[TheClimate.Vote] January 27, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 27, 2019/

[See why you are cold ... Chill data from - http://Earth.nullschool.net]
*Displaced Polar Vortex January 26, 2019*
greenmanbucket
Published on Jan 26, 2019
Polar vortex pulling arctic air into Eastern North America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzrjh7CLW3U


[more CO2 this year]
*Faster CO2 rise expected in 2019**
*January 25, 2019, University of Exeter
With emissions already at a record high, the build-up of carbon-dioxide 
in the atmosphere could be larger than last year due to a slower removal 
by natural carbon sinks.

During 2019 Met Office climate scientists expect to see one of the 
largest rises in atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration in 62 years of 
measurements. The Met Office CO2 forecast is based on a combination of 
factors including rising anthropogenic emissions and a relative 
reduction in the uptake of carbon-dioxide by ecosystems due to tropical 
climate variability.

Professor Richard Betts of the Met Office Hadley Centre and the 
University of Exeter said: "Since 1958, monitoring at the Mauna Loa 
observatory in Hawaii has registered around a 30 per cent increase in 
the concentration of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. This is caused by 
emissions from fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production, and 
the increase would have been even larger if it were not for natural 
carbon sinks which soak up some of the excess CO2. This year we expect 
these carbon sinks to be relatively weak, so the impact of record high 
human-caused emissions will be larger than last year".

Weather patterns linked to year-by-year swings in Pacific Ocean 
temperatures are known to affect the uptake of carbon-dioxide by land 
ecosystems. In years with a warmer tropical Pacific, many regions become 
warmer and drier, which limits the ability of plants to grow and absorb 
CO2. The opposite occurs when the Pacific is cool, as happened a year ago.

The Met Office forecast suggests that the average rise in atmospheric 
CO2 will be 2.75+/-0.58 parts per million (ppm) higher in 2019 than in 
2018. This figure would be among the largest annual rises on record, but 
less than those in 2015-2016 and 1997-1998 - years with El Nino events 
and hence large Pacific warming. In the first decade of measurements, 
the rise of atmospheric CO2 was less than 0.9 ppm per year. The rise has 
since become generally faster over time as human emissions have 
increased, but with fluctuations related to climate swings such as El Nino.

The average CO2 concentration in 2019 is forecast to be 411.3 ppm, with 
monthly averages reaching a peak of 414.7 ppm in May, temporarily 
dropping back to 408.1 ppm in September before rising again at the end 
of the year.

Professor Betts added: "The Mauna Loa graph of atmospheric CO2 is a 
thing of beauty, but also a stark reminder of human impact on climate. 
Looking at the monthly figures, it's as if you can see the planet 
'breathing' as the levels of carbon dioxide fall and rise with seasonal 
cycle of plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere. But each 
year's CO2 is higher than the last, and this will keep happening until 
humans stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Testing our predictions of the 
details of this helps us improve our understanding of feedbacks in the 
climate system."

The CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa are measured by the Scripps 
Institution for Oceanography at UC San Diego and the National 
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-faster-co2.html#jCp


[Plenty of positivism]
*NextEra: solar and wind plus batteries will be "massively disruptive" 
to conventional generation*
JANUARY 25, 2019 - CHRISTIAN ROSELUND
The power giant says that coal, gas and nukes will not be able to 
compete with clean energy, and that renewable energy deployment is "just 
getting started".
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/01/25/nextera-solar-and-wind-plus-batteries-will-be-massively-disruptive-to-conventional-generation/


[Forbes magazine]
*With $32 Trillion In Assets, Investors Demand Immediate Action On 
Climate Change*
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/12/11/with-32-trillion-in-assets-investors-demand-immediate-action-on-climate-change/#1f793f362b48


[Lynas is the author of Six Degrees]
*Climate change: The more we know, the worse it seems*
By Mark Lynas, for CNN
Sat January 26, 2019
(CNN)To get a full grasp of climate change, you need to take a 
geological perspective. Wind the clock back all the way through human 
history, past the Romans and through the Stone Age, to the time before 
modern humans evolved, and our ape ancestors roamed in Africa.

