Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part III
The pace of alarming climate news, always prefaced with "sooner than expected" or similar such phrases in press releases and news articles, necessitates another survey of recent revelations.
NASA visualization of oceanic garbage (2015).
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part I
Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction Part II
With record-setting heatwaves and droughts parching inland bodies of water throughout the world, and other signifiers of impending collapse emerging at a breakneck pace, it is important to once again catalogue a wide-ranging survey of our ecological decline, which continues in all arenas. First, a word about climate optimism, which is both unrealistic and, according to this 2016 research, counterproductive (I have argued this many times).
• Emotional distress is strongly correlated with mitigation motivation; hope is not.
• Optimistic messages about carbon emissions reduce climate change risk perceptions.
• Less risk leads to less distress, which in turn lowers mitigation motivation.
• Pessimistic climate change messages avoid complacency without eroding efficacy.
Second, a good example of the folly of attempting to use capitalism to solve a problem which was entirely created by capitalism (a caveat: the article is insufficiently critical of economists and overly optimistic about green technology and the Inflation Reduction Act):
But as President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act with its $392 billion in climate-related subsidies, one thing became very clear: The nation’s biggest initiative to address climate change is built on a different foundation from the one Dr. Nordhaus proposed.
Rather than imposing a tax, the legislation offers tax credits, loans and grants — technology-specific carrots that have historically been seen as less efficient than the stick of penalizing carbon emissions more broadly.
The outcome reflects a larger trend in public policy, one that is prompting economists to ponder why the profession was so focused on a solution that ultimately went nowhere in Congress — and how economists could be more useful as the damage from extreme weather mounts.
A central shift in thinking, many say, is that climate change has moved faster than foreseen, and in less predictable ways, raising the urgency of government intervention. In addition, technologies like solar panels and batteries are cheap and abundant enough to enable a fuller shift away from fossil fuels, rather than slightly decreasing their use….
For Ryan Kellogg, an energy economist who worked as an analyst for the oil giant BP before getting his Ph.D., that was a key realization. Leaving an economics department for the public policy school at the University of Chicago, and working with an interdisciplinary consortium including climate scientists, impressed on him two things: that fossil fuels needed to be phased out much faster than previously thought, and that it could be done at lower cost.
Just in the utility sector, for example, Dr. Kellogg recently found that carbon taxes aren’t meaningfully more efficient than subsidies or clean electricity standards in driving a full transition to wind and solar power. And as more essential devices can be powered by batteries, affordable electricity becomes paramount.
“If you want to get rid of some of the carbon but you don’t think it’s worthwhile to invest in deep decarbonization, keeping a price on carbon is probably a good idea,” Dr. Kellogg said. “If you’re going to zero, and really cleaning the grid, you want to use that clean electricity to electrify other stuff, and you want it to be cheap.”
And now, a surfeit of reasons to have great emotional distress:
By 2100, that brutal heat index may linger for most of the summer for places like the U.S. Southeast, the study’s author said.
And it’s far worse for the sticky tropics. The study said a heat index considered “extremely dangerous” where the feels-like heat index exceeds 124 degrees (51 degrees Celsius) — now something that rarely happens — will likely strike a tropical belt that includes India one to four weeks a year by century’s end.
“So that’s kind of the scary thing about this,” said study author Lucas Zeppetello, a Harvard climate scientist. “That’s something where potentially billions of people are going to be exposed to extremely dangerous levels of heat very regularly. So something that’s gone from virtually never happening before will go to something that is happening every year.”…
The study focuses on the heat index and that’s smart because it’s not just heat but the combination with humidity that hurts health, said Harvard School of Public Health professor Dr. Renee Salas, who is an emergency room physician.
“As the heat index rises, it becomes harder and harder to cool our bodies,” Salas, who wasn’t part of the research team, said in an email. “Heat stroke is a potentially deadly form of heat illness that occurs when body temperatures rise to dangerous levels.”
In 2016, police found a 61-year-old Army veteran dead in his house after someone noticed his air conditioner was broken and his mail was piling up during a searing heat wave that broke records across Phoenix that June.
This summer in Houston, a 72-year-old woman was found unresponsive in her car as the temperature approached 100 degrees. She died at a local hospital of hyperthermia, or an abnormally high body temperature.
Every summer, heat records are being shattered in the United States, where heat waves, now increasingly common, claim more lives than any other natural disaster. And older people are disproportionately affected.
Across the country, buddy programs are cropping up to address the problem. In big cities such as Philadelphia and in rural communities such as Twentynine Palms in California, people are checking in on their older neighbors to make sure they have water, shade, fans or access to air conditioning and cooling centers.
