Green Group discussion

You mention gases in the atmosphere, Robert; here's a new look at the amount of methane. When concentrating on CO2 we might forget CH4. The carbon is still present, but this molecule is much better at trapping heat, though it breaks down faster. That's just to put this report in context for everyone; although CO2 emissions slowed recently, CH4 hasn't.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-global-...

"Between 2000 and 2017, levels of the potent greenhouse gas barreled up toward pathways that climate models suggest will lead to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of this century. This is a dangerous temperature threshold at which scientists warn that natural disasters, including wildfires, droughts and floods, and social disruptions such as famines and mass migrations become almost commonplace. "

This report is from Stanford and there is a good infographic showing sources of emissions and natural sinks.

The population might now grow at a slower pace globally than suggested by the UN.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-world-p...

The IHME say it's because of people getting more educated, women getting more rights and the average age rising. China could be .7 billion and Nigeria will rival India.
I could see the Chinese government ordering people to have two or three kids if they thought it would help their nation in some way.
Likewise, once everyone has left college and looked around and found there are no jobs because everything is automated from call centres to factories, why not have a couple of kids? Raising them would give you something to do.
I doubt this report has taken all the randoms into account. But a lower population would mean less pressure on resources, less pollution, etc.

The methane is a huge problem. Supposedly there is more methane sitting on the Earth's crust below water or under permafrost than there is coal and oil. It is trapped on the surface of the planet and held in place only by the temperature.

The melting permafrost will pump an enormous amount of methane into the air. There are also extremely large deposits of frozen methane laying on the ocean floor. It looks like slush and is home to a large variety of sea creatures. The frozen underwater methane deposits are very similar to the super hot water chimneys venting into the ocean. Both ecosystems' animals use chemosynthesis bacteria to get energy from the methane or the sulfur oxides and sulphates. In the hydrothermal vents the dominant energy substance is sulfur. In the frozen seeps it is methane.

The similarity ends there. Unlike the narrow hydrothermal vents, the frozen methane seeps are spread out over wide areas. The methane comes from within the Earth and the methane comes from the action of bacteria breaking down ocean sediments. A lot of it is in waters that are not very deep and open to temperature increases that will cause the methane seeps to rise to the surface. This will unlock methane that has been sequestered by bacteria as a frozen slush that doesn't float for the past couple of million years.

Because the methane has been deposited by forming the slush over millions of years, there are huge quantities of easy to reach methane deposits energy companies are planning on harvesting.

The energy companies say the deposits are stable and won't suddenly melt add methane to the atmosphere. This is while the oceans are getting measurably warmer and the permafrost is melting at record rates. The slush is not found in the coldest, deepest waters (so far) because there are only very low levels of edible sediment for the bacteria to decompose.

https://helix.northwestern.edu/blog/2...

https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1...

Thank you for this, Robert.
Worrying indeed.
I expect Russia and Canada would be the two top countries for frozen methane.

Press release:

"There is growing support for the move to make ecocide an international crime: last November Pope Francis called for ecocide as a “fifth category of crimes against peace”; in December the small island states of Vanuatu and the Maldives called for serious consideration of ecocide crime at the International Criminal Court’s assembly; earlier this year the Swedish workers movement urged Sweden to lead on proposing it; and just last month President Macron of France promised to champion it on the international stage. "

Belgium is exploring making ecocide a crime.
https://www.stopecocide.earth/press-r...

Australia is planning a 2.7 km concrete runway in Antarctica.

https://www.ecowatch.com/concrete-run...

That article leaves the worst for last. It would appear several, if not most of the nations with an Antarctica presence are all ramping up their "footprints" and it seems more likely they are getting ready to cut up the cake, not preserve it.

An assessment of Earth’s climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence, SHERWOOD et al. (2020)

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...

Cloud research added to factors we already know, plus historical comparisons.

"That’s just the tip of the cloud research iceberg, to say nothing of the other variables they considered, including Earth’s reflectivity, ice sheets, and even dust. Like I said: complex. Peter Cox, a University of Exeter climate scientist who wasn’t involved with the study, told Earther via email that the “paper is a monumental effort to consider multiple lines of evidence.”

