Diary Of The Last Age

As I've posted before, here,   here,  and  here , sea levels will be the one of consequences we will be experiencing very soon from global warming.   The New York Times is doing a special feature on the Antarctic ice shelf.  Snow and ice is increasing over parts of Antarctica, which deniers love to point out, but there are other major parts of Antarctica where there is a very serious danger of major melting events. Looming Floods, Threatened Cities. THE RISK IS CLEAR : Antarctica’s collapse has the potential to inundate coastal cities across the globe. Over tens of millions of years, thin layers of snow falling on the continent — in many places, just a light dusting every year — were pressed into ice, burying mountain ranges and building an ice sheet more than two miles thick. Under its own weight, that ice flows downhill in slow-moving streams that eventually drop icebergs into the sea. If that ice sheet were to disintegrate, it could raise the leve...

Financial Times declares a winner in the war for energy’s future, and Big Oil won’t be happy Traditional energy companies and mainstream financial publications are finally waking up to the new reality: The shift to renewable energy, electric cars, and a low-carbon economy is now unstoppable. The details of this transition are spelled out in a new, must-read, 4000-word article in the Financial Times, “ The Big Green Bang : how renewable energy became unstoppable.” What is most remarkable about the article is that it appears in the Financial Times.  The free-market oriented paper  is the “most important business read” for the world’s top financial decision makers and “the most credible publication in reporting financial and economic issues” for global professional investors, according to surveys. The business community, though, is starting to see the writing on the wall, especially in Europe. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest company, declared in...

US Glacier national park losing its glaciers with just 26 of 150 left  Only 26 glaciers remain, down from 150 a century ago. A century ago, the Park had about 150 glaciers. By 1966, that was down to 37. The US Geological Survey reported Wednesday that only 26 remain, with some losing as much as 85 percent of their area over the past five decades. “It’s inevitable that we will lose them all over the next few decades,” said Dr. Daniel Fagre, who led the research for USGS. The American West has been warming twice as fast as the world as a whole for several decades, and Glacier National Park (GNP) has seen a tripling of 90°F days over the last century. As a result, the one million-acre park that borders Canada has lost more than four fifths of its original glaciers. To be considered an “active” glacier, they must exceed 25 acres. Boulder Glacier (pictured above) is no longer “active.” Even if we stopped the warming they will be gone in twenty years.  It would...

Carbon pollution is suffocating ocean life and speeding up the next mass extinction Depletion of dissolved oxygen in our oceans, which can cause dead zones, is occurring much faster than expected, a new study finds . And by combining oxygen loss with ever-worsening ocean warming and acidification, humans are re-creating the conditions that led to the worst-ever extinction, which killed over 90 percent of marine life 252 million years ago. A 2011 study , “Rapid expansion of oceanic anoxia immediately before the end-Permian mass extinction,” found that rapid and widespread anoxia (absence of oxygen) preceded “the largest mass extinction in Earth history, with the demise of an estimated 90 percent of all marine species.” As National Geographic reported in 2015, we’re already starting to see the impacts of anoxia. “The waters of the Pacific Northwest, starting in 2002, intermittently have gotten so low in oxygen that at times they’ve smothered sea cucumbers, sea stars, anem...