The Uninhabitable Earth — When Will The Planet Be Too Hot For Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine.

From an Article by David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 9, 2017

Unbreathable air — We inhale not only oxygen and nitrogen, but everything else in ambient air. The air now contains 400 parts per million of CO2. If CO2 enters the atmosphere at the high level of the projection it will reach 1000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

Hotter air increases pollutants. “An increase in pollution particles in the air of 10 micrograms per cubic meter cuts victims’ life expectancy by 9-11 years,” one recent study showed. 10 micrograms is ten thousandths of a gram. A dime weighs 28.3 grams, so 10 micrograms is one half a thousandth the weight of a dime!

By mid-century, Americans will be exposed to a 70% increase in ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research says. By 2090 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above WHO “safe” level. A pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism, too. More than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil fuel burning.

A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.

Perpetual War — Violence goes with heat. Syria has experienced serious drought since 2007. The fight and the flight of its population are not due to politics only, but to the shortage of food, and terrible heat. It has long been recognized that interpersonal violence and war flourish in hot weather. Now the statistical correlation has been shown. When you increase temperature by half a degree, on average you see something like a 10 to 20 percent increase in the risk of conflict.

It can be expected that a planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century. The U.S. military is obsessed with climate change. Droughts, food shortage, populations migrating, ocean rise, and greater violence with higher temperature make a very complex problem for them. There are 65 million displaced people wandering the earth now. When it is hot, suicides go up, crime goes up and people swear more on social media.

Air conditioning will not help because it is beyond the reach of most of the world’s population. Also it requires more energy, contributing to the temperature rise.

Permanent Economic Collapse — Neoliberalism the belief that economic growth will solve all problems. Crashes seem to inevitable, and many people even in advanced economies are marginalized. Now there is a school of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism.” They believe the swift economic growth in recent history is not due to the dynamics of global capitalism, but to the use of fossil fuels after the mid 18th century.

Before that time, most people had a subsistence living. Conditions did not improve from one generation to the next. After fossil fuels are gone (assuming no other source of energy is used) the world will return to subsistence living.

Another group has studied the effect of temperature on economics. They find every degree Celsius warming costs 1.2% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product, total value of all production of a nation). Since growth of GDP is in small whole numbers, 1.2% loss is quite significant. See here for the recent US record. The theory is quite complicated. Their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century. This resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor. The Great Depression lowered global GDP per person by 6%, for comparison.

Poisoned Oceans — There will be four to ten feet of sea level rise by 2100. One third of the world’s major cities are on the coast. With severe storms, a much greater area will be effected. People, industry, naval installations, farmlands, coastal food resources such as oysters and other shellfish will be affected.

More than a third of the world’s extra CO2 is dissolved in the ocean, making it more acid. Already coral bleaching is a problem in several areas, including the great barrier reef off the Australian east coast, the world’s largest. These protecting reefs contain much more wildlife than most oceans areas, some say one quarter of all sea life. Reefs supply food for half a billion people. More acid sea water will make it difficult to impossible for shell fish, which have calcium carbonate shells, to form their shells. The acid will affect other sea creatures, too.

Carbon absorption causes anoxic conditions, in other words, lack of oxygen, which destroys life dependent on oxygen, which includes most forms of higher life than microbes. Then hydrogen sulfide bubbles up as it does along the “skeleton coast” as it does off Mexico and Nambia. Hydrogen sulfide is extremely poisonous, making such areas prone to expand.

The great filter — Why don’t all of us see and worry about climate change? Because it is slow and we are psychologically adapted to react on a short time line. We get used to change, like the proverbial frog in water that is brought to a boil. It is hard to develop a sense of urgency for something that is not an immediate threat. Eventually consciousness will rise, but consciousness needs to come up in time to effectively deter what surely will happen on the present course.

More than half the carbon society has put into the atmosphere in all of history has been emitted in the last three decades! Some 85% has been produced since WWII, little time for science to discover and publicize it.

The fact that needed change gets into the pockets of some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful doesn’t help. There is a huge barrage of disinformation, and very effective political power being brought up to fight the rising consciousness of the public. This is particularly true in the United States, but also in other places where coal, oil and gas are an economic power.