The end result, sadly, shows that we can likely rule out the lower estimates of climate sensitivity. This is bad news, since lower sensitivity would buy us a little more time to address carbon pollution and adapt to heating. Instead, the results show that the likely range of global warming we can expect if carbon dioxide levels double is 4.7 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2.6 to 3.9 degrees Celsius). The former is well above the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), meaning meeting it is essentially impossible if the world doubles pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide. On the “bright” side, the study shows that the previously held upper limit of climate sensitivity is also unlikely."

https://earther.gizmodo.com/scientist...

Zurich has ceased to insure a major pipeline works project.

Any time I get a survey I say I want firms I deal with to be environmentally sound.

"Trans Mountain's current insurance contract runs out in August of this year, according to Reuters. For now, the company says it still has enough insurers to cover its regular operations and the expansion.

"There remains adequate capacity in the market to meet Trans Mountain's insurance needs and our renewal," a pipeline spokesperson told Reuters in an email.

Zurich did not comment on its reasons for abandoning the project.

Other insurers who covered the project this year include Munich Re, Lloyd's of London, Liberty Mutual and Chubb. Munich Re said it would review the contract based on its new policies on covering oil sands. The others declined to comment.

One insurer who dropped out in July, Talanx, based its decision on climate concerns.

"As a matter of principle, Talanx no longer invests in companies that derive more than 25% of their revenue or generate more than 25% of their power from coal. In addition, oil sands have been added to the list of exclusion criteria for both investments and underwriting," the company wrote, as Burnaby Now reported."

https://www.ecowatch.com/trans-mounta...

I have always maintained that the lower, milder, plenty of time before it happens, levels of climate change are signs of denial, just the same as those who say it isn't happening. I didn't inhale.

Until the world can figure out a way to allow underdeveloped regions, and countries that want more, to achieve the same level of austerity, comfort, and comparable levels of sanitation and educational opportunities that generate more progress for most of their citizens, as experienced by developed countries, the path of underdeveloped regions will push the envelope of "acceptable" climate change numbers past any levels thought to be acceptable.

The projected sales rate for air conditioners in Africa for 2019 through 2025 is 5.7 percent.

It is a low number not because they already have enough air conditioners but because they don't have the power or the civil infrastructure to install more units. As the power becomes available, the number of air conditioning units will automatically increase.

The rise of the US New South in the 1950s and 60s was powered by air conditioners. The installation of air conditioners as they became available caused the southern populations to significantly increase which directly increased the southern states power in the US Congress as they got more representatives year after year.

The air conditioning made for comfortable housing, good working conditions, and the ability to store all kinds of products. Because the money, the power, and the civil infrastructure was already there, the flow of air conditioners from the factory floors to the windows and building tops was a non stop river of sales, installation, and comfort.

Air conditioning is in almost 100 million American homes, representing 87 percent of all households. The heating and cooling of all kinds of buildings uses 48 percent of the US electrical energy. Compare that to the figure of 5 percent for the number of homes in Africa with air conditioning. In the US and the other developed countries, air conditioning is thought of as a necessity, not a luxury.

Forecast Of Air Condition Sales
https://apnews.com/f9d3e9f5eb2e43eaa3...

History Of Air Conditioning
https://www.energy.gov/articles/histo...

Fascinating; air con is not normally in homes in Ireland, just offices and colleges.
When we visited the US we have found that the a/c is too high. People are sitting in shirtsleeves in a temperature that freezes me.

I know a lot of Irish lads who went to work in Australia are fitting wraparound insulation to houses, to cool them. Firstly this keeps heat out and secondly it keeps cool indoors.

In one of my SF books I project London builders putting a big temporary dome over an office building site so the main structure can be built. Inside the dome is air conditioned. Once the building is sufficiently finished that a/c can be installed for the indoor work, the see-through dome can be dismantled.
I based this on reports that this already has to happen in the Middle East.

As air conditioned temporary domes over large construction projects become more sophisticated, they could be a forerunner of something more permanent, either here on Earth or off planet.

Well, the services are still external, which will not be the case off-planet. But yes, that is what we'll need.

The atmosphere over Southern Hemisphere is much less polluted than the industrialised North, so scientists are able to study what the world used to be like before the Industrial Revolution. Not completely, but a good proxy.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-pristin...

"The team used satellite measurements of cloud droplet concentration in the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere—heavily polluted with today's industrial aerosols—and over the relatively pristine Southern Ocean.

They used these measurements to quantify the possible changes due to industrial aerosols in Earth's albedo since 1850.

