Month: February 2012

President Mohammed Nasheed, first democratically elected President of the Maldives, one of the nations most immediately threatened by sea level rise and global climate change, has resigned in the face a coup by forces loyal to his predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an autocrat and long time ruler who has been accused of torture.

President Nasheed had gained international recognition for his efforts to bring attention to the effects of global climate change.

Digital Journal:

Update: 

MALE, Maldives — A Maldives court issued an arrest warrant Thursday for former President Mohamed Nasheed, who resigned this week but later insisted he had been ousted by coup plotters in a political dispute that sparked rioting.

Police spokesman Abdul Mannan Yusuf refused to disclose the grounds for the criminal court’s warrant, or say when Nasheed – who is living at his Male home, surrounded by supporters – would be arrested. Later, Police Commissioner Abdullah Riaz said it was not clear if the warrant was constitutional. He declined to provide details, but said the warrant’s legality was still being examined.

Rioters had rampaged through the streets of the Maldives capital Wednesday to demand Nasheed’s return, and more had attacked police stations in remote parts of this 1,200-island archipelago nation off the southern coast of India.

Below, Aljazeera Interview, and trailer 2

Continue reading “Maldives President, Climate Change Leader, Forced to Resign in Coup”

Yesterday’s Toast-of-the-Tea-Party Renaissance Genius has become today’s embarrassing crazy uncle.

2 years ago, the congressional GOP chose “Lord” Chris Monckton as their sole witness in hearings before congress on climate change. (see above)

Last month, Monckton was conspicuously absent as a signatory from the “Wall Street 16” climate denial polemic printed in Rupert Murdock’s Wall Street Journal (which included economists. why not a classics major?).  I haven’t seen him on Fox News in ages. About the only reliable venue he has left is, predictably, the loony bin over at Anthony Watt’s Tea Party.

Monckton’s ravings, – that he’s won a Nobel Prize, (he hasn’t), that he’s a member of the House of Lords (he’s not),  that he’s cured AIDS (what do you think?), are delusional, sure, but no more delusional than the idea that every significant scientific group on the world who has studied global climate is wrong, and part of some global UN plot to raise taxes.

His Splendid Magnificence was in His heyday following his validation by the anti-science wing of the US congress, when an obscure physics professor at a Minneapolis University decided to actually examine, point by point, the series of claims made by His Munificent Resplendency in a well-viewed speech to a right-wing  “think tank” audience. The result was John Abraham’s stunning and utterly convincing evisceration of virtually everything in the Monckton presentation – and the subsequent leper status, as anyone with a grain of intelligence fled the putrid roadkill smell of an exposed fraud.

So, my problem is, what do we have to do to raise his Serene Munificence’  profile again?  Keeping His Stately Stupendousness as the poster boy for global warming denial should be a high priority for science advocates, and anyone interested in truth-in-advertising.

Now we have another chance.

Continue reading “His Weirdship Lord Bonckton: Why Nobody Wants to Be Seen with This Guy”

Weirdly warm and snowless in the US. Brutally cold and icy in Europe. What’s going on?

Note in the satellite map above, how cold air is shifted out of the arctic and on to the European land mass – while large polar areas are warmer than usual.

Climate Central:

The weather pattern responsible for bringing the frigid air to Europe and Eurasia, and locking it in place, is being driven in part by a naturally-occurring pattern of climate variability known as the Arctic Oscillation. The Arctic Oscillation, or AO, is is a climate index that describes the characteristics of the atmospheric circulation over the Arctic, and a related index describes the circulation over the North Atlantic. Depending on whether it’s in a “positive” or “negative” phase, the Arctic Oscillation can bring warmer or cooler than average wintertime conditions to the U.S. and Europe.

Right now the Arctic Oscillation is in a negative phase, which tends to favor colder than average weather in Europe and the U.S. Scientists don’t fully understand what causes the Arctic Oscillation to switch from one phase to the other, which limits their ability to forecast these changes ahead of time beyond a week in advance.

Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel who has been keeping close tabs on trends in weather and climate extremes in recent years, said the frigid weather in Europe is another in a series of weird winters that have been related to the Arctic Oscillation.

Continue reading “Graph of the Day: Arctic Oscillation and the Winter of Global Weirding”

MIT researcher Andreas Mershin has a vision that within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material.

You could also file this under “One More Reason Why Climate Deniers Are Working so Furiously To Hold Back the Renewable Revolution”.

I reported here when NASA’s Ice Bridge flight serendipitously discovered a large new crack in the PIG – Antarctica’s  Pine Island Glacier.
There’s more. National Geographic interviews the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s Ted Scambos.

National Geographic News:

With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica‘s fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say.

Glaciers that flow into the sea, like the Pine Island Glacier, go through a normal cycle in which the floating section grows, stresses mount, and an iceberg breaks off, Scambos said.

“That is nothing unusual in most cases.”

But when the pattern deviates, glaciologists take notice. In this case, the crack is forming significantly farther “upstream” than has previously been the case. That “signifies that there are changes in the ice,” he said.

When “that point of rifting starts to climb upstream, generally you see some acceleration of the glacier.” That means that the ice will flow into the ocean at a faster rate, contributing even more to sea level rise.

(Related: “Hundreds of Glaciers Melting Faster in Antarctica.”)

Such an acceleration is of particular concern at the Pine Island Glacier, because, among Antarctic glaciers, it’s “the one that’s contributing the most to sea level rise.”

In fact, he said, ice flows from that glacier alone account for a quarter to a third of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea level rise.

“It’s moving at about three kilometers [almost two miles] per year,” Scambos said. And, he noted, “it’s been accelerating quite a bit.”v

“This glacier,” NSIDC’s Scambos added, “is really important.”

See NASA IceBridge video below:

Continue reading ““Changes in the Ice”. Pine Island Glacier’s Crack Heard Round the World”

The Tea Party is now telling us that sustainability is a plot to sap our precious bodily fluids. At what point does this just become too embarrassing for sensible human beings?

New York Times:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

—

In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom ahigh-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.

“It sounds a little on the weird side, but we’ve found we ignore it at our own peril,” said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association’s chapter in Virginia.

Fox News involved. Go figure

Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to “enhance federal engagement with rural communities,” Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order.”

As a result of the nut bag wing wagging the GOP dog, the whole party is trapped in the the never-was 1950s of Ward Cleaver, WonderBread,  and Chesterfields….

Continue reading “Denier Derangement Syndrome: Energy conservation/Bike Lanes/Sustainability = UN/Commie Plot”

Popular new video gives a quick overview of just why climate change is, well, – kind of undesirable.

While the upper midwest of the US experiences days of sparkling clear and snowless weather, other parts of the globe are experiencing extremes of another kind.

The Independent:

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.

A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week

A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.

In particular, the loss of Arctic sea ice could be influencing the development of high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia, which bring very cold winds from the Arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, the scientists believe. An intense anticyclone over north-west Russia is behind the bitterly cold easterly winds that have swept across Europe and some climate scientists say the lack of Arctic sea ice brought about by global warming is responsible.

Jeff Masters on All Things Considered:

CORNISH: Lots of folks have been talking about this crazy weather being, you know, climate change, essentially. And do you – is there any connection?

MASTERS: Well, at this point, we don’t know. I have to say I’ve been a meteorologist for 30 years, and when I look at the atmosphere over the last couple of years, it’s really not the atmosphere I know anymore. There have been substantial changes. We’ve seen major perturbations to the rhythms I’ve grown accustomed to. And when you start seeing unprecedented events, like we’ve seen in the past few years, you do have to look at, well, is there a major climate-altering force at work?

And, well, we know there are. There are a lot of heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide, going in the atmosphere, and those could potentially cause some of these unprecedented events, though we don’t have any theory right now that can show exactly what’s going on.

Continue reading “Jeff Masters: “…not the atmosphere I know anymore””