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Climate change disruption – the future is happening now

Dahr Jamail | As Climate Disruption Advances, UN Warns: “The Future Is Happening Now” TruthOut, , 02 May 2016 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report Each month as I write these dispatches, I shake my head in disbelief at the rapidity at which anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is occurring. It’s as though each month I think, “It can’t possibly keep happening at this incredible pace.”

But it does.

By late April, the Mauna Loa Observatory, which monitors atmospheric carbon dioxide, recorded an incredible daily reading: 409.3 parts per million. That is a range of atmospheric carbon dioxide content that this planet has not seen for the last 15 million years, and 2016 is poised to see these levels only continue to increase.

Recently, Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist and longtime whistleblower about the impending dangers of ACD, published a paper with several colleagues showing that ACD will push sea level rise into exponential levels by the end of this century. Their paper shows how melting is actually compounding itself, generating dramatically fast increases in both melting and sea level rise. We may well see the current three millimeter per year sea level rise grow to nearly five centimeters by 2056, and continue to increase in a nonlinear fashion.

Scientists in Antarctica are now astounded at the rapidity of the disintegration of the massive Antarctic ice shelves: It turns out the ice in Antarctica is far more fragile and predisposed to melting than was previously believed.

The situation is already dire enough that the conservative UN warned recently, “The future is happening now,” and called for more urgent measures to be taken to cut global carbon emissions.

“Many people now think that the problem is solved since we reached a nice agreement in Paris last year … but the negative side is that we haven’t changed our behaviors,” Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, told the media recently.

As if to underscore that point, March global temperatures crushed the 100-year-old record by the greatest margin we’ve seen for any month yet. February was also notably far above the long-term average, enough so that scientists described that month as a “shocker,” as well as it being “a kind of climate emergency.” Then, on the heels of February, the Japan Meteorological Agency released data showing that March was even hotter. NASA data confirms this increase, and also shows that March was 1.65 degrees Celsius higher than the 1951-1980 March average, while February was 1.71 degrees Celsius hotter than the February average over that time period.

NASA data shows that March was also the 11th straight month in a row that set a new global temperature record. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that is the longest such streak ever recorded.

The Japan Meteorological Agency also reported that the first three months of this year were 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial baseline levels……….http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35860-as-climate-disruption-advances-un-warns-the-future-is-happening-now

May 4, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change