The results, published today in the journal PNAS, suggest that early-industrial aerosol concentrations and cloud droplet numbers were much higher than is currently estimated by many global climate models. This could mean that human-generated atmospheric aerosols are not having as strong a cooling effect as some climate models estimate. The study suggests that the effect is likely to be more moderate."

More information: Isabel L. McCoy el al., "The hemispheric contrast in cloud microphysical properties constrains aerosol forcing," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.192...
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Protest, but be careful. You may find it hard to believe but people are in danger because they protect their local environment.

"In 2019, a record number of environmental activists were killed for trying to protect land and water resources from mining, agribusiness and fossil fuel interests, according to a report released Wednesday by Global Witness, as CNN reported.

The number of activist deaths that Global Witness recorded was 212, a nearly 30 percent increase from 2018, when the organization recorded 164 deaths linked to environmental activism. The NGO also warned that the true number is likely higher since many deaths go unreported, according to The Guardian."

https://www.ecowatch.com/environmenta...

https://www.globalwitness.org/en/camp...

https://www.theguardian.com/environme...

Hottest day since records began in 1955 in northern Spain.
Local records broken elsewhere in Spain.
Increase in tropical nights- that's when the temperature doesn't go below 20 C.

"San Sebastian on Spain's northern coast witnessed 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday—the hottest temperature there since records began in 1955, the national weather agency said.

The city of Palma, on Spain's Mediterranean island of Mallorca, set a local record of 40.6 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday.

The Spanish weather agency, Aemet, said tropical nights— when temperatures do not fall below 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit)—were also frequent in many parts of Spain in July.

"Climate change is increasing the frequency of heatwaves," it said, adding that the annual number of days in heatwave conditions has doubled since the 1980s.

To the north, U.K. residents sought shade as temperatures rose above 37 degrees Celsius. National weather agency the Met Office said a reading of 37.8 degrees Celsius—100 degrees Fahrenheit—was recorded at Heathrow Airport west of London. That made Friday the hottest day of 2020 and the third-hottest on record."

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-spain-t...

The North Atlantic, as might be expected, influences the temperature of northern Africa - and even the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula on the far side, not so obvious. Fluctuations in the ocean temperatures will lead to change on land.
This one is a heavier read. I've picked a few paragraphs that aren't too full of jargon.

"examined the impact of North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) variations, one of the main drivers for Northern Hemisphere climate, on summer ME-SAT.

The SST variability was analyzed through an important indicator, termed AMV—Atlantic Multidecadal Variability or AMO—Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to remind of its apparent oscillatory behavior; the instrumental records show that AMO/AMV is associated with a low frequency fluctuation of basin-wide anomalously warm and cold phases, with a typical 40-80-year time scale.

The phenomenon is not only interesting from an academic point of view, but also for its impacts on the climate across a large area: on the regional and local scale, it drives the climate of North America and western Europe, Mediterranean surface temperatures, influences the global monsoon, the current high levels of Atlantic hurricane activity, controls Sahel rainfall, and impacts Eurasian climate and the South Asian summer monsoon."

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlanti...

More information: Muhammad Azhar Ehsan, et al. (2020). Atlantic Ocean Influence on Middle East Summer Surface Air Temperature, NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science, DOI: 10.1038/s41612-020-0109-1

Rare Earth Elements analysis from cave sediments implies that volcanoes, not meteors, caused the Younger Dryas cooling 13,000 years ago.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-texas-c...

UK Met Office buys a new supercomputer.

"In the the Met Office's annual report [PDF], published earlier this week, chief scientist Professor Stephen Belcher said: "In February, we secured investment to develop the case for our next supercomputer, which will offer an unprecedented opportunity to advance our weather and climate services.

"As well as improving the accuracy of our weather forecasting, we'll put the increased computing capacity to good use to develop new climate services. In addition to pushing the limits of what is possible in simulating weather and climate, we will use the data to underpin actionable advice for robust decision making.""

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/2...

In the 1970s biorhythms was a popular topic. It was believed the status of a persons bio activities could be charted by following 3 different frequency waves. If this was applied to the oceans there would probably be thousands of symphonies playing all at the same time and all in tune with each other.

I'm just thinking of how many computers and supercomputers and satellites around and above the world, are engaged in weather and climate work.

