TADEAS:

Doomsday Glacier in Antarctica Could Collapse Soon: New Research - Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/doomsday-glacier-thwaites-antarctica-climate-crisis-1273841/

the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.

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Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). “The difference between those [models] is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate [the worst scenario] is Thwaites.”

Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.”

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“We just don’t know what the upper boundary is for how fast this can happen,” Alley says. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed before. We have no analog for this.”

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“The current divergence among model predictions is actually a good sign because it means that scientists are probing different parameterizations, representations of processes, and hypotheses,” writes Jeremy Bassis, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. Bassis suggests not focusing so much on the long-term uncertainty and highlighting instead what scientists know about the next few decades. “The skill of models in predicting sea level change on decadal time scales is high, and we already have actionable projections on these time scales. We should be emphasizing that fact in discussions with community members, stakeholders, and decision-makers, so they can move ahead with important adaptation and mitigation planning.”

But in the long run, it is not clear that the dynamics of ice sheet collapse that are underway at Thwaites can be stopped. As glaciologist Eric Rignot put it in 2015, in Antarctica, “the fuse has been blown.” Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, warm water will continue to flow beneath the ice sheet for decades, destabilizing the ice and further pushing the glacier toward eventual collapse. This doesn’t means that cutting carbon pollution to zero isn’t an important goal — nothing, in fact, is more important or more urgent. “We may have a small safety margin in Antarctica, but not a large one,” says Alley. Even if the fuse is blown, cutting emissions fast could slow it all down to a millennium-long crack-up that will give us more time to adapt. One way or another, our future is written in ice.

Di Caprio shrnuje poselství Don’t Look Up. Přijde mi, že zkoušej nastínit problém lidem odlehčenou humornou formou, na Attenborougha moc průměrnejch lidí nekouká, protože je to nudí.
Leonardo DiCaprio Explains Don't Look Up | Netflix
https://youtu.be/YEMaLsPTWlo

INK_FLO:

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day | Peter Kalmus | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/climate-scientist-dont-look-up-madness

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
- Peter Kalmus

Walter Jehne's presentation on "The soil-microbe-root interface in the evolution, resilience and future of life on land". International Nature Farming Convergence, Dec 2-4, 2021.

Walter Jehne:The soil-microbe-root interface in the evolution, resilience and future of life on land
https://youtu.be/XYJq6c2pg5s


Walter presents a landmark historical synopsis of geology, biology, and soil carbon functions over 4.5 billion years; why "agroecosystems that mimic nature" matter aka natural farming; the critical importance of soil carbon and why the health of planet earth depends on addressing the soil carbon sponge and hydrogeological cycles.

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Walter Jehne, retired soil scientist with CSIRO in Australia, gave a mind-blowing synopsis on the evolution of geochemistry and soil biology at the International Nature Farming Virtual Convergence on Saturday. It essentially demonstrated how industrial agriculture has burned off soil carbon with destructive farming practices, and secondly how natural farming practices can regenerate soil health, create a soil carbon sponge, reinvigorate hydrogeological cycles, and stave off dire planetary climate change.

Themes: designing agroecosystems that mimic nature, soil organic matter management, soil carbon sponge, water cycles. Natural and regenerative farmers are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt these practices are solid, economical and ecological on a worldwide basis.

Waler Jehne nails why alternative farming movements -- with their constant attention to SOIL BIOLOGY HABITAT and SOIL CARBON FARMING -- have fought tooth and nail for 50-100 years to make a difference: compost, cover crops, mulches, keep the soil covered, minimize soil distrurbance, biodiversity, integrated crop-livestock farming systems, keep your worms and soil biology happy!

hyperpredator

Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-early-humans-largest-animals-extinction.html

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years—as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size—improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

The study was conducted by Prof. Ran Barkai and Dr. Miki Ben-Dor of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Prof. Shai Meiri of the School of Zoology and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, and Jacob Dembitzer, a research student of Prof. Barkai and Prof. Meiri, who led the project. The paper was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

pray


Thread by @Jasonvj2005 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475065873224372235.html

The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is larger than the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland combined, it is already melting and is responsible for 4% of the global rise in sea level.

However, researchers from the American Geophysical Union have now found huge diagonal cracks across the ice shelf that are growing ever faster. The prognosis: in the next five years the ice mass could collapse suddenly. What would that mean?

The ice shelf will likely break up into countless icebergs, and the rest of the glacier will then drain into the sea about three times faster. For comparison: in the last 30 years the pace has "only" doubled.

In the best-case scenario, the contribution to sea level rise increases by 1%. In the long term, his contribution would be 65cm. But worse, the Thwaites Glacier is like a plug. When it melts, the neighboring glaciers slide into its basin and melt too.

As a result, the entire ice in West Antarctica is gradually disappearing and the sea level is rising by up to 3.3 meters. And the ice cannot come back, because the oceans are much warmer than when the great glaciers were formed. Gone is gone.

Let's put that in a context: This is exactly what the IPCC warned about this year with "ice sheet instability". Our maps would have to be redrawn



Most likely, there is nothing we can do about the collapse. Millions of people are practically dead, just not yet dropped. NOW should our preparations begin to organize asylum for the displaced in the industrialized countries. It will be historically unique.
This message really comes at the wrong time. Only a few weeks ago, strong statistical evidence was found in Greenland that the egg melt is now irreversible. Shortly before that, a study predicted a sea level rise of 5cm PER YEAR from 2060 onwards.

Every five years the sea level would rise as much as it has from the beginning of industrialization until today. The power of exponential growth, experienced first hand ...

I have simplified a few things: There are other processes at work, the glacier melts, for example, through a kind of tide pump "from below". It is essential that we are entering a phase in which the climate crisis is being driven by factors over which we can no longer influence.

TADEAS:

'Dangerous territory': Western Canada sees extreme cold reaching -56 C
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/climate-and-environment/2021/12/27/1_5720447.amp.html

Brazil’s Amazon hit by worst deforestation since 2006
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/19/amazon-deforestation-brazil-15years/?s=09

The Amazon in Brazil lost more than 5,000 square miles of rainforest from August 2020 to July 2021, the government research center said in a report that was dated Oct. 27 and shared on Thursday. It was the fourth year in a row that the rate of deforestation rose, it said.

Climate activists have warned of the risks of letting the global pledge fall short: The devastation of forests drives up greenhouse gas emissions, and Global Forest Watch found the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020 — roughly half the size of the United States.