Temperatures in Fairbanks have shifted so much that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially changed the city’s subarctic designation in 2021, downgrading it to “warm summer continental.” As the climate warms, the ancient ice that used to cover an estimated 85 percent of Alaska is thawing. As it streams away, there are places where the ground is now collapsing. Many of the valley’s spruce trees lean drunkenly and sometimes, only a thin layer of soil covers yawning craters where the ice has vanished. The University of Alaska Fairbanks, home to much of the state’s permafrost research, has itself struggled with recurring sinkholes on its roads and parking lots. “We have invested funding to rebuild,” said Cameron Wohlford, director of design and construction at the school’s facilities, “only to have them fail.” Homeowners around Alaska’s second-largest city are facing expensive repairs, or even having their properties condemned. Hasson eventually traced the river running beneath Lenniger’s property to her neighbor’s, where the owner, Judy Gottschalk, reported that her septic pipes had broken as the ground settled. “My well went out this winter, too,” she said. Not knowing where else the ghost ice lies, Gottschalk has been nervous about putting in a new septic system. The drilling and construction required to replace it would cost her as much as $45,000, more than she originally paid for her house. “Everyone I know is having problems with their housing,” Lenniger said.  As parts of Alaska set record high temperatures in December, Fairbanks closed out 2021 with a destructive ice storm, causing roofs to collapse. A warmer Arctic is also a wetter Arctic, accelerating the breakdown of permafrost, explained Tom Douglas, a senior scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in Fairbanks. “For every centimeter of rain, we see about one centimeter of additional top-down thaw,” he said. On average, Fairbanks now sees about five more weeks of rain than it did in the 1970s. The word permafrost, after all, is simply an abbreviation of “permanently frozen ground.” Much of Alaska’s permafrost is tens to hundreds of thousands of years old, first frozen when Goldstream Valley was grazed by mammoths. Now, that sense of immutability is slipping. “It was thought to be permanent — that any changes happened on a scale of tens of thousands of years,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a leading permafrost researcher.  Many variables influence permafrost’s stability, like how cold it is, how deep it runs, and the quantity of soil moisture, or its “ice richness.” In some parts of Alaska, ice extends nearly a half-mile below the surface, while in others, it has formed the landscape itself, sprouting tundra-covered ice hills called pingos. While the impacts of permafrost thaw — subsidence, flooding, sinkholes, and landslides — mimic the devastation of natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn’t responsible for permafrost damage, and it’s difficult to get covered by homeowner’s insurance. “How fast does a disaster need to move for a department that handles disasters to address it?” Cooke asked.  In 2018, the state recognized a new hazard: usteq, a word from the Alaska Native Yup’ik language that describes the catastrophic land collapse stemming from thawing permafrost, and the erosion and floodingit entails. As sea ice disappears, the coast has been battered by intensifying storm surges, speeding the breakdown of permafrost under the shore. Riverbanks are corroding from thaw, changing everything from the chemistry of the groundwater to its distribution and movement. Permafrost, Henry said, “is linked to everything — our homes, water sources, food sources, vegetation.” researchers usually collect data during the Arctic’s short summer field season, even though winter conditions may look very different, making conclusions less accurate. For instance, recent studies have found that emissions of carbon and methane released by thawing permafrost have been drastically underestimated. There are 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon currently stored in permafrost — twice what’s now in the atmosphere. New projections suggest that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could equal those emitted from the rest of the United States by the end of the century.......read on      https://grist.org/science/alaska-permafrost-thawing-ice-climate-change/                                               

Long Live the COPs! By Gwynne Dyer 13 December 2023 The poet Horace foreshadowed the COP28 climate summit by more than 2,000 years when he wrote “Mountains will labour. What’s born? A ridiculous mouse!” A mouse that couldn’t bring itself to speak of “phasing out” fossil fuels, but squeaked instead about “transitioning away” from them. The mighty struggle over precisely which set of weasel words to use is over for another year, and everybody will go home happy knowing that they have kept global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees C for another year. Except, of course, for the large proportion of the delegates who secretly know that battle has already been fought and lost.The temperature in Sydney, Australia hit 43.5C last Saturday, fifteen degrees higher than the usual highs in early summer. The northern hemisphere summer, when it arrives, will also surpass all previous records, and the average global temperature for 2024 as a whole will almost certainly exceed +1.5C. El Nino, which will go away again in a year or two, can be blamed for a bit of that, but we’ll be back up beyond +1.5 for good by 2029 or 2030. It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that by next year’s COP everybody will be frightened enough to vote for serious action. That will obviously require a radical departure from the system that was set up in the 1990s, when global warming first became an international priority. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was then much more powerful than it is today, and it insisted that every decision of the COPs must be made by consensus. Even a single one of the 198 countries at this year’s COP (including all 13 OPEC members) could veto any decision. That explains the strangulated language of the final resolution: the fossil fuel lobby would have vetoed anything stronger. So the process continues to stumble forward very, very slowly – but next year will be different. I have long assumed that this veto will be overridden when deaths attributable to climate change reach between one and ten million a year, and we are probably in the lower end of that zone already. (It would be useful, by the way, if someone reputable set up a site to keep track of that number.) But the COPs need to be reformed, not replaced.In their current form they are a toothless wonder, but they still have value – for two reasons.....read on             https://gwynnedyer.com/2023/long-live-the-cops/

War is a climate killer.......Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed the climate crisis off the agenda. But we need a ceasefire and global demilitarisation for a 1.5°C world. War brings death and destruction – not least to the environment and climate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers a depressing reminder of that fact, and further increases the military sector’s already enormous global CO2 footprint. In addition, the eastern Ukrainian cities where fighting is taking place are home to fossil fuel infrastructure such as chemical factories, oil refineries, and coal mines, the bombing of which produces a cocktail of toxic substances that has devastating environmental impacts. Efforts to arm the two sides, moreover, are consuming materials and resources that could otherwise go towards tackling the climate crisis.

