Month: August 2016

Gizmodo:

Something strange is happening to one of the coldest places on Earth. Dazzling blue lakes are blooming like summer wildflowers atop the East Antarctic ice sheet’s Langhovde Glacier. And that’s got scientists worried—because they’ve seen these lakes before.

“Supraglacial lakes”—meltwater ponds that form as warm summer air heats the surface of an ice sheet—have been spreading across Greenland for years. They’re both a sign of global warming and a cause of ice sheet collapse: as meltwater from the lakes drains into the underlying ice, it can lubricate the ice sheet’s foundation, causing it to weaken. This feedback is thought to be one of the reasons Greenland is now melting at an accelerating rate. (Earth’s northernmost ice sheet shed roughly a trillion tons between 2011 and 2014.)

Now, the lakes have jumped to the other end of the world, peppering an ice sheet that’s enjoyed relative stability compared with its overheated neighbor to the north. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters drew on satellite and meteorological data to construct the first long-term record of meltwater ponds along the coast of East Antarctica. According to the authors’ analysis, nearly 8,000 dazzling blue lakes appeared on the Langhovde Glacier in the summertime between 2000 and 2013.

Here, Dark Snow Project chief scientist Jason Box discusses the role this kind of lake plays on the Greenland sheet.

Continue reading “Beautiful and Ominous: Lakes Developing in East Antarctica”

National Review:

Mainstream society has only just now begun to figure out the alt-right. This relative tardiness makes sense: Prolonged alienation from mainstream society is the only explanation for the noxious concoction of racism, illiberalism, and psychological derangement that defines the movement. But after years of incubating online in harmless irrelevancy, the alt-right is getting attention. This is in large part owing to the way that certain parts of its online coalition have latched onto Donald Trump as their conquering vanguard.
—
Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, who calls Trump “Daddy,” has penned the most comprehensive alt-right apologia. According to him, the movement’s deployment of white-nationalist imagery and rhetoric is provocative satire. And one might well ask, What’s so weird, after all, about Trump fan sites posting Trump-related images and links?

UPDATE: David Duke and radio buddy on the takeover of the Republican party. “The Yids are flipping their lids.”

To find an answer to that question, watch this video.(above)
It is in the form of a commercial; uploaded on Wednesday, it currently has more than 600,000 views. The video has a stylized, futuristic aesthetic common to Japanese popular culture, a semiotic hallmark of the alt-right. But its origins are decidedly American: It was created by meme generator Mike Diva. Perhaps Diva created this video out of an artistic impulse or as a clever ploy for money; he’s selling the video’s song on iTunes for $0.99. But people are genuinely watching this stuff. They are posting in these “Trump General” threads, and waging furious comment wars on Reddit about the reasons neo-Nazis should be welcome in “The_Donald.” People are spending hours rebuking journalists on Twitter who pronounce their disdain for Donald Trump. The defense that it’s somehow lighthearted satire is hard to maintain when you look at the all-consuming investment that the online people have in the Trump campaign.

Nice piece by Rachel Maddow explaining the back ground of Donald Trump’s new campaign “CEO” Stephen Bannon, formerly chairman of the right wing website Breitbart.

Maddow focuses on some of the most egregious racist, anti-semitic and mysogynistic outbursts from one of the right wing’s most feverish swamps, but neglects to point out something that makes perfect sense to anyone that has followed this blog – that there is some weird, poisonous, toxic, incestuous relationship between racism and climate denial.

I was honored not long ago to be the target of one of Breitbart’s (near instantaneous) attacks on my video discussing the accuracy of satellite temperature data.

But it didn’t take long to assemble a list of headlines illustrating the website’s curious predilection for mixing vile white supremacist rhetoric with anti-science screeds.

See below: Continue reading “Trump’s New “CEO” runs an Empire of Racism and Climate Denial”

New footage from Dark Snow Chief Scientist Jason Box – description:

Sequence starts with a rough comparison of stills entitled “south Greenland glacier resembling an Eagle, now wingless”

 

Below, Dr. Box in a recent interview on Danish TV. Starts in Danish but Jason is interviewed in English about 30 seconds in. Continue reading “This Glacier Has Lost its Wings”

Climate deniers like to talk about hurricane activity being “down”. What they don’t specify, is that the only thing that is down is land falling major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher on the US mainland.  In fact, 2015 set a record for Category 3 and higher storms in the northern hemisphere.

Costliest in US history:
Katrina $125B
Sandy $75B
Ike $37.5B
Wilma $29.3B
Andrew $26.5B
Ivan $23.3B#laflood $20B https://t.co/pURNyJcQJm

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) August 19, 2016

Below, NASA video discusses current “drought” of landfall hurricanes in US.

Technically, Hurricane Sandy was not a “major” hurricane, as wind speeds made it a Category 1 when it came ashore, even though it’s size, power, and storm surge made it one of the most destructive storms in history.

Below, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and others discuss the effect of climate change on this year’s hurricane season, which is just winding up. Continue reading ““A Hurricane Without Wind””

Updated comparison of climate models (CMIP5 RCP4.5) with observations through June/July: pic.twitter.com/aMWEINa7Bq

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 16, 2016

I’ve been waiting for this.
Above, Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project tweeted an updated comparison of global temps to model predictions, including the most recent measurements.

