Category Archives: Sea Level Rise

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Ocean Acidification, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Humanity needs to change course immediately on climate change

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This report from the United Nations is sobering:

U.N. Says World Has 10 Months to Get Serious on Climate Goals

“The language of diplomacy rarely allows for a true sense of emotion or urgency. But reading between the lines of the latest report commissioned by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the body representing the 197 member nations of the Paris Agreement to minimize a global average temperature rise this century—the message is clear. The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century.”

As described many times in this blog, there are steps that humanity could take (e.g. the immediate halt to fossil fuel usage and the immediate initiation of direct carbon dioxide capture from the atmosphere). But humanity shows little interest in averting the catastrophe that is approaching. Even though we know what will happen, and even though it will cause trillions of dollars in damage along with the displacement of millions of people, humanity seems unable to take action.

At this point it is difficult to imagine anything that would cause humanity to change course in any significant way. And what is really needed is an intense effort, similar to space program in the United States in the 1960s, where significant funding and hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers are dedicated to the task of solving and then reversing climate change.

See also: ‘Mutual suicide’: US issues stark warning on climate change

“Failing to address climate change is “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact”, said Kerry. “We bury our heads in the sand at our own peril. It’s urgent to treat the climate crisis as the urgent security threat that it is.””

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

The collapse of the Gulf Stream

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Several articles appeared this week talking about the weakening of the Gulf Stream, a river of warm water that flows from the Gulf of Mexico northward. Climate change is affectin g the flow, and if the flow stops then it will have unpredictable but likely catastrophic effects on the Earth’s weather, oceans and marine life.

Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists

Scientists predict that the AMOC will weaken further if global heating continues, and could reduce by about 34% to 45% by the end of this century, which could bring us close to a “tipping point” at which the system could become irrevocably unstable. A weakened Gulf Stream would also raise sea levels on the Atlantic coast of the US, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The “end of the century” part is interesting, but there is reason to believe that it could happen much quicker. Another article:

A Major Ocean Current May Be Hurtling Towards Collapse

“The AMOC is at risk of collapsing when a certain level of freshwater flow into the North Atlantic from increasing ice melt in Greenland is reached,” Johannes Lohmann, one of the authors of the study, said in an email. “These tipping points have been shown previously in climate models, where meltwater is very slowly introduced into the ocean. In reality, increases in meltwater from Greenland are accelerating and cannot be considered slow.”

There is no way to stop the collapse of the Gulf Stream without ending the burning of fossil fuels, along with the removal of excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Sea Level Rise

John Kerry (Special Envoy for Climate) gives us 9 years to get our climate act together

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According to John Kerry, we have 9 years to start getting out act together and 29 years to hit net-zero on Carbon:

Kerry warns the US has 9 years to avoid worst climate consequences

From the article:

““The scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” Kerry said. The former secretary of State appeared to be referring to a 2018 United Nations report, which warned that global emissions needed to decrease 45 percent by 2030 in order to avert 1.5 degrees of global warming… “We all need to develop not just a number but a road map for how we will actually make the dramatic progress we need to make over the next 10 years and what we will specifically do to get to net-zero by no later than 2050,” Kerry stated.”

The question that many experts are exploring now is, “have we already stretched nature so far that 1.5 degrees is impossible without drastic measures.

What Kerry should instead be doing is taking a big leap and advocating dramatic global measures. Net Zero should be happening in 10 years, not 30, and CO2 needs to be extracted from the atmosphere to boot. Fossil fuel consumption must end quickly and completely, and we must remediate the carbon dioxide we have already released. Why should Kerry do this?

  • We have to do this if the planet is to survive
  • Dramic steps like this will drive publicity
  • If we turn on crisis mode behaviors, there is some hope that humanity can get the job done.

Trillions of dollars or infrastructure, millions of human lives and quadrillions of plant/animal lives are at stake. Humans must take drastic steps, and Kerry should be leading the charge globally.

