Abstract
The subtropical oceanic gyre in the North Pacific Ocean is currently covered with tens of thousands of tonnes of floating plastic debris, dispersed over millions of square kilometres. A large fraction is composed of fishing nets and ropes while the rest is mostly composed of hard plastic objects and fragments, sometimes carrying evidence on their origin. In 2019, an oceanographic mission conducted in the area, retrieved over 6000 hard plastic debris items > 5 cm. The debris was later sorted, counted, weighed, and analysed for evidence of origin and age. Our results, complemented with numerical model simulations and findings from a previous oceanographic mission, revealed that a majority of the floating material stems from fishing activities. While recent assessments for plastic inputs into the ocean point to coastal developing economies and rivers as major contributors into oceanic plastic pollution, here we show that most floating plastics in the North Pacific subtropical gyre can be traced back to five industrialised fishing nations, highlighting the important role the fishing industry plays in the solution to this global issue.
Governments and businesses failing to change fast enough, says United in Science report, as weather gets increasingly extreme
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The United in Science report found:
◘ The past seven years were the hottest on record and there is a 48% chance during at least one year in the next five that the annual mean temperature will temporarily be 1.5C higher than the 1850-1900 average.
◘ Global mean temperatures are forecast to be between 1.1C and 1.7C higher than pre-industrial levels from 2022-2026, and there is a 93% probability that at least one year in the next five will be warmer than the hottest year on record, 2016.
◘ Dips in carbon dioxide emissions during the lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic were temporary, and carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels returned to pre-pandemic levels last year.
◘National pledges on greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to hold global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
◘ Climate-related disasters are causing $200m in economic losses a day.
◘ Nearly half the planet – 3.3 to 3.6 billion people – are living in areas highly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis, but fewer than half of countries have early warning systems for extreme weather.
◘ As global heating increases, “tipp nts” in the climate system cannot be ruled out. These include the drying out of the Amazon rainforest, the melting of the ice caps and the weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, known as the Gulf stream.
◘ By the 2050s, more than 1.6 billion people living in 97 cities will be regularly exposed to three-month average temperatures reaching at least 35C.
A recent study, published in the journal Science, provides the clearest picture yet of the long-term effects of land mammal declines on food webs.
It’s not a pretty sight.
“While about 6% of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50% of mammal food web links have disappeared,” said ecologist Evan Fricke, lead author of the study. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past and now, are key for mammal food web complexity.”
A food web is comprised of all the connections between predators and their prey in a given region. Complex food webs are essential for managing populations in a manner that allows more species to coexist, hence promoting the biodiversity and stability of ecosystems. But animal losses may diminish this complexity, thereby reducing the resilience of an ecosystem.
Although declines of mammals are a well-documented aspect of the biodiversity crisis, with many animals either extinct or surviving in a small portion of their historic geographic ranges, the extent to which these losses have impacted the world’s food webs has remained unclear.
To understand what has been lost from food webs linking land mammals, Fricke led a team of scientists from the United States, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Spain in using the latest techniques from machine learning to determine “who ate who” from 130,000 years ago to today. Fricke conducted the research during a faculty fellowship at Rice University and is currently a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Using data from modern observations of predator-prey interactions, Fricke and colleagues trained their machine learning system to determine how species characteristics impacted the probability that one species would prey on another. Once trained, the model could predict predator-prey interactions between species pairings that have not been seen directly.
“This approach can tell us who eats whom today with 90% accuracy,” said Rice ecologist Lydia Beaudrot, the study’s senior author. “That is better than previous approaches have been able to do, and it enabled us to model predator-prey interactions for extinct species.”
The research offers an unprecedented global view into the food web that linked ice age mammals, Fricke said, as well as what food webs would look like today if saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, marsupial lions, and wooly rhinos still roamed alongside surviving mammals.
“Although fossils can tell us where and when certain species lived, this modeling gives us a richer picture of how those species interacted with each other,” Beaudrot said.
By charting changes in food webs over time, the analysis revealed that food webs worldwide are collapsing because of animal declines.
“The modeling showed that land mammal food webs have degraded much more than would be expected if random species had gone extinct,” Fricke said. “Rather than resilience under extinction pressure, these results show a slow-motion food web collapse caused by selective loss of species with central food web roles.”
