A "natural instinct for science" by @BloggersRUs

A "natural instinct for science"

by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Greenland Travel via Flickr.

Mocking laughter erupted in the conference room as a White House adviser promoted burning coal before 200 people gathered at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland on Monday, the Washington Posts reports:

Monday’s presentation came after a weekend in which the U.S. delegation undercut the talks by joining with major oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking full endorsement of a critical U.N. climate report. The report, by some of the world’s leading scientists, found that the world has barely a decade to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.

Regenvanu was part of a cohort of small island states in the Pacific and Indian oceans that urged greater global action on limiting global warming to 1.5C; leaders from Kiribati, Samoa, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands and the Maldives argued their countries faced an impending existential threat from climate change.

• Surface air temperatures in the Arctic continued to warm at twice the rate relative to the rest of the globe. Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900.
• In the terrestrial system, atmospheric warming continued to drive broad, long-term trends in declining terrestrial snow cover, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and lake ice, increasing summertime Arctic river discharge, and the expansion and greening of Arctic tundra vegetation.
• Despite increase of vegetation available for grazing, herd populations of caribou and wild reindeer across the Arctic tundra have declined by nearly 50% over the last two decades.
• In 2018 Arctic sea ice remained younger, thinner, and covered less area than in the past. The 12 lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last 12 years.