"I'm happy and grateful now that our amazing Paya Bay is the most beautiful, most blissful, most environmentally friendly, and most financially successful boutique resort in Central America."
On Earth, the amount of ice lost each year is equal to a monstrous, over six-mile-high ice cube looming over New York City.
And this ice loss is accelerating.
In research published Monday in the scientific journal The Cryosphere, earth scientists concluded the planet lost a prodigious 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017. This means ice mass is melting away, like a shrinking glacier. Since the 1990s, the rate of annual ice loss has increased by 57 percent.
"Over the past three decades, ice has been lost from every corner of our planet," said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and a coauthor of the research.
The world’s seas are simmering, with record high temperatures spurring worry among forecasters that the global warming effect may generate a chaotic year of extreme weather ahead.
Parts of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans all hit the record books for warmth last month, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information. The high temperatures could offer clues on the ferocity of the Atlantic hurricane season, the eruption of wildfires from the Amazon region to Australia, and whether the record heat and severe thunderstorms raking the southern U.S. will continue.
In the Gulf of Mexico, where offshore drilling accounts for about 17% of U.S. oil output, water temperatures were 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit (24.6 Celsius), 1.7 degrees above the long-term average, said Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University. If Gulf waters stay warm, it could be the fuel that intensifies any storm that comes that way, Klotzbach said.
Climate change and nutrient pollution are driving the oxygen from our oceans, and threatening many species of fish.
That's the conclusion of the biggest study of its kind, undertaken by conservation group IUCN.
While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate change is making the lack of oxygen worse.
Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s.
Researchers say the depletion is threatening species including tuna, marlin and sharks.
Global sea levels are expected to rise between two to seven feet (0.6 meters to 2.1 meters) -- and possibly more -- over the course of the 21st century.
And by 2050, land that is currently home to about 300 million people will fall below the elevation of the average annual coastal flood -- meaning they could face severe floods at least once a year. By 2100, land that is home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line, rendering those coastal areas all but unlivable.
"The results indicate that, yes, a great deal more people are on vulnerable land than we thought," said Benjamin Strauss, one of the study's co-authors and CEO of non-profit organization Climate Central. He added that these affected regions need to take immediate action to avoid the impending "economic and humanitarian catastrophe."
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about it money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth - how dare you?"
Love her!
The world's oceans are warming at an accelerated rate and are much warmer than scientists thought -- and things could get a lot worse if nothing is done to stop climate change, according to a new study.
The data, published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science, shows that the oceans have experienced consistent changes since the late 1950s and have gotten a lot warmer since the 1960s. The oceans are heating up much faster than scientists calculated in the UN assessment of climate change released in 2014.
[...]
Though a warmer ocean might make for a more pleasant swim, it carries deadly consequences.
A warmer ocean causes sea level to rise, bringing problems like dangerous coastal flooding. It leads to the loss of sea ice, heating the waters even further. It can affect the jet stream, allowing cold Arctic air to reach farther south, making winters more intense, and endanger the lives of animals that depend on sea ice like penguins and polar bears.
A warmer ocean also contributes to increases in rainfall and leads to stronger and longer-lasting storms like Hurricanes Florence and Harvey.
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden.
I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.
Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn't matter what we do.
But I've learned you are never too small to make a difference.
And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.
You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.
Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.
Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.
The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything while there still was time to act.
You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.
We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.
We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.
We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.
We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.
"There's a very clear outcome, the higher the numbers of larvae that you put into the reef system, the more coral recruits you get," Harrison said. "The pilot studies at small scales are giving us hope that we will be able to scale this up to much larger reef scales."
The 2,300km-long (1,500 miles) Great Barrier Reef -- a UNESCO World Heritage Site -- lost around half of its coral in the past few years after two mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, a pattern repeated on coral reefs around the world.
Marine heat waves caused by global warming are killing off the corals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest reef system, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The Great Barrier Reef experienced an extended marine heat wave in 2016 that caused massive coral bleaching and die-off. Most of the impact was along 500 miles of the northern Great Barrier Reef, its most pristine region.
The reef endured coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, but the northern region sustained only minor damage then. Global heat and coral bleaching began to increase in 2014 and continued through 2017; this event meant that marine heat waves causing bleaching struck three-quarters of the world's coral reefs and that the heat waves that cause corals to die struck almost a third, the researchers said.
The 2016 marine heat wave caused the most severe and catastrophic coral bleaching event the Great Barrier Reef has ever experienced, the study found. Overall, these events have affected every part of the reef.
The cognitive dissonance... it's mind-boggling. What gets me are those that get on their laptops (a product of science) and their hand-held devices (another product of science) to showcase their ignorance and/or close-mindedness on the Internet (yet another product of science). WTF? If you don't believe in science, it would be way less hypocritical if you used something like, say, smoke signalsto spread your anti-science message, instead of using the cool, convenient tools that exist today because of this "so-called science" you don't believe in. Either that, or STFU, because THIS is what's happening in the reality-based, appropriately educated world.
New federal estimates say global sea levels could rise faster than previously thought, and the rise may be even worse in many coastal regions of the United States.
A new report, written by scientists with several federal agencies and universities, says that under a worst-case scenario, climate change could raise the oceans an average of more than 8 feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than a previous federal estimate published in 2012. The best case now projected would be an average of about a foot.
[...]
The six scenarios are based on United Nations models of future greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether countries rapidly slash pollution or continue burning fossil fuels as usual. The authors determined that the worst-case rise of more than 8 feet has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring by 2100, even under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, but a rise of more than 1.5 feet is near certain with high emissions.
The increase in the estimates for global sea rise was partly due to new research on the Antarctic ice sheet, which is melting faster and appears to be more fragile than previously estimated, suggesting that some of the more pessimistic scenarios are increasingly likely.
[...]
Sea levels have already risen by more than 8 inches globally since 1880, with 3 inches coming since 1993. Tidal flooding "has increased by an order of magnitude over the past several decades," the report says, "turning it from a rare event into a recurrent and disruptive problem."
[...]
"Even if society sharply reduces emissions in the coming decades," the authors write, "sea level will most likely continue to rise for centuries."
This is what Pigeon Cay, one of the Universe's masterpieces, looked like nine years ago. Heaven on earth. One of the most beautiful and magical places in our hemisphere.
I had not been to Pigeon Cay during the last eighteen months or so. I was shocked - SHOCKED! - at the apocalyptic scene I found when I visited two days ago! It seems climate change and rising sea levels are quickly destroying this amazing little island that we Bay Islanders cherish and love so much. The cay is now only about a fifth of its former size and the thick jungle of palms, shrubs, and trees down its center that held it together is nearly all dead or dying. The cay is unraveling and dissolving. Fast. It looks as if a bomb exploded on it. I am SO heartbroken! WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
I felt a deep sense of sadness and foreboding as we were leaving, as the boat floated away from the fragile remnants of our magical little Pigeon Cay. If something is not done -- and done fast -- I estimate that the cay will slip below the waves forever in the next three to five years (faster if we have a big storm come through). That would be a tragic loss for humanity. We humans are responsible for this.We have to at least try to do something to help! Please feel free to share this blog post and/or these photos with anyone you feel needs to know about this crisis and who might want/be able to help. The Bay Islands won't be the same without our beloved Pigeon Cay.
After all...
...where will our black iguana buddies on the cay get to live if their home completely slips under the sea? Put yourself in their shoes.
Look him in the eye. Where?
The tragic plight of our cay and my iguana buddy reminded me of this song...
