[✔️] Feb16 2024 Global Warming News | Texas TV to the Arctic, Amazon tipping point, Fires opinion, Mortality cost, Greenland goes green, 2002 GWBush

Fri Feb 16 09:19:35 EST 2024

/*February*//*16, 2024*/

/[ Texas TV crew goes to Arctic methane source - easy to watch video ]/
*Ancient methane escaping from melting glaciers could potentially warm 
the planet even more*
CBS TEXAS
  Dec 6, 2023
Carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories are the primary driver 
of climate change, and can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShDVJudNlw

/[ Nexus Hot News aggregates specific content and sends as daily content ]
/*Amazon Could Reach Tipping Point By Midcentury:* Thanks to droughts, 
climate change, and deforestation, the Amazon rainforest may reach a 
climate tipping point as soon as 2050, new research finds. A study 
published Wednesday in the journal Nature looked at five major factors 
impacting water stress in different regions of the Amazon, analyzing 
them with factors that could push a region towards a tipping point where 
it could become grasslands or forest with degraded canopies or cover. 
The study found that 10% of the Amazon is at high risk of reaching that 
tipping point, while up to 47% could also transform by 2050. The study 
also finds that 13% of the Amazon’s original forest has already been 
completely cleared, while another 38% of its old-growth forest has been 
disturbed by human use of land and repeated droughts. “We have to expect 
things happening earlier than we thought,” Bernardo Flores, lead 
author of the study, told the Guardian. “We need to address this with a 
very precautionary approach. We must reach net zero emissions and net 
zero deforestation as quickly as possible. It needs to be done now. If 
we lose the Amazon, it would be problematic for humanity.” (New York 
Times $, The Guardian, CNN, NBC)
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/amazon-could-reach-tipping-point-by-midcentury-louisianas-wetlands-are-drowning-more 

/- -/

/[ Clips -  Wallace-Welles reminds us of the era - this is the Pyrocene]/
*Fires Are the Sum of Our Choices/
/*David Wallace-Wells - Opinion Writer
Feb. 14, 2024
In early February, the deadliest South American wildfires in a century 
swept through Valparaiso, Chile, killing more than 100 people. It was 
almost six months to the day since the deadliest American fires in a 
century killed more than 100 people when flames tore through Lahaina, in 
Maui, burning up much of Hawaii’s precolonial capital and forcing 
residents to jump into the ocean for safety, the flames leaping over 
them to ignite the boats docked in the harbor...

Two record-setting episodes of fire death in half a year might once have 
looked like a world-historical ecological coincidence, but it has been a 
year of fire extremes — and a year in which the world has mostly 
whistled past them. In the United States, mercifully little land burned 
— only 2.6 million acres, which was less than half the recent average. 
But in Canada, fires ate through more than twice as much forest as the 
country’s previous modern record, the total burn scar large enough that 
more than half the world’s countries could fit inside. In Greece, one 
fire forced the country’s largest-ever evacuation, and another became 
the largest fire in the history of the European Union. And in Australia, 
the bush fire season has burned over 150 million acres — three times the 
land burned last year in Canada and more than twice as much land as was 
destroyed in Australia’s Black Summer of 2019-20, when Sydney Harbor was 
so choked with smoke that ferries couldn’t navigate the waters, at least 
a billion animals were consumed by flames and panicked evacuees had to 
be rescued from a beach by military helicopter...
- -
But... one of the challenges of climate change, even in the present 
tense, is that none of us are living in those counterfactual histories. 
Instead, we’re living in a timeline in which large gaps have opened up 
between the climate we anticipated and the one we are confronted with, 
between the infrastructure we built on the basis of those expectations 
and the world we might have engineered and between the standards for 
safety and preparedness we once had and the ones we are now revising and 
haphazardly improvising in the face of rising threats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/climate/wildfire-climate-change-urban-firestorm.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Vk0.PZmt.bPBb_j-wyBb0&smid=url-share/
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/[  measuring MCC changes our thinking ]/
*The Mortality Cost of Carbon*
Paul Beckwith
  Feb 14, 2024
An interesting report by GreenPeace UK came out late last year on the 
mortality cost of carbon.

Basically, this report looked at the number of lives lost per ton of 
fossil fuel emissions. The idea is that expressing our emissions in 
terms of lives lost may make people sit back and take notice.

Probably not; nothing seems to do this unless an individual loses their 
house or loved ones to some climate or extreme weather event catastrophe.

