Slow-Melt Irony
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One of the great turds of the US political system, Sen. James Inhofe, yes, that silly-assed Republican from Oklahoma, displayed a most-marvelous bit of horror-irony this week as he tweaked the future and all those to come after us.
Inhofe is a major big-mouth-crybaby global-warming denier — appears a fairly ignorant man.
And with the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in a couple of weeks, the pecker-head, dim-witted Inhofe claims the world is safe as nothing good comes out of Denmark.
Via HuffPost:
And Inhofe had a message specifically for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) — “We won, you lost, get a life.”
Something terrifyingly-paradoxical there.
(Illustration found here).
Whether one wants to hear it or not, or even, whether you believe/know it or not, the near-future of the planet is way-grounded in the word, change.
There’s so much afoot nowadays aimed at a really-clouded and anxious tomorrow — weather, energy, food (all the basics) — that despite all of stinky-Jim Inhofe’s blubberings will affect/effect everyone in such a profound way it’s unfathomable here writing this morning.
Read the basics on weather/climate here.
And on energy here; the basic problem on food here.
Inhofe’s mouth-off last week was in response to news the full Senate won’t get around to a climate bill until this coming spring, months after the Denmark meeting.
Last summer, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), which called for cutting US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, 83 percent by 2050.
The Senate’s slightly more ambitious bill calls for a 20-percent cut by 2020.
And from the clown who blubbered years ago climate change was “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Inhofe continues to bluster hysterical about the hysteria behind global warming alarmism:
I also said in Milan that the science is not settled.
That was an unpopular view back then.
But today, since Al Gore’s science fiction movie, more and more scientists, reporters, and politicians are questioning global warming alarmism.
I proudly declare 2009 as the “Year of the Skeptic” — the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.
…
Of course, from the most memorable tidbit from my two-hour global warming speech in July of 2003 were my comments about the science behind global warming.
Now, six years later, and as I head to the next UN global warming conference, I am pleased by the vast and growing number of scientists, politicians, and reporters all over the world who are publicly rejecting climate alarmism.
When I made those comments on the Senate Floor, few people were there to stand with me.
Today, I have been vindicated and I am proud to share the stage with all those who now dare question Al Gore, Hollywood elites, and the United Nations.
Inhofe feels “vindicated” from what?
Barbara Boxer is head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — the EPW passed global warming legislation a couple of weeks ago by bypassing bowl-obstructed GOP members, thus eliminating their participation — the guys were being asshole-jerks, they’d boycotted the bill by stubbornly seeking more EPA analysis at an estimated (and additional) $140,000 cost.
Inhofe whined about it anyway: “In the history of this, we’ve not been able to find a time when a bill has been marked up without minority participation…”
However, he does seem to get the ever-changing last laugh –spine-lacking Harry Reid’s assertion of no Senate debate on climate-warming until the snow melts.
Read a view of the Senate version of the climate bill at Climate Progress.
And adding fuel to the skeptic/denier crowd were e-mails hacked this week from the UK’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online — actually a bit to do about nothing, unless you’re scamming.
From Wired:
Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.
And one such e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:
But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it.
That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.
…
“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he (Trenberth) says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”
A good semi-insider response can be found at RealClimate.
Global warming and all its outlying complications are all too real — even a total mainstream source like National Geographic has a good interactive site on climate change — and Time magazine posed on Friday the consequences of a lame or near-non-existent agreement coming out of Copenhagen:
But there’s no getting around the fact that as the science of climate change grows more dire, the global political system seems increasingly unable to deal with that reality.
“We don’t want a global suicide pact,” said Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a low-lying Indian Ocean nation that could be swamped by global warming-caused flooding. “We want a global survival pact.”
But the world’s most influential leaders still aren’t ready for that.
Ready for what? An event way down the road, a maybe-problem for some future generation?
Not so fast…
From the executive summary of a new study (pdf) commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund International (h/t Climate Progress):
This report models the ability of low-carbon industries to grow and transform within a market economy.
It finds that runaway climate change is almost inevitable without specific action to implement low-carbon re-industrialisation over the next five years.
The point of no return is estimated to be 2014.
Re-invent modern industry in five years?
You gotta be shittin’ me!
Just follow Jumping-Jim Inhofe’s advice: ‘Get a life.’
Ponzi’s Glad Tidings
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Beware of feel-good economic news…
(Illustration found here).
