Six Out of Nine Planetary Boundaries Already Crossed, Study Warns. "This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell," said one scientist. JULIA CONLEY. Sep 14, 2023 Scientists behind a new study on the crossing of the Earth's "planetary boundaries" on Wednesday likened the planet to a sick patient, warning that six out of nine barriers that ensure the Earth is a "safe operating space for humanity" have now been breached. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and other international institutions analyzed 2,000 studies to update a planetary boundary framework developed in 2009 by the Stockholm Resilience Center, completing the first "complete check-up of all nine processes and systems that determine the stability and resilience of the planet." The boundaries for climate change and land use have been broken for decades as extractive industries have razed forests and planet-heating fossil fuel emissions have significantly increased since preindustrial times. The "novel entities" boundary—pertaining to the accumulation of synthetic pollution from substances such as microplastics, pesticides, and nuclear waste—was quantified for the first time in the study, which was published in Science Advances. Freshwater change—both "green" freshwater in soil and vegetation and "blue" freshwater in bodies of water—has also been breached, along with biogeochemical flows, or the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment, which can create ocean dead zones and algal blooms."We don't know how long we can keep breaching these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm." The study marked the first time researchers quantified a control variable for the "biosphere integrity" boundary, which they found was breached long before the framework was introduced—in the late 19th century as the Industrial Revolution and other factors accelerated the destruction of the natural world. Co-author Wolfgang Lucht called biosphere integrity "the second pillar of stability for our planet" next to climate change, and warned the pillar is being destabilized by humans "taking out too much biomass, destroying too much habitat, deforesting too much land. Our research shows that mitigating global warming and saving a functional biosphere for the future should go hand in hand."     https://www.commondreams.org/news/six-planetary-boundaries-crossed 

10 Climate Change Impacts That Will Affect Us All.....and what you can do.  As global greenhouse gases are projected to hit a new high for 2019, Petteri Taalas of the World Meteorological Organization recently declared, “Things are getting worse.” A 2019 poll found that only 24 percent of U.S. respondents believed climate change would have a great deal of impact on their lives; 31 percent believed it would have a fair amount of impact.
Different regions of the country will be affected in different ways, some more than others. But there are certain impacts that will probably affect the way of life of every American [and all others on this planet]. Here are 10 of them..........1. Damage to your home.....2. More expensive home insurance and 8 more....read on            https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/12/27/climate-change-impacts-everyone/     

Heat Waves and Tipping Points 17 July 2023  By Gwynne Dyer

From Bill McKibbon- This edition will be a touch more personal than most, because the past couple of weeks have felt personal.I wrote the first book on what we now call the climate crisis way back in 1989, and it feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record. And long before records too: it seems almost certain that this is the hottest weather on our planet in 125,000 years; Jim Hansen made a quite reasonable case Friday that it is already or soon will be hotter than it’s been for a million years, which is to say before the evolution of homo sapiens. In other words, this is what climate change feels like—still in the earlier stages since we’re less than halfway to the temperature our current trajectory will produce. But more than enough to, all of a sudden, start understanding that it’s entirely intolerable. Here’s the New York Times yesterday, reporting on the heat in Laredo where the current hellish spell has killed at least ten people. One man found his brother dead in a bedroom with two broken air-conditioners. They were used to heat, of course; they’d grown up on the border. “But this was a different kind of heat. This is a magnifying-the-sun-on-top-of-ants kind of heat. This is beyond anything we’ve had before.” On Wednesday, firefighters encountered a man sprawled in the street in north Phoenix…When firefighters arrived, the man was unconscious. There were burns all over his body. His skin was coming off and his internal temperature was 107 degrees, they said. They delivered him to the emergency room. “Basically, his brain was fried,” said firefighter Brandon Kanae, who responded to the scene.When I read things like this, I weep for the people involved, and I also weep at my own failure. I’ve known about this crisis longer than almost anyone on earth, and I’ve done what I can think of to do, and some of it has been useful, but it hasn’t been enough. Others have done more and better, but that hasn’t been enough either. ‘I told you so’ is, in this case, just a different way of saying ‘I couldn’t figure out the right words’ or ‘I couldn’t mobilize enough others.’ Kind people say ‘you tried,’ and I have, but that’s also another way of saying ‘you blew it.’  Vermont was one of many places that took it on the chin this week—huge flooding in Japan and India and China and Spain, but also in Montpelier and Ludlow and Barre and a dozen other places I know intimately. And this weekend, a second round of bucketing rainfall across the Green Mountains unleashed a landslide a half mile from my house; we’re fine, but another family saw their home buried in a roaring wall of mud.....[a strong warning that climate change impacts can hit any of us!] The current horrors are not a reason to stop working. We know from a recent study that every tenth of a degree in temperature rise that we prevent keeps 140 million of our brothers and sisters in habitable zones on this planet. And nothing has changed my basic conviction about the key: we need to keep building huge movements to finally break the political power of the fossil fuel industry and force the emergency conversion to clean energy.......read more, and other climate comments also. https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so?utm_source=substack&publication_id=438146&post_id=134789579&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false