The proof of Climate Change
Both my kids' degrees are in conservation. My daughter has worked for Watershed Coalitions, and my son is majoring in habitat restoration and Fire Ecology. Their knowledge about this is amazing. Climate change is actually changing the types of trees that are claiming the land after these fires. It is thought that these "cleansing" fires are paving the way for more heat and drought tolerant trees and vegetation. I witnessed that this summer on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The formerly mixed Aspen and pine forest burned in 2006 is now being replaced by massive stands of pure Aspen.
Everything is changing almost more quickly than can be studied. Pine bark beetles are a part of this. Did you know that beetle killed pine is one of the most popular (and now) most expensive woods you can buy? It has a beautiful blue and natural hue. Of course it can only be used cosmetically because it doesn’t have the strength to bear loads.
When the last White Pine Tree dies, there will be no juveniles to replace it. White Pine Forests will then be obsolete because it cannot survive in this changed global climate environment. All you have to do to believe in climate change is go to the Arctic where the Ice Cap and permafrost are melting or go to California, Norway, Greece where climate change and the resulting fires are actively changing our forests.
Nature will be fine. It's adapting, changing. We can't stop it, we can't save the nature we're used to, probably not the animals and marine life either. At some point though, we're going to have to get off of our stupid asses and come to the realization that if we live in flood plains, coastal areas and interfaces with Western forests, our homes will, at the very least, be damaged, possibly destroyed, and we ourselves will be displaced and at the very worst, die. Do you disagree with this? Do you see anybody trying to address this reality? I'm not panicking. I will be fine. Lots of people will not be.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Q8Nm4ksVU
“Global warming is already having significant and costly effects on our communities, our health, and our climate.”
“Rising seas and increased coastal flooding”
“Average global sea level has increased eight inches since 1880, but is rising much faster on the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. Global warming is now accelerating the rate of sea level rise, increasing flooding risks to low-lying communities and high-risk coastal properties whose development has been encouraged by today's flood insurance system.”
“Longer and more damaging wildfire seasons”
“Wildfires are increasing and wildfire season is getting longer in the Western U.S. as temperatures rise. Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snow-melt result in forests that are hotter and drier for longer periods of time, priming conditions for wildfires to ignite and spread.”
“More destructive hurricanes”
While hurricanes are a natural part of our climate system, recent research indicates that their destructive power, or intensity, has been growing since the 1970s, particularly in the North Atlantic region.
“More frequent and intense heat waves”
“Dangerously hot weather is already occuring more frequently than it did 60 years ago—and scientists expect heat waves to become more frequent and severe as global warming intensifies. This increase in heat waves creates serious health risks, and can lead to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and aggravate existing medical conditions.”
“Military bases at risk”
“Rising seas will increasingly flood many of our coastal military bases.”
“National landmarks at risk.”
“The growing consequences of climate change are putting many of the country's most iconic and historic sites at risk, from Ellis Island to the Everglades, Cape Canaveral to California's César Chávez National Monument.”
“Widespread forest death in the Rocky Mountains”
“Tens of millions of trees have died in the Rocky Mountains over the past 15 years, victims of a climate-driven triple assault of tree-killing insects, wildfires, and stress from heat and drought.”
“Costly and growing health impacts”
“Climate change has significant implications for our health. Rising temperatures will likely lead to increased air pollution, a longer and more intense allergy season, the spread of insect-borne diseases, more frequent and dangerous heat waves, and heavier rainstorms and flooding. All of these changes pose serious, and costly, risks to public health.”
“An increase in extreme weather events”
“Strong scientific evidence shows that global warming is increasing certain types of extreme weather events, including heat waves, coastal flooding, extreme precipitation events, and more severe droughts. Global warming also creates conditions that can lead to more powerful hurricanes.”
“Heavier precipitation and flooding”
“As temperatures increase, more rain falls during the heaviest downpours, increasing the risk of flooding events. Very heavy precipitation events, defined as the heaviest one percent of storms, now drop 67 percent more precipitation in the Northeast, 31 percent more in the Midwest and 15 percent more in the Great Plains than they did 50 years ago.”
“More severe droughts in some areas”
“Climate change affects a variety of factors associated with drought and is likely to increase drought risk in certain regions. As temperatures have warmed, the prevalence and duration of drought has increased in the western U.S. and climate models unanimously project increased drought in the American Southwest.”
“Increased pressure on groundwater supplies”
“As the climate changes in response to global warming, longer and more severe droughts are projected for the western US. The resulting dry conditions will increase the pressure on groundwater supplies as more is pumped to meet demand even as less precipitation falls to replenish it. In California, water and wastewater utilities have an opportunity to significantly increase clean energy in the state's water sector.”
“Growing risks to our electricity supply”
“Our aging electricity infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to the growing consequences of global warming, including sea level rise, extreme heat, heightened wildfire risk, and drought and other water supply issues.”
“Changing seasons”
“Spring arrives much earlier than it used to — 10 days earlier on average in the northern hemisphere. Snow melts earlier. Reservoirs fill too early and water needs to be released for flood control. Vegetation and soils dry out earlier, setting the stage for longer and more damaging wildfire seasons.”
