How Bad Is Global Warming?

[tapitsbo]

Well fracking has been stopped in many jurisdictions. The shit is fucked, though.

[Luther Blissett]

Many fracking "bans" in the common parlance are actually temporary "moratoriums" and are sometimes up for vote more often than one would expect, keeping the situation very anxiously edgy for communities in perpetuity. There are numerous cases of community "wins" that quickly flip to "losses" in short order. It's tough to keep a ban on the books when there's a lot of money pushing in the opposite direction.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^ Yeah. I've learned of no bans on fracking anywhere but in Germany and New York State, so where are you referring to, tapitsbo?

My first look at methane and its negative climate impacts began with that being released from a local landfill. Sometimes when when you plunge headlong into an issue, you never know where you'll wind up, or would believe that it would take decades to get there.

Thanks for sharing McKibben's article, Luther, though much of the information about the methane released from well sites has been long known, even the approximations it relates for methane release have remained consistent, though never reported as high as 7.9%. The high end figure given, 105X for CH4 warming potential has been modified downward to the lower figure, 86X the warming potential of CO2.

I'm sure I've related these ratios long ago, when I first learned it from Howarth himself.

The EPA’s old chemistry and 100-year time frame assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure, says Howarth, is between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two.

This is the old, but sound argument that we should not be using a 100 year period when comparing the warming potential of CH4 to that of CO2, but to instead use a 20 year period because the warming potential of methane is greatest over 20 years. Thereafter, due to the eventual breakdown of Methane into Carbon Dioxide, its warming impact lessens, but still remains many times as high as CO2.

Sorry to be crude, but the gas you pass today will still be warming our climate for centuries.

While every state was analyzing and inventorying their sources of greenhouse gas producers, they overlooked the oil and gas industry. Why? Because it is exempt from the Clean Air Act.

Some of us working to oppose fracking in NYS were astonished to learn there were thousands of abandoned wells in our state, many left uncapped, spewing methane 24/7. "What about the health of the workers?" next came to mind, those whose exposure to fugitive hydrocarbon emissions is greatest. There were and are no independent health studies of well pad workers, so we set out to defeat fracking where it was weakest. And then a panel of health care professionals was convened, all experts in their respective fields, to proclaim fracking was unsafe because it has not been proven safe ~ the Precautionary Principal in action!

That's my contracted Alzheimer's version of past events!

If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025

.

We knew this goal was set far too low to be effective. Our own state's goals are also unrealistic and not achievable.

Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.”

With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.

March 10, 2016 the EPA took action.

EPA Taking Steps to Cut Methane Emissions from Existing Oil and Gas Sources
https://blog.epa.gov/blog/2016/03/epa-taking-steps-to-cut-methane-emissions-from-existing-oil-and-gas-sources/

Here is a link to the EPA search results for Methane:
https://search.epa.gov/epasearch/epasearch?querytext=methane&x=0&y=0&fld=&areaname=&typeofsearch=epa&areacontacts=comments.htm&areasearchurl=&result_template=epafiles_default.xsl&filter=sample4filt.hts

Note the dates of the first three dated links?

There will be no happy ending to this situation.

[KUAN]

.
One metre of sea level rise would see many tens of millions of people from coastal areas on the move - dwarfing the Syrian situation.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... test-study

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/sat/sat-20 ... se-048.mp3

cooling at higher latitudes and at lower ones, increased warming and mega storms powerful enough to throw huge undersea boulders up onto the land.

I really hope I get to see it, and then die

[fruhmenschen]

http://robertscribbler.com

[Luther Blissett]

Navy forced to evacuate Arctic ice camp

A crack through the Navy's Arctic ice camp forced submariners and researchers to break camp in a hurry Thursday.

More than 40 international researchers and personnel were evacuated by aircraft back to the U.S. after the crack was discovered, bringing the Navy's biennial ice station to a premature close, according to two officials familiar with the exercise. The operation, which began in early March, was slated to run another week.

The camp was being packed up early prior because another crack farther away had been discovered earlier in the week. The evacuation kicked into high gear when the second crack ripped through the camp.

