Earth Dance

I woke from a dream where Ten and I were swing dancing – something, and I bet this'll come as a complete shock, we’ve NOT engaged in outside of my sleepy-bye head. We were contestants in a dance contest. There were five rounds – five dance styles with each bout named for a scientific paper on global warming.

Ya know...this could totally, like happen and shit. I could see the fun folk at MIT doing this during IAP (Independent Activities Period) month.

We started in majorly high gear with a jitterbug for The Extremely Active 2017 North Atlantic Hurricane Season. The research…finds that hurricanes on a similar scale to those of 2017 could become 1.5-2 times more frequent by 2080 – depending on how much action is taken to tackle climate change.

This was followed by an East Coast Swing for Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ...number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017 was around 70 times higher than official figures.

And, from there, we were Lindy Hopping in Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages
The paper, led by Prof Terry Hughes of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, warns that corals on the Great Barrier Reef began to die immediately in the aftermath of the record-breaking marine heatwave in 2016.

We caught a slight respite with the relatively slower paced West Coast Swing during Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat  Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world by volume consumed, and yields of its main ingredient, barley, decline sharply in periods of extreme drought and heat.

Ten and I were perspiration incarnate and utterly knackered but we rallied for the final round – a blindingly fast, wild Jive for Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Widely referred to as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, the study explored the self-reinforcing “feedback loops” that could magnify how the Earth warms in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

The dream cut out just before we finished the last dance. Probably Coco’s to blame – it was time for breakfast, don’cha know.