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JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race

February 22, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, business and costs, climate change | Leave a comment

All the world is betraying the world’s children, the World Health Organisation has found

February 22, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, children, climate change | Leave a comment

All wars are serious, but this climate war could have the direst consequences

THE ONE WAR THAT THE HUMAN SPECIES CAN’T LOSE  The New Yorker, By Robin Wright, 20 Feb 2020  “……… For almost a half century, I’ve covered wars, revolutions and uprisings on four continents, many for years on end. I’ve always been an outside observer watching as others killed each other. I lamented the loss of human life—and the warring parties’ self-destructive practices—from an emotional distance. In Antarctica, I saw war through a different prism. And I was the enemy. “  “Humans will be but a blip in the span of Earth’s history,” Wayne Ranney, a naturalist and geologist on the expedition, told me. “The only question is how long the blip will be.”

Last week, the temperature in Antarctica hit almost seventy degrees—the hottest in recorded history. It wasn’t a one-day fluke. Famed for its snowscapes, the Earth’s coldest, wildest, windiest, highest, and most mysterious continent has been experiencing a heat wave. A few days earlier, an Antarctic weather station recorded temperatures in the mid-sixties. It was colder in Washington, D.C., where I live.  Images of northern Antarctica captured vast swaths of barren brown terrain devoid of ice and with only small puddle-like patches of snow.

The problem is not whether a new record was set, “it’s the longer-term trend that makes those records more likely to happen more often,” John Nielsen-Gammon, the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A. & M. University, told me this week……

The iceberg that I watched break off from Antarctica was part of a process called calving. It’s normal and a necessary step in nature’s cycle, except that it’s now happening a lot faster and in larger chunks—with existential stakes. The ice in Antarctica is now melting six times faster than it did forty years ago, Eric Rignot, an Earth scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of a major study of the continent’s ice health, told me.

This month, an iceberg measuring more than a hundred square miles—the size of the Mediterranean island of Malta, or twice the size of Washington, D.C.—broke off the Pine Island Glacier (lovingly known as pig, for short) in West Antarctica. It then broke up into smaller “pig-lets,” according to the European Space Agency, which tracked them by satellite. The largest piglet was almost forty square miles.

The frozen continent is divided into West Antarctica and East Antarctica. (The South Pole is in East Antarctica.) Most of the melting and much of the big calving has happened in the West and along its eight hundred-mile peninsula. But, in September, an iceberg measuring more than six hundred square miles—or twenty-seven times the size of Manhattan—calved off the Amery Ice Shelf, in East Antarctica. Calving has accelerated in startling style. Two other huge soon-to-be bergs are being tracked as their crevices and cracks become visible from space. One is from pig in the West, the other is forming off the Brunt Ice Shelf in the East……….

“By 2035, the point of no return could be crossed,” Matthew Burrows, a former director at the National Intelligence Council, wrote in a report last year about global risks over the next fifteen years. That’s the point after which stopping the Earth’s temperature from rising by two degrees Celsius—or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, in turn triggering “a dangerous medley of global disasters.”

And that, in turn, goes back to ice and its role in fostering human civilization. “What’s coming—or is happening—is the end of the earth’s stability,” Glendon told me. “In human terms, that means a return to migration, but in a population of not just a few million, but several billion.”

Before I went to Antarctica, I checked in with Donald Perovich, a geophysicist at Dartmouth who tracks sea ice. We got to talking about wars. “You can argue that in all wars, there are winners and losers. Afterward, societies go on. There’s an opportunity to recover and move forward. If you approach climate change as a war, there are some really severe consequences across the board,” he told me. “This,” he added, “is the one war we can’t lose.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/antarcticas-ice-the-one-war-that-the-human-species-cant-lose?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_022020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea00ac3f92a404693b7a69&cndid=46508601&esrc=&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Daily

 

 

February 22, 2020 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, climate change | Leave a comment

Al Gore’s goal to beat climate change – get Trump out of office!

Al Gore’s New Campaign To Save The Planet Is Focused On Getting Donald Trump Out Of Office

“For those of us concerned about the future of the Earth’s climate and balance, this election is extremely important,” Gore said.

