I’m fairly certain that Guantanamera translates to a girl from Guantanamo
X
later: Wasn’t Guantanomo a part of Cuba. They must have broken the lease agreement. I think that I would kick them out anyway
I’m fairly certain that Guantanamera translates to a girl from Guantanamo
X
later: Wasn’t Guantanomo a part of Cuba. They must have broken the lease agreement. I think that I would kick them out anyway
See the original post here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/09/lawyers-cant-reunite-666-seized-migrant-children-parents-121-more-previously
The children were separated from their families under the Trump administration’s widely condemned “zero tolerance” immigration policy. byBrett Wilkins, staff writer
A father embraces his 6-year-old son after entering the United States on May 16, 2019 following a harrowing trek through Guatemala and Mexico. (Photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
Last month, the world was shocked and outraged to learn that lawyers tasked with locating relatives of child migrants seized by U.S. immigration agents under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy were unable to locate the parents of 545 children. Now it turns out that the actual number of children and infants separated from their parents is significantly higher than previously thought, according to an email obtained by NBC News.
In the email, Steven Herzog, the lawyer leading the effort to locate the children’s relatives and reunite the families, says that 666 children—about 20% of whom were under the age of 5 when they were ripped away from their parents—remain separated. Herzog attibutes the initial undercount to the fact that the government did not provide phone number contacts for 129 of the minors.
“We would appreciate the government providing any available updated contact information, or other information that may be helpful in establishing contact for all 666 of these parents,” Herzog wrote to Justice Department attorneys representing the Trump administration.
Last month, the House Judiciary Committee released a scathing report revealing the administration knew it would not be able to reunite migrant families when planning the “zero tolerance” separation policy, but implemented it anyway. The Democratic-led committee spent 21 months investigating the planning and execution of the administration’s policy, which resulted in the seizure of more than 2,500 migrant children—including some with physical and mental disabilities—from their parents, the majority of whom are believed to have been deported from the U.S.
Both parents and children—who were often told by U.S. officials that they would never see each other again—have suffered tremendous emotional and psychological trauma that Physicians for Human Rights has called “torture” and “state-sanctioned child abuse.” The federal government often separated families who presented themselves at U.S. ports of entry and legally requested asylum after fleeing violence or persecution in their home countries, much of it resulting from U.S. policies and actions.
Some of the children have been given to U.S. families, who are sometimes able to petition for permanent custody of them, and some of the children may indeed never see their parents again.
In late June 2018, as public outrage mounted in the face of stories like a breastfeeding baby being torn away from her mother and a father driven to suicide after being separated from his wife and child, the administration reluctantly rolled back the policy—which along with forced surgical removal of reproductive organs of migrant women has been called the Trump administration’s worst domestic human rights violation.
President-elect Joe Biden vowed last month that he will form a task force to reunite all of the separated children with their families. President Donald Trump, on the other hand, continues to defend the separation policy while falsely claiming that the seized children were brought into the country by human traffickers. …
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Comment by dizzy: This is not and should not be regarded as any less serious than – for example – demanding money with a threat of serious injury[ed: Perhaps a bit confused there. How does destroying a family compare to a mugging using a knife or gun. I think that he point is that it doesn’t compare but that the total cnut is not even anything. He gets to destroy families without even – well nothing }. Depriving young children from their families is serious and I suggest criminal. I think that it is treating people as less than people.
Laws should apply to everyone. Individuals should not evade prosecution by having or previously having high office.
2.55/3 GMT Later ed about electoral fraud: Well the point is that the Imbecile appointed the head of USPS to stop mail-in votes, deliberately to disrupt them. That’s obvious electoral fraud – a deliberate attempt to obstruct legitimate votes. Lock Him Up.
ed: There are so many reasons that he should be prosecuted – destroying families, treating them as less than human and electoral fraud are only two of them.
Leaders are happy to set targets for decades ahead, but flinch when immediate action is needed, she says
Greta Thunberg has blasted politicians as hypocrites and international climate summits as empty words and greenwash. Until humanity admits it has failed to tackle the climate crisis and begins treating it as an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic, society will be unable to stop global heating, she said.
In an interview with the Guardian, Thunberg said leaders were happy to set targets for decades into the future, but flinched when immediate action to cut emissions was needed. She said there was not a politician on the planet promising the climate action required: “If only,” said the teenager, who will turn 18 in January.
