the energy that goes into it, which is primarily energy produced by the Sun and absorbed by the Earth. The second is the energy that leaves the Earth, which is primarily due to the Earth radiating it away.

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During the day, we absorb energy from the Sun; this is the power inputted into the Earth. During both the day and the night, we radiate energy back into space; that’s the power outputted by the Earth. This is why temperatures heat up during the day and cool off during the night, something that’s pretty much true for every planet that has both a day side and a night side.

The Earth and Moon, to scale, in terms of both size and albedo/reflectivity. Note how much fainter the Moon appears, as it absorbs light much better than Earth does.NASA / APOLLO 17

To know what the temperature of Earth ought to be, we need to first understand the energy that comes into our world. The source of this energy is the Sun, which radiates with a very well-measured power: 3.846 × 1026watts. The closer you are to the Sun, the more of this energy you absorb, while the farther away you are, the less you absorb. Over the timespan that we’ve measured the Sun’s power output, it’s varied by only about ±0.1%.

The anatomy of the Sun, including the inner core, which is the only place where fusion occurs. Even at the incredible temperatures of 15 million K, the maximum achieved in the Sun, the Sun produces less energy-per-unit-volume than a typical human body. The Sun’s volume, however, is large enough to contain over 10^28 full-grown humans, which is why even a low rate of energy production can lead to such an astronomical total energy output.NASA/JENNY MOTTAR

Sunlight spreads out in a sphere the farther away you are from it, meaning that if you’re twice as far away from the Sun, you only absorb one-quarter the radiation. At Earth’s distance from the Sun, we encounter a power of around 1,361 watts-per-square-meter; that’s how much hits the top of our atmosphere.

The Earth also orbits in an ellipse around the Sun, meaning that at some points it’s closer to the Sun, absorbing more radiation, while at other times it’s more distant, absorbing less. The variation from this effect is more like ±1.7%, with the largest amount of energy absorbed occurring in early January, and the least amount occurring in early July.

The way that sunlight spreads out as a function of distance means that the farther away from a power source you are, the energy that you intercept drops off as one over the distance squared.WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER BORB

But that’s not the full story. The sunlight that hits us comes in a variety of wavelengths: ultraviolet, visible, and infrared, all of which carry energy. The atmosphere has many layers, some of which absorb that light, some of which allow it to transmit all the way down to the ground, and some of which reflect it back into space.

All told, about 77% of the energy from the Sun makes it down to Earth’s surface when the Sun is directly overhead, with that number dropping significantly when the Sun is lower on the horizon.

The atmosphere of the Earth, although only 5.15 x 10^18 kilograms in mass (just under 0.0001% of the Earth’s mass), plays a tremendous role in defining the properties of our surface.COSMONAUT FYODOR YURCHIKHIN / RUSSIAN SPACE AGENCY PRESS SERVICES

Some of that energy gets absorbed by Earth’s surface, while some of it gets reflected. Clouds reflect sunlight better than average, as do dry sand and icecaps. Other ground conditions are better at absorbing sunlight, including oceans, forests, wet soil, and savannahs. Depending on seasonal conditions on Earth, the individual locations on Earth vary tremendously in how much light they reflect or absorb.

On average, however, the Earth is very consistent: 31% of the incident radiation gets reflected, while 69% gets absorbed. As far as global effects go, this average has changed remarkably little over time, even as human civilization has transformed the landscape of our planet.

Although various components of the Earth’s surface display huge variable ranges in the amount of light they absorb or reflect, the global average reflectance/absorption of Earth, known as albedo, has remained constant at ~31%.KEN GOULD, NEW YORK STATE REGENTS EARTH SCIENCE

When we put in all the factors we know of:

  • the Sun’s power output,
  • the Earth’s physical size and distance from the Sun,
  • the amount of sunlight that Earth absorbs vs. reflects,
  • and the intrinsic variability in the Sun over time,

we can arrive at a way to calculate the average temperature of the Earth.

The result?

We calculate that Earth should be at 255 Kelvin (-18 °C / 0 °F), or well below freezing. And that’s absurd, and completely not reflective of reality.

The Earth as viewed from a composite of NASA satellite images from space in the early 2000s. Note the abundant presence of liquid water on the surface: an indicator of a temperate climate.NASA / BLUE MARBLE PROJECT

Instead, our planet has an average temperature of 288 Kelvin (15 °C / 59 °F), which is much warmer than the naive predictions we just painstakingly calculated. Our world is temperate, not frozen, and there’s one big reason for these predictions and observations to be so thoroughly off from one another: we’ve been ignoring the insulating effects of Earth’s atmosphere.

Sure, the Earth radiates the energy it absorbs back into space. But it doesn’t all go into space straightaway; the same atmosphere that wasn’t 100% transparent to sunlight also isn’t 100% transparent to the infrared light that Earth radiates. The atmosphere is made up of molecules that absorb radiation of varying wavelengths, depending on what the atmosphere is made out of.

The interplay between the atmosphere, clouds, moisture, land processes and the oceans all governs the evolution of Earth’s equilibrium temperature.NASA / SMITHSONIAN AIR & SPACE MUSEUM

For infrared radiation, nitrogen and oxygen — the majority of our atmosphere — act as though they’re virtually transparent. But there are three gases that are part of our atmosphere which aren’t transparent at all to the radiation Earth produces:

  • water vapor (H2O),
  • carbon dioxide (CO2),
  • and methane (CH4).

All three of these gases, when they’re present in any planet’s atmosphere, act the same way a blanket does when you place it over a warm-blooded animal’s body: they prevent the heat from escaping.

An emaciated orphaned elephant calf was rescued from the wild after tourists spotted him struggling. Kenya Wildlife Service and David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust responded to reports of the wandering calf on March 18 and dispatched a rescue team to pick up the calf. Here, a blanket was placed over the elephant calf to help it retain its body heat: an extremely effective technique that humans take for granted in our daily lives.THE DSWT / BARCROFT IMAGES / BARCROFT MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES

In the case of an animal, they need to generate less of their own heat to maintain a constant temperature when there’s a blanket on them. And if the blanket is thicker, or if there are a greater number of thin blankets, they need to generate even less. This analogy extends to layers of clothing in any conditions; the more insulation you have around you, the less heat escapes, allowing you to maintain higher temperatures.

