Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Existence Is Futile

Living Each Day,

It has been awhile since I looked at Professor Guy McPherson's work, at least a couple of years, it seems.
What has come together in that time is the observation, not the understanding, that the self-reinforcing destruction of climate buffers is exploding in front of us right now. It's no theory. You may have seen video of sinkholes in Siberia from melting of methane clathrates in the permafrost. Methane is stored in a frozen slush in water and permafrost, until it isn't, and that is happening now.
Image result for Methane concentration, global distribution
The clathrates under the arctic sea ice melt when the ice melts in summer. That incomplete red line is this year. We are on track for the least summer ice in the arctic ever, and that makes all hell break loose. It. comes back thinner and thinner, and when it is gone, our thermal buffer is gone. No more massive heat can go to melting the ice. It goes to heating the surface, water first, then air. Then we notice things a lot hotter and accelerating.

The Arctic Ocean was predicted to be ice free the summer if 2016 +/- 3 years. That is a readily testable hypothesis. We'll know before the next US presidential election.
Will that be the last election? Will we even have an election? (Who you gonna vote for?  :-)
If we get 6 degrees C of global warming in the next decade, the agriculture which feeds us and the plant life in general, will mostly just die. Half the plankton in the ocean are dead, compared to a couple of decades ago.
One thing now being appreciated in science is how very rapidly temperature shifts have actually happened in the fossil and tree-ring records. We just couldn't tell from such a distance. We were proud to be able to tell they happened, and about-when. The only time ever that we can tell there was this much sudden temperature rise, was during "The Great Dying", the Permian/Triassic Extinction event.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

There are a lot of positive-heat-feedback events occurring simultaneously right now, and our ice buffer is what is keeping the global temperature from shooting up suddenly. This is the argument for near term human extinction, our personal extinction by 2030. We will know very soon.

How will we choose to live the last few years of lour increasingly chaotic lives?
I'll garden, bike commute, and take care of poor people, as long as that gig keeps up.
At some point I'm going to have to help a lot of people die.

Here I am with the Siamese cucumbers, Maybe a sign from God, or something. I pickled them Saturday morning.
Inline image 1

Here is a 20 minute brief overview of Guy McPherson's message, with video and transcript. Highly recommended. Few believe it. Testable hypothesis.

Here is the archive of recent videos. I watched the one from Wellington, New Zealand 12/6/16 (their summer) It's the same message and charts. It has evolved since I first met him in Austin around 2007. The timeline is short, and cannot be mitigated by our actions now. In the current case, we actually depend on the sulfates released by burning dirty coal to reflect sunlight away. These fall from the sky pretty quickly when smokestacks stop belching them, so the immediate effect of stopping coal-burning would be immediate warming, a rapid temperature rise within a few months. Catch-22.

Here is the exhaustive compilation of the thesis of rapid glomal warming from multiple exponential positive heat feedback cycles taking away most land and surface life by 2030. Guy did it last summer. He probably won't update it.

Don't forget about all of those nuclear reactors we have not shut down and stored their reactor cores.

In this context, life on planet earth could really use the Yellowstone super-volcano eruption this year.

Still Living Each Day

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