But she is inspired by the millions of students who have taken up the school strike she began by herself in Sweden 116 weeks ago. Since then she has addressed the UN and become the world’s most prominent climate campaigner. She also has hope: “We can treat a crisis like a crisis, as we have seen because of the coronavirus. Treating the climate crisis like a crisis – that could change everything overnight.”
…
“So the first thing we need to do is understand we are in an emergency [and] admit the fact that we have failed – humanity collectively has failed – because you can’t solve a crisis that you don’t understand,” Thunberg said.
…
Top 5 Ways Trump Failed you too Epically ever to be Reelected
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –
1. Environment. This is the biggest single issue. Trump is a real-life world-destroying Thanos from the Avengers, and is trying his best to commit planeticide. His policies will kill the earth. The human race has a window of about 20 years to avoid the worst impacts of the climate emergency. We should have swung into action years ago to vastly reduce our use of coal, gasoline and natural gas. Trump has presided over an increase in our annual carbon dioxide emissions rather than, as he should have, greatly reducing them. If Americans give him another four years to wreak this kind of destruction, it will be game over for normal human life on the planet. We will see gargantuan disruptions, with turbocharged hurricanes, massive wildfires, raging sea level rise, coastal flooding, and mass extinctions. These disasters can be light or heavy. Trump is doing his best to ensure they are heavy.
…
2. Trump’s second biggest failure was in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. For the most part, he adopted an ostrich policy of burying his head in the ground and pretending that it wasn’t there, or would abruptly disappear “like a miracle,” or that its consequences were not grave.
…
3. Trump’s failure on the coronavirus is also a failure on the economy. China dealt with the pandemic in a scientific way, and is now past the crisis. It will grow 1.2 percent this year, whereas US GDP will be in negative territory. Trump blames governors’ shutdown orders for harming businesses.
…
4. Health Care. Trump has tried to kneecap Obamacare, which had allowed an extra 22 million Americans to afford health care insurance. Trump has undermined the program at every turn. He is presently in court attempting get rid of the Affordable Care Act entirely. He has also consistently challenged the requirement that insurers insure people with pre-existing conditions. Trump brazenly lies about his opposition to health care for people and his attempt to get rid of the provision about pre-existing conditions. But you have to look at what he does, not what he says. What he has done is to sue to get rid of them and to get rid of the ACA. He lies and says he has a better plan in mind, but the Republicans have had a decade to produce an alternative and they never have given us a bill to examine.
5. Under Trump, the US trade deficit has climbed 14% from where it was in Obama’s last year. It skyrocketed with China, but then Trump used tariffs (paid for by Americans) to wrestle it back down to just about where it was in 2016. It then just grew with other countries.
…
There wasn’t any really.
[2/11/20 ed: I would say that the scale of the problem was dramatically overstated for political reasons by opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That was enough to get Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the Labour Party despite it being an entirely true and accurate statement.
Aljazeera’s investigation ‘The Lobby‘ documents the Israeli embassy smear-campaign against Socialists in the Labour Party using false manufactured accusations of anti-semitism.
“This killing must be thoroughly investigated, and the officers responsible for Wallace’s death must be held accountable for their actions.”byJake Johnson, staff writer
Demonstrators protest the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. on October 27, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Mass demonstrations flooded the streets of Philadelphia for the second consecutive night Tuesday as outrage and demands for justice continue to grow in the wake of the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old Black man who city officers shot at least 10 times earlier this week as he suffered a mental health crisis.
Footage of the incident made public Monday shows Wallace holding a knife and walking toward two officers as they backed up with their guns drawn. Before the officers began opening fire, Wallace’s mother is seen in the clip attempting to hold her son back and deescalate the situation.
“As we know from the tragic killings of Daniel Prude, Nicolas Chavez, Quintonio LeGrier, and now Walter Wallace Jr., the criminalization of mental health is dangerous, particularly for Black and Brown people.”
—Lynda Garcia, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Shaka Johnson, the Wallace family’s attorney, told reporters Tuesday that Walter’s brother had called 911 to request medical assistance and an ambulance before the armed police officers arrived.
“When you come to a scene where somebody is in a mental crisis, and the only tool you have to deal with it is a gun… where are the proper tools for the job?” Johnson said.
Lynda Garcia, director of the policing campaign at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement Tuesday that “this killing must be thoroughly investigated, and the officers responsible for Wallace’s death must be held accountable for their actions.”
