New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to End of the World; Not To Worry; The Milky Way Died Seven (7) Billion Years Ago And Came Back To Life.

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a wimper." -- T S Elliot

New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World; Not To Worry The Milky Way Died 7 Billion Years Ago And Came Back To Life. 

The gases of stars tell a fascinating history.

New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World

Researchers are thinking about social  and how to prepare for it.

A home damaged by Hurricane Maria stands abandoned in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 17, 2018. 

At the end of 2016, before Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed, wildfires reached the Arctic, and a large swath of North Carolina was submerged under floodwaters, Jonathan Gosling published an academic paper asking what might have seemed like a shrill question: How should we prepare for the consequences of planetary climate catastrophe?

“If some of the more extreme scenarios of ecocrisis turn out to be accurate, we in the West will be forced to confront such transformations,” wrote Gosling, an anthropologist who’d just retired from the University of Exeter in England.

Almost two years later, as the U.S. stumbles through a second consecutive season of record hurricanes and fires, more academics are approaching questions once reserved for doomsday cults. Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption?

Those researchers, who are generally more pessimistic about the pace of climate change than most academics, are advocating for a series of changes—in infrastructure, agriculture and land-use management, international relations, and our expectations about life—to help manage the effects of crisis-level changes in weather patterns.

A hog farm is surrounded by floodwater in New Bern, N.C., on Sept. 21, 2018.

In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. The costs are enormous: The U.S. government is considering a 5-mile, $20 billion seawall to protect New York City against storm surges, while Louisiana wants to spend $50 billion to save parts of its shoreline from sinking. Poorer countries could require $500 billion a year to adapt, according to the United Nations.

But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.” For Gosling, that means not only rapid decarbonization and storm-resistant infrastructure, but also building water and communications systems that won’t fail if the power grid collapses and searching for ways to safeguard the food supply by protecting pollinating insects.

Propelling the movement are signs that the problem is worsening at an accelerating rate. In an article this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 climate scientists from around the world argued that the planet may be much closer than previously realized to locking in what they call a “hothouse” trajectory—warming of 4C or 5C (7F or 9F), “with serious challenges for the viability of human societies.”

Jem Bendell, a professor at the University of Cumbria who popularized the term deep adaptation, calls it a mix of physical changes—pulling back from the coast, closing climate-exposed industrial facilities, planning for food rationing, letting landscapes return to their natural state—with cultural shifts, including “giving up expectations for certain types of consumption” and learning to rely more on the people around us.

“The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war,” he wrote in a paper he posted on his blog in July after an academic journal refused to publish it. “We need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible.”

A man collects firewood on a dried up-dam in Indonesia’s West Java province on Sept. 15, 2018.

It might be tempting to dismiss Bendell and Gosling as outliers. But they’re not alone in writing about the possibility of massive political and social shocks from climate change and the need to start preparing for those shocks. Since posting his paper, Bendell says he’s been contacted by more academics investigating the same questions. A LinkedIn group titled “Deep Adaptation” includes professors, government scientists, and investors.

William Clark, a Harvard professor and former MacArthur Fellow who edited the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, is among those who worry about what might come next. “We are right on the bloody edge,” he says.

Clark argues that in addition to quickly and dramatically cutting emissions, society should pursue a new scale of adaptation work. Rather than simply asking people to water their lawns less often, for example, governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and moving cities away from the ocean.

“This is not your grandfather’s adaptation,” he says.

Diana Liverman, a professor at the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development and one of the authors of this summer’s paper, says adapting will mean “relocation or completely different infrastructure and crops.” She cites last year’s book New York 2140, in which the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the city surviving under 50 feet of water, as “the extreme end of adaptation.”

Relocating large numbers of homes away from the coast is perhaps the most expensive item on that list. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent $2.8 billion since 1989 to buy 40,000 homes in areas particularly prone to flooding, giving their owners the chance to move somewhere safer. But if seas rose 3 feet, more than 4 million Americans would have to move, according to a 2016 study in the journal Nature: Climate Change.

