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by DrEvil » Fri Feb 01, 2013 12:44 am
by wintler2 » Fri Feb 01, 2013 3:01 am
elihu wrote: i am asking you to discontinue the scientific front-end.
by wintler2 » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:40 pm
The Scary Truth About How Much Climate Change is Costing You
A 2012 study by the Madrid-based group DARA found that extreme weather associated with climate change is costing the world economy $1.2 trillion a year, destroying 1.6 percent of global gross domestic product. The study projects that the effects of climate change could cut global GDP by 3.2 percent a year by 2030. ..
..In the United States, 2011 and 2012 were the two most extreme years on record for destructive weather events.
A record 14 weather disasters occurred in 2011, sustaining more than $1 billion each in economic losses for a total of $60.6 billion. Last year brought 11 weather disasters that each cost $1 billion or more; while the total economic loss has not been determined, experts say the dollar figure is almost certain to exceed 2011’s.
Meanwhile, the insurance industry estimates that its losses from 2012’s natural disasters will total $58 billion—more than double the average yearly losses of $27 billion from 2000 to 2011. ..
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 12, 2013 10:44 pm
Satellites Reveal Depletion of a Vital Middle East Water Supply
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Just in case you needed more reasons to be concerned about the stability of the Middle East, new research using data from NASA’s gravity-sensing Grace satellites shows a substantial decline in the volume of groundwater reserves in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins. Data gathered between 2003 and 2009 show the seasonal recharge of the region’s aquifers (the blue pulses in the illuminating animation above) but then the onset of a potent drought in 2007 followed by a persistent big drop in water amounts, 60 percent of which is ascribed to unsustainable rates of pumping in a study to be published on Friday in the journal Water Resources Research.
Here are some useful excerpts from a joint news release from NASA and the University of California, Irvine:
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs….
“Grace data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.” [Read the rest.]
On a crowding, turbulent planet, the value of remote-sensing satellites and related programs has never been greater. I hope and trust that President Obama will find room in his State of the Union address tonight not only for jobs, security and environmental progress, but also for sustaining critical investments in such technologies and related science.
To see more evidence of the value of remote sensing, tune in Wednesday night to PBS, which will take a detailed look at various ways satellite and space station imagery are enriching understanding of the home planet in a two-hour Nova special, “Earth from Space.”
by Luther Blissett » Thu Feb 14, 2013 5:50 pm
Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks
Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 February 2013 08.39 EST
Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.
The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives.
The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.
Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust told the Guardian that her organisation assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes.
"We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," she said in an interview.
By definition that means none of the money is going to end up with groups like Greenpeace, she said. "It won't be going to liberals."
Ball won't divulge names, but she said the stable of donors represents a wide range of opinion on the American right. Increasingly over the years, those conservative donors have been pushing funds towards organisations working to discredit climate science or block climate action.
Donors exhibit sharp differences of opinion on many issues, Ball said. They run the spectrum of conservative opinion, from social conservatives to libertarians. But in opposing mandatory cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, they found common ground.
"Are there both sides of an environmental issue? Probably not," she went on. "Here is the thing. If you look at libertarians, you tend to have a lot of differences on things like defence, immigration, drugs, the war, things like that compared to conservatives. When it comes to issues like the environment, if there are differences, they are not nearly as pronounced."
By 2010, the dark money amounted to $118m distributed to 102 thinktanks or action groups which have a record of denying the existence of a human factor in climate change, or opposing environmental regulations.
The money flowed to Washington thinktanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore.
The ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama's environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.
Those same groups are now mobilising against Obama's efforts to act on climate change in his second term. A top recipient of the secret funds on Wednesday put out a point-by-point critique of the climate content in the president's state of the union address.
And it was all done with a guarantee of complete anonymity for the donors who wished to remain hidden.
"The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records.
"These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable. There is no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them," Davies said.
The trusts were established for the express purpose of managing donations to a host of conservative causes.
Such vehicles, called donor-advised funds, are not uncommon in America. They offer a number of advantages to wealthy donors. They are convenient, cheaper to run than a private foundation, offer tax breaks and are lawful.
That opposition hardened over the years, especially from the mid-2000s where the Greenpeace record shows a sharp spike in funds to the anti-climate cause.
In effect, the Donors Trust was bankrolling a movement, said Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who has extensively researched the networks of ultra-conservative donors.
