Unprecedented

Jeremy Lent calls for a "Deep Transformation" rather than a "Deep Adaptation", Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen contrast the "Creaturely World" over the "Industrial World", and the Natural Climate Solutions campaign seeks "to prevent climate breakdown by restoring our life support systems". George Monbiot:

We don’t want natural climate solutions to be used as a substitute for the rapid and comprehensive decarbonisation of our economies. The science tells us both are needed: the age of carbon offsets is over. But what this thrilling field of study shows is that protecting and rewilding the world’s living systems is not just an aesthetically pleasing thing to do. It is an essential survival strategy.

Meanwhile, a study published in Nature finds that the world's glaciers are melting 18 percent faster than a previous calculation in 2013. Losses are five time faster than 50 years ago.

The glaciers shrinking fastest are in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, the U.S. Lower 48 states, New Zealand and near the tropics. Glaciers in these places on average are losing more than 1 percent of their mass each year.

And a paper published in Environmental Research Letters compiles 47 years of data for key indicators in the Arctic.

The Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic.

Update (April 13):  Paul Street comments on how we got here and where we're going.

Update (April 19):  Robert Hunziker warns of the possibility of a "blue ocean event" (total loss of Arctic sea ice) and cites a study that found reduced sea ice in the past drove up temperatures around Greenland by as much as 16 degrees Celsius over a few decades.

And Paul Voosen reports on revised climate models that now calculate a climate sensitivity of 5 degrees Celsius for doubled carbon dioxide concentration (previously 2 to 4.5 degrees). It's not clear if this is an accurate representation.

Update (April 29):  Dahr Jamail in his latest roundup of recent research:

[T]he last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere (412 ppm), in the Pliocene Epoch 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, sea levels were 20 meters higher than they are right now, trees were growing at the South Pole, and average global temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer.

Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates don't seem likely to do enough on this issue.

And Chris Hedges paints a heart-wrenching picture of life near the Cree reserve.

It is hard, until you come here, to grasp the scale of the tar sands exploitation. Surrounding Beaver Lake are well over 35,000 oil and natural gas wells and thousands of miles of pipelines, access roads and seismic lines. Giant processing plants, along with gargantuan extraction machines, including bucket wheelers that are over half a mile long and draglines that are several stories high, ravage hundreds of thousands of acres. These stygian centers of death belch sulfurous fumes, nonstop, and send fiery flares into the murky sky. The air has a metallic taste. Outside the processing centers, there are vast toxic lakes known as tailings ponds, filled with billions of gallons of water and chemicals related to the oil extraction, including mercury and other heavy metals, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, arsenic and strychnine. The sludge from the tailings ponds is leaching into the Athabasca River, which flows into the Mackenzie, the largest river system in Canada. Nothing here, by the end, will support life.

The Cree, the Dene and other tribes that live amid the environmental carnage and whose ancestral lands have been appropriated by the government to extract the tar sands oil suffer astronomical rates of respiratory and other illnesses. Cancer rates are 30% higher than in the rest of Alberta, according to the Alberta Cancer Board, which was disbanded soon after releasing this information in 2008.

Update (May 3):  A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that melting ice from Greenland has added a quarter inch to sea levels in the past eight years.

The paper casts the transformation of the Greenland Ice Sheet as one of the profound geological shifts of our time. Scientists measure the mass of ice sheets in "gigatons"—each unit equal to 1 billion metric tons, or roughly the same amount of water that New York or Los Angeles uses in a year. Greenland, according to the study, has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972.

More worryingly, the paper finds that Greenland lost about half of that ice—roughly 2,200 gigatons—in the years between 2010 and 2018. The ice sheet has also failed to gain mass in any year since 1998.

Update (May 5):  Climate strikes continue to grow.

Update (May 10):  I haven't been paying attention to the extreme weather in the Midwest.

From the top of a lookout point on a clear day here, Joe Keithley could see the Missouri River spill over its banks into three states: Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. Underwater farmland stretched to the horizon in all directions.