While the people were evacuated, some of the equipment was left and would have to be retrieved later, one official said.

Ice Camp Sargo consists of shelters, a command center and infrastructure to house and feed more than 70 people at a time.

The evacuation of Sargo was reminiscent of the evacuation of Ice Camp Nautilus in 2014, almost two years ago to the day. The camp is set up every two years to assist two attack submarines conducting operations under the ice floes in the Beaufort Sea. It also serves as a base camp for researchers testing ice thickness, among other things.

While the researchers were disappointed to leave a week early, the Navy still counts the mission a big success, said Cmdr. Tommy Crosby, spokesman for Submarine Force Atlantic.

"The vast majority of the experiments being conducted were completed, all but two" Crosby said, adding that while the camp was demobilized, the Navy was pressing on with its submarine-based experiments.

The attack submarines Hampton and Hartford are stalking around under the ice floes as scheduled, Crosby said.

"The exercise is still ongoing," Crosby said. "Hampton and Hartford are resuming their regularly scheduled operations."

[Luther Blissett]

The Warmer, Wetter Arctic Is Becoming a New Source of Carbon
Researchers find that hotter temperatures could be setting off dangerous environmental feedback loops.

Could the impacts of climate change include environmental feedbacks that intensify its effects?

New research from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire adds to a growing body of evidence that in the Arctic, at least, such feedback loops are a real consequence of the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Ecologist Julia Bradley-Cook and her team took samples back to the lab of western Greenland tundra soil that grows grass and shrubs and tested how increases in both temperature and moisture would affect the release of carbon dioxide.

They found that both types of soils released significantly more CO2 as they got warmer and wetter. Grass soils released up to twice as much carbon than the shrub soils as heat and moisture increased.

“I think about it as if you’re pouring Red Bull on the soils,” said Bradley-Cook, who led the study as part of completing her Ph.D. at Dartmouth. “As you ramp up temperatures, you’re giving the microorganisms in the soils all this energy, in an accelerated way. The grass soils are more sensitive to that Red Bull than the shrub soils.”

The grass and shrub soils “are relatively on the lower side, in terms of temperature sensitivity, than some of the permafrost soils in Alaska and in Russia,” which comprise a much larger land area of the Arctic than Greenland, she noted.

“The big picture is that there is twice as much carbon stored in Arctic soils as there is in the atmosphere,” Bradley-Cook said. “What’s going to happen to that carbon that built up in soils over millennia under the conditions of rapid climate change?”

GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian research center affiliated with the United Nations Environment Programme, estimates that Arctic soils hold about 1.8 trillion tons of carbon.

Bradley-Cook acknowledged that her research, which was published in the journal Climate Change Responses, looked solely at the volume and rate at which CO2 was leaving the soil and did not measure how much was being stored at the same time.

So the question of how much carbon Arctic soils are releasing compared with how much they’re sequestering from the atmosphere remains open.

But “there is warming in the Arctic already,” Bradley-Cook said. “We are observing changes in permafrost depths—so, the thawing of permafrost. That would introduce new carbon into the atmosphere from those soils.”

Scientists have been warning the public in recent months that climate change is accelerating.

In February, temperatures across the Arctic soared as much as 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1951 to 1980 average, according to the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center—blowing away the maximum warming target of 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) that nations agreed to in last year’s Paris climate accord.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed on Thursday that February’s global temperatures set a new heat-increase record by departing 2.18 degrees (1.21 degrees Celsius) from historic norms.

[Luther Blissett]

Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly

For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization.

The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed the worst effects would take hundreds — if not thousands — of years to occur.

Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner.

Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades, according to a study published Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level as much as three feet by the end of this century.

With ice melting in other regions, too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.

The situation would grow far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding a pace of a foot per decade by the middle of the 22nd century. Scientists had documented such rates of increase in the geologic past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.

“We are not saying this is definitely going to happen,” said David Pollard, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the new paper. “But I think we are pointing out that there’s a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention.”

The long-term effect would likely be to drown the world’s coastlines, including many of its great cities.

