The UK Independent Party is a the wacky British equivalent of the Tea Party. They have various theories about why the Isles are taking a beating the last few years. Now one of their members has hit on something revolutionary.
A UK Independence party (Ukip) councillor has claimed that Britain’s recent storms and floods are “divine retribution for the government’s decision to legalise gay marriage.
David Silvester, who defected from the Tories in protest at David Cameron‘s support for same-sex unions, claimed he had warned the prime minister that the legislation would result in “disasters”.
The Henley-on-Thames councillor said that the country had been “beset by storms” since the passage of the new law on gay marriage because Cameron had acted “arrogantly against the Gospel”.
In a letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: “The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.
“I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same-sex marriage bill
“But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.”
Blaming the prime minister for the bad weather, he added: “It is his fault that large swaths of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.
Legendary musician Neil Young is mounting a rally cry against “the ugliest environmental disaster” that he has ever seen or “could even comprehend”. In an exclusive interview with Jian Ghomeshi, the storied wanderer offers an unfiltered condemnation of the Alberta oilsands, brushes off his critics, and stands by his controversial comparison of Fort McMurray to atomically-devastated Hiroshima
Part 2 above, of my interview with Dr. Mauri Pelto.
Here Dr. Pelto weighs in on the “some glaciers are expanding” crock.
I posted the first part last weekend, here.
Part one is worth a listen for his take on the rescue of scientists from Antarctic ice that we’ve heard so much about. Dr Pelto pointed out that the scientists were working in an area where the recent break-off of a tongue from Mertz Glacier made the surrounding area much more unpredictable and difficult to work in, due to the release of a large amount of dammed up sea ice.
He writes more on that on his blog, From a Glacier’s Perspective.
My first crowd-sourced science expedition was in August 2012, when I joined Dr. Mauri Pelto in the Northern Cascades range, just this side of the Canadian border, on Easton Glacier, a major ice slab on the south face of Mt Baker, an active volcano.
Dr. Pelto has been trekking these glaciers for 30 years, painstakingly compiling a record of snow fall, freeze, thaw, melt, and motion. Pelto is held in the highest regard by his peers, and working with him, you realize why. The work is at once physically demanding, overwhelming, even dangerous – and yet calls for the utmost in careful measure and method.
Part 2 of last week’s Skype conversation with Dr. Pelto is above.
Earth set a new record for billion-dollar weather disasters in 2013 with 41, said insurance broker Aon Benfield in their Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report issued this week. Despite the record number of billion-dollar disasters, weather-related natural disaster losses (excluding earthquakes) were only slightly above average in 2013, and well below what occurred in 2012. That’s because 2013 lacked a U.S. mega-disaster like Hurricane Sandy ($65 billion in damage) or the 2012 drought ($30 billion in damage.) The most expensive global disaster of 2013 was the June flood in Central Europe, which cost $22 billion. The deadliest disaster was Super Typhoon Haiyan, which killed about 8,000 people in the Philippines. Six countries set records for most expensive weather-related disaster in their history, as tabulated by EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, and adjusted for inflation:
Germany, June flooding, $16 billion. Previous record: $15 billion in damage from the August 2002 Elbe River floods. Philippines, Super Typhoon Haiyan, $13 billion. Previous record: $2.2 billion, August 2013 floods near Manila. Austria, June flooding, $4 billion. Previous record: $3.1 billion in damage from the August 2002 floods. Czech Republic, June flooding, $1.5 billion. Previous record: $0.3 billion in damage from the August 2002 floods. New Zealand, Jan – May Drought, $1.6 billion. Previous record: $0.3 billion, January 2001 heat wave. Cambodia, Oct – Nov floods, $1 billion. Previous record: $0.5 billion, August 2011 flood.
Volatile weather around the world is taking farmers on a wild ride.
Too much rain in northern China damaged crops in May, three years after too little rain turned the world’s second-biggest corn producer into a net importer of the grain. Dry weather in the U.S. will cut beef output from the world’s biggest producer to the lowest level since 1994, following 2013’s bumper corn crop, which pushed America’s inventory up 30 percent. U.K. farmers couldn’t plant in muddy fields after the second-wettest year on record in 2012 dented the nation’s wheat production.
“Extreme weather events are a massive risk to agriculture,” said Peter Kendall, president of the U.K. National Farmers Union, who raises 1,600 hectares (3,953 acres) of grain crops in Bedfordshire, England. “Farmers can adapt to gradual temperature increases, but extreme weather events have the potential to completely undermine production. It could be drought, it could be too much rain, it could be extreme heat at the wrong time. It’s the extreme that does the damage.” Continue reading “Extreme Weather Impacts Accelerating”
The new Steve Jobs, the most fantastically, ambitiously smart and successful business innovator (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and now, SolarCity) of this generation, Elon Musk, has done a lot of thinking about Solar energy. Good God, turning away from the dopiness of climate deniers to this super smart visionary is like swigging pure Oxygen..
So what does Elon Musk know about solar that the rest of us don’t?