“As we know from the tragic killings of Daniel Prude, Nicolas Chavez, Quintonio LeGrier, and now Walter Wallace Jr., the criminalization of mental health is dangerous, particularly for Black and Brown people,” said Garcia. “We must redefine public safety and prioritize investing in community-based services and non-police responses to assist people with mental health needs so we can prevent more tragedies like this.”
As many as 2,000 people poured into the streets and marched near the site of Wallace’s killing in West Philadelphia Tuesday night, with demonstrators chanting, “Who killed Walter Wallace?” and, “No justice, no peace, no racist police!”
Pascale Vallee, a 34-year-old graduate student who took part in Tuesday’s demonstration, told the Washington Post that the killing of Wallace was “shameful.”
Published onWednesday, October 28, 2020byCommon Dreams
“Texas continues to be openly hostile to voting rights.”byJulia Conley, staff write(r)
An election worker accepts ballots from voters in cars at a drive-through mail ballot drop-off site at NRG Stadium on October 7, 2020 in Houston, Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order limiting each county to one mail ballot drop-off site. (Photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images)
In a ruling that critics said served as an endorsement of voter suppression, the Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday evening sided with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott regarding his order limiting each county in the state to just one mail-in ballot drop box.
After a federal appeals court stacked with President Donald Trump’s judicial appointees ruled earlier this month in favor of the directive—which voting rights advocates say will make it particularly hard for voters in largely Democratic, urban areas like Austin and Houston to cast their ballots—the Anti-Defamation League of Texas and Common Cause Texas brought the case to the state Supreme Court. The groups argued Abbott did not have the authority to implement a rule which would disproportionately burden residents of large counties.
“Texas continues to be openly hostile to voting rights,” tweeted Common Cause Texas after the ruling was handed down.
:’ see original ‘
The court claimed in its ruling that Abbott’s order “does not disenfranchise anyone” because Texas voters can cast their ballots in person prior to Election Day and can mail in their ballots—options which could force voters to risk exposure to the coronavirus or use a method of voting which has been undermined repeatedly by Trump, who has baselessly claimed that voting by mail will invite election fraud, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.
New York Times contributing writer Wahajat Ali denounced the ruling as “shameful, naked voter suppression.”
…
Published onWednesday, October 28, 2020byCommon Dreams
Members of the activist group Rise and Resist gathered for a press conference and demonstration outside NBC News and Fox News in Manhattan on October 22, 2020. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Countering President Donald Trump’s false suggestion Tuesday that tallying votes after Election Day is unlawful, a top official at the U.S. Federal Election Commission said that in fact “counting ballots—all of ’em—is the appropriate, proper, and very legal way to determine who won.”
“An election is not a reality show with a big reveal at the end,” Ellen Weintraub, an election attorney and a Democratic commissioner at the FEC, tweeted in response to Trump’s insistence that a winner be officially declared on the night of November 3.
“All we get on Election Night are projections from TV networks,” Weintraub noted. “We never have official results on Election Night.”
: ‘ … see original ‘
Trump’s comments Tuesday came amid growing fears that the president could attempt to take advantage of slower-than-usual vote counting—which is expected due to the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting amid the pandemic—to falsely declare victory on Election Night and dismiss as illegitimate legally submitted ballots counted after November 3.
Those concerns were intensified by Trump-nominated Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s falsehood-riddled concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s late Monday ruling that barred the battleground state of Wisconsin from extending its absentee ballot deadline. The decision means that ballots received by Wisconsin officials after Election Day cannot be counted, even if they are postmarked by November 3.
In his opinion, Kavanaugh declared that absentee ballots arriving after Election Day—which is allowed in more than a dozen states—could “flip the results of the election.” But as Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent (pdf), “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”
“And nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or ‘improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on Election Night,” Kagan added. “To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”
Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern warned late Tuesday that “by deploying so many falsehoods in his 18-page opinion, Kavanaugh sent a signal to lower court judges: Uphold voter suppression at all costs, even if you have to ignore or contort the factual record to do it.”
“Trump’s dozens of hackish judicial nominees will hear this message loud and clear,” Stern wrote. “At least one member of the Supreme Court is willing to construct a fantasy world that is utterly detached from our grim reality of mass disenfranchisement. If we cannot trust the justices to tell the truth now, why should we believe them if they decide the election next week?
