steve austin

from The Guardian

by @jonathanwatts

The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken.

Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature.

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.

read more here

Cause what good is a wall on this planet without a roof too?

Or to put it another way, imagine the inhabitants of the spaceship below holding those kinds of signs.  The fact that all humans share exactly the same thing – a single spaceship – makes that thought kind of completely ridiculous.

By Rafi Letzter, Live Science

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting six times faster than it was in the 1980s. And all that meltwater is directly raising sea levels.

That’s all according to a new study, published April 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that carefully reconstructs the behavior of the ice sheet in the decades before modern measurement tools became available. Scientists already knew that there was a lot more ice on Greenland in the 1970s and 1980s. And they’ve had precise measurements of the increase in melting since the 1990s. Now they know just how dramatically things have changed in the last 46 years.

“When you look at several decades, it is best to sit back in your chair before looking at the results, because it is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing,” University of California, Irvine, glaciologist Eric Rignot, a co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Greenland is just one island. But its ice sheet has the potential to transform the entire planet. The Greenland ice sheet has existed for 2.4 million years and is 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) thick at its deepest point. The whole thing weighs about half as much as Earth’s whole atmosphere, or 6 quintillion — or 6 with 18 zeros after it — lbs. (2.7 quintillion kilograms). If it melted entirely, sea levels would rise by 24.3 feet (7.4 meters).

Between 2000 and 2010, Greenland lost about 412 trillion lbs. (187 trillion kg) of ice per year. Between 2010 and 2018, the ice sheet lost roughly 631 trillion lbs. (286 trillion kilograms) of ice per year.

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Those numbers make concrete what researchers and inhabitants of Greenland already knew: that the island is changing and its ancient glaciers are receding at an alarming rate. The dramatic uptick in ice loss in the last two decades coincides with a similar surge in atmospheric greenhouse gases and warming. As Live Science reported earlier this year, nine of the 10 warmest winters on record have happened since 2005.

What does this all mean for the future of the ice sheet, as well as global sea levels? As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded, that will depend primarily on what humans do next.

By Steve Austin

Sadly, the headline does not refer to a livable climate.  But the consequences are far worse. From The Guardian.

By Andy Stone in Forbes 

“,..despite the major political barriers to dramatic near-term emissions cuts, a terrifying realization is that such action is, in fact, the most realistic option available to hold climate change in check. Of the climate action pathways modeled by the IPCC, the scenario that requires boldest action in the near term is the only one that doesn’t also require a leap of faith that a suite of uneconomic, logistically challenging, and ultimately unproven negative emissions technologies will in fact deliver us from our collective peril.

The gulf between the promise of these technologies (a multitude of variations on carbon capture and storage) and their real ability to offset a future of high carbon emissions appears unbridgeable, if not in terms technological viability, then almost surely in terms of magnitude and scale.

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….none of this is to say negative emissions aren’t possible or a worthwhile pursuit. It’s just that they’re only going to be a partial solution to the climate problem, akin to an insurance policy whose payout is likely to prove woefully inadequate when disaster strikes. We place our bets on the promise of negative emissions, and the dangerous political complacency that such faith engenders, at our global peril.”

The entire piece has a very detailed examination of the physical realities of negative emissions- read it all here

By Steve Austin

Can it just be a streak of bad luck? Unfortunately, for the poor souls who are suffering through this, it might just be the new normal thanks to climate change.

Now in 2019….

LONDON, March 26 (Reuters) – Global energy-related carbon emissions rose to a record high last year as energy demand and coal use increased, mainly in Asia, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.

Energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.7 percent to 33.1 billion tonnes from the previous year, the highest rate of growth since 2013, with the power sector accounting for almost two-thirds of this growth, according to IEA estimates.

The United States’ CO2 emissions grew by 3.1 percent in 2018, reversing a decline a year earlier, while China’s emissions rose by 2.5 percent and India’s by 4.5 percent.

Europe’s emissions fell by 1.3 percent and Japan’s fell for the fifth year running. Continue reading “Uh oh: Global CO2 emissions hit record high in 2018”