How Bad Is Global Warming?

[DrEvil]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 45607.html

Exposed: The myth of the global warming 'pause'

Failure to record temperature rises in the Arctic explains apparent ‘flatlining’, study finds, undermining sceptics’ argument that climate change has stopped

Scientists can now explain the “pause” in global warming that sceptics have used to bolster their arguments. Sceptics had claimed we have nothing to fear from climate change because it has stopped being a problem.

A new study has found that global temperatures have not flat-lined over the past 15 years, as weather station records have been suggesting, but have in fact continued to rise as fast as previous decades, during which we have seen an unprecedented acceleration in global warming.

The findings will undermine the arguments of leading sceptics, such as the former Chancellor Lord Lawson, who have criticised scientists from the Met Office and other climate organisations for not accepting that global warming has stopped since about 1998.

Two university scientists have found that the “pause” or “hiatus” in global temperatures can be largely explained by a failure of climate researchers to record the dramatic rise in Arctic temperatures over the past decade or more.

When Kevin Cowtan of York University and Robert Way of Ottawa University found a way of estimating Arctic temperatures from satellite readings, the so-called pause effectively disappeared and the global warming signal returned as strong as before.

The paucity of surface-temperature records in the remote and inaccessible Arctic has long been recognised as a problem for global estimates, not least by the Met Office itself.

However, the scale of the Arctic warming highlighted by Mr Cowtan and Mr Way has surprised seasoned climate researchers.

“The problem with the polar areas lacking data coverage has been known for a long time, but I think this study has basically solved it,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

He added: “People will argue about the details, as is normal in science, but I think basically this will hold up to scrutiny.”

[Iamwhomiam]

A momentary lapse of reason.

[fruhmenschen]

'Apocalyptic' storm floods Sardinia, 17 dead

http://news.yahoo.com/apocalyptic-storm ... 23772.html

[Belligerent Savant]

.

http://www.occupy.com/article/end-snow- ... ort-skiing

About halfway down the slope, the thought that all of this — the mountain, the snow, this bizarre sport revered by 65 million people around the world — had a chance of being diminished seemed reason enough to do something.

So writes Porter Fox, an editor at Powder, a ski magazine facing the fact that the white stuff is disappearing around the globe. In the mag’s latest issue Porter takes a 1,000-mile road trip around America's Northwest. He meets a sage of the snow, takes memorable runs, reflects on the beauty and intoxication of speed and steepness in the white, and laments the avalanche of dark data threatening it all.

In Oregon at Mount Hood, a 79-year old landmark named Bud Valian remembers the fifties, when snow was high, skiing fresh, and Timberline Lodge was being rehabbed into "one of the hippest winter resorts in the Northwest." Today, Valian adds, "The average elevation of the snowline is 1,200 to 1,400 feet higher now than it was." Some of the iconic mountain’s dozen glaciers have shrunk 60 percent and Palmer Glacier, the only year-round ski site in the U.S., is melting away.

Mt Hood’s story is the new normal. Data from multiple sources, including NASA, show the snowpack in America's Northwest falling 50 to 70 percent. “Spring arrives in Tahoe two and a half weeks earlier now than in 1961,” writes Porter, “and in vaunted cradles of skiing like the Alps, climatologists estimate that two-thirds of the ski resorts are in danger of closing by 2100.”

In New England and the Northeast., “On our current track, only four of the major 14 resorts in the region will be economically viable by 2100.” Snowmaking will delay shut downs, as will new fibers and plastic snow, now most evident in ski jumping (check out Sarah Hendrickson, 19, in her tank top and jumping skis, and en route to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia; a Park City, Utah, native, Hendrickson jumps the same distances as the men). But it’s weird watching jumpers fly past green trees.

Almost as weird as plastic snow is seeing a magazine like Powder, dedicated to snow, hedonism, petrol-fuel machines and high-tech products, along with the travel needed to reach mountains, now laying the facts clearly on the line. Meanwhile, the ski biz seems in quasi denial about climate change’s colossal whack at its foundation.

Porter relentlessly stacks up data, anecdotes, and thrills, but repeatedly returns to the same conclusion: "The math regarding the situation is relatively simple: It's getting warmer and snow is melting." He also waxes poetic about the "the ingenuity and passion in the sport — and the distinct and essential human trait of doing something for the thrill of it. There is nothing in the world that compares to the feeling of giving yourself over to gravity and flying down a mountainside — no state of human presence that rivals carving your own line, through nature, no less."



