Skip to main content

TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK PART FIVE


If it’s Sunday, it must be time for Tick Tock the Climate Clock.  Here are a few nuggets of recent climate news.

Time to Hang Up Your Skates.  The Elfstedentocht (11 cities race on ice skates) hasn’t been held since 1997 in Friesland, the most northern part of Holland, because the canals don’t freeze anymore.
Now You Don’t Have to Add Salt!  Fields in coastal North Carolina are becoming too salty for farming.  Scientists fear rising sea levels are shifting the underground gradient where fresh groundwater meets salty seawater.  Dikes and pumps can hold back ocean flooding, but they can’t prevent it from mixing with the fresh water aquifers.  

1993 Redux.  According to NOAA, nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states have an elevated risk of flooding from now until May, and 25 states could experience serious flooding, worse than the historic floods of 1993.

They’re Having Twins!  Last week twin cyclones heading straight for Western Australia and its Northern Territories forced the largest evacuations since 1974.
Build the Wall!  Climate change is threatening national security at the U.S. Strategic Command just outside Omaha, Nebraska.   A retired Rear Admiral said that Defense Department officials “by and large know what they need to do, but …the White House does not want to hear about it.  We probably do need walls, but they’re probably levees.”  

It Wasn’t Us, Honest.   Global energy-related carbon emissions rose to a record high last year.  The United States’ CO2 emissions grew by 3.1% in 2018, reversing a decline in 2017, while China’s emissions rose by 2.5% and India’s by 4.5%.  Europe and Japan each get a gold star:  Europe’s emissions fell by 1.3% and Japan’s fell for the fifth year running.


Happy New Year!  Just days after its celebration of Nowruz last week (the Iranian new year), Shiraz, a city of 1.8 million, was hit by 2.33 inches of rain in 2 days—more than a month’s worth—killing at least 23 people.  

Baked Alaska.  Alaska is the fastest warming state in the U.S.  Since the beginning of March, it’s seen 55 tied or broken record daily highs through March 23, according to NOAA.  Anchorage has had no measurable snow in March for the second time on record, and on March 19, Klawock, a town in southeastern Alaska, reached 70 F.


Well, Isn’t that Just Peachy!  Milder winters are prompting the early flowering of fruit trees, exposing the blooms and fruit to increasingly unpredictable frosts and hail.  Unless breeders can develop more climate-resilient varieties, fruit-growing regions in the United States will be seriously disrupted, scientists say.
Don’t Peak.  About 300 people have died trying to climb Mt. Everest.  Some bodies were covered in ice and remained hidden for years, but now climate change is melting the ice around them, exposing limbs and bodies, as reported by the BBC. 
OMG!  Some Temporary Good News.   NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission indicates that the Jakobshavn Glacier, which has been the fastest-flowing and thinning glacier in Greenland for the past 20 years, has temporarily slowed its retreat and thickened.  But before you get out the party hats, the glacier is still adding to global sea level rise, and scientists don't expect the slowing trend to continue. 

Have a nice Sunday!

Keep it real!
Marilyn


Comments

  1. LibbyMarch 31, 2019 at 2:03 PM

    Thank you for putting this together. You're connecting the dots for us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MarilynMarch 31, 2019 at 3:03 PM

      My (dis)pleasure! Your comment is anonymous. Do you want to tell me who you are?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS

A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci, Italian philosopher and politician,  was imprisoned for his political views in 1926; he remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1937.   From his cell, he wrote the  Prison Letters in which he famously said, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."   In this time of upheaval, when the post-World War II world order is dying, a new world order is being born, and monsters roam the earth, it is from Gramsci's dual perspective that I write this post.    I will be brief. Th e window to oppose America’ s headlong rush into authoritarianism at home and neo-imperialism abroad by congressional or judicial means has closed.   Law firms, universities, businesses, the press, media, foundations, and individuals alike who have been deemed "insufficiently aligned" with the Administration's agenda, have been intimidated into submission by frivolous lawsuits, expe...
8 comments
Read more

DISPUTING KEATS

The great English poet John Keats wrote in his magnificent 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn , “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.”  Were that it were so!   But poetry cannot hide the fact that the truth is sometimes ugly.  Consider two current cases. First, the war in Gaza and the destruction and famine it has wrought.   Policy makers, scholars, and pundits can argue whether what is happening in Gaza (and to some extent, in the West Bank) is genocide, whether the leveling of Gaza and the systematic killing of its people is equivalent to the Holocaust, or whether Palestinians have the right to free themselves by any means necessary from an open-air prison.   They can debate whether Israel has become an apartheid, undemocratic state, or whether the only way to achieve security in Israel is to ring-fence or destroy Hamas. And they can construct theories about who has the “right” to live in historic Palestine, e...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE IRON TRIANGLE

Corruption.   It’s like an operating system running in the background on the Computer of Life that inflects and infects everything we do and what is done to us.   Corruption is epidemic, endemic, and systemic. Universal, it is everywhere and all at once.   When he was the director of the FBI, Robert E. Mueller III gave an address to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and opened a new window on the operating system of corruption:   transnational organized crime.   He called this new operating system an “iron triangle.” Its three sides:  organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.    In her June 17, 2025, Substack , Heather Cox Richardson recalled Mueller’s address in an account of foreign investment in President Trump’s businesses.   She wrote: Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate develope...
Post a Comment
Read more