Global Climate Change Science News

[Animavore]

It's all over the news.

[pErvinalia]

We are a fuck up of a country.

[DRSB]

English Village Becomes Climate Leader by Quietly Cleaning Up Its Own Patch

Ashton Hayes, England

[Hermit]

Link to the above.

Good news, but it's worth keeping in mind that Ashton Hayes is a small village community of well-off and well-educated people. Environmentalism on a boutique scale. One, moreover, that requires a substantial amount of cash above and beyond funds needed for the ordinary necessities of life.

[DRSB]

Renewables are often more expensive and emission-generating than oil, this is indeed a problem, and not really renewable, and insufficient. I see no way around nuclear.

[DRSB]

Thousands of strange blue lakes are appearing in Antarctica, and it’s very bad news

Scientists have confirmed that thousands of pristine blue lakes have appeared on the ice sheets of East Antarctica, and it’s got them very worried.

The problem? They’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. Greenland’s ice sheet has been disintegrating rapidly, losing a whopping 1 trillion tonnes of ice between 2011 and 2014, and research suggests it’s because of these lakes.

A team of UK researchers has analysed hundreds of satellite images and meteorological data taken of the Langhovde Glacier in East Antarctica, and found for the first time that between 2000 and 2013, nearly 8,000 of these lakes had formed.

http://www.sciencealert.com/thousands-o ... y-bad-news

[DRSB]

Costa Rica has been running on 100% renewable energy for 2 months straight

http://www.sciencealert.com/costa-rica- ... s-straight

[Animavore]

[Animavore]

The effects of climate change endanger U.S. military operations and could increase the danger of international conflict, according to three new documents endorsed by retired top U.S. military officers and former national security officials.

"There are few easy answers, but one thing is clear: the current trajectory of climatic change presents a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security, and inaction is not a viable option," said a statement published on Wednesday by the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based think tank.

It was signed by more than a dozen former senior military and national security officials, including retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, and retired Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of the Pacific Command until last year.

They called on the next U.S. president to create a cabinet level position to deal with climate change and its impact on national security.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-c ... SKCN11K0BC

[Animavore]

here may be music in the roar of the sea, as Byron eulogized, but the waves can also bring creeping unease. On low-lying fragments of land like the Marshall Islands, the tides are threatening to take away what they previously helped support: life.

Hilda Heine surveys the latest temporary sea wall that cleaves her property from the waves. It has been knocked down twice since February by floods and she frets about her plants that will probably face a salty demise.


Her vista would, sadly, be unremarkable in the Marshall Islands were it not for the policeman languidly guarding the corrugated metal wall – Heine is the president of the Pacific island nation. Here, no one is spared the rising seas.

“I need a better wall, one with rocks,” Heine mutters. Her presidency will probably be defined by climate change. Heine took charge in January and immediately declared a state of emergency over a drought so dire that water was rationed in the capital, Majuro. The nation also faces the existential threat of sea level rise and, with it, the potential exodus of its population.

The escape route is there [that allows Marshallese work in the US without a visa], for now, but it has come at a cost. The option of moving to the US was born from the Marshall Islands’ misfortune of being under US administration during the cold war.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted nuclear weapons testing on the islands, peppering Bikini atoll alone with 23 bombs. The largest, known as the Bravo shot, was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and vaporized three small islands.

While Bikini was evacuated, the wind blew radioactive detritus on to the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and Utrik. “Within hours, the atoll was covered with a fine, white, powder-like substance,” says Jeton Anjain, who led the eventual evacuation of Rongelap. “No one knew it was radioactive fallout. The children played in the snow. They ate it.”


Cancers, particularly of the thyroid, riddled many of those who came into contact with this radioactivity. But the wounds of dispossession are the ones that run deepest, 70 years on. The Marshallese may use faded US dollar bills, daub murals of LeBron James and Steph Curry on walls and retain the names Rita (after Rita Hayworth) and Laura (after Lauren Bacall) for the two ends of the curved Majuro island, but the relationship with America is a complicated one.

A US military base remains at Kwajalein, where unarmed missiles periodically land, fired from California. Many Marshallese serve in the US army, while the rest of the population each gets around $500 a year via a trust fund set up to compensate the harrowing nuclear tests. Still, many feel it’s not enough given the legacy of trauma.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... e-arkansas

[DRSB]

On the other hand, the crew of the 9th Lucky Dragon that was caught up for two weeks there and were down with radioactivity sickness of the worst kind, skin burns, etc, are for the most part still alive and well into their 90s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru
This case did a lot to change the perception of radioactivity in the scientific world.
We are constantly exposed to radioactivity and respiration alone produces the exact same intermediary oxygen compounds that are highly reactive and aggressive and poisonous.

[Animavore]

Perspective, and an answer to the fallacy, "B-But-the climate has changed in the past".

[rainbow]

The upside is that we will be dead before it gets too bad, but our children will spit on our graves.

[Animavore]

[cronus]

                      

!!1!	NOTMOD This thread is now locked. All further discussions will now take place on the Global Weather thread.