No words.
Month: October 2015
More Trouble at Totten Glacier
Last spring I interviewed Jamin Greenbaum of the University of Texas, a key researcher on one of the planet’s most remote areas, the vast expanses of East Antarctica vulnerable to warming ocean water. He helped me flesh out the reasons why East Antarctica, long thought to be stable and resistant to the rapid melting taking place in West Antarctica – has now become a focus for researchers worried about just how rapidly large chunks of ice and significant amounts of sea level might come off that area.
Chris Mooney reports in the Washington Post about a new study with good news, bad news, and fresh uncertainty.
Earlier this year, we learned some worrisome climate news. Although Antarctic scientists have been most concerned about loss of ice in the western part of Antarctica, a study in Nature Geoscience suggested a vulnerability in the much larger ice sheet of East Antarctica, as well.
East Antarctica’s enormous Totten Glacier, you see, has a key similarity with the glaciers of West Antarctica — namely, it is rooted deep below sea level. This means that it is potentially exposed to warm ocean waters, and the study in March uncovered a deep and 5-kilometer wide subsea valley beneath the glacier’s oceanfront ice shelf that, the authors said, could be a route for warm offshore water to reach its base. This might explain why the glacier has been observed to be thinning and lowering, or losing elevation, over time, they noted.
Located along East Antarctica’s Sabrina Coast, Totten glacier is the ice sheet’s largest. It holds back 3.9 meters of potential sea level rise, or over 12 feet, and connects with the very deep and vast Aurora Subglacial Basin, which is also rooted well below sea level. So the results were treated as being of enormous consequence.
But they’re not the end of the story, as there is vastly more to learn about Totten glacier. A new study out in Geophysical Research Letters reaffirms some of these core concerns about Totten’s melt — while also appearing to partly alleviate others.
Xin Li, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, worked with a team from her institution and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to examine Totten using satellite imagery and aircraft data. The researchers documented for the first time just how much the glacier’s “grounding line” — the critical underwater area where ice, bedrock and the ocean meet — has been retreating inland over the years.
The answer is quite a bit. The research found that between 1996 and 2013 Totten’s grounding line retreated as much as 3 kilometers in some places. That’s fast, but it’s not nearly so fast as what has been happening in West Antarctica, where the retreat in some areas has been as much as one to two kilometers per year.
Tobacco Road: Exxon’s Growing Denial Dilemma
For years, ExxonMobil has been running away from the environmental politics of former CEO Lee Raymond, a salty-tongued chemist who spent millions of company money to fund writers and foundations to sow scientific doubt about climate change.
Although Raymond retired a decade ago, his hand remains visible in the undercurrent of US skepticism toward climate change that began in the 1990s and has flowed through US politics ever since. But new reports suggest an even more complex legacy—that Raymond, while he was leading the charge to undermine near-consensus climate science, had access to pioneering, Exxon-produced studies that meticulously documented the potential perils of climate change.
Beginning in 1977, Exxon scientists began to produce a decade of papers that described a general scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels was changing global climate. It was not yet knowable whether the planet was undergoing a heating trend, but if it was, temperatures could rise by three to 10 degrees Celsius, one early paper said. In the late 1980s, however, Exxon abruptly embraced a message that scientists were exaggerating how much they knew, and that the risk was that they were utterly wrong. In full-throated public statements, Raymond himself said he did not believe the planet was warming.
The possible legal ramifications of the Exxon paper trail are that the company could potentially be shown in a court to have deliberately squelched scientifically based evidence that effectively accepted the consensus view. Science is rarely incontrovertible, but, as the tobacco industry was fined a decade ago for having lied about the dangers of cigarettes, Exxon could be liable for stiff penalties should it be shown to have purposely misled the public for corporate gain.
–If it looks like a mess, if not a corporate crisis, ExxonMobil appears to think it is, too, judging by how it is responding.
Continue reading “Tobacco Road: Exxon’s Growing Denial Dilemma”
Vertical Farming Hits the Wall
In most cities, where any available land tends to be quickly snatched up by developers, it can be hard for would-be urban farmers without backyards to find a place to plant crops. But if there aren’t enough community garden plots to go around, one urban farming company thinks cities have another resource: walls.
Bright Agrotech, a Wyoming-based vertical farming company, designs lightweight hydroponic farm systems that can attach to any unused wall space along sidewalks or behind buildings.
Vertical surfaces are really one of the most undervalued types of real estate in the world,” says Nate Storey, CEO of Bright Agrotech. “Basically all you can use them for is advertising.”
While living walls have been around for a while, they aren’t usually used for growing food, and they’re usually expensive. Bright Agrotech’s system is still a little pricey—a small system starts at $569—but they’re working to make it accessible to anyone who wants to grow food and bring the cost down further.
