Forwarded from zeitgeist.earth
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"[...]“Hurricane Katrina caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure in New Orleans that no one really predicted,” Chester explains. “Levees broke. People were stranded. Rescue operations failed. Extreme heat could lead to a similar cascading failure in Phoenix, exposing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee.”
[...]
Extreme heat is the most direct, tangible, and deadly consequence of our hellbent consumption of fossil fuels. Rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere trap heat, which is fundamentally changing our climate system. “Think of the Earth’s temperature as a bell curve,” says Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. “Climate change is shifting the bell curve toward the hotter end of the temperature scale, making extreme-heat events more likely.” As the temperature rises, ice sheets are melting, seas are rising, hurricanes are getting more intense, rainfall patterns are changing (witness the recent flooding in the Midwest). Drought and flooding inflict tremendous economic damage and create political chaos, but extreme heat is much more likely to kill you directly. The World Health Organization predicts heat stress linked to the climate crisis will cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change found that by 2100, if emissions continue to grow, 74 percent of the world’s population will be exposed to heat waves hot enough to kill. “The more warming you have, the more heat waves you have,” says Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The more heat waves you have, the more people die. It’s a pretty simple equation.”
Heat waves are driven not just by rising temperatures but by a change in the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system. As the atmosphere warms, the temperature difference between the poles and the subtropics is shrinking, which is changing the path of the jet stream, the big river of wind 35,000 feet up in the sky that drives our weather system. The jet stream’s path is shaped by atmospheric waves called Rossby waves, which are created naturally as the Earth spins. Mann explains that as the Earth’s temperature gradient flattens, the Rossby waves tend to bend, resulting in a curvy jet stream that is more likely to get “stuck,” trapping weather systems in place and creating what Mann calls “huge heat domes.”
[...]
How hot will it get? That depends largely on how far and how fast carbon-dioxide levels rise, which depends on how much fossil fuel the world continues to burn. The Paris Climate Agreement (which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of) aims to limit the warming to 3.6°F (2°C). Given the current trajectory of carbon pollution, hitting that target is all but impossible. Unless nations of the world take dramatic action soon, we are headed for a warming of at least 5.4°F (3°C) by the end of the century, making the Earth roughly as warm as it was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene era, long before Homo sapiens came along. “Human beings have literally never lived on a planet as hot as it is today,” says Wehner. A 5.4°F-warmer world would be radically different from the one we know now, with cities swamped by rising seas and epic droughts turning rainforests into deserts. The increased heat alone would kill significant numbers of people. A recent report from the University of Bristol estimated that with 5.4°F of warming, about 5,800 people could die each year in New York due to the heat, 2,500 could die in Los Angeles, and 2,300 in Miami. “The relationship between heat and mortality is clear,” Eunice Lo, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol and the lead author of the report, tells me. “The warmer the world becomes, the more people die.”
[...]
"[...]“Hurricane Katrina caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure in New Orleans that no one really predicted,” Chester explains. “Levees broke. People were stranded. Rescue operations failed. Extreme heat could lead to a similar cascading failure in Phoenix, exposing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee.”
[...]
Extreme heat is the most direct, tangible, and deadly consequence of our hellbent consumption of fossil fuels. Rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere trap heat, which is fundamentally changing our climate system. “Think of the Earth’s temperature as a bell curve,” says Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. “Climate change is shifting the bell curve toward the hotter end of the temperature scale, making extreme-heat events more likely.” As the temperature rises, ice sheets are melting, seas are rising, hurricanes are getting more intense, rainfall patterns are changing (witness the recent flooding in the Midwest). Drought and flooding inflict tremendous economic damage and create political chaos, but extreme heat is much more likely to kill you directly. The World Health Organization predicts heat stress linked to the climate crisis will cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change found that by 2100, if emissions continue to grow, 74 percent of the world’s population will be exposed to heat waves hot enough to kill. “The more warming you have, the more heat waves you have,” says Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The more heat waves you have, the more people die. It’s a pretty simple equation.”
Heat waves are driven not just by rising temperatures but by a change in the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system. As the atmosphere warms, the temperature difference between the poles and the subtropics is shrinking, which is changing the path of the jet stream, the big river of wind 35,000 feet up in the sky that drives our weather system. The jet stream’s path is shaped by atmospheric waves called Rossby waves, which are created naturally as the Earth spins. Mann explains that as the Earth’s temperature gradient flattens, the Rossby waves tend to bend, resulting in a curvy jet stream that is more likely to get “stuck,” trapping weather systems in place and creating what Mann calls “huge heat domes.”
[...]
How hot will it get? That depends largely on how far and how fast carbon-dioxide levels rise, which depends on how much fossil fuel the world continues to burn. The Paris Climate Agreement (which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of) aims to limit the warming to 3.6°F (2°C). Given the current trajectory of carbon pollution, hitting that target is all but impossible. Unless nations of the world take dramatic action soon, we are headed for a warming of at least 5.4°F (3°C) by the end of the century, making the Earth roughly as warm as it was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene era, long before Homo sapiens came along. “Human beings have literally never lived on a planet as hot as it is today,” says Wehner. A 5.4°F-warmer world would be radically different from the one we know now, with cities swamped by rising seas and epic droughts turning rainforests into deserts. The increased heat alone would kill significant numbers of people. A recent report from the University of Bristol estimated that with 5.4°F of warming, about 5,800 people could die each year in New York due to the heat, 2,500 could die in Los Angeles, and 2,300 in Miami. “The relationship between heat and mortality is clear,” Eunice Lo, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol and the lead author of the report, tells me. “The warmer the world becomes, the more people die.”
[...]
Forwarded from zeitgeist.earth
“Think of the Earth’s temperature as a bell curve,” says Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. “Climate change is shifting the bell curve toward the hotter end of the temperature scale, making extreme-heat events more likely.” As the temperature rises, ice sheets are melting, seas are rising, hurricanes are getting more intense, rainfall patterns are changing (witness the recent flooding in the Midwest). Drought and flooding inflict tremendous economic damage and create political chaos, but extreme heat is much more likely to kill you directly. The World Health Organization predicts heat stress linked to the climate crisis will cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between 2030 and 2050. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change found that by 2100, if emissions continue to grow, 74 percent of the world’s population will be exposed to heat waves hot enough to kill.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-crisis-goodell-survive-extreme-heat-875198/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-crisis-goodell-survive-extreme-heat-875198/
Forwarded from zeitgeist.earth
The very process of living — of eating, breathing, moving, thinking, having sex — generates heat. The outside air is usually lower than 98.6°F, so our bodies release heat, mostly by circulating blood to capillaries close to the surface of our skin, where the heat can be dissipated (that’s why your body is warm to the touch). Without a cooling mechanism, just our basic metabolism would result in about a 2°F hourly rise in body temperature. We wouldn’t even make it through the day.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-crisis-goodell-survive-extreme-heat-875198/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/climate-crisis-goodell-survive-extreme-heat-875198/
Forwarded from zeitgeist.earth
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The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy Vice Documentary (2018)
H.264 1920x1080
English [AAC 125kb/s]
H.264 1920x1080
English [AAC 125kb/s]
Forwarded from zeitgeist.earth
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy
In this feature-length documentary, Social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new era of sustainable development
The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models.
In VICE’s feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system. A Third Industrial Revolution is unfolding with the convergence of three pivotal technologies: an ultra-fast 5G communication internet, a renewable energy internet, and a driverless mobility internet, all connected to the Internet of Things embedded across society and the environment.
This 21st century smart digital infrastructure is giving rise to a radical new sharing economy that is transforming the way we manage, power and move economic life. But with climate change now ravaging the planet, it needs to happen fast.
“I think the political struggle of the millennials, their children, and grandchildren will be how to address these problems.”
— JEREMY RIFKIN
In this feature-length documentary, Social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new era of sustainable development
The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models.
In VICE’s feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system. A Third Industrial Revolution is unfolding with the convergence of three pivotal technologies: an ultra-fast 5G communication internet, a renewable energy internet, and a driverless mobility internet, all connected to the Internet of Things embedded across society and the environment.
This 21st century smart digital infrastructure is giving rise to a radical new sharing economy that is transforming the way we manage, power and move economic life. But with climate change now ravaging the planet, it needs to happen fast.
“I think the political struggle of the millennials, their children, and grandchildren will be how to address these problems.”
— JEREMY RIFKIN