Todays guest on Nature Bats Last was Dr Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University. Dr Andrew Glikson is a geologist living in Australia. He is an Earth scientist and paleo-climatologist currently serving as Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. He is the author of dozens of articles and ten books, notably including his 2015 masterpiece Climate, Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep Time Dimensions of the Anthropocene.
Put your feet up, relax and enjoy, episode 129 of Nature Bats Last which is embedded here;
I’ve posted below corroborating links to the discussion.
We discussed Dr Glikson’s recent article titled: Beyond Climate Tipping Points: Greenhouse Gas Levels Exceed the Stability Limit of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets
I additionally quoted an article from Scripts Institution of Oceanography titled ; Research Highlight: Loss of Arctic’s Reflective Sea Ice Will Advance Global Warming by 25 Years
“The 4.3 million hectare fire – an area now larger than Denmark – is contributing significantly to climate change.
Since the beginning of the year, a total of 13.1 million hectares has burned.” A climate catastrophe that can not be stopped by human means! Russian fires now bigger than Denmark: 13 million hectares gone
I mentioned that both Dr Glikson and Professor McPherson are concerned about the methane threat and how they both respect the work of Dr Natalia Shakova and her colleagues. A link to a recent paper from Dr Shakova titled ” Understanding the Permafrost–Hydrate System and Associated Methane Releases in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”can be found here; A video interview with her courtesy of Nick Breeze is embedded here;
As well as discussing the scientific aspects of what we are witnessing, we discussed the psychological roller coaster we are all on and Dr Gliksons’ Poetry and the role it plays in absorbing and expressing the psychological challenges this knowledge of the predicament we find ourselves in entails. Finding an emotional and artistic outlet we believe is imperative.
Mine is to volunteer at the not for profit Rakino Island Nursery on a rewilding program. It’s both my “Antidote to despair” as Edward Abbey wrote but also proof that just because I recognise the severity of the multiple crises we face it doesn’t mean I have ‘given up’, an accusation often leveled at Professor McPherson and myself.
Guy spoke about “Scientific Reticence”, he has covered it previously on his You Tube Channel and blog Nature Bats Last Here is an excellent edit on the subject via the Tim Bob Channel featuring Guy.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” Ernesto Che Guevarra.
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Look after each other, be gentle, time is short, Only Love Remains
Q&A: Dr Andrew Glikson on the Plutocene age
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Thank you as always for an excellent post. My only criticism, as always, is your pacifist response to our near-term extinction. For myself, my response is to be found in this poem by Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into this good night.” https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
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For clarity: Che Guevara didn’t talk a revolution, he killed the people who were responsible for the inequalities of his time. Right now, with mass extinction here, happening around us in cascading, regional mass mortality events, the Universe demands no less of us.
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Yeah I concur, Utah Phillips was quoted as saying “The world isn’t dying, it’s being killed and the people killing it have names and addresses”.
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Kevin, He Never Gives Up and Never Gives in ,,You are the man..
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I have that Utah Phillips poster in my pictures doc file, Kevin. And he really did think like this!
I had the opportunity to sit and talk with the guy as I worked concert security for years down at Hog Farm and he came to the Kate Wolf Memorial Folk Festival one fine June weekend and ended up hiding out from all the PR and other flunkies they deal with. I don’t remember which year. That happened every once in a while when some ‘famous’ musician person would be sick of the ‘hospitality star zone’ crap and groupie/hangers on types and come hang out backstage with us in the crew coordinators’ and security Rovers’ camp (called Kenetic Camp) that was close enough to get to Main Stage but was hidden away under the trees and relaxing talking politics, economy, police state, war, and racism with us. Most of us were in our 40s then, been there done that types and fairly intelligent so it was a conversation between equals in that sense. He was one of the few that did this. As was who also came and found us at another concert held on that venue. Talked story with us, drank a couple of cold beers and puffed on a couple Humboldt County homegrown joints being passed around in camp before due on stage. You should have seen the flunkies trying to drag these musicians back to ‘their’ area! Managers really hated us because we didn’t fawn over their ‘stars’ and talked real instead.
caspermilquetoastwriter: oh no, I’m sure we all on this site understood what you were saying. And I certainly know that it’s the young that make the revolutions. My age group can’t run fast enough anymore and, honestly, we had enough beatings by cops back when. There are some pretty big shoes to fill by the up and coming young, too. If the planet keeps living and breathing. That is looking grimmer by the day in a number of categories.
Our species has always been like this (at least since the rise of city states and writing), and it has always been a Class War. This time, though, the wealthy think they are somehow immune to the absolutely cataclysmic collapse of the entire biosphere and climate…then the 500 nuclear reactors will go Fukushima-bad and the Northern Hemisphere will become, if not extinct, seriously mutated and they won’t be able to come out of their flipping bunkers they are hiding in….
Not something fun to ponder, that’s for sure.
