Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[ChescoWx]

20 hours ago, HailMan06 said:

No please not this again with Chesco.

LOL!!! You will note in the above I asked Charlie to take it to the Chesco thread where we are continuing the debate....

[LongBeachSurfFreak]

5 hours ago, TheClimateChanger said:

 

Yeah. Hypercanes and adios ice caps. 7c in warming would leave large parts of the earth uninhabitable, that’s the places that aren’t underwater… But C02 is great!!!!

[HailMan06]

14 minutes ago, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

Yeah. Hypercanes and adios ice caps. 7c in warming would leave large parts of the earth uninhabitable, that’s the places that aren’t underwater… But C02 is great!!!!

Yeah not to minimize what we will see the rest of this century but living through the 22nd century sure will be a wild time to experience the world.

[gallopinggertie]

17 hours ago, HailMan06 said:

Yeah not to minimize what we will see the rest of this century but living through the 22nd century sure will be a wild time to experience the world.

That’s for sure. Not only global warming, but ocean acidification and microplastic pollution will become huge problems. 

As a random aside, Portland OR (where I live) broke its all-time march record high yesterday, with a high of 82. 

[chubbs]

Earth's storage of water in soil, lakes and rivers is dwindling. And it's especially bad for farming

Their paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds that global warming has notably reduced the amount of water that's being stored around the world in soil, lakes, rivers, snow and other places, with potentially irreversible impacts on agriculture and sea level rise. The researchers say the significant shift of water from land to the ocean is particularly worrisome for farming, and hope their work will strengthen efforts to reduce water overuse. Earth's soil moisture dropped by over 2,000 gigatons in roughly the last 20 years, the study says. For context, that's more than twice Greenland's ice loss from 2002 to 2006, the researchers noted. Meanwhile, the frequency of once-in-a-decade agricultural and ecological droughts has increased, global sea levels have risen and the Earth's pole has shifted.

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-earth-storage-soil-lakes-rivers.html

[Typhoon Tip]

6 hours ago, chubbs said:

Earth's storage of water in soil, lakes and rivers is dwindling. And it's especially bad for farming

Their paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds that global warming has notably reduced the amount of water that's being stored around the world in soil, lakes, rivers, snow and other places, with potentially irreversible impacts on agriculture and sea level rise. The researchers say the significant shift of water from land to the ocean is particularly worrisome for farming, and hope their work will strengthen efforts to reduce water overuse. Earth's soil moisture dropped by over 2,000 gigatons in roughly the last 20 years, the study says. For context, that's more than twice Greenland's ice loss from 2002 to 2006, the researchers noted. Meanwhile, the frequency of once-in-a-decade agricultural and ecological droughts has increased, global sea levels have risen and the Earth's pole has shifted.

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-earth-storage-soil-lakes-rivers.html

Yeah, I was going to drop this little gem off this morning, myself ... but I see you beat me to it.

This CC apocalypse is slow moving.   Human relative observation doesn't see it moving, but on scales of a 100 years or so, this is moving very fast. 

again again and again and again ... the primary reluctance and/or belated response, and/or denailism ... and/or [add enabling reason not to react here], it is all made possible because people don't respond unless they feel pain.

That simple.  Biology on this planet, from the paramecium to the larger order and everything in between, are programmed to react based up perceptions that are directly fear-triggering some instinctual signal, or what causes discomfort.  

Humans do have a capacity for cause-and-effect awareness, one that far exceeds any other organisms of this world that show any semblance of the same ability - it's what really separates us from the chorus. Not that other shit with tools and language...  But there is just this one nagging flaw, other than the trope of "being human."  We are often in hesitation when that ability to foresee cost, competes with the immediate gratification of reward. This hesitation may be our undoing.   

It would be nice if there really was a kind of super consciousness known as Gaia running the show... and it had any interest in preserving us - but with little or no evidence to the contrary ... it such an agency does exist, it's clearly quite contented with us fucking up the world and leaving the keys on the counter upon exit.   Otherwise, a burning bush may tell us something about the, hey! ... wait a second -

I think it would be astounding if all this trillion dollar history of SETI search efforts at last found a world that had all the aspects of advancing industrial footprints, alas was completely absent of any life above bacterial decay ... Setting foot upon such a world would reveal hollowed winds as the only sound, other than the occasion pieces of edifice crumbling to the ground.  It wouldn't take long to deduce what's happened. Unfortunately, at several 10's of light-year's travel it would take 30,000 years for conventional velocity to find the bones in the rubble. 

Science Fiction authors of the early and mid last Century were amazingly visionary. A cinema in the 1950s, called "The Forbidden Planet"   It was not for an environmental catastrophe, per se, but as the plot thickened, "killed off by a mysterious force.."  Hmm, in principle ...something the indigenous, the so-called "Krell," had created thousands of years before humans arrived in their somehow faster than light (maybe warp drive) exploreration, killed them all off in some sort of sweeping disaster... 

Stop there - no need to go further to see the metaphoric, comparative value.   On geological times scales?   - this CC could certainly be construed, and realized (being the self-afflicting tragedy) as a similar sweeping "correction". And, we almost don't even need the metaphoric comparison; strikingly similar, the Krell's agent of their own demise was something eerily alike an AI run amok.

[ChescoWx]

For all of you Cyclical Climate Deniers - where is that warming??

 

[paulm]

22 minutes ago, ChescoWx said:

For all of you Cyclical Climate Deniers - where is that warming??

 

Amazing that the "no warming since 1998" claim has been set aside with no acknowledgement why from those who were pushing it to begin with. Tells you there are bad faith factors involved in this discourse.

There was already goalpost moving to "no warming since 2016" but 2023/2024 have ensured that 2016 will no longer be used as a starting year to cherry pick going forward either.

[TheClimateChanger]

23 hours ago, paulm said:

Amazing that the "no warming since 1998" claim has been set aside with no acknowledgement why from those who were pushing it to begin with. Tells you there are bad faith factors involved in this discourse.

There was already goalpost moving to "no warming since 2016" but 2023/2024 have ensured that 2016 will no longer be used as a starting year to cherry pick going forward either.

And as for the so-called cyclical warming, I'm not seeing the cyclical downturn? If it was cyclical, wouldn't there be a period where temperatures dropped by 0.6C? I see two periods of similar length with 0.6C warming, with a period in the middle with not much warming, although I'm sure there is still warming during that period as well.

[paulm]

3 minutes ago, TheClimateChanger said:

And as for the so-called cyclical warming, I'm not seeing the cyclical downturn? If it was cyclical, wouldn't there be a period where temperatures dropped by 0.6C? I see two periods of similar length with 0.6C warming, with a period in the middle with not much warming, although I'm sure there is still warming during that period as well.

Yep - that graphic does nothing to address what the cause of the longer term warming trend is.