Even as the US stock markets post some high gains, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which has risen over the past six sessions, also finished Monday at its highest level in a year, and even as those infamous banks appear to slowing on losses — all just a figment of fantasy.
The Dow is “flirting” with the 10,000 level this morning after opening, based primarily on JP Morgan’s huge $3.6 billion reported earnings in the last quarter, and there is festive fun for everyone!
A total financial-only gravy-train: Bigger than prior to September 2008′s Wall Street meltdown — Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007…
And from the New York Times yesterday:
In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs.
Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer.
But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.
In the face of the official line on the economy — US Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke’s blubberings last week helped fuel higher expectations and: “At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road.” — the reality is covered up by an artificial band-aid for this so-called period on ‘down the road.’
Prepare to duck, or maybe tuck-n-roll when banks use its earning in a strategy called Delay-and-Pray.
What’s to be expected, however, when the federal government is once again trying to stop financial suck-hole AIG from paying out $198 million in bonuses promised to employees of its trading unit — same shit from the same ass from last spring to the same assholes.
WTF!
Yes indeed, WTF.
Lester R. Brown, normally an environmentalist and also an early voice on global warming, has compared the world’s economy, and especially with the US, to a giant “Ponzi Scheme” that’s about to collapse around our collective ears.
In his book published earlier this month, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Brown asserts that too much of modern life is entangled in a vast overstretching of just about everything, and the planet just can’t sustain itself much longer.
The book’s first chapter, “Selling Our Future,” can be found here.
A few snips:
As recently as 1950 or so, the world economy was living more or less within its means, consuming only the sustainable yield, the interest of the natural systems that support it. But then as the economy doubled, and doubled again, and yet again, multiplying eightfold, it began to outrun sustainable yields and to consume the asset base itself.
In a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980.
As of 2009 global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. This means we are meeting current demands in part by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for an eventual Ponzi-type collapse when these assets are depleted.
…
The larger question is, If we continue with business as usual — with overpumping, overgrazing, overplowing, overfishing, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide — how long will it be before the Ponzi economy unravels and collapses?
No one knows. Our industrial civilization has not been here before.
An example question: The $3 per gallon cost of gas in mid-2009 — layered with even higher costs (finding the oil, pumping it, refining it into gasoline and delivering it)?
These indirect costs now total some $12 per gallon.
In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap.
So, this literal house of cards, what’s its future?
Reading tea leaves can be a bit tricky, but sometimes You don’t need a weather man To know which way the wind blows.
One guy who has been making accurate economic-related predictions for nearly 30 years, Gerald Celente, views another massive, maybe even worse downturn as just around the corner — or maybe even closer than the nearest corner.
Considered the most extraordinary forecaster/herald this side of Nostradamus, Celente has been right on the money with all kinds of future readings, calling 1987′s global-market-crash, the infamous “Black Monday,” to the rise of the Internet, all kinds of other shit, to nowadays and the current economic predicament: In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”
In an interview last week with the San Francisco Examiner, Celente said people need to wise up:
“We want to make it very clear that the policies leading to the decline of ‘Empire America’ have been long in the making,” he said.
“What has happened in the Obama Administration is that they have taken policies far beyond even what Bush took with the TARP program; for example, with his stimulus package, with the buyouts, with the bailouts, the rescue packages, these are unprecedented in American history.”
“Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,” Celente continues.
“You don’t even have to be a student of history to know the outcome of this.
All you have to do is have your eyes open, and start thinking for yourself.”
Celente claims nasty shit is about to hit the swirling fan: He wrote in July about what will happen within the next two years — By 2012, even those in denial and still clinging to hope will be forced to face the truth. It will be called “Obamageddon” in America. The rest of the world will call it “The Greatest Depression.”
Don’t panic — yet.
Once the panic does arrive, however, the following suggestions are suggested (from SatireWire):
- Eat your young. “It seems barbaric, but trust me, if you don’t do it, someone else will, and you’ll end up kicking yourself.”
- If you live in Manhattan and hear somebody sing “It’s Rainin’ Men,” don’t hum along. Jump out of the way.
- Diversify your portfolio. Always sound advice, no matter the economic climate.
- Set aside 10 percent of your pre-tax income for firearms.
- Will your online broker be there in a market panic? Maybe it’s time you switched to a Schwab One account. (paid advertisement)
And always carry a pencil — you just never know.