For a planet like ours, these gases prevent the infrared radiation from escaping, instead absorbing it and re-radiating it back to Earth. The more of these gases that are present, the longer and more efficiently Earth holds onto the Sun’s heat. We can’t change the energy input, so instead, as we add additional amounts of these gases, the temperature of our world simply goes up.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere can be determined from both ice core measurements, which easily go back hundreds of thousands of years, and by atmospheric monitoring stations, like those atop Mauna Loa. The increase in atmospheric CO2 since the mid-1700s is staggering, and continues unabated.NASA / NOAA

The water vapor content is something that’s determined by Earth’s oceans, the local temperature, humidity and dew point. When we add more water vapor to the atmosphere or take water vapor out of it, the overall water vapor content doesn’t change at all. As far as human activity goes, nothing we do has any impact on the net amount of H2O in the atmosphere.

The concentrations of the other two gases (CO2 and CH4), though, are primarily determined by human influence. It’s well-documented, for example, that CO2 has risen by more than 50% of its 1700s-era value due to the burning of fossil fuels coinciding with the start of the industrial revolution. According to NASA scientist Chris Colose:

50% of the 33 K greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, about 25% to clouds, 20% to CO2, and the remaining 5% to the other non-condensable greenhouse gases such as ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, and so forth.

At an average warming rate of 0.07º C per decade for as long as temperature records exist, the Earth’s temperature has not only increased, but continues to increase without any relief in sight.NOAA NATIONAL CENTERS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION, CLIMATE AT A GLANCE: GLOBAL TIME SERIES

All of this leads to a very straightforward conclusion: if we increase the concentrations of infrared-absorbing gases in our atmosphere, like CO2 and CH4, the Earth’s temperature will rise. Given that the temperature record unequivocally shows that the Earth is warming, and we have put these additional proverbial blankets onto our atmosphere, it seems like a slam dunk that this is cause-and-effect at work.

It cannot be proven that human activity is the cause of global warming, of course. That conclusion we drew is still a scientific inference. But based on what we know about planetary science, Earth’s atmosphere, human activity and the warming we’re observing, it seems like a very good one. When we quantify the other effects, it’s unlikely that anything else could be the cause. Not the Sun, not volcanoes, not any natural phenomenon that we know of.

The Earth is warming, and humans are the cause. The next steps — of what to do about it — are 100% up to us.

I am a Ph.D. astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. I have won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for my blog, Starts With A Bang, inclu…

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Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and primary writer of Starts With A Bang! His books, Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy, are available wherever books are sold.

New Year 2019, and I’m hoping for a miracle

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Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle From All-Creatures.org

Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.

from: There’s an Elephant in the Room blog

https://www.all-creatures.org/articles/new-year-2019-miracle.html
December 2018

Today, as 2018 slips away, I have a new and excruciating awareness of the climate catastrophe that is breaking in slow motion.

So this year, because it’s all I know, I’m just going to keep on writing about veganism, keep on defending our trillions of annual victims, and keep on pleading with my species to wake up and realise what’s happening. I don’t know what it will take to make humanity sit up and take notice, but I have to keep trying.

Polar Bear

I usually do a blog at this time of year – it’s an apt time to reflect on the changes that have taken place and a chance to evaluate the slow but steady progress that we’re making towards a vegan world. However this year I found my thoughts being drawn in an altogether different direction from usual; something has irrevocably changed since I last sat down to write my New Year thoughts.

Humans – facing up to what we do

In 2012, I became vegan in recognition of the brutal injustice that we are inflicting on every species on the planet by the unending ways that we ignore their vital interests in favour of our own trivial and frivolous preferences. Today, as 2018 slips away, I have a new and excruciating awareness of the climate catastrophe that is breaking in slow motion like a wave over this beautiful world, and we are running out of time to fix it. Let’s face it, our causative role in the atrocity, and our resulting peril as a species, are not even being acknowledged yet, at a time when we ALL need to be working on – and close to – the solution.

We hack and butcher our vicious way through the gentle and innocent creatures whose world this also is, ‘farming’ and mutilating them, violating, impregnating, breaking up their families and pumping out their breast milk, genetically altering them to increase egg production, slaughtering, sawing, dismembering and flaying the sweet individuals who face our slavering appetite for gore in uncomprehending bewilderment while we kill them by the trillions each year. We devour, excrete, wear, experiment on, and are ‘entertained’ by the pitiful ways that our despairing victims try to please us, their desperate attempts to make us stop hurting them. None of it works, despite the fact that none of what we do is necessary.

We are a species drunk on delusions of grandeur.

It’s real. We’re in big trouble

Be assured, there are charlatans who will say otherwise because the status quo of nonhuman exploitation is making vast sums of money for them, but as the old year slips away, the environmental and health related science against our use of others is continuing to pile up and the clamour for action to save the world grows louder. This year we all must surely be beginning to realise that humanity, and humanity alone, has brought our beloved planet, and all who travel through the black depths of space on this irreplaceable blue green orb, to the very brink of disaster. We are teetering now on the edge of the abyss.

It’s too late to complain about corporations and industries. It’s too late to carry on as before and blame everyone but ourselves for the disasters that afflict our world with increasing severity. We are consumers and it is our cash that is creating the demand that continues to drive vast agricultural industries; it is our cash that funds all the industries and practices that are wrecking our global home and depriving our children and grandchildren of a future. We are depriving them of a habitable world on which to even have a future. It’s time to take responsibility as individuals because if we don’t, we are condemning our loved ones to a world from our nightmares. We may be dead and gone, but our legacy of senseless corruption will remain as long as our species lasts – which isn’t likely to be very long at all as things are.

Global warming – the cosy myth of climate change

I know when I was younger, the term ‘global warming’ was occasionally mentioned, and here in the bitter cold of a Scottish winter, people smiled and nodded and agreed that a wee bit of warmth wouldn’t be a bad thing. How little I understood the mechanisms behind the idea of the ‘warmth’ that we all crave here.

I had no idea about the man-made build-up of greenhouse gasses that in turn was heating the planet, changing climates, bringing extreme weather events with increasing frequency and severity. I didn’t think about indigenous crops and species no longer being able to survive as their environment becomes increasingly hostile; the land, oceans and waterways clogged with effluent and assorted and non-biodegradable waste. I had no concept of melting icecaps raising sea levels and releasing even more greenhouses gas into an already seething atmosphere. To my younger self, the world seemed so unchanging, so unaffected by the life forms who swarm its surface. Earth seemed unbreakable.

Climate change – the consequences

Yet here we are as the year 2019 looms, well on our way to quite literally eating, using, and poisoning our planet to death. We are in it up to our necks, persisting in our brutal use of all other species while the very survival of our own is on the line as a direct result. New scientific reports support this view almost every week. All this devastation has been created in the recent past by a species whose technological burgeoning, enslaving, modifying, despoiling and displacing every other species and every environment to our own ends, while disregarding the tragic consequences of our indulgence.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, we sanctimoniously delude ourselves 1) that we care about other animals and ‘nature’, and 2) that we can claim superiority amongst the millions of other species in the world; millions whose number falls daily as a result of our actions in what is known and recognised as the 6th Mass Extinction event. Google it.

