When Your Entire Planet is a "Heat Island."


In an amazingly brief period of time, the Earth is retaining more of the man-generated heat, double the amount in 2005.


The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The Earth is warming faster than expected.”

Is Anyone Listening?

When there is a positive imbalance — Earth absorbing more heat than it is losing — it is a first step toward global warming, said Stuart Evans, a climate scientist at the University at Buffalo. “It’s a sign the Earth is gaining energy.”

Did you get that? The Earth is "gaining energy." How many wake-up calls do we need?  

The United Nations now warns of another pandemic-size disaster - global drought.  

Mami Mizutori, the UN secretary general’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it. Most of the world will be living with water stress in the next few years. Demand will outstrip supply during certain periods. Drought is a major factor in land degradation and the decline of yields for major crops.”

...Developed countries have not been immune. The US, Australia and southern Europe have experienced drought in recent years. Drought costs more than $6bn a year in direct impacts in the US, and about €9bn (£7.7bn) in the EU, but these are also likely to be severe underestimates.

Population growth is also exposing more people in many regions to the impacts of drought, the report says.

Drought also goes beyond agriculture,said Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-author of the report.

He pointed to the Danube in Europe, where recurring drought in recent years has affected transport, tourism, industry and energy generation. “We need to have a modernised view of drought,” he said. “We need to look at how to manage resources such as rivers and large watersheds.”

Comments

  1. LorneJune 17, 2021 at 5:13 PM

    What kind of world are we leaving to our children and grandchildren, Mound? It is sad when people reach the stage in their lives when they start seeing their demises that are on the horizon as escape from the horrors to come on earth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJune 17, 2021 at 10:03 PM

      Most of us avoid that question as much as we can, Lorne. Imagine a press conference to discuss the latest progress with the Trans-Mountain pipeline. A reporter stands up and asks "what kind of world are we leaving to our children and grandchildren?" You never hear that and you probably never will. In these times the hard questions go unasked.

      Delete
  2. Northern PoVJune 18, 2021 at 7:41 AM

    "unprecedented” ... "amazingly brief period of time"

    Indeed. It seems that humans (playing sorcerer's apprentice) are capable of causing planetary changes within the spans of their lifetimes (or faster) that previously took millennia to occur.

    "Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9gKyRmic20

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJune 18, 2021 at 7:52 AM

      Mankind has shown itself capable of exponential growth, NPoV. Given the opportunity to increase in numbers or in material wealth, we'll take it despite the knowledge of what that portends.

      Some hotly dispute the idea that intelligent life is self-extinguishing when the only example of intelligent life we currently have is corroborating that theorem.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more

"Creeping Normalcy" in the Plague Age

Image
  Britain is experiencing a new wave of Covid cases, 40,000 per day .  Yet it hasn't caused much reaction from the public. It sounds like the legendary stiff upper lip, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" resolve. Health officials think it's something much more troubling. “We’re in a phase where we still have large numbers of people dying from this disease,” said Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh. “But it has gone into the background. We’ve become used to something that has not gone away. I think there’s been a desensitisation to the mortality.” On Thursday, the UK reported more than 45,000 new coronavirus cases – the most since mid-July – and more than 800 deaths were reported in the past seven days. Hospitalisations are rising, with one-fifth of ICU beds occupied by Covid patients, and the latest figures showed an estimated 200,000 pupils absent from school. The UK is faring far worse than its European neighbours, with a rate of death
Read more