UPDATE 8.19.19: NASA OMG — Oh My God! — Project
NASA’s OMG (Oceans Melting Greenland) program sponsors scientists to travel and research the world’s biggest island this year after a heatwave scorched the United States and Europe, smashing temperature records and triggering the mass melting of its ice sheet. [source]
NASA oceanographer Josh Willis and his team are investigating how the ice is being attacked not only by rising air temperatures but also by the warming ocean, which is eating it away from underneath.
“It’s very rare anywhere on the planet to see 700 meters of no temperature variation, normally we find colder waters in the upper hundred meters or so, but right in front of the glacier it’s warm all the way up. These warm waters now are able to be in direct contact with the ice over its entire face, supercharging the melting.”
Ian Fenty, climate scientist at NASA
Helheim has become famous in recent years as it has been retreating at a stunning rate. In 2017, the glacier lost a whopping two miles, and a year later scientists from New York University captured a miles-long ice column break off the glacier’s front. The melt doesn’t seem to be slowing this year either.
“It retreats by many meters per day, it’s tens of meters per day. You can probably set your iPhone on timelapse and actually see it go by.”
Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer
“Greenland has impacts all around the planet. A billion tons of ice lost here raises sea levels in Australia, in Southeast Asia, in the United States, in Europe,” Willis said. “We are all connected by the same ocean.”
Heat Records Fall in July
Update 7.25.19: Paris baked in all-time high temperature of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 F) as a ferocious heatwave smashed records across northern Europe, sparking concerns about public health and causing new misery for rail travelers. Records also tumbled in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Paris exceeded previous high of 40.4C set in July 1947.
In Britain, temperatures reached 38.1C in Cambridge, only the second time temperatures over 100 Fahrenheit have been recorded in the UK.
In Netherlands, new high of 40.4C in the south broke record dating back to 1944.
Warmest June Ever in the World
France experienced its highest temperature on record last week — blistering 45.9 degrees Celsius (115 degrees F). Alaska enduring ongoing heat wave. Scientists warn this is just a taste of what the climate crisis has in store for the Earth.
Greenhouse gasses spewed into the atmosphere by various human activities are the primary cause.
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Music superstar Miley Cyrus had an emotional message for fans about the environment before her closing her at the Tinderbox Festival in Odense, Denmark. Miley’s comments were welcomed by powerful cheers of support by the audience.
“All of you know how important it is for you all to be involved in politics. The youth, this generation, we are the last fucking hope on this dying fucking planet. It is begging you to fucking go clean up the fucking oceans.”
Miley Cyrus, music superstar
The planet won’t die. But we will. The 26-year-old singer added:
“I don’t like there’s more fucking trash in the water than living fucking animals that deserve to be there, that have nowhere else to go. And by the fucking way, we don’t have anywhere to fucking go, either! There’s no planet B, so don’t fuck it up!”
[originally published by InfoImagination, 6.19.19. republished with permission]
The photo snapped by Danish meteorologist Steffen Olsen hit major national publications yesterday. I was most interested in how FOX News, a leading climate-change-denying portal, would discuss the story. Hannah Sparks says the stunning photo shows a “crisis in Greenland.” That’s an inconvenient truth … a partial truth.
By all acccounts, if the entire 2,850,000 km3 (684,000 cu mi) of ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise 7.2 m (24 ft). Recently, fears have grown that continued climate change will make the Greenland Ice Sheet cross a threshold where long-term melting of the ice sheet is inevitable. This is not a “crisis in Greenland” — but a U.S. and world crisis.
Hannah is accurate this is truly a mesmerizing photo of Olsen’s band of sled dogs walking on thin ice, across a frozen sea that has become flooded with melted glacial waters. Mesmerizing? Yes. Warning for us all? Absolutely!
[update 7.1.19] Guadalajara, Mexico, Covered In Ice after a freakish summer hailstorm.
Guadalajara had been enjoying a sweaty summer for the past few weeks until the weekend brought a shocking surprise. Residents woke up Sunday morning to more than 3 feet of ice in some areas after a heavy hailstorm swept through the region.
“Hail more than a meter high, and then we wonder if climate change exists.”
Enrique Alfaro Ramirez, governor of Jalisco
Governor of Jalisco, capital is Guadalajara, Enrique Alfaro Ramirez, said he has never witnessed scenes like the ones he saw Sunday morning. NEVER!
Government officials scrambled to contain damage, clear up roads, and assist vehicles and residences swallowed by ice. Guadalajara is nearly 5,000 feet above sea level and usually maintains a temperate climate. Summer months are often rainy.
CNN photos reveals the destructions to buildings, vehicles, chaos and devastation. Fun for kids who are out of school for summer. Won’t be fun for long.
[update 6.21.19] Steamboat Springs, Colorado Received 20 inches of Snow. A winter weather advisory remains in effect until Sunday morning. Even for the area, snowfall at this time of year is rare. Last time was June 17, 1928.
“Only in Colorado does it snow the first day of summer.”
Miami Beach wrestles with a new and unwelcome visitor: Seaweed — foul piles of it
In Florida, large brown mats of seaweed started showing up in 2011, after an unusual pattern of winds and surface seawater circulation took place in late 2009 and early 2010 in the Sargasso Sea, in the Atlantic.
Since then, mass seaweed beachings in Florida, in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, in Western Africa and as far south as Brazil have been frequent, leading scientists to connect the sargassum explosions to rising ocean temperatures and increasing amounts of nutrients from fertilizers that flow into the ocean.
Hawai’i is the Canary in the Coal Mine
Our energy company, Hawaiian Electric Industries (HEI), is led by banker Constance Hee Lau. She directs elected officials toward solar power technology that may require the deployment of some 12.5 million panels of oil-based plastics and silicon like parking lots across the island beautiful green spaces; cover roof tops with panels; or stand a forest of over 300′ wind turbines, although we live in a major hurricane zone.
Financial expert and Wall Street favorite HEI CEO Constance Hee Lau advocates massive battery systems that combine some of the planet’s most toxic mix of chemicals. Where do solar panels go to die; how about short-lived battery systems? The battery in your phone lasts about 3-4 years.
Tesla guarantees the standard battery for the Model 3 will retain 70 percent of its capacity for 100,000 miles. By comparison, Nissan guarantees battery in the LEAF will have at least 66 percent of original capacity after 100,000 miles. Per Tesla and Nissan guarantees, some 30-40 percent of homes and businesses will be forced to live with insufficient power in some finite, 5-10 year, period.
In March 2017, Tesla unveiled the world’s first utility-scale solar plus battery storage generation facility on Kaua’i. The 13 megawatt solar field, which is coupled with a 52 megawatt battery storage system, allows KIUC to store solar power during the day and dispatch it over a four-hour period during the evening peak demand.
Let’s say stored power is used from 8pm until midnight. What runs your refrigerator from midnight until you need milk or orange juice for breakfast at 8am in the morning? How about critical medical devices or home cooling units? This means KIUC will need TWO MORE 13MW solar fields of 55,000 panels each and TWO MORE 52MW battery storage system to provide electricity for the additional eight hours.
Less than 100 people died in Puerto Rico due directly to Hurricane Maria. Nearly 4,000 died as a result of the mismanagement of the island’s electric grid. Are we next? HEI CEO Constance Hee Lau is dangerous for island inhabitants. InfoImagination forwarded a Better Energy Proposal for Hawai’i in June 2012. See Energy Report
Why Are Alarm Bells Sounding?
For any who are unsure what they should be seeing in the featured Greenland photo (top), a “healthy environment” would show a field of white snow and ice with white snow-covered moutains in the distance. White is normal; blue is dangersous in this case.
Olsen was trekking through northwest Greenland along the Inglefield Gulf, which is normally covered with ice and snow, but was flooded with running water from the melting Greenland ice sheet. Experts say the image is indicative of the planet’s climate crisis.
As this time, Greenland has suffered a loss of two billion tons of ice already this season — about 40 percent of their nation’s icy covering.
While the country experiences annual melting from June through August, the rate so far this year has been record-breaking.
“The high melt is unusual so early in the season but not unprecedented.”
@GreenlandIceSMB, Danish Ministry for Energy, Utilities and Climate
Experts warn of a snowball effect [no pun intended] when it comes to early season melting. Ice and snow better reflect the sun’s rays than water or soil, preventing heat absorption. Less ice means more rapid melting as heat more easily penetrates the surface of the water.
Olsen is calling for immediate action:
“Communities in #Greenland rely on the sea ice for transport, hunting and fishing. Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt call for an increased predictive capacity in the Arctic.”
Water Lilies in the Pond
From 1991 through 1994, I served a United Nation’s Task Force on Sustainable Development. Major discussions at the time focused on global food and water supplies to reduce hunger and thirst, as well as more environmentally-friendly development methodologies to reduce pollution. Nobody talked about temperatures or climate change.
It would be another five to six years before Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth discussing rising global temperatures. The trend of the zipper, as some like to call it, continues upward.
My sister and her family live in Texas. They ridiculed Al Gore and people like me. I was developing apps for the Internet at the time. They loved to chide me about the Political Right’s false allegation Gore had claimed he had invented the Internet.
She boasted of her fancy new SUV with all the trimmings, which got about three miles to the gallon, and proudly painted VIVA Bush on all the back windows. Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth was a convenient way to dispel the progressive, liberal agenda. We were simply all kooks. InfoImagination, on the other hand, honored Vice President Gore for his leadership.
As an environmental policy scientist, we like to use an example about water lilies on a pond to display the common reaction — and anticipated human failure when facing such threats.
Imagine you have a pond outside your farm home. Green lily pads sometimes bloom uncontrollably. They double every day. If they cover the pond completely, the fish will die. Your family needs the fish to live. A few lily pads are normal and fish feed on them. It is therefore important to “weed” and manage the growth of lilies on the pond responsibly.
When a major bloom occurs, at what point is life seriously threatened by the lilies?
This is tricky and few get the answer correctly. Generally, this is because it is hard to visually imagine the scenario.
The key to getting the right answer is to remember the lily pads DOUBLE EVERY DAY. When the pond is half full, life is seriously threatened. The pond will be covered the next day, as the lily pads double each day.
What is the point? To the untrained eye, there would be little concern seeing a pond half covered by lily pads. People would not be alarmed. They would take no action. We could say the pond above is about half full. Few would be alarmed.
Seeing water on Greenland in our feature photo is like seeing the pond covered 50 percent by lily pads. To the untrained eye, there is no need for alarm. Olsen is trained. He is calling for immediate action:
“Communities in #Greenland rely on the sea ice for transport, hunting and fishing. Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt call for an increased predictive capacity in the Arctic.”
We cannot just turn down the planet’s temperature overnight. Global temperature started increasing just after WWII, around 1945. This rise has taken 70 years or so. It will take possibly an equal amount of time to undo the damage we are doing. And, we haven’t even started. We increase our temperatures each day — and every year.
And, today, due to political and social resistance, it may take Americans and people of the world 10 years to accept the pond is filling with lily pads. It may therefore require 100 years after this global recognition to correct the problem. I’m 61. I likely be dead before the climate really tears up the planet.
Planet Earth will survive. The planet Venus survives her hot, steamy environment — consisting mainly of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid. Venus and Earth are often called twins because they are similar in size, mass, density, composition and gravity. The similarities end there.
Venus is the hottest world in the solar system. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that warms Earth. Temperatures on Venus reach 870 degrees Fahrenheit, more than hot enough to melt lead.
Probes that scientists have landed there have survived only a few hours before being destroyed. Venus will survive; Planet Earth will survive. Human beings and life as we know it will not.
We could sit around and watch this Tragic Comedy unfold; laugh how the dinosaurs were too stupid to avoid their own extinction; or we can prevent our children and grandchildren from getting into a massive train wreck. They’ll never appreciate us. One doesn’t thank someone for the accident avoided.
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Ko’olau of Kaua’i. I am the Defiant One
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