Zero Carbon: Kicking the hornet’s nest Chris Hatch | Opinion | March 12th 2024 It’s time for a serious look at shading the Earth, say the Swiss. Switzerland kicked the hornet’s nest of geoengineering with an official proposal at the UN Environment Assembly’s latest gathering in Nairobi. The Swiss wanted the UN to set up an expert group to study “the risks, benefits and uncertainties” of blocking some of the sun’s rays using techniques of solar radiation modification (SRM). The most common suggestion is to inject sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere and reflect some fraction of the sun’s heat before it hits the Earth. The proposal provoked fierce opposition, especially from African nations, which countered with a demand for a “non-use” agreement on SRM. After some cantankerous debate, nothing was agreed. Switzerland ultimately pulled its proposal, saying, “At least we managed to start a global conversation about this important topic.” In truth, that conversation is already well underway. In the past several months, climate engineering has been part of reports and research strategies issued by the U.S. government, as well as the European Commission and the European Parliament. There’s a Climate Overshoot Commission studying geoengineering chaired by the former head of the WTO that includes Kim Campbell, who was (briefly) Canada’s 19th prime minister. Luminaries of climate science like James Hansen are calling for intensified research and there are now institutes at various universities and scientific conferences dedicated to the topic. It’s a hornet’s nest even in academic circles where some scientists say we’d better get our emergency options figured out, while others think we’re already running too many geoengineering experiments altering the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses. Almost everyone involved seems to think it’s a desperate idea. Tempered by the fact that we’re headed into desperate territory. “Solar radiation management is both a terrifying, terrible idea and an absolutely inevitable future,” says Nils Gilman, editor at Noema Magazine. It was the ninth straight month obliterating global heat records. February was not just the hottest February on record, it averaged 1.77 C above pre-industrial temperatures. Every month since last July has exceeded the symbolic 1.5-degree figure......read on    https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/12/opinion/zero-carbon-sun-earth-shade-global-heating-climate  

‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint. Allies and advisers have hinted at a more methodical second term: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining scientists and overturning rulesThe United States’s first major climate legislation dismantled, a crackdown on government scientists, a frenzy of oil and gas drilling, the Paris climate deal not only dead but buried. A blueprint is emerging for a second Donald Trump term that is even more extreme for the environment than his first, according to interviews with multiple Trump allies and advisers. In contrast to a sometimes chaotic first White House term, they outlined a far more methodical second presidency: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining mainstream climate scientists and overturning rules that curb planet-heating emissions. “Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before,” said Myron Ebell, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for Trump’s first term. “He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.” The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will bethe Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370bn bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles. Ebell said the legislation, signed by Biden in 2022 with no Republican votes, was “the biggest defeat we’ve suffered”.Carla Sands, a key environment adviser to the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who has criticised Biden’s “apocalyptic green fantasies”, said: “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.” He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail. This would deal a mortal blow to the global effort to restrain dangerous global heating, with scientists warning that the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half this decade, and eliminate them entirely by 2050, to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits and plunge billions of people into worsening heatwaves, floods and droughts......and more!     https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/06/trump-climate-change-fossil-fuels-second-term?utm_term=65c22d55b239d174e7522ad0a1f2ca42&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

Extreme Climate Impacts From Collapse of a Key Atlantic Ocean Current Could be Worse Than Expected. New Study Warns Disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current could freeze Europe, scorch the tropics and increase sea level rise in the North Atlantic. The tipping point may be closer than predicted in the IPCC’s latest assessment. Bob Berwyn February 9, 2024 A new study affirms that a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that shunt warm and cold water between the poles is “on course” to a tipping point. If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation fails because of increasing freshwater inflows from melting ice sheets and rivers swelled by global warming, the authors said it would disrupt the climate globally, shifting Asian monsoon rainfall patterns and even reversing the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon. “It’s a global shift,” saidUtrecht University climate and physics researcher René van Westen, co-author of the research published today in Science Advances. Along with changes in rain distribution, an AMOC collapse could also make some other related ocean currents in the Atlantic, like the Gulf Stream, “partly vanish,” he said. “This leads to a lot of dynamic sea level rise, up to a meter in the North Atlantic under an AMOC collapse,” he said. “And you need to add that on top of the sea level rise already caused by global warming. So the problems are really severe.” The East Coast of the United States would be one of the regions most affected by rising sea levels if the AMOC shuts down, he explained, because warming waters, which expand and increase sea level, would pile up there instead of flowing northward. Warming coastal oceans can also contribute to extreme heat waves over land and fuel more intense storms and rainfall. Without warm water flowing toward the Arctic, he added, winter sea ice could expand as far south as England, and some regions of Europe would quickly dry out and cool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius per decade. Some of the projected impacts would be nearly impossible to adapt to, said Peter Ditlevsen, an ice and climate researcher with the University of Copenhagen Niels Bohr Institute and the author of a 2023 paper in Nature Communications that warned of a mid-century AMOC tipping point. “A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said.                                                                                                                                                    But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.” Under the current global warming trend, “It will be about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer by 2050, and then maybe the AMOC tips and results in a slight cooling,” he said. The impact on the average global temperature wouldn’t be extreme, but Western Europe could cool to pre-industrial levels, and would get substantially less precipitation, he added. Other parts of the planet will warm faster, especially the southern hemisphere and tropics, since the heat transport system won’t be able to convey the increasing ocean warmth northward, he added. “It’s not science fiction,” van Westen said. Alarmist or not, “We need to show this is not only the Hollywood blockbuster, ‘The Day After Tomorrow.’ This is real, this can happen. And I think it’s important and urgent to keep saying to people, okay, we need to really tackle our emissions.” The AMOC distributes both warmer and colder water between both poles via a network of deep and near-surface ocean currents. The twin engines for the network are at high latitudes, where dense, cold and salty water sinks deep and pushes water horizontally across the seafloor. Those dynamics maintain the Circulation’s strength and the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.                                                                    The new study takes a detailed look at what happens when the balance is disrupted by greater quantities of freshwater flowing into the ocean, and the findings are a “major advance in AMOC stability science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University. The last AMOC breakdown occurred about 12,000 years ago and most climate scientists think it triggered the Younger Dryas cold event around the northern Atlantic, during which temperatures over Greenland dropped by 4 to 10 degrees Celsius in a matter of decades and glaciers temporarily advanced, while drier conditions spread across parts of the Northern Hemisphere......in the meantime, the United States is about to elect a raving fascist as president who wants to negate all of the green reforms already implementeed and "drill baby drill", and there's invasions, war and violence everywhere - the world is going mad!     https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022024/climate-impacts-from-collapse-of-atlantic-meridional-overturning-current-could-be-worse-than-expected/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=fc035e3f05-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_02_10_02_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-fc035e3f05-327998718    ......AND ALSO click on..... 'Cliff-Like' Collapse of Critical Current System More Likely Than Thought: Study "The new study adds significantly to the rising concern about an AMOC collapse in the not-too-distant future," said one scientist. "We will ignore this at our peril."