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Global warming, climate change, and some key concepts and facts

• Weather versus climate (where is the temperature changing?)
• Global warming–average global increase in temperature
• Greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases (sources and sinks, climate vs weather), the atmosphere
• Glaciation (The Wallowas (to the right–East Fork of the Lostine River, carved by a glacier), a moulin in Greenland)
• Milankovitch cycles (precession, tilt, Eccentricity) explained
• from the plane over Greenland (glaciers, ice sheet, fjords):

• A Greenland glacier calving 
• Lakes, whirlpools, and moulins
• Dark snow (and reduced albedo)
• Rivers and melting patterns
• Ever heard of an Ice bridge? Ice sheet (and the infamous Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier)?
• Greenland ice sheet time lapse? Arctic sea ice melt

Some effects (see NASA’s page)

• • rise in sea levels (how would this affect human settlements?)
  • Maldives, Kiribati, Marshall Islands (hundreds of Marshallese live in Union County)

Laws of thermodynamics

• • First, energy can be neither created nor destroyed–it’s just transformed.
  • Second, transformation as suggested is usually from a ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ quality of energy (entropy). For instance, hydroelectricity is used to turn on a light bulb, which gives off heat–as well as light (some kinds more than others). The heat is often unusable, a ‘waste product.’ Where does it go??

Other impacts

• • severe weather (what’s happening where?)
  • US trends (from NASA)
  • coral bleaching (caused by warmer oceans)
  • Acidification of oceans, possible changes in ocean currents
  • AMOC, (recent research calls into question an imminent ‘tipping point’)
  • NASA animation of thermohaline circulation
  • Thawing permafrost (considerable land mass involved) releases methane (Siberia) and creates a positive feedback loop (permafrost melts, carbon released, atmosphere warms, melting more permafrost, etc.)
  • Altered climates (what will this to do plant and animal habitats, life?)
  • Spread of diseases

Key questions, issues

• Is warming actually occurring? At what pace? Where? How fast? Anthropogenic causes (and urban-rural population trends and energy use)
• Is it caused by humans (CO2 concentrations and the famous Keeling Curve, 1000 years back, 24,000 years,  and much longer)?
• Key sources
• Sinks–Where is carbon stored?
  • In vegetation (tropical forests are critical, because they are multi-layered and lush with carbon-fixing plants, and they do not have a dormant season as many plants in the temperate [upper latitude] regions; plankton in the ocean fix carbon, but they also die, sink, and can change the pH in the ocean, making it more acidic and perilous for shellfish; when tropical forests are replaced by grasslands [that is, when ranching and grazing replace the forest ecosystem], their capacity to store carbon is greatly diminished)
  • Other natural sinks include soil (though less so where annual, industrial cropping prevails), permafrost (frozen soil, which is melting in the upper latitudes and releasing large amounts of methane, see links above)

Impacts–extreme weather and disasters

• Map–US disasters of over $1 billion damage, 2022, 2023, 1980-24 
• Costs–US, disasters by type, 1980-2024
• Map–US sea level rise, 2050 and 2100
• Map–Potential ‘tipping events‘, globally
• Map–US, community resilience index
• Map–Global disaster alert and coordination
• Map–Global drought and water stress