Greenland's annual ice mass loss has increased sixfold since the 1980s

April 26, 2019 12:12 AM

Greenland Is Falling Apart - "Since 1972, the giant island's ice sheet has lost 11 quadrillion pounds of water." (cf. Forty-six years of Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance from 1972 to 2018; viz. chasing ice)

also btw...
Antarctic emperor penguins experiencing "unprecedented" breeding failure - "'There had been no previously recorded instances of total breeding failure at the site', study says."

A map tetraptych that will likely explain a great deal over the coming decades: Country-level economic impact of historical global warming

We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by fossil fuel use has likely exacerbated the economic inequality associated with historical disparities in energy consumption. Our results suggest that low-carbon energy sources have the potential to provide a substantial secondary development benefit, in addition to the primary benefits of increased energy access.

'You did not act in time': Greta Thunberg's full speech to MPs

You don't listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don't exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I'm sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

meet the girl who changed the world - "One girl's utter determination to try and stop the greatest threat humanity has ever faced has set off a global youth climate strike movement. 16-year-old Greta Thunberg is the voice of a generation."

posted by kliuless (21 comments total)

Dismissing Greta Thunberg as a cult leader doesn't weaken her argument
posted by chavenet at 4:45 AM on April 26, 2019

This seems as good a place as any to quote Gary Younge in today's Guardian:

In XR [Extinction Rebellion] we see an inchoate expression of a different worldview. For starters it is a “worldview”. There is no meaningful national response to global warming, because however much you fortify your borders you can’t stop CO2 emissions from migrating. As such they see themselves as part of a global movement to save the planet, which requires seeing foreign people as human beings, and agreements and alliances between nations as fundamental to any possible solution.

posted by Acey at 5:05 AM on April 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

🌎
.
posted by Bee'sWing at 6:06 AM on April 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

I believe that we are fucked. I hope that I am wrong and that we might squeak by. While very ill and close to death, CG Jung had a vision of world wide conflagration. Humanity managed to just make it by through.
posted by DJZouke at 6:08 AM on April 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I believe that we are fucked.

Great! Now the question is, what are you going to do about it?
posted by ragtag at 6:18 AM on April 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

Is it just me or is there an enormous ice whale that surfaces at about 1:53?
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:26 AM on April 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

If you know any eight-year-olds, put the statistic from the main link above in terms of their lifetime when you repeat it to other adults: ice melting in Greenland during the kid's lifetime has added a quarter inch to the global sea level, and that ice loss during their lifetime is half of all the Greenland ice loss from the past 46 years.

For a parallel statistic regarding Antarctica, last year a joint project between NASA and the ESA released a study-of-studies on the Antarctic ice sheet that estimated the annual net ice loss increased from ~43 gigatons yearly during the period 1992-2002 up to ~220 gigatons per year between 2012 and 2017. DOI 10.1038/s41586-018-0179-y.

So, five times as fast. But, um—fortunately?—the Antarctic ice loss is all in West Antarctica, while the much larger region of East Antarctica remained stable and has probably had a net gain of a small amount of ice over the period studied.

Last summer in Sweden there were forest fires above the Arctic Circle. Earlier this week on Radio Sweden (in English) an official said that now, in April, they're seeing wildfire conditions they normally see in August.
posted by XMLicious at 6:38 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

While very ill and close to death, CG Jung had a vision of world wide conflagration.

Well, he was a religious nutjob, is why.
posted by thelonius at 7:10 AM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm sad I couldn't make it to an Extinction Rebellion activist training event a couple of weeks ago, they're doing some good work.

I really wouldn't worry about the climate thing though. Give it a couple more years of full-energy, dedicated activism, and we can get some slightly more left-wing people into govt positions. Nothing too radical, mind you, just what the political market will bear, so to speak.

Then, after a term of wishy-washy failure to get the right to agree and a respectable lack of will to take steps that undermine our great traditions of state, they can be voted out or overthrown by a discontent populace, and the fascists will ensure some small, carefully chosen segment of the world's population gets to survive in biodomes or behind heavily fortified borders.

So it'll all work out fine, humanity will survive. Liberalism will triumph, so much tension will be dissipated by the mass death that we can finally get back to some civil, rational debate about exactly who counts as human and precisely just how much we should lower taxes to promote all the fabulous new industries which will rise to deal with the new challenges of a world wracked by climate change. The market, as always, will bring us salvation!

/Hamburger.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:54 AM on April 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Dumb question - are the two Youtube Links supposed to be to the same video?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:50 AM on April 26, 2019

Great! Now the question is, what are you going to do about it?

As (someone else put it) that is the great Neoliberal lie: individual action cannot ameliorate climate change. It requires collective action - and it absolutely requires absolute support from our leadership.

