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Heat index of 150F in the shade from Heat Dome and corn sweat. Climate crisis seemingly everywhere. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-22

Fox just blamed Biden for Hurricane Hilary. “They let it right into the country because it’s Biden’s America,” the host said. https://t.co/f8wNIfpawq

Rising methane could be a sign that Earth's climate is part way through a 'termination-level transition'

Imagine accelerating a car with your foot flat down. The car speeds up but eventually air resistance equals engine power and the car hits maximum speed. In 1999, it looked like methane had reached a similar equilibrium between its sources and sinks. Then in late 2006, the amount of methane in the air climbed fast. Even more unexpectedly five years later, the rate of growth sped up again. During the 2020s the growth rate has become yet faster, faster even than during the peak of gas industry leaks in the 1980s.

Today's growth seems to be driven by new emissions from wetlands, especially near the equator but perhaps also from Canada (beavers are methane factories which pull huge amounts of plant matter into ponds they've made) and Siberia. This is a result of climate change: increasing rainfall has made wetlands wetter and bigger while rising temperatures have boosted plant growth, providing more decomposing matter and so more methane. Emissions from huge cattle lots in tropical Africa, India and Brazil may also be rising and rotting waste in landfills near megacities like Delhi are important sources too.

In the past few million years, Earth's climate has flipped repeatedly between long, cold glacial periods, with ice sheets covering northern Europe and Canada, and shorter warm inter-glacials.

When each ice age ended, Earth's surface warmed by as much as several degrees centigrade over a few millennia. Recorded in air bubbles in ice cores, sharply rising methane concentrations are the bellwethers of these great climate-warming events. With each flip from a glacial to an interglacial climate there have been sudden, sharp rises in atmospheric methane, likely from expanding tropical wetlands.

These great climate flips that ended each ice age are known as terminations. Each has a Roman numeral, ranging from Termination IX which happened about 800,000 years ago to Termination IA which initiated the modern climate less than 12,000 years ago. For example, around 131,000 years ago during Termination II, the British climate suddenly flipped from glaciers in the Cotswolds to hippopotami wallowing in what is now Trafalgar Square.

Full terminations take several thousands of years to complete, but many include a creeping onset of warming, then a very abrupt phase of extremely rapid climate change that can take a century or less, followed by a longer, slower period during which the great ice caps finally melt. In the abrupt phase of the great change that brought about the modern climate, Greenland's temperature rose by around 10°C within a few decades. During these abrupt phases, methane climbs very steeply indeed.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/22/2188793/-Heat-index-of-150F-in-the-shade-from-Heat-Doom-and-corn-sweat-Climate-crisis-seemingly-everywhere

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