There’s no time to lose. The new research led by the French team confirms that whether we like it or not, human civilisation is in the midst of the most rapid transformation of the global energy system we’ve ever experienced. And hanging on for dear life to the old, dying...
Arctic
The American Geological Union documents a significant rift in the Last Ice Area just north of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian arctic in May of 2020. A hole of open water in sea ice is known as a polynya, and its formation is remarkable because the ice in the area is...
According to new findings from the University of California San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, primarily in summer, unprecedented quantities of heat from the Pacific are pouring into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. This likely explains the rapid decimation of sea ice in the region. The decline has...
Very little is known about rainfall in Antarctica; precipitation falls as snow on the bitter cold ice-covered continent. But during the austral summer of 2013-2014, an Adélie penguin colony near Dumont d’Urville station on coastal Adélie Land experienced “unusual and dramatic rainfall event that occurred on January 1, 2014, and that was...
The “Arctic is already under such threat from so many angles, and while production there is expensive, it is also very, very high risk. It requires absolutely the strongest levels of global oversight.” Phoebe Barnard, Professor at Washington’s Conservation Biology Institute Putin’s Russia made history today when the Christophe de Margerie, the enormous...
“In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.” ~ Aristotle It is a fact that the biggest threat to our species is not climate change, though it will likely end much of what we experience today, but rather our war on bio-diversity. Bio-diversity is under attack from...
I keep vigil. Last summer, record-breaking wildfires in Siberia, “in and around the Arctic circle,” continue to smolder and burn; the fuel feeding the fires is peat, decomposing organic matter that has been stored in the earth for millenniums. According to NASA estimates, at least half of wildfires burned in Siberia in the...
I had never heard the extraordinary story of Ada Blackjack, her Alaskan way of life was transformed into a destitute single woman with a small child when abandoned by her dog-musher husband. She had no choice but to walk forty miles to Nome, Alaska, with a two-year-old ill with tuberculosis. Upon arrival, she...
Donald Trump has been plotting to screw our climate and kill off the diversity of life for four years. This isn’t hyperbole; he has devasted critical habitat and created scars over 400 miles long through National Parks, private and public lands along the US and Mexican borders with his racist wall. By changing...
In 2019 John Kerry was awarded and accepted the Arctic Circle Prize in a speech to an assembly of climate scientists and other Arctic stakeholders in Reykjavik, Iceland. In his dramatic speech, Kerry, who has been nominated by President-Elect Joe Biden, to be the first ‘Climate Tsar’ in a cabinet-level position, declared a world...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
“It’s gotten so out of whack that we are now looking at survival for our children, not survival of our grandchildren.”, Peter Carter, M.D., – reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Dozens of scientists from Sweden, Russia, China, and seven other countries studied methane emissions...
The crises facing the country are severe — from a pandemic to an economic recession, climate change to racial injustice — and the transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One. Biden Transition Team As I write...
Jo Biden had offered 20 billion to preserve the Amazon. It was ridiculed denied by the Trump of the Tropics, Jair Bolsonaro. Perhaps a similar offer to the nations involved in Africa would be a rational response and likely considered. It’s worth a try. I highly suspect this diary will...
Larry Kudlow continues the underlying theme of Trumpian nihilism and its trickle-down contagion of pixie dust and pseudoscience. Trump continues to see his numbers decline as his campaign put him on a superspreader rally schedule, attempting to repeat his 2016 victory of 155,000 votes in swing states while trailing 3 million...
If we lose the Arctic, we lose the whole world. President Niinistö of Finland There is a record open ocean in the Arctic as a delayed freeze in sea ice formation due to record-shattering heat in the Laptev Sea. Siberia has been freakishly hot recently, resulting in the loss of bone-chilling winds...
Yale Environment 360 notes “just as global warming has propelled the Arctic Ocean past a tipping point which will lead to a largely ice-free Arctic in summer in the coming decades. Wildfire scientists say that rising global temperatures and worsening droughts mean that the world has entered a new era...
“Oh yes Sapiens, you hungry little monkey, it's all about you” comment via Greenland Ice Sheet — Ice Sheet Melting Is Perfectly in Line With Our Worst-Case Scenario, Scientists Warn New research has found that 50-70% of Antarctica's glacier marine extensions are at risk of hydrofracture due to enormous meltwater lakes on the...
Due to a buildup in methane in a rapidly heating Siberia, an explosion occurred that tossed boulders of frozen soil and ice “hundreds of metres” into the sky from the epicenter of the blast in the Yamal Penninsula. The powerful blast site was discovered by accident when a TV news crew...
Devastating and scary news from the Arctic as Greenland has reached the tipping point. The melting of our northern freezer which allows our civilization to flourish has reached the point of no return, even if we cut our emissions to zero. The tipping point is where snowfall “that replenishes the ice...
Canada’s last fully intact ice caps have disappeared NASA satellites confirmed. The two ice caps are in the Northeast of Ellesmere Island, near Greenland. The ice caps formed during the Little Ice Age, they have succumbed to the intense heat waves blanketing the Arctic over the past several years. From the...
Good news for the Arctic, and the entire planet, as Deutsche Bank announced that they were ending financing fossil fuel projects at the tar sands in Alberta, and projects of fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic. Burning the filthy dirty tar sands for energy is far worse than crude oil. The...
Most of us have been experiencing warm to hot temperatures. It doesn’t appear that the misery will go away any time soon. There is a lot of news lately on our warming planet. I shared a few articles on the subject, but they barely scratch the surface of what is...
The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming. Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted, and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.” Professor John Abraham, University of St Thomas, MN There are many complicating factors in our efforts to combat the...
