Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Razgovory]

Its sad, but the Greens were coming around to nuclear power until Fukushima. When the anti-science kicked in again

That's not really anti-science just anti-practical.

[The Brain]

Also that chart shows you then, how fucking stupid most greens are. They had ALL the German nuclear plants closed because of a TSUNAMI IN JAPAN. Now they burn coal instead.

I believe that the German Greens have been in favor of quitting both nuclear and coal power. I recall that they positioned themselves that quitting nuclear energy mustn't lead to increased energy production from coal, and that both should be phased out a.s.a.p. for renewables.

Surely in the current situation phasing out coal should be a much higher priority than phasing out zero emissions energy sources. What kind of idiotic positioning are they taking? Do they want to help the environment or play a central role in environmental destruction? Because that position makes it hard to tell.

The current situation is the same as it's been for decades, and all this time they've been consistent.

[Duque de Bragança]

Its sad, but the Greens were coming around to nuclear power until Fukushima. When the anti-science kicked in again

Not in Germany. Opposition to nuclear has always been a core tenet. (Atomkraft? Nein danke)

[Valmy]

Greens and Environmentalists have always been shitty allies for trying to reduce emissions. It is really frustrating.

[grumbler]

Its sad, but the Greens were coming around to nuclear power until Fukushima. When the anti-science kicked in again

Not in Germany. Opposition to nuclear has always been a core tenet. (Atomkraft? Nein danke)

Exactly.  Better to tolerate global warming than nuclear power.  Gotta shut down those nukes even if it kills us.

[Monoriu]

50 years from now, when humanity deals with the carnage from global warming, one of the questions that will be asked is why didn't our forefathers fix this when they could.  I wonder what the lessons learned will be in future generations' minds.  I don't think the lesson learned will be let's maintain the status quo.  It will be ugly.

[Eddie Teach]

50 years from now, when humanity deals with the carnage from global warming, one of the questions that will be asked is why didn't our forefathers fix this when they could.  I wonder what the lessons learned will be in future generations' minds.  I don't think the lesson learned will be let's maintain the status quo.  It will be ugly.

Yet you cling to that "lesson" like a life preserver. 

[Monoriu]

50 years from now, when humanity deals with the carnage from global warming, one of the questions that will be asked is why didn't our forefathers fix this when they could.  I wonder what the lessons learned will be in future generations' minds.  I don't think the lesson learned will be let's maintain the status quo.  It will be ugly.

Yet you cling to that "lesson" like a life preserver. 

I am but a bystander.

[mongers]

Climate change: UK's 10 warmest years all occurred since 2002
By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent

The top 10 warmest years on record in the UK have all occurred since 2002, a new analysis from the Met Office says.
Its State of the UK Climate report shows that 2014 remains the warmest year in a temperature sequence now dating back to 1884.
Despite last summer's blistering heat, 2018 only places as the seventh warmest year on record - as the statistic is based on temperatures all year round.
When it comes to the coldest years, the most recent in the top 10 was in 1963.
The patterns of warm and cold years in Britain are a clear signal of climate change, say scientists.

.....

Full article here, well worth reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49167797

[Berkut]

It's kind of amazing that one of the fallouts of the Rise of Trump is that it is now cool to pretend that global warming is a hoax again.

[Syt]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-865803/

Greenland Is Melting Away Before Our Eyes

Amid an ongoing heat wave, new data show the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It's the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists.

The record-setting heat wave that sweltered northern Europe last week has moved north over the critically vulnerable Greenland ice sheet, triggering temperatures this week that are as much as 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal.

Weather models indicate Tuesday's temperature may have surpassed 75 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of Greenland, and a weather balloon launched near the capital Nuuk measured all-time record warmth just above the surface. That heat wave is still intensifying, and is expected to peak on Thursday with the biggest single-day melt ever recorded in Greenland. On August 1 alone, more than 12 billion tons of water will permanently melt away from the ice sheet and find its way down to the ocean, irreversibly raising sea levels globally.

A tweet from the Danish Meteorological Institute, the official weather service of Greenland, said "almost all the ice sheet, including Summit" measurably melted on Tuesday. According to a preliminary estimate, that melt covered 87 percent of the ice sheet's surface, which would be the second-biggest melt day in Greenland's recorded history. Separate weather monitoring equipment at Summit Camp at the top of the 10,000-foot-thick Greenland ice sheet confirmed the temperature briefly reached the melting point.

Downhill, meltwater was seen dramatically streaming off the edge of the ice sheet in massive waterfalls. Climate scientist Irina Overeem, who placed a meltwater monitoring station in western Greenland eight years ago, recorded a dramatic video of a rushing torrent of water. In a comment posted on Twitter, she said "I have my fingers crossed for it not being washed away." In an email to Rolling Stone, Overeem described the nature of life in Greenland these days: After recording that video, she spotted a warning of the major glacial water runoff on the announcement board of the main supermarket in the capital city. A similar glacial flood in 2012 was so intense it washed away bridge.

Ice core records show melt days like these have happened only a handful of times in the past 1,000 years. But, with the advent of human-caused climate change, the chances of these full-scale melt events happening are sharply increasing.

Even just a few decades ago, an event like this would have been unthinkable. Now, island-wide meltdown days like this are becoming increasingly routine. The ongoing melt event is the second time in seven years that virtually the entire ice sheet simultaneously experienced at least some melt. The last was in July 2012, where 97 percent of the ice sheet simultaneously melted.

In the 1980s, wintertime snows in Greenland roughly balanced summertime melt from the ice sheet, and the conventional wisdom among scientists was that it might take thousands of years for the ice to completely melt under pressure from global warming.

That's all changed now.

With a decade or two of hindsight, scientists now believe Greenland passed an important tipping point around 2003, and since then its melt rate has more than quadrupled.

This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1mm. So far in July, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 160 billion tons of ice — enough to cover Florida in about six feet of water. According to IPCC estimates, that's roughly the level of melt a typical summer will have in 2050 under the worst-case warming scenario if we don't take meaningful action to address climate change. Under that same scenario, this week's brutal, deadly heat wave would be normal weather in the 2070s.

Xavier Fettweis, a polar scientist at the University of Liège in Belgium who tracks meltwater on the Greenland ice sheet, told Rolling Stone in an email that the recent acceleration of these melt events means the IPCC scenarios "clearly underestimate what we currently observe over the Greenland ice sheet" and should revisit their projections for the future.

"This melt event is a good alarm signal that we urgently need change our way of
living," said Fettweis. "It is more and more likely that the IPCC projections are too optimistic in the Arctic." Altogether, the Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 24 feet.

This isn't happening in isolation: This summer has been horrific all across the Arctic.

Unusual wildfires across Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, and Greenland have been raging all summer, and by one estimate released about 50 million tons of carbon dioxide in the month of June alone — equivalent to the annual emissions of Sweden. In Switzerland, some glaciers melted so rapidly during last week's heatwave that they sent swirling mudflows racing downhill. In the Arctic Ocean, sea ice is at a record-low extent as the melt season continues to lengthen. In Alaska, ecosystems are rapidly changing, especially in the Bering Sea region where this year's ice-free season began in February.

As daunting as this is, the latest science on Greenland also points to a window of hope: Greenland's meltdown is not yet irreversible. That self-sustaining process of melt-begetting-more-melt would kick in at around 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of global warming. That means whether or not Greenland's ice sheet melts completely is almost entirely in human control: A full-scale mobilization ­— including rapidly transforming the basis of the global economy toward a future where fossil fuels are no longer used — would probably be enough to keep most of the remaining ice frozen, where it belongs.

[The Brain]

So far in July, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 160 billion tons of ice — enough to cover Florida in about six feet of water.

This should be very easy to check.

[viper37]

https://www.livescience.com/66120-amazon-rainforest-deforestation-bolsonaro.html

deforestation up 278% since last year, (June to June) in Amazonia.

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/14/glaciers-iceland-country-loss-plaque-climate-crisis

The glaciers of Iceland seemed eternal. Now a country mourns their loss

My grandparents mapped these giants of the landscape. A plaque will mark the spot where the first was lost to the climate crisis

How do you write a eulogy for a glacier? Think about it. How would you go about that, having grown up with glaciers as a geological given, a symbol of eternity? How do you say goodbye?

When academics at Rice University in Houston, Texas called and asked me to write the text for a plaque to commemorate the first dead glacier in Iceland, I found myself confronted with this problem. I was reminded of one of my favourite passages from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:

"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"

"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?"

"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

Well guess what, Harrison Starr. We humans have done for the glaciers. Almost every glacier on the planet has stopped growing and most are shrinking at an alarming rate. Ok Glacier is the first in Iceland to be formally declared dead ice. In the Himalayas, Greenland, the Alps and Iceland, the glaciers are all melting. In the spirit of Vonnegut, you could say that the Texan professors had asked me to write a pro-glacier text.

