And apparently based on the so-called favorable employment report released Friday, U.S. sweet crude increased by $1.48 to end the week at $97.84 per barrel, while Brent picked up $2.51 to finish at $114.58 per barrel.
Gas-pump prices appear erratic, depending where ye be: Statewide average in California is $3.73 a gallon for regular, up 3.7 cents in a week, but meanwhile, a good friend of mine residing less than two hours south of me recently paid $4.19 a gallon — Sup with that?

(Illustration found here).

Maybe we should take the plunge already and go Eurozone — $10-a-gallon gas would force stiff-necked US peoples to alter lifestyles and move on before the whole thing becomes reality.
New fuel for old vehicles — there’s about 240.5 million cars and light trucks cruising US highways and the average age of those vehicles rose to 10.8 years last year from 10.4 in the year before, due mainly to bad times in Detroit and the economy.
Apparently from indications beyond a recession, US peoples have been easing off the private vehicle for awhile now.
Via AlterNet  two years ago:

Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15-17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.
Market saturation may be the dominant contributor to the peaking of the U.S. fleet.
The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers — nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.

Kids and cars:

Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people.
For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage.
Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.
In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars.
They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars.
Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license.
This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.
If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.

Plus these kids now are also faced with an incredible financial burden, not only with a humongous student-loan debt, but a bleak employment picture (despite Friday’s numbers) — unless one is an oil/gas person (corporations are people).

Maybe a bit of inequality right there: Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008…Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent.

Maybe venture into the ugly-oddness of fuel:

Gasoline prices are higher at the beginning of 2012 than at the beginning of any previous year ever — even at the beginning of 2008, a year when the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline reached a record $4.114 on July 7.
In its Daily Fuel Gauge Report, AAA Texas noted Friday a national average of $3.467 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline — up from $3.455 a day ago, $3.389 a week ago, $3.288 a month ago and $3.116 a year ago.
“We’re seeing the highest gasoline prices that we’ve seen,” Sarah Schimmer of AAA Texas said Friday.
“2011 was a record year, and in 2012 we’re definitely seeing higher prices.”

And all this for mobility, not only just for driving my Jeep around town, but oil/gas framed within the way-big picture of how the existence of an entire civilization depends on the black, bubbly shit — no way yesteryear can continue into the nowadays.
In reality, peak oil is actually the end of easy oil, low prices at the pump and so forth, and this peak supposedly occurred worldwide in about 2005 — so we’re already on the downside.
One interesting look at future possibilities comes from “Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse,” a collection of essays from economists, environmental scientists, a couple of architects and even a corporate lawyer on the premise of how close we are to being totally f*cked.
From a review by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall of Fleeing Vesuvius and posted Friday at DissidentVoice:

The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent.
For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse.
Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.
…
All (the essay writers) are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.
In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years.
He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible — an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it.
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further.
Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

And Ms Bramhall also reveals a brightness from the essays, not all doom-n-gloom: The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.
Inspiration needs to have already been popped — too much pie-in-the-sky without actual political reality.
One updated  sample chapter of Fleeing Vesuvius can be found at The Oil Drum.
And another review of the essay collection can be found here.

A major snag in the optimism — the above-mentioned political reality.
So says Kumi Naidoo, head of the environmental group Greenpeace, who spoke Friday at the big-wig, pow-wow Munich Security Conference, and chimed a loud alarm.
Via Raw Story:

“The moment of history we are in can be described as a boiling point or a perfect storm,” he told the assembled gathering of world leaders, ministers, top brass and defence policy experts at the annual Munich gathering.
“We are seeing a convergence of multiple crises happening at the same time. A food crisis, climate crisis, poverty crisis … and then of course the financial crisis and a demographic crisis and a global governance democratic crisis,” he added.
“The bottom line is that too many of our leaders … are sleepwalking us into a crisis of epic proportion,” he claimed.

One of those doing the sleepwalking is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s also in Munich, Germany, this weekend for the conference, but her schedule has no room for end-of-life-as-we-know-it antics fostered by environmental activists — Clinton will most-likely reminisce about “…what a key partner Europe is in the global security, economic, democracy promotion agenda that we have.”

