The real gorilla ...

An undisturbed permafrost landscape adjacent to the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau.
Credit: Xiling Gu

The real gorilla of global warming is warming up for the big show, CO2 coming out of the permafrost. The Russians warned us, the Chinese warned us and now, the rest of the world is warning us as the amount of carbon sequestered in ice is now issuing forth in force as the ice trapped in the tundra begins to melt. BRT has posted blurbs about permafrost for years and now it seems, the tipping point may be arriving at last. 

A new study in Nature Communications finds a critical climate tipping point in Tibetan permafrost ecosystems. Warming of 2–4 degrees Celsius triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of carbon release that could significantly accelerate climate change, according to the work.

Permafrost covers roughly 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's land surface. It is ground that remains frozen for at least two years. For millennia, organic matter has been trapped in frozen ground, kept out of the atmosphere as a vast carbon reserve.

As global temperatures rise, however, that carbon bank is increasingly springing leaks. Warming thaws the frozen ground, allowing microbes to break down the stored organic matter and release it back into the atmosphere as CO2, a feedback loop that could significantly amplify climate change. But at what warming level does this process cross a point of no return, where carbon losses permanently outpace carbon gains?

Phys.org spoke with Professor Jinzhi Ding of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-author of the study, to understand what drove the research and what the findings mean for our understanding of climate feedback.

"Old-carbon decomposition was essentially a 'black box' because we lacked the tools and long-term observations to track it," she told Phys.org. "That unanswered question motivated us to finally open that black box."

Schematic diagram of the permafrost carbon-climate tipping point triggered by warming-induced decomposition of old carbon. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72122-3

Ground zero

The Tibetan Plateau is home to the world's largest alpine permafrost carbon reservoir, with roughly 47 billion tons of carbon present in the top 10 meters of soil alone. The plateau is warming at approximately 2.5 times the global average rate, making it a testing ground for understanding the effects of rising temperatures on permafrost ecosystems worldwide.

The problem centers on a delicate balance between two competing processes. Plants initially thrive with a slight increase in temperature resulting in them pulling more CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. But it simultaneously accelerates microbial decomposition in the soil, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. The critical unknown was which process ultimately wins and at what temperature the balance breaks irreversibly.

What made this particularly difficult to answer was the role of ancient carbon locked deep in permafrost soils. Once thawed, carbon frozen for hundreds to thousands of years enters the atmosphere as entirely "new" emissions—not simply recycled modern plant carbon, but a net addition that existing climate models have struggled to account for.

Panoramic view of the experimental site on the Tibetan Plateau. Credit: Juan Li

The thermokarst is thawing ...

Dire news on global warms keeps ramping up along the lines of whack a mole. Todays bon bon  focuses on the Thermokarst, a land surface characterised by very irregular surfaces of marshy hollows and small hummocks formed as ice-rich permafrost thaws, that occurs in Arctic areas, and on a smaller scale in mountainous areas such as the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps. 

This previously hidden entity is thawing at rates researchers never thought possible until now.

It’s perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback loops: As the planet warms, permafrost—landscapes of frozen soil and rock—begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, more thawing, and even more carbon emissions.

But here’s something you’ve probably never heard of, and it’s something not even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has really considered: thermokarst. That’s the land that gets ravaged whenever permafrost thaws rapidly. As the ice that holds the soil together disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up. Climate scientists have been working gradual permafrost thaw into their models—changes that run centimeters deep over decades or centuries. But abrupt permafrost thaw happens on the scale of meters over months or years. That shocks the surrounding landscape into releasing potentially even more carbon than would have if it thawed at a more leisurely pace.

Permafrost thaw ponds in Hudson Bay, Canada in 2008.

Crossing the threshold ...

Permafrost, seen at the top of the cliff, melts into the Kolyma River outside Zyryanka, Russia, on July 4. Melting permafrost is altering Siberia's landscape and economy. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

BRT, as my loyal readers know, has talked often about the danger of methane, the greenhouse gas of green houses gases, an entity beginning to issue forth at ever increasing levels as the permafrost melts, thus releasing this most powerful of planet warming agents in biblical proportions.

The findings are contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and unfamiliar environment.

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback

Scientists are alarmed that this earth, frozen for millennia, is now thawing. And the pace of the thaw is picking up.

