Atmosphere – Higher temperatures in the Arctic and unusually lower temperatures in some low latitude regions are linked to global shifts in atmospheric wind patterns.
Sea Ice & Ocean – A shift in the Arctic Ocean system since 2007 is indicated by the decline in ice age and summer extent, and the warmer, fresher upper ocean.
Marine Ecosystems – Since 1998, biological productivity at the base of the food chain has increased by 20%. Polar bears and walrus continue to lose habitat in Alaskan waters.
Terrestrial Ecosystems – Increased “greenness” of tundra vegetation in Eurasia and North America linked to increase in open water and warmer land temperatures in coastal regions.
Hydrology and Terrestrial Cryosphere – Continued dramatic loss of ice sheet and glacier mass, reduced snow extent and duration, and increasing permafrost temperatures are linked to higher Arctic air temperatures.
In late autumn 2010 and early winter 2011 there was a continuation of the “warm Arctic-cold Continent” climate pattern that first appeared in winter 2009-2010, when an increased linkage between Arctic climate and mid-latitude severe weather occurred. This was due to changing wind patterns, which resulted in both warmer and colder regions in the sub-Arctic.
The cause for the increased exchange in the last two winters is a subject for further research into whether recent changes in the Arctic are involved, whether they are the result of extreme but random events, or a combination of these and other mechanisms.
This week President Obama took the initiative to launch a major energy efficiency initiative, using the Property Assessed Clean Energy model – Maybe he’s reading Climate Crocks?
This is a pleasant surprise: President Obama announced today that he’s launching a $4 billion private-public initiative to upgrade the energy efficiency of the nation’s buildings. Bill Clinton joined Obama today in making the announcement, which shouldn’t be surprising–the former president has been pushing the very idea that comprises the backbone of the initiative for some time now.
According to an independent analysis, this effort to retrofit inefficient buildings will create tens of thousands of jobs, and will cost the taxpayer a grand total of nothing.
The $4 billion investment announced today includes a $2 billion commitment, made through the issuance of a Presidential Memorandum, to energy upgrades of federal buildings using long term energy savings to pay for up-front costs, at no cost to taxpayers. In addition, 60 CEOs, mayors, university presidents, and labor leaders today committed to invest nearly $2 billion of private capital into energy efficiency projects; and to upgrade energy performance by a minimum of 20% by 2020 in 1.6 billion square feet of office, industrial, municipal, hospital, university, community college and school buildings
In an interview last week (above), Bill Clinton spent much of his time extolling the job creating virtues of PACE programs for retrofitting and upgrading buildings, for efficiency and renewable energy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, one of the things you talk about in the book is something that you highlighted today with President Obama, and that is retrofitting or making buildings more energy-efficient, and in the process creating, I guess, tens of thousands of construction jobs. President Clinton, that’s an area that clearly was hard hit. But this kind of project is short-term, isn’t it?
BILL CLINTON: Not if we do as much as we should. That is, this is the nearest thing that America’s got to a free lunch. That is, you can – if you can set up a financing mechanism where you let the people who own the building – whether they’re schools, state, county or local buildings, federal buildings, museums, hospitals or big commercial buildings like the one the president and I visited today — with no debt — if you can set it up so they can pay that money back only from their utility savings, then you can create jobs and there’s no net out-of-pocket cost to the people who own the buildings. And when the debt’s paid off, they have a huge drop in their utility bills.
UP with Chris Hayes featured the most comprehensive discussion of the Durban climate talks I have yet seen in the media this week.
(the first segment is above, go here to see the remainder..)
He spends the segment talking with Amy Goodman, to which I say, its about damn time. Goodman has been doing some of the country’s best journalism for a dozen years or more, and I’d like to see more of her.
There’s a lot of criticism of Obama for not using the bully pulpit to push the climate change message, and I agree with that much. I don’t jump on the bash Obama bandwagon totally, because I think that no one could have predicted the degree of pure racist hatred that’s been orchestrated against him by the Republican party, to block basically anything he would want to do, even such no-brainers as fixing roads and bridges.
Since it’s clear there is a huge overlap between racism and climate denial, we can see the problem.
Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) — China this week softened its opposition to making a legally binding pledge to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, opening the possibility for a broader international effort to fight climate change.
