Climate Change Is The Biggest Threat & Will Kill Us All

Grand Potentate

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Welcome to the environment thread. All global warming, science, and related shit that's coming out recently has be morbidly depressed, so I figured it was worth collecting so that I can ruin everyone else's fucking day.

Lets start with our lying jerkoff-in-chief and his stupid fucking ethanol policies:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-dirty-cost-obamas-green-power-push-0
The secret, dirty cost of Obama's green power push
CORYDON, Iowa (AP) — The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America's push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply.

Even the cemetery that disappeared like an apparition into a cornfield.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. When President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."

But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and contaminated water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have been converted on Obama's watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, polluted rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative consequences.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president's push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

In some cases, such as the decision to allow wind farms that sometimes kill eagles, the administration accepts environmental costs because they pale in comparison to the havoc global warming could ultimately cause.

In the case of ethanol, the administration believes it must encourage the development of next-generation biofuels that will someday be cleaner and greener than today's.

"That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."

But next-generation biofuels haven't been living up to expectations. And the government's predictions on ethanol have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.

That makes the hidden costs even more significant.

"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a Democratic member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, Iowa, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon town pharmacy.

The numbers behind the ethanol mandate have become so unworkable that, for the first time, the EPA is soon expected to reduce the amount of ethanol required to be added to the gasoline supply. An unusual coalition of big oil companies, environmental groups and food companies is pushing the government to go even further and reconsider the entire ethanol program.

But the Obama administration stands by the mandate and rarely acknowledges that green energy requires any trade-offs.

"There is no question air quality, water quality is benefiting from this industry," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told ethanol lobbyists recently.

But the administration has never conducted studies to determine whether that's true.

Fertilizer, for instance, can make drinking water toxic. Children are especially susceptible to nitrate poisoning, which causes "blue baby" syndrome and can be deadly.

Between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than a billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but conservative projections suggest another billion-pound increase since then.

In the Midwest, where corn is the dominant crop, some are sounding alarms.

The Des Moines Water Works has faced high nitrate levels for many years in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, which supply drinking water to 500,000 people. Typically, when pollution is too high in one river, workers draw from the other.

"This year, unfortunately the nitrate levels in both rivers were so high that it created an impossibility for us," said Bill Stowe, the utility's general manager.

For three months this summer, huge purifiers churned around the clock to meet demand for safe, clean water.

Obama's support for ethanol dates to his time as a senator form Illinois, the nation's second-largest corn producer.

"If we're going to get serious about investing in our energy future, we must give our family farmers and local ethanol producers a fair shot at success," Obama said in 2007.

From the beginning of his presidential administration, however, Obama's environmental team saw corn ethanol as a dubious policy. Corn demands fertilizer, which is made using natural gas. What's worse, ethanol factories typically burn coal or gas, both of which release carbon dioxide.

Then there's the land conversion, the most controversial and difficult-to-predict outcome.

Digging up grassland releases greenhouse gases, so environmentalists are skeptical of anything that encourages planting more corn.

"I don't remember anybody having great passion for this," said Bob Sussman, who served on Obama's transition team and recently retired as the Environmental Protection Agency's senior policy counsel. "I don't have a lot of personal enthusiasm for the program."

There was plenty enthusiasm at the White House and at the Department of Agriculture, where officials argued to the EPA that ethanol was cleaner than it thought. The EPA ultimately agreed.

The policy hinged on assumptions that corn prices would not go too high and farms would get more efficient. That way, there wouldn't be much incentive to plow untouched areas and destroy conservation land.

But corn prices climbed to more than $7 a bushel, about twice the administration's long-term prediction. Suddenly, setting aside land for conservation was bad economics for many farmers.

"I'm coming to the point where financially, it's not feasible," said Leroy Perkins, a farmer in Wayne County who set aside 91 acres years ago and let it grow into high grass.

Losing millions of conservation acres was bad. Plowing over untouched prairies was worse.

Using satellite data — the best tool available — The Associated Press identified at least 1.2 million acres of virgin land in Nebraska and the Dakotas that have been converted to corn and soybean fields since 2006.

"The last five years, we've become financially solvent," said Robert Malsam, a farmer in Edmunds County, S.D., who like others in the Dakotas has plowed wild grassland to expand his corn crop.

The government could change the mandate or demand more safeguards. But that would pick a fight with agricultural lobbyists and would put the administration on the side of oil companies, which despise the ethanol requirement.

Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol lobbying group, said there's no reason to change anything. Ethanol is still cleaner than oil, he said.

These days, when administration officials discuss ethanol, they often frame it as an economic program for rural America, not an environmental policy.

When Obama gave a major speech in June on reducing greenhouse gas, biofuels received only a passing reference.

With the government's predictions so far off from reality, scientists say it's hard to argue for ethanol as global warming policy.

"I'd have to think really hard to come up with a scenario where it's a net positive," said Silvia Secchi, a Southern Illinois University agriculture economist.

She paused, then added: "I'm stumped."

