2020 has been a watershed year. A look at the state of man’s relentless onslaught on Nature and what mitigation might be made.
Category: Environment
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.
In northeastern North America over the past 30 years, habitat destruction and man-made pollution, including pesticides, have annihilated the intimate networking between plants and pollinators. 94% loss of plant-pollinator networks were disrupted.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with ~86 times the warming power of carbon dioxide for 2 decades. As it ages, methane oxidizes and loses hotness – but is still 26 times more warming than carbon dioxide for a century.
Planting massive numbers of trees to demonstrate concern about climate change is just a stupid publicity stunt at best.
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is widely used as an insulator in high-voltage electrical equipment for electricity production and transmission. SF6 is also the most potent greenhouse gas, and its emission is burgeoning.
2 types of advanced-technology refuse are especially noxious to the environment: plastic and electronic waste. Both are unsustainably burgeoning.
Since its widespread commercialization in the early 1950s, plastic has become ubiquitous: first in products and their packaging, and now everywhere on Earth.
Cyclones are accelerating global warming.
Plastic debris concentrates on the surface of the ocean via the currents of ocean gyres, with agglomerations shockingly visible from space. Plastic pollution further flows into the deep sea, following the same currents that historically have provided nutrients.
Coral reefs worldwide have been stressed by pollution, warmer seas, and outright destruction by men. Cyclones add another hazard.
The Devonian period closed with multiple mass extinction events. The 2 most severe were the Kellwasser Event 372 million years ago (MYA) and the Hangeberg Event, which ended the Devonian 359 MYA.
Global warming is making cyclones more frequent and intense.
China had ranked 3rd in turtle species diversity. Now its wild turtles face extinction.