The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand | Johan Rockström | TED

When did the climate crisis begin?

How old is the climate crisis?

I was born in 1994, when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was measured at 360 parts per million; today it is close to 420. Furnaces, engines and former forests emitted 23 billion tonnes of this planet-warming gas in 1994; today they spew more than 37 billion tonnes. With some exceptions (economic downturns, the pandemic), humanity has released more CO₂ into the atmosphere each year than the one before it for at least two centuries.

Earth is not only hotter as a result of all this additional greenhouse gas, it is also getting hotter at a faster and faster rate. Where did it all begin? Figuring that out can tell us who or what is responsible – and what a possible solution looks like. (...)

Antarctic heat, wild Australian winter: what’s happening to the weather and what it means for the rest of the year

TL;DR: Shit's fucked

Meanwhile, in Texas, Guadalupe River tubing has been found to be a dangerous activity....

When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down?
Intensifying extreme weather events and an insurance crisis are likely to cause significant economic and political disruption in the U.S. sometime in the next 15 years.

The words of explorer John Wesley Powell on the eve of his departure into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon in 1869 best describe how I see our path ahead as we brave the unknown rapids of climate change:

We are now ready to start our way down the Great Unknown. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.

Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.

Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous rapids of unknown ferocity. Our path will be fraught with great peril, and there will be tremendous suffering, great loss of life, and the destruction of much that is precious.

It is inevitable that climate change will stop being a hazy future concern and will someday turn everyday life upside down. Very hard times are coming. At the risk of causing counterproductive climate anxiety and doomism, I offer here some observations and speculations on how the planetary crisis may play out, using my 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, including four years of flying with the Hurricane Hunters and 20 years blogging about extreme weather and climate change. The scenarios that I depict as the most likely are much harsher than what other experts might choose, but I’ve seen repeatedly that uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to climate change. This will be a long and intense ride, but if you stick through the end, I promise there will be a rainbow.

By late this century, I am optimistic that we will have successfully ridden the rapids of the climate crisis, emerging into a new era of non-polluting energy with a stabilizing climate. There are too many talented and dedicated people who understand the problem and are working hard on solutions for us to fail. (...)

Plants and their pollinators are increasingly out of sync
As global temperatures rise and seasons shift, bees and other pollinators are missing critical connections with flowers and crops.

 ColdMiser wrote:

Interesting that his childhood was supported mostly by his grandfather who worked at a blue collar job and was a member of a union.

US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation
Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication

The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.

This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.

“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.

Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.

That lawsuit alleges that Marathon knew of the dangers of global temperature rise long before the general public due to its membership in the American Petroleum Institute, which began studying the link between fossil fuels and global heating decades ago.

This newly surfaced article shows the company was undertaking efforts on its own to stay up to date on the latest climate science and the threats a more volatile climate could pose to humankind. (...)

 R_P wrote:
Or before the Fossil Fuel Industry gave him $238,000 for his campaign. Drain the Swamp? Hardly. 

Before the beard and lobotomy
JD Vance: "We have a climate problem in our society"

In the South, Sea Level Rise Accelerates at Some of the Most Extreme Rates on Earth
The surge is startling scientists, amplifying impacts such as hurricane storm surges and nuisance flooding and testing mitigation measures like the Resilient Florida program

 R_P wrote:
You see all this on Main Stream Media and I think most folks just don't get it, or don't care, or are resigned to it being normal. Wouldn't it be nice if when you went to the supermarket to buy groceries there were signs or videos showing what this heat does to our food infrastructure. When it's triple digits for weeks on end, how do you think the vegetables are doing? The cattle, the chickens. When it floods does everything bounce right back like it never happened? Instead most people think the high cost of groceries are the governments (usually the presidents) fault.  There needs to be some other form of communication to regular folks that this is effecting their lives in ways they don't obviously see but are real. 

‘More Heat, More Often’: Temperature Records Keep Breaking
The burning of fossil fuels has created more frequent and more intense heat waves. Experts warn these heat waves are “the new normal.”

June was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record. It beat the record set last year for the hottest June on record, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union.“

We should consider this the new normal,” said Katherine Idziorek, an assistant professor in geography and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We need to be preparing for more heat, more often. That’s the reality.”

More than half the U.S. population — almost 175 million people — faced extreme heat on July 4, and the impacts of this new normal continued to broil the country this week. (...)

“Heat is like the silent storm,” said David Sittenfeld, the director of the Center for the Environment at Boston’s Museum of Science. Other climate-related hazards like heavy rain and wildfires are more visible, he said, but heat affects everyone and can exacerbate socio-economic inequalities.

The burden of urban heat, for example, isn’t equally distributed. A Columbia University analysis showed that neighborhoods that were historically redlined experienced hotter summers in 84 percent of major American cities, including Houston.

These communities often experience the urban heat island effect: Roads and rooftops absorb more heat than natural spaces do, making urban areas hotter than rural areas. A report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central found that almost 70 percent of 50 million city dwellers are in areas where the temperature was at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher because of city infrastructure.

Based on that analysis, over 1.7 million people in Houston were experiencing heat at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 90-degree temperatures that led to a heat advisory on Thursday — while more than a million people were still without power.

Hot Nights Fuel Wildfires, Complicating Containment Efforts
Climate change is causing more fires to burn overnight, growing bigger, lasting longer and challenging the fire teams trying to control them.

Over the July 4 weekend, hundreds of fires sparked across California, feeding on the hot, dry conditions of an ongoing heat wave.

But some of these fires were strange.

They grew rapidly and expanded their territory at a time when fires, like people, traditionally rest: at night.

Overnight hours, when temperatures tend to go down and relative humidity, or the amount of water vapor in the air, goes up, can act as a barrier to fire. Overnight, fires tend to creep along, giving firefighters a chance to sleep or manage smaller flames. But human-caused climate change has accelerated nighttime warming more quickly than daytime warming, dismantling this natural shield.

“Night won’t save us,” said Kaiwei Luo, a doctoral student in environmental sciences at the University of Alberta and the lead author of a recent study in the journal Nature that found overnight burning can cause fires to burn larger and longer. “With climate change, we will see more and more overnight burning,” he said. (...)