A young technician came by from a local vendor to service my 3 in1 printer. He said he understood climate change was a serious problem. I asked him is source of information, and he said, Youtube videos by some group he recommended but couldn’t recall. He looked it up on my computer, and it was Kursgesagt, and below is one of their videos. It turns out, it is run by Breakthrough Energy, which was founded by Bill Gates and friends.
Regarding Bill Gates, I just read his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need. It is excellent. So by the way, is this quirky video, which is stocked full for facts from an organization called Our World and Data.
WASHINGTON — Juliette Hart quit her job last summer as an oceanographer for the United States Geological Survey, where she used climate models to help coastal communities plan for rising seas. She was demoralized after four years of the Trump administration, she said, in which political appointees pressured her to delete or downplay mentions of climate change.
“It’s easy and quick to leave government, not so quick for government to regain the talent,” said Dr. Hart, whose job remains vacant.”
“Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.
Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.
But that’s only the beginning, according to the report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.”
“. . . . While the broad scientific understanding of climate change has not changed drastically in recent years, scientists have made several key advances. Computer models have become more powerful. And researchers have collected a wealth of new data, deploying satellites and ocean buoys and gaining a clearer picture of the Earth’s past climate by analyzing ice cores and peat bogs.
That has allowed scientists to refine their projections and conclude with greater precision that Earth is likely to warm between 2.5 degrees and 4 degrees Celsius for every doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
By Susan Joy Hassol, Kristie Ebi and Yaryna Serkez
Ms. Hassol is the director of the nonprofit organization Climate Communication. Dr. Ebi is a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. Ms. Serkez is a graphics editor for Opinion.
“Yes, it is getting hotter. And while you might be able to escape the intensifying tropical storms, flooding or droughts by moving elsewhere, refuge from extreme heat is no longer easy to find.
Even in Siberia.
Summers that seemed exceedingly hot 50 years ago are becoming much more commonplace. The extreme heat of that era — which had a chance of occurring of only one-tenth of 1 percent during the summer season — is now reached more than 20 percent of the time, according to calculations by the climate scientist James Hansen. That’s 200 times as often. And nights are warming faster than days, at nearly twice the rate. So much for relief.
And though the deadly, intense heat that baked the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada recently was startling, extremely hot temperatures have struck elsewhere in recent years, in surprising places and with calamitous consequences.
This should be reason enough — along with the recent disastrous floods in China, Germany and other European countries — to move quickly to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming.”
By Susan Joy Hassol, Kristie Ebi and Yaryna Serkez
Ms. Hassol is the director of the nonprofit organization Climate Communication. Dr. Ebi is a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. Ms. Serkez is a graphics editor for Opinion.
“Yes, it is getting hotter. And while you might be able to escape the intensifying tropical storms, flooding or droughts by moving elsewhere, refuge from extreme heat is no longer easy to find.
Even in Siberia.
Summers that seemed exceedingly hot 50 years ago are becoming much more commonplace. The extreme heat of that era — which had a chance of occurring of only one-tenth of 1 percent during the summer season — is now reached more than 20 percent of the time, according to calculations by the climate scientist James Hansen. And nights are warming faster than days, at nearly twice the rate. So much for relief.”
“Last month was the hottest June on record in North America, with more than 1,200 daily temperature records broken in the final week alone. But overlooked in much of the coverage were an even greater number of daily records set by a different — and potentially more dangerous — measure of extreme heat: overnight temperatures.
Unusually hot summer nights can lead to a significant number of deaths, according to climate scientists and environmental epidemiologists, because they take away people’s ability to cool down from the day’s heat.”
David Lindsay Jr.Hamden, CT | NYT Comment:
Thank you Catrin Einhorn for your work. This piece, though excellent, is devastating. The comments after it are inspiring, in the recoconition of so many readers of alarm and grief and fear for the future. My partner and I are writing and performing a folk concert on these issues, and here is paragraph from one of our readings: “DL.V2: Edward O. Wilson, the famous Harvard entomologist, now retired, has written that at our present course of human growth, we might lose 50 to 80% of the earth’s species in the next 100 years. (2) E.O. Wilson and his scientific colleagues around the world are deeply concerned. They suspect that only about 10% of this world’s biodiversity has been identified and named— KS.V1: and they see that Earth is losing species of animals and plants before we know much about them, about their qualities, habitat, about how they support the ecosystems where they thrive. These scientists think that if we do lose 50% or more of the world’s species, then homo sapiens will probably disappear. When the dinosaurs died out, so did possibly 95% of all species at that time. (3) These scientists are sounding an alarm. ”
David Lindsay Jr is the author of the Tay Son Rebellion about 18th century Vietnam, and blogs at InconvenientNews.Net. He is currently writing a book about his concert and show “Noah’s Ark, 2.0. on climate change and the sixth extinction.”
Dr. Mann is a professor of atmospheric science and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State. He is the author of “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.” Ms. Hassol is the director of the nonprofit organization Climate Communication. She publishes the series “Quick Facts” with the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s SciLine on the connections between extreme weather and climate change.
“In the old days, we could escape the summer heat by heading north — to the Adirondacks in the East or to the cool, forested Pacific Northwest in the West.
But this is not your grandparents’ climate.
And though we’re only one week into official summer, the characteristically cool Pacific Northwest has turned into a caldron of triple-digit temperatures, with Portland, Ore., and Seattle reaching record highs of 115 and 108 degrees, respectively. That’s unseasonably hot — for Phoenix.
The western United States is currently under the influence of an epic heat dome, an expansive region of high atmospheric pressure characterized by heat, drought and heightened fire danger. It’s being called a once-in-a-millennium event, which means you might have expected to witness it once during your lifetime — if you happen to be Methuselah of biblical fame.” . . .
“The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) will come to a close at the end of this year after three decades of fostering international collaborative research and synthesis on global change.
The organisation’s legacy is embodied in its scientific publications; the workshops and conferences it organised; the close interaction it fostered with policy and assessment processes such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); and its innovative approaches to communication and outreach. It will leave behind a strong record in building networks as well as enhancing research capacity around the world.
The IGBP Secretariat, which has been housed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) in Stockholm for over 25 years, will vacate its offices at the end of this year. The IGBP website will not be updated from the 27th of November. However, it will remain accessible until 2026. An electronic archive of important documents will be available with our sponsor, the International Council for Science (ICSU). A hard copy archive will be held at the RSAS. . . . “
A decade on, IGBP in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre has reassessed and updated the Great Acceleration indicators, first published in the IGBP synthesis, Global Change and the Earth System in 2004.
(The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) )
“Human activity, predominantly the global economic system, is now the prime driver of change in the Earth System (the sum of our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes), according to a set of 24 global indicators, or “planetary dashboard”, published in the journal Anthropocene Review (16 January 2015).”
No, not that kind of red. (We’ll leave that to the political pundits.) We’re talking about the thermometer kind.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week issued its latest “climate normals”: baseline data of temperature, rain, snow and other weather variables collected over three decades at thousands of locations across the country.
30-year temperatures compared with 20th century average
1901-1930, 1911-1940, 1921-1950 etc. all the way up to