Especially noteworthy is the report’s conclusion that the Arctic already may have become a net emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions due to thawing permafrost, which would only accelerate global warming. Permafrost is the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers 24 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, encompassing vast stretches of territory across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

Channeling Thelma & Louise without question.

Positive Feedback Writ Large

Just a very short post. Seems the mystery of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere causing massive heat gain in the earth (50 millions years ago as example) has been solved, a finding with direct consequences to what is happening today as we spew out ever more amounts of CO2 into the air without regard for the inevitable blow back we will soon be facing.


"The standard hypothesis has been that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments," DeConto says. "We are instead ascribing the carbon source to the continents, in polar latitudes where permafrost can store massive amounts of carbon that can be released as CO2 when the permafrost thaws."


The new view is supported by calculations estimating interactions of variables such as greenhouse gas levels, changes in the Earth's tilt and orbit, ancient distributions of vegetation, and carbon stored in rocks and in frozen soil.


While the amounts of carbon involved in the ancient soil-thaw scenarios was likely much greater than today, implications of the study appear dire for the long-term future as polar permafrost carbon deposits have begun to thaw due to burning fossil-fuels, DeConto adds. "Similar dynamics are at play today. Global warming is degrading permafrost in the north polar regions, thawing frozen organic matter, which will decay to release CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. This will only exacerbate future warming in a positive feedback loop."

The picture below shows how positive feedback works.

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble - Macbeth

For 30,000 years, the permafrost has remained quiescent, holding onto carbon dioxide and methane, it's O2 starved cousin, at bay, keeping runaway global warming from happening until we came along to upset the apple cart. 

A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.


Temperatures are warming across much of that region, primarily, scientists believe, because of the rapid human release of greenhouse gases. Permafrost is warming, too. Some has already thawed, and other signs are emerging that the frozen carbon may be becoming unstable.

but that's not all.

When organic material comes out of the deep freeze, it is consumed by bacteria. If the material is well-aerated, bacteria that breathe oxygen will perform the breakdown, and the carbon will enter the air as carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But in areas where oxygen is limited, like the bottom of a lake or wetland, a group of bacteria called methanogens will break down the organic material, and the carbon will emerge as methane.


Scientists are worried about both gases. They believe that most of the carbon will emerge as carbon dioxide, with only a few percent of it being converted to methane. But because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas, the 41 experts in the recent survey predicted that it would trap about as much heat as the carbon dioxide would.

In indirect fashion, the slow motion push of global warming will bring tragedy to those who cannot deal with it just as the fatal attraction to power brings tragedy to Macbeth, a supremely gifted man unable to escape the clutches of unbridled ambition.

1 WITCH.  Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd. 
       2 WITCH.  Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd. 
       3 WITCH.  Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time! 
       1 WITCH.  Round about the caldron go; 
    In the poison'd entrails throw.— 
    Toad, that under cold stone, 
    Days and nights has thirty-one; 
    Swelter'd venom sleeping got, 
    Boil thou first i' the charmed pot! 
       ALL.  Double, double toil and trouble; 
    Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 
       2 WITCH.  Fillet of a fenny snake, 
    In the caldron boil and bake; 
    Eye of newt, and toe of frog, 
    Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, 
    Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, 
    Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,— 
    For a charm of powerful trouble, 
    Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. 
       ALL.  Double, double toil and trouble; 
    Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 

Synergy of an ominous kind

BRT has discussed how feedback loops amplify events like climate change ad nauseam with loss of albedo being one and now another, thermokarst lakes, a relatively unknown entity that could amp global warming in ways that truly boggle the mind.

However, in the presence of thermokarst lakes, permafrost thaws deeper and more quickly. Thermokarst lakes form when substantial amounts of ice in the deep soil melts to liquid water. Because the same amount of ice takes up more volume than water, the land surface slumps and subsides, creating a small depression that then fills with water from rain, snow melt and ground ice melt. The water in the lakes speeds up the thawing of the frozen soil along their shores and expands the lake size and depth at a much faster pace than gradual thawing.

Photo shows what appears to be permafrost thaw ponds in Hudson Bay, Canada, near Greenland. (By inspection this photo appears to match a location at 66°11′10″N 73°26′42″W in Dewey Soper Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Baffin Island, overlooking the waters of the Hudson Bay near Greenland)

The horse is out of the barn, don't you think?