“The government’s going to have to spend more money to help relocate people,” says Rob Moore, a policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council who specializes in flooding. The alternative, he says, is “a completely unplanned migration of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this country.”

A wildfire burns in Karbole, Sweden, on July 15, 2018.

Cameron Harrington, a professor of international relations at Durham University in England and co-author of the 2017 book Security in the Anthropocene, says adapting to widespread disruption will require governments to avoid viewing climate change primarily as a security threat. Instead, Harrington says, countries must find new ways to manage problems that cross borders—for example, by sharing increasingly scarce freshwater resources. “We can’t raise border walls high enough to prevent the effects of climate change,” he says.

There are even more pessimistic takes. Guy McPherson, a professor emeritus of natural resources at the University of Arizona, contends climate change will cause civilization to collapse not long after the summer Arctic ice cover disappears. He argues that could happen as early as next year, sending global temperatures abruptly higher and causing widespread food and fuel shortages within a year.

Many academics are considerably less dire in their predictions. Jesse Keenan, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and advises state governments on climate adaptation, says warnings about social collapse are overblown. “I think for much of the world, we will pick up the pieces,” Keenan says. But he adds that the prospect of climate-induced human extinction has only recently become a widespread topic of academic discourse.

Even mainstream researchers concede there’s room for concern about the effects of accelerating change on social stability. Solomon Hsiang, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies the interplay between the environment and society, says it’s too soon to predict the pace of global warming. But he warns that society could struggle to cope with rapid shifts in the climate.

“If they are indeed dramatic and fast, there exists substantial evidence that many human systems, including food production and social stability more broadly, will be sharply and adversely affected,” Hsiang says.

For Bendell, the question of when climate change might shake the Western social order is less important than beginning to talk about how to prepare for it. He acknowledges that his premise shares something with the survivalist movement, which is likewise built on the belief that some sort of social collapse is coming.

But he says deep adaptation is different: It looks for ways to mitigate the damage of that collapse. “The discussion I’m inviting is about collective responses to reduce harm,” he says, “rather than how a few people could tough it out to survive longer than others.”

.....But not to worry the universe will come back, some day...

The Milky Way Died 7 Billion Years Ago And Came Back To Life

The gases of stars tell a fascinating history.

Like Bruce Springsteen says, "everything dies baby, that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." New calculations show that on a galactic level, he was correct. A new study shows that the Milky Way galaxy is currently in its second life, having previously died over a 10 billion year time period.

The new data comes from Masafumi Noguchi of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan and has been published in Nature. Noguchi proposes that stars were formed in two different epochs under two different sets of circumstances. While two-stage galaxies have been suggested for galaxies larger than ours, Noguchi has been able to confirm that a process known as "cold flow accretion" played a fundamental role in the formation of the only galaxy mankind has ever known.

Cold flow accretion refers to how galaxies collect surrounding gas during their formative process. Since stars inherit the composition of gases from which they are formed, these gases form a history of sorts, similar to how a tree's inner rings can reveal the story of its life.

Noguchi's story of the Milky Way begins 10 billion of years ago when cold gas streams containing what are known as "alpha process elements," or α-elements like oxygen, magnesium and silicon flowed into the galaxy. Stars began to form out of these gases, and once they reached their natural endpoints, they were punctuated with explosions of short-lived type II supernovae. These supernovae were rich with these α-elements.

After around three billion years or so of these alpha process supernovae, shock waves started to heat the gases up to warmer temperatures. With new temperatures, cold gas accretion slowed to a halt. During this interregnum period, type Ia supernovae, which last longer than type IIs, began to inject iron into these gases. The iron changed the elemental composition of the gas, and therefore, the stars.

These gases began to emit radiation and cool down again, and around 5 billion years or so ago a cooling flow made its way into the galaxy and began creating a second generation of stars, this time rich in iron. Among these second-wave stars include Earth's very own sun.
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The Milky Way is full of surprises. Another recent study showed that it might be twice as large as astronomers previously thought. And while 10 billion years might sound like a long time, some of the galaxies surrounding the Milky Way might be the among the oldest galaxies in the universe.