it’s crazy that im alive to witness major effects of climate change. like it always seemed super vague and it was always ‘the polar bears won’t have anywhere to live’ but this shit is going to fuck everything up bigtime.
Most people don’t realize how serious it is. We’ve only got 50 years worth of resources left, if we keep going the way we are, and honestly, that’s optimistic. Aside from that, we’ve already gone over the calculated “point of no return”, so even if we immediately start sucking gasses out of the atmosphere and stop all transport and agriculture, we’re going to see oceans rise, sea life die, we’re going to be crammed into smaller land areas, places like Melbourne will be underwater, and the fallout will probably send us into an ice age anyway (long story, but basically the ice melts, cold water sinks, the ocean flow responsible for thermoregulation of the planet is interrupted, cue ice age).
I can already see it now. Forget the hurricanes for a moment:
-Hay isn’t growing at the right time. Last year, no one got good hay where I live, because the weather (which has been in the same pattern during hay season for as long as I’ve been alive) was whacked out.
-None of my animals grew coats correctly, because the weather is just all wrong, and they don’t know what season they’re in.
-We’re getting new temperature records globally; basically, all weather is starting to change already
-Where I live, there are always two weeks where we see echidnas everywhere, and then we don’t see them the rest of the year. that is, until last year, when we barely saw them, spaced throughout several months.
-Let me reiterate, the animals cannot tell what season it is because climate change is altering weather patterns that have been here for as long as anyone can remember
-We also have more acidic rain due to all the gasses, which is why we’ve got so many statues and whatnot corroding even though they haven’t changed for thousands of years
-We had a tornado start to form in Melbourne. That’s unheard of.
We have the technology to slow down climate change. If we want to survive for more than 50 years, we need to act now. NOW. We need to put in place all the technologies we have, and pour money into more scientific research.
And why haven’t we? Because politicians earn money from oil companies and don’t care about the future of the planet, because they’re not going to be here in 50 years anyway.
The world’s best-known living physicist, Stephen Hawking, says that President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate change accord could lead humanity to a tipping point, “turning the Earth into Venus.”
The Cambridge professor and renowned cosmologist made the remarks in an interview with the BBC that aired Sunday.
“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible,” Hawking told the BBC. “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”
Hawking, who is best known for his discoveries about black holes, called climate change “one of the great dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now.
“By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children,” Hawking told the BBC.
It’s not the first time that Hawking has blurred the lines between science and politics in his public pronouncements. In December, for example, he wrote in an editorial in The Guardian newspaper that Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were “a cry of anger” aimed at the elites, such as himself, in both America and Britain. He said that we are “at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity.”
When we say that the United States is joining Syria and Nicaragua by not participating in the Paris agreement, I think it’s not fair to leave it at that, because neither of them refused to sign for reasons anything like the selfish ones of the United States.
Syria was under sanctions making it complicated to even attend, and on top of that were embroiled in intense civil warfare and not in a great position to make a commitment like that. They didn’t disagree with it, but were never involved with the deal in the first place.
Nicaragua actually felt that the Paris agreement was not strict enough, arguing that they didn’t want to be complicit in a voluntary effort that didn’t properly allocate the responsibility to large countries for being the ones who poisoned the environment in the first place, nor impose a punishment on anyone failing to comply with the standards. Nicaragua is one of the countries that’s most affected by climate change but least responsible, and they felt that wasn’t fairly reflected in the accord.
The United States is the ONLY country that has rejected the Paris accord because of the belief that our environment is less important than our profit. Even oppressive regimes and the poorest nations in the world are smarter than that, or at least know when to keep their mouths shut and play along. The USA is not really in the league of Syria or Nicaragua, but alone in the refusal to cooperate out of pure greed.
Apparently Nicaragua is closing in on being 80%+ reliant on renewable energies which is one of the most impressive amongst nations, I believe I read somewhere.
The collapse of the most vulnerable parts of the ice sheet would
cause the rising of the sea level, threatening some of the world’s
biggest coastal cities such as Miami, New York, Mumbai and Shanghai.
New research shows climate change is altering the delicate seasonal clock that North American migratory songbirds rely on to successfully mate and raise healthy offspring, setting in motion a domino effect that could threaten the survival of many familiar backyard bird species.
A growing shift in the onset of spring has left nine of 48 species of songbirds studied unable to reach their northern breeding grounds at the calendar marks critical for producing the next generation of fledglings, according to a paper published today in Scientific Reports.
That’s because in many regions, warming temperatures are triggering plants to begin their growth earlier or later than normal, skewing biological cycles that have long been in sync.
The result, researchers say, could be a future much like the one Rachel Carson hinted at more than 50 years ago.
“It’s like ‘Silent Spring,’ but with a more elusive culprit,” said Stephen Mayor, a postdoctoral researcher with the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and first author of the study. “We’re seeing spring-like conditions well before birds arrive. The growing mismatch means fewer birds are likely to survive, reproduce and return the following year. These are birds people are used to seeing and hearing in their backyards. They’re part of the American landscape, part of our psyche. To imagine a future where they’re much less common would be a real loss.”
Sex may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of climate change. But for the collared flycatcher, the two seem to be linked in some mysterious way. As temperatures have risen, male flycatchers’ brilliant white forehead patches have changed from a valuable sexual signal into a liability.
Since 1980, ecologist Lars Gustafsson at Uppsala University in Sweden has been monitoring a population of collared flycatchers on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Every year, he and his colleagues have marked every bird in the population with numbered leg-bands, allowing the parentage, reproductive success and survival of many generations of birds to be tracked.
In recent years, Gustafsson’s team has noticed that the males’ forehead patches have been shrinking. Team member Simon Evans wondered whether this change was just a response by individual birds to changing conditions, or whether the population as a whole was evolving.
So Evans combed through 34 years of records. He found that early on, birds with larger forehead patches were more likely to contribute genes to future generations than their small-patched neighbours, but this edge reversed in the second half of the study period. Further analysis showed that this change was associated with higher springtime temperatures, a result of changing climate.
Oddly, birds with large forehead patches did worse in warm years, not because they had fewer offspring but because they were less likely to survive the following winter.
Evans, now at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, does not yet know why this is the case. But he speculates that males with large forehead patches must incur some cost for their display, perhaps through more aggressive competition against other males. Warmer springs somehow increase this cost. “These traits are evolving due to climate change,” says Evans.
Climate change is making birds less sexy!!!! We must stop this scourge!
lovingdread 