Before the Flood .... a must watch

From filmmaker Fisher Stevens, Leonardo DiCaprio travels the world speaking to scientists and world leaders about the dramatic effects of climate change.


Please watch
It is so important

The amazing creatures of the world’s newest marine protected area in Antarctica

A foraging Emperor penguin preens on snow-covered sea ice around the base of the active volcano Mount Erebus, near McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. Science base in Antarctica, December 9, 2006.

After five years of debate, the Ross Sea has been declared a “marine protected area.”
The southern most ocean in the world is considered the last true wilderness left on Earth. Its waters are relatively untouched by pollution and climate change, and most of its native animals still live as they would have hundreds of years ago. Each species has a relatively small population and needs to be protected before they join the legions of  species who have disappeared from earth, in the last forty years.
The declaration was made by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which consists of 24 countries .
No one actually owns the Antarctic continent, but all countries are welcome to conduct scientific experiments there. Many countries would like to own a slice of the continent which makes up 10% of the earth's land mass. Many would like to exploit it's natural resources, off-shore oil drilling, commercial fishing, perhaps mining for minerals, even drilling wells to harvest mineral waters, which are highly commercial. The ice crust is between three to five kilometers thick making any form of mining difficult with our present technology.

A leopard seal is seen in the port of Talcahuano near Concepcion city, some 500 km (311 miles) south of Santiago. The leopard seal from Antarctica was brought to a rescue center for marine animals after she was found injured, presumably hit by a small boat.


Like a protected land reserve, this decree will ensure there will be no form of fishing or mining in the 600,000 sq miles that comprise the Ross Sea (though some regulated amount of toothfish catching will be allowed).
Though Ross Sea takes up only 2% of the Southern Ocean, it is home to nearly a third of all Adelie penguins, a third of all Antarctic petrels, and 6% of the world’s Antarctic minke whale.

Dwarf minke whale Great Barrier Reef. Pacific Ocean.

 

One reason for the bounty of wildlife is that ocean currents cause an upwelling of nutrients, making the sea a prime feeding ground.
The proposal succeeded in no small part due to the work of Lewis Pugh, the UN Patron for the Oceans, who undertook a series of death-defying swims in the freezing Antarctic waters to raise awareness of the amazing species that exist in and around the Ross Sea.

A Weddell seal lies on a beach on Lagoon Island on the Antarctic Peninsula January 14, 2009. A group of elephant seals lolling by a damaged wooden hut in Antarctica vastly complicated simple repairs on Wednesday, a sign of extra hazards to people on the frozen continent.

 

A seagull perches on a pier as two Falkland Skua birds fly away in Port Stanley

A colony of Adelie penguins settled on a rocky spur above ice melt pools gather in front of the Ross Sea ice shelf in Antarctica January 27. Scientists warned on Wednesday that the Antarctic ice shelf was in danger of melting due to global warming and warned sea global levels could rise up to six metres within one full generation. Ministers and senior officials from 24 nations gathered on the vast frozen Antarctic wastes, issuing an impassioned plea to safeguard the world's last true wilderness.

A petral , a species on the endangered list

Up to now, science has been king, thanks to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, a highly successful international agreement concluded by 12 scientifically active nations -- Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States. Thirty-nine other nations now participate and 25 of these have active scientific research projects.

The Antarctic Treaty grew from the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-58, a scientific assault on the Antarctic, and called for scientific cooperation in the area south of latitude 60 degrees. 

It froze territorial claims, banned all military activity and weapons testing, and established Antarctica as off limits to nuclear explosions and the disposal of
radioactive waste.  It provided all nations freedom of scientific inquiry but obligated them to share the results.  The question of resources was avoided in 1959, but since that time two additional treaties protect seals and marine living resources and regulate possible minerals development.

But the future of the continent is anybody's guess. The world thirst for oil, gas, and other minerals will probably determine it's future, even though today's recovery technology seems inadequate.
The scientific community feels that the fragile environment would not survive massive commercial enterprises carried on down there but when has that stopped us? Anything negatively affecting Antarctica will have very negative consequences on the entire world regarding global warming and climate change.

Lewis Pugh may not be able to hold back the entire world of entrepreneurs who wish to lay waste to this last untouched habitat forever. One hundred countries are presently challenging the protective treaties. But right now he is my number one hero.