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/12/ap-obama-s-ethanolpolicyravagestheenvironment.html
Report: Obama's ethanol policy has ravaged the environment
Boost in corn grown for ethanol has wiped out 5m acres of conservation land, polluted water, finds AP investigation

Topics:
Environment
EPA
USDA
Corn is harvested near the southern Illinois town of Cobden. Scores of farmers throughout the region have benefited from pulling millions of acres of farmland out of a federal conservation program and putting it back into corn production, partly to profit from grain prices sent higher by America's demand for ethanol.
Jim Suhr/AP
When President Barack Obama gave a major policy speech on reducing greenhouse gases last June, he didn't once mention ethanol, an alcohol-based fuel that’s a byproduct of distilled corn. Biofuels in general, which are extracted from sugar, grasses or rapeseed oil, received a brief, passing reference.

But when the Iowa political caucuses were on the horizon in 2007, Obama, a presidential candidate, made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. And when former President George W. Bush signed a law that year requiring oil companies to add billions of gallons of ethanol to their gasoline each year, Bush predicted it would make the country "stronger, cleaner and more secure."

But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today, an Associated Press investigation found. As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, the Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama's watch, according to Agriculture Department figures.

What’s more, between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than one billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but because of the huge increase in corn planting, even conservative projections by the AP suggest another billion-pound fertilizer increase on corn farms since then.

Some of that fertilizer has seeped into drinking water, contaminating rivers and boosting the growth of enormous algae fields in the Gulf of Mexico, which eventually decompose and leave behind a huge dead zone, currently covering 5,800 square miles of sea floor where marine life can't survive.

The dead zone is one example among many of a peculiar ethanol side effect: As one government program encourages farmers to plant more corn, other programs pay millions to clean up the mess.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America's demand for it.

"They're raping the land," said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

The investigation drew a sharp response from the ethanol industry before the findings were even published.

According to AP, ethanol producers, corn growers and its lobbying and public relations firms have criticized and tried to alter the story.

The Agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, told the Des Moines Register that the project included "a number of inaccuracies and errors." He also said farmers were engaged in other conservation practices, including wetland reserve programs, wildlife incentive programs and EQIP, a program that helps farmers adopt conservation practices.

Industry officials distributed letters and emails to newspaper editors saying the AP project "rife with errors," and calling the report a "smear," "hatchet job" and "more dumpster fire than journalism."

The industry said the primary driver for losses of conservation land was Congress lowering the number of acres allowed in conservation, not ethanol.

It also cited a Dutch study, which was not peer-reviewed, which found that urban sprawl internationally was responsible for greater loss of grassland than biofuels.

The Dutch study that the industry cited, which AP did not mention, noted that in the United States "biofuel expansion is the dominant cause of agricultural land use loss."

Department of Agriculture officials note that the amount of fertilizer used for all crops has remained steady for a decade, suggesting the ethanol mandate hasn't caused a fertilizer boom across the board.

But in the Midwest, corn is the dominant crop, and officials say the increase in fertilizer use — driven by a rise in corn planting — is having an effect.

"This is an ecological disaster," said Craig Cox with the Environmental Working Group, a natural ally of the president that now finds itself at odds with the White House.

But pulling the plug on corn ethanol, Obama administration officials fear, might mean killing any hope of these next-generation fuels.

"That is what you give up if you don't recognize that renewable fuels have some place here," EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said in a recent interview with AP. "All renewable fuels are not corn ethanol."
 


Some of these sounds are pretty dang creepy. A lot of religious types claiming they're trumpets of angels (ala Revelation) re: the Last Days, and apparently no scientific explanation at all.
 
http://www.vox.com/2014/5/1/5672494/carbon-dioxide-levels-are-at-their-highest-point-in-800000-years

Carbon-dioxide levels haven't been this high in at least 800,000 years

Updated by Brad Plumer on May 1, 2014, 4:00 p.m. ET @bradplumer brad@vox.com


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Pile of hard coal in front of an industrial plant on December 04, 2013, in Hamburg, Germany. Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Image
The man-made greenhouse gases warming the planet hit another record high last month.

CO2 remained above 400 parts per million for a whole month

Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has tracked the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the simplest measure of how humans are altering the Earth and warming the planet.

This "Keeling Curve" reached a new milestone in April: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained above 400 parts per million for the entire month (an average of 401.25 ppm). That's the first time that's happened in recorded history:

mlo_full_record.png


Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Notice that the Keeling Curve keeps zig-zagging up and down. As humans burn fossil fuels, we add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But nature isn't an innocent bystander here. When trees in the Northern Hemisphere bloom in the spring and summer, they absorb more carbon dioxide. When the leaves wilt in the winter, carbon dioxide readings spike again.

levels are going up, but zig-zag up and down with the seasons

Last year, carbon-dioxide levels rose briefly above 400 parts per million for a single day in May before falling again. This year, they spent an entire month above 400 ppm — and will likely drop again this summer. In a few years, so long as humans keep burning fossil fuels, we should get above 400 ppm permanently.

Is 400 ppm an important milestone?
By itself, probably not — it's more notable as an indication that carbon-dioxide levels are going up and up, which will set the stage for future global warming.

