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by stillrobertpaulsen » Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:02 pm
by zangtang » Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:31 pm
by Luther Blissett » Mon Jul 11, 2016 9:17 am
stillrobertpaulsen » Sat Jul 09, 2016 9:02 pm wrote:My latest blog post visibly shows how bad global warming is. I'm trying to make American Judas more visually oriented (even creating a YouTube channel) and it started with a trip to a glacier that is rapidly disappearing. But going on the trip with my wife was so eye-opening we decided to start a joint blog and YouTube channel documenting our adventures.
Our Road Trip to the Columbia Icefield, Yellowstone and Beyond
by NeonLX » Mon Jul 11, 2016 10:02 am
by stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Jul 11, 2016 10:21 pm
by Luther Blissett » Fri Jul 22, 2016 10:13 am
Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can
Jason Hickel
It’s time to pour our creative energies into imagining a new global economy. Infinite growth is a dangerous illusion
Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep.
With such extreme events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.
This growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness. But I can’t help but fear we’ve missed the point. As important as clean energy might be, the science is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.
Let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario wouldn’t be enough to avert climate catastrophe.
Why? Because the burning of fossil fuels only accounts for about 70% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining 30% comes from a number of causes. Deforestation is a big one. So is industrial agriculture, which degrades the soils to the point where they leach CO2. Then there’s industrial livestock farming which produces 90m tonnes of methane per year and most of the world’s anthropogenic nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are vastly more potent than CO2 when it comes to global warming. Livestock farming alone contributes more to global warming than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in the world. Industrial production of cement, steel, and plastic forms another major source of greenhouse gases, and then there are our landfills, which pump out huge amounts of methane – 16% of the world’s total.
When it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it’s what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement, and fill more landfill sites, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless compound growth, and for some reason we have not thought to question this.
Think of it this way. That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil fuel sources isn’t static. It is adding more to the atmosphere each year. Scientists project that our tropical forests will be completely destroyed by 2050, releasing a 200bn tonne carbon bomb into the air. The world’s topsoils could be depleted within just 60 years, releasing more still. Emissions from the cement industry are growing at more than 9% per year. And our landfills are multiplying at an eye-watering pace: by 2100 we will be producing 11m tonnes of solid waste per day, three times more than we do now. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.
The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system. After all, we’re only using fossil fuels in the first place to fuel the broader imperative of GDP growth.
The root problem is the fact that our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year – the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits. That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And then double them again over the next 20 years from their already doubled state.
Our more optimistic pundits claim that technological innovations will help us to de-couple economic growth from material throughput. But sadly there is no evidence that this is happening. Global material extraction and consumption has grown by 94% since 1980, and is still going up. Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the world’s shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles – along with all the material stuff that those vehicles transport – almost exactly in keeping with the rate of GDP growth.
Clean energy, important as it is, won’t save us from this nightmare. But rethinking our economic system might. GDP growth has been sold to us as the only way to create a better world. But we now have robust evidence that it doesn’t make us any happier, it doesn’t reduce poverty, and its “externalities” produce all sorts of social ills: debt, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to abandon GDP growth as our primary measure of progress, and we need to do this immediately – as part and parcel of the climate agreement that will be ratified in Morocco later this year.
It’s time to pour our creative power into imagining a new global economy – one that maximises human wellbeing while actively shrinking our ecological footprint. This is not an impossible task. A number of countries have already managed to achieve high levels of human development with very low levels of consumption. In fact Daniel O’Neill, an economist at the University of Leeds, has demonstrated that even material de-growth is not incompatible with high levels of human well-being.
Our focus on fossil fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off the coming crisis, we need to confront its underlying cause.
by Luther Blissett » Fri Jul 22, 2016 1:48 pm
A hemisphere just broke an all-time heat record, and everywhere else is just damn hot
While much of the United States braces for a weekend defined by a suffocating heat dome, a hemisphere away the weather is making these 100-degree days look downright pleasant in comparison.
According to Jeff Masters at Wunderblog, on Thursday the Eastern Hemisphere may have set at all-time high when a city in Kuwait hit “an astonishing” 129.2°F (54°C). Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt told Masters that if verified, “this would be Earth’s hottest temperature ever reliably measured outside of Death Valley, California.”
