"The last generation of humans went to the moon.
This generation of humans needs to decide
if it wants to stay alive on planet Earth."
– Mohamed Nasheed, former President of the drowning Maldives,
Copenhagen summit, 2009
Introduction Part 1
– NASA
Reports Part 2
– Critical Science Part 3
– Encouraging perspectives Part 4
– Good Solutions Part 5
– Gaia Theory Part 6
– Recommended reading and viewing
"Global warming" refers to the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s
average surface temperature over the past century, thought to be primarily due to greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels.
Introduction
How can we return, both the planet and humanity, to "good health"?
At present, the world’s oceans, forests, and soil absorb about half of our annual CO2 emissions, which push our oxygen layer higher, and further out of reach.
Atmospheric heat blocks CO2 from rising into outer space, consequently, the average temperature of the planet has been steadily increasing.
Put simply:
We are breathing the invisible gases which accumulate in our atmosphere.
- The oxygen in the air we breathe comes from water, composed primarily of nitrogen gas and oxygen gas with small amounts of other gases, including carbon dioxide.
– When we breath-in oxygen we breath-out carbon dioxide: Deep breathing fills the lungs and transports oxygen via the body’s red blood cells.
- Exercise improves oxygen uptake and leads to higher energy levels, deeper sleep, and better quality of life.
- Plants also take in oxygen and produce carbon dioxide and are important in controlling CO2 levels.
Meanwhile:"On a per capita basis, Australia’s carbon footprint, including exports, is nine times higher than China’s, four times that of the US, and 37 times that of India."
- Climate Analytics, July 2019
Photosynthesis defined:
"Plants are autotrophs, which means they produce their own food. They use the process of photosynthesis to transform water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into oxygen, and simple sugars that the plant uses as fuel."
EPA: Overview Greenhouse Gas
During 2019 alone, coal, petroleum, natural gas, wood and other organic materials, burned to generate energy, released more than 36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
“Unlike any previous warm period, this one was caused by people”
Northern Hemisphere, July 2023
Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here’s how we know.
Observations are enough to make scientists confident that the current period of warming is exceptional
By Scott Dance
July 8, 2023, WashingtonPost
Excerpt
Observations from both satellites and the Earth’s surface are indisputable — the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earth’s average temperature has been rising.
In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.
Tracing climatic fluctuations back centuries and millennia is less simple and precise than checking records from satellites or thermometers. It involves poring through everything from ancient diaries to lake bed sediments to tree trunk rings.
But the observations are enough to make paleoclimatologists, who study the Earth’s climate history, confident that the current decade of warming is exceptional relative to any period since before the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago.
Our understanding of conditions so long ago is far less detailed than modern climate data, meaning it’s impossible to prove how hot it might have gotten on any given day so many thousands of years ago. Still, the Earth history gleaned from fossils and ice cores shows the recent heat would have been all but impossible over most of those millennia.
“There’s no way to drop one hot day into the middle of the ice age,” Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.
...
CONCLUSION
“I’m pretty damn certain it’s the warmest day in the last 2,023 years,” said Thorne, who was a coordinating lead author of a chapter exploring long-term changes to Earth’s climate in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment.
That assessment states with “medium confidence” that temperatures from 2011-2020 exceed those of any multi-century period of warmth over the past 125,000 years.
Further, there is no evidence anywhere in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s history of warming that occurred nearly as rapidly as the ongoing spike in temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases.
If a hotter day happened on Earth anytime in the past, Alley said, it was the result of natural processes.
“The current rise is not natural, but caused by us,” he said. >>>more
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2020 was different! - due to Covid-19 Lockdown impacts "sudden reduction of both GHG emissions and air pollutants" "The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sudden reduction of both GHG emissions and air pollutants." Nature: 7 Aug. 2020 Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19
Excerpt:
… Here we build an estimate of emission changes in GHGs and air pollution due to the COVID-19 global restrictions during the period February–June 2020 and project these into the future. These emission changes are then used to make a prediction of the resultant global temperature response. We examine the temperature response of a direct recovery to pre-COVID-19 national policies and emission levels, and also explore responses where the economic recovery to COVID-19 is driven by either a green stimulus package or an increase in fossil fuel use. >>>more
Excerpt:
... a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings.
... a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper.... The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.