The study also showed all is not lost. While extinctions caused about half of the reported food web declines, the rest stemmed from contractions in the geographic ranges of existing species.
“Restoring those species to their historic ranges holds great potential to reverse these declines,” Fricke said.
He said efforts to recover native predator or prey species, such as the reintroduction of lynx in Colorado, European bison in Romania, and fishers in Washington state, are important for restoring food web complexity.
“When an animal disappears from an ecosystem, its loss reverberates across the web of connections that link all species in that ecosystem,” Fricke said. “Our work presents new tools for measuring what’s been lost, what more we stand to lose if endangered species go extinct and the ecological complexity we can restore through species recovery.”
RALEIGH – You may have heard the idea that climate change will, in the worst-case scenario, cause the collapse of human civilization as we know it today. How could this happen? If you have been watching recent headlines, then you know that humanity has now received the worst climate news possible, where we can see a direct path to utter catastrophe from climate change.
Planet Earth is standing on a precipice, where irreversible climate change tipping points are about to trigger. If they trigger, the topic of climate change will shift from “problematic” to “completely catastrophic for all life on Earth.” Things will change from “maybe with a concerted effort humanity can solve the climate crisis” into “there is nothing we can do to put the genie back into the bottle, and humanity is doomed.” Here are four articles that tell the tale:
•World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds
•Climate change: Six tipping points ‘likely’ to be crossed
•The world may have already crossed 5 climate tipping points
•Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points
And then PBS issued this explanatory video on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBKZWKeKYqE
I know that it sounds hyperbolic to talk about the collapse of human civilization. I know it seems impossible that climate change could get so awful that it destroys the Earth’s biosphere. Nonetheless, this is the reality that these tipping points represent.
Putting it all together, the message is clear – it’s now or never when it comes to climate change solutions. Once irreversibility enters the picture, there is no turning back.
What is an irreversible tipping point, and why are they so catastrophic?
What does the term “irreversible tipping point” or “irreversible feedback loop” actually mean?
Here is the simplest possible example. In a previous article we talked about the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, also known as the “Doomsday Glacier”. The problem with this particular glacier is first that it is utterly gigantic (about the size of Florida), and second that it is in a very precarious position, where it could let go and slide into the ocean with remarkable speed (for a glacier). Recent headlines have painted a dire picture, for example:
‘Doomsday glacier’ hanging on ‘by its fingernails’: scientists
“’Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails,’ said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist who co-authored the study. ‘And we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future — even from one year to the next…’ The Thwaites Glacier is roughly the size of Florida and could potentially raise the sea level by nearly 16 feet should it fall into the ocean… According to scientists, the glacier could potentially fall into the sea within three years.”
It is easy to understand why the collapse of the Thwaites glacier is irreversible. If it collapses, it will raise sea levels by many feet, inundating and destroying coastal cities and beaches. Trillions of dollars in damage will occur. Once the damage is done, there is no possible way to undo it: There is no way that humanity will ever be able to put the glacier back and lower sea levels again.
In other words, either humanity MUST save the Thwaites glacier now, or there will be trillions of dollars in irreversible damage that occurs to all of our coastal cities. In addition, there will be millions of climate refugees from these cities who will have to go somewhere. Take Miami as one example city. Miami will disappear when the Thwaites Glacier collapses. This means that 6 million Miami residents will need to move somewhere else. See this video for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3mXFXd3GU
And this is just one of the tipping points that humanity now faces. The articles above are talking about half a dozen tipping points, all on the brink of triggering, all with catastrophic and irreversible effects.
What Won’t Humanity Act? Why is humanity so incompetent when it comes to climate change?
The threat of the Thwaites Glacier to all of humanity is so clear and so obvious that the lack of response to this threat feels completely mystifying. And then all of the other tipping points stack on top of it.
Therefore we might ask:
•Why haven’t the world’s leaders collected together, allocated a trillion dollars, assembled a million of the world’s best and brightest engineers and scientists, and done a World War II style war effort to conquer climate change? Why didn’t they do it 30 years ago? Why are they not doing it now?