Roughly three million years ago, in an epoch called the Pliocene, was 
the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high in the atmosphere as 
they are now. In other words, today's CO2 concentrations -- at about 410 
parts per million -- are higher than at any time during the existence of 
Homo sapiens.
Sea levels were as much as 30 meters higher than now, suggesting that 
even today's carbon dioxide levels will be enough to eventually (albeit 
over many centuries) melt so much ice from the polar regions that all 
major coastal cities will be drowned.
But it's the rate of change that is really off the charts, even 
geologically. Humans are now transferring 10 billion tonnes of carbon 
from the earth's crust -- in the form of combusted coal, oil and gas -- 
into the atmosphere each year.
This is a rate of carbon release probably 10 times faster than anything 
scientists can find in the geological record for the past 300 million 
years, including cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that are linked with 
several of the mass extinctions of life that have occurred during that time.
*Ocean warming, coral bleaching*
So it's perhaps hardly surprising that each new climate-related news 
headline seems to be worse than the last.
Just recently scientists announced that the oceans are warming much 
faster than they had previously thought. The amount of heat now being 
absorbed in the seas equates to the energy generated by exploding at 
least three Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs in the oceans every second, 
according to a calculation by The Guardian.
No wonder the coral reefs are dying -- also at a rate that is much more 
rapid than anyone previously thought. When I wrote my 2007 book "Six 
Degrees," looking at the predicted degree-by-degree impacts of climate 
change, it was expected that reefs would be undergoing regular bleaching 
events in about 2030.
Sadly, it's already happening. More than 90 percent of the Great Barrier 
Reef was affected by coral bleaching just over two years ago -- the 
devastation was so severe that the marine scientists surveying the 
aerial data wept.
I am currently working on an updated edition of Six Degrees. It's a 
scary task because many of the impacts that I had previously put in 
later chapters -- equating to three or more degrees of global warming -- 
have had to be moved forwards, because they are happening already.
Another example is the worsening of climate extremes, like hurricanes. 
In 2007 I imagined a monster storm, worsened by global warming, hitting 
Houston in about 2040. Well that happened already too -- in 2017 
Hurricane Harvey poured so much water on the Houston area that it 
equated to the flow of Niagara Falls for 110 days.
Scientists later calculated that Harvey's rainfall was likely 
intensified by as much as a third because of the changing climate, in 
particular the warming oceans which act as rocket fuel for tropical 
cyclones.
The flooding from hurricanes is often aggravated by storm surges, which 
are worsened in turn by rising sea levels. There is news here too: this 
week scientists announced that the melt rate in Antarctica has increased 
six-fold since the 1980s, which contributes to sea-level rise.
Greenland's melt rate has also shot up, increasing four-fold between 
2003 and 2013. This week scientists announced that the giant northern 
polar ice sheet has likely already crossed a "tipping point" of 
irreversible decline. Recent Greenland melt rates are now without 
precedent for hundreds, and probably many thousands, of years.
*Closer to worst-case scenarios*
When I wrote Six Degrees back in 2007 I felt that there was at least an 
odds-on chance of stabilizing global temperatures at or below 2 degrees 
Celsius, the policy target that was later agreed by world leaders at the 
Paris climate conference in 2015.
This now looks deluded. Achieving the two-degrees target would require 
the whole world to cut its net carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, 
and to go carbon-negative -- somehow hoovering up hundreds of billions 
of tonnes of extra carbon dioxide using technology yet to be invented -- 
from the atmosphere for decades thereafter.
In the real world, the opposite is happening. Emissions reached a new 
record last year, dragging us ever closer to the worst-case scenarios 
employed by climate models, which yield four degrees or more by the end 
of this century.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all is that millions of people -- 
including the President of the United States -- are still climate 
skeptics. For them, conspiracy theories and mass psychological denial 
serve to justify business as usual.
*Optimism risks letting us off the hook*
It is customary to end articles like this with an optimistic call to 
arms, a rousing finale making that case that it is not yet too late to 
act to avoid the worst if only we scale up zero-carbon technologies fast 
enough to urgently cut emissions.
But that risks letting us off the hook. Instead, consider this.
There is no known geological precedent, for at least the last 
half-billion years of the history of life on earth, for climate change 
of the magnitude now projected this century to take place over such a 
short period of time.
To think that young people alive today will experience all of this 
within their lifetimes is an extraordinary thought indeed.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/25/opinions/climate-change-getting-worse-intl/index.html
- - -
[just how bad is Six Degrees  See interactive chart]
*How bad can it be? ...and when?*
The chart has linked hotspots. In the lower right corner of the chart 
notice the temperature line for the current year.   There are seven 
future projections plotted.
The graphic IPCC Chart uses data from special report emissions scenario 
for the IPCC.   Links below in blue are summarized projections for each 
degree change taken from the book "Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter 
Planet" - Mark Lynas and videos segments from National Geographics.
http://localsteps.org/howbad.html