In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form. For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun. ... more
2005, NASA
Frozen in Time: the Ice Core Record Paleoclimatology: The Ice Core Record
by Holli Riebeek· design by Robert Simmon·
NASA Earth Observatory,
December 19, 2005
Excerpt:
Richard Alley might have envied paleoceanographer Jerry McManus’ warm, ship-board lab. (See previous installment: “A Record from the Deep.”)
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_SedimentCores
One of the researchers in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2), Alley huddled in a narrow lab cut into the Greenland Ice Sheet, where “the temperature stayed at a ‘comfortable’ twenty below [Fahrenheit],” he wrote in his book about his research, The Two-Mile Time Machine. An assembly line of science equipment lined the twenty-foot-deep trench that served as a makeshift lab. For six weeks every summer between 1989 and 1993, Alley and other scientists pushed columns of ice along the science assembly line, labeling and analyzing the snow for information about past climate, then packaging it to be sent for further analysis and cold storage at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado. Nearby, a specially built drill bored into the thick ice sheet twenty-four hours a day under the perpetual Arctic sun. Essentially a sharpened pipe rotating on a long, loose cable, the drill pulled up cores of ice from which Alley and others would glean climate information. >>>more
Abstract
The recent completion of drilling at Vostok station in East Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial–interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds. Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years. >>> more
Excerpt:
As I said at the opening, we must accelerate action to keep the 1.5 degree goal alive. Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread.
We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.
It is time to go into emergency mode — or our chance of reaching net zero will itself be zero.
I reaffirm my conviction that we must end fossil fuels subsidies.
Phase out coal.
Put a price on carbon.
Build resilience of vulnerable communities against the here and now impacts of climate change.
And make good on the $100 billion climate finance commitment to support developing countries.
We did not achieve these goals at this conference. But we have some building blocks for progress.
Commitments to end deforestation. To drastically reduce methane emissions. To mobilize private finance around net zero. >>>more
2016 Japanese Monks Recorded the Climate for 700 Years By Michelle Nijhuis
National Geographic, April 2016
Some of the oldest continuous historical records from around the world show us how dramatically the climate has changed.
Excerpt:
Every year since at least 1443, the priests who live at the shrine on the edge of Lake Suwa have carefully recorded the date the ridge appears.
In 1693, on the other side of the world, a Finnish merchant named Olof Ahlbom started recording the date and time of the spring ice breakup on the Torne River, which forms part of the border between Sweden and Finland. Though Ahlbom’s record keeping was interrupted in 1715, when he had to flee a Russian invasion, he resumed it after he returned home in 1721, and it has been carried on by other observers ever since.
When scientists want to glimpse the climate of the ancient past, they almost always have to use indirect evidence—changes in tree rings, ice-core layers, or pollen deposits. But the ice records from Japan and Finland, which are the longest of their kind, give us a more direct look at the climate our distant ancestors experienced...
"Earth system has not yet fully adjusted to environmental changes we've already made."NASA
Unparalleled views of sea level rise
July 2024
Global sea levels have risen more than 4 inches (102 millimeters) since measurements began in 1992, increasing coastal flooding in some places.
As ocean water warms, it expands and takes up more space. The added heat in the air and ocean is also melting ice sheets and glaciers, which adds freshwater to the ocean and further raises sea levels.
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, launched in 2022, and Sentinel 6 Michael Frelich, launched in 2020, are providing unparalleled views of sea level rise on top of decades of data from other missions.
The ocean is warming
Rising greenhouse gas concentrations not only warm the air, but the ocean, too. Research shows that around 90 percent of the excess heat from global warming is being absorbed by the ocean. Ocean heat has steadily risen since measurements began in 1955, breaking records in 2023. All this added heat has led to more frequent and intense marine heat waves. >>>more
The ocean is getting a little greener 2024 Recent research [2023] found that over the past 20 years, the tropical ocean turned greener. Ocean color reflects the life that is found in it. Green colors often correspond to phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms that form the center of the ocean's food web. Observations of changes in phytoplankton populations due to climate change are a key part of the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, which launched in 2024.
NASA: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Can new NASA carbon-to-oxygen conversion technology like MOXIE be used to address climate change?
On April 20, 2021 – two days before Earth Day – 5.4 grams of oxygen were released into the Martian atmosphere. … But while technology is part of any plan for addressing climate change, the conversion that MOXIE accomplished on Mars is not a viable approach. … But, for now, in order to address climate change, it would be more effective to employ strategies to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide such by reducing our emissions, carbon capture, and habitat preservation and restoration. ...
