Climate change

[Al_U_Card]

Thanks for the correction. The reference was for the continental US and not for Alaska and it was poorly worded.

Btw. looking at temperature records recorded at airports tends to have an inherent bias towards warming as air traffic increases. Even that record in Anchorage (AIRPORT) was mitigated by the recording method used and was not official. Global temps are mostly static and rises are generally Tmin at night. Regional variations have a lot to do with ocean-atmosphere circulation patterns and local anomalies (Alaska) are also affected by the jet stream variations (polar vortex) induced by solar (in)activity. CO2, not so much, if at all.

[Al_U_Card]

Interesting article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/25/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-replicate-climate-contrarian-papers?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0oY0EB93shnF0bwUsSnxzy4sQOFyfmGlx0gET9XoTmZt4EdGWylkWZMsA

Dana N. at the Grauniad as a source ... National Enquirer would likely be more credible.

[Cyberyeti]

Dana N. at the Grauniad as a source ... National Enquirer would likely be more credible.

 

The Guardian is not that credible, but the science it reports in this case is, WAAAAAAAY more credible than anything on the other side

[Winstonm]

This doesn't bode well:

 

In less than 20 years, millions of people in the United States could be exposed to dangerous “off-the-charts” heat conditions of 127 degrees Fahrenheit or more, a startling new report has found. In 60 years over one-third of the population could be exposed to such conditions, “posing unprecedented health risks,” the report says.

 

Or if you prefer peer-reviewed articles:

[johnu]

Btw. looking at temperature records recorded at airports tends to have an inherent bias towards warming as air traffic increases. Even that record in Anchorage (AIRPORT) was mitigated by the recording method used and was not official. Global temps are mostly static and rises are generally Tmin at night. Regional variations have a lot to do with ocean-atmosphere circulation patterns and local anomalies (Alaska) are also affected by the jet stream variations (polar vortex) induced by solar (in)activity. CO2, not so much, if at all.

More ridiculous talking points repeated without understanding them at all :rolleyes:

 

Airports temperatures increase as air traffic increases? Who thought up that stupid talking point at a climate change denier brainstorm? Yes, air traffic has been increasing since the airplane was invented. So, are you saying global warming is caused by increased air traffic? Well, airplanes do emit CO2 and other pollutants just like all equipment that uses internal combustion engines. So to the extent that airplanes increase CO2 as a small part of the overall CO2 problem, air traffic does cause temperature increase. I'm sure whoever fed you that talking point never saw that one coming.

 

The rest of your post is pretty much a jumble of nonsense. Since you don't seem to understand any of the science, you would do a lot better to just post a link and a short quotation from the article rather than try to think for yourself because that's clearly not working.

[y66]

From Francis Gooding’s review of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells:

 

How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale. Transformations that will have consequences for thousands of years to come are already being expressed in sudden crises that spring up overnight. The changes are at once planetary and minute, affecting everything from the earth’s variable ability to reflect light from the sun to the microbes inside your body. Everything, it seems, is dissolving.

 

The book’s focus is on the most direct effects of global warming – hotter temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather and so on – as well as what these effects mean for humanity. Wallace-Wells leaves out much of our disastrous impact on the natural world. He doesn’t dwell on biodiversity loss, for instance, or the details of the mass extinction that we are by all accounts now living through, though he reminds us that of the five previous mass extinctions, only the most recent was caused by an asteroid. What was responsible for the other four? ‘Climate change produced by greenhouse gas.’ The deadliest occurred 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when 96 per cent of life on earth was wiped out. High levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led to around 5°C of warming, which in turn triggered the release of methane – a much more powerful greenhouse gas – and possibly highly toxic and ozone-destroying hydrogen sulphide, produced by the anaerobic green sulphur bacteria that began to thrive in the warm oceans. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate ‘considerably faster’ than it took to cause this near-total erasure of complex life. ‘By most estimates,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘at least ten times faster.’ We may not be at anything like end-Permian levels yet, but the parallels are clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that if emissions continue to rise at the current rate, the earth could experience as much as 4.5°C of warming by 2100. Permafrost in the Arctic is already melting, with the potential to release large quantities of methane, while the hydrogen sulphide that is thought to have ‘capped the end-Permian extinction, once all the feedback loops had been triggered’, is currently ‘bubbling out of the sea’ along a thousand-mile stretch of the Namibian coast, where green sulphur bacteria have caused a vast oceanic dead zone, devoid of oxygen and life.

 

It’s by no means the only one. There are now more than four hundred such dead zones in the world’s oceans, totalling an area the size of Europe. Most cluster around cities and river mouths, where the combination of warming waters, sewage pollution and fertiliser run-off causes blooms of algae whose decay leaches oxygen from the water. Others are caused by upwellings of the green sulphur bacteria, which has survived from a primordial planetary era before oxygen, waiting in the deep ocean for a chance to turn the seas back into a toxic microbial stew. Warmer seas and the subsequent changes to ocean currents mean their chance may be coming. The Baltic Sea now contains a layer of anoxic water all year round; the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is nine thousand square miles in size; it’s possible that the recently discovered dead zone in the Arabian Sea is large enough to consume the entire Gulf of Oman. Dead zones are examined briefly by Wallace-Wells in a chapter called ‘Dying Oceans’; only briefly, because he also has to consider ocean acidification, ocean warming, coral bleaching and the attendant die-offs of ocean life, as well as the slowing and potential failure of the Gulf Stream and other currents whose movements are intimately tied to regional climate. Should this last come to pass, the results would be ‘inconceivably catastrophic’. The Gulf Stream has already slowed by 15 per cent, something which hasn’t happened for at least a thousand years. A paper from 2018 suggests that the vast ocean circulation current is moving at its slowest rate for 1500 years. According to most global warming scenarios, this wasn’t supposed to happen for another hundred years.

