Vice-Regent

It is quite toxic when evacuated in large amounts. Look no further than the tar sands industry in Canada and North America. Accordingly many drinking water sources are irreversibly contaminated by such industries among other 'toxic' effects. Air pollution will lower your life expectancy by as much as 20%.

“Dear Caesar Keep Burning, raping, killing But please, please Spare us your obscene poetry And ugly music “ (From Seneca’s last letter to Nero) The excavation of more than 600 billion tons of toxic carbon and hydrocarbon geological remains of previous biospheres and their transfer to the atmosphere as carbon gases constitutes nothing less than insanity leading to global suicide. With estimated profitable carbon reserves in excess of 20,000 GtC (Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”, see this), including oil shale, tar sand, coal seam gas, further emissions would take the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere back to early Eocene (~55-40 million years ago) and Mesozoic-like (pre-65 million years ago) greenhouse atmosphere and acid oceans conditions, during which large parts of the continents were inundated by the oceans. Most likely to survive the extreme transition over a few centuries would be grasses, some insects and perhaps some birds, descendants of the fated dinosaurs. A new evolutionary cycle would commence. Survivors of Homo sapiens may endure in the Arctic. Figure 1. Global warming by January 2018 relative to 1951-1980 Since about 542 million years ago, acting as the lungs of the biosphere, the Earth’s atmosphere developed an oxygen-rich composition over hundreds of millions of years, allowing emergence of breathing animals. A critical parameter in Drake’s Equation, which seeks to estimate the number of planets that host civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, is L – the longevity of technological civilizations. Estimates of L range between a minimum of 70 years and 10,000 years, but even for the more optimistic scenarios, only a tiny fraction of such planets would exist in the galaxy at the present time. It is another question whether an intelligent species exists in this, or any other galaxy, which has brought about a mass extinction of species on the scale initiated by Homo sapiens since the mid-18th century and in particular since 1945.. The history of Earth includes six major mass extinctions defining the end of several periods, including the End-Ediacaran, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Each of these events has been triggered either by extra-terrestrial impacts (End-Ediacaran and K-T) , massive volcanic eruptions, or methane release and related greenhouse events. Yet, with the exception of the proposed role of methanogenic bacteria for methane eruptions, the current Seventh mass extinction of species constitutes a novelty. For the first time in its history, the biosphere is in crisis through biological forcing by an advanced form of life, i.e. of a technological carbon-emitting species. Climate Projections: A World on Borrowed Time The distinct glacial-interglacial cycles of the Pleistocene (2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago), with rapid mean global temperature changes of up to 5 degrees Celsius rises over a few thousand years, and, in some instances shorter periods, forced an extreme adaptability of the Genus Homo. Of all the life forms on Earth, only this genus mastered fire, proceeding to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum, split the atom and travel to other planets, a cultural change overtaking biological change. Possessed by a conscious fear of death, craving a god-like immortality and omniscience, Homo developed the absurd faculty to simultaneously create and destroy, culminating with the demise of the atmospheric conditions that allowed its flourishing in the first place. The biological root factors which underlie the transformation of tribal warriors into button-pushing automatons capable of triggering global warming or a nuclear winter remain inexplicable. Inherent in the enigma are little-understood top-to-base mechanisms, explored among others by George Ellis, who states: “although the laws of physics explain much of the world around us, we still do not have a realistic description of causality in truly complex hierarchical structures.” (“Physics, complexity and causality”, Nature, 435: 743, June 2005): 66 million years ago, huge asteroids hit the Earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs and vacating habitats, succeeded by the flourishing of mammals. At 56 million years ago, in the wake of a rise of atmospheric CO2 to levels near-800 parts per million, the monkeys made appearance. About 34 million years ago, weathering of the rising Himalayan and Alps sequestered CO2. Earth was cooling, the Antarctic ice sheet formed and conditions on land became suitable for large, warm blooded mammals. About 5.2 to 2.6 million years ago, in the Pliocene, with temperatures 2 – 3oC and sea levels 25+/-12 meters higher than during the 15th to 18th centuries, the accentuation of climate oscillations saw the appearance of the genus Paranthropus and the genus Homo. At least about one million years ago the mastering of fire by Homo Erectus, about a quarter of a millennium ago the appearance of Homo sapiens,and about 8,000 years ago the stabilization of the interglacial Holocene, saw the Neolithic and urban civilization. Since the industrial age about 1750 and in particular from 1950, a period denoted as the Anthropocoene (cf. Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, Ambio, 36, 614-621, 2007), deforestation and climate change led to the demise of an estimated 10,000 species per year due to destruction of habitats, ever increasing carbon pollution, acidification of the hydrosphere. Planetcide stems back to deep recesses of the human mind, primeval fear of death leading to yearning for god-like immortality. Once excess food was produced, fear and its counterpart, violence, grew out of control, generating murderous orgies called “war“, designed to conquer death to appease the Gods. From the Romans to the Third Reich, the barbarism of empires surpasses that of small marauding tribes. In the name of freedomthey never cease to bomb peasant populations in their small fields. Only among the wretched of the Earth is true charity common, where empathy is learnt through suffering. War is a synonym for ritual sacrifice of the young. From infanticide by rival warlord baboons, to the butchering of young children on Aztec altars, to the generational sacrifice such as in WWI, youths follow leaders blindly to the death. Hijacking the image of Christ, a messenger of justice and peace, fundamentalists promote a self-fulfilling Armageddon, while other see their future on space ships and barren planets. Nowadays a cabal of multibillionaires, executives and their political and media mouthpieces are leading the human race and much of nature to ultimate demise, with little resistance from the majority of people, either unaware or too afraid to resist the slide over the cliff. Humans live in a realm of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical existential factors (Janus: A summing up, Arthur Koestler, 1978) in a world as cruel as it is beautiful. Existentialist philosophy allows a perspective into, and a way of coping with, all that defies rational contemplation. Ethical and cultural assumptions of free willrarely govern the behavior of societies or nations, let alone an entire species. And although the planet may not shed a tear for the demise of technological civilization, hope on the individual scale for the moment is possible. Going through the black night of the soul, members of the species may be rewarded by the emergence of a conscious dignity devoid of illusions, grateful for the glimpse at the universe for which humans are privileged for the fleeting moment: “Having pushed a boulder up the mountain all day, turning toward the setting sun, we must consider Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) * Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Dr. Andrew Glikson, Global Research, 2018 https://www.globalresearch.ca/crimes-against-the-earth-2/5662944

