State of the Climate

Stop me if you've heard this one--summer ice melt in part of Antarctica is the most extensive in a thousand years. Arctic summer sea ice is melting faster than previously believed, and scientists now expect that it will be gone completely in 2050.

A Peruvian glacier has melted 1600 years worth of ice in the last 25.  Professor Wagstaff (author of the article in The Week) sees this as A Bad Omen.

NPR reports: "The Earth's wettest regions are likely to get wetter while the most arid will get drier due to warming of the atmosphere caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, according to a new NASA analysis of more than a dozen climate models."

The LA Times, looking at the same report, emphasizes droughts in temperate areas, and includes a little interactive feature, "Your Take," asking the question: "Will we be able to limit the worst effects of climate change?" Yes? No?  Because why would we take the word of people who might know what they're talking about?

Health experts in the UK warn that the climate crisis could bring malaria and other nasty pest-borne diseases that now bedevil the tropics. California and Arizona are already seeing increases in the normally unfamiliar valley fever, due to persistent drought.  Yet another tree-killing insect is threatening new areas--this time in cities--because of climate heating.

And carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is zooming past the levels humanity has ever seen, and may hit the magic in a bad way number of 400 parts per million, this month.  Scientists, says the NY Times, are Alarmed.  Update: The 400 has in fact been reached, as reported on 5/10.

What's potentially even worse--yes, worse--is the CO2 stored in the oceans.  As hot as it's been getting, the oceans have actually lessened the effects of global heating over the past decade by storing more C02 than usual, but when it returns to its usual behavior--or simply has stored so much in its depths that it rises up and out--global heating will resume increasing, and probably faster.

The Arctic Ocean is already showing other effects of heating, such as higher acid content, that won't be reversed for thousands of years.

So back in March the Biggest Picture study so far was announced--covering some 11,000 years (here's a q and a explanation of the study)-- and this chart was widely (if briefly) disseminated.  Possibly because even chartphobics like me get the picture.

Looking at this and all the data, a no-nonsense, thoroughly rational scientist evaluated it and concluded: Compared to the past, what’s happening in the present is scary. The future is scary as hell.

Still, that spike at the end he said might be overstated, for various scientific, chartcentric reasons.  However he provides another chart that he says is probably more accurate, but is basically just as scary:

Look at the spike at the end. The big, and most importantly the steep, scary spike at the end. That’s not an artifact of the way proxy ages were computed, or how the reconstruction was done, or the effect of proxy drop-out as records become more sparse in the later period. It’s what the thermometers say. Ignore them at your peril. As scary as that is, what’s far more frightening is that it’s not going to stop.

He concludes (repeating himself a bit, but the bolding is his:)

In the span of a century or two, man-made changes to the atmosphere wiped out 5,000 years of natural climate change. People can argue about the uptick at the end of the Marcott reconstruction — I’ll do so myself — but for most who do so, it’s just an attempt to divert attention from the fact that global temperature really has increased in the last century, at a speed not seen in at least the last 11,300 years. We know this, thermometers have made it plain, only those in denial still deny it.
We are changing the climate rapidly — on the geologic time scale, in the blink of an eye. This is exactly the kind of rapid change which has caused extinction events in the past. What’s far more frightening is that it’s not going to stop.

So the argument against this overwhelming evidence is ever more obviously, I just don't believe it, science is divided (yeah, 99.9% v. cranks and folks on petroleum payrolls) and I'm just not...going to...listen.

Nor am I going to let anybody else hear about this.  Denialists and other reactionary GOPers have pretty effectively prevented the climate crisis from being taught or talked about in schools.Some two-thirds of public school students aren't learning about it in school.   That's the subtext of this NPR piece on a traveling climate education project.   But one barnstorming guy is not really much.  More may be on the way, as new nationwide science standards recommend teaching about the climate crisis--for the first time.

But we can look on the bright side--we aren't Saturn!  Not yet!  We may be having bizarre rain and snowstorms in the Midwest, fires in California way early in the season, etc.  But we don't get hurricanes anywhere near the size of the one pictured at the top (in a false color photo from the Cassini spacecraft), which is 30 times larger and has winds twice as fast as the biggest Terran hurricane.  On the other hand, it's only called a hurricane. Our hurricanes need water and Saturn has very very little.  Scientists don't have any idea how that works.  Unfortunately, they know all too well how stuff works here.