 

‘Dying Oceans’ is one of 12 chapters discussing what Wallace-Wells calls the ‘elements of chaos’. Each is dedicated to a particular aspect of what we can expect in a warming world, from simple increases in temperature to crop failure, freshwater shortages, and violent and unpredictable weather, as well as secondary features such as greater migration and an increased incidence of wars. The US military is ‘obsessed with climate change’, Wallace-Wells writes, and the Pentagon is actively ‘planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming’. They are not alone in thinking this way. The Chinese government is responding to the anticipated loss of military and naval bases in the rising Pacific by creating militarised artificial islands in the South China Sea, ‘a dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world’. A new era of geopolitical contest looms, and it sounds like science fiction: end-time resource wars on a dying planet.

 

The Uninhabitable Earth is an example of the class of writing the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has described as ‘ecological information data dump’: quantities of frightening and confusing information, mostly out of date by the time of publication, ‘shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts’. Morton believes this approach is unhelpful, and that it is essentially a symptom of the diffuse psychological pain caused by climate change – an attempt to prepare us for what has in fact already happened. And most of what Wallace-Wells describes has already happened. The phenomena he documents in the first part of the book are not hypothetical outcomes or doomsday prophecies: they are accounts of real events.

 

Take wildfires. Wallace-Wells concentrates on California, which has always been susceptible to burning. In 2017, more than nine thousand separate wildfires were recorded, including five of the twenty worst ever recorded in the state. Two thousand square miles burned. A similar area was destroyed again in 2018 by six thousand fires, among them a giant network called the ‘Mendocino Complex’, which blazed across four counties between July and September. It grew to be bigger than New York, destroying almost half a million acres of land. Wildfires now burn twice as much land per year in the US as they did fifty years ago, and that figure is expected to double again by 2050 to twenty million acres per year. ‘For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple.’ This isn’t just an American problem, of course: in Greenland ten times more land than usual was lost to wildfires in 2017; in 2018, Swedish forests within the Arctic Circle succumbed to fires of unprecedented size. Wildfires in Greece killed more than a hundred people during the European heatwave of 2018, the sixth highest direct death toll in the last century. A hundred thousand fires burned across the Amazon during 2017.

 

Like everything else that happens within a responsive and interconnected ecological system, fires contribute to cumulative processes. Soot and ash from boreal fires blacken the northern ice sheets, which then absorb more solar heat and melt faster. Denuded hillsides increase the likelihood of disasters such as flooding and landslides (thousands were evacuated and many killed in the mudslides that followed the 2017 California fires). Burning forests release vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. One major wildfire in California can set the emission gains of the entire state back to zero for the year, making ‘a mockery of the technocratic, meliorist approach to emissions reduction’. Recent news reports suggest that Arctic wildfires have released as much carbon dioxide in the last month as Sweden does in the course of a year.

 

The loss of forests to fire adds to the general disaster of worldwide deforestation, a major cause of increasing carbon emissions. It is estimated that, at current rates, tropical deforestation would produce a further 1.5°C of warming, even if emissions from fossil fuels stopped tomorrow. The loss of forest resulting from Jair Bolsonaro’s policy of opening the Amazon to ‘development’ could add 13.2 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere before 2030, the equivalent of almost a year’s worth of Chinese and American emissions. (Given what we now know about the consequences of unabated emissions, perhaps acts of such destructive magnitude should be recognised as a special kind of international crime.)

 

As the unprecedented disasters, terrifying statistics and nightmare scenarios continue to mount, the links between them multiply in tangled profusion. Climate scientists refer to ‘systems crises’, Wallace-Wells to ‘cascades’: tumbling sequences of events connected within a dynamic chaos of feedback loops, amplification and reinforcement. ‘Complexity is how warming articulates its brutality,’ as Wallace-Wells puts it. Most of the known feedback mechanisms look as though they will trigger even more warming. One of the key variables complicating climate forecasts is how much more carbon we will pump into the atmosphere. On that count too, the reports are dismal. Only seven of the 195 signatories to the 2016 Paris Agreement are ‘in range’ of their carbon emissions pledges. Even if every country was to keep to its target, this could still deliver more than 3°C of warming (not given to understatement, Wallace-Wells says this would ‘unleash suffering beyond anything humans have ever experienced’). The agreed ‘must-meet target’ in 2016 was 2°C, a level which will anyway almost certainly be enough to cause the collapse of the polar ice sheets, and the attainment of which is now regarded as improbable without the massive implementation of carbon capture technology, a technology that does not exist on any meaningful scale. (Nature has dismissed global warming projections based on carbon capture and storage as ‘magical thinking’.) Some estimates suggest that to keep warming below the agreed 2°C using existing technology would require ten new carbon capture plants to open every week for seventy years. There are currently 18 plants worldwide. And since the Paris Agreement, overall emissions have risen. The World Bank predicts that there will be 140 million climate refugees by 2050; the UN thinks it might be more like 200 million, or even, in the worst-case scenario, a billion. The poorest countries, which have caused least pollution, will bear the brunt of the suffering, and already do.

