Climate Change News & Discussions

[erowind]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeM5emt ... WL&index=5

https://sites.psu.edu/sovas3a/2020/02/0 ... rch-finds/

Source: [Studio for Sustainability & Social Action (S3A,) Penn State University]

Cuba found to be the most sustainably developed country in the world, new research finds

The socialist island outperforms advanced capitalist countries including Britain and the United States, which has subjected Cuba to a punitive six-decades-long economic blockade.

The Sustainable Development Index (SDI), designed by anthropologist and author Dr Jason Hickel, calculates its results by dividing a nation’s “human development” score, obtained by looking at statistics on life expectancy, health and education, by its “ecological overshoot,” the extent to which the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth’s natural limits.

Countries with strong human development and a lower environmental impact score highly, but countries with poorer life expectancies and literacy rates as well as those which exceed ecological limits are marked down.

Based on the most recent figures, from 2015, Cuba is top with a score of 0.859, while Venezuela is 12th and Argentina 18th.

The implication of Cuba's incredible success, is that the rest of the world is not as doomed as it may seem, even without speculative technological solutions, (as welcome as they are should they be sustainably developed.) Only not doomed if we choose to change our ways though, and radically restructure our societies. Cuba's government was researching applied permaculture and organic agriculture for years before the Soviet Union collapsed and the embargo was unjustly and cruelly tightened. They were able to apply this research to the majority of the economy within 3-5 years depending on the region. This shows that we as humans could genuinely solve much of, perhaps even most of the ecological crises in a very short period of time if we were motivated to. I sincerely hope we in the currently rich and powerful countries of the world are not so critically stupid that we court famine before trying.

[Lorem Ipsum]

https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=aeM5emtaVC0&list=WL&index=5

If video shows as unavailable complete the link above.

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[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeM5emtaVC0&list=WL&index=5[/url]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeM5emt ... WL&index=5

[wjfox]

You need to remove the bit starting with the ampersand.

i.e. – &list=WL&index=6, which is the redundant part of the code.

[weatheriscool]

8,000 years of Great Barrier Reef climate history revealed
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-years-gre ... imate.html
by University of Queensland

A group of Australian scientists has for the first time unraveled the history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef over the past eight millennia.

Led by University of Queensland graduate Dr. Marcos Salas-Saavedra, the team analyzed rare earth elements in drilled reef cores, unveiling a deep history of wild weather.

"Eight thousand years ago, extreme runoff from an intense Indian-Australian summer monsoon affected water quality in the southern offshore Reef," Dr. Salas-Saavedra said.

"Water in the GBR was much dirtier, and poor water quality is known to be a major cause of reef decline around the world.

"But 1,000 years later, monsoonal rains eased and the water quality greatly improved.

"We noticed water quality declined during times of dampened El Niño Southern Oscillation frequency, which may have led to more La Niña-dominated wet climates in Queensland at those times—like the weather we have seen this year in Queensland."

[Tadasuke]

The global greenhouse effect has been know for 110 years:


Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change:


Global greenhouse gases emissions have been rising and rising:

However, they are now dropping in developed countries.

[caltrek]

A Cloudless Future? The Mystery at the Heart of Climate Forecasts
May 31, 2021

Introduction:

(News Release via EurekAlert) We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice. But how will it affect clouds?
"Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets," says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. "Or they could thicken and become more reflective."

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.

"If you ask two different climate models what the future will be like when we add a lot more CO2, you get two very different answers. And the key reason for this is the way clouds are included in climate models."

No one denies that clouds and aerosols — bits of soot and dust that nucleate cloud droplets — are an important part of the climate equation. The problem is these phenomena occur on a length- and time-scale that today's models can't come close to reproducing. They are therefore included in models through a variety of approximations.

Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954415

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Highest in Human History
Source: New York Times

The amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a record in May, continuing its relentless climb, scientists said Friday. It is now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal in the late 19th century. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at anytime in at least 4 million years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said.

The concentration of the gas reached nearly 421 parts per million in May, the peak for the year, as power plants, vehicles, farms and other sources around the world continued to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions totaled 36.3 billion tons in 2021, the highest level in history. As the amount of carbon dioxide increases, the planet keeps warming, with effects like increased flooding, more extreme heat, drought and worsening wildfires that are already being experienced by millions of people worldwide. Average global temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than in preindustrial times.

Growing carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly. They are “a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said in a statement. Although carbon dioxide levels dipped somewhat around 2020 during the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there was no effect on the long-term trend, Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in an interview.

The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentration “just kept on going,” he said. “And it keeps on going for about the same pace as it did for the past decade.” Carbon dioxide levels vary throughout the year, increasing as vegetation dies and decays in the fall and winter, and decreasing in spring and summer as growing plants absorb the gas through photosynthesis. The peak is reached every May, just before plant growth accelerates in the Northern Hemisphere. (The North has a larger effect than the Southern Hemisphere because there is much more land surface and vegetation in the North.)

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/clim ... ecord.html

[caltrek]

Including All Types of Emissions Shortens Timeline to Reach Paris Agreement Temperature Targets
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Countries around the world pledged in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or, at most, 2 degrees Celsius. As emissions rates gradually begin to decline, countries are looking at how many greenhouse gases can still be emitted while remaining below these temperature targets, which are deemed the upper limits to avoid the most catastrophic impacts to the climate system.

New research led by the University of Washington calculates how much warming is already guaranteed by past emissions. While previous research has explored this question for carbon dioxide, the new work includes related emissions such as methane, nitrogen oxide and aerosols, like sulfur or soot.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954682

Conclusion:

“This paper looks at the temporary warming that can't be avoided, and that’s important if you think about components of the climate system that respond quickly to global temperature changes, including Arctic sea ice, extreme events such as heat waves or floods, and many ecosystems,” said co-author Kyle Armour, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences and of oceanography. “Our study found that in all cases, we are committed by past emissions to reaching peak temperatures about five to 10 years before we experience them.”

The paper finds that if countries aim to achieve their goals of staying below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, then the total amount of carbon that humans can still emit, the remaining “carbon budget,” is significantly smaller than previous estimates.

“Our findings make it all the more pressing that we need to rapidly reduce emissions,” Dvorak said.

[caltrek]

Textile Filter Testing Shows Promise for Carbon Capture
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) North Carolina State University researchers found they could filter carbon dioxide from air and gas mixtures at promising rates using a proposed new textile-based filter that combines cotton fabric and an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase – one of nature’s tools for speeding chemical reactions.

The findings from initial laboratory testing represent a step forward in the development of a possible new carbon capture technology that could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from biomass, coal or natural gas power plants. And while the filter would need to be scaled up in size significantly, the researchers think their design would make that step easier compared with other proposed solutions.

“With this technology, we want to stop carbon dioxide emissions at the source, and power plants are the main source of carbon dioxide emissions right now,” said the study’s lead author Jialong Shen, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State. “We think the main advantage of our method compared to similarly targeted research is that our method could be easily scaled up using traditional textile manufacturing facilities.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/955028

Further point made in the article:

Capturing the carbon dioxide is just one part of the process – they also are working on the problem of how to recycle the liquid after it exits the filter, as well as the process of turning the bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide so it can be stored and disposed of, or used for other commercial purposes.