Science Archives - Vote Climate One

Politics vs physical dangers and real death

William P. Hall on March 22, 2023

IPCC warns we have only a few years left when climate action can reverse human caused global warming to avoid a crescendo of climate catastrophes

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where the greedy self-interests of billionaires and multi-national corporations tend to control media and politics. These special interests are threatened by things that must be done to slow and stop global warming. They use their power over the media and politicians to deny the need for and to prevent critically important climate action. However, the real-world understanding reported in the concluding summary of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report on Climate Change (published this week) documents and explains the very real dangers and even mass deaths society faces if global warming is not stopped by 2030. We genuinely face a climate emergency that threatens human survival. To have any hope of organizing and implementing the kinds of statewide and national actions needed to stop the warming process citizens have to replace the parliamentary puppets of special interests with MPs who will genuinely work for the citizens who elected them. In New South Wales, how you vote this week is a life-and-death matter!

The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formed by the World Meterological Organization and the United Nations in 1988 to study and advise world governments on climate change. The IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers published this week was unanimously agreed to and signed off by the politically appointed representatives of all 195(!) member governments of the United Nations that form the World Meteorological Organization (normally only 170-180 governments participate in IPCC reviews). This unusual approval process required for IPCCs “summary reports” is intended to ensure that governments accept its findings as authoritative advice on which to base their actions (a 1:30 minute IPCC video explains).

I have explained that this approval process is highly conservative and cannot avoid downplaying the extent and dangers of climate change. In reality, the actual dangers to humanity are likely to be a lot worse than described by the IPCC. New South Wales residents who are currently voting on their state government (polls close on 25 March) should note that all the modeling and predictions discussed in the Report are based on weather and climate data collected only up to 2020. The models and predictions do not include evidence on or predict how extreme climate events have actually been: e.g.,Black Summer bushfires, more than two years of unprecedented and widespread flooding, extreme heatwaves and drought, etc. If you are living on the land or close to Nature, you will know that the reality you are living with is already significantly worse than anticipated by the IPCC.

At nearly 8,000 pages, the full report is virtually unreadable. Every statement is documented, justified, and qualified. Fortunately, the World Resources Institute has done an admirable job of highlighting critical content in a readable way:

Cover Image by: Anirut Thailand/Shutterstock (from the article)

by Sophie Boehm and Clea Schumer, 20/03/2024 in World Resources Institute – Insights

10 Big Findings from the 2023 IPCC Report on Climate Change

Today marks the release of the final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), an eight-year long undertaking from the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change. Drawing on the findings of 234 scientists on the physical science of climate change, 270 scientists on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change, and 278 scientists on climate change mitigation, this IPCC synthesis report provides the most comprehensive, best available scientific assessment of climate change.

It also makes for grim reading. Across nearly 8,000 pages, the AR6 details the devastating consequences of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around the world — the destruction of homes, the loss of livelihoods and the fragmentation of communities, for example — as well as the increasingly dangerous and irreversible risks should we fail to change course.

But the IPCC also offers hope, highlighting pathways to avoid these intensifying risks. It identifies readily available, and in some cases, highly cost-effective actions that can be undertaken now to reduce GHG emissions, scale up carbon removal and build resilience. While the window to address the climate crisis is rapidly closing, the IPCC affirms that we can still secure a safe, livable future.

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Looking Ahead

The IPCC’s AR6 makes clear that risks of inaction on climate are immense and the way ahead requires change at a scale not seen before. However, this report also serves as a reminder that we have never had more information about the gravity of the climate emergency and its cascading impacts — or about what needs to be done to reduce intensifying risks.

Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) is still possible, but only if we act immediately. As the IPCC makes clear, the world needs to peak GHG emissions before 2025 at the very latest, nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero CO2 emissions around mid-century, while also ensuring a just and equitable transition. We’ll also need an all-hands-on-deck approach to guarantee that communities experiencing increasingly harmful impacts of the climate crisis have the resources they need to adapt to this new world. Governments, the private sector, civil society and individuals must all step up to keep the future we desire in sight. A narrow window of opportunity is still open, but there’s not one second to waste. [my emphasis]
Read the complete article….

Think about what this means!

As reported extensively in all Australian media today (21 May) the agreed IPCC summary says that near-term (i.e., ASAP!) climate action is urgent because the window is closing for us to secure a livable and sustainable future, and that: “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years”. These and many other critically important points are clearly summarized in the Headline Statements, which are the overarching conclusions of the approved Summary for Policymakers. Taken together these provide a concise narrative as to why effective action on the climate emergency is so urgent.

If you care for your future and the future of your family and society, you need to take the IPCC’s cautions and warnings seriously. And consider what this means in a world where your political representatives are likely to be more concerned to satisfy the wants of their big donors and special interests rather than you or other citizens of their electorates. These big donors are developers, fossil fuel industries, miners, etc., who are more concerned about immediate profit rather than future survival.

Think: if you are a “rusted-on” voter who can be counted on to vote for the incumbent or party you have always voted for, especially in a ‘safe’ seat, your ‘representative’ has no reason to consider your future in any way, and can work full time for the special interests.

However, in Australia, we still live in a democracy where your considered vote can actually work to throw the bastards out, by electing someone you can reasonably trust to work for the community of those who vote rather than those who pay…. Given the nature and reality of the climate emergency, you should consider Vote Climate One’s motto:

We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters — reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species will soon end up extinct no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship.

How Vote Climate One can help

Science and politics

If you need more evidence that we need to change our governments, there is plenty on our Climate Sentinel News blog covering both science and politics.

How to vote

We don’t tell you how to vote. We work to help you achieve the results you want when you vote.

In Australia, Vote Climate One works to assess and rank how we think every party and independent candidate on the ballot in Federal and all State elections will respond to the climate crisis. Thanks to modern computer technology this is actually do-able. How we rank candidates is explained in our Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment process. Sometimes, we’ll even get on the phone to find out more. The undeniable task of the climate lens is to prioritise the protection of everything we hold dear. The hubris of our species needs a dose of the reduction perspective tranquilizer encapsulated in this painting by Peter Trusler.