…
“Like the major oil and gas companies, leading car companies took a calculated risk that they—and the world—could delay action to address the drivers of climate change. We are all paying for that
Source: GM and Ford Knew, Too: Reporting Reveals Auto Giants Recognized
You must address the climate crisis as your first priority.
later edit: me, my name
(my surname is Tucker ;)
well c’mon, didn’t you notice [ed: that} I said 23 before? (3321) [I hate poor grammar (and illiterate presidents)]
later: Actually, I would prefer a president who is not a total imbecile
Published on Saturday, October 24, 2020 by Common Dreams
“Trump’s lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives. We need a new president,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. by Jake Johnson, staff writer
President Donald Trump speaks during his campaign event on October 23, 2020 in The Villages, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump late Friday repeated his lie that the United States is on its way to defeating the coronavirus pandemic just before the country reported a single-day record of more than 85,000 new Covid-19 infections, nearly 10,000 more cases than were tallied at the height of the devastating surge in mid-July.
But the president’s remarks during a campaign rally Friday at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, conveyed zero indication that the U.S. is entering what could be the worst phase of the pandemic yet.
“It’s true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic. We are spiraling out of control.”
—Dr. Zoë McLaren,School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
“I mean, you look at what’s going on and we’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. We’re rounding the corner beautifully,” Trump said, recycling an egregious falsehood that has become a staple of his stump speech even as infections and hospitalizations surge nationwide.
The New York Times reported late Friday that “since the start of October, the rise in cases has been steady and inexorable, with no plateau in sight… By that measure, Friday was the worst day of the pandemic, and health experts warned of a further surge as cold weather sets in. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has already risen 40 percent in the past month.”
Consistent with his reckless downplaying of the pandemic from the very start, Trump once again peddled the lie that the U.S. is “rounding the turn” during a late Friday rally in Pensacola, one of many largely maskless and closely packed in-person campaign events the president has held in recent days against the warnings of public health officials.
Watch:
Just hours after news broke that the US set a single-day record today for new coronavirus cases, Trump absurdly claims in Pensacola that the country is “rounding the turn” of the pandemic pic.twitter.com/fG0uXxluPu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 24, 2020
“It’s true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic,” responded Dr. Zoë McLaren, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We are spiraling out of control.”
In addition to the record number of cases, the U.S. also reported more than 940 coronavirus deaths on Friday, bringing the nation’s death toll to nearly 224,000—the highest in the world.
“This is only getting worse,” tweeted epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, warning that the U.S. could soon reach 100,000 new cases per day as the winter months approach.
With the November 3 election less than two weeks away, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Friday that “Trump’s lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives.”
“We need a new president,” Sanders said.
Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Published onFriday, October 23, 2020by Common Dreams
“The policy of the Japanese government to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is not based on scientific or environmental protection principles and has no justification.”by Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Storage tanks for radioactive water stand at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Jan. 29, 2020 in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. (Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Greenpeace sounded alarm Friday over the Japanese government’s plan to release stored water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, releasing a new report warning about the presence of carbon-14, which the group says “has the potential to damage human DNA.”
The warning laid out in a new report says the government and plant operator TEPCO’s controversial plan—which has been under consideration for some time—is founded on “a series of myths” and pursues the cheapest option to get rid of the water over what is best for human and ecological health.
The plan allows “the government [to] create the impression that substantial progress is being made in the early decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors,” Greenpeace says.
Entitled Stemming the tide 2020: The reality of the Fukushima radioactive water crisis, the publication argues that the planned release of the water “will have serious, long-term consequences for communities and the environment, locally and much further afield.”
“Nearly 10 years after the start of the disaster, TEPCO and the Japanese government are still covering up the scale of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi,” said Shaun Burnie, author of the report and senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany. He further accused the entities of having “deliberately held back for years detailed information on the radioactive material in the contaminated water.”
Beyond the remaining radioactive material tritium in the water, an additional problem is the presence of high levels of carbon-14, which belies the government’s assertion that the water is not “contaminated,” said Greenpeace.
According to the report,
If the contaminated water is discharged to the Pacific Ocean, all of the carbon-14 will be released to the environment. With a half-life of 5,730 years, carbon-14 is a major contributor to global human collective dose; once introduced into the environment carbon-14 will be delivered to local, regional, and global populations for many generations. […]
Contrary to the understanding of the Japanese government, water that contains large quantities of radioactive carbon-14 (as well as the other radioactive isotopes including strontium-90 and tritium) can only be described as contaminated.
