Obligatory Climate Change Thread or Are We Fucked?
Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, according to new study
Record Arctic blazes may herald new ‘fire regime’ decades sooner than anticipatedGreenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, and efforts to slow global warming will not stop it from disintegrating. That's according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University.
"The ice sheet is now in this new dynamic state, where even if we went back to a climate that was more like what we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still be pretty quickly losing mass," Ian Howat, co-author of the study and a professor at Ohio State University, said.
'Faster than expected' is becoming the climate change taglineHowever, this year is proving those scientists wrong. And it raises the unsettling possibility that fire seasons that begin much earlier than average and end later — and affect delicate Arctic ecosystems — could soon be the new normal. Wildfires continue to burn unimpeded across Siberia, as they have since May, after getting an unusually early start to the fire season. A thick blanket of smoke has turned the sky a milky gray in Siberia’s cities, with some smoke making it across the Pacific into Alaska and Canada’s Hudson Bay.
Next thing you'll know, scientists will say that they've found that feedback loop has already started and we're FUBAR.
Earth may temporarily pass dangerous 1.5 C warming limit by 2024, major new report says
Climate crisis could displace 1.2bn people by 2050, report warnsThis first overshoot beyond 1.5℃ would be temporary, likely aided by a major climate anomaly such as an El Niño weather pattern. However, it casts new doubt on whether Earth's climate can be permanently stabilized at 1.5℃ warming.
Climate change may wreck economy unless we act soon, federal report warnsThe Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a thinktank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, said 1.2 billion people lived in 31 countries that are not sufficiently resilient to withstand ecological threats.
Nineteen countries facing the highest number of threats, including water and food shortages and greater exposure to natural disasters, are also among the the world’s 40 least peaceful countries, the IEP’s first ecological threat register found.
Climate change "poses a major risk to the stability of the US financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy," the report (196-page PDF) from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) begins. Regulators "must recognize that climate change poses serious emerging risks to the US financial system, and they should move urgently and decisively to measure, understand, and address these risks."
The fires raging out West are unprecedented. They're also a mere preview of what climate change has in store
I hope you guys are all safe"It's shocking to see the impacts, but not scientifically surprising," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research told CNN on Tuesday. "This is in line with essentially every prediction for what could happen this year and the trends we're seeing over years and decades."
UN warns that world risks becoming 'uninhabitable hell' for millions unless leaders take climate action
Researchers pointed to a failure of political and business leaders to take meaningful action to mitigate the impact of climatic change and stop the planet from turning into "an uninhabitable hell for millions of people."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng- ... al-warmingThe Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?
At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was no more.
On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St Patrick’s Bay ice caps completely disappeared.
Two weeks later, scientists concluded that the Greenland Ice Sheet may have already passed the point of no return. Annual snowfall is no longer enough to replenish the snow and ice loss during summer melting of the territory’s 234 glaciers. Last year, the ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million metric tons every minute.
The Arctic is unravelling. And it’s happening faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago. Northern Siberia and the Canadian Arctic are now warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. If greenhouse gas emissions stay on the same trajectory, we can expect the north to have warmed by 4C year-round by the middle of the century.
“The latest models are basically showing that no matter what emissions scenario we follow, we’re going to lose summer [sea] ice cover before the middle of the century,” says Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Even if we keep warming to less than 2C, it’s still enough to lose that summer sea ice in some years.”
'Faster than expected' will probably be the last words we'll hear.
I hope polar bears can emigrate, which they're also partly already doing but still. I guess besides the Russians the Orcas are going to be the apex predators in the north pole.
lol @ Russians thinking they can capitalize on climate change. For how long? 10 years?
Much much longer unfortunately. Climate change will not make the whole world a dystopia in 10 or 100 years. Climate in first world countries will likely not change that much. Economically it will be getting worse for this reason and many others but not a catastrophe immediately either. The climate refugee crisis will be building for a number of years as people become insensitive to the issue and will likely resent the influx of people which they'll see as the main problem for their comfortable lifestyle becoming less comfortable. More division and conflict will come with it. But it will take time before the shit hits the fan. What this year has taught us is that devastating consequences don't happen overnight and your life will more or less feel the same as you live through slowly but steadily growing hardship. Dystopia is as boring if not more for first world passive observers than normalcy.
