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Nonprofit, High Resolution, Large Format Photography
In Support of the Climate Change Now Initiative
CLIMATE CHANGE-CAUSED; of course these repeatedly unprecedented catastrophes are caused by climate change. The science that says “we can’t tell yet,” or “made more likely,” is based on certainty like all science. Because our climate has only recently warmed beyond its natural variation, evidence is young and thirty years of evidence is generally required to create scientific certainty with weather events.
REPEATEDLY UNPRECEDENTED EVENTS do not happen one after another after another in our old climate, with magnitudes wildy in excess of previous records. Of course these things are directly caused by climate change.
CATASTROPHE THEORY AND THRESHOLDS tell us that catastrophes do not occur unless thresholds are crossed. The climate change event catastrophe crossing we are now experiencing is wildly evident today in extreme storms, winter tornadoes, wildfire, drought mortality, native beetle attack, beach erosion, permafrost collapse, extreme hurricanes, unprecedented floods, and even unprecedented winter storms.
EXTREMES BECOME FANTASTICALLY MORE EXTREME because we have only in the last half-decade exceeded the natural variation of our old climate, and because climate change-caused impacts increase nonlinearly with warming; that is, a little warming does not create a little more extremeness, it creates a lot more, and because current extreme events are likely only of the 1-, 2- and 5-year occurrence frequency; even with zero additional warming, as time passes, nonlinearly more extreme rare events like the 10-, 25- and 100-year storm will occur.
CLIMATE TIPPING is now active a hundred years ahead of widespread projections. Tipping is directly related to Earth systems collapses and was not supposed to begin until 5 degrees C warming, when we are at about 1 degree C today. These collapses complete and become irreversible resulting in existential scenarios — with no further warming. Half of known tipping collapse systems are now active and they create feedbacks that increase the extremeness and speed of other tipping systems collapses.
EVOLUTIONARY BOUNDARIES – These tipping collapses are what happen when Earth systems exceed their evolutionary boundaries of temperature, precipitation, humidity, winds, etc.; the systems collapse to re-evolve with new species tolerant of the changed conditions.
NATURAL VARIATION OF OUR OLD CLIMATE has a maximum average global temperature of between 0.5 and 1.0 degrees C above normal depending on the systems where collapse is currently activated. We have warmed our world beyond it’s systems evolutionary boundaries and they are in collapse.
IRREVERSIBLE TIPPING RESULTS IN EXISTENTIAL SCENARIOS FOR HUMANKIND – We have been warned about the existential consequences of climate tipping happening far in the future on some dystopian Earth where our civilization did not head the scientific warnings about climate pollution. Climate tipping is why scientists are beginning to sound the alarm about the climate emergency. This is not like what has been bandied about as the “climate emergency” of the past. This is real. We have delayed too long and climate change has passed through a threshold into a new and dangerous time that we have been repeatedly warned would occur if we did not act. Lives are at stake. Humanity is literally at stake because of those dystopian irreversible tipping points. This is like any other emergency only it is global in extent. We must use the tools at hand to save lives. They key now is to reduce current warming and this presents a new challenge. The critical path today is to remove atmospheric climate pollutants and reduce current warming. Emissions reductions and a fossil fuel extinction help, but by far the largest task we have today is cleaning up the trillion tons of climate pollution that has accumulated in our sky over the last 250 years.
CLIMATE EMERGENCY RESPONSE is a report invited by the City of Austin, prepared by a stakeholder committee I chaired and our nonprofit supported. It speaks to the scientific rationale for prematurely activated climate tipping collapses in response to climate change beyond Earth’s systems evolutionary boundaries, or a maximum safe warming target of less than 1 degree C warming above normal. This report includes 29,000 words of content, 125 in-depth references in 28,000 words, 51 images of climate change impacts mostly in Texas, and 264 links
Our Climate Emergency Response, a stakeholder report prepared at the request of the City of Austin, is a guide and scientific resource to the most recent climate science on evolutionary collapse of earth systems, commonly understood in the climate change era as climate tipping responses.
Climate Emergency Response
The Urgent and Immediate Response Needed to Reverse Activated Climate Tipping With a Safe, Sustainable and Equitable Target of Less Than 1.0˚C Warming Above Normal
September 2021
THIS IS WHAT WE SHOOT. Our focus is to bringing these collapses to the world, when the science is slow, politics cause poor reporting, and the climate change countermovement obfuscates reality.
Our climate photography work started in 2007 with a trip to Greenland, where so much ice had melted at Uummuunaq, the sun appeared on the horizon two weeks early when it rose in the spring from Greenland’s winter darkness.
Since Greenland we have been all over North America in search of climate change impacts and everywhere; there they are. The loss of environmental services is astounding: like food and raw material production, reliable water availability, regional vegetative cooling and rain propagation, stable and predictable conditions for engineering design, and carbon cycling–specifically the flipping of ecosystems from absorbing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, that has just begun but is already widespread and profound with emissions rivalling the largest emissions sectors in our human civilization.
We literally go to the ends of the Earth to bring you images of impacts from our most vulnerable areas, and from within some of the most beautiful treasures on the planet. Few know of these impacts or can identify them for what they are. Research takes years to decades for earth systems processes where data collection events occur only seldom and consequently, and where findings are still nascent on many of the impacts we witness. But seeing these impacts happening, in such extraordinary and vast ways, with repeatedly unprecedented occurrences; of course it is climate change. Our Earth systems are failing. We have warmed our global ecologies beyond their evolution.
THE AMAZON HAS FALLEN. It is now releasing one gigaton of greenhouse gases every year, twice as much as Great Britain. Three times since 2005 the Amazon has seen ever more extreme drought beyond the 100-year event and now emissions from over 2 billion killed trees from drought alone not counting fires, has overwhelmed the ability of the lungs of the planet to absorb carbon dioxide.
CANADA’s FORESTS HAVE FLIPPED and are now emitting, not absorbing, 250 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. It started in 2003, shortly after the great pine beetle attack across western North America began. Eighty percent of these emissions are from the beetle killed trees, the attack is ongoing, and now the fires loom.
OUR BEACHES HAVE ERODED AND NOW THE DUNES – Our low elevation beaches are now mostly eroded away from sea level rise and in some places the dunes have been eroded away too. The beach protects the dunes, and the dunes protect the mainland. Fifty-three times in 2019, sea level rise was eroding into the dunes on South Padre Island during non-storm conditions. More than half of these events were during King Tides when the sun and moon align to create the biggest tides of the year. A third of these erosion events however, occurred during normal non-storm, non-King Tide conditions.
THE FIRES HAVE EXCEEDED PRE-EUROPEAN TIMES and are simply astonishing. Fourteen-thousand homes were destroyed in Paradise, California in a climate change driven fury in 2018, in just 6 hours. In our old climate, excess fuels from Smokey Bear Era fires suppression policies were to blame. With warming though, fires are burning 400 degrees hotter because of drier fuels, lower humidities, lower ignition thresholds, and bigger windstorms. These multiple fire behavior enhancement drivers have now overwhelmed the excess fuels fire behavior response in forests and climate change is firmly in control of wildfires. This threshold crossing is so profound, California area burned annually has now caught up with pre-European burned area only today CalFire alone, not including the US Forest Service, spent $2.3 billion fighting fires in 2020.
TWENTY PERCENT OF UNBURNABLE SEQUOIAS BURNED – Perhaps the most meaningful climate impact from wildfire, an impact to a global treasure of the highest classification; twenty percent of all giant sequoias, unkillable sequoias, were burned in these epic fires in 2020 and 2021.
PERMAFROST COLLAPSE ONGOING – The most amazing Earth system collapse is seen be almost no one however. Permafrost collapse is now responsible for 2.3 gigatons of greenhouse carbon dioxide emissions every year on average 2003 to 2017. Permafrost was a stable and frozen Earth repository of some of the greatest sequestration capacity on the plant. In just the last half decade, warming has now created thaw collapse that has reversed the greenhouse sequestration capacity of permafrost and it is now emitting thousands of years of accumulated carbon; and the collapse has just begun.
AS GO THESE SUBCONTINENTAL ECOSYSTEMS LIKE GOES THE REST OF THE WORLD – Science is slow. Reporting has just begun. Obfuscation of causation is rampant. Because of warming caused collapse, Earth’s natural systems are emitting nearly as many greenhouse gases as all of transportation across the globe.
Very few out there are bringing these things, or even reporting a complete scientific explanation of these things to the people. The reason is because the negative propaganda has diminished the meaningfulness the science. Of course it is climate change. Reporters are afraid of being labelled so they report science findings equally to unfounded talking points from conservative voices. We must use our brains and not listen to the skeptical voices.
Even the science is reticent. If scientists are wrong, they lose the ability to publish and with it their paychecks that support their family. The consensus reports summarizing the science then understates because if one asks two experts to create a consensus statement, a compromise inevitably results. Our consensus climate science reports have dozens or even hundreds of experts.
But you can believe your eyes. What we bring are not rare worst of the worst photos. The beach really was 300 feet wide 30 years ago. One-hundred million acres of forest across Western North America have been mostly destroyed by native bark beetles driven berserk because of warming. Fires across California have now grown to pre-European size, and this is with CalFire spending $1.3 billion fighting them in 2020, when zero was spent fighting them in pre-European times. Permafrost collapse across the north is now common. In 2007 we had to go to the University of Alaska to find out where it was. Now, permafrost thaw lakes are very common.