The first major Republican Presidential candidate for this election cycle is Senator Ted Cruz, who has made his disdain for climate science and science in general well known. Recently, Senator Cruz opined that snow and ice in New Hampshire disproved the last 300 years of physics.
Above, Governor Jerry Brown of California points out that this kind of insanity, would, in a more rational world, render one unfit to be considered for public office.
Perhaps that’s because Governor Brown has a front row seat on one of Climate Change’s emerging Greatest Hits – the California drought. Here’s some pathetic pics of some very, very determined skiers at Lake Tahoe.
Climate change could have a “huge impact” on China, reducing crop yields and harming the environment, the country’s top weather scientist has warned, in a rare official admission.
Zheng Guogang told Xinhua news agency that climate change could be a “serious threat” to big infrastructure projects.
Mr Zheng, the head of China’s meteorological administration, said warming temperatures exposed his country to a growing “risk of climate change and climate disasters”.
He said temperature rises in China had already been higher than the global average for the past century.
These are rare admissions from a Chinese official, BBC Asia analyst Michael Bristow says.
China’s leaders have acknowledged the damage from global warming but they usually do not lay out the full scale of the problems.
Perhaps I should cross my fingers before writing this, but it just may be that we have slipped, virtually without noticing, past a landmark in environmental and industrial history. Preliminary figures suggest that last year, for the first time, global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels failed to rise despite economic growth. Even more surprisingly, emissions seem to have fallen in China. Continue reading “China’s Awakening to Climate Change is Bad News for Coal”
If you watched the new video about the slowing of the North Atlantic Circulation, then you’ll be primed to take in this multi-dimensional view of factors influencing sea level rise in Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic region. Turns out there are a number of counter-intuitive factors that are going to make for devastating rise in these regions, as soon as mid century.
Description:
In 2013, scientists released new projections for future sea level rise for the Chesapeake Bay and for Maryland, Virginia and nearby Mid-Atlantic coastal areas. In these regions, sea levels are rising faster than the global average, the result of subsiding lands, a slowing Gulf Stream and melting land ice in Antarctica.
The disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” was based on long term scientific concerns about global warming’s impact on the North Atlantic Current, also called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, – what most people think of as “The Gulf Stream” – although that is a simplification.
The movie was obviously over the top in terms of the projected impacts, but after a decade in which science has downplayed the possibility of such an event, a new paper shows that the circulation is indeed slowing down.
This could signal potential impacts on weather, the food chain, and circulation of oxygen and nutrients throughout the ocean.
I’ve been interviewing key authors of the paper, Lead author Stefan Rahmstorf, as well as paleoclimate expert Mike Mann, and Glaciologist Jason Box.
This is a paper that could have substantial impact, and might very well be distorted or sensationalized, – so bookmark this post as a damper for overhyped speculation, as well as a warning about real impacts.
The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years.
The whole world is warming. The whole world? No! A region in the subpolar Atlantic has cooled over the past century – unique in the world for an area with reasonable data coverage (Fig. 1). So what’s so special about this region between Newfoundland and Ireland?
Fig. 1 Linear temperature trend from 1900 to 2013. The cooling in the subpolar North Atlantic is remarkable and well documented by numerous measurements – unlike the cold spot in central Africa, which on closer inspection apparently is an artifact of incomplete and inhomogeneous weather station data.
It happens to be just that area for which climate models predict a cooling when the Gulf Stream System weakens (experts speak of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or AMOC, as part of the global thermohaline circulation). That this might happen as a result of global warming is discussed in the scientific community since the 1980s – since Wally Broecker’s classical Nature article “Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?” Meanwhile evidence is mounting that the long-feared circulation decline is already well underway.
Today, Senator Ted Cruz announced he is running for President, the first, no doubt of a string of avowed climate science deniers that will be vying for the Chief Executive job.
Above, on his NBC “Late Night” show, Seth Meyer interviewed Senator Cruz a few weeks ago, and questioned the Senator’s stance on climate change. I think Seth let the Senator get away with a few whoppers.
I’ve offered to run a seminar for talk show hosts in this political season, to prep them for situations just such as this, which are bound to come up again.
If anyone knows Seth, pass this along. My hourly rates are reasonable.
Dear Mr Meyers
A few weeks ago Senator Ted Cruz appeared on your program – significant because the Honorable Senator is now running for President of the United States.
I greatly appreciate that you challenged Mr Cruz on his denial of climate science, and I hope you’ll continue to challenge future political guests on this critical issue.
That said, I think you let Mr Cruz get away too lightly with three talking points that are often heard, and can be effectively knocked down.