 

‘We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.’ He is not a climate scientist, so is perhaps less circumspect than he might be: the data here is designed to scare us. ‘I am alarmed,’ he writes. Who isn’t? We know exactly where we are, despite the continuous chatter of doubt and denial. Wallace-Wells is scathing about the oil industry, whose disinformation clogs public discourse and waylays political processes: ‘A more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.’

 

How on earth are we supposed to think about all this horror? How do we plan for the future or raise children knowing what we know? The magnitude and implications of climate change short-circuit the imagination. Wallace-Wells cites the novelist Amitav Ghosh, who has suggested that we fail to put climate change into proper perspective because we don’t yet have the stories to comprehend it. Even the refrains ‘by 2100’ or ‘by 2050’ seem more like magic charms, pushing the disaster into an infinitely receding future. Faced with a planetary-scale crisis that requires urgent collective action, contemporary minds and institutions are left embarrassingly exposed: imagining the necessary change within our political cycles, even our lifespan, appears to be an impossible leap.

 

What will real action look like, if and when it finally comes? Wallace-Wells reminds us that we have the tools to change things, and even – a rare moment of optimism – ‘to stop it all’. His remedy involves ‘a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.’ But whether the changes that are already underway could be stopped by such measures is presently moot: ‘We … haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might and cultural flexibility to install and activate them.’ Depressingly, it could have been so much easier. If decarbonisation had started in 2000, only a 3 per cent annual emissions reduction would have been necessary to keep us below 2°C of warming. The figure now is 10 per cent per year. If we wait until 2030, it will be 30 per cent. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, believes there is only one year left in which to begin this reduction. The IPCC says that global mobilisation on the scale of the Second World War will be necessary.

 

Many people, especially the young, have seen enough; like Wallace-Wells, they demand that others, especially those with the power to act, start to respond too. The pepper-spraying of Extinction Rebellion protesters in Paris in June and the claim by the former head of British counterterrorism that the group represents ‘anarchism with a smile’ illustrate how climate-related action by the public is likely to be handled, even by ostensibly liberal governments. State security services and corporate interests long ago classified environmental groups as a threat; they will not be quick to recast them as the vanguard of planetary salvation. Reporting on the environment is second only to reporting from war zones in terms of the number of journalists killed, attacked or threatened. Talk of a ‘Green New Deal’ and similar policies still belongs to political factions and activist groups, when everything we know about climate change suggests it should be the global first order of business. It may be symbolically significant for the UK government to declare a ‘climate emergency’, but what is urgently needed are vast, co-ordinated programmes of decarbonisation. The old certainties no longer apply. We are on an alien planet.

[Al_U_Card]

From Francis Gooding’s review of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells:

RCP 8.5 undoubtedly. btw, any luck on that mathematical relation between anthropogenic CO2 and global temperatures?

[Zelandakh]

RCP 8.5 undoubtedly. btw, any luck on that mathematical relation between anthropogenic CO2 and global temperatures?

You understand that that is precisely what a mathematical model is, right? Even skeptical scientists agree that such a relationship exists; the disagreement these days (outside of your posts and a few (mostly non-scientific) fringe groups) is primarily over the level of sensitivity rather than any question of there being no relationship at all. Read Judith Curry's simplified climate model papers for, essentially, a lower bound on sensitivity. There are basically two different ways of calculating the sensitivity with one consistently producing a higher value than the other.

 

Most scientists seem to believe that the higher way of calculating is generally more accurate but the question is one of the points that is not fully resolved. As I understand it, models have typically used a climate sensitivity at the lower end of the estimates from the method giving the higher figures. Since modelled global temperatures essentially generate noise around the long-term gradient, this sensitivity is a critical component and is therefore also a popular point of attack for CC deniers. Unfortunately (for you but I suppose also for the world generally) even the credible lower bounds are high enough to predict uncomfortable and dangerous levels of warming. Models that incorporate more factors (and that should be more accurate) just reduce the time taken to reach dangerous levels. If the aim of your post is to suggest that there is no relationship between anthropogenic CO2 and global temperatures though, then I am afraid you are just p!$$ing in the wind.

 

NB: I daresay you will move on to the accuracy of models next. This is not the first time for the resulting dance - where you raise some inaccurate points, the community corrects them and you just move onto the next talking point - so just refer to the last time round the loop for answers as to why you are wrong regarding the reliability of the mathematical models.

[hrothgar]

RCP 8.5 undoubtedly. btw, any luck on that mathematical relation between anthropogenic CO2 and global temperatures?

 

For anyone who is new to this thread, some quic background information

 

Al_U_Card is a long time BBO troll.

 

He started his career as a 9/11 truther 15 odd years ago. 10 years back, he shifted over to Climate Change as his pet cause.

 

He is a pathological liar, appears to be a LaRouchie and an anti semite.

 

The world will be a better place when he is dead.

With luck, his passing will be prolonged, painful, and incur crippling expenses.

[Winstonm]

Astroturfing is traditionally understood as the manufacture of a grassroots movement that is totally fake. Such synthetic grass was first cultivated in the US by the Tea Party, which would bankroll the hiring of flash-mob protesters and the swarming of news sites with the intention of drowning out discussion, and replacing it with a Tea Party ideology.