I recently wrote a blog that highlighted a recent report that we had 12 years left to change our ways [Twelve years. Twelve.]. Oh, I know humanity won’t disappear in 12 years; our doomed species is likely to struggle on for a considerable while after that point is reached. But the science is clear that by then – or even earlier according to some – it will be too late for us to avoid the consequences of our desecration of our fellow creatures and the planet we all share. And the effective word that our children and grandchildren will get to know too well for any of us to feel good about, is ‘struggle’. Life will become an increasingly hard struggle for them in ways we find difficult to imagine, and it won’t be just in terms of the occasional storm or flood that they’ll get used to dealing with.

How would I know about this ‘struggle’?

In what feels increasingly like a past life, I worked in the related areas of ‘Disaster Planning’ and ‘Business Continuity’ in local government. Because effective planning made it essential for me to understand the realities of what might be faced, I am only too well aware of the speed with which the veneer of ‘civilisation’ falls away in the event of even a relatively localised catastrophe such as a disease pandemic, or extreme climatic event such as an earthquake or flood.

For the most part, we live in a world where our every daily requirement relies on a largely unrecognised network of interdependent services; people going to work to create supplies, transporting these supplies to where they need to be to keep the population fed, clothed and moving. Supporting the population we have health and emergency services, schools, refuse collection, and such unrecognised essentials as crematoria – all with staff who need transport to get to work. All these services work in an equilibrium.

These systems are more fragile than we suppose and here in the UK we can see just how little it takes to upset that balance. In Scotland, all shops close on New Year’s Day and many on 2 January, and in the days leading up to this planned closure, we see panic buying that strips the shelves of vast supermarkets. That’s for a planned and short-termclosure – imagine an unplanned one.

All it takes is an interruption in any part of the service network and it’s like a house of cards. Once transport links fail, fuel supplies fail and food supplies fail because whatever is available cannot be distributed. Without transport, power stations, hospitals and schools can’t be staffed. Any available medical provision starts to be overwhelmed. Roads and infrastructure are impaired, but there’s no fuel at the filling stations anyway, people have to stay home to look after their children and no one can get to work to earn money. With nothing to eat and no way to feed their families, desperation takes hold. Public services are prioritised in increasingly futile efforts to cover the bare essentials. I could go on.

I have been employed to plan for eventualities such as these but even I can scarcely imagine this sort of scenario on a planetary scale. However I am convinced that our children – that’s yours and mine – may well become aware of it as an everyday reality. Disaster Planning will become a new and vital career choice. My heart breaks to realise that this is the world that my generation is bequeathing to our children; those children we love more than anyone else may find themselves living hand to mouth as they fight for survival on a dying planet.

Plant based consumption – it’s a start

Along with so many self-interested and scathing dismissals of the scientifically proven need for plant based consumption, are the same old calls for yet more laws, yet more regulations, yet more support for small-scale ‘farmers’ of animal-derived substances, the same old calls to penalise large-scale animal substance producers and so on. Now apart from the fact that the concept of penalising large-scale producers for meeting large-scale demand (see the obvious problem there?) demonstrates a woeful lack of a grasp on the basic mechanics of supply and demand, basically here we have a call for the same old, same old. These tired, worn, and desperately weary suggestions have shown no sign of working in the decades that they have been buzzing around, but making a big thing about calling for them to be implemented/enforced seeks to give the appearance of concern while indicating that the individual does not intend to take personal responsibility for their own actions. All the problems arising from those actions are conveniently the fault of ‘someone else’ who now apparently has responsibility for putting things right using the same tried and tested measures that have spectacularly failed animals for hundreds of years.

Without a widespread commitment to action, such pie-in-the-sky measures to regulate animal substance use are now physically impossible to achieve while the human population (currently 7.7 billion) spirals upwards, carrying with it the increased consumer demand for our fellow species to be used as inappropriate ‘food’ on a planet with dwindling resources.

We are out of time. Really.

What do we need? Action! When do we need it? Now!

As pointed out so eloquently by climate activist Greta Thunberg, the climate crisis should be the emergency first priority of every government and every one of us. Despite this, many are still in denial and in this world of sensationalised gossip-mongering that masquerades as journalism, denialists continue to find a ready platform for their anti-science opinions. However any one of us who has lived more than a decade or two can see clearly evidenced in the changing landscape, the disappearance of insect life, and the terrifyingly increasing incidence of extreme events, the torment of a planet entering its death throes.

Some appear to be sitting on the metaphorical fence. Waiting to be convinced. Thinking that ‘there’s time’; thinking it’s all bullshit but hell, if it is real, we can always take steps in the future if we’re absolutely forced into it. Sadly that is not the case. The time to act is now. By the time the doubters and deniers are beginning to wake from their torpor and believe what the scientists have been trying to tell us about for decades, it will be well beyond too late. We couldn’t backtrack, any more than we could stuff a bullet back in a gun once the trigger has been pulled.

Start with veganism

So this year, because it’s all I know, I’m just going to keep on writing about veganism, keep on defending our trillions of annual victims, and keep on pleading with my species to wake up and realise what’s happening. I don’t know what it will take to make humanity sit up and take notice, but I have to keep trying.

But now, as the bells of 2019 begin, the thing we need most is the thing that every single one of us should be working for, day and night, with every fibre of our being. A miracle.

Ten Ways 2018 Brought Us Closer to Climate Apocalypse

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A line of burned out abandoned cars sit on the road after the Camp Fire moved through the area on November 9, 2018, in Paradise, California.
A line of burned out abandoned cars sit on the road after the Camp Fire moved through the area on November 9, 2018, in Paradise, California.
JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES
BY
Dahr Jamail,
Truthout
PUBLISHED

The 20 warmest years ever recorded have been within the last 22 years, and the four warmest of those have been 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO has stated that if these trends continue (and there is no reason to believe they won’t), global temperatures may rise from between 3-5 degrees Celsius (3-5°C) by 2100. The organization warned that if humans exploit all known fossil fuel reserves, “the temperature rise will be considerably higher” than even those catastrophic levels.

“It is worth repeating once again that we are the first generation to fully understand climate change and the last generation to be able to do something about it,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas announced in a recent WMO press release.