The broader historical picture is a bit more relevant here: In recent decades, carbon-dioxide levels have remained higher than at any point in 800,000 years. Scientists figured this out by analyzing prehistoric air bubbles that had been trapped in ice cores:

co2_800k.png


Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Indeed, some studies go further and estimate that carbon-dioxide levels may be at their highest point in 4.5 million years. During the Pliocene era, scientists have found, carbon-dioxide levels appeared to be around 415 ppm. (This rise was likely caused by wobbles in the Earth's orbit — humans weren't around then.)

We have to go back 4.5 million years to find an analogue to the present day

The climate of the Pliocene was much warmer and wetter than it is today. Global average temperatures were 3°C or 4°C hotter (that's 5.4°F to 7.2°C) and sea levels were between 5 and 40 meters higher.

That doesn't mean we'll getexactly those things today — the Pliocene isn't perfectly comparable, since a variety of different factors were at play. But it's the best guide we have to a fairly unprecedented situation. Other features of the Pliocene era: more frequent and intense El Niño events in the Pacific Ocean, intense flooding in the western United States, and severe coral reef extinctions as the oceans warmed.

What's also relevant, climatologists note, is the speed of change — the Earth is blowing past 400 parts per million today much faster than it did in the past. That makes it more difficult for species to adapt to the accompanying temperature increases (including, for that matter, humans).

So how high will carbon-dioxide levels rise?
That's the big unknown. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we should stabilize levels at somewhere between 430 and 480 ppm if we want a good shot at keeping total global warming below 2°C — which is ostensibly the international goal. For reasons I laid out here, that scenario looks increasingly unlikely.

Alternatively, if emissions keep rising without end, the IPCC predicts that we could blow past 1,000 ppm by the end of the century. That would put us in extremely uncharted territory — with global average temperatures likely to rise at least 4°C (or 7.2°F) over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/s...on=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article

U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods

By JUSTIN GILLIS MAY 6, 2014

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Rising Temperatures
1991-2012 average temperature compared with 1901-1960 average

The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”

The report is the latest in a series of dire warnings about how the effects of global warming that had been long foreseen by climate scientists are already affecting the planet. Its region-by-region documentation of changes occurring in the United States, and of future risks, makes clear that few places will be unscathed — and some, like northerly areas, are feeling the effects at a swifter pace than had been expected.

Alaska in particular is hard hit. Glaciers and frozen ground in that state are melting, storms are eating away at fragile coastlines no longer protected by winter sea ice, and entire communities are having to flee inland — a precursor of the large-scale changes the report foresees for the rest of the United States.

The study, known as the National Climate Assessment, was prepared by a large scientific panel overseen by the government and received final approval at a meeting Tuesday.

The White House, which released the report, wants to maximize its impact to drum up a sense of urgency among Americans about climate change — and thus to build political support for a contentious new climate change regulation that President Obama plans to issue in June.

But instead of giving a Rose Garden speech, President Obama spent Tuesday giving interviews to local and national weather broadcasters on climate change and extreme weather. The goal was to help Americans connect the vast planetary problem of global warming caused by carbon emissions from cars and coal plants to the changing conditions in their own backyards. It was a strategic decision that senior White House staff members had been planning for months.


Speaking to Al Roker of NBC News, in an interview scheduled to be shown Wednesday morning on the “Today” show, Mr. Obama said “This is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now. Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires — all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.”

In the Northeast, the report found a big increase in torrential rains and risks from a rising sea that could lead to a repeat of the kind of flooding seen in Hurricane Sandy. In the Southwest, the water shortages seen to date are likely just a foretaste of the changes to come, the report found. In that region, the report warned, “severe and sustained drought will stress water sources, already overutilized in many areas, forcing increasing competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers and plant and animal life for the region’s most precious resource.”

The report did find some benefits from climate change in the short run, particularly for the Midwest, such as a longer growing season for crops and a longer shipping season on the Great Lakes. But it warned that these were likely to be countered in the long run by escalating damages, particularly to agriculture.

“Yes, climate change is already here,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in writing the report. “But the costs so far are still on the low side compared to what will be coming under business as usual by late in this century.”

The report was supervised and approved by a large committee representing a cross section of American society, including representatives of two oil companies. It is the third national report in 14 years, and by far the most urgent in tone, leaving little doubt that the scientists consider climate change an incipient crisis. It is also the most slickly produced, with an elaborate package of interactive graphics on the Internet.

One of the report’s most striking findings concerned the rising frequency of torrential rains. Scientists have expected this effect for decades because more water is evaporating from a warming ocean surface, and the warmer atmosphere is able to hold the excess vapor, which then falls as rain or snow. But even the leading experts have been surprised by the scope of the change.

The report found that the eastern half of the country is receiving more precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27 percent in the South, the report found.

“It’s a big change,” said Radley M. Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia University in New York who helped write the report. He added that scientists do not fully understand the regional variations.

In recent years, sudden intense rains have caused extensive damage.

For instance, large parts of Nashville were devastated by floods in 2010 after nearly 20 inches of rain fell in two days. Last year, parts of Colorado flooded after getting as much rain in a week as normally falls in a year. Just last week, widespread devastation occurred in the Florida Panhandle from rains that may have exceeded two feet in 24 hours.