We're in deep shit

The latest IPCC report on the world's oceans is dire. If nothing is done, we are screwed.

B1. Global-scale glacier mass loss, permafrost thaw, and decline in snow cover and Arctic sea ice extent are projected to continue in the near-term (2031–2050) due to surface air temperature increases (high confidence), with unavoidable consequences for river runoff and local hazards (high confidence). The Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are projected to lose mass at an increasing rate throughout the 21st century and beyond (high confidence). The rates and magnitudes of these cryospheric changes are projected to increase further in the second half of the 21st century in a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (high confidence). Strong reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades are projected to reduce further changes after 2050 (high confidence). {2.2, 2.3, Cross-Chapter Box 6 in Chapter 2, 3.3, 3.4, Figure SPM.1, SPM Box SPM.1}

B2. Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions with

increased temperatures (virtually certain), greater upper ocean stratification (very likely),

further acidification (virtually certain), oxygen decline (medium confidence), and altered net

primary production (low confidence). Marine heatwaves (very high confidence) and extreme El

Niño and La Niña events (medium confidence) are projected to become more frequent. The

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is projected to weaken (very likely). The

rates and magnitudes of these changes will be smaller under scenarios with low greenhouse gas

emissions (very likely). {3.2; 5.2; 6.4; 6.5; 6.7; Box 5.1; Figures SPM.1, SPM.3}

Deep shit indeed.

The World Island yet again ...

 

BRT Repost ... Back in 2015, yours truly chanced upon Sir Halford Mackinder's extraordinary take on world politics with his notion that the future of world power will reside in Euro-Asia, the great landmass connecting three continents forever separate from North and South America and Australia. Seems his prescient analysis is spot on given just how inept and bankrupt the US (and west) has become regarding it's obsession with endless war and it's total lack of understanding why The Art of War really matters for the continued wellbeing of any entity wishing to call itself a viable nation.

In 2022, this 2015 notion's accurate to a fault but now, the impact of GW on the fate of the world looms ever larger as phase transitions are never linear and proof of that is seen by estimates of water rise in just 30 years exceeding the guesstimates made by researchers made just a few years ago. 

With continued ocean and atmospheric warming, sea levels will likely rise for many centuries at rates higher than that of the current century. In the United States, almost 40 percent of the population lives in relatively high-population-density coastal areas, where sea level plays a role in flooding, shoreline erosion, and hazards from storms. Globally, eight of the world's 10 largest cities are near a coast, according to the U.N. Atlas of the Oceans.

Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has increased in recent decades. In 2014, global sea level was  2.6 inches 67 mm above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of  about one-eighth of an inch 3.2 mm per year.

Click https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ to see how high the ocean will rise. Intense without question. 

What this means to countries and the fate of the world becomes scary, dire predictions made by James Lovelock 15 years ago and now, with Alfred M. Mccoy, a superb writer who takes the long view on issues as serious as this.

Alfred McCoy, Professor of History at UW-Madison. His new book is Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

We’re in a time of growing belligerence of a kind unknown since the Cold War. It’s already taken us to the edge of conflict with nuclear-armed great powers, whether in Ukraine or Taiwan and the South China Sea.  Meanwhile, here at home (and in other countries globally), internal divisions, flaring anger, and violence are growing. And yet the true violence, the true war, the one those aggressive great powers are already waging in a major way goes largely unnoticed and remarkably undealt with, perhaps because it’s a genuine world war on humanity and the planet itself.

In case you’re not living in the American Southwest, that region has been experiencing “megadrought” conditions.  (The whole west is, in fact, drought-stricken right now.) And that would be bad enough, but a new study by climate scientists indicates that the Southwest has been going through “the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years” and, no surprise, climate change is significantly to blame. We’re talking about a catastrophe — one that, as yet, shows no signs of abating and that in the long run is only going to get worse.

If lack of water is a problem in the Southwest, here’s the “good” — actually, terrible — news: this country’s coasts are going to be anything but short of water.  According to another new study, sea levels around this country are going to rise by something like a foot in the next three decades (more even than the global average). In other words, while parts of the U.S. broil, other parts will functionally drown, with ever more disastrous flooding occurring ever more often. Again, this is due to the never-ending burning of fossil fuels (and toss in as well phenomena like the melting of Russia’s permafrost, potentially releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse-gas methane into the atmosphere).

