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  • 6 months later...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/a-zombie-fire-outbreak-may-be-growing-in-the-north/

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Northern soils are loaded with peat, dead vegetation that's essentially concentrated carbon. When a wildfire burns across an Arctic landscape, it also burns vertically through this soil. Long after the surface fire has exhausted the plant fuel, the peat fire continues to smolder under the dirt, moving deeper down and also marching laterally. In their analysis, Scholten and her colleagues found this is most likely to happen following hotter summers, because that makes vegetation drier, thus igniting more catastrophically. "The more severe it burns, the deeper it can burn into that soil," says VU Amsterdam Earth systems scientist Sander Veraverbeke, co-author on the new paper. "And the deeper it burns, the higher the chances that that fire will hibernate." Even when autumn rain falls or the surface freezes in the winter, water isn't able to penetrate the soil enough to entirely extinguish it.

Then spring arrives and the ice retreats. These hot spots can flare up, seeking more vegetation to burn at the edges of the original burn scar. "Basically, right after the snow melts, we already have dry fuel available," says Scholten.

underground smoldering peat fires that reignite months later is pretty cool but also it's pretty crazy shit...and also extra bad for the environment in ways they later get into in the article. these sorts of tangentially related effects of climate change on the environment are going to be interesting (also terrifying) as they pop up over the next decades

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two of the last three summers were absolutely nuts here. in 2018 a bunch of people died. in 2020 pretty much all the grass & trees were dying in the parks because it was so dry

this year we were having 25c days in March & now +30c days in May. that hot for kaneda

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^going to just get nutsier over the next decades i'm sure. i've slowly been learning how ecologically diverse of a country Canada is, there's a lot of things that are likely to change drastically there as these effects compound and have time to gestate.

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4 minutes ago, auxien said:

^going to just get nutsier over the next decades i'm sure. i've slowly been learning how ecologically diverse of a country Canada is, there's a lot of things that are likely to change drastically there as these effects compound and have time to gestate.

yeah it is making me wonder where i want to settle long term. i don't want to stay in the city forever (in fact I had been planning on leaving early 2020 just before covid started) the east coast (where I'm from) is nice but it seems to be getting heavily populated of late (dunno if this trend will continue or if it's just a fad. fingers crossed that my new brunswick homeland remains ignored, i like it that way). maybe the north will be the next great frontier? afaik it's still so remote that it'd be ages before it becomes super developed or hit by these heat waves

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driest april/may on record here in PNW. ugh. every summer is a crapshoot. last year wasn't so bad EXCEPT FOR THE WEEKS OF FIRES AND SMOKE that choked everyone out in the whole state.. and washington.. 

at least there's two huge rivers around us so we can idk maybe have some water source of last resort if it comes to that some time in the future.. 

massive fires and drought are going to be west coast and midwest issues for a long time.. with sporadic super heavy downpours in places leading to floods. 

long term i think it's gonna be chaos basically.. bookended by extremes in winter/summer. 

 

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10 minutes ago, nikisoko said:

that, on top of trump, covid and protests/riots, was a bit much

aye yeah summer 2020 had strong end of the world vibes even entirely ignoring the macarena virus

curious to see if things will get turnt up this summer

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does anyone know where to find tha article about where the guys talking about how hes a consultant for billionaires and he had a climate change consultation and he said they asked him questions like "how do i prevent the guards in my bunker from revolting against me" and "how do i keep my food storage secure" and things like this intead of "how do i help fight climate change"?

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5 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

does anyone know where to find tha article about where the guys talking about how hes a consultant for billionaires and he had a climate change consultation and he said they asked him questions like "how do i prevent the guards in my bunker from revolting against me" and "how do i keep my food storage secure" and things like this intead of "how do i help fight climate change"?

lol i don't remember the article but i remember hearing about this. in a way it's sort of comforting because it shows just how uncordinated the western financial elites are, like they can never see too far beyond "how do I maximize free time before an angry mob inevitably ties me up to four different motorcycles going in different directions?". like it suggests that if & when things get bad enough that the masses revolt (uh) en masse they won't have much of a contingency plan. like i think their plan is literally just to scramble to automate military hardware as much as possible so that a small team of lackeys can protect them from the other 99% of the population

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50 minutes ago, nikisoko said:

that, on top of trump, covid and protests/riots, was a bit much

yeah.. in the middle of dense smoke i thought "surely the protestors will stay home tonight"  but nope. the north portland protests especially lingered on.  i don't know what their lungs are made of but it's stronger stuff than mine. 

