Climate - Page 2

Ransacking Russia’s Ancient Forests

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*Each year, Man steals $400 billion of wild animals and ancient forests from Nature. In fact, 15 percent, or, 1.14 billion people, rise each morning to kill the planet. Much of this rapacious looting is controlled by organized crime.

Since 1970, 60% of wildlife on land is gone and it’s far worse under the sea, according to the 2018 Living Planet Report from the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF). Insect populations, too, have crashed. 250 billion metric tons annually of deadly Man-made chemicals along with the accelerated ocean heat from combustion of fossil fuels have taken a hideous toll on all earth-bound life.

Beyond toxic chemicals and unrelenting heat, destruction of habitat is also accelerating globally. For example, 104 football fields a minute of ancient forests are razed, 24/7/365.

The most perfect flying rivers and CO2 warehouses, the planet’s terrestrial climate stabilizers, are under siege like never before.

No ancient forests. No animals. No insects. No freshwater. No life.

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Losing Your Mind, Fossil Fuel Smog

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*Today, most of civilization exists within congested smoggy cities. Fossil fuel air pollution, including filthy diesel fumes loaded with fine particles of nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide, are quickly crippling, dogs, bees and man.

About two decades ago in Mexico City, my colleagues began investigating an increasing number of howling frightened dogs that grew disoriented and incapable of recognizing their owners.

They examined the dog’s brains and found them coated with the protein amyloid beta, or, plaque, linked with Alzheimer’s disease. The dogs, they concluded after further experiments, had lost their minds from breathing the exhaust fumes of fossil fuel combustion.

Fossil Fuel Pollution - Bees
Bees pollinate most of the 80,000 species of trees on Earth. Image credit: Reese Halter

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Fossil Fuels Poisoning Children

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*In 2018, we learned the ubiquitous extent of fossil fuel poisons. It is now so egregious that before a human fetus is even born, it’s toxic from fossil fuel pollution.

In April, the Health Effects Institute yearly State of the Global Air revealed that 95 percent of all humans, or, 7.2 billion people, are non-stop inhaling putrid fossil fuel air above the World Health Organization’s “safe level.”

Fossil Fuels - New Delhi pollution
Half of New Delhi’s 4.4 million schoolchildren have permanently stunted lung development from breathing fossil fuel pollution. Image credit: VOA News

Also in April, a research team led by the University of Montana found that 99.5 percent of 203 autopsies from Mexico City, ages ranging from 11 months to 40 years old, possessed the telltales of Alzheimer’s disease in their brainstems from breathing poisonous fossil fuel air. The scientists concluded that those children and young adults also faced an elevated risk of suicide.

Children in cities are at risk of losing their minds from breathing air, their birthright. Hideous.

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Fossil Fuel Pollution – Raging British Columbia Fires

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Fossil Fuel Pollution - Raging British Columbia Fires

*3,000 intrepid firefighters are battling more than 500 apocalyptic firestorms spread across the massive forested Canadian province of British Columbia.

Thick smoke is blanketing millions of urban dwellers from Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to Seattle, WA. That smoke has spread thousands of miles eastward across Canada and the U.S.

Thick forest fire smoke is choking the southwest of British Columbia and the northwest of Washington state. Photo credit: NASA

For the elderly, the children, the outdoor workers and anyone afflicted with respiratory, e.g. asthma, or heart ailments, it’s a crisis. They are advised to stay indoors and keep windows shut tight. It’s a nightmare for all the animals. While this year’s area of scorched forests (about a million acres) is far less than the record of last year (more than three million acres), BC is in a state of emergency. Keep Reading

Unprecedented Crime, Climate in Crisis

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*A new book “Unprecedented Crime” by climate scientist Dr Peter Carter and researcher Elizabeth Woodworth is a vital addition to our understanding the climate in crisis.

This is a well researched and written account of the present fossil fuel-induced catastrophe befalling all life on Earth. It’s a story interwoven with reverence for our mother, Nature. With over 100 years of combined research experience, this book is rich.

