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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/morning-briefing/u-s-sends-message-iran-1-million-species-under-threat-n1002256

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2012- Most of the world's population dies, but those at the top of society would survive!!!

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2012- Most of the world's population dies, but those at the top of society would survive!!!

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https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj5zoL91q3iAhWCsJ4KHd8QBTIQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dvdsreleasedates.com%2Fmovies%2F20%2F2012-(2009).html&psig=AOvVaw1HgqSO9XnpbfLm5Ed3rvc_&ust=1558564392563961

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Perhaps a more pessimistic argument for (in favor?) of the voluntary extinction movement, from one of my favorite comedians.

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The Earth has already warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century. Now, a major new United Nations report has looked at the consequences of jumping to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius.

Half a degree may not sound like much. But as the report details, even that much warming could expose tens of millions more people worldwide to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. Half a degree may mean the difference between a world with coral reefs and Arctic summer sea ice and a world without them.

Status of coral reefs worldwide:

Small changes, big impacts

The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, warns that these dangers are no longer remote or hypothetical.

Nations have delayed curbing their greenhouse gas emissions for so long that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is now all but inevitable. At current rates of warming, the world will likely cross the 1.5 degree threshold between 2030 and 2052, well within the lifetime of most adults and children alive today.

And 1.5 degrees is a best-case scenario. Without an extremely rapid, and perhaps unrealistic, global push to zero out fossil fuel emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher this century looks more likely.

Each time the Earth heats up an extra half-degree, the effects aren't uniform across the planet. Some regions, such as the Arctic, will heat up two to three times faster. The Mediterranean and Middle East regions could see a 9 percent drop in water availability at 1.5 degrees of warming and a 17 percent drop at 2 degrees, according to one major study cited in the report.

"If you're looking at this one region, which is already water-scarce today and sees a lot of political instability, half a degree makes a really big difference," said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, the head of climate science and impacts at Climate Analytics and the lead author of that study. "It's a good reminder that no one experiences the global average temperature."

The odds of extreme weather events like severe heat waves or powerful rainstorms also don't go up uniformly with an extra half-degree. The number of extremely hot days around the world, for example, tends to rise exponentially as the global average temperature increases, the report said.

The risk of tipping points

The report also highlights the possibility that even modest amounts of warming may push both human societies and natural ecosystems past certain thresholds where sudden and calamitous changes can occur.

Take coral reefs, which provide food and coastal protection for half a billion people worldwide. Before the 1970s, it was virtually unheard-of for ocean temperatures to get so warm that swaths of corals would bleach and die off. But as global average temperatures have risen half a degree in that span, these bleaching events have become a regular phenomenon.

With an additional half-degree of warming above today's levels, the report said, tropical coral reefs will face "very frequent mass mortalities," though some corals may adapt if given enough time. But at 2 degrees of total warming, coral reefs are in danger of vanishing entirely.

It is less certain when other long-feared tipping points will occur, such as the irreversible disintegration of the vast ice sheets on top of Greenland or West Antarctica. But the report warns that these ice sheets could potentially start to destabilize with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, committing the world to many more feet of sea level rise for centuries to come.

The report also warns that vulnerable areas, like many African countries and small island nations, may struggle to cope with multiple impacts. Crop failures, heat waves and the expansion of malaria-carrying mosquitoes compound when they occur together.

"You're not just adapting to one thing at a time, you're adapting to everything shifting at once," said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of public health at the University of Washington and one of the lead authors of the report's chapter on climate impacts.

Beyond 1.5 degrees

At the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris in 2015, countries promised to hold total global warming to well below 2 degrees and agreed to "pursue efforts" to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Leaders of small island nations, like the Marshall Islands and Maldives, had deemed that lower goal essential to their survival.

At this point, however, both goals are starting to look wildly out of reach. If you add up all the national pledges made in Paris to curb emissions, they would put the world on track to warm around 3 degrees Celsius or more.

Holding warming to 1.5 degrees, the report said, would entail a staggering transformation of the global energy system beyond what world leaders are contemplating today. Global greenhouse emissions would need to fall in half in just 12 years and zero out by 2050. To stay below 2 degrees, emissions have to decline to zero by around 2075. Virtually all of the coal plants and gasoline-burning vehicles on the planet would need to be quickly replaced with zero-carbon alternatives.

In addition, the report said, the world would have to swiftly develop and deploy technology to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year - using technology that is still untested at large scales.

"My view is that 2 degrees is aspirational and 1.5 degrees is ridiculously aspirational" said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University. "They are good targets to aim for, but we need to face the fact that we might not hit them and start thinking more seriously about what a 2.5 degree or 3 degree world might look like."