How will it go? That’s anybody’s guess.

In major theaters on Friday, July 28-th

From an Article by Dr. Joe Romm, Think Progress, July 20, 2017

New film tells the rollercoaster story of the climate movement and Paris agreement with humor and humanity.

A decade ago, former Vice President Al Gore had one of the unlikeliest hit films of all time, An Inconvenient Truth. Now he’s back with a follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which premiered in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
In an interview with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s The Late Show Monday night, Gore joked, “And to young people in particular, I really recommend this movie as a date movie… it’s a hot date movie. It’s an amazingly hot date movie.”

But the truth is this movie is a great movie for anyone who cares about humanity and where we are headed. It tells the stories of the ups and downs of the climate movement, the Paris climate negotiations, and Gore’s own life — and it’s an emotional rollercoaster filled with moments of joy and despair.

Gore told the audience he thought the original, a 2006 documentary of a slideshow on climate change that would become one of the most successful documentaries of all time, was a “bad idea” and had to be convinced by Jeff Skoll, former CEO of eBay and founder of Participant Media. Skoll ended up producing the Oscar-winning film that help start a national conversation on climate change.

Gore and Skoll have again partnered to produce the sequel, which takes off where the original ends and tells the story — through Gore’s eyes — of the climate movement leading up to drama of the Paris climate negotiations and, yes, the election of President Donald Trump.

Gore sense of humor and his humanity suffuse the new movie, one of the reasons it’s even better than the original. Indeed, for those who still think of the former vice president in terms of his media stereotype from the 2000 election — “stiff” and “wooden” — the movie will be quite a surprise. He has emerged as a world-class communicator.

The sequel also fixes the biggest flaw in the original, which was criticized for not enough focus on solutions. This film makes the new clean energy revolution a major focus.

The documentary has many unexpected moments, including the behind-the-scenes role Gore played in getting India on board during the Paris negotiations and Gore’s remarkable meeting with a conservative Republican mayor “in the reddest county in the reddest state” who is taking his city 100 percent renewable.

This is a movie to take a date — or kids — to, but it is especially valuable for people who are involved in the climate movement, or any social justice movement.

For many activists, nothing is harder than staying motivated year after year in the face of the inevitable failures along the (too) slow road to social justice. But few progressives have had to face the disappointments and despair that Gore has, most infamously his controversial presidential defeat in 2000.

Yet Gore remains remarkably optimistic and filled with hope. Seeing how he is able to keep going decade after decade is an inspiring life lesson anyone can learn from.

The film hits theaters on July 28th.

Wild Cards of Global Warming — Parts 3 thru 5

By S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

III The global heat conveyor

In the tropical Atlantic Ocean, surface water warms and some of it evaporates so the water becomes saltier. It moves north through the Gulf Stream along the East coast of the United States and into the North Atlantic. There it cools, giving up it heat to warm the cooler air that comes from the Arctic area. On cooling, the salty seawater becomes more dense and descends to the bottom.

This occurs over a large area. As more seawater arrives above, this bottom deep water moves southward, past the equator, around South Africa and all the way to the Central Pacific. Here it warms, picks up freshwater from rain, becoming both less salty and less dense, and returns via the surface, back around South Africa, out into the Atlantic and back up to the Equator.

The pace is slow, but the quantity of water is huge, and very much heat is acquired and carried with it from the tropics to the North Atlantic. The heat given up there gives Western Europe a much more temperate climate than it would be without the global heat conveyer. This is nicely diagrammed here.

Because of the great mass, the system is quite robust from year to year. There are indications it has stopped in the past, however, due to injection of fresh water into the North Atlantic. Normally the water is very salty, and cooling it makes it more dense and causes it to sink. If fresh water mixes with the salt water from the tropics, it becomes less dense, and even with cooling cannot sink into the surrounding salty ocean, stopping the conveyer. So Western Europe becomes very cold, as much as 15 to 20 Fahrenheit degrees colder in winter.

This in believed to have happened in the past, as the continental glaciers were melting. A vast lake kept in place by the glacier in the great plains broke through and caused what is called the “Younger Dryas Event,” causing a return to glacial conditions in Europe for 1500 years, about 7000 years ago, until the fresh water was mixed into the ocean.