Hubble Deep Field shots The Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.5 million observations since its launch in 1990, capturing stunning subjects such as the Eagle Nebula and producing data that has been featured in almost 18,000 scientific articles. But no image has revolutionized the way we understand the universe as much as the Hubble Deep Field. Taken over the course of 10 days in 1995, the Hubble Deep Field captured roughly 3,000 distant galaxies varying in their stages of evolution. >>>more
Land Surface Temperature Anomaly
Global Maps Feb 2000 — Nov 2021
These maps depict anomalies in land surface temperatures (LSTs); that is, how much hotter or cooler a region was compared to the long-term average. LST anomalies can indicate heat waves or cold spells. >>>more
Why Do Scientists Think Current Warming Isn’t Natural?
In Earth’s history before the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate changed due to natural causes unrelated to human activity. These natural causes are still in play today, but their influence is too small or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades.
How Much More Will Earth Warm? Models predict that as the world consumes ever more fossil fuel, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise, and Earth’s average surface temperature will rise with them. Based on plausible emission scenarios, average surface temperatures could rise between 2°C and 6°C by the end of the 21st century. Some of this warming will occur even if future greenhouse gas emissions are reduced because the Earth system has not yet fully adjusted to environmental changes we've already made.
How Will Earth Respond to Warming Temperatures? The impact of global warming is far greater than just increasing temperatures. Warming modifies rainfall patterns, amplifies coastal erosion, lengthens the growing season in some regions, melts ice caps and glaciers, and alters the ranges of some infectious diseases. Some of these changes are already occurring.
NASA Interactive Global Maps Global warming over the last 50 years vividly illustrated:
Mapping global heat trends from June 1976 and June 2022. GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (v4)
Excerpt: Nearly 90% of economically viable global coal reserves must be left in the ground to have even a 50% chance of hitting internationally agreed climate-change goals, according to an updated model of limits to fossil-fuel extraction.
Excerpt: An urgent increase in policy support and investment would be needed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) to achieve the scale needed to meet global decarbonisation goals, according to University of Queensland and Princeton University researchers.
"But the essence of our abatement challenge is not the volume of storage available, it's the rate at which CO2 can be safely injected and permanently contained that counts.
…
"The characterization work required to build confidence in our storage capacity relies on mobilizing tens of billions of dollars in risk capital over the next decade," Dr. Greig said.
"Currently, these capabilities are in the oil and gas sector.
"For the necessary investment to happen, storage developers need to be confident that the capture projects will actually be built before they enter into long term storage contracts. >>>more
Researchers found some 100,000 papers that potentially documented evidence of climate change's effects.
The effects of climate change could already be impacting 85 percent of the world's population, an analysis of tens of thousands of scientific studies said Monday.
A team of researchers used machine learning to comb through vast troves of research published between 1951 and 2018 and found some 100,000 papers that potentially documented evidence of climate change's effects on the Earth's systems.
"We have overwhelming evidence that climate change is affecting all continents, all systems," study author Max Callaghan told AFP in an interview.
…
Between 1951 and 1990 "we have about 1,500 studies in total," Callaghan said, "Whereas in the five years or so since the last (UN) assessment report we have between 75,000 and 85,000 studies—a phenomenal increase." >>>more
"To decarbonise an economy is not a simple subtraction; it requires a near-complete overhaul." – Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor in Chief, The Economist
The Economist: Climate Issue, September 19th 2019 From one year to the next, you cannot feel the difference. As the decades stack up, though, the story becomes clear. The stripes on our cover represent the world’s average temperature in every year since the mid-19th century. Dark blue years are cooler and red ones warmer than the average in 1971-2000. The cumulative change jumps out. The world is about 1ºC hotter than when this newspaper was young.
To represent this span of human history as a set of simple stripes may seem reductive. These are years which saw world wars, technological innovation, trade on an unprecedented scale and a staggering creation of wealth. But those complex histories and the simplifying stripes share a common cause. The changing climate of the planet and the remarkable growth in human numbers and riches both stem from the combustion of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to produce industrial power, electricity, transport, heating and, more recently, computation.
MTSU: Environmental Ethics Excerpt: The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island.
