[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

Amazon rainforest 'close to irreversible tipping point'

Soaring deforestation coupled with the destructive policies of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, could push the Amazon rainforest dangerously to an irreversible “tipping point” within two years, a prominent economist has said.

After this point the rainforest would stop producing enough rain to sustain itself and start slowly degrading into a drier savannah, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would exacerbate global heating and disrupt weather across South America.

The warning came in a policy brief published this week by Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC.

The report sparked controversy among climate scientists. Some believe the tipping point is still 15 to 20 years away, while others say the warning accurately reflects the danger that Bolsonaro and global heating pose to the Amazon’s survival.

“It’s a stock, so like any stock you run it down, run it down – then suddenly you don’t have any more of it,” said de Bolle, whose brief also recommended solutions to the current crisis.

Speaking of Brazil, apparently there's a mystery oil spill going on?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/qY3KzpA.png)

Worst round of Sim Earth EVAR

What do the colors denote? Specifically the purple?

LeapingGnome wrote:

What do the colors denote? Specifically the purple?

Marijuana plantation on fire.

"Purple Haze, in my mind..."

LeapingGnome wrote:

What do the colors denote? Specifically the purple?

I think it has something to do with the age of the fires. Found the image in a Reddit comment for this depressing story:

Koalas ‘Functionally Extinct’ After Australia Bushfires Destroy 80% Of Their Habitat

LeapingGnome wrote:

What do the colors denote? Specifically the purple?

Yellow is rare, purple is epic, orange is legendary, and only noobs care about the grey ones.

Our air quality has been on par with Beijing/New Delhi for the last couple of weeks as everything surrounding Brisbane (and some bush well within city limits) burns. It's a bit surreal... Drive an hour west and every speck of green has leached out of the landscape. Thousands and thousands of hectares of bare, bone-white scrub and tinder-dry eucalyptus trees waiting for lightning or even just the wrong combination of heat, wind and friction and we are still at least a month away from any traditionally recognised bushfire season.

The best part is that our current government is moving away from full-on climate change denial to a 'maybe it's a thing, but it's too late to change any of our behaviours now' stance. It's making it really hard for me to not wish for the voting rights of anyone over the age of 55 to be immediately and permanently rescinded.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

What do the colors denote? Specifically the purple?

I think it has something to do with the age of the fires. Found the image in a Reddit comment for this depressing story:

Koalas ‘Functionally Extinct’ After Australia Bushfires Destroy 80% Of Their Habitat

Yeah, it's age of fires. Here's a link to the site the pic came from.

Bushfires have razed almost 23,000 square miles in Australia so far this season and we're technically not even halfway through. Whole towns have been destroyed while their inhabitants huddled under blood red skies on New Year's Eve, and our country's executive leadership see no problem taking international holidays (including the State Emergency Minister of New South Wales, one of the most badly affected states) while regional Australia is quite literally obliterated. This is the way we open 2020.

That is too much to ask, sadly.

I am here to tell you that, unlike you, my generation will not give up without a fight.

I am pretty sure I heard this line when I was a teen, and yet here we are.

fangblackbone wrote:

That is too much to ask, sadly.

Every billionaire ever: "I'd be happier with the dollar."

They do. They just don't give a sh*t about anyone else's children.

Fact is climate change won't kill the rich first. Unless we collectively make that happen.

bnpederson wrote:

They do. They just don't give a sh*t about anyone else's children.

Fact is climate change won't kill the rich first. Unless we collectively make that happen.

Is it though? It could happen in a landslide.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/4oavR6v.jpg)

The right keeps attacking Greta Thunberg’s identity, not her ideas

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Thursday became the latest member of the Trump administration to mock Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old activist who has spent her adolescence calling adults to account for their failure to act on climate change.

Asked by a reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos whether the climate policies Thunberg advocates would hinder US economic growth, Mnuchin answered, “Is she the chief economist, or who is she? I’m confused.”

“It’s a joke,” he went on. “After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us.”

It was one in a long line of belittling comments that politicians and pundits on the right have made about Thunberg in recent months. President Trump has led the charge, sarcastically tweeting in September that Thunberg seemed like “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” In December, after Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, Trump called the choice “ridiculous” and said the activist should “go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

If you can't debate the message, you can always attack the messenger.

LeapingGnome wrote:

If you can't debate the message, you can always attack the messenger.

The GOP Motto

Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, its warmest temperature ever recorded

WaPo wrote:

Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 65 degrees was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history.

The Argentine research base is on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Randy Cerveny, who tracks extremes for the World Meteorological Organization, called Thursday’s reading a “likely record,” although the mark will still have to be officially reviewed and certified.

The balmy reading beats out the previous record of 63.5 degrees, which occurred March 24, 2015.

The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50 years, temperatures have surged a staggering 5 degrees in response to Earth’s swiftly warming climate. Around 87 percent of glaciers along the peninsula’s west coast have retreated in that time, the majority doing so at an accelerated pace since 2008.

Cripes, that is like near perfect SF Bay Area weather...
I bet there is still a nasty wind chill.

d4m0 wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you can't debate the message, you can always attack the messenger.

The GOP Motto

Both sides do it.

kazar wrote:
d4m0 wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you can't debate the message, you can always attack the messenger.

The GOP Motto

Both sides do it.

I think you forgot the "/s"

kazar wrote:
d4m0 wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you can't debate the message, you can always attack the messenger.

The GOP Motto

Both sides do it.

Isn’t that the GOP motto?

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/researc...

January 2020 Decadal Forecast Summary wrote:

Averaged over the five-year period 2020-2024, forecast patterns suggest enhanced warming over land, and at high northern latitudes. There is some indication of continued cool conditions in the Southern Ocean. Current relatively cool conditions in the north Atlantic sub-polar gyre are predicted to warm, with potentially important climate impacts over Europe, America and Africa.