According to Burt, the highest reliably recorded temperature at Death Valley was a 129.2°F reading on June 30, 2013—tied with Thursday’s measurement in Kuwait. Death Valley has hit 129°F four other times: July 20, 1960, July 18, 1998, July 20, 2005, and July 7, 2007.
Masters said that considering the incredible heat surrounding the city of Mitribah, Kuwait on Thursday—such as the all-time heat record of 128°F (53.4°C) at Basrah, Iraq—the Kuwait temperature will likely be verified.
These extreme heat waves in the United States and the Middle East are just the most recent headlines in a year that’s been chock full of baking temperatures. As NASA recently verified, a record-setting June prolonged a 13-month global heat wave. The first six months of this year have been the hottest ever recorded.
Stateside, the latest reports show that some isolated spots could reach up to 115 degrees today, while over 100 million people may experience heat indices above 100 degrees. Saturday is expected to be the worst of the heatwave, at which point we can all emerge from our houses for a few moments and give the air a big, wet kiss.
According to NBC News, “the intense weather is the result of an atmospheric phenomenon called a heat dome — a ridge, or high-pressure system, that traps hot air underneath it — creating unusually hot and humid conditions.”
by Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:33 pm
This heat wave was planned in a board room.
Last Friday, President Obama and various national and local government agencies issued statements about an impending heatwave, directing people to stay inside, drink plenty of water, and watch for signs of heat stroke. Over the weekend, 26 states issued heat advisories, and press swarmed to public parks to photograph people sunbathing and cooling off in fountains. All across the country people are mopping their brows and greeting each other with looks of exhausted recognition. It’s too hot.
Heatwaves are familiar — we like to think of them as intense and uncomfortable, but temporary. Except this year’s heat wave is something more. It covers nearly all 50 states, and is occurring simultaneously with heat waves in Europe, China, and the Middle East [Kuwait broke the record temperature for the Eastern Hemisphere at 129.4 degrees this week]. It follows on the heels of a hot streak in India last year that is responsible for 2500 deaths. According to NASA, every month of 2016 is the hottest on record, and this last week has been no exception. And even with all the government warnings, somewhere around 6-8 people have died due to heat this week in Arizona and Detroit, and we’ve got at least one more day of scorching temperatures.
This intensified heat wave is part of the unfolding crisis of climate change, and all the impacts — the wildfires, the drought, the crop failures, the public health emergencies — were choices. The people dying today from climate impacts were killed in a board room 20 years ago by executives who decided that it was worth it to squeeze another few decades of profit out of the fossil fuel industry.
The oil, gas and coal industries have had access to damning climate science for at least half a century. Fossil fuel executives knew when they decided to cover it up that there would be devastating impacts on people and the planet just a few years down the road. But rather than acting on climate, FF execs chose to pour resources into an extensive web of climate denial, blocking action at every turn and ensuring that the public (and not the industry) would bear the consequences of those decisions.
Heat waves are most dangerous for those who are already vulnerable: children, the elderly, people who are already sick, and poor and homeless people without access to the resources to adapt to or insulate themselves from extreme conditions. The climate crisis works in a similar way. It hits hardest where people are most vulnerable, and often to those who have done the least to create the problem. We see it play out each time a storm or drought or heatwave hits. People with money can afford to move or rebuild or import water or build walls. People without the resources have to fight to survive [Recommended reading: Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine].
That’s why it’s so easy for the fossil fuel industry and their allies in business and government to choose crisis over and over again — because they can protect themselves with money and by force. And that’s why it’s so important for us to hold them accountable — by demanding policies that halt the climate crisis, by holding companies responsible for their disastrous impacts, and by building a climate justice movement that doesn’t leave anyone behind.
We have a lot of work ahead, and petitions aren’t where that work ends — it’s going to keep getting hotter — but it’s a good place to start. Take care of yourself and your community as the heatwave blazes on, and take action!
1. Call for Obama to make the most of his last days in office by saying NO to new offshore drilling for oil and gas.
2. Demand the Department of Justice investigate Exxon for misleading the public about climate science for decades.
by zangtang » Tue Jul 26, 2016 10:10 pm
by Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 27, 2016 4:10 pm
Scientists caught off-guard by record temperatures linked to climate change
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Record temperatures in the first half of 2016 have taken scientists by surprise despite widespread recognition that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, the director of the World Climate Research Program said.
The earth is on track for its hottest year on record with June marking the 14th straight month of record heat, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said last week.