We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when records began on a global scale. We are adding planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate faster than at any point in human history since the beginning of industrialization.>>>more
NOAA: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
is an American scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce. The NOAA managed Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) is located on the north flank of Mauna Loa Volcano, on the Big Island of Hawaii, at an elevation of 3397 meters, or 11,135 feet above sea level, and has been continuously monitoring and collecting data related to atmospheric CO2 change since the 1950's.
Records of earlier CO2 levels come from the Vostok Antarctic ice core samples:
Vostok ice core Antarctic Experiments 420,000 years of atmospheric history revealed In January 1998, the collaborative ice-drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, reaching a depth of 3,623 m "Preliminary data indicated the Vostok ice-core record extends through four climate cycles, with ice slightly older than 420,000 years." (Petit et al., 1997, 1999). 1999, Study conclusions:
Recorded human history covers a fraction of this timeline. We must take responsibility for our contributions to global warming and global dimming on our precious habitat. We have the resources, and by utilizing problem solving skills, such as Systems Theory, Fifth Discipline, and Best Practice we can find solutions.
"Given the similarities between this earlier warm period and today, our results may imply that without human intervention, a climate similar to the present one would extend well into the future."
"French, Russian and American researchers have measured the temperature, the aerosol and greenhouse gas concentration and various other climate and environmental parameters over the last four climate cycles. The results confirm the idea that climate variations are caused by the Earth’s orbital changes and to a large extent amplified by greenhouse gases. The high concentrations of greenhouse gases, unprecedented in the past 420,000 years, underscore their role in the possible warming of the planet’s climate. This study was published in Nature by 19 researchers from three participating countries. They include thirteen glaciologists and climatologists from CNRS laboratories in Grenoble and the joint CEA-CNRS unit in Saclay."
UC Irvine Report Petit, et al., (1999), Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica
The recent completion of drilling at Vostok station in East Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial–interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds. Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
>>> more
Abstract
Air trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere.
>>> more
Researchers have “pushed a major milestone in the evolution of Earth's environment back by about 250 million years. While oxygen is believed to have first accumulated in Earth's atmosphere around 2.45 billion years ago, new research shows that oceans contained plentiful oxygen long before that time, providing energy-rich habitat for early life.”
"When tiny bacteria in the ocean began producing oxygen, it was a major turning point and changed the chemistry of the Earth," explained Katsev. "Our work pinpoints the time when the ocean began accumulating oxygen at levels that would substantially change the ocean's chemistry and it's about 250 million years earlier than what we knew for the atmosphere. That is about the length of time from the first appearance of dinosaurs till today."
The results are important, according to the authors, because they deepen our understanding of conditions on Earth when all life consisted of single-cell microbes and their metabolisms that we know today were only just emerging. >>>more
The Arctic Arctic Sea Ice Minimum See NASA's monitoring graphs HERE
Excerpt: Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 12.85 percent per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. This graph shows the average monthly Arctic sea ice extent each September since 1979, derived from satellite observations. The animated time series below shows the annual Arctic sea ice minimum since 1979, based on satellite observations. The 2012 sea ice extent is the lowest in the satellite record.
NASA: February 2020 Arctic Ice Melt Is Changing Ocean Currents Excerpt:
A major ocean current in the Arctic is faster and more turbulent as a result of rapid sea ice melt, a new study from NASA shows. The current is part of a delicate Arctic environment that is now flooded with fresh water, an effect of human-caused climate change.
Using 12 years of satellite data, scientists have measured how this circular current, called the Beaufort Gyre, has precariously balanced an influx of unprecedented amounts of cold, fresh water — a change that could alter the currents in the Atlantic Ocean and cool the climate of Western Europe.
The Beaufort Gyre keeps the polar environment in equilibrium by storing fresh water near the surface of the ocean.
. . . the since the 1990s, the gyre has accumulated a large amount of fresh water — 1,920 cubic miles (8,000 cubic kilometers) — or almost twice the volume of Lake Michigan. The new study, published in Nature Communications, found that the cause of this gain in freshwater concentration is the loss of sea ice in summer and autumn. This decades-long decline of the Arctic's summertime sea ice coverhas left the Beaufort Gyre more exposed to the wind, which spins the gyre faster and traps the fresh water in its current. >>>more
"Climate change is not only about exhausts and smokestacks, but also intrinsically connected with our mass interference with the earth’s biological processes through deforestation and agricultural malpractice." – Craig Mackintosh, The Permaculture Research Group
Regenerative farming practices can pull down excess Carbon in the atmosphere in less than a decade!
