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... Built Shade will be a growth industry for all of our cities. ...
Organic geochemical analyses of sedimentary organic matter from a marine Permian-Triassic transition sequence in northeastern Italy reveal a significant influx of land-derived diagenetic products of polysaccharides. This unique event reflects massive soil erosion resulting from destruction of land vegetation due to volcanogenic disturbance of atmospheric chemistry. The excessive supply of soil materials to the oceans provides a direct link between terrestrial and marine ecological crises, suggesting that ecosystem collapse on land could have contributed to the end-Permian marine extinctions.
... When erosion seven times the normal rate sent large flows of nutrients into the ocean, it created conditions much like the over-fertilization we see today near the outlets of large rivers. As it does today, this condition led to a microbial feeding frenzy and the removal of oxygen -- and life -- from the late Permian ocean.
"If there is a lesson to all this," Algeo said, "it is a reminder that things can get out of whack pretty quickly and pretty seriously. We are used to a stable world, but it may not always be so stable."
Officials in the Australian city of Townsville are deliberately flooding several neighbourhoods after record rainfall that has swollen a dam beyond capacity.
Residents in and around the north-eastern city have been warned of "risk to life" and "unprecedented flooding" that could inundate up to 20,000 homes.
People have been told to seek shelter on higher ground.
Townsville has received more than a metre (3.3ft) of rain in just a week.
That is more than 20 times the average for the time of year - beating the previous record set in 1998, in what became known as the Night of Noah.
... The Townsville Bulletin newspaper said low-lying properties were being flooded, and troops on boats were searching for residents in need of help.
Cars and livestock have already been swept away around the coastal city in the state of Queensland.
https://twitter.com/madvoice/status/1092023384941027328
Meanwhile, parts of southern Australia are in the grip of a severe drought.
January was the hottest month on record for Australia as a whole, with the southern city of Adelaide breaking its own records twice in the month, first reaching 47.7C and then 49.5C
The day after President Trump posted a tweet suggesting that extreme cold temperatures in the Midwest cast doubt on the existence of global warming, the climate service for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tweeted a cartoon explaining that warming oceans result in more extreme winter weather.QuoteWinter storms don't prove that global warming isn't happening.
(link: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/are-record-snowstorms-proof-global-warming-isn%E2%80%99t-happening) climate.gov/news-features/…
https://mobile.twitter.com/NOAAClimate/status/1090263390503596032
Antarctic explorers are to break their way through 75 miles of sea ice in an effort to reach the final resting place of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, which sank to the bottom of the Weddell Sea in November 1915.
Expedition leaders believe they have the best chance yet to find the wreckage of the lost vessel, which became trapped in sea ice for 10 months and eventually went down in two miles of water after the crushing forces of the surrounding ice breached its hull.
... “Just getting to the wreck site will be an exciting challenge,” Shears said. “We will need to break through about 120km of dense, thick pack ice, up to 2-3 metres thick.
Scientists on the SA Agulhas II have spent the past two weeks collecting samples and surveying the area around the Larsen C ice shelf, where a trillion-tonne iceberg, A68, four times the size of Greater London, calved in July 2017.
At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. ... We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
Either we do that or we don’t.
You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.
Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.
... Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.
... In Brussels, home to the main EU institutions, students carried banners with slogans such as "Dinosaurs thought they had time too" ...
Important krill habitats are under threat from climate change, and this latest research – published today (21st January 2019) in Nature Climate Change – has found that their distribution has contracted towards the Antarctic continent. This has major implications for the ecosystems that depend on krill.
"These northern waters have warmed and conditions throughout the Scotia Sea have become more hostile, with stronger winds, warmer weather and less ice. This is bad news for young krill."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0370-z
The risks of catastrophic weather and flooding from climate change top the list of concerns for business leaders heading into next week's World Economic Forum meeting in Davoshttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/is-the-world-sleepwalking-into-a-new-global-crisis/
An annual WEF report—based on a survey of about 1,000 respondents drawn from the Davos community of company chiefs, politicians, civil society and academics—listed climate change as the dominant concern for a third year running.
The Global Risks Report 2019 is published against a backdrop of worrying geopolitical and geo-economic tensions. If unresolved, these tensions will hinder the world’s ability to deal with a growing range of collective challenges, from the mounting evidence of environmental degradation to the increasing disruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
"The world is sleep-walking into catastrophe," Alison Martin, group chief risk officer at Zurich Insurance Group, said at the launch of the 114-page report in London on Wednesday.
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2019.pdf
The WEF report showed mounting alarm about the risks of extreme weather and a failure to take mitigating action as temperatures rise, detailing the possibility of many low-lying cities in Asia, Europe and North America being wiped off the map by flooding.
China alone has more than 78 million people in cities at risk of inundation, a number increasing by three percent every year, the report said, citing World Bank research.
Martin at Zurich Insurance Group said 2018 was already marked by historic wildfires, heavy flooding and rising greenhouse gas emissions.
"It is no surprise that in 2019, environmental risks once again dominate the list of major concerns. So, too, does the growing likelihood of environmental policy failure or a lack of timely policy implementation," she warned.
For environmentalists, such a policy failure has been made more likely by the election of Brazil's far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is due to address the annual WEF gathering.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro is a climate sceptic. But the two populist leaders won't get to rub shoulders in Switzerland after the US president cancelled his trip owing to the budget crisis in Washington.
... Future Shocks: As the world becomes more complex and interconnected, incremental change is giving way to the instability of feedback loops, threshold effects and cascading disruptions. Sudden and dramatic breakdowns—future shocks—become more likely. In this section, we present 10 such potential future shocks. Some are more speculative than others; some build on risks that have already begun to crystallize. These are not predictions. They are food for thought and action—what are the possible future shocks that could fundamentally disrupt or destabilize your world, and what can you do to prevent them?