•If the world’s leaders won’t do it together, why hasn’t the United States or the European Union or China unilaterally done it, given that these are the places that will be hit hardest economically by climate change? They have the most to lose.
•More to the point: Why hasn’t the United States acted alone with a gigantic investment of money and talent, given that America has the wealth, the technology, the military might, and the history to create real solutions? The United States certainly could act unilaterally, plus the United States has several examples of success in this realm including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions.
•Could a prominent billionaire take action to get the ball rolling? Or a team of several billionaires? Imagine a billionaire team engaging 10,000 scientists and engineers to tackle the most pressing aspects of the climate change problem. Imagine this billionaire effort getting so much publicity that they drag the world’s leadership into the effort?
•What if 30 million people in the developed world (roughly 3% of the people in the developed world) could be inspired to donate $250 annually each to an effort to immediately solve the climate crisis? It would be the classic pitch along the lines of, “just $5 per week, the cost of one cup of coffee per week, could fund 30,000 scientists and engineers focused on saving our planet.” This group of people could have more impact than the billionaires.
•What if 3% of the people in the United States – approximately ten million people – could bond together as protestors and cause enough noise and disruption to get our nation’s leaders to pay attention to and solve the climate change crisis?
It all comes down to leadership and real action:
•Who will make the decision to start planetary geoengineering and then do it?
•Who will make the decision to eliminate human activity from the Amazon rainforest and then do it, before we lose the whole thing and the rainforest becomes a desert?
•Who will make the decision to spend billions dollars to stabilize the Thwaites glacier and then do it?
This video shows the kind of thing scientists and engineers would be thinking about if they had significant resources to do research and take action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcQ4BzHGaS8
None of these things are happening right now at any significant level, even in the face of impending destruction of the entire ecosystem of the planet. It seems impossible that we have come to this point, yet here we are standing on the brink of catastrophe.
What is at stake? Everything.
Somehow humanity must make a concrete and highly-funded decision to take significant, real action with thousands upon thousands of scientists and engineers dedicated to researching + implementing real solutions.
Humanity stands on the brink of disaster
The climate change disasters in the month of August gave humanity a taste of what is coming. Once the irreversible tipping points kick in, things will become far worse. This article describes the tipping points that are imminent:
World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds
“The nine global tipping points identified are: the collapse of the Greenland, west Antarctic and two parts of the east Antarctic ice sheets, the partial and total collapse of Amoc, Amazon dieback, permafrost collapse and winter sea ice loss in the Arctic.”
What does this paragraph actually mean?
1. When it says, “Greenland”, it is talking about the accelerated melting we now see in the Greenland ice sheet as discussed here.
2. When it says, “west Antarctic”, this is a synonym for the Thwaites Glacier discussed above.
3. When it says, “two parts of the east Antarctic ice sheets”, think of Antarctica as two separate areas (east and west) divided by a mountain range. For decades the conventional wisdom has felt that east Antarctica was safely in deep freeze for the foreseeable future. However, recent heating events have proven the conventional wisdom incorrect.
4. When it says, “AMOC”, it is talking about “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”. Think about the Gulf Stream. It is an ocean current that is like a vast river of water flowing from the Gulf of Mexico up toward England, bringing warmer water and nutrients. The Gulf Stream is one part of AMOC. If AMOC collapses, it will have a significant impact on weather patterns and ocean health with global repercussions.
5. When it says, “Amazon dieback”, it is talking about the collapse of the Amazon Rainforest ecosystem, which will dump hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, kill off a million species, and turn the rainforest into a savannah or a desert.
6. When it says, “permafrost collapse”, it is talking about the feedback loop where melting permafrost releases vast quantities of trapped methane and carbon, which causes more global heating, which melts more permafrost, and so on. Once this feedback loop gets rolling in any significant way, the permafrost emissions negate any human attempts to cut back on human carbon emissions.
7. When it says, “winter sea ice loss in the Arctic”, it is talking about a feedback loop where melting sea ice, which is white and reflective, exposes more open ocean water, which is darker and more absorbent to the sun’s energy. Therefore, the Arctic region heats faster and melts more ice, until all the ice is gone. As the ice disappears, it creates new weather patterns that will be quite destructive. See this article for one potential solution.