 

Today, astroturfing is not about creating the image of a unified grassroots movement, but rather the training of scores of individual crusaders to go out and crash blogs in online news sites. As such, it is an almost exclusively online affair, where participants are known as “trolls”. Trolls are supposed to look like they are acting independently, but it is alleged that they are co-ordinated largely by conservative think-tanks, like the IPA and Menzies House, the latter founded and funded by Cory Bernardi.

http://theconversation.com/astroturfing-the-climate-wars-five-ways-to-spot-a-troll-19011

[hrothgar]

Liked the following quotes from said article

 

 

Fourthly, if you web search some unique word-strings from a troll you will often find the same content cut and pasted appearing in other forums under different names, topped and tailed. This is particularly evident of trolls who have posted large slabs of text shortly after an article is published.

 

Fifthly, look at the activity pages of participants you suspect are trolls to see if they have ever sustained an argument rather than hit-and-run comments.

[johnu]

As for coolest Jan-July, post your data links.

 

July was Earth’s hottest month on record, beating or tying July 2016

 

July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded, “on a par with, and possibly marginally higher” than the previous warmest month, which was July 2016, according to provisional data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This European climate agency will have a full report for all of July on Monday, but a spokesperson said enough data (through July 29) has already come in to make this declaration.

 

Al_U_Card, it has been weeks since you claimed that Jan-July was the coolest weather in US history. Was this another one of your lies or did you just happened to read that on site that posts ridiculous stuff for the climate change deniers to have wet dreams about? Don't bother answering, that was a rhetorical question. Just for laughs, post the link where you got those whoppers :lol:

[johnu]

Al_U_Card, it has been weeks since you claimed that Jan-July was the coolest weather in US history. Was this another one of your lies or did you just happened to read that on site that posts ridiculous stuff for the climate change deniers to have wet dreams about? Don't bother answering, that was a rhetorical question. Just for laughs, post the link where you got those whoppers :lol:

 

Al_U_Card, are you confirming for the n-th time that you are just another hit and run troller? :rolleyes:

[johnu]

New UN Report Puts A Dagger Through Climate Deniers’ Favorite Argument

 

Certain named posters (e.g. Al_U_Card) have repeated sung "don't worry, be happy" about global warming because increased CO2 and warmer temperatures will actually be good for food production and animal diversity.

 

The new assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, the leading U.N. body of researchers studying human-caused global warming, warns that the unfolding crisis has already negatively affected crop growth in many parts of the world and poses a major threat to global food security. It found that some 500 million people live in areas where once-productive land has dried out and turned to desert, including parts of North Africa, East Asia and the Middle East.

 

“Food security will be increasingly affected by future climate change through yield declines – especially in the tropics – increased prices, reduced nutrient quality, and supply chain disruptions,” Priyadarshi Shukla, an author of the IPCC report, said in a statement.

....

“This argument about CO2 being good for us, good for the food system, is really pure lies and propaganda,” Sam Myers, a research scientist at Harvard University, told HuffPost.

 

Specifically, on the hoax that CO2 is good for food crops,

 

Rising CO2 Is Reducing The Nutritional Value Of Our Food

 

We now know that high levels of CO2 lead to lower concentrations of important dietary micronutrients like zinc and iron in major food crops. High CO2 also has a negative effect on the nutrient value of staple crops like soy and sorghum.

Moreover, rising CO2 can also cause some food crops to produce more toxins. Around 60% of crop species produce molecules called cyanogenic glyocosides, which can break down into cyanide. This is actually not unusual, many plants produce low levels of cyanogenic glycosides as part of their metabolic processes and for fending off insects, but some plants like cassava produce a relatively high amount. Currently, cassava is an important crop for millions, and the current levels of cyanogenic glycosides are already a problem.

In the new paper, researchers in China, Japan, the US and Australia collaborated to conduct a multi-year series of free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiments. These studies took place in a rice growing region near the Yangtze River Delta in China, and in a farming region in the Ibaraki Prefecture of Japan, between Tokyo and Fukushima.

 

At both locations multiple varieties of rice were exposed to high levels of CO2 in line with those expected by the end of the century (approx. 570ppm CO2; for comparison, we just officially passed 410ppm CO2).

 

Analysis confirmed declines in protein, iron and zinc, as expected. Researchers also observed declines in vitamins B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B5 (pantothenic acid) and B9 (folate). Though, curiously, there was an increase in vitamin E.

 

Why? It seems high CO2 affects the plants ability to build molecules containing nitrogen. B vitamins, which contain nitrogen, tended to decrease while nitrogen-free carbon-rich compounds, like vitamin E, increased.

[y66]

From Justin Gillis at NYT:

 

For a political party stocked with people who deny the seriousness of the climate crisis, the Republican Party does some curious things.

 

Did you know, for instance, that a Republican Congress put an explicit price on emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide? That was in early 2018. Companies can now get a tax credit from the United States government as high as $50 a ton for pumping carbon dioxide into the ground, instead of emitting it into the air.

 

For years, Congress has also subsidized the installation of low-emission sources of electricity like solar panels and wind turbines, a policy that has helped scale the market and drive their cost down drastically. More recently, it has offered tax incentives for the purchase of electric cars, and their costs are falling, too. Some of these policies were originally adopted when Congress was controlled by the Democrats, but the Republicans declined to kill them in the years when they held both houses.

 

A huge extension of the wind and solar tax breaks passed Congress in late 2015. Like most of these policies, it sailed through with votes from both parties and little public fighting.

 

Yes, I know the 2015 subsidies were part of a much larger, must-pass budget bill. So was the 2018 tax credit for burying emissions. But with Republicans in full control of Congress, you can bet those measures would not have gotten through unless senior people in the party had wanted it to happen.