[most likely]
*ARE WE HEADED TOWARD THE WORST-CASE CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO?*
A series of recent studies and reports suggest that, without immediate 
and drastic action, the worst-case climate scenario will become the rule 
rather than the exception.
KATE WHEELING
A record number of Americans say they accept that global warming is 
happening, according to a new survey from the Yale Program on Climate 
Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate 
Change Communication, and nearly three-quarters of them now say it's an 
issue that's personally important to them. Both numbers have risen 
sharply over the last few years—a shift that could not have come soon 
enough, as the once-distant tipping points and worst-case climate 
scenarios researchers have been forecasting for decades become reality.

This week, for example, researchers warned that Greenland's ice sheet 
has reached a tipping point. Looking at more than a decade's worth of 
ice loss, an international team of scientists found that the rate of 
Greenland's ice loss in early 2013 was four times higher than in 2003.

It's not the fact that ice loss was accelerating that was surprising, 
but, rather, where it was coming from. There are two sources of ice loss 
in Greenland, according to Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio State 
University and lead author on the new study: chunks of glaciers falling 
directly into the ocean and runoff from melting, land-based ice. For 
years, climate scientists have known that the Arctic nation's glaciers 
were calving into the sea at an accelerating pace as the ocean around 
the island warmed, but its ice sheet was relatively insulated from 
increases in air temperatures, Bevis says.

So in this new study, Bevis and his colleagues were surprised to see 
that most of the ice loss occurred in the southwest corner of Greenland, 
a region with very few glaciers. In other words, most of the ice loss 
was in the form of meltwater runoff, draining from land-based ice sheets 
into the sea.

"We could see a huge acceleration in ice loss due to melting: Greenland 
was losing 100 billion tons a year in 2003, and it was losing nearly 400 
billion tons a year in the beginning of 2013," Bevis says. "Then, in the 
summer of 2013, it just stopped. It was astonishing."

What Bevis and his colleagues found was that the melting was being 
controlled by something called the North Atlantic Oscillation—an 
irregular fluctuation in atmospheric pressure over the Atlantic Ocean 
that influences the weather on several continents. The NAO has two 
phases: a negative phase, which brings warm air to Greenland, and a 
positive phase, which brings cold temperatures. The NAO has been around 
for thousands of years, with little impact on ice melt in Greenland. 
What changed, Bevis says, is our atmosphere.

"Global warming brought summertime temperatures just shy of the critical 
temperature at which massive melting would occur, and the NAO pushed it 
over this critical threshold," he says. When the NAO flipped back to the 
positive phase and colder air returned, the major melting stopped. This 
may sound like good news—that a positive NAO can buffer Greenland's ice 
sheet from global warming—but it's assuredly not, Bevis says. It means 
that the ice sheet is now sensitive to small fluctuations in summer 
temperatures, and if global temperatures continue to rise as predicted, 
soon Greenland's summers will be warm enough to cause massive melting 
regardless of the NAO's phase.