Any one of these events is terrible. All of them together is how we get to the point of discussing the collapse of human civilization and the destruction of the planetary ecosystem. Sea levels rise so much, there is so much carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, and there is so much heating, drought and flooding that things we take for granted today (like food production) catastrophically fail. This video talks about this future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17aE91SBMoY
It all comes down to this simple question: Will humanity be able to take any kind of real, concrete, highly-funded action to avert disaster? Or will we sleepwalk into catastrophe and witness the collapse of human civilization? These impending tipping points hold the key to our future. If we do nothing to prevent the tipping points from triggering, all will be lost. This is not hyperbole or doomerism. This is reality for our planet and our future. Humanity must take highly-funded action now in order to avert catastrophe.
Climate change & doomsday: Irreversible tipping points may mean end of human civilization
Quote:
They say that like it's a bad thing. Does it matter since we're all doomed to die anyway?
I had a dream this morning that all the greedy, nasty, etc., people were despatched to live on the Moon. They eventually figured out how to get along and be decent people. When those on Earth were asked if the Moonies could return to Earth, there was a resounding No! That might work.
The doors of good restaurants frequently display stickers from guidebooks such as Michelin or the Good Food Guide. It is far less common to spot anything that proclaims their green credentials. Even venues making positive moves on sustainability can be coy about flagging it, for fear of boring people.
Consequently, diners who are keen to make better choices for the planet in where and how they eat lack direction. You need to know how to decode a restaurant and its menu, spotting the tell-tale signs of a progressive operation. What marks out a greener restaurant and what should we order when we get there? How, as customers, can we embrace that change?
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Traffic jams and stuck barges are clogging up a critical artery of the U.S. economy, as a prolonged drought pushes the Mississippi River’s water levels to near-record lows.
Around 500 million tons of supplies are ferried along the Mississippi River every year with trade value worth $130 billion, according to the Port of New Orleans, mainly agricultural products, like corn and soybeans, along with fuel products. The Mississippi River Basin produces more than 90% of U.S. agricultural exports, according to the National Park Service, and nearly 80% of the world’s grain exports.
But all that is coming to a standstill amid historic drought conditions that are making the river untraversable for most shipping barges. River levels are now at their lowest level in a decade after historically low rainfall in recent months, becoming the latest supply-chain snag to hit the U.S.
“America is going to shut down if we shut down,” Mike Ellis, CEO of American Commercial Barge Line in Indiana, told the Wall Street Journal this week.
River traffic jams
The low water levels have clogged up entire sections of the Mississippi River in recent weeks, wreaking havoc on the local economy.
At least 2,000 barges were backed up along the river last week, Bloomberg reported, citing data from the U.S. Coast Guard. Also last week, the Coast Guard warned that at least eight heavy barges had become “grounded” in particularly shallow parts of the river.
With fewer barges able to navigate the river and longer wait times, prices are starting to go up.
“It’s definitely having an impact on the local economy, because the commercial use of this river has almost completely stopped,” George Flaggs, mayor of Vicksburg, Miss., told local news channel WAPT earlier this week, adding that the river around Vicksburg is the lowest he’s seen it in nearly 70 years.
“This will actually affect us in a very negative way. We have to have less cargo on our barges and less tonnage moving. It affects our revenues,” Austin Golding, president of Golding Barge Line, told WAPT.
It’s the worst possible time for a drought in the Mississippi, as early fall is typically when grain is harvested in the Mississippi Basin and sent down the river. Soybeans are the most commonly shipped commodity on the river, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, but the low water levels are throwing the supply chain into chaos.
Full soybean trucks are being turned away from loading stations along the river entirely, Ted Kendall, a farmer near Vicksburg, told local channel WLOX this week.
With water levels so low and the river’s flow weakened, salt water from the Gulf of Mexico could start creeping upstream, which would threaten local ecology and drinking supplies. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced plans at the end of September to construct a sill—an underwater obstacle—to halt the salt water’s flow upstream.
The Mississippi River tends to experience seasonally low water levels in the fall, the corps said, but with drought conditions persisting across the Mississippi’s headwater regions in the Midwest, it may be a while before water height returns to normal.
