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I was taught to respect my elders. The world’s largest coral reef system, or, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is about 8,000 old. It is sacred, yet it has been horribly abused. Consequently, the GBR is terminally ill.
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From Florida to Western Australia, our brethren and sistren, the bottlenose dolphins, are dying horribly. The culprits are the moneyed, banker-backed, government subsidized villains: Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.
Each second, the heat from combusting fossil fuels is the equivalent of dropping five Hiroshima-style bombs into the oceans. Since 1994, that’s 3.6 billion atomic bombs worth of fossil fuel heat absorbed by the oceans. The oceans drive Earth’s habitable climate.
For every 1oC (1.8oF) increase, Earth’s atmosphere holds seven percent more moisture. Hence there are more extreme climate rain events today compared with a quarter century ago.
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Alberta’s expensive, dirty, planetary-fricasseeing, water-ruining tar sands is a non-starter even with many billions of taxpayers subsidies that failed to prop up multi-national corporations with a nationalized pipeline. And now, 330 billion gallons of hideous carcinogenic poisons from giant tailing ponds (visible from space) are seeping into the waterways that empty into the Western Arctic Ocean.
If gooey water-contaminating oil deposits won’t work then how about dynamiting mountaintops, digging up coal and sullying another 100 billion gallons of alpine and glacier meltwater that eventually drains into Hudson Bay, the Eastern Arctic Ocean?
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What will it take for the Gen Zs (under 26s) to have a habitable planet?
Switching the metric of progress from uncontrolled growth (the gross domestic product, or, GDP) to citizen wellbeing is an essential first step for the Gen Z’s survival.
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The heat from fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion stored within the oceans (equivalent to dropping five Hiroshima atomic bombs every five seconds nonstop) is supercharging these god-awful climate hurricanes and climate fires.
Today, tropical storms are rapidly intensifying into hurricanes and typhoons. In addition, global heating is slowing down these tempests, which means they have become more torrential, violent and deadly.
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Gen Zs (<26 year olds) are rescuing and breaking new ground within the queendom of our sistren, the bees.
Honeybees have a remarkably complex language. It includes dancing, headbutting and scaling vibrations. Each intriguing maneuver conveys specific and precise meaning. For example, when honeybees encounter giant Asian hornets their vibrational dialect quickly pulses up the scale. That is, the higher the pitch, the greater the peril.
Honeybees can communicate danger better than any other of the 900,000 or so kinds of insects. That’s why scientists are paying close attention to the bees because they spotlight toxicity within the environment. It’s high time for the lawmakers globally to ban all these deadly nerve poisons that are killing bees and birds, e.g., neonicotinoids, sulfoxaflors, flupyradifurone and chlorpyrifos.
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From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck.
This Monday evening, satellite data from Hurricane Eta revealed sustained winds of 190 mph (306 kph) at its core. This climate hurricane in the North Atlantic was the strongest storm so far recorded, and the only Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic during November.
On Tuesday, Eta delivered an unsurvivable 21-foot (6.4 m) storm surge to northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 500,000 children (Gen Zs) were in danger of becoming climate refugees.
Meanwhile, Eta has left the ravaged landfall and is drawing energy from the warm Caribbean Sea while moving slowly northeast towards the Florida Keys.
Why has Earth’s climate changed so radically in such a short span of time? The elephant in the living room is combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets chopped up from old-growth forests. That accumulated heat is being stored deep within the oceans. Over the previous 25 years, that heat is the equivalent of dropping 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bombs. The oceans drive Earth’s climate, which has become unstable with both higher highs and lower lows.
Even to the untrained eye, the effects of climate instability are highly conspicuous across western North America’s cold tolerant and hardy coniferous forests.
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The pharmaceutical gold rush to invent an antidote for the highly infectious airborne coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has set its sights on devouring the most perfect fish to swim the seas: the shark.
Some of the 176 coronavirus vaccine trials are using an oily animal hydrocarbon found in deepsea shark livers called squalene. Squalene is believed to improve the human response of the antigen (toxin) within the dose.
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Nestled along 500 miles of Alaska’s verdant Inside Passage there are spellbinding skyscraper Sitka spruce, giant western hemlocks, colossal western redcedars and weathered 1,800-year-old yellow cedars. The hallowed old-growth temperate rainforest is ruled by the monarchs of nature, three-quarter ton grizzly bears. Altogether, some 17 million dripping, breathing, climate-making Mother Earth forested acres are guarding a whopping eight percent of all the carbon held in the United States. The Tongass National Forest is America’s Amazon rainforest. It contains about one-third of the sanctified old-growth temperate forests left on our man-besieged planet. That priceless rainforest is every American (and planetary) Gen Zs birthright, and Donald J. Trump, the chief promoter of extinction, has just signed off on the death warrants for more than half of it, some 9 million acres.