Just wake ‘em later.

Part of an e-mail yesterday from my youngest daughter, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota: Oh yeah, It’s like 50 degrees and sunny today. crazyness, right? I was sweating like crazy riding my bike to work this morning. Global warming man…
The kid’s got some sense — just talkin’ ’bout the weather.

(Illustration found here).

A warm winter, duh!
From Climate Central:

This week, it’s likely that warm temperature records will be broken throughout the eastern U.S., with forecast highs in New York City approaching 60°F on Tuesday and Wednesday, and reaching the mid-60s in Washington, D.C. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), record highs may also be set today in Islip, N.Y., and Bridgeport, CT.
It has also been unusually warm in the mid-section of the country.
As Paul Douglas wrote for the Minneapolist Star-Tribune, the Twin Cities missed setting a record high by just four degrees on Monday, topping out at 44°F, about 20°F above average for the date.
Douglas wrote that there have been just three subzero nights so far this winter in Minneapolis-St. Paul, down from the average of 19 to date.
“It’s been one of the mildest winters on record; at the rate we’re going this will easily be a “Top 10 Warmest Winter” in the Twin Cities,” Douglas wrote.

And it’s only gonna get worse — Dr. Jeff Masters at Wunderblog: But it strains the bounds of credulity that all of the extreme weather events — some of them 1-in-1000-year type events — could have occurred without a signicant change to the base climate state. Mother Nature is now able to hit the ball out of the park more often, and with much more power, thanks to the extra energy global warming has put into the atmosphere.
No one seems to be much concerned, however.

Despite all the warming, the US MSM still doesn’t connect the dots, or put two-and-two together, or use any other glib phrase to describe how Americans are walking around in January bundled up in a Slayer t-shirt seemingly without a care in the boiling world.
These warm countrywide temperatures ain’t no flash in the pan.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Our science-based institutions, like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, have no difficulty straightforwardly explaining the connection between human-caused global warming and these monster heatwaves.
If only our news-based institutions could do the same.
Now as I’ve said many times, every story about extreme weather does not need to mention global warming.
But if you are writing about a heatwave that is so uniquely extensive in space and time — just the kind of heat wave climate scientists have warned would become increasingly likely — and you are devoting an entire science article to explaining why it’s been so warm, then, yes, it is incumbent on you to at least mention global warming.

And political irony from Craig Ferguson: “It was so hot in Washington that Congress had to install a fan on the debt ceiling.”

Beyond just talkin’ about the weather, we should be screaming, crying about it.

Last year, despite all kinds of horrible weather/climate shit, the news media has way-down-played climate change as anything more than a storm in passing — coverage for the common folk has just “fell off the map.”

(Illustration found here).

Up here along California’s northern coast this early Thursday rain is beating down, bolstered by a pretty-good wind — most likely an off-shoot from that big storm blasting the northwest (via Wunderblog): Field reports late Tuesday already indicated lots of natural and human triggered slides ranging from about 1 to 3 feet deep. Avalanche warnings already in effect for high danger…and with warming…further winds and additional heavy to very heavy snow…some quite dense…avalanche activity should become larger and more severe on Wednesday.
And what about that white stuff in Algeria, as …an unusual sight in the North African country, with scenes of palm trees surrounded by snow.
What, me worry?

You betcha.

One terrible aspect with the science on climate change is the re-occurring situation of shit being worse than originally proposed, as this little snippet from two years ago: We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought.
And now, a new one, bringing extreme weather events into focus with climate and the speed of change, all done by math nerds.
From PhysOrg.com (h/t The Oil Drum):

Swiss mathematicians have shown that the risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated.
They are developing a model for better understanding the impact of climate change.
…
For several years now, the scientists have noted that the increase in extreme events associated with climate change appears to be having much more of an impact on society than the increase in mean temperatures.
Natural disasters are accompanied by a significant human and economic cost.
In the case of exceptional heat waves, the mathematicians found that, based on global warming predictions, the probability of an event at least as severe as the 2003 heat wave will be six times greater in 2050 than it was in 2003.