“Basically, we’re not seeing any heavy rainfall over the next several weeks to indicate that we would get any relief from low water conditions for the lower Mississippi,” Jeff Graschel, a National Weather Service hydrologist at the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, told the New York Times last week.
We are now at “code red” on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency. The scale of untold human suffering, already immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related disasters. Therefore, we urge scientists, citizens, and world leaders to read this Special Report and quickly take the necessary actions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” signed by more than 1700 scientists in 1992. Since this original warning, there has been a roughly 40% increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. This is despite numerous written warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a recent scientists’ warning of a climate emergency with nearly 15,000 signatories from 158 countries (Ripple et al. 2020). Current policies are taking the planet to around 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100, a temperature level that Earth has not experienced over the past 3 million years (Liu and Raftery 2021). The consequences of global heating are becoming increasingly extreme, and outcomes such as global societal collapse are plausible and dangerously underexplored (Kemp et al. 2022). Motivated by the moral urgency of this global crisis, here, we track recent climate-related disasters, assess planetary vital signs, and provide sweeping policy recommendations.
Climate-related extreme weather
Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of severe weather events across the world (Coronese et al. 2019). This is likely because of a variety of interconnected processes, including an overall warming trend, changing precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and changes in the jet streams. For example, rapid Arctic warming may have made the summer jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere more prone to meandering and becoming blocked, causing heat waves, flooding, droughts, and other disasters (Mann et al. 2017). Rather than just being more frequent, some extreme weather events are now more intense or sometimes occur closer together in time and space. This compounds damage and decreases recovery time. It may increase the likelihood of extreme risks such as simultaneous global failure of crop yields across multiple major food producing regions.
We are now regularly seeing events and disasters that previously occurred only rarely. Tragically, these disasters disproportionately harm poor people in low-income regions that have had minimal contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gasses. For example, in the summer of 2022, one third of Pakistan was flooded, displacing 33 million people and affecting 16 million children. Other disasters this year include terrifying wildfires in Europe, back-to-back cyclones and subsequent flooding in eastern Australia, numerous rivers drying up in China and Europe, an extraordinarily intense hurricane striking the Southeastern United States, powerful storms and extensive flooding in Bangladesh and India, megafires and a continuation of the decadal drought in the western United States, a massive flood that closed Yellowstone National Park, and unusually severe heat waves or “heat domes” in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere (see table 1 for details and attribution). These serial and simultaneous impacts are testing society’s limits as they greatly reduce resilience and ability to cope with other crises.
The global economy is on the path to hyperinflation and risks societal collapse if soaring prices are not brought under control, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds has warned.
Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Wall Street billionaire Paul Singer, hit out at central bank rate-setters in an apocalyptic warning to clients as rate-setters bring the era of ultra-cheap money to an abrupt end.
The world economy faces an “extremely challenging” outlook and hyperinflation could result in “global societal collapse and civil or international strife”, the letter to clients said, the Financial Times reported. It said central banks have been “dishonest” in deflecting blame for the price surge from their prolonged use of ultra-loose monetary policy.
Elliott is one of the most influential hedge funds in the world and is feared in corporate boardrooms for its approach to investor activism.
Central banks are being forced into rapid interest rate rises to tackle inflation with the rate of price growth hitting double digits and a four-decade high in the UK.
The US Federal Reserve voted for its fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point increase to its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday while the Bank of England followed with a 0.75 percentage point jump on Thursday, the eighth straight increase.
Stock markets have already suffered a tough year as the global economic outlook darkens and interest rates are pushed to levels last seen before the financial crisis. But Elliott believes that investors should brace for a “a seriously adverse unwind of the everything bubble” because of the number of “frightening and seriously negative possibilities”.
The “everything bubble” refers to the surge in a range of investments, including stocks, bonds and house prices, since the financial crisis after central banks left interest rates at rock bottom levels for years and cranked up the printing presses under quantitative easing.
Investors should not believe they have seen everything from previous financial crises, the letter warned. The sudden end to cheap money has “made possible a set of outcomes that would be at or beyond the boundaries of the entire post-WWII period”.