New York City is nearly 400 years old; in the worst-case scenario conjured by the research, its chances of surviving another 400 years in anything like its present form would appear to be remote. Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia, are all just as vulnerable as New York, or more so.

In principle, coastal defenses could be built to protect the densest cities, but experts believe it will be impossible to do that along all 95,000 miles of the American coastline, meaning that immense areas will most likely have to be abandoned to the rising sea.

The new research, published by the journal Nature, is based on improvements in a computerized model of Antarctica and its complex landscape of rocks and glaciers, meant to capture factors newly recognized as imperiling the stability of the ice.

The new version of the model allowed the scientists, for the first time, to reproduce high sea levels of the past, such as a climatic period about 125,000 years ago when the seas rose to levels 20 to 30 feet higher than today.

That gave them greater confidence in the model’s ability to project the future sea level, though they acknowledged that they do not yet have an answer that could be called definitive.

“You could think of all sorts of ways that we might duck this one,” said Richard B. Alley, a leading expert on glacial ice at Pennsylvania State University. “I’m hopeful that will happen. But given what we know, I don’t think we can tell people that we’re confident of that.”

Dr. Alley was not an author of the new paper, though it is based in part on his ideas about the stability of glacial ice. Several other scientists not involved in the paper described it as significant, with some of them characterizing it as a milestone.

But those same scientists emphasized that it was a single paper, and unlikely to be the last word on the fate of West Antarctica. The effort to include the newly recognized factors imperiling the ice is still crude, with years of work likely needed to improve the models.

Peter U. Clark of Oregon State University helped lead the last effort by a United Nations panel to assess the risks of sea level rise; he was not involved in the new paper. He emphasized that the research, like much previous work, highlighted the urgency of bringing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under control.

It was his panel that had estimated an upper limit of three feet or so on the likely sea level rise in the 21st century, while specifically warning that a better understanding of the vulnerability of Antarctic ice could change that estimate.

The new research is the work of two scientists who have been at the forefront of ice-sheet modeling for years. They are Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Dr. Pollard, who is a colleague of Dr. Alley’s at Penn State.

In a lengthy interview on Monday, Dr. DeConto recounted years of frustration. The computer program he had built in a long-running collaboration with Dr. Pollard showed increasing sophistication in its ability to explain the behavior of ice sheets, but it had some trouble analyzing the past.

Unless global temperatures were raised to unrealistic levels, the model would not melt enough ice to reproduce the high sea levels known to have occurred in previous periods when either the atmosphere or the ocean was warmer. The ability to reproduce past events is considered a stringent test of the merits of any geological model.

“We knew something was missing,” Dr. DeConto said.

The new idea came from Dr. Alley. He urged his colleagues to consider what would happen as a warming climate attacked huge shelves of floating ice that help to protect and buttress the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Smaller, nearby ice shelves have already started to disintegrate, most spectacularly in 2002, when an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, the Larsen B shelf, broke apart in two weeks.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a sort of deep bowl that extends far below sea level, and if it loses its protective fringes of floating ice, the result is likely to be the formation of vast, sheer cliffs of ice facing the sea. These will be so high they will become unstable in places, Dr. Alley said in an interview, and the warming atmosphere is likely to encourage melting on their surface in the summer that would weaken them further.

The result, Dr. Alley suspected, might be a rapid shrinkage as the unstable cliffs collapsed into the water. Something like this seems to be happening already at several glaciers, including at least two in Greenland, but on a far smaller scale than may be possible in West Antarctica.

When Dr. DeConto and Dr. Pollard, drawing on prior work by J. N. Bassis and C. C. Walker, devised some equations to capture this “ice-cliff instability,” their model produced striking results.

The obvious next step was to ask the model what might happen if human society continues to warm the planet by pouring huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The answer the scientists got is described in their paper in the dry language of science, but it could easily serve as the plot device of a Hollywood disaster movie. They found that West Antarctica, which is already showing disturbing signs of instability, would start to break apart by the 2050s.