- Food Supply Disruption Emerges As A Tool As Geo-Economic Tensions Intensify
- Use Of Weather Manipulation Tools Stokes Geopolitical Tensions
- Advanced And Pervasive Biometric Surveillance Allows New Forms Of Social Control
- In A World Of Diverging Values, Human Rights Are Openly Breached Without Consequence
- Escalating Protectionist Impulses Call Into Question Independence Of Central Banks
- Widening Gulf Between Urban And Rural Areas Reaches A Tipping Point
- Quantum Computing Renders Current Cryptography Obsolete
- AI That Can Recognize And Respond To Emotions Creates New Possibilities For Harm
- Low Earth Orbit Becomes A Venue For Geopolitical Conflict
When something goes wrong in a complex system, problems start popping up everywhere, and it is hard to figure out what’s happening. And tight coupling means that the emerging problems quickly spiral out of control and even small errors can cascade into massive meltdowns.
https://www.wftv.com/news/local/monkeys-swarm-ocala-mans-property/552589371
A quick reminder: there’s a band of feral monkeys running wild in Central Florida that carries a type of herpes lethal to humans. The mischievous simians—who are not shy around people—can transmit deadly disease with just a scratch, nip, or fling of poo.
Last year, experts warned that the rhesus macaques are a public health threat. It now seems that the monkey business is likely to get worse, with a wildlife expert revealing that their population is set to double in the next few years.
“It’s going to be a problem… Continual growth of that population is going to occur without intervention,” Steve Johnson told Florida ABC-affiliate WFTV in a report published January 3. Johnson is a professor and wildlife expert at the University of Florida and part of a team of researchers that has followed the monkeys for years.
Early last year, Johnson and colleagues published a study estimating that about 25 percent of Florida’s population of free-wheeling monkeys carries the deadly virus, known as macacine herpesvirus 1 (McHV-1), herpes B, or monkey B virus. The study appeared in the February issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.
In humans, McHV-1 can cause a flu-like illness that can progress to neurological problems, such as double vision and paralysis. At that point, an infected person is likely to die of the infection.
The population got its start during the 1930s and 1940s when the captain of a glass-bottom boat released a handful of macaques on an island in Florida’s Silver River to amuse tourists. The monkeys, which are excellent swimmers, established in the surrounding Silver Spring State Park and nearby Ocala National Forest.
... Bart discover that they are in fact Bolivian tree lizards, an invasive species responsible for the demise of many native birds and must by law be exterminated. After developing a bond with the hatchlings, Bart refuses to hand the lizards over and instead releases them to freedom.Quote“Our top story, the population of parasitic tree lizards has exploded, and local citizens couldn’t be happier! It seems the rapacious reptiles have developed a taste for the common pigeon, also known as the ‘feathered rat’, or the ‘gutter bird’. For the first time, citizens need not fear harassment by flocks of chattering disease-bags.” (Kent Brockman)Much to everyone’s surprise, the lizards turn out to be a blessing, dining on the town’s pesky pigeon population. Bart is thanked and praised by Mayor Quimby, but Lisa worries about the long-term ramifications of the introduced lizards. Principal Skinner reassures her that releasing other non-native species will keep the lizards in check.QuoteSkinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn’t that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They’ll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren’t the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we’re stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
A United Nations report published last week said we have about a decade to get climate change under control, which—let’s be honest—isn’t likely to happen. So break out your goalie masks and harpoon guns, a Mad Max future awaits! Now, as new research points out, we even know where on Earth the inevitable water wars are most likely to take place.
Published today in Global Environmental Change, the paper identifies several hotspots around the globe where “hydro-political issues,” in the parlance of the researchers, are likely to give rise to geopolitical tensions, and possibly even conflict. The authors of the new report, a team from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), say the escalating effects of climate change, in conjunction with ongoing trends in population growth, could trigger regional instability and social unrest in regions where freshwater is scarce, and where bordering nations have to manage and share this increasingly scarce commodity.
Looking at the results, the researchers found that conflicts are more likely to arise in areas where a “transboundary” to water is present, such as a shared lake, basin, or river, and when freshwater is scarce, population density high, and power imbalances and climate stresses exist. A number of potentially problematic areas were identified, including five hotspots: the Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates, and Colorado rivers.
... I am still waiting for the first real water war - it must come, sometime or other. Maybe between countries, maybe internal unrest. Of interest will be how this also happens in the developed countries (e.g. Phoenix, Arizona).
... This winter, snow in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Colorado, was 70% lower than average. Last month, the US government calculated that two thirds of Arizona is currently facing severe to extreme drought; last summer 50 flights were grounded at Phoenix airport because the heat – which hit 47C (116F) – made the air too thin to take off safely. The “heat island” effect keeps temperatures in Phoenix above 37C (98F) at night in summer.Quote... “There are plans for substantial further growth and there just isn’t the water to support that,” says climate researcher Jonathan Overpeck, who co-authored a 2017 report that linked declining flows in the Colorado river to climate change. “The Phoenix metro area is on the cusp of being dangerously overextended. It’s the urban bullseye for global warming in north America.”
... despite the federal Bureau of Reclamation reporting in 2012 that droughts of five or more years would happen every decade over the next 50 years, greater Phoenix has not declared any water restrictions. Nor has the state government decided its official drought contingency proposal.
... Greater Phoenix is good at recycling waste water, but most of it is used for cooling the Palo Verde nuclear power plant to the west of the city, the largest in the US and the only one not on its own body of water. Conversely, the water department is Arizona’s biggest electricity consumer, because it has to pump the water uphill from the Colorado along miles of canals into Phoenix and Tucson. And most of that electricity comes from the heavily polluting, coal-fired Navajo Generating Station in the north of the state.
