I usually try to add content but, heck, this is so good I’m just publishing the link: Read this.
Solar panel spill releases almost 1000000 lumens of sunlight into environment
Frog Blog
rescuethatfrog.com has a new look!
I’m excited that rescuethatfrog.com has a new look, courtesy of the graphic arts wizardry of CJ Holton at cjholtondesigns.com!
Learn more about the habits and hopes of the Earth-flag-waving space frog on my new About the frog page.
Before Our Eyes: Okjokull Glacier, R.I.P.
On Sunday, a group of about 100 scientists, politicians, and others hiked 2 hours up the desolate side of an extinct volcano northeast of Reykjavik, Iceland to commemorate the final demise of the Okjokull glacier, Iceland’s first glacier to be entirely lost due to climate change.
Once spanning an area of 38 square km, according to a 1901 geologic map, the Okjokull glacier had shrunk to 3 square km when aerial photographs were taken in 1978. In 2014, following two decades of warming summers, glaciologist Oddur Sigurdsson, of the Icelandic Meteorological Office, determined Okjokull was no longer a glacier, as it lacked sufficient thickness to move under gravity and was melting faster than snow could be replaced on its cap. At that time, “jokull,” meaning “glacier” in Icelandic, was dropped from its name and it has been called simply “Ok” since. Now, Ok is a smattering of snow and ice covering less than 1 square km.
Children among the group of ice mourners placed a copper memorial plaque at the site of the former glacier. Engraved on the plaque in Icelandic and English is the following remembrance:
A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.
August 2019
415ppm CO2
At the beginning of the same month, the Greenland ice sheet dumped 12.5 billion tons of meltwater into the ocean within just a 24-hour period, the largest single-day loss since ice loss records began in 1950. There is sufficient land ice on Greenland to raise global sea levels by about 25 feet.
“I know my grandchildren will ask me how this day was and why I didn’t do enough.”
Gunnhildur Hallgrimsdottir, 17, at the site of the former Okjokull glacier
“But the climate changes all the time!” (A pictorial answer.)
“… as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils”
–Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
Learn more about the scientific evidence for climate change.
A Song for Our Earth: Lucy Jones and our baroque climate
“I am an experimental seismologist. That means I spend a lot of time looking at data about the earth. … I am also a musician and I sometimes hear the data. This data is like a graceful minuet accelerating into a frantic jig. … I find these graphs terrifying and I struggle to understand why so many people accept this without fear.”
Dr. Lucy Jones
Dr. Jones is referring to the temperature data in the graph below, which correlates with the atmospheric CO2 data.
Global temperature anomaly according to 4 independent research groups (orange, pink, maroon, and purple lines) plotted on top of atmospheric CO2 data from ice cores (green) and direct atmospheric measurements (blue). Global temperature has been rising since around 1880, lately at a markedly accelerating rate, in correlation with atmospheric CO2 concentration. All data publicly available, downloaded and plotted by me (for details, see here).
In a newly published composition years in the making, Dr. Jones translates the actual temperature data since 1880 into a compelling musical piece in a baroque period tradition called In Nomine, in which one instrument plays a steady melody. She assigns Earth’s temperature to falling or rising notes in that melody, illustrating in song the accelerating ascension of our Earth’s temperature and its growing urgency.
Click below to watch a music video of In Nomine Terra Calens: In the name of a warming Earth.
“Dealing with climate change means investing in the future. Look again at the consequences of our current trajectory. The true threat to modern life is not dealing with climate change. I end In Nomine Terra Calens with a stripping away of harmonies to finally land on one, lone, very high note. I end without direction to represent the uncertain future. We stand at a decision point where the future of the world really rests on our decisions.
Dr. Lucy Jones
Read about some of Lucy’s specific thoughts about solving climate change on her blog.
#rescuethatfrog
A Voice for Our Earth: Rachel Carson on human mastery
–Rachel Carson (1907-1964), marine biologist and nature writer, author of Silent Spring, a book that documented, with scientific evidence and a composite of true accounts, environmental and human health harms of DDT and the potential catastrophic consequences of over-use of toxic and persistent chemicals. Controversial in its time, the bestselling book engendered fierce and personal attacks on Ms. Carson by chemical companies, and is now often credited with having raised awareness of environmental challenges resulting in the creation of Earth Day and the EPA. The above quote seems relevant still, as we have made great progress in improving our air and water quality but are acutely aware of the easily observable affects and potential irreversible consequences of unfettered dispersal of another persistent chemical, fossil carbon dioxide.
“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”
#rescuethatfrog
A Voice for Our Earth: Carl Sagan and A Pale Blue Dot
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
#rescuethatfrog
A Picture on Earth Day
A possible future: Weather report in 2100
The future is calling.
In a new immersive video, The Weather Channel (hardly a fringe, pseudoscience liberal organization) presents a projected weather report from the year 2100 … assuming we don’t act decisively now.
The video uses movie magic to frightening effect. But anyone knowledgeable about climate change will recognize that the movie magic is underpinned by real observations and science.
After all, as I’ve written about on this blog, Charleston, SC floods at some high tides even today:
As does Norfolk, VA, also depicted in the video:
As do Miami, Shishmaref, Fiji, and Kiribati.
The sea level rise graph presented in the video is entirely recognizable as the most recent data and “business as usual” (RPC 8.5) projection by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a consortium of the world’s climate scientists:
And the root cause depicted in the video, showing the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland dumping land ice into the ocean, is informed by actual time lapse photography of that glacier, which is currently retreating at 17 km/y:
This is similar to other time lapse photography of collapsing glaciers captured nearby in Greenland, as well as Iceland and Alaska, by the photographer James Balog.
Are we really going to allow this to happen to us?
allow our grand coastal cities, the skyscrapers we built so proudly, to be submerged in the sea?
even though we have alternatives?
because fossil fuel companies want to keep making record profits off their antiquated business model?
because they can afford with those profits to buy the servitude of half our politicians?
because we are experimenting in our precious social media with the notion of “fake news” and arguing with each other about the very nature of reality, as if we haven’t devised reliable methods of ascertaining reality? (If scientific understanding is so “fake,” how did you get that wireless phone you’re arguing on?)
This is not “fake news.” The observations and predictions related to climate change are the serious, dedicated work of generations of scientists and public policy experts.
The future is calling. It’s ours to choose.
#rescuethatfrog