The 2020 documentary film Kiss The Ground shares encouraging insights on "Regenerative Agriculture":
A revolutionary group of activists, scientists, farmers, and politicians band together in a global movement of "Regenerative Agriculture" that could balance our climate, replenish our vast water supplies, and feed the world.
Excerpt: . . . To avert climate catastrophe, the report warns, people need to make changes in agriculture and land use. In other words, it’s no longer enough to wean society off of fossil fuels. Stabilizing the climate will also require removing carbon from the sky. Rethinking humanity’s relationship to the soil can help on both scores.
Soils under stress Healthy, fertile soils are rich in organic matter built of carbon that living plants pulled out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Carbon-rich organic matter helps fuel the soil organisms that recycle and release mineral elements that plants take back up as nutrients.
But soils release carbon too. And the frequent tillage and heavy fertilizer use that underpin modern conventional agriculture have accelerated degradation of soil organic matter, sending more carbon skyward – a lot, it turns out.
The new IPCC report concludes that globally, cropland soils have lost 20-60% of their original organic carbon content. >>> more
September 2, 2016 Ethical Eating
Philosophy Seminar, University of Queensland
Assoc. Professor William Grey:
Major determinants of food choice are taste, price, health, food safety and (occasionally) animal welfare and sustainability. Climate change is seldom considered when making food choices. Livestock however accounts for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the direct emissions from the global transport sector. Moderating consumption of meat and dairy would not only deliver health benefits, it may also be necessary if global temperature increase is to be kept below the two degree Celsius danger level.
April 4, 2016
Rewilding human nature
by Lucy Purdy
Positive News - Environment
Lucy Purdy explores how the concept of ‘rewilding’ could be applied not just to the natural world, but to ourselves. . . Technology has connected people like never before but also deprives us of truly deep connection. Ideologies proliferate that paint our instinctive nature as being in need of constraint. >>>more
25 January 2012 Plants have known for years... Our planet is warming
Planting Zone Map On Seed Packets Updated To Reflect Warmer Century:
Associated Press, USA
It's the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has revised the official guide for the nation's 80 million gardeners, and much has changed. It reflects a new reality: The coldest day of the year isn't as cold as it used to be, so some plants and trees can now survive farther north. "It is great that the federal government is catching up with what the plants themselves have known for years now: The globe is warming and it is greatly influencing plants (and animals)" – Terry Root, emeritus professor of biology, Stanford University, "primarily works on how wild animals and plants are changing with climate change".>>>more
April 2017 China, India Become Climate Leaders as West Falters
By John Upton
Excerpt: Less than two years after world leaders signed off on a historic United Nations climate treaty in Paris in late 2015, and following three years of record-setting heat worldwide, climate policies are advancing in developing countries but stalling or regressing in richer ones. . . .
SUMMARY
Here’s a trip around the world, assessing how pro-climate and anti-climate forces are faring in key nations and regions and showing how recent developments are affecting the languishing fight against global warming. United States Dire. Trump moving to end climate regulations, research and spending. Canada Concerning. Canada is moving to nationwide carbon pricing but is sending mixed messages on tar sands mining. European Union Concerning. Key votes loom as opposition and antipathy toward climate action grows. Australia Dire. After dumping its carbon tax, Australia may subsidize a large coal mine. Russia Dire. After declaring climate change a crisis, President Vladimir V. Putin resumes his climate denialism. India Positive. State and local governments boosting efforts to deploy clean energy. China Positive. China views climate action as an economic opportunity. Amazon Concerning. Deforestation accelerated in 2015 and 2016 following a decade of gains. Southeast Asia Dire. The global hunger for palm oil is causing rampant deforestation in Indonesia. Congo Basin Dire. Deforestation is accelerating in Africa’s biggest tropical rainforest >>> more
A survey carried out in 2010 by global risk analysis firm Maplecroft identified 16 countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
Each nation's vulnerability was calculated using 42 socio, economic and environmental indicators, which identified the likely climate change impacts during the next 30 years. >>> more
Excerpt: UN scientists say reclaiming wasteland could capture carbon Global effort would stall emissions growth for up to 20 years
$300 billion. That’s the money needed to stop the rise in greenhouse gases and buy up to 20 years of time to fix global warming, according to United Nations climate scientists. It’s the gross domestic product of Chile, or the world’s military spending every 60 days.
The sum is not to fund green technologies or finance a moonshot solution to emissions, but to use simple, age-old practices to lock millions of tons of carbon back into an overlooked and over-exploited resource: the soil.
“We have lost the biological function of soils. We have got to reverse that,” said Barron J. Orr, lead scientist for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. “If we do it, we are turning the land into the big part of the solution for climate change.”
Rene Castro Salazar, an assistant director general at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said that of the 2 billion hectares (almost 5 billion acres) of land around the world that has been degraded by misuse, overgrazing, deforestation and other largely human factors, 900 million hectares could be restored.
Returning that land to pasture, food crops or trees would convert enough carbon into biomass to stabilize emissions of CO2, the biggest greenhouse gas, for 15-20 years, giving the world time to adopt carbon-neutral technologies.
“With political will and investment of about $300 billion, it is doable,” Castro Salazar said. We would be “using the least-cost options we have, while waiting for the technologies in energy and transportation to mature and be fully available in the market. It will stabilize the atmospheric changes, the fight against climate change, for 15-20 years. We very much need that.”
The heart of the idea is to tackle the growing problem of desertification -- the degradation of dry land to the point where it can support little life. At least a third of the world’s land has been degraded to some extent, directly affecting the lives of 2 billion people, said Eduardo Mansur, director of the land and water division at the FAO. >>> more
March 21, 2013
Planck unveils a new image of the Big Bang
2013 Press Release
Launched in 2009, Planck, the satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) dedicated to the study of fossil radiation, today delivers the results of its first fifteen months of observations. They bring a wealth of information on the history and composition of the Universe: the most accurate map ever obtained of fossil radiation, the highlighting of an effect predicted by Inflation models, a downward revision the rhythm of the expansion of the Universe, or a new evaluation of the composition of the Universe. Many of these data were obtained from Planck 's main instrument, HFI, modeled in particular at IPAG.
Since its discovery in 1965, the fossil radiation is a source of precious knowledge for cosmologists, a real "Rosetta Stone" to decrypt the history of the universe since the Big Bang. This flux of photons detectable throughout the sky, in the range of radio waves, testifies to the state of the Universe in its early youth and conceals the traces of large structures that will develop thereafter. Produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the first atoms were formed, it happens almost unchanged and allows scientists to access the image of what was the cosmos at birth, here are about 13.8 billion of years. Confronting these measurements with theoretical models can bring us many informations:
August 2013 “Let the facts fall where they may. . .
Science is not about consensus. It’s about hypothesis".
– Professor Bob M. Carter
Author of "Climate, the Counter Consensus" Professor Robert M Carter details natural warming and cooling cycles, and explains the difference between real climate science and IPCC computer-model based scare-mongering. Within the Holocene range, to which humanity and other planetary life are adapted, global temperature was relatively stable. In other words, our climate now encompasses greater extremes.
Theories for the cause of observed global temperature change are thus separated as an independent matter. However, it is of interest to compare the data with results from climate models that are used to simulate expected global warming due to increasing human-made greenhouse gases. The "climate dice" concept was suggested in conjunction with climate simulations made in the 1980s (Hansen et al., 1988) as a way to describe the stochastic variability of local temperatures, with the implication that the public should recognize the existence of global warming once the dice become sufficiently "loaded" (biased).
Figure 3. Frequency of occurrence (vertical axis) of local June-July-August temperature anomalies (relative to 1951-1980 mean) for Northern Hemisphere land in units of local standard deviation (horizontal axis). Temperature anomalies in the period 1951-1980 match closely the normal distribution ("bell curve", shown in green), which is used to define cold (blue), typical (white) and hot (red) seasons, each with probability 33.3%. The distribution of anomalies has shifted to the right as a consequence of the global warming of the past three decades such that cool summers now cover only half of one side of a six-sided die, white covers one side, red coversfour sides, and an extremely hot (red-brown) anomaly covers half of one side. Image credit: NASA/GISS.
What is wrong with the IPCC: Proposals for a Radical Reform (2011) pdf
by Ross Mckitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He is a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of The Global Warming Policy Foundation. His academic research is in the areas of environmental economics and climate change. He was an Expert Reviewer for Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the Fourth Assessment Report.
