Climate change

[PassedOut]

Was it ever? B-)

Sure.

[Al_U_Card]

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/storage/thumbnails/902844-24881091-thumbnail.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1399980109432

[y66]

From Ellen Degeneres' 2009 commencement address at Tulane:

 

I know that a lot of you are concerned about your future, but there’s no need to worry. The economy is booming, the job market is wide open, the planet is just fine. It’s gonna be great. You’ve already survived a hurricane. What else can happen to you? And as I mentioned before, some of the most devastating things that happen to you will teach you the most. And now you know the right questions to ask for your first job interview — like, ‘Is it above sea level?’ So to conclude my conclusion that I’ve previously concluded in the common cement speech, I guess what I’m trying to say is life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain. And if they like what they see, you’ll have more beads than you know what to do with. And you’ll be drunk most of the time.

Keep your shirt on. It's gonna be fine.

[mike777]

From Ellen Degeneres' 2009 commencement address at Tulane:

 

 

Keep your shirt on. It's gonna be fine.

 

No she did not say keep your shirt on

 

if anything she hints at show your boobs.

[y66]

Good story here about one grass roots organization's opposition to the Keystone pipeline.

 

One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. “One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,” she said. “People here care about their neighbors. So we were looking for a face.”

 

...

 

The culmination of the effort came at a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game in Lincoln that September, when a TransCanada ad titled “Husker Pipeline” ran on the stadium’s giant HuskerVision screen. The stadium erupted in spontaneous booing, delighting Kleeb, who later asked people to go to State Department hearings in Cornhusker red. The next week, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln announced that it was cutting sponsorship ties with the company.

 

To the leaders of the larger climate-change movement, the group’s work in Nebraska has turned the tide against the Keystone XL. Bill McKibben, one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, told me that the Cornhusker uprising was one of the first moments he thought they could actually win the larger pipeline fight. “There’s no question that that moment happened because of the work Jane was doing,” he said. Kenny Bruno, who has coordinated many of the groups involved in the movement, went even further. “Without Jane and a few other people, without their organizing and education on the route, that pipeline would have been built already.”

[blackshoe]

Some people want a pipeline, some people don't. In the end whether there will be a pipeline will not be decided by logic.

 

Same for "global warming" or whatever we're supposed to call it this week.

[PassedOut]

Some people want a pipeline, some people don't. In the end whether there will be a pipeline will not be decided by logic.

 

Same for "global warming" or whatever we're supposed to call it this week.

No one today doubts man-made global warming. The issue now is the pace of the changes it causes. Objective evidence requires accurate measurements, so Europe's Cryosat provides essential information about the rise in sea levels: ESA's Cryosat mission sees Antarctic ice losses double

 

Prof David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the Cryosat survey, commented: "The increasing contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise is a global issue, and we need to use every technique available to understand where and how much ice is being lost.

 

"Through some very clever technical improvements, McMillan and his colleagues have produced the best maps of Antarctic ice loss we have ever had. Prediction of the rate of future global sea-level rise must be begin with a thorough understanding of current changes in the ice sheets - this study puts us exactly where we need to be."

You are right that logic does not tell us what the effects of global warming will be. Evidence does.

[blackshoe]

You are right that logic does not tell us what the effects of global warming will be. Evidence does.

That is not what I said. What to do about it will not be decided by logic. But then I suspect you understood me the first time.

[billw55]

No one today doubts man-made global warming.

(comment not necessary)

[PassedOut]

What to do about it will not be decided by logic.

Maybe. The global warming problem today resembles the ozone layer problem of the last century: The Skeptics vs. the Ozone Hole

 

On June 28, 1974, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, published the first scientific paper warning that human-generated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer (Molina and Rowland, 1974). They calculated that if CFC production continued to increase at the going rate of 10%/year until 1990, then remain steady, CFCs would cause a global 5 to 7 percent ozone loss by 1995 and 30-50% loss by 2050.

 

They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. At the time, the CFC industry was worth about $8 billion in the U.S., employed over 600,000 people directly, and 1.4 million people indirectly (Roan, 1989).

 

Critics and skeptics--primarily industry spokespeople and scientists from conservative think tanks--immediately attacked the theory. Despite the fact that Molina and Rowland's theory had wide support in the scientific community, a handful of skeptics, their voices greatly amplified by the public relations machines of powerful corporations and politicians sympathetic to them, succeeded in delaying imposition of controls on CFCs for many years. However, the stunning discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985 proved the skeptics wrong. Human-generated CFCs were indeed destroying Earth's protective ozone layer. In fact, the ozone depletion was far worse than Molina and Roland had predicted. No one had imagined that ozone depletions like the 50% losses being observed by 1987 over Antarctica were possible so soon. Despite the continued opposition of many of the skeptics, the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to phase out ozone-destroying chemicals, was hurriedly approved in 1987 to address the threat.

So it is not impossible for folks to act responsibly to counteract an environmental threat.

[y66]

That is not what I said. What to do about it will not be decided by logic. But then I suspect you understood me the first time.

I suspect that even Marco Rubio will become persuaded by the logic of rising sea levels that carbon pricing makes sense.

[Al_U_Card]

Hmmmnnnn and if there was a net ice GAIN, would that make the carbon price negative? ;)

 

400 -160 = -240

 

Now, the fact that Antarctica is contributing 1 zillionth (technical term for an insignificant quantity) of a meter to global SLR while Greenland is accumulating ice and reducing it by 3 zillionths... maybe we need to be finding a price for icebergs?