This doesn’t seem to matter, however, if the MSM keeps pushing climate change away from A1 and onto the society pages without much ado, leaving people to fend for their mental selves — a horror story in itself.
The standard thought from the standard brain: ‘Somebody will figure out something, they always do.’
This line I’ve heard from countless folks, some more intelligent than others, but all have some kind of gray matter stored in their skull caps.
Since climate change is such a huge, way-out-there subject, a thing one “believes” (like it’s a religion or something), and not like a ball-bat up-side the head, people tend to skip away from really getting down and dirty with our one and only environment.

People seem to have a need to feel better than the reality — one has to have hope in order to work through tomorrow, right?
In view of this, a lot of problems that don’t literally face us each minute/hour/day are pushed aside and placed in a giant petri dish called the “optimism bias” — also known  as the “positivity” illusion.
A paradox of that ain’t gonna happen to me.

From a discussion at CNN Health:

“It is a natural human inclination to see our situation and our future through rose-colored glasses,” says David Ropeik, author of “How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”
“We tend to see our prospects as being far better than they may actually be — and particularly when compared to the next guy.
This optimism lets us deal with hardship and take chances in life.”
…
Most people are mildly optimistic and that’s a good thing, observes Dr. Tali Sharot, author of “The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Mind.”
“The 20 percent or so of people who do not have an optimism bias are clinically depressed.
In fact, when things go really bad, people become more optimistic, not less, because that’s when we need it most.”
According to Sharot, there is even more reason to celebrate our inclination toward hope.
“Optimism is better for your mental health – it eases your mind and actually lowers your stress.”
…
At the end of the day, “the bias toward optimism is helping you cope to some degree, but it can also be deceiving you into ignoring a danger,” notes Ropeik.
“To the extent we are less worried about something than we should be, that clearly raises our risk.
If optimism bias is letting us deny that our stressed lives are bad for our health, that harm far outweighs the measure of relief optimism can bring.
“Two things to keep in mind: you want to be aware of the risk and you want to be clear about the psychology behind the way you read and assess the risk.
When you know both, you will be better equipped to take action.”

Unless it’s done too late — optimism without reality won’t travel far.

No wobbling of that sort from Santorum — he’s an out-and-out denier.
“There is no such thing as global warming,” he told a smiling Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011.
That same month, he told Rush Limbaugh that climate change is a liberal conspiracy: “It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”

One would hope the mass of US peoples who vote can see through the shit rain coming from Iowa — Mitt Romney, not Rick Perry, should go home to assess the results if a twitchy, bat-shit crazy Rick Santorum could foam-up a near-tie in yesterday’s near-useless Iowa caucuses.

(Illustration found here).

Even as these self-promoting assholes parade through the GOP elimination contest, climate change is still eating away at the fabric of life — in denial of a process that can make your nose bleed is a criminal act that harms every air-sucking person on this earth.
And anyone who calls it ‘junk science’ is worse than a warmonger.
And in Rick Santorum‘s case it’s all about the money.
From Think Progress last October:

On the campaign trail, Rick Santorum says his career since the Senate has been a paid commentary role at Fox News and as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
But a mandatory disclosure requirement for presidential candidates reveals something new: Santorum has maintained his lifestyle through a well-paid consulting gig with Consol Energy Inc and a lobbying firm called American Continental Group.
…
According to the disclosure, Santorum is paid more than $330,000 for his work on behalf of Consol Energy, American Continental Group, and a public relations firm called the Clapham Group.
He was paid $217,000 from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and $239,000 for his contributions to Fox News in 2010 and the beginning of 2011.

Santorum might be even more ass-holish and slimy than Newt Gingrich, who by the way, received an underwhelming fourth-place finish in Iowa — he’s history, and as a historian, Newt knows.

While all the airwaves were filled with Iowa corn-fed shit: On Christmas Day, December 25th, the temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole site soared to an all-time record high of 9.9°F (-12.3°C) at 3:50 p.m. local time, eclipsing the former record of 7.5°F (-13.6°C) set on December 27, 1978. The low temperature on December 25th was a mild (relatively!) 0°F (-17.8°C). Records at the site began in January 1957. Its elevation is 9,301 feet (2,835 meters). (h/t wunderground.com).
And here in the sweet US of A, the environment is also warmer: Aided by a strong warm surge toward the end of the month, new U.S. daily high temperature records exceeded daily cold records in December by a ratio of 1.8 to 1, a margin of 80 percent. (from CapitalClimate).