Yet even with this stark wake-up call, it may well already be too late, given that we are already living in the Sixth Mass Extinction. A study published earlier this year, conducted by an international team of researchers from 17 countries whose findings were published in Nature Geoscience, showed that global temperatures could eventually double those that have been predicted by climate modeling.

The vast majority of governments around the globe are responding in ways that range from laughable to pathetic, given the consequences that are upon us already.

2018 has been yet another year of records and alarming developments as runaway climate change continues apace. Here are ten significant climate-related phenomena from 2018.

1. Arctic Sea Ice

The Arctic sea ice is close to historic lows in both extent, volume, and mass. The annual minimum Arctic ice volume, based on observations (not projections), is following a trend that shows we should expect periods of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer by 2023, and possibly sooner.

World-renowned Arctic Sea Ice expert Peter Wadhams predicted this during an interview with Truthout.

Warm temperatures have become the norm in the Arctic, so the now increasingly rapid loss of sea ice should come as no surprise. Some of the ground in the Arctic is not even freezing any more, even during the winter.

Militaries from around the world, particularly from the US and Russia, are racing to stake claims in the region and project their presences there in order to advantage of the fragile Arctic region for exploitation of oil and gas reserves, as well as those countries actively exploring shipping across the increasingly accessible region as the sea ice continues to melt away.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice will lock in several runaway climate feedback loops that will dramatically altar global climate, causing water availability and food-growing capacity to be severely diminished across large swaths of the planet.

2. Increasingly Warm Oceans

Earth’s oceans have already absorbed 93 percent of the warmth humans have generated since just the 1970s.

To give you an idea of how much energy that is, if you took all of the heat humans generated between the years 1955 and 2010 and placed it in the atmosphere instead of the oceans, global temperatures would have risen by a staggering 97 degrees Fahrenheit.

We continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, 25 percent of whichcontinues to be absorbed by the oceans, along with the heat the CO2 traps in the atmosphere.

2017 was the second warmest year ever recorded for the oceans, and according to NASA, the five hottest years ever recorded for the oceans have occurred since 2010. The oceans are thus becoming increasingly warmer and more acidic with each passing day.

And, according to the WMO, “For each 3-month period until September 2018, ocean heat content was the highest or second highest on record.”

And Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned this November the “chance of an El Niño forming in the coming months is 70 percent,” which would bring warmer than normal ocean temperatures.

3. Methane

One extremely worrying development in the Arctic came in the form of bubbling lakes. A report showed that large numbers of lakes across the region were leaking methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

In what is perhaps a harbinger of things to come, one lake in particular was found to be bubbling vigorously as methane from below escaped through the lake and into the atmosphere.

These lakes that are bubbling from methane being released from the thawing permafrost beneath them don’t completely freeze during the winters, which causes them release even more methane as the permafrost does not reach the cold temperatures it had prior to this phenomenon. Hence, another runaway climate feedback loop is born.

This distressing development comes on top of numerous other feedback loops in the Arctic that have already kicked in.

More bad news about methane came in the form of a report illustrating how large amounts of methane (up to 41 tons daily) were being released from a glacier in Iceland via its meltwater. This is an amount equal to the methane produced by more than 136,000 belching cows.

4. Wildfires

Wildfires, amped up by climate change, ravaged many regions of the world in 2018.

California saw its most destructive wildfire on record, surpassing the previous record set only the year before, as scores died from incineration that likely released radiation and toxic chemicals into the air in Southern California.

Wildfires across Canada’s British Columbia, as well as other parts of that country, were the largest ever for the second year in a row.

Wildfires across Queensland, Australia during November were unprecedented, given that the area is technically a rainforest, and it was springtime there.

Nearly 100 people died in wildfires in Greece, in what turned out to be Europe’s deadliest forest fire in over a century.

5. Insect Apocalypse

Insects, and hence the global food web, are in crisis, according to several studies, one of which was published earlier this year.

A study published this October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed how massive the collapse of insects is, and that it is far more widespread that previously known. Climate change is implicated as the leading cause.

This comes on the heels of a study from last year showing a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in nature preserves across Germany. This was a dramatic uptick from a 2014 study by an international team of biologists which estimated in the previous 35 years the abundance of invertebrates like bees and beetles had decreased by 45 percent.

Everywhere long-term data on insects is available, particularly across Europe, the numbers of insects are plummeting.

“This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call — a clarion call — that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut, told the Washington Post. “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.” He added, “I’m scared to death.”

Without these pollinators, which are being annihilated, the already beleaguered global food production system is in even greater danger of collapse.

6. A Broken Global Food System

The global food system is already broken, according to the 130 of the world’s science and medicine academies.

Tim Benton, a professor of population ecology at the University of Leeds who was involved in the large report, told the Guardian: “Whether you look at it from a human health, environmental or climate perspective, our food system is currently unsustainable and given the challenges that will come from a rising global population that is a really [serious] thing to say.”

Staggeringly, nearly one billion people went hungry last year. This number is guaranteed to climb, due to worsening climate impacts as atmospheric CO2 content continues to increase and the nutritional value of crops decreases as the result.

As Truthout reported earlier this year, two studies investigating corn and vegetables warned of an increasing risk of food shocks around the world, along with malnutrition, if climate change continues unchecked.

Both studies, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed how climate change will increase the risk of simultaneous crop failures across the planet’s largest corn-growing regions, as well as sapping nutrients from critical vegetables. For example, an increase of 4°C — which is essentially the current mid-range trajectory we are on to reach by 2100 — could cut US corn production nearly in half. Meanwhile, the likelihood of simultaneous crop failures for the four biggest corn exporters (US, Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine) suffering yield losses of 10 percent or greater increases from 7 percent at 2°C warming to 86 percent at 4°C.

Another study warned of how climate change already poses a serious threat to the nutritional value of crops, and a lack of action could well have major global implications for both food security and global health. The same study showed that global crop yields could be reduced by nearly one-third with a 4°C temperature increase.

7. Uninhabitable and Permanently Altered Regions

Still suffering from the impacts of a devastating Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was officially left to its own devices to recover.

The country has been physically, socially, and psychologically devastated as tens of thousands of people have struggled to survive without electricity, health care or basic services long after the reconstruction of the island should have taken place.

Another example of this in the last year was Florida’s panhandle, portions of which were obliterated by Hurricane Michael. Government aid was slow to arrive.

Meanwhile, increasingly intense and extensive heat waves, coupled with broadening drought, and climate change forecasts showing more of all of these, revealed that countries across North Africa and along the Persian Gulf will become literally uninhabitable in the not-so-distant future. Rising seas infiltrating water tables, and thus contaminating many people’s drinking water source, are also going to be a large factor in this equation.