More Trumpage - "Climate Change was created by the Chinese" ..... Oh yeah?? Keep scrolling down the blog

Then Trumpet mouth denies what he said when Hillary spoke of it during the debate




Have you Ever Seen the Rain



You think what you can't see can't hurt you ?? .... Well take a look *

Mexico City, Mexico is one of the most heavily populated cities in the Western Hemisphere. The city is extremely cramped and dirty.  Human waste  pollutes the waterways, Garbage dumps grow into mountains and the haze in the air is mainly from cars without carbon emission controls.

 Extreme drought and starvation in Africa is decimating the wildlife and human population

Here you can see a coal power plant in the United Kingdom billowing plumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

China’s Yellow River has been deemed unsafe for use of any sort of use because of its extremely high levels of pollution and human waste. Discharge from factories along the river has this man turning away in disgust.

Ghoramara Island in West Bengal, India has been experiencing severe sea level rises because of the effects of global warming. Since the 1980’s, more than 50% of the land has been washed away.

This image shows the Mir Mine, the world’s largest diamond mine, in Russia, larger than the town which surrounds it. Diamond mining is devastating for the land, as this photo illustrates perfectly, Leaving a manmade scar that can be seen from space.

Residents of West Bengal, India face water shortages because of intense droughts, often followed by intense floods. They suffer every extreme of climate change including more and more powerful typhoons.

This photo is of the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, or what’s left of it. The forest was destroyed and levelled to build a reservoir

Manila Bay in the Philippines

Acid rain caused by pollution kills forests

This bird died from eating tiny bits of brightly colored plastic which it mistook for food. The bird is decomposing but the plastic will never decompose and may become a meal for another bird.

At the current rate of deforestation, all the rain forests will be gone in less than 100 years

 Water pollution in China has reached critical levels

Air pollution in Beijing 

 

Air apocalypse in China

 

Now for something I cannot show you. Did you know that over fifty percent of all wildlife on earth has disappeared in the last forty years??


The greatest wildlife loss affecting our food supply is the honey bee. 

We lose about 30% of the bee population a year now

Bee researchers first reported massive die-offs back in the 1990s caused mainly by insecticides on crops, loss of habitat, lack of nutrition and the effects of global warming. But the plight of the honeybee didn’t truly buzz into the national consciousness until the spring of 2013, when data revealed the average beekeeper had lost 45% of their colonies the previous winter to a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Bees pollinate two thirds of our food crops and without them

we would  have world starvation in a very short time.

A wise man once said

SOOO what's the good news?
Danged if I know.
People of Earth...Wise up!

Belgium sure has their act together

80,000 Belgians turned out to sing to make us all aware of our responsibility to the planet. Bless them all.



Earth 100 million years in the future



The truth gets sadder every day

It’s always sad to see dead animals in the wild, but the death of this 16-year-old male polar bear found dead on a beach north of Norway is especially tragic. After examining the bear’s emaciated body, researchers determined that the bear starved to death due global warming. Record high temperatures have melted arctic ice sheets that this and other polar bears need for hunting. Making matters even more tragic, this same malnourished polar bear was in good health when researchers examined it just three months prior in southern Svalbard.



same bear three months ago

Dr Ian Stirling, a Polar Bears International scientist who has been studying the bears for 40 years now, told The Guardian, “From his lying position in death, the bear appears to simply have starved and died where he dropped. He had no external suggestion of any remaining fat, having been reduced to little more than skin and bone.”

Dr. Stirling attributed this tragedy to climate change, citing that the sea ice in the Arctic dropped to record-setting lows in 2012. Satellite images from last year show that a rapid summer melt reduced the surface of the frozen sea to less than 1.32 million square miles, which combines to be a land mass just over twice the size of Alaska.

Climate change is particularly affecting polar bears because ice sheets are instrumental in their hunt for seals. Although they have webbed paws that make them incredibly good swimmers, they are still land animals and need the arctic ice to rest and haul up their catch. Ultimately the lack of ice packs will force more polar bears to migrate in search for food—as was the case with this bear, who moved from the southern to northern coast of Svalbard—hopefully to better success than this one.

