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Lake Buchanan, Highland Lakes, Central Texas, Drought of record, 2013. Texas recorded its worst drought ever in 2011-2013, which was more extreme than both the Dust Bowl and the Drought of the 50s (which usurped the Dust Bowl in Texas). Since, the highland Lakes have remained in significant drought. D major drought returned to central Texas in 2020 and is as severe as the most recent drought of record, so far.

Climate Triad

Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Douglas fir mortality from balsam adelgid at Kuwohi (Clingmans Dome) lookout. The non-native balsam wooly adelgid is a pin-head size sap sucker that attacks stressed trees in mass. It takes a while, but unless the stress is removed, mortality follows attack. This attack started 30 years ago, and some regeneration has occurred, but it is being hampered by warm tolerant species taking over the Doug fir’s mountain-top habitat. This adelgid species was introduced to North America in about 1900. Outbreaks remain today in these remnant high altitude forests.

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Steering Circle Members

Red kill, spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) in Engelman spruce, south Central Colorado near the New Mexico border at 11,000 feet. Over 100,000 million acres in western North America have been killed by native bark beetles since the turn of the century. The cause is water stress from warming. The first major attacks were from the mountain pine bark beetle (dendroctonus ponderosea). This attack is now waning as the mountain pine beetle has destroyed almost all large stands of its preferred hosts of ponderosa and lodgepole pine. Beginning about 2015, attacks from native fir and spruce beetles began ramping up and are now comparable to the worst of the mountain pine beetle’s attack.

Why We Are Here

Lodgepole and ponderosa pine killed by the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) near Steamboat Lake State Park, Colorado. These aggressive native bark beetles, driven berserk from warming, have killed over 100 million acres of forest across North America in an attack that is two orders of magnitude larger than anything known. Today, these beetles have killed almost all of their favorite large stands of ponderosa and lodegepole and the attack is on the decline. Continued warming however, has allowed less aggressive native bark beetle species that prey upon fir and spruce to now become dominant with an attack that is beginning to rival the aggressive mountain pine beetle’s attack.

Who We Are

Image Description – Ilulissat Icefjord This is the Ilulissat Icefjord in Greenland (Greenlandic: Ilulissat Kangerlua). It is fed by the Jakobshavn Glacier (Greenlandic: Sermeq Kujalleq, Danish: Jakobshavn Isbræ), and is the largest ice stream draining the Greenland Ice Sheet, just outside of the town of Ilulissat on the west coast and just north of the Arctic Circle. It is about thirty-five miles long, five miles across and 3,000 feet deep where the stream enters the ice sheet from the terminus of the icefjord. The Jakobshavn has increased its ice discharge of giant bergs, bergy bits, and melange since warming began, until about 2010 when the glacier reached a pinning point and it’s rate of increase stabilized where the icefjord entered the ice sheet. It has since re-accelerated in 2018 and the calving front has now significantly penetrated the ice sheet. The icefjord is usually stagnant and quiet, while calving events at the face of the glacier continue to jam icebergs and melange into the relatively narrow icefjord, until a threshold is reached and pressures burst a stream of bergs into Disco Bay, that feeds Baffin Bay then south into the North Atlantic. The sound of these burst events may be unparalleled in nature, with millions of pieces of ice from the size of a pea to bergs weighing tens of millions of tons all smashing against one another in a wild rush to the sea.

