THE 2030 SPIKE HAS ALREADY ARRIVED METHINKS

[Michael Grove]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today opens the approval session for its Working Group I assessment on the physical science basis of climate change. The report will provide the latest assessment of scientific knowledge about the warming of the planet and projections for future warming, and assess its impacts on the climate system.

IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee will be joined by Deputy Executive Director of UNEP, Joyce Msuya, and WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Follow the opening session live at 11:00am CEST (0900 GMT) at https://bit.ly/3i0RTCF

The approval session will last through to 3 August. It is the first time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Working Group I report feeds into the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), due to be published next year.

[Michael Grove]

     Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful `drivers' will  

     converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could

     tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age.

     Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global

     climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international

     lawlessness are on a collision course with potentially catastrophic

     consequences. Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of

     conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture

     of the world as it is, and our possible futures.

    THE 2030 SPIKE: COUNTDOWN TO GLOBAL  CATASTROPHE

     Colin Mason - August 2003

      Never forgetting that Colin Mason as a Tasmanian, was the

      representative for Australia at the 1992 Climate Conference

      in Rio where Severin Suzuki gave her original climate address. 

       

 

    THE 2030 SPIKE • HAS ARRIVED METHINKS

[Michael Grove]

In an age of human-induced climate change, catastrophic natural disasters appear to be occurring with greater frequency and magnitude. Tsunamis, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean ‘Boxing Day’ and 2011 Tōhoku (Japan) events, are of particular note, striking quickly and with little warning (Seneviratne et al. 2012). 

Around 6000 BC a devastating tsunami tore down through the North Sea and across the island of Doggerland, wiping out its population • never forgetting that over time here in Britain, sea levels rose and Doggerland became increasingly submerged, eventually becoming cut off from land on both sides and forming an island.

[Michael Grove]

East Antarctica’s biggest glacier lost ice because of warm water an...

ps UPDATE to THIS ...

Ice sheets can collapse into the ocean in spurts of up to 600 metres (2,000 feet) a day, a study has found, far faster than recorded before.

Scientists said the finding, based on sea floor sediment formations from the last ice age, was a “warning from the past” for today’s world in which the climate crisis is eroding ice sheets.

They said the discovery shows that some ice sheets in Antarctica, including the “Doomsday” Thwaites glacier, could suffer periods of rapid collapse in the near future, further accelerating the rise of sea level.

[Michael Grove]

On 3 September 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. The change mainly took place at night, but in Stockholm and Malmö all traffic stopped for most of the weekend while intersections were reconfigured. So sweet was the resulting city air that weekend that environmental enthusiasm went sky high. It was a moment that would change the world.

Three months later Sweden, citing air and other pollution, asked the UN to hold the first-ever international environmental conference, initiating a process that would lead to a groundbreaking gathering in its capital in 5 June 1972, the 50th anniversary of which will be marked next week. This was the beginning of a long and slow struggle to find and agree global solutions to these newly understood global environment problem. Twenty years later, the Rio conference would follow in the same month, kicking off UN climate summits, the most recent of which was held in Glasgow last autumn.

Last year’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow achieved more than was expected, with governments giving themselves this year – until another summit, in Egypt in November – in which to do more. So far, not much has happened, but potential exists, not least to cut emissions of methane and similar pollutants, a hitherto neglected measure that could cut the rate of warming in half.