Tag Archives: ecology

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.

Environment

The Arctic Is On Fire Amid Hottest June Month On Record, More Than 100 Fires Raging

July 26, 2019 Cal Knight 2 Comments

“The number and intensity of wildfires in the Arctic Circle is unusual and unprecedented,” said Mark Parrington, a scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service in an interview with CNN, “They are concerning as they are occurring in a very remote part of the world, and in an environment that many people would consider to be pristine,”

As many parts of the world are suffering from one of the worst heatwaves on record, the notoriously frosty Arctic is fairing no better. Iceland recently mourned the loss of its first glacier with a plaque, with more planned as we remain on track to lose most glaciers from several continents by the second half of the century. CNN sat down with scientists from CAMS and the Weather Meteorological Organization (WMO) to discuss the recent surge of heat the Earth is experiencing, and the prognosis is not good.

As the climate changes and record highs break each month, dense Northern forests are experiencing violent wildfires in places with little to no infrastructure, making fighting them practically impossible. Worse yet, these fires themselves further worsen climate change.

“The fires themselves contribute to the climate crisis by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They emitted an estimated 100 megatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere between 1 June and 21 July, almost the equivalent of Belgium’s carbon output in 2017, according to CAMS.”
CNN

PinePowerLI

As the Earth warms from a combination of natural processes and man-made emissions, more and more people are becoming endangered. Temperatures in France have reached as hot as 110 F. This is incredibly dangerous, as Europeans often don’t own homes with central air conditioning units as Americans do.

Direct Action, Environment, Orgs

Crop Circle Warning of Extinction Bemuses Festival-Goers

July 26, 2019 Cal Knight Leave a comment

Attendees of WOMAD 2019, the UK’s World of Music, Art and Dance Festival, are reporting quite the shocking turn of events: the appearance of a two acre, 300 foot-in-diameter crop circle in a field near the festival grounds in Wiltshire, England.

The symbol, a pointed hourglass enclosed by a circle, is the infamous ‘extinction symbol’ popularized by the Extinction Rebellion, an activist organization with a flair for the dramatic. The group is well known for staging large-scale events that make it hard to keep them out of the headlines. This crop circle is the latest.

“The Extinction Symbol crop circle draws our attention to ecocide, the loss of 75% of insects and catastrophic loss of biodiversity; the overuse of herbicide and pesticide and the havoc climate chaos wreaks on our capacity to grow food. People are already going hungry around the world, even here in the UK, and yet the amount of perfectly good food thrown away every day by our supermarkets is astounding. In the Midwest of the USA, 16 million acres won’t grow wheat this year, due to flooding. This is the reality of our current systems and the Climate and Ecological Crisis we are in. The coming years will see truly cataclysmic changes to our capacity to grow food and that is when we are genuinely looking at societal collapse.”
Extinction Rebellion Festivals Coordinator Julian Thompson

This circle is the second massive circle to occur in the UK, but the last one was not made of flattened plants, it was made of people.

rebellion.earth

The creators of this human symbol are an art collective entitled The Circlemakers, who released the following statement about their demonstration:

“Much of our work is inspired by the ancient sacred sites of Britain and the world – we come together, we work as a team – as they did in the past. No one of us could create what we do entirely on our own. Extinction Rebellion is about making positive change by working together. The Extinction Symbol lends itself perfectly to land art. It is the peace sign of our times. The symbol which is free to use by all (in a non commercial way) signifies the threat of extinction. The circle represents planet Earth and the hourglass within is a warning to us, that time is running out. We are in a Climate and Ecological Emergency. In the making of this crop circle – the largest Extinction Symbol ever made – we were conscious of the huge risk to our fragile planet. The time to act is now.”
The Circlemakers

The Extinction Rebellion is quickly growing in numbers and popularity, with their concise demands listed on their website, and scrawled on massive banners at protests. Their demands are:

“Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.”
“Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.”
“Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.”

More on this movement can be found at Rebellion.Earth