[y66]

From The Obama Tapes (January 2014) by David Remnick:

 

Q.: Mr. President, when the Copenhagen pact was signed, our carbon emissions were about the same as the Chinese. Now the Chinese are double ours—double. And you’ve now had meetings with the Chinese leadership, and you know the forces that impinge on them in terms of development and lifting people out of poverty. But, as I think I remember you saying, if India and China develop at our rate we’ll be “four feet underwater.”

 

Obama: Yes, we’ve got problems.

 

Q.: What leverage do we have?

 

Obama: Well, the good news is the Chinese and Indians understand that. I may have mentioned this to you earlier—the most popular Twitter account in China is the U.S. Embassy’s daily air-quality measurement. When you talk to China experts, they will tell you that the most active, robust civic organizations, and the area where there’s been the loudest complaint about government inaction, alongside corruption, is the issue of the environment.

It's going to be fine.

[Al_U_Card]

"The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step. And it is part of the scientific attitude that the pronouncements of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the most probable on present evidence. One of the greatest benefits that science confers upon those who understand its spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive support of subjective certainty."

 

-- Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, p. 102.

[Zelandakh]

http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

Thanks Daniel, I found this very interesting, particularly the presentation from Richard Lindzen. This little section also made me laugh:

 

DR. COLLINS: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is that we are not using the models as statistical projection tool.

DR. KOONIN: What are you using them as?

DR. COLLINS: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.

DR. KOONIN: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?

DR. COLLINS: Well, I mean, it is part of the assessment process.

[y66]

Obama to take action to slash coal pollution

 

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday will announce one of the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change, a proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details.

 

The regulation takes aim at the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants. If it withstands an expected onslaught of legal and legislative attacks, experts say that it could close hundreds of the plants and also lead, over the course of decades, to systemic changes in the American electricity industry, including transformations in how power is generated and used.

 

Experts said that the new regulation would set the United States on track to meet its target set forth in a United Nations accord in 2009, when Mr. Obama pledged that the United States would cut its greenhouse gas pollution 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050

 

The proposal to be unveiled Monday will be a draft, open to public comment, and is certain to set off a wave of lobbying from states, industry groups and environmentalists seeking to shape the final version of the rule. While there is no legal deadline for finalizing the regulation, Mr. Obama has directed the E.P.A. to issue the rule by June 2015 so that the administration can begin putting the program in place before he leaves office.

Is this not cool?

[billw55]

Obama to take action to slash coal pollution

 

 

Is this not cool?

I will reserve judgment until I see a plan for how they are going to generate power, not just what they are removing (coal plants). Energy demand will continue to rise. Closing coal plants is ok, but show me how you are replacing that capacity, and increasing total capacity at the same time.

[PassedOut]

I will reserve judgment until I see a plan for how they are going to generate power, not just what they are removing (coal plants). Energy demand will continue to rise. Closing coal plants is ok, but show me how you are replacing that capacity, and increasing total capacity at the same time.

Some information on the plan is coming out today. This is from the NY Times: Unveiling New Carbon Plan, E.P.A. Focuses on Flexibility

 

The E.P.A. estimates that the 30 percent reduction in carbon pollution from power plants will be the equivalent of cancelling carbon pollution from two-thirds of all cars and trucks in America.

 

Although the rule will target coal-fired power plants, the E.P.A. says it will allow states several years to retire existing coal plants, rather than forcing the immediate shutdown of such plants. The E.P.A. estimates that under the rule, 30 percent of the U.S. electricity mix will still come from coal in 2030, down from about 40 percent today.

Lots of information yet to come, no doubt. Still it seems clear that the impact of the new rules has been considered. Because I know the resilience of the free market first hand, I don't worry about replacing that power over a period of 15 years.

 

But I'm sure that lots of politicians who fear the free market will blast the new rule over and over between now and November.

B-)

[billw55]

Because I know the resilience of the free market first hand, I don't worry about replacing that power over a period of 15 years.

It is not entirely a free market. Good luck getting a new nuclear plant started.

 

Still, the free market has already produced a thriving alternative to coal - natural gas. I'm not sure if this should be considered a success or not from a carbon reduction standpoint.

[blackshoe]

"according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details."

 

What the hell is wrong with these people? Have they no integrity?

[hrothgar]

Puffin snuff films

 

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/03/puffin-got-problems/

[billw55]

"according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details."

 

What the hell is wrong with these people? Have they no integrity?

Yes, sometimes people talk when they aren't supposed to. Other times these are planned "leaks". I know of no way to tell the difference.

[blackshoe]

If my boss came to me to set up a "planned leak," and I agreed to play his dirty little game, I would most certainly not claim that I had been asked not to reveal details.

[mike777]

fwiw saw that there are about 3 molecules out of 10,000 of Co2 in our atmosphere. Increase that to about 6 and things really start to heat up, more is an urgent problem.

 

Interestingly for the most part the sun and volcanos have little to do with huge increases in co2 compared with man made. However natural orbit changes of earth around the sun does as that effects ocean levels which have a lot to do with capturing co2 in seawater or ice.

 

Methane for whatever reasons seems to be even more dangerous compared to co2 one on one for trapping heat.

[billw55]

If my boss came to me to set up a "planned leak," and I agreed to play his dirty little game, I would most certainly not claim that I had been asked not to reveal details.

I knew there was a reason you don't work for the government http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif