Call me pessimistic, but I don't think RCP2.6 is going to happen. I mean, that's basically an immediate, massive decline in emissions, and there are currently zero frameworks for any transformative change in a global society. Right now, we're solidly on the RCP8.5 path. That's what our species, our governments, have chosen. Talk and agreements aside. To share these incredibly optimistic pathways seems to be naive of societal, political, and economic forces beyond science. Meteorologist Nick Humphrey
A quick note - the RCP8.5 scenario is the worst-case heating scenario for the biosphere.
Global heating and precipitation patterns have combined to make the world a more difficult place for life. Humans living in the first world are experiencing what the world's poor have known for a while that the climate has changed, and it is harder to feed themselves, house themselves and maintain an optimal body temperature.
There is drought, flooding and, hail that all punish and kill the food crops we depend on for sustenance. There are other factors as well. Water in streams, lakes and the ocean is all warming, and those temperatures are killing the fish that reside in them. On land, livestock is unable to withstand the heat and humidity. Eventually, we will have to air-condition them to keep them alive. We are now hearing that we will need insects to be a part of our diet. This is all traceable to runaway climate feedbacks.
Preach it.
The world is counting on farmers in North America for big harvests of everything from corn to canola this year. Due to weird weather patterns, growers will likely come up short.
The U.S. and Canada are seeing unusual variability in climate, with some crops withering from severe heat and drought while others see flooding. Meanwhile, demand is surging as economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic, so much so that every grain counts.
The culprit is an abnormal, high pressure system that’s likely to remain in place during a key period of the growing season when plants are blooming and developing. It’s responsible for the hottest temperatures ever in the U.S. Pacific Northwest while forming a trough across the central U.S. that’s bringing rain showers. The hot and arid conditions have moved east, spilling over into farming areas in the U.S. Plains and Canadian Prairies, hurting everything from spring wheat that goes into pizza to canola used for cooking oil.
Land Ecosystems Are Becoming Less Efficient at Absorbing Carbon Dioxide reports NASA.
Land ecosystems currently play a key role in mitigating climate change. The more carbon dioxide (CO2) plants and trees absorb during photosynthesis, the process they use to make food, the less CO2 remains trapped in the atmosphere, where it can cause temperatures to rise. But scientists have identified an unsettling trend – as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase, 86% of land ecosystems globally are becoming progressively less efficient at absorbing it.
Because CO2 is a main "ingredient" that plants need to grow, elevated concentrations of it cause an increase in photosynthesis, and consequently, plant growth – a phenomenon aptly referred to as the CO2 fertilization effect, or CFE. CFE is considered a key factor in the response of vegetation to rising atmospheric CO2 as well as an important mechanism for removing this potent greenhouse gas from our atmosphere – but that may be changing.
Without this feedback between photosynthesis and elevated atmospheric CO2, Poulter said we would have seen climate change occurring at a much more rapid rate. But scientists have been concerned about how long the CO2 Fertilization Effect could be sustained before other limitations on plant growth kick in.
For instance, while an abundance of CO2 won’t limit growth, a lack of water, nutrients, or sunlight – the other necessary components of photosynthesis — will. To determine why the CFE has been decreasing, the study team took the availability of these other elements into account.
“According to our data, what appears to be happening is that there’s both a moisture limitation as well as a nutrient limitation coming into play,” Poulter said. “In the tropics, there’s often just not enough nitrogen or phosphorus, to sustain photosynthesis, and in the high-latitude temperate and boreal regions, soil moisture is now more limiting than air temperature because of recent warming.”
In effect, climate change is weakening plants’ ability to mitigate further climate change over large areas of the planet.
Climate News Network weighs in on our hungry world.
LONDON, 18 June, 2021 − Researchers have once again warned that climate change is likely to mean a hungrier world with less food on the table: by 2050, global crop yield could have fallen by 10%. And by the century’s end − and with a much larger burden of human population − farmers might be producing 25% less than they do now.