Besides which there’s enough going on around here. I’m buried under heavy smoke and ash fall in 100’F+/38-40’C temperatures with another “abundant” lightning strike series of t-cells due in tomorrow night… I’m wearing N-95 particulate masks outside to be able to breathe when I do go outside (which ain’t much) and can’t open the windows at night to cool the house down. No AC but the swamp cooler and fans do an appreciable job. But things just ain’t looking all that good in this neck of the woods….or anywhere else, are they?
sealintheSelkirks
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The Tim Bob Channel on You Tube which often covers Professor McPherson’s work has just uploaded excerpts from the interview. I have posted multiple corroborating links sent to me by Dr Glikson in the comments section
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THanks SOO much Kevin!
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This is the nature of non-linear warming and reinforces the opinion of Dr Andrew Glikson our latest guest on Nature Bats Last where we discussed his recent research on “Tipping Points in the Earth Climate System.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-weather-station-above-the-arctic-circle-hit-94-6-degr-1837274379?IR=T
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“Stephen Pyne, who studies the history of fire at Arizona State University, in the US, says we are entering the “age of the pyrocene”.”
‘Pyrocene’, I don’t like the term but it is spot on.
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3025880/dark-days-ahead-huge-arctic-wildfires-spew-soot?fbclid=IwAR16VnMlcKc7QIjO_Iz99JW6dJKV839O9TeNRmyPwmIeLtTNSh_5nMr94pE
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…or hurricaneocene or typhoonocene or floodocene or meltocene or as the planet deforms from ice loss weight volcanocene and earthquakeocene…lots of ‘cenes’ are possible besides that one description. Depends on where you are. Combinations of different ‘cenes’ even! I’m definitely in the pyrocene living here…and I’m not in danger of flooding since I’m not in a valley below.
I’ve got the article downloaded, and the writer is STILL using the discredited term ‘climate change’ invented by WBush PR flack Frank Lutz!!! Haven’t they read the damn memo Nader put out about that last year??? Even the UK Guardian is discouraging the use of ‘change’ now.
And one sentence caught my eye (I glanced through it quick). The one about “could be contributing to the increase of lightning strikes” because that lightning storm of a few weeks ago I think I mentioned somewhere on your site, has now been upgraded due to a better satellite count. It went from 2,500 confirmed to 3,500. TWO HOURS of sky crazy! It was insane, Kevin. Very very spooky.
Pyrocene. Great. Not what I wanted to read but figured something similar out a while back on my own. Good term I guess. Us humans just love to label shit, don’t we?
Very High fire danger as I passed the fire station this afternoon in a pouring rainstorm. No lightning yet. The weather shifted yesterday morning early am rain, backed off in the afternoon, then came back in today. Everything is SO dry under the wet top cover. I checked when I got home. Not enough to make much difference yet. It’s freaking dusty under the wet overgrowth at least a finger depth down… But at least this gives some water to the plant growth, strengthen the root structures a bit.
Do I really want to read the article? Well, no. But I will anyway. You get SUCH interesting tidbits of information to read!
sealintheSelkirks
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The latest from Sam Carana confirming what no one wants to know.
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/09/critical-tipping-point-crossed-in-july-2019.html?fbclid=IwAR2Qg4UhvZcAjvdo_dCmUJ-s8HvdUSQC0sk7zPZ53tci_6YiTVFWBd4_-yU
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“In July 2019, a critical tipping point was crossed. July sea surface temperatures on the Northern Hemisphere were 1.07°C above what they were during the 20th century, as illustrated by above image which has a trend added that points at 5°C above the 20th century by 2033.”
Climate sensitivity has been grossly underestimated by the capitalist patriarchy, let’s not fein surprise.
Enter stage left Sam’s seminal work.
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/09/critical-tipping-point-crossed-in-july-2019.html
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I read the article the day it came out and figured you’d be posting it. First thoughts were What Now and How Long. Unfortunately I’m just not much of an optimist. About practically anything having to do with our species, and this…definitely has a wee little bit to do with us.
I’m assuming there isn’t a single word of this on any MSM outlet, but since I turned the TV off decades ago and don’t really listen to much corporate radio… I do ask people I know about what they heard on the ‘news’ about this or that and they’re always answering that they didn’t hear anything about that and am I sure? Yeah, well…
That Sept. 13th methane levels sat map (appropriately taken on the silly superstitious’ Friday the 13th don’t you think?) has such pretty colors. I’ve got Polartec fabric out in my sew shop of that exact light lavender purple. Maybe I should make a nice warm winter hat out of that bolt and then maybe people will ask me why I’m wearing such a shade and I can tell them why. Bet they will either not understand, not want to understand, or hold up their hand for me to wait while answer the text that just came in on their ‘smart’ phone…which are always more important than the person in front of you.
Well, we’ve known that the ‘official’ science positions have always been heavy on the conservative viewpoints, and predictions were always based along those lines, so is this truly that unexpected? I think not. How much this is going to positively affect the accelerating destabilization curve is anyone’s guess at this point. We’ve gone out of the realm of expectations and the ability to guess much less accurately see what the billiard balls caroming around the table are going to do next. This is the unknown, the never experienced, and we are grasping at mental images that we are unequipped to handle.
Truly, we as a species (including me) just cannot exactly get a clear mental picture of what ‘exponential’ means. And I always wonder if I’m just fooling myself when I try to let the pieces correlate on their own in my head and they add up to really, really scary shit.