All of the above data is solidly backed by sea level rise trends. However the recent increase in sea level cannot be attributed directly but it's likely the lions share of recent SLR has derived from Antarctica. Locally, the high tides and sunny day flooding has ticked up substantially since 2015.

Could be an artifact of a growing network of observations. Before 2000 ocean heat content was very poorly measured especially at depth.

Good luck to the world....

DCA: 12/24 BWI: 11/25 IAD: 11/5 RIC: 12/16 Tiebreaker: 3.5"

It looks like Florence will recover at the last possible second with an apparent huge eye clearing out in 3-6 hours. Pressure at landfall will be important. https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/sat/satlooper.php?region=06L&product=vis

They only explode north of 30N when they go out to sea. You know how it works.

July 2018 Global Temperature Update To sign up for our monthly update of global temperature (Maps and Graphs), click here. Additional figures are on our global temperature web page. Heat waves seemed unusually widespread in July, as the media reported extreme heat in Europe, the Middle East, northern Africa, Japan and western United States. Extreme heat contributed to extensive wildfires in the western United States, Greece and Sweden, with fire extending into the Arctic Circle. The left map is the global distribution of temperature anomalies with our usual 1200 km smoothing; the right map has 250 km smoothing and uses only meteorological stations (no sea surface temperatures). Area-weighted warming over land (1.14°C) is 1.5 times larger than global warming (0.78°C), consistent with data for the past century (see graphs at http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/). Globally July 2018 was the third warmest July since reliable measurements began in 1880, 0.78°C warmer than the 1951-1980 mean. The warmest Julys, in 2016 and 2017, were 0.82°C and 0.81°C, respectively. July 2018 temperature was +1.06°C relative to the 1880-1920 base period, where the latter provides our best estimate of pre-industrial global temperature. Continue reading: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/Emails/July2018.pdf

The global tropics have been soaking up an insane amount of heat because of the monsoons and strong trades. Atlantic basin more fortunate with the negative SAL forcing but still heating robustly below the surface.

Reasoning? I think the retracement period is already behind us. Next el nino late 2019?

Death by humidity and fog. The second shortest path (fastest being bottom melt from atlantification) to ice free/blue ocean. The most interesting melt season to date - most people just don't know it yet.

