WTF Climate Change News

[danielravennest]

Coal Miner shifting to mining metals for batteries

Glencore is the world's largest exporter of thermal coal, the kind burned in power plants and a major contributor to planet-warming carbon emissions. The multinational miner on Wednesday said it will broadly limit its capacity to produce coal to current levels, or about 150 million tons per year.

The company instead plans to put capital to work churning out more copper, cobalt, nickel, vanadium and zinc, commodities that are used in electric vehicle batteries and other technologies that underpin the shift to a cleaner energy and transportation future.

I think they see the way the world is heading, and are preparing to stay in business when coal goes away.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Floating houses aren't that unusual. Denmark has many, not the traditional concept of houseboats but just houses that float

Remember Sleepless in Seattle and the floating house? This is Union Bay, where those scenes occurred -- there's a whole community of floating houses.

So we've been doing that for a long....................wait, wut?

attached to dolphins

 

[Tigger]

Remember Sleepless in Seattle and the floating house? This is Union Bay, where those scenes occurred -- there's a whole community of floating houses.

So we've been doing that for a long....................wait, wut?

yes, you harness them to dolphins and have them pull your seashell waterchariot to where the sun is shining.... OR .... a dolphin is a fixed post that passes through part of the building anchored into the bed of the sea/lake/river/whatever , effectively mooring it in place.

Dolphin (structure) - Wikipedia

 

[Tigger]

Also, today the UK experienced its first ever winter temperatures of 20+ degrees (centigrade)

 

[Archer]

A World Without Clouds

The simulation revealed a tipping point: a level of warming at which stratocumulus clouds break up altogether. The disappearance occurs when the concentration of CO2 in the simulated atmosphere reaches 1,200 parts per million — a level that fossil fuel burning could push us past in about a century, under “business-as-usual” emissions scenarios. In the simulation, when the tipping point is breached, Earth’s temperature soars 8 degrees Celsius, in addition to the 4 degrees of warming or more caused by the CO2 directly.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Also, today the UK experienced its first ever winter temperatures of 20+ degrees (centigrade)

More details

UK experiences winter temperatures above 20C for first time

 

[Rose Karuna]

Climate change has played a part in several major civilization collapses.

How Western civilisation could collapse

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change.

It's an interesting article and they site multiple problems that have brought societies down, of which we are now experiencing several.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

UK experiences hottest winter day ever as 21.2C is recorded in London This unseasonable weather is very pleasant, but somewhat alarming.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Fascinating article Rose. And as always, the mantra: "events are happening faster than we anticipated." Whether it's climate change or political upheavals, our predictions are running just a little behind reality.

 

[Beebo Brink]

The worst-case scenario for global warming just got 14°F worse

 

[Beebo Brink]

And some thoughtful reviews:

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells – review

Destruction from climate change will be ‘worse, much worse, than you think’

 

[eighthdwarf Checchinato]

UK experiences hottest winter day ever as 21.2C is recorded in London This unseasonable weather is very pleasant, but somewhat alarming.

The weatherman on the radio just said that, with today's temperatures which won't be much different than yesterday, we'd have the hottest February ever recorded here in Hesse.
With only a couple days below 0°C (in January), I'd even say it's been the mildest "winter" as far as I can remember. And that after the longest and hottest summer ever recorded, with nearly 120 days above 25°C (in Hesse - I didn't follow how it was elsewhere in Germany): Yes, I also think that it's alarming.

 

[Beebo Brink]

For just over a decade, the oceans have been acting as a heat sink and absorbing part of the rise in global warming (misinterpreted by some as a pause in warming). The oceans are a deep well, but not infinite. Apparently that redistribution of heat ended around 2013, so now we're beginning to feel the true impact of climate change. We're much farther along this path than seems apparent just on land.

Oceans act as a 'heat sink': No global warming ‘hiatus’

 

[Rose Karuna]

Sadly the problem is that when people think "global warming" they think that it's just getting hotter by a few degrees. It's a grim scenario.

Most of the population doesn't think about an increasing amount of super storms, flooding, sea levels rising, sea and other life we depend on for food sources dying out, mass famines, massive plagues of insects and rodents, drought, and illness born of these things. Not to mention societal collapse. In fact, that 1/3 of the population that would happily kill another 1/3 of the population off thinks it won't touch them and that society should collapse. The "other" third of the population that just watches it all happen will finally realize that it's too late to do anything about it and die off too.

I hope I'm wrong. People like Ocasio-Cortez give me a little hope.

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez right to ask if the climate means we should have fewer children?

Ocasio-Cortez is not encouraging people stop having children. And as the leading advocate of the Green New Deal plan – which aims to radically transform the US economy by 2030 – she is one of the few politicians to be working on a plan that might just offer a way to avoid the worst impacts of this crisis.

She may seem extreme to some but we need more people like her that recognize the problem and are looking for ways to solve it. Not a bunch of ostriches who stand around with their head in the sand refusing to acknowledge that there even is an issue or worse yet, pass laws forbidding people from speaking about climate change.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Maybe rephrase the impact: "in 2025, our climate will have changed enough that America will have the climate Mexico had 100 years ago. Mexico is not a fertile "breadbasket" agriculture is hard, heat is oppressive. We will be depending on Canada for our crops. They will be the new America, and we'll just be just another Mexico."

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Maybe rephrase the impact: "in 2025, our climate will have changed enough that America will have the climate Mexico had 100 years ago. Mexico is not a fertile "breadbasket" agriculture is hard, heat is oppressive. We will be depending on Canada for our crops. They will be the new America, and we'll just be just another Mexico."

 

[Beebo Brink]

Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard': scientists | Reuters

OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

 

[Brenda Archer]

These swaths of San Francisco could be underwater in just 70 years, extreme models suggest
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/climate-change-sea-level-rise-models-underwater-13595207.php

IMAGE 1 OF 32
San Francisco in 2100 - modeled by Climate CentralGoogle Earth images show San Francisco now, and how it could look by 2100. The 2100 images were modeled by Climate Central using NOAA data and represent a worst-case scenario for sea level rise in San Francisco.In this extreme scenario, which is highly unlikely yet now being researched as scientifically plausible, the Antarctic ice sheet would have to begin collapsing, triggering a sea level rise of 10-12 feet for most coastal states.

 

[Clara D.]

I, for one, will welcome our syrup-drinking overlords.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Climate Change Confirms It’s Happy To Wait Until World Has Better Leaders