Let’s take the first one – “I just came back from New Hampshire, where there’s snow and ice everywhere.” We are supposed to infer, apparently, that because there is snow, in winter, in New Hampshire, that there is no global warming.
I suggest you have your graphics guys blow up a few key graphs. Here’s one. (click it for a larger version)
Ask your guest if they have looked at a temperature map of the globe, where they would see that New Hampshire, (or wherever the cold spot of the moment is) is an anomaly in a sea of warmth, as this February 26th, 2015, map from the University of Maine shows. Ask them if a President should have a global view, or one that ends at our shores, or the state line of New Hampshire.
Let’s take the next one: “Satellite data demonstrate that for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever.”
Skipper Dan Kipnis, a charter captain in the Miami area, has provided online a glimpse of what high tide means in Miami Beach.
With a new 400 million dollar tax payer funded pumping system, the problem is mitigated somewhat in the local area, but the remainder of South Florida will still continue to be overwhelmed.
Below, see my video on this, which predated the current kerfuffle by 4 months, and has been getting a lot of traffic lately.
A London primary school was criticised for banning children from watching the eclipse for “religious and cultural reasons.”
Pupils at North Primary School in Southall were stopped from watching the solar eclipse directly and had to observe it on screens instead.
Sometimes known as Little India, Southall is a diverse community in west London with a large Hindi population.
Although headteacher Ivor Johnstone would not comment on what the ‘religious and cultural’ reasons were, some Hindu scriptures say that an eclipse makes believers impure.
And fundamentalists believe that they need to bathe immediately after an eclipse and chant the name of God to overcome the forces of darkness.
However parents said children were disappointed by the decision, arguing that religious superstition had been allowed to overshadow science.
Phil Belman, whose seven year old daughter goes to the school, told The Evening Standard: “I am extremely upset about it.
“My child went in having spent an hour preparing and making up her pinhole camera. This is an issue about scientific matters versus religious superstition.
“I am outraged – is it going to be Darwin next? We will be like mid America.”
Out here in California — for those of us now living directly “on the front edge of a climate crisis”, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes describes it in the interview below — it’s both extraordinarily unusual and incredibly welcome to hear a politician with ambitions for higher office speak as frankly as Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) does here.
Newsom describes the state’s voluntarily water conservation measures to date, in the face of our record-shattering drought, as “small ball”.
“I think we’re going to have to move to mandatory rationing,” he notes bluntly. Hayes appears surprised in response, noting that calls for mandatory rationing are “essentially anathema in American political vocabulary.”
“This is serious,” Newsom responds in turn, detailing the crisis the state is now facing. “This is Code Red”.
“We can call for voluntary rationing because that polls better, or we can lead. And I guess at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves ‘Are we just stewards? Or are we gonna step up and step in and actually share our private thoughts — trust me, private thoughts are ample around some requirements for mandatory reductions — or we can continue to play the finger in the wind politics that, frankly, has put us in this crisis in the first place.”
Meanwhile, in the far reaches of Denierville – this from Right Wing Watch:
End Times broadcaster Rick Wiles knows what is to blame for the record California drought: gay people and legal abortion.
While discussing the drought on his “Trunews” radio show yesterday, Wiles said that measures to conserve water are not going to help the state since it is currently experiencing divine punishment.
“Rain will follow repentance,” Wiles said. “The state is in the forefront of spiritual rebellion against God: abortion; homosexuality; pornography; Hollywood’s movies that promote sexual immorality, violence, bloodshed, witchcraft, occult practices; the television industry; the crime and street violence in California cities. All of it has combined to reach a level of depravity that has reached Heaven and God has no other choice but to cut off the rain. So let’s see how long Californians will suffer without water before they humble themselves, repent of their sins and call upon God to save them.”
I’ve been saying for a long time that the next refuge of deniers, after “I’m not a scientist”, and “oh well, it’s too late”, will be “See? God’s doing it to punish our sins.” The exact causative sin will depend, of course, on the wack fundamentalist religious perspective of your choice, but I can predict with serene confidence that, across all fringe theological boundaries, gay people and sassy women are going to be high on the list of scapegoats for bringing down God’s wrath.
As the inevitable recognition that all is not well sets in, be on the lookout for another variety of science denial tailored to the “Left Behind” crowd. Climate Change, in this formulation, is not a result of greenhouse gases, but rather comes from God’s anger with the gay, muslim, socialist rays emanating from the White House, New York, and Los Angeles.
And it’s not computer modeled, it’s “prophecied”.
Warning: State of the art fundamentalist climate denial Rants below:
