Set aside for a minute the Joe/Vlad face-to-face on the shores of peaceful Lake Geneva, or even the nauseous, toxix Repubican party here in the US, seeking to erase democracy, or the outbreak of vicious gun violence that’s sweeping this country — mass shootings are being normalized by their countinous occurrence — or maybe a docket of other shitstorms festering all over, to concentrate on most-likey the greatest threat facing us, all of mankind, in the immediate near-future — climate change.
No shit.

Naturalist David Attenborough last February called climate change ‘“the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced.”‘ A point covering a lot time and a lot of people.

The latest bad environment news comes via the Arctic, sort of the ‘canary-in-the-coal mine’ for global warming as it’s the initial heat-central for a roasting planet and results/studies from the biggest expedition to that most-north lands reveals we could already have triggered the tipping point for irreversible climate change:

#UPDATE The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest expedition to the Arctic warned Tuesday pic.twitter.com/y6ArHiDu02

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) June 15, 2021

The scientist who led the mission has a better-listen-to warning — from Agence France-Presse yesterday:

“The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” said Dr Markus Rex.

“And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion.”

Dr Rex led the world’s biggest mission to the North Pole, an expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 countries.

The expedition returned to Germany in October after 389 days drifting through the North Pole, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free summers in just decades.

The €140 million (S$225 million) expedition also brought back 150 terabytes of data and more than 1,000 ice samples.

Presenting their first findings, Dr Rex said scientists found that the Arctic sea ice had retreated “faster in the spring of 2020 than since the beginning of records” and that “the spread of the sea ice in the summer was only half as large as decades ago”.

“Only the evaluation in the next years will allow us to determine if we can still save the year-round Arctic sea ice through forceful climate protection or whether we have already passed this important tipping point in the climate system,” he added.

Last October, Dr.Rex and his expedition returned home after the time in the Arctic — background via The New York Times, updated in December 2020:

After a year spent drifting across the top of the world, frozen in sea ice, a German research ship returned home on Monday, ending the largest Arctic science expedition in history, one aimed at better understanding a region that is rapidly changing as the world warms.

The ship, the Polarstern, docked at its home port of Bremerhaven nearly 13 months after it left Norway.
In October, it became deliberately frozen into the ice north of Siberia, about 350 miles from the North Pole, and drifted north and west for thousands of miles, leaving the little remaining ice for good late last month between Greenland and Norway.
…
“It’s a historic milestone for Arctic research,” Markus Rex, an atmospheric scientist at the institute and the expedition leader, said at a news conference.
“We come back with a pool of data and samples that will change Arctic research for a long time.”

Yet shortened our time to react to the quickly-advancing heat — apparently they analyzed their ‘pool of data‘ and spun-it out to our discomfiture:

And to add insult to injury, another deep dive into science and mankind’s desire for burning fossil fuels — a new study indicates the earth is confining great amounts of heat, the most in since forever — per The Washington Post this afternoon (beware, another one of those ‘worse than we first figured‘ reports):

The amount of heat Earth traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land, according to new research from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented,” said Norman Loeb, a NASA scientist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“The Earth is warming faster than expected.”

Using satellite data, researchers measured what is known as Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun, and how much it’s able to shed, or radiate back out into space.

When there is a positive imbalance — Earth absorbing more heat than it is losing — it is a first step toward global warming, said Stuart Evans, a climate scientist at the University at Buffalo.
“It’s a sign the Earth is gaining energy.”

That imbalance roughly doubled between 2005 and 2019, the study found.
“It is a massive amount of energy,” said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study. Johnson said the energy increase is equivalent to four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once.
“It’s such a hard number to get your mind around.”
…
That extra heat, especially in the oceans, will mean more intense hurricanes and marine heat waves.

“I hope the heating doesn’t keep going at this clip,” Loeb said.
“It’s not good news.”

No shit, bro:

Back to your regular scheduled programing…

(Illustration out front found here).