Peter Trusler – from his book, Thrice Told

Our conclusions are presented via downloadable and printer-friendly voting guides for each and every electorate in NSW. You can find the guide for your electorate here (in this case, Lismore). The electorate screen tells you how we can help. Parties and candidates we think will work for climate action are designated with green lights. Those who we think won’t or who haven’t given us much to go on, are designated with red lights, Those we think are better than the worst, but not fully trustworthy are designated orange.

If you are concerned to see action on climate change, number all the green-light independents and parties first. Thus, even if your number [1] selection doesn’t win, you still maximize the chances that someone else with good climate credentials will be elected. If you want detail to help you decide how to rank green-light candidates, the Research Tools provide links to candidate websites and other information about them.

As Rob and his grandchildren explain in the video, the printable voting guides make it easy for you to transfer your preferences to the ballot paper in the voting booth:

Remember, we are voting in hopes of leaving a happy future for our families and society.

About the featured image: Figure SPM.6 from Summary for Policymakers, AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023

There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. There are a multitude of political choices that need to be made during this window. If we make good ones we can go on living in a world with a sustainable future. Bad choices will rapidly constrain our future to pathways that are likely to lead to societal collapse and eventual human extinction in a still rapidly warming world.

Figure caption: The illustrative development pathways (red to green) and associated outcomes (right panel) show that there is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. Climate resilient development is the process of implementing greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation measures to support sustainable development. Diverging pathways illustrate that interacting choices and actions made by diverse government, private sector and civil society actors can advance climate resilient development, shift pathways towards sustainability, and enable lower emissions and adaptation. Diverse knowledge and values include cultural values, Indigenous Knowledge, local knowledge, and scientific knowledge. Climatic and non-climatic events, such as droughts, floods or pandemics, pose more severe shocks to pathways with lower climate resilient development (red to yellow) than to pathways with higher climate resilient development (green). There are limits to adaptation and adaptive capacity for some human and natural systems at global warming of 1.5°C, and with every increment of warming, losses and damages will increase. The development pathways taken by countries at all stages of economic development impact GHG emissions and mitigation challenges and opportunities, which vary across countries and regions. Pathways and opportunities for action are shaped by previous actions (or inactions and opportunities missed; dashed pathway) and enabling and constraining conditions (left panel), and take place in the context of climate risks, adaptation limits and development gaps. The longer emissions reductions are delayed, the fewer effective adaptation options.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Earth’s annual healthcheck — and our future

Climate News Links on March 5, 2023

A compendium of graphs plots key indicators of our changing climate. Unless trends are reversed today’s lethal extremes will be ‘lethal ‘new normals’.

Climate scientist Zach Labe shows us in a collection of simple graphs from his WordPress page how many of Planet Earth’s vital signs have been changing over recent decades. He plots the best available data, and lets the plots tell the story without adding his redundant commentary.

However, If you want, you can still follow links that explains how the data was collected and analyzed. Click on Climate Visualizations at the top of the screen to open a pull-down menu, and then on FAQ and my methods at the bottom of that menu.

Plotting the reality

Four critical variables (the three critical greenhouse gases and global average temperature) show us how our changing climate is progressing.

The collection of graphs shows completely unambiguously that ever more heat energy is being loaded into our planetary climate system to make it hotter and more humid — where heat and humidity are the drivers for all kinds of extreme weather events.

If you look at the most recent years of Rising Temperature (beginning with 2020) you might think temperatures have stopped rising. However, this is almost certainly dangerously wrong. We have just finished an unusual three successive periods of La Niña conditions that result in below average global temperatures. GIven the generally increasing rate of temperature rise, the next El Niño periods are likely to be substantially hotter than the last ones (2014-2019) when Australia suffered the record-breaking bushfires of our Black Summer that even burned temperate rainforests that survived previous fires for many hundreds of years.

What do the graphs tell us?

In the past VoteClimateOne’s Climate Sentinel News has posted many articles attesting to the increasing frequency, extent and ferocity of extreme weather and the increasing chaos and costs these cause.

As the energy in the climate system continues to rise, catastrophes will increasingly overlap such that more damage and chaos will be caused by following events before recovery from earlier ones is complete. We are already seeing examples of this in NSW’s Northern Rivers and southwestern areas. At some point (in the not distant future — if global warming is not reversed) the still growing social and physical costs will lead to social and physical collapse of society.

Can you do something to change the picture?

At this point both major political parties in the NSW government are still defending and even subsidizing the fossil fuel industry’s (coal and gas) continuing increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.

It is time for you to help elect a government able to act effectively against the climate emergency by ensuring neither party has a majority to do things without people’s support. Hard-right members in either party who will do deals with anyone to stay in power to enforce their religiofascist dogmas tend to ignore even stark objective realities such as the climate crisis shown by Earth’s vital sighs. Such people need to be replaced by electing teals, other community-oriented independents and Greens who accept the reality of the climate emergency and are willing to prioritize acting on it.

My Climate Sentinel News article, Is Premier Perrettet a far-right puppet, or the puppet master?, documents and explains how the kind of ultra dogmatic hard-right politicians got into power that most need to be replaced by parliamentarians who will represent and work for the voters’ benefits. As the now deceased Lyenko Urbanchich, ex MLC David Clarke, federal Senator Alex Hawke, the Tudehope family and the Perrottet family have shown on the far right of the NSW Liberal Party, if your faction can fill key positions in party and factional organizations with collaborators who can organize cadres of ‘storm troops’, it is easy to put whoever the faction ‘leader(s)’ may want into Parliament. The party’s ‘safest’ seats are taken over by using the cadres to subvert preselections by branch stacking and simple thuggery or by bypassing preselection entirely with direct appointments (as has been demonstrated many times over the 40 years of history covered in my article).

Here I focused on the Liberal hard-right. But it should be recognized that Labor also has had and probably still has a very similar hard-right. This was made most evident in the impact Bob Santamaria had on the Labor Party in the 1950’s that led to it a near-lethal split to form the Democratic Labor Party. I have not had the time to adequately research the NSW Labor Party, but its leader, Chris Minns shares many characteristics with Dominic Perrottet, and has even backed and defended him over the treatment of climate protester Violet Coco. Like the Liberals, Labor also safe seats giving factions many opportunities to subvert real democracy. To me this is more than enough reason for VoteClimateOne to advise voters in such seats not to vote for factional puppets in hopes of making the seat marginal. Even if you don’t get rid of the puppet this time, you may be given a real opportunity in the next election to preselect someone actually representing you (rather than someone dogma) in the next election.

How to vote?

We won’t suggest who you should vote for. However we try to show you in our NSW voting guides where we think each candidate in your electorate stands relative to action on the climate emergency and whether we think there are reasons a particular candidate might be considered to be a puppet or less trustworthy on issues than others in the electorate. These recommendations won’t be complete or final until we have had a chance to work our way through those on the ballots provided by the Electoral Commission.

Featured image

Featured image from Dettre, M., (18/08/2022). Lismore City News, Questions over NSW flood victims’ buyback / More than a thousand people lost homes in the NSW Northern Rivers floods. (Darren England/AAP PHOTOS).

Health Minister Minster Mark Butler says ongoing trauma can manifest in increased rates of anxiety, post-traumatic stress and domestic and family violence: “Mental health is one of the government’s highest priorities and I recognise that these flooding events have been hugely traumatic for many people,” he said…. For some of these communities, this has been their fourth flood in 18 months.”

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

On the down-hill road to extinction

William P. Hall on December 11, 2022

Now the Victorian Election is over, we we must keep our politicians feet to the fire. Strong, early, and competent action against global warming is the only issue in Parliament that really matters if we are concerned for the futures of our families, or indeed, for our species and the majority of life on our planet. If we don’t stop and reverse the still accelerating global warming our world will soon be so hot that humans and many other species will be experiencing major die-offs and collapses of critical ecosystems before the end of this century on our way to extinction.

The featured article here shows how close we already to this precipice of no return — even without considering the added stress of human caused global warming.

Our road to extinction began with killing off megafauna

In his ‘overkill’ hypothesis, Paul S Martin proposed in 1966 that humanity’s expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, and then into Australia and the Americas led to the extinction of most of the very large terrestrial animals (“megafauna”). The large animals were easy to kill because they had no prior experience with two legged hunters. Hunters feasted and multiplied until the easy prey in a local area was all killed off within a generation or two as humans continued to multiply and expand into new territories — until entire species were exterminated. By its very nature the fossil record is sparse and little evidence of an actual killing spree has been found, but in most of the areas humans colonized out of Africa there was a healthy variety of megafauna before there was evidence of human habitation. And once evidence of human habitation appears in the record there is no more evidence for megafauna, suggesting that large animals were hunted into extinction within a few decades of their first encounters with our distant ancestors.

Martin published his seminal paper while I was doing preparatory studies at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville before starting my PhD in evolutionary biology at Harvard. The debate continued throughout my time at Harvard as evidence accumulated and was discussed. Martin’s North American paper was published in 1973 as I received my degree and began my teaching career. Some scientists still argue today that climate change was responsible for most of the extinctions and not humans. However, accurately dated fossils and evidence for human hunting reviewed in a 2015 research article by Surovell, show a good fit with Martin’s overkill hypothesis rather than close correspondence with the climate changes.

Once humans are present in the landscape and as our evolving technology grows ever more powerful, this presence affects all living things. Our expanding population and exponentially increasing consumption, control, and destruction of biological resources is progressively leading towards total exploitation or extermination of the natural biological resources we depend on for our own survival. Most extinctions – especially of little creatures – has resulted from human obliteration of their habitats through increasingly mechanized and fossil-fuel driven agriculture.

This post’s featured image shows what a few years of plowing did to the plains of SW Colorado during the ‘dust bowl’ droughts in the 1930’s. Simple farming managed to obliterate all life for as far as as the camera could see…. Actually, the tractor is plowing along the contour lines of the slope working to repair some of the damage so at farming could resume when the rains returned again. The Guardian article below did not include the photo I used, but describes the situation:

A replica of cave paintings in Chauvet cave, France, created around 36,000 years a go. More than 178 species of megafauna are estimated to have been driven to extinction betweeen 52,000 and 9,000 BC. Photo: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images [from the article]

by Phoebe Weston, 25/11/2022 in the Guardian

Humans v nature: our long and destructive journey to the age of extinction

The story of the damage done to the world’s biodiversity is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. Can the world seize its chance to change the narrative?

The story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old. When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is – unsurprisingly – patchy. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans.

Take the case of Genyornis, one of the world’s heaviest birds, which was more than 2 metres tall and weighed in excess of 200kg. It lived in Australia until, along with many other megafauna, it went extinct 50,000 years ago. In North America, giant beavers weighing the same as a fridge and an armadillo-like creature called a glyptodon, which was the size of a small car, existed until about 12,000 years ago, when they, too, went extinct. In all, more than 178 species of the world’s largest mammals are estimated to have been driven to extinction between 52,000 and 9,000BC.

For a long time, these extinctions were thought to be linked to natural changes in the environment – until 1966, when palaeontologist Paul S Martin put forward his controversial “overkill hypothesis” that humans were responsible for the extinctions of megafauna, destroying the romantic vision of early humans living in harmony with nature.

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[T]oday … we are not just killing megafauna but destroying whole landscapes, often in just a few years. Farming is the primary driver of destruction and, of all [surviving] mammals on Earth, 96% are either livestock or humans. The UN estimates as many as one million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.
Read the whole article….

We hit the accelerator on the downhill road to extinction with fossil fuel burning and habitat destruction

I came face-to-face with the catastrophe we humans are speeding towards some than six years ago as I was finishing a 10+ year book project on the coevolution of humans and our increasingly powerful technologies, “Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation“. This combines significant threads from my own life-history (paleontology, evolutionary biology, systems ecology, theory of knowledge, organizational theory, engineering & the exponential growth of computer technology), to explore and explain how our hominin ancestors (close cousins of the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos) have become so powerful that we are profoundly impacting our planet’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and biosphere.

As I focused on finishing the project by forecasting future trends in this coevolution, it became clear that further effort was largely pointless — because few if any people would be available to actually read the book. We face a population crash and social collapse in the global mass extinction event we are forcing on our only planet. I concluded that what time I had left would be far better spent trying to focus people’s and our leader’s attentions on the crisis that we are rushing towards in hopes of organizing actions to delay and perhaps avoid the oblivion.

Several of my works (plus much of the material I have collected on Climate Sentinel News) map out how the evolutionary road we are on leads to a catastrophe if we are unable to put on the brakes and turn off the road to extinction to find a way back up the hill before it is too late:

2015: Human Origins, Cognitive Technologies, and Futures
2016: The Angst of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Our Species’ Existential Risk [this presentation clearly shows the global impact of human activities].
2017: Is this the start of runaway global warming?
2021: Portents for the Future – 2020 Wildfires on the Siberian Permafrost
2022: Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong.

… Victor Anderson, a visiting professor in sustainability at Anglia Ruskin University, also argues biodiversity loss has been seen by some as a middle-class, trivial or even rightwing issue….. He says the issue continues to be difficult, not least because every aspect of industry is entwined with nature’s destruction. “I think tracing through the causes of biodiversity loss is a bit frightening, because it does lead you to the whole way in which the world economy operates.”

The story of the biodiversity crisis is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. From hunting huge mammals to extinction to poisoning birdlife with pesticides, humans have treated nature as an inexhaustible resource for too long. Environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and scientists have been sounding the alarm about the biodiversity crisis for more than half a century, and yet no meaningful action has been taken. Much has already been lost, but there is still lots to play for.
Featured article

Collapsing biodiversity on its own is a shocking indicator that human impacts on the natural world are exterminating a vast array of other species through direct killing and habitat destruction. We are also making the entire planet less friendly to life in general through global warming, increasing the acidity of watercourses, lakes and oceans, and poisoning the environment many other ways.

Inevitably, the circle of biological collapse is folding back on humanity itself. The biosphere provides a vast array of “ecosystem services” (oxygen in the air, drinkable water, pollination of crops, soil renewal, fisheries, etc….) that we and our domesticated plants and animals depend on for life. Beyond that, our continued burning of fossil carbon is raising Earth’s surface temperature to levels that are lethal for many plants and animals. As I write this, much northern Australia faces extreme heatwave conditions in the mid 40s, that are easily lethal to unprotected humans and many other organisms:

Maximum temperatures are expected to be in the low to mid forties over inland NT and in the mid to high thirties across northern parts of the Top End, while overnight temperatures will be in the mid to high twenties. Severe to Extreme heatwave conditions are expected to increase in area and intensity and reach a peak early next week before beginning to ease. (http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/heatwave.shtml; see also **Extreme heat health alert issued across Northern Territory**). Similar warnings have also been issued for northern WA and QLD.

Such conditions can easily cause local extinctions to many species unable to migrate long distances to recolonize depleted areas. Many other organisms that depended in one way or another on the now extinct species will also go extinct because they are unable to replace that dependency – leading to a cascade of extinctions leading towards the ‘sterilized earth’ situation depicted in the featured image. As more and more extinctions occur along with increasingly frequent and widespread ecosystem collapses, Homo sapiens (our own species) will almost certainly be included in the casualties lost for all time. This conclusion is where ‘business as usual’ is driving towards.

I’m not the only one issuing this warning; Antonio Guterres – UN Chief said: We’re racing down the “highway to climate hell” and pointed to the only realistic way to avoid this end to our history on Earth: “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres told the UN COP27 summit. “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact or a Collective Suicide Pact,” he added.

Avoiding this suicide won’t be easy given the vast sums of money fossil fuel and other self-serving special interests are willing to spend whatever it takes to protect their short-term interests in maximizing their extraction of burnable fossil fuels and minimizing their costs to stay in business. No thought seems to be given to the fact that this path may well doom them and everyone else to extinction within a few more decades of business as usual as our whole biosphere collapses in global mass extinction.

At least Australians and Victorians seem to be moving our governments in the right direction to begin mobilizing effective action to protect what is left of our natural environment and to stop and reverse global warming. In the last few months, we have proved we are able to elect governments that claim to be interested in doing this (even though they also still seem to be working to protect fossil fuel special interests).

What we must do now is to hold our elected parliamentarians feet to the fire to ensure that they actually take the climate emergency seriously and begin mobilizing to fight the fires.

We need to turn away from the the Apocalypse on the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!

In the same way I saw no point in finishing my book, it seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

greta-act-as-if-the-house-was-on-fire — Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.

In other words, Wake up! Smell the smoke! See the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential (“i.e., UN Newspeak for “extinction is likely”) climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

And above all…. make sure that your elected parliamentarians take this situation very seriously indeed!

Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish.

Featured Image: A farm tractor plows terraces after the contour of the land is determined on the southwestern plains of Colorado, March 25, 1938. Associated Press file photo from an August 1, 2017 Denver Post article by Patrick Traylor | [email protected], PHOTOS: The Dust Bowl in Colorado and the Great Plains, showing what was left of humanity’s work a few decades after trying to occupy the land.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Climate Council warns of wet future for Oz

William P. Hall on November 28, 2022

Climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, contributing to the Great Deluge, is consigning Australia to escalating climate disasters

Most of Australia’s East Coast from Cape York south to the Victorian border has had over a meter of rain by the end of October — with the rains still continuing. Some of these areas have had more than 2 meters, and a few more than 3 meters! Many rainfall records have been smashed in all of the eastern states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania; leading to almost constant flooding through the whole area that is continuing today. The latest reports from the BOM tell us the rains will continue into summer.