8. Great Barrier Reef

A record heat wave in Queensland, Australia, in November shattered the previous high temperature record by a stunning 5.4°C. The heat wave alarmed scientists, raising fears of another bleaching event that could further weaken the already beleaguered Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world.

The heatwave increased already above-average marine temperatures, driving up the likelihood of the coral once again dying off in the overheated waters.

Marine heatwaves in 2016 and 2017 already killed off and/or damaged large regions of the Great Barrier Reef, as scientists worried about the fact that without breaks in the annual heatwaves, the coral will not have a chance to recover.

The scientific consensus shows that coral reefs typically need a minimum of 10-12 years to recover from bleaching events. However, climate change is causing the bleaching events to occur on nearly an annual basis now.

Hence, a 2011 NOAA report warning that the planet could lose most of its coral reefs by 2050 is looking increasingly like an over-conservative projection.

Additionally, with scientific institutions already warning the odds are high that another El Nino could occur next year does not bode well for Earth’s already overheated oceans.

9. UN Report: Only 12 Years Left to Limit Warming

A landmark UN report released in October served as an imminent warning that if governments fail to act swiftly and dramatically (and within the next dozen years), droughts, flooding, and increasingly extreme heat waves will increase drastically.

In the Paris Climate Change Agreement, global governments pledged to try to keep warming within a limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in order to prevent increasingly catastrophic impacts.

In the recent UN report, experts stated that without urgent and unprecedented changes, meeting the 1.5°C limit would be impossible.

The report pointed out several important thresholds: just an extra 0.5°C of warming beyond 1.5°C would essentially completely annihilate corals and dramatically accelerate the loss of what is left of the Arctic sea ice, and the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress would be at least 50 percent higher.

Additionally, at 2°C warming, extremely hot days would become much more common, there would be more forest fires and the number of heat-related deaths would increase. Plants would be nearly twice as likely to lose half their habitat than they would at 1.5°C, and sea level rise would increase by at least 10cm.

10. Nowhere Near Meeting Climate Change Goals

While many world leaders met in Poland for the COP24 climate talks in December, it was already clear that we are nowhere near on track to attain the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

Given we are currently already at 1.1°C, the Paris climate agreement in 2015 was non-binding, and the majority of the planet’s countries are still nowhere near doing what would actually be necessary to curtail emissions radically, we are on track to see at least 3.5°C warming by 2100, and much more after that.

Yet it became known in 2017 that oil giants BP and Shell were already planning for global temperatures to increase by 5°C by 2050, even in the wake of the Paris climate agreement.

Numerous reports have shown that it is highly unlikely civilization is possible at 3.5°C.

Ocean Deoxygenation as an Indicator of Abrupt Climate Change

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The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention …. The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.~ Christy Wampole 

I’ve responded to Max Li’s inane email messages. Doing so did not make him go away. One of the adverse consequences of making myself available to the public is frequent exposure to a public characterized by people long on unsupported opinions and short on intelligence. My prior responses to Mr. Li’s correspondence did not clear up his obvious insanity. As a result, my future responses to him will appear in this space. As a result, I expect to hear from him less often, and I also expect others to benefit from Li’s ongoing errors.

Saw this on a foreign website. You are so far out in your human extinction calculation you look like a bloody fool.

Scientists know what killed most life on Earth 250m years ago and say we’re on the same path. http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/109167147/humans-blazing-similar-path-to-cause-of-ancient-mass-extinction

Mr. Li’s link references a review paper in Science, a premiere refereed journal. The journal article was widely reported by the corporate press (for example, the New York Times), probably because it adheres to the 2100 meme. It’s the standard, halfway-there approach. Color me shocked.

I turn, as usual, to evidence beyond the headlines. I know few people are impressed with this unusual approach. Indeed, I suspect few people even understand the idea. This is why I write primarily for myself: Writing forces clear articulation of the writer’s thoughts, as I explained to resistant college students for more than two decades.

Shifting the baseline is a common trick used by governments, media, and paid climate scientists, as I have explained repeatedly. We were on the brink in 1965, we had 10 years in 1989, and now we have until 2030. Shifting the baseline continues, even in the journal literature, which claims we are striving to achieve a target we passed long ago: 1.5 C above the pre-industrial baseline.

In the current case, shifting the baseline is hardly the only problem with the journal article. Indeed, the article refers to ocean deoxygenation (also known as hypoxia) as if this phenomenon could never occur in the near future, much less today. The study adds to information published in a March 2017 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pointing to deoxygenation of the oceans. Neither study draws attention to earlier research indicating deoxygenation could become a major issue by 2030. Nor do they point out obvious, ongoing harbingers. They similarly downplay the rapidity with which deoxygenation can occur, as reported in the August 2017 issue of Science Advances. The latter paper mentions, quite importantly, that dead zones in today’s oceans bear remarkable resemblance to those during the Cretaceous. As pointed out in an article in the 19 December 2018 issue of Science Advances, “ocean oxygen loss may, thus, elicit major changes to midwater ecosystem structure and function.”

Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is willing to describe ocean deoxygenation as a contemporary issue, as illustrated in the short video embedded below.

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The 10 December 2018 online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesincludes a paper titled, “Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates.” When does the paper propose such a profoundly rapid rise in global-average temperature? As early as 2030, from this most conservative of sources.

It’s not only the world’s oceans currently impacted by hypoxia. Dead zones have already spread to freshwater lakes and streams.

Lacking habitat, humans will not survive Earth with a Pliocene-style climate. The same holds for Earth with an Eocene-style climate. Sadly, hothouse Earth is simply not suitable for us. We are vertebrates. We are mammals. Neither vertebrates nor mammals can “keep up” with projected gradual changes. To believe we can adapt to or mitigate for the abrupt climate currently under way is absurdly human.

Precisely zero humans will witness 2100. Indeed, there will be nary a human more than seven decades before the calendar reads 2100. As a result, no calendars will be turned to 2100. Rather, our species has a scant few years left on Earth.

Our extinction is imminent. As usual, I encourage readers to live accordingly.

PENGUIN POOP, SEEN FROM SPACE, TELLS OUR CLIMATE STORY

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NICK GARBUTT/BARCROFT/GETTY IMAGES

SATELLITES WATCH MANY things as they orbit the Earth: hurricanes brewing in the Caribbean, tropical forests burning in the Amazon, even North Korean soldiers building missile launchers. But some researchers have found a new way to use satellites to figure out what penguins eat by capturing images of the animal’s poop deposits across Antarctica.