Big sigh. On that note it has been raining all day, woke up to it after a weekend of chainsawing and moving firewood. I think I need to go walk around outside and breathe, smell the scents that have been released from the conifers and plant life and the ground. Do something fun today, Kevin.
sealintheSelkirks
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Even smaller doses of internet than usual, so little time – but for the past two interview links I’ve not seen a download option for ‘normal laptop’ downloads… perhaps I’m missing something in the hurried online checks. The audios load when on line (today at a restaurant) but don’t play when i am off line at home.
Presently there’s a crisis here in Ecuador, but thanks for the continued updates on our rapidly-imploding world.
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ARCTIC HIT BY TEN TIPPING POINTS
Tipping point 7. Seafloor methane.
In March 2020, a huge amount of heat accumulated over Russia and over the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), setting the scene for eruption of vast quantities of methane from hydrates contained in sediments at the seafloor.
See the post ‘Arctic Hit By Ten Tipping Points’, at:
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/04/arctic-hit-by-ten-tipping-points.html?fbclid=IwAR3D5JNcy0C_YNNQH0bbhAOnILxx5wRdRIeqT7rV9ckh2UfrxN23IxM8-DI
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Hunziker again:
Abrupt Ecosystem Collapse
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/15/abrupt-ecosystem-collapse/
A new study in Nature (April 2020) casts a disturbing light on the prospects of abrupt ecosystem collapse. The report analyzes the probabilities of collapsing ecosystems en masse, and not simply the loss of individual species. (Source: Trisos, C.H. et al, The Projected Timing of Abrupt Ecological Disruption From Climate Change, Nature, April 8, 2020)
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Kevin, we both knew (and probably a majority of those reading your site) that, when the facade started cracking off, it was going to get really bad. And I’m sure there were the thoughts of cascading collapse racing through the structure of human Empire just like the last 22 freaking times human Empires crashed and burned in the last 9,000 years.
We had ancestors that lived through all of those massive die-offs. But they always had somewhere else to run to. The real difference is that the entire damn surface of the planet this time has been paved over, cut it down, plowed under, dug up, layered with toxic…the list is just freaking endless, isn’t it?
This time, we just get to see it for our own self instead of reading about past incidents of death and destruction in dusty old history books.
Sigh.
It’s been getting increasingly difficult to read arctic-news.blogspot…there is this grinding gears sound I get in my head when looking at the satellite maps as a whole and trying to plug in the text around them. Do I need a fresh cup of tea or is this normal?
HA!
I’ve been sitting here hitting ‘save as’ to 76 articles going into documents. Most are SARS II CoV-19 but there are others like Hunziker’s latest rounding out the insanity of what we are about to experience. I won’t say good luck to all because there ain’t no such thing, just random chaos that either rolls over you or doesn’t.
Feeling a bit gloomy today even under this brilliantly blue sky with puffy fleecy clouds going by overhead in the extremely bright sunshine, woodstove heating the house downstairs, a good night’s sleep, the birds are happily gobbling on the suet feeders, green grass is starting to come up, and the 40 year old apple tree out front where the feeders are has been hit with ‘Fire Blight.’ Half the tree died this winter. I went out to trim the shooters before it starts to leaf and oh my hell, the entire west-facing side limbs are peeling bark and dead and a couple of places on the south side has also started looking burnt. About a 50 year old tree according to the neighbor who remembers when this house was built and it was planted…and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.
I’m going to make a hot cup of tea, grab a book, put on a bunch of Reggae cds, and sit in the sunshine on the porch for a while before I go chainsaw up a bunch of firewood rounds. There ain’t a damn thing I can do about any of this. Damn. We all knew this was coming and every day we all probably was hoping it would hold off just a wee bit longer…
sealintheSelkirks
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The Anasazi ran away, where will we go? Arizona is gonna die, western Texas, SoCal, Nevada, Utah…
I’m imagining what this year’s fire season is going to look like. And now that everybody has lost/is losing their fire insurance…
I have N95 masks on the shelf because of the smoke we get hit with in these mountains from the fires to the West and up in Canada. With SARS II/CoV 19, I don’t think I have anywhere near enough in stock…
sealintheSelkirks
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Emerging Climate-Fueled Megadrought in Western US Rivals Any Over Past 1,200 Years: Study
“We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/17/emerging-climate-fueled-megadrought-western-us-rivals-any-over-past-1200-years-study
The western United States is likely being gripped by an “emerging” megadrought partly fueled by the climate crisis, says a study published Friday.
Researchers claim the region’s 19-year drought, from 2000–2018, already rivals that of any over the past 1,200 years.
“We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now,” said lead author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in a statement. “We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.”
For the study, published in the journal Science https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/314, Williams and the other researchers looked at nine U.S. states, stretching from Oregon and Montana at the northern and southward through California and New Mexico. The researchers also included a portion of northern Mexico in the study.
Using tree ring data to infer yearly soil moisture and plot out the pre-modern data, the researchers documented four megadroughts—multi-decade droughts—beginning in 800 AD.
