OK, if you are reading this and thinking Umair is being hyperbolic or exaggerating to make a point. Think again.
Umair is an eloquent, stirring writer. I am not. I am the kind of person who writes reports. Who does analysis. I have been writing these for the last two years documenting everything Umair brings up here.
So, if you want to know the numbers and scientific papers behind what Umair is saying, here you go.
Permafrost:
Umair is really insightful about this. Few people realize it. Someone who does, Putin.
There is a great picture of a methane crater in permafrost on the Yamal peninsula. Umair doesn't do them justice. But they are like the Grand Canyon. Words just don't convey the scale of them.
There is also a discussion of permafrost "slumping". One of the favorite Climate Action Resistor (CARs) tropes is that the frozen North will turn into farmland as the planet warms. Yeah, that's completely wrong.
Boreal Forests:
Really all forests everywhere. This is known as forced ecosystem turnover. What part of "GLOBAL" didn't you understand? Global warming means everywhere.
I use the term “ecosystem turnover” frequently in my articles to explain why the planet is going to be plagued by fires on unbelievable scales for the rest of this century. The basic idea is that Global Warming is warming up the entire planet, so every ecosystem on the planet is going to change in response to that warming.
Not just “vulnerable” places, not just “some” places, every place is going to go through this. The ecosystem you live in right now is already dying.
In Alaska for example, researchers in 2019 made a projection: By the middle of this century, Alaska’s forests, now dominated by spruce, would give way to forests of deciduous trees, like birch, aspen, and cottonwood. Their conclusion,
“we’re going to lose every single spruce tree in Southcentral Alaska”.
This is also true for the Amazon and the Pantanal.
Polar Ice:
Umair is spot on about this. Although due to the geometry of the planet 2/3's of all the land is in the Northern Hemisphere so the situation between North and South pole is complex.
Melting ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is going to accelerate warming and add about 0.5C to the equilibrium temperature. But, it's not going to add to sea level rise. That ice floats, melting it doesn't add to sea level rises.
Greenland does, and it's melting way faster than expected.
Melting surface ice forms huge lakes on top of the glaciers each summer. The water finds\melts cracks in the ice and starts flowing down. Deeper and deeper into the glacier. Until it reaches the bottom and the lake suddenly drains.
When it finds a weakness in the ice, huge amounts of water can drain out of one of these lakes in just hours. Flowing from the surface to the bottom of the glacier.
What no one foresaw, was how much the movement of the water in one of these flows could warm the water up further.
The Greenland glaciers are 5,000 feet thick on average, about one mile. Water, falling through the glacier for that mile picks up speed. Speed plus friction makes heat. Falling water also has kinetic energy. That energy also becomes heat. The study found that.
“The ice sheet covering Greenland is melting rapidly at its base and is injecting far more water and ice into the ocean than previously understood, which could have serious ramifications for global sea level rise".
“Unprecedented” rates of melting have been observed at the bottom of the ice sheet, caused by huge quantities of meltwater falling down from the surface, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As the meltwater falls, its gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which ultimately warms the water as it pools at the base of the ice sheet. In that process, the study found
that the Greenland ice sheet produces more energy than the world’s 10 largest hydroelectric dams combined.
“However, the heat generated by the falling water is not used to generate electricity. Instead, it melts the ice” stated Poul Christoffersen, a Canmridge University senior scientist who took part in the study.
The paper Umair mentions was put out by NOAA. It estimates one foot of sea level rise by 2050. However, it does not include accelerated rates of Greenland melt. Two to three feet of sea level rise in the next 30 years is very possible.
Our planet is dying and mass extinction:
Again, Imair is spot on. Just think about the world's oceans.
When you consider all of them together, when you look at the big picture, the outlook for the oceans is grim. They are rapidly becoming hotter, more acidic, and oxygen starved. Long term, we don’t know what’s going to happen. The last time conditions like this existed was 14–15 million years ago. We literally have no clue what’s going to happen. But the signs don’t look good
A reckoning is upon us:.
The UN has confirmed that we are about to get a massive temperature spike.
