Tag: human-caused

Past seven years hottest on record

1 Comment

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said 2021 was the fifth-warmest year, with record-breaking heat in some regions.

And the amount of warming gases in our atmosphere continued to increase…

The environmental, human and economic costs of hotter temperatures are already being seen globally.

Europe lived through its warmest summer, and temperature records in western US and Canada were broken by several degrees. Extreme wildfires in July and August burnt almost entire towns to the ground and killed hundreds…

The Copernicus data comes from a constellation of Sentinel satellites that monitor the Earth from orbit, as well as measurements taken at ground level.

Conclusions and comments are mixed. Sentiment is predictably pessimistic. I won’t be around long enough to see much of any progress; BUT, I have sufficient confidence in science and practitioners to hope that reasonable solutions will be found. Hopefully, including not only reduced chemical effects on our atmosphere; but, adequate diminishing population in spite of hangers-on hoping to retain their religious blinders on education and politics.

Brief history of extinctions on Earth

3 Comments

“Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants several times since the dawn of animals. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Working in the 19th century, paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier saw dramatic turnovers of life in the fossil record and likened them to the French Revolution, then still fresh in his memory.

Today, we refer to such events as “mass extinctions,” incidents in which many species of animals and plants died out in a geological instant. They are so profound and have such global reach that geological time itself is sliced up into periods—Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous—that are often defined by these mass extinctions.

RTFA and “enjoy” or at least reflect upon the mortality of this widespread but fragile species.

Thanks, Barry Ritholtz