Individually, there are things one can do: minimize flying, seek out fuel efficiency in your transportation and home-heating, eat a plant-based diet.

But this won't reduce overall emissions significantly. We need to change the infrastructure of our whole society. Individually, we are like people putting our fingers in the (not at all metaphorical) dyke, even as the water comes to lap the top.
posted by jb at 8:57 AM on April 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

Individually, there are things one can do [...]. But this won't reduce overall emissions significantly.

The point of taking individual action isn't to reduce carbon emissions.
posted by ragtag at 9:05 AM on April 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

As (someone else put it) that is the great Neoliberal lie: individual action cannot ameliorate climate change. It requires collective action - and it absolutely requires absolute support from our leadership...

No. It requires all those things.

Governments could increase incentives on buying electric vehicles and increase taxes on gas cars as Norway did (last month 58% of new car sales were EV) but it's individuals who need to purchase those cars. Ditto for rooftop solar. A single person can't build better mass transit or high speed rail on their own, but if they can afford it, they can decide to buy an EV for their next car. 29% of CO2 emissions in the US come from transportation and 60% of that are light-duty vehicles. Those are the cars we drive. Early adopters can make an outsized impact as it keeps nascent businesses afloat and helps reduce the time at which a tipping point arrives where things like driving EVs or not eating red meat become mainstream (meatless burgers at BurgerKing??).

174 large corporations have made commitments to go 100% renewable. Do you work for a company that hasn't? Complain about it or organize like Amazon employees recently did.

Also, regarding leadership support: It is counterproductive to think of this simple as "The president and the party that controls the senate doesn't believe in climate change" and therefore there isn't support at the leadership level. Climate action happens at every level of government: Global (IPCC, World Bank, UN, treaties), Nation-state (country wide co2 targets and laws), US States (13 have either committed or are considering going 100% RE), Corporate, County/City/Town (at least 120 have made 100% renewable commitments), and individuals.
posted by gwint at 9:51 AM on April 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

Yesterday there was the first local Danish poll on the EU elections, and it was heartening. First of all, most Danes find global warming to be the most important issue, before the economy and (anti)immigration and whatever other stupid issues the pollsters could think of. Second, they plan to vote accordingly and they know that this needs international policies.
Greenland is in a commonwealth with Denmark, but I don't think that is why people are waking up. I think Greta Thunberg has a huge influence here, and also we have had some unusual and damaging weather during the last decade, which have hit across the usual political and economic divides.
posted by mumimor at 4:53 PM on April 26, 2019

The Uncanny Power of Greta Thunberg’s Climate-Change Rhetoric: Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist, says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us.
posted by homunculus at 6:05 PM on April 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

> In XR [Extinction Rebellion] we see an inchoate expression of a different worldview. For starters it is a “worldview”. There is no meaningful national response to global warming, because however much you fortify your borders you can’t stop CO2 emissions from migrating. As such they see themselves as part of a global movement to save the planet, which requires seeing foreign people as human beings, and agreements and alliances between nations as fundamental to any possible solution.

In other words: Cosmopolitanism.
posted by homunculus at 6:18 PM on April 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Greta Thunberg: ‘All my life I’ve been the invisible girl.’ The climate activist on becoming the face of a global movement — and why she sees her Asperger’s as a gift

Via
posted by homunculus at 6:55 PM on April 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is what counts as good news these days: modeling of gravitational effects and the Earth's crust rebounding from ice mass loss shows that—by 2350—the contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier should be down by 25%. So perhaps less doomful doom for human civilization in its entirety. But for anyone who will be alive in the 22^nd century instead of the 24^th, unfortunately the mass change factors only result in a 1% reduction by 2100.
posted by XMLicious at 9:53 PM on April 27, 2019

The Climate Exodus
Mass Migration—The Real Environmental Disaster

(Deutsche Welle DocFilm, in English, 42½ min., direct .mp4 link)—best depiction I've seen so far of the direct, personal experiences of people all over the world and how it affects their daily lives. So if you know anyone who still regards climate change as an abstract thing that just means slightly different temperatures on some days and some scientific theories, this is the link to send them to show concrete effects that can be seen and felt.
posted by XMLicious at 4:04 AM on May 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World ("Focus on the candid conversation between @JeffGoodell and @StewartBrand starting at 57:40 mins.")
posted by kliuless at 6:04 PM on May 6, 2019

Jakarta Is Sinking. Now Indonesia Has to Find a New Capital: "today the city of more than 10 million is facing nothing short of obliteration by rising seas and sinking land, two opposing yet complementary forces of doom. Models predict that by 2050, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be submerged. And Jakarta is far from alone—cities the world over are drowning and sinking, and there’s very little we can do about it short of stopping climate change entirely."
posted by homunculus at 10:07 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]