Month: February 2015

Washington Post:

The long and severe drought in the U.S. Southwest pales in comparison with what’s coming: a “megadrought” that will grip that region and the central Plains later this century and probably stay there for decades, a new study says.

Thirty-five years from now, if the current pace of climate change continues unabated, those areas of the country will experience a weather shift that will linger for as long as three decades, according to the study, released Thursday.

Researchers from NASA and Cornell and Columbia universities warned of major water shortages and conditions that dry out vegetation, which can lead to monster wildfires in southern Arizona and parts of California.

“We really need to start thinking in longer-term horizons about how we’re going to manage it,” said Toby R. Ault, an assistant professor in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, one of the co-authors. “This is a slow-moving natural hazard that humans are used to dealing with and used to managing.”

Megadroughts are sustained periods of sparse precipitation and significant loss of soil moisture that span generations, about 10 times as long as a normal three-year drought.

 

 

Weather in eastern North America can fairly be described as “Polar”.   Minus 10°F right now as I’m posting this thing in the upper midwest.
Meanwhile,  see above, the jet stream is, like last year, kicking warmer air high into the arctic.

Andrew Freeman in Mashable:

The U.S. is experiencing one of the most unusual winters in years, with a pronounced and enduring bubble of warm, high pressure over the West, and blast after blast of frigid Arctic air and heavy snow in the eastern two-thirds of the country. The warmth is breaking all-time records, while the cold is rivaling some of the coldest weather in more than two decades.

In fact, the Arctic outbreaks outrank 2014’s polar vortex cold waves in terms of severity and duration.

Fairbanks (AK) Daily News Miner:

ANCHORAGE — The race clock for the 2015 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race will start ticking in Fairbanks, not the usual takeoff point in Willow.

Members of the trail committee’s board of directors met Tuesday and voted unanimously to change the course due to low snowfall in some of the most treacherous sections of the trail’s roughly 1,000 miles.

Similar conditions forced the race’s restart to move from Willow to Fairbanks in 2003, bypassing the Alaska Range but keeping it roughly the same distance. The move to Fairbanks was considered in snow-starved 2014, too, and after the board’s decision kept mushers on the traditional southern route, the bruised and beaten up dog drivers criticized officials for not avoiding what some of them described as a catastrophe.

 

CBC:

Spring-like weather has moved through the Yukon this week, with temperatures 10-15 degrees above what’s normal for this time of year. Here’s a look at some of the temperatures across the territory yesterday, all of these breaking temperature records for the day!

Continue reading “Whiplash: Polar Express Barrels into Eastern North America, Northwest Eerily Warm”

In another astonishing announcement, a second major Oil producer has called for a global carbon  pricing mechanism.
BP follows last week’s speech from Ben Van Beurden, CEO of Shell, which called for policies to curb climate change, including a price on carbon.

Telegraph:

BP has warned that carbon dioxide emission levels from burning fossil fuels are unsustainable unless the international community unilaterally introduces tougher binding regulations on atmospheric pollution.

The stark warning from the UK’s second-largest oil company came with the publication on Tuesday of its closely-watched long-term outlook for global energy markets, which predicts that CO2 emissions will increase by 1pc per year, or 25pc in total, through to 2035.

This rise in pollution would be worse than the current rate, which scientists have said would have a negative effect on climate change. The United Nations is seeking to limit the increase of the average global surface temperature to no more than 2C, compared with pre-industrial levels, to avoid “dangerous” climate change, and will hold a major conference in Paris in December to agree on a firm system for restricting emissions.

Bob Dudley, BP chief executive, said: “The most likely path for carbon emissions, despite current government policies and intentions, does not appear sustainable. The projections highlight the scale of the challenge facing policy makers at this year’s UN-led discussions in Paris. No single change or policy is likely to be sufficient on its own.”

Oil companies such as BP and Shell are coming under increasing pressure from shareholders and governments to clearly define their policies surrounding climate change. The so-called “carbon bubble” theory argues that shares in the oil industry could plummet due to the need to limit global warming.
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“Identifying in advance which changes are likely to be most effective is fraught with difficulty. This underpins the importance of policy-makers taking steps that lead to a global price for carbon, which provides the right incentives for everyone to play their part,” said Mr Dudley.

As I’ve been mentioning – this blog is beating the drum leading up to the release of “Merchants of Doubt”, the film version of Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway’s book, which makes the link between the climate denial movement, and a broader attack on science that was perfected in large part by the tobacco industry.  I believe this movie will be “An Inconvenient Truth” for this decade.

All of the so-called ‘think” tanks that have been primary vectors for disinformation about climate change, cut their teeth carrying water for the tobacco industry. Yes, they are that venal, and that evil.