The nation may be willing to accept a target on carbon- dioxide emissions after 2020, Su Wei, China’s lead climate negotiator, said in an interview with Bloomberg on Nov. 29. He told Reuters yesterday adopting a goal was a “possibility.” China Daily on Dec. 2 quoted an analyst close to the government saying preparations for a pledge on carbon were being considered.
The comments suggest the government in Beijing is preparing to break a deadlock with the U.S. over which country moves first in cutting fossil fuel emissions blamed for damaging the atmosphere. Previously, China has resisted any talk of taking on a target of its own. The U.S. says it won’t make a binding promise without action from developing countries.
“We are definitely seeing some hints of softening from China on this question of whether or not they’d be willing to accept a binding commitment at some point in the future,” Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the New York- based Natural Resources Defense Council, said today in an interview in Durban, South Africa. “In the past they’ve never been willing to say the words ‘binding commitment.”
When an energized U.S. delegation arrived in Copenhagen for world climate talks two years ago, environmentalists were encouraged by its willingness to tackle global warming.
In the months before Copenhagen, the House of Representatives had passed climate change legislation, and the new Obama administration had crafted an agreement with the auto industry to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the main contributor to global warming.
But now, halfway through a two-week round of climate talks in Durban, South Africa, that excitement has disappeared. Weakened by reversals in Congress and the ailing economy as a presidential election looms, the U.S. delegation has staked out a position that has confused and frustrated environmentalists and other nations.
Doubts have arisen about Washington’s willingness to cut emissions more substantially and its commitment to follow through on helping developing countries already battling climate change, people at the talks said.
The U.S. has shown up “empty-handed, with questions about whether it will be able to meet the emissions-reduction pledge President Obama put forward before Copenhagen,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The question now is whether the U.S. will facilitate progress or block it,” said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Fukushima accident is the ongoing spread of contamination thru the ocean food chain. Starting at the bottom with smaller species, the radioactive elements are gradually finding their way into larger, and more commercially critical, species.
TOKYO — Molten nuclear fuel may have bored into the floor of at least one of the reactors at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the complex’s operator said Wednesday, citing a new simulation of the accident that crippled the plant in March.
In the No. 1 reactor, the overheated fuel may have eroded the primary containment vessel’s thick concrete floor, and it may have gotten almost within a foot of a crucial steel barrier, the utility said the new simulation suggested. Beneath that steel layer is a concrete basement, which is the last barrier before the fuel would have begun to penetrate the earth.
Some nuclear experts have warned that water from a makeshift cooling system now in place at the plant may not be able to properly cool any nuclear fuel that may have seeped into the concrete. The new simulation may call into question the efforts to cool and stabilize the reactor, but the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, says it is not worried more than eight months after the accident.
The findings are the latest in a series of increasingly grave scenarios presented by Tepco about the state of the reactors. The company initially insisted that there was no breach at any of the three most-damaged reactors; it later said that there might have been a breach, but that most of the nuclear fuel had remained within the containment vessels.
“This is still an overly optimistic simulation,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor of physics at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, who has been a vocal critic of Tepco’s lack of disclosure of details of the disaster. Tepco would very much like to say that the outermost containment is not completely compromised and that the meltdown stopped before the outer steel barrier, he said, “but even by their own simulation, it’s very borderline.”
Tex Richman, a wealthy man that plans to demolish the Muppet studio after the National Geological Survey finds oil directly beneath it, has his plans foiled by three Muppet fans. They “discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath the Muppets’ former stomping grounds,” as described by “The Muppets” website.
Throughout the movie, Richman cackles maniacally and shows just how heartless he really is by denying Kermit’s personal plea to give back the studio. He even tells the Muppets its “time to give up your dream,” which is one of the worst things anyone can say to a Muppet (or a Hollywood liberal).
Yes, it’s a Muppet movie – farcical and silly. But how sadly predictable that the villain is the perennial bogeyman of liberal environmentalists, and how sadly telling that the writers politicized a children’s movie. Again.
I saw it. It’s funny. If you feel self conscious about going to a kids movie, borrow a 10 year old to go see it with you.
The Climate Crocks video series thrives because the internet is a vast repository of information, sounds, sights, and ideas. Freely sharing and creatively mixing those ideas is a major piece of what makes the internet exciting, engaging, and useful.
It’s made it possible for those with no funds, no backers, and no influence, to find their voice and their audience, and speak their truth. Predictably, there are those who want to shut it down.
PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”
The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.