 

Because so much else was wrapped up in these bills, you didn’t read or hear much about the buried climate policy. That, you might have already guessed, was one of the goals.

 

What exactly is going on here?

 

I got my first clue a decade ago, over lunch in Washington. I had just sat down with an eminent figure in the Republican Party to discuss global warming. As a condition of the chat, he made me pledge I would never print his name in association with the remarks he made.

 

We ordered our iced teas, and he looked me in the eye.

 

“We know this problem is real,” he said, or words to that effect. “We know we are going to have to do a deal with the Democrats. We are waiting for the fever to cool.”

 

He meant the fever in the Republican base, then in full foaming-at-the-mouth, Tea Party mode. Denial of climate change was an article of faith in the Tea Party, and lots of Republican officeholders who had been willing to discuss the problem and possible solutions just a few years earlier had gone into hiding.

 

The fever never really cooled, of course. It transmuted into the raging xenophobia and nativism that put Donald Trump in the White House. Racist demagogy about foreign invaders is his stock in trade, but he has also become the climate-denier in chief, filling federal agencies with toadies for the fossil fuel industry and crackpot scientists.

 

What the fellow told me that day still holds true: Lots of Republicans know in their hearts that this problem is real. I hereby posit the existence of something you might call the Republican climate closet.

 

Over the past decade, as denial of climate change became a central feature of Republican political identity, lots of smart people in that party felt obliged to shut their mouths. Yet in that same decade, it became more and more obvious to the public at large that we really do have a crisis on our hands.

 

Certainly, some Republicans seem to believe that scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to cook the books on climate change. But they’re not all that crazy. And you can see this in the way that bits and pieces of sensible climate policy keep sneaking through Congress.

 

As long as nobody in those red districts back home is really watching, Republican members of Congress will adopt low-key measures to help cut emissions. They especially like ones that offer additional benefits, like building up the tax base in rural communities, as wind and solar farms do.

 

To be sure, these policies are modest, given the scale of the problem. But they tell you the political situation may not be quite as hopeless as it looks. Lurking below the surface of our ugly politics is, I believe, a near consensus to do something big on climate change.

 

Yet we can never get there as long as a large majority of Republicans hide in that closet. Even if Democrats take Congress and the White House in 2020 and push forward an ambitious climate bill in 2021, they are likely to need at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate. We ought to hope for more than that. The policy will be more durable if it passes Congress with substantial bipartisan majorities, as all of our landmark environmental laws did.

 

We are, at long last, starting to see some Republicans inch their way out of the closet: a toe here, a foot there, followed by some carefully hedged statement hinting that the United States government might actually need a climate policy.

 

My favorite case is that of John Barrasso, the powerful senator from Wyoming, a state heavily dependent on coal mining. He long used his influence to block climate legislation, and only two years ago he received an award from the Heartland Institute, which does its best to deceive the public about the climate problem.

 

This year, he has come out as an advocate for climate action. And he is not just talking: He is shepherding a transportation infrastructure bill through the Senate that would, for the first time, recognize the need to limit emissions from cars and trucks, authorizing $10 billion in programs for that purpose. If it passes in its current form, that bill will be a milestone.

 

What this whole trend really tells us is that the Republicans — some of them, at least — are starting to sense political risk in continued climate denial. Their constituents, battered by the fires and torrential rains and the incessant rise of tidal flooding, are knocking on the closet door.

 

Frank Luntz, the pollster who wrote a scurrilous memorandum 17 years ago counseling Republicans to obfuscate the science of climate change, is among those who have come around. Watching Los Angeles burn from the window of his house apparently clarified his thinking. He distributed a memo to Congress in June warning that climate change was a growing vulnerability for Republicans.

 

In the coming debate, a Republican Party that came fully out of the closet on climate change would be liberated to play the role it naturally ought to play: arguing for a national climate strategy that does the least economic damage and makes maximum use of markets to find the solutions we need.

 

For those Republicans still cowering in the closet, I have a question: If we really decided to commit the nation in all its might to solving this problem, do you not believe that American ingenuity and American industry could get the job done?

[johnu]

GOP Senator John Cornyn Torched Over ‘Dumbest’ Climate Change Explainer

 

The lawmaker on Friday was widely ridiculed for the way he responded to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) call for action on the climate crisis. Schumer had tweeted about July 2019 being “the hottest month ever, of any month, on record” and described climate change as “the greatest threat facing our planet.”

 

Cornyn replied: “It’s summer, Chuck.”

A bit of an overreach because so many climate change deniers have said so many stupid things. In particular, I want to give a shoutout to our own Al_U_Card who has frequently humiliated himself far worse than Cornyn by repeating discredited and easily disproved climate denier talking points. It's unfair of Cornyn to hog the spotlight when he doesn't deserve it.

[y66]

From Noah Smith at Bloomberg:

 

As Greenland's glaciers melt, Siberia's permafrost turns to slush, the Amazon burns and the Arctic sizzles, this summer of record heat should serve as a reminder of the imminence of climate change. A warming world isn’t decades away -- it’s here now, as the carbon emissions that accelerate warming keep rising.