Based on the global C02budget, humanity has less than eight years to ensure it still hits its 1.5-degree warming target. To do so, we need to urgently implement reforms in all areas, to bring about ‘systemic change’, as the IPCC report from early April puts it. The military sector barely gets a mention in this almost 3,000-page document, however, with the word ‘military’ coming up just six times. You might thus conclude that the sector is of little relevance to the climate emergency. The reality is rather different. Using military hardware results in huge quantities of emissions. In the war in Ukraine, 36 Russian attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure were recorded in the first five weeks alone, leading to prolonged fires that released soot particulates, methane and C02 into the atmosphere, while oil infrastructure has been ablaze on the Russian side too. The oil fields that were set on fire in 1991 during the second Gulf War contributed two per cent of global emissions for that year. While greenhouse gas emissions are one of the most significant impacts of war, the quantity emitted depends on the duration of the conflict and on what tanks, trucks, and planes are used. Another is the contamination of ecosystems that sequester CO2. Staff from Ukraine’s environment inspectorate are currently collecting water and soil samples in the areas around shelled industrial facilities.   Military emissions......The ramifications for the climate can be catastrophic in scale. According to a study by the organisation Oil Change International, the Iraq War was responsible for 141 million tonnes of C02equivalent emissions between its outbreak in 2003 and the report’s publication in 2008. By way of comparison: some 21 EU member states emitted less CO2equivalent in 2019, with only six states topping that figure. Globally, the military sector is estimated to generate around six per cent of all CO2emissions. Post-war rebuilding also produces significant emissions. Estimates suggest that reconstruction in Syria will lead to 22 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. The rebuilding in Ukraine, too, will consume vast amounts of resources. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that at least 5 billion US dollars of reconstruction funding was needed per month. Emissions from armed forces and military equipment cause considerable environmental harm around the globe. And yet, bowing to pressure from the US, military CO2 emissions were excluded from climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015. As a result, they do not form part of their binding agreements and are neither surveyed systematically nor published transparently. The consequent lack of data means we can only make vague estimates as to the military sector’s impact on global heating. According to a study by Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, the US defence ministry alone is a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than individual countries such as Sweden or Portugal. This makes it the largest institutional source of greenhouse gases in the world. Globally, the military sector is estimated to generate around six percent of all CO2emissions. https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/economy-and-ecology/war-is-a-climate-killer-6094/  

Yesterday, Nov. 18, 2023, the planet’s temperature went past the 2.0 degree Celsius barrier for the first time. It’s temporary—but it’s a terrible reminder that we’re now in the desperate end game for global warming. And yet no one noticed because—unavoidably—the world’s attention is riveted on the horrors in Gaza. The best reason for a ceasefire there is that the war is a humanitarian disaster; the macabre evil of the Hamas raid on Israel has long since been repaid by the industrial terror of Israel’s response. The proverbial eyes and teeth are attached to altogether too many literal and bloodied bodies. But if you need another reason: on a rapidly heating planet the world cannot afford to have its attention endlessly diverted. We talk about the “ancient” nature of the Mideast conflict, and indeed it’s been contested for several thousand years. But this year saw the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years—which is to say, we’re now experiencing in real time heating that outpaces anything from a very long way before human history. We have almost no time to slow that heating—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to cut emissions in half in the next six years to have an outside shot at holding temperatures to anything like a livable level. And that means that we’ve got a duty to move on the things that are preventing action. One, clearly, is the fight over Palestine; it’s never been clearer that these two sides are here to stay, and that some kind of working territorial compromise must be brokered. Even if all you cared about was this one region in the world, you’d want and need to do something about climate change.......because the land here, theoretically so sacred to all sides, is in danger of turning into an uninhabitable desert. At the moment, the region is warming twice as fast as the world as a whole.  Here’s some data (very little of which comes from Israel’s government, because as a detailed report in Haaretz found, the Netanyahu government has ignored the issue as profoundly as it has ignored so much else). Since 1980 the average number of high fire-risk days per year in Israel increased by a factor of 2.5 and very high fire-risk days saw a three-fold increase.In the last three decades, Israel saw a 3.4 percent decline in precipitation; in the coming decades, this is expected to increase to 24 percent less rainfall than the current annual average.  Not surprisingly, the outlook is even grimmer for Gaza. The Turkish news agency AAreportedlast month that an MIT study found that the average annual precipitation in the region will fall 10% to 30% by 2100, temperatures will increase by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, and it will affect the region's agricultural productivity and food supply, causing price instability and food shortages.  Each day on this earth climate change is the most important thing that happens. But each day these fights stretch on is another day we don’t remember that; another day when, mesmerized by the blood and injustice, we focus instead on the deep, sick attraction of war. It’s impossible to look away; our humanness is defined in part by the short-term fascination with the violent and sad. Human nature has been conditioned by long experience to see the real fights as the ones between humans—that’s what Scripture is about, and history, and drama, with the natural world forming a backdrop. But quite suddenly that backdrop needs to be the foreground; the most essential fight on earth right now is between people and physics.            https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/its-so-hot?utm_campaign=email-post&r=mwxsy&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email