There is emerging research that the human body is far more susceptible to heat stress at lower temperatures than previously believed. It has other environmental costs as well. This is what was once the Loire river in France:
We are busy poisoning (“sanitizing”) what bodies of water remain to us:
The council also contended that the chlorine is unlikely to affect flora and fauna in the bay.
It said: “The chlorine is driven off by the motion of the water and as such is unlikely to affect the flora and fauna in the bay and certainly not as much as some beach users leaving their rubbish, discarded plastics and other waste.
“The stream is chlorinated upstream of the culvert to the beach [some 150m-200m away] primarily because children tend to play in the stream despite notices being erected advising adults / parents that it is unsafe to do so.
“The purpose of the chlorination plant is primarily to protect human health from the impact of diffuse pollution sources further upstream.”
Poland's prime minister said Friday that “huge amounts of chemical waste” were probably dumped intentionally into the Oder River, which runs along the border with Germany, causing environmental damage so severe it will take the river years to recover.
Tons of dead fish have been seen floating or washed ashore on the Oder's banks over the past two weeks but the issue only erupted into a major scandal late this week.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, whose government is under pressure for its handling of what appears to be a major environmental catastrophe, vowed that Polish authorities would hold the perpetrators to account.
“Huge amounts of chemical waste were probably dumped in the Oder River with full awareness of the risks and consequences,” he said in a video on Facebook. “We will not let this matter go. We will not rest until the guilty are severely punished."
After France's summer of drought, massive wildfires and deadly storms, as well as continuing loss of life in Ukraine, the 44-year-old leader delivered a bleak message on Wednesday to the first cabinet meeting after the traditional August holiday break.
"I believe that we are in the process of living through a tipping point or great upheaval. Firstly because we are living through... what could seem like the end of abundance," he said.
The speech appeared designed to prepare the country for what promises to be a difficult winter ahead, with energy prices rising sharply and many families struggling to meet the cost of living….
On Wednesday, he also referred to the wild weather that has hit France over the summer, increasing fears about the pace of climate change.
"This overview that I'm giving – the end of abundance, the end of insouciance, the end of assumptions – it's ultimately a tipping point that we are going through that can lead our citizens to feel a lot of anxiety," Macron continued.
Droughts (occurring throughout the world) and water overuse can drain aquifers, leading to saltwater intrusion and the essential poisoning of the water supply:
Under natural conditions, the seaward movement of freshwater prevents saltwater from encroaching on freshwater coastal aquifers. This interface between freshwater and saltwater is maintained near the coast or far below the land surface. The interface actually is a diffuse zone where freshwater and saltwater mix. This zone is referred to as the zone of dispersion or the zone of transition.
Groundwater pumping can reduce freshwater flow toward coastal areas and cause saltwater to be drawn toward the freshwater zones of the aquifer. Saltwater intrusion decreases freshwater storage in the aquifers, and, in extreme cases, can result in the abandonment of wells. Saltwater intrusion occurs by many ways, including lateral encroachment from coastal waters and vertical movement of saltwater near discharging wells. The intrusion of saltwater caused by withdrawals of freshwater from the groundwater system can make the resource unsuitable for use. Thus, groundwater management plans should take into account potential changes in water quality that might occur because of saltwater intrusion.
The dugong, a marine mammal related to the manatee, is now functionally extinct in China.
Dugongs have a similar appearance and behaviour to manatees, but their whale-like tail sets them apart. They have inhabited China’s southern waters for centuries, and were said to have been mistaken for mermaids by sailors in the past.
In one of the Yangtze’s important flood basins in central China’s Jiangxi province, the Poyang lake has now shrunk to a quarter of its normal size for this time of year, state news agency Xinhua reported.
As many as 66 rivers across 34 counties in the southwestern region of Chongqing have dried up, state broadcaster CCTV said on Friday.
Rainfall in Chongqing this year is down 60 percent compared with the seasonal norm, and the soil in several districts is severely short of moisture, CCTV said, citing local government data.
The district of Beibei, north of Chongqing’s urban centre, saw temperatures hit 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, according to China’s weather bureau.
Chongqing accounted for six of the 10 hottest locations in the country on Friday morning, with temperatures in the district of Bishan already approaching 39C (102F). Shanghai was already at 37C (98F).
China’s current heatwave is in fact “the most severe ever recorded in the world.” Europe is fairing little better, with punishing heat and record drought conditions of their own:
If governments are thus far unequal to the task of saving our planet, corporations, even when regulated, are far worse. This is an important Twitter research thread about the folly of expecting companies to “go green” in any meaningful sense to help ameliorate the issues that are already devastating to millions:
A report released Wednesday by the UN Environment Programme suggests it's time we "learn to live with fire" and adapt to the uptick in the frequency and severity of wildfires that will inevitably put more lives and economies in harm's way.