Amidst the great photos of a disappearing sport are data bits about high carbon emissions. They tell us that since the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol in 1997, global CO2 emissions have increased 45 percent. They tell us that by this century’s end, if present trends continue, the average temperature in Alaska will rise between 8-13 degrees Fahrenheit, Washington and Oregon ski seasons will be reduced by 80 percent, and snowpack losses across the American West will vary from 25 to 100 percent. Present snowmaking costs eat up about 50 percent of the ski industry’s energy bill, adding to the acceleration of natural snow’s demise.

Overall, Porter documents the likely death of the very thing he loves; it’s an old and powerful narrative form. Despite lightning flashing in snow storms and winters disappearing in February, he hangs in there. In the feature he sings the blues but ends on a high note, tasting the metallic tang of snow in the High Tetons of Idaho and Wyoming and giving skiers a ray of hope. The Tetons “have faired relatively well recently, and sit in a sweet spot that the latest NOAA models say might stay relatively snowy over the next 70 years.”

Getting out of the tram at Jackson Hole and snapping on his boards, Porter gets ahead of the pack and is soon taking us down Far Drift. “It still took my breath away — accelerating downhill, the feeling of nothingness as my skis floated in the powder." Alas, soon the nothingness on Far Drift may well be a new dawn, a warm sun rising over a rusted tram, and skiing but a sweet memory of a bygone era.

Can this be averted is not a question Porter raises here (the piece is an excerpt from his new book DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, out in November from Nowhere Publishing). Maybe he addresses it in the book; let’s hope he tries. A caption alongside a photo of a skier carving a burn above Salt Lake City, Utah, does posit this airball, "Being part of the winter community means being part of the solution."

How true is that? Twenty-five pages after Porter’s story are pages of thumbnails of 300 pairs of new skis, from Sick Day 125 to Ripper to Deathwish, along with slews of bindings and boots. From the ads in the mag we see who pays the bills. The end of snow message is fresh here, but the context remains troublingly old. It’s hard to feel deep sympathy for the demise of a sport that, in a quick half century, has gone from leather boots and ski-slope shacks to $1000 skis, $500 boots, and $100 day tickets — an ever narrowing joy for the well-to-do.

Near my home in Northern Vermont, Jay Peak, until quite recently synonymous with skiing sanity, continues its mega expansion funded by Green Card sales, evoking this thought, “Did we really piss away $100 million on this?" Still, one praises Porter Fox, awaits ski industry leadership pondering the new era of dark snow, and salutes Powder’s willingness to take a long look at the unthinkable: the end, nada, snow gone, Aspen all rock, the Alps too, maybe some drifts on Annapurna.... and we're talking in your baby's lifetime.

[norton ash]

^^^ puts a sad new spin on an old joke.

Aegean cruise passenger: 'What are those white peaks I see in the distance?'
Steward: 'That's Greece.'
Passenger: 'Really?? I thought it was snow!'

[Iamwhomiam]

http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest

Global Forest Change Map
(be sure to explore its layers)

We must stop harvesting our forests for a biomass fuel!

The brits have fallen victim to the slick salesmen pushing biomass incineration for producing electricity, burning wood pellets to boil water to create steam to spin electricity-producing turbines. Another form of biomass incineration is RFD, Refuse Derived Fuel, which includes plastics that should have been recycled and other organic wastes, household garbage that should be composted, scrap tires, and in some cases hazardous materials and chemicals, including resinated wood products that may be construction or demolition debris contaminated with asbestos.

But the world demand for wood pellets, which are supposed to manufactured from waste wood or deadfall, is so great that the manufacturers are felling forests to meet the demand and garner profit while prices are high due to the industry's rapid growth.

And they have a tremendous appetite, those incinerators. Many burn more than 1k Tonnes of pellets Per Day, some burn far in excess of that daily demand.

Wood pellet incinerators, like all incinerators, are designed to operate continuously but often experience "upsets" that force their shutdown. These upsets are exceedances in their permitted amount of releases of toxins they generate that are mandated to be monitored and reported to regulators. They have exceeded their limit of their license to pollute through malfunction. Because these shutdown instances are unplanned and unexpected the government regulators allows the industry not to monitor or report pollution being released during the upset, the shutdown or the start-up.

