‘Nature doesn’t trust us any more’: Arctic heatwave stokes permafrost thaw: Climate Home News

Published on 07/07/2020, 9:38am
 

Teriberka, a village in the Russian Arctic (Pic: Ninara/Flickr)

By Alister Doyle

Record permafrost temperatures are transforming the Arctic, especially for indigenous peoples, whose hunting livelihoods are at risk as ground melts 

 

Frozen ground in the Arctic is thawing, harming indigenous people’s hunting livelihoods and destabilising buildings and roads across the rapidly warming region.

Air temperatures hit 38C in Russia on 20 June in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk in Siberia, claimed as a heat record in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the global average.

The previous day, the land surface temperature hit an extraordinary 45C at several locations in the Arctic Circle, according to European satellite data.

Often overlooked compared to air temperature records, temperatures in the ground are trending ever higher across the Arctic, according to the UN panel of climate scientists.

Permafrost, permanently frozen ground often just below the surface which melts to mud in summer, covers about a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere. And shrinking permafrost is causing wrenching long-term changes to nature.

“As one of our elders says: ‘Nature doesn’t trust us any more’,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, chair of the Yukaghir Council of Elders, of the Republic of Sakha-Yakutia in the Russian far east, about 600 km from Verkhoyansk. The Yukaghir total about 1,500 people.

“We can’t predict what will happen tomorrow. This is maybe the main challenge. All our lives are based on traditional knowledge. We used to know that tomorrow we catch fish or have our reindeer. Now we can’t say,” he told Climate Home News. Rivers that were reliable roads for months in winter can now be treacherous.

A bison horn revealed by melting permafrost in Siberia (Pic: Johanna Anjar)

Until a few decades ago, he said that many Yukaghir did not dig up ancient mammoth bones or tusks, fearing that disturbing bones entombed in the frozen soil could release malevolent spirits from an underworld below.

Today, however, the thaw of permafrost means such finds are more common – and valuable to collectors – and many Yukaghir have abandoned the belief.

“Traditionally the most forbidden things are connected to the mammoth, the spirit of the underworld. Now we use mammoth bones as a profit,” he said.

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Around the Arctic, the loss of white snow and ice that reflects sunlight back to space reveals darker soil and water, that absorb ever more heat and accelerates the thaw.

At the time of publication, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was tracking close to 2012 levels, the minimum on records dating back to 1979, NSIDC data show. On land, snow and ice cover is also among the lowest for the time of year, according to Rutgers University, and Greenland’s melt so far this year is also rapid, adding to sea level rise.

The World Meteorological Organization said it is checking last month’s heat record in Siberia. Daily records can be natural freaks – Fort Yukon on the Arctic circle in Alaska hit 37.7C as long ago as 1915, before climate change was a worry.

The temperature spike in Siberia was “an iconic threshold that indicates the warming we’re seeing over the long term” both in the air and the soil, said Walt Meier, senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe and the Siberian region, even in the Arctic, is warming rapidly,” he told CHN. “We’re seeing buildings cracking, roads buckling around the Arctic.”

Greenpeace takes Arctic oil lawsuit to Norway’s supreme court

The thaw of permafrost may have caused the collapse of a fuel tank that spilled 21,000 tonnes of diesel into rivers and subsoil near the city of Norilsk on May 29. Elsewhere, loss of permafrost has been blamed for causing more frequent avalanches.

Read the complete Climate Home News article 

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permafrost, Russia, Arctic, #cambio-climatico, #climateaction, #climatecriminals, #jailclimatecriminals, #climateemergency, #climatecrisis, 

US 2020 election: Louisiana governor vetoes bill denying free speech and pushing environmental racism: A greener life, a greener world

Environmental Pollution

The US is facing an intense battle against the COVID-19 outbreak, in which more than 100,000 US citizens have lost their lives. The majority of fatalities have occurred with people of colour communities. This, combined with the illegal police killing of George Floyd, an African American man effectively suffocated during his arrest, has fuelled widespread anti-racist and anti-police-brutality protests across the country and beyond. 

Adding fuel to the fire, a controversial bill called the HB 197,  which proposed increasing penalties imposed on peaceful environmental protestors, was introduced in the Louisiana House of Representatives by a Republican, Jerome Zeringue, and subsequently approved. However, Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards subsequently used his veto power and denied the bill becoming law. 

Activists had argued that the bill would make it harder for local activists to protest against ‘corporate polluters’ and that, the bill in effect, constituted ‘environmental racism’ as people of colour were disproportionately paying the price for fossil fuels pollution in Louisiana, in particular the region nicknamed ‘Cancer Alley’ – a stretch along the Mississippi River that houses numerous industrial plants, which is experiencing far higher than average incidents of cancer. The now-defeated bill would have landed harsh penalties on any protesting ‘trespassers’ on any factory infrastructure.
A petition protesting the bill reads: ‘This bill would silence free speech by imposing harsh prison sentences for merely being present at a so-called “critical infrastructure” facility. If this bill were to become law, it could criminalize people for protesting environmental injustices and racism – including the residents of Louisiana’s so-called “Cancer Alley” who have been protesting the deadly and devastating impact of corporate polluters.’