The name of our dead glacier has multiple layers. Ok in Icelandic is the equivalent of "yoke" in English, the pole traditionally used to carry buckets of water. Yoke can also mean burden, something that weighs you down. Ok carried water in the form of ice. And now that water has become ocean, the slowly rising burden of future generations.

According to current trends, all glaciers in Iceland will disappear in the next 200 years. So the plaque for Ok could be the first of 400 in Iceland alone. The glacier Snæfellsjökull, where Jules Verne began his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, is likely to be gone in the next 30 years and that will be a significant loss. This glacier is for Iceland what Fuji is for Japan.

The combined disappearance of all the glaciers of Iceland will add about 1cm to global sea levels. It might not seem much, but when that process is replicated worldwide, the floods will affect hundreds of millions of people. The most worrying prospect of all is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. They are the yoke that carries the water for one billion people.

My family has a personal connection to glaciers. My grandparents were founding partners of the Icelandic glacial research society. When my grandfather said he wanted to take my grandmother with him on a three-week research trip in 1955, some men asked him if he was crazy. Take a woman on a glacier trip? My grandparents and the research team mapped and measured the glacier and were stuck in a small tent for three days. "Weren't you cold?" I asked them. "Cold? We were just married," they replied. The part of the glacier where they pitched their tent had no name at the time. Today it is called Brúðarbunga, "The Bride's Bulge".

For now, about 10% of Iceland is covered with glaciers. The thickest packs are in Vatnajökull – up to 1,000 metres deep. Imagine stacking three Empire State Buildings on top of each other – then stretch that bulk over the horizon. To think that something so huge is actually fragile is beyond comprehension. When my grandparents measured the glaciers, they were the eternal white giants. But calculate how long they will last in this warming climate and the outlook is bleak, to say the least. Most of them will only last the lifespan of someone born today who lives to a good age. We understand that glaciers grow and recede, but this is a collapse, an explosion in slow motion.

It's not that we aren't used to changes in nature: we have mountains in Iceland younger than myself, huge craters that are younger than the Brooklyn Bridge. We have volcanic eruptions so violent and powerful that they seem to render all human action puny by comparison.

What do we humans matter, people ask, when a volcano might blow and spew out millions of tonnes of CO2? In 2010 the famous Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed down all airports in Europe. But its CO2 emissions were only about 150,000 tonnes a day, compared with human activity which is responsible for almost 100m tonnes a day. The impact of humans on a daily basis is equal to more than 600 of these volcanoes. Imagine all these eruptions on every continent, all day, all night, all year round and tell yourself that they have no effect on the climate.

The natural world is being transformed at an alarming rate. The frozen graves of mammoths in Siberia are thawing and the rate of ocean acidification is reaching levels not seen for 50m years. A dying glacier is not a dramatic event. The drama of a melting glacier is no more dramatic than springtime: one day there is snow and the next day it is gone. We are living through the Great Thaw, the Big Melt. We have to remind ourselves that this is not normal. That it is not OK to write a memorial to a glacier named Ok. We remind ourselves with a plaque that we resemble the frogs which are slowly boiled alive in the fable. Fellow frogs, we are cooking: what are we going to do about it?

One of the fundamental flaws of our civilisation is its inability to think outside the present. When a scientist talks about 2100, we feel the date has nothing to do with us. So sometimes when I talk to university students I ask them to do a simple calculation, a thought experiment. I tell them, if you were born in the year 2000 you might become a healthy 90-year-old. At that time you might have a favourite 20-year-old in your life. A grandchild perhaps, someone you have known and loved for 20 years. When will that person be a healthy 90-year-old, maybe talking about you as the greatest influence in their lives?

The students do the maths and come up with a year like 2160. That is not an abstract calculation. That is the intimate time of someone in high school or at university today. This is time whose meaning they can touch with their bare hands. If we can connect deeply to a date like this, what do we think of scientists warning of catastrophe in 2070? Or 2090? How can that be beyond our imagination, as if part of some sci-fi future?

So on the copper plate to commemorate Ok glacier, we have written to these loved ones of the future: "We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."

[Tamas]

From a purely irresponsible and selfish view, why should the inhabitants of Greenland and Iceland worry about the mildening of their islands' climate? Honest question.