Men argue. Nature acts. Voltaire
Climate change does not respect any international borders, and those countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis suffer the most. Disaster is coming for us all at some point, regardless of the color of our skin.
People should insist on the government's actions and not worry about upsetting our beautiful minds with scientific facts. It’s not all about you, America. Only wealthy nations can produce technology to power green energy, and somehow the Herculean task of technology does not currently exist to suck CO2 out of the air.
If ever there was a reason that climate change is a planetary emergency and not limited to the world's great ice sheets. One only needs to look no further than the central Asian country of Mongolia.
A review of climate records via tree rings has found that increasing drought and heat could turn the nation into an uninhabitable wasteland. The tipping point is already underway, according to researchers.
George Dvorsky of Earther writes:
New research published today in Science is painting an alarming picture of the current climate situation in inner East Asia. Contemporaneous heatwaves and droughts in the region are happening more often now than they did 20 years ago, but as the new study points out, the current climate situation in the region has no precedent over the past 260 years. The authors of the new paper reached this conclusion after analyzing tree-rings, which document droughts and heatwaves dating back to the mid-18th century.
This is bad because the region will be even more susceptible to hot and dry weather extremes. The Mongolian Plateau is currently a semi-arid region, but it may not stay that way. The kind of climate that’s being predicted, in which the region will suffer though even more heatwaves and droughts, could make the region as dry and barren as parts of the U.S. southwest, according to the study.
By analyzing tree-rings sourced from the Mongolian Plateau, the researchers were able to tell when heatwaves and droughts happened in the past, and when the soil was moist. Results showed that current temperatures in inner East Asia are unprecedented across the 260-year record.
Evaporation produced by wet soil cools the air immediately above the surface. Without moisture, however, heat transfers directly into the air about the ground. This creates a negative feedback loop: high temperatures are boosted by soil drying, but as the soil dries out this leads to even more heat. As to where this ends, “we cannot say,” said Deliang Chen, a co-author and researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Hyungjun Kim, a co-author and climate scientist at the University of Tokyo, said the process could lead to the triggering of “an irreversible feedback loop” that could accelerate the region “toward a hotter and drier future.”
This could eventually lead past an irreversible tipping point that would move the region into a permanent state of aridness. And in fact, we may have already passed this tipping point, as the “semi-arid climate of this region has entered a new regime in which soil moisture no longer mitigates anomalously high air temperature,” as the authors wrote in the study.
All climate news is grim. We have a leader now determined to fight climate change aggressively; we need to have his back.
When Joe Biden won the US presidency earlier this month, it seemed like a huge opportunity to restore the country’s position as a leader in the fight against climate change. But whether he’ll be able to deliver on his climate agenda — the most aggressive ever put forth by a leading US presidential candidate — remains to be seen, especially because he will face a powerful Republican opposition in Congress.
Still, climate-policy experts say that there is a lot the former senator and vice-president to Barack Obama can do, including exerting his authority over federal agencies to drive forward his agenda, and leveraging his experience working with both parties in the Senate to push legislation in Congress.
“This is really the first time that a US president is leading with climate,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of Georgetown University’s Climate Center in Washington DC. That’s exciting, she says, but suggests cautious optimism: global warming is still a partisan issue on Capitol Hill, dividing Republicans and Democrats, and “that is going to limit what Biden can accomplish”.
The Hu is a Mongolian band that uses heavy metal in a blend with traditional throat singing.
Action Item