Several other US states have signed similar bills into law, criminalising environmental protests, effectively denying the public to chance to speak out and protest projects like oil and gas pipelines. It is believed that the right-wing climate-denying think tank ALEC, which defends polluting industries, is behind these laws and bills and has been lobbying intensely to get them approved. 

By Anders Lorenzen

Read the complete A greener life, a greener world article

It’s a Defining Moment in the Fight Against Climate Change | Time

Climate change fell out of the public eye as COVID-19 took over the world. But this year is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate change.

From our vantage point today, 2020 looks like the year when an unknown virus spun out of control, killed hundreds of thousands and altered the way we live day to day. In the future, we may look back at 2020 as the year we decided to keep driving off the climate cliff–or to take the last exit. Taking the threat seriously would mean using the opportunity presented by this crisis to spend on solar panels and wind farms, push companies being bailed out to cut emissions and foster greener forms of transport in cities. If we instead choose to fund new coal-fired power plants and oil wells and thoughtlessly fire up factories to urge growth, we will lock in a pathway toward climate catastrophe. There’s a divide about which way to go.

In early April, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. and doctors urgently warned that New York City might soon run out of ventilators and hospital beds, President Donald Trump gathered CEOs from some of the country’s biggest oil and gas companies for a closed-door meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. The industry faced its biggest disruption in decades, and Trump wanted to help the companies secure their place at the center of the 21st century American economy.

Everything was on the table, from a tariff on imports to the U.S. government itself purchasing excess oil. “We’ll work this out, and we’ll get our energy business back,” Trump told the CEOs. “I’m with you 1,000%.” A few days later, he announced he had brokered a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to cut oil production and rescue the industry.

Art by Jill Pelto for TIME

Later in April, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, in a video message from across the Atlantic, offered a different approach for the continent’s economic future. A European Green Deal, she said, would be the E.U.’s “motor for the recovery.”

“We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently,” she said. On May 27, she pledged more than $800 billion to the initiative, promising to transform the way Europeans live.

For the past three years, the world outside the U.S. has largely tried to ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate, hoping 2020 would usher in a new President with a new position, re-enabling the cooperation between nations needed to prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But there’s no more time to wait.

We’re standing at a climate crossroads: the world has already warmed 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass 2°C, we risk hitting one or more major tipping points, where the effects of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that threshold, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. Climate change has understandably fallen out of the public eye this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages. Nevertheless, this year, or perhaps this year and next, is likely to be the most pivotal yet in the fight against climate change. “We’ve run out of time to build new things in old ways,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. What we do now will define the fate of the planet–and human life on it–for decades.

— Read on time.com/5864692/climate-change-defining-moment/

#auspol #qldpol #ClimateCrisis #StopAdani demand #ClimateAction a #GreenNewDeal #TellTheTruth #TheDrum #QandA #insiders

John Pratt Climate Change, Stop Adani July 11, 2020 2 Minutes

 

With Greenland's Extreme Melting, a New Risk Grows: Ice Slabs That Worsen Runoff: Inside Climate News

More meltwater is now pouring off these hardened surfaces and toward the ocean, a new study finds. That will have an impact on sea level rise.

By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News

Sep 18, 2019

Meltwater pools form on Greenland's surface as temperatures rise and feed into rivers that funnel water toward the ocean. New research shows ice slabs are now forming in areas where water used to sink into the snow layer, increasing runoff. Credit: Dave Walsh/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Scientists have added a new item to the long list of Greenland Ice Sheet woes. Along with snow-darkening algae and increasing rainfall, giant slabs of ice have been thickening and spreading under the Greenland snow at an average rate of two football fields per minute since 2001, new research shows.

The slabs prevent surface meltwater from trickling down and being absorbed by the snow. Instead, more water pours off the surface of the ice sheet and into the ocean.

That's speeding Greenland's contribution to sea level rise, said University of Liege climate researcher Xavier Fettweis, a co-author of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "It is very likely that the current climate models overestimate the meltwater retention capacity of the ice sheet and underestimate the projected sea level rise coming from Greenland ... by a factor of two or three," he said.

Read the complete original Inside Climate News article

Jan 1 to Sep 2016 2019 Melt Days

 

Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet: The Decolonial Atlas

Names and Location of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet, 2019 – by Jordan Engel

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips

Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The guys who run those companies – and they are mostly guys – have gotten rich on the backs of literally all life on Earth. Their business model relies on the destruction of the only home humanity has ever known. 

Meanwhile, we misdirect our outrage at our neighbors, friends, and family for using plastic straws or not recycling. If there is anyone who deserves the outrage of all 7.5 billion of us, it’s these 100 people right here. Combined, they control the majority of the world’s mineral rights – the “right” to exploit the remaining unextracted oil, gas, and coal. They need to know that we won’t leave them alone until they agree to Keep It In The Ground. Not just their companies, but them. Now it’s personal.