When ice forms crystals, the salt is excluded, so the ice pack is pure water. Many scientists consider the possibility of the warming of the Arctic with melting of the ice pack and mountain glaciers there might cause the global heat conveyer to slow or stop again.

Melting of the Arctic ice is readily observed by satellite. You can follow this whenever you wish at Arctic Sea Ice New & Analysis.

At present, movement of global heat conveyer currents is a major area of investigation by scientists. They track the speed and volume of the Arctic and North Atlantic currents with surface floats and other floats designed to stay a fixed distance below the surface. This apparatus is capable of measuring temperature and salinity, and then broadcasting this information and position.

A related unknown is what will happen when the Article Ocean is ice-free, which is likely to happen in a decade or so. Snow surfaces reflect both light and infrared radiation back into space. The ocean is relatively dark and will absorb much of the incident solar radiation in summer, and will retain much that it absorbs through the winter. (Companies are gearing up to sail directly across the Arctic Ocean rather than take more circuitous routes between Europe and Asia.)

But what will the increased temperatures and increased evaporation from this vast area do to the weather?

IV Other uncertainties

1. Clouds. How will cloud patterns change? Clouds reflect the sun’s radiant energy back into space. Increased evaporation leads to more clouds. Will this be a negative feedback? In other words, will more clouds mean less sunlight gets to the earth’s surface? How will this affect the upper atmosphere?
2. How much carbon dioxide will ultimately dissolve in the oceans? How will this affect sea life? It is now given credit for bleaching tropical corral that forms reefs, the area of the oceans with most abundant life and making it difficult for shelled invertebrates to form their shells.
3. How will global warming affect the distribution of rainfall? It seems likely that some areas will receive less, such as the drought in the Western U. S., due to the strong el niño shifting of the jet stream North. It is also likely that weather extremes will be greater, mostly hotter, but colder in some places at some times, as well as more floods, snow storms, droughts with wildfires, and so on.
4. Effects on hurricanes. Increasing temperatures will cause greater evaporation from the surface of the ocean. Evaporated water provides the energy for hurricanes. Heavy rainfall and greater storm surges will affect costal residents?
5. How much will the sea rise? It certainly will rise, as a result of ice melting on land. Also, the melting of beached glaciers that are not completely floating is occurring. The melting of floating Arctic sea ice will not increase sea level, because it floats and will occupy the same volume as it displaces.
6. Changes in distribution of plants and animals. What about the northern shift of Africanized bees and fire ants that now plague the U. S. South? What about the birds adapted to raising their young in the Arctic? Tropical diseases such as malaria?
7. Worsening air quality due to increased use of fossil fuels in summer? More asthma, allergies from dust and pollen? Drinking water shortages because of reduced snow mass and disappearing mountain glaciers?
8. What about effects on recreation? Hunting and fishing? Seaside resorts? Camping? Boating? Hiking? Bird watching? Watching TV will be a winner!
9. Effects on agriculture? No levity here! This is the basic industry. Empty bellies cause riots! Shifted growing seasons, shifted and reduced crop regions, new directions in livestock breeding. Greater year to year production variability. Grapes in Denmark? Dates in Italy? Pineapple in Alabama? Wheat on Greenland?
!0. Building. Both cement and steel production are major emitters of carbon dioxide, as is glass. These are the standard materials of construction of large buildings everywhere, and smaller buildings in warm climates. Wood is used elsewhere. The forests of the Western U. S. and Canada are now being destroyed by the pine bark beetle, because it doesn’t get cold enough to kill them in winter.

V. Concluding remarks . . .

We could go on, but lets stop here. Contrary to what the climate warming deniers say, the future being built now promises to be quite a “hassle” as we get older and for our children and theirs.

The climate denier says, “If there is so much uncertainty, don’t worry about it.” Ah! But every one of these possibilities is bad. When you really analyze the effects presented above, there are no good possibilities from global warming. It only takes one or a few major changes to drastically reduce the carrying capacity of the earth. Anybody want to volunteer to go first? Seems to me many regions of the earth are already experiencing the effects of global warming!