Coming Soon to a Planet Near You
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Health, Madness | Leave a Comment
Quiet and kind of warm here this early Tuesday morning on California’s northern coast, a disarming false front to the hushed riot building all over the world.
As US peoples go ga-ga over gay rights — who gives a fat-rat’s-ass who the couple is next door when the neighborhood is on the brink of a firestorm.
Strong, relatable words from the film ‘Titanic:’ Yes. In an hour or so…all this…will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
(Illustration found here).
One route to reducing the obesity problem in the US — no more stuff to eat.
From Businessweek/Bloomberg this morning:
“We are living as if we have an extra planet at our disposal,” WWF International Director General Jim Leape said in the report.
“We are using 50 percent more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast.
By 2030, even two planets will not be enough.”
…
“Similar to overdrawing a bank account, eventually the resources will be depleted,” the study’s authors wrote. “At current consumption rates some ecosystems will collapse even before the resource is completely gone.”
The results from the World Wildlife Forum in its biennial Living Planet report and this a boost to the all-growth concept of Western civilization, which it appears as a type of suicide.
And in more simple terms as explained by the director of conservation sciences at the WWF, Colby Loucks, who compared mankind to bad houseguests: “We’re emptying the fridge, we’re not really taking care of the lawn, we’re not weeding the flower beds and we’re certainly not taking out the garbage,” Loucks said.
The problem, of course, is such death-throes bullshit such as this on the oil shale supposedly underneath Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, and why should we worry:
But with current U.S. daily oil consumption running at about 19.5 million barrels, the staggering amount of Green River reserves would by itself supply domestic oil consumption for more than 200 years!
…
Even if development is 15-20 years away, the vast untapped energy resources of Green River, the largest oil shale deposit in the world, provide additional support for the idea that “peak oil” is “peak idiocy.”
Climate change is the biggest nut humanity will ever crack — if we can, but the odds are appearing less and less in the good range with most people only way-dimly aware of the horror coming.
In this the more-neglected peoples are responding, such as the trials and tribulations of Bangladesh, due to the fact climate change has become an every-day reality to them, not just a far-away theory.
From Climate Central and the problem in a nutshell:
“I am quite amazed at how people are grappling with climate change and are adapting,” said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist who is head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and an adviser to the Bangladesh government on how to adapt to climate change.
“It’s by far the most aware society on climate change in the world,” Huq said.
“It has seen the enemy and is arming itself to deal with it.
The country is now on a war footing against climate change.
They are grappling with solutions.
They don’t have them all yet but they will.
I see Bangladesh as a pioneer.
But Foreign Minister Dipu Moni notes the rub:
“The people being affected are not the big banks but the poor.
Our plight goes quite unnoticed.
It does not make the rich countries produce trillions of dollars overnight.
It’s a shame, but we keep trying.”
Yes, a dying shame, and not a good sign at all.
Connect The Dots
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Media, Weather | Leave a Comment
Despite all my efforts to keep track of shit, I’d never heard of Climate Impacts Day — the event launched by Bill McKibben’s 350.org — until this morning and was reading Dr. Jeff Masters, where he talks about how climate change is altering our weather in the worse way.
And the entire process is geared toward ‘connecting the dots‘ between all the global extreme weather the last couple of years to climate change — the intent to maybe force asshole politicians to attack global warming like they do gay people.
(Illustration found here).
Apparently, however, we can’t leave it to the MSM — nightly news coverage of climate change has dropped 72 percent between 2009 and 2011 (Media Matters).
Meanwhile, Dr. Masters at his WunderBlog pretty-much sums it up:
Connecting the dots between human-caused climate change and extreme weather events is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.
One the one hand, the underlying physics is clear — the huge amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide humans have pumped into the atmosphere must be already causing significant changes to the weather.
But the weather has huge natural variations on its own, without climate change.
So, communicators of the links between climate change and extreme weather need to emphasize how climate change shifts the odds.
We’ve loaded the dice towards some types of extreme weather events, by heating the atmosphere to add more heat and moisture.
This can bring more extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy downpours, and intense droughts.
What’s more, the added heat and moisture can change atmospheric circulation patterns, causing meanders in the jet stream capable of bringing longer-lasting periods of extreme weather.
And this shit ain’t gonna stop until…
UPDATE
Yesterday morning, I wrote about the Heartland Institute’s horrifying PR stunt of comparing people who know and understand climate change to Charles Manson and Fidel Castro.
The shit didn’t stick — Heartland pulled the whole project in less than 24 hours.
What assholes!
Read the results at DeSmogBlog.
Climate A Go-Go
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Weather | Leave a Comment
Moist weather here early this morning along California’s northern coast — a seemingly continuous drizzle which turns into a deep, wet fog and then back again.
Fairly normal, though, for this region, but it still gets old, and everyone appears jolted with a zest for life at each sliver of sunshine, which comes infrequently.
Rare last Sunday, however, was an EF-1 tornado with winds between 73 and 112 miles-per-hour punching across a portion of southern France, south of Toulouse, a near-unprecedented twister which collapsed walls, uprooted trees, and cars moved out of place.