And here on the Left Coast, the warmth spreads: The mercury hit 85 degrees in Woodland Hills, breaking a record of 84 set in 1994. Burbank topped out at 80 degrees and Saugus in northern Los Angeles County had a high of 83 degrees. “It’s been nice and toasty for the holiday season,” said National Weather Service meteorologist David Sweet. (sfgate.com).
Which in turn could create a human disaster.
Also from sfgate.com:

There was about as much snow on the ground last July 4 as there is now at historic Phillips Station off Highway 50 near the Sierra at Tahoe resort.
Some say the skiing was better then, too.
Frank Gehrke, chief snow surveyor for the California Department of Water Resources, might have had better luck counting butterflies than taking snow measurements, but he nevertheless found a tiny patch of glaciated material shaded by trees.
…
“That’s the lowest January measurement ever,” Gehrke said. “With pretty much no fall storms at all, that’s not a surprise.”
…
Lake Oroville, the primary storage reservoir for the State Water Project, is at 72 percent of capacity, which is 114 percent of normal for this time.
Shasta Lake, which is part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project and is the largest reservoir in the state, is currently at 68 percent of capacity, or 106 percent of normal.

Up here on California’s northern coast the situation isn’t so much warmth, but wet — very little rain so far this season, and if it does rain, most of the time it’s sprinkle-like and just damp.
Old timers tell me they haven’t seen this type of weather in years, if ever.

A press release last November from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (h/t Climate Progress):

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows.
The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.
“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
“The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”
…
The modeling results indicate that if nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.
The mid-century ratio could be much higher if emissions rose at an even greater pace, or it could be about 8-to-1 if emissions were reduced significantly, the model showed.

Hurrah, now on to New Hampshire!

Although prices here in northern California have dipped a bit, it’s still freakin’ high compared nationwide — the national average for regular this week is $3.258 a gallon, still more than 20 cents higher than the same time last year.

Meanwhile, in California the statewide average hit $3.576, up 2 cents since Dec. 19, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of service stations. That shattered — by 28.9 cents — the old record of $3.287 a gallon set in December 2007 and was tied in December 2010.

(Illustration found here).

The price of oil — beyond the natural-technical problems — has been influenced by more swinging bullshit centered around Iran, which, in the face of new efforts by the US and the European Union to halt Iran’s nuclear program, has threatened to close the most-vital Strait of Hormuz if the shit gets too deep.
Some experts Iran is bullshitting.
Maybe not — the two-mile-wide strait is much closer to Iran than just the physical: After boasting yesterday: “Shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is … easier than drinking a glass of water,” Iran’s navy chief Admiral Habibollah Sayari said: “Today, we don’t need [to shut] the strait because … it is completely under the control of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
A nasty set of circumstances, though, it doesn’t seem to ruffle many feathers.

The US, however, will not be intimidated, and pooh poohed the possible action as an empty gesture:

However, playing down the threat, State Department spokesman Mark Toner called it as nothing more than mere “bluster.”
According to Toner, this was just another attempt by Iran to draw attention away from the key issue, that of their habitual “non-compliance with international nuclear obligations,” he added.

A lot of drama is being played out with this Iranian deal — the US claims it has certain “red lines” (kind of like those famous, ‘line in the sand’ routines) that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then, the shit would really hit the fan.
Israel is the most concerned.
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:

Officially, of course, both sides would insist such an attack was about Iran’s nuclear program.
But since both nations have been claiming Iran is within striking distance of acquiring nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s, the excuse isn’t going to really fly internationally, so both nations are hoping to settle on something which could be the “trigger” for the attack.

This ‘trigger’ ain’t no horse on some happy trail.

Bluster or not…
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $107.90 a barrel, 08.03 GMT this morning on the ICE Futures Exchange.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $99.53 a barrel, 07.42 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.

The quickly approaching new year signals even higher prices to come.