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry at Climate Adaptation Summit

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

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If humanity could fully appreciate everything that this video is saying, we would understand that the situation with Earth’s climate is devolving very quickly and we need to take immediate, dramatic steps to reverse climate change:

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

How do we get humanity to change course? Somehow we would need to start with the developed world – countries like the United Stets and Europe. And then they could provide solutions to the developing world to eliminate all fossil fuels.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Clean energy, Global Warming, Government, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

We are headed in a direction where large areas the planet become unihabitable

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Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable

“In a report for the sustainability group Future Earth, a survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, freshwater shortages and the broad degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems “have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse.” A 2019 report from the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, a think tank in Australia, projected that a rapidly warming world of depleted resources and mounting pollution would lead to “a largely uninhabitable Earth” and a “breakdown of nations and the international order.” Analysts in the U.S. and British military over the past two years have issued similar warnings of climate- and environment-driven chaos.”

It gets worse:

“If you are a nonhuman species, collapse is well underway. Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie in North America is gone, by one estimate; 96% of the biomass of mammals — biomass is their weight on Earth — now consists of humans, our pets and our farm animals; nearly 90% of the fish stocks the U.N. monitors are either fully exploited, over exploited or depleted; a multiyear study in Germany showed a 76% decline in insect biomass.”

It will not be long before the Amazon rainforest and similar large ecosystems start collapsing and turning into deserts. Once that happens, equatorial regions are likely to become so hot that nothing can survive. Once that happens the oceans heat up to the point where they become uninhabitable as well. Melting ice raises sea levels a hundred feet or more and it is game-over for modern civilization as we know it.

What is so incredibly depressing here is that humanity could bind together and start correcting these problems. Humanity could:

All of these steps are within our grasp. But can humanity get its act together and undertake any of them?

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Sea Level Rise, Tsunamis

A well-placed tsunami can wreak gigantic damage

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The 2011 tsunami in Japan was an apocalyptic event for several parts of the country. Even though some of these areas had walls to protect against tsunamis, this tsunami easily overtopped them (as seen here around the 6 minute point). The rushing water in multiple locations across Japan caused unprecedented damage and over 15,000 deaths. This video captures one small part of the tragedy:

Japan Tsunami 2011

Same tsunami hitting another Japanese city:

Tsunami in Kesennuma city, ascending the Okawa river

What has happened here is that an earthquake off the coast of Japan has pushed a massive tectonic plate upward by several feet. All of the water above the plate – many cubic miles of water – has been pushe up as well, and the excess spreads out in all directions. Parts of the excess are what we see here.

The problem for any human decision-makers is that tsunamis are infrequent and unpredictable events, and it is incredibly expensive (and ugly) to build tall concreate walls that may not be used for decades . Unfortunately, short of moving the city out of harm’s way, there is no alternative to expensive, ugly walls for tsunami-prone areas.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Hurricanes & Cyclones, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Climate Change will force human migration in 3 ways: Flooding, drought and heat

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There are three big things that will force human beings out of one area and into another:

  • Flooding – Climate change can cause flooding either by raising sea levels or increasing rains (e.g. hurricanes)
  • Drought – Climate change causes areas that once received rain to dry up. Rainforest collapse is the most dramatic example, but simple rainfall pattern change is another.
  • Heat – As the planet warms, equatorial regions will eventually become so hot that humans can no longer tolerate or work in the heat.

All three of these effects will cause climate migration, by millions and millions of people. The people who are migrating will have no choice, because the alternative is death.

Take a country like Bangladesh. Much of Bangladesh is highly susceptible to sea level rise, and much of Bangladesh is hot and humid, so rising temperatures will eventually make it virtually uninhabitable. 160 million people live in Bangladesh, and most are in poverty already. Given this, the headline is probably understating things:

Climate change could create 63 million migrants in South Asia by 2050

The growing impacts of climate change have already pushed more than 18 million people to migrate within South Asian countries, but that could more than triple in three decades if global warming continues on its current path, researchers warned on Friday. Nearly 63 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 in the region as rising seas and rivers swallow villages, and drought-hit land no longer supports crops, said ActionAid International and Climate Action Network South Asia in a report. The projection does not include those who will be forced to flee sudden disasters such as floods and cyclones and so is likely an under-estimate, noted Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid. He said the situation could become “catastrophic”.

The obvious solution is to try to limit the damage that climate change causes by:

  1. Stopping the combustion of all fossil fuels
  2. Pulling carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere

Unfortunately, there are many economic forces and powers that want to move in the opposite direction:

‘Grossly Insufficient’: ExxonMobil Lambasted Over Emissions Reduction Plan That Pledges No Reduction in Absolute Emissions

ExxonMobil’s Monday announcement of new targets for addressing greenhouse gas emissions was met with derision by climate advocates who called the plan “too little, too late.”

