The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a lo
Source: Washington Post
Capital Weather Gang
The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback
Report finds sweeping changes underway across the Arctic
By Andrew Freedman
December 10 at 2:04 PM
The Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid, and unmitigated shift into a new climate state, one that is greener, features far less ice, and is now a net source of greenhouse gas emissions from melting permafrost, according to a major new federal assessment of the region released Tuesday.
The consequences of these climate shifts will be felt far outside the Arctic in the form of altered weather patterns, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers.
The findings are contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and unfamiliar climate state.
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Andrew Freedman edits and reports on extreme weather and climate science for the Capital Weather Gang. He has covered science, with a specialization in climate research and policy, for Axios, Mashable, Climate Central, E&E Daily and other publications. Follow https://twitter.com/Afreedma
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/
Arctic Report Card from Federal agencies with bombshell finding: The Arctic may now be releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than it's taking up due to rapid warming and permafrost melt:
Link to tweet
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I didn't see a link in the article to the report. I'll get to that.
saidsimplesimon
(7,888 posts)me that chill and dread of apprehension because the destruction is escalating beyond reversal.
Mike 03
(16,616 posts)terrible data is like a 9/11 moment. And a lot of people still don't get it, which makes recognizing how serious this is all the more frustrating.
Eugene
(61,881 posts)mahatmakanejeeves
(57,425 posts)Indigenous communities previously saw ice floating on the northern Bering Sea during eight months of the year. A new report on the state of the Arctic says they now only see it for three to four months.
Link to tweet
groundloop
(11,518 posts)Sadly this has long been expected.
Fuck it..... I'm not gonna' be around long enough for this to effect me too drastically, maybe I'll just keep sticking my head in the sand and pretend there's no problem.
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)Over the years, many reports were of shock by scientists as to how quickly the effects were accelerating and the predictions of when things hit hard are shorter.
All the feedback loops will continue that acceleration and that's not good.
cstanleytech
(26,290 posts)been through the cycle off thawing and freezing numerous times since the earths crust cooled and they will keep on doing so for millions of years after our species is extinct.
Pacifist Patriot
(24,653 posts)cstanleytech
(26,290 posts)lowers the oxygen levels to a level that would render it impossible for us to breath that is not likely to happen any time soon as unlike 99.9% of the other species we have the ability to problem solve and thus can probably compensate enough to survive as a species.
Our species might even be able to survive a snowball earth scenario for a time if we had time to prepare shelters but of course in the long run no matter what happens our species will eventually go extinct as no species lives forever.
NickB79
(19,236 posts)Small communities of humans, knocked back to a pre-industrial age, living short brutal lives of constant hunger and tribal warfare, is not the future most of us hope our descendents to live in. It is, however, a real possibility given the risk of global resource wars and social collapse on a hot, crowded planet filled with all manner of horrific weapons controlled by increasingly desperate, nationalist leaders.
hatrack
(59,584 posts)The world's oceans are struggling to breathe, rapidly running out of oxygen at an unprecedented rate. Climate change is dangerously exacerbating the issue, scientists warned in a new study.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released the largest report of its kind combining the efforts of 67 scientists from 17 countries at the global climate summit in Madrid on Saturday. It found that the oxygen level of the ocean has declined by about 2% since the 1950s, and the volume of water completely depleted of oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s.
Sixty years ago, only 45 ocean sites suffered from low oxygen levels. That number skyrocketed to 700 in 2011. According to the study, about 50% of oxygen loss in the upper part of the ocean is a result of temperature increase.
Climate Change More
"With this report, the scale of damage climate change is wreaking upon the ocean comes into stark focus," Dr. Grethel Aguilar, IUCN acting director general, said in a statement. "As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray."
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-oceans-are-losing-oxygen-at-a-dangerous-unprecedented-rate-as-temperatures-rise/
EDIT
To tease out what was primarily responsible for all this death in the oceansin this, the Great DyingPenn and his colleagues developed a climate model, not dissimilar to those used to project future warming on our own modern world. Only in Penns model, the continents were reunited. This was Pangaea, the mythic supercontinent that reached its apotheosis in the Permian period, joining Morocco with New Jersey and India with Antarctica. Then the team lit this ancient world on fire.
