Short 🧵of recent #Climate measurements

Hotter … … wetter …

The flooding in Spain was made twice as likely by climate change, and the rainfall 12% heavier.

#Climate change also made the warm Atlantic Ocean temperatures that added moisture to the storm 50-300 times more likely. It used to be speculative laying the blame so firmly at the door of climate change. But the increasingly rapid work of attribution scientists means these things can be assessed within days.

New study on #AMOC Collapse published today.

We already understand how Greenland’s melting ice sheet (5 times faster now than in 2004) is adding freshwater that slows down the Atlantic’s circulation. This new peer reviewed study published in @Nature Communications shows that there is an additional pressure on the #AMOC from melting arctic sea ice.
You can see how much of the outflow from the arctic sea comes down Greenland’s east coast to the North Atlantic.

Yesterday 44 of the world’s leading climate scientists wrote an open letter about collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation (AMOC)

When I interviewed one of them about the consequences of AMOC reaching a tipping point he could barely keep it together. 🧵 They warn that further weakening of the AMOC by global heating could trigger significant changes in weather patterns, extreme temperature shifts, rising sea levels, and disruption to marine ecosystems.

“We appeal to the Nordic Council of Ministers to take this risk seriously”

Another “Don’t Look Up” moment

Ocean currents regulate the planet. Transferring heat and cold around the globe. One estimate suggests without the Atlantic Overturning Circulation (AMOC) the seas at the equator would be 20c hotter and 20c colder to the north.
Short 🧵
#Climate There is a lot of uncertainty amongst oceanographers about what is happening to the AMOC. But there is broad agreement global heating is slowing it down.

The most recent IPCC assessment says the chance of AMOC shutdown this century is low.

Five facts that the climate scientists of the IPCC wanted you to know that the petro-states successfully lobbied to bury or fudge.
1/ This weeks report is the product of a long negotiation in which all the governments of the world horse trade.

Luckily there are minutes kept of who vetoed what. Some of it is important but not critical 👇

I've just finished the latest #IPCCReport. It's written in the usual barely comprehensible climate wonk speak. But behind the jargon there's a blueprint that seems as revolutionary now as Das Kapital must have in 1867... The climate scientists don't do anything like call for the overthrow of the capitalist classes. But they use science to point to how society has to be re-ordered from top to bottom.
e.g. If we want to keep warming below 1.5 global emissions will need to peak in 2025 – three years

This is quite a slap in the face from Brussels for Ireland's care for the environment. It comes from the Director in charge of environmental implementation at the Commission speaking at a recent online conference.
Thread ...

https://twitter.com/FIEIRELAND/status/1488255757057499145

1) "About 50% of Ireland's urban waste
waters are still not collected and treated in compliance with the Urban wastewater treatment
directive"

2) "Many bird species are in serious decline, and there is even a serious risk of extinction of certain breeding species"

Journalist Murray Sayle wrote this piece about #BloodySunday just 5 days after the murders. It was spiked by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, but fifty years on remains an astonishingly accurate account of what the Army was up to. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/… Perhaps it was telling that it took a man from a colonised country (Australia) to recognise the British Army account for the tissue of lies that it was. And it was an unforgivably supine decision of Evans to not run the piece. Sayle did the right thing and resigned

Four climate experts have just made statements to the Oireachtas Environment & Climate Action Committee which is considering Carbon Budgets. Some of their analysis really raises fundamental questions about whether we are getting this right at all. In no particular order ... Ireland is subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of €2.4bn a year (CSO, 2019). At COP26 we agreed to start phasing those out, but for now Ireland plans only to produce a road map for cutting subsidies in 2024.
- Prof John Sweeney

What scientists are projecting will happen to the Thwaites Glacier in the next three to five years should be front page news everywhere today.
Short thread. The Thwaites Glacier (roughly the size of Britain) is mostly held in place by a massive shelf of ice that slows its flow in to the sea.

47% Irish people against nuclear power. 25% in favour.

@AmarachResearch ran a poll of 1600 people prompted by this evening’s Hot Mess on @RTERadio1

We posed a number of questions 1/ Q1: Should Ireland consider nuclear energy to achieve its climate change targets?

Yes: 31%
No: 42%

This story sent me down a late night research rabbit hole wondering how quarantines were enforced during the Black Death. A lot of it is still the same five centuries later.

Thread

itv.com/news/anglia/20… In Damascus at the start of the 8th century the Arab world had already come up with an embryonic form of hospital.
They then had the good sense to build entirely separate units for the treatment of leprosy.

What the hell is happening to Britain?

I have been travelling to London since the eighties but I have never come across the volume and depth of despair as presently. It has taken me until now to process something I saw on The Tube yesterday.

A man begging, reduced to involuntarily howling in exhausted anguish. Met with everything from indifference to anger.

Dublin tech bro heading to Lisbon for Web Summit is putting his best moves on a Brazilian girl in the row behind me. This is very thread-worthy. In fact this is worthy of a title:

Missed connections: A possible explanation of why the tech-bro’s failed chat up routine led to species extinction.

The Brexiteer who launched a thousand #HannanIrishHistory tweets also dabbled in futurology. Daniel Hannan’s wrote this prediction for a glorious Brexit just before the referendum I’ll just leave these excerpts here.

History and Geography were dropped as core subjects in Britain. Only 40% now study it at GCSE (junior cycle).

It’s a bit of a leap from there to #Brexit but it must be part of the background picture.

https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/1099969803131994112

History is compulsory in Britain only up until age 14. The most recent figure I can find from 2009 suggests only 4% sat a History GCSE exam. Making it less popular than Design & Technology.