This is clearly a function of global warming. Physical laws dictate that as air temperatures rise, the air can carry more water vapor before it begins to condense as rain. Higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation of water from soils and standing water – encouraging drought. Seemingly contradictory warmer air can precipitate more water in areas where it is raining. As the water condenses out as rain it also releases its ‘heat of fusion’ — and more heat is available to drive more extreme winds able to carry rain to high elevations before the rain freezes to fall back to Earth in devastating hail storms. Over larger areas there is also more energy available to fuel increasingly powerful cyclones.

Increased water means increased plant growth, increased temperature increases the rate at which soils and vegetation dry out — ensuring ever more catastrophic wildfires.

Ever more floods, fires and tempests cause increasing damage to infrastructure and people’s livelihoods and property until the catastrophes follow one another so closely that there are simply not physical or human resources left to repair the damage from one catastrophe before the next catastrophe causes even more damage. If the warming is not stopped this progression leads inevitably leads to social collapse (as we are already seeing in parts of the world), agricultural collapse (and famines as we are already beginning to see in Africa and the Middle East), ecological collapse (as we are already seeing in marine habitats with coral reef communities, kelp beds, sea grass meadows), and finally, population collapses when the land has literally been swept bare (areas in Africa are already on the edge of the cliff).

With the collapse of society, humans will quickly lose the scientific and engineering capabilities to fight further climate change already dialed into the system, such that there will be little hope of avoiding near-term global mass extinction. Continuing ‘business as usual’ support of the fossil fuel industry more-or-less ensures this grim outcome.

The Climate Council’s report, presented below, presents the facts and explains what they mean here in Australia, and some of the things we can to moderate and mitigate the expected damages. This is a good start, but I would be a silly liar if I said this was all we need to do in order to keep from utterly destroying our future.

The great deluge: Australia’s new era of unnatural disasters

Vote Climate One will continue to do whatever we can do to encourage serious government leadership and action to fight climate change. Please do what you can to pressure your representatives to counteract the self-serving special interests who consume our resources and return little or nothing from the super-profits they take overseas.

If we can help get climate savvy governments on the problems that really matter, they may be able to mobilize enough action so we can survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in….

Featured Image: Rainfall and Flooding 2022 – Queensland to Tasmania. Current year data from 1 January to 2 November, sourced from Bureau of Meteorology, 2022. Graphic from Chapter 2, The Great Deluge: Climate Extremes in Action, in the featured article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Proof that humans caused rapid global warming

William P. Hall on October 22, 2022

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency summarizes evidence that humans are responsible for huge CO₂ emissions driving rapid global warming.

Rock solid evidence leaves no other explanations able to explain the observations. Humans caused the problem. Humans should be able to do something about it!

By Rebecca Lindsey, October 12, 2022 on Climate Q&A

How do we know the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by humans?

The most basic reason is that fossil fuels—the equivalent of millions of years of plant growth—are the only source of carbon dioxide large enough to raise atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts as high and as quickly as they have risen. The increase between the year 1800 and today is 70% larger than the increase that occurred when Earth climbed out of the last ice age between 17,500 and 11,500 years ago, and it occurred 100-200 times faster.
In addition, fossil fuels are the only source of carbon consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon present in today’s atmosphere. That analysis indicates it must be coming from terrestrial plant matter, and it must be very, very old. These and other lines of evidence leave no doubt that fossil fuels are the primary source of the carbon dioxide building up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Read the complete article….

Carbon dioxide over 800,000 years

The featured image is from the article above. It shows the variation in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last 800,000 years of time. The caption explains:

Global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂₎ in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years based on ice-core data (purple line) compared to 2021 concentration (dark purple dot). The peaks and valleys in the line track ice ages (low CO₂) and warmer interglacials (higher CO₂). Throughout that time, CO₂ was never higher than 300 ppm (light purple dot, between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago). The increase over the last 60 years is 100 times faster than previous natural increases. [my emphasis] In fact, on the geologic time scale, the increase from the end of the last ice age to the present looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lüthi, et al., 2008, via NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.

Also from Climate Q&A, see two related articles: What evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause?; and Which emits more carbon dioxide: volcanoes or human activities?

Why is this important?

Many articles on Climate Sentinel News provide evidence that global temperatures are already reaching very dangerous thresholds. If we do not stop human generated/activated carbon emissions, positive feedbacks driven by the increasing temperatures will increase natural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fast enough to keep temperatures rising even if we completely stop human GHG emissions (e.g., the warming process will run away – see Climate Crisis! The only issue that matters, Tripping down the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and Global Mass Extinction, and Apocalypse will come if global warming is not stopped.

If we do not stop global warming, there is probably enough carbon readily available for emissions in soil, permafrost, and biomass to drive temperatures high enough to exterminate most complex life on Earth (the 6th global mass extinction).

What can we do about it?

Because the climate crisis is a global threat for the whole of humanity, there is very little a single human can do in isolation to stop and turn around the warming process. Effective action has to be guided and managed at international, national and state levels before individual actions become effective. Consequently, the single most effective things individual people can do is to elect representatives to government who will respond actively and seriously to ensure that our governments are taking appropriate and effective actions.

Where governments are concerned, state governments probably have the most power to directly manage and control responses to climate change through their controls of environmental regulations, planning and permitting. In Australia, Victorians will have an opportunity around a month from now (on on 26 November 2022) to elect members for the next Parliament of Victoria. All 88 seats in the Legislative Assembly (lower house) and all 40 seats in the Legislative Council (upper house) will be up for election. The most important thing you can do to respond to the climate crisis is to elect upper and lower house representatives committed to effective action on the climate crisis.