By jacking up the CO2 in their model high enough, Penn and his colleagues were able to re-create the scorching temperatures of the end-Permian mass extinction, searing their ancient climate model maps in worrying shades of red. The flip side of a hot ocean is one with less oxygen, and it has long been known that the oceans of the end-Permian were gasping for the stuff. This paleoceanographic fact has been uncovered by geologists who have found the sickly presence of laminated, pyrite-rich ocean rocks in end-Permian rock outcrops around the wordfrom the Salt Range in Pakistan to the old whaling redoubt of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. Even subtler, uranium isotopes in rocks from the catastrophe whisper dark rumors about the asphyxiation of the entire ancient ocean.
By driving up the temperature in his model, Penn re-created this end-Permian oxygen loss as well. This is because oxygen is less soluble in hot water, so heat alone can cause oxygen to plummet in the ocean. But a hotter ocean is also a more sluggish and stratified one, so the depths become starved of oxygens delivery as well. Even worse, the hotter it gets, the more oxygen animals need to power their metabolism, so hot water quickly creates a crisis of supply and demand. By populating his model ancient ocean with modern creatures, such as sharks and crabs and coralscreatures with a variety of tolerances to things like deoxygenation, temperature, and pHand then letting all climate hell break loose, Penn found that it was the heat-driven loss of oxygen in the ocean, more than any other factor, that could explain the end of the world.
While essentially nothing was spared in this mass extinction, it appears from the fossil record that life at the poles was especially marked for destruction. And this makes sense in a world losing its oxygen. Theres more oxygen in colder waters at the poles, so the creatures there have adapted to itand are especially sensitive to its diminishment. Meanwhile, tropical creatures are adapted to warmer, more oxygen-poor waters. So if anyone is to survive on a world thats about to become outrageously hot and lose three-quarters of its oxygen, it will be those hardy inhabitants of the low latitudes. And thats whats seen in the fossil record. The tropics still faced an unthinkable cataclysm, but they fared mildly better. The predicament for polar creatures was not unlike those luckless creatures that today inhabit the tops of mountains, and that will have no higher altitude to which to escape in the coming decades. Theyre shit out of luck, Deutsch says.
When the ocean loses its oxygen, its something of a great leveler compared with other hypothesized mass-extinction mechanisms. Ocean acidification, for instance (what happens when too much CO2 reacts with seawater), has previously been proposed as the great killer of the end-Permian. But while acidification can have a surprisingly variable effect on the survival of different kinds of sea life, there is hardly any selectivity at all when oxygen disappears from an ecosystem. Everyone dies, matching the near-universal signal of slaughter in the ancient ocean. This study suggests we should be worrying much more about hypoxia than about ocean acidification, Deutsch says. Theres vastly more resources being put into [studying] organisms responses to pH in seawater than there is into understanding temperature-dependent hypoxia. I think that the field has basically allocated those resources in exactly the wrong way.
EDIT
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/oxygen-loss-during-mass-extinction/577537/
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)A dramatic and forced change in human habits and lifestyles are by definition, dreaded... regardless of change mechanism.
Muriel
(16 posts)True, the wealthy will be able to buy whatever resources exist at the end, but eventually, when the wars over whatever food is available, the global drought dries up the fresh water, and the atmosphere begins to boil away, there will be a reckoning. This will be an equal-opportunity die off.
For the most advance organism on the planet to know that that this has been coming for a half a century and still let it happen... we deserve what's coming.
jeffreyi
(1,939 posts)So much as climate carnage. Any bets as to when this overshadows everything?
Haggis for Breakfast
(6,831 posts)about 25 years ago that predicted how the carbon "sinks" in the oceans would begin to disperse and enter the atmosphere. It was chilling to read then, but the rate they predicted has accelerated by 5000%.
Anyone who doesn't understand the science behind how minute changes in the oceans affect the overall quality of our lives should either study it or shut the fuck up. I am sick to death of people who have no idea what they are talking about, or attempting to negate or even minimize the catastrophic future that awaits not us, but our childrens' children. I am tired of these illiterate fools telling us that the earth has undergone various climate changes, reversal of the poles, etc. Some of us have studied the science and do not want to hear from those pompous, pretentious loudmouths who haven't.
And YES, I WOULD call it "DREADED."
roamer65
(36,745 posts)Climate disaster and war.
truthisfreedom
(23,146 posts)helped the US turn this around and refused because he was "too smart." He's a complete idiot whose legacy will guarantee that no fascist idiot ever gains control of America again.