Polar bears can’t survive on land, but they’re trying to. They have to. As sea ice melts due to climate change, Polar bears can’t rely on their traditional diet rich in fish, seals, and other marine-based food. The bears are turning to terrestrial foods like berries, birds and eggs, but they’re not as healthy and their survival rate is threatened by this new diet. “While it’s tempting to think that polar bears could survive by switching to a terrestrial diet, this paper establishes in no uncertain terms that land-based foods do not offer any hope of polar bear salvation,” said Steven Amstrup, the chief scientist for conservation group Polar Bears International (PBI) and co-author of the study, which was published Wednesday in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Scientists with the USGS, PBI and Washington State University participated in the research.

Please Believe Us...Global Warming is happening

This image has become the 'poster bear' for climate change

But the real effects of climate change are even sadder as in the images below.

 The Arctic is melting twice as fast as expected since global warming is more intense at the poles

Drought in 13 countries across Southern and Eastern African countries leaves over 36,000,000 million people hovering on the brink of starvation. The highest temperatures in recorded history have scorched these lands into deserts.

There is no food or water to support domestic animals and about 40% of  livestock has been lost to starvation in African drought stricken countries. The worst hit this year is Ethiopia



Image from Ethiopia

Around Ireland the winds are so strong the sea is pounding the island in gale after gale

Searing heat waves and ravaging storms hit New York this year and worse is predicted

for the city in the next couple of decades 

China is experiencing floods in many provinces

Katrina is only one of many extreme floods in the last ten years



 Marine dead zones are occurring more and more because ocean temperatures are becoming too warm and/or too acid for certain fish. The dead wash up on shore.



Tornadoes have increased in numbers and size exponentially. In 2011 one hundred and twenty two tornadoes touched down in the southern United States. Some were so enormous they destroyed whole cities.

 A tornado literally flattened Kansas City



 Glaciers all over the world,  that are millions of years old, are collapsing and melting
They are needed to reflect the sun's rays away from the planet

 Wild fires burn out of control due to dry timber from hot dry summers



We have never seen such frequent or devastating earthquakes as we are experiencing now.



In January 2016, two volcanoes in Indonesia had simultaneous massive eruptions while another occurred in Russia at the same time. Within 24 hours three more volcanoes erupted in Indonesia. It was an unprecedented event.
We have always heard that volcanic eruptions contribute to global warming. Scientists have now discovered that the reverse is also true. Higher temperatures from global warming are causing volcanoes to erupt more frequently.


 We have hardly touched the surface of the climate crisis and so far it is pretty scary,
is it not??


And who pays the highest price for what we have done to the planet?

Extreme Weather ...A film we all need to watch to understand the connection to climate change

Hear the rumble of ice blocks shearing off the edge of a glacier. See the destructive power of a tornado’s swirling winds. Watch flames devour a forest as if it were so many matchsticks. Sean Casey explains the journey this film took him on. The new IMAX film is in theaters now. You have to watch it on the big screen to get a better idea of the huge relentless forces nature can unleash when the natural environment and climate of our planet is changed by global warming.

These dramatic scenes are presented in the new IMAX documentary film Extreme Weather, produced by National Geographic and appearing in theaters starting October 15.

More than two years in the making, the film takes viewers from Alaska to California to witness the awesome power of the Earth. It offers a front-row seat on a fast-changing and dangerous world.

Sean Casey is a veteran storm chaser and filmmaker who's also known for his IMAX works Tornado Alley (2011), Forces of Nature (2004), and Alaska: Spirit of the Wild (1997).

What was the idea behind this film?

Our weather is changing because of climate change. We have a warming atmosphere and ocean, and that affects the weather. But rather than just talk about that, we wanted to show powerful imagery that really does justice to what’s happening.

Extreme Weather makes the case that the weather is an interconnected system, where small changes in one place create changes elsewhere. Can you explain how this works?

No one event is isolated from others. For example, when you have melting ice you have rising and warmer oceans, which means hurricanes have the potential to do more harm. Drought is killing a lot of trees—65 million in California alone—and all that dead wood increases chances for fires. In turn, soot from those fires covers ice, which leads to faster melting of snowpacks.

We tried to connect things to show that each event is not insular; it affects other parts of the planet. Normally, the Earth is so large that those kinds of effects are hard for us to see.