The World Island ...

Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about the future development of flying cars, cryogenics, or even as-yet-unimaginable versions of space travel.

After leading the world for the past 75 years, the United States is ever so fitfully losing its grip on global hegemony. As Washington’s power begins to fade, the liberal international system it created by founding the United Nations in 1945 is facing potentially fatal challenges.

After more than 180 years of Western global dominion, leadership is beginning to move from West to East, where Beijing is likely to become the epicenter of a new world order that could indeed rupture longstanding Western traditions of law and human rights.

The new hegemon

Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing seems to have an underlying design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the U.S. geopolitical grip over a region that has long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational scheme is a monumental construction effort that, in just two decades, has already covered China and much of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.

A short lived hegemon 

In its hell-bent drive for development, in other words, China is digging its own grave (and ours as well).

To whit

Simultaneously, soaring temperatures are expected to devastate the North China Plain between Beijing and Shanghai, one of that country’s prime agricultural regions currently inhabited by 400 million people, nearly a third of that country’s population. It could, in fact, potentially become one of the most lethal places on the planet.

“This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” said Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a climate specialist at MIT who published his findings in the journal Nature Communications. Between 2070 and 2100, he estimates, the region could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger” and perhaps five lethal periods of 35° Wet Bulb Temperature (where a combination of heat and high humidity prevents the evaporation of the sweat that cools the human body). After just six hours under such conditions, a healthy person at rest will die.

Rather than sudden and catastrophic, the impact of climate change in North China is likely to be incremental and cumulative, escalating relentlessly with each passing decade. If the “Chinese century” does indeed start around 2030, it’s unlikely to last long once its main financial center at Shanghai is flooded out and its agricultural heartland is baking in insufferable heat.

End game.

After 2050, the international community will face a growing contradiction, even a head-on collision, between the two foundational principles of the current world order: national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have the sovereign right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of protecting the human rights of the 200 million to 1.2 billion climate-change refugees expected to be created by 2050, both within their own borders and beyond. Faced with such extreme disorder, it is just possible that the nations of this planet might agree to cede some small portion of their sovereignty to a global government set up to cope with the climate crisis.

The choice is up to us if civilization is to survive.

A planet ever more battered by climate change, one in which neither an American nor a Chinese “century” will have any meaning, will certainly need a newly empowered world order that can supersede national sovereignty to protect the most fundamental and transcendent of all human rights: survival. The environmental changes in the offing are so profound that anything less than a new form of democratic global governance will mean not just incessant conflicts but, in all likelihood, disaster of an almost-unimaginable kind. And no surprise there, since we’ll be dealing with a planet all too literally on the brink.

Any questions?

2024 ...

Off in the distance ...

Predicting the future's not possible, only guesstimates, thanks to the vagaries of reality as probabilities rule but you already know that, right? No prognostications here save that 2024 will be a watershed year thanks to three prime drivers ...

Climate Change From the Thwaites Glacier getting close to collapse to the loss of albedo in the arctic and the release of increasing amounts of methane from the permafrost, the 900 lb gorilla continues to emerge from the shadows.

AI, the open ended tech forever to remain unknowable as code must write code in order for AI to function, is an inconvenient fact many experts avoid discussing. There's a cost to everything due to the laws of thermodynamics and their intrinsic connect to entropy.

Out of darkness

Agent Orange possibly becoming president yet again scares the crap out of yours truly thanks to the feckless foreign policy initiatives conducted by the Biden administration along with the festering immigration problem that never seems to go away. 

Happy New Year :)

1:00 AM

Can You Hear Me Now?

Every time one hears a bloviator like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman states categorically that Climate Change is but a myth, something not to be considered by anyone of good faith, should consider this...

"The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth's climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.


The Arctic ice melt is also accelerating the rate of climate change beyond what humanity is doing with every barrel of oil, tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas burned."

The frightening thing about Global Warming is the fact it's only just beginning...

"One consequence is the acceleration of global warming as the Arctic flips from all white to dark blue, with the ocean absorbing tremendous amounts of heat from the 24-hour summer sun. That shift in albedo - from white to dark - is expected to add an additional amount of heat energy of about 0.3 watts per square meter over the entire land and water surface of the planet, calculates Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute.