 

It’s critical for the U.S. to reduce its own carbon emissions to help combat this threat. A number of Democratic politicians have released sweeping plans to do this. But decarbonizing the U.S. economy won't be enough to prevent catastrophic warming, for two reasons. First of all, U.S. emissions are already dwarfed by the rest of the globe, and the disparity is increasing as developing nations catch up with rich-world living standards:

 

But even more importantly, much of the world is moving in the wrong direction. As part of its Belt and Road global development initiative, China is building coal plants in developing countries around the world. That threatens not just to increase emissions, but to create infrastructure around coal power in those countries that could lock them into reliance on fossil fuels as they industrialize. Meanwhile, fires are raging through the Amazon rainforest at a record pace, thanks in part to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s weakened environmental protections and arson by ranchers eager for more land. The Amazon's trees are vital for pulling carbon out of the air, so clearing of the ancient forest will accelerate climate change even more.

 

If the U.S. merely stays in its corner of the world and attends to its own emissions problem, it will have at most a marginal impact on the progress of climate change. This is a global crisis, and it needs global solutions. One approach is to use international accords like the Paris Agreement, which the U.S. unwisely withdrew from in 2017. We need more agreements like this, and there are plenty being proposed. But the failure of most nations to meet their Paris emissions targets, combined with lax requirements for developing nations, shows that this approach by itself is insufficient.

 

But there are several steps the U.S. can take to encourage other nations to reduce their emissions, even as it cuts its own.

 

The most obvious step is to directly transfer green energy technology to less advanced nations. This can be done through international institutions like the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, and with bilateral agreements with countries like India. The most important technology is improved energy storage, for use when wind and solar can't generate power.

 

A second approach is to subsidize U.S. exports of green technology and low-carbon products, including green energy, storage, smart grids, building conversion kits and low-carbon cement and steel. This would include helping finance foreign purchases of these products. If the rules of the World Trade Organization forbid such subsidies, then the rules should be rewritten. This idea sometimes is referred to as a Green Marshall Plan, and has been touted by some of the current crop of presidential candidates.

 

A more dramatic version of this strategy is to pay developing countries to build green-energy infrastructure like flexible power grids, electric-vehicle charging stations and energy storage facilities -- even if these products aren’t made in the U.S. This could be done through the same channels by which rich countries now offer official development assistance, or through the Green Climate Fund. Green infrastructure would help lock newly industrializing nations into using carbon-free energy sources.

 

Another idea, proposed by economist Bard Harstad, is for the U.S. and other rich countries to buy up coal deposits around the world and leave it in the ground. This will raise the price of coal relative to greener alternatives, and help prevent developing countries from building their infrastructure around coal. It also would assure that much of the fossil fuel in the world never gets burned.

 

Finally, there are more punitive measures. Carbon tariffs would tax the emissions embedded in imports, discouraging other countries from using carbon-intensive energy and production processes. The U.S. could go further, threatening to cut trade with nations like Bolsonaro’s Brazil unless they implement more stringent conservation policies. European countries are already taking some steps in this direction.

 

This last step would be a harsh and extreme policy. In most cases, it doesn’t make sense for rich countries to hold poor ones to their own environmental standards. But climate is an exception, because Brazilian deforestation and Chinese coal construction affect the entire globe. And the U.S. certainly shouldn’t seek to punish other countries for reckless environmental policies until it implements its own serious program of rapid emissions reductions. Yet in the end, steps like this may be necessary, since there’s only one Amazon rainforest in the world.

 

None of these policies is likely to be politically possible as long as Donald Trump is president, but after his departure a window for action may open. Any ambitious, comprehensive climate plan must address the international aspect of the problem.

[Winstonm]

Come gather round people who all need to breathe

and admit that you think that the air is all free

but it's paid for by burning Brazil's rain forest trees

oh, the climate it's a changin'

[johnu]

Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Rules Requiring More Energy-Efficient Bulbs

 

One part of the new standards would have required the adding of four kinds of incandescent and halogen light bulbs to the energy-efficient group: three-way, the candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers; the globe-shaped bulbs found in bathroom lighting; reflector bulbs used in recessed fixtures; and track lighting. A rule that will be published Thursday in the Federal Register will eliminate the requirement for those four categories of bulbs.

 

The Department of Energy was also supposed to begin a broader upgrade concerning energy efficiency in pear-shaped bulbs, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The department is proposing a new rule that would eliminate that requirement, subject to a 60-day comment period.

His group estimates that putting efficient bulbs in all six billion light sockets in the United States could mean $14 billion in savings in 2025, “equivalent to the electricity generated by 25 large power plants,” he said.

The dying incandescent/halogen light bulb manufacturers refuse to see the writing on the wall, and the Gasbag in Chief is more than happy to do what he can to increase global warming.

[johnu]

Global warming: Earth had second-hottest summer on record

 

The Northern Hemisphere just sweltered through its hottest summer on record, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday.

 

A whopping 90% of the population of the Earth lives in the Northern Hemisphere, where all five of its warmest summers have occurred in the past five years.

 

For the planet as a whole, the three months were the second-hottest on record. (June-August is winter in the Southern Hemisphere). Only 2016 was warmer, NOAA said. The overall trend is one of heat: Nine of the 10 highest June-August global surface temperatures have occurred since 2009.

 

Records go back to 1880.

Will the climate change deniers take off their tin foil hats long enough to spout another fringe talking point for the n'th time?

[johnu]

Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Rules Requiring More Energy-Efficient Bulbs

 

One part of the new standards would have required the adding of four kinds of incandescent and halogen light bulbs to the energy-efficient group: three-way, the candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers; the globe-shaped bulbs found in bathroom lighting; reflector bulbs used in recessed fixtures; and track lighting. A rule that will be published Thursday in the Federal Register will eliminate the requirement for those four categories of bulbs.

