Category Archives: climate change

Glacier Breaks Dam – In India, what more can I say

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Yes right now the United States has some serious examples of Global Warming. California’s a mess. Let’s see: Massive fires, Massive floods, Massive mud slides and smog. Hotter weather, Melting ice. Then there are the hurricanes.

But this a falling Glacier that destroys a Dam. It killed 100s. That is a serious difference in orders of magnitude.

https://news.sky.com/story/northern-india-150-feared-dead-as-glacier-breaks-and-hits-dam-in-12211408

Northern India: At least 26 dead and 165 missing as glacier breaks and hits dam

A portion of a Himalayan glacier broke off causing a wall of water and debris to hit two hydroelectric projects in Uttarakhand.

By Manpreet Kaur Sachdeva and Russell Hope, news reporters

At least 26 people have died and 165 others are missing in northern India after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, sending a wall of water and debris into two hydroelectric dams.

More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police are carrying out search-and-rescue missions after Sunday’s incident in the state of Uttarakhand.

The deluge destroyed one dam, damaged another and washed homes away downstream.

The focus of teams’ efforts was on saving 37 workers trapped inside a tunnel at the Dhauliganga project, one of the affected hydropower plants, officials said.

A portion of Nanda Devi glacier broke off in the Tapovan area of Uttarakhand state on Sunday, with the subsequent flooding damaging the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga hydropower projects, officials said.

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Go there and shriek. More next week.

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Climate Change – Why no one believes it

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Everyone wants to believe but they can’t. The bigger it gets, the less they believe. No one can really get their heads around how big the problem is. The solutions are even LARGER.

According to this article, even though people’s minds are changing their hearts are not. That is a big bummer.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-crisis-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine-heres-what-happens-if-you-try?utm_source=pocket-newtab

by Elizabeth Weil

(sorry for starting in the middle of the article, but it makes my point here)

Sometimes everything is both too much and not enough. George Marshall opened his book, “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change,” with the parable of Jan Karski, a young Polish resistance fighter who, in 1943, met in person with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was both a Jew and widely regarded as one of the great minds of his generation. Karski briefed the justice on what he’d seen firsthand: the pillage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Belzec death camp. Afterward, Frankfurter said, “I do not believe you.”

The Polish ambassador, who had arranged the meeting on the recommendation of President Franklin Roosevelt, interrupted to defend Karski’s account.

“I did not say that he is lying,” Frankfurter explained. “I said that I didn’t believe him. It’s a different thing. My mind, my heart — they are made in such a way that I cannot accept. No no no.”

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Go there and meditate er…read. More next week.

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We Are About To Unthaw Pandora’s Box – Do you like the spread of Human Killers

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Well now it is here. Permafrost covers 24% of the Earth’s surface. It is melting at a quickening pace. Buried in this permafrost are many Dead Bodies. Dead Human’s that carry ancient diseases that we have no defense against. Not just Human bodies but animal bodies and maybe Dinosaur bodies. Who knows what diseases they might contain? What if we had not just one virus to deal with (like now) but several and we had no time for a vaccine? That does not take into account the bacterium and other microbes that may have been harmless in their day, but cause Humans to turn deaf, or blind, or mute?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-frozen-arctic-microbes-are-waking-up/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate | Opinion

Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

Thawing permafrost is releasing microorganisms, with consequences that are still largely unknown

By Kimberley R. Miner, Arwyn Edwards, Charles Miller on

In August 2019, Iceland held a funeral for the Okjökull Glacier, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. The community commemorated the event with a plaque in recognition of this irreversible change and the grave impacts it represents. Globally, glacier melt rates have nearly doubled in the last five years, with an average loss of 832 mmw.e. (millimeters water equivalent) in 2015, increasing to 1,243 mmw.e. in 2020 (WGMS). This high rate of loss decreases glacial stores of freshwater and changes the structure of the surrounding ecosystem.

In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years.

As the global climate continues to warm, many questions remain about the periglacial environment. Among them: as water infiltration increases, will permafrost thaw more rapidly? And, if so, what long-frozen organisms might “wake up”?

Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface, and the soil constituents vary with local geology. Arctic lands offer unexplored microbial biodiversity and microbial feedbacks, including the release of carbon to the atmosphere. In some locations, hundreds of millions of years’ worth of carbon is buried. The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. As the permafrost thaws with increasing rapidity, scientists’ emerging challenge is to discover and identify the microbes, bacteria and viruses that may be stirring.

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Go there and get grossed out. More next week.

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Want To See What Climate Change Does To America – You really don’t but you will go look anyway

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As you scroll through this article it shows how climate change effects America. I must say it is pretty cool in a technological way, but it is depressing for an environmentalist like me. Illinois fares OK until about 2070. Just in case you are interested.

