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Beebo Brink

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Beebo Brink

Climate Apocalypse Alarmist
Joined
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Messages
5,488
SL Rez
2006
Washington Post: Carbon dioxide spikes to critical record, halfway to doubling preindustrial levels
Data obtained from glacial ice cores indicates that modern-day CO2 levels are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.
The Guardian:
At pre-lockdown rates of increase, within five years atmospheric CO2 will pass 427 parts per million, which was the probable peak of the mid-Pliocene warming period 3.3m years ago, when temperatures were 3C to 4C hotter and sea levels were 20 metres higher than today.
 
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WolfEyes

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Hazardous spill in Florida highlights environmental threat decades in the making (msn.com)




When a tear in the lining of a wastewater pool at a former phosphate plant threatened to unleash a 20-foot wave of contaminated water into neighborhoods in Piney Point, Florida, officials had no choice but to pump millions of gallons of the water into Port Manatee, a cargo port along the eastern shore of Tampa Bay.

The transfer of 165 million gallons into the bay averted catastrophe. But scientists and state officials are now urgently monitoring the bay’s water quality, fearful that nutrients in the wastewater could lead to harmful algal blooms and disrupt the bay’s marine ecosystem.


The 77-acre containment pond contains a mix of seawater, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Before the tear, first reported on March 25, it held 480 million gallons of wastewater. It is unclear how much of the remaining 303 million gallons will need to be drained to allow engineers to stabilize the pond, but some scientists and environmentalists are speculating all 480 million gallons might have to go.

“If they drain the whole pond, it’s basically the equivalent of a year’s worth of [nutrient pollution] being delivered from one source over a two-week period,” says Maya Burke, the assistant director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.

The effect could be a disaster for marine life. Just like they help crops grow in fields, these nutrients fuel explosive growth in algae, which in turn can kill an unknown portion of the bay’s wildlife, become a human health hazard, and jeopardize local businesses. In a worst-case scenario, the nutrients could cause a “red tide”—a toxic algal bloom of the kind that in the past have wreaked havoc on Florida’s coastlines, killing fish, shellfish, turtles, dolphins, and manatees.
 

Beebo Brink

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Another exclamation of "this could happen sooner than anyone had dared to imagine" -- added to the pile of hundreds that came before it. Apparently our species is severely lacking in imagination because climate change has already been happening waaaay faster for over a decade now, yet we keep being surprised when it keeps on doing that.
 

Grandma Bates

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The NY Times has an interesting article about the mitigation strategies that helped reduce the impact of the outbreak of locusts in Northeast Africa last year. The outbreak was due to irregular weather, and there have been warnings that this kind of phenomena may be more likely in the future due to changes in climate patterns. Some of the actions that people took to track the swarms and inform others made a huge difference on the impact of the event, and one of the themes of the article is that as we see more changes these kinds of strategies may have to be adapted more widely.

 

Grandma Bates

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The periodical Scientific American has signed on to a statement calling for the press to refer to the current situation as a climate emergency rather use phrases designed to avoid political backlash from science deniers. American news outlets are still trying to figure out how to avoid triggering conservative snowflakes who seek to embrace a lie at the expense of the common good, and this is a needed but small step forward.

 

Beebo Brink

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“We’d know for a long time there was erosion but the pace of it caught everyone by surprise,” said Andy Nash, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Boston office. “We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn’t have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem.”