Cooling Solutions

Sandbergs calving into the Gulf of Mexico at South Padre Island… Up the wild four-wheel drive beach on South Padre Island, Texas, beyond the sand nourished million-dollar beaches of the tourist zone, the beach is gone at high tide and in some places the dunes have been completely eroded away. This image was during a King Tide in 2017 when the beach was entirely impassable at high tide. This image was taken at low tide. In the distance, the blocks of sand dunes with the similarly angled slopes are sandbergs that are calving into the surf as each wave runup erodes a little more from the bottom of the dune and eventually it slowly slides down into the surf. See more images of beaches erosion from sea level rise here – https://climatechangephoto.org/beach-gallery/

What Is Geoengineering

Forest clearing, beginning about 8,000 years ago, removed 40 percent of global forests by 3,000 years ago and 50 percent by 250 years ago, with an additional 10 percent removed to today. Prior to human’s fossil fuel emissions, forest removal, prevented sequestration, and subsequent animal husbandry and agriculture, created about 1 degree C of warming, contributing to the longest interglacial warmth period known, that allowed humankind to advance our civilization from half a billion to eight billion souls. Clearcut forest, Joseph Kellerer, Unsplash, Creative Commons.

Risks

A crevasse on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Crevasses can be deadly, but often in the warm(ish) season, snow that hides the peril is melted or ablated away. The edges of the crevasse may be pitted with small razor edged inch-wide depressions that threaten with only the smallest amount slipperiness. Crevasses can be relatively shallow, or they can extend to bedrock, thousands of feet below. They often serve as drains for meltwater on the surface, with interconnecting crevasses deep within the ice serving as a plumbing system to shunt almost all meltwater to the bottom of the ice. This melt water accumulates enough that it can actually float the ice sheet up above its bedrock base and lubricate its flow to the sea. This action mostly happens in abrupt movement events where the ice sheet can surge tens to hundreds of feet before stopping. in a tremendous earth, or rather an icequake, of up to magnitude 5.1 on the Richter scale, or enough to badly disrupt a settlement in a developing nation.

Ethical Considerations

Red kill, lodgepole pine (Dendroctonus ponderosae) Central Colorado north of Silverthorne on I70. Over 100,000 million acres in western North America have been killed by native bark beetles since the turn of the century. The cause is water stress from warming. This continental-scale attack is now waning as the mountain pine beetle has destroyed almost all large stands of its preferred hosts of ponderosa and lodgepole pine. Beginning about 2015, attacks from native fir and spruce beetles began ramping up and are now comparable to the worst of the mountain pine beetle’s attack.

Pushback

Wind turbines in South Texas, seen from Padre Island National Seashore. The Laguna Madre, between the Seashore and the mainland, is a narrow body of water a mile or two wide at most that extends over a hundred miles landward from Padre Island from north of corpus Christi to Brownsville and the Mexican border. The wind turbines line the mainland just inland of the Laguna shore. Atmospheric conditions in this image created a mirage that optically raised the foreground so that it appears the wind turbines are under water. This makes for a great photo, but it is a mirage, not real; not photoshop.

Climate Restoration

Steamboat Lake State Park, near Steamboat, Colorado. A field of alpine sunflowers set against an extreme mountain pine beetle kill in lodgepole an ponderosa pine.

What Can I do

Permafrost Thaw, Glenn Highway, Alaska. Most permafrost is mostly ice. When it melts, it creates lakes with drowned vegetation. Sometimes the lakes drain away leaving bombshell-pockmarked landscapes. Sometimes they remain lakes. All emit fossil greenhouse gases in large quantities when thawing and thawing has just begun. Most is extremely deep with depths up to a half mile in Alaska and a mile in Russia.

Climate Tracking

Coalition Work

Reduce – Sustainable Emissions

Wind generators in South Texas as seen across the Laguna Madre from the back island flats on Padre Island.

A mile inland on the Greenland Ice Sheet, near Point 660, 18 miles from Kangerlussauq on the east coast, down the longest road in Greenland, near the Arctic Circle. The darkest discoloration is from rock ground off by the ice sheets’ movement and twisted up to the surface by ice turbulence form bedrock obstructions. The rest of the dark coloration is dust from up to a hundred millennia, from as far away as Siberia. the dust mostly stays on the surface as the ice melts because it is trapped in uncountable small inch-size depressions in the ice caused by extra melt from the warmth absorbed by the dust. the ice sheet is about a 1,000 feet thick here.