More dangers lurking..

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On Tuesday, NOAA released its latest annual Arctic Report Card, which analyzes the state of the frozen ocean at the top of our world. Overall, it’s not good. “The Arctic is going through the most unprecedented transition in human history,” Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic research program, said at a press conference. “This year’s observations confirm that the Arctic shows no signs of returning to the reliably frozen state it was in just a decade ago.” The report, which you can read in full here, compiles trends that scientists have been seeing for years. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. And 2017 saw a new record low for the maximum sea ice extent (i.e., how much of the Arctic ocean freezes in the coldest depths of winter). Arctic sea ice extent has been measured by satellites since the 1970s. And scientists can sample ice cores, permafrost records, and tree rings to make some assumptions about the sea ice extent going back 1,500 years. And when you put that all on a chart, well, it looks a little scary.

We’re witnessing the fastest decline in Arctic sea ice in at least 1,500 years - Vox

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Scientists have known that for a long time, but according to a new finding from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, CO2 levels have reached a point that could have catastrophic effects on human health. As BI's Kevin Loria reported on Tuesday, for the first time in recorded history, the average monthly level of CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded 410 parts per million (ppm) in April. Research suggests this trend could lead to tens of thousands of pollution-related deaths, slow human cognition, and result in more frequent and powerful natural disasters. While this new record is dangerous for the planet overall, it could be even worse for urban areas, where more than half of the world's population lives.

How high carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere affect health, cities - Business Insider

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A new study out Monday warns of the possibility of out-of-control global warming if humans fail to band together to fight the worst effects of climate change. The analysis, conducted by researchers at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center, among other institutions, outlines the potential for a "threshold" that, if crossed, would lead to runaway warming patterns and the advent of a "Hothouse Earth." If such a threshold is crossed, the study warns, global average temperatures could climb as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above current temperatures and sea levels could rise 30 to 200 feet. "Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene," the study says.

Study warns of looming potential for runaway global warming | TheHill

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It is universally recognized that the pledges made in Paris would lead to a warming far beyond 1.5 degrees — more like 2.5 or 3 degrees Celsius, or even more. And that was before the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, decided to try to back out. “The pledges countries made during the Paris climate accord don’t get us anywhere close to what we have to do,” said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at Duke University and one of the authors of the IPCC report. “They haven’t really followed through with actions to reduce their emissions in any way commensurate with what they profess to be aiming for.”

Climate scientists are struggling to find the right words for very bad news - The Washington Post

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Bit of a contrast between the report's summary and the report itself..

The report’s summary for policymakers paints a sobering picture of the potentially terrible impacts of allowing global mean surface temperature to rise by 2C compared with pre-industrial levels: more extreme weather, sea level rise and ocean acidification, with detrimental effects on wildlife, crops, water availability and human health. But the policymakers, or at least their aides, should make the effort to read the whole report. Incredibly, the stark summary is still a relatively conservative assessment of the consequences we might face if global warming does exceed 1.5C. The report is a comprehensive review of the published evidence painstakingly compiled by hundreds of authors and reviewers over the past two and a half years.

The summary of the report was approved line by line by governments, including the US, Australia and Saudi Arabia, during long and intensive discussions last week in South Korea. It is written in matter-of-fact language, but it omits some of the biggest risks of climate change, which are described in the full text. For instance, the summary indicates that warming of 2C would have very damaging impacts on many parts of the world. But it does not mention the potential for human populations to migrate and be displaced as a result, leading to the possibility of war. 

The summary also leaves out important information about so-called “tipping points” in the climate system, beyond which impacts become unstoppable, irreversible or accelerate. It acknowledges that the land-based ice sheets in Greenland and west Antarctica may be destabilised even by warming of 1.5C, ensuring several metres of sea level rise over the coming centuries. But there is no mention of other important thresholds that might, for instance, halt the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, or cause shifts in the occurrence of the monsoons in Africa and Asia. It is not clear why such crucial information has been left out of the summary. Perhaps the authors felt that there are too many uncertainties in our knowledge to be definitive. But the danger is that policymakers will assume the absence of these very significant risks from the summary means that researchers have assessed them to be unimportant or impossible.

The IPCC global warming report spares politicians the worst details | Bob Ward | Opinion | The Guardian

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A disturbing new study finds that global warming helped drive as much as a 60-fold decline in insect population in Puerto Rico’s tropical rainforest between 1976 and 2013. “Our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated,” said lead author, biologist Brad Lister, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). And that’s a potentially catastrophic problem given that the forest saw 3.6°F (2°C) warming during that time — yet warming this century is on track to be far greater. These new findings follow several studies in recent years that found collapsing insect populations around the world..

Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns – ThinkProgress

Se link for the studies

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Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide. For example, when Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render runaway climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended 11,600 years ago, temperatures rose 10C within a decade.

I don’t believe such a collapse is yet inevitable, or that a commensurate response is either technically or economically impossible. When the US joined the second world war in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with a military economy within months. As Jack Doyle records in his book Taken for a Ride, “In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft … Barely a year after Pontiac received a navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.” And this was before advanced information technology made everything faster.

The problem is political. A fascinating analysis by the social science professor Kevin MacKay contends that oligarchy has been a more fundamental cause of the collapse of civilisations than social complexity or energy demand. Control by oligarchs, he argues, thwarts rational decision-making, because the short-term interests of the elite are radically different to the long-term interests of society. This explains why past civilisations have collapsed “despite possessing the cultural and technological know-how needed to resolve their crises”. Economic elites, which benefit from social dysfunction, block the necessary solutions.

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

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Cement, the key component of concrete and one of the most widely used manmade materials, is now the cornerstone of global construction. It has shaped the modern environment, but its production has a massive footprint that neither the industry nor governments have been willing to address. Because of the heat needed to decompose rock and the natural chemical processes involved in making cement, every tonne made releases one tonne of C02, the main greenhouse warming gas.

Concrete is tipping us into climate catastrophe. It's payback time | Cities | The Guardian

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A report by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future. Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health. “There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century, climate change has to be ranked as one of the most serious threats to health,” said Prof Sir Andrew Haines, a co-chair of the report for the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac).

Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds | Environment | The Guardian

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Since taking the oath of office in 2017, Donald Trump has made it clear that he cares about the environment about as much as freedom of the press and sounding lucid on Twitter. In the past 29 months, he’s ditched the Paris climate agreement; gutted regulations designed to prevent another Deepwater Horizon spill; unveiled a proposal to freeze rules on planet-warming pollution from cars and trucks; and put in motion a plan to bury evidence that his replacement for Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan could kill 1,400 Americans a year. The administration has muzzled science that contradicts its official stance that climate change is nothing to worry about—or is even a thing that exists—and, to that end, hired a guy who has said carbon dioxide is being demonized “just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” whose primary job is to discredit the conclusions of last year’s National Climate Assessment, a report written by 13 federal agencies that predicted harrowing consequences for not taking action on climate change. At this point, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to learn that government employees caught even uttering the words “climate change” and “not good” around the water cooler gets cattle prodded by Aunt Lydia. 

Trump Official Goes Rogue, Says Climate Change May Cause Next Financial Crisis | Vanity Fair