Zahra HirjiBuzzFeed News Reporter  – 19 Feb 20, Former vice president Al Gore is launching a voter registration campaign this week to increase voter turnout in November, focusing on young people concerned about the rapidly warming planet.This new effort by Gore, who starred in the 2006 climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth and won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism, comes amid dire scientific warnings about the climate crisis and a new explosion in climate activism, driven mostly by young people skipping school and challenging politicians to take action. …

“Young people in particular have been both more concerned about climate than other age groups and traditionally less likely to vote in large percentages,” said Gore. “I want to do everything I possibly can to contribute to the registration and turnout and voting by those who are concerned about the climate crisis.”

The effort will initially focus on key battleground states. Gore will kick off with a voter registration rally on Wednesday at the Texas Southern University, a historically black public college in Houston, followed by visits to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on March 10 and the University of Pittsburgh on March 17. Voter registration drives are also being planned at eight additional college and university campuses in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas over the coming months, and Gore plans to add more sites in the future.

And although he’s largely focused on influencing the presidential election, Gore will encourage voters to consider climate across the ballot…..

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/al-gore-climate-voter-registration-2020

February 20, 2020 Posted by | climate change, politics, USA | Leave a comment

UK’s new nuclear projects headed to be submerged due to climate change?

Speeding Sea Level Rise Threatens Nuclear Plants https://www.ecowatch.com/sea-level-rise-nuclear-plants-2645160125.html?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2   Climate News Network, Feb. 15, 2020  By Paul Brown

The latest science shows how the pace of sea level rise is speeding up, fueling fears that not only millions of homes will be under threat, but that vulnerable installations like docks and power plants will be overwhelmed by the waves.

New research using satellite data over a 30-year period shows that around the year 2000 sea level rise was 2mm a year, by 2010 it was 3mm and now it is at 4mm, with the pace of change still increasing.

The calculations were made by a research student, Tadea Veng, at the Technical University of Denmark, which has a special interest in Greenland, where the icecap is melting fast. That, combined with accelerating melting in Antarctica and further warming of the oceans, is raising sea levels across the globe.

The report coincides with a European Environment Agency (EEA) study whose maps show large areas of the shorelines of countries with coastlines on the North Sea will go under water unless heavily defended against sea level rise.

Based on the maps, newspapers like The Guardian in London have predicted that more than half of one key UK east coast provincial port — Hull — will be swamped. Ironically, Hull is the base for making giant wind turbine blades for use in the North Sea.

The argument about how much the sea level will rise this century has been raging in scientific circles since the 1990s. At the start, predictions of sea level rise took into account only two possible causes: the expansion of seawater as it warmed, and the melting of mountain glaciers away from the poles.

In the early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports back then, the melting of the polar ice caps was not included, because scientists could not agree whether greater snowfall on the top of the ice caps in winter might balance out summer melting. Many of them also thought Antarctica would not melt at all, or not for centuries, because it was too cold.

Both the extra snow theory and the “too cold to melt” idea have now been discounted. In Antarctica this is partly because the sea has warmed up so much that it is melting the glaciers’ ice from beneath — something the scientists had not foreseen.

Alarm about sea level rise elsewhere has been increasing outside the scientific community, partly because many nuclear power plants are on coasts. Even those that are nearing the end of their working lives will be radio-active for another century, and many have highly dangerous spent fuel on site in storage ponds with no disposal route organized.

Perhaps most alarmed are British residents, whose government is currently planning a number of new seaside nuclear stations in low-lying coastal areas. Some will be under water this century according to the EEA, particularly one planned for Sizewell in eastern England. 

The agency’s report says estimates of sea level rise by 2100 vary, with an upper limit of one meter generally accepted, but up to 2.5 meters predicted by some scientists. The latest research by Danish scientists suggests judiciously that with the speed of sea level rise continuing to accelerate, it is impossible to be sure.

A report by campaigners who oppose building nuclear power stations on Britain’s vulnerable coast expresses extreme alarm, saying both nuclear regulators and the giant French energy company EDF are too complacent about the problem.

The report said: “Polar ice caps appear to be melting faster than expected, and what is particularly worrying is that the rate of melting seems to be increasing. Some researchers say sea levels could rise by as much as six meters or more by 2100, even if the 2°C Paris target is met.