The new report emphasized that people should not expect global warming to happen at a steady pace, nor at the same rate throughout the country. Bitterly cold winters will continue to occur, the report said, even as they become somewhat less likely. Warming, too, will vary. While most of the country has warmed sharply over the past century, the Southeast has barely warmed at all, and a section of southern Alabama has even cooled slightly.

The report cited the likely role of climate change in causing an outbreak of mountain pine beetles that has devastated millions of acres of pine forest across the American West and the Canadian province of British Columbia; warmer winters and longer summers have let more of the beetles survive and reproduce at an exponential rate. And the report warned of severe, long-lasting heat waves. For instance, it cited research saying the type of record-breaking heat that scorched Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 had become substantially more likely because of the human release of greenhouse gases.

On rising sea levels, the new report went beyond warnings issued in September by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said that by the end of the century, sea levels could rise by as much as three feet globally if emissions continue at a rapid pace. The American scientists said the rise could be anywhere from one to four feet, and added that six feet could not be ruled out. Along much of the East Coast, the situation will be worse than the global average because the land there is sinking, the scientists said.

Historically, the United States was responsible for more emissions than any other country. Lately, China has become the largest emitter over all, though its emissions per person are still far below those of the United States.

The report pointed out that while the country as a whole still had no comprehensive climate legislation, many states and cities had begun to take steps to limit emissions and to adapt to climatic changes that can no longer be avoided. But the report found that these efforts were inadequate.

“There is mounting evidence that harm to the nation will increase substantially in the future unless global emissions of heat-trapping gases are greatly reduced,” the report warned.
 
The dry gets drier and the wet gets wetter? What thinly veiled Marxism!
It's all China's fault. This all occurred in the period where Earth Day and greeniness was on the mainstage in America.
Much like my wardrobe, the climate should not be expected to be permanently static. It continually changes. And despite the rising temperatures showing my state as the reddest one on the map, I just went through the coldest winter in ... the same 20+ year period.
 
Don't leave out the Indians or the rest of the Asians. Or the Mexicans. Or any of the other tanned people.
 
Ack, I thought I omitted the China reference, as the article already mentioned that.

The effects of pollution are not immediate, and my understanding is that most was caused by the industrial revolution over a century ago. So all we need to do is sit back and wait for the cleaner years that are already behind us to kick in with their effect.

I don't trust the UN worth a lick, BTW.
 
pfft. In the 1980s, the Malthusian chicken littles were telling me that NYC was going to be a couple stories underwater in twenty years. Is there a single prediction the "climate change" crowd has made that has had any merit whatsoever? Or is this all a bunch of hooey to limit the proles and make money selling carbon credits?
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/s...-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html?_r=2

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans From Polar Melt
  • by Justin Gillis And Kenneth Chang
  • May 12, 2014
  • 5 min read
  • original

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

13icenew-articleLarge.jpg

Various measurements have captured the West Antarctic ice sheet changing very rapidly in the region where it flows into the Amundsen Sea.
Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the earth, with the base of the ice below sea level. Warm ocean water is causing the ice sitting along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. As the front edge of the ice pulls away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat much faster than before.

In one of the new papers, a team led by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, used satellite and air measurements to document an accelerating retreat over the past several decades of six glaciers draining into the Amundsen Sea region. And with updated mapping of the terrain beneath the ice sheet, the team was able to rule out the presence of any mountains or hills significant enough to slow the retreat.

Continue reading the main story
“Today we present observational evidence that a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” Dr. Rignot said in the NASA news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.”

Continue reading the main story

Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.

A separate team led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington studied one of the most important glaciers, Thwaites, using sophisticated computer modeling, coupled with recent measurements of the ice flow. That team also found that a slow-motion collapse had become inevitable. Even if the warm water now eating away at the ice were to dissipate, it would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” Dr. Joughin said. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.”

The two teams worked independently, preparing papers that were to be published within days of each other. After it was learned that their results were similar, the teams and their journals agreed to release the findings on the same day.

The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted. (He died in 1987.)

Continue reading the main story
antarctica-1-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg

A NASA animation shows glacier changes detected in the highly dynamic Amundsen Embayment of West Antarctica.

Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because relatively warm water that occurs naturally in the depths of the ocean was being pulled to the surface by an intensification, over the past several decades, of the powerful winds that encircle Antarctica.

And while the cause of the stronger winds is somewhat unclear, many researchers consider human-induced global warming to be a significant factor. The winds help to isolate Antarctica and keep it cold at the surface, but as global warming proceeds, that means a sharper temperature difference between the Antarctic and the rest of the globe. That temperature difference provides further energy for the winds, which in turn stir up the ocean waters.

Some scientists believe the ozone hole over Antarctica — caused not by global warming but by an entirely different environmental problem, the human-caused release of ozone-destroying gases — may also be adding energy to the winds. And natural variability may be contributing as well, though scientists do not believe it is the primary factor.

The global sea level has been rising since the 19th century, but Antarctica so far has been only a small factor. The biggest factor to date is that seawater expands as it warms.

Continue reading the main story
antarctica-2-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg

This “airborne” tour was created from a small portion of the images collected during a flight over the Pine Island Glacier crack on Oct. 26, 2011.