What was the experience of making the film like?

A lot of the events we chose to film are fast, fleeting, and dangerous. They are weather-dependent, and so on that timeframe it was almost like a suicide run, but we got through it.

 We decided to do a glacier sequence, using a specially built armored boat to film glaciers calving in a way that hadn’t been done before.

How did that effort to film glaciers pay off?

We took the camera and our crew right into what we called the “kill zone,” where glaciers were calving directly over you. They shot out ice hundreds of yards. I hope viewers will be able to really feel that power, to share in the visual intensity of ice blasting all around you.

But that shoot also had a psychological effect on us. We put ourselves right on the edge. We worked under the shadow of a 300-foot face of ice that at any moment could topple on top of us, for 14 hours a day, in a little armored boat. You don’t know if the next piece of ice will be the size of a baseball or a car. For months afterward I would wake up in a sweat, look out the window, and see the face of the glacier.

Were there other dangerous or poignant moments that stick out from the filming?

I’ve been chasing tornadoes for 16 years, so I understand what tornadoes can do and what I shouldn’t do. But when we immersed ourselves in filming calving glaciers and wildfires it was a steep learning curve.

We got run over twice by a wildfire, into a zone that is called the ember wash. You just have to sit tight as a massive fire rages all around you. You're being sandblasted by a storm of burning embers and smoke. The radiant heat is unbelievable. I hadn’t been in that situation before, and I felt some panic. Firefighters are the real and absolute heroes in those situations.

Did you use other technology?

We also used drones, which can give a perspective that is incredible. We tried some technology that didn’t work. We made something we called the “black ball of death,” a crashcam that we wanted to tow in front of a glacier, and have the ice calve on top of it. But we couldn’t get it to work.

What was it like documenting the work of scientists studying glaciers, storms, and so on?

We were following people who are passionate about what they do, and that’s infectious. They want to better understand how things work, to better protect people and all forms of life. It was really great to document that.


The film shows us exactly what is happening on earth and how scientists brave real dangers to learn and understand.



Over 150 Nations Clinch Landmark Pact To Fight Climate Change ... Awesome!

 

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers a speech Saturday during the 28th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol in Kigali, Rwanda.       

                   

More than 150 countries have reached a landmark deal in Kigali, Rwanda to reduce emissions of a powerful chemical used in refrigeration and air conditioning.
The U.N. calls this a "breakthrough" against climate change because the pact signed Saturday could prevent global temperatures from rising "up to 0.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century" – though some experts say the impact may fall short of 0.5 degrees.
This deal tackles hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), which are commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners. This type of greenhouse gas is extremely powerful – it can trap "thousands of times more heat in the Earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide," according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
The U.N. says Saturday's agreement is a major step toward the goal of "keeping the global temperature rise 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius, a target agreed at the Paris climate conference last year."
The major climate accord reached in Paris last December offers voluntary pledges, as The New York Times reported, which are "often vague and dependent on the political will of future leaders." This new deal offers "offers specific timetables to replace HFCs with more planet-friendly alternatives," and "maintains the legal force of a treaty," according to the Times.
In comparison to the Paris accord, the outcome of the Kigali agreement "could have an equal or even greater impact on efforts to slow down the heating of the planet," as the Times reported.
"This is about much more than the ozone layer and HFCs. It is a clear statement by all world leaders that the green transformation started in Paris is irreversible and unstoppable," U.N. Environment chief Erik Solheim said in a statement. "It shows the best investments are those in clean, efficient technologies."
The agreement, which is billed as a compromise, sets out a schedule for countries to phase down their HFC consumption.
"Developed countries will start to phase down HFCs by 2019," UNEP said. That includes the U.S. and the European Union. "Developing countries will follow with a freeze of HFCs consumption levels in 2024, with some countries freezing consumption in 2028."
The countries starting to reduce their emissions in 2028 include India, Pakistan, and some Gulf states, as The Associated Press reported. They had lobbied for a later start, "saying their economies need more time to grow."
 China, the world's largest producer of HFCs, will not actually start to cut their production or use until 2029.
"They needed an agreement here, since it's perceived as an Obama legacy, so the US delegation has been pretty aggressive in making China and India come to an agreement," Paula Tejon Carbajal from Greenpeace International said. "It's an incremental step towards 0.5 degrees but its not there yet, they say that the market will work to get us there, but we are not there yet."
Still, this is the "largest temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement," as the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development termed it. The group's president, Durwood Zaelke, said this agreement amounted to about 90 percent of what they were hoping for.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said this was "is likely the single most important step we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet and limit the warming for generations to come," as the Times reported. He added that it is "the biggest thing we can do in one giant swoop."
The pact is an amendment to 1987's Montreal Protocol, which the U.N. credits for "a 98 percent decrease in the production and use of ozone-damaging chemicals."

