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.
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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