The storm was accompanied by baseball-sized hail — France has about three tornadoes a year, compared to the nearly 500 reported in the US since 2009.
Welcome to weather’s new-normal.
(Illustration of tornado in southern France found here).
Along with the twister, Europe felt the heat last weekend with records set all over — Moscow was at 84 degrees last Sunday, a new record since data collection began 130 years ago, authorities said.
The reason is a large low pressure system off the coast of France pumping hot air from the Sahara Desert northwards into Europe, which should be keeping things real-warm the remainder of the week.
In my humble observation, there’s never been an event so humongously-devastating as climate change in the history of the entire-whole world, and apparently the shit is getting worse.
Which might be a good thing.
US peoples are starting to take more notice — a poll a couple of weeks ago: When invited to agree or disagree with the statement, “global warming is affecting the weather in the United States,” 69 percent of respondents in the new poll said they agreed, while 30 percent disagreed.
And:
“Most people in the country are looking at everything that’s happened; it just seems to be one disaster after another after another,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz of Yale University, one of the researchers who commissioned the new poll.
“People are starting to connect the dots.”
Some people — others are criminally lying.
Nut-house Heartland Institute, a right-wing, bat-shit crazy bunch, unleashed a new bowel-movement aimed to further confuse the issue of global warming.
An excerpt via Care2.com:
The Heartland Institute is clearly attempting to sway people into thinking that those who accept that global warming is happening are marginal kooks: “The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. … The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”
The assholes know they’re on the fringe, but these clowns will one day pay as their children and grandchildren will end up loathing their name — if there’s any grandchildren of anybody’s still alive.
Folks, climate change is real-bad shit.
Bill McKibben at tomdispatch calls climate change “the most important story of our time,” and time’s a-wasting:
This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up.
The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on.
But — as with the tobacco industry before them — the evidence has simply gotten too strong.
…
The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is… the news.
Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate.
In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming.
Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge.
Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change — and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.
…
If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.
People always ask me after we starting talking about the weird weather: Do you ‘believe‘ in global warming?
And as always, I tell ‘em climate change ain’t no religion, it don’t depend on a belief system or any other mode/function in a dream-like state to know reality from delusion.
Real as a sharp pain in the guts.
The rub, however, is greed for economic growth.
From Grist yesterday:
It’s not about climate sensitivity or forcings or feedbacks; it’s not about biophysical systems at all. It’s about what nations will do, what sort of treaties will be signed, what sort of policies will be implemented.
In other words, it’s a question about politics.
Politics and power.
This is kind of obvious, but it often goes unremarked: Predictions about the impacts of climate change involve politics as much as physics.
Scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don’t just involve different estimations of climate sensitivity, they involve different projections of the spread of renewable energy and efficiency, the development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the rate of deforestation, and all sorts of other social, political, and technological trends.
Just one example — the crazed desire for energy to push the economics can be seen in the problems within the new-booming shale oil industry, where waste is flared-off into the environment, creating even more CO2 in the warming air: According to a World Bank official, gas flaring bumped up by 4.1 percent in 2011 — roughly totaling the gas demand from Denmark.
And we gotta put on the brakes, or else…
A new study from the University of Michigan reveals it’s the economy, stupid, but going the other way:
It is the first analysis to use measurable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to assess fluctuations in the gas, rather than estimates of CO2 emissions, which are less accurate.
“If ‘business as usual’ conditions continue, economic contractions the size of the Great Recession or even bigger will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO₂,” said Tapia Granados, who is a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).
…
In years of above-trend world GDP, from 1958 to 2010, the researchers found greater increases in CO2 concentrations.
For each trillion in U.S. dollars that the world GDP deviates from trend, CO2 levels deviate from trend about half a part per million (ppm), they found.
Concentrations of CO2 are estimated to have been between 200-300 ppm during preindustrical times.
They are presently close to 400 ppm, and levels around 300 ppm are considered safe to keep a stable climate.
To break the economic habits contributing to a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming, Tapia Granados says that societies around the world would need to make enormous changes.
“Since the 1980s, scientists like James Hansen have been warning us about the effects global warming will have on the earth,” Tapia Granados said.
And this ain’t no ‘cry wolf‘ bullshit — it is the wolf.
Pump the Dollars
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics | Leave a Comment
One item that’s fallen off the news radar the past few weeks is gas prices — no more the hand-wringing stories of people going without food to fuel their vehicles and all is well.
Out of sight, out of mind?
You betcha.
Yesterday, I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep with the pump price still at $4.49 a gallon for regular — it’s stuck at that price and although national pump prices fell $.06 cents to $3.84 a gallon and overall prices are 1.3 percent lower than a year earlier, up here in northern California, time seems frozen.
The state average has dropped 1.7 cents to about $4.18 a gallon for regular.
An IMF consultation document reports oil and mining companies might be “under-taxed” relative to their profits and internal rates of return.
No fracking’ shit, sherlock.
(Illustration found here).
