Microorganisms are key to storing carbon in soils, shows new study
May 2023, phys.org
What's the impact ratio of fossil fuel carbon vs soil carbon?
Microbial carbon use efficiency is at least four times more influential than other biological or environmental factors when it comes to global soil carbon storage and distribution. The study's result has implications for improving soil health and mitigating climate change.Soils serve as crucial carbon sinks, storing more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem and three times more than the atmosphere. However, the processes involved in soil carbon storage have not been well understood.
And the paranoid person should readily come to the suspicion that this is not a coincidence, Big Agra etc.
via Max Plank Society for Biogeochemistry in Jena: Feng Tao et al, Microbial carbon use efficiency promotes global soil carbon storage, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06042-3
Image credit: AI Art - A Collection of Teaching Resources - 2023
Also: Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests
Apr 2023, The Guardian
It has long been known to be one of Earth’s biggest stores of carbon, but until now it has not been possible to examine in detail how much carbon soils in particular areas are locking up and how much they are emitting.
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| AI Art - Magnetar in Space - 2023 |
This is where things get interesting.
Recent, rapid ocean warming ahead of El Niño alarms scientists
Apr 25 2023, BBC News
Note that this article comes out only months after the IPCC 6.
"In March, sea surface temperatures off the east coast of North America were as much as 13.8C (24.8F) higher than the 1981-2011 average."
Because that sounds really high. And it makes you think, how can we be that wrong? We've been studying this for a long time, devote so many resources to this, use the world's most powerful computers to run these models, and we're still ----this---- wrong about what's happening. I imagine that anyone paying close enough attention to this sees nothing but the all-out apocalypse blinding their vision of the future.
"Scientists don't fully understand why this has happened."
The IPCC 6 is almost 4,000 pages long and based on 14,000 scientific papers, and we can't figure out why the ocean is 25F hotter than it's supposed to be, based on the same models that went into that report? You think that would be big news. Yet:
"An important new study, published last week with little fanfare, highlights a worrying development."
I saw this mentioned first on BBC. Then I saw it in Wired magazine within the same week. That was it. Until one month later, it resurfaces, this time in the Wall Street Journal. Maybe that's because it can be used to support the idea that we have no idea what we're doing, and maybe we can stop all this panic and keep the motor running another 100 years. You might expect to hear that from a newspaper owned by the same guy who also owns a global logistics company which relies on exploiting the intimate relationships developed in cooperation with Big Fossil.
Then again, maybe it's really no big deal, right? (Right?)
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| AI Art - Quarks - 2023 |
Reduced emissions during the pandemic led to increased climate warming, reveals study
May 2023, phys.org
The global material experiment -- "It is well known that emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants lead to the formation of aerosols (particles) in the air that can offset, or mask, the full climate warming caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. But there has been a lack of knowledge about this "masking effect." In order to determine the size, large-scale experiments involving huge regions would be required—this is infeasible.The COVID pandemic became such a "natural" experiment.""Through this large-scale geophysical experiment, we were able to demonstrate that while the sky became bluer and the air cleaner, climate warming increased when these cooling air particles were removed," says Professor Örjan Gustafsson at Stockholm University, who is responsible for the measurements in the Maldives and who led the study.The results show that a complete phasing out of fossil fuel combustion in favor of renewable energy sources with zero emissions could result in rapid "unmasking" of aerosols, while greenhouse gases linger.
via Stockholm University: H. R. C. R. Nair et al, Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41612-023-00367-6
Ocean temperatures are off the charts, and El Niño is only partly to blame
Jun 2023, phys.org
Had to "increase the upper bound on the y-axis," he said.
When someone is measuring a global emergent disaster, that is absolutely not what you want to hear them say.