The number of extreme wildfire events will increase up to 14% by 2030, according to the report's analysis. By 2050, the increase will climb to 30%.
Even with the most ambitious efforts to slash heat-trapping emissions, the report shows that those near-term consequences are locked in.
“Locked in” is an important phrase. Even if emissions are slashed today, their effects will be locked in for decades to come, triggering feedback loops such as wildfires, which themselves release a substantial amount of carbon dioxide:
California is burning with a ferocity never seen before in the Golden State. So far this year, fires have burned through more than 1.4 million hectares (3.4 million acres) of land — about half the size of Belgium — according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. What’s more, it’s only mid-September, and the region’s normal fire season usually lasts until somewhere in November.
Along with the flames comes a rapid rise in carbon dioxide emissions, which, in turn, will accelerate climate change events that are fueling the current fires, experts say.
It’s estimated that the 2020 California wildfires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of CO2 (as of Sept. 15), according to data from the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). That’s about 25% of the annual emissions from fossil fuels in the state, Niels Andela, an atmospheric scientist from Cardiff University in the U.K., told Mongabay.
Two studies that investigated calving — the term that describes the breaking off of chunks of ice from the edge of a glacier — found that the crumbling ice in Antarctica is actually double that of previous estimates and details how the continent is changing. The two studies were led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and reveal what NASA says is “unexpected” new data about how the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been losing mass in recent decades.
The first study, published in Nature and titled Antarctic calving loss rivals ice-shelf thinning, maps how iceberg calving has changed the coastline of the polar continent over the last 25 years.
“Antarctica’s ice shelves help to control the flow of glacial ice as it drains into the ocean, meaning that the rate of global sea-level rise is subject to the structural integrity of these fragile, floating extensions of the ice sheet,” the researchers write….
NASA says that scientists don’t think it is possible that Antarctica can regrow the ice that it has lost since prior to the year 2000 before the end of the century and that instead, it is more likely that they will experience “major” calving events in the next 10 to 20 years.
The second study, published in Earth System Science Data, goes a step further and shows how the thinning of Antarctic ice has spread from the continent’s outer edges towards its interior, almost doubling the western part of the ice sheet over the last 10 years.
Up to one-sixth of the tree species found in the continental United States face possible extinction, yet only a handful enjoy federal protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, a new study finds.
The study, which focused on 881 tree species native to the continental United States, drew on field data indicating where trees occur and scientific literature detailing threats they face. (Hawaii has a vastly different flora that’s being assessed separately.) Researchers evaluated how endangered each tree is according to criteria developed by the organizations NatureServe and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). As a result of invasive insects, pathogens, climate change, development, and other threats, the team found, 11% to 16% of those trees—as many as 135 species—face possible extinction.
And the token attempts to “go green” referenced above? Already being eviscerated by Republicans:
GOP targets powerhouse Wall Street firms over investments meant to fight climate change
Republicans are fighting against a social movement in the financial sector meant to address systemic issues like climate change.
Governmental initiatives in Florida, West Virginia and Texas are targeting powerhouse Wall Street firms that they say are engaging in environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, which they view to be harmful to their states’ economies.
Letters dated Aug. 10 were sent out this month by the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs to Wall Street firms Blackrock, Vanguard, Institutional Shareholder Services and State Street, asking for details about the companies’ ESG practices and how they could affect the state’s public pensions, including retirement funds for teachers and state employees.
The letter to Blackrock requested “all documents and communications relating to the actual or potential effects of ESG integration practices on the financial outlook, risk/return profile, performance, or profitability of any of your funds, portfolio companies, or institutional accounts of ESG integration practices.”
Texas State Affairs Committee Chairman Bryan Hughes (R) said in an interview with The Hill that numerous public pension funds, endowments and retirement accounts could all be affected by ESG investing practices.
“The Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the Employees Retirement System of Texas, all of our university endowment funds and various other pension funds, as well as the millions of investors who are trusting these firms with their 401(k)s, and then of course all the Texas companies that are being bullied and being manipulated by these firms – for all those reasons, this is important for the Texas legislature to do something about,” he said.
“The people of Texas are finding out that a handful of Wall Street firms are using other people’s money to push a narrow agenda and we’re pushing back,” he said.
The news is uniformly negative, and the prognosis grim. Optimism regarding the state of nature and climate change is as factually wrong as it is detrimental. It is better to face our reality head on so that we might begin to work toward a real solution, if one is still possible. And the only economic system equal to the task is undeniably a green communist revolution; all else is either pointless or actively harmful. We are now being told by our leaders to prepare for the worst, that we will have to live with wildfires, that austerity is looming, that millions if not billions will have to be relocated (becoming refugees who will be treated with utmost disdain). The elites have given up; should we?