The Climate Catastrophe

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Obama Makes Urgent Appeal in Alaska for Climate Change Action

"Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now," Mr. Obama said here at an international conference on the Arctic. "We're not acting fast enough. I have come here today, as the leader of the world's largest economy and its second-largest emitter, to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/us-makes-urgent-appeal-for-climate-change-action-at-alaska-conference.html

"Even if we did reduce the CO2 tomorrow, we can't shut off the warming from the CO2 we've already dumped into the air. "The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge. Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, for longer than the age of human civilization so far." "If it blew over their huts, they could rebuild them. I don't think they had a sense permanence, a sense that their world was settled. Their world was changing every day." "It's exactly the kind of threat that we humans are genetically ill equipped to deal with. We have evolved to defend ourselves from a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth, but we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We're not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water." "Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled them with countless human beings." "I looked again, and another small piece fell. I could feels the physics at work here, the ancient and unstoppable force of a glacier sliding down into the sea and reshaping our world." "If the American people see the president of the United States standing atop a melting glacier and telling them the world is in trouble, will they care?" "It's not a pretty picture, but you can't let yourself be paralyzed by fear. You have to take it one step at a time and do what you can right now." "Walls often make people stupid. They allow you to ignore the risk of living in dangerous places—if something goes wrong, it can be a catastrophe." "It's not just about the next Sandy, as if Sandy was the worst thing that could happen." "For us, the end has already begun. The question is, what is the world going to do about it?" "How long can I stay? And when it's time to leave, where do I go?"

I went to Humboldt State University to study Environmental Science, and this is incredibly dumb... At 0:25 he says that human activity "could be" responsible for the extinction of "nearly" 1,000 plant and animal species in the last 100 years. The real numbers are way higher than that. "Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate." Don't get me wrong, crashcourse makes some really cool stuff, I've seen it... But this guy made a 10 minute presentation on environmental science, and within 30 seconds he shows that he fundamentally misunderstands the magnitude of the crisis he's talking about. We're not just cutting down a few trees and changing the temperature a bit. We cut and burn 40 football fields of trees per minute. We redirect so much water and till so much soil that we have created deserts the size of countries. Misinformation like this makes me furious because it makes people think, "well if only 10 species a year have become extinct over the last 100 years, then maybe this is something we can solve next year if we just try a little bit harder. I'm sure that environmental group or whatever has it on lock..." People need to understand that by doing as much damage as we have, we have committed ourselves to fix it, and it's going to be expensive and controversial and it's going to take decades, and if we don't, this extinction event that we've created will continue to spiral out of control, decimating all the most beautiful things we know and love or want to discover. Want to know what happens when you cut down a very old tree? Here's a tree centuries old, and looks nothing like the other trees around it, and covered in a strange moss, and sweet smelling purple flowers. Only one species of bird in the forest is adapted to suck nectar from these flowers, touting a ridiculously long and otherwise impractical needle of a beak everywhere they go. When this tree falls, its flowers become extinct because they can only grow on that particular tree. The birds return to find the tree and its flowers dead, and they too become extinct... and the bugs that can only survive on the feces of the birds, and the fungus which only grows on the corpses of the poop eating bugs, and the bugs which only eat that particular fungus, and the spider which primarily eats the fungus eating bugs, and so on. The effects ripple through the forest, and hundreds or thousands of other species become extinct because of the felling of this one tree. You guys need to understand... We can't keep doing what we're doing and expect everything to be okay. Everything we love came from the rainforest- Chicken, bananas, strawberries, corn, wheat, prozac, marijuana, cocaine, opium, coffee, the list goes on- basically everything good comes from there, and what most people don't know is that's just the tip of the iceberg. We have yet to discover so much amazing food and medicine that exists in the rainforest, it would be a shame to lose it. Of course the rest of the world is also in jeopardy, but it isn't nearly as valuable, and I think this is the end of my soapbox. Look elsewhere for your education.

a BIG one to baby boomers. Tell them to ask their kids if they plan on having children of their own. Lots of snake people and GenZ are opting out because of climate change. If a boomer thinks they'll miss out on grandkids because of their inaction, they might sit up and take notice. I've seen a few people who thought it was all hyperbole till they realized "no grandkids for YOU." Changes their attitude instantly.

Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections

Sept. 12, 2019 he Trump administration on Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water. The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. Those efforts have focused heavily on eliminating restrictions on fossil fuel pollution, including coal-fired power plants, automobile tailpipes and methane emissions, but have also touched on asbestos and chemical hazards like pesticides. An immediate effect of the clean water repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. But the measure, which is expected to take effect in a matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now be allowed to flow freely into waterways. Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the Vermont Law School, said that, for conservative states and leaders who hold the view that the Clean Water Act has been burdensome for farmers and industry, "this is an opportunity to really drive a stake through the heart of federal water protection." Overhauling the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their properties as they see fit. Mr. Trump signed an executive order in the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin the work of repealing and replacing it. "When you take private property rights from a man who's worked all his life," Mr. Duvall said, "that is very intrusive to him and it's something he just can't stand for." But environmentalists warned of the repercussions. "With many of our cities and towns living with unsafe drinking water, now is not the time to cut back on clean water enforcement," said Laura Rubin, director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition. It was issued under the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the federal government broad authority to limit pollution in major water bodies, like Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River and Puget Sound, as well as streams and wetlands that drain into those larger waters. Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops, and would have been required to obtain E.P.A. permits in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted. and there is no intention to close our borders and there is no intention to roll back clean air standards and pollute the air we breathe and there is no intention to give away our forests to the logging industry and there is no intention to give away our wilderness resources to the oil industry and there is no intention to open up our coastlines to drilling what will it take for you to open your eyes and see what is really going on here. Trump is selling off our future for political and financial gain. Of course there's "no intention to pollute the waters" but unintentional pollution caused by sloppy manufacturing and farming practices is just as bad. With all due respect, perhaps some of the information in this article didn't sink in with various ramifications. A "looser replacement rule" will go into effect by the of 2019. Currently, "farmers using land near streams and wetlands [are] restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops, and [are] required to obtain E.P.A. permits in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted." In essence, farmers will be able to use whatever they chose, regardless of how deadly and toxic the materials they use will be. Those toxins will flow into other bodies of water as well as soak into the soil. Sure, Trump isn't giving orders to directly pollute the waters. By good grief JrpSLm, the results WILL be the same. The waters WILL become polluted. This is NOT an alarmist statement, but rather a cold, realistic statement of fact.

did trump withdraw from paris climate agreement?

Thursday, June 1 2017 United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement 2017

Gobi Desert

a desert located in northern China and southeast Mongolia, and a prime area for finding dinosaur fossils The Gobi Desert is a vast, arid region in northern China and southern Mongolia. It's known for its dunes, mountains and rare animals such as snow leopards and Bactrian camels. In the Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, the Khongoryn Els sand dunes are said to sing when the wind blows. The park also features the deep ice field of Yolyn Am canyon. Dinosaur fossils have been found at the red "Flaming Cliffs" of Bayanzag. The Gobi is the fastest growing desert on Earth, transforming nearly 2,250 miles of grassland per year into inhospitable wasteland. This expansion eats away at space that was once fit for agriculture and creates unbridled sandstorms that batter cities near the edge of the desert.

What percentage of all global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions since 1751 have occurred in my lifetime. If you are 15 it is more than 30% If you are 30 it is more than 50% If you are 85, it is more than 90%

https://twitter.com/neilrkaye/status/1129347990777413632 https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/ftp/ndp058_v2016/readme.ndp058_v2016.txt https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/ftp/ndp058_v2016/?C=N;O=D

Italy floods: Death toll climbs to 17 - as 14 million trees destroyed

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italy-floods-storm-landslide-deaths-river-sicily-forests-trees-destroyed-trentino-veneto-venice-a8616951.html

85 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html

Are we even able to stop it at this point, or are we just trying to mitigate the inevitable damage?

The damage is happening now, even as we speak, so we are definitely in the "mitigate damage" phase. It's going to get much worse before it gets better. However, everything we do to reduce carbon emissions etc. will still have an impact on the scale of the catastrophe. I don't know if a point will come when what we do no longer matters, but the best guess at the moment is that we're not past that point, and probably not near it.

one trillion = one million * one million

big

Climate Change's Role in Tick Migration | Ticks survive in conditions that are more humid.

https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/climate-changes-role-in-tick-migration

Climate change is taking a toll on the $20 billion winter sports industry — and swanky ski homes could lose value

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/climate-change-is-taking-a-toll-on-the-20-billion-ski-industry.html

