The warmth of a planet partly depends on its albedo: how much of its starlight is reflected back into space (as opposed to absorbed). The higher the albedo, the cooler the planet. Earth’s albedo has been dropping.
Category: Environment
Comparing 2019 to 2005 – a brief 14-year span – Earth trapped twice as much heat. Global warming is accelerating at a frightening pace.
When trying to solve a problem involving patterns, people think of adding but not subtracting – a bias with wide-ranging implications.
Countries and corporations are pledging to get to “net zero” carbon emissions in the not-too-distant future. The promise rings hollow.
For a half century, doomsters have predicted the end of the world. On the opposite pole, climate change deniers increasingly seem psychotic. But optimists still hold sway: that human ingenuity can solve what selfsame ingenuity created. When does a cliffhanger become a tragic fall – or a last-minute miracle salvation?
Driven by the wind, the gyres of ocean circulation play a vital role in the marine biosphere and regulating weather & climate. Global warming is changing the way ocean gyres work.
A mass extinction event is well underway, propagated by a burgeoning human population which has raped Nature with technological marvels in the name of ‘progress’.
2020 will mostly be remembered as the year of the covid-19 pandemic, but so much more served as a harbinger of the doom which lies ahead.
The first creatures to evolve on land, insects have a crucial presence on Earth. Their passing presages our own doom.
Cyclones are lasting longer on land and accelerating global warming.
Overfishing typifies the capitalist approach to natural resources: exploit until exhaustion. Governments subsidize the effort.
Climate change befell and extinguished ancestors of humanity.
The world’s largest river basin, Amazonia once had half of the world’s rainforest. The Amazon is quickly being reduced to wooded patches and scrub lands.
The world is rapidly hotting up. Heatwaves are frequenting in an accelerating trend. The toll on trees is severe, killing off the greatest terrestrial carbon sink.
Vehicles are a major contributor to polluting emissions which damage health and foster global warming. So too are the asphalt roads which they ride upon.
There is no simple formula for how fast Earth is hotting up. If there were, 2 key components in the equation would be greenhouse gas emissions and temperature sensitivity to those emissions. Those 2 factors suggest that Earth is racing toward hellish heat.
The hype that electric vehicles are environmentally preferable to petrol-powered cars is untrue.
The heat waves happening across the world this year are just a warming up of what’s to come. The most profound aspect of events is how nothing is being done to adapt.
Soil is a significant store of carbon. Warming soils will release more CO2 into the atmosphere than previously supposed, accelerating global warming well beyond what current climate models predict.
Presented with bad news, most people tend to play it down if they can. Professional forecasters are no exception. Alas, their untoward optimism often hurts those they smile upon.
The world hotting up has made wildfires more frequent and intense. Siberia, which has the world’s most extensive forest, has been ablaze for months.
Half of the world’s land has been degraded by man’s exploitation: an unsustainable percentage that keeps rising. One unintended consequence is the increasing unleashing of infectious disease.
Global warming is just one aspect of the man-made major mass extinction event underway but is the facet upon which the most attention has been paid. Here’s a summary of the modeling effort and a prediction of fate.
Climate models fail to predict wind, which is an extremely significant forecasting facet. That wind is predictable highlights how pathetic climate model forecasts are.
US households emit 20% of that nation’s greenhouse gas exhaust. If considered a country, American residences would be the world’s 6th most significant polluter. The wealthy do more than their share.