Which is what makes this post perfectly on-topic – John Oliver’s epic expose of what the tobacco industry has been doing to make up for the decline in smoking in the US – bully third world countries into accepting hideously destructive marketing campaigns which will all but guarantee enormous  epidemics of heart, lung, and vascular disease in coming decades, – on top of the ever-mounting costs from climate change that their devil-spawn anti-science campaigners have set in motion.
You really have to wonder if there is any punishment that can even begin to fit the scale and scope of the crimes here.

Oliver’s target, the Phillip Morris company, has long been a supporter of climate denial specialists The Heartland Institute.
I’ve posted in the past on Heartland CEO Joe Bast’s bootlicking appeal for cash to the tobacco giant, proudly recounting Heartland’s tireless effort on their behalf:

The letter is from Bast to Roy Marden, a Phillip Morris executive, and member of the Heartland board. Marden had apparently invited Bast to solicit further funds from the tobacco giant.

Dear Roy:

Thank you for inviting me to request renewed general operating support for The Heartland Institute for 1999.1 note that Philip Morris contributed $5,000 last August (for a Gold Table at our annual benefit) and $25,000 in October (general operating support). It also has allowed you to serve on our Board of Directors, which has produced many positive results for the entire organization. Continue reading “Last Week Tonight on Tobacco: A Reminder”

Drop everything and watch. I mean it.

Description:

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

Continue reading “5 Years of Spectacular Solar Observations”

Birth of a climate denial crock.

PolitiFact:

“They’re (the White House) actually kind of lucky that we don’t cover climate change as much as we should,” Perino said. “Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it’s all blowing up in their faces.”

Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle interjected that it was “fraud science” and Perino said, “Yes, I agree.”

We have checked this sort of claim before and found it wrong, but some time has passed, and Perino referenced new reporting. So we wanted to fact-check her claim that temperature readings “have been fabricated.”

We reached out to Perino to find the source of her statement and did not hear back. However, a couple of days before she spoke, the British paper The Telegraph carried an opinion piece entitled, “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”

I, of course covered this last week – but let’s recap.

Not long ago, Paul Homewood, a blogger that Fox News itself describes as “retired accountant, blogger, and self described “climate historian”‘ (that certainly inspires confidence) –  posted that he had looked at data from several stations in Paraguay, and that those temperatures had been “adjusted” to bias them toward warming.   Rabidly right wing columnist Christopher Booker of the Telegraph newspaper picked this slim reed up and declared it the “Biggest Science Scandal Ever”.

Cue the right wing echo chamber. Here’s one thing that the climate denialist right wing does well. They don’t have many thoughts, but the ones they do have, they repeat and amplify endlessly.

Continue reading “Fox Climate Reporting Rates “Pants on Fire” – “Retired Accountant” as Climate Expert”

Example: “Daddy, why is that 800 pound gorilla eating your lunch?”

Fossil Fuels, despite the best efforts of propagandists, continue to fall.  The “War Against Coal” turns out to be nothing more than the fossil fuel industry’s own “War Against Reality”.

CNBC:

The plunge in oil prices is mirrored by the cost of coal, which has been cut in half since 2011 and is expected to keep falling. What’s more, the drop in prices is adding pressure to U.S. coal producers.

Coal prices are falling for the same reasons crude is selling for half what it did last summer: There’s too much supply at a time when global demand for coal is cooling.

The latest evidence came last week, when China reported an unexpected 20 percent drop in imports, largely from lower volumes of coal oil and other commodities. After a streak of red-hot growth, China’s economy is downshifting as Beijing tries to reign in an overheated housing market and a lending boom that’s left behind a pile of bad debts.

The world’s largest consumer and importer of coal is also restricting imports of coal with high ash and sulfur content as it tackles a serious air pollution problem.
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Demand is also falling in the U.S. as power companies continue to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas. Thanks to the ongoing boom in natural gas production in the U.S., power companies in the lower 48 states consumed record amounts of natural gas to generate power last month as low prices made it cheaper to burn than coal, according to data from Thomson Reuters Analytics.

Bloomberg:

A 37 percent drop in natural gas prices since June has lowered what U.S. nuclear and coal plants can charge for electricity, potentially speeding the demise of generators teetering on the brink of closing.

Continue reading “Like Oil, Coal Prices Plunge”

Raw Story:

Lesley Gore, the New Jersey-raised singer who topped the charts in the early 1960s with a string of teenage anthems, has died of lung cancer in New York City. She was 68.
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Gore has continued to perform and was reportedly in the process of bringing her life story to a stage show. She also made headlines in 2005 when she revealed she was a lesbian. She and (her partner Lois) Sasson, a jewelry designer, were together for 33 years.

 

Another in the series. Skeptical Science’ John Cook asks major scientists – “What’s your elevator pitch for climate science?”

Here Ken Caldeira summarizes a moral perspective.