I created r/climatechange nine years ago to focus on what scientists actually say (as opposed to the scientifically illiterate media) in a dispassionate way, and that includes honest looks at approaches to adaptation and mitigation. The biggest challenge with moderating that sub is getting people past doomerism. There's been good discussion over the years about how we can actually deal with climate change. One of the first things I say in such discussions is that we need advanced nuclear power, so one of the best things people can do as a course of action is to stop supporting the big environmental NGOs (ENGOs), all of which oppose nuclear power. Beyond that, we have numerous ways to mitigate or adapt. Here's a list I made two years ago in a comment: - biochar. (See r/BioChar) - ground up olivine binds with CO2 - ocean fertilization results in more biomass - productions of synthetic fuels using CO2 from the oceans and seawater - reflective objects placed at the L1 Lagrangian point - compression of CO2 in old oil/gas wells - desalination of seawater to irrigate new forests in desert areas - a fleet of autonomous boats that atomize seawater to produce cloud condensation nuclei - using more lumber in construction - painting roofs white - painting rocks in the Arctic white - pumping SO2 into the stratosphere Since that time, I would modify that list a little: All sorts of silicates, not just olivine, can be powdered and used as fertilizer. This is win-win because it binds with CO2 and actually improves crop yields. Reflective objects needn't just be at the Earth-Sun L1. Isaac Arthur (the man himself) actually discussed radiation management in an episode. There are other ways of cloud brightening than just atomized seawater. Wiser management of livestock. Dr. Peter Ballerstedt is a great source on this. The idea is that well managed livestock, especially ruminants actually end up enriching soils, and thus sequestering carbon. This list is not exhaustive, by the way. Just a few examples.

I was never a climate denier but here's the thing: Climate change is a normal occurrence on Earth. The Sahara wasn't always a desert, for example. BUT Humans are ACCELERATING climate change, to the point where we are destroying entire ecosystems. Usually the Earth can repair from SLOW climate change, but the rate at which we are accelerating it is proving to be disastrous.

The water solubility of CO2 and CH4 decreases by approximately 1 to 2% per 1C increase in ocean temperature. Therefore, as the oceans warm, CO2 will move from the large ocean reservoir into the atmosphere, a positive feedback that will further enhance the greenhouse effect. At the same time, three factors will reduce oceanic uptake of carbon, especially at high latitudes: (1) decreased solubility of CO2 at higher temperatures, (2) increased density stratification with warm waters lying on the surface that reduce vertical mixing and transport of CO2 to the deep ocean, and (3) changes in the biogeochemical cycle of CO2. The gain in atmospheric CO2 from these feedbacks is 10% with a doubled and 20% with a quadrupled CO2 atmosphere. This translates into a 15% higher mean global temperature increase than would occur in the absence of these feedbacks (Friedlingstein et al. 2001).

Aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) solution is commonly used for post-combustion carbon capture via chemical absorption. Extensive research has been carried out to characterize both uptake and release of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Trump administration wants to vet worries about drilling near national parks from regional offices

Staffers were concerned about how dust and smog from the oil and gas activity could worsen air quality and obscure the night sky across the canyon-cut parklands in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. "The visiting public expects high-quality experiences across federal land, and we are concerned that continuing to offer parcels for oil and gas exploration and development in proximity to our parks will be detrimental," wrote Kate Cannon, superintendent of the Park Service's Southeast Utah Group, in an October 2017 comment on the potential impacts to Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments. BLM (Bureau of Land Management) went ahead with the sale anyway. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/19/drilling-near-national-parks-trump-admin/

solar irradiance vs atmospheric temperature

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

270 → 280 ppm: ~5000 yrs 280 → 290: ~100 290 → 300: ~40 300 → 310: ~30 310 → 320: ~23 320 → 330: 12 330 → 340: 8 340 → 350: 6 350 → 360: 7 360 → 370: 6 370 → 380: 5 380 → 390: 5 390 → 400: 5 400 → 410: 4 410 → 415.7: 2 We are in a climate emergency.

Climate change in Bangladesh is a pressing issue. According to National Geographic, Bangladesh is one the most vulnerable nations to the impacts of climate change. Bangladesh being located on the Tropic of Cancer receives fairly direct radiation throughout the year and maintains relatively high temperature. A three-foot rise in sea level would submerge almost 20 percent of the country and displace more than 30 million people—and the actual rise by 2100 could be significantly more

Forest carbon sinks could be enhanced. Trees, through photosynthesis, remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as organic carbon until the tree dies and decays, or is burned, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. The World's vegetation and forests currently store about 610 Gt of carbon. Young growing forests shift carbon from the atmosphere into temporarily stored organic biomass, but a mature old-growth forest is probably close to equilibrium, giving off as much carbon to the atmosphere (as trees die and decay) as it removes through photosynthesis. Planting a new tree could effectively offset some CO2 emissions for the life of the tree, often 100 to 300 years, and largescale reforestation could significantly reduce the rate of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. Some scientists suggest that more forests could decrease the Earth's albedo so that the darker surface would absorb more heat and add to global warming.