The more subsidized climate-wrecking fossil fuels burned, the more extreme weather occurrences. From the horrendous hurricanes to the epic floods, heatwaves, droughts, firestorms and terrifying tornadoes, they all piled up in 2017.

Unprecedented explains these events and then easily connects the dots.

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Endless Hideous Heatwaves

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*Unrelenting heatwaves and hellfires are raging around the globe. August has commenced where July’s fury ended, more furnace-like heat.

This weekend Spain and Portugal may set an all-time European heat record eclipsing Athens, Greece, at 118.4 Fahrenheit (F), recorded on July 10, 1977.

Heatwaves in Europe
A humongous deadly heatwave is blanketing southwestern Europe. Photo credit: Met Office

It’s not just that a North African high is pumping scalding bone-dry air and mega tons of dust over the Iberian Peninsula. It’s also that the fire risk is extreme. 20 percent of Portugal is tinderbox dry.  11,000 intrepid firefighters and 56 water-bombing aircrafts are on emergency standby to combat forest fires.

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Hell-Fire: New Not Normal Firestorms

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*Help, the planet is on fire. From Siberia to the Congo Basin and the Arctic to Brazil and much in between, the onslaught of terrestrial and marine heatwaves is ubiquitous.

World Fire Map - Hell-fire

The oceans, which drive the climate, are supercharged with fossil fuel heat. 300 zettajoules of man-made heat have lambasted our planet. All life lives within a habitable range of temperatures. Once that range is exceeded, death occurs.

Instead of heeding thousands of scientific warnings urging all nations to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the opposite has occurred. Keep Reading

Climate Crisis – Heatwaves, Firestorms, Failing Crops

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Heatwave - Climate Change

*The planet is exhibiting telltale symptoms of our addiction to burning climate-wrecking fossil fuels: hellacious wildfires, unrelenting heat, sweltering Arctic temperatures and withering crops in northern Europe. We are in a climate crisis!

14 million people in the megalopolis of London braced themselves for record-breaking heat, dubbed “Furnace Friday.” Combustion-induced smog levels soared exacerbated by extreme heat. Intense demand for power had emergency services on red alert. Hospitals contended with many heatwave casualties. 90,000 lightning strikes, flash flooding and wildfires ravaged sun-baked Britain in an unforgettable week of Mother’s Nature’s unbridled overheated wrath.

Burnt Cars from Greece's July 2018 Firestorm - Climate Change
Apocalyptic fiery images of burnt cars from Greece’s firestorm of July 23, 2018. Photo credit: The Guardian

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Hot As Hell, Everywhere

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Hot as Hell - Boy in Water

*12 footballs fields a minute are incinerating in California’s latest wildfires,  adding to the 104 football fields furiously felled every minute, 24/7/365, on our ailing overheated planet.

When heat and drought collide firestorms erupt across the western United States and elsewhere on the globe. The higher the mercury soars, the quicker the fine fuels in the forest become tinder-dry kindling, especially amidst a drought.

Hot as Hell - Map
Photo Credit: Weather Channel

113 million Americans are blanketed by a massive heat dome. It stretches from the Mississippi Valley up to Philadelphia, Chicago and arches over to New York City, Boston, Baltimore and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Temperatures are soaring into triple digits, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (F) above normal.
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Republicans Ransacking Nature

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Dead Fish - Photo credit: Warren Carlton

*Last week, along the southern border of America, refugees were separated and children were caged. Shock and outrage ricocheted around the world. Under the cover of chaos the Republicans pushed through two atrocious assaults on our mother, Nature.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which washed away President Barack Obama’s emphasis on ocean conservation and a plan to mitigate the climate in crisis.

Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama, Dr Jane Lubchenco said, “The policy reflects a shift from ‘use it without using it up’ to a very short-sighted and cavalier ‘use it aggressively and irresponsibly’.”

Trump’s policy increases slaughtering the ocean and it greenlights more subsidized fossil fuel seismic surveys. It’s in keeping with his election promise to unlock $50 trillion of U.S. oil and gas.

In so doing, Trump is impoverishing all sea life by increasing ocean acidity and decreasing ocean oxygen.

Dissolved Shells - Article: Ransacking Nature
53 percent of free-swimming snails sampled off the west coast of the U.S. had severely dissolved shells. Photo credit: NOAA

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Silk Road to Hell

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Silk Road to Hell

*Despite our planetary climate emergency, the first and third largest economies on the globe are moving at the speed of light to extract and burn all available fossil fuels. The consequences are hideous.

China’s One Belt One Road, a 21st century Silk Road, is linking 71 countries with rapid rail-lines and new supertanker ports. China is spending $1 trillion on its infrastructure to add an additional $2.5 trillion to its 11 trillion GDP thereby narrowing the gap on the European Union, the second largest economy.

This plan requires mega zettajoules of fossil fuel energy. It’s an expansion of the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent, with 1,600 new coal power stations in 62 countries. Keep Reading

Aussie Glimpse at a 2.4C World

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Sydney Australia Skyline

There is a revived fossil fuel fever taking hold of the climate Down Under.

Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which triggers the release of two other planetary, heat-trapping gases: methane and nitrous oxide. These three gases together are known as CO2 equivalent (CO2eq).

Currently, CO2eq is 495 parts per million and rising. According to the 2007 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, Earth is committed to a temperature increase of at least 2.4C (4.3F), which translates into climate instability with more frequent and intense extreme weather e.g. heatwaves, droughts, firestorms, insect epidemics and flooding.

Dead mangroves in Queensland Australia
Photo credit: digitaljournal.com Tatiana Gerus. 200,000 people from 22 towns were affected from extreme weather, torrential rains and flooding, December 30, 2010.

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Toxic Tar Sands Cooking Our Planet

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Arctic

On February 24, 2018, the mercury at the Cape Morris Jesup weather station, northern Greenland, soared to 43 degrees (F), 70 degrees above normal – unprecedented. During that month, temperatures in northern Greenland were above freezing for 61 hours, three times the number of hours in any previous year. Terrifying. Our planetary life support systems are rapidly overheating, deteriorating, dying, and dead.

Emaciated Polar Bear
Photo credit: inhabit.com photographer Kerstin Langenberger
As the Arctic melts, the incidence of starving polars will escalate quickly. How much longer will people turn a blind eye to the death of animals and plants as Earth’s rising temperature accelerates from burning fossil fuels?

The Arctic is warming twice as quickly as any other region on the globe. For example, the Arctic has just experienced its warmest winter on record. February Arctic sea ice cover was 521,000 square miles (almost twice the area of Texas) below its normal – the lowest monthly record ever witnessed. At the South Pole, the summer Antarctic sea ice cover reached its minimum extent, the second lowest since the inception of satellite data.

The missing Arctic sea ice and the heat escaping from the Arctic Ocean into the atmosphere is unhinging the polar jet stream. It’s linked to record-breaking flooding, firestorms, heatwaves, droughts, torrential rains, blizzards and even China’s airpocalypse.

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New Skyscrapers Fueling Arctic Meltdown

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Skyscrapers and Arctic

* 2017 set a record for the most skyscrapers built in a single year – 144. 2018 is predicted to eclipse it by reaching 160 superstructures. Happy dance. Not.

The fossil fuel energy necessary to produce the concrete and steel in each of those 144 edifices, located in 69 cities (many of which sit empty in China), is cooking our planet alive.

China Concrete Usage
China Used More Concrete in 3 Years than America Used in the 20th Century

In 2018, the Arctic had its warmest winter on record at least 10º(F) above normal. The Arctic is missing 62,000 square miles of ice below last year’s record low.

Minus the ice, the latent heat from the Arctic Ocean transfers immense amounts of energy into the troposphere. It supercharges the polar jet stream which now meanders 10, 20 and even 30º southward, off course. This wayward polar jet stream has unleashed deadly and wild weather around the globe, including recent snowfalls in London and Rome. Keep Reading

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