Floods, Fires, and Heat Domes (the climate change thread)

Good news all over…

7 Likes

pose-pray-greaaat

6 Likes

10 Likes

yyyep.

starvinggrizz

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/03/americas/emaciated-grizzly-bears-knights-inlet-canada-trnd-scn/index.html

The bears’ main food source, salmon, is at an all time low in the area… Commercial fishermen in British Columbia are calling this the worst salmon season in nearly 50 years…In August, a report released by the Fisheries and Oceans Canada noted that Canada’s climate is warming twice as fast as the global average, drastically impacting the salmon’s ecosystems. The report also cited marine heatwaves, increased floods and droughts as causing greater stress on the fish.

7 Likes
3 Likes

Living Planet: Glacier melts a threat to Swiss hydropower?

1 Like

Thought provoking and slightly depressing. Fusion power, baby. That’s pretty much the only hope for our future.

1 Like

I feel like a lot of these “oh shit” moments are coming from the utter lack of movement we’ve been able to make in a lot of the (comparatively) less complicated areas like power generation and transit. Would we feel so up against the wall with the industrial manufacturing sector’s carbon production if we’d already decarbonized the world’s electric grid and replace the internal combustion engine in transportation 30 years ago?

Sometimes this feels like a run of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure where we didn’t pick up the babelfish at the start of the game. Have we already soft-locked our entire civilization by building an entire century’s worth of progress on top of carbon-heavy infrastructure? I really hope we make it…

The numbers cited for heavy industry carbon footprint is 22%. Certainly significant, but if we could make significant inroads into the other 78% it would be real progress. Instead, we are trying to undo what little progress has been made. “Stupid” will be our epitaph, certainly not “mostly harmless.”

3 Likes
1 Like

Nothing to see here…

5 Likes
9 Likes

grumpy-cat-good

6 Likes

Bring back the flying boats!

1 Like

7 Likes

Great, the corporate-greed-fueled basically-murders have begun. Anything to avoid having to spend money on infrastructure instead of stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.

(Posted here because PG&E is shutting off power for over 2 million people for almost an entire week specifically because of wildfire risks that are being elevated because of climate change. USA, USA, we’re #1, ra ra ra.)

8 Likes

So far, Qatar has maintained outdoor life through a vast expansion of outdoor air conditioning. In the restored Souq Waqif market, a maze of shops, restaurants and small hotels, three- to four-foot-high air-conditioning units blow cool air onto cafe customers. At a cost of $80 to $250 each depending on the quality, they are the only things that make outdoor dining possible in a place where overnight low temperatures in summer rarely dip below 90 degrees.

The country’s new dairy farm, a natural candidate for solar power, uses 35 megawatts from the natural-gas-fired grid to keep the cows cool enough to survive the heat.

1 Like
4 Likes

Intersectionality everywhere.

6 Likes

Jane Fonda and Grace and Frankie co-star Sam Waterston got arrested at a protest this week in DC:

6 Likes