24 August, 2009
GRIST
The fallacy of climate activism
By Adam Sacks "I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases"
- Global Warming as Symptom - Telling the Truth - Stating the Problem
Global Warming as Symptom
The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.
The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.
To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry — to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)
We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause . . .
6] A word here about the skeptics, with whom we are also obsessed: Forget about them. They may appear to have control of the public discussion, but they are babbling into the abyss. Our enemy is us. By our own unwillingness to face the profound implications of climate change — that we have to reject civilization as currently conceived and come up with something completely different — we are doing far more damage to the cause of preserving life on earth than the deniers could ever do...
. . . Ross Gelbspan, a courageous and ground-breaking journalist, who early on investigated the forces driving the fossil fuel machine and has been sounding the alarm for almost two decades. See his excellent article, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” December 2007 . . .
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“According to Gaia theory, living systems act collectively to maintain favourable coditions.” and, “If life is inherently programmed to eliminate itself then it isn’t doing a very good job.” – William Grey Ph.D.
We inhabit an extraordinary planet. Our nearest celestial companions—the Moon, and our sister planets Venus and Mars—provide striking abiotic (lifeless) contrasts to the conditions on planet Earth. Just how the Earth got this way, and how it has managed to stay this way, is a fascinating story, some elements of which we are beginning to understand. Working out the detail is a project that will no doubt continue for a long time.
The robust scientific consensus is that about 3.5 billion years ago organic chemistry transformed our then lifeless world by somehow generating self-replicating molecules. These precursors of life, by steps unknown, eventually produced the most remarkable molecule (that we know of) in the universe: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Over unimaginable billion year epochs of geological time, DNA molecules have managed to construct, through Darwinian selective mechanisms, complex protein structures—which include us, as well as the rest of the living world which surrounds us. Always opportunistic, life has become ever more complex and wonderfully adapted to the world in which it exists.
Three new books published by Princeton University Press address the story of life on Earth. The books are, however, very different in their conclusions and in their quality. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is the theme which connects each of their concerns. >>>more
"Now, I don’t reckon Lovelock is saying sit back and enjoy the apocalypse. I think he’s saying we require radical action fast, and that radical action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to the occupants of the bejewelled bus. They are the problem, we are the solution, so we have to look inside ourselves." - Russell Brand, Revolution, 2014, p.17 Google Books scan
James Lovelock (1919-2022) Wikipedia
James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). He invented the electron capture detector and, using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis.
In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide–consuming algae. He was an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy,[4] asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. He wrote several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.
He also worked for MI5, the British security service, for decades.[5] Bryan Appleyard, writing in The Sunday Times, described him as "basically Q in the James Bond films".[6] ...
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Part 6
Recommended reading and viewing Back to top
-Killing the Host (2015), by Professor Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Abstact:
KILLING THE HOST exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the FIRE sector) have gained control of the global economy at the expense of industrial capitalism and governments.
The FIRE sector is responsible for today’s economic polarization (the 1% vs. the 99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while deflating the “real” economy of labor and production.
The Great 2008 Bailout saved the banks but not the economy, and plunged the U.S., Irish, Latvian and Greek economies into debt deflation and austerity.
This book describes how the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes austerity on the U.S. and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.
See Table of Contents HERE
- Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed To Reverse Global Warming (2017)
Edited by Paul Hawken, environmentalist, journalist. Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown (2017) claims to have made a definitive list of the most effective global strategies for lowering our emissions. Don’t despair: they’re all totally achievable. ... Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed To Reverse Global Warming, analyzes the details of what it might actually take not only to stop global warming, but potentially begin to reverse it. To create it, a team of researchers spent two years examining data on the 100 most substantive ways to reduce or sequester emissions, and doing the math on how much those solutions could achieve over the next three decades. >>> more
She's Alive...
Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth Dying for... This video attempts to highlight the fact that world leaders, irresponsible corporates, and 'consumers' are thoughtlessly destroying life on earth. It is dedicated to all who died fighting for the planet and those whose lives are on the line today. Follow the Sanctuary Asia network:
"cutting-edge developments concerning wildlife and nature conservation, natural history, science, & climate change."
"Cynicism, denial and hopelessness amount to victimhood." - Bruce Mulkey Ph.D.
“It is with our passions as it is with fire and water,
they are good servants, but bad masters” Aesop: Ancient Greek Fabulist
and Author of a collection of Greek Fables: 620 BC-560 BC.