“But it’s not just the height of the rise in sea level that is important for the protection of nuclear facilities, it’s also the likely increase in storm surges. An increase in sea level of 50cm would mean the storm that used to come every thousand years will now come every 100 years. If you increase that to a meter, then that millennial storm is likely to come once a decade.

Bearing in mind that there will probably be nuclear waste on the Hinkley Point C site [home to the new twin reactors being built by EDF in the West of England] until at least 2150, the question neither the Office of Nuclear Regulation nor EDF seem to be asking is whether further flood protection measures can be put in place fast enough to deal with unexpected and unpredicted storm surges.”

February 18, 2020 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Climate change to continue hitting UK with bigger storms

February 18, 2020 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Global Optimism – The Future We Choose

Observer 15th Feb 2020, Christiana Figueres is a founder of the Global Optimism group and was head of the UN climate change convention when the Paris agreement was achievedin 2015.

Your new book is called The Future We Choose. But isn’t it too
late to stop the climate crisis? We are definitely running late. We have
delayed appallingly for decades. But science tells us we are still in the
nick of time. We can only choose it this decade.

Our parents did not have this choice, because they didn’t have the capital, technologies and understanding. And for our children, it will be too late.

So this is the decade and we are the generation. If we all reduce our emissions,
collectively we give a signal to the market. Obviously, corporations have
their own responsibilities but it’s helpful to have a strong demand from
the public. Once you get governments, corporations and the public moving in
the same direction towards low carbon, it can grow exponentially [such as
with renewable energy and electric cars]. People reducing their emissions
– by flying less, eating less meat and using clean energy, for example
– is important.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/15/christiana-figueres-climate-emergency-this-is-the-decade-the-future-we-choose

February 17, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | 1 Comment

Giant iceberg ‘calves’ from Antarctic ice shelf

Shrinking Antarctic ice shelf Pine Island Glacier sheds giant iceberg, ABC News, Digital Story Innovation Team  By Mark Doman 14 Feb 20,  In one of the fastest-changing areas of the Antarctic ice sheet, satellites have captured the formation of a giant, 300-square-kilometre iceberg.

Researchers monitoring satellite imagery of the Pine Island Glacier (PIG), in west Antarctica, first noticed two large rifts forming in the shelf in 2019.

Over the next few months, as the glacier moved out towards the Amundsen Sea, the rifts expanded, eventually leading to the splitting of the iceberg from the glacier on February 9.

Within a day, the iceberg had broken up into smaller pieces.

Only one of the pieces was large enough to be named (B-49) and tracked by the United States National Ice Centre.

It comes just days after a station on the Antarctic Peninsula logged its hottest day on record, registering a temperature of 18.3 degrees Celsius.

The peninsula, which juts out to the north-east of the Pine Island Glacier, is among the fastest-warming regions on the planet. Temperatures there have increased almost 3C over the last 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

Last month, scientists also recorded unusually warm water beneath the Thwaites Glacier, a neighbour to Pine Island.

While the calving of icebergs from shelves such as the Pine Island Glacier is a natural process in the life of a giant glacier, the rate at which this glacier and others in the region have been disintegrating is a cause of concern for scientists.

Previously the ice shelf calved once a decade. By the early 2000s, it started calving once every five years. But since 2013, the glacier has calved five times, according to Stef Lhermitte, a remote sensing scientist from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands……. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-13/antarctic-ice-shelf-pine-island-glacier-sheds-giant-iceberg/11957770

February 15, 2020 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, climate change, oceans | Leave a comment

Sellafield and Drigg, Today and tomorrow’s Flood Warning.