Driving around eastern Nebraska, Keithley and Gary Lesoing, an educator with the University of Nebraska Extension office in Nemaha County, reached a high point on Highway 159 with a clear view of flooding between Rulo, Nebraska, and Fortescue, Missouri, home of Keithley’s Missouri farm. Miles of farmland were once dotted with modest homes.

"See the water?" Keithley asked.

"It just blows your mind," Lesoing said.

Update (May 11):  Arctic sea ice reached a record low in April and there's revived coverage of geoengineering projects such as "refreeezing" the pole.

And in an interview with C. J. Polychroniou, Paavo Järvensivu explains how capitalism and climate change have been tightly bound through the use of fossil fuels.

Looking back, we can see that the growing use of fossil fuels was not an accidental but rather an elemental part of the growth of industrialized economies. We could not have had this kind of industrialization without catalyzing climate change. The growth in productivity was not only due to innovative technologies and human ingenuity in general; the machinery needed fossil fuels to function. Economic growth has meant growing energy use. Economic growth has stalled at the same time as the cheapest and best fossil fuel sources have become depleted and the costs of climate change have become more apparent.

Update (May 12):  Keeping in mind the Paris Agreement itself falls far short of the action needed, this comment from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is especially dismal.

We are not on track to achieve the objectives defined in the Paris Agreement. And the paradox is that as things are getting worse on the ground, political will seems to be fading.

Update (May 21):  Places near the Arctic Ocean reached into the 80s which was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

Possibly related, Robert Hunziker refers to a post at Arctic News that raises some doubts. The post uses a somewhat misleading trend line to forecast 420 ppm of carbon dioxide by 2020. The post also claims paleoclimate correlation indicates "abrupt climate change could result in a rise of as much as 18°C or 32.4°F by 2026".

That can’t possibly be true, or can it? The good news is nobody knows 100% for sure. But, here’s the rub: Some really smart well-educated scientists think it could happen.

Update (May 22):  The Guardian now prefers the terms "climate crisis" and "global heating" over "climate change" or "global warming".

Update (May 26):  Leta Dickinson reports on the unexplained rise in methane emissions.

Update (June 11):  Robert Hunziker is encouraged by an essay by Margaret Klein Salamon in which she discusses the Climate Emergency Movement:

This movement tells the truth about the scale of the crisis, and demands a "Green New Deal" or a WWII-scale climate mobilization — a 10-year transition to zero emissions plus drawdown. Led by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Justice Democrats in Congress, the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, School Strikers, and Extinction Rebellion in the streets, this movement has burst forth with tremendous force and momentum.

Update (June 15):  More heat waves and record melting in Greenland.

Update (June 20):  Permafrost melting and methane dangers.

Update (June 21):  Robert Hunziker refers to the permafrost study.

[T]he show-stopping catastrophic collapse of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic is hard evidence that climate scientists have been way too conservative for far too long.

Update (August 2):  Studies published in Nature and Geophysical Research Letters have a bit of a good news/bad news flavor. The aerosol masking effect is probably lower than previously believed, but the loss of sea ice could have a major impact.

The amount of additional heat introduced into the Earth system because of Arctic melt is equivalent to an increase in CO2 concentration from 400 to 456.7 parts per million.

Update (September 4):  Dahr Jamail reports that for the first time in weather records, there is no sea ice within 150 miles of the Alaskan coast.

Update (March 22, 2020):  Robert Hunziker cites a study indicating the rate of land ice loss at the poles has increased by six times as much over 30 years.

Here’s the horrifying truth: The combined rate of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica averaged 89 billion tons per year in the 1990s. Yet, by the 2010s (if standing, please sit down) the average rate exploded to 523 billion tons per annum. That’s a shocker. It’s inconvertible evidence that global heat is coming on strong, way too strong, especially for coastal dwellers.

Update (April 25, 2020):  A study published in Geophysical Research Letters uses 40 climate models to project the fate of arctic sea ice. Ed Blockley:

Alarmingly the models repeatedly show the potential for ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean before 2050, almost irrespective of the measures taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. The signal is there in all possible futures. This was unexpected and is extremely worrying.