World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction In the brain, when neurons fire off electrical signals to their neighbors, this happens through an “all-or-none” response. The signal only happens once conditions in the cell breach a certain threshold. Now an MIT researcher has observed a similar phenomenon in a completely different system: Earth’s carbon cycle. Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has found that when the rate at which carbon dioxide enters the oceans pushes past a certain threshold — whether as the result of a sudden burst or a slow, steady influx — the Earth may respond with a runaway cascade of chemical feedbacks, leading to extreme ocean acidification that dramatically amplifies the effects of the original trigger. But Rothman says that’s not the case. What does this all have to do with our modern-day climate? A carbon feedback “It’s a positive feedback,” Rothman says. “An inexorable rise”
Have We Really Killed 60 Percent of Animals Since 1970? Ultimately, they found that from 1970 to 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is absolutely not the same as saying that humans have culled 60 percent of animals—a distinction that the report’s technical supplement explicitly states. “It is not a census of all wildlife but reports how wildlife populations have changed in size,” the authors write. To understand the distinction, imagine you have three populations: 5,000 lions, 500 tigers, and 50 bears. Read: It’s a mistake to focus just on animal extinctions. For similar reasons, it’s also not right that we have “killed more than half the world’s wildlife populations” or that we can be blamed for “wiping out 60 percent of animal species” or that “global wildlife population shrank by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.” The average 60 percent decline across populations also obscures the fates of individual species. None of this is to let humanity off the hook.
BOOK Life without plastic : the practical step-by-step guide to avoiding plastic to keep your family and the planet healthy Contents include: Framing the issue through our plastic-free journey -- The super easy "Pareto plastic-free living" quick start guide -- Knowing your plastics ... and the alternatives -- Removing plastic from your personal space: how to create a healthier home -- Plastic-free living on the go -- Radiating the plastic-free lifestyle -- Final words : embracing a circular life without plastic. Summary: After the birth of their son, Jay Sinha and Chantal Plamondon set out on a journey to eliminate plastic baby bottles as the Canadian government moved to ban BPA. When they found it was difficult to procure glass baby bottles, Jay and Chantal made it their mission to not only find glass and metal replacements for plastic, but to make those products accessible to the public as well.
1.9 billion people at risk from mountain water shortages, study shows | Environment A quarter of the world’s population are at risk of water supply problems as mountain glaciers, snow-packs and alpine lakes are run down by global heating and rising demand, according to an international study. The first inventory of high-altitude sources finds the Indus is the most important and vulnerable “water tower” due to run-off from the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Ladakh, and Himalayan mountain ranges, which flow downstream to a densely populated and intensively irrigated basin in Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan. The authors warn this vast water tower – a term they use to describe the role of water storage and supply that mountain ranges play to sustain environmental and human water demands downstream – is unlikely to sustain growing pressure by the middle of the century when temperatures are projected to rise by 1.9C (35.4F), rainfall to increase by less than 2%, but the population to grow by 50% and generate eight times more GDP.
20,000 scientists give dire warning about the future in 'letter to humanity' – and the world is listening A dire warning to the world about its future, which predicts catastrophe for humanity, is continuing to gain momentum. The letter – which was first released in November – has now been signed by around 20,000 scientists. And the world seems to be listening: it is now one of the most discussed pieces of scientific research ever, and its publishers claim it is now influencing policy. The new letter was actually an update to a an original warning sent from the Union of Concerned Scientists that was backed by 1,700 signatures 25 years ago. Download the new Indpendent Premium app Sharing the full story, not just the headlines Mankind is still facing the existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population, they warned. If the world doesn’t act soon, there will be catastrophic biodiversity loss and untold amounts of human misery, they wrote. The original letter was signed by more than 15,000 scientists.
Rewilding will make Britain a rainforest nation again | George Monbiot The forests still burn, but the world now looks away. In both the Amazon basin and the rainforests of Indonesia, the world-scorching inferno rages on, already forgotten by most of the media. Intricate living systems, species that took millions of years to evolve, are being incinerated in moments, then replaced with monocultures. Giant plumes of carbon tip us further into climate breakdown. And we’re not even talking about it. But underneath the grief and frustration, I also feel disquiet. Among our missing ecosystems are rainforests. We now know that, alongside keeping fossil fuels in the ground, natural climate solutions – using the mass restoration of nature to draw down carbon from the air – offer perhaps the last remaining chance to prevent more than 1.5C, or even 2C, of global heating. Foreigners I meet are often flabbergasted by the state of our national parks. We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting.
Birds Are Vanishing From North America The skies are emptying out. The number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970, scientists reported on Thursday. There are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now than there were 50 years ago. The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the most exhaustive and ambitious attempt yet to learn what is happening to avian populations. The results have shocked researchers and conservation organizations. In a statement on Thursday, David Yarnold, president and chief executive of the National Audubon Society, called the findings “a full-blown crisis.” Experts have long known that some bird species have become vulnerable to extinction. There are likely many causes, the most important of which include habitat loss and wider use of pesticides. “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound.” Dr. The researchers found some positive signs. Dr.
US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change. Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels. It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. The American military’s climate policy remains contradictory. Not green, but less, military
Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted | Environment Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared. A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia. “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.
Robbie Andrew: Professional home page First published: 2016. Updated 13 November 2017, 23 April 2019. The road to 2°C is steep; the road to 1.5°C is a cliff. While it is theoretically possible that we can keep global warming under 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, that task is monumental. In fact, models struggle to generate future scenarios that *keep* warming below 1.5°C, but can pull temperatures back under 1.5°C after they have overshot that target. What is required is not only unheard-of cuts in global emissions of greenhouse gases (not just CO2), but also the development of new technologies to pull CO2 out of the air and store it safely again ("negative" emissions). Every year we delay devours the remaining budget. The road is hard and long, but waiting is not an option. Negative Emissions Our remaining carbon budget to keep warming under 1.5°C is tiny. At the moment this vast cavalry of negative emissions charging to save us from ourselves is but a dream. Data Sources Methods A short history of these figures
‘Extraordinary thinning’ of ice sheets revealed deep inside Antarctica | Environment Ice losses are rapidly spreading deep into the interior of the Antarctic, new analysis of satellite data shows. The warming of the Southern Ocean is resulting in glaciers sliding into the sea increasingly rapidly, with ice now being lost five times faster than in the 1990s. The West Antarctic ice sheet was stable in 1992 but up to a quarter of its expanse is now thinning. More than 100 metres of ice thickness has been lost in the worst-hit places. A complete loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would drive global sea levels up by about five metres, drowning coastal cities around the world. The current losses are doubling every decade, the scientists said, and sea level rise are now running at the extreme end of projections made just a few years ago. The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, compared 800m satellite measurements of ice sheet height from 1992 to 2017 with weather information.