But the melting from both Greenland and Antarctica is expected to be far more important in the future. A United Nations scientific committee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has warned that the global sea level could rise as much as three feet by the end of this century if stronger efforts are not made to control greenhouse gases. The new findings suggest the situation is likely to get far worse in subsequent centuries.

The effects will depend in part on how much money future governments spend to protect shorelines from a rising sea. Research published in 2012 found that a rise of less than four feet would inundate land on which some 3.7 million Americans live today. Miami, New Orleans, New York and Boston are all highly vulnerable.

Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the new research but has studied the polar ice sheets for decades, said he found the new papers compelling. Though he had long feared the possibility of ice-sheet collapse, when he learned of the new findings, “it shook me a little bit,” Dr. Alley said.

He added that while a large rise of the sea may now be inevitable from West Antarctica, continued release of greenhouse gases will almost certainly make the situation worse. The heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, potentially causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned.

“If we have indeed lit the fuse on West Antarctica, it’s very hard to imagine putting the fuse out,” Dr. Alley said. “But there’s a bunch more fuses, and there’s a bunch more matches, and we have a decision now: Do we light those?”
 
Meh, it's not that big a deal anyway. Everything will be fine in 50 years when the old liberal scare-mongers finally wise up that Nuclear Power is cheap, clean, safe and the most efficient power source on the planet. Izzy Asimov knew it 50 years ago but it takes politicians a long time to process
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I heard the crazy greenies in Germany got a bug up their ass and wanted no nuclear power, and of course couldn't take care of themselves and had to buy energy from France that... has gobs of clean, safe nuclear power.
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...uters-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html
World's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought - and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong
  • Leaked report reveals the world has warmed at quarter the rate claimed by IPCC in 2007
  • Scientists accept their computers may have exaggerated
By David Rose

Published: 16:01 EST, 14 September 2013 | Updated: 10:00 EST, 19 September 2013


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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has changed its story after issuing stern warnings about climate change for years

A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.

The Mail on Sunday has obtained the final draft of a report to be published later this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the ultimate watchdog whose massive, six-yearly ‘assessments’ are accepted by environmentalists, politicians and experts as the gospel of climate science.

They are cited worldwide to justify swingeing fossil fuel taxes and subsidies for ‘renewable’ energy.

Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that over the past 15 years, recorded world temperatures have increased at only a quarter of the rate of IPCC claimed when it published its last assessment in 2007.

Back then, it said observed warming over the 15 years from 1990-2005 had taken place at a rate of 0.2C per decade, and it predicted this would continue for the following 20 years, on the basis of forecasts made by computer climate models.

But the new report says the observed warming over the more recent 15 years to 2012 was just 0.05C per decade - below almost all computer predictions.

The 31-page ‘summary for policymakers’ is based on a more technical 2,000-page analysis which will be issued at the same time. It also surprisingly reveals: IPCC scientists accept their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures – and not taken enough notice of natural variability.

They recognise the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.

lThey admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.

lThe IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.

lA forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention.

This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.


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One of the report’s own authors, Professor Myles Allen, the director of Oxford University’s Climate Research Network, last night said this should be the last IPCC assessment – accusing its cumbersome production process of ‘misrepresenting how science works’.

Despite the many scientific uncertainties disclosed by the leaked report, it nonetheless draws familiar, apocalyptic conclusions – insisting that the IPCC is more confident than ever that global warming is mainly humans’ fault.

It says the world will continue to warm catastrophically unless there is drastic action to curb greenhouse gases – with big rises in sea level, floods, droughts and the disappearance of the Arctic icecap.

Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’.


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She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased.

For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007.

Prof Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.



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Head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary showed that 'the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux'



Starting a week tomorrow, about 40 of the 250 authors who contributed to the report – and supposedly produced a definitive scientific consensus – will hold a four-day meeting in Stockholm, together with representatives of most of the 195 governments that fund the IPCC, established in 1998 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The governments have tabled 1,800 questions and are demanding major revisions, starting with the failure to account for the pause.

Prof Curry said she hoped that the ‘inconsistencies will be pointed out’ at the meeting, adding: ‘The consensus-seeking process used by the IPCC creates and amplifies biases in the science. It should be abandoned in favour of a more traditional review that presents arguments for and against – which would better support scientific progress, and be more useful for policy makers.’ Others agree that the unwieldy and expensive IPCC assessment process has now run its course.

Prof Allen said: ‘The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in future.’

Climate change sceptics are more outspoken. Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described the leaked report as a ‘staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and sheer ignorance’.

As for the pause, he said ‘it would appear that the IPCC is running out of answers .  .  . to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’.

The Mail on Sunday has also seen an earlier draft of the report, dated October last year. There are many striking differences between it and the current, ‘final’ version.

The 2012 draft makes no mention of the pause and, far from admitting that the Middle Ages were unusually warm, it states that today’s temperatures are the highest for at least 1,300 years, as it did in 2007. Prof Allen said the change ‘reflects greater uncertainty about what was happening around the last millennium but one’.

A further change in the new version is the first-ever scaling down of a crucial yardstick, the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – the extent to which the world is meant to warm each time CO2 levels double.

As things stand, the atmosphere is expected to have twice as much CO2 as in pre-industrial times by about 2050. In 2007, the IPCC said the ‘likeliest’ figure was 3C, with up to 4.5C still ‘likely’.