The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming. Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted, and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.” Professor John Abraham, University of St Thomas, MN There are many complicating factors in our efforts to combat the...
Even if a small fraction of the Arctic seafloor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked. Climatologist Jason Box, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland We all have our hands full at the moment, with multiple catastrophes occurring at once. Before scrolling past the headline of this diary, I implore...
Even if a small fraction of the Arctic seafloor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked. Climatologist Jason Box, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland We all have our hands full at the moment, with multiple catastrophes occurring at once. Before scrolling past the headline of this diary, I implore...
I am sharing some of the stories from the Arctic that have not received the media attention that they deserve. We can expect increasing wildfires, a busy and dangerous Atlantic storm season, and rising marine and land temperatures as a result of the incredible speed of the climate crisis. As we...
There is no vaccine or hydroxychloroquine dosage that can stop an exceptional heating event happening in the Arctic. In Siberia, an intensifying heatwave threatens a disastrous melt season across the Arctic, once again. Summer is coming. We should brace ourselves for an ominous and dangerous summer of wildfire and powerful storms as...
Parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans all hit the record books for warmth last month, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information. The high temperatures, particularly in the tropics, will help in forecasting the fierceness of the Atlantic hurricane season, and “the eruption of wildfires from...
We have our hands full of worldwide contagion due to the incompetence of Donald Trump, Remember the same denial and sabotage of scientific facts that have led us to disaster with COVID is in overdrive at the White House when it come to dangers from climate change. What happens in...
“The Arctic is heating up twice as much as the rest of the planet. With that comes permafrost thawing and the birth of aquifers, it is likely that groundwater transport in the Arctic will be more and more important in the future.” M. Bayani Cardenas, Jackson School of Geosciences Another previously...
Not since the plague, also known as the Black Death, arrived in Europe in the early 1300s has the human population been more vulnerable to exotic disease. Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 to 60% of the population of Europe. With international transport of people and goods, dense...
“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril, this is the new extinction and we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” Sir David Attenborough Antarctic and Arctic ice...
I’ve always loved Elizabeth Warren’s “I Have A Plan For That Motto” because it rings so true. Today, she unveils three new plans that cover three big issues. First, the Coronavirus: Warren’s plan has several provisions, starting with attempts to help people who need or will need medical attention. She wants...
Donald Trump is king of the bungle, but he’s not, in any formal sense, a monarch. That didn’t stop him from suggesting it this morning in a tweet, though: x …..biggest test of his presidency emboldened, ready to claim exoneration, and take his case of grievance, persecution and resentment to...
Faster than previously expected. Those four words are horrifying when it comes to describing the changes to our climate. We have been reading about these phenomena frequently lately and, they haunt with such dire consequences as increasing permafrost thaw, marine heatwaves, climate migration, increasing pressure on our food systems, to...
Though temperatures have cooled somewhat in Australia, providing much-needed relief for the overworked and exhausted firefighters, provides some critical time to strengthen containment lines the firestorms have not stopped. They are predicted to intensify in the next few days as yet another heatwave will desiccate the soils, plants, and trees...
The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union was held on December 9 in San Francisco. There should be a lot of updated information on climate change released to the public in the coming weeks. Two items discussed was permafrost and glaciers, including those from Greenland and Antarctica. The other...
The high Arctic is in serious trouble from the fossil fuel and extraction industries to the degradation of the region’s biomes from climate change. Despite the best efforts of the Trump regime to silence climate scientists, while sabotaging and burying their work, more and more studies are sounding the alarm...
The Arctic has been warming faster than any other region on earth. The marginal sea of the Pacific which divides the most extensive landmasses on earth, Eurasia (Russia) and North America (Alaska), is named the Bering Sea. It is here that the most dramatic changes can be seen observed. Alaska...
Three new studies raise the specter that the great ice platforms of the Antarctic continent are more unstable and susceptible to collapse than previously thought. Antarctica holds ninety percent of the world’s store of freshwater and would raise sea levels 230 feet if it all melts. East Antarctica’s ice is...
The Arctic is unraveling before our eyes. As our understanding of the changes continues, scientists have been fine-tuning models to give us a sense of how quickly we can expect tipping points to arrive. One of the most terrifying is the permafrost feedback. A new study finds that the feedback...
“We have never observed an ice sheet behaving this way before. It’s unprecedented in human scientific history.” – Kristin Poinar, Glaciologist, University of Buffalo Greenland is, for the most part, a very moist environment (with the exception of northern Greenland which until recently had been a dry environment). The ice...
I am not sure if people realize the significance of the dramatic and probable, irreversible loss of Greenland's ice by warming oceans and atmospheric changes. Most of the time I feel a good majority simply don’t give a rat’s ass. Here is a tip for you, if you even bothered...
And all those facing outward, towards the planetary, the geologic, the unknown, raised a great cry, a witnessing of the very tide that had been predicted. Homo Colossus did not stir from its dream of currency. The Greenland Ice Sheet. All of the sea ice has melted around the Alaskan...
More gobsmacking imagery out of Greenland. x Greenland is melting – even in the highest north! Here water is running off the top of the ice sheet at our field site on Inglefield Land. The ice cliff is c. 40 m tall. pic.twitter.com/WFMbNLMeW7— Anders Anker Bjørk (@aabjoerk) August 7, 2019...
“Because the Arctic’s role in regulating the global climate is a critical link in the chain of climate protection it should be the focus of an all-out effort to keep it strong and safe,” Durwood Zaelke, preident of the Institute of Governance and Sustaninable Development. Scripps issues a code-red warning...