Impending Climate Catastrophe as World Warms
New UN Report Warns of Impending Catastrophe as World Warms, Glaciers Melt, DAHR JAMAIL, TRUTHOUT PART OF THE TRUTHOUT SERIES CLIMATE DISRUPTION DISPATCHES NOVEMBER 2, 2018
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Meanwhile, the warnings that the catastrophe is already upon us continue.
A recent study in a paper published August 31 in the journal Science warned that for each degree of rise in global temperature, insect-driven losses to the staple crops of rice, wheat and corn increase by 10-25 percent. Given we are already at 1.1°C warming, we are already seeing these losses, which are sure to increase. “In 2016, the United Nations estimated that at least 815 million people worldwide don’t get enough to eat,” the University of Washington Press wrote of the study. “Corn, rice and wheat are staple crops for about 4 billion people, and account for about two-thirds of the food energy intake, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.”
At the same time, scientists are deeply concerned about the fact that non-pest insect numbers are declining rapidly. Bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs and other insects are far less abundant, and scientists around the world warn that these insects are crucial to as much as 80 percent of all the food we eat. “You have total ecosystem collapse if you lose your insects,” University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy told the AP. “How much worse can it get than that?”
Meanwhile, in the realm of sea level rise, things are irreversibly catastrophic. A recent study of Antarctic ice sheets shows them to be far more sensitive to temperature increases than previously believed. The study showed that when global temperatures were only slightly warmer than they are currently, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher than they are right now. “It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time, this is the end game,” David Wilson, a geologist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new research told The Washington Post.
Equally disturbingly, lakes in the Arctic are literally bubbling and hissing: They are releasing methane in large quantities as the ground underneath them thaws. Methane is a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a 10-year timescale, and the widespread release of methane was a key driver of the Permian Mass Extinction event which annihilated more than 90 percent of life on Earth.
Meanwhile, the Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly. Ice extent reached its annual minimum recently, which is normally when the ice would begin reforming rapidly, particularly right in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Instead, the ice continued to decline.
To underscore how governments are not doing enough to mitigate climate change impacts, Brazil, a major greenhouse gas emitting country, recently elected right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro as president. To say he is anti-environment (in addition to homophobic, racist and sexist) would be a gross understatement. Known as the Trump of the Tropics, his plans include disempowering federal environmental agencies, opening up Indigenous reserves in the Amazon to mining and farming, and building hydroelectric dams in the rainforest, where deforestation, already at crisis levels, is set to explode.
EarthImpacts of human-caused climate disruption across the terrestrial plane are becoming increasingly stark………
WaterAs usual, climate change-induced disruptions are glaringly apparent in the watery realms of Earth…….
Fire……A recent report discussed how wildfire tornadoes, record sizes and temperatures of wildfires, and other seeming anomalies will become phenomena we can expect regularly going into the future, thanks to climate change.
Air
Record-breaking warm temperatures beset Anchorage, Alaska, in September, along with unusually dry weather……..
Denial and Reality
In a recent interview, Donald Trump, who had called human-caused climate change “a Chinese hoax,” said it is real, “but I don’t know that it’s manmade.” He also said the climate will “change back again” — whatever that means…..https://truthout.org/articles/new-un-report-warns-of-impending-catastrophe-as-world-warms-glaciers-melt/
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Reblogged this on jpratt27 and commented:
Time to declare a global crisis and enact regulations to rapidly decrease CO2 emissions there is no soft option.
Capitalism is the root cause of the problem continuous growth is a suicide pact.