"This is what I call the counter-movement, a large-scale effort that is an organised effort and that is part and parcel of the conservative movement in the United States " Brulle said. "We don't know where a lot of the money is coming from, but we do know that Donors Trust is just one example of the dark money flowing into this effort."
In his view, Brulle said: "Donors Trust is just the tip of a very big iceberg."
The rise of that movement is evident in the funding stream. In 2002, the two trusts raised less than $900,000 for the anti-climate cause. That was a fraction of what Exxon Mobil or the conservative oil billionaire Koch brothers donated to climate sceptic groups that year.
By 2010, the two Donor Trusts between them were channelling just under $30m to a host of conservative organisations opposing climate action or science. That accounted to 46% of all their grants to conservative causes, according to the Greenpeace analysis.
The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of six to one.
"There is plenty of money coming from elsewhere," said John Mashey, a retired computer executive who has researched funding for climate contrarians. "Focusing on the Kochs gets things confused. You can not ignore the Kochs. They have their fingers in too many things, but they are not the only ones."
It is also possible the Kochs continued to fund their favourite projects using the anonymity offered by Donor Trust.
But the records suggest many other wealthy conservatives opened up their wallets to the anti-climate cause – an impression Ball wishes to stick.
She argued the media had overblown the Kochs support for conservative causes like climate contrarianism over the years. "It's so funny that on the right we think George Soros funds everything, and on the left you guys think it is the evil Koch brothers who are behind everything. It's just not true. If the Koch brothers didn't exist we would still have a very healthy organisation," Ball said.
by wintler2 » Thu Feb 14, 2013 8:36 pm
by beeline » Fri Feb 22, 2013 2:15 pm
by wintler2 » Thu Feb 28, 2013 6:16 am
by wintler2 » Thu Feb 28, 2013 6:26 pm
Fact check: has global warming paused?
To summarise, claims that warming has paused over the last 16 years (1997-2012) take no account of ocean heating. ..
by Iamwhomiam » Sat Mar 02, 2013 4:24 pm
by beeline » Thu Mar 28, 2013 10:08 am
by hanshan » Mon Apr 22, 2013 10:56 am
Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis
edited by John D. Steinbruner, Paul C. Stern, and Jo L. Husbands
National Research Council, 238 pp., $54.00 (paperback), available at nap.edu/catalog
Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4ºC Warmer World Must Be Avoided
a report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics
November 2012, 58 pp., available at climatechange.worldbank.org
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Daedalus, Winter 2013
Ian Berry/Magnum Photos
A melting iceberg from the South Sawyer Glacier in the Tracy Arm Fjord, near Juneau, Alaska
And the heat goes on. In the last few weeks, new data from the CryoSat satellite system have shown that there’s only one fifth as much sea ice in the Arctic as there was in 1980. New data from the carbon dioxide monitors on the side of Mauna Loa in Hawaii showed the second-greatest annual leap in atmospheric CO2 ever recorded. A new study of temperature records dating back 11,000 years showed that the planet is currently heating up fifty times faster than at any point during human civilization. New data from the Arctic showed that over the last thirty years vegetation zones have moved seven degrees latitude further north. In other words, the planet continues to show the effects of the early stages of global warming, and those effects are very large.
snip
. At this point, almost all observers agree that because of the inertia in our political and economic systems, it would take an all-out effort to hold temperature increases below two degrees Celsius, the red line that the international community drew at Copenhagen in 2009. And there is no sign of that all-out effort; instead, there’s a constant push to drill and frack and mine for more oil and gas and coal. Instead, also in the last few weeks, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson announced that the company would double the acreage it is currently exploring looking for new oil.
Meanwhile, a new oil find in California was reported to be four times larger than the new oil patch in North Dakota, which was itself compared to Saudi Arabia. And that’s just in the US—in Australia, a new find of shale oil in the Ackaringa Basin was estimated to be even larger than the tar sands of Canada, with estimated recoverable reserves worth as much as $20 trillion.
The mighty political power of the fossil fuel industry has so far been enough to obliterate reason—we’re now a quarter-century past the day when NASA scientist James Hansen1 first announced in Congress that it was “time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”snip
There is, therefore, something both noble and despairing about the new volumes under review. They represent the inertia of our academic and bureaucratic systems, which continue to churn out warning after ever-more-detailed warning about our plight.snip
The National Research Council,...this volume, which was “prepared at the request of the US intelligence community,” contains information as sobering as it is sober. Its basic take is that:given the available scientific knowledge of the climate system, it is prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises in the coming decade, including unexpected and potentially disruptive single events as well as conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate.
