July 2. 01. 7 Stormwatch Climate Change. Many years ago, not long after I first got onto the internet, I created a website to try to encourage community groups to make preparations for the hard times to come. It was titled The Stormwatch Project why, yes, I was a Jethro Tull fan back in the day how did you guess I let it go the way of all websites in due time. Yet the name, not to mention the underlying image of eyes turned to the turbulent heavens, watching for signs of trouble to come, seemed worth keeping, so Ill be repurposing it here. I considered just doing a monthly link roundup, but there are already quite a few good sites that provide that service on a daily basis two that I visit regularly are Naked Capitalism and the Collapse subreddit so reinventing that particular wheel didnt seem like a good idea. Instead, Im going to try a monthly post with links from the internet and commentary from me, focusing on one theme at a time. This month were going to talk about the current pace of anthropogenic climate change. Thats perhaps the most massive story of our time its happening a good deal faster than I expected though in all fairness, a great many climate scientists have been caught flatfooted by the pace of change as well. Its a measure of how drastic the situation has become that so many people have fled into a flat denial that anything of the kind is taking place, or the equal and opposite insistence that were all going to die soon so it doesnt matter. Thats understandable, as the alternative is coming to terms with the impending failure of the myth of progress and the really messy future were making for those who come after us. On that note, fellow stormwatchers, don your waterproof boots were going to visit a planetwide flood zone. John Lewis Partnership Handbook For The Recently Deceased' title='John Lewis Partnership Handbook For The Recently Deceased' />We would like to show you a description here but the site wont allow us. John Lewis Partnership Handbook For The Recently Deceased' title='John Lewis Partnership Handbook For The Recently Deceased' />Search for the best recommended Insurance Law firms, Lawyers, Attorneys in London. One of the dismal advantages of the way weve treated the atmosphere as a gaseous trash can is that scientists now get to learn much more than they want to learn about the complex interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, and the planets waning ice caps. Ars Technica has a useful summary of one of the feedback loops now under way as arctic sea ice melts, the climate balance shifts in ways that drive more melting. Bunny Fairy Tales, Grosset Dunlap 5023405001125 Fretwork, Maire Ni Chathasaigh, Nollaig Casey, Chris Newman 9780769281063 0769281060 Sonata. Similarly, a paper released by www. Greenland ice sheet is going into overdrive as a result of fewer clouds and more summer sunshine due to shifting climate belts. Meanwhile, down in Antarctica, the rate of melting is such that plants and insects are beginning to colonize the once frozen landscape. A while ago, if I may interject something relevant, I fielded a diatribe from a climate denialist who insisted that there were trees growing on the shores of Antarctica when the Robert Scott expedition arrived there in 1. Thats what is known in the business as a bald faced lie. There are plenty of good photographs of Scotts base camp Im looking at some of them right now in a book I own. Its one of the volumes of the Life Nature Library, The Poles, which was published before anybody but a few physicists thought that anthropogenic climate change was an issue, and it shows that Scotts camp on the shores of Mc. Murdo Sound was set in a wasteland of snow and bare ground, without a tree or even a patch of moss in sight. Anyone who wants to argue that point had better be prepared to show something more than empty rhetoric. Okay, back to the changing climate. Remember those craters that started appearing in the Siberian tundra a few years back Theyre still appearing, and witnesses have watched the methane explosions that cause them as they happen. As far as I know, this is still purely a Siberian phenomenon this is not surprising, as Siberia has heated up faster than any other land mass bordering the Arctic Ocean but as permafrost continues to melt and methane to bubble up, expect more loud booms from the Alaska north slope and arctic Canada. Speaking of loud booms, an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware is poised to drift off into the southern seas in the months immediately ahead. Longtime watchers of the climate change scene will remember the ballyhoo a few years ago when the first two parts of the Larsen Ice Shelf, unimaginatively labeled Larsen A and Larsen B, turned out to be unstable. Theyre gone now as in drifted free, broke up, and melted and its now the turn of the much bigger Larsen C sheet. Theres more in line once thats gone. Rounding out the loud boom category, the west coast of Greenland was hit by a tsunami, which killed four people and washed away eleven houses. That in itself doesnt signal anything out of the ordinary tsunamis happen all the time but if it turns out to be the first of many, the North Atlantic basin is in deep trouble. The weight of all that ice pushed the portion of the Earths crust we call Greenland more than a thousand feet down into the mantle as the ice melts, what geologists call isostatic rebound will raise the crust back up, and any geological fault under strain has a sharply heightened change of pupping an earthquake as that happens. The result, to judge by what happened at the end of the last ice age, will be tsunamis hammering the coasts of eastern North America and western Europe at unpredictable intervals another good reason, dear reader, to be sure you live on high ground if youre anywhere near the ocean. Here in the US, as a result of rising sea level, the number of high tide related floods has nearly doubled 5. NOAA, as compared to the usual average of 2. In response, real estate investors in the greater Miami area are quietly moving to higher ground, relocating away from beachfront property into formerly poor neighborhoods that are a few more feet above sea level. Fort Lauderdale, meanwhile, is having to raise fees for drainage in order to deal with the increased cost of flooding. Expect much more of this in the years ahead. Nobodys yet willing to deal with the reality of the situation, which is that most of Florida will have to be abandoned to the sea in the decades ahead of us. Elsewhere, the Earths zone of tropical climate is steadily expanding as climate belts shift, and heatwaves severe enough to kill people in large numbers have become steadily more common since 1. Europe spent much of June baking beneath unaccustomed heat as a direct result. As the climate shifts, furthermore, diseases and parasites spread accordingly five counties in Florida now have populations of the unappealingly named rat lungworm, which can eat your brain no, Im not making that up. Its a nasty tropical parasite that afflicts humans as well as rats. Expect much more of this, too, as climate zones shift and living things follow them. Theres much more along the same lines, but these are indicative. Meanwhile President Trump has insisted that hes going to take the US out of the Paris climate accords. The mainstream media has duly lambasted him for that, wihtout ever quite mentioning that the Paris climate accords dont actually commit anyone anywhere to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. Dr. James Hansen, arguably the dean of climate scientists researching the mess were in, has thus described the Paris accords as a fraud. As usual in todays America, the choices offered us by the two parties consist of business as usual on the one hand, and business as usual with a few futile face saving gestures on the other. How To Fix Reason File Bad Formation there. If you want a different option, dear reader, youre going to have to make it yourself. What were heading toward, in the absence of meaningful leadership from either side of the political scene, is a future most people alive today cant even imagine. Ironically, they could learn a lot about it by reading up on recent research into the end of the last ice age. Scottish and Norwegian researchers have tracked the way that the ice sheets of the last glaciation collapsed, flooding millions of square miles of once dry land and kicking off a cascade of climatic and ecological changes.