Now it does not give a ‘likeliest’ value and admits it is ‘likely’ it may be as little as 1.5C – so giving the world many more decades to work out how to reduce carbon emissions before temperatures rise to dangerous levels.

As a result of the warming pause, several recent peer-reviewed scientific studies have suggested that the true figure for the sensitivity is much lower than anyone – the IPCC included – previously thought: probably less than 2C.

Last night IPCC communications chief Jonathan Lynn refused to comment, saying the leaked report was ‘still a work in progress’.

MET OFFICE'S COMPUTER 'FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED' SAYS NEW ANALYSIS
The British Met Office has issued ‘erroneous statements and misrepresentations’ about the pause in global warming – and its climate computer model is fundamentally flawed, says a new analysis by a leading independent researcher.

Nic Lewis, a climate scientist and accredited ‘expert reviewer’ for the IPCC, also points out that Met Office’s flagship climate model suggests the world will warm by twice as much in response to CO2 as some other leading institutes, such as Nasa’s climate centre in America.

The Met Office model’s current value for the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ (ECS) – how much hotter the world will get each time CO2 doubles – is 4.6C. This is above the IPCC’s own ‘likely’ range and the 95 per cent certainty’ level established by recent peer-reviewed research.

Lewis’s paper is scathing about the ‘future warming’ document issued by the Met Office in July, which purported to explain why the current 16-year global warming ‘pause’ is unimportant, and does not mean the ECS is lower than previously thought.

Lewis says the document made misleading claims about other scientists’ work – for example, misrepresenting important details of a study by a team that included Lewis and 14 other IPCC experts. The team’s paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience in May, said the best estimate of the ECS was 2C or less – well under half the Met Office estimate.

He also gives evidence that another key Met Office model is inherently skewed. The result is that it will always produce high values for CO2-induced warming, no matter how its control knobs are tweaked, because its computation of the cooling effect of smoke and dust pollution – what scientists call ‘aerosol forcing’ – is simply incompatible with the real world.

This has serious implications, because the Met Office’s HadCM3 model is used to determine the Government’s climate projections, which influence policy.

Mr Lewis concludes that the Met Office modelling is ‘fundamentally unsatisfactory, because it effectively rules out from the start the possibility that both aerosol forcing and climate sensitivity are modest’. Yet this, he writes, ‘is the combination that recent observations support’.

The Met Office said it would examine the paper and respond in due course.


‘Children of MoS reporter should murder him’: vile abuse on Guardian site
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The Mail on Sunday’s report last week that Arctic ice has had a massive rebound this year from its 2012 record low was followed up around the world – and recorded 174,200 Facebook ‘shares’, by some distance a record for an article on the MailOnline website.

But the article and its author also became the object of extraordinarily vitriolic attacks from climate commentators who refuse to accept any evidence that may unsettle their view of the science.

A Guardian website article claimed our report was ‘delusional’ because it ignored what it called an ‘Arctic death spiral’ caused by global warming.

Beneath this, some readers who made comments had their posts removed by the site moderator, because they ‘didn’t abide by our community standards’.

But among those that still remain on the site is one which likens the work of David Rose – who is Jewish – to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic rant Mein Kampf.

Another suggests it would be reasonable if he were to be murdered by his own children. A comment under the name DavidFTA read: ‘In a few years, self-defence is going to be made a valid defence for parricide [killing one’s own father], so Rose’s children will have this article to present in their defence at the trial.’

Critics of the article entirely ignored its equally accurate statement that there is mounting evidence the Arctic sea ice retreat has in the past been cyclical: there were huge melts in the 1920s, followed by later advances.


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David Rose¿s article in the Mail on Sunday last week attracted world wide interest



Some scientists believe that this may happen again, and may already be under way – delaying the date when the ice cap might vanish by decades or even centuries.

Another assault was mounted by Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics.

Mr Ward tweeted that the article was ‘error-strewn’.

The eminent US expert Professor Judith Curry, who unlike Mr Ward is a climate scientist with a long list of peer-reviewed publications to her name, disagreed.

On her blog Climate Etc she defended The Mail on Sunday, saying the article contained ‘good material’, and issued a tweet which challenged Mr Ward to say what these ‘errors’ were.

He has yet to reply.

'A REFLECTION OF EVIDENCE FROM NEW STUDIES'... THE IPCC CHANGES ITS STORY


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Power house: The IPCC'S Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland



What they say: ‘The rate of warming over the past 15 years [at 0.05C per decade] is smaller than the trend since 1951.'

What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world had warmed at a rate of 0.2C per decade 1990-2005, and that this would continue for the following 20 years.

The unexpected 'pause' means that at just 0.05C per decade, the rate 1998-2012 is less than half the long-term trend since 1951, 0.12C per decade, and just a quarter of the 2007-2027 prediction.

Some scientists - such as Oxford's Myles Allen - argue that it is misleading to focus on this 'linear trend', and that one should only compare averages taken from decade-long blocks.

What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’

What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement is highly questionable.

What they say: ‘Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 – 15 years.’