But this is where it gets good:
"major change in regulations around the sulfur content of shipping fuels could also be behind the warming spike, according to both Swain and Jacobson.The regulations, ordered by the International Maritime Organization in 2020, reduced the upper limit of sulfur in fuels from 3.5% to 0.5% in an effort to achieve cleaner air in ports and coastal areas.However, the change may have had an unexpected consequence because sulfate aerosols can reflect sunlight away from the earth, "effectively dimming the planet's surface," Jacobson wrote in a post on his website."By cleaning up shipping fuels, massive regions of the world's oceans that were protected from heating by shipping sulfate aerosols are now experiencing rapid warming," he said, including many of the main shipping routes where the warming is happening. -Eliot Jacobson, retired mathematics professor who created the graph using data from NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory ... "
Aside from the Tonga eruption, the global pandemic, the arriving El Niño, this comes up as one possibility for the sudden rise in sea temperatures -- how crazy would it be if the very sulfur that we are trying to keep out of the air because it gets in the blood and causes heart disease, has been masking a huge temperature rise that might now cause heart attacks across the planet but this time from heat-related events.
Then again, Terminal Shock and Ministry for the Future already wrote that book, if you're interested in hearing what it might be like to intentionally put sulfur back into the air...
Climate change -- Sudden heat increase in seas around UK and Ireland
Jun 2023, BBC News
Same alarms as the above, but this time from the European Space Agency (ESA). They mention that the North Atlantic is seeing the most rise in temperatures, and also talk about the sulfur emissions:
Regulations reducing the sulphur content of fuel burned by ships were brought in by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) in 2020.This significantly reduces the amount of aerosol particles released into the atmosphere, the IMO says.But aerosols that pollute the air can also help reflect heat back into space, so removing them may have caused more heat to enter the waters.
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| AI Art - Un Pequeno Dispositivo Cuantico - 2023 |
Effect of volcanic eruptions significantly underestimated in climate projections, study shows
Jun 2023, phys.org
Researchers have found that the cooling effect that volcanic eruptions have on Earth's surface temperature is likely underestimated by a factor of two, and potentially as much as a factor of four, in standard climate projections.Compared with the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, the effect that volcanoes have on the global climate is relatively minor, but it's important that we include them in climate models, in order to accurately assess temperature changes in future.
via University of Cambridge: Man Mei Chim et al, Climate Projections Very Likely Underestimate Future Volcanic Forcing and Its Climatic Effects, Geophysical Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2023GL103743
Climate change: Shipping agrees net-zero goal but critics chide deal
Jun 2023, BBC News
The global shipping industry has agreed to reduce planet warming gases to net-zero "by or around 2050", but critics say the deal is fatally flawed. Ships produce around 3% of global CO2 but countries will now have to reduce this as close as possible to zero by the middle of the century.Small island states have welcomed the plan but green groups are furious. They believe the strategy is toothless and will do little to limit rising temperatures. China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and others the new strategy that will see "indicative checkpoints" rather than hard targets
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| AI Art - A Virus Drawn by DaVinci - 2023 |
Let's switch to something different for a moment:
Potential financial losses from a renewable energy transition are concentrated among the wealthy, study finds
Jun 2023, phys.org
Pretty much explains everything --
Their results found that, in the United States, two-thirds of the financial losses from lost fossil fuel assets would affect the top 10% of wealth holders, with half of that affecting the top 1%. Because the top 1% tend to have a diverse portfolio of investments, any losses from fossil fuel assets would make up less than 1% of this group's net wealth. When the researchers repeated this analysis for the United Kingdom and continental European countries, they found similar results."Investing in a stranded asset is like buying a rotten apple," says Chancel. "In this case, the apple is rotten because of climate change. Who owns these rotten apples? We find that the richest 10% of the population owns the vast majority of these assets."
via Political Economy Research Institute and Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Center for Research on Social Inequalities, Sciences Po, Paris : Gregor Semieniuk, Potential pension fund losses should not deter high-income countries from bold climate action, Joule (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2023.05.023.
