It’s been a year now, come wednesday, since the online publication of stolen
CRU emails.
For a quick recap, if you can stand it, of the humongous nothing-burger that denialists would like to call climate gate, you can review these videos.
and
I have a theory that right wingers who were in their formative years during the original Water gate scandal have grown up desperately searching for some kind of equivalent criminal activity among their political opponents – and lacking any evidence for that, have had to content themselves with the occasional stained dress.
Thus the continued need to apply the “gate” suffix to anything that could possibly be negatively spun.
“As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.
And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.”
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Climate scientists readily admit that the three-foot estimate could be wrong. Their understanding of the changes going on in the world’s land ice is still primitive. But, they say, it could just as easily be an underestimate as an overestimate. One of the deans of American coastal studies, Orrin H. Pilkey of Duke University, is advising coastal communities to plan for a rise of at least five feet by 2100.”
The video above debunks some of the most common denier myths about sea level. Joe Romm has more over at climateprogress.
My son was fortunate enough to intern at Growing Power in Milwaukee this past summer, and I had the opportunity to tour the facility. It’s not perfect, it’s a work in progress, kind of coming together all at once, and you can definitely see lots of opportunities to improve on the basic model. In fact, the idea is being exported to cities throughout the rust belt and beyond – food for people, grown in their communities, solving problems of nutrition, global climate, urban blight, and self determination.
In the heart of North America is the world’s largest concentration of fresh water, the Great Lakes system. The system has been resilient to a myriad of human insults over the last 2 centuries, primarily because of the remote and relatively untouched nature of Lake Superior, the largest of the lakes, and the source of most of the Great Lakes water.
In recent years, the impact of climate change has been more and more evident for those of us who spend time on Lake Superior and love the lake. If climate change unfolds the way most experts believe it will, the abundant water supply available to the American midwest will become an all the more critical resource in coming decades. Understanding how the system works, and moving to reduce impacts where we can will be a critical priority.
Time-lapse sequence of satellite images of Lake Superior taken between March 2009 and May 2010. The images were posted daily on NOAA’s Coast Watch page (http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/modis/modis.cgi/modis?region=s&page=1). Notice how the lake has ice cover in the early part of the video (winter of 2008-09) but has no ice cover during the winter of 2009-10. That’s a big part of the reason why this summer Lake Superior’s surface reached the highest temperature ever recorded.
The stories that we tell ourselves about the world shape our perception of reality.
And the way we tell our stories in the modern world, is through movies.
My most recent video about climate science in 1956 made the point that the science has been clear for a long time.
I started out with the famous Bell Telephone hour clip, which has been floating around the web for a while, but amazingly, a lot of people have not yet seen.
Then it moves on to a number of blockbusters and not-busters, which may or may not have had climate as a theme, but where a sense of climate change informs the view of man’s future.
It’s an interesting,and sometimes infuriating, exercise to see how the climate change paradigm has evolved in the collective consciousness – while we’ve only gone backwards in terms of dealing with it the “real world”. If you can think of films, tv shows or other media that have referenced climate change, send links here. We’ll review and revisit again in a future video.
This video has been floating around on the web for a while, but I thought it was time I included it in my uploads, since so many people have come to rely on these videos. It’s still amazing how many people have not seen this – the whole presentation, “The Unchained Goddess”, which comes as a two-fer with “Hemo the Magnificent”, which was part of the same series – is worth viewing. (Netflix has it) For one thing, Frank Capra directed. It’s not clear who came up with the idea of speaking to and dialoging with mythical beings on topics of modern science – but it certainly resonates in the post Joseph Campbell mind. There were some pretty wild ideas floating around in the 50s. We just thought they looked normal because of the cute animation.
As climate change accelerates, the biggest impacts will be felt first among the world’s poorest people.
The following, though made before last year’s Copenhagen conference, remains relevant. For most of the world’s poor, the debate about whether climate change is happening is long over, and the race to mitigate effects is underway.
Despite the fashionable meme going around about public resistance to wind farms, the reality is, that is for the most part a shuck and a sham. Outside of a few well publicized instances of NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) movements around wind development – by far public reaction has been more of the PPIIMBY (Please Put It In My Back Yard) variety.
Here in Michigan, one of the primary epicenters of onshore wind development, the agricultural thumb region, has seen several medium sized wind farms already, and is gearing up for even larger developments. A referendum in last week’s election asked voters if they approved of new development in the Huron County area, and voters responded with a 59 percent approval. Continue reading “Resistance to Wind Development – Really? Not in My Back Yard…”
Many climate deniers still seem to think global warming was invented by Al Gore, in 2006. As this recently uncovered recording from 1956 shows, the outlines of climate change science have been clear for many decades.
I showed this to my 25 year old son, who happened to be home from school. He watched in silence, but I knew what he was going to say. “It makes me angry. They’ve known about this for all these years.” I don’t have a good answer for him. I hope I have an answer for his children. Continue reading “This is your Father’s Climate Science: A Climate Crock Blast from the Past”