Researchers were already concerned about Greenland's contributions to 
sea-level rise when it was just shedding icebergs that would slowly melt 
in the ocean. But meltwater, though also a source of sea-level rise, is 
also worrying for other reasons. The longer-term concern, Bevis says, is 
that, maybe 50 or 100 years from now, "if you put enough freshwater into 
the oceans near Greenland, you can start to disturb the global ocean 
circulation system."

"It's the 900-pound gorilla of the climate system," Bevis says. 
"Basically, the climate system exists to spread heat out, so a lot of 
that heat transfer is done by the global ocean circulation systems." Hot 
water currents, like the Gulf Stream, carry warm water from the Equator 
toward the poles; when the warm water arrives around Greenland, it 
sinks. "If there's a whole bunch of freshwater, it won't want to sink, 
and that conveyor belt of heat is going to slow down," Bevis says. "It's 
hard to say what the consequences would be, but they would be major."

But here's the thing about those long-term climate change concerns: So 
far, they have a tendency to arrive much earlier than expected.

Earlier this month, researchers reported in the journal Science that the 
oceans are warming about 40 percent faster than the United Nations' 
climate panel predicted just a few years ago. Last year, a climate 
scientist told the Guardian that the Antarctic ice sheet is now melting 
at a "surprising" and accelerating rate. Bevis agreed that recent years 
have produced a "whole series of papers saying that the impacts of 
global warming have been underestimated and they are happening faster 
than expected."

While melting ice sheets and sea-level rise get lots of attention, 
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, points out 
that climate change is also already having dramatic effects on extreme 
summertime weather events. In a Science Advances article from October, 
Mann and his colleagues identified a key mechanism by which climate 
change influences extreme weather events that current climate models had 
failed to capture: a misbehaving jet stream. The team found that climate 
change was causing the once-meandering jet stream to stay in place, 
trapping high or low pressure systems in place in the atmosphere, which, 
in the summer of 2018, led to extreme heat waves, drought, wildfires, 
and flooding across the United States and abroad.

"In other words," Mann writes in an email, "the climate models have 
likely underestimated the impact that climate change is already having 
on extreme weather events like the devastating events that unfolded in 
[the summer of] 2018 and they are likely underestimating the future 
increases in these events."

Despite this sobering evidence, and growing recognition of the problem 
by the public, the current federal administration continues to punt on 
climate change, rolling out policies that weaken environmental 
protections, bolster fossil fuels, and, ultimately, slow down 
international progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement. Indeed, 
Trump administration officials have tried to discredit some of the most 
rigorous climate science—the National Climate Assessment, which is based 
on the work of more than a dozen federal agencies—as "alarmist" or 
"radical." White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders 
claimed—falsely—that the assessment was based only on "the most extreme" 
emissions scenario.

"Trump and the fossil fuel lobbyists and advocates who run his 
administration have done everything possible to deny the science, bury 
government reports warning of the impacts, and reverse previous policies 
aimed at curbing carbon emissions and stabilizing warming below 
dangerous levels," Mann writes. "In that sense—that is to say, from a 
political perspective, yes—we are witnessing a worst-case scenario."

Indeed, it's becoming ever more clear that, without immediate and 
drastic action, the worst-case climate scenario will become the rule 
rather than the exception.

"We're already in a situation where there are going to be quite serious 
consequences to what we've done to the atmosphere," Bevis says, "but the 
longer we delay, the worse the consequences will be."
https://psmag.com/environment/are-we-headed-toward-the-worst-case-climate-change-scenario


[2018 data analysis from Tamino]
*Global Temperature 2018*
Posted on January 26, 2019
Some organizations which estimate global temperature change have been 
behind schedule because of the U.S. government shutdown. But the folks 
at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project have released their 
figures for December's temperature, bringing the year 2018 to a close. 
It was a hot one.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/global-temperature-2018/


[classic interview with scientist]
*What happens when permafrost thaws?*
https://youtu.be/BFfuHmrW2gc?t=1158


[check your flood risk on a map with graphic overlays]
*What's your flood risk?*
https://floodiq.com/



[Books, books, books]
*Annie Proulx on the best books to understand climate change*
The novelist shares her favourite books to help us cope with how our 
world is changing - and inspire everyone to do something about it
Annie Proulx
Mon 21 Jan 2019
Today we live with non-stop special events of fire, flood, mud slide, 
rising water, whirling hurricanes, toxic algae blooms, unprecedented 
droughts. That word "unprecedented" is coming to define our time. Most 
of us were short-changed by educations that ignored ecology. We need 
clear explanations of climate change, what it means and how to cope with it.