“What we’re really focused on is decentralizing and democratizing agriculture,” Storey says. “Getting produce from the grower to the consumer as quickly as possible, as efficiently and as locally as possible.”
The company also designed the system to be simple enough for non-gardeners to master.
“You’ve Got to Get Your Head Around this.” Bill Nye on the Top 5 Things You Need to Know about Climate.
Description:
Bill Nye boils down the basic facts surrounding climate change, and why the rate at which our planet is changing is so important. EXPLORER: THE FIVE STAGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE AIRS SUNDAY NOVEMBER 1 at 8/7c.
Note the kid who says he doesn’t worry about climate change, because “I’m in Miami.”
Creationist Ken Ham launched another attack against Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye on Sunday after Nye released a short video explaining key things to remember about climate change.
“We don’t need to be concerned about drastic climate change,” Ham wrote on his blog. “Our climate, and the checks and balances that keep it operating within safe parameters, were designed by an all-wise Creator.”
If Nye accepted God’s Word and God’s sovereignty, he would know that the all-powerful God would not allow humanity to die off by climate change or anything else. Nye also therefore rejects God’s Word as a basis for value, purpose, and meaning in life. Does he realize that, from his atheistic perspective, man is just an evolved animal and, in being consistent with an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” worldview, population alarmists could suggest mass killings or forced sterilizations as possible solutions in reducing the population? I’m sure he would be aghast at such suggestions—but then on what basis does he anchor his morality and determine what is ultimately right and wrong in this world? It comes down to one’s worldview. What solutions are there in Nye’s game of “blame man and his increasing population”?
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It should be noted that evolutionists believe in many ice ages over Earth’s history. These ice ages, in the evolution model, would have dramatically dropped ocean levels, which would then have risen during the interglacial periods. In this view of Earth’s history, this happened many, many times without being caused by humans. Now, of course, biblical creationists reject this idea of multiple ice ages because we start with the true history in God’s Word. The Bible records the event of the global Flood of Noah’s Day. This Flood, and accompanying events such as massive volcanic activity, produced the perfect conditions for an Ice Age. This Ice Age lowered ocean levels for a time before they rose again as the continental ice sheets melted. So changes in sea level are not unprecedented in either an evolutionary or biblical model.
With El Nino Warmth – Natural Gas Prices in Free Fall, BP Braces for Long Term Low Oil Prices
Roller Coaster to nowhere continues.
Cheaper gas means it’s harder for frackers to frack. Cheap Oil makes Keystone Pipelines less attractive, and Tar Sands tougher to pencil out.
Meanwhile the uncertainty continues to be a headache for anyone seeking certainty in estimating costs going forward. Big advantage for renewables, as the fuel costs remain utterly predicable, the same 25 years from now as today – zero.
Wall Street Journal (paywall):
The benchmark U.S. natural-gas price tumbled to its biggest one-day decline since February 2014 on expectations of a deepening supply glut.
Forecasts for warm fall weather across swaths of the U.S. spurred the nearly 10% plunge on Monday. Above-average temperatures at the start of heating season will undercut seasonal demand, analysts say, boosting stockpiles that already are near record highs.
“The market is now in absolute free fall,” said Stephen Schork, editor of energy-trading newsletter The Schork Report. “There’s no real strong forecast for any weather-[related] demand in the near future.”
The North American natural-gas market has been mired in a supply glut for years amid robust output. Companies continue to grow more efficient at extracting the fuel from shale rocks in Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere, and they’re able to maintain production even as gas prices plumb three-year lows.
But Monday’s selloff nevertheless is another blow to energy producers, which now must grapple with falling natural-gas prices in addition to low oil prices. Producers have struggled with persistently low gas prices for years and are now seeing additional threats to their earnings due to the past year’s plunge in oil prices.
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Through the Denial Looking Glass with Stephen Lewandowsky
Ever had a climate denier assure you that, although it is impossible to know whether the Earth is warming, or cooling – we know as a matter of absolute fact that Mars, Jupiter, and/or Neptunes moons are definitely warming up….?
Stephen Lewandowsky in Open Democracy:
“CO2 keeps our planet warm . . . .” — Ian Plimer, Australian climate “skeptic”, Heaven & Earth, p. 411
“Temperature and CO2 are not connected.” — Ian Plimer, Australian climate “skeptic”, Heaven & Earth, p. 278
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – The White Queen, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
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When a person’s worldview and identity are threatened by climate change, or other environmental risks, they frequently engage in what is called “identity-protective cognition”. Identity-protective cognition can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most frequent manifestation is that it moderates people’s risk perceptions. However, in the case of climate change, the overwhelming scientific consensus—and the impetus for mitigative policies it entails—poses a particular dilemma for people whose identity is threatened by any potential interference with the free market. A mere moderation of risk perception may be insufficient to justify active rejection of the science and of relevant policy options. What are the cognitive and argumentative options available to them in light of the inconvenient consensus?