Two Canadian icecaps have vanished.


https://phys.org/news/2020-07-canadia...

"...first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.

"When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape," said Serreze. "To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.""

"Using high-resolution data generated by satellites and a 2000 Space Shuttle mission to create three-dimensional representations of Andean glacier change over time, the researchers calculated that the area covered by glaciers in Peru shrank by nearly a third from 2000 to 2016."

That was only the warmup period. The serious melting is happening now and it has been aggravated by the soot from the Amazon fires settling on the glaciers.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/andes-....

The soot, of course, attracting heat.

New Zealand's glaciers are shrinking fast and have already passed the peak of water supply.
Paintings from the 1800s and series of photographs prove the loss of ice.

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-zealand...

Building, enlarging and paving roads through the Amazon jungle would seem like a bad idea for carbon capture and storage. Here's why.

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-climate...

Jared Diamond warns in his latest book that civilization is not headed in a good direction as societies over-use resources and overpollute.
This Medium article is a conversation between Diamond and a journalist from New Yorker magazine, David Wallace-Wells.

https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/...

"I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050. I’ll be dead by then but my kids will be, what? Sixty-three years old in 2050. So this is a subject of much practical interest to me. At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted. Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either we’ve figured out a sustainable course, or it’ll be too late."

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

A major Canadian ice shelf collapsed into the sea. This was at the end of a glacier, from what I can make of the images. So now it is likely that the glacier will speed up its motion.
The last epishelf or freshwater lake on an ice shelf was perhaps lost with the break. As definitely was a (fortunately uninhabited) research camp.

https://www.ecowatch.com/canada-ice-s...

"The northern portion of the Milne Ice Shelf calved between July 30, 2020 and July 31, 2020. The ice shelf was reduced from 187 km2 to 106 km2 and a large ice island drifted north into the Arctic Ocean. This ice island broke into two parts by August 3, 2020 — the larger one was 55 km2 (~10 x 5.5 km) and the smaller one was 24 km2 (~5 x 5 km). Due to the presence of pre-existing fractures in the remaining Milne Ice Shelf, there is a potential for further destabilization."

https://wirl.carleton.ca/research/ice...

Just go down that page to where they have a clip of researchers dropping a little ROV into a hole they drilled in the ice shelf to explore the water - the robot goes down to land on ice with sediment, and swims around in the water, seeing places that nobody has ever seen before. And it finds soft corals, shellfish, even a cod. This is science in action.

Hello, Death Valley. Saw this on the news last night.

"Death Valley hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) on Sunday. The data still has to be confirmed, but if it is, this past Sunday will have been our planet’s hottest reliably recorded day ever."

https://earther.gizmodo.com/death-val...

From Gizmodo;

"“Democrats support eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuels, and will fight to defend and extend tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.”

While 29 other pages of amendments and changes were added to the final version of the party platform, from simple phrases to whole paragraphs, this one sentence is conspicuously absent. Collin Rees, a campaigner with Oil Change U.S. who was among those who lobbied for the language, said in an email this was the “main win we had on fossil fuels.” Now, it’s gone from the platform being voted on at this week’s virtual Democratic National Convention.

“The amendment in question was incorrectly included in the manager’s mark,” a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said in an email. “After the error was discovered, both the Biden campaign and Sanders campaign, along with those who submitted the amendment, agreed to withdraw the amendment from consideration.”"

https://earther.gizmodo.com/democrats...

"Saturday is Earth Overshoot Day, the date when humanity will have used “all the biological resources that Earth can renew during the entire year,” as calculated by Global Footprint Network, an environmental research organization.

The group has been doing this annual assessment since 2006. That year, Earth Overshoot Day fell in October. The date then crept earlier every year until this one, when the coronavirus pandemic put a dent in the global economy.

To determine the date, Laurel Hanscom, the Global Footprint Network chief executive, said the group collects more than 15,000 data points per country, largely from United Nations sources.

Researchers then compare Earth’s biocapacity (the amount of resources the planet’s land and seas can generate in a year) to humanity’s ecological footprint (that year’s demand for things like food and urban space, and forests to absorb our emissions of carbon dioxide), determine the gap and project the results onto the calendar."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/cl...

Biden is corporate and always has been.

NASA measures the heat in California using ECOSTRESS from orbit.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Image shows San Fernando Valley, LA and the Ranch fire to the northeast.

Greenpeace on plans by Royal Dutch Shell to abandon oil (sludge it seems) off the Shetland Islands in big tanks:

"Dr Christian Bussau, Greenpeace Germany marine biologist, said: “Shell still wants to cheaply dismantle the platforms, and the UK government is colluding with them to allow it. Shell’s profit-before-people business model is blocking an opportunity to create jobs to dispose of the 11,000 tonnes of oil and parts of the platform that must be removed in an environmentally friendly manner. Shell must urgently get out of the dirty oil and gas industry and pivot its business to renewable energy.”

Shell has felt the pressure in recent months after the global pandemic saw oil demand plummet and accelerated the need for fossil fuel companies to transform their businesses. According to Shell’s decommissioning proposals, it will leave behind the remains of four platforms in the Brent oil field. Shell estimates three of those platforms contain 640,000 cubic metres of oily water and 40,000 cubic metres of oily sediment with a total content of more than 11,000 tonnes of oil. [1]

“While the rest of the world has moved on, Shell apparently still believes the world is its garbage dump, just as it did 25 years ago."

https://www.greenpeace.org/internatio...

If you want to know how an oil rig works and gets transported: fiction for young adventurers.

Death Of An Oil Rig

Looks good, a Norwegian fund divests from oil.

"In addition to divesting from companies that lobby against the Paris climate agreement and climate change regulations, the fund will also:

Make investment decisions in line with scientific consensus and the goals of the Paris agreement
Divest from companies that make more than 5 percent of their revenues from coal or oil sands
Make decisions that maintain nature's ability to store carbon dioxide, with a special focus on stopping deforestation
Increase investments in low-carbon companies"

https://www.ecowatch.com/norway-asset...

"“If you have corporates that are spending a lot of resources and energy to try to avoid that regulation that is required, that is clearly not supportive and not in the long-term interest of anybody, if you want to reach the climate goals or the (United Nations’) sustainable development goals,” Storebrand Asset Management CEO Jan Erik Saugestad told Reuters."

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-cl...

NASA tells me:

"On Aug. 25, several days before Hurricane Laura made landfall as a destructive Category 4 storm in Louisiana, NASA's Terra satellite flew over Laura in the Gulf of Mexico. Using its Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument, the satellite collected data on wind speeds and cloud-top heights as the storm intensified and moved northwest towards the U.S. Gulf Coast."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Plans to install a major Total Oil pipeline through East African countries and wildlife habitats.
This is a bad idea. First, the damage the pipe works will cause.
Second, these pipelines in Africa always get attacked by groups wanting to steal oil because they are poor. Sometimes this causes a fire or explosion.
Third, the pipelines all around the world seem to leak here and there.

WWF is opposed to the plan by Total.

https://www.wwf.no/assets/attachments...

Yale:
"The middle of a global pandemic, during which oil demand is in freefall and prices at rock bottom, might seem an odd moment to boost the world’s oil production. But the petrochemicals industry is always looking for new reserves to replace those being exhausted. And two oil fields discovered on the shores of Lake Albert, which straddles the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are currently among the biggest and cheapest new reserves available. They contain an estimated 6 billion barrels, roughly half the size of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field.

Construction work has begun at the Kingfisher and Tilenga oil fields, where the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and French giant Total intend to sink 500 wells. They have already spent an estimated $4 billion on infrastructure, and made enemies among local communities by grabbing land and providing paltry compensation."

https://e360.yale.edu/features/a-majo...

I would think that if a country's global operations both public and private were included with the internal measurements of their activities that many of the countries supposedly leading an ecologically designed path as promised by global environmental agreements would be at the bottom of the list instead of the top of the list.

The oceans were absorbing up to 10% more atmospheric carbon than shown in previous studies, according to this new report. Surface temperatures differ from those a few metres down where measurements had been recorded.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-ocean-c...

Thank you, NASA.

"When a satellite by the name of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich launches this November, its primary focus will be to monitor sea level rise with extreme precision. But an instrument aboard the spacecraft will also provide atmospheric data that will improve weather forecasts, track hurricanes, and bolster climate models.

