Sunday, October 31, 2021

Emergency


This is a "climate emergency" declare 11,000 plus scientists from 153 countries. Climate change "chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable" This November 2019 paper was released via Bioscience Magazine.

California is experiencing the specific climate impacts with a long, exceptional drought and massive wildfires, along with a vanishing winter snowpack that normally piles up by the end of winter in the mountainous northern part of the state.

"People regularly discuss California when talking about long-term drought, particularly because the state often experiences prolonged water shortages. Some experts believe that rather than going through brief non-drought periods, the state is actually enduring a so-called emerging megadrought and has been for the last two decades.

Research conducted in 2020 examined nine Western U.S. states and parts of Mexico. The team started by looking at ancient droughts dating back to 800 A.D. It then scrutinized soil moisture records associated with observed weather events from 2000-2018.

Park Williams, a bioclimatologist and associate professor at UCLA involved with the study, remarked, “This drought that we’re in now over the last 22 years has been as severe as the worst 22-year periods of the worst megadroughts that occurred last millennium."

The climate projections for 2500, published in TheConversation, show an Earth that is alien to humans.

Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth's climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring that these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for projection. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore short-sighted.

These bleak scenarios are well on their way to becoming real in a "business as usual" projection. There does not appear to be a collective will to put the necessary carbon reduction strategies in place to avoid the near-future devastation that humanity, and our ecosystem that supports life, is facing.