Crude Bubblin’ Bust
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A few short years ago, anyone who discussed subjects like “peak oil” were considered a crank (not to be confused with, for instance, ‘Will my car crank without fuel?’) or a nutcase or just a plain worry-wart-conspiratorial fruitcake (not to be confused with a Dick Cheney), but nowadays there’s enough evidence from authentic sources to ignite water.
The latest report outlines a “significant risk” of oil running out in a decade, another from Germany’s Deutsche Bank which spell the end of the oil era and from San Francisco, “the end of the world as we know it.”
(Illustration found here).
Peak oil, of course, is manacled hand-and-foot with global warming/climate change, though, it’s hard to tell which will seriously erupt first — coal and oil fueled the engine for an industrial society (advanced civilization) that seems about to eat itself.
A classic creation-destroying-the-creator scenario.
Peak oil is also tied to economics — when there’s no money, consumption drops and there’s less demand.
Some even ponder $6-a-gallon gas as making life better.
Catastrophic results of peak oil appear further on down the time-line, although who’s to really say about a future so entangled with so many varying variables.
This week, a gaggle of peak oil “theorists” will gather in Denver, also the HQ of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA (ASPO), to swap figures, statistics and hopefully seek solutions on how best to handle the inevitable.
According to denverpost.com:
“Up until now, technology has delivered dazzling results to America and the world economy, in delivering oil from all around the world despite increasingly challenging environments,” said Dave Bowden, ASPO’s executive director.
“The harsh reality is, despite the best efforts of amazing technology, they’re not finding as many of these big fields anymore.”
ASPO and others of its ilk push wind, solar and ocean-wave power, along with hybrid cars and use of better technologies to extract more oil — a bandage on an gut shot.
Last May, the US Energy Information Administration released its International Energy Outlook 2009 and a large oil-gulping sound could be heard: World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 73 percent, compared with an increase of 15 percent in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.
And in Alaska, peak oil and climate change collide.
From MSNBC:
Oil companies scouring the coastline of Alaska’s North Slope for new production sites are converging on the same territory as hungry polar bears trying to escape shrinking and thinning sea ice.
Polar bears have not attacked any workers recently, but oil companies are reporting four times as many sightings as they did last decade.
…
“What this appears to be is bears looking for another option because their traditional habitat is not as healthy as it used to be,” said Steve Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey. This summer, Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-lowest area on record.
(h/t The Oil Drum)
Mad Max, a damn dog and polar bears.
Climate Change Choo Choo
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There’s something I just don’t understand regarding climate change/global warming, although there’s plenty of opinions (Truism — opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one) about this horrifying weather/sky/ground/ocean-related event barreling square at humanity, and with seemingly a lot of multi-verified science to warrant near panic — Why isn’t climate change taken more seriously?
Does many more of the earth’s so-called civilized urban centers have to become Mars-looking Melbourne, Australia (depicted in the surreal artwork at left), before real action is taken — way more than just tree-hugging, plastic-hating and recycling.
(Illustration found here).
The earth is in such a fix, major adjustments are required, and from what I’ve gleaned from a little bit of knowledge (and far-less-real-science jargon understanding) is yesterday might have been too late — can mankind step back quickly from the threshold, or in the words of David Letterman, “We Are Dead Meat“?
Seemingly to me, the main focus is the mix of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere — detailed to parts per million (ppm) — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its report in 2007 with a 450 ppm as the stated goal to flatten CO2 and thus reduce global warming — in the last couple of years that benchmark, however, has been lowered, now to 350 ppm. (As an aside: I could never write any kind of science blog, just don’t got the brains — I can understand while reading, but within seconds that knowledge is most likely replaced by something off ‘Family Guy’).
Best site to stay informed is climateprogress.org — a good timely piece was posted there this afternoon with the timely and apt title: Is it just too damn late? Part 1, the Science.
The short answer: No.
The money snip:
I don’t think the basic story should be a surprise to regular readers of this blog. We’re in big, big trouble, and we’re not yet politically prepared to do what is necessary to avert catastrophe — as I’ve said many times. But that is quite different from concluding it’s too late and we’re doomed.
A good rendition/background and the economics of the 450 ppm and the 350 ppm CO2 situation can be found here.