Tim Flannery, an Australian mammalogist, is a supple writer with a 
wide-ranging and questioning mind. His 2005 The Weather-Makers gave 
lucid and easily understandable explanations of climate change, both a 
history and a look into what might come next. It is still a basic 
starting point.
Climate scientist Michael Mann and Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles 
collaborated on The Madhouse Effect. It is drawn straight from the 
frontline of the climate wars. In trenchant sentences the authors skate 
out, hockey sticks swinging, and scythe the legs from under the cabal of 
vested interests, venal payola scientists and shadowy political 
éminences grises. They name names and present a player list as well as 
the irrefutable tough news.

The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell is especially good at showing the 
daunting complexity of solutions to on-the-ground problems in places 
such as Miami Beach, Alaska, New York, Venice and remote islands whose 
residents have nowhere to go. Here are real-world headaches of flood 
insurance, transportation, nuclear reactors on eroding shorelines, the 
tendency to rebuild rather than rethink following disasters.
Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 
is literate and probing. He presents a critical discussion of the Paris 
Agreement vis-a-vis Pope Francis's Laudato Si'. As for the "unthinkable" 
in his book's title, it is left to the reader to decide which of several 
dreadful outcomes he means. I concluded one was truly unthinkable.

Charles Wohlforth's The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern 
Front of Climate Change looks at two different and sporadically 
intermeshed groups - science experts from distant universities and local 
whale-hunter people of the Arctic with millennia of ice experience. The 
cooperations and rivalries between local residents and academic 
scientists matters in the way we handle the hellishly complex changes 
bearing down. Both groups work towards understanding how best to survive.
Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World is a witty review of Earth's 
previous global species extinctions. His discussions with experts 
present the evidences in the ancient rocks showing that in the vast life 
collapses of the geologic past CO2 was a major operative and thus a 
patterned back-story to our present situation; climate change extinction 
is new to humans but not to the planet. It puts a lid on the hubristic 
belief that Earth exists solely for human use.

Poet-linguist Robert Bringhurst and classicist philosopher Jan Zwicky 
offer a meditative approach in their Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age 
of Climate Crisis. Bringhurst's essay The Mind of the Wild outlines the 
liminal relations between the natural world and humans. Here the wild is 
the bedrock of human ethical and moral values.

He suggests that to understand what is happening we should individually 
"practise thinking like an ecosystem ... " by "spending a day in the 
wilds - alone with reality, keeping quiet and letting things unfold". 
This exercise can clarify our thinking and open windows of perception. 
Zwicky's essay A Ship from Delos guides us towards ways to live and know 
the situation of climate change. Her beautiful recasting of Socratic 
excellences - awareness, courage, self-control, justice, contemplation 
and compassion - can profoundly shape our inner selves.

- Barkskins by Annie Proulx is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy 
for £8.79 (RRP £9.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. 
Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/21/books-climate-change-annie-proulx
- - -
[time for climate fiction]
*How science fiction helps readers understand climate change*
Can imagined futures of drowned cities and solar utopias help us grasp 
the complexity of climate change? Diego Arguedas Ortiz takes a look.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190110-how-science-fiction-helps-readers-understand-climate-change


[science commentary video]
*Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars Aren't The Dumbest Thing. But... | Answers With 
Joe*
Joe Scott Published on Jan 21, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU-LDZ0HTGc