Humanity is fatally blind.
Seeking oil for energy is akin to eating poison — it tastes good and makes us feel good all over, but will kill us in a horrible, twitching death.
Talk about bat-shit crazy — the intake of this crude is making an environment already stunned near-beyond recovery even worse and apparently the glutton forces are stronger than self-preservation.
Even the so-called ‘saving grace’ of the Canadian tar sands oil creates a horrible future:

Extraction of Alberta’s energy-intensive tar sands has expanded steadily in recent years, with about 232 square miles now exposed by mining operations.
That expansion is expected to double over the next decade, which could mean the destruction of 740,000 acres of boreal forest and a 30 percent increase in carbon emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.

And in perspective (via DeSmogBlog): The latest tally (2008) puts Canada’s GHG emissions at “only” 1.8 per cent, which is swell as long as you don’t think about Canada’s population amounting to just 0.004 per cent of the world’s total. That makes Canada the fourth worst polluter per capita. It also makes our 34 million inhabitants the seventh largest source of CO2 among all the countries in the world – that’s seventh from a list of 216 countries and jurisdictions.

And the end result?
From TreeHugger:

A new study in the Journal of Glaciology shows that the glaciers in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected.
Lead researcher Michel Baraer, from McGill University, told IPS News that the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades off, “those years don’t exist.”
Baraer said that the glaciers feeding the Rio Santo watershed are now too small to maintain past flows of water.
During the dry season water availability is expected to be 30 percent lower than historic levels.
In the 1930s glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca covered 850 square kilometers.
Today they cover less than 600 sq km.
In a global context, the World Glacier Monitoring Service recently has said that 90 percent of the glaciers studied in its latest Glacier Mass Balance Bulletin are losing mass.
In the Himalaya, 75 percent of the glaciers there are melting; the USGS fully puts the blame on this on global warming and not other factors.

My underline for some way-emphasis — and that, my friends, ain’t bluster.

The glitch in the ‘super committee?
Think Progress answers with the obvious: Time and time again, the only thing preventing an agreement on long-term deficit reduction has been the Republicans’ absolute refusal to consider any tax increases on high-income households as part of the solution.
(Illustration found here).

Republicans don’t understand the word ‘solution’ — a much-glaring case in point was a Congressional climate briefing last week in which not only were there zero GOPers in attendance, but the whole affair was smaller than a blink on the all-news, all-the-time media.
The Natural Resources Committee held a briefing called, “Undeniable Data: The Latest Research on Global Temperature and Climate Science,” chaired by two Democrats, Ed Markey and Henry Waxman, with three top climate scientists testifying, Dr. Ben Santer, an expert on climate change attribution; Dr. Bill Chameides, vice chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on America’s Climate Choices; and a former chief climate-change denier/skeptic, Dr. Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, finally now a believer.
Via Skeptical Science:

Rep. Waxman also noted that the Republican-controlled House has voted 21 times to block actions to address climate change, including a vote to deny that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.”
…
The take-home message from each presentation is:
Muller: The planet is undeniably warming. Muller is personally not convinced how much of that warming is due to humans, but believes the remaining uncertainty is not sufficient to prevent us from taking serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Santer: The scientific evidence clearly indicates that the observed global warming is predominantly caused by humans.
Chameides: The prudent path forward involves a diversified risk management approach, which must involve a comprehensive federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Overall it was a very interesting and informative briefing.
Unfortunately, the fact that it was attended by zero Republican congressmen suggests that contrary to the hearing subtitle, it will not be the end of climate skepticism, but perhaps it at least represents a small step in the right direction.
Maybe Congressional Republicans will find some time to listen to climate scientists when they’re finished classifying pizza as a vegetable.

Skeptical Science titled its post, “Congressional Climate Briefing – The End of Climate Skepticism?”
That question mark could also read, Republican.