The big problem that I can see is the advancement of climate change — a lot of these scientific research papers and reports are based on models and a lot of science-laced predictions.
Climate change is happening faster than previously supposed — stories here and here.
A snippet from the site Global Warming:
The IPCC Fourth Report confirms that over the past 8,000 years, and just before Industrialisation in 1750, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increased by a mere 20 parts per million (ppm).
The concentration of atmospheric CO2 in 1750 was 280ppm, and increased to 379 ppm in 2005.
That is a whopping increase of 100 ppm in 250 years.
For comparison and at the end of the most recent ice age there was approximately an 80ppm rise in CO2 concentration. This rise took over 5,000 years, and higher values than at present have only occurred many millions of years ago.
Another factor in the ability to combat approaching bad levels of climate change is the intense and turbulent anxiety of the age — most-likely for the vast bulk of US peoples climate-change consequences are just on the peripheral vision of thought, if there at all.
Two horrible wars — one about to implode — a coming oil problem and a US economy described as a dead man walking does present major preoccupation notions.
Only time will upset the cart.
Earth’s Frantic ‘Wake-Up Call’
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Global warming is not only about oceans and weather, but also the land.
(Illustration found here).
Just as more bad global warming news gushed forth — sea level rise, unprecedented regional droughts, and, the Arctic is warmer than its been been for 2,000 years — comes research that indicates the land masses of earth (the ground) will be literally shifting as well.
From UK’s The Guardian this morning:
Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.
Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.
…
“Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).
“Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something,” added McGuire, who is one of the organisers of UCL’s Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, which will open on 15 September.
…
“Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes. It is a wake-up call to Terra Firma,” McGuire said.
Yes, maybe so…
Cold Methane Gets Hot
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A shitload of cows standing around farting — Not!
Another brick in the wall as a research team has found that a powerful global warming component, methane gas, is seeping from the Arctic seabed, which is nothing new (a study last year revealed the methane time bomb), but for the first time the process appears to be at a faster rate than previously figured.
From the BBC:
Professor Tim Minshull of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton told BBC News: “We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen and that’s an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world.”
…
Professor Minshull said: “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”
This is another indicator global warming is much further along than anyone supposed just months ago, and this methane gas phenomenon is a baddie, it creates way-more heat and rising temperatures than does carbon.
Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period — the Arctic region is heating up, so warm apparently, the permafrost lid on the sea floor developed holes, thus leaking methane up though “methane chimneys.”
The principal component of natural gas, methane is extremely combustible.
(Illustration found here).
Heat over ice seems to be hotter than anywhere else.
Methane burps to the surface and becomes an unpredictable, flammable entity.
According to history these “burps” can be near-fatal to humanity as complied in Michael Benton‘s When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, when most of all things living were nearly wiped out by a quick, CO2/methane overload.
Methane apparently has been in the air for eons, but human mechanical industry really, really put the icing on the cake, so to speak: The abundance of methane in the earth’s atmosphere in 1998 was 1745 parts per billion, up from 700 ppb in 1750, before the start of the Industrial Revolution.
The environmental problem facing the planet is nearly-beyond catastrophic.
In an increasingly interesting age with glaring, heinous financial meltdowns, unreasonable perpetual wars and other such-tomfoolery, it’s easy to overlook something coming at us slowly and easily like a comfortable form of mass asphyxia.
Read a good analysis and background on the methane “burps” at Climate Progress.
No Longer ‘Just Around the Corner’
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One of the most-alarming aspects of climate/weather change/global warming is the science — the most current report is always worse than the previous one and sometimes the figures are amazing.
Just a couple of examples can be found here and here.
If this trend continues, and most-likely it will, the very-near-future will assure there will cease to be any kind of global warming deniers — the reality of the horror will be staring us in the panic-stricken face.
Maybe the climate mutation won’t be as quick and violent as depicted in the film, “Day After Tomorrow,” but who’s to really say as science seems to continually confirm the environment is accelerating toward the whacked.
(Illustration found here).
So this from the BBC on how one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was just a decade ago:
A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year.
Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise.
The work by British scientists appears in Geophysical Research Letters.
…
Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years.
…
One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to global sea level.
“But the ice trapped behind it is about 20-30cm of sea level rise and as soon as we destabilise or remove the middle of the glacier we don’t know really know what’s going to happen to the ice behind it,” he told BBC News.