Temperatures recorded mainly in the northern hemisphere in the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and "new highs" in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said.
In a further announcement on Tuesday, the U.N. agency said it would examine whether a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit) reported in Kuwait last Thursday was a new high for the eastern hemisphere and Asia.
"What concerns me most is that we didn't anticipate these temperature jumps," said David Carlson, director of the WMO's climate research program, late on Monday.
"We predicted moderate warmth for 2016, but nothing like the temperature rises we've seen," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from Geneva.
"Massive temperature hikes, but also extreme events like floodings, have become the new normal," Carlson said. "The ice melt rates recorded in the first half of 2016, for example – we don't usually see those until later in the year."
He said sudden temperature rises could endanger people, animals and water systems.
"Also critical is the fact that people survive the heat by using more energy for cooling, thus further depleting the world's resources," Carlson said.
PREDICTING THE NEW NORMAL
Carlson said although "the uncertainty surrounding extreme weather events can be used to deny or avoid the issue of climate change," their increased frequency has drawn greater attention from the international community.
"The question is shifting from 'has the climate changed?' to 'by how much?'," he said.
"Statistically we need to get better at predicting not only how frequent and intense these events will be – but how long they will last."
Key to understanding extreme weather will be the availability of data across the globe, Carlson said.
"We have good data for North America and Europe – on precipitation for example – but just don't have enough records in Central Africa, Central America and the Arctic."
Carlson called for global leaders to put climate action higher on national agendas following the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels.
"The world leaders making serious commitments to tackle climate change are currently few and far between," he said.
However, action at the government level will only happen with pressure from citizens themselves, he added.
"The Clean Air Act, for example, that was all won by the people," Carlson said, referring to a U.S. law designed to increase pollution controls on vehicles and manufacturers.
No one is talking about the astronomically large forest fire currently burning in Siberia. One of the largest in history. It's melting vast amounts of permafrost, and releasing ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases (methane) into the atmosphere. The Russian government is downplaying it because they don't know how to contain it, and the US media isn't covering it.
This will surely accelerate climate change. Scary, scary stuff.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/image ... 5g8LXNlDqA
http://theconversation.com/vast-wildfir ... care-62881
edit: Look at the scale of this shit. Zoom out. https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?p=geographic&l=VIIRS_SNPP_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor,Reference_Labels(hidden),Reference_Features(hidden),Coastlines&t=2016-07-25&v=79.71363212495385,43.2197579693912,130.33863212495385,71.5205392193912
A few years ago a group of "fringe" climate scientists started claiming that the clathrate gun had fired.
One scientist Natalia Shakova was almost in tears as she revealed the findings of her team seen here.
These findings were ignored or dismissed as alarmist at the time. Since then we have seen massive holes bursting with methane in Siberia. And the world has been heating up at an unprecedented rate.
But dont worry people its all going to be okay
by Luther Blissett » Fri Jul 29, 2016 7:51 pm
by PufPuf93 » Sat Jul 30, 2016 2:20 pm
by PufPuf93 » Sat Jul 30, 2016 7:12 pm
Iamwhomiam » Thu May 12, 2016 10:11 pm wrote:PufPuf, I've been gathering information from two old computers in order to respond to you and to argue intelligently and convincingly demonstrate why biomass burning is dirtier than burning coal. It's been a bit of an arduous task to refresh my poor memory. It would be ideal if you could locate a Title V air permit for a biomass incinerator, perhaps one you're familiar with so we could both use the same evidence for one facility.
My area was municipal waste management rather than woody biomass, but the permitting for stationary sources of reportable and regulated emissions is the same, regardless of fuel source. I do have many allies who work specifically in biomass and forestry and will be drawing in part from information they've shared with me over the years. It's too late for me to begin now, but I surely will tomorrow. Sorry for taking so long to give you a proper response,
by backtoiam » Sat Jul 30, 2016 8:03 pm
by PufPuf93 » Sat Jul 30, 2016 8:46 pm
backtoiam » Sat Jul 30, 2016 5:03 pm wrote:Interesting that Al Gore is predicted to become one of the first global warming BILLIONAIRES ain't it. And that the carbon footprint of his mansion estate is HUGE. Al Gore wants the rest of us to live like primitives, or "pay our fair share of carbon tax revenue" while he slowly becomes a carbon tax billionaire.
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