Voting in Australia’s preferential voting system requires careful consideration if you care about the result.

Applying your decision to preferential voting on the ballot

If you believe that our present Victorian Labor government will govern in your interests rather than their corporate and union patrons in the fossil fuel and related industries, then go with the flow and don’t concern yourself with the likely consequences of going down their fossil fueled road towards runaway global warming. On the other hand, if you think it is better to work for a sustainable future where your children and their children can hope for long and happy lives, Vote Climate One can help you elect a government that will actively lead and support this work.

In general, we think a minority government led by Labor, where the balance of power is held by Greens and pro-climate community independents will give us the parliamentary representation that will give us the best outcome.

The trouble with party led majority governments is that the large parties are all disciplined to follow a party line. All too often super wealthy special interest patrons including non-citizen overseas entities strongly influence parties via large ‘donations’ and campaign support. Far better to give the last word on parliamentary decisions to MPs owing allegiance to the citizens who elected them than to people constrained to follow party disciplines..

Vote Climate One was formed for the specific purpose of studying and ranking all political parties and independent candidates on their policies and promises relating to climate and related environmental issues. What are they committed to do, and can you trust them to keep to their commitments. This is expressed in our Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment process. (The results and their presentation are still being processed for the Victorian Election as this is being written).

Questionnaire used along with other kinds of evidence in our evaluation of candidates.

Our Climate Sentinel News provides access to factual evidence about the growing climate crisis to support your thinking; and our Traffic Light Voting System gives you easy to use factual evidence developed through our assessment process about where each candidate in your electorate ranks in relation to their commitment to prioritize action on the climate emergency. This should make it easier to decide your voting preferences before confronting a long ballot paper in the voting booth. We do the work so you can easily cope with Victoria’s complex party-based preferencing to plan your voting before you enter the booth.

We need to turn away from the the Apocalypse on the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!

It seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.

In other words: Wake up! Smell the smoke! See the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future. As individuals, our most effective fire axe is to elect the right people to government who can lead and coordinate the fire fight.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Small birds underline reality of climate crisis

William P. Hall on October 6, 2022

The rate our green(ish) planet is warming is still rising due to humanity’s carbon emissions. Many species are dying to pay the price.

Nothing humans have done so far seems to have slowed the rate of increase, let alone stopping and reversing the rise. Most animal and plant species, including humans. have genetically determined thermal maximums, i.e., environmental temperature limits above which they cannot survive. The featured article here describes field studies that show what happens when these lethal limits are reached in the environments of some reasonably well known Australian birds.

Without stretching the metaphor, these birds are ‘canaries in the mine’ together with all kinds of other species dying out to warn us that we, too, are at risk of extinction if we fail to stop the process that is progressively warming our globe.

Sadly, many birds at the study site died on hot days. Author provided (from the article)

by Janet Gardiner & Suzanne Prober, 29/9/2022 in The Conversation

‘Sad and distressing’: massive numbers of bird deaths in Australian heatwaves reveal a profound loss is looming

Heatwaves linked to climate change have already led to mass deaths of birds and other wildlife around the world. To stem the loss of biodiversity as the climate warms, we need to better understand how birds respond.
Our new study set out to fill this knowledge gap by examining Australian birds. Alarmingly, we found birds at our study sites died at a rate three times greater during a very hot summer compared to a mild summer.
And the news gets worse. Under a pessimistic emissions scenario, just 11% of birds at the sites would survive.
The findings have profound implications for our bird life in a warming world – and underscore the urgent need to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help animals find cool places to shelter.
Read the complete article….

Continued emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the production and burning of fossil fuel is driving all complex life on Earth (including humans) towards extinction

Climate Sentinel News has published several articles that explain how rising temperatures driven by anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions are triggering further GHG emissions from warming soil, melting permafrost, burning forests and tundra and a variety of other sources. These emissions are making the weather more extreme. But, also, the additional heating from these sources drives global temperatures still higher through positive feedbacks. This will result in what is called ‘runaway warming’. The nature of positive feedback is that it accelerates the rate of change until the driving force is exhausted (i.e., the fuel runs out) or stopped by stronger external forces; or the system itself self-destructs.

Even if we stop all human GHG emissions immediately, it is probably too late to stop the positive feedback processes driving us towards near-term extinction. … However, removing the human contribution will give us more time to work out how to remove GHGs from the atmosphere faster than they are being added by the feedback process — thus providing the external force needed to stop the runaway process. However, if we don’t mobilize effective action very soon, the accelerating feedbacks will likely exceed anything humans can do to stop them.

THIS IS AN EXISTENTIAL CLIMATE EMERGENCY, REQUIRING EMERGENCY MOBILIZATION FOR ACTION TO STOP EMISSIONS AND RECAPTURE A RESPECTABLE FRACTION OF PAST EMISSIONS.

It is clear that our present governments are reluctant or are even refusing to take effective action to stop fossil fuel emissions. Even Labor governments at state and federal levels are committed to supporting new fossil fuel production projects, to say nothing of protecting the ‘rights’ of existing projects to continue their emissions.

We need to turn away from the the Apocalypse on the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!

In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.

Victorian Labor with a majority in Parliament is still supporting the petrochemical industry and gas guzzling private transport; and a Liberal Government in power would be even worse! What we need is to have a minority government where climate friendly greens and independents have the balance of power to ensure that effective climate action is prioritized and mobilized.

How can we ensure this to respond effectively to the climate crisis?

Individual actions can help a bit, but real solutions demand concerted actions at all government levels (global, national, state, and local).

The UN through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and COP process is trying to provide the science basis and coordination. But is hampered by major nations such as the USA, China, Russia, and Brazil.

With the April Federal Election, Australia has made significant progress towards taking the climate seriously as enabled by the Teals and Greens decimation of the science denying Liberal Government to put Labor in power. But labor still supports continuing (and even expanding) fossil fuel production.