“This is unprecedented in this area of Antarctica. We’ve known that it’s been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
In 2006, the Christian Science Monitor reported:
Global warming appears to be pushing vast reservoirs of ice on Greenland and Antarctica toward a significant, long-term meltdown.
The world may have as little as a decade to take the steps to avoid this scenario.
…
By 2100, spring and summer temperatures in the Arctic could reach levels that trigger an unstoppable repeat performance, they say.
Over several centuries, the melt could raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, submerging major cities worldwide as well as chains of islands, such as the present-day Bahamas.
The US would lose the lower quarter of Florida, southern Louisiana up to Baton Rouge, and North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
The ocean would even flood a significant patch of California’s Central Valley, lapping at the front porches of Sacramento.
As noted that report was from two years ago when things seemed fine and dandy.
Welcome to the new movie, “The Day After Yesterday.”
(Another great h/t to Climate Progress).
Wood-Be Inferno
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Via ClimateProgress this morning:
We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively.
Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.
This outlook is painted in a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050.
Moderate (or medium) is the focus of the above weather synopsis, both in CO2 emissions and warming temperatures.
However, reality might be different.
Last March, the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change met in Copenhagen, Denmark, with more than 2,000 registered participants and nearly 1,600 scientific studies from researchers in more than 70 countries.
A key finding:
Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.
For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived.
These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events.
There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.
The IPCC is The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tasked by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.
The panel was established in 1988 and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
And the IPCC’s worse-case scenario?
Again from ClimateProgress:
The A1F1 scenario takes us to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of 1000 ppm (parts-per-million)in 2100 — otherwise known as the end of human civilization as we have known it.
Actually it’s worse than that.
The 2001 IPCC report largely failed to model amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks.
The 2007 IPCC report, which began to consider such feedbacks, warns that even averaging 11 GtC (billion metric tons of carbon) a year this century could take us to 1000 ppm.
Complicated is not the half in the science of global warming — immediate and current physical impacts does, however, like more tornados, longer hot spells and bigger forest fires.
And the best online site I’ve discovered is Climate Progress to somewhat explain this phenomenon that’s taken not-so-long to get here.
Climate change/warming/cooling in itself appears to be a natural state of the planet, depending upon many variables
There’s even been a “Little Ice Age” somewhat recently (not millions and millions of years ago, anyway), from the late 14th century to the end of the 19th century, but the real change in climate change came just 150 years ago.
The Discovery Channel online has a fairly simple global-warming timline, outlining the movement of climate down through the eons:
The Industrial Revolution added a new player to the climate game: Humans.
Suddenly, we were burning coal and oil in vast amounts and releasing huge amounts of carbon-rich greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
All that carbon has been locked up deep in the earth, where it could not interfere with the climate.
So there you are.
Stormy Days Of Fever Heat
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The earth is indeed melting away.
(Illustration found here).
Clouds, those wispy, sometimes dark and ominoness floating forms we all take for granted as part of our natural environment whenever we look up — when clouds move into together and won’t let the sun shine in, everyone gets a little bit sad.
Now start crying as it seems a cloud can kill — eventually.
From the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science comes research into cloud cover and its impact on global warming:
Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.
Because of inconsistencies in historical observations, trends in cloudiness have been difficult to identify.
The team broke through this cloud conundrum by removing errors from cloud records and using multiple data sources for the northeast Pacific Ocean, one of the most well-studied areas of low-level stratiform clouds in the world.
The result of their analysis was a surprising degree of agreement between two multi-decade datasets that were not only independent of each other, but that employed fundamentally different measurement methods. One set consisted of collected visual observations from ships over the last 50 years, and the other was based on data collected from weather satellites.
“The agreement we found between the surface-based observations and the satellite data was almost shocking,” said Clement, a professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami, and winner of the American Geophysical Union’s 2007 Macelwane Award for her groundbreaking work on climate change.
“These are subtle changes that take place over decades. It is extremely encouraging that a satellite passing miles above the earth would document the same thing as sailors looking up at a cloudy sky from the deck of a ship.”
And what about some top secret US military pictures from high above the earth which enhance the shocking effect (and truth) of a dying planet?
The last guys in charge of the US hated the words, “global warming,” and so did everything in their power to censor any science about the subject.
Declassified US military spy-satellite photos taken over the past decade reveal water and very little ice over the Artic — bad global-warming evidence, suppressed by George Jr and his boys, just released by President Obama’s administration.
