A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.

Melting ice on Khumbu glacier in the Everest-Khumbu
region. Himalayan glaciers are a water source for
250 million people.

Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

Read the story from The Guardian by Damian Carrington - “A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report.”

Short-lived greenhouse gases cause centuries of sea-level rise

Even if there comes a day when the world completely stops emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, coastal regions and island nations will continue to experience rising sea levels for centuries afterward, according to a new study by researchers at MIT and Simon Fraser University.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that warming from short-lived compounds -- greenhouse gases such as methane, chlorofluorocarbons, or hydrofluorocarbons, that linger in the atmosphere for just a year to a few decades -- can cause sea levels to rise for hundreds of years after the pollutants have been cleared from the atmosphere.

"If you think of countries like Tuvalu, which are barely above sea level, the question that is looming is how much we can emit before they are doomed. Are they already slated to go under, even if we stopped emitting everything tomorrow?" says co-author Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. "It's all the more reason why it's important to understand how long climate changes will last, and how much more sea-level rise is already locked in."

Solomon's co-authors are lead author Kirsten Zickfeld of Simon Fraser University and Daniel Gilford, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Read the ScienceAlert story - “Short-lived greenhouse gases cause centuries of sea-level rise.”

Endless consumption drives captitalism, and catastrophic climate change

A light bulb at a fire station in
Livermore, California, has been
on almost continuously since
1901. In 2015 it was recognized
by Guinness World Records as
the world’s longest-burning bulb.

Capitalism driven by the endgame that is Neoliberalism survives only if people consume endlessly.

Early in the 20^th Century, the leading corporate entities realised that long-lived products spelt doom for the operations and so in what was probably the first cartel with global reach.

It was seemingly inextinguishable light globes that drove the creation of that first cartel when it was realised that new and continuing sales depended entirely upon on that a light globe must regularly fail.

The sophistication of industry and the design of the products it produced meant that the quality of goods improved steadily and the life of goods equally improved.

It seemed that the manufacturing world was doomed, ruined by its own success.

The too good to fail light globe was a symbol of that success and so industry groups arrived at what is now understood as planned obsolescence.

That planned obsolescence may well be good for the world’s manufacturing industries, but it is the antithesis of what is needed if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Read J. B. MacKinnon’s story in The New Yorker - ”The L.E.D. quandary: why there’s no such thing as ‘built to last’.”

What will be left once earth's climate changes - art?

Not much more than our art will be left among the ruins resulting from climate change, some argue.

Interestingly it has been art, at least of the film variety, that has been predicting what is ahead.

The Guardian writes in a story headed: “A doomed Earth of science fiction may well become a reality” that our climate altering activities are hurtling us towards the fictional future of a hot, melting world.

The sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Caught Fire” was made some 50 years ago, but could easily be showing us what is really happening today.