The southwest’s current drought was worse compared to the ones that took place in the late 800s, mid-1100s, and the 1200s. The most severe megadrought on recorrd began in 1575, though researchers said the difference between that Medieval one and the current was slight.
And while natural variability played a role in the current drought, the scientists estimate about half the blame—47%—lies with the Earth’s heating, as warmer air is able to suck up more ground moisture.
According to coauthor Benjamin Cook of Lamont and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “It doesn’t matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever” but that “it has been made much worse than it would have been because of climate change.”
Natural variability that can drive drought will likely continue, as will global warming, threatening further upheaval for a region already facing groundwater depletion.
“Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts,” added Williams.
“We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while,” he said. “But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought.”
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“A new report in Science shows that maximum daily temperatures above 32.2 degrees Celsius (about 90 degrees Fahrenheit) cause tropical forests to lose stored carbon more quickly.”
I stand corrected. For many years I have quoted 35C as the point that trees no longer sequester carbon and in drought conditions become carbon emitters.
As new research comes in the prognosis is always worse than we thought.
https://scitechdaily.com/temperature-tipping-point-for-tropical-forests-identified-scientists-recommend-immediate-steps/?fbclid=IwAR3fxULjVw0sSMOToYUFyU_cue5NoW1sPXE_yUi5COC66QLET8xJsIT7g0w
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Kevin, The weirdest monster storm came roaring in just after sunset yesterday, before it became dark. It looked more like what I’d imagine an atmospheric ‘tidal bore’ would than the T-storm frontal mass that had been predicted earlier in the day.
I’ve never seen clouds like that, shaped like that, colors like that, and I’ve seen some impressive t-storms. I really can’t find the words to describe their shapes. Ocean waves mixed with rolled bread dough? Rogue Solitron(?) deep water waves woven together as a solid mass but sticking out in odd angles and shapes? I’m…at a loss here. They were…greenish sort of, lots of other shades that I can’t say were beautiful but they were striking. And looked like some impressionist painting rather than the sky.
The entire horizon to my south was alight with lightning everywhere above the overcast that was boiling towards me. Yes, boiling, as that was what it looked like. Most of the strobelight flashes were in a contiguous line of clouds that stretched from east to west going up through and shoving the overcast that had come in earlier in the day. Like very bright incandescent but indirect lighting that is continually flashing above the mismatched cloud shape/formations roaring north. A HUUUUGE goddamned bolt hit directly in front of me in the trees maybe…400 meters south that was thick as my forefinger holding it up as comparison, and stayed that was for what seemed like a couple seconds and I don’t think it was an after-image. One of those instantaneous splitting-air Craccccckkkk/SNAP broken branch sound and I physically felt the concussion/air shock hit the front of my body standing there on the porch.
When I realized what I was seeing I ran back inside for the digital camera. I took maybe 3-4 pictures before the wind/rain/hail front blew in sideways directly into me under the porch roof. Never got another of those bolts, and I didn’t have time to set any of the functions. I haven’t dropped them into the other computer that has the picture file program so I don’t know if any came out. I actually kind of doubt I did because the lighting was unreal, surreal. I did take one pic to the east and up into the top of the formation as it passed overhead, where there were waves of clouds silouetted against a lighter background of the front clouds hanging over themselves.
I wish I was a painter. I can vividly see this in my head that my hand could never translate to art.
Wind went to 50mph gusts that bent 3 meter+ Ponderosa, lodgepole, and fir to 60′ of arc. There is heavier debris all over the property, larger branches and such, but zero small stuff. Blew yellowjacket traps off the roofline of the house, blew stuff over all over. But what was really strange…because objects that happened to be behind something else that was wider and taller didn’t lose tarps or get blown over. Even light objects weren’t moved. The wind was so strongly funneled and moving so fast that there weren’t any cross currents or eddies that I normally see that suck stuff out from behind the woodshed or shop building etc etc. Wind was in too much of a hurry to get north I guess!
Power flickered, went out, came back on a couple times. No surprise there as the transfer station is to the south and last Fall a bolt hit that blew something up in it that took until the next day to fix. I’d unplugged and turned off everything before this storm hit anyway. A neighbor down in the valley called after I switched the walk-around to a dial phone on the landline to ask what it was looking like up here on the ridge. I could here his girlfriend in the background loudly exclaiming ‘Do you see that?’ and a roomie yelling ‘holy shit’ as he described to me a funnel cloud dropping out of the clouds between Valley (the town) and the Colville River. It never hit the ground but got halfway down, and then they watched it suck back up as he was talking.
The wind was worse down there than up here on the ridge I think, from what he was describing. That deluge of rain completely washed out the view of the ridgeline west across the valley that leads up into the Huckleberry Mountains. And everything else north or south around it. Rain going by at 70mph funneled down a less than 2-mile wide valley as a solid front? Yeah, that’ll definitely do some grayscale!
Then my old friend on Windward Side Oah’u called saying that my area was on the ‘special report’ TV news. Booted up the satellite pics on his computer. I wasn’t going to risk plugging mine back in. Lightning was flashing all the hell over the place, I was upstairs with e/s/w window curtains open and watching it light up the darkened room around me. Deluge monsoon-style rains hit and we’re still under flash flood watch, and this went on and off all night. Some incredibly bright flashes to the east very late, and thundering as I fell asleep…
Still raining off and on, solid overcase in every direction with light and dark gray clouds mixed. No sign of the sun is visible but it is a fairly bright day nonetheless. Checked earler and this will supposedly be gone by tomorrow.