... In particular, the report warns of the effects of climate change on water supplies in critical river basins, the risk of famine as crops fail, the disruption caused by surges of refugees migrating away from catastrophes, and the spread of pandemic diseases. The latter section includes a particular focus on yellow fever, whose mosquito carrier, Aedes egypti, has, the authors report, spread to cover an area of 2.5 billion people. “The possible return of outbreaks of urban yellow fever is a serious potential public health risk in Africa and South America,” they conclude.
Urban yellow fever results in large, explosive epidemics when travelers from rural areas introduce the virus into areas with high human population density…affecting up to 20 percent of the population with high case-fatality rates.
Reading even dry reports like that makes it easier to understand why security agencies are, in fact, ever more worried about climate change. It makes systems unstable—wherever there’s already risk of trouble, it’s a “threat multiplier.” ...Last month, in an interview with The Boston Globe, the US Navy’s senior Pacific commander, Samuel J. Locklear III, said that climate change “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about,” such as a North Korean nuclear bomb or Chinese computer hacking. “You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level,” Locklear said. “Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon twenty-seven or twenty-eight this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about seventeen.”2
Other military leaders, he added, were thinking along the same lines. “We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue—even with China and India—the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”
The World Bank ... Jim Yong Kim as the bank’s new president, .... “It is my hope that this report shocks us into action,” he begins his foreword to Turn Down the Heat, published last autumn. His team points out that the current policies of world governments, our own included, guarantee that we’ll rush past a two-degree increase and end up with a world at least four degrees warmer. Since that outcome is not yet foreordained—a dramatic effort to change those policies and hence cut emissions could still keep us below two degrees, his team concludes—the volume is an effort to show the consequences of failure. The “4°C scenarios are devastating,” he writes.
The inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter, unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.snip
... But a world warmer by four degrees, this analysis points out, “will consistently cause temperatures in the tropics to shift by more than 6 standard deviations for all months of the year.” By 2080, the coolest months of the year will be substantially warmer than the warmest months now, and we would experience “a completely new class of heat waves, with magnitudes never experienced before in the 20th century.”
... National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study published in February: the rise in heat and humidity we’ve already experienced, it found, has reduced by about 10 percent the amount of outdoor work humans are able to do. That percentage could double by midcentury, and by its end the average person would find his productivity cut by a third. The killing heat would extend into the mid-latitudes—in the Lower Mississippi Valley, for instance, conditions would “prevent any safe level of sustained work,” according to the study.snip
...the Keystone Pipeline, ...In mid-February, the State Department issued a preliminary finding showing the pipeline would have minimal environmental impact, but it required such tortured logic (essentially concluding that the same amount of oil would leave the tar sands if the pipeline was built or not) that support for the enterprise has begun to waver in some establishment circles.snip
Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “locks in” dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is both a conspicuous example of that kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging.snip
.... But this small essay from two historians of science is a mordant and fascinating exception. It’s a report looking back from 2373 and attempting to explain our inaction on climate, concluding that “a second Dark Ages had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” It invents a great many fancies—2021 is the “year of perpetual summer,” for instance, with livestock and pets keeling over in the heat around the world—all eventually leading to a “Great Collapse.”
This account, I am sure, was finished before the events of January 2013, when a heat wave of completely unprecedented proportion baked the entire continent of Australia day after day, and required the country’s meteorological agency to add two new colors to its charts to reflect the unheard-of heat. The Aussies have taken to calling this record year, which also featured towering wildfires and huge floods, the “angry summer.” It sounds both biblical and like something out of science fiction, but it is painfully real. What remains to be seen is whether reality still has any traction in our public life.
1
In early April Hansen announced his retirement from NASA, an agency he joined as a young scientist in 1967. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for the development of the climate science the world is currently ignoring. ↩
2
See Bryan Bender, “Chief of US Pacific Forces Calls Climate Biggest Worry,” The Boston Globe, March 9, 2013. ↩
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by coffin_dodger » Mon Apr 22, 2013 11:12 am
by coffin_dodger » Mon Apr 29, 2013 7:47 am
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