Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Climate Change Black Death is inevitable
  It is officially too late to prevent the release of a
  gigaton of methane and 37 gigatons of carbon
  dioxide from an Arctic permafrost thaw by 2100


On Tuesday the U.S. Government 2019 Arctic Report Card was released describing a region moving towards an entirely new and unfamiliar environment resulting in the release of carbon dioxide and methane in an accelerating feedback process. TIME magazine on Wednesday named 16-year-old Swedish climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg its youngest "Person of the Year". The background shows permafrost at the top of the cliff melting into the Kolyma River outside Zyryanka, Russia.


Certainly it was a true "feel good" story today that TIME offered 16-year-old Swedish climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg as its 2019 Person of the Year cover girl making her at least somewhat more important than
  • Lizzo: TIME's Entertainer of the Year
  • Public Servants: TIME's Guardians of the Year
  • U.S. Women's Soccer: TIME's Athlete of the Year and
  • Disney CEO Bob Iger: TIME's Businessperson of the Year.
Yesterday we read The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback letting us know what was in the U.S. Government's 2019 Arctic Report Card.

Some may wonder why this writer chooses to express the climate crisis in an "extreme" way as...


...and this week's juxtaposition of news articles provides an opportunity to explain the situation.

Twenty-five years ago this month, in 1996, six years before Ms. Thunberg was born, Science Magazine published Arctic Tundra Leaking Greenhouse Gases which explained:

    A profound change appears to be sweeping the landscape above the Arctic Circle: Northern Alaska's tundra is warming up, perhaps because of local climate change. And as it warms, it is releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it's soaking up, according to a report at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week. The findings suggest that a sustained global warming because of human activity could unleash a flood of carbon dioxide from the arctic tundra, which could alter the region's environment and nudge up global temperatures.
    Scientists are concerned that this trickle of greenhouse gases may represent the first cracks in a dam, as the arctic tundra stores an estimated 180 billion metric tons of carbon--about a third of the total in the Earth's atmosphere, says [University of Michigan biologist George] Kling. "The concern is what will happen in the future as global warming increases and melting permafrost exposes more of this buried carbon to be respired and released into the atmosphere," he says. As it does, this cold place could turn up the heat on the rest of the planet.

So here we are 25-years later. Nothing has been done.

Today at the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP25, the 25th United Nations Climate Change conference (yeah, the same 25 years), Thunberg said to the adults in the room: “We are desperate for any sign of hope. I’ve given many speeches and learned that when you talk in public you should start with something personal or emotional to get everyone’s attention, say things like ‘our house is on fire,’ ‘I want you to panic,’ and ‘how dare you.’ But today I will not do that, because then those phrases are all that people focus on. They don’t remember the facts, the very reason why I say those things in the first place.”

During the same meeting 22-year-old Ugandan activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye noted: “You’ve been negotiating for the last 25 years, even before I was born."

Both Thunberg and Nakabuye, along with Lizzo, are members of the Gen Z generation, who along with the Millennial generation that will experience through their entire lives the environmental changes of Climate Change Black Death.

Bob Iger at age 68 has not had and will not have a similar lifetime experience, as he is a Baby Boomer, among the many that have overseen the huge expansion of a corporation creating demand for content, and creating the content, on the internet for huge profits. Which brings up a related study.

Last month as noted in The Guardian a study commissioned by energy company OVO pointed out that "if every adult in the UK sent one fewer “thank you” email a day we would save more than 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year – equivalent to 81,152 flights to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road."

An expert explained: “When you are typing, your computer [device] is using electricity. When you press send it goes through the network, and it takes electricity to run the network. And it’s going to end up being stored on the cloud somewhere, and those data centres use a lot of electricity. We don’t think about it because we can’t see the smoke coming out of our computers, but the carbon footprint of IT is huge and growing.”

As has been explored in these posts previously, such things as wind and solar power or electric cars  just reduce the expansion rate of the societal carbon footprint within the first world. The Paris Agreement goal of keeping the global temperature rise well below 2 °C is simply hot air created by the aircraft and vehicles delivering the participants in conferences to various meeting sites. As noted here numerous times, in 2018 in both the U.S. and China formal findings have been made that we have "locked in warming" of 4°± Celsius most likely within 60 years with the Chinese projecting an increase of 4°C as early as 2064.

And for clarity again it must be mentioned that Al Gore began his campaign to stop the climate crisis in 1974 and in 1989, 30 years ago as a U.S. Senator, with a frustration level matching that of Thunberg and Nakabuye, wrote: "How much information is needed by the human mind to recognize a pattern? How much more is needed by the body politic to justify action in response? ...If an individual or a nation is accustomed to looking at the future one year at a time, and the past in terms of a single lifetime, then many large patterns are concealed. But seen in historical perspective, it is clear that dozens of destructive effects have followed the same pattern of unprecedented acceleration in the latter half of the 20th century. ...Yet, the pattern of our politics remains remarkably unchanged. That indifference must end. As a nation and a government, we must see that America's future is inextricably tied to the fate of the globe. In effect, the environment is becoming a matter of national security -- an issue that directly and imminently menaces the interests of the state or the welfare of the people."

Well, Al, Greta gave us a truth today when she said the people "don’t remember the facts, the very reason why I say those things in the first place.” Let me add to it. The people who could do something like Bob Iger don't remember it because they don't want to.


The 21st Century Climate Change Black Death is happening now.
                                                                                                          If you're new to this blog here's the link to the listing of the 30+ previous posts in the Blog regarding Climate Change and the Environment.

This post is a part of a series:  climate change black death surrounds us 
                                                                                                         

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