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Earth in Human Hands

Earth is in Your Hands

From Clearwater, Florida

GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:

Trendlines, we are looking at trendlines today. Data, the data changing as time passes. We need to step back and have perspective. We need to look closely, to see with detail as time rolls by. Measure-to-Manage NASA says, science advises as we guide our 'Spaceship Earth. GreenPolicy360 recommends listening and, as a guide, following 'good science.'

GreenPolicy360 believes in personal responsibility to manage wisely. We are planet citizens and Planet Earth is in human hands.

Together we are guiding our planet home into the future. We are delivering a legacy to future generations.

We, all of us, have entered a climate crisis and one of GreenPolicy360's greatest concerns is global climate change, as all our readers and sharers know. The scientific Earth Science studies we set in motion a half century ago are returning their results. We are looking at this data, studying it, observing trendlines into the future... This reality is our legacy and responsibility.

Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth

Earth Science Vital Signs

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Green_Politics_with_GreenPolicy360

Planet Citizen Action

Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070

Associated Press (AP)

• https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-ap-top-news-climate-change-pollution-science-bdcdb1e537c2f23becb3960fbd4a8ed8

(AP) — In just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can’t afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle, a new study said.

With every 1.8 degree (1 degree Celsius) increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study.

'How many people will end up at risk depends on how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions are reduced and how fast the world population grows.

Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution — which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days — the study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas. That’s a third of the projected 2070 population.

Too Hot

Future of the Human Climate Niche

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.

May 26, 2020

Significance

We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.

Abstract

All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.

• https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

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Earth in Human Hands, Earth in Your Hands, Our Hands

Read a Sample from the book by David Grinspoon

https://eapsweb.mit.edu/third-annual-william-f-brace-lecture-david-grinspoon

About David Grinspoon:

David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist, award-winning science communicator, and prize-winning author. He is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and adjunct professor of astrophysical and planetary science at the University of Colorado. Grinspoon's research focuses on climate evolution on Earth-like planets and potential conditions for life elsewhere in the universe. He is involved with several interplanetary spacecraft missions for NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency. In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress where he studied the human impact on Earth systems and organized a public symposium on the Longevity of Human Civilization.

His new book "Earth in Human Hands" was named a “best science book of 2016” by NPR’s Science Friday. His previous book “Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life ” won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Grinspoon has been recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for Public Communication of Planetary Science by the American Astronomical Society.

Can a Planet Be Alive? Yes!

Global Climate Strike, Student Action

Kids in 123 countries strike to protect the climate

“This movement had to happen, we didn’t have a choice.”

Via Vox

An estimated 1.4 million young people in 123 countries skipped school Friday to demand stronger climate policies in what may be one of the largest environmental protests in history.

Students Worldwide Striking to Demand Climate Action Change

Going Global: Student #ClimateStrike

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A Healthy, Hopeful Planet, Our Future, Our Responsibility

The Great Challenge: Life on Earth, Preserving and Protecting

In the Age of the Anthropocene

“We are living in the middle of a mass extinction today, but none of us feel that urgency, or that it really is so.”

-- Dr. Gerta Keller, Princeton University

Sudan, the last of his Rhino kind

The 8 Million+ Species We Don’t Know

By Edward O. Wilson

March 3, 2018 / New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/opinion/sunday/species-conservation-extinction.html

The most striking fact about the living environment may be how little we know about it. Even the number of living species can be only roughly calculated. A widely accepted estimate by scientists puts the number at about 10 million. In contrast, those formally described, classified and given two-part Latinized names (Homo sapiens for humans, for example) number slightly more than two million. With only about 20 percent of its species known and 80 percent undiscovered, it is fair to call Earth a little-known planet.

• To effectively manage protected habitats, we must also learn more about all the species of our planet and their interactions within ecosystems.

The best-explored groups of organisms are the vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes), along with plants, especially trees and shrubs. Being conspicuous, they are what we familiarly call “wildlife.” A great majority of other species, however, are by far also the most abundant. I like to call them “the little things that run the world.” They teem everywhere, in great number and variety in and on all plants, throughout the soil at our feet and in the air around us. They are the protists, fungi, insects, crustaceans, spiders, pauropods, centipedes, mites, nematodes and legions of others whose scientific names are seldom heard by the bulk of humanity. In the sea and along its shores swarm organisms of the other living world — marine diatoms, crustaceans, ascidians, sea hares, priapulids, coral, loriciferans and on through the still mostly unfilled encyclopedia of life.

Do not call these organisms “bugs” or “critters.” They too are wildlife. Let us learn their correct names and care about their safety. Their existence makes possible our own. We are wholly dependent on them.

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Warming Oceans

Phytoplankton & Photosynthesis

Plankton: The Ocean Food Chain & Atmospheric Oxygen

"Tiny Blue Green"

More than Meets the Eye

"A single kind of blue-green algae in the ocean produces the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take"

~ from "The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One" by Sylvia Earle

TinyBlueGreen

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/TinyBlueGreen

Visit the 'tiny little unseen ones' @GreenPolicy360

Seventy percent of the Earth's surface is ocean and here,

in myriad life forms, "tiny blue-green" organisms are essential to preserving life on the planet

producing in their photosynthesis vast quantities of life-enabling oxygen in our atmosphere...

and the 'tiny life' support all life, as we consider Earth Day and an All Species Day

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The Unseen and the Seen

The "Tree of Life" 1.0

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Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth

It's All Related

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