A group of scientists studying Adélie penguins and climate change have found that the color of penguin droppingsindicates whether the animals ate shrimp-like krill (reddish orange) or silverfish (blue). The distinction is interesting because the penguin’s diet serves as an indicator of the response of the marine ecosystem to climate change. Separate research is starting to show, for example, that penguin chicks that are forced to rely on krill as their main source of food don’t grow as much as those who have fish in their diet.

The penguins’ guano deposits build up over time on the rocky outcroppings where the birds congregate, making them colorful landmarks. The researchers took samples from the penguin colonies, found their spectral wavelength, then matched this color to images taken from the orbiting Landsat-7 satellite.

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THE WIRED GUIDE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

“There’s a clear regional difference, krill on the west, fish on the east,” says Casey Youngflesh, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut who presented his findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington. It’s the first time that scientists have been able to track diet from space, and researchers say it’s a new tool for looking at how certain seabird and penguin populations are doing on other regions of the planet.

Knowing what, and how much, five million breeding pairs of Adélie penguins are eating is important because it tells researchers how the base of the food chain is doing. The population of tiny krill has crashed on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula, the 800-mile thumb that sticks up toward the tip of South America. Rapidly warming, changing climactic conditions as well as a huge increase in industrial-scale fishing, have taken a toll on these small crustaceans.

Krill are harvested commercially for use in pet food and nutritional supplements, but for many penguins, it’s the basis of their diet. As krill have become more scarce, so, too, have the penguins in western Antarctica who like to eat them. “Diet can tell us how food webs are shifting over time,” says Youngflesh. “It would take a lot of time and a lot of money to visit all these sites. Climate change is extremely complicated and we need data on large scales.”

Youngflesh says he hopes the color-coded poop maps can be used to track penguin populations in the future, as well as other seabirds across the globe. That’s because seabirds aggregate in the same places as penguins and eat the same things. Of course, this form of remote sensing can’t tell researchers how penguins’ diets compare across time. So one researcher dug through the guano itself in search of insights into the penguins’ history.

“There are unanswered questions about when did they arrive, how have their diets changed over time,” says Michael Polito, assistant professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University. “Those are questions satellites can’t answer, and it was my job to dig it up.”

MICHAEL POLITO/LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY

Polito excavated mounds of guano, feathers, bones and eggshells on the remote Danger Islands, a large penguin colony on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that has remained mostly free of human visitors. When he reached the bottom of the pile, he took the material back to his lab and applied radiocarbon techniques to figure out the age of the first penguin settlers. He found that the penguins have been living on Danger Island for nearly 3,000 years. Since Adélie penguins need access to ice-free land, open water and a plentiful food supply to feed their baby chicks, the presence or absence of a penguin colony is a sign of the climate conditions at the time, Polito says. Polito’s new study pushes back the time of penguin’s arrival there by 2,200 years for that region and confirms other data taken from ice cores and sediments about the history of that region’s climate.

“This ability to estimate penguin diets from space will be a real game changer for science in Antarctica,” Polito said. “It really takes a lot of time and effort to figure out what penguins eat using traditional methods so being able to evaluate diets all around the Antarctic continent from space is a pretty amazing leap forward.”

The combination of digging through poop and analyzing images from satellites is giving researchers a better handle on possible trouble spots for the Adélie penguin, as well as its cousins the chinstrap, Gentoo and emperor penguins. The laboratory of Heather Lynch, associate professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University, put together a nifty continent-wide map of penguin colonies from the four species, and is using citizen volunteers to count them one by one. Lynch’s group is also beginning to look back at previous satellite images taken from the 1980s until now to see if they can establish the same penguin poop-diet connection.

Teen tells climate negotiators they aren’t mature enough

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By John Sutter and Lawrence Davidson, CNN

Updated 9:38 AM ET, Mon December 17, 2018

greta thunberg cop24 climate world leaders sot nr vpx_00001202

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Teen activist scolds world leaders on climate 01:05

(CNN)Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old student from Sweden, captured the attention of the world recently when she shamed climate change negotiators at a United Nations climate summit in Poland.

“You are not mature enough to tell it like is,” she said at the COP24 summit, which ended late Saturday night after two weeks of tense negotiations. “Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.”

COP24 climate talks end in agreement -- barely

COP24 climate talks end in agreement — barely
The climate talks resulted in nearly 200 nations agreeing to a set of rules that will govern the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial levels. Even the negotiators know they’re not doing nearly enough to reach that goal and avoid disastrous effects of climate chance, which include the end of coral reefs, rising seas, stronger superstorms and deadlier heatwaves.
Thunberg and other young people emerged as among the strongest moral voices at the talks, which went into overtime amid disputes about the scientific consensus on global warming, which has shown for decades that burning coal, oil and gas wreaks havoc on people and the planet.
The teen has inspired thousands of young people around the world to walk out of their schools on Fridays to demand adults take more action to protect their futures and those of future generations. She decided to walk out of her own school in Sweden, she told CNN, by herself. No one joined her the first day, she said. Then she kept at it, inspiring thousands.
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People started joining me,” she said.
Last Friday, a number of students left their classes and walked into the conference center in Katowice, Poland, where the UN talks were held. They held signs that, together, read: “12 years left.” That’s a reference to the latest dire report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global climate targets could become impossible in just 12 years. The report says emissions need to be cut about in half by 2030, which would require a near-complete overhaul of the global energy system.
“Adults sometimes forget about the young people,” said Małgorzata Czachowska, one of the Polish students inspired by Thunberg.
Toby Thorpe heard about Thunberg in Tasmania, Australia, and led a walkout of his own. That led to more than 10,000 students walking out of classes, he told CNN. He and others hope that effort will grow.
Thunberg, who describes herself on Twitter as a “15 year old climate activist with Asperger’s,” said she was inspired by the school walkouts in the United States that followed the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
She is asking students around the world to walk out of their classes each Friday to demand adults take climate action. Those actions include big systems changes like transitioning to cleaner sources of energy including wind and solar power. Thunberg told CNN she doesn’t fly, doesn’t eat meat (beef is a major contributor to climate change) and tries not to buy new things unless they’re absolutely necessary in order to do her part.
She uses the hashtags #climatestrike and #fridaysforfuture.
“We have done this many times before and with so little results,” she told CNN. “Something big needs to happen. People need to realize our political leaders have failed us. And we need to take action into our own hands.”
Here is the full text of her speech at COP24 in Poland:
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden.
I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.
Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn’t matter what we do.
But I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference.
And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.
You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.
Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.
You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.
We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.
We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.
We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.
We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.
Thank you.