All this GOP bullshit comes on the heels of a couple of bad reports cards on our environment.
Yesterday, another snapshot of reality:

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2010 since pre-industrial time and the rate of increase has accelerated, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
It focussed special attention on rising nitrous oxide concentrations.
Between 1990 and 2010, according to the report, there was a 29 percent increase in radiative forcing — the warming effect on our climate system — from greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide accounted for 80 percent of this increase.
…
The atmospheric burden of nitrous oxide in 2010 was 323.2 parts per billion — 20 percent higher than in the pre-industrial era.
It has grown at an average of about 0.75 parts per billion over the past ten years, mainly as a result of the use of nitrogen containing fertilizers, including manure, which has profoundly affected the global nitrogen cycle.
Its impact on climate, over a 100 year period, is 298 times greater than equal emissions of carbon dioxide.
It also plays an important role in the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer which protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun.

And if that isn’t bad enough: The US Dept. of Energy earlier this month said in 2010, The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
(Great h/t to Climate Progress).

Danger indeed, Will Robinson, but guys,  Zachary Smith should have been history long before now.

Yesterday, there were a couple of ‘monster‘ reports — one in climate science, the other in economics — that explained in detail why both our environment and our state-of-living is in bad shape, and why the US and the world night be on the brink of some nasty consequences for years of a self-centered lifestyle.
Despite the Rolling Stones’ song to the contrary, time appears not on our side.

From the BBC and that nasty Greek problem — Luc Lampiere, executive director of Oxfam in France, and the shameful Cannes G20 gathering: “There are problems across the planet. The issues that were a victim of this agenda, of this very European agenda, are issues of poverty in the world – issues of food supplies, the fight against climate change…. This is a big failure for leadership from those countries.”
People need to listen and take great action.

(Illustration found here).

As these world leaders fiddle about with themselves, problems beyond the near-petty Euro-zone are reaching bad-news highs.
Especially in climate change, where it butts heads with economics.
Via Time magazine:

The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009.
That’s an increase of 6 percent.
That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.
It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

And once again, that old ‘worse than anticipated’ line:

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

Finances must come first:

India and China are huge users of coal.
Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide and emissions from that jumped nearly 8 percent in 2010.
“The good news is that these economies are growing rapidly so everyone ought to be for that, right?” Reilly (John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change) said Thursday.
“Broader economic improvements in poor countries has been bringing living improvements to people.
Doing it with increasing reliance on coal is imperiling the world.”
…
“Really dismaying,” Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the new figures.
“We are building up a horrible legacy for our children and grandchildren.”

Joe Romm at Climate Progress adds: Chinese emissions now exceed ours by a whopping 50%. They will be double ours by 2010 if they keep on their rapacious, immoral path of weekly coal-plant building — and we keep on our rapacious, immoral path of doing nothing.
No happy campers here.

And the other ‘monster’ in the room is poverty in the US — the Brookings Institution released on Thursday a study which concluded that those living below the poverty line (defined in 2010 as having an income of $22,314 for a family of four) appears to be getting worse, and it’s widespread.
The study says populations of extreme poverty neighborhoods grew by one-third over the last 10 years.
From Reuters:

“You can think of this in two ways: One is how deeply poor someone is and the other is how persistently poor the community is,” said Steve Suits, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, noting that since the end of the Civil War, poverty has become increasingly concentrated in the South.
In studying the effects of extreme poverty on education, the foundation found that in 2009, nearly 6.5 million children lived in households with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty threshold.
The South accounted for nearly half of the nation’s increase in extreme poverty, it found.
“In 2009, people in extreme poverty was the fastest- growing income group in America,” Suits said.
“Most households in this economy are in jeopardy of falling into poverty or extreme poverty.”
The U.S. Census recently reported the ranks of the poor rose in almost all states and cities in 2010.
About 40 percent of the poor live outside major cities, Brookings said, showing poverty is rolling into the suburbs.
“While large metro areas experienced the largest absolute increases in extreme poverty neighborhoods and concentrated poverty, small metropolitan areas were home to the fastest growth in extreme poverty tracts and the number of residents living in them,” Brookings found.

So that’s one in 15 people are way poor.

Is there any economic solution to climate change?
In creating a robust economy, the future is dark — what good is money is you’re not alive to spend it.

From NewScientist on what we really don’t know about this whole situation: A warmer, wetter Earth with higher CO2 levels could support more life — if there were time to adapt to it. The problem for the plants, animals and people living today is that they and we have adapted to the unusually stable climate of the past few thousand years.

