Sea Levels Are Going To Rise 20ft. We Can Do Something About It →

Harold R Wanless of The Guardian writes the following:

To avoid the grimmest outlook posed by warming oceans, we need to extract heat-trapping gases from the atmosphere.

The climate emergency is bigger than many experts, elected officials, and activists realize. Humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions have overheated the Earth’s atmosphere, unleashing punishing heat waves, hurricanes, and other extreme weather – that much is widely understood.

The larger problem is that the overheated atmosphere has in turn overheated the oceans, assuring a catastrophic amount of future sea level rise.

As oceans heat up the water rises in part because warm water expands but also because the warmer waters have initiated major melt of polar ice sheets. As a result, average sea levels around the world are now all but certain to rise by at least 20 to 30 feet. That’s enough to put large parts of many coastal cities, home to hundreds of millions of people, under water.

The key questions are how soon this sea level rise will happen and whether humans can cool the atmosphere and oceans quickly enough to prevent part of this. > Read More

Long-Range Forecast for The Future →

Bryan Walsh of Axios writes the following:

The global future is looking dark and stormy. A new 20-year-forecast for the world: increasingly fragmented and turbulent.

The big picture: A major report put out this week by the National Intelligence Council reflects a present rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. How the next two decades will unfold depends largely on whether new technologies will ultimately unite us — or continue to divide us.

Driving the news: Many, if not most, of those trends identified in the new report from the U.S. government are trending negative.

"Shared global challenges — including climate change, disease, financial crises, and technology disruptions — are likely to manifest more frequently and intensely in almost every region and country," the report's authors write.

They predict that those intensifying challenges will collide with a geopolitical structure that will become increasingly fragmented and fragile, as the U.S. competes with China for global leadership while citizens of both democracies and autocracies grow more dissatisfied with their leaders. > Read More

Chronic Fear of Environmental Doom? You're Not Alone →

Marta Zaraska of Discover Magazine writes the following:

Climate anxiety is real — and psychologists are taking notice. Experts say there are proactive things you can do to ease your worries and help slow the climate crisis at the same time.

I’m trying to work but my heart is pounding. I’m in my daughter’s bedroom, the only air-conditioned room in our house. Outside, the French summer roasts at 109 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s not just the outdoor heat that makes me feel light-headed. I’m reading research papers on climate change with titles like “Accelerating Extinction Risk” and “Accelerated Dryland Expansion.” Everything seems to be accelerating, my pulse included. Thoughts race, too: How bad is it, really? Are we all doomed? Should I start homeschooling my daughter in martial arts, shooting and forest gathering? Should I get a Xanax — or stay true to my Polish roots and just drink some vodka?

Scientists already have several terms for what I’m experiencing. Some call it climate anxiety. Others call it pre-traumatic stress disorder or solastalgia — distress over seeing the natural environment negatively transformed. There is also “reef grief" — named after the heartache people describe over the loss of coral reefs. Name notwithstanding, one thing is clear: Worry and fear surrounding global warming is sharply increasing, taking a toll on many. An American attorney, David Buckel, tragically went so far as to set himself on fire in 2018 to protest the use of fossil fuels as a global pollutant.

Photo Credit: Ethan Daniel

Beloved Creatures Headed Toward Extinction →

Sophie Lewis of CBS News writes the following:

Snow leopards in the Himalayas, lemurs in Madagascar and elephants in central Africa: Some of Earth's most beloved creatures are on a path to extinction, a new study shows, thanks to current greenhouse gas emissions. Unless humans stop pumping carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, researchers say the planet's biodiversity will suffer devastating consequences.