CNN’s Gül Tüysüz contributed to this report

Beef-eating ‘must fall drastically’ as world population grows

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/05/beef-eating-must-fall-drastically-as-world-population-grows-report

Current food habits will lead to destruction of all forests and catastrophic climate change by 2050, report finds

Cattle farming in California.
 Cattle farming in California. Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

People in rich nations will have to make big cuts to the amount of beef and lamb they eat if the world is to be able to feed 10 billion people, according to a new report. These cuts and a series of other measures are also needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, it says.

More than 50% more food will be needed by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI) report, but greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture will have to fall by two-thirds at the same time. The extra food will have to be produced without creating new farmland, it says, otherwise the world’s remaining forests face destruction. Meat and dairy production use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s emissions.

Increasing the amount of food produced per hectare was the most critical step, the experts said, followed by cutting meat-eating and putting a stop to the wasting of one-third of food produced.

“We have to change how we produce and consume food, not just for environmental reasons, but because this is an existential issue for humans,” said Janet Ranganathan, vice-president for science and research at the WRI.

Tim Searchinger, of the WRI and Princeton University, said: “If we tried to produce all the food needed in 2050 using today’s production systems, the world would have to convert most of its remaining forest, and agriculture alone would produce almost twice the emissions allowable from all human activities.”

The new report, launched at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, follows other major scientific analyses showing that huge reductions in meat-eating are “essential” to avoid dangerous climate change. Another found that avoiding meat and dairy products was the single biggest way to reduce an individual’s environmental impact on the planet, from slowing the annihilation of wildlife to healing dead zones in the oceans.

The world’s science academies concluded last week that the global food system was “broken”, leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight and driving dangerous global warming. Another new reportconcluded that the global food system required “radical transformation” if climate change and development goals were to be met, including “widespread dietary change”.

After increased productivity, the WRI report focuses on meat from ruminant animals. The digestion of cattle and sheep produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Beef provided 3% of the calories in the diet of US citizens but was responsible for half the emissions, the WRI said.

The report recommends that 2 billion people across countries including the US, Russia and Brazil cut their beef and lamb consumption by 40%, limiting it to 1.5 servings a week on average. Most of the world’s citizens would continue to eat relatively little beef in the WRI scenario.

But Searchinger said: “The world’s poor people are entitled to consume at least a little more.” The 40% reduction is a smaller cut than in other studies. “We think that is a realistic goal,” he said. “In the US and Europe, beef consumption has already reduced by one-third from the 1960s until today.”

Tobias Baedeker, of the World Bank, said farmers would require a lot of support to make the changes required but that redirecting the world’s huge subsidies could be a “game-changer”. Subsidies of more than $590bn (£460bn) a year are given to farmers in 51 nations, representing two-thirds of global food output, according to the OECD. In the US, these subsidies halve the current price of beef, the WRI says.

The sophisticated marketing and behaviour-change strategies that food companies already used to influence customers could help shift diets, said Ranganathan, as could governments encouraging less meat in schools, hospitals and other public institutions.

Other changes to farming that are needed, according to the WRI, include better feed to reduce methane production from cows, limiting biofuels made from food crops, managing manure and fertiliser better and cutting energy use by farm machinery. It also said the overall demand for food could be cut, with policies to curb population growth such as “improving women’s access to education and healthcare in Africa to accelerate voluntary reductions in fertility levels”.

The WRI report was launched at the UN climate summit in Poland where almost 200 nations are aiming to turn the carbon-cutting vision set out in Paris in 2015 into reality. The rapid ramping up of action is another key goal. Climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to the 1.5C scientists advise, according to the UN.

“Scary” warming in the Arctic at unusual times and places

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 December 12, 2018

WASHINGTON — Scientists are seeing surprising melting in Earth’s polar regions at times they don’t expect, like winter, and in places they don’t expect, like eastern Antarctica. New studies and reports issued this week at a major Earth sciences conference paint one of the bleakest pictures yet of dramatic warming in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Alaskan scientists described to The Associated Press Tuesday never-before-seen melting and odd winter problems, including permafrost that never refroze this past winter and wildlife die-offs.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Tuesday released its annual Arctic report card, detailing the second warmest year on record in the Arctic and problems, including record low winter sea ice in parts of the region, increased toxic algal blooms, which are normally a warm water phenomenon, and weather changes in the rest of the country attributable to what’s happening in the far North.

“The Arctic is experiencing the most unprecedented transition in human history,” report lead author Emily Osborne, chief of Arctic research for NOAA, said Tuesday.

What’s happening is a big deal, said University of Colorado environmental science program director Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s former chief scientist who was not part of the NOAA report.

“It’s a new Arctic. We’ve gone from white to blue,” said Abdalati, adding that he normally wouldn’t use the word “scary” but it applies. That means other problems.

“Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted, and, also, unexpected ways,” the NOAA report said.

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One of the most noticeable problems was a record low sea ice in winter in the Bering Sea in 2017 and 2018, scientists said. In February the Bering Sea “lost an area of ice the area of Idaho,” said Dartmouth College engineering professor Donald Perovich, a report card co-author.

This is a problem because the oldest and thickest sea ice is down 95 percent from 30 years ago. In 1985, about one-sixth of Arctic sea ice was thick multi-year ice, now it is maybe one-hundredth, Perovich said. University of Alaska Fairbanks marine mammal biologist Gay Sheffield not only studies the record low ice, but she lives it daily in Nome, far north on the Bering Sea.

“I left Nome and we had open water in December,” Sheffield said at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington. “It’s very much impacting us.”

“Having this area ice free is having this massive environmental change,” Sheffield said, adding there’s been a “multi-species die off” of ocean life. She said that includes the first spring mass die off of seals along the Bering Strait.

Ornithologist George Divoky who has been studying the black guillemots ofCooper Island for 45 years noticed something different this year. In the past, 225 nesting pairs of the seabirds would arrive at his island. This past winter it was down to 85 pairs but only 50 laid eggs and only 25 had successful hatches. He blamed the lack of winter sea ice.

“It looked like a ghost town,” Divoky said.

With overall melting, especially in the summer, herds of caribou and wild reindeer have dropped about 55 percent — from 4.7 million to 2.1 million animals — because of the warming and the flies and parasites it brings, said report card co-author Howard Epstein of the University of Virginia.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Vladimir Romanovsky said he was alarmed by what happened to the permafrost — ground that stays frozen years on end. This past year, Romanovsky found 25 spots that used to freeze in January, then February, but never froze this year.

Because of warming, the Arctic is “seeing concentrations of algal toxins moving northward” infecting birds, mammals and shellfish to become a public health and economic problem, said report card co-author Karen Frey.

