Sunday October 4th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster Than At Any Time Since The Beginning Of Agriculture
Dear Diary. The longer I live into the 21st century the faster I see the rate of the planet warming, with many more views of more evidence coming to light. As of 2020 it’s hard to keep up with this avalanche of data. This week we have learned that a new study is projecting that the Greenland ice sheet will be melting faster than at any time in the last 12,000 years. That’s roughly at the time humans started to transition from being hunter gatherers towards agriculture in the Middle Eastern area. There is a general consensus among anthropologists that civilization began about 5000 years ago, so what is happening to our ice sheets worldwide in general is beyond the scope of what we as humans have dealt with since progressing as a species beyond just simple foragers.
The reason I have brought up historical references to these timeframes is because it will be hard, even given how far technologically we have progressed, to adapt to a world in which sea levels are rising, enveloping all coastal areas where the bulk of major cities have been built. Here is more from the Hill:
Greenland’s ice sheet will melt at its fastest rate in 12,000 years this century, a new study projects.
The study, published in the journal Nature, said the melt rate of the ice sheet between 2000 and 2018 was about 6,100 gigatons tons per century — a similar rate to that of the pre-industrial Holocene era, when the melt rate was up to 6,000 gigatons tons per century.
But, researchers estimate that the rate over the course of the 21st century will be between 8,000 gigatons and 35,900 gigatons tons per century, nearly six times faster than the early-Holocene era rate. A gigaton is equal to 1 billion tons.
They attribute their projected increase to climate change, writing that “climate is projected to become increasingly unfavourable for maintaining even the current levels of [Greenland ice sheet] mass balance.”
The researchers add that the ice lost from the sheet this century will be “unprecedented” in the context of the past 12,000 years unless the world has low carbon emissions. They also warned that this could cause increasing sea-level rise.
“This provides further evidence that low carbon emissions are critical to mitigate contributions of the [Greenland ice sheet] to sea-level rise,” the study said.
The study adds to a growing body of research indicating that Greenland’s ice sheet melt is accelerating. A study from last year found that the rate of Greenland’s ice sheet loss has significantly increased since the 1990s and an analysis from last month determined that the ice sheet lost a record amount of ice last year.
Melting from the ice sheet contributes to rising sea levels, which can result in flooding and harm coastal ecosystems.
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Well, I still may live long enough to see this study begin to come to fruition during the next couple of decades. I sincerely hope that yet one more study will spur the human race to stymie carbon pollution. We will see.
Today I will be listing items from California’s dire fire and Heatwave Desdemona situation below. The most recent items, which I will be updating frequently, will be at the top of this list:
Here are some warm “ET’s” for October from Sunday:
Here is more climate and weather news from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”