What this means: The ‘models’ are computer forecasts, which the IPCC admits failed to ‘see... a reduction in the warming trend’. In fact, there has been no statistically significant warming at all for almost 17 years – as first reported by this newspaper last October, when the Met Office tried to deny this ‘pause’ existed.In its 2012 draft, the IPCC didn’t mention it either. Now it not only accepts it is real, it admits that its climate models totally failed to predict it.

What they say: ‘There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing.’




What this means: The IPCC knows the pause is real, but has no idea what is causing it. It could be natural climate variability, the sun, volcanoes – and crucially, that the computers have been allowed to give too much weight to the effect carbon dioxide emissions (greenhouse gases) have on temperature change.

What they say: ‘Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models.’

What this means: Its models don’t accurately forecast the impact of fundamental aspects of the atmosphere – clouds, smoke and dust.

What they say: ‘Most models simulate a small decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, in contrast to the small increasing trend in observations... There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the small observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent.’

What this means: The models said Antarctic ice would decrease. It’s actually increased, and the IPCC doesn’t know why.

What they say: ‘ECS is likely in the range 1.5C to 4.5C... The lower limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2C in the [2007 report], reflecting the evidence from new studies.’

What this means: ECS – ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – is an estimate of how much the world will warm every time carbon dioxide levels double. A high value means we’re heading for disaster. Many recent studies say that previous IPCC claims, derived from the computer models, have been way too high. It looks as if they’re starting to take notice, and so are scaling down their estimate for the first time.





Clarification

An original version of this article sought to make the fairest updated comparison with the 0.2C warming rate stated by the IPCC in 2007.

It drew on the following sentence in the draft 2013 summary: ‘The rate of warming over the past 15 years… of 0.05C per decade is smaller than the trend since 1951, 0.12C per decade.’ This would represent a reduction in the rate of warming by a little under one half.

But critics argued that the 0.2C warming rate in the 2007 report relates only to the previous 15 years whereas the 0.12C figure in the forthcoming report relates to the half-century since 1951. They pointed out that the equivalent figure in the 2007 report was 0.13C.

This amended article compares the 0.05C per decade observed in the past 15 years with the 0.2C per decade observed in the period 1990-2005 and with the prediction that this rate per decade would continue for a further 20 years.

A sentence saying that the IPCC now projects warming by 2035 to be between 0.4 and 1.0C, which was reproduced accurately from the leaked document, has been deleted, following representations that these figures were an IPCC typographic error.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...cts-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html#ixzz31mNzL06c
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http://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6126245...-the-atmosphere-rose-at-a-record-pace-in-2013

Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose at a record pace in 2013
Updated by Brad Plumer on September 9, 2014, 10:50 a.m. ET @bradplumer brad@vox.com


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Photo by Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images
Levels of carbon-dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere rose at a record pace in 2013, setting the stage for "potentially devastating" climate change in the decades ahead, the World Meteorological Organization warned Tuesday.

The Oceans and forests may be absorbing less CO2 than before

There are two possible reasons why the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is growing so rapidly. One is obvious: Humans continue to emit more and more carbon-dioxide from power plants, cars, and factories each year.

But the other reason is a bit more surprising: According to the WMO, early data suggests that the world's oceans and forests are now absorbing less of our extra carbon-dioxide than they used to — which means that more of it ends up in the atmosphere, where it traps heat and warms up the planet.

Traditionally, oceans and forests have acted as giant sponges, soaking up roughly half of our carbon-dioxide emissions. (Indeed, that's why oceans are now acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years, with dire consequences for marine life.) But if they're now less able to absorb all our extra carbon-dioxide, it could mean we're in for even more global warming going forward.

The WMO report (pdf) found that atmospheric levels of three planet-warming greenhouse gases — carbon-dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) — are all at record highs. That's what the top row in the chart below shows. But the year-over-year increase for carbon-dioxide was the fastest since records began in 1984:

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(World Meteorological Organization)

More precisely: In 2013, CO2 concentrations were 142 percent of what they were in the pre-industrial era, methane concentrations were 253 percent, and nitrous oxide concentrations were 121 percent.

How we're disrupting the carbon cycle
Of all the greenhouse gases above, climate scientists tend to agree that carbon dioxide is the most important — it can linger in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and traps heat on the planet, increasing temperatures on the Earth's land and oceans.

Of all the greenhouse gases, CO2 is the most important

Before the industrial revolution, the Earth's atmosphere already contained some carbon-dioxide, roughly 270 parts per million. (That's why the planet wasn't a frigid wasteland.) Overall CO2 levels were regulated by the natural carbon cycle: Animals would breathe out carbon-dioxide, plants would absorb it to convert sunlight to energy, and the oceans and soils would both absorb and emit CO2.

But human activities have significantly altered that cycle. As we began burning oil, gas, and coal for energy, we released additional carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere that was previously buried deep underground.

Traditionally, about one-fourth of that additional carbon-dioxide has been absorbed by the oceans (which in turn became more acidic), one-fourth by soils and plants (which are bolstered by the extra CO2). The other half made it into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming:

The carbon cycle

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(NASA Earth Observatory)

The WMO notes that levels of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere are now hovering near 400 parts per million — and will likely cross that threshold in 2015 or 2016. Levels have never been that high since human civilization has been around.