These un-monitored upset periods are when these plants are most dangerous; deadly, in fact. And due to the lack of regulation during the upset period, which may last hours or even days, the public health authorities cannot tell how much of any toxin you've been exposed to, only how long you've been exposed.

Dust created by the plant's operation endangers workers and the host community's residents and not just from breathing it. Dust explosions and fires are other well known problems these wasteful facilities frequently experience.

Even without including the huge carbon footprint of pelletized fuel, the harvesting of the wood and the manufacturing of the pellets and then its transport by ship across the ocean, then by truck or rail to its destination and finally adding in its actual carbon emissions from its burning, biomass incineration is dirtier than burning coal would be.

And biomass incineration is the second most expensive way to produce electricity, burning waste being most costly of all according the the US Energy Information Administration.

Once a community is locked into a 20 year or longer contract to pay for one, they're screwed. Their financing now contractually tied up for a generation or more precludes any investment in an alternative sustainable electricity producing technology, should the community tire of choking daily on its incinerator's toxic emissions.

Ultimately, incineration is unsustainable. We simple cannot afford to waste our forests so foolishly. Forests have an importance we can barely comprehend and should be preserved, not harvested for comfort.

There's a cost to society in paying for the healthcare for those made ill by industrial emissions that's rarely considered when these pollution promoters talk about host community benefits. Promoters will tell you you'll be saving money if you invest in their project, but they don't tell you it might cost you your life.

Invest in sensible and sustainable energy development. Avoid primitive technologies that come wrapped-up as science fiction fix-alls.

There is a vastly better world possible.


Allies:
http://www.energyjustice.net/biomass/
http://www.energyjustice.net/platform
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/Biofuelwatch
Twitter @Biofuelwatch

[coffin_dodger]

Recent (early Nov 2013) presentation from Guy McPherson:

http://vimeo.com/78610016

[Luther Blissett]

Recent (early Nov 2013) presentation from Guy McPherson:

http://vimeo.com/78610016

He's saying a lot of brave things here (human extinction, destroying industrial civilization, life may not recover for a very long time, etc).

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Simple. We'll just need more GM crops to 'mitigate' the effects of global warming. Problem Solved

http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publicat ... efault.asp

Pocket K No. 43: Biotechnology and Climate Change

Climate Change and its Effect in Agriculture

The continuing increase in greenhouse gas emissions raises the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. This results to melting of glaciers, unpredictable rainfall patterns, and extreme weather events. The accelerating pace of climate change, combined with global population and depletion of agricultural resources threatens food security globally.

The over-all impact of climate change as it affects agriculture was described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), and cited by the US EPA (2011)1 to be as follows:

Increases in average temperature will result to: i) increased crop productivity in high latitude temperate regions due to the lengthening of the growing season; ii) reduced crop productivity in low latitude subtropical and tropical regions where summer heat is already limiting productivity; and iii) reduced productivity due to an increase in soil evaporation rates.
Change in amount of rainfall and patterns will affect soil erosion rates and soil moisture, which are important for crop yields. Precipitation will increase in high latitudes, and decrease in most subtropical low latitude regions – some by as much as about 20%, leading to long drought spells.
Rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will boost and enhance the growth of some crops but other aspects of climate change (e.g., higher temperatures and precipitation changes) may offset any beneficial boosting effect of higher CO2 levels.
Pollution levels of tropospheric ozone (or bad ozone that can damage living tissue and break down certain materials) may increase due to the rise in CO2 emissions. This may lead to higher temperatures that will offset the increased growth of crops resulting from higher levels of CO2.
Changes in the frequency and severity of heat waves, drought, floods and hurricanes, remain a key uncertain factor that may potentially affect agriculture.
Climatic changes will affect agricultural systems and may lead to emergence of new pests and diseases.
In 2012, almost 40% of the world population of 6.7 billion, equivalent to 2.5 billion, rely on agriculture for their livelihood and will thus likely be the most severely affected. 2
To mitigate these effects, current agricultural approaches need to be modified and innovative adaption strategies need to be in place to efficiently produce more food in stressed conditions and with net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.


Contribution of Biotech Crops in Mitigating Effects of Climate Change

Green biotechnology offers a solution to decrease green house gases and therefore mitigates climate change. Biotech crops for the last 16 years of commercialization have been contributing to the reduction of CO2 emissions. They allow farmers to use less and environmentally friendly energy and fertilizer, and practice soil carbon sequestration.

Herbicide tolerant biotech crops such as soybean and canola facilitate zero or no-till, which significantly reduces the loss of soil carbon (carbon sequestration) and CO2 emissions, reduce fuel use, and significantly reduce soil erosion.
Insect resistant biotech crops require fewer pesticide sprays which results in savings of tractor/fossil fuel and thus less CO2 emissions. For 2011, there was a reduction of 37 million kg of active ingredients, decreased rate of herbicide and insecticide sprays and ploughing reduced CO2 emission by 23.1 billion kg of CO2 or removing 10.2 million cars off the road.3
Biotech Crops Adapted to Climate Change

Crops can be modified faster through biotechnology than conventional crops, thus hastening implementation of strategies to meet rapid and severe climatic changes. Pest and disease resistant biotech crops have continuously developed as new pests and diseases emerge with changes in climate. Resistant varieties will also reduce pesticide application and hence CO2 emission. Crops tolerant to various abiotech stresses have been developed in response to climatic changes.

Salinity Tolerant Crops
Biotech salt tolerant crops have been developed and some are in the final field trials before commercialization. In Australia, field trials of 1,161 lines of genetically modified (GM) wheat and 1,179 lines of GM barley modified to contain one of 35 genes obtained from wheat, barley, maize, thale cress, moss or yeasts are in progress since 2010 and will run till 2015. Some of the genes are expected to enhance tolerance to a range of abiotic stresses including drought, cold, salt and low phosphorous. Sugarcane that contains transcription factor (OsDREB1A) is also under field trial from 2009 to 2015.4

More than a dozen of other genes influencing salt tolerance have been found in various plants. Some of these candidate genes may prove feasible in developing salt tolerance in sugarcane 4, rice5,6, barley 7, wheat 8, tomato9, and soybean10.

Drought Resistant Crops
Transgenic plants carrying genes for water-stress management have been developed. Structural genes (key enzymes for osmolyte biosynthesis, such as proline, glycine/betaine, mannitol and trehalose, redox proteins and detoxifying enzymes, stress-induced LEA proteins) and regulatory genes, including dehydration–responsive, element-binding (DREB) factors, zinc finger proteins, and NAC transcription factor genes, are being used. Transgenic crops carrying different drought tolerant genes are being developed in rice, wheat, maize, sugarcane, tobacco, Arabidopsis, groundnut, tomato, potato and papaya.11, 12

An important initiative for Africa is the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project of the Kenyan-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and Howard G. Buffet Foundations. Drought tolerant WEMA varieties developed through marker assisted breeding could be available to farmers within the next two or three years. Drought-tolerant and insect-protected varieties developed using both advanced breeding and transgenic approaches could be available to farmers in the later part of the decade.13 In 2012, a genetically modified drought tolerant maize MON 87460 that expresses cold shock protein B has been approved in the US for release in the market.14

Biotech Crops for Cold Tolerance
By using genetic and molecular approaches, a number of relevant genes have been identified and new information continually emerges. Among which are the genes controlling the CBF cold-responsive pathway and together with DREB1 genes, integrate several components of the cold acclimation response to tolerance low temperatures.15

Cold tolerant GM crops are being developed such as GM eucalypti, which is currently being field tested in the US by Arborgen LLC since 2010. Thale cress has been improved to contain the DaIRIP4 from Deschapsia antarctica, a hairgrass that thrives in frosts down to -30C, and sugarcane are being introgressed with genes from cold tolerant wild varieties.4

Biotech Crops for Heat Stress
Expression of heat shock proteins (HSPs) has been associated with recovery of plants under heat stress and sometimes, even during drought. HSPs bind and stabilize proteins that have become denatured during stress conditions, and provide protection to prevent protein aggregation. In GM chrysanthemum containing the DREBIA gene from Arabidopsis thaliana, the transgene and other heat responsive genes such as the HSP70 (heat shock proteins) were highly expressed when exposed to heat treatment. The transgenic plants maintained higher photosynthetic capacity and elevated levels of photosynthesis-related enzymes.16