1. Solar energy is inherently an exponential technology.
If there’s one thing Wall Street loves, it’s a good growth story, and that’s something that SolarCity has been careful to cultivate. The company already has 80,000 paying customers and expects to sign up 1 million customers within the next four years. That means the company will need to literally double in size every few months. Think about that for a minute: 1 million customers over four years means 250,000 new customers in 2014, or approximately 20,000 new customers each month. So the company will have doubled in size — from 80,000 to 160,000 customers — by Memorial Day weekend.
And then the company will double again, from 160,000 to 320,000; and then from 320,000 to 640,000; all the way to 4 million. That requires exponential growth to make possible in such a short time frame, so it’s no wonder that the godfather of exponential technological growth, Ray Kurzweil, has been quick to point out the remarkable growth that’s possible with solar technology. Just as computers benefit from the ability to cram a growing number of transistors on a chip (Moore’s Law), solar panels also benefit from being able to cram an ever-growing number of photovoltaic cells on them. According to Kurzweil’s calculations, we can expect to be energy independent within the next 20 years.
Note: Ray Kurzweil has sometimes been included on lists of “climate skeptics”, but apparently that is incorrect. Dr. Kurzweil grasps the climate issue, he just thinks that solar is going to take over so fast there will not be a problem. Coal Barons and Pension Funds be advised:
Currently, solar power supplies less than 1% of the world’s energy needs, which has led many to disregard its future significance. Where they’re wrong is that they fail to understand the exponential nature of technology, says eminent inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Just like computer processing speed—which doubles every 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law—the nanotechnology that drives innovations in solar power progresses exponentially, he says.
During his latest Big Think interview, Kurweil explained:
“Solar panels are coming down dramatically in cost per watt. And as a result of that, the total amount of solar energy is growing, not linearly, but exponentially. It’s doubling every 2 years and has been for 20 years. And again, it’s a very smooth curve. There’s all these arguments, subsidies and political battles and companies going bankrupt, they’re raising billions of dollars, but behind all that chaos is this very smooth progression.”
So how far away is solar from meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs? Eight doublings, says Kurzweil, which will take just 16 years. And supply is not an issue either, he adds: “After we double eight more times and we’re meeting all of the world’s energy needs through solar, we’ll be using 1 part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the earth. And we could put efficient solar farms on a few percent of the unused deserts of the world and meet all of our energy needs.”
My friends and I get together once a month to play Texas HoldEm poker – great conversation, a few drinks, snacks and laughs. But I don’t like high-stakes poker. Gambling with high-value is not a wise choice, particularly if the pain of the loss translates beyond oneself.
The fossil fuel industry is bluffing society in a multi-trillion dollar high-stakes poker game. Current reserves of fossil fuels are five times morethan we can afford to burn if we want to keep global warming to less than 2°C; and we have to keep global warming below 2°C. The net worth of fossil fuel corporations, the value of their chip stack, is based on fully exploiting these reserves. Financial leaders are expressing great concerns about betting on fossil fuels. Forbes magazine says,
“Groups as diverse as Shell, Mercer, HSBC, prominent insurance companies and re-issuers, Standard & Poor’s and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have been giving clear warning signs about continuing to invest in fossil fuels.”
But fossil fuel-based corporations are still bluffing. They want expanded fossil fuel use; making massive investments in oil exploration, hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas, and the Canadian tar sands. The latter two are particularly bad bets given their large greenhouse gas footprints, water, soil and air pollution problems; and tar sands need 40 years to recover the costs of multi-billion dollar plants.
Stubborn Jet stream behavior has brought historic drought and january wild fire to california.
Scientists are finding evidence that “stuck” jet stream events may be related to human caused climate change.
Meanwhile, just as the east shakes off the “polar vortex” of misplaced arctic air that blanketed the area in early january, yet another cold air bubble is gathering.
The remainder or January is expected to be colder than normal, sometimes downright frigid. The pattern is very similar to the pattern during the first week of January when temperatures plunged more than 20 degrees below normal in the so-called polar vortex event. This time, the cold could stick around for a longer duration.
‘Two metres depth of sand and shingle disappeared.’ – a view of Covehithe on the Suffolk coast. Photograph: Anthony Robinson
Following massive storms and flooding that recently hit the UK, extensive damages to coastal areas including beaches is showing up.
Beaches, of course, change from time to time, the injunctions not to build on sand are biblical – but humans generally build coastal structures in areas that have remained much the same over some period, and in Europe many such structures have been in place for decades and even much longer – so the damage to the built environment tells us something.
And by ‘us”, I mean, people who step out of the Fox News universe and believe their lying eyes. We have a lively discussion thread going after I posted video of flooding and sea level rise impact in South Florida, something climate deniers seem unable to process.
A battered lookout at Ynys Mon, Newborough. ‘It took about a year to build and only opened in the summer. Am told it cost 50k. It lasted 6 months.’ Photograph: wookietaff/GuardianWitness‘The dog is standing on pure clay where two to three feet of sand used to be,’ writes our reader of this image of Trearddur Bay seawall. Photograph: Didired/GuardianWitness
