I liked your piece. It has a sunny optimism that made me nostalgic. But I don't think you really understand what's going on with Ukraine or the Climate

We are having a Sarajevo moment - In Ukraine, we are seeing the first war of the “Climate Crisis”.

The Climate situation is rapidly getting worse.

Heat doesn’t “just happen” - Where it’s coming from and why that matters

Here’s the bad news: the Earth’s albedo has been declining during the last 20 years.

Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine pub. Aug 2021

Earth observation satellites are constantly measuring the Earth’s albedo using a suite of sensors, and the reflectivity of the planet is measured through earthshine, the light from the Earth that reflects off the Moon. This paper analyzes earthshine measurements between 1998 and 2017 to see if the Earth’s albedo is rising or declining in response to climate change. Here’s their conclusion.

“We have reported a two-decade long data set of the Earth’s nearly globally averaged albedo as derived from earthshine observations. Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means. These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years (much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied). Remarkably, the inter-annual earthshine anomalies agree well with those from CERES satellite observations, despite their differences in global coverage, underlying assumptions to derive the albedo, and the very different sensitivities to retroflected and wider-angle reflected light.”

The two-decade decrease in earthshine-derived albedo corresponds to an increase in radiative forcing of about 0.5 W/m2, which is climatologically significant (Miller et al., 2014). For comparison, total anthropogenic forcing increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the same period. The CERES data show an even stronger trend of decreasing global albedo over the most recent years, which has been associated to changes in the PDO, SSTs and low cloud formation changes. It is unclear whether these changes arise from the climate’s internal variability or are part of the feedback to external forcings.”

Notice that last paragraph. It quantifies how much of an effect this change in albedo is having. By 2017 it had reached 0.5 W/m2 (Watts per square meter). That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the effect of all our CO2 pollution in 2017 was 0.6 W/m2. Bottom line,

By 2017 the decline in the Earth’s albedo doubled the rate that the Earth was warming. We are warming up twice as fast as we were.

The UN has confirmed that we are about to get a massive temperature spike.

Now, the only question is “how hot is it going to get”?

Famines are coming.

I am forecasting 800 million to 1.5 billion deaths over the next 4-6 years.