Climate Links: February 2019

Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment: Climate Change, Sustainability and People. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

627-page report states that even in the best-case scenario, the Himalayan mountains will lose more than one-third of their ice by the end of the century. An earlier report was even scarier, it said the Mt Everest region would lose 90% of its ice by 2100.

‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change. David Wallace-Wells, Guardian. Feb. 2, 2019.

reading about warming, you will often come across analogies from the planetary record: the last time the planet was this much warmer, the logic runs, sea levels were here. These conditions are not coincidences. The geologic record is the best model we have for understanding the very complicated climate system, and gauging just how much damage will come from turning up the temperature. Which is why it is especially concerning that recent research into the deep history of the planet suggests that our current climate models may be underestimating the amount of warming we are due for in 2100 by as much as half. The authors of one recent paper suggested that slashing our emissions could still bring us to 4 or 5C, a scenario, they said, would pose severe risks to the habitability of the entire planet. “Hothouse Earth”, they called it.

Sea Level Rise and the Loss of Shipping Ports. SurvivalAcres. Feb. 3, 3019.

What this means is all low-lying coastal regions are now at greater and greater risk. An enormous amount of infrastructure is destined to be destroyed and flooded out. That would include many of the world’s sea ports (not just cities and towns), which handle 95% of the U.S. international trade. 

In total, there are 196 countries with more than 4,764 ports that will be affected by sea level rise. Not one sea port in the world is prepared for extreme sea level rise.

In total, should all the world’s ice melt, we’re talking about a level of inundation that absolutely boggles the mind. And if it were to happen – civilization would certainly end.

Silent majority' of Canadians wants more government action on climate change. Andre Mayer, What on Earth, CBC News. Feb. 1, 2019.

The Canadian weasel: a whiny species. undenial. Feb. 15, 2019.

The problem in microcosm. Consciousness of Sheep. Dec. 26, 2018.

... in this one small issue we find a microcosm of our global predicament and the reason why we are not going to do anything about it. ...

Indeed, the car symbolises our global predicament: 

• Emitting too much greenhouse gas 
• Powered by a fuel that is increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain 
• Made from increasingly rare and hard to recycle mineral resources 
• Central to our excessively-consumptive lifestyles. 

If we were serious about mitigating climate change, resource depletion and environmental destruction, among the most important things we would do (I would add a ban on commercial air travel and a one-child policy) would be to cease all non-essential private motoring immediately. And yet, when it comes down to it, politicians lack the spine even to implement what would amount to little more than some additional inconvenience for motorists in order to begin to redress some of the vast imbalances between cars and other road-users. 

If they will not even do that, does anyone seriously believe that they are going to implement the massive lifestyle changes necessary to offset the unfolding environmental catastrophe or the cascading failures that will follow from resource depletion?

Environment in multiple crises - report. Roger Harrabin, BBC. Feb. 12, 2019.

Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims. 

The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy. 

Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors. 

These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans. 

The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are "driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels. 

"This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years."

Insect population faces 'catastrophic' collapse: Sydney research. University of Sydney. Feb. 12, 2019.


The Ocean Is Running Out of Breath, Scientists Warn. Laura Poppick, SciAm. Feb. 25, 2019.

Widespread and sometimes drastic marine oxygen declines are stressing sensitive species—a trend that will continue with climate change

As the Colorado River runs dry: A five-part climate change story. By Jim Robbins, Photography by Ted Wood, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. February 15, 2019.


Guest post: Land management ‘blind spots’ make 1.5C goal highly unlikely. Dr. Calum Brown, Carbon Brief. Feb. 18, 2019.

The Paris Agreement represents a rare high point in international climate negotiations, with 195 signatories pledging to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels. 

However, despite initial optimism, progress towards meeting this ambition has been lacking. Of the “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) that describe each country’s plans for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, most are vague, underwhelming documents that are almost certainly insufficient and unlikely to be implemented in full. 

This is particularly obvious in plans for cutting emissions from the way the land is used, managed and farmed. 

In a new “perspective” paper, published in Nature Climate Change, my co-authors and I look at the “blind spots” that hinder strategies to cut land-based emissions. These include inconsistent policies, time lags that make rapid change difficult, and detrimental consequences of some mitigation options.

The hidden environmental cost of Valentine’s Day roses. Gaby Del Valle, Vox. Feb. 12, 2019.

It all comes down to shipping.

When we talk about flowers and sustainability, the biggest issue is how flowers get from their point of origin to retailers across the country. During most of the year, flowers are shipped on passenger planes, Amy Stewart, an investigative reporter and author of the 2007 book Flower Confidential, told me. “They’re put on planes that are going anyway.” But hundreds of cargo planes full of flowers fly from the Andes to Miami in the month before Valentine’s Day. According to the Post, 30 cargo jets fly from Colombia to Miami every day in the three weeks leading up to the big day and a similar amount fly out from Ecuador, amounting to more than 15,000 tons of flowers delivered in less than a month.  

These flights have important consequences for the rest of the planet. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, comprising 28 percent of the country’s total emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over a quarter of US transportation emissions come from freight over air, land, and sea. Growing aviation demand, for both passengers and cargo, helped fuel an increase in emissions in the United States last year, reversing years of decline. This is significant, as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. 

Concrete is tipping us into climate catastrophe. It's payback time. John Vidal, Guardian. Feb. 25, 2019.


global dimming:
Up to half a degree more warming hidden in pollution. Dr. Robert Allen, via RadioEcoShock. Feb. 21, 2019.


Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. Josh Gabbatiss, The Independent. Feb. 18, 2019.

New findings suggest trees are 'our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change', says scientist

Humans are frogs in hot water of climate change, research says. Jen Christensen, CNN. Feb. 25, 2019.

BP Energy Outlook 2019.


Suffering in Silence III. The 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2018. CARE.

Dancing with Ulysses. Albert Bates. Feb. 10, 2019.

While it is yet unknowable if humans have the collective capacity to act quickly enough to actually reverse climate change, what can be said is that a small number of activists in the ecovillage, bioregional, and permaculture worlds have already changed the conversation.

If there will be salvation for our kind, it must pass through that reversing door. We have set a lantern there. Wahl quoted (without attribution to Herman Kahn or Al Gore) the aphorism, “We must do the impossible because the probable is unthinkable.”

This too we know: each and every one of us will have our deer-in-the-headlights moment when we realize we really did blow up the Holocene and it won’t be coming back and that could be all she wrote for homo sapiens. Then arrives, in the echo of that thunderclap, the realization that accumulating property, saving historical mementos, writing books, making films, or building companies or concepts to outlive yourself are all meaningless activities when placed into a context of Near Term Human Extinction. What matters is… What? What matters is what happens next to each and every one of us.

Remembering the sensation that Alan Watts called The Wisdom of Insecurity, or that Arnold Mindell describes in Sitting in the Fire, — living fully in the moment, not knowing, but being content with unknowing — is a better skill to develop than trying to know everything or to be constantly battling boredom while surfing channels on your phone. This complex, living, dynamic system of which we are part and which we co-created with our actions or inactions, is too complex to be predicted and controlled anyway. Indeed the very act of attempting control, such as with AI, changes it enough to make it unpredictable again.

Is There An Upper Limit On Human Self-Deceptive Bullshit? Dave Cohen, Deline of the Empire. Feb. 7, 2019.

So, even a non-binding resolution expressing humanity's positive but delusional hopes and fantasies is unlikely to make it through the U.S. Congress.