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17 hours ago, Cryptowen said:

yeah it is making me wonder where i want to settle long term. i don't want to stay in the city forever (in fact I had been planning on leaving early 2020 just before covid started) the east coast (where I'm from) is nice but it seems to be getting heavily populated of late (dunno if this trend will continue or if it's just a fad. fingers crossed that my new brunswick homeland remains ignored, i like it that way). maybe the north will be the next great frontier? afaik it's still so remote that it'd be ages before it becomes super developed or hit by these heat waves

i've considered moving to Canada one day, mostly just because of the coastal weather (east or west near-ish America, not the northern coasts lol) but it seems that's changing somewhat from what you're saying....also i don't think it's easy to just up and move to another country, especially without any real special skillset beyond making some IDM beats. 

northern Canada being a frontier honestly might just be the case someday, at least in some places. hadn't really considered that possibility.

16 hours ago, ignatius said:

massive fires and drought are going to be west coast and midwest issues for a long time.. with sporadic super heavy downpours in places leading to floods. 

that heavy rainfall leading to flooding is happening in many other places too. all the shifting weather patterns are going to cause even more issues of droughts and floods, i really don't think this sort of thing is emphasized enough, or was, seems to be changing maybe. for years all the media reporting was 'sea levels are gonna rise! oh and probably droughts and floods and fires and stuff i guess? but sea levels when the icebergs all melt!' which is all sorta amorphous to the average person...but now seeing these massive floods and droughts and fires etc for the last decade or two is maybe shifting some outlooks of people and seemingly the governments as well. 

anyway world is in a bad spot, humans are the reason, rest is all details.

15 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

does anyone know where to find tha article about where the guys talking about how hes a consultant for billionaires and he had a climate change consultation and he said they asked him questions like "how do i prevent the guards in my bunker from revolting against me" and "how do i keep my food storage secure" and things like this intead of "how do i help fight climate change"?

https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

idk if that reporting is legit or not but that's the one i'm p sure

 

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snowpack in colorado mtns is 1/3 of usual.  snowmelt/runoff supplies a lot of ranchers and people in rural areas w/water. so, colorado river into lake mead, lake powell.. both lakes are critically low levels already. 

it's expected the federal government will declare a water shortage which will limit what ranchers etc can use. so, they're already reducing number of cattle in their herds etc. and some rural people who use well water may not get water rights or something. 

lake mead/lake powell are lakes created by the hoover dam which generates hydro electric power for las vegas and many other places. 

it's easy to think worst case scenario long term for this area. 

california, colorado etc going into 3rd year of drought. 

Edited by ignatius
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more good news.

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The new report from the WMO, an agency of the United Nations, finds that global temperatures are accelerating toward 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. The authors of the new report predict there is a 44% chance that the average annual temperature on Earth will temporarily hit 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming at some point in the next five years. That likelihood has doubled since last year.

"We're seeing accelerating change in our climate," says Randall Cerveny, a climate scientist at Arizona State University and a World Meteorological Organization rapporteur who was not involved in the report.

 

 

Edited by ignatius
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Meanwhile in capitalistic society...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/cataclysmic-day-for-oil-companies-sparks-climate-hope

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“It is the first time a judge has ordered a large polluting corporation to comply with the Paris climate agreement.”

Tom Cummins at the UK law firm Ashurst said: “This is arguably the most significant climate change-related judgment yet,” and Joana Setzer at the London School of Economics called it “mind-blowing, basically changing what Shell is at the core”. Scott Addison of the communications firm Infinite Global said: “Today’s ruling puts into stark relief just how high the commercial and reputational costs can get for inaction on climate change.”

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

another chart that encapsulates the issue

 

1280px-Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png

 

 

you see the top right? how it's been stable for 7000 years? that's the stability that we are undoing. 

 

btw, meltwater pulse 1a: "global sea level rose between 16 meters (52 ft) and 25 meters (82 ft) in about 400–500 years"

kind of wild that there kind of was a biblical flood like 14,000 years ago.

Edited by very honest
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