(Illustration found here).

Two years ago, Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, quipped that if people painted roofs, streets and all kinds of things the color white, it would reduce global warming — it would reflect the heat backwards.
Chu: “If you look at all the buildings and if you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour and if you do that uniformally, that would be the equivalent of… reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years — just taking them off the road for 11 years,” he said.
Seemed reasonable — wrong!

From Climate Central yesterday:

But a white roof does just the opposite.
It bounces sunlight right back into the sky, just as light clothing helps you stay cool in the summer. Cooler buildings need less air conditioning, which translates to fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases.
…
Unfortunately, what seems obvious is not always true, and a new study available online and soon coming out in the Journal of Climate reveals some bad news for white roofs.
When Stanford University engineer Mark Jacobson, and his grad student John Hoeve modeled the total climate response to white roofs and other urban surfaces, they found the lightening may actually cause more global warming.
Here’s why: the sunlight that bounces off white roofs doesn’t all fly out into space.
A lot of it is absorbed by particles of soot and other dark-colored pollutants that float around in the atmosphere (those same particles are already responsible for a good portion of global warming).
The particles heat up, just like your house would have, and the net result is a warmer atmosphere.
You house might be a bit cooler, but it would be at the expense of heating the planet.
In short, says Jacobson in a press release:
“There does not seem to be a benefit from investing in white roofs. The most important thing is to reduce emissions of the pollutants that contribute to global warming.”
So much for trying to take the easy way out.

Add information like this to the recent report from the World Resources Institute: The latest science summarized below suggests that the impacts of climate change in many areas of the world are not advancing linearly: profound changes are already occurring and models project even greater changes for the remainder of the 21st Century.
A review of the WRI study can be found at Climate Progress: As a whole, the literature paints a bleak picture. We are continuing to see accelerating change in many systems, with some changes happening much faster than initially envisioned.

The WRI study also found: Based on physiological estimates, a global average temperature increase of 7° C, which is toward the extreme upper part of the range of current projections, would make large portions of the world uninhabitable to humans.

The great problem facing mankind right now, by a long, long shot is climate change, but making the situation worse is all the bullshit floating around by people who are hardcore assholes — global warming is NOT something a person “believes” in, like religion or something.
Bad news on the door step and there ain’t no easy way out.

We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8.
For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80 percent probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.

(Illustration found here).

Joe Romm at Climate Progress on the study: Again, this extreme event ended Russian grain exports for year. So the increase in extremes very much threatens food security if we don’t act soon to reverse emissions trends.

In other words, gird thy loins, or learn how to re-eat foodstuffs.

Romm also notes the study from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) is a “bombshell” because NOAA did a flawed analysis just a few months ago that found no connection between global warming and the record-smashing (heat).
Wiggle room is shrinking for deniers.

And another anti-denial nail was driven home this past week — the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which was supposed to slash holes into the very heart of climate change, released a report ‘confirming‘ the bad news the earth is indeed burning alive.
From former ‘skeptic‘ Richard Muller, the chair of the Berkeley study, in the Wall Street Journal:

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming.
The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming.
The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC’s average of 0.64ºC.
…
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find.
Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups.
We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.
They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real.
Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.
How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects?
We made no independent assessment of that.

Just watch the weather reports, Richard.
Despite Muller and his study, some people are still hard-headed wrong — read a good view of fallout from the Berkeley study on the hardcore denial crowd at DeSmogBlog, and follow the links.

Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column last week, took to task another study, this one from the American Petroleum Institute (and one can guess its point of view), which is the core of the GOP’s economic proposals — pollution makes for more jobs.
Republicans, however, don’t even understand their own shit.
Money bits:

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy?
No.
…
Moreover, even if you take the study’s claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis.
All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade.
The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.
You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.
More pollution, then, isn’t the route to full employment.
But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection?
No.
Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.
…
As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down.
What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.”
That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.
Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P.
But the reality is that more pollution wouldn’t solve our jobs problem.
All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

And the planet gets warmer and warmer while ignorant dickheads fiddle.