Open Mind:

In 1981 James Hansen and colleagues published research in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science titled “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” They discussed the result of basic physics, that carbon dioxide in the air inhibits Earth cooling off, thus heating the planet. They also reported the results of computer simulations of Earth’s climate in a world with ever-increasing CO₂.

In that research they stated some of the more notable results, both for the long term (if we double the amount of CO₂ in the air), and some of the changes expected by the year 2010 if CO₂ kept increasing the way it had been (because of our burning fossil fuels). These include:

• Doubling the atmosphere’s CO₂ would raise Earth’s overall temperature by 2.8°C (5°F).
• By 2010, Earth’s temperature would rise about 0.4°C (0.7°F).
• The Arctic will warm considerably faster than the globe as a whole.
• There will be a reduction of sea ice in the Arctic.
• There’s a chance we might see the opening of the fabled “Northwest passage” during late summer.

Naturally one wonders, how did things turn out?

Continue reading “Climate Predictions: How are We Doing?”

Twitter has been lit up this week following the exchange on the Australian television show “Q and A”, between Professor Bryan Cox and a right wing legislator Malcolm Roberts.

Climate denier Roberts attempted to refute NASA data by appealing to the non-scientist blogger who calls himself Steven Goddard, leaving the audience notably unimpressed.

News.com.au:

British physicist Professor Brian Cox and newly-elected Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts went head-to-head over climate change science on the ABC’s Q&A program.

Viewers knew the showdown was coming long before it started. Mr Roberts has previously questioned the legitimacy of claims that humans are responsible for a warming planet. He’s even called for a royal commission into climate science.

Mashable:

Then Cox pulled out a graph showing a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the air, which is currently at its highest levels in 650,000 years.

“So the question essentially, first of all, are those two things correlated, and secondly, do we understand the physical mechanisms — and we’ve understood those since the 19th century,” Cox said.

That wasn’t good enough for Roberts, who wanted to focus on the spike in temperatures during the mid-1930s to 1940s. “Yeah, the 1930s and ’40s were warmer than the current decades,” he claimed.

Except they aren’t, as illustrated by Cox’s finger-pointing.

Continue reading “Denier Destroyed on Aussie TV. Crowd Goes Wild”

Bloomberg (october 2015):

Three-quarters of Americans now accept the scientific consensus on climate change, the highest level in four years of surveys conducted by the University of Texas at Austin. The biggest shocker is what’s happening inside the GOP. In a remarkable turnabout, 59 percent of Republicans now say climate change is happening, up from 47 percent just six months ago.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

A new public opinion survey finds that “Americans across political lines, except conservative Republicans, would support a presidential candidate who strongly supports taking action to reduce global warming.”

The survey of 1,004 registered voters by the Climate Change Communication programs at Yale and George Mason University yielded a number of important findings consistent with earlier polling this year by Gallup.

The new survey found a growing number of registered voters understand global warming is happening: “Three in four (73%, up 7 points since Spring 2014) now think it is happening. Large majorities of Democrats — liberal (95%) and moderate/conservative (80%) — think it is happening, as do three in four Independents (74%, up 15 points since Spring 2014) and the majority of liberal/moderate Republicans (71%, up 10 points).”

Continue reading “Pollster: Opinion Tipping Point on Climate”

“People didn’t understand how big this disaster was”

Katrina Syndrome: the victims were poor and many dark skinned, no proximity to New York. Therefore, media uninterested, wants to talk about Obama founding ISIS.

Below, worth repeating or sharing, my vid on how climate change makes for stronger storms.

 

Desmogblog:

A long-awaited campaign to rebrand fossil fuels called Fueling U.S. Forward made its public debut at the Red State Gathering 2016 on Saturday, where the organization’s President and CEOCharles Drevna gave attendees the inside scoop on the effort, and confirmed that the campaign is backed financially by Koch Industries.

Back in February, Peter Stone first reported in the Huffington Post that a $10 million-a-year effort was proposed by a Koch Industries board member, James Mahoney, and Mr. Drevna, aiming “to boost petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles.” In early August, the Fueling U.S. Forward website launched, and on Saturday, the first public comments were made about the campaign by Mr. Drevna, and they revealed a lot about how the Koch-backed initiative is working to re-frame fossil fuels.

“We need a sustainable energy to ensure the future of the country,” Mr. Drevna told the audience.

The source of that energy? That which Mr. Drevna labeled “reliable, abundant, efficient and sustainable fuels.”

“Folks, that’s of course the fossil fuels,” he immediately added.

Never mind that fossil fuels don’t align with any dictionary definition of “sustainable,” as oil, gas and coal reserves are limited to what’s buried in the ground, unlike renewable sources of energy. Technically speaking, fossil fuels are the opposite of sustainable energy sources — but that fact did little to slow Mr. Drevna down as he made what he called the “pro-human” case for burning fossil fuels.

The top line takeaway from Mr. Drevna’s comments is that the Koch-funded Fueling U.S. Forward is an effort to rebrand fossil fuels, focusing on the “positive” sides of oