Brian’s Comments (group member since May 09, 2013)

Brian’s comments from the Green Group group.

Have to admit, the ongoing discussion of (potentially imminent) tipping points keeps me up at night. Here's a new article from NPR on the topic:

When the planet heats up beyond 1.5 degrees, the impacts don't get just slightly worse. Scientists warn that massive, self-reinforcing changes could be set off, having devastating impacts around the world.

Such changes are sometimes called climate tipping points, although they're not as abrupt as that term would suggest. Most will unfold over the course of decades. Some could take centuries. Some may be partially reversible. But they all have enormous and lasting implications for humans, plants and animals on Earth.

...

Change No. 1: Coral reefs could be gone forever

For coral reefs, the tipping point may have already begun. Widespread coral die-offs have been seen around the globe as ocean temperatures heat up, making it the first domino to fall, according to a new report.

...

Change No. 2: Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica could collapse

Ice sheets are the massive frozen expanses that cover Greenland and Antarctica and contain about two-thirds of the freshwater on Earth. Climate change is already causing them to melt and raising sea levels around the world.

...

Change No. 3: Permanently frozen ground is thawing

Climate change is causing permafrost — the permanently frozen ground in the Arctic — to thaw. And as the Earth approaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that thawing ground will cause both local and global problems.

3 massive changes you'll see as the climate careens toward tipping points — https://www.npr.org/2025/11/19/nx-s1-...

I'm encouraged by the confluence of events / momentum around solar energy adoption (e.g., Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization). Here's a similarly optimistic article from New Scientist:

Technical, logistical and political challenges may slow the rollout of solar in some countries in the short term. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency predicted that renewable power will more than double by the end of the decade, but is set to fall short of an international goal to triple capacity by the same date. The agency said policy changes in the US and the challenges of integrating solar into grid systems were headwinds to the expansion in renewables capacity.

But energy market experts are confident that, by mid-century and beyond, solar will dominate global energy supply. “By the end of this century, it is pretty clear that we will be getting all of our electricity from renewable sources, of which the vast majority will be solar,” says Bond, estimating that as much as 80 per cent of the world’s electricity supply will be generated by solar by 2100. Added to that, at least 80 per cent of the world’s total energy demand will be electrified, he expects.

Roadblocks from politics, energy storage and infrastructure will all be cleared out of the way to usher in the green power revolution. “The human condition is to turn energy into stuff,” says Bond. “We use energy for everything. And now, suddenly, we found this cheap, universal energy source – of course, we are going to figure it out.”

Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think — https://www.newscientist.com/article/...

I find this fascinating:

The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according to a new study from UC Berkeley’s Linguistics Department and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). These findings could revolutionize our understanding of the animal world.

“In the past, researchers thought of whale communication as a kind of morse code,” said Berkeley Linguistics Professor Gašper Beguš, who is the linguistics lead at Project CETI. “However, this paper shows that their calls are more like very, very slow vowels. This suggests a complexity that approaches human language.”

The study, titled “Vowel- and Diphthong-like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas(link is external),” discovered two distinct patterns, an ɑ-vowel and an i-vowel, and several diphthong-like patterns, in whale communication. Beguš, who led the study, said that sperm whales exchange these vowels and diphthongs with each other in what seems to resemble a dialogue.

UC Berkeley and Project CETI study shows sperm whales communicate in ways similar to humans — https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berke...

Clare wrote: "Not sure if this belongs with fires or floods.

https://gizmodo.com/evacuation-warnin...

"California’s wildfire s..."

Yikes! Talk about a deadly double whammy....

Grist gives us all a little hope as we approach the Holiday season!

Earlier this month, scientists announced that humanity has kicked off the first major “tipping point” — in which an Earth system dramatically transforms, often permanently — as warm-water corals die en masse due to relentlessly rising temperatures. Think of such events like driving off a cliff: There’s no reversing back up to the edge, and the impact will be terrible.
For all the attention these disastrous milestones get from scientists and the media — and rightfully so — less discussed is the fact that they also work the other direction. Positive tipping points can unfold on a wide range of scales, from a community garden helping a neighborhood eat healthier, all the way up to the global energy system switching from fossil fuels to renewables. An individual person can even reach one, like if they decide to do more and more walking instead of driving.

