News links on the end of the Earth 1

Just a little overstatement in the headline. No human tech for a thousand or maybe a million years will be sufficient to stop the Earth’s rotation. Kill 90% of all like like that meteor off the Yucatan Penninsula. No problem. We’re half way there already. So, this is a place I’ll start putting links to news stories I’ve been emailing myself for the past year or more. I want a place to organize them for later use. You will be welcome to read them if you’d like.

This is but one category of such stories. There will be another about Republicans or Trump or something along those lines.

APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE NEWS

Monarch Butterflies, Mayflies, Bees. They are just the tip of the iceberg. Last year, a global review published in the journal Biological Conservation spawned headlines heralding an “insect apocalypse,” “Armageddon” and “collapse of nature” when it found 40% of insect … View the article.

Two researchers present evidence today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the accelerating melt of Arctic sea ice is linked to weather patterns near the equator in the … View the article. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-links-sea-ice-retreat-tropical.html

Sea-level is rising, causing susceptible coastal cities to experience more extreme floods. These are the cities where people are likely to migrate to from increasingly flooded coastal cities. Hurricane Harvey was a perfect example of the migration impacts a major storm and flooding has on people…. View the article. https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/01/27/these-are-the-cities-most-people-will-move-to-from-sea-level-rise/#5d7cc0982368

CFCs, which caused the hole in the ozone layer, also caused half of Arctic warming and sea ice loss from 1955 to 2005. The chemicals that caused the hole in the ozone layer were also responsible for … View the article.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/ozone-destroying-chemicals-also-warmed-the-earth/

The recent catastrophic bush fires in Australia were so immensely destructive that they could be seen from space. Now, a new animation from NASA shows the impact of those fires and other extreme … View the article.
https://www.space.com/australia-fires-hurricane-global-effect-nasa-animation.html

A joule is a measurement of heat. Currently the Earth is heating up at 28 zeta joules each day. I heard this figure on MPR’s climate cast and it stuck with me because forty years ago I recall a factoid in a column by Sydney Harris. Harris said that every fall day Lake Superior released the heat energy equivelent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs into the atmosphere. Of course in the summer it was absorbing that much energy from the sun each day.

I’ll see if I have a link to the climate cast broadcast but the figure that suck with me is this: At this time the Earth as a whole is absorbing 28 zeta joules of energy every day. In times past it stayed steady gaining and losing heat just like Lake Superior. No more: I think a Zeta Joule is a figure with 28 zeros behind it. It is the equivalent of Earth absorbing five Hiroshima bombs every second of every day 365 days a week, year in and year out. No more steady state.

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