In a study published Friday in the journal Biological Conservation, scientists warn that some of the richest concentrations of plants and animals on Earth will be "irreversibly ravaged" by global warming unless countries make a real effort toward their goals made under the 2015 Paris climate treaty. They report a high danger for extinction in almost 300 biodiversity "hot spots" if temperatures rise three degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. > Read More

How To Save Planet Earth →

Timothy Meinch of Discover Magazine writes the following:

Have you ever held a product in your hands and considered the existential weight of your purchase? Beyond each price tag hides a ripple effect. It expands from soil to waterways, grocery aisles to kitchen plates, factories to fulfillment centers and mail slots to landfills. This global impact has become less hidden in the past decade, and ignoring the people downstream from us has grown increasingly difficult. We’re more aware than ever of the mark our consumption leaves on planet Earth, which now sustains nearly 8 billion people. Somehow, humans are still pumping more than 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year into the atmosphere, despite the mountain of evidence that CO2 is the top contributor to greenhouse gases causing global warming. Similar conundrums apply to use of plastics and consumption of meat and other goods. We know we need to do better, but we feel helpless and overwhelmed. Let’s call this the eco-stential crisis; it applies on a deeply personal level for most environmentally aware humans, and on a global scale. > Read More

PhotoCredit: Sepp Photography

Must Highlight Marginalized Voices

Kharoll-Ann Souffrant of Ricochet Media writes, The Climate Movement - We Need Must Highlight Marginalized Voices.

It was 2005. We all remember Kanye West’s famous words, now etched on our memories: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people!”

This phrase was spoken in the aftermath of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bush Jr. was being roundly criticized for his slow response to the natural disaster that left nearly 2,000 people dead and countless others injured. Katrina was one of the most powerful hurricanes in U.S. history, and New Orleans, with a predominantly Black population, has one of the largest concentrations of Black people in the country.

As is often the case, this natural disaster highlighted and exacerbated health and socioeconomic inequalities: Black people were the most affected, and also the most likely to have been left to fend for themselves. Today, tens of thousands of these Black residents have deserted the city. The area, gentrified and mostly populated by whites and Latinos with higher incomes, is adapting to the perpetual threat of rising waters. > Read More

Greta Thunberg

Real Reason Humans Are Dominant Species

Justin Rowlatt & Laurence Knight of BBC News writes, The Real Reason Humans Are The Dominant Species.

From early humans rubbing sticks together to make fire, to the fossil fuels that drove the industrial revolution, energy has played a central role in our development as a species. But the way we power our societies has also created humanity's biggest challenge. It's one that will take all our ingenuity to solve.

Energy is the key to humanity's world domination.

Not just the jet fuel that allows us to traverse entire continents in a few hours, or the bombs we build that can blow up entire cities, but the vast amounts of energy we all use every day.

Consider this: a resting human being requires about the same amount of energy as an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb to sustain their metabolism - about 90 watts (joules per second).

But the average human being in a developed country uses more like 100 times that amount, if you add in the energy needed to get around, build and heat our homes, grow our food and all the other things our species gets up to.

The average American, for example, consumes about 10,000 watts.

That difference explains a lot about us - our biology, our civilisation and the unbelievably affluent lifestyles we all lead - compared, that is, with other animals. > Read More

Earth's Terrifying Ancient Rock Record →

Peter Brannen of The Atlantic writes “The Terrifying Warning Lurking In the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.”

In 2021, we find ourselves in an unusual situation: We live on a world with massive ice sheets, one of which covers one of the seven continents and is more than a mile deep. For most of the planet’s past, it has had virtually no ice whatsoever. The periods of extreme cold—like the ultra-ancient, phantasmagoric nightmares of Snowball Earth, when the oceans might have been smothered by ice sheets all the way to the tropics—are outliers. There were a few other surprising pulses of frost here and there, but they merely punctuate the balmy stretches of the fossil record. For almost all of the Earth’s history, the planet was a much warmer place than it is today, with much higher CO2 levels. This is not a climate-denying talking point; it’s a physical fact, and acknowledging it does nothing to take away from the potential catastrophe of future warming. After all, we humans, along with everything else alive today, evolved to live in our familiar low-CO2 world—a process that took a long time. > Read More

Photo Illustration by Brendan Pattengale

Trees Talk →

Scientists On How Trees Talk Through an Ancient ‘Otherworld’ Network

Trees talk to each other deep underground. It’s an idea still relatively new to science but familiar to ancient beliefs. > Read More