Burnie said that TEPCO and the Japanese government “have failed to explain to the citizens of Fukushima, wider Japan, and to neighboring countries such as South Korea and China that the contaminated water to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean contains dangerous levels of carbon-14. These, together with other radionuclides in the water will remain hazardous for thousands of years with the potential to cause genetic damage.”
“It’s one more reason why these plans have to be abandoned,” said Burnie.
The report puts some of the blame on TEPCO’s decision to rely on technology known as ALPS that the operator should have known was incapable of bringing concentrations of radionuclides down to acceptable levels.
Rather than quickly moving to dump the water into the ocean, the Greenpeace report says the government should pursue “continued long-term storage and processing of the contaminated water.”
“There is no technical, engineering, or legal barrier to securing additional storage space for ALPS-treated contaminated water. It is a matter of political will,” said Burnie.
“The policy of the Japanese government to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is not based on scientific or environmental n principles,” he said, “and has no justification.”
On Trump’s Full, Flowing, Magnificently Brilliant Answers
Poor little snowflake Donny’s been super busy throwing tantrums after one of those mean girl reporters hurt his feelings again. When 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl started her interview with, “Are you ready for tough questions?” – and then asked some – he was so mad he left in a huff and posted it all to expose her “bias, hatred and rudeness,” aka her competence as he lied, dodged, stumbled. And earlier he even gave her a big book of all the health care things he’s done! It was blank, but still. Read More… More Further
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
A quiz for you today. You may notice that there is a trap for blonde-haired global leaders of the very stable genius variety.
Please identify the items in the images. Answers are at the end.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Thanks to wikimedia for all the images.
The answers are:
Ace it? Did you notice the trap for blonde-haired World leaders of the very stable genius variety? That’s right both current US Resident Donald Trump and current UK Prime Mister Boris ‘rice pudding’ Johnson mistake wind generators or turbines for windmills.
Boris was using the phrase windmills in his speech to the Conservative Party conference yesterday. By misusing the phrase windmills he is associating himself with the World’s most prominent climate crisis denier and climate destroyer, Donald Trump. Is the message that his speech should be regarded as donkey doo?
Here are some extra images which are not part of the quiz.
A floating wind turbine. Windmills generally don’t float Boris.
Skin on rice pudding.
A donkey. This one is for my friends at Led by Boriss.
Republished under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Julie Brigham-Grette, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Steve Petsch, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Every year, sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean shrinks to a low point in mid-September. This year it measures just 1.44 million square miles (3.74 million square kilometers) – the second-lowest value in the 42 years since satellites began taking measurements. The ice today covers only 50% of the area it covered 40 years ago in late summer.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in human history. The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations reached today’s level – about 412 parts per million – was 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch.
As geoscientists who study the evolution of Earth’s climate and how it creates conditions for life, we see evolving conditions in the Arctic as an indicator of how climate change could transform the planet. If global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, they could return the Earth to Pliocene conditions, with higher sea levels, shifted weather patterns and altered conditions in both the natural world and human societies.
We are part of a team of scientists who analyzed sediment cores from Lake El’gygytgyn in northeast Russia in 2013 to understand the Arctic’s climate under higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Fossil pollen preserved in these cores shows that the Pliocene Arctic was very different from its current state.
Today the Arctic is a treeless plain with only sparse tundra vegetation, such as grasses, sedges and a few flowering plants. In contrast, the Russian sediment cores contained pollen from trees such as larch, spruce, fir and hemlock. This shows that boreal forests, which today end hundreds of miles farther south and west in Russia and at the Arctic Circle in Alaska, once reached all the way to the Arctic Ocean across much of Arctic Russia and North America.
Because the Arctic was much warmer in the Pliocene, the Greenland Ice Sheet did not exist. Small glaciers along Greenland’s mountainous eastern coast were among the few places with year-round ice in the Arctic. The Pliocene Earth had ice only at one end – in Antarctica – and that ice was less extensive and more susceptible to melting.
Because the oceans were warmer and there were no large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, sea levels were 30 to 50 feet (9 to 15 meters) higher around the globe than they are today. Coastlines were far inland from their current locations. The areas that are now California’s Central Valley, the Florida Peninsula and the Gulf Coast all were underwater. So was the land where major coastal cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston and Seattle stand.
Warmer winters across what is now the western U.S. reduced snowpack, which these days supplies much of the region’s water. Today’s Midwest and Great Plains were so much warmer and dryer that it would have been impossible to grow corn or wheat there.