"Our fundamental goal with Sentinel-6 is to measure the oceans, but the more value we can add, the better," said Josh Willis, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It's not every day that we get to launch a satellite, so collecting more useful data about our oceans and atmosphere is a bonus."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Author Laura Bradbury tells me;


"Les Vendanges! Grape Harvest 2020 in Burgundy
It was a hot, dry summer in France. Our friends and family there complained about the succession of “la canicule” (heatwaves). As a result, the annual grape harvest was super early—in fact, the earliest it’s been since the 1500s, which is worrisome—and will be mostly complete in Burgundy by the time September rolls around."

Addenda: we have a separate thread for wine matters, use the search box to find it.

Multinationals, by getting products made in a cheap country and shipping them to a more affluent one, account for massive supply chain carbon. They also have been emitting foul carbon in manufacture, which is starting to reduce as manufacturing gets more efficient. The suggestion here is to make firms account for the carbon in the countries where the goods are sold.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-multina...

To put it another way:
"Lead author Dr. Zengkai Zhang, of Tianjin University, said: "Multinationals are increasingly transferring investment from developed to developing countries. This has the effect of reducing developed countries' emissions while placing a greater emissions burden on poorer countries. At the same time it is likely to create higher emissions overall, as investment is moved to more 'carbon intense' regions.""
...

""However, companies' climate change policies often have little effect when it comes to big investment decisions such as where to build supply chains.

"Assigning emissions to the investor country means multinationals are more accountable for the emissions they generate as a result of these decisions.""

A piece published on Gizmodo got exported to a news feed and people read it who didn't normally read Giz. This was about the potential demise of oil firms. Many angry mails were sent to the author. He wrote back. His findings were surprising.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/what-i-le...
Warning: some strong language.

The Clinton Syndrome

"And I admitted that I really did fuck up in not making clear that I think it’s important that fossil fuel workers are welcomed into the future we build together."

That is overlooked time after time by so many people, from naturalists to politicians. By overlooking this factor, the conversation automatically becomes divisive. It presents a clear lack of understanding of the entire situation. Sure, what is said is 100 percent correct, but that is only half the story.

Telling half stories has become an advanced form of lying that is entirely acceptable. It is the same as cherry picking the facts you like or framing the story to support a particular point of view. Its not like we don't have access to all the facts, they just get edited out.

The article has to sell itself, it can't just be instructive. The rules for writing have been engulfed by the rules for selling, which hides under the banner of meaning full communication. That is, did the reader get moved to action and followed through by buying the product.

The other let down is the article that shows off a vibrant streak of knowledge that shoots across our horizon like a skyrocket. Entirely impressive and amazing and connected to absolutely nothing. After lighting up the stratosphere it lands with a plunk in the ocean of data debris that is where all the articles ends up.

Until social studies, natural studies, science, and technology that are all based on what is actually happening in the present day world get blended into one curriculum, it will always be the story of the impaired people and the elephant.

The UN. Article from RTE.

"Record temperatures are accelerating the rise of sea levels, melting glaciers and snow coverage and threatening the water supplies for billions, according to a major UN report charting the "increasing and irreversible" impacts of climate change.

The multi-agency United in Science report said the world had seen its warmest five years on record in the last five years, adding that extreme weather events bore "a clear fingerprint" of climate change.

It comes after UN chief Antonio Guterres said nations must use the coronavirus crisis as a springboard to implement "transformational" green policies to make energy, transport, industry and everyday life more sustainable.

If they fail, he warned humanity was "doomed". "

https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2020...

Devastating wildfires in the western U.S. Thanks to Phys.org for this article. Stay safe, everyone.

"In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown declared the fires in the northwestern state to be a "once-in-a-generation event."
"Almost every year since becoming governor, I've witnessed historic fire seasons," Brown said. "This is proving to be an unprecedented and significant fire event for our state."

Jay Inslee, the governor of neighboring Washington state, described the wildfires as "unprecedented and heartbreaking."

Inslee, who campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president on a platform of battling climate change, and California Governor Gavin Newsom both blamed the effects of a changing climate for the exceptional ferocity of this year's blazes.

"I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers," Newsom said. "It's completely inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground.""

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-devasta...

From the U.N.
"The world already has warmed nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 1800s, and the last five years are hotter than the previous five years, the report said."

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-limit.h...

Slideshow from Gizmodo of some striking photos juxtaposed with politicians' comments denying climate change.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/9-quotes-...

This is the 600th post in this thread.

Here is the latest temperature chart of the Earth, all the way back to the Paleocene. And we can see where we are headed.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-high-fi...