Tag Archives: arctic

11 Billion Tons of Ice Gone In a Single Day

August 5, 2019 Elliot Szaro 1 Comment

The Arctic is accustomed to seasonal ice melt and regrowth, or at least it was. The Climate Emergency is changing that, fast. Greenland normally sees its annual melt begin at the end of May. In 2019, the melt came early. In the beginning of May. Admittedly, 11 billion tons of melt in one are not abnormal. What is abnormal, unprecedented even, is when it happens several days in a row. Melt of this degree wasn’t expected until 2070.

NASA

The Climate Emergency, formerly known as Climate Change, is ramping up. Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) has come forward, telling the world about Greenland’s mass melt-off. 197 billion tons of ice, gone. Many parts of the world have joined the fight against Climate Change, committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

CBSN

“It comes in a summer where the Arctic has experienced “unprecedented” wildfires, which scientists say have been facilitated by high temperatures.
Since the start of June, Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), has tracked more than 100 intense wildfires in the Arctic Circle.
Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at a faster rate than the global average, providing the right conditions for wildfires to spread, Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECWMF), told CNN last week.”
CNN

Unfortunately, net-zero by 2050 is not enough. To put the Climate Emergency in perspective, one could use an analogy. The Titanic. Climate scientists recently told the world that we have roughly twelve years left to curb the worst-case scenario projections for the Climate Emergency.

So imagine we are the Titanic, and we’ve seen the iceberg coming at us for forty years or so. Nobody really cared much or put much thought into it until the last twenty years. Right, here we are, twelve years to throw the ship into full reverse and dodge the deadly iceberg. Sounds like a plan, let’s do it. Only…that’s not what most governments are doing. The UK’s ‘net-zero by 2050’ plan is the equivalent of killing the throttle, but not reversing it, about twenty years after we’ve slammed into the ice and are well on our way to the bottom of the sea. The final cherry on top? Some people have seen the iceberg, decided it doesn’t exist, and started throwing passengers who do see it overboard.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Environment, Politics

Rising Global Temperatures Are Now Pushing Us “Close To Thermal Limits”

August 2, 2019 Elliot Szaro Leave a comment

The Climate Emergency is introducing humanity to our new, hellish reality with frightening speed. We had every warning possible, but we did not listen. Now, humanity must reap what it has sewn. “The global warming caused by human activities has resulted in a climate emergency that … demands a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale.” reads Ocasio-Cortez’s draft of the Climate Emergency resolution.

Loughborough University climate scientist Dr. Tom Matthews discusses our new frightening world in The Conversation. Dr. Matthews presents to us the disturbing science of “wet bulb” temperatures. In essence, when it’s both too hot and too humid, the body becomes incapable of producing sweat and thus cannot cool itself. Once this temperature is achieved, death will occur in hours unless you can escape to cooler locations.

“The wet bulb temperature includes the cooling effect of water evaporating from the thermometer, and so is normally much lower than the normal (“dry bulb”) temperature reported in weather forecasts,” He writes. “Once this wet bulb temperature threshold is crossed, the air is so full of water vapour that sweat no longer evaporates,” Dr. Matthews elaborates on the consequences, “Without the means to dissipate heat, our core temperature rises, irrespective of how much water we drink, how much shade we seek, or how much rest we take,”

While humans are currently spared from wet bulb temperatures (having only been measured in the warmest regions of the planet), the animals we share the Earth with are not so lucky. Recently, more than 200 reindeer were found dead in the arctic of starvation. Why’d they starve? The Svalbard reindeer are some of the first victims of the Climate Emergency. The Guardian reports:

“Ashild Onvik Pedersen, the head of the census, said the high degree of mortality was a consequence of climate crisis, which according to climate scientists, is happening twice as fast in the Arctic as the rest of the world. ‘Climate change is making it rain much more. The rain falls on the snow and forms a layer of ice on the tundra, making grazing conditions very poor for animals,’ she said. In winter, Svalbard reindeer find vegetation in the snow using their hooves, but alternating freezing and thawing periods can create layers of impenetrable ice, depriving the reindeers of nourishment.”
The Guardian

As the Earth spirals into potentially irreversible chaos, governments and corporations alike are telling us to calm down. China is on track to meet its climate change mitigation goals, and many other countries are celebrating small successes as well. But scientists say it’s simply not enough.

Even so, CEO of BP, the infamous oil company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon incident, Bob Dudley thinks climate activists are being too polarizing. He told CNBC “I don’t think it helps anything to demonize companies or groups. It gets society polarized and it is really hard to move through big complex problems when you set that up.”

So, as we reach deadly wet bulb temperatures, please do remember not to trouble the billionaires too much. We wouldn’t want to make their lives difficult.

Environment, Politics

2019 Is Hotter Than Any Year In The Past 2,000 Years, and Scientists Are Panicking Over Earth’s Prognosis

July 29, 2019 Cal Knight 5 Comments

That headline is not clickbait. Scientists are urging legislators and corporations to quit dragging their feet over climate change and call a spade a spade: this is a climate emergency, the biggest existential threat to human life in recorded history.

“We are living a global cataclysm.” Reads an open letter signed by 200 scientists and numerous others, published by France’s biggest news publication Le Monde. “Global warming, drastic decrease of living spaces, collapse of biodiversity, deep pollution of soil, water and air, rapid deforestation: all the indicators are alarming. At the current rate, in a few decades, there will be almost nothing left. Humans and most living species are in a critical situation.”

While politicians bicker and citizens live their lives, scientists are getting increasingly scared, and depressed, over what the data is telling them about our immediate future. They say our ecosystems face collapse, and civilization with it.

“We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores, running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they were ‘unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.’”
Naomi Klein

Despite this, many still (somehow) question climate change. How can the ice caps be melting if it still snows every winter? Perhaps this warming trend is just part of the Earth’s naturally fluctuating temperature. However, at this point the data and evidence are undeniable. The Earth is heating, and far faster than was anticipated even just a few years ago. Not even the best climate skeptic theories stand up to scrutiny, and today nearly 99% of scientists around the globe are in agreement on the climate crisis. These are not natural fluctuations, and here’s why:

Last spring, for example, a number of media outlets and websites reported on a story that looked at data acquired from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), which estimates changes in global surface temperature. The article discussed a short-term cooling period that showed up in the data in 2017 and 2018 and correctly stated that short-term cooling cycles are “statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.”
Afterward, we received some queries from readers who wanted to know if this finding meant a significant period of global cooling either could be or already was under way.
The answer is no. This story is a great example of why focusing on just a short period of time – say, one, two or even several years — doesn’t tell you what’s really going on with the long-term trends. In fact, it’s likely to be misleading.
Alan Buis, NASA Global Climate Change

What of that other bit in the headline, the one about it being hotter than any year since Christ walked the Earth? The latest studies say it’s true. From the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the sweltering city streets of the Industrial Revolution, this year was hotter than any of those, by a long shot.

One of the three new research publications specifies: “This [research] provides strong evidence that anthropogenic (human induced) global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.”

We don’t want to leave this on a high note. This is worse than the nuclear threat of the Cold War, worse than 9/11, worse than fears of alien invasions or asteroid impacts. The climate emergency is real, and we’ve already locked in damage that will devastate the planet for your entire life, and far beyond that. There is hope to mitigate the worst case scenarios, but that is our reality now; mitigation instead of prevention.