Kevin, it was over 90’F/32-34’C on Thursday and Friday. In the sun it felt much hotter. Yesterday was plenty warm, in the mid-80s in the morning, the overcast came in about 1pm when it hit near 60% humidity (odd for the dry NE corner mountains), and then this monster roars up out of the south.
And this concludes the report on weather conditions in the Selkirk Mountains!
And for your reading dis-pleasure:
Human Footprint Threatening Nearly 50 Billion Years of Evolutionary History: Study
“Our findings indicate that the magnitude of our impact as a species on the natural world is incomprehensibly large, and appears to be overwhelmingly impacting the most irreplaceable areas and species on the planet.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/26/human-footprint-threatening-nearly-50-billion-years-evolutionary-history-study
Human activities threaten to saw off branches of the “tree of life”—putting irreplaceable species at risk of extinction.
So finds a study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16410-6 published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications which highlights the need for urgent conservation actions.
Barring such action, the researchers wrote, “close to 50 billion years” of evolutionary history worldwide is at risk.
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Shit be getting freaky, Kevin, no doubt about that.
sealintheSelkirks
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Front row seats to the biggest show in history provided free by capitalism with the externalised costs paid by the biosphere. That’s how we chronicle the collapse of the living planet.
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The Day The Oceans Boiled
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This is a very disturbing development. Another ‘Tipping point’ crossed;
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/22/first-active-leak-of-sea-bed-methane-discovered-in-antarctica?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco&fbclid=IwAR23SKbxQqumP4LNN_z5icXfuePdwdJ_Qt6GStGnl_lSmXz-XDpADdxUC6c
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“A new study from Umea University highlights the uncertainty involved in projecting CO2 emissions from thawing permafrost in the Arctic.
The research reveals that CO2 emissions from permafrost have been underestimated by billions of tons due to the role of plant roots in microbial decomposition and carbon release.
As permafrost thaws across the Arctic, carbon in the organic matter is oxidized to CO2 through microbial activity. Some of this carbon has been stored in the frozen soils for thousands of years.”
https://www.earth.com/news/plant-roots-will-increase-arctic-co2-emissions-by-40-billion-tons/?fbclid=IwAR25nLeN24MhrwU1mMN4f08xyDt0RdJqriOJ8nS6w0_UjiOBWgF2-clsNLQ
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This is a brilliant explanation of ‘Tipping Points’, subscribe to the blog folks;
https://www.joboneforhumanity.org/climate_tipping_points?fbclid=IwAR2Ujwg6aKj344PVo1BMWdsRRQZkqQ4XIjN2tV_QjV5tNpEe5SLFhp42LK4
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This out recently from Sam Carana
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/08/methane-hydrates-tipping-point-threatens-to-get-crossed.html?fbclid=IwAR3fGmQuwtm2Qrb0-s-PXuKo5NJGOM8038k3Yqv2sBhmpxiUqKVOq4NhBTY
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And it’s about 3am in Louisiana and Hurricane Laura is now over St Charles with ‘only’ sustained 140mph winds as of 30 minutes ago. The CNN guy is now off the air and the last contact the building was ‘vibrating’ under their feet. The wind speed dropped a little? Big deal! From 150 down to 140 ain’t enough to notice!
But the storm surge is being labeled ‘unsurvivable’ and what we are going to see tomorrow is…GLOBAL WARMING not climate ‘change’! When the methane hits the atmosphere in large chunks, the heat will increase (including the ocean temps I presume) the storms are going to get bigger, yes? Or if it just lets go all at once…oh darn.
There is so much going on that I’m juggling info…and friends in Cali are in the burn zones. Or under the massive smoke plumes. The Santa Cruz fire is dropping ash in Montana to the east of me…
sealintheSelkirks
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Every day a new feedback loop.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/uoc-gg050218.php?fbclid=IwAR3wCAfjErUcyqJKs_h89bFyC-UxlL8RrOy_DSE3fj4HGy7UiY7gY36Z0jo#.X5MQkzF8cGc.facebook
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Every day some new freaking ‘natural’ disaster you mean? Feedback loops sound so…gentle, ya know? Personally I’m waiting for the first Category 6 or 7 to hit, 200-300mph should be interesting don’t you think? Some of those ‘good old boy’ and their families have already turned into climate migrants heading north…
Here in the US another hurricane, Zeta as they’ve run out of names, is hitting Louisiana today, number 27 no less, and strengthened to a Cat 2 this morning. And, after the ‘unusually cold weather’ and snowfall of last Friday/Saturday morning, this area has been waking up to -15C but warming up to just over 0’C by afternoon. The snow has compacted into a solid layer of ice covering the ground that is about as slick as frog snot. Even the old husky dog is having trouble keeping her footing much less us bipeds. I’ve broken out the old ’93 Airwalk snowboard boots I wear all winter already. Damn are these things heavy on the feet after months of flip-flops!
