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West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Brief: Tipping Initiation, Restoration Reverses Some Sea Level Rise, Beach Disintegration, Limit to Sea Level Rise Adaptation

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beach Report, Beaches coastal, climate restoration, Earth systems, Emissions flip, feedback, Tipping, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Brief Report: Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation, Climate Restoration Reverses Some Sea Level Rise, and the Barrier Island Disintegration Threshold, Limit to Sea Level Rise Adaptation A brief discussion with summarized academic findings. Climate Tipping, Earth Systems Collapse Initiation Greenland and Antarctica have seen their tipping activated. This does not mean they have passed…

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IPCC Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere, The Important Bits

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Arctic Sea Ice, Beaches coastal, Glaciers, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, Methane, modeling, Oceans, Permafrost, sea ice, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, September 24, 2019 The Ocean and Cryosphere (the icy part of our planet) in a Changing Climate A Summary of Important Findings Overall of course, climate change is astonishingly worse with every new report. This one is no exception. Polar and mountain ice are melting faster, the…

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Climate Science Compromise Feedback Loop and Unrecoverable Impacts

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beaches coastal, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate restoration, Deniers and Delayers, feedback, global warming psychology, Healthy Climate, ice sheet, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Messaging, modeling, politics, Psycho, Sea Level Rise, The Unexpected, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Why are climate change impacts so much worse than projected? What does it mean? Why don’t we do something? In a nutshell, science is conservative, it’s slow, and the great climate consensus that has evolved to protect our society compounds the understating nature of the industry of science. This creates a vastly understating public facing message. …

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West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

    West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse: The Critical Path Article link Sea level rise estimates of around 10 feet by 2100 are now becoming hard to ignore. This article is about several new findings in 2018 that build on near-10 feet of sea level rise news from NOAA in 2016 and 2017. What is…

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Sing Delay, Delay, Delay: 0.5 C Limit to Dangerous Climate Change

By Abrupt changes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate restoration, Emissions, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Methane, modeling, sea ice, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Sing Delay, Delay, Delay When serious discussions about global warming gases and fossil fuels began in the 1980s, all that was needed to prevent what would become labeled as dangerous climate change was a reduction of the emissions of global warming gases. Since that time, we have emitted as much CO2 as we emitted in…

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Abrupt Sea Level Rise Warning From NOAA: Paris Inadequate

By Abrupt changes, Beaches coastal, Climate Culture, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate restoration, climate solutions, economics, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Healthy Climate, ice sheets, Impacts, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

NOAA’s new sea level rise report in January 2017 is a dope slap that describes 17 inches of sea level rise in Florida by 2030. You can see the report here, or check out our review that summarizes the important parts here.  The continuing publishing of sea level rise research on emissions reductions and resultant…

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Climate Change 2017: What Happened and What It Means

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Extreme Weather, Fire, Flooding, Impacts, polar vortex, rainfall, Sea Level Rise, The Unexpected, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Climate Change 2017: What Happened and What It Means By Bruce Melton First posted on Truthout.org, December 30, 2017 How many more billions of dollars in damages will it take? How many more lives? It’s obvious; all the climate extremes we have been experiencing lately are indeed caused by climate change. Our climate is already…

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Very Large Negative Emissions: Beyond Paris Emissions Reductions to a Safe and Healthy Climate

By Abrupt changes, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, climate solutions, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, Impacts, modeling, Negative emissions, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…

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Another Big Antarctic Calving From New Underice Melt

By Abrupt changes, Glaciers, ice sheet, submarine channel, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Another Big Antarctic Calving From New Underice Melt Ice scientists have been warning us since 2006 that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has begun its collapse. Giant icebergs are a symptom that collapse initiation is underway. The continuing laissez-faire attitude of the press to these events is counter intuitive and even dangerous, and represents…

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Sea Level Rise Scenarios Starting to Catch Up With Prehistory

By Abrupt changes, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, ice sheets, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…

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Global Warming vs. Abrupt Change — What’s the Difference?

By Abrupt changes, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheets, modeling, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Something that is not clear in the overall climate discussion is that global warming is a radically different beast from abrupt change.  We hear abrupt change bandied about, but often it is not well defined. It appears to many that global warming is abrupt change simply because the warming we are experiencing, and that is…

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Ice Loss During Antarctic Cold Reversal May Spell Trouble for WAIS Collapse

By Abrupt changes, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, Oceans, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Fifty-two feet of sea level rise occurred in 400 years, 14,500 years ago with ocean and collapse conditions similar to today. We were coming out of the last ice age then, but then, forcing was thousands of times less than today. Our climate’s most meaningful and common changes are classified as abrupt changes in climate…

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Fairness Bias: Big Misstatements in NYT Antarctic Ice Article

By Abrupt changes, ice sheet, Impacts, Oceans, Sea Level Rise, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

This New York Times article from May has compiled the best of current Antarctic science images into a huge three-part piece, but some of the most important reporting is completely wrong. And most importantly, the way it is wrong exemplifies the impacts of the Climate change Counter Movement and how they have influenced the media’s…

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Sea Level Rise: IPCC Averages, Extremes From Latest Publishing, and Ice Sheet Collapse

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Extreme Weather, global warming psychology, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, Legacy Policy, Messaging, Negative emissions, Psycho, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, Strategy, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…

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Warm Winter, Early Spring: Is Climate Change a Mixed Bag or are we Kidding Ourselves?

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Beaches coastal, Climate Catastrophes, Climate Policy, Climate Reform, Deniers and Delayers, Drought, economics, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, Extreme Weather, forest health, Forest Mortality, Glaciers, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, ice sheets, Impacts, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Oceans, pine beetle, politics, Psycho, Scenarios, Sea Level Rise, Shifting Ecology, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Winter Weather

President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…

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NOAA — Ice Sheet Collapse in Our Time: Zero Warming Climate Solution

By Abrupt changes, adaptation, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Emissions Scenarios, ice sheets, in-depth and Popular Press, modeling, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, Solutions, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

We have delayed too long and now must urgently reduce the load of warming gases already emitted to our sky. We have been warned this would happen for decades, we just didn’t think it would happen so soon. This is exceedingly bad news, though the good news with climate change is very good indeed. The…

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Saved They Say: Emissions Have Flattened — Climate Mirage

By aerosols, Climate Policy, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, ice sheets, Negative emissions, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

And they also say that Elvis is not dead. But alas… the answer is no, we are not saved. Things are actually getting worse because of the so-called “flattening emissions.” This needs to be said over and over: the only way to treat the vast amount of long-lived warming pollutants already emitted into our sky…

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Climate Change 2015: The Latest Science

By aerosols, Climate Policy, climate pollutants short-lived, CO2 Removal and Sequestration, Emissions, Gulf Stream, ice sheet, in-depth and Popular Press, Negative emissions, Solutions, submarine channel, underice, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

First published on Truthout December 26, 3015, by Bruce Melton. Climate science is way out in front of climate policy. Commitments at the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris pale in comparison to those from the Kyoto Protocol with its beginnings in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The cheap and unambiguous solution of removing CO2…

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West Antarctic Melt Rate has Tripled

By Glaciers, ice sheet, ice sheets, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Researchers at UC Cal Irvine and NASA, using four different measurement techniques, have found that West Antarctica’s ice loss has tripled since 1992. The measurements looked at glaciers discharging to a west central location of West Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea Embayment (see Amundsen Sea in the map on the right). This could possibly be…

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