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/?utm_source=digg

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

by Al Shaw, Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, and Jeremy W. Goldsmith, Special to ProPublica, September 15, 2020.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.

Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers modeled the human climate “niche”: the regions where temperature and precipitation have been most suitable for humans to live in over the past 6,000 years.

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Go there and read. Go there and play. More next week.

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Attached To An Ice Floe In The Arctic – What a brave way to study Global Warming

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So who are you going to believe? A research vessel attached to Arctic ice or a weasel attached to the Presidency with Leech like suckers.  ie. Trump – it’s a hoax or Science – it’s COMING! Me I trust science. Not Russian science either.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/scientists-made-an-alarmingly-easy-trip-to-the-north-po-1844858358?utm_source=digg

Climate change

Scientists Made an Alarmingly Easy Trip to the North Pole

 

dharnanoor
Dharna Noor

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Filed to:ice ice maybe

 

At Earther, we’ve been following the historic extent of ice melt in the Arctic this summer pretty closely. But not as closely as Gunnar Spreen and his research team, who are literally following the ice.

“We’re attached to an ice floe now,” he said on the phone from a research vessel called the Polarstern, which is currently at the latitude 88 degrees north, just under 150 miles (230 kilometers) from the North Pole. “We’re drifting with the ice. Wherever it goes, we go.”

Spreen, a sea ice and remote sensing scientist at the University of Bremen, is taking part in a research expedition known as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC. It’s the largest Arctic research campaign in history, with some 500 scientists and staffers rotating on and off of the research vessel for months at a time.

The current cohort boarded the Polarstern on August 12, and in just a week’s time, they made it to the North Pole. To get there, they took an unexpected route, north of Greenland.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Do Not Have To Be A Weatherman To Know Which The Wind Blows

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It ain’t good news. So I will just put them up.

https://www.erienewsnow.com/story/42470351/canadian-ice-shelf-larger-than-manhattan-collapses-into-the-sea

Canadian ice shelf larger than Manhattan collapses into the sea

Saturday, August 8th 2020, 4:16 PM EDT
Updated:
Saturday, August 8th 2020, 4:16 PM EDT

The size of Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was reduced by 43% over July 30 and 31 when the Milne Ice Shelf on Ellesmere Island in the northern territory of Nunavut collapsed into the ocean.

This large sheet of ice then drifted into the Arctic Sea, further breaking into two large chunks. This entire calving event — the scientific term for the breaking of ice chunks off glaciers — was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel satellite.

The piece that broke off was around 80 square kilometers — larger than the 60-square-kilometer Manhattan.

“Above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break up,” according to the Canadian Ice Service.

AND THIS

https://news.yahoo.com/heat-wave-bakes-california-more-123049167.html

From ‘firenadoes’ to record heat, California extreme weather a glimpse of future

Tony Barboza, Louis Sahagun, Joseph Serna
LA Times

In the last few days, a moisture-laden heat wave has unleashed extreme weather in almost every corner of California.

In a single day, Northern California was hit with triple-digit temperatures, as well as hundreds of lightning strikes that ignited brush fires. The mercury hit 107 degrees Sunday in Santa Cruz, known for its moderate climate, and Death Valley reached 130 degrees — one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded there.

Meanwhile, unusually muggy air made Los Angeles feel like Houston, and warm nights failed to offer much relief. The Central Valley sweltered with temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. A fire-caused tornado touched down near the Sierra Nevada community of Loyalton. And a pyrocumulus cloud towered over Southern California, where heat and wildfires pushed smog levels higher than they’ve been in years.

Did we mention the power went out too?

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Go there and read. More Next week if I survive.

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Michael Sellenberger Is A Lying Fool – He is a huge supporter of Nuclear Power

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As one of the commenters on Peak Oil said, “yah and smoking cures cancer”. Or as another said. ” a deniers denier, whose paying him”? His editorial is so wrong in so many ways. Yes, we ARE causing the next big extinction by habitat destruction and this pandemic is a perfect result of that habitat destruction and it’s results. Global warming IS the biggest crisis facing humans. Its true – not the biggest crisis facing the Earth cause after we are gone and all the smoke gets reabsorbed the Earth will be just fine. This guy is raising money by spreading feel good skepticism (and that’s all it is) and making himself famous by telling lies.

https://environmentalprogress.org/who-we-are

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

  • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

  • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

  • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

  • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

  • The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

  • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

  • Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

  • Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

  • We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

  • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

  • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

  • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

 

 

 

 

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Thank The Dominican Nuns – If you get the chance