The S&P 500 – the benchmark US stock index – has plunged by 22pc this year and dropped a further 2.5pc on Wednesday after Fed chairman Jerome Powell signalled more rate increases are on the way. The FTSE 100 has been one of the world’s better performing stock indices but is still 5.6pc lower.
Elliott declined to comment.
Abstract
Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.
A new study finds Greenland’s ice sheet thinning much further into the ice sheet core than previously thought, 100 miles inland. (Source: S. Khan, et al, Extensive Inland Thinning and Speed-Up of North-
East Greenland Stream, Nature, November 9, 2022)
The implications are extremely concerning and far-reaching, especially for sea level rise. It is a significant development that will prompt climate scientists to recalculate global warming’s impact. In that regard, some facts are worth repeating. Here’s one that cannot be told often enough because of the gravity of its implications for the 130 coastal cities of the world each with over one million residents:
During the 1990s Greenland and Antarctica combined lost 81 billion tons of ice mass per year on average. A decade later, during the decade of the 2010s, the ice mass loss increased 6-fold to 475 billion
tons per year on average. (Source: Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s, NASA, March 16, 2020)
It should be noted that it takes billions upon billions of tons of melted ice to move sea levels appreciably up, which does give some pause to any immediacy of cities overrun by gushing water. Yet, what if 475
billion tons per year becomes much more than that?
Additionally, rehashing one more relevant stat, according to John Englander, the sea level expert par excellence: “If we only melt 5% of global glacial ice, it’s 10 feet of sea level rise.” But, how long does it
take to melt 5%? Nobody knows for sure, but it’s most likely well beyond 2100. What about only 2%? Again, nobody knows.
By now readers of articles like Greenland is Worse Than Ever, Much Worse must be getting accustomed to negative reports of climate change getting worse over time. In fact, relentlessly year by year it gets worse, never better. It’s like a terminally ill cancer patient knowing what to expect: Every checkup gets worse. Greenland just got an eye-opener!
There’s a good reason why climate change continually gets worse. It’s the failure of the leaders of the world to react to years and years and years of climate scientists’ warnings, starting in the 1980s with Dr.
James Hansen formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate” splashed onto the front page of The New York Times d/d June 24,
1988.
The needle to fix the climate change imbroglio has not budged since well before Dr. Hansen’s speech to the US Senate. Fossil fuels still account for 80-90% of energy use, the same as 50 years ago! Moreover,
according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) fossil fuel companies plan on $1.5T spending for new production. That’s a lot of future CO2. And, in certain quarters, coal is picking up steam again.
These are the direct sources of CO2 spewing into the atmosphere, prompting a big question for the 21st century: What’s gonna stop the onset of runaway global warming?
As it happens, new studies bring new insight to prior studies. For example, previous studies of the Greenland ice sheet studied the edges of Greenland to look at active melting. Whereas, this new Khan
study is drawn further inland, more than 100 miles inland, discovering thinning ice never before seen.
“What they found was alarming: thinning from Greenland's coast stretched back 200 to 300 kilometers (125 to 185 miles)… what we see happening at the front reaches far back into the heart of the ice sheet, said Shfaqat Abbas Khan in a press release about the study, published in Nature…. the new model really captures what's going on inland, the old ones do not… you end up with a completely different mass change, or sea level projection.” (Source: Shfagat A. Khan, et al, Extensive Inland Thinning and Speed-up of Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, Nature, Nov. 9, 2022)
The principal area studied, known as the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) covers approximately 12% of the ice sheet. The thinning is estimated to add 13.5 to 15.5 mm to sea levels over time, which is equivalent to the contribution of the past 50 years. More to the point, according to the scientists: " The NEGIS could lose six times more ice than existing climate models estimate.” Thus, it’s getting
worse, much worse, six times worse than previous studies. 6xs is really a lot, off the charts.
Warm ocean currents that absorb over 90% of the planet’s heat cause the inland disturbances. In 2012 the floating extension of NEGIS collapsed, an event that accelerated ice flow and triggered rapid ice
thinning, spreading upstream by over 100 miles: One has to wonder if the integrity of the entire ice sheet is more compromised than ever before?