Article:
“Todays Emissions, Tomorrows Deaths: How Europes Major Oil and Gas 
Companies are Putting Lives at Risk: Greenpeace Netherlands, December 
2023”: 
https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-netherlands-stateless/2023/12/885ced20-layout-cdt-1.pdf
- -
Peer-reviewed scientific paper:
“The Mortality Cost of Carbon”: 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w.pdf

    “Abstract
    Many studies project that climate change can cause a significant
    number of excess deaths. Yet, in integrated assessment models (IAMs)
    that determine the social cost of carbon (SCC) and prescribe optimal
    climate policy, human mortality impacts are limited and not updated
    to the latest scientific understanding. This study extends the
    DICE-2016 IAM to explicitly include temperature-related mortality
    impacts by estimating a climate-mortality damage function. We
    introduce a metric, the mortality cost of carbon (MCC), that
    estimates the number of deaths caused by the emissions of one
    additional metric ton of CO2. In the baseline emissions scenario,
    the 2020 MCC is 2.26 × 10‒4 [low to high estimate −1.71× 10‒4 to
    6.78 × 10‒4] excess deaths per metric ton of 2020 emissions. This
    implies that adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide in
    2020—equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average
    Americans—causes one excess death globally in expectation between
    2020-2100. Incorporating mortality costs increases the 2020 SCC from
    $37 to $258 [−$69 to $545] per metric ton in the baseline emissions
    scenario. Optimal climate policy changes from gradual emissions
    reductions starting in 2050 to full decarbonization by 2050 when
    mortality is considered.”

Extremely interesting paper…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-JjQr5U6w

/[ Ice cold, now warming and melting, like making a salad ]/
*Land cover changes across Greenland dominated by a doubling of 
vegetation in three decades*
Michael Grimes, Jonathan L. Carrivick, Mark W. Smith & Alexis J. Comber
Scientific Reports volume 14, Article number: 3120 (2024) Cite this article
224 Altmetric

    *Abstract*
    Land cover responses to climate change must be quantified for
    understanding Arctic climate, managing Arctic water resources,
    maintaining the health and livelihoods of Arctic societies and for
    sustainable economic development. This need is especially pressing
    in Greenland, where climate changes are amongst the most pronounced
    of anywhere in the Arctic. Ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and
    from glaciers and ice caps has increased since the 1980s and
    consequently the proglacial parts of Greenland have expanded
    rapidly. Here we determine proglacial land cover changes at 30 m
    spatial resolution across Greenland during the last three decades.
    Besides the vastly decreased ice cover (− 28,707 km2 ± 9767 km2), we
    find a doubling in total areal coverage of vegetation (111% ± 13%),
    a quadrupling in wetlands coverage (380% ± 29%), increased meltwater
    (15% ± 15%), decreased bare bedrock (− 16% ± 4%) and increased
    coverage of fine unconsolidated sediment (4% ± 13%). We identify
    that land cover change is strongly associated with the difference in
    the number of positive degree days, especially above 6 °C between
    the 1980s and the present day. Contrastingly, absolute temperature
    increase has a negligible association with land cover change. We
    explain that these land cover changes represent local rapid and
    intense geomorphological activity that has profound consequences for
    land surface albedo, greenhouse gas emissions, landscape stability
    and sediment delivery, and biogeochemical processes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52124-1

- -

Greenland Getting Greener: Greenland has lost around 1.6% of its total 
ice cover since the 1980s Both plant-filled landscapes and barren rock 
absorb more sunlight than ice cover, leading to a feedback loop that 
creates overall hotter conditions. “The expansion of vegetation, 
occurring in tandem with the retreat of glaciers and the ice sheet, is 
significantly altering the flow of sediments and nutrients into coastal 
waters,” Michael Grimes, the lead author of the report, told the 
Guardian. “These changes are critical, particularly for the Indigenous 
populations whose traditional subsistence hunting practices rely on the 
stability of these delicate ecosystems. Moreover, the loss of ice mass 
in Greenland is a substantial contributor to global sea level rise, a 
trend that poses significant challenges both now and in the future.”

/[The news archive - cough, cough  ]/
/*February 16, 2002 */
February 16, 2002: In response to President George W. Bush's February 
14, 2002 speech on climate change, the New York Times editorial page 
declares:

    "The obvious conclusion to be drawn from President Bush's latest
    global warming strategy, unveiled this week, is that he does not
    regard warming as a problem. There seems no other way to interpret a
    policy that would actually increase the gases responsible for
    heating the earth's atmosphere. That the policy demands little from
    the American people, while insulting allies who have agreed to take
    tough steps to deal with the problem, only adds to one's sense of
    dismay."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/16/opinion/backward-on-global-warming.html

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