[Beckwith the climate researcher- video]
*Chat on Enormous Risks of Rapid Climate Disruption: 1 of 3*
Paul Beckwith
Published on Jan 25, 2019
Ongoing 2019 climate disruption is fast and furious. Abrupt climate 
system change cares not about human affairs, structures, politics, our 
livelihoods, and our precious but precarious civilizations. Disruption 
accelerates at ever faster rates wreaking havoc on our lives, with huge 
consequences. Media coverage on climate disruption, weather extremes, 
etc. in the main-stream is better, but often inaccurate; while risks and 
consequences are significantly downplayed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0tTE0DZ_60



[simple words, repeated often]
Greta Thunberg "Our House is on Fire" 2019 World Economic Forum (WEF) in 
Davos
UPFSI
Published on Jan 25, 2019
Subscribe to http://ScientistsWarning.TV - Greta has done it again. You 
go girl!  Here Greta makes a historic statement to the world's 
glitterati, political, business, banking and entertainment celebrities 
all at once, point out that most of the ARE the problem!  When it comes 
to climate in particular, and destruction of the biosphere in general, 
those she spoke to at Davos ARE the source of the problem.  Let's see it 
this young lady's 'truth to power' shakes things up a little.  It took a 
brilliant, focused child to say that these emperors and empresses have 
no clothes on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrF1THd4bUM


[conjecture from CounterPunch]
JANUARY 25, 2019
*End Times, Dead Ahead*
by ROBERT HUNZIKER

"It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a 
global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive 
today." (Jem Bendell)

In other words, the world is coming to an end.

Of course it is… but when?

Professor Jem Bendell's brilliant seminal work, "Deep Adaptation: A Map 
for Navigating Climate Tragedy" d/d July 27th 2018, claims the time is 
now, within a decade, not sometime in the distant future. Not only that, 
he suggests embracing this transcendental experience that's colloquially 
known as "End Times."

Along those lines, a powerful intimately conceived film by 
ScientistsWarningTV.org produced by Stuart Scott captures Bendell's 
inner thoughts about "what's important" in the face of near extinction:
View the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vwbanH9pgY
*Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy*
Bendell's 15-minute video monologue should be viewed in the context of 
the current status of the world's climate crisis, which is a 
mindboggling steroid-enhanced-CO2-laced trip to nowhere but trouble, and 
it's smack dab on target (actually ahead of target) for a grim, bleak 
world that alters all life and contorts the socio-economic compact, 
meaning sudden death for the "neoliberal brand" of capitalism, which 
will not survive once the world comes to accept and recognize its 
inherent villainy, notably its massive extensive disruption of the earth 
system of life, or Gaia.

Even worse yet, total annihilation of almost all life is a probability, 
a scenario that a small minority of scientists embrace. Those scientists 
believe that an extinction event is baked-in-the-cake, inevitable, 
inescapable within current lifetimes because of excessive human-caused 
greenhouse gases such as CO2, which, in turn, disrupts James Lovelock's 
Gaia hypothesis, meaning the biosphere has a self-regulatory effect on 
Earth that sustains life. Destroy one ecosystem and all others will fail 
in time and most of Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Decidedly, as well as factually, the planet has a long history of 
uninhabitable epochs known as extinction events (five times in the 
past), although the past occurrences were much slower than today's zip 
zap exponential speedway to obliteration that literally takes one's 
breath away! Never before has impending cataclysm been on such a rapid 
ascent as the 21st century.

On the other hand, who really believes it ("extinction") will happen? 
Answer: Almost nobody believes it. As for the world at large, the "big 
it" isn't remotely possible. All of which makes Bendell's essay and 
monologue so intriguing and compelling as an alternative viewpoint. He 
embraces the "what if the worst-case scenario" really (surprise, 
surprise) happens?

Meantime, as things stand today, the world has come to its senses about 
the relentless severe dangers inherent within excessive CO2 emitted by 
power plants, cars, trucks, and planes. After all, greenhouse gases 
cumulate in the stratosphere, similar to layers of heavy woolen 
blankets, which, in turn, traps global heat which otherwise would escape 
into outer space, but no, it's trapped.