Just to keep the oil flowing, barrel prices rose with reports there’s been growth in U.S. and Chinese manufacturing sectors, creating a demand for way-more energy: Benchmark crude rose $1.29 to finish at $106.16 per barrel in New York. That’s the highest settlement price since it hit $106 on March 28. Brent crude increased 19 cents to $119.66 per barrel in London.
The drop in gas prices is due to US peoples cutting back, this while oil-related profits are NOT cutting back.
However, as long as the GOP has breath in its collective assholes, there will be no change in the tax schedule and the money keeps flowing.
No matter the harm, no matter the long-term side effects of a major f*ck-up.
Just ask the most-wonderful BP.
Via Think Progress:
Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP is reporting profits of $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2012.
…
BP has also returned to pre-disaster levels for campaign contributions.
It has nearly surpassed 2010 spending with $122,410 in political contributions so far this cycle, 65 percent of which has gone to Republicans.
Its lobbying is much more expansive, with $8.1 million in 2011, and nearly $2.2 million so far this year.
Meanwhile, CEO Bob Dudley received a raise of $6.8 million in compensation, while BP paid out $1.1 million in shares to former CEO Tony Hayward, who resigned in the wake of the Gulf disaster.
And all is indeed well in them warm, sweet Gulf waters: We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
The GOP and Mitt Romney keeps the subject on the DL.
From Politico:
What does Big Oil get in return for its $200 million investment in Romney?
It gets to keep its billions in special tax breaks every year.
So middle-class families pay twice — high gas prices when they fill up the tank and $4 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies for an industry where the top five companies combined made $137 billion in profits last year.
At the same time, Big Oil gets one of its own dictating Romney’s energy policy.
Harold Hamm, Romney’s top energy adviser, is a billionaire oil executive who says clean energy is a “magical fantasy” and wants high gas prices.
He admitted as much when he declared in 2009 that cheap oil would be a “disaster.”
Welcome the elephant to the room.
Reality, Or Not
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
We all live by certain rules, sometimes, and to be able to live outside those guidelines is fantasy.
Michelle Obama has a thought, via CNN:
“It is hard to sneak around and do what you want,” Obama continued.
“I have done it a couple of times.
But you know one fantasy I have, and the Secret Service they keep looking at me because they think I might actually do it, is to walk right out the front door and just keep walking.”
What’s the First Lady actually saying?
(Illustration found here).
Mrs. Obama was waxing on fantasy, but not wishful thinking: “One of the things I have learned being a grown up is that you always look forward,” Obama said. “You look to where you want to go as opposed to looking back.”
What about that old chestnut: If you don’t remember the past, you’re bound to repeat it?
But we catch her drift.
And this present, past and fantasy/fact scenario got a touch personal in this piece from the UK’s Guardian last week — we don’t look at the future as us:
I’m struck by how my sense of my “present self” extends, quite specifically, for about eight years.
Me at 43 is just me at 36 with an even dickier knee; but 50-year-old me is some other chap entirely.
(In my mind’s eye, weirdly, he’s actually less bald.)
Then again, I think of next-week-me as different from present-me, too.
Many self-help tricks — such as stating your future goals in the present tense — are based on manipulating the relationship between these selves.
But would we need tricks if we could truly come to feel that all these “me”s were one?
In his book Staring At The Sun, the psychotherapist Irving Yalom suggests that this is exactly what we need to do to reconcile ourselves to the big one: death.
One of his clients told him that the revelation “came from realising it would be me who will die, not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me.”
Once we grasp that everything that’ll ever happen to us, including death, will happen to the same person, Yalom argues, we’ll make wiser choices, but also live far more intensely.
And speaking of the future, the most-delectable Onion has a rollout of problems to be encountered by potential presidential candidates for 2040 because of all the bad shit now recorded via social media — see it here. (h/t The Dish).
Nothing is fantasy and everything is fiction.
Except reality.
From the NY Times yesterday:
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades.
…
If the estimate holds up, it implies that the water cycle could quicken by as much as 20 percent later in this century as the planet warms, potentially leading to more droughts and floods.
“This provides another piece of independent evidence that we need to start taking the problem of global warming seriously,” said Paul J. Durack, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the lead author of a paper being published Friday in the journal Science.
…
Assuming that the paper withstands scrutiny, it suggests that a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past half century has been enough to intensify the water cycle by about 4 percent. That led Dr. Durack to project a possible intensification of about 20 percent as the planet warms by several degrees in the coming century.
That would be approximately twice the amplification shown by the computer programs used to project the climate, according to Dr. Durack’s calculations.
Those programs are often criticized by climate-change skeptics who contend that they overestimate future changes, but Dr. Durack’s paper is the latest of several indications that the estimates may actually be conservative.
The new paper confirms a long-expected pattern for the ocean that also seems to apply over land: areas with a lot of rainfall in today’s climate are expected to become wetter, whereas dry areas are expected to become drier.
In the climate of the future, scientists fear, a large acceleration of the water cycle could feed greater weather extremes.
Perhaps the greatest risk from global warming, they say, is that important agricultural areas could dry out, hurting the food supply, as other regions get more torrential rains and floods.
Another jab at fantasy, huh?