The calculations come just a few weeks after a separate team of scientists predicted that uncontrolled global heating driven by continued profligate use of fossil fuels might change the global climate in ways that could cut harvests by as much as a third.
Food is not separable from climate change: modern agriculture and the global appetite for animal products is both a major contributor to ever-greater greenhouse gas emissions and, in very different ways, a potential answer to some of those challenges.
Demand for food for ever-greater numbers of increasingly wealthier people has driven the destruction of forests, savannahs and wetlands that nurse life’s variety, underwrite the planet’s economy, and buffer nations against climate change.
Well-fed optimists believe the earth can feed 10 billion people. At the same time, others believe that our children can migrate to Siberia, Canada, or Alaska and rebuild our civilization with abundant farmlands. It’s not going to happen. In Canada, there is a lot of rock in the soil. In the tundra, the ground is thawing permafrost, in other words oozing mud. Water from the thaw can’t percolate down through the ground as the soil is still frozen below, so it moves (solifluction). That soil has now been described as analogous to fluid instabilities.
From the DOE/LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY:
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 7, 2021--Slow-moving arctic soils form patterns that, from a distance, resemble those found in common fluids such as drips in paint and birthday cake icing. Los Alamos researchers and their collaborators analyzed existing arctic soil formations and compared them to viscous fluids, determining that there is a physical explanation for this pattern that is common to both Earth and Mars landscapes.
"The study of this effect is especially important as we measure landscape response to climate change and aim to understand the storage and release of permafrost carbon in arctic landscapes," said Rachel Glade, first author on a paper in the journal PNAS. "As we see permafrost thaw across the arctic, we will need to be able to predict and mitigate arctic slope instabilities."
The research shows the value of understanding "sticky" cohesive forces in landscape dynamics. A key feature of arctic soil is that it is periodically frozen, producing an evolving mixture of granular material, fluid and actual ice, which is devilishly complex to understand as it shifts and changes over time.
Once set in motion due to slopes and warming temperatures, the soil movement, called solifluction, tends to produce distinctive spatial patterns that can be observed from airplanes, both across the slopes and up and down them. The downhill flow, rather than showing a broad sheet of evenly sliding material, instead forms fingerlike "lobes" of soil reaching out ahead of the main sheet as it moves.
Inspired by fluid instabilities, the research team developed a conceptual model for soil patterns and used mathematical analysis to predict their wavelength. "In particular, we propose that soil patterns arise due to competition between gravity and cohesion or the 'stickiness' of soil grains," the paper's authors note. "We compare our theoretical predictions with a dataset of soil features from Norway, finding that soil patterns are controlled by fluid-like properties as well as climate." This has implications for scientists' understanding of landscapes and complex materials composed of both granular and fluid components.
You tell me how we farm on this?
Or this?
At the very beginning of a horrid and lethal trajectory, most of us aren’t even aware of the severity and intense suffering yet to come. Am I saying we have to redirect our energy and priorities to absorb the blows of a fucked up climate future? We should certainly entertain the likelihood that we will not survive this. Humans did not evolve in temperatures this hot, and there is no do-over with the rapidly changing climate system to correct our repetition of epic blunders.
This will not end well as green energy and planting trees will not stop climate change even if we miraculously implement the policies. We need to suck the CO2 out of the air, and that technology is decades away. And, we don’t have decades, not anymore.
For an example of the lunatics making life and extinction choices on our behalf, I offer this anecdotal observation of our liberal media.
I watched MSNBC yesterday when they briefly showed the President’s talk to western governors on the climate crisis, the heroes that put out the fires, and why the infrastructure bill is critical, particularly in the west where fires and drought are the most acute. That coverage lasted about 3 minutes before they broke away to cover the news conference on the condominium that collapsed in Miami (which is also a possible result of climate change. Despite some distractors that dropped some smelly turds in my diary on this subject, I give you our energy secretary). To paraphrase the TV host, we’ll come back to the president if he says anything important. The subject wasn't brought up again.
Ground Temperatures Reached an Astounding 145 Degrees in the Pacific Northwest By Brian Kahn