 

The Department of Energy was also supposed to begin a broader upgrade concerning energy efficiency in pear-shaped bulbs, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The department is proposing a new rule that would eliminate that requirement, subject to a 60-day comment period.

His group estimates that putting efficient bulbs in all six billion light sockets in the United States could mean $14 billion in savings in 2025, “equivalent to the electricity generated by 25 large power plants,” he said.

The dying incandescent/halogen light bulb manufacturers refuse to see the writing on the wall, and the Gasbag in Chief is more than happy to do what he can to increase global warming.

I may have been wrong about the Conspirator in Chief:

 

'I always look orange': Trump rails against energy-efficient light bulbs and Democratic environmental policies

 

"What's with the lightbulb?" Trump asked introducing one of several environmentally related rants in his more than hour-long remarks. He described energy efficient light bulbs as "many times more expensive than that old, incandescent bulb that worked very well" and "the lights no good."

 

"The bulb that we're being forced to use, number one, to me, most importantly, I always look orange," he said, to laughs from the audience.

Finally, an excellent reason for being against energy conservation.... B-) I hope nobody reminds him that he also looks orange in natural sunlight.

[y66]

World to Become Hotter Than Expected, Updated French Climate Models Show by Rudy Ruitenberg at Bloomberg:

 

The world may become hotter than previously expected by the end of the century, according to a major study by some 100 of the top researchers in the field in France.

 

In the worst-case scenario, average global temperatures may rise 6 degrees to 7 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees to 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to the work released by France’s National Center for Scientific Research CNRS, the atomic energy commission CEA and weather office Meteo-France.

 

That reading is about 1 degree Celsius hotter than previous projections. It’s also well above the 2-degree threshold endorsed by the United Nations. Beyond that level, storms are likely to become much more powerful and sea levels more than 1 meter higher.

 

The two updated models by the French researchers take a closer look at the regional effects of higher temperatures. They integrate the latest understanding of atmospheric physics and have higher resolution, CEA climate scientist Pascale Braconnot said in a press conference on Tuesday. All of the scenarios generated by the models predict “pronounced” and more severe global warming than the previous research completed in 2012, CNRS said in a statement.

 

“There’s a jump in quality in the result of the models for numerous indicators,” Braconnot said. “We have more confidence in the new version compared to the previous one.”

 

Updating the climate models required 500 million hours of calculations by supercomputers at Genci and Meteo-France, the weather office said in a statement. The research will contribute to part one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, expected in 2021.

 

Only one of the updated climate models used by the researchers allowed for the global temperature increase to remain below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

 

The assumptions in that best-case scenario, called SSP1 1.9, include carbon neutrality by 2060 followed by a boost for carbon capture technology. That would also require lower population growth, a priority on sustainability and strong global cooperation to reduce pollution.

 

The worst-case scenario, called SSP5 8.5, assumes rapid economic growth driven by fossil fuels.

 

In the more pessimistic scenario, all summers in France by the end of the century will be hotter than the 2003 heatwave year, CNRS climate researcher Olivier Boucher said at the press conference.

 

Across Europe, heat waves will become longer and more intense, while the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer in the last two decades of this century.

 

“In 10,000 years, we haven’t explored anything as major as what we’re doing over a period of 100 years,” Braconnot said. The global temperature difference between the last ice age and the end of glaciation was 3 to 4 degrees Celsius, she said.

[johnu]

America's great climate exodus is starting in the Florida Keys

 

The Great Climate Retreat is beginning with tiny steps, like taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas from Staten Island, New York, to Houston and New Orleans — and now Rittel’s Marathon Key. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map.

 

By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.

As the Climate Change Denier in Chief might say, why are these people afraid of Fake Water :rolleyes: Don't believe your lying eyes. Put your trust in Fox Propaganda for your most up to date climate change denier news.

[PassedOut]

Despite the droolers in the White House who deny that mankind's CO₂ emissions are causing global warming, it's heartening that youngsters around the world understand what's being done to their futures: We will make them hear us: Millions of youths around the world strike for action

 

In one of the largest youth-led demonstrations in history, millions of people from Manhattan to Mumbai took to the streets around the globe on Friday, their chants, speeches and homemade signs delivering the same stern message to world leaders: do more to combat climate change and do it faster.

 

From small island nations such as Kiribati to war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and across the United States, young people left their classrooms to demand that governments act with more urgency to wean the world off fossil fuels and cut carbon dioxide emissions.

 

Oceans are rising and so are we, read the sign that 13-year-old Martha Lickman carried through London.

 

Whose future? Our future! shouted students from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., as they made their way to the U.S. Capitol.

Policymakers dont get it, said Yujin Kim, a 17-year-old South Korean student who had traveled to New York for a U.N. youth summit. Theyre not going to be here in 30 years. And we are. Were going to keep speaking out until they listen.

 

Organizers said more than 1,100 strikes took place across all 50 states on Friday. New York and Boston public schools granted students permission to skip school for the strikes. Numerous companies closed their doors in solidarity with the youths and encouraged employees to attend the strike.

 

After hours of marching and chants and speeches in New York, the sea of protesters roared as Thunberg finally took the stage.

 

The eyes of the world will be upon them, she said of the national leaders gathering next week at the U.N. summit. They have a chance to take leadership. To prove they actually hear us.

 

She paused.

 

Do you think they hear us?

 

The crowd screamed back: No.

 

She smiled.

