As I alluded to in last week’s post, there is enough information out there for a lifetime of climate related research, all available for you to learn from.

Here is a snippet:

On 11/14/2023, 500 science authors from fourteen federal agencies issued a federal report, The Fifth National Climate Assessment, which basically states climate change is impacting every region of the U.S. “It is foolish for anyone to deny the impacts of climate change anymore. Unchecked, climate change will make it more difficult to maintain safe homes and healthy families. Humans are totally responsible for the changes to Earth’s climate. How much climate change we experience in the future depends on how fast we act right now. CO2 concentration is directly tied to how warm Earth becomes.” The report is issued every five years and began in 1980. “Each additional increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses.” Coincidently, on the same date, the United Nations Climate agency stated, “Climate action is too slow to keep up with the effects of global warming.”

It’s important to note that developing countries that have done the least to contribute to global warming will suffer the most.

Considering the minuscule period of time industrialized civilization has existed in relation to the age of our planet, I find our global crisis alarming, yet captivating, because the Earth science community is devoted to the welfare of all civilizations. It’s an assignment larger in scope that anything mankind has been faced with to date. This team of brilliant people understands why governments around the world have delayed fossil fuel action for so long, thus concluding global warming cannot be halted from becoming more extreme for at least another two to three decades. 

Since decarbonization of the global economy is underway, an extinction catastrophe for the distant future should be avoided. One day, capturing the excess carbon that surrounds us will be accomplished, but not before a transfer to clean energy from dirty energy (more on that later). Once that occurs, what’s left of floating ice will remain intact and the quick demise of the Arctic will be halted for a very long time. 

The last decade was the hottest in 125,000 years and the current ice-melting rate is unprecedented in the last 2,000 years. All because carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) levels in the atmosphere and oceans haven’t been this high in millions of years. Due to the present-day requirement of fossil fuel reliance, Earth has lost thirty trillion tons of ice since the mid-1990’s. While a warmer atmosphere melts it, a warmer ocean erodes the ice sheet edges which randomly breaks massive icebergs free of the ice sheet, thus slowly raising the sea level. What I am describing here is essentially the definition of a climate crisis.