Assuredly, excessive greenhouse gases with concomitant global warming 
compelled a gathering of nations at Paris 2015 in agreement to limit 
global warming to 1.5-2.0C?

But honestly, come on now! Are humans omnipotent enough to "control the 
climate" to +1.5-2.0C from baseline post-industrial without unintended 
blowback and/or f/ups of major proportions? Is it really so simple? 
Answer: No.

Some knowledgeable sources claim it'll be 10-20 years, or more, before 
technology is perfected and fully implemented to alter human-caused 
climate damage with any degree of proficiency, but that presumes an 
engineered concept sizeable enough in-scale to do the trick, which is 
the bane of on-going geoengineering efforts.

Although, eleventh-hour rescues seldom succeed within enough time.

Already, the Paris 2015 climate accord is poignant proof that the world 
recognizes the dangers of abrupt climate change and a lot of very smart 
people are scared as hell! Still, the problem remains: Nobody seems to 
know what to do other than theorize, experiment and talk, which is 
notoriously cheap.

As it happens, nothing of major consequence is being done to stop an 
extinction event. As of today, fossil fuels emitting CO2 remain at 
80-85% of energy consumption (Source: U.S. EIA, Washington, D.C.) the 
same as 50 years ago. Nothing positive has happened for decades!

Come to think of it, is it really too late?

Yes, according to Bendell, it is too late. He carefully reviewed the 
scientific literature as well as accessing research institutions to get 
to the bottom of the current status of climate change. What he 
discovered is basic to his conviction that society is headed for a train 
wreck of enormous proportions.

Deep Adaptation offers examples of likely outcomes, to wit: "With the 
power down, soon you wouldn't have water coming out of your tap. You 
will depend upon your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will 
become malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear 
being violently killed before starving to death."

Professor Bendell concludes: "Disruptive impacts from climate change are 
now inevitable. Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or 
counter-productive. Therefore, the mainstream climate policy community 
now recognizes the need to work much more on adaptation to the effects 
of climate change… Societies will experience disruptions to their basic 
functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such 
disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, 
disease, civil conflict and war - and will not avoid affluent nations."

It goes without saying Bendell's contention may or may not play out 
accordingly. And in sharp contrast to his forlorn viewpoint, human 
ingenuity has been a powerful force over millennia and hopefully comes 
to the rescue. But then again, it's human ingenuity that got into this 
mess in the first place.

Is it too late?

Ecosystems are already starting to crumble where no people live so 
nobody sees it. Meanwhile, a lot of very smart well-informed people are 
scared as hell, but hush-hushed. Indeed, a few scientists, but very few 
public voices, believe society is fast approaching "lights out." It's 
why Jem Bendell wrote Deep Adaptation.

Postscript: The Australian Bureau of Meteorology said mid January 2019 
marked the hottest days on record. Authorities are blaming the pounding 
heat wave for massive die-offs of bats on biblical scale and fish, as 
well as farms with "fruit still on the trees cooked from the inside 
out." Ominous? Oh, Yes!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/25/end-times-dead-ahead/


*This Day in Climate History - January 27, 1995 - from D.R. Tucker*
January 27, 1995: The New York Times reports:

"Whatever happened to global warming? The question was on many lips
a year ago, when the northeastern United States suffered through its
bitterest winter in years. Now an exceptionally warm winter has
whipsawed perceptions about the world's climate once again.

"An answer has become apparent in annual climatic statistics in the
last few days: global warming, interrupted as a result of the
mid-1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, has resumed
-- just as many experts had predicted.

"After a two-year cooling period, the average temperature of the
earth's surface rebounded in 1994 to the high levels of the 1980's,
the warmest decade ever recorded, according to three sets of data in
the United States and Britain.

"The earth's average surface temperature last year closely
approached the record high of almost 60 degrees measured in 1990.
That was the last full year before the Pinatubo eruption, which
cooled the earth by injecting into the atmosphere a haze of
sulfurous droplets that reflected some of the sun's heat."

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/27/us/a-global-warming-resumed-in-1994-climate-data-show.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
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