[Keith_McClary]

Using a set of satellite images from the Google Earth Engine Timelapse dataset, Professor Lewkowicz and his co-author Robert Way recorded an astounding sixty-fold increase in the number retrogressive thaw slumps—landslides caused by the melting of the ice in the permafrost—on Banks Island over the past three decades. In 1984, there were about 60 active thaw slumps on the island. In 2013, there were more than 4,000

3 min. video with timelapse of slump (18 days in 13 seconds).
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-slippery- ... rctic.html

[Newfie]

Thanks, I did not know that was going on.

[dohboi]

Yeah, good catch, Keith!

Meanwhile, a sobering article at Cat6:

Global CO2 Emissions Hit an All-Time High in 2018; is a Hothouse Earth in our Future?

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Globa ... at6-widget

[Cog]

Or a prelude to another ice age. Its happened before.

[dohboi]

Earth’s Glaciers Melting Much Faster Than Previously Thought: Study
Glacier melt is accelerating due to global warming, and adding more water to already rising seas, the study found.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/earth-gl ... 7a705be906

[dissident]

Earth’s Glaciers Melting Much Faster Than Previously Thought: Study
Glacier melt is accelerating due to global warming, and adding more water to already rising seas, the study found.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/earth-gl ... 7a705be906

Oh my, yet another non-surprise surprise. We already saw this with the Greenland ice sheet. As of the year 2000, understanding of ice sheet dynamics was sadly lacking. It seems that 19 years later, "unexpected" findings are rolling in.

It seems that there is some resistance to the idea that ice sheets are meta-stable systems that exhibit self-organized criticality. Instead the old and brain-dead ice cube analogy is still afflicting the minds of researchers and lay people. An ice sheet resembles an ice cube only at the smallest scale. On larger scales it is basically a slurry with a low creep rate. And all those cracks that permeate its volume are a great conduit for water which does not freeze before reaching the base. Thanks to increasing pressure with depth the water is actually prevented from freezing. And the tight contact of the fracture interfaces results in capillary action so that water still penetrates to the base even though the pressure increases.

Being a self-organized critical system, ice sheets can exhibit nonlinear responses to heating. Instead of ablating over centuries, they experience surges in flow and catastrophic ice loss.

Be prepared for a crescendo of surprises in the future.

[dohboi]

How Trump’s border crisis is driven by climate change

For months, President Trump has tweeted and raged about the ongoing migration crisis along the U.S. southern border.
…
What Trump has spent far less time discussing are the driving forces of this current wave of migration — at least not the one whose very existence the president still disputes. But it’s become increasingly clear that climate change has played a significant part in deepening the extreme poverty and insecurity that compels many to head north. According to the World Bank, climate change could lead to at least 1.4 million people leaving their homes in Mexico and Central America over the next three decades.
…
A recent lengthy exposé by the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer focused on the expanding “dry corridor” — a region in Central America marred by drought that stretches from Panama to the southern reaches of Mexico. Conditions are particularly acute in the highlands that link central Honduras to western Guatemala, where millions of subsistence farmers have seen their livelihoods ravaged not just by lack of rain, but also its excess — floods, landslides and hurricanes. Their plight has been compounded by woeful agricultural infrastructure and national governments that have few resources to help them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/201 ... 18a34655ce

[dohboi]

For a laugh:

"You better get down on your hands and knees and kiss Jimmy Carter's rosy-red Georgia-peach-picking ass and beg me to run your fucking country again"

"But who comes to me, huh? Fucking nobody. Why ask old Jimmy anything? What the fuck could he know about peace in the Middle East? It's not like he fucking won the Nobel Peace Prize for that shit. "

"Cocksuckers."

"Oh, what's that I hear? The weather's all screwy? You got a global warming problem? Boo-fucking-hoo! I was telling you morons to turn off your lights and unplug all your shit at night to conserve energy in 19-fuckin'-75, for chrissake. "

"You had your chance with Jimmy Carter, and you fucking blew it. "

https://politics.theonion.com/i-got-wha ... 1819584452

[Newfie]

LOL! About right. As I recall I was the other guy to vote for his second term.

[Newfie]

Here’s an interesting bit of good news.

Swiss billionaire gives away 1 billion to protect ecosystem.

https://www.livekindly.co/83-year-old-s ... bwkX4PQx64

[dohboi]

Climate change exacerbates inequality:

the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries

...per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019 ... 1816020116

[dohboi]

Japan is cancelling many of the coal fired power plants it planned to build after the Fukishima disaster.

https://www.reuters.com/article/japan-c ... SL3N2280MH

[dohboi]

Twelfth Annual Survey of Emerging Risks: Summary of Finding

https://www.casact.org/cms/files/12th-A ... ging_1.pdf

For the first time in the survey’s history, climate change ranked as both the top current risk and leading emerging risk – breaking cyber risk’s four-year streak as number one – according to the Twelfth Annual Emerging Risks Survey of Risk Managers from the Joint Risk Management Section (JRMS) of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) and the Society of Actuaries (SOA).

[Plantagenet]

Japan is cancelling many of the coal fired power plants it planned to build after the Fukishima disaster.

https://www.reuters.com/article/japan-c ... SL3N2280MH

Any reduction in CO2 emissions attributable to the 13 coal-fired power plants that Japan is cancelling will be swamped by CO2 emissions from the 300+ new coal-fired power plants that China is building.

why-is-china-placing-a-global-bet-on-coal

Cheers!

[dohboi]

Britain sets record of 7 days without coal power as renewables surge:
UK to shutter all coal plants by 2025

Great Britain’s electrical grid has gone more than seven days without burning any coal as of Wednesday morning, the longest stretch on record since the Industrial Revolution began in England over two centuries ago.

https://thinkprogress.org/britain-coal- ... e-GXz2Jy0M

(As P will doubtless immediately inform us yet again, China is still building coal plants. There, now he doesn't have to bother himself to remind us. )

[eclipse]

I'm optimistic we can beat peak oil & climate change if we adopt abundant reliable nuclear power now, but I'm sceptical about how large a mix renewables will supply. Depending on the mix, maybe 30%? So when I read headlines about UK not burning coal for a week, I'm wondering about how much natural gas they burned and how much electricity they imported from abundant baseload nuclear France?

[Tanada]

I'm optimistic we can beat peak oil & climate change if we adopt abundant reliable nuclear power now, but I'm sceptical about how large a mix renewables will supply. Depending on the mix, maybe 30%? So when I read headlines about UK not burning coal for a week, I'm wondering about how much natural gas they burned and how much electricity they imported from abundant baseload nuclear France?

Agree 100% on the first part. However on the issue of climate change, we have now progress so far down the road of CO2 emission and we continue to accelerate our rate of CO2 emission that I no longer believe avoidance of vast change is within our possible futures.

[dohboi]

We all want a silver bullet or a knight in shining armor to come in and save the day.

For some, it is nukes (which I guess would be a knight in glowing armor :D )

For others it's renewables, or lifestyle changes, or cosmic rays...

But as T points out, the die is now cast. Really, really bad things are not baked in (and I mean baked!). We may be able to keep things from going to the level of really really really really bad...but I even have my doubts about that. And now even that would take heroics that are pretty clearly beyond our current deranged body politic.

[Newfie]

And the question remains, what to do?

That has something to do with how long this mess takes to unfold and if something else exacerbates the situation in the meantime. Still many unknowns.

It’s likely none of us will die from climate change. So, IMHO, we are really talking about helping our kids be in a position to cope. And from my experience that ain’t easy.

[Newfie]

What to do? Here is a region that will feel the stress early on. The Hindu Kush.


https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/why-the ... s-matters/