Houston tops this list as home to 7 of the 100 top ecocidal planet killers, followed by Jakarta, Calgary, Moscow, and Beijing. The richest person on the list is Russian oil magnate Vagit Alekperov, who is currently worth $20.7 billion.

The map is in the form of a cartogram which represents the size of countries by their cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since industrialization.

This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them. The key decision-makers at these companies have the privilege of relative anonymity, and with this map, we’re trying to pull back that veil and call them out. These guys should feel the same personal responsibility for saving the planet that we all feel.

  

Closeup of the top 32 North Americans killing the planet.

  

Closeup of the top 18 Europeans killing the planet.

Update, September 2019:

Writer Adam Weymouth contacted every person on this list asking for an interview to discuss their thoughts on climate change. In the course of his research, he found a few CEOs have now changed. 

They are:

Suncor – CEO Mark Little;

 

Kiewit – CEO Bruce Grewcock;

 

NACCO – CEO J C Butler Jr;

 

Console Energy – CEO James A Brock;

 

Alpha Natural Resources no longer exists. Bought by Contura Energy. CEO Kevin S Crutchfield;

 

Polska Grupa  Górnicza – CEO Tomasz Rogala;

 

OKD – CEO Michal Heřman;

 

EGPC – CEO Abed Ezz El-Regal;

 

Nigerian National Petroleum – CEO Mele Kyari;

 

DTEK – CEO Maxim Timchenko (Rinat Akhmetov is the owner);

 

CNOOC – CEO Yuan Guangyu;

 

INPEX – CEO Takayuki Ueda;

 

Berau Coal Energy – CEO Iskak Indra Wahyudi;

 

Indika Energy – CEO Agus Lasmono

 

“Names and Location of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet, 2019” was made by Jordan Engel. It can be reused under the Decolonial Media License 0.1.

Sources: 2017 Carbon Majors Report WRI Climate Analysis Indicators Tool via The Carbon Map The Forbes List of Richest People in the World

The Magnitude of the Challenge - Dr Will Steffen, Australian National University: Youtube 2016 and 2020

Dr Will Steffen from the Australian National University discusses 'Climate Change: The Magnitude of the Challenge' at Festival of Ambitious Ideas, May 2016.



 

Greenhouse Gas Removal: The Royal Society of Engineers 2018 Report

Cover image Visualisation

 of global atmospheric carbon dioxide

 surface concentration by Cameron Beccario,

 earth.nullschool.net,

using GEOS-5 data provided by the

Global Modeling and Assimilation Office

(GMAO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

"In 2017 the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering were asked by the UK Government to consider scientific and engineering views on greenhouse gas removal. This report draws on a breadth of expertise including that of the Fellowships of the two academies to identify the range of available greenhouse gas removal methods, the factors that will affect their use and consider how they may be deployed together to meet climate targets, both in the UK and globally."




"Recommendations
 Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) from the atmosphere will be required to fulfil the aims of the Paris agreement on climate change. This report recommends the following international action to achieve this GGR: 

RECOMMENDATION 1 

Continue and increase global efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Large-scale GGR is challenging and expensive and not a replacement for reducing emissions. 

RECOMMENDATION 2 

Implement a global suite of GGR methods now to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. This suite should include existing land-based approaches, but these are unlikely to provide sufficient GGR capacity so other technologies must be actively explored. 


RECOMMENDATION 3 

Build CCS infrastructure. Scenario building indicates that substantial permanent storage, presently only demonstrated in

geological reservoirs, will be essential to meet the scale required for climate goals. 











RECOMMENDATION 4 

Incentivise demonstrators and early stage deployment to enable development of GGR methods. This allows the assessment of the real GGR potential and of the wider social and environmental impacts of each method. It would also enable the process of cost discovery and reduction.

RECOMMENDATION 5 

Incentivise removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases through carbon pricing or other mechanisms. GGR has financial cost at scale and so will require incentives to drive technological development and deployment of a suite of methods. 

RECOMMENDATION 6 

Establish a framework to govern sustainability of GGR deployment. Undertake rigorous life cycle assessments and environmental monitoring of individual methods and of their use together.

RECOMMENDATION 7

 Build GGR into regulatory frameworks and carbon trading systems. In the UK, as an example, active support for GGR implementation (soil carbon sequestration, forestation, habitat restoration) should be built into new UK agricultural or land management subsidies. 

RECOMMENDATION 8 

Establish international science-based standards for monitoring, reporting and verification for GGR approaches, both of carbon sequestration and of environmental impacts. Standards currently exist for biomass and CCS, but not for GGR methods at large.RECOMMENDATION 5Incentivise removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases through carbon pricing or other mechanisms. GGR has financial cost at scale and so will require incentives to drive technological development and deployment of a suite of methods."

Online Report: https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/greenhouse-gas-removal/royal-society-greenhouse-gas-removal-report-2018.pdf

Read the complete report 

#jailclimatecriminals  #cambio-climatico, #climatecrisis, #climateemergency, #jailclimatecriminals, #criminalesclimáticosdelacárcel, #greenhousegas