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It is rare that I have a good thing to say about any religion. Seriously, the sexism, the domination of nature, and the worship of the unknowable leaves little to praise. Same for Morgan- Stanley. When they get it right, they deserve all the praise we can afford them. So:

THANK YOU

Meet the Dominican nuns who created their own climate solutions fund

sister acts

Meet the Dominican nuns who created their own climate solutions fund

By on Jun 29, 2020

It’s been five years since Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si,” the celebrated 225-page encyclical in which the pope called for environmental justice and fundamental social change in the face of global warming. To mark the occasion earlier this month, the Vatican urged Catholics around the world to take practical steps to fulfill this mission — including by divesting from fossil fuel-based industries. And in the U.S., 16 congregations of Dominican nuns (named for their patron saint, Saint Dominic) debuted a collaboration with Morgan Stanley to create a $130 million “climate solutions fund.”

In a press release, the bank called the fund a “first of its kind collaboration … to find investment solutions which focus on climate change and aiding marginalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by global warming.” Examples of the fund’s “holistic” approach to climate solutions could include “early stage investments in energy efficiency software” as well as “more mature opportunities like fruit producers with water-saving hydroponic irrigation systems.”

Sister Patricia Daly, a Dominican nun from a congregation in Caldwell, New Jersey, helped create the fund. The nuns began organizing the fund in 2018 after they pooled $46 million. Daly said the sisters have long wanted to invest in companies and technology that are actively working toward the United Nations sustainable development goals, which include ending poverty, improving access to clean energy, curbing climate change, and more. When they couldn’t find a fund with that focus — most sustainable investment funds do not holistically address all of those goals, according to Daly — the congregations enlisted Morgan Stanley to create a new fund themselves and set a standard for future investing.

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Go there and read. Maybe donate. More next week.

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Could Coronavirus Save The Planet – Well it certainly has reduced pollution

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Oil prices are actually at an all time low as supplies are on at an all time high. This article argues however that the oil corporations are so big that they will just diversify as climate change looms larger. In the end they will sell worthless reserves off to unregulated startup oil companies and oil will become like drugs.Those startups will function like drug cartels function today. Selling oil to those addicted to oil. Pretty picture? NO. Our future. Maybe.

PS – this is an enormously loooooog read.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1?utm_source=digg

Business

Shell Is Looking Forward

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

By

We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”

In a conference room overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international community could balance the need for growth with our precarious ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios, everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and democracy’s track record is mixed.

A graph from Chinese social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a patriotic retort to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — had a real effect on the room. Combine that with the Chinese state-led investment in clean-energy technology and infrastructure and everyone admired how the world’s largest source of fossil-fuel emissions was going about transition. That’s what the salesperson meant by “outcomes”: decarbonization.

Regional experts from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East–North Africa also entertained the democracy question, pointing to Iraqi disillusionment with voting and economic growth in Rwanda under Paul Kagame (“He’s technically a dictator, but it’s working”). The China expert said the average regional Communist Party official is probably more accountable for his or her performance than the average U.K. member of Parliament, a claim no one in the room full of Brits seemed to find objectionable. The moderator didn’t pose the question to me, the American expert, presumably because our national sense of democratic entitlement is inviolable.

Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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I Am Not Having Kids – Some people get way to carried away with environment issues

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There are people that live their lives to right environmental wrongs. Then there are people who live their lives according environmental principles. Sometimes the two meet in a happy medium. Then there are people who over do it. To those people I say stop. (no exclamation mark) Don’t be vegetarian to “save the planet”. It will not. Don’t have children to make the “world a better place”. It will not. Do those things if they make you feel good and you will have a better life. But if you want to have 3 kids- and you can love them and afford them,  then do that thing.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/13/21132013/climate-change-children-kids-anti-natalism

Having fewer kids will not save the climate

Some say you shouldn’t have children in the era of climate change. Don’t buy it.

By Sigal Samuel

A growing contingent of young people are refusing to have kids — or are considering having fewer kids — because of climate change. Their voices have been growing louder over the past year. UK women set up a movement called BirthStrike, announcing that they won’t procreate until the world gets its act together on climate, and high-profile US figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez amplified the question of whether childbearing is still morally acceptable.

One of the main worries cited by this contingent is that having a child will make climate change worse. Their logic is that anytime you have a kid you’re doing something bad for the planet. You’re adding yet another person who’ll cause more carbon emissions, plus their children, plus their grandchildren … and so on, in a never-ending cascade of procreative shame.

Driving this logic are studies claiming to show that having a child leads to a gargantuan amount of carbon emissions — way, way more than the emissions generated by other lifestyle choices, like driving a car or eating meat. Media reports have trumpeted the takeaway that if you want to fight climate change, having fewer children is far and away the best thing you can do.

But that’s just not true, according to a new report by Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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