autismserenity: allthecanadianpolitics: mindblowingscience: Cl…
Climate Change is acting much faster than many have expected. Global sea ice is in a free fall compared to all other years on record.
Related article:
The North Pole is an insane 20 C warmer than normal as winter descends
While we’re on the topic of Climate Change, this post and article is worth reading (from my science blog above).
That’s 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it should be at this time of year. I’m especially troubled because my Actual News-Reading Friends are reacting to this with “wait but is that normal, or is it actually global warming?”
Which means that sources like the Washington Post are doing a terrible job of explaining what this actually means. Which is probably a huge part of why people are generally not very concerned about climate change, especially not compared to how bad the situation actually is.
The graph above shows that every single year on record, the amount of ice in the sea has grown and melted at about the same times and in the same amounts. Except this year, when suddenly, instead of a bunch of ice forming in fucking winter, it’s… Not. It’s remaining at summer levels, basically.
This is not just part of global warming, it IS global warming. This is the core of the whole thing. The amazing amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere at an increasing rate for the past 100 years have been trapping more and more heat inside the atmosphere.
This has finally reached the point of Horrible Vicious Cycle. Because when it gets too warm, the polar ice caps melt.
When they melt, the oceans become much warmer and more acidic and can’t sustain life well.
When the oceans get warmer, they stop helping cool the atmosphere. Having large bodies of cold water lying around is GOOD if you want an area to be cooler. Having large bodies of warm water lying around does fuck all for cooling anybody down.
The less the oceans help cool things, the more our carbon emissions affect the atmosphere. Because they’re no longer partly being counteracted by the oceans.
Which means global warming accelerates.
Which means ice melting accelerates.
Which means the oceans get even more fucked up.
Which means global warming accelerates even more.
The reaction to this should not be “wait but is this just a thing that happens, the newspaper didn’t really say,” it should be a massive, front page, global headline of “OH FUCKING SHIT.”
Seeing that graph in McKibbon’s tweet was the scariest thing I’ve seen in my twitter feed in… well… ever. It actually cut through all the other scary stuff I’ve seen there this month. And that’s saying something.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2fsuK8x.
Tags: climate change, tipping points.
