So, Anything New To Report?

Well, the world becomes harder to understand. Despite my many years on this earth, the irrationality of humans is still the thing that most perplexes me. Despite the fact that it is much later than we like to think, we are still partying like it is the 1950's. And payment is coming due.

Kendra Pierre-Louis reports that the world's oceans are warming 40% faster than had been previously estimated:

“2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth’s oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. “As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year.”

The fact that the oceans are absorbing so much heat means that surface temperatures are not nearly as high as they would be without this buffer. However, there is a massive downside to this reprieve:

... the surging water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.

As the oceans continue to heat up, those effects will become more catastrophic, scientists say. Rainier, more powerful storms like Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Hurricane Florence in 2018 will become more common, and coastlines around the world will flood more frequently. Coral reefs, whose fish populations are sources of food for hundreds of millions of people, will come under increasing stress; a fifth of all corals have already died in the past three years.

An additional effect is rising sea levels.

As the oceans heat up, sea levels rise because warmer water takes up more space than colder water. In fact, most of the sea level rise observed to date is because of this warming effect, not melting ice caps.

The warming alone would cause sea levels to rise by about a foot by 2100, and the ice caps would contribute more. That could exacerbate damages from severe coastal flooding and storm surge.

Some of the worst effects of climate change were once thought to be waiting until 2050 and beyond, a measure of time people had a hard time getting agitated about. The fact that some of those worse effects are already being felt through more intense storms, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. should be sobering.

And yet we largely continue to ignore all of this, get outraged at the mere mention of piddling carbon taxes and felt massively aggrieved when people suggest moderation of our bloated, carbon-intensive lifestyles.

Can our species be saved or, more to the point perhaps, do we deserve any manner of salvation from what we have wrought?

Worse Than We Thought

Yesterday, friend Mound posted a disturbing piece on the fact that the oceans have absorbed 60% more heat than expected. The implications for global warming are significant, and suggest, among other things, that we have far less than 12 years to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. If you haven't yet read it, I urge you to.

Last night Global News did a piece on the crisis, explaining in a very accessible manner the situation:



But as the Mound so tartly observes in his post, our political leaders are, of course, missing in action when we most need them. We cannot look to them for environmental salvation.