One option is to deny the existence of the consensus. Another option is to accept the consensus (at least tacitly), but to glorify the few contrarian scientists as heroes, often by appealing to Galileo, who oppose the “corrupt” mainstream scientific “establishment.”
Continue reading “Through the Denial Looking Glass with Stephen Lewandowsky”
Could CO2 Bring on the Zombie Apocalypse? More Evidence.
It may have already.
Let’s recap.
We already know that a warming world increases the general level of violent behavior.
We know that a warmer world enlarges the range for brain-eating amoebas.
I’ve posted before that might be a deadly combination.
Now this.
In a landmark public health finding, a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health finds that carbon dioxide (CO2) has a direct and negative impact on human cognition and decision-making. These impacts have been observed at CO2 levels that most Americans — and their children — are routinely exposed to today inside classrooms, offices, homes, planes, and cars.
Carbon dioxide levels are inevitably higher indoors than the baseline set by the outdoor air used for ventilation, a baseline that is rising at an accelerating rate thanks to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels. So this seminal research has equally great importance for climate policy, providing an entirely new public health impetus for keeping global CO2 levels as low as possible.
In a series of articles, I will examine the implications for public health both today (indoors) as well as in the future (indoors and out) due to rising CO2 levels. This series is the result of a year-long investigation for Climate Progress and my new Oxford University Press book coming out next week, “Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know.” This investigative report is built on dozens of studies and literature reviews as well as exclusive interviews with many of the world’s leading experts in public health and indoor air quality, including authors of both studies.
Significantly, the Harvard study confirms the findings of a little-publicized 2012 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) study, “Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance.” That study found “statistically significant and meaningful reductions in decision-making performance” in test subjects as CO2 levels rose from a baseline of 600 parts per million (ppm) to 1000 ppm and 2500 ppm.
Continue reading “Could CO2 Bring on the Zombie Apocalypse? More Evidence.”
“Steve Jobs” is Insanely Great
Totally wowed by this one.
Benghazi-ing Climate Science: House “Science” Committee Subpoenas NOAA
Not content to let the House Benghazi committee grab all the pointless, partisan investigation glory, the Republican controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, noted for a membership not comfortable with findings of modern science, is seeking to harrass government scientists whose findings conflict with current conservative political doctrine.
The head of a congressional committee on science has issued subpoenas to the Obama administration over a recent scientific study refuting claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the last decade.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and a prominent congressional skeptic on climate change, issued the subpoenas two weeks ago demanding e-mails and records from U.S. scientists who participated in the study, which undercut a popular argument used by critics who reject the scientific consensus that man-made pollution is behind the planet’s recent warming.
Smith’s document request to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ordered the agency to turn over scientific data as well as internal “communications between or among employees” involved in the study, according to a letter Friday by the House committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.). Johnson accused Smith of “furthering a fishing expedition” by looking for ways to discredit NOAA’s study, which was published in June in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
“It is a disturbing trend for the legitimacy of this committee,” Johnson said in the letter to Smith. She linked the subpoena to previous requests by the committee’s Republican staff seeking information about NOAA’s climate researchers, which Johnson called “a serious misuse of Congressional oversight powers.” Noting that NOAA routinely publishes supporting data for its studies, Johnson said Smith had “not articulated a legitimate need for anything beyond what NOAA has already provided.”
Smith, responding to Johnson’s letter, said the subpoena was not “harassment” but “appropriate constitutional oversight.
A new study published online today in the journal Science finds that the rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than that seen during the latter half of the 20th Century. The study refutes the notion that there has been a slowdown or “hiatus” in the rate of global warming in recent years.
The study is the work of a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information* (NCEI) using the latest global surface temperature data.
“Adding in the last two years of global surface temperature data and other improvements in the quality of the observed record provide evidence that contradict the notion of a hiatus in recent global warming trends,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., Director, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Our new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.”
Karl et al, Science June 26, 2015:
Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the global warming “hiatus.”
Here, we present an updated global surfacetemperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than those reported by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support thenotion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.
As a reminder, FactCheck.org recently reviewed an article that Rep. Smith wrote for the Wall Street Journal, recycling climate denial myths.
Continue reading “Benghazi-ing Climate Science: House “Science” Committee Subpoenas NOAA”