Tag: climate change

The Climate Has Already Changed

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❝ The Washington Post…published a massive, interactive feature on the effects of climate change in the United States, headlining the story by promising to illustrate the corners of the country that are warming fastest as the effects of a century’s worth of carbon emissions take hold.

❝ Climate change doesn’t warm the globe equally, according to the article, and some parts of the Lower 48 have already crossed the critical threshold of a 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase.

❝ “Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark,” according to the article. Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country. Rhode Island has already crossed the 2 degrees Celsius mark. New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts are close. The article includes an searchable graphic that produces the increase in temperature for U.S. counties.

If you’re still catching a free peek at the POST, more power to you. Retirees managing their resources tight enough to maybe live as long as they’d like to…are more pennywise than that. Here’s a link to the Washington POST article. As more folk quote it – it will become available in widespread fashion. Sounds like a good one.

Only you in the future will know if we saved glaciers

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Rice University

❝ The first of Iceland’s 400 glaciers to be lost to the climate crisis will be remembered with a memorial plaque – and a sombre warning for the future – to be unveiled by scientists and local people next month.

❝ The former Okjökull glacier, which a century ago covered 15 sq km (5.8 sq miles) of mountainside in western Iceland and measured 50 metres thick, has shrunk to barely 1 sq km of ice less than 15 metres deep and lost its status as a glacier.

❝ “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” the plaque reads, in Icelandic and English. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”…

❝ Cymene Howe, an associate professor of anthropology at Rice, said the plaque “would be the first to a glacier lost to climate change anywhere in the world”. Marking the moment should draw attention to what is being lost, she said.

Notice will be taken – and understood – by that small number of human beings who comprehend what is happening. And that even smaller number of politicians who care.

new fossil fuel sources + overproduction = bankruptcy for greedy developers

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❝ For decades, elected leaders and corporate executives have chased a dream of independence from unstable or unfriendly foreign oil producers. Mission accomplished: Oil companies are producing record amounts of crude oil and natural gas in the United States and have become major exporters…With a global glut driving down prices, many are losing money and are staying afloat by selling assets and taking on debt…

❝ In the last four years, roughly 175 oil and gas companies in the United States and Canada with debts totaling about $100 billion have filed for bankruptcy protection. Many borrowed heavily when oil and gas prices were far higher, only to collectively overproduce and undercut their commodity prices. At least six companies have gone bankrupt this year, and Weatherford International, the fourth-leading oil services company, which owes investors $7.7 billion, is expected to file for bankruptcy protection…

❝ One concern is that the industry will be forced to leave oil and gas in the ground as climate change prompts environmental restrictions on drilling or a shift to alternative fuels.

As usual, the fossil fuel barons relied on their political bubbas in the White House and Congress to stand in the doorway to blockade any changeover to cleaner and cheaper energy generation. Climate change deniers from both parties were doing their share. Trump was elected and pledged to continue his own variety of populist ignorance to support backwards as the only true American direction.

A funny thing happened on the way to the bank, though. The rest of the world ignored our crooks and hustlers. As did a number of state governments. Not the majority. Just the states that understand that science and engineering, progressive policies result in cleaner, forward-looking economies.

Doesn’t mean problems are all solved. “Backwards” still includes a lot of federal flunkies calling themselves Democrats and Republicans. Change is only coming in the fullest sense of the word if all the deadwood is cleared out of the way.

Trump’s flunky refuses to sign Arctic Climate Declaration

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Mandel Ngan/Pool

❝ The United States has refused to sign an agreement on challenges in the Arctic due to discrepancies over climate change wording, diplomats said on Tuesday, jeopardizing cooperation in the polar region at the sharp edge of global warming.

❝ With Arctic temperatures rising at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, the melting ice is creating potential new shipping lanes and has opened much of the world’s last untapped reserves of oil and gas to commercial exploitation .

A meeting of eight nations bordering the Arctic in Rovaniemi in Finland on Tuesday was supposed to frame a two-year agenda to balance the challenge of global warming with sustainable development of mineral wealth.

❝ But sources with knowledge of the discussions said the United States balked at signing a final declaration as it disagreed with wording that climate change was a serious threat to the Arctic.

Our pantywaist president and his pimp, Pompeo, aren’t about to admit to science when they are committed to oil and other mineral profiteers ready to strip-mine the Arctic. The two of them – Pompeo and Trump – are in a fancy dress footrace to see who is the best imitation Mussolini to run the next two or more terms as fake president.

Half of World Heritage Glacier Sites May Be Gone by 2100

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Click to enlarge — Jungfrau — Martin Price

❝ Glaciers are set to disappear completely from almost half of World Heritage sites if business-as-usual emissions continue, according to the first-ever global study of World Heritage glaciers.

The sites are home to some of the world’s most iconic glaciers, such as Grosser Aletschgletscher in the Swiss Alps, Khumbu Glacier in the Himalayas, and Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae…

❝ The study in the AGU journal Earth’s Future…combines data from a global glacier inventory, a review of existing literature and sophisticated computer modeling to analyze the current state of World Heritage glaciers, their recent evolution, and their projected mass change over the 21st century.

I spent some truly enjoyable time camped on the climbing approaches to the Jungfrau decades ago. Now, I wish I’d kept the photos I took. I never thought I’d be witnessing the early stages of the death of so much natural beauty at the hands of corporate carbon profiteers and their political pimps.

Oceans are becoming stormier

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Shutterstock

❝ Earth’s oceans have become stormier since 1985, according to a study published Thursday in Science. In the most extreme places, wind speed and wave height rose by about 5 to 8 percent.

If this trend continues, it could exacerbate the effects of sea level rise, including floods that damage coastal communities and natural ecosystems…

❝ The authors said the precise role that climate change is playing in this trend is still unclear, because interactions between the oceans, the atmosphere, and global climate are so complex. It’s possible that the seas are becoming stormier due to warming temperatures, and that stormier conditions in turn contribute to extreme weather events.

Of course, the creeps at the top of the chain of command governing reactionary politics aren’t about to risk their butts working at any tough, dangerous job. If they work for a living at all.