There is something Exxon could do to help migitgate the problems it has created. Exxon could develop and sell a carbon neutral gasoline substitute. In this way, all of the existing pipelines and gas stations and vehicles could still operate, while not adding any more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Using solar, wind or nuclear power, there is definitely a pathway toward achieving this. For example, the U.S. Navy has demonstrated how to make jet fuel out of seawater.

What If We Powered the Planet With Seawater?
How Big Can Wind Turbines Get?

There are several other approaches that can make synthetic gasoline as well. Exxon (and other oil companies need to scale them up and sell synthetic gasoline instead of fossil fuel gasoline.

Then humanity needs to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a massive scale:

Carbon Engineering | Direct Air Capture Technology

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Is the loss of arctic ice the true harbinger of the climate apocolypse?

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Is the loss of arctic ice the true harbinger of the climate apocolypse? Probably:

Blue Ocean Event : Game Over?

From the description:

A Blue Ocean Event, or Ice-Free Arctic, is the source of almost fever pitch speculation in the climate science world. The consequences of the disappearance of sea ice from the arctic ocean, however briefly, at the end of a summer melt season some time in the not too distant future, are potentially very ominous for the way we organise our human socio-economic structures today. This week, we consider what those consequences may look like.

It truly is a frightening prospect. Without artic ice to cool things off, temperatures in the northern hemisphere can go haywire and permafrost will melt, releasing gigatons of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop. It is both terrifying and deeply depressing, because it appears that humanity (though politics, lack of leadership, lobbying, inertia, ignorance, indifference, corporate power in the fossil fuel industries, etc.) will be unable to take any coordinated action to turn things around.

See also: Global warming has profoundly transformed Arctic in just 15 years, report warns

The Arctic as we once knew it, an inhospitable, barely accessible and icebound place, is gone. Climate change has transformed it into a region that can heat up to 100 degrees, is beset by ferocious wildfires, and is covered in permafrost that is no longer permanent. The sea ice cover that has long defined the Far North is fast disappearing. This is the picture from a new international scientific assessment released Tuesday. The 2020 Arctic Report Card, a report led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) involving 133 scientists from 15 countries, points to trends that, with each passing year, have grown more extreme and have far-reaching implications for people living far outside the region, including in the Lower 48 states.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Global Warming, Hurricanes & Cyclones, Mass Extinction, Ocean Acidification, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Humans continue burning fossil fuels despite the obvious stupidity of doing so

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Such a depressing headline:

World is ‘doubling down’ on fossil fuels despite climate crisis – Production must fall by 6% a year to avoid ‘severe climate disruption’ but Covid-19 funding is supporting increases

The world’s governments are “doubling down” on fossil fuels despite the urgent need for cuts in carbon emissions to tackle the climate crisis, a report by the UN and partners has found. The researchers say production of coal, oil and gas must fall by 6% a year until 2030 to keep global heating under the 1.5C target agreed in the Paris accord and avoid “severe climate disruption”. But nations are planning production increases of 2% a year and G20 countries are giving 50% more coronavirus recovery funding to fossil fuels than to clean energy.

The headline, however, is not nearly strong enough. The reality is that fossil fuel burning should be reduced to zero immediately, and humanity must start sucking excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Otherwise the planet faces an unstoppable cascade of catastrophic effects including:

As discussed in the book, humanity somehow needs to transform its thinking to a wartime posture against climate in order to prevent all of these cataclysms from occurring. If we do not take immediate action, the prospects are dire.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Automation economy, Global Warming, Mass Extinction, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Terrorism

Some people are so negative about the future that they stop having babies

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This article contains a shocking statistic:

Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – Survey of 600 people finds some parents regret having offspring for same reason

The statistic:

The study indicated that climate-related fears for their children’s lives were rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the future. Of the 400 respondents who offered a vision of the future, 92.3% were negative, 5.6% were mixed or neutral, and just 0.6% were positive.

92% of people surveyed have a negative view of the future. Less than 1% are positive! Unbelievable. But it makes sense when you start adding up the imminent doomsday scenarios that humanity is facing: The many facets of climate change, the economic effects of robots, the destructive power of inequality, terrorism, etc.

Meanwhile, the babies that are born grow up to become terrified young people as described here.

The doomsday book describes all of these problems, and also offers solutions for many of them, if humanity can get organized and unified enough to implement the solutions.

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.