That's enough additional energy to power an LED night light for each square meter of the 510 million square meters that comprise the Earth's surface. That will raise global temperatures about 0.25 C, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told IPS.


Of course, most of that tremendous amount of heat will reside first in the Arctic, where temperatures are already an average of three to five degrees C higher than 30 to 40 years ago. This winter parts of the Arctic were 21 C above normal for a month.


All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world's biggest "carbon bomb", the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometers across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe."

At this point in time, it looks like James Lovelock's dire view of the negative impact Global Warming is beginning to have on the world may be spot on even though a very sizable percentage of people (in this country)  continued to deny its existence because of the subtlety of change, something vastly different from the speed of tv or the web where instant gratification is not fast enough.

Seen below is a video of Lovelock's take on the emergence of the 900 lb gorilla no one wants to talk about as we move further into the 21st century.

Crossing the Rubicon ...

Twilight

This pix, taken a few years ago, sums up a possible future for man as civilization moves further into the Anthropocene and it's tangental relationship to all things related to tech, the environment and to earth as everything's connected and ... everything's quantum where certitude is but an illusion,

3500 articles, musings on thousands of postings and guesstimates, both accurate and inaccurate, populate this blog to the nth degree but you, my loyal readers, already know that so here's to crossing the Rubicon, a most perilous journey we will all be taking whether we like it or not.

No connects or numbering schemes but rather a random walk through a partial list of issues most dire with climate change being No. 1.

Covid-19 is but a weak introduction to what's coming, a pandemic to be sure, but nothing compared to GW and the impact it will have on the world.

For starters, the equator will soon become uninhabitable. Animals and plants are migrating away as we speak but little is said as to what species will survive as they make their desperate move. This also involves us and the impact on the food supply as growing food will move north and south with large swaths of land unable to sustain civilization due to not only excess heat but also loss of water as seen by the move on Lake Mead to restrict waster supply when the water level goes below 1047'.

2020-30 will be remembrance of species lost. Researchers discovered ocean life died much quicker than land in the Great Dying of 250 million years ago. Does this mean the same for us as the acceleration of GW is happening thousands of times faster than the 30,000 year timeframe of the Permian eruption of the Siberian Traps in northern Russia.

2040-50, the real bite of GW begins, where temps of 3+ take hold and Russia and Canada become the bread baskets of the world while Cat 6 hurricanes ply the Atlantic with devastating power. This scenario is already baked including the melting of the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland as the loss of albedo is a prime GW accelerant and we haven't even discussed the release of ever more methane from the rapidly melting permafrost and ocean located in and around the arctic. Water rise - 2-3 meters?

Forget Florida and cities on the coast, right?

Too many people add to the mix. 8 billion and counting. Not good, not sustainable but Gaia's thinking about a drastic solution to this issue, something Lovelock talked about over 15 years ago.

Mass migrations loom.

AI - the open ended tech where we have lost contro but don't know it yet but we will, soon.

Question: When does AI become sentient? 5 years, next year, 10? One never knows but whenever anyone says AI cannot be this or that, remember the Rand Corporation's take on the net and the fact only 20 systems will be ever be needed to run civilization. 

The military goes full tilt into autonomous bots armed to the teeth. Who's the enemy? How can they be identified? Is man the enemy? Skynet's happening as digital swarms are already being ramped up, connected as one entity driven by, you guessed it, AI. 

The needs of AI differ from us. What does that mean?

Cybersecurity - no system is invulnerable. Everything can be hacked. The biggie is shutting down infrastructure, you know, access to electricity, heat, medical and water supply among significant others. Countries all over the world are capping on this as tech is cheap. All it takes is brainpower, desire to hack and access to the web to make it happen. Is this the end of the world?

Biotech - CRISPR and manipulation of DNA, combined with AI as enhancer, what could possibly go wrong? Pandemics are us, not only with upcoming labs on a chip used by twisted individuals to create bugs but also of the natural kind as GW disrupts all things related to life. Think mosquitoes ...

Continued abuses ...

30% of all arable land is used to feed Bessie, Loghorn T. Fog Horn and Porky, an unsustainable way to feed man, not to mention the accompanying manure, urine and fertilizers used to leverage the land in addition to rampant injections of steroids and antibiotics, along with genetic engineering, to said fauna, to create fast growing franken foods, packaged for us rubes in all shapes and sizes, to consume to our heart's content.

