Sorry about the accident that spoiled yesterday’s letter for purposes of later reading. Those first two images, that so dramatically showed two weather extremes side by side, simply cannot be recovered. I want to do more postings with explanations based on similar Weather Maps—properly presented—and will be looking for another good opportunity of the same type. Today we’ll just go back to more regular stories.
A new study warns that great care must be taken before opening up large new tracts of land for agriculture (Inside Climate News). “As the climate warms in the decades ahead, billions of acres, most of them in the northern hemisphere, will become suitable for agriculture and could, if plowed, emit a massive, planet-altering amount of greenhouse gases…..could unleash more carbon dioxide than the U.S. will emit in nearly 120 years at current rates…..This is the time to get good policy in place that excludes the most carbon-rich soils or we really risk runaway climate change.” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12022020/agricultural-frontiers-russia-canada-climate-warming
More than two billion people live on drylands that are subject to abrupt ecosystem changes in the current century (University of Alicante – Spain). From a new study, “…aridity is increasing worldwide as a result of climate change…..as aridity increases, dryland ecosystems on the planet undergo a series of abrupt changes…..when certain aridity thresholds are crossed, the ecosystem undergoes disproportionate changes and becomes even more arid…..Three phases of change were identified by the researchers.” The third phase ends with a complete conversion to desert. There are practical ways to minimize the negative consequences, as recommended by the authors. https://phys.org/news/2020-02-climate-abrupt-shifts-dryland-ecosystems.html
Climate change has been linked to significantly increased losses of groundwater in the US (University of Arizona). This first-of-a-kind study looked at the horizontal movement of shallow groundwater over large areas of territory having great complexity. “The calculations revealed a direct response of shallow groundwater storage to warming that demonstrates the strong and early effect that even low to moderate warming may have on groundwater storage and evapotranspiration…..the eastern U.S. will be much more sensitive to a lowering of the water table…..may reach a tipping point sooner rather than later, when vegetation starts to lose access to shallow groundwater as storage is depleted with warming.”
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-groundwater-depletes-arid-american-west.html
Last month was the hottest January on record (Phys.org). “The global average land and ocean surface temperature in January was 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit (1.14 degrees Celsius) above the average January temperatures for the 20th century…..In parts of Russia, Scandinavia and eastern Canada, temperatures exceeded the old averages by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 C).” (Note that these numbers were compared with a modernized average, not the lower pre-industrial baseline that is always used for the well-known targets. The latter way, according to James Hansen, would bring the global average increase for January up to an estimated 1.5C.) https://phys.org/news/2020-02-month-hottest-january-scientists.html
What are the prospects for a world without growth? (The New Yorker). This is a good discussion because it presents a number of different viewpoints and a number of ways to approach the subject. It is all based on the realization that, for civilization to survive, we have no choice other than to abandon current practices of consumption of limited natural resources. Quite a few things will then need to be rearranged, hopefully in a fair and peaceful way.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/10/can-we-have-prosperity-without-growth
Carl