In Australia, the states actually have the most direct power over industry and environmental protection, but most are still working to protect the fossil fuel industries from from being harmed by environmental regulations, etc. as might be required to stop GHG emissions.

Even local governments can play a role in climate and environmental protection through zoning and development controls, but generally they work for the developers rather than citizens.

As shown Federally, voters can make major changes in governmental composition and behavior.

Victorians go to the polls on 26 November. All seats will be up for election/re-election. Voters have the possibility to completely change the government if they so desire. If you are a Victorian concerned about our future in a warming environment, assuming anyone is running on this issue, you can use your vote to help elect a candidate in your electorate who will work for action on the climate emergency. However, where the parties can heavily fund their candidates, and several independents and minor party candidates trying to be all things for all people, it is very hard to know how you should vote to have the maximum chance of electing a climate ‘friendly’ candidate.

Vote Climate One will help you make your choices for the upper and lower houses with our Traffic Light Voting Guides under preparation for the Victorian election (see our Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment page for a foretaste). Voting for the Legislative Council is important, and we advise you to vote below the line to maximize your chances to elect a climate friend, but as Anthony Green explains, Victoria’s Group Voting Ticket makes it very difficult to ensure that some ‘preference harvesting’ deal doesn’t apply your vote to someone you wouldn’t want to elect on a bet. Our voting guides for the Legislative Council contests will be designed to make voting below the line as safe and easy to use as possible based on our analyses of each candidate’s climate credentials.

Featured image: A Jacky Winter at the study site showing signs of dehydration on the morning following a 47℃ day. Author provided (from the article)

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

August 2022 Greenhouse Gas Report

William P. Hall on August 21, 2022

No evidence here that humans have done anything yet to stop and reverse GHG emissions to get us off the road to Hothouse Earth and global mass extinction.

As the ocean ice around Antarctic approaches its maximum spread for the year, on 19 August 2022 Antarctic sea-ice extent is the second lowest ever as recorded in the satellite era as recorded by the US National Snow & Ice Data Center. As sunlight again begins to shine on the antarctic polar region more of the ocean surface is exposed to solar heating that will warm the waters surrounding the ice cap to speed glacial melting and slow the formation of more sea-ice next winter.

July’s trends in global warming continue in August. Heatwaves, fires, and droughts in the Northern Hemisphere continue, e.g:

In the run-up to Australia’s May 22 Federal Election many articles on our Climate Sentinel News documented the reality, mechanisms and dangers humans face if global warming is allowed to continue. If global warming runs away due to already documented feedback mechanisms heating will continue at an accelerating rate that will soon rise beyond the capacity anything humans can do to stop it.

Critical time is wasting. It is time for all of our politicians, new and old to lead our country in massive mobilization to stop carbon emissions and start implementing carbon capture and sequestration processes able to extract excess amounts from the atmosphere. Biological processes are likely to scale up a lot more successfully than engineering solutions. Geoengineering to increase Earth’s reflectivity (i.e., albedo reduction) may also help. We know how to stop emissions, but sequestration and albedo reduction will require significant research that needs to start now.

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE, AND THE URGENCY GROWS WITH EVERY DAY OF DELAY!

Featured image: See July’s report for details.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Reminder: A New Government is Not a Solution to the Climate Emergency – Action is Required!

William P. Hall on August 11, 2022

Since Australia’s 21 May national election, I’ve been too busy working on a series of articles on the genesis of the ‘Teal Tsunami’ of climate friendly community independents that is transforming Australian government to post much else. However, replacement of the COALition Government whose solution to the climate emergency was denial by one that at least accepts that the emergency is real still does not solve the problem. Today’s post is a reminder that effective action becomes more urgent with every day that passes.

By David Spratt, 10/08/2022 in Climate Code Red

High-profile paper on “catastrophic” climate impacts echoes our “What Lies Beneath” analysis on fat-tail, existential risks and IPCC reticence, published four years ago

Last week, just as a new paper on catastrophic climate risks was hitting the media, I received an email:
“It would appear some scientists are now, finally, openly speaking about what you yourself have long been describing as the ‘high end’ or ‘fat tail’ risks associated with climate change and want UN scientists to look into the risks of catastrophic climate change. Here’s the link to the article on the BBC website… On two occasions when reading this article I did punch the air on your behalf; when it mentions the need for more emphasis on tipping points and for the IPCC to produce a special report on catastrophic climate failure..”
It wasn’t the only one.
So what does this new paper say? Well, in essence, some very similar things to our report What Lies Beneath: The underestimation of existential climate risks.
Read the complete article: http://www.climatecodered.org/2022/08/high-profile-paper-on-catastrophic.html

As early as 2016 based on my backgrounds in evolutionary biology and technology, I was beginning to publish the same message. If we humans don’t stop and reverse global warming we face near-term (i.e., in less than a century) global mass extinction, including the extinction of our own species and families. See

18/08/2016: The End of Exponential Growth ― Our Species’ Existential Risk;
06/09/2016: The Angst of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Our Species’ Existential Risk;
21/02/2017: Are Humans Facing a Climate Emergency — Evidence and Actions;
26/04/2017: Is this the Start of Runaway Global Warming?
…
20/12/2021: Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy — The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong.

And, as if this wasn’t enough to highlight the reality of the dangers we face from inaction, the bulk of my posts here in Climate Sentinel News present the ever growing evidence that the impacts we are already facing from the climate emergency are increasing in magnitude, frequency, and death tolls. We are clearly approaching a physical point of no return, beyond which we can do nothing to escape the one-way road to mass extinction.

Parliament needs to declare a state of emergency and begin total mobilization to stop all carbon emissions and begin works to scrub excess carbon from the atmosphere. The latter will require more research, but the most promising technologies I can see from my wide general knowledge all involve either:

biological sequestration in the oceans, especially fertilizing ocean ‘deserts’ with iron to grow algae and farming of zooplankton and fish to take the captured carbon to the sea floors along with their deaths; or
reflecting solar radiation away from our planet, perhaps using carbonate aerosols (e.g., chalk dust), which in addition to reflecting light will when it falls out help neutralize excess acidity of the oceans produced by its absorption of excess CO₂.