During the five-year period 2020-2024, global average temperature is expected to remain high and is very likely to be between 1.06°C and 1.62°C above the pre-industrial period from 1850–1900.This compares with an anomaly of +1.16±0.1°C observed in 2016, currently the warmest year on record. In the absence of a major volcanic eruption a new record is likely in the coming five years, and there is a small (~10%) chance of one year temporarily exceeding 1.5°C. These high global temperatures are consistent with continued high levels of greenhouse gases.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Isn’t that the GOP motto?

You're thinking of "Mwa Ha Ha!"

"It's not cheating if you get away with it!"

fangblackbone wrote:

"It's not cheating if you get away with it we do it. They would have done it anyway!"

FTFY

(Not included; “we didn’t do it anyway”, “we might have done it but it’s actually ok”, “we did it, but everybody does it”, and “why are you all still so focused on this?”)

The One War That the Human Species Can’t Lose

On the final day of my expedition to Antarctica last year, ten of us set out on a Zodiac to tour dozens of icebergs in nature’s wondrous ocean museum. The frozen sculptures glistened in exquisite hues of blue and cyan; iceberg colors vary by the density of air bubbles. Each was formed after snapping off an ancient glacier. The iceberg that sank the Titanic in the Atlantic, in 1912, was considered a mere “bergy bit,” or a smaller piece of floating ice; it melted within a couple of years. The ones we saw around Antarctica were massive. Occasionally, we spotted blubbery elephant seals (which can weigh more than four tons) napping on icebergs, or Adélie penguins (so named by a French explorer, for his wife) leaping among them, or a Humpback whale’s blow unnervingly nearby. As we headed back to the ship, the naturalist steering the Zodiac suddenly turned off the motor. “Listen,” he said. Antarctica is usually a powerfully silent continent except for the gusting winds or the lapping waves on its coastline. He put his finger up, signalling to wait for it. We sat motionless. A thundering crack then ripped through the air, echoing across the water until it felt like it was going off inside my head. We watched a towering slice of the continent break off and crash into the Southern Ocean. It felt cataclysmic.

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. “It’s sort of like a forest where trees are constantly growing and trees are dying, but if they start dying faster than they can grow back, then you eventually lose the forest,” he said. “The same thing applies to glaciers. Glaciers flow out to the ocean and break off, but if they break off faster then the glacier retreats and you lose ice—and then the sea level goes up around the world.”

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.

The world’s largest iceberg—a colossus measuring more than two thousand square miles, or about the size of Delaware—broke off West Antarctica, in 2017. It was so big that maps of the continent had to be redrawn. It’s now slowly making its way around the Antarctic Peninsula, headed toward the Atlantic Ocean on a path known as “iceberg alley.”

The amount of ice on Earth was pivotal in the creation of human civilization ten thousand years ago, a fact that paleo-climatologists only discovered in the late twentieth century. Scientists now say that ice is the key to peace among civilizations for millennia to come, too. “The stability and size and mass of Antarctica is not a bad proxy for how violent the world could become, in that human civilization was built on a stable climate,” Spencer Glendon, a senior fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center, explained to me. “For the first hundred and ninety thousand years that they were on the planet, humans moved from place to place to find temperate weather, as ice and deserts shifted and temperatures moved in wild swings. About 10,000 B.C., the climate stabilized. When it stabilized, the nice places stayed nice. A stable climate helped humans stop being nomads. And that’s why people settled,” creating time and space to create humankind’s first civilizations.

In physics terms, the climate stabilized because there was just the right percentage of ice on the planet, Glendon explained. Ice reflects, so sunlight bounces off it back into space and doesn’t overheat Earth or its inhabitants. That’s now changing, as Antarctica (and Greenland) shrink. For the past ten thousand years or so, glaciers shrank in summer and grew in winter, but they had a mean or average size that was stable over time, he said. “Now, all the glaciers are receding. And that’s because it’s warmer, so they shrink more in the summer and expand less in the winter—and there’s less and less ice.”

At least eighty per cent of the planet’s fresh water is also contained in Antarctica’s ice. Icebergs that melt help replenish supplies. Again, the issue is balance. If Antarctica were to completely melt, the oceans would rise around the world by up to two hundred feet, an apocalyptic event that would reconfigure the globe’s geography. The might and majesty of Antarctica—in its huge spiny peaks and frigidly uninhabitable plateaus—makes that prospect seem impossible. In winter, the temperature has reached as low as a hundred and forty-eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Yet the process has begun. In 2018, a survey published in Nature reported that Antarctica lost more than three trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2017. That’s enough to fill Lake Erie twelve times over, according to Earther. A quarter of the glacier ice in West Antarctica is now unstable due to melting over the same period, a second report, by scientists at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling in Britain, concluded last year. New snowfall can no longer compensate for the losses.

Glaciers, and their iceberg offspring, take millennia to produce. The iceberg that sunk the Titanic probably originated with a snowfall in Greenland, three thousand years ago, possibly around the time that King Tutankhamun reigned in ancient Egypt, according to one account. It probably broke off Greenland in 1910 or 1911 and started floating toward the Atlantic. By the time it was struck by the Titanic, in 1912, killing more than fifteen hundred passengers and crew, it was already melting.

“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.”

As I've mentioned here before, if you're seriously concerned about migration, you should be seriously concerned about climate change. But I assure you, if climate change does cause this kind of mass migration, you will see the deniers seamlessly pivot from "It's not real" to "It's real, and that's why we can't let anyone in"