Something must be broken. I don't even know where to begin when explaining the discrepancy between HYCOM and PIOMAS ice volume.

Are you ready?

The AMOC is slow enough to stop further catastrophic melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet but fast enough to cause extreme heat events in Europe (and the US?). That can't be a good thing. As well we know Antarctica holds 5x the fresh water content of Greenland. Maybe it's just a natural variability and revision to the mean but I would say it's not a good sign. We still have tremendous heat transport in the Atlantic. This can't hold for much longer without causing massive damage to something/somebody. If you thought Sandy and Harvey was bad just wait a few years.

That's rain on ice at the surface. We shall see.

All fair points. The packing in of Global Warming into the political divisor was massively unethical and the momentum is relegated to a election winning (in this case losing) cliche. Democrats are the worst offenders to date. It's one thing to ignore the science and another to disparage it. I have never self-identified as democrat or republican. By and large Cape May County is red. (Republican). Cities are the number 1 reason for population overshoot and environmental degradation. It's clear to me now that environmentalism has been co-opted by neoliberalism and the obsession with consumer choices. Since this issue is so deeply embedded in politics (where it has no business being) it is necessary to elaborate on how we got here. This is a fiscal problem - a engineering problem. Democracy is not equipped to deal with such problems of scope.

Elaborate insight into the hazards of coastal life. What I was referring to was the enormous obstacle in reducing damage from sea level rise. Also as you point out increased coastal development masks the signal a bit and beach replenishment covers up the damage at least temporarily. Look no further than Tangier Island in the Chesapeake which should completely vanish from nautical charts by 2035 thereabouts. Essentially. You need to redesign civilization from the ground up to prevent catastrophic global warming without the usage of abrasive solar geoengineering. I think throwing global warming into the conspiracy theory basket is a great disservice to posterity and science. I'm sure all of the long-term posters would agree with this line of thought. There is no conspiracy in alarm-ism. Remember Global Warming is the canary in the coal mine hinting at the unsustainable nature of civilization (which had required millennia to advance to fossil fuel based agriculture). Take for example the amount of raw materials and rare earth minerals needed to sustain both the renewables and tech industries. We aren't doing enough and the window is closing on us rapidly.

We live in a deeply troubled society. Anyone debating that aspect of our life should get the cold shoulder. However I am concerned when such valid points are presented behind a facade of malicious intent or for lack of a better term - trolling. I'm not sure if such methods are effectual in changing the status quo. If nothing else - counter-productive. Until proven otherwise. Best to stay true to the purpose of this forum. Give us the proof. I have layed our why the Arctic is behaving in this manner - seemingly to shield itself from the onslaught of the heat flux over Siberia and North America. Sadly it just cements our demise even more as people become more complacent and the climate system has a instantaneous state change resulting in multi-meter decadal sea level rise.

The heat is put simply building outside of the CAB and the CAB is mostly centered around 80N. You would really be hard-pressed to have a completely ice-free Arctic. It's more significant to have an ice-free Bering Sea all year around for example. Perhaps as a Canary in the coal mine for the Arctic as a whole.

We love our bbr2314 (Quoted from ASIF) bbr2314 « Reply #1603 on: Today at 07:49:13 PM » The situation has actually been quite similar to 2012 this June, IMO. The differences are that we are more "advanced" in accumulating oceanic heat so the Hadley Cells have advanced farther north, while the albedo impacts have also created new negative anomalies as ^ has occurred prior to full continental melt-out. You can clearly see that heat has been pouring into the Arctic just as it did in 2012, only this year, due to what has happened re: Kara, it has been forced even farther N, entering over the Laptev. The anomalies have been scorching over half of the Arctic. While the rest of the CAB has been about normal, that is irrelevant to what is going to happen next. If you roll 2012's monthly anomalies forward, the areas that accumulated the most heat early on in the season featured the brightest reds come September and October. If we can imagine the same happening this year (and I don't see why we shouldn't at this point), we can magnify the June pattern into July, August, and September. This results in a near-perfect "sequential" melt out of the weakest ice in terms of accumulating albedo feedbacks into autumn, so the "order of operations" for reaching the CAB and melting it out by late July or August is much more efficient this year than in any year prior, IMO. Oh, and the PAC is far worse than 2012, as is the high ATL, in terms of SSTs / available & impending heat through autumn. Screen Shot 2018-06-24 at 1.42.51 PM.png (260.33 kB, 1102x952 - viewed 0 times.)