Meanwhile, according to the WMO, early data suggests that the oceans and forests are no longer absorbing quite as much carbon-dioxide as they used to. Scientists have generally agreed that this would happen as the planet got warmer — particularly since, as the oceans became more acidic, they'd be able to take up less carbon-dioxide. This is essentially a feedback mechanism, in which global warming leads to more global warming. But the timing of this feedback has always been a bit uncertain.

The oceans are now acidifying at the fastest pace in 300 million years
There's another twist to all of this: As the oceans absorb carbon-dioxide, they become more acidic — the carbon dissolves to form carbonic acid. The WMO said "the current rate of ocean acidification appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years."

More acidic seawater can chew away at coral reefs and kill oysters

More acidic seawater can chew away at coral reefs and kill oysters by making it harder for them to form protective shells. Acidification can also interfere with the food supply for key species like Alaska's salmon.

One study in the journal Climatic Change estimated that the loss of mollusks alone could cost the world as much as $100 billion per year by the end of the century.

Scientists are still trying to understand exactly how acidification will affect different species and the marine food chain, through both lab experiments and by looking at past acidification events. About 55 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the oceans became warmer and more acidic. As a result, coral reefs became scarcer and the food chain had difficulty supporting larger predators.
 
The ozone layer was a success. The original danger and possibility of recovery were greatly exaggerated, of course, but the banning of CFCs has greatly improved our atmospheric conditions.
Oddly, even though the banning of CFC's has been a great success, the replacement has been HFCS's which has led to increased global warming.
 
I read an article today about how WTO and other trade agreements are inhibiting nations from growing alternative energy industries - namely the requirement for local manufacturing and local parts going into subsidized industries like solar.
 
Damn trade agreements cause unintended problems (or maybe intended). I don't know which is sillier: blocking local industry to support alternative energy that will never be viable without massive subsidization or not blocking it and creating a false industry that is bound to eventually fail when subsidization ends.

Nooclear powa FTW
 
Hey, who needs the EPA? Bunch of bureaucrats telling us how much smog is in the air!
Meh, I'm all for conservation but I'm not really sure how shaking down business accomplishes anything beyond enriching useless bureaucracy. Their detriment greatly outweighs any good they may do.

Oddly, even though the banning of CFC's has been a great success, the replacement has been HFCS's which has led to increased global warming.
High fructose corn syrup?
 
Thruth Thruth IIRC it stated that they were still present despite the ban and the conclusion was that there were still residuals and/or bad actors out there. The shrinking in the ozone hole is due to the reduction. So, for the sake of example, let's say we got rid of 93.5%, and the other 6.5% is still being produced or left over from before and we're now better able to detect them.
 
Thruth Thruth IIRC it stated that they were still present despite the ban and the conclusion was that there were still residuals and/or bad actors out there. The shrinking in the ozone hole is due to the reduction. So, for the sake of example, let's say we got rid of 93.5%, and the other 6.5% is still being produced or left over from before and we're now better able to detect them.

Grand Potentate Grand Potentate , got you. That makes more sense to me now.
 
Ok, lets say I buy into this line of reasoning. Who are we marketing for/to here?

This debate illustrates how science and research has been manipulated on both sides of the argument both by scientists and non-scientists.

What is important here is that we are no more close to knowing the scientific truth because it is still unfolding.

The science is manipulated for political and personal gain. The scientists are just as bad as everyone else. Territorial pissing and prestige building as well as holding and advancing grudges.
 
It's a power struggle between government and the green industry and the usual industrial complexes.

Again, I'm an environmentalist. I just hate how fighting "global warming" has completely taken over the movement. It's asinine to base your entire marketing campaign on something that the average Joe can dismiss every time there's a cold snap. And not to mention the hundreds of thousands of acres of wild land that is being ruined for grossly inefficient solar warms and wind power farms. FFS, even the WWF put out a list of "most threatened animals" that was complete bullshit (the number one threat to all of them was listed as global warming, not habitat destruction; and of course they were all furry mammals, naturally).

You can easily measure and show air pollution. You can easily measure and show birth defects from mercury in coal power plants. Why not focus on that instead of shrieking that the seas are going to rise 12/10/8/6/4/2 feet in the next fifty years or that we're going to be inundated with hurricanes/blizzards? People are just throwing wild guesses in the air and hoping it works.

Actually though, it seems to work. People are convinced the "world is going to shit" when no one even knows what the actual changes are going to be. So, naturally, they will tell Group A to take Group B's money and spend it.

I take similar but slightly opposite view. I think you have a large number of scientists that are very alarmed, and has a pretty significant body of evidence that it's related to human activity. I think the marketing campaign is the innumerable body of vested interested adversely affected by the kinds of change the science is indicating is necessary.

This seems like a derivative of the discussion about the ice bucket challenge. Everything's a marketing campaign.

I think we largely agree on these chicken little scenarios, but I also think there is early evidence that storms are becoming increasingly more powerful, that the jet stream is slowing, etc.

My suspicion is that the warming camp feels like they need to present an extreme viewpoint because the business/political class is undermining the valid science.
 

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