Global Climate Change Science News

[pErvinalia]

That's crazy. But it was really cold here last night.

[Svartalf]

weird, I slept all night with windows open and without the doona...

[Brian Peacock]

Greta Thunberg fined for disobeying Swedish police at climate protest: Activist had pleaded not guilty on grounds she acted out of necessity at demonstration that blocked oil trucks in Malmö.

ClientEarth loses high court fight with Shell over climate strategy: Environmental law charity claims energy firm cannot achieve net zero goal with current transition plan.

[Brian Peacock]

Scientists discover 36-million-year geological cycle that drives biodiversity

Movement in the Earth's tectonic plates indirectly triggers bursts of biodiversity in 36‑million-year cycles by forcing sea levels to rise and fall, new research has shown.

Researchers including geoscientists at the University of Sydney believe these geologically driven cycles of sea level changes have a significant impact on the diversity of marine species, going back at least 250 million years.

As water levels rise and fall, different habitats on the continental shelves and in shallow seas expand and contract, providing opportunities for organisms to thrive or die. By studying the fossil record, the scientists have shown that these shifts trigger bursts of new life to emerge.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Associate Professor Slah Boulila from Sorbonne University in Paris.

Study co-author Professor Dietmar Müller, from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, said, "In terms of tectonics, the 36-million-year cycle marks alterations between faster and slower seafloor spreading, leading to cyclical depth changes in ocean basins and in the tectonic transfer of water into the deep Earth."...

[Brian Peacock]

Climate change extinction threat to double the number at risk
Mo Costandi, Nature, Jun 2023

Research emphasises urgent need for emission reduction targets

Global warming will expose thousands of species to dangerous temperatures in the coming decades, doubling the number of those at risk of extinction, according to new research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Human activity is believed to have increased the average global temperature by approximately 1ºC since pre-industrial times, and this anthropogenic climate change poses a major threat to the planet's biodiversity.

The new research suggests that this will worsen throughout the 21st century, during which the average global temperature is projected to rise a further 2.5ºC, and highlights the urgent need to reduce global carbon emissions and mitigate its impact on the environment.

Alex Pigot of University College London, and colleagues, used global climate models to predict how the geographical ranges of animal species will be exposed to dangerously high temperatures up to the year 2100. Geographical data on almost 36,000 species from land and sea environments, including amphibians, birds, cephalopods, corals, mammals, reef fish, seagrasses and zooplankton, was incorporated to model their exposure to dangerously high temperatures.

Data analysis show that the areas at risk of thermal exposure will expand abruptly, with more than half of the projected exposure occurring within a single decade. This will occur for all of the species studied, regardless of how widespread or rare they may be, or whether their geographical range is entirely or only partially exposed to dangerously high temperatures.

The number of species at risk of exposure to dangerously high temperatures will double, from less than 15% to more than 30%, such that the disruption or damage to key elements of the planet's ecosystem may pass a tipping point.*

The authors note that the abrupt and pervasive expansion of thermal exposure they have projected may be partly explained by the fact that their climate and geographical data consisted of relatively coarse 'grain size' of 100km-sized grids. Their projections do not take ecological interactions or evolutionary processes into account, which may either delay or amplify the risk of abrupt ecosystem collapse.

Climate change currently affects almost 11,000 species on the Red List of Threatened Species, increasing the likelihood of their extinction...

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d44148-023-00136-w

* my bold

[macdoc]

ugh

Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests
A collapse would bring catastrophic climate impacts but scientists disagree over the new analysis

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... y-suggests

[pErvinalia]

Fckn great.

[Sean Hayden]

Damn this heat! It’s still 95+ at 9:00pm every day now.

[macdoc]

High overnight temps are very damaging to the biome

[Sean Hayden]

I wonder if there’s a tendency to assume any mistakes in dire predictions will go our way when they’re corrected.

[Brian Peacock]

I wonder if there’s a tendency to assume any mistakes in dire predictions will go our way when they’re corrected.

Well, the explanations of the modelling in the current IPCC report are, apparently, rather conservative, with varying degrees of confidence depending on the specifics - i.e. time-scale or severity of this-or-that. However, I don't think we can assume that we'll have the time, economic structures, or political cohesion at some point in the future if we wait to see if things pan out better or worse, sooner or later than modelled. The consequences of even the best-case modelling are still pretty horrendous for potentially billions of people and for the biosphere, and those consequences are going to impact our resilience and adaptability regardless. Rapid transformative action now is simply the most rational, and the cheapest, thing to do.

[Woodbutcher]

I think mother earth has a fever caused by rapidly breeding human infestation. She will be coming up with a new form of a defense against that, possibly something comparable to white blood cells in our systems. Something causing cannibalism, or maybe religious wars.

[Tero]

“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” he said. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”

Donwahi said the world could not afford to ignore desertification. “We need to solve all the problems together. Desertification and drought leads to climate change, leads to loss of biodiversity. And when you have climate change you have droughts, floods, storms.

“It’s not only the poor countries, everybody is in the same boat [on food security]. Climate change, droughts, storms, floods don’t know any boundaries, they don’t need a visa to go into a country.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ion-expert

[Sean Hayden]

In short, there is a complex explanation for the complex weather patterns that have prevailed this summer. Multiple geologic, solar, meteorological, and atmospheric events have occurred simultaneously, resulting in unusually high summer temperatures obtaining over much of the world. Fossil fuel use does not cause volcanic eruptions, oceanic and wind current shifts, or changes in solar activity, thus climate change cannot fairly be blamed for the present pattern of heatwaves, which long-term data show have not increased.

Hot Summer Due to Many Factors—Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are Not One of Them

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2023/08/ ... e-of-them/

[Sean Hayden]

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