Here's one sequence for example: In spring, plants will bloom at times they didn't used to, and insects will emerge earlier, so the birds that arrive to eat them won't have food. Because the birds aren't there to eat them, the insects will infest things at a larger rate than they used to, causing various plant species to be eaten at a higher rate. Some of those plants are also eaten by small mammals, but there will be fewer of them, so more of the small mammals will die off--just move that up the food chain, you see where it's headed. Meanwhile the plants that didn't get pollinated like they should won't fruit or set seed, so anything depending on that fruit or seed is also out of luck and by the way, that plant won't reseed itself now. The ecosystems have evolved based on set patterns of weather: rainy season, cold season, hot season, etc. When the weather becomes so erratic that people say "there is no normal for this time of year anymore," it means every living species on the food chain is going to be stressed. Where do you farm if you can't predict the frost, rain and spring? Where do you raise livestock if you can't rely on the water supply and livable outdoor temperatures? How do you generate hydroelectric power without the hydro part? What will people in the valleys of the world do for water when there is no spring runoff from snow melting on the mountains? These problems are already occurring all over the world. Unfortunately, the media isn't reporting much of it if it doesn't happen "here" and they're not connecting the dots that they're all symptoms of the same disease.

I attend a lot of ice/climate/geosciences conferences and still remember a few years back when I was sitting at talk being presented by a good friend and collaborator of mine. He was talking about his temperature reconstruction that he developed using data from a specific Antarctic Ice core that we had both worked on. I've spent enough time in this field now, where it's generally hard to really "shock" me, as it were. But I'll never forgot as he was going through his slides he said, in effect, "Because of this warming trend of XXXX Degrees over the last 100 years, we have permanently eliminated the possibility that we will progress into the next glacial cycle." You see...for the last few million years we've been on a orbitally-driven cycle of very-regular glacial/interglacial periods. But...we have altered the climate and atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases so drastically, that the next glacial cycle will no longer be able to initiate. We truly have begun the Anthropocene period. I had already known this, but hearing him say it so matter-of-factly at large conference if front of so many established scientists was quite sobering.

I got to year 11 science, and we were doing this token chapter on the environment, and it mentioned that the vast majority of atmospheric CO2 is absorbed and stored by the ocean. We'd also done a bit of gas-water solubility, which basically says, any non polar gas (which CO2 is) is only dissolved in water because it's kind of stuck with all the water molecules, like trying to fight your way our of a ball pit. As the thermal energy increases however, it becomes much easier for the CO2 to fight its way out, thus for non polar gasses solubility decreases at higher temperatures (there's also other chemical reactions involved but that's the main gist). It suddenly hit me. As the atmosphere heats up, more CO2 is released, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2......etc. It doesn't matter if you don't believe it's happening right now. It doesn't matter If you think 9 of the 10 past years being the hottest in recorded history was a coincidence. If that process of CO2 liberation begins, humans cannot stop it. Period. To ensure the longevity of our species we need to do everything in our power to make sure it never does. Especially when you add in the permafrost melting because of increased temperatures - which causes more heat increase... which makes more permafrost melt. There are multiple "multipliers" in this positive feedback loop, which means that warming could accelerate at a non-linear rate (maybe not exponential but, not linear). It's scary to think we may have already passed the tipping point. Carbon dioxide is nonpolar because of the symmetry of its bonding. The electronegativity difference between carbon and oxygen is 1.0, which makes the bonds polar. However, the two polar bonds are at 180 degrees to each other so the dipoles cancel out.

Second, there are environmental and safety concerns. Ocean storage involves environmental questions such as acidification of the seawater when the CO2 is dissolved. Also, the lifetime of solid CO2 stored in the deep sea is not known. It might form bubbles and return to the surface. Underground terrestrial storage involves safety questions. Leaking CO2 could, in high enough concentrations, suffocate nearby animal and human populations.

The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84.[5][6] That is, over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 32 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions.[7] Global methane concentrations rose from 722 parts per billion (ppb) in pre-industrial times to 1866 ppb by 2019,[8] an increase by a factor of 2.5 and the highest value in at least 800,000 years.[9] Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated mean half-life of 9.1 years in the atmosphere,[19] whereas carbon dioxide is currently given an estimated mean lifetime of over 100 years.

I think this is the argument that should be made. Even if man-made climate change is not 100% proven or agreed upon, why wouldn't we want to do things that we already can to limit human impact? Money is the only real reason, and it's not good enough. If you could stop the global economy and still do absolutely nothing to stop the heating of our planet then you just messed up the global economy for no reason with billions of people starving instead. I can't speak for every "climate change denier" because I don't live in a country where that's a thing but I have heard plenty of intelligent people, including climate scientists, saying that even if we were to magically stop all carbon emission it would still not change anything, these atmospheric changes takes decades to fully manifest and the ball's already started rolling, it's not going to stop. Plenty of people use that as an excuse to not give a shit and (rightly) blame a lot of initatives reducing emission through tax as economical scams and virtue signaling. You can agree that human made climate change is real and still disagree with the current policies being thrown around. The only way for us to get rid of our carbon dependence is to make it obsolete, either through new technology or through regression back to the stone ages. Well either we make hard choices today, or they are made for us tomorrow. Both endgames result in our extinction or near-extinction, so why not go for the one with an actual chance at success? (That would be stopping global warming, if it wasn't obvious.) I also don't think that moving toward that goal (electric cars, renewable power generation, sustainable farming practices) would by any stretch suddenly make people starve. That is precisely why we need to stop pushing that ball right now. By the time the effects are noticeable and dire, it will be far too late to do anything about. IIRC the BEST CASE scenario, if we turned off all CO2 emission today, is that the Earth would be 2C hotter. That's enough to cause a myriad of droughts and famines already. Obviously turning off instantly is an impossibility, so we are probably looking at far more than that even if we quickly ramped our production down ASAP.

I used to be a skeptic because Earth's environment has changed for billions of years before humanity so we seemed to be an insignificant part of the equation. But an interesting tidbit caught my attention: the first lifeforms on Earth would turn CO into O2 via photosynthesis and ended up becoming so populous they ended up filling up the entire atmosphere with O2 and basically poisoning themselves into extinction because O2 for them was basically farts. So I imagined us humans farting so much we literally fill the atmosphere until we just suffocate to death in our own shit. And if some shitty bugs can change Earth's environment then why the heck can't we?

I was ambivalent about climate change for the longest time. Here's the thing that convinced me things weren't okay. There was a day when I was about twelve years old (so circa 1999) when the weather suddenly went from ~30°F to about ~55°F. There was snow on the ground, but it hadn't melted yet. My brother, the neighbor kid, and I had a snowball fight wearing just gloves and hoodies. That day stuck out in my memory as so bizarre. When would that ever happen again? Now it happens several times each year. The memory of how strange that day seemed gives me pause. That was a noticeable shift in climate that's happened during my lifetime, and it emphasizes the problem: extreme shifts without warning, chaos instead of a predictable cycle.

I'm going to echo a post from a few days ago; we need to stop framing the issue around preventing/halting climate change or "we're killing our planet". We're not. Earth gives zero craps about humans. We are actively destroying our ability to survive on Earth. Life on Earth will persist long after humans die from their own negligence. We should be discussing the topic in terms of how to shape a sustainable global society. We are experiencing a rate of growth that can only lead to a collapse. Whether that's famine, social, economic, or some combination thereof is irrelevant. If our actions today do not consider the fate of the future then the human race is doomed.

In summary: the best thing you can do, apart from causing less emissions, is plant a tree. But you have to make sure that eventually, the tree becomes buried without rotting or burning, or is replaced at its death with another tree, so that the carbon stays captured. And if you replace it with a 2nd tree, you can't claim the 2nd tree sequestered carbon, all it did was extend the sequestration attributed to the first tree. ___________ Tree carbon calculations are always weird and filled with variability based on the life of that tree; Plant a tree. Gets eaten by a deer or moose within a week. No sequestration.Plant another tree. Grows to maturity. Dies in fire. Sequestered for the life of that tree.Plant another tree. Grows to maturity. Gets knocked down by wind. Sequestered for life of tree, plus decay time.Plant another tree. Grows to maturity. Cut it down. Make 2x4s. Build house. Sequestered for life of tree, plus house lifetime, plus decay time after house is demolished.Plant another tree... Trees are at best a delay tactic. They simply stall out the process because trees were already part of the natural carbon cycle. The best we can do with trees is use them to get carbon out of the atmosphere until we can deal with the carbon in a permanent way. Ultimately, we don't reverse the carbon problem until we find a way to get it back to where it come from; deep in the ground, chemically locked up so it can't decay. That said, we are in desperate need of delay tactics right now, so I see value in afforestation. But the carbon locked up in a tree will still be a problem that someone else will have to solve when those trees hit maturity.

On the point of no return: It's likely already passed, I believe we are in the fake mad scramble phase designed to raise awareness but not cause mass hysteria It depends on where you are, and who you are. For the bottom two or three billion people on the planet, almost all of whom are clustered along coasts that are already starting to flood and subsisting at or below starvation levels from farming regions undergoing nutrient depletion and desertification already, you're not very likely to survive long enough to die of natural causes. Poorer people in the developed world (the next few billion) will experience a dramatic slump in quality of life and violence as the bottom few billion are no longer working to produce low cost goods, and are migrating anywhere they can get to. The wealthier you are, the less it'll impact you. So the point of no return for Americans may not have passed, but if you're living in Bangladesh? Yeah, that ship has sailed. "It's Puerto Rico annihilated by a hurricane. It's villages in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal tortured by lethal flooding. The apocalypse is already here; you just don't live there yet."

Poor air quality causes an estimated 114,000 U.S. deaths each year and sickens thousands more. Additionally, the carbon dividend puts money directly into people's pockets every month to spend as they see fit, helping low and middle income Americans.

Removing large quantities of CO2 from the air is difficult. Consider, for example, the self-contained underwater rebreathing apparatus. In this system used by navy divers (and less frequently by sport divers), the diver's exhaled air is filtered through a chemical cartridge containing soda lime (mostly calcium hydroxide, with small amounts of sodium and potassium hydroxide) to remove CO2, and then the air is rebreathed. Unlike the more popular SCUBA system, no air bubbles are released into the surrounding water. Thus, chemical filters can economically remove small quantities of CO2.

There was an article in NewYorker recently, it argued for us to acknowledge that climate catastrophe is inevitable and that we should turn our focus to reducing the size of it, instead of pretending we can prevent it. Do you agree with this assessment? If true, wouldn't the policies required to do damage control be different than those required to prevent any catastrophe? I've heard a lot of commentary disputing this position. The main counterpoint that I've heard is that there isn't some magic threshold after which climate change is devastating and before which it's fine: it's a gradation, and whatever work we can do to prevent warming will help. That's true but there are steeper sections on the curve that we want to avoid. They come from feedback loops coming to bear, like blue ocean events and methane release from permafrost. And it's also true that the faster the climate changes, the worse of a hit the biosphere will take, because fauna and flora will have less time to adapt.

Want to know what happens when you cut down a very old tree? Here's a tree centuries old, and looks nothing like the other trees around it, and covered in a strange moss, and sweet smelling purple flowers. Only one species of bird in the forest is adapted to suck nectar from these flowers, touting a ridiculously long and otherwise impractical needle of a beak everywhere they go. When this tree falls, its flowers become extinct because they can only grow on that particular tree. The birds return to find the tree and its flowers dead, and they too become extinct... and the bugs that can only survive on the feces of the birds, and the fungus which only grows on the corpses of the poop eating bugs, and the bugs which only eat that particular fungus, and the spider which primarily eats the fungus eating bugs, and so on. The effects ripple through the forest, and hundreds or thousands of other species become extinct because of the felling of this one tree.

links: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/eod26h/oceans_are_warming_at_the_same_rate_as_if_five/febp79k?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

A typical 500-MW coal-fired power plant emits (depending on efficiency) about 10,560 metric tonnes of CO2 per day (Stultz and Kitto 1992) Rough estimate of 1.45 trillion pounds of CO2 emitted every day from power plants alone. 62,500 power plants * 10,560 metric tons of CO2/day * 2,200 convert metric ton to pounds And apparently power plants only account for 30% of the CO2

Hydroelectricity from rivers and streams currently supplies 20% of global electrical demand. However, many streams remain untapped and this source could be expanded, particularly through the use of multiple small-stream generators on local scales. However, dams and hydroelectric plants have their own set of environmental impacts, ranging from human population displacement (1.9 million people in the case of Three Gorges) to interference with migrating fish and decreased downstream water flow and sedimentation.

400 billion tons approximate total glacier loss per year since 1994

1 Cazenave, A., Palanisamy, H. and Ablain, M. (2018). Contemporary sea level changes from satellite altimetry: What have we learned? What are the new challenges?. Advances in Space Research, 62(7), pp.1639-1653. Mouginot, J., Rignot, E. and Scheuchl, B. (2019). Continent‐wide, interferometric SAR phase, mapping of Antarctic ice velocity. Geophysical Research Letters. Mouginot, J., Rignot, E., Bjørk, A., van den Broeke, M., Millan, R., Morlighem, M., Noël, B., Scheuchl, B. and Wood, M. (2019). Forty-six years of Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance from 1972 to 2018. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, p.201904242. Rignot, E., Mouginot, J., Scheuchl, B., van den Broeke, M., van Wessem, M. and Morlighem, M. (2019). Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979-2017. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(4), pp.1095-1103. Schröder, L., Horwath, M., Dietrich, R., Helm, V., van den Broeke, M. and Ligtenberg, S. (2019). Four decades of Antarctic surface elevation changes from multi-mission satellite altimetry. The Cryosphere, 13(2), pp.427-449. Zemp, M., Huss, M., Thibert, E., Eckert, N., McNabb, R., Huber, J., Barandun, M., Machguth, H., Nussbaumer, S., Gärtner-Roer, I., Thomson, L., Paul, F., Maussion, F., Kutuzov, S. and Cogley, J. (2019). Global glacier mass changes and their contributions to sea-level rise from 1961 to 2016. Nature, 568(7752), pp.382-386. 2 National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

How do we know what greenhouse gas and temperature levels were in the distant past?

Ice cores are scientists' best source for historical climate data. Every winter, some snow coating Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets is left behind and compressed into a layer of ice. By extracting cylinders of ice from sheets thousands of meters thick, scientists can analyze dust, ash, pollen and bubbles of atmospheric gas trapped inside. The deepest discovered ice cores are an estimated 800,000 years old. The particles trapped inside give scientists clues about volcanic eruptions, desert extent and forest fires. The presence of certain ions indicates past ocean activity, levels of sea ice and even the intensity of the Sun. The bubbles can be released to reveal the make-up of the ancient atmosphere, including greenhouse gas levels. Other tools for learning about Earth's ancient atmosphere include growth rings in trees, which keep a rough record of each growing season's temperature, moisture and cloudiness going back about 2,000 years. Corals also form growth rings that provide information about temperature and nutrients in the tropical ocean. Other proxies, such as benthic cores, extend our knowledge of past climate back about a billion years into the past.

How Grazing Cows Can Save the Planet, and Other Surprising Ways of Healing the Earth

It's not even the # of cows that's the biggest problem, it's the way we treat/use them. Cows in their natural state can actually reduce atmospheric CO2, the polar opposite of what's happening now. I don't have a source, nor do I know whether I'm about to say is true. However, I do know how this sort of thing works in the ocean, and assume it's at least similar for cows, so I'll apply similar logic. Cows in their natural state eat things like prairie grass, etc, not corn. By eating all this grass, they allow the plants to grow at a more efficient rate than they would otherwise. (If a wild grass would typically grow to 10 feet then plateau, the only CO2 it would remove from the atmosphere would be to keep itself alive, which would be a bit of a wash. If, however, it is continually regenerating itself, some of the carbon it takes from the atmosphere will inevitable go towards structures that the cows will then eat and process.) While it's true that these cows will breathe most of this carbon back into the atmosphere, some of it will remain in parts of the cow that won't be processed after they die, and will basically be eroded into particles that will become part of the dirt. If, let's say, each cow's body contains 20 pounds of carbon in forms that won't be broken down by scavengers and fungi, that's 20 pounds of carbon that was removed from the atmosphere. Had they not eaten all the grass to generate these parts of their body, that grass would've stopped growing, stopped the net removal of carbon from the atmosphere, and the carbon would still be simple CO2 helping heat the planet. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/01/12/grazing-cows-biological-farming.aspx

antarctica just hit 65 degrees

Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 65 degrees was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent's highest measured temperature in history. https://www.google.com/search?q=antarctica+just+hit+65+degrees&oq=antarctica+just+hit+&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2.5492j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

CO2 released daily from fossil fuels vs. volcanoes

Last year, all the world's nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, according to new international calculations on global emissions published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. (2012) According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world's volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide. (2009) 38.2/365 = 104 million tons of carbon released anthropogenically daily. Let that sink in. 208 billion pounds of carbon released each day.. 300/365 = 800,000 tons released each day due to volcanic activity.

Direct Air Capture (DAC)

Our Direct Air Capture technology has four major pieces of equipment. The process starts with an air contactor, which is a large structure modelled off industrial cooling towers. A giant fan pulls air into this structure, where it passes over thin plastic surfaces that have potassium hydroxide solution flowing over them. This non-toxic solution chemically binds with the CO2 molecules, removing them from the air and trapping them in the liquid solution as a carbonate salt. The CO2 contained in this carbonate solution is then put through a series of chemical processes to increase its concentration, purify and compress it, so it can be delivered in gas form ready for use or storage. This involves separating the salt out from solution into small pellets in a structure called a pellet reactor. These pellets are then heated in our third step, a calciner, in order to release the CO2 in pure gas form. This step also leaves behind processed pellets that are hydrated in a slaker and recycled back within the system to reproduce the original capture chemical.

how many species go extinct in an average day?

Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species will become extinct each year. If the low estimate of the number of species out there is true - i.e. that there are around 2 million different species on our planet** - then that means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. Idk man. Whatever the numbers are, they're not good.

What's the difference between weather and climate?

Some people say "weather is what you get" and "climate is what you expect." "Weather" refers to the more local changes in the climate we see around us, on short timescales from minutes to hours to days to weeks. Examples are familiar - rain, snow, clouds, winds, thunderstorms, heat waves and floods. "Climate" refers to longer-term averages (they may be regional or global), and can be thought of as the weather averaged over several seasons, years or decades. Climate change is harder for us to get a sense of because the timescales involved are much longer, and the impact of climate changes can be less immediate. Examples of climate change include several drier-than-normal summers, a trend of, say, winters becoming milder from our grandparents' childhood to our own, or variations in effects like El Niño or La Niña.