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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Why Half a Degree of Global Warming Is a Big Deal

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The Earth has already warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century. Now, a major new United Nations report has looked at the consequences of jumping to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Half a degree may not sound like much.

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The living conditions of animals like polar bears seem like a clear foreshadowing of what the fate of humans will look like if the issue of climate change is not addressed properly.

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Climate change causing loss of habitat. Who’s next?

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IRobot -- even though the movie was quite a meme

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IRobot -- even though the movie was quite a meme

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Robots that were originally meant for human good develop their own goal: destroy humans. The older generation of robots tries to save the humans, but are overtaken by the newer destructive robots.
(there are positive uses of AI, but if it gets out of our control...)

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This article is not about Trump. This is about Wall-E.

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Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with current events. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They're all fair game. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was. The movie of the week for June 3 to 9 is Wall-E(2008), which is available to digitally rent on , , , and Google Play.

When Pixar released Wall-E in 2008, it was described as an "environmentalist parable" so often that director Andrew Stanton felt the need to disavow the label.

"I don't have a political bent or ecological message to push," Stanton told New York magazine. "I don't mind that it supports that kind of view - it's certainly a good-citizen kind of way to be - but everything I wanted to do was based on the film's love story, the last robot on Earth, the sentence that we first came up with in 1994."

Whether or not Stanton "meant" it to be an environmental tale is irrelevant. Wall-E is the tale of a little robot left alone on earth to clean up after humans literally trashed the place, then took off for a comfy life in outer space, where their rapacious need for consumption has turned them into blobs who can't stand and move on their own. (What happened to the poorer inhabitants of Earth is left out of the film, probably to make it suitable for children.)

Meanwhile, Wall-E pushes trash and compacts it into cubes, until a glowing orb of a robot named EVE shows up and brings him to the humans' outer space home, along with an organism that suggests Earth may not be done quite yet.

And with the planet's future - and the living conditions of its inhabitants - on everyone's mind following President Donald Trump's announcement that the United States will be leaving the Paris agreement, Wall-E may be exactly the kind of movie we need to revisit.

Surprisingly enough, the film's genius is probably due to Stanton's assiduous efforts to stay "neutral." There are no familiar slogans or symbols easily identified with a politicized notion of the environment anywhere in Wall-E. Instead, the film paints a pretty stunning picture of the deleterious effects of letting two things continue unchecked: a society's insatiable need to consume (cheap products, entertainment, food, resources), and private industry's drive for profit when it overtakes public good. (The ship on which the humans have escaped is wholly owned and operated by the same company - cheekily named "Buy n Large" - that ran Earth into the ground.)

Wall-E's vision of the future is a cautionary dystopia wrapped up in a children's tale, and a very funny and skillfully made one, too; the film's first 40 minutes are virtually wordless, a masterpiece of modern silent filmmaking. Yet while we're squealing over the cute robots, we can't forget to imagine the world that gave rise to Wall-E 's trash-strewn wasteland and its more well-off humans' disintegration into helpless, shapeless flesh globules who've lost the ability to create, think, or have real relationships. Futuristic science fiction is at its best when it makes us take a hard look at our own world.

Watch the trailer for Wall-E:

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Now is the time to revisit Wall-E, perhaps the finest environmental film of the past decade

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Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with current events. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They're all fair game. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was.

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Melting of the Stein Glacier in just four years

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Melting of the Stein Glacier in just four years

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Photo on top is the Stein Glacier on Sept. 17, 2011 and the bottom is taken on Aug. 20, 2015. Dramatic change has undertaken in just four years due to global warming.

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Bill Nye Getting Really Mad About Climate Change *language warning*

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Bill Nye Getting Really Mad About Climate Change *language warning*

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I wasn't sure how to link the video directly, but here's an article with the video in it. Bill Nye is one of those figures that a lot of people grew up seeing (at least in the US) and so to see him this angry was wild! ... he's definitely right though and people should be freaking out about it, it was just wild to think of Bill Nye doing this... it's somewhat comical though and draws attention to the issue, basically talking to our generation who grew up watching his videos and now can watch this new one.

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What The Netherlands is projected to pay for extra flood management measures in the future (on top of the 6 billion Euros we already pay for water management each year).

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What The Netherlands is projected to pay for extra flood management measures in the future (on top of the 6 billion Euros we already pay for water management each year).

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Humans aren't Living in Harmony with Nature No More

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Humans aren't Living in Harmony with Nature No More

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Humans aren't Living in Harmony with Nature

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Humans aren't Living in Harmony with Nature

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Hi folks,
tomorrow we'll be talking about how stories help us imagine the possibility of human extinction. To give us an archive of "source material" I'd you to please post an image or (brief) text or film clip that you find productive or provocative for thinking about human extinction. I've gone first...