From the UK’s The Guardian:
One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow.
One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore.
A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.
The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice — a record loss — were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.
Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.
…
Disappearing summer sea ice poses considerable dangers, scientists have warned.
Ice shelves are used by animals such as polar bears as platforms for hunting seals and other sea creatures. Without them, they could starve.
In addition, ice reflects solar radiation.
Without that process, the Arctic sea could warm up even more.
The phenomenon threatens to set off runaway heating of the planet, say climatologists.
And what about funds for keeping track of this runaway climate thing?
The latest revelations have triggered warnings from scientists that they no longer have the funds to keep a comprehensive track of climate change.
Last week the head of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Professor Jane Lubchenco, warned that the gathering of satellite data — crucial to predicting future climate changes — was now at “great risk” because America’s ageing satellite fleet was not being replaced.
This ‘thing’ with climate change/global warming is most-likely its appearance as a snail’s pace of a problem and won’t effect anyone in a long, long time — humans react to more immediate dangers first.
The big problem is that the problem is already here — what was once confined to the tropics is now in middle America.
From Bloomberg:
Mosquitoes that can transmit dengue fever, a disease that’s sometimes fatal and is more common in the tropics, are now found in 28 U.S. states and may extend their reach further as temperatures warm, a study said.
(Illustration found here).
The reasearch study from the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group, also reported dengue infections have multiplied by thirty in the last 50 years, with as many as 100 million annual cases and 22,000 deaths worldwide.
Mosquitoes are tough-skinned little sumbitches — they can more easily survive and spread when winters are milder, so global warming may increase transmission.
Hey, don’t kill the freakin’ messenger — even David Letterman knows us humans are in reality ‘Dead Meat.’
Beyond There Lies Their Lies
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Still more grim news, but today’s particular sack of shit is more ethics and morals than anything else.
Three stories that reflect our times — strange/bad and getting worse — and how lopsided situations have become as if a giant screw is being tightened down.
The first item concerns a near-invisible US horror — coal ash dump-ponds, of which there are 1,300 nationwide, some up to 1,500 acres, holding tons of toxic mush full of arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium.
Last December, one such ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville,TN, busted and spilled “5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep” of toxic sludge.
So the more-interesting this found at HuffPost:
Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States?
So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can’t publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.
The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States — or a storm or some other disrupting event — could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.
There are 44 sites deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency to be high hazard, but Boxer said she isn’t allowed to talk about them other than to senators in the states affected.
“There is a huge muzzle on me and my staff,” she said.
“Homeland Security and the Army Corps [of Engineers] have decided in the interests of national security they can’t make these sites known,” she said.
Odd, huh?
And this a view on the validity/reality of those US government stats concerning the current financial/economic meltdown — a look at that set of principles known as the Pollyanna Creep.
From SmartMoney:
If the theory has a chief architect, it is John Williams, a semi-retired grandfather of five living in Oakland, Calif.
The son of a chainsaw importer, Williams sold the family business in the 1970s and began consulting for corporations, recalculating government economic data to arrive at what he says were more reliable measures, and with them, truer forecasts.
Today Williams runs Shadow Government Statistics from his home.
For $175 a year subscribers get economic data and analysis adjusted to back out the accumulated effects of what Williams has dubbed the Pollyanna Creep — Pollyanna being the orphan protagonist of the 1913 children’s book who learns to play the “glad game” to find cheery perspectives on life’s sorrows.
In other words, he provides figures he feels are properly miserable, to offset government ones he says are too prettied-up.
If Williams is right, unemployment is over 20%, gross domestic product is shrinking by 8% and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7%.
His forecasts border on apocalyptic.
The government is creating so much new money, he says, that the all but inevitable result is hyperinflation, where “your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.”
Buy physical gold, he advises.
And finally, a bit on the double standard imposed by the US on the “rest of the world” in times of trouble.
A post from BoingBoing:
Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz contrasts the American response to its economic crisis with the measures it shoved down the throats of poor countries during their crises, and discusses why rich-world double-standards (“Buy American/European” provisions in bailouts that only discriminate against poor countries) contribute to a global disillusionment in the values that the rich world nominally espouses: democracy, transparency, and so on.
“Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw.
During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures — even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving.
America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks — and demanded that the government not bail them out.
What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed.
To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero.
Banks are being bailed out right and left.
Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis.
Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises.
Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it.
America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word.
In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics.
American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.
Shit.
Toxic waste, assets and ethics.
Oil-A-Goner
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Just as I get my Jeep Commache finally running right and back on the road — a near-two-year traumatic odyssey — fuel prices at the pump are starting to go up again, rising 20 cents in less than a month.
Here in northern California, we’re now paying $3.25 a gallon, well above the national upwardly-mobile US average of $2.63 a gallon.
This particular increase, however, has reportedly started to act oddly beyond the summer supply/demand bullshit, and gas-pump prices might be finally reflecting the affects of what’s termed “Peak Oil.”
Crude oil closed at near $73 a barrel today, its highest point since last October.
The planet’s biggest oil fields are past peak production, declining 6 to 7 percent a year, and the end of easy, cheap fuel is near-about finished.
And the end has been a-coming awhile.
US oil production peaked in 1970, has dropped ever since and now imports about 60 percent of its oil.
The UK gushed with oil from the North Sea in the 1970s, but the field started to bust flat without warning in 1999, knocking the Brits from global oil producer to importer.
A most-excellent observation on this quickly-approaching energy disaster is from Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The Geopolitics of Energy, proclaiming the official end of cheap oil in a piece today at tomdispatch.
Klare says word comes from the US Department of Engery’s annual International Energy Outlook (IEO) report — bad moon rising.
A few snippets from Klare’s post:
Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands.
For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level — a peak — and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos.
Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil’s actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.
Until recently, Energy Information Administration officials scoffed at the notion that a peak in global oil output was imminent or that we should anticipate a contraction in the future availability of petroleum any time soon.
“[We] expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century,” the 2004 IEO report stated emphatically.
…
For example, any significant increase in biofuels use — assuming such fuels were produced by chemical means rather than, as now, by cooking — could substantially reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, actually slowing the tempo of future climate change.
On the other hand, any increase in the production of Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, and Rocky Mountain shale oil will entail energy-intensive activities at staggering levels, sure to emit vast amounts of CO2, which might more than cancel out any gains from the biofuels.
In addition, increased biofuels production risks the diversion of vast tracts of arable land from the crucial cultivation of basic food staples to the manufacture of transportation fuel.
If, as is likely, oil prices continue to rise, expect it to be ever more attractive for farmers to grow more corn and other crops for eventual conversion to transportation fuels, which means rises in food costs that could price basics out of the range of the very poor, while stretching working families to the limit.
As in May and June of 2008, when food riots spread across the planet in response to high food prices — caused, in part, by the diversion of vast amounts of corn acreage to biofuel production — this could well lead to mass unrest and mass starvation.
Read Klare’s entire post here.
‘Climate Refugees’
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Still more bad news from the war on weather.
Changes in climate the next few years will create a disaster scenario beyond even the old chesnut of “biblical proportions” as all kinds of bad shit will force the mass movement of many peoples.
From Agence France-Presse today (via Raw Story):
Tens of millions of people will be displaced by climate change in coming years, posing social, political and security problems of an unprecedented dimension, a new study said on Wednesday.
Estimates of the likely numbers range from 25 to 50 million people by 2010, while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has pitched a figure of 200 million by 2050.
…
“Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before,” its authors warned.
“Climate change is already contributing to migration and displacement.
“All major estimates project that the trend will rise to tens of millions of migrants in coming years. Within the next few decades, the consequences of climate change for human security efforts could be devastating.”
The report, “In Search of Shelter,” was compiled by specialists from Columbia University in New York and the United Nations University, and from a non-governmental organisation, CARE International.
…
In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels will rise by up to 59 centimeters (23 inches) before 2100 due the expansion of warmer waters.
But this figure does not factor in a partial melting of massive ice sheets in western Antarctica and Greenland, a scenario now identified by more recent research.
The new report urged policymakers to develop tools to identify regions and populations at risk of being displaced by climate change.
…
The report admits that the definition of a climate migrant is complex, as poverty, a run of bad harvests or civil strife are usually the immediate, and thus most visible, triggers for displacement.
The term “climate refugee” is shunned by UN organisations, as “refugee” is a term with legal connotations under the 1851 Geneva Convention.
And why can’t humans get their shit together and do something?
In the US, this is one reason.