A new international research study on the cause of Arctic amplification published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that local greenhouse gas concentrations, and Arctic climate feedbacks outweigh other processes. Using complex computer simulations, the scientists were able to disprove previously suggested hypotheses, that emphasized the role of transport of heat from the tropics to the poles as one of the key contributors to the amplified warming in the Arctic.
"Our study clearly shows that local carbon dioxide forcing and polar feedbacks are most effective in Arctic amplification compared to other processes," said corresponding author Malte Stuecker, project leader at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) in Busan, South Korea.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-local-dri ... c.html#jCp
In the tropics—fueled by high temperature and moisture—air can easily move up to high altitudes, meaning the atmosphere is unstable. In contrast, the Arctic atmosphere is much more stable with respect to vertical air movement. This condition enhances the CO2-induced warming in the Arctic near the surface. In the tropics—due to the unstable atmosphere—CO2 mostly warms the upper atmosphere and energy is easily lost to space. This is opposite to what happens in the Arctic: Less outgoing infrared radiation escapes the atmosphere, which further amplifies the surface-trapped warming.
"Our computer simulations show that these changes in the vertical atmospheric temperature profile in the Arctic region outweigh other regional feedback factors, such as the often-cited ice-albedo feedback" says Malte Stuecker.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-local-dri ... c.html#jCp
Guy McPherson & Dahr Jamail - Moment of Bliss
6.640 weergaven
Tim Bob
Gepubliceerd op 7 mrt. 2018
Video: BBC Blue Planet II
Music: Battle Hymn of the Republic - Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
The Murder of Crows - 'Moment of Bliss'
Beautiful! Profound words of wisdom by one of the few hero's of our current time; Guy McPherson. Great job Tim Bob in creating this perfect montage using short but poignant video clips and corresponding music to this dire but honest message! And thanks to Dahr Jamail for his important words as well! BRAVO TO ALL!
After listening to this ep with Dr David Suzuki, you’ll never be the same again. The environmentalist, activist, professor of genetics and science broadcaster hits us with some home truths about what our future will look like if we continue to live the way we have been. What will life be like for our children and grandchildren? Can the damage we’ve done to the planet be reversed? Is extinction of the human race imminent?
We talk about population control, the importance of renewable energy and discuss what we can do right now in our own lives that can actually make a difference. This is for anyone who cares about the future of mankind.
Timestamps
20:06 Why humanity has only got 1 minute left to live
25:25 Humans are the only species that don't care about their own children
29:17 Educate yourself on politics or don't complain about the government
36:26 Can we be saved from our own extinction?
59:09 A final challenge for entrepreneurs
The unrelenting increase in global levels of atmospheric methane went literally off-the-charts used to display methane for the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS). Methane levels were so high that they swamped out the colour scheme used in the map legend, causing saturation in large red blobs with little detail. The colour legend was shifted by 100 ppb to more clearly show the detailed structure of where methane was being emitted.
Climate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate via a plethora of direct and indirect, often synergic, mechanisms. Among these, primary extinctions driven by environmental change could be just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg. As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources — a process known as ‘co-extinction’ — is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss. Although the general relevance of co-extinctions is supported by a sound and robust theoretical background, the challenges in obtaining empirical information about ongoing (and past) co-extinction events complicate the assessment of their relative contributions to the rapid decline of species diversity even in well-known systems, let alone at the global scale. By subjecting a large set of virtual Earths to different trajectories of extreme environmental change (global heating and cooling), and by tracking species loss up to the complete annihilation of all life either accounting or not for co-extinction processes, we show how ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.
Being in the midst of the sixth mass extinction1, it is fitting to quantify the relative contribution of different mechanisms driving catastrophic biodiversity loss. Drivers directly related to anthropogenic modifications of the biosphere are apparent and well-described: habitat destruction, over-exploitation, and biotic invasions2. Similarly, the effects of environmental change (e.g., temperature rise, increased droughts, ocean acidification, et cetera) can be easily interpreted — when the environmental conditions of a certain locality become incompatible with the tolerance limits of inhabiting species, in many cases these will go locally extinct, just like fish in an aquarium with a broken thermostat (even if there are counter examples of species that have been capable of rapid adaptation to novel environmental conditions3). Yet, there are other, more complicated mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss. In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse4,5,6,7,8,9.
This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes. A previous study14 contended this idea by using the remarkable tolerance of tardigrades to extreme temperature, pressure, and radiation as a reference to calculate the likelihood of global sterilization on an Earth-like planet following different, dramatic astrophysical events. The stunning conclusion of that study is that life on our planet has the potential to survive asteroid impacts, supernovae, and gamma-ray bursts14. This ostensibly reassuring news highlights how some scientists still tend to disregard the role of co-extinctions within collapsing communities in driving global biodiversity loss, while focusing on individual species’ tolerance limits as the only criteria relevant to species survival in a changing world. Ecologists know the optimism is not supported quantitatively, but can we estimate the magnitude of the bias?
Here we attempt to do this by combining real-world ecological and environmental data to generate several virtual Earths populated by interconnected species-interaction networks where we allow species to move and adapt, that we then subjected to extreme, global environmental change. By comparing scenarios of extinctions based only on species’ environmental tolerances with others accounting also for co-extinctions, we show that neglecting to consider the cascading effect of biodiversity loss leads to a large overestimation of the robustness of planetary life to global change.
Conversation with Dr. Guy McPherson on Nov. 18, 2018
Peter Miller - http://www.breakawaymhe.com
Guy McPherson - http://www.guymcpherson.com
Topics discussed...
- comments in youtube videos
- carbon sequestration technologies
- accountability for greenhouse effect (who got us here? who should take responsibility?)
- the self-defeating nature of neoclassical economics/capitalism
- pathology of the rich and powerful
- shifting pathology to the powerless (gaslighting)
- hubris in science, hubris in general
- thoughts about "deep state"
- when/how/if to communicate extinction info. to children
Parental Advisory for explicit content
onlooker wrote:Fredrik, you need to read the many threads of Runaway Global warming on this site. In them you can peruse the many commentaries from Cid Yama synthesizing what some scientists are saying is happening in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. Suffice to say we are talking about a substantial amount of disassociated methane just below the permafrost in danger of being released because this permafrost is melting under current conditions there.
dohboi wrote:Back to Guy--I do think that he tends to look at the ranges of possibilities presented at any time anywhere in the science and assumes that the absolute worse is sure to happen.
Rod_Cloutier wrote:Parental Advisory for explicit content
Content over the top. The lucky bugger got a threesome, and yet he's travelling all around the place telling people to commit suicide.
His reputation has just gone down a few notches.
dohboi wrote:???
I just said what you just said, so why are you asking me this? He doesn't give statistical ranges of probability. He just picks the most extreme point that he can find anywhere in the literature and presents it as the value.
I don't really care much about what he says or what he has predicted. Coming up with specific years for when you know something is going to happen for sure when it come to something as complex as climate is just stupid.
So we're in agreement on that, right?
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