The warmer Arctic and melting sea ice has been connected to shifts in the jet stream that have brought extreme winter storms in the East in the past year, Osborne said. But it’s not just the Arctic. NASA’s newest space-based radar, Icesat 2, in its first couple of months has already found that the Dotson ice shelf in Antarctica has lost more than 390 feet (120 meters) in thickness since 2003, said radar scientist Ben Smith of the University of Washington.

Another study released Monday by NASA found unusual melting in parts of East Antarctica, which scientists had generally thought was stable. Four glaciers at Vincennes Bay lost nine feet of ice thickness since 2008, said NASA scientists Catherine Walker and Alex Gardner.

Loss of ice sheets in Antarctica could lead to massive rise in sea level.

“We’re starting to see change that’s related to the ocean,” Gardner said. “Believe it or not this is the first time we’re seeing it in this place.”

© 2018 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

UN warns of ‘destructive and irreversible impacts’ as greenhouse gases hit level not seen for millions of years

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https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-un-report-greenhouse-gases-carbon-dioxide-methane-sea-level-rise-global-warming-a8646426.html

‘The urgency and extent of the actions needed to address climate change have not sunk in’

The last time a comparable level of carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere, temperatures were over 2C warmer and sea levels 10-20m higher, UN scientists say

The last time a comparable level of carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere, temperatures were over 2C warmer and sea levels 10-20m higher, UN scientists say ( Getty )

The greenhouse gases driving climate change have reached highs not seen in at least 3 million years, prompting UN scientists to warn the “window of opportunity” to tackle emissions is rapidly closing.

Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane are all still on the rise, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said, and there has been a resurgence in ozone-depleting CFCs.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,” said WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas.

In its annual bulletin on greenhouse gas levels, the WMO said there is no sign of a reversal in the trend in increasing emissions which are driving climate change, sea level rises, extreme weather and making oceans more acidic.

“The science is clear,” Mr Taalas said. “Without rapid cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth.

“The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.”

Average concentrations of carbon dioxide hit new highs of 405.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2017, up from 403.3 ppm in 2016 and 400.1 ppm in 2015 – 2.5 times the pre-industrial revolution concentration.

“CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and in the oceans for even longer. There is currently no magic wand to remove all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere,” said WMO deputy secretary-general Elena Manaenkova.

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Heatwaves driven by climate change making insects infertile, study suggests

“Every fraction of a degree of global warming matters, and so does every part per million of greenhouse gases,” she said.

Levels of methane have soared to 3.5 times their pre-industrial levels, with emissions largely coming from cattle, rice paddy fields and oil and gas leaks.

Farming methods including use of fertilizers is largely behind the rise in nitrous oxide, which has doubled since the pre-industrial era.

The latest findings come after a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found net emissions of carbon dioxide must reach zero by around 2050 to keep temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and reduce the risks of climate change.

IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee said: “The new IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5C shows that deep and rapid reductions of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will be needed in all sectors of society and the economy.

“The WMO greenhouse gas bulletin, showing a continuing rising trend in concentrations of greenhouse gases, underlines just how urgent these emissions reductions are.”

Professor Corinne Le Quere, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, said she was “not surprised but I am very concerned” the major greenhouse gases are rising unabated.

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“It seems the urgency and extent of the actions needed to address climate change have not sunk in.

“Low-carbon technologies like wind, solar, and electric transport need to become mainstream, with old-fashion polluting fossils pushed out rapidly,” she said.

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COP24: Anger as US delegates tell summit fossil fuels can help fight global warming

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https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cop24-us-fossil-fuel-event-trump-climate-change-global-warming-coal-poland-katowice-a8676126.html

‘It’s ludicrous for Trump officials to claim that they want to clean up fossil fuels, while dismantling standards that would do just that’

The Trump administration has held an event at a major UN climate summit to promote the use of fossil fuels in the fight against global warming.

Branded “laughable” by critics, the news comes after the US allied with other oil states included Russia and Saudi Arabia to stop a key scientific report influencing proceedings at the COP24 event in Poland.

The side event, which featured representatives from the US government and energy industry, saw panellists insist so-called “clean” fossil fuels had a role to play in tackling global warming.

Their presentations suggested innovation and investment in these energy sources would not only make them more competitive, but significantly decrease emissions as well.

Proceedings were interrupted by activists infuriated by the administration’s continued focus on polluting fuels.

The overwhelming majority of qualified experts agree that coal, oil and gas must be rapidly and completely phased out if the world is to stand a chance of meeting its ambitious climate targets and avoid catastrophic environmental consequences.

According to the US State Department, the event was intended to “showcase ways to use fossil fuels as cleanly and efficiently as possible, as well as the use of emission-free nuclear energy”.

This marks the second year in a row the US government has tried to promote fossil fuels at a UN climate event.

While the event was meant to focus on “clean” fossil fuels, Donald Trump has made clear his enthusiasm for coal, the dirtiest variety available, very clear.

Even as coal consumption has fallen in the US, the president has attempted to reverse this trend by announcing a rollback of Obama-era standards that would make building new plants easier.

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“It’s ludicrous for Trump officials to claim that they want to clean up fossil fuels, while dismantling standards that would do just that,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

“Since taking office, this administration has proposed to roll back measures to cut methane leaks from oil and gas operations, made it easier for companies to dump coal ash into drinking water, and just days ago proposed easing carbon pollution rules for new coal-fired power plants.

“This sideshow in Poland would be laughable if the consequences of climate change weren’t so deadly serious.”

Rachel Cleetus, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, said considering the urgent warnings to cut emissions, the Trump administration’s ongoing promotion of coal “stands in stark contrast with this climate reality”.

“Instead of feeding an addiction to fossil fuels to line the pockets of coal company executives, the US should be leading the world in transitioning towards low-carbon energy sources, driving innovation, prosperity and a healthier future for all,” she said.

Many nations, including the UK, have already committed to phasing out coal completely over the next few years due to its disproportionate contribution to carbon emissions.

The US, on the other hand, has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, but sent a small delegation to Poland since it is still officially a member.

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Around 100 activists including Indigenous and youth leaders disrupted the start of the event, chanting “keep it in the ground” in referencing to ending fossil fuel extraction.

Aneesa Khan, a youth delegation leader from campaign group SustainUS who was among the protesters, called the US-sponsored event “a joke”.

“The US elite has profited off fossil fuels for decades. It’s time for them to pay up and support to the world transition away from dirty energy,” she said.

As the controversial event kicked off, global investors managing $32tn (£25tn) in assets called for a total end to coal as a source of energy, and greater action from world leaders on climate change.