Radiation Free Lakeland 10th Feb 2020, Sellafield and Drigg, Today and tomorrow’s Flood Warning. This is why there
should be no new nuclear wastes arriving at Sellafield, no new so called
Small Modular Reactors on this floodplain ….and no new coal mine deep
under the Irish Sea. Cumbria (and the fallout is planetary) is ALREADY
under intolerable risks. Today’s flood warnings …fingers crossed.

https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/sellafield-and-drigg-today-and-tomorrows-flood-warning/

February 13, 2020 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Coronovirus, bats, and the Climate Change connection

The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics…...TIME, 10 Feb 2020, 

“………The strain of coronavirus that’s spreading now is different than Candida for many reasons, but its likely animal vector—bats—provides an interesting example of how temperatures relate to the spread of infectious disease. Like humans, bats are mammals that maintain a warm body temperature that protect them from disease. But while our body temperature rests around 98.6°F and spikes a few degrees when we’re sick, bats’ body temperatures can regularly jump to as high as 105°F.
That means they can carry a whole slew of pathogens without suffering from them. In the near future, as global temperatures inch up, bats will continue to be protected by their body heat, while the pathogens they carry are better able to harm us.
For decades, scientists have recognized that climate change would lead to a range of public health consequences. A 1992 report from the National Academy of Sciences, for example, cited a number of ways climate change could lead to the spread of infectious disease and described the lack of resources devoted to studying the impact of climate change on disease as “disturbing.” Four years later, a widely-cited paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned that climate change could increase the spread of everything from malnutrition to malaria, and called for concerted study between doctors, climate scientists and social scientists. That same year the World Health Organization published a 300-page tome on the topic, looking at a slew of ties between climate and health, but at the same time noting that the links are “complex and multifactorial.”https://time.com/5779156/wuhan-coronavirus-climate-change/

February 11, 2020 Posted by | China, climate change | 1 Comment

Some climate models now predict unexpected , unprecedented spike in global temperatures

A few climate models are now predicting an unprecedented and alarming spike in temperatures — perhaps as much as 5 degrees Celsius, Business Insider, CONNOR PERRETT FEB 9, 2020  

  • A handful of climate projections are predicting much higher rise in global temperatures than scientists have seen in the models before.
  • While there’s concern over the number, some scientists hope the latest projections are outliers.
  • A 2-degree rise in temperature could lead sea level to jump, coral reefs to die, and water to become dangerously scarce in some parts of the world. Some models right now predict a 5-degree rise.
Several recent climate models have suggested the Earth’s climate could warm to a far higher temperature than scientists previously predicted, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The startling anomaly first appeared in models from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which suggested that if Earth’s atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration doubles (as it’s expected to do by the end of the century), the planet could wind up 5.3 degrees hotter. That’s 33% higher than the group’s previous estimate.

About a fifth of new climate-model results published in the past year have indicated similarly stark global temperature spikes, according to Bloomberg. The UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre predicted a 5.5 degrees of warming, the US Department of Energy calculated a 5.3°-degree jump, French scientists estimated a 4.9-degree increase, and a model from Canadian scientists predicted the largest rise: 5.6 degrees

Scientists hope the models are an “overshot,” Bloomberg reported. It will take scientists a significant amount time – at least months – to figure out how to interpret the results.

The climate models estimate “climate sensitivity,” which tells scientists how much warmer the planet will get as a result of rising CO₂ concentrations. For four decades, the expected temperature rise if CO2 levels double has been about 3 degrees.

These models have a proven track record of accurately forecasting climate change. A recent study from the American Geophysical Union found that climate projections over the past five decades have largely been accurate – actual climate observations aligned with the models’ predictions.

Still, there’s a hope among climate scientists that the new projections are outliers. About a dozen other models are still due to be released, Bloomberg reported, and they could help paint a clearer picture……. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/global-warming-climate-models-higher-than-usual-confusing-scientists-2020-2?r=US&IR=T

February 11, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Delhi’s disaster – disappearing water supplies

February 11, 2020 Posted by | climate change, India | Leave a comment

Climate emergency plans must have a ‘no new nuclear’ clause

The nuclear and fossil fuel industry are mutually intertwined.

“There is no such thing as a zero or near-zero-emission nuclear power plant”

the mean value is about 66 grams of carbon dioxide for every kWh produced by nuclear power. This compares to about 9g for wind, 32g for solar and 443 for gas.

“This puts nuclear as the third highest carbon emitter after coal-fired plants and natural gas….

February 10, 2020 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Arctic ice melt is changing ocean currents 

February 10, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

Permafrost thawing -“fast and dramatic, affecting landscapes in unprecedented ways

 

February 6, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

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