But at least the air smelled so much cleaner after months of smoke and soot from all the fires. I’m not in the gig-freaking-gantic Colorado plume that is still burning.
But that was until two days ago when a stagnant air alert was issued telling people to not burn fires for warmth (in -15C nights?) and refrain from driving anywhere, or breathing the air since it isn’t good for you until the end of the month. Oh well, a couple of days of clean cold air off the ocean was good, right? I’m still feeling the effects from the smoke that this first article talks about.
And wildfire season has now run right into the flu season. Can we say oopsie?
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23102020/wildfire-smoke-health-coronavirus
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Then a new study comes out on the Arctic that fails to make us warm and fuzzy:
New Climate Warnings in Old Permafrost: ‘It’s a Little Scary Because it’s Happening Under Our Feet.’
A new study shows a few degrees of warming can trigger abrupt thaws of vast frozen lands, releasing huge stores of greenhouse gases and collapsing landscapes.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16102020/permafrost-study-arctic-ocean-climate-change
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Tipping points, baby, big bad tipping points and we’ve crossed a whole bunch of them I’m afraid. Here’s another I don’t know if I posted:
Going, Going … Gone: Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet Passed a Point of No Return in the Early 2000s
A new study finds that the accelerating retreat and thinning of Greenland’s glaciers that began 20 year ago is speeding the ice sheet toward total meltdown.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14082020/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-climate-change
a cut by Lead author Michalea King, a glaciologist: “The kind of discouraging thing is, even if we were to go back to the old amounts of snow we were adding, at this new elevated rate of melting, we would expect it to stay out of balance for some time,”
KIND of discouraging? What an understatement this woman said!
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Nothing else for the moment.
sealintheSelkirks
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More than a little inconvenient considering we have crossed 2C if 1750 is used for a baseline.
The 10 to 30 year lag masks the release but it is now baked in;
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-billions-tons-soil-carbon.html?fbclid=IwAR1E0C4v1Ri7acT2WcSse35FcdxMRzK8Dna45Dh4jYWLJNRQ7SN92nqmElI
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Boy does this article warm my heart or what?. I mean, toasty warm on this rainy chill night in these mountains with a fire going in the woodburner stove and now I can just see it, no more need to cut firewood for winter at 49’N Latitude and haul it to the woodshed in a wheelbarrow in the rain all afternoon like I did today. It’ll be just flip-flops and shorts year round. Of course that will mean a year-round fire season and choking clouds of smoke that I’m still feeling in my lungs from this year…and last year…and the year before that ad nauseum… But then of course most of the conifer forest that surrounds me will be dying or dead by then because the summers will be like…the Mojave Desert in SoCal. But I’m guessing probably not as hot as the desert mountains just 60 miles north of Mojave with that cute little name of Death Valley… I’ve already seen my thermometer at 43’C in the last 16 years.
And why would anybody who thinks they are intelligent NOT use the 1750 baseline since it’s the industrial age that has blasted us over the top in greenhouse gas build-up? Before that we were mostly agrarian and just cutting down forests and planting crops and using up all the water…
Big sigh. I really wish I had been born somewhere more…sane.
sealintheSelkirks
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There is no shortage of evidence that we have crossed numerous ‘Tipping points’;
https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/2020/11/13/how-small-changes-can-make-a-big-difference-tipping-points-in-antarctica/?fbclid=IwAR3Qa5yvMpc3-hqGHJ7ARoIMIHn0uWUiBj2dlauDKK-xgFZ56tWYI5eDOl0
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More confirmation that we have hurtled off the cliff;
https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7661724?fbclid=IwAR26Pbpfy2Wv8omCh0ZoHgCQXtYJHmjnxgP52DHLXMWjl-RAG7PWQOWBdn8
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Sam Carana and Dr Andrew Glikson continue their collaboration;
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/12/polar-ward-climate-zones-shift-and-consequent-tipping-points.html?fbclid=IwAR1J7rDI8bso2vsAylqXjy1lhzhFCK1g68jDiqoIuXcMZQvQ9oJ8ZzNxS8M
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Another tipping point crossed;
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/land-ecosystems-are-becoming-less-efficient-at-absorbing-co2
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“The Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last ice age are among the best studied abrupt climate changes, yet a comprehensive explanation is still lacking. They are most pronounced in the North Atlantic, where they manifest as large temperature swings, on timescales of decades or shorter, between persistent cold (stadial) and warm (interstadial) conditions. This review examines evidence that Dansgaard-Oeschger events are an unforced or “spontaneous” oscillation of the coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean system comprising the North Atlantic, Nordic Seas and Arctic, collectively termed the Northern Seas.” Quote from a Science direct article titled “Coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean dynamics in Dansgaard-Oeschger events”, I’ll post the paper below.
Welcome to the world of feedback loops leading to rapid non linear warming.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118305705
Paul Beckwith’s latest
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In Dr Gliksons latest contribution to the debate he mentions the book ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, by David Wallace-Wells.
Whilst writing that book Wells interviewed my co-host on Nature Bats Last Professor Guy McPherson. Shamefully Wells plagiarised Guy’s monster climate change essay an never mentioned the interview.