PARLIAMENTARIANS NEED TO BEGIN ACTING NOW, AND VOTERS IN UPCOMING STATE ELECTIONS NEED TO ELECT MORE CLIMATE FRIENDLY COMMUNITY INDEPENDENTS TO RE-ENFORCE AND EXECUTE CLIMATE ACTION AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

July 2022 Climate – still on road to extinction

William P. Hall on July 31, 2022

Australia has a new government. Every month we fail to stop global warming is a month closer to global mass extinction. Still no visible progress towards solution.

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

The graphic above downloaded today shows the current state of sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent. Despite what seems to be a cold winter in Victoria, its coverage indicated by the teal blue line in the chart is 530 km² smaller than it has ever been before for this time of the year. There are many more indicators that the climate is still deteriorating towards making Earth uninhabitable for its present life forms (including humans!) at an accelerating rate.

The following news items underline the dangers this represents for humans.

Model-analyzed temperatures at 12Z Tuesday, July 19, 2022 (noon GMT) were transcending average values for the time of day and season by 12 to 24 degrees Celsius—or 22 to 33 degrees Fahrenheit—over large parts of northwestern Europe. (Image credit: tropicaltidbits.com) [from the article]

by Bob Hensen, 17/07/2022 in Eye on the Storm, Yale Climate Connections

Horrific heat descends upon Western Europe: 104°F in London

Dozens of all-time record highs melted on Monday and Tuesday under a searing, deadly European heat wave that has caused at least 1,169 heat-related deaths in Spain and Portugal. The heat wave has also brought the hottest day on record for many locations in France and the hottest temperatures — by far — ever observed in the United Kingdom.
The record-smashing heat in Europe’s normally mild, maritime northwest corner was eerily comparable to the astounding heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada in June 2021. The latter was found to have been “virtually impossible” without human-produced climate change.
By 9 a.m. GMT on Tuesday, July 19, London’s Heathrow Airport had already surged past 90°F, and at 12:50 p.m., the airport’s official observing site for London recorded what, if confirmed, would be the hottest temperature in London history: 40.2 degrees Celsius, or 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
…
Read the complete article

Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images [from the article]

by Robin McKie, 31/07/2022 in the Guardian

‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientistRobin McKie.
The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.
And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.
…
Read the complete article

In the run-up to the May 21st Federal Election, I posted many more articles documenting the increasing risk of mass extinction that humans face if we do not stop and reverse the runaway acceleration that is flipping our global climate to the Hothouse Earth state.

In the Election Australians replaced the Liberal/National COALition with a more climate friendly Labor government supported by an extensive cross-bench of climate-friendly independents (‘teals‘) and Greens.

The Government has very little time (if any – see the article above) to act to stop carbon emissions and to do what we can to remove some of the past excesses from the atmosphere.

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!

Featured image:

Time series graphs showing the variation in the three most important greenhouse gases as observed and recorded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Global Monitoring Laboratory at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.

The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa shown in the top row constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO₂ in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at a facility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [Keeling, 1976]. The first graph shows atmospheric CO₂ concentrations over the last five complete years of the Mauna Loa CO₂ record plus the current year. The second graph shows annual mean CO₂ growth rates for Mauna Loa. In the graph, decadal averages of the growth rate are also plotted, as horizontal lines for 1960 through 1969, 1970 through 1979, and so on.

The middle row charts the growth of atmospheric methane: the first graph shows the full NOAA time-series starting in 1983, The red circles are globally averaged monthly mean values centered on the middle of each month. The black line and squares show the long-term trend (in principle, similar to a 12-month running mean) where the average seasonal cycle has been removed.The second graph summarizes annual increases in atmospheric CH₄ based on globally averaged marine surface data.

The bottom row charts the growth of atmospheric N₂O (Nitrous oxide) beginning in 2001, when NOAA began to have confidence in the data. Values for the last year are preliminary pending recalibrations of standard gases and other quality control steps. The second graph plots the annual increase in atmospheric N₂O in a given year, i.e., the increase in its abundance (mole fraction) from January 1 in that year to January 1 of the next year, after the seasonal cycle has been removed (as shown by the black lines in the first figure). It represents the sum of all N₂O added to, and removed from, the atmosphere during the year by human activities and natural processes.

As yet, there is NO evidence that any of these values are beginning to stop increasing, let alone decrease, as the result of any human actions.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

S Hemisphere already seeing 2080 storms now

Climate News Links on May 30, 2022

New studies show winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere are already reaching intensities predicted for 2080. Climate emergency is real!

Winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere. Credit: NASA Worldview (from the article)

By Weizmann Institute of Science, 26 May 2022 in Phys Org

New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted

A new study, published today in Nature Climate Change, will certainly make the IPCC—and other environmental bodies—take notice. A team of scientists led by Dr. Rei Chemke of Weizmann’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department revealed a considerable intensification of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere. The study, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Yi Ming of Princeton University and Dr. Janni Yuval of MIT, is sure to make waves in the climate conversation. Until now, climate models have projected a human-caused intensification of winter storms only toward the end of this century. In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.
…
Chemke, Ming and Yuval’s study has two immediate, considerable implications. First, it shows that not only climate projections for the coming decades are graver than previous assessments, but it also suggests that human activity might have a greater impact on the Southern Hemisphere than previously estimated. This means that rapid and decisive intervention is required in order to halt the climate damage in this region. Second, a correction of the bias in climate models is in order, so that these can provide a more accurate climate projection in the future.
Read the complete article….

Featured Image: NASA. Remote sensing from orbit has now been observing for decades how our planet is changing and providing massive amounts of data for increasingly accurate forecasts of climate change. Our futures depend on taking these predictions seriously…..

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.