Earths Oceans continue to absorb the brunt of rapid global heating in 2022. Around 93% of our incoming radiation excess is steadily raising the temperature of our oceans. Ocean temperatures are measured by a distributed fleet of measurement buoys. Another 11 zettajoules of energy was added in 2022. We haven't yet felt the full warming impact on land, due to a prolonged La Nina phase. But another El Nino excess heat climb will return again soon, this year or next.
Over the last decade, our oceans have absorbed something like 100 zettajoules. All of that comes from the current net average of three quarters of a watt per square meter of surface area retained by our atmosphere. Global heating from our greenhouse gases continues to add up.
The uncomfortable truths lie somewhere far outside our Denialist and Technophile mindsets.
It looks like our global fossil fuel civilization will keep burning until it runs out of fuel, and warming will continue past 1.5C in the early 2030's and then 2.0C and some more. Net zero by 2050 is far too late to save anything at all. Governments take global ecocide very seriously. It is now a serious crime in Australia to do anything which impedes the business as usual of burning fossil fuels.
Article from Rueters - "Dying lands: Farmers fight to save the 'skin of the Earth".
Repeated extreme weather events from global heating are increasing the rate at which civilization is denuding its soil quality and thickness. Civilization was already doing this much faster than nature can rebuild soil from bedrock minerals. This confirms how agro-systems collapse is happening now in many places. Widespread malnutrition and starvation risks are sure to follow in many regions.
There will likely be no political surprise or acknowledgement of this in our general media-ocracy, as our typical politics will continue to promote fossil fuels growth and dependency everywhere, supported by limited "green" energy systems. The news will continue to be full of celebrity doings and positive spin for business as usual, while ignoring the long predicted bad news. This is a global tipping-over point of our civilization. There is more global heating still to come.
A new era in seriously tackling climate change means that we also need to seriously tackle the protection of our carbon-dense native forests. Failure to properly protect forests makes no environmental sense nor any economic sense in a carbon-constrained world where dealing with climate change is a must.
We all have carbon hunger, but climate policies of NAB are slicker and sicker than politicians and insurers small print -
NAB’s policy is a cynical attempt to wordsmith its way out of the climate crisis - Jack Bertolus, Australian Campaigns Coordinator, Market Forces
The world is forced to have a future with less and less, except that those with large repositories of money think to avoid going there.
Dire warnings about our future destination are plentiful. We now have access to the "growing pains" and lessons of more than five decades of climate science and study of our biophysical environment. Our failures to heed them are becoming fatal. Our political and institutional systems will need to collapse or drastically change. Our impacts are the products of our population and affluent consumption. Our species future if we can still have some, will support far fewer people, and much diminished rates of resource consumption per person. A general outline of the processes we shall undergo is found in many publications, but a recent humble and sympathetic account of our self imposed predicament is in the book "An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity" by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen.
We have to figure out a different way of being in the world.
We’re in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.
National Politics almost completely hides our global climate crisis. Trends evidenced in Australia is that administrations still give out fossil fuel mining rights like lollies. Australia pays out more in mining subsidies than it receives back in royalties. Foreign mining corporations easily fund our governing political parties from their export revenues. Our foreign mining owned media blinkers electoral sentiment. Even our banks are part-owned by foreign banks with mining investments.
Money growth is ruling very badly and has no effective policy while global climate goes into failure mode. It seems that total systems collapse is the only possible consequence. Meanwhile in the USA there is evidence of a sudden Administration Panic to "find a quick solution". (Monumental plans to fix the planet) It is something to do while continuing public denial of worst case acceleration that has proven to be faster than climate model predictions.
Maybe we shouldn't have got into this known mess in the first place. To fall back to biology based economics after rapid departure of fossil fuel burning is still not in any nations stated political plans. But it is sure to come, as it is the only possible, really well known, but the most inconvenient "solution". No technology is likely to change that. Our power-down is going to be full of risks and down-fails. So fossil fuel politics has no public mitigation plans, that are going to be needed for sure because of the oncoming rapid fossil fuel addiction withdrawal.
Support for our dense populations that need a large global agriculture base is most likely to be a downfall. Production will decline from climate change fragility, loss of fossil fuel inputs, and accelerating soil exhaustion. Global heating will suppress the physiology and ecology of all "primary production". This is a problem even for sparse populations of hunter-gatherer existence. As the crisis unfolds all national governments will fail completely, just like the failure modes they are practicing now.
New coal and gas projects in Australia that are still being approved by our mining-paid politicians are bad case of eco-suicide from delusional insanity. These people need be thrown out of office for taking money from tax-payer subsidized projects that work against global climate safety.