 

We will make them hear us, Thunberg said, adding, Change is coming. Whether they like it or not.

Well said.

 

Indisputable Facts On Climate Change

[y66]

From John Schwartz at NYT:

 

Kathryn Murdoch is sitting with a reporter in her offices in the West Village, talking about climate change and democracy.

 

This, in itself, is unheard-of. She is a Murdoch, a member of the billionaire family that controls influential news organizations on three continents, and Murdochs rarely talk to the outside press. Ms. Murdoch is married to James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch.

 

Ms. Murdoch and her husband, however, are stepping out of their family’s shadow. He had once risen to dominance in the companies, only to lose a closely watched power struggle to his brother, Lachlan. As he neared the height of his influence — in the empire, and with his father — James was running the British satellite television service Sky while nudging the company into green initiatives. In 2006, he even invited Al Gore to speak at a Fox corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, Calif.

 

But Lachlan, whose politics are more in line with those of his father, saw his star rise as James’ fell. This year, after Fox sold assets to Disney, including 21st Century Fox, for $71.3 billion, James left the company, with his portion of the proceeds coming to a reported $2 billion.

 

Now James and Kathryn Murdoch are claiming their independence from the more conservative arm of the family.

 

James Murdoch recently spoke with The New Yorker for a brief article in which he acknowledged that “There are views I really disagree with on Fox,” referring to Fox News, the channel that was his father’s brainchild and which is known for its lineup of popular conservative hosts. And, in a series of interviews with The New York Times beginning in May, Ms. Murdoch has stepped out further, in order to bring attention to the fight against climate change. That means countering the efforts of those who block progress by stoking partisan rancor or by attempting to muddy the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, and it is driven by human activity.

 

The Murdoch empire and Fox News have long had a substantial role in that muddying and stoking.

 

So this could be awkward. But to Ms. Murdoch, it is all part of her moment to go public on some 13 years of behind-the-scenes climate activism. “I’m very comfortable staying in the background and continuing to work quietly,” she said, but “I’ve decided doing that means I’m not working hard enough, I’m not doing everything in my power to do.”

 

Ms. Murdoch said that she actually got the inspiration to take on climate change from that Al Gore talk at the Fox retreat in 2006. The former vice president presented a version of the slide show that had just been turned into the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

 

In particular, the urgency of the climate crisis jolted her. “I decided to switch everything I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did everything I could.’”

 

Now, working with the nonpartisan group Unite America, she is connecting like-minded organizations that are trying to overhaul the democratic process of voting to make it less likely to reward partisanship. She is also raising funds to ensure that the network will be effective.

 

She and her husband have already invested millions in their work toward these ends, and are “anchor funders” in the larger plan, she said, with an ultimate goal that she characterized as being in the “nine figures.” (While she declined to be more specific, the lowest nine-figure number is $100 million.)

 

“I’m not saying I have all the answers — I don’t,” she said, “But what I know and what I feel very strongly is that sitting around not doing anything is the wrong answer.”

 

Ms. Murdoch’s public comments confirm what many who closely watch the intricacies and intrigues of the Murdoch empire have long believed: that she is more progressive than many other members of the family. (She calls herself a “radical centrist.”)

 

Her approach is bipartisan, but it is also clear that one party has been more resistant to action. “There hasn’t been a Republican answer on climate change,” Ms. Murdoch said. “There’s just been denial and walking away from the problem. There needs to be one.”

 

To those who defend climate science and warn of the risks that global warming poses, her emergence and use of her fortune and network of powerful friends and her famous name — which she describes as a “double-edged sword” — is welcome. “Murdoch media are notorious amongst climate scientists for their constant stream of misinformation on climate change,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “I can see how a thinking person who marries into that family might feel an urge to counter at least a little bit of the damage they do.”

 

Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Her early climate work included taking a position in 2008 with the newly formed Clinton Climate Initiative, part of the Clinton Foundation established by the former president. As for her family connections, “I was certainly aware that the other Murdochs are conservative,” the founder of the climate initiative, Ira Magaziner, said, but “it didn’t matter.” At the time, he noted, many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, had spoken about the need to deal with climate change.

 

Over the years, she has worked with organizations whose approaches to environmental action align with her own. She joined the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that often collaborates with industry on climate issues. In 2014 she and her husband created the Quadrivium Foundation (the word means “crossroads”) to fund their programs. One of those is SciLine, an independent nonprofit service that connects reporters with scientists and provides fact sheets on topics in the news like a primer in August on hurricanes and climate change.

 

She decided, however, that spreading scientific knowledge might not be enough. People already understand that the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. The deeper problem, she said, is that the government of the United States isn’t doing anything about it.

 

She took a deep dive into possible solutions to partisan deadlock and reviewed the players in the diffuse field known as democracy reform: Small groups that push for changes in the electoral system.

 

Some of the avenues her groups are pursuing include ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Proponents of this method argue that it reduces the tendency of primaries to reward candidates who work mainly to energize their base, and favors candidates who have the broadest appeal. She is also interested in initiatives to restrict gerrymandering and increase access to voting through proposals like automatic registration, as well as open primaries, in which voters do not need to declare their party affiliation.

 

Charles Wheelan, founder of Unite America, said that because of Ms. Murdoch’s surname, “it’s fair to say that in some quarters our relationship raises a few eyebrows.” But he also calls her “an important ambassador” to the wealthy and powerful, someone who can tell them, as a peer: “Look, if you really want to make the world better for your grandchildren, fix politics.”