Meanwhile, despite enjoying more than 330 days of bright sunshine a year, Holway estimates that Arizona only derives 2-5% of its energy from solar power.
The Phoenix City Council rejected a two-year water-rate increase that would have supported $1.5 billion in new drought-contingency projects and repairs to the city's aging water-delivery system.
About $500 million generated from the rate increase would have gone toward a Colorado River resiliency project, and $500 million would have gone toward fixing aging pipelines. The rest of the money would have paid to replace pumps and update water-treatment facilities and equipment.
That proposal amounts to an increase of $1.98 per month in 2019 and an additional $2.35 per month in 2020 for the average customer, according to the city.
... Hundreds of residents are slated to lose affordable access to privately hauled drinking water at the end of the year because of a city of Phoenix crackdown on water haulers refilling from city fire hydrants.
Meanwhile, families who own wells are anxiously watching groundwater levels drop as population growth sucks the already shallow aquifer dry.
"What would happen if 1,000 people just suddenly have no water available?" ... "There's going to be a big problem. I don't think the people (in government) making the decisions are looking at the greater picture."
... Phoenix accuses private water haulers of hooking up illegally to its hydrants, which are designated for firefighting and construction only, to draw water for residents outside the city. "Water in the hydrants is intended to put out fires, not to be potable," said Wes Harris, a member of the Phoenix Water and Wastewater Citizens' Rate Advisory Committee.Sounds like India.
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced Wednesday that they have found new evidence of a giant icy planet lurking in the darkness of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. They are calling it "Planet Nine."
Their paper, published in the Astronomical Journal, describes the planet as about five to 10 times as massive as the Earth.
... They have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet – a "massive perturber." The astronomers suggest it might have been flung into deep space long ago by the gravitational force of Jupiter or Saturn.
... Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar."
Researchers find evidence of a real ninth planet
Batygin and Brown realized that the six most distant objects from Trujillo and Shepherd's original collection all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space. That is particularly surprising because the outermost points of their orbits move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates.
"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place," says Brown. The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way—pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent. "Basically it shouldn't happen randomly," Brown says. "So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."
After examining the orbital periods of these six Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) – Sedna, 2010 GB174, 2004 VN112, 2012 VP113, and 2013 GP136 – they concluded that a hypothetical planet with an orbital period of about 17,117 years (or a semimajor axis of about 665 AU), would have the necessary period ratios with these four objects. This would fall within the parameters estimated by Batygin and Brown for the planet's orbital period (10,000 – 20,000 years).
Their analysis also offered suggestions as to what kind of resonance the planet has with the KBOs in question. Whereas Sedna's orbital period would have a 3:2 resonance with the planet, 2010 GB174 would be in a 5:2 resonance, 2994 VN112 in a 3:1, 2004 VP113 in 4:1, and 2013 GP136 in 9:1. These sort of resonances are simply not likely without the presence of a larger planet.
"For a resonance to be dynamically meaningful in the outer Solar System, you need one of the objects to have enough mass to have a reasonably strong gravitational effect on the other," said the research team. "The extreme Kuiper belt objects aren't really massive enough to be in resonances with each other, but the fact that their orbital periods fall along simple ratios might mean that they each are in resonance with a massive, unseen object."
Estimates of Planet Nine’s “possible” and “probable” zones. by French scientists based on a careful study of Saturn’s orbit and using mathematical models.
Constraints on the location of a possible 9th planet derived from the Cassini data http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06116v3.pdf
... “For me candidate Planet Nine is a close object, although it is about 700 times further away as the distance between the Earth and the Sun,” noted Linder in a statement. The “ideal” Planet Nine, according to the models, features a mass ten times heavier than Earth, and a radius 3.7 times wider than our planet. Similar to Uranus and Neptune, it has an outer envelope of helium and hydrogen, a layer of gas (also consisting of helium and hydrogen), a water ice layer, a silicate mantle, and an iron core.
The models also projected a temperature of 47 Kelvin (-374 degrees Fahrenheit, -226 degrees Celsius). Planet Nine is bitterly cold—but this data suggests that it’s being heated from the inside.
“This means that the planet’s emission is dominated by the cooling of its core, otherwise the temperature would only be 10 Kelvin,” explained Linder.“Its intrinsic power is about 1,000 times bigger than its absorbed power.”
Through a computer-simulated study, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet 9 from its original star.
An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is by definition a planet located outside our solar system. Now it appears that this definition is no longer viable. According to astronomers in Lund, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since.
"It is almost ironic that while astronomers often find exoplanets hundreds of light years away in other solar systems, there's probably one hiding in our own backyard", says Alexander Mustill, astronomer at Lund University.
Stars are born in clusters and often pass by one another. It is during these encounters that a star can "steal" one or more planets in orbit around another star. This is probably what happened when our own sun captured Planet 9.
In a computer-simulated model, Alexander together with astronomers in Lund and Bordeaux has shown that Planet 9 was probably captured by the sun when coming in close contact while orbiting another star.
Simulations show that the glancing flyby shown here in a computer image best explains the current structure of our outer solar system. As the star and sun drew nearer, gravity began to take hold of objects in both systems. As the sun and passing star approach each other, gravity can yank small objects from one solar system to the other. Once the stellar encounter is complete, the disk of each solar system contains a mixture of indigenous and captured dust and planets, as shown in the final computer image. Credit: University of Utah and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
"Planet 9 may very well have been 'shoved' by other planets, and when it ended up in an orbit that was too wide around its own star, our sun may have taken the opportunity to steal and capture Planet 9 from its original star. When the sun later departed from the stellar cluster in which it was born, Planet 9 was stuck in an orbit around the sun", says Alexander Mustill.
"This is the only exoplanet that we, realistically, would be able to reach using a space probe", he says.
Alexander J. Mustill et al. Is there an exoplanet in the Solar system?, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters (2016).
Over four billion years ago, our sun stole hundreds of frozen mini-planets from a passing star – and the peculiar planetoid Sedna is one of them.
With its extremely elongated orbit taking it 200 times further from the sun than Neptune every 11,400 years, Sedna has been a mystery ever since its discovery in 2003. Its nearest neighbours, the thousand-plus “ice dwarfs” that populate the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, are believed to be the frozen remnants of our solar system’s formation.
But Sedna, and a dozen other objects with similarly wonky orbits, are harder to explain. A gravitational kick from a planet in our solar system could never have thrown them into such orbits.
One idea was that Sedna could have been jolted out of place by a passing star, but there was little evidence to back it up.
... Using a low-cost, custom-built supercomputer, the team simulated over 10,000 possible encounters to find out which combination of a star’s mass, fly-by distance and velocity would lead to ice dwarfs being gravitationally captured into Sedna-like orbits.
They conclude that the passing star would have been 80 per cent more massive than the sun, and that it came as close as 34 billion kilometres – 51 times Neptune’s distance. The encounter probably took place when the sun was very young and still a member of a newly born star cluster.
The passing star would itself have stolen hundreds of ice dwarfs from the sun’s Kuiper belt, and flung hundreds more into interstellar space.
Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who together with Ben Bromley of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City was one of the first to propose the idea, says the simulations are “pretty convincing”.
Mamat Rahmat, Head of the Ujung Kulon National Park (TNUK), confirmed that the tsunami had reached the national park area. ... "Estimates in the field, water reaches 20-50 meters from the shoreline," ... Mamat stated that the condition of the Javan Rhino ( Rhinoceros sondaicus) was safe after the tsunami.
Rhinos gathered in the middle of the forest and the southern edge of the coast. While those [beaches] affected by the tsunami are in the north - the Sumur Subdistrict, Pandeglang Regency, Banten, which is the entrance to TNUK, is the area directly affected by the disaster.
Infrared camera monitoring shows that the rhinos spent most of their time in areas with an elevation of between 9-15 meters and distances to the coastline of 412-855 meters.
Monitoring the condition of the area affected by the tsunami was carried out directly by WWF-Indonesia National Rhino Officer Ridwan Setiawan , while evacuating the communities around Ujung Kulon.
Europe's most active volcano, Mount Etna in Sicily, erupted on Monday, with officials reporting more than 130 earthquakes of up to 4.3 in magnitude.
The Mount Etna observatory said lava had spewed from a new fracture near its south-eastern crater.
... Some 230,000 people across fourteen coastal countries died, but, in the aftermath, locals and rescuers in certain areas noted a conspicuous absence of animal casualties. In the following weeks and months, stories emerged of some animals acting oddly just before the tsunami hit: Eyewitnesses in Sri Lanka and Thailand told of elephants that trumpeted before seeking higher ground, dogs that refused to go outside, and flamingos that suddenly abandoned low-lying nesting areas.An article from 2017 describes the scenario your suggesting:
... In the largest survey to date, researchers placed motion-activated cameras at nearly 200 locations throughout the park. After analyzing the large amount of video collected, they determined that only 62 Javan rhinos remain in the wild. These few live in low-lying areas that could be inundated by a tsunami, researchers write in a study describing their findings, published in the journal Conservation Letters .
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12366/epdf
... The researchers conclude that a tsunami that made it to 10 meters, or 33 feet, above sea level would threaten 80 percent of the rhinos' territory.
... The park also happens to sit about 50 miles from one of the world’s most fearsome volcanoes: Anak Krakatoa. It is the “offspring” of the Krakatoa volcano which erupted in 1883, the most cataclysmic in modern history, the reverberations of which were felt around the world. Anak Kratoa, which means “childs of Krakatoa,” has been growing from the destroyed remnants of this volcanic island ever since. If it erupts before 2040 scientists estimate it could create tsunamis that reach up to nearly 70 feet above sea level. If it erupts after then, the waves could rise to heights of almost 100 feet.
For this reason, a second population of Javan rhinos needs to be established to increase the likelihood of their survival, Gerber says.
Knowing which Americans have installed solar panels on their roofs and why they did so would be enormously useful for managing the changing U.S. electricity system and to understanding the barriers to greater use of renewable resources. But until now, all that has been available are essentially estimates.
To get accurate numbers, Stanford University scientists analyzed more than a billion high-resolution satellite images with a machine learning algorithm and identified nearly every solar power installation in the contiguous 48 states.
The analysis found 1.47 million installations, which is a much higher figure than either of the two widely recognized estimates. The scientists also integrated U.S. Census and other data with their solar catalog to identify factors leading to solar power adoption.
The group's data could be useful to utilities, regulators, solar panel marketers and others. Knowing how many solar panels are in a neighborhood can help a local electric utility balance supply and demand, the key to reliability. The inventory highlights activators and impediments to solar deployment. For example, the researchers found that household income is very important, but only to a point. Above $150,000 a year, income quickly ceases to play much of a role in people's decisions.
On the other hand, low- and medium-income households do not often install solar systems even when they live in areas where doing so would be profitable in the long term. For example, in areas with a lot of sunshine and relatively high electricity rates, utility bill savings would exceed the monthly cost of the equipment. The impediment for low- and medium-income households is upfront cost, the authors suspect. This finding shows that solar installers could develop new financial models to satisfy unmet demand.