“Melting ice”
“Temperatures are rising in the planet's polar regions, especially in the Arctic, and the vast majority of the world's glaciers are melting faster than new snow and ice can replenish them. Scientists expect the rate of melting to accelerate, with serious implications for future sea level rise.”
“Disruptions to food supplies”
“Rising temperatures and the accompanying impacts of global warming — including more frequent heat waves, heavier precipitation in some regions, and more severe droughts in others — has significant implications for crop and meat production. Global warming has the potential to seriously disrupt our food supply, drive costs upward, and affect everything from coffee to cattle, from staple food crops to the garden in your backyard.”
“Destruction of coral reefs”
“As global temperatures rise, so too do average sea surface temperatures. These elevated temperatures cause long-term damage to coral reefs. Scientists have documented that sustained water temperatures of as little as one degree Celsius above normal summer maxima can cause irreversible damage.”
“Plant and animal range shifts”
“A changing climate affects the range of plants and animals, changing their behavior and causing disruptions up and down the food chain. The range of some warm-weather species will expand, while those that depend on cooler environments will face shrinking habitats and potential extinction.”
The changes predicted above are already well underway. Since this is an exhaustive list, I am including only a few of the more significant climate change events of this year and last. Coral reefs are dying. Mass extinctions are already occurring.
“Agriculture has always been at the mercy of unpredictable weather, but a rapidly changing climate is making agriculture an even more vulnerable enterprise. In some regions, warmer temperatures may increase crop yields. The overall impact of climate change on agriculture, however, is expected to be negative—reducing food supplies and raising food prices. Many regions already suffering from high rates of hunger and food insecurity, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are predicted to experience the greatest declines in food production. Elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are also expected to lower levels of zinc, iron, and other important nutrients in crops.”
“With changes in rainfall patterns, farmers face dual threats from flooding and drought. Both extremes can destroy crops. Flooding washes away fertile topsoil that farmers depend on for productivity, while droughts dry it out, making it more easily blown or washed away. Higher temperatures increase crops’ water needs, making them even more vulnerable during dry periods.”
http://www.foodsystemprimer.org/food-production/food-and-climate-change/
I acknowledge that fuel build-up is responsible for the intensity of fires. Western Forests are dependent on fires to maintain forest health, but there are other contributory factors that have changed. “According to Funk, not only US forests are endangered by increasing wildfires - the trend has been that wildfires are burning more area around the world.”
"In recent years, there have been big fires in Siberia and various other places around the world where we typically don't see large-scale wildfires," he said.
Projections by the UCS suggest that wildfires could get four, five and even six times as bad as they currently are within this century."
"Science suggests that over the past few decades, the number of wildfires has indeed increased, especially in the western United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), every state in the western US has experienced an increase in the average annual number of large wildfires over past decades.
What's more, wildfire season - meaning seasons with higher wildfire potential - has universally become longer over the past 40 years."
http://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-is-increasing-forest-fires-around-the-world/a-19465490
“It's been a hot July.”
“Wildfires in Greece killed at least 83, Sweden is desperately fighting fires above the Arctic circle, heat waves have struck everywhere from the U.K. to Siberia, and at least 70 deaths in Quebec in July were linked to the heat.”
“If we want to understand what's driving this heat wave — and if we should expect more of the same — we need to look northward, according to Dr. Jennifer Francis, research professor in Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.
Francis has been studying Arctic climate her entire career, and has authored and co-authored dozens of articles in peer-reviewed publications on the subject since the 1990s.”
"The basic story is that because the Arctic is warming so much faster than everywhere else, it's having an effect on mid-latitude weather," she told CBC.
Winds fan flames, rip trees from ground in deadly California wildfires
According to Francis, weather patterns can stall in certain areas — prolonging an intense heat wave, for example — if the jet stream gets too weak.
She describes the jet stream is a fast-moving current of air flowing across the northern hemisphere, passing over mid and northern Canada. It's caused by the collisions between frigid, descending air moving southward from the Arctic, and rising warm air coming from the equator.”
“Given that the Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as anywhere else in the world, Francis says the temperature difference between Arctic and equatorial winds becomes smaller and smaller.”
“This is "weakening the winds of the jet stream," she said.”
"This creates weather patterns on the surface that tend to also get stuck in one place for a long time."
“Francis says while this research isn't conclusive yet, the science is "pretty well-settled."
"We can't finger point directly at the Arctic to say that this summer's crazy weather is directly related to the rapid warming up there, but it certainly fits the story that we've been putting together over the last several years."
“If Hurricane Harvey had happened at the end of the 20th century, that amount of rain falling in Houston in a single storm would have been rare—a 1-in-2,000-year event, said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric sciences. But as temperatures continue to rise, those rare events are becoming increasingly less rare, he said."