How did CO2 concentrations during the Pliocene reach levels similar to today’s? Humans would not appear on Earth for at least another million years, and our use of fossil fuels is even more recent. The answer is that some natural processes that have occurred on Earth throughout its history release CO2 to the atmosphere, while others consume it. The main system that keeps these dynamics in balance and controls Earth’s climate is a natural global thermostat, regulated by rocks that chemically react with CO2 and pull it out of the atmosphere.
In soils, certain rocks continually break down into new materials in reactions that consume CO2. These reactions tend to speed up when temperatures and rainfall are higher – exactly the climate conditions that occur when atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations rise.
But this thermostat has a built-in control. When CO2 and temperatures increase and rock weathering accelerates, it pulls more CO2 from the atmosphere. If CO2 begins to fall, temperatures cool and rock weathering slows globally, pulling out less CO2.
Rock weathering reactions also can work faster where soil contains lots of newly exposed mineral surfaces. Examples include areas with high erosion or periods when Earth’s tectonic processes pushed land upward, creating major mountain chains with steep slopes.
The rock weathering thermostat operates at a geologically slow pace. For example, at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, scientists estimate that atmospheric CO2 levels were between 2,000 and 4,000 parts per million. It took over 50 million years to reduce them naturally to around 400 parts per million in the Pliocene.
Because natural changes in CO2 levels happened very slowly, cyclic shifts in Earth’s climate system were also very slow. Ecosystems had millions of years to adapt, adjust and slowly respond to changing climates. https://www.youtube.com/embed/2hNgEVFMJnQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Summer heat waves are altering northern Siberia, thawing permafrost and creating conditions for large-scale wildfires.
Today human activities are overwhelming the natural processes that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the dawn of the Industrial Era in 1750, atmospheric CO2 stood at about 280 parts per million. It has taken humans only 200 years to completely reverse the trajectory begun 50 million years ago and return the planet to CO2 levels not experienced for millions of years.
Most of that shift has happened since World War II. Yearly increases of 2-3 parts per million now are common. And in response, the Earth is warming at a fast pace. Since roughly 1880 the planet has warmed by 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) – many times faster than any warming episode in the past 65 million years of Earth’s history.
In the Arctic, losses of reflective snow and ice cover have amplified this warming to +5 C (9 F). As a result, summertime Arctic sea ice coverage is trending lower and lower. Scientists project that the Arctic will be completely ice-free in summer within the next two decades.
[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]
This isn’t the only evidence of drastic Arctic warming. Scientists have recorded extreme summer melt rates across the Greenland Ice Sheet. In early August, Canada’s last remaining ice shelf, in the territory of Nunavut, collapsed into the sea. Parts of Arctic Siberia and Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands in the Arctic Ocean, reached record-shattering high temperatures this summer.
Coastal cities, agricultural breadbasket regions and water supplies for many communities all will be radically different if this planet returns to a Pliocene CO2 world. This future is not inevitable – but avoiding it will require big steps now to decrease fossil fuel use and turn down Earth’s thermostat.
Julie Brigham-Grette, Professor of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Steve Petsch, Associate Professor of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
[ed: I think that the Idiot/Ignoramus OTUS is history (i.e. dead) although I accept that I have made a false call for another blond-haired ignoramus who is instead actually still hanging on as the walking(dead)]
That ‘China virus’ that will go away …
such extreme xenaphobic fascism …
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving blond-haired psychopath …
Oh, come to think of it
Can I do on your way to Perpetual Torment?
[ed: He was never a Christian, the filthy rich are raised and educated as psychopaths (US: sociopaths). They are taught to be uncaring (your choice here, may be 4/5 characters {or 6/7] or 8/9) who are not responsible for the consequences of their actions. Rich cnuts are rich cnuts because that’s what they’re taught.
To change it. Hold them responsible for their actions, stop that teaching, stop them being rich.
ed: Socially distanced please
[ed: Capitalism is not coping well with Coronavirus. Have you noticed? We’ve got to do away with ridiculously rich people and instead care for each other and our future (including our World and our Environment)] .
later: Shouldn’t we be caring for our World? Shouldn’t we be caring for it?
later: We need to care for each other and our world and our environment and we can’t allow a ridiculously rich minority to destroy it/that.
Boris was an Englishman, a liar and a cheat …
Is that reality rupture?
ed: Isn’t that that exactly what you should expect from someone with such a reputation?