Joule, Yu & Wang et al.: "DeepSolar: A Machine Learning Framework to Efficiently Construct Solar Deployment Database in the United States"
Powerful storms drenched the East and West coasts over the weekend, shattering rainfall records in the Washington, D.C., area and creating office tower-sized waves off the California coast.
Tweeting in all-caps Saturday afternoon, the National Weather Service issued a warning to surfers and gawkers in Northern California: “STAY WELL BACK FROM THE OCEAN OR RISK CERTAIN DEATH.”
Though not especially rare in some parts of the Arctic, the north Greenland polynya of February 2018 was most unexpected. 50,000 km² of open water in the Wandel Sea, an area the size of the state of Kentucky or the province of Nova Scotia.
... In their paper, What caused the remarkable February 2018 Greenland Polynya?, Moore, Schweiger, Jinlun Zhang and Mike Steele identify the polynya's cause to be strong surface winds catalyzed by a dramatic warming in Earth's upper atmosphere known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming.
"During these events, temperatures in the stratosphere – about 30km above ground level—can warm by 10° or 15°C in just a few days," Moore says.
"This causes a change in air circulation that includes a reversal in the winds in the stratosphere. These high altitude winds blow against the west-to-east direction of the jet stream, descending toward the Earth's surface. In February 2018, this caused winds from Siberia to blow cold air into northern Europe, creating a weather system that became known as the 'Beast from the East'. It brought temperatures of minus 20°C to northern Europe, and the same weather pattern moved warmer air northwards up the east coast of Greenland."
Strong southerly winds forced mild air to Greenland and beyond, but it wasn't their warmth that caused the polynya.
"Most Arctic warmings last a day or two," says Moore. "This lasted a week, and these were the warmest temperatures and strongest winds observed in north Greenland since observations began in the 1960s. Winds were close to hurricane force (93+km/h) and temperatures were above freezing. Once we got that piece of the puzzle, we realized it could be wind rather than warmth that caused the polynya."
While the size of the polynya was unprecedented over the period we have good data, it appears not to be tied to the thinning of the ice pack that has occurred over the same period. Simulations with the University of Washington's Pan-Arctic Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) indicate that similar conditions would have created a polynya, even without the recent thinning of the ice north of Greenland.
G. W. K. Moore et al. What caused the remarkable February 2018 North Greenland Polynya?, Geophysical Research Letters (2018)
Abstract:
During late February and early March 2018, an unusual polynya was observed off the north coast of Greenland. This period was also notable for the occurrence of a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW). Here we use satellite and in‐situ data, a reanalysis and an ice‐ocean model to document the evolution of the polynya and its synoptic forcing. We show that its magnitude was unprecedented and that it was associated with the transient response to the SSW leading to anomalous warm southerly flow in north Greenland. Indeed, regional wind speeds and temperatures were the highest during February going back to the 1960s. There is evidence that the thinning sea ice has increased its wind‐driven mobility. However, we show that the polynya would have developed under thicker ice conditions representative of the late 1970s and that even with the predicted trend towards thinner sea ice, it will only open during enhanced southerly flow.
Plain Language Summary:
In late February 2018, satellite imagery revealed the presence of a large polynya (a region of reduced sea ice cover within the pack), in the Wandel Sea off the north coast of Greenland. Since this region is not known for the development of polynyas, this discovery generated interest among Arctic observers and in the science community, raising questions about the nature and cause of this unusual event. In this paper, we show that its opening coincided with a period of sustained and unusually warm winds from the south, with above‐freezing temperatures and wind speeds in excess of 25 m/s reported at local weather stations. February 2018 was also notable for a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event, in which an abrupt warming of the atmosphere between 10‐50 km altitude occurred in conjunction with a reversal of the stratospheric winds. We show this event was responsible for the polynya. We also use a computer model to confirm the dominant role of the winds in creating the polynya. Finally, we show that even with future thinning of sea ice due to climate change, extreme winds will remain necessary to create a polynya in this region over the next few decades.
The Trump administration will propose scrapping an Obama-era mandate that new coal-fired power plants use carbon-capture technology, removing a major barrier to constructing the facilities, according to a person familiar with the plans
The Environmental Protection Agency is slated to unveil the measure on Thursday, during an event at its headquarters in Washington
The EPA is set to assert that the requirement for carbon capture and storage technology fell short of a legal standard that it be "adequately demonstrated," mirroring an objection raised by power companies, coal miner Murray Energy Corp. and industry associations that have challenged the mandate in federal court.
The proposed replacement would raise allowable carbon dioxide emissions from new and modified coal power plants.
The move dovetails with the EPA's separate effort to dramatically weaken an Obama administration regulation limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back coal jobs and lift regulations he said were throttling the U.S. economy.
Yet the effort is unlikely to bring about a coal power renaissance in the U.S., as utilities increasingly shift to cheap, cleaner burning natural gas and zero-emission renewables. Since 2010, power plant owners have either retired or announced plans to retire at least 630 coal plants in 43 states—nearly 40 percent of the U.S. coal fleet, according to data by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
...
HAL: You can't take care of your own planet. I'm not letting you f**k this one up.
On May 15, 2006, American International Group (“AIG”) became the first U.S. insurance company to publicly address climate change as a risk and formally outline its corporate policy and programs regarding the issue. As a leading provider of Property and Casualty (“P&C”) insurance in the U.S., AIG is directly exposed to the risk of insured losses resulting from severe weather. According to Allianz, one of AIG’s competitors, “climate change stands to increase insured losses from extreme events in an average year by 37 per cent within just a decade”[2]. Given this threat, the players in this market have focused on limiting their financial exposure to high-risk areas, either by canceling or not renewing policies or by increasing deductibles, reducing limits, and adding new exclusions to policies.
As a major global reinsurer, Swiss Re has had a major role in the climate change debate for over two decades.
For a reinsurer, climate change constitutes a key risk because it can lead to an increase in the frequency and severity of natural catastrophes such as floods, storms, excessive rainfall and drought. In combination with growing asset concentrations in exposed areas and more widespread insurance protection, this will cause a rise in losses.
Since detecting the long-term threat posed by climate change more than 20 years ago, we have been an acknowledged thought leader on the topic.
For more than 40 years, Munich Re has been dealing with climate change and the related risks and opportunities for the insurance industry. Our approach to coping with this challenge is holistic and based on the following pillars: risk assessment – insurance solutions – asset management
... Find me an insurance company that does NOT charge based on risk! Anyone that does not accurately base their premiums on the risk of payout, will probably be out of business soon.
Recently, some commentators have tried to dismiss recent increases in the areas burnt by fires in the US, claiming that fires were much worse in the early part of the century. To do this, they are ignoring clear guidance by scientists that the data should not be used to make comparisons with earlier periods.
... According to data from the NIFC, there has been a clear trend in increased area burned by wildfires in the US since the 1980s, when reliable US-wide estimates based on fire situation reports from federal and state agencies became available.
Today, wildfires are burning more than twice the area than in the 1980s and 1990s. These figures include all wildland fires in both forested and non-forested areas. Most of the area burned today is in the western US, where dryer conditions tend to allow for large, quickly-spreading wildfires.
The NIFC explicitly warns users on its website: “Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result, the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.”
Those sceptical about the role of climate change in the recent increase in fires have pointed to the full dataset, trying to argue that the fire area has decreased by around 80% over the past century.
This is not an accurate comparison, according to Randy Eardley, a spokesman at the NIFC.Quote... To try and compare any of the more modern data to that earlier data is not accurate or appropriate, because we didn’t have a good way to measure [earlier data]. Back then we didn’t have a reliable reporting system; for all I know those came from a variety of different sources that often double-counted figures. When you look at some of those years that add up to 60 or 70 million acres burned a lot of those acres have to be double counted two or three times. We didn’t have a system to estimate area burned until 1960, but it was really refined in 1983.If 50m acres had actually burned in the early 20th century, it would amount to an area of land equal to the entire state of Nebraska going up in flames every year.
Eardley suggests that earlier records were inflated by including areas where fires were purposefully set to clear forests for agriculture, or where rangelands were torched to get rid of sagebrush to improve grazing conditions. Other federal reports suggest that most of the area burned between 1930 and 1950 was in southeastern US and were primarily intentionally set fires for clearing land.
While the early 20th century data is not reliable and likely double or even triple-counted actual fires, Eardley says that it is possible that fire extents were higher back then for a simple reason: there was no large-scale firefighting organisation in the first half of the 20th century. Therefore, fires would burn through larger areas before being extinguished or burning themselves out, particularly when they were not close to towns or settlements.
There has been no proof that wildfires and global warming have any connection besides in the media...
... Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
It's that time of the year again: time for asset management company Lazard to release its annual Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) study. (We know, you've been waiting all year.) The numbers in the report offer economic insight into how energy choices were made in the previous year and how the energy landscape will likely change in the coming year.
The bottom line? The cost of coal-fired electricity per megawatt-hour hasn't budged a bit from 2017, while wind and solar costs per MWh are still falling. That spells bad news for an American coal revival, especially in places where the cost of building brand-new renewable installations is cheaper than the cost of operating existing coal and gas plants—a situation that Lazard says is happening with increasing frequency (PDF).
Although this is Lazard's 12th year quantifying the cost of energy, it's only the fourth year that it has released a separate report quantifying the cost of storage (PDF). Energy storage includes grid-scale lithium-ion batteries as well as vanadium and zinc flow batteries, lead-acid batteries, and advanced lead batteries.
Lazard breaks these down further by market: batteries selling storage wholesale have different revenue streams than batteries connected to utility-grade solar or commercial standalone batteries that are not controlled by a utility.
Here, Lazard says that lithium-ion batteries showed significant cost declines in the relevant markets throughout 2018. Meanwhile, "cost declines for flow batteries are less significant but still observable," Lazard writes. The asset management company unfortunately doesn't expect that to last: "Future declines in the cost of lithium-ion technologies are expected to be mitigated by rising cobalt and lithium carbonate prices as well as delayed battery availability due to high levels of factory utilization."
Lazard also found that shorter-duration batteries, which can discharge over about four hours, are the most cost-effective of any batteries. These batteries "improve the grid’s ability to respond to momentary or short duration fluctuations in electricity supply and demand." This has been confirmed by reports from real-world battery use in Australia, where the massive Tesla battery at the Hornsdale Wind Farm has been used to maintain grid frequency, rather than replacing more traditional forms of electricity generation.
IEA's World Energy Outlook 2018 Presentation: https://www.iea.org/media/presentations/WEO2018-Presentation.pdf
The International Energy Agency's newly released World Energy Outlook finds that oil demand for passenger vehicles is slated to peak in the mid-2020s due to more efficiency, biofuels, and electric vehicles. That's according to their "new policies" scenario, which models not only existing policies but also countries' announced plans and emissions targets.
But, but, but: That projected mid-2020s peak doesn't mean that overall global demand for crude oil is reaching an inflection point anytime soon. That's because other uses — petrochemicals, heavy freight, shipping and planes — remain robust.
Add it all up and the report sees global crude oil demand rising slightly to reach 106 million barrels per day in 2040 (it's roughly 100 mbd right now).
Why it matters: The findings underscore that despite heavy and justified attention to electric cars, passenger transport is just one part of the wider equation when it comes to oil.
Yes, but: The annual report also models a "sustainable development" scenario — a wholly upended global energy system where policy and investment trends are bent to be consistent with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. On the oil side, that means overall demand peaks in almost all nations by 2030. Per an IEA summary...Quote- "By 2040, cars that rely solely on gasoline and diesel are 40% more efficient than today; there are 930 million electric cars on the road (50% of the global car fleet); a quarter of buses are electric; and nearly 20% of fuels used by trucks are low or zero carbon."
- "There are also major changes in most other sectors and as a result, total oil demand in 2040 in this scenario is 25 mb/d lower than today."
What's next: Despite the forces trimming growth, the world still needs lots of oil and several sources are at risk, including Iran, which is seeing exports fall thanks to looming reimposition of U.S. sanctions. Per IEA...Quote- Global oil demand is on the cusp of the "historically significant" 100 mbd mark.
- While the market has enough supplies "for now," Iran's exports are slated to fall even more, Venezuela is deteriorating, and there's the "ever-present" threat of more Libyan disruption.
- "[W]e cannot be complacent and the market is clearly signalling its concerns that more supply might be needed."
In its report, the IEA said its main projection scenario through to 2040 foresees the U.S. accounting for nearly 75% and 40% of global oil and gas growth, respectively, over the next six years. Growth is expected to be driven primarily by shale fracking, which should lead U.S. shale oil supply to more than double, reaching 9.2 million barrels a day by the mid-2020s, the agency said.
If these approvals do not pick up sharply from today’s levels, US tight oil production would need to triple from today’s level to over 15 mb/d by 2025 to satisfy demand in the NPS. With a sufficiently large resource base, this could be possible. But it would require levels of capital investment that would far surpass the previous peaks in 2014.
Oil markets are entering a period of renewed uncertainty & volatilityQuote- Natural gas is on the rise: China’s rapid demand growth is erasing talk of a ‘gas glut’Oil demand looks robust in the near term; if approvals of new conventional projects remain low, market stability would require continuous exceptional growth in US shale
- Solar PV has the momentum while other key technologies & efficiency policies need a push
- Our assessment points to energy-related CO2 emissions reaching a historic high in 2018Quote“More than at any other point in recent history, fundamental changes to the development model of resource-rich countries look unavoidable,” said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director. “Following through with the announced reform initiatives is essential, as failure to take adequate action would compound future risks for producer economies as well as for global markets.”New sources of supply will be needed whether or not demand peaks, the agency said.
"The analysis shows oil consumption growing in coming decades, due to rising petrochemicals, trucking and aviation demand. But meeting this growth in the near term means that approvals of conventional oil projects need to double from their current low levels," IEA director Fatih Birol said.
"Without such a pick-up in investment, US shale production, which has already been expanding at record pace, would have to add more than 10 million bpd from today to 2025, the equivalent of adding another Russia to global supply in seven years“ which would be an historically unprecedented feat."
Projected growth of renewable power, electric vehicles and other low-carbon sources won't prevent levels of global warming that soar past the targets of the Paris climate agreement, the International Energy Agency said Monday.
Over the next two decades, the world’s energy system will undergo a huge transformation. Wind and solar power are poised to become dominant sources of electricity. China’s once-relentless appetite for coal is set to wane. The amount of oil we use to fuel our cars could peak and decline.
But there’s a catch: The global march toward clean energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous global warming, at least not unless governments put forceful new policy measures in place to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
That’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, which on Monday published its annual World Energy Outlook, a 661-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2040. These projections are especially difficult right now because the world’s energy markets, which usually evolve gradually, are going through a major upheaval. ...
The report projects that emissions will keep rising slowly (steadily) until 2040.
"Plants are the base of the food web and drive the carbon cycle, nutrient cycles and water cycles on which we rely," Langley said. "When the plant species change, everything else in the ecosystem may follow."He added, "We are trying to simulate how the future earth will look with global change, but, climate change and nutrient pollution are changing ecosystems so fast it's tough to experiment on top of those changes. In the face of ongoing environmental change, our experiments may be like 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic'.
"At 32.0 feet...Disastrous flooding well into the flood plain will cut off and potentially drown thousands of livestock," the National Weather Service predicted. "Homes, resorts, commercial buildings, boats, docks and marinas will flood disastrously above Castell to Marble Falls on Lake LBJ. Roads and bridges near the river will be severely flooded and dangerous to motorists."
... Afterward, [a survivor] sat in the shade and broke down. "I know, but we can rebuild it," a FEMA rescuer said, putting his arm around her.Although I feel for the survivors, this is the root of the problem.
VANCOUVER, Wash. - A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought -- the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years -- and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives.
She warns that the Earth's current warming climate could make a similar drought even worse.
The Global Famine is among the worst humanitarian disasters in history, comparable to the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, World War I or World War II. As an environmental disaster, it has few rivals. Making matters worse were social conditions, like British colonialists hoarding and exporting grain from India. Some populations were particularly vulnerable to disease and colonial expansion afterwards.
"In a very real sense, the El Niño and climate events of 1876-78 helped create the global inequalities that would later be characterized as 'first' and 'third worlds'," writes Singh, who was inspired by "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World." The book details the social impact of the Great Drought and subsequent droughts in 1896-1897 and 1899-1902. ..."Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism"... Its author, Mike Davis, is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Riverside, and a co-author on Singh's paper.
The Great Drought actually was several droughts, Singh found, beginning with a failure of India's 1875 monsoon season. East Asia's drought started in the spring of 1876, followed by droughts in parts of South Africa, northern Africa and northeastern Brazil. There were also droughts in western Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia.
The length and severity of the droughts prompted the Global Famine, aided in no small part by one of the strongest known El Niños, the irregular but recurring periods of warm water in the tropical Pacific Ocean. That triggered the warmest known temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and the strongest known Indian Ocean dipole -- an extreme temperature difference between warm waters in the west and cool waters in the east. These in turn triggered one of the worst droughts across Brazil and Australia.
Deepti Singh et al, Climate and the Global Famine of 1876-78, Journal of Climate (2018).
Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2018 lowest extent on Sept. 19 and again on Sept. 23, according to NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that, at 1.77 million square miles (4.59 million square kilometers), 2018 effectively tied with 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest summertime minimum extent in the satellite record.
"This year's minimum is relatively high compared to the record low extent we saw in 2012, but it is still low compared to what it used to be in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s," said Claire Parkinson, a climate change senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Parkinson and her colleague Nick DiGirolamo calculated that, since the late 1970s, the Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk on average about 21,000 square miles (54,000 square kilometers) with each passing year. That is equivalent to losing a chunk of sea ice the size of Maryland and New Jersey combined every year for the past four decades.
Abstract
Astrometric and geodetic measurements show that the mean position of Earth's spin axis drifted through the solid crust toward Labrador, Canada at an average speed of cm/yr during the 20th century. Understanding the origins of this secular polar motion (SPM) has significance for modeling the global climate, as it provides a link to ice mass balance and sea-level rise. A perplexing issue, however, is that while glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) models satisfactorily explain the direction of SPM, the associated prediction of the amplitude is insufficient. Our Bayesian GIA analysis, with constraints from relative sea-level and vertical land motion data, reveals that this process only accounts for % of the observed SPM amplitude. This shortfall motivates a more broadly scoped reassessment of SPM drivers. To address this, we assemble a complete reconstruction of Earth's surface mass transport derived from recent advancements in modeling the global 20th century cryospheric, hydrologic, oceanic, and seismogenic mass exchange. The summed signals, nonetheless, cannot fully reconcile the observed SPM, even when considering the error statistics of each driver. We investigate an additional excitation source: changes in Earth's inertia tensor caused by mantle convection. Sophisticated models have recently been advanced in tectonic plate reconstructions, in conjunction with geoid and seismic tomographic models. Here we use these models to compute new estimates of SPM. While the convection-driven SPM has considerable uncertainty, the average direction of 283 recent models aligns with the residual SPM (within 2.7 +/- 14.8 ), significantly reducing the gap between observation and prediction. We assert that one key mechanism for driving 20th century SPM is long-term mass movement due to mantle convection.
Over long, geologic time scales, carbonic acid weathering is an important control on atmospheric CO2 levels and climate, but under the right conditions, weathering by sulfuric acid can release substantial CO2.
Ph.D. candidate Scott Zolkos and his supervisor, U of A biologist Suzanne Tank, found that these conditions are prevalent in the western Canadian Arctic.
"We found that rapidly thawing permafrost on the Peel Plateau in the Northwest Territories is greatly enhancing mineral weathering," explained Zolkos, the lead author on the study. "Because weathering is largely driven by sulfuric acid in this region, intensifying permafrost thaw could be an additional source of CO2 to the atmosphere."
The researchers worked with scientists from the Northwest Territories Geoscience Office to examine long-term records of river chemistry from the Peel River.
They found that weathering driven by sulfuric acid has intensified with regional permafrost thaw in recent decades, and likely increased the amount of CO2 released into the surrounding water and air.
Scott Zolkos et al. Mineral Weathering and the Permafrost Carbon-Climate Feedback, Geophysical Research Letters (2018).
... What they found: without oxygen, equal amounts of methane and CO2 are produced. But since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, it is more significant. Because methane production couldn't be measured, it was assumed that in the absence of oxygen only very small amounts of it can be formed. "It takes an extremely long time until stable methane-producing microorganisms develop in thawing permafrost," explains Knoblauch. "That's why it was so difficult to demonstrate methane production until now."
"By combining process-based and molecular-microbiological methods, our study shows for the first time that the methane-forming microorganisms in the thawing permafrost have significant influence on the greenhouse gas budget," adds co-author Susanne Liebner from the Helmholtz Center Potsdam - GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences
Knoblauch C, Beer C, Liebner S, Grigoriev M N, Pfeiffer E-M (2018): Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost; Nature Climate Change
Shetland Island (north of Scotland) has been hit by at least two more tsunamis in the past 10,000 years than previously thought, and scientists are working to identify where the giant waves originated.
Around 8,200 years ago, the Storegga off the coast of Norway caused a 20m-high tsunami to sweep across Shetland. Sands found at various points across the isles, and in mainland Scotland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, proved the tsunami's towering height, and the event has been well-reported.
Scientists funded by NERC have identified sands on Shetland that they say prove additional tsunamis hit Shetland 5,000 and 1,500 years ago. This could mean that tsunamis are a more common occurrence than previously thought in the UK.Quote... We found sands aged 5,000 and 1,500 years old at multiple locations in Shetland, up to 13 meters (42 feet) above sea level. These deposits have a similar sediment character as the Storegga event and can therefore be linked to tsunami inundation.... Submarine landslides can occur on slopes of just one or two degrees, and we still don't know exactly how they are set in motion, except that earthquakes are considered to be the most common trigger. It is critical that we learn more.
The research is part of the Landslide-Tsunami project, ongoing research that forms a key element of NERC's Arctic Research Programme. The project aims to discover what causes enormous submarine landslides, what the impact of slides in different locations and of different magnitude would be on the UK, and what the likelihood of such an event might be, given the significant scale of Arctic climate change.
https://nerc.ukri.org/planetearth/stories/1906/
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