...

Tipping points, then, are both an environmental curse that we desperately need to avoid, and an essential phenomenon we need to exploit to keep more of Earth’s systems from tipping. Individual sectors can positively tip, and in turn influence other aspects of the clean energy economy — momentum building upon momentum. “Once those tipping points have then been reached,” Sutherland said, “and there’s the positive feedback loop, you’ll start to see the other elements of the solutions of the system clicking into place a bit more easily.”

Good news! These ‘positive tipping points’ will help save the world. — https://grist.org/cities/good-news-th...

Sigh. Very concerning story from Inside Climate News:

For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year.

“Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course. And they’re not alone.

...

To conserve whales and other migratory marine life, Friedlaender said, static protections such as implementing marine protected areas are not enough. Instead, he said, dynamic management strategies must be created and implemented that help protect the animals as they move, such as real-time monitoring of whale movements, shifting shipping lanes or requiring vessel speed limits when whales are present, as well as stricter fishing regulations in key habitats. Ongoing research into how climate change is reshaping animal migrations around the world is also critical, Atwood said, not only to safeguard the species themselves but to protect the ecosystems they help sustain.

“Because these animals are so uniquely adapted to move across huge swaths of land and oceans, oblivious to political borders, the solutions must be just as dynamic, far-reaching, and borderless,” she said. “Effective responses therefore require an integrated understanding of projected climatic and habitat changes, species’ ecologies and behavioral responses, and mechanisms for fostering international cooperation.”

Whale and Dolphin Migrations are Being Disrupted by Climate Change — https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24...

Encouraging interview with British data scientist Hannah Ritchie in Yale Environment 360. Despite the U.S. throwing its climate action policies into reverse, she sees cause for optimism!

It has been 10 years since countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, and emissions and temperatures continue to reach new highs, fueling unprecedented weather disasters around the globe. Meanwhile, the shift to clean energy is facing powerful headwinds in the United States, where climate policies are being reversed and support for clean energy is withdrawn.

Yet, while the headlines paint a dismal picture of efforts to rein in climate change, the numbers often tell a different story. That is the assessment of data scientist Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor of the publication Our World in Data. Analyzing the broader trends on global development, she sees a world making unheralded progress in the fight to stem warming.

This Data Scientist Sees Progress in the Climate Change Fight — https://e360.yale.edu/features/hannah...

P.S.: her new book looks really cool as well: Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers

Peat may in fact be a key to mitigating (or accelerating) the impact of global climate change:

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it — https://www.vox.com/climate/464782/pe...

Ugh. This is worrisome.

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mile thick and holds 61 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, enough to raise the global average sea level by about 190 feet if it all melts. The smaller, western portion of the ice sheet is especially vulnerable, with enough ice to raise sea level more than 10 feet.

Thirty years ago, undergraduate students were told that the Antarctic ice sheets were going to be stable and that they weren’t going to melt much, said Ruth Mottram, an ice researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead author of a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the accelerating ice melt and other similarities between changes in northern and southern polar regions.

“We thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that’s really not true,” said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers and increased surface melting in satellite data.

Scientists Warn About the ‘Greenlandification’ of Antarctica — https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16...

Australia appears well positioned and poised to achieve the ability to run its power grid entirely on renewable energy in the not-too-distant future!

“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”

Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100 percent renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. ​“Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”

Australia’s March Toward 100 Percent Clean Energy — https://www.wired.com/story/as-coal-f...

Another cause for some optimism in the struggle to mitigate climate change (I admit, I'm desperately searching for good news these days... ;-):

As far as the sustainability of humanity's energy consumption, Cohan said, the world is on the verge of making noticeable gains in protecting the environment from fossil fuel use.

"Wind and solar are finally growing fast enough that not only do they offset some of the demand growth, but they actually offset more than 100% of the demand growth," he said.

"That's the tipping point at which we can start to see fossil fuel use decline," Cohan said.

Renewable energy outpaces coal for electricity generation in historic first, report says — https://www.npr.org/2025/10/09/nx-s1-...

A German company is launching carbon-capture technology at two cement works to pilot production of "zero-carbon cement."

The developments could mark a big advance in the cement industry’s move to cut emissions, long seen as one of the most challenging aspects of decarbonisation. “It’s a good step forward,” says Paul Fennell at Imperial College London, speaking of the projects in Norway and the UK.

The development of Heidelberg’s Brevik plant in Norway has been subsidised by its government. The carbon-capture infrastructure captures 50 per cent of the cement plant’s total emissions. It works by using an ammonia-derived solvent, called amine, to extract CO2 from the exhaust gases at the cement plant. The captured CO2 is then released from the solvent, liquified and pumped beneath the Norwegian seabed.

Could we have cracked one of the world's toughest climate problems? — https://www.newscientist.com/article/...

Clare wrote: "I'm pleased to say that our home now has 10 piezoelectric solar panels on the roof, and a storage battery in the attic.
We are running the house, heating water, and feeding the national grid. All ..."

That is wicked cool, Clare! Keep us posted on how they work out? We looked into solar panels for our roof a while back, but our roof orientation / structure doesn't lend itself to efficient deployment (we were told) and the panels were prohibitively expensive (for our budget). Thought about ground-level panels, but our housing association doesn't allow that. Sigh.

Very interesting and informative video from PBS Terra explaining new economic modeling that resolves the major disparities between climate scientists vs. economists with regard to the future cost of climate change:

Economists and Scientists DEEPLY DISAGREE About the Cost of Climate Change — https://youtu.be/GMf32qo7CHk?si=grVnZ...

Candidly, geoengineering to mitigate climate change impacts makes me squeamish... feels like a high-risk experiment using our biosphere as the test subject. But this potential approach — seeding the oceans to stimulate phytoplankton growth and atmospheric carbon draw-down — certainly sounds intriguing.

The tiny ocean organisms that could help the climate in a big way — https://grist.org/climate/the-tiny-oc...

As humanity lags far behind where it should be in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are turning to phytoplankton for help. They’re exploring how to fertilize the oceans like farmers fertilize crops, helping more of these microscopic organisms grow and eventually sink into the depths, taking carbon with them. But scientists are still exploring the many unknowns swirling around this sort of ocean fertilization, like where best to apply nutrients and in what forms, amounts, and proportions. And then they have to consider what unintended side effects might ripple through ecosystems.

Palm oil is obviously a huge contributor to deforestation worldwide. It appears there may be an emerging palm oil alternative that could reduce some of the pressure to expand oil palm plantations:

This ingenious new invention could mean the end of palm oil — https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/pal...

Palm oil – along with other tropical oils such as shea, coconut oil, cocoa butter and soybean – is known to be problematic for the environment.

These oils compete with rainforest for land, so contribute towards deforestation, loss of biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and air and water pollution, in Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.

Now, they [scientists at the University of Bath] seem to have found a possible solution: a yeast called Metschnikowia pulcherrima.

Researchers are using "directed evolution" to vat-grow this yeast-based oil as a potential replacement for palm oil, at least in many contexts. Sounds promising!

I just finished reading The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by environmental journalist Jeff Goodell. Wow...definitely made me sweat over the implications! I highly recommend this one. Goodell does an amazing job of describing — in agonizing detail — just what extreme heat does to the human body as internal temperature rises and bodily systems desperately try to cope. The book also explores differing macro-impacts in various parts of the world, and Goodell himself explores remote regions of the world from the Canadian Arctic Circle all the way down to Antarctica. A haunting cautionary tale told by someone who has gone to courageous lengths to capture the full scope of global heating.

Just thought I'd share that my latest eco-fiction short story, "Hard Reset," appears in the new issue (#9) of Neon Origami. Feels good to get work out there! ;-)

https://neonorigami.co/wp-content/upl...

Clare wrote: "https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/1...

"Apple has signed a deal with the only active rare earth mine under American control to begin sourcing magnets for its iDevices f..."

Very cool! We try our best to recycle our electronics, but it's painful here; in our area, we either have to wait for once-or-twice-yearly "e-cycling days" or pay for the privilege at dropoff locations. Seems crazy to me that we don't encourage e-cycling...and in fact put barriers in the way.

Now here's the kind of news story that really lifts my spirits!
Report reveals unprecedented growth in one type of energy production: 'Record-breaking' — https://www.thecooldown.com/green-bus...