In the article Dr Glikson refers to scientific reticence. In our last interview with him he mentioned that no wants to fill the role of ‘Cassandra’, as a Casandra who for the last 6 years has been raising the alarm I can assure you it’s not a popularity contest.
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2020/12/an-orwellian-climate-while-rome-burns.html?fbclid=IwAR2QEgkPG258X_vX1ukjdv1q8GNGA6c6W4ObVlKlFyKLn6MZrQzfgQTLLmA
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Feedback Loops
https://feedbackloopsclimate.com/introduction/
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Our former guest on Nature Bats Last Jim Massa provides a summary of ‘Tipping Points” in the climate system referencing the work of Dr Andrew Glikson another one of our guests on Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM
For the science and oceanography nerds amongst us.
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Here’s a new methane feedback loop;
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-huge-methane-emission-extreme-rainfall.html?fbclid=IwAR1fYE2mEzTm5t4zJ_NuhMw9Hw1yxHhLqkO35hWImezUBpva_-9CDjeEMBs
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Oh lookee, the US Democrats suddenly became climate warriors! Don’t worry about all this methane because neoliberal corporate President Biden will make it all better don’t ya know?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/02/04/new-bill-blumenauer-ocasio-cortez-and-sanders-demands-biden-declare-national-climate
I’m still waiting for a Super Dooper CO2 Vacuum machine to be launched into Earth orbit that can suck all GHGs down to a level where the planetary atmosphere can stabilize. I’ll probably be waiting a long time for that, eh?
At least it’s a beautiful clear sky tonight and the starfields were rotating above my head while the dogs were running around on the disappearing thin ice sniffing whitetail and bunny tracks. That’s one thing I really appreciate about this mountain place I live on, the sky.
The new adopted girl Golden Retriever is doing wonderfully well this being her second month here with the old blind girl Husky. After 4 years locked up in a freaking kennel with a choke chain around her neck I’m surprised that she has blended into the household so quickly but she has. She also, after I was told she didn’t like balls or playing, has picked out her favorite toys from leftover other dog toys that spent their life living here. A very well used tennis ball and a rubberized ice cream cone squeaky toy for inside, and a hard nubby rubber ball with a bell in it for outside. Sticks are optional when I’m cutting firewood but she always finds something to chew on out there. Life still can be good and the tail never stops wagging!
sealintheSelkirks
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Living the dream.
Rescue dogs rock. They are invariably very adaptable when shown compassion and respect and can often be the very best comrades.
I knew one named ‘Herb’, he was super laid back.
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Yeah, Kevin, I’ve never had anything but rescue dogs that nobody wanted. There have been a couple that were so damaged by humans they couldn’t function, though. But this Red Dog is an absolute sweetheart, no doubt about it.
Time for bed, 3am PST. Supposedly heading down to the F single digits this week. Maybe winter will come back? Best get more firewood into the house tomorrow, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
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The latest from Dr Glikson
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/02/snowstorms-breach-of-arctic-vortex-and-the-effects-of-ice-meltwater-on-the-oceans.html?fbclid=IwAR0gMDg0d0uOatAMparR1wLrV3IjHD5Zx1yZ2bIG_F70P9zAENA9cQxY268
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No mention of the 10 to 30 year minimum lag between emissions and their effects. This chaos was all baked in decades ago;
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the-threat-of-high-probability-ocean-tipping-points?fbclid=IwAR3a-ZIqqTgVqWXCSSrMUHelVLwrsCpIbUdWkEsqrYFMlY8peLa8U229f1k
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Then into the abyss we descend;
https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-major-ocean-current-may-be-hurtling-towards-collapse-1846337333?fbclid=IwAR1vbAeYZmi308rL1zO-u6XYlvNB5QXU-2rx7VYbZWS-iBnLsduH0tcmU-w
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You did read this latest from Hunziker? Gave me the shivers.
The Doomsday Glacier Lives up to its Billing
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/20/the-doomsday-glacier-lives-up-to-its-billing/
sealintheSelkirks
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Somehow, Kevin, I have the uncomfortable thought that there will be a point that we all find out there were a whole bunch of tipping points nobody had any idea about. Suddenly they will just be there throwing poop in our faces like monkeys trapped in cages at zoos…
Maybe I’m wrong, yes?
sealintheSelkirks
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It’s a given that there are a multitude of “Black Swans” coming our way
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Dr Andrew Glikson, Professor Guy McPherson, Professor Corey Bradshaw, Sam Carana, Paul Beckwith, myself and thousands more have ben hammering on about this, in many of our cases, for a decade or more.
Shit is happening folks, now, not long off in the future.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03263-2?fbclid=IwAR3GLRlpGNWv_G3aF6BtrjM8zg7N9keRmSMZWIZ8jT_oJRqNNthHhLGyB44
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“Critical slowing down suggests that the western Greenland Ice Sheet is close to a tipping point”
Close to a tipping point ?
How many of you think we close to a tipping point ?
There is a 10 to 30 year lag between carbon emissions and their full effects being felt, it’s almost immediate for methane.