Trump rolls back endangered species protections

The Trump administration on Monday announced it has finalized a controversial rollback of protections for endangered species, including allowing economic factors to be weighed before adding an animal to the list. The Interior Department regulations would dramatically scale back America's landmark conservation law, limiting protections for threatened species, how factors like climate change can be considered in listing decisions and the review process used before projects are approved on their habitat. "It means that in all likelihood that the federal government itself and individuals will be damaging the habitat and likely increase the timetable and likelihood of a species going extinct," David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center and a former deputy of Interior, said in a previous interview with The Hill. "You'll see a parade of species listed as threatened because they will have no protective teeth behind them," she said. "It's absolutely driving species closer to extinction." Strip-mining the country and destroying our land and animals, all so a handful of people can make a quick profit. Seems like a weird way to put "America first." https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457086-trump-administration-rolls-back-endangered-species-protections

Trump rolls back regulations on energy-saving light bulbs

The Trump administration said it will roll back requirements for more energy-efficient lightbulbs, a set of rules that could lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate global warming. The decision will prevent new efficiency requirements from getting implemented in January. The standards applied to about half of the roughly 6 billion light bulbs used in the U.S, and would have prevented millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/trump-rolls-back-requirements-on-energy-saving-light-bulbs.html

how many trees are chopped down each day?

Throughout the world, about 900 million trees are cut down annually. This equates to about 2.47 million trees cut down every day. As to the "number of trees" this represents, it's impossible to get an accurate count. Tree density in primary forests varies from 50,000-100,000 trees per square km, so the math would put this number at 3.5 billion to 7 billion trees cut down each year. The study by the journal Nature estimated current and historical rates of tree cover loss. It said that the number of trees worldwide has fallen 46 percent since the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago and more than 15 billion trees are felled every year. Nearly 42,000,000 trees are cut down daily.

Is the ozone hole causing climate change?

Yes and no. The ozone hole is basically a man-made hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole during the Southern Hemisphere's spring. The ozone layer, which lies high up in the atmosphere, shields us from harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays that come from the Sun. Unfortunately we punched a hole in it, through the use of gases like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in spray cans and refrigerants, which break down ozone molecules in the upper atmosphere. While some extra of the Sun's UV rays slip through the ozone hole, their net effect is to cool the stratosphere more than they warm the troposphere. So this increase in UV rays cannot explain the global warming of the planet's surface. What scientists have uncovered recently, however, is that the ozone hole has been affecting climate in the Southern Hemisphere. That's because ozone is also a powerful greenhouse gas, and destroying it has made the stratosphere (the second layer of the atmosphere going upwards) over the Southern Hemisphere colder. The colder stratosphere has resulted in faster winds near the pole, which somewhat surprisingly can have impacts all the way to the equator, affecting tropical circulation and rainfall at lower latitudes. The ozone hole is not causing global warming, but it is affecting atmospheric circulation. https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/15/is-the-ozone-hole-causing-climate-change/

Ozone Hole

Yes, this. The ozone hole didn't really affect anyone in the northern hemisphere. New Zealand is getting screwed by the ozone hole. They have the highest skin cancer rates in the world, 4 times higher than Canada, US, or UK. So yes, the ozone hole did as much damage as everyone said it would. Skin cancer is the most common cancer in New Zealand. New skin cancers total about 82,000 per year, compared to a total of 16,000 for all other types of cancer. Our skin cancer rates are the highest in the world. In fact, the incidence of melanoma in New Zealand and Australia is around four times higher than in Canada, the US and the UK. Over 90% of skin cancers are due to excess UV exposure in high UV environments like New Zealand. Non-malignant skin cancers are generally found on the exposed parts of the body (such as the face and forearms), and long-term frequent UV exposure is thought to be a predominant cause. The low ozone levels - the ozone layer absorbs a good deal of UVB ultraviolet light from the Sun. Any decrease in the ozone layer (such as the 'ozone hole' over Antarctica) is expected to increase surface UVB levels. Excessive UVB exposure causes skin cancers such as basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas. However, UVA, which is linked to melanoma, is not absorbed by ozone. https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1329-new-zealand-skin-cancer-statistics

Too much greenhouse effect: The atmosphere of Venus, like Mars, is nearly all carbon dioxide. But Venus has about 154,000 times as much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as Earth (and about 19,000 times as much as Mars does), producing a runaway greenhouse effect and a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

U.S. Regional Effects Below are some of the impacts that are currently visible throughout the U.S. and will continue to affect these regions, according to the Third3 and Fourth4 National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours and sea level rise pose growing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning. Northwest. Changes in the timing of streamflow reduce water supplies for competing demands. Sea level rise, erosion, inundation, risks to infrastructure and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire, insect outbreaks and tree diseases are causing widespread tree die-off. Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts. Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also exacerbate a range of risks to the Great Lakes. Southwest. Increased heat, drought and insect outbreaks, all linked to climate change, have increased wildfires. Declining water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, health impacts in cities due to heat, and flooding and erosion in coastal areas are additional concerns.

https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Climate Change: How Do We Know?