Roadside hedges can reduce harmful ultrafine particle pollution around schools
Sep 2023, phys.org
(Why did we need science to tell us this)
"Western red cedar does a great job in 'capturing ' particulate pollution because it has abundant, fine, evergreen leaves into which airborne particles bump and then settle from the roadside air," said study co-author Professor Barbara Maher from the University of Lancaster who led the previous research. *I believe we call these trees Arborvitae here in the Northeast?The researchers applied a new type of pollution analysis, using magnetism to study particles which originate from vehicle exhaust and the wearing of brake pads and tires, and are then trapped by a hedge separating a major 6-lane road from a primary school in Manchester, UK. They found that the hedge was especially successful in removing ultrafine particle pollution, which can be more damaging to health.Testing with magnetism allowed them to distinguish local traffic pollution from other sources of air pollution.In the school playground, 30 meters from the road, they measured a 78% decrease in PM10 relative to roadside air.They noticed that this removal was even more efficient for ultrafine PM2.5 particles. "What was remarkable was just how efficiently the tredge hoovered up the very finest particles," said senior author Professor Richard Harrison, also from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences. They measured an 80% reduction in the ultrafine particles just behind the tredge.
via University of Cambridge and Lancaster University: H.A. Sheikh et al, Efficacy of green infrastructure in reducing exposure to local, traffic-related sources of airborne particulate matter (PM), Science of The Total Environment (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.166598
Green growth loses favor with climate policy scientists
Sep 2023, phys.org
A total of 86.1% of the researchers from the European Union for instance expressed very high levels of skepticism about green growth, while North American researchers were less likely to hold degrowth positions compared to those from other OECD countries. In contrast, more than half of the researchers from non-OECD countries, most importantly BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), expressed views aligned with a green growth position."We also found that climate policy researchers with a degrowth position tend to support direct regulation (standards, quotas, bans) while green growth proponents support innovation subsidies."
Truly eye opening, every piece of this makes sense, like how the US (more infiltrated by industry and money) is for green growth more than EU, how economists and environmentalists (latter a direct target of academia money influence on climate) and even how the innovators are for green growth, and they are the people who stand to make money off it, as usual....
Post-Growth (either degrowth or agrowth) -- prioritize sustainability, social justice, and human well-being, even if this means a reduction in material consumption and economic activity.
via ESCP Business School (France), the Graduate School of Economics and Management of the Ural Federal University (Russia), the University of Málaga (Spain), and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Lewis C. King et al, Shades of green growth scepticism among climate policy researchers, Nature Sustainability (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-023-01198-2.
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| AI Art - Bosons - 2023 |
New study finds that the Gulf Stream is warming and shifting closer to shore
Oct 2023, phys.org
The Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean as a whole and has shifted towards the coast."The warming we see near the Gulf Stream is due to two combined effects. One is that the ocean is absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere as the climate warms," said Todd. "The second is that the Gulf Stream itself is gradually shifting towards the coast."They identified these trends using observational data from Spray autonomous underwater gliders and from the Argo Program, which is an array of about 4,000 autonomous profiling floats that drift with ocean currents and move up and down between the surface and about 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) in depth, collecting data as they rise. Argo is an international program that has been operating since 1999. WHOI is one of the original Argo institutions and maintains about 10% of the array.
via Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Robert E. Todd et al, Warming and lateral shift of the Gulf Stream from in situ observations since 2001, Nature Climate Change (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01835-w
Carbon emissions threaten 1.5C climate threshold sooner than thought
Oct 2023, BBC News
They're not saying it but they are saying it --
Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's key advisory body, projected that the world could only emit another 500bn tonnes of carbon and have a 50% chance of keeping warming under the 1.5C figure.As the current annual level of emissions is around 40bn tonnes, the IPCC projected that the threshold would be crossed permanently by the middle of the next decade. But this new analysis suggests it will be much sooner than that.The researchers ... also re-examined the role of other, non-carbon factors that impact warming. One of the most critical are sooty particles called aerosols, which mainly arise from the burning of fossil fuels. They contribute heavily to air pollution but have an unexpected benefit for the climate because they help cool the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight back into space.The new research paper finds that these aerosols have in fact a far higher cooling impact than previously thought.
Neil Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson, literally wrote this future like yesterday (2020).
Shoot I can't keep up; this is unfolding in real time:
Pioneering scientist says global warming is accelerating. Some experts call his claims overheated
Nov 2023, phys.org
The Godfather of Global Warming -- former NASA top scientist James Hansen, prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988Hansen argues there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those particles means there's less of the cooling effect that they can have.
Particles.
via James Hanson, Godfather of Global Warming: James Hansen et al, Global warming in the pipeline, Oxford Open Climate Change (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008
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