Forward Looking

Improved crops resilient to extreme environments caused by climate change are expected in a few years to a decade. Hence, food production during this era should be given another boost to sustain food supply for the doubling population. Biotech research to mitigate global warming should also be initiated to sustain the utilization of new products. Among these are: the induction of nodular structures on the roots of non-leguminous cereal crops to fix nitrogen. This will reduce farmers’ reliance on inorganic fertilizers. Another is the utilization of excess CO2 in the air by staple crop rice by converting its CO2 harnessing capability from C3 to C4 pathway. C4 plants like maize can efficiently assimilate and convert CO2 to carbon products during photosynthesis.

References

US EPA. 2011. Agriculture and Food Supply: Climate change, health and environmental effects. April 14, 2011. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effect ... lture.html

IFPRI. 2009. Climate change impact on agriculture and cost adaptation. http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/file ... s/pr21.pdf

Brookes, G and P Barfoot. 2012. Global economic and environmental benefits of GM crops continue to rise. http://www.pgeconomics.co.uk/page/33/global-impact-2012

Tammisola, J. 2010. Towards much more efficient biofuel crops – can sugarcane pave the way? GM Crops 1:4; 181-198. http://www.landesbioscience.com/journal ... GMC1-4.pdf

http://thesecondgreenrevolution.blogspo ... ls-in.html

http://irri.org/index.php?option=com_k2 ... nt&lang=en

Salt Tolerant GM Barley Trials in Australia, Successful. http://thesecondgreenrevolution.blogspo ... ls-in.html
http://www.grdc.com.au/director/researc ... 5C8E62BAE7
518CD28067&pageNumber=1&filter1=&filter2=&filter3=&filter4=

Moghaieb RE, A Nakamura, H Saneoka and K Fujita. 2011. Evaluation of salt tolerance in ectoine-transgenic tomato plants (Lycopersicon esculentum) in terms of photosynthesis, osmotic adjustment, and carbon partitioning. GM Crops. 2(1):58-65. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21844699

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h51n73352374v877/.

http://bioeconomy.dk/outcome/presentati ... esentation

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... 51#preview

http://www.monsanto.com/ourcommitments/ ... frica.aspx

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/2011 ... ions.shtml

Sanghera, GS, S H Wani, W Hussain, and N B Singh. 2011. Engineering cold stress tolerance in crop plants. Curr Genomics 12 (1): 30-43. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... ool=pubmed

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19234675

[coffin_dodger]

He's saying a lot of brave things here (human extinction, destroying industrial civilization, life may not recover for a very long time, etc).

I believe him and I don't believe him. That's schizophrenic, I guess, or cognitive dissonance.

The part of me that believes him surfaces ocassionally - what's the point in planning anything for the future? Knowing that everyone except the already elderly will be dead before their time? That it's hopeless? That it's properly the end? Not with a bang but with a whimper.

I can afford the luxury of part of me believing him because thankfully, not many other people do. And frankly, if the probability increases and more feedback loops present themselves, I'd prefer it to stay that way - an open secret - something the theorists don't talk about in polite company and something that the majority of people don't even think about. Because an entire world which realises it's dying rapidly with no escape hatch will be... well, I don't go there unless the mood is very black.

At the same time, I don't believe him - to allow myself to continue functioning in this reality.

I liken it to watching a horror film from the comfort of my armchair in my lounge.

If it gets too scary, I quickly 'detune' by looking away at my true surroundings, my lamp, the carpet, my chair. I switch from a state of terror - to calm - in an instant. Everything is (relatively) OK in reality.

It's the prospect of a day coming when I cannot detune my senses from the horror flick planted in my mind by McPherson becoming reality, that I fear most. But until that day comes, it's just a scary movie.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The 'Ticking Time Bomb' That Could Cause Such Rapid Global Warming We'd Be Unable to Prevent Extinction

Our planet has experienced five major extinctions over the past billion or so years -- do we really want to launch an irreversible 6th?
November 26, 2013 |





If, 250 million years ago, you were standing thousands of miles away from what is now Siberia in the first years of the Permian Mass Extension, probably the most you would notice is an odd change in the weather and a reddish hue in the northern sky. What you wouldn’t know, and probably your children wouldn’t even realize –although their grandchildren probably would – is that a tipping point had already been passed, and an extinction – an unstoppable one – was already underway.