When I first started studying science there was this quaint old scientific maxim called the “Precautionary Principal”.
None of the refereed journals are following the precautionary principal since we entered early stage irreversible runaway warming.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2024192118?fbclid=IwAR0m6RcNNhCfnF1ERXUttMKjrNFUmTPKmaOTIrKhw4Rfls_WQWIeGTJqLZ0
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I’m sure you’ve noticed that the same questions keep being repeatedly asked year after year.. Then it gets debated back and forth for a while before a ‘new’ commission is funded to ‘study’ the questions all over again. And another debate comes out about ‘potential’ and ‘possible’ that gets tossed back and forth…and yet another study is commissioned…
And nothing truly changes in the overall behavior of the species that is causing these problems. The giant Wall St. banks continue to fund more exploration and extraction of fossil fuel (all finite resources for that matter) anywhere they can because that’s where the profits are, Governments continue to sell ‘rights’ to do so on so-called public lands, and we see more pipelines being built everywhere even though there are a few that become media sensations and get cancelled to great fanfare so people think they’ve actually ‘won’ some great battle. It’s absurd.
And then there’s that 30 year lag time between emissions and effect. Oops! Don’t really hear that being reinforced on the MSM evening news I imagine.
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Yep, I remember reading about the ‘Precautionary Principle’ back in the late 80s when I started studying at university, It was threaded through all of the science classes and also in my early childhood teaching classes because a teacher needs to have an understanding of the worst case ‘what ifs’ before one causes irrevocable damage. The native american concept of looking 7 generations ahead, yes?
But you know as well as I do that concept fell to the wayside and was run the hell over by the back tires by the neoliberal capitalism model this civilization is running on. All about as much profit as possible and damn any consequences; they don’t matter. Nothing matters beyond short-term profit increases. It’s a sickness, dude, I swear!
My questions at this point are simple. Will I still be alive when the freshwater melt pouring off Greenland finally shifts the salinity and completely stops the flow of warm water to Europe? That ought to have some pretty interesting effects damned fast on the worldwide climate don’t ya think?
Will it literally shut down like flicking a light switch in one day or will it continue to gradually slow down and occasionally ‘stutter’ as it has done already as the salinity continues to be diluted? Science understands the mechanics of it pretty dang well but they are lousy at predictions of when and we know that they tend towards the conservative side of predictions as a group…
The lobsters in Maine are already shifting north off the Canadian coast because the Atlantic is becoming too warm to suit them. But if shuts off I guess the lobsters will move back to Maine, right? Won’t the lobster industry be happy….
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On a side note, refreshing on the Black Swan Event thread. Big sigh. Never any good news.
Oh, and my thermometer hit 90F/35C yesterday. Lots of wind and again very windy today. Fire danger continues to rise. End of July temperatures in the middle of May at 49’N latitude…but at least today there are cloud masses going by. and it is cooler today but still that muggy feel to the air. Haven’t look at the satellite map lately…
sealintheSelkirks
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“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.”
Our former guest on Nature Bats Last, Jim Massa, another paleoceanographer, has just published an interpretation of this latest data on the unravelling of the complex system we used to have, titled “Ocean Heat Content”, where he describes what’s happening in the oceans
“The AMOC is thus a poster child for the idea of climatic “tipping points” — of hard-to-predict thresholds in Earth’s climate system that, once crossed, have rapid, cascading effects far beyond the corner of the globe where they occur. “It’s a switch,” said Dr. de Menocal, and one that can be thrown quickly.”
Remember this is the corporate media downplaying the risk even though their conclusions are dire many of us believe it’s much worse.
We are witnessing a phase shift that will leave a totally different planet in it’s wake, soon.
I’ll post Jim Massa’s work below for further reference.
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Hunziker today:
The Net Zero Mirage
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/28/the-net-zero-mirage/
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And the Arctic is burning already so I’m assuming that means the Arctic Ocean is heating up, too:
Arctic Wildfires Are Back With Record Blazes in Western Siberia
Scientists are worried about the intensity of fires this early in the season
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-26/arctic-wildfires-are-back-with-record-blazes-in-western-siberia
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And the oceans will heat and heat and heat….and the land will burn and burn and burn…
sealintheSelkirks
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The latest from Dr Glikson from the tireless Sam Carana
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-climate-change-runaway-chain-reaction-like-process.html?fbclid=IwAR3WPMe_6bJRtR-DuoOMXRIKMS8NnYEznjDbGMlB6JB660HhGhURAzArkJA
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Oops.
Planet Earth is Heating Up Faster
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/22/planet-earth-is-heating-up-faster/
A new scientific paper just accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) shows that, on the basis of both computations and experimental measurements, the net rate at which Planet Earth is absorbing solar energy has increased between years 2005 and 2019. Planet Earth is heating up — global warming — at a faster rate, and that rate is increasing.
sealintheSelkirks
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For the ultra-conservative Physorg the article even conveys a little bit of urgency, something most science papers lack.
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-climate.amp?fbclid=IwAR0I5JF7tfWm4aG1W4GRuzqYT5cJ8fPTKbEAvVDovSGqKsGAz1wkcaBCHvw
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