Polar bears across the Arctic face shorter sea ice season

By Michelle Ma, University of Washington
Adapted by Maria-Jose Viñas, NASA’s Earth Science News Team
A polar bear tests the strength of thin sea ice. Credit: Mario Hoppmann.

Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

A new study by University of Washington researchers, funded by NASA and using satellite data from NASA and other agencies, found a trend toward earlier sea ice melt in the spring and later ice growth in the fall across all 19 polar bear subpopulations, which can negatively impact the feeding and breeding capabilities of the bears. The paper, published on Sept. 14 in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to quantify the sea ice changes in each polar bear subpopulation across the entire Arctic region using metrics that are specifically relevant to polar bear biology.

"This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears," said co-author Harry Stern, a researcher with the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle.

The analysis shows that the critical timing of the sea ice break-up and sea ice freeze-up is changing in all areas in a direction that is harmful for polar bears.

“Other researchers have used the satellite-derived sea ice data to look at how the sea ice extent in a particular place is changing in a particular month. But for us the important thing was the timing of the retreat of sea ice in the spring and its advance in the fall, for all 19 polar bear subpopulations,” Stern said.

Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in southeast Greenland. Credit: Kristin Laidre/University of Washington.
Nineteen separate polar bear subpopulations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting. The bears have evolved mainly to eat seals, which provide necessary fats and nutrients in the harsh Arctic environment. Polar bears can't outswim their prey, so instead they perch on the ice as a platform and ambush seals at breathing holes or break through the ice to access their dens.
"Sea ice really is their platform for life," said co-author Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the UW's Polar Science Center. "They are capable of existing on land for part of the year, but the sea ice is where they obtain their main prey."

The new study draws upon 35 years of satellite data showing sea ice concentration each day in the Arctic. NASA scientists process the data, stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

The center also reports each fall the yearly minimum low for Arctic sea ice. This August saw the fourth lowest in the satellite record and the September minimum extent is likely headed to its second lowest level in the record.

In 17 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, the researchers found that the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of seven to 19 days per decade between 1979 and 2014. The decline was even greater in the Barents Sea and the Arctic basin. Sea ice concentration during the summer months — an important measure because summertime is when some subpopulations are forced to fast on land — also declined in all regions, by 1 percent to 9 percent per decade.

The most striking result, researchers said, is the consistent trend across all polar bear regions for an earlier spring ice melt and a later fall freeze-up. Arctic sea ice retreats in the springtime as daylight reappears and temperatures warm. In the fall months the ice sheets build again as temperatures drop.

"These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed," Laidre said. "Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months."

The researchers found that on average, spring melting was three to nine days earlier per decade, and fall freeze-up was three to nine days later per decade. Over the 35 years of Arctic sea ice satellite data. that corresponds to a roughly 3-and-a-half-week shift at either end — and seven weeks of total loss of good sea ice habitat for polar bears.

"We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," Stern said.

The trend appears to be linear and isn't accelerating or leveling off, Stern added.

The study's results currently are used by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission. The Polar Bear Specialist Group used the sea ice metric as a measure of polar bear habitat in the IUCN Red List assessment of polar bears, which assesses the conservation status of polar bears. The researchers plan to update their findings each year as new ice coverage data are available.

"It's nice to see this work being used in high-level conservation goals," Laidre said.

“This NASA-funded work is an excellent example of the use satellite imagery to understand the distribution and abundance of an Arctic keystone species, with the added benefit of providing vital information to those charged with managing polar bear populations globally,” said Woody Turner, the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.


The study was funded by NASA and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.