Ogdred Weary
ᛟᛒᛊᛏᛁᚾᚨᛏᛖ ᚲᛁᛗᚱᛁᚲ
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2012
- Messages
- 7,123
That is very worrying. The vegetation in those areas will take a long time to grow back.
In some places the soil is peat and the land itself burns.
That is very worrying. The vegetation in those areas will take a long time to grow back.
Scary photos
The link above will take you to news that wildfires are blazing out of control - across the Arctic (even Greenland). They've released the same amount of carbon dioxide during the hottest June since records began as Sweden does in a year. On the bright side, at least they might kill the dormant frozen deadly viruses.
On topic - anyone who gets the world talking about the climate crisis - regardless of their age, background, mental condition or fallibility - deserves a round of applause and, if not that, then at the very least respect.
Taking climate change out of the equation, I still think there are sound, ecological programs that deserve support. I think reforestation efforts make sense on many levels, not the least of which is trees' ability to sequester carbon dioxide.
Global warming causes some bird species to become smaller, researchers find
Source: thetimes.co.uk
Date: 5 December, 2019
Global warming is causing some bird some species to shrink, a study has suggested.
Researchers in Chicago have found that sparrows and thrushes have become smaller over the past four decades. Their wings, however, have become slightly longer.
The findings are based on more than 70,000 birds that were examined after dying from flying into windows since 1978. Body size in all 52 species had been reduced while the wing length increased in 40 of them.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...smaller-researchers-in-chicago-find-gwvv562hj
Of it could simply be that the strongest fliers survive. I thought that's how evolution worked?
Strong fliers would have selective advantage only if relative flight characteristics (e.g., endurance; range) correlated with reproductive success. This would be more important to migratory birds who travel long distances to breeding grounds, but less critical to birds who live and breed within a small geographic area.
It strikes me that the most direct connection one might suggest between environmental temperature and bird size would concern body temperature and temperature regulation. Birds are endothermic ("warm-blooded") with high metabolic rates. Smaller body size could confer an advantage by reducing caloric intake requirements, facilitating heat dissipation, and hence reducing risk of overheating.
Climate change: Greenland ice melt 'is accelerating'
Source: BBC news online
Date: 10 December, 2019
Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than it was in the 1990s.
The assessment comes from an international team of polar scientists who've reviewed all the satellite observations over a 26-year period.
They say Greenland's contribution to sea-level rise is currently tracking what had been regarded as a pessimistic projection of the future.
It means an additional 7cm of ocean rise could now be expected by the end of the century from Greenland alone.
This threatens to put many millions more people in low-lying coastal regions at risk of flooding.
It's estimated roughly a billion live today less than 10m above current high-tide lines, including 250 million below 1m.
"Storms, if they happen against a baseline of higher seas - they will break flood defences," said Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University.
"The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimetre of sea-level rise. So, when you hear about a centimetre rise, it does have impacts," he told BBC News.
https://www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science-environment-48387030?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE=#referrer=https://www.google.com&_tf=From %1$s
Conversely so. Really interesting.... globally averaged sea level fluctuates considerably over time.
Reasons why...Personally, one remains ambivalent re climate change.
From a very long term viewpoint, CO2 levels are gradually decreasing over a timescale of hundreds of millions of years. About 500 million years from now, in the deep future, CO2 levels are expected to go so low that most plants will die out. There's no guarantee that our planet would naturally return to high CO2 levels if there were no anthropogenic effects.I really should state my case here. I believe global warming, whether or not it has a significant human component, is inevitable in the long run. I'm talking millennia there. We are still on an interstice on the way out of the last ice age and there is no guarantee the last kick of said ice age is past. But if the geological record is to believed, the planet's normal state, when not in an ice age, is both warmer than now and with a substantially higher percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The first statement is probably wrong, since it would go against the long-term trend. The second statement is probably true at present, but it hopefully will not remain so. In the long term we will need to engineer the Earth's climate one way or another.I believe the planet will restore itself to that normal state whatever we puny humans do, as it did after disastrous asteroid impacts and other disruptive events in the past. Therefore we adapt or die. Trying to preserve the status quo is beyond our powers.
I agree with this, but don't expect to find any better planets out there. If we are going to live on any extrasolar planets at all, we'll have to learn the technology for climate engineering somehow. Every earth-like planet out there will have some sort of climate issue- different rotation period, different obliquity, different magnetic field strength, different water content, different atmospheric content, different temperature ranges, different frequency range of illuminance, different tidal characteristics, different gravity regime- and that's just for starters.And if the human race is to survive we really must resume our push to the stars.
From a very long term viewpoint, CO2 levels are gradually decreasing over a timescale of hundreds of millions of years. About 500 million years from now, in the deep future, CO2 levels are expected to go so low that most plants will die out. There's no guarantee that our planet would naturally return to high CO2 levels if there were no anthropogenic effects.
The first statement is probably wrong, since it would go against the long-term trend. The second statement is probably true at present, but it hopefully will not remain so. In the long term we will need to engineer the Earth's climate one way or another.
I agree with this, but don't expect to find any better planets out there. If we are going to live on any extrasolar planets at all, we'll have to learn the technology for climate engineering somehow. Every earth-like planet out there will have some sort of climate issue- different rotation period, different obliquity, different magnetic field strength, different water content, different atmospheric content, different temperature ranges, different frequency range of illuminance, different tidal characteristics, different gravity regime- and that's just for starters.
Even after the expected climate disasters of the next few hundred years, Earth will remain the most Earth-like planet for many thousands of light-years, if my estimates are correct.