Now turn this ‘success‘ into a spotlight on the environment — why worry about finances when you are dead/dying.

Climate talks are scheduled for next month in Durban, South Africa, but already there’s talk of another round of nothing — Jos Delbeke, director general for climate action at the European Commission: “I think if people are expecting a big bang, that is not on the cards,” he said.

The climate, however, is getting ready for a ‘big bang‘ of its own, and a long-lasting bang-for-your-buck, too.

(Illustration found here).

Climate change awareness has been around for years, the call for action coming in the mid 1980s.
I only became really aware of our changing climate for the bad more than four years ago, and what’s even worse, I watched ‘The American President‘ the other night, the movie with Michael Douglas, and one of the sub-plots was climate change.
The film came out in 1995 and I’d seen it about then, but the words ‘climate change‘ didn’t matter at all, in fact, hadn’t registered at all, don’t remember it even being part of the movie  — what a dumb ass I am.
Concept of the earth warming and all the horror it means is now fairly known, but still the words ‘climate change‘ is still not getting people aroused.
Despite the terror.

One of the most-interesting aspects of climate-change reports and studies I noticed right off was that information seemed to be followed-up with another blurb explaining all that data was wrong — it was worse.
Now it’s official: Scientists have been underplaying climate impacts.
From Climate Progress this week:

The warnings were dire: 188 predictions showing that climate-induced changes to the environment would put 7 percent of all plant and animal species on the globe — one out of every 14 critters — at risk of extinction.
Predictions like these have earned climate scientists the obloquy from critics for being “alarmist” — dismissed for using inflated descriptions of doom and destruction to push for action, more grant money or a global government.
But as the impacts of climate change become apparent, many predictions are proving to underplay the actual impacts.
Reality, in many instances, is proving to be far worse than most scientists expected.
“We’re seeing mounting evidence now that the scientific community, rather than overstating the claim or being alarmist, is the opposite,” said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian with the University of California, San Diego.
“Scientists have been quite conservative … in a lot of important and different areas.”
…
In a notable 2010 study, the late William Freudenberg, a University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher who studied science and the media, found that new scientific findings are more than 20 times likely to show that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

So expect bad shit to be worse, and come much-more quickly.

And some aspects to hang for years and years.

One result of a warming earth is the melting of the planet’s poles — as the ice dissolves sea levels rise, a cause and effect kind of horror.
This phenomenon will possibly last half a millennium.
Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute has calculated the long-term outlook with findings published in the scientific journal Global and Planetary Change.
Via Skeptical Science:

“Based on the current situation we have projected changes in sea level 500 years into the future.
We are not looking at what is happening with the climate, but are focusing exclusively on sea levels”, explains Aslak Grinsted, a researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
…
Even in the most optimistic scenario, which requires extremely dramatic climate change goals, major technological advances and strong international cooperation to stop emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the atmosphere, the sea would continue to rise.
By the year 2100 it will have risen by 60 cm and by the year 2500 the rise in sea level will be 1.8 meters.
…
“In the 20th century sea has risen by an average of 2mm per year, but it is accelerating and over the last decades the rise in sea level has gone approximately 70 percent faster.
Even if we stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere and stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we can see that the rise in sea level will continue to accelerate for several centuries because of the sea and ice caps long reaction time.
So it would be 2-400 years before we returned to the 20th century level of a 2 mm rise per year,” says Aslak Grinsted.

And that’s way beyond any of my kin making it.

Can any of us survive, even from this…
Animals and plants are getting smaller due to a warming world:

Researchers argue that warmer and drier weather causes plants and animals to reach smaller sizes, while more variable rainfall levels raise the risk of failed crop years.
Over the past century animals including toads, tortoises, blue tits, Soay sheep and red deer have all started to reduce in size, they said.
…
Reduced food supplies are likely to mean that animals at the top of their food chains — including humans — will grow to smaller sizes, have fewer offspring, and be more vulnerable to disease, they added.
Cold blooded animals, particularly amphibians, are at the highest risk because having a smaller size will put them at greater risk of drying up in warmer temperatures.

Maybe, the incredible shrinking planet?
Time to get them protest signs out!