Climate Letter #1564

A new study clarifies the close link between ice shelves and the glaciers behind them (BBC News).  “A new study finds the diminishing thickness of ice shelves is matched almost exactly by an acceleration in the glaciers feeding in behind them.  What’s more, the linkage is immediate.”  As ocean waters warm the shelves are thawed from their undersides, causing the glaciers to speed up and dump their ice into the oceans more quickly, without ever needing to be melted on top by warmer air.  Satellites have established both the actual amount of shelf thinning and the acceleration of glaciers as they fall away from the land.  This should help make sea level forecasts more accurate than before, and perhaps also more unfavorable with respect to timing.

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A Brazilian study provides detailed evidence that deforestation causes losses extending far beyond the damage done through climate change (Climate News Network).  The study is able to express these losses in monetary terms, along with a comparison of winners and losers under current government policies.  “Farmers sometimes take a short-term view that focuses on three or four years of personal profit, but the nation is left with enormous losses. This mindset should go. The paper makes that very clear.”
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An Oxfam report says climate change is the biggest driver of people leaving their homes (CNN).  “Climate-fueled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade — equivalent to one every two seconds…..This makes the climate the biggest driver of internal displacement for the period, with the world’s poorer countries at the highest risk…..People are seven times more likely to be internally displaced by floods, cyclones and wildfires than volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and three times more likely than by conflict…..When you get large populations displaced that’s when you get instability and conflict.”  That’s where we are today, and the future looks even worse.
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“Why clean energy isn’t enough to tackle climate change” (Axios).  Amy Harder wrote this as an advance review of a report from MIT that is due out tomorrow, plus adding some solid ideas of her own.  “Forget renewable energy for a moment. To really fight climate change, the world needs to focus far more on cutting its use of oil, natural gas and coal.”  That is an inescapable fact, and it probably won’t happen anywhere without the public being ready to accept a carbon tax.  All around the world, it looks like the public is not yet there, and thus we keep falling farther behind.
–China’s contribution to this state of affairs is not at all helpful these days:
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A warning from the UN Secretary-General on the eve of an important international conference (ABC News).  He said Sunday that the world’s efforts to stop climate change have been “utterly inadequate” so far and there is a danger global warming could pass the “point of no return.”  The UN has good intentions but no power to make or enforce laws that would be binding.  Everything depends on the political will motivating the world’s largest emitters, and that has to change—quickly.
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A science writer who lives in Canberra expands on the Secretary-General’s remarks—in a less diplomatic manner (The Guardian).  Julian Cribb, the author of eight books, wants everyone to recognize exactly what is happening and who is mainly responsible for continuing to make it worse.  “The world is dividing into two opposing movements: the concerned “survivors” – the young, the old, the wise, the educated, the informed and the pragmatic – and the cynics backing the very global system that will precipitate collapse.”  With so much at stake, might this situation indeed be a fulfillment of predictions labeled “the Battle of Armageddon”?
Carl

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