Extinction?

What could get America’s leading experts on climate change to agree on something that the average American has probably never even heard of?

Methane.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and there are trillions of tons of it embedded in a sort of ice slurry called methane hydrate or methane clathrate crystals in the Arctic and in the seas around continental shelves from North America to Antarctica.

If enough of this methane is released quickly enough, it won’t just produce “Global warming.” It could produce an extinction of species on a wide scale – an extinction that could even include the human race.

If there is a “ticking time bomb” in our biosphere that could lead to a global warming so rapid and sudden that we would have no way of dealing with it, it’s methane.

Our planet has experienced five major extinctions over the past billion or so years, times when more than half of all life has died in a geologically brief period of time, and the common denominator of each one has been a sudden pulse of global warming. Increasingly, it appears that a rapid release of methane played a primary role in each one.

Back in 2002, the BBC documented how, just in the previous decade, geologists had by-and-large come to the conclusion that a sudden release of methane led to the death of over 95% of everything on Earth during the Permian Mass Extinction. That methane is back, probably in even larger quantities, as life has been so active since the last mass extinction.

We laid out the scenario and its possible doomsday implications in a short video titled “Last Hours” a few months ago. Since the world has been recently sensitized about methane, we’re now discovering more and more of it leaking from oil wells, fracking operations, melting permafrost, and even stirred up by Arctic storms.

Just this week, the EPA reported they may have been underestimating by half the amount of methane being produced by human activity. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation just released a report that methane releases from the Arctic have also been underestimated. The caption accompanying their graphic says it all too clearly: “Methane is leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf into the atmosphere at an alarming rate.”

While methane does eventually degrade into carbon dioxide, when large amounts are released over a short time period, their effect on global warming can be dramatic, since methane is such a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has passed 400 ppm, a number never before seen in human history, but we’ve also never seen methane releases on this order in human history. And, to a large extent, the naturally occurring methane releases are the result of that 400 ppm of carbon dioxide.

While many of the methane releases are the result of fossil fuel extraction processes, the most dangerous ones – the ones that could lead to trillions of tons of methane escaping into the atmosphere and driving an extinction event – are from the melting of frozen methane clathrate crystals along the seabeds. And the process that drives that is global warming, principally driven by carbon dioxide.

If we want to avoid an extinction that could approach or even rival some of the five past extinctions that have wiped out so much of life on earth, we must get control, quickly, of our man-made carbon dioxide and methane releases.

[coffin_dodger]

Esa's Cryosat mission detects continued West Antarctic ice loss
11 December 2013
Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

West Antarctica continues to lose ice to the ocean and this loss appears to be accelerating, according to new data from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft.

The dedicated polar mission finds the region now to be dumping over 150 cubic km of ice into the sea every year.

It equates to a 15% increase in West Antarctica's contribution to global sea level rise.

more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25328508

[Iamwhomiam]

Obviously 'warmer' false propaganda... Ben informs us Antarctica the other day was 10 degrees colder than ever before recorded. Prepare for the coming Ice Age!

Gonna be weird, though... nobody will know what ice is when it happens. 'Cause there won't be anyone around to witness it.

[NeonLX]

So far it's been a colder and snowier winter than normal. The office GW "expert" informs me of this every day.

Ha-Ha, you crazy tree huggers and your crackpot theories...

Of course, the reason we are getting this weather is because of a flow change in the Pacific caused by warmer water, which is messing with the jet stream, allowing it to pull down more arctic air over a larger swath of the continent. But that's just too damned complicated and I'm making things up to fit my theory.

[Iamwhomiam]

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse we're reminded of the looming reality of the tenuous nature of our survivability.

Now I'm going to do just that. Unfortunately and purposely omitted from this study (studies in my earlier post) landfill generated methane from the digestion of organic wastes by methanogenic anaerobic bacteria was not included. Methane produced by landfills are one of the largest sources of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

What this means is the study reported in the article posted by stillrobertpaulson or me has grossly underestimated anthropogenic methane production.

Maybe later tonight, after I've read the full study and its supporting documents, I'll have a multiplier for a more accurate reporting of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from all sources.