Vulnerable parts of the higher, colder ice sheet of East Antarctica would eventually fall apart, too, and the result by the year 2500 would be 43 feet of sea level rise from Antarctica alone, with still more water coming from elsewhere, the computer estimated. In some areas, the shoreline would be likely to move inland by miles.

The paper published Wednesday does contain some good news. A far more stringent effort to limit emissions of greenhouse gases would stand a fairly good chance of saving West Antarctica from collapse, the scientists found. That aspect of their paper contrasts with other recent studies postulating that a gradual disintegration of West Antarctica may have already become unstoppable.

But the recent climate deal negotiated in Paris would not reduce emissions nearly enough to achieve that goal. That deal is to be formally signed by world leaders in a ceremony in New York next month, in a United Nations building that stands directly by the rising water.

[KUAN]

.

Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... tudy-warns

Most funny headlines .com

[smoking since 1879]

It's April and it feels like June already...

[jakell]

It's April and it feels like June already...

I'm not familiar with these two ladies.

[smoking since 1879]

It's April and it feels like June already...

I'm not familiar with these two ladies.

May I introduce you ?

[backtoiam]

The Inquisition has spoken. We have a new religion. Heritics will be burned at the stake. Al Gore, Inconvenient Hockey Stick Daddyo will help lead the burnings.

16 Democrat AGs Begin Inquisition Against ‘Climate Change Disbelievers’
April 5, 2016



Beginning in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition systematically silenced any citizen who held views that did not align with the king’s. Using the powerful arm of the government, the grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, and his henchmen sought out all those who held religious, scientific, or moral views that conflicted with the monarch’s, punishing the “heretics” with jail sentences, property confiscation, fines, and in severe cases, torture, and execution.

One of the lasting results of the Spanish Inquisition was a stifling of speech, thought, and scientific debate throughout Spain. By treating one set of scientific views as absolute, infallible, and above critique, Spain silenced many brilliant individuals and stopped the development of new ideas and technological innovations. Spain became a scientific backwater.

As an old adage says, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So we now have a new inquisition underway in America in the 21st century—something that would have seemed unimaginable not too long ago.

Treating climate change as an absolute, unassailable fact, instead of what it is— an unproven, controversial scientific theory, a group of state attorneys general have announced that they will be targeting any companies that challenge the catastrophic climate change religion.

Speaking at a press conference on March 29, New York Attorney General EricSchneiderman said “The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real.” He went on to say that if companies are committing fraud by “lying” about the dangers of climate change, they will “pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”

The coalition of 17 inquisitors are calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power.” The coalition consists of 15 state attorneys general (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington State), as well as the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands. Sixteen of the seventeen members are Democrats, while the attorney general for the Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, is an independent.

The inquisitors are threatening legal action and huge fines against anyone who declines to believe in an unproven scientific theory.

Schneiderman and Kamala Harris, representing New York and California respectively, have already launched investigations into ExxonMobil for allegedly funding research that questioned climate change. Exxon emphatically denounced the accusations as false, pointing out that the investigation that “uncovered” this research was funded by advocacy foundations that publicly support climate change activism.

Standing next to Schneiderman throughout the press conference was the grand inquisitor himself, former Vice President Al Gore, who has stepped into the role of Tomas de Torquemada

Read more: http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/04/16-de ... aign=jd-fb

[Iamwhomiam]

Great news! backtoiam is back with the latest from the Heritage Foundation! A source you should always trust and never doubt!

What a tool you are, btia, of the Coors family's propaganda machine.

Besides, this is the wrong thread for that kind of article; it would be better placed within its own topic, How Bad Is Climate Change Denial.

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=38884&hilit=how+bad+is+climate+change+denial

You are unfuckingbelievably consistent in posting "news" from the extreme right wing.

Standing next to Schneiderman throughout the press conference was the grand inquisitor himself, former Vice President Al Gore, who has stepped into the role of Tomas de Torquemada.

[backtoiam]

Almost 20 Attorney Generals are wanting to prosecute people for debating a topic and thats the best you can do? ^^^

Tell it to this guy. I'm seeing more and more of this as a pattern in our society today. BLM flopped in more ways than one.