Plastics and chemicals of all kinds, including micro plastics in our air, soil and of course, food, invade everything, something most disturbing as researchers are now finding out this deadly combination adversely impacts fertility. Children of Men anyone? ... by possibly 2045.

The car, ubiquitous in the US because there is no high speed or medium speed rail of any consequence in the US, pollutes the planet to no end as most are gas powered. Maybe we should ask China how they build high speed rail as they are really good at it while the US does nothing. Going electric is not all that great either as the grid, powered by natural gas and oil, power these things. Question, where will the batteries go? Can they be recycled? Good question to ask is it not?

Suburbs ... journey to nowhere, ditto strip malls. Both ecologically disastrous. 

Planes, another prime driver of fossil fuels continues unabated. The production and distribution of ever more stuff never ceases to amaze, particularly in terms of landfill when said stuff become a throwaway for the ages. Think China on this one. 

Subsidies to fossil fuel polluters instead of developing sustainables has been the US mantra for years. It looks like this is slowly changing but it will take time, something we no longer have.

Nuclear war becomes a possible given just how many countries hate each other.

Resource depreciation, environmental degradation and poverty, combined with starvation and over population, become prime drivers for revolution and violence all over the world.

Right now, it's lip service. Nothing of real consequence is being done because that means enormous change for all of us, an issue not be be addressed until the real shit hits the fan. Time frame - 2050.

One point perspective

Feedback Loops

 Lightning strikes in the far north of Canada Photograph: Sandra Angers-Blodin

The Arcic's doing a slow broil. How do we know this? it's because of lightning strikes and the incursion of shrubs in the tundra driven by the loss of albedo as the remaining ice in the Arctic rapidly melts  away thanks to global warming.

THE ARCTIC ISN’T doing so hot. That’s because it is, in fact, too hot. Its warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet, which is setting off vicious feedback loops that accelerate change. Ice, for instance, is more reflective than soil, so when it melts, the region absorbs more solar energy. More dark vegetation is growing in northern lands, absorbing still more of the sun’s heat. And when permafrost thaws, it releases gobs of greenhouse gases, which further warm the climate.

The Arctic has gone so bizarro that lightning—a warm-weather phenomenon most common in the tropics—is now striking near the North Pole. And according to new modeling, the electrical bombardment of the region will only get worse. By the end of the century, the number of lightning strikes across the Arctic could more than double, which may initiate a shocking cascade of knock-on effects—namely, more wildfires and more warming. “The Arctic is a rapidly changing place, and this is an aspect of the transformation that I'm not sure has gotten a whole lot of attention, but it's actually really consequential,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Wildfire burning in the Russian tundra Photograph:Jeffery Kerby

An Existential Crisis

An existential crisis looms ever nearer as we move further into the Anthropocene.

It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island near the North Pole. A storm was dumping rain at a time of year when the temperature was usually well below freezing; because the water had short-circuited the electrical system, the electric pumps on site were useless. This subterranean safe house holds more than 5,000 species of essential food crops, including hundreds of thousands of varieties of wheat and rice. It was supposed to be an impenetrable, modern-day Noah’s ark for plants, a life raft against climate change and catastrophe. Local firefighters helped pump out the tunnel until the temperature dropped and the water froze. Townspeople from the village at the mountain’s base then brought their own shovels and axes and broke apart the ice sheet by hand.

A few Norwegian radio stations and newspapers reported the incident at the time, but it received little international attention until May, when it was becoming clear that President Trump was likely to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Suddenly the tidings from Svalbard were everywhere, in multiple languages, with headlines like “World’s ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Has Been Breached by Climate Change.” It didn’t matter that the flood happened seven months earlier, or that the seeds remained safe and dry. We had just lived through the third consecutive year of the highest global temperatures on record and the lowest levels of Arctic ice; vast swaths of permafrost were melting; scientists had recently announced that some 60 percent of primate species were threatened with extinction. All these facts felt like signposts to an increasingly hopeless future for the planet. And now, here was a minifable suggesting that our attempts to preserve even mere traces of the bounty around us might fall apart, too.

Sadness comes to mind on our sorry stewardship of the planet we call home.

Trinity site, New Mexico, on July 16th 1945, 05:29:21 MDT,
16 milliseconds after the proposed start of the Anthropocene.