"There are myriad reasons why individual storms develop as they do, including a combination of natural and manmade causes. That can make it hard to assess what role climate may have played in an individual storm (though the science behind attribution studies is getting better all the time). What scientists who study hurricanes are confident in, though, is the underlying physics that show that warmer temperatures are among the factors changing the way that storms form."
"According to the 2014 National Climate Assessment, the intensity, frequency and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s. The frequency of the strongest storms—category 4 and 5 hurricanes—has increased too."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06092017/hurricane-irma-harvey-climate-change-warm-atlantic-ocean-questions
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06092017/hurricane-irma-harvey-climate-change-warm-atlantic-ocean-questions
Right now, the world is about 2.1 degrees F (1.2 degrees C) warmer than it was during preindustrial times, deMenocal said. The 144 countries participating in the 2016 Paris Agreement announced that the world should limit the global increase in this century to 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C), a stricter limit than the former goal of a 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) increase.
To put 2.7 degrees F into perspective, just about 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) separates the modern world from the last ice age, which ended about 15,000 years ago, deMenocal said. During that time, sea levels were about 350 feet (106 meters) lower than they are today, because an extensive amount of water was stored as ice at the poles, he said. During that ice age, about 32 percent of Earth was covered in ice, compared to just about 10 percent today, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
All of these threats are just around the corner, deMenocal said. The Earth is anticipated to exceed the 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) milestone in about 15 years — between 2032 and 2039, deMenocal said. The planet is expected to surpass the 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) benchmark between 2050 and 2100, he said.
"If we're on our current emissions scenario, it's even sooner than that," he said. "Even over the last 8,000 years, we haven't seen a temperature extreme this rapid and this fast and large.
https://www.livescience.com/58891-why-2-degrees-celsius-increase-matters.html
“The rainforests of the sea, coral reefs play vital roles in the health of the ocean. But as a new study makes clear, humans’ influence on Earth’s climate is pushing them to the brink.”
“The analysis, published on Thursday in Science, takes a fresh look at the health of 100 coral reefs from around the world, stitching together a record from 1980 to 2016 from government documents, scientific studies, and media reports.”
“This approach corrects for the biases found in other, more spottily maintained databases—and paints a grim picture. On average, the study finds that the amount of time between severe bleaching events, which gravely wound coral reefs, has shrunk by a factor of five.”
“In the 1980s, coral reefs could expect about 25 to 30 years of recovery time between stressful episodes. But now, abnormally warm waters come once every six years on average. That’s simply not enough time for corals to cope, scientists warn. “Even the fastest-growing corals need at least 10 to 15 years to fully recover from severe bleaching. Entire reefs need decades to heal.”
“This carnage has dire implications. More than a quarter of all known marine species spend at least some of their lifecycle in coral reefs, says Eakin. In addition, more than 500 million people depend on coral reefs for food or fishing income. Even more still rely on corals to protect their shorelines from unchecked erosion and to fuel local tourism industries.”
“In all, the new analysis finds that of the 100 reefs studied, more than half saw more than 30 percent of their corals bleach in 2015 or 2016.”
THE EXTINCTION CRISIS
“It's frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day [1]. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.”
“In the past 500 years, we know of approximately 1,000 species that have gone extinct, from the woodland bison of West Virginia and Arizona's Merriam's elk to the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, passenger pigeon and Puerto Rico's Culebra parrot — but this doesn't account for thousands of species that disappeared before scientists had a chance to describe them [4]. Nobody really knows how many species are in danger of becoming extinct. Noted conservation scientist David Wilcove estimates that there are 14,000 to 35,000 endangered species in the United States, which is 7 to 18 percent of U.S. flora and fauna. The IUCN has assessed roughly 3 percent of described species and identified 16,928 species worldwide as being threatened with extinction, or roughly 38 percent of those assessed. In its latest four-year endangered species assessment, the IUCN reports that the world won't meet a goal of reversing the extinction trend toward species depletion by 2010.”
“What's clear is that many thousands of species are at risk of disappearing forever in the coming decades.”
“Communities and nations of the 21st century face a great challenge: to protect people from the harm caused by an increasingly volatile climate.”
“The damaging impacts of climate change will grow as the climate changes and adaptation fails to keep pace, unless societies take steps to increase their resilience through aggressive action on both climate mitigation and adaptation.”
“This report focuses on adaptation, where choosing among possible actions is often not straightforward or intuitive, and highlights 15 principles for decision makers to use to prioritize investments in climate change adaptation.”
I believe that is too late for climate mitigation. It is time for acknowledgement and adaptation. Study up on climate change. Change your investments. Evaluate where you live in light of environmental changes and risks. Lobby your idiot government representatives to acknowledge that our time is up. Natural disasters will dominate and prevail, changing life as we know it. Yet we have Senators throwing snowballs in Congress as proof against global warming, oblivious that a snowball in Washington D.C. is proof of the extreme weather events associated with climate change. This will affect the poor the most. They have limited resources to change their income sources or move to safer ground. If changes are not made, we will see great loss of life among the most vulnerable populations; the homeless and the poor. Read up. Educate. Lobby.
Tarin Ann Vincent
Copyright July 30, 2018
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