An article in Space.com commented on the new finding: “Greenland's largest ice sheet is thawing at a much higher rate than expected, a new study has revealed, suggesting it will add six times more water to the rising sea levels than previously thought. And the trend may not be limited to Greenland, scientists worry.” (Source: Sea Levels Might Rise Much Faster Than Thought, Data From Greenland Suggest, Space.com, November 9, 2022)
Repeating that prior statement “And the trend may not be limited to Greenland, scientists worry.” Probably points a finger at Antarctica, where recent research has identified similar warm underwater
currents eroding the base of ice sheets, for example, Thwaites glacier West Antarctica, the widest glacier on the planet: Under the ice, the geological structure of Thwaites is “a recipe for disaster.” Until only
recently, Thwaites had not measurably changed since it was first mapped in the 1940s. All of that has changed now that global warming has intervened. It’s what’s happening hidden underneath
that spooks scientists: “Ocean water well above melting point is eroding the base of the ice.” (Source: Ted Scambos, lead principal investigator for the Science Coordination Office of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (SCO project).
Even more alarming: The Khan study discovered that accelerating melt continued throughout the winter of 2021 and the summer of 2022, which were unusually cold in Greenland, suggesting the thinning/melting process is impervious to temperature changes on the surface.
According to Eric Rignot, professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, co-author of the paper: “We foresee profound changes in global sea levels, more than currently projected by existing models.” Comments from leading climate scientists like Rignot saying the study represents “profound changes in sea levels” should alert world leaders to take action to convert fossil fuels to renewables, posthaste.
The Khan study was released as the world met in Egypt for COP27, seeking solutions. Based upon multitudes upon multitudes of climate change issues throughout the world maybe the delegates should
extend their stay by several months or maybe even by one year just to go thru reams of demanding issues. Two weeks of COP27 can only scratch the surface of so many pressing issues that threaten our
continuance.
Hopefully, COP27 does initiate real breakthrough enforcement mechanisms that compel countries to meet net zero by 2030, if that is soon enough, but if history is a prologue to results, don’t hold your
breath. Instead, it’s prudent, in fact real smart, to make plans to adapt to fierce and fiercer climate change as well as much higher sea levels sooner rather than later.
The Khan study unfortunately comes on top of a chilling statement by the world’s leading Greenland expert as mentioned on a Radio Ecoshock interview d/d October 26, 2022: Luke Kemp: Climate
Endgame: “Greenland ice expert Jason Box warns Earth is already committed to at least another foot of sea level rise from Greenland no matter what we do.”
PAGE, Ariz. — The first sign of serious trouble for the drought-stricken American Southwest could be a whirlpool.
It could happen if the surface of Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir along the Colorado River that’s already a quarter of its former size, drops another 38 feet down the concrete face of the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam here. At that point, the surface would be approaching the tops of eight underwater openings that allow river water to pass through the hydroelectric dam.
The normally placid Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, could suddenly transform into something resembling a funnel, with water circling the openings, the dam’s operators say.
If that happens, the massive turbines that generate electricity for 4.5 million people would have to shut down — after nearly 60 years of use — or risk destruction from air bubbles. The only outlet for Colorado River water from the dam would then be a set of smaller, deeper and rarely used bypass tubes with a far more limited ability to pass water downstream to the Grand Canyon and the cities and farms in Arizona, Nevada and California.
Such an outcome — known as a “minimum power pool” — was once unfathomable here. Now, the federal government projects that day could come as soon as July.
Worse, officials warn, is the remote possibility of an even more catastrophic event. That is if the water level falls all the way to the lowest holes, so only small amounts could pass through the dam. Such a scenario — called “dead pool” — would transform Glen Canyon Dam from something that regulates an artery of national importance into a hulking concrete plug corking the Colorado River.
Anxiety about such outcomes has worsened this year as a long-running drought has intensified in the Southwest. Reservoirs and groundwater supplies across the region have fallen dramatically, and states and cities have faced restrictions on water use amid dwindling supplies. The Colorado River, which serves roughly 1 in 10 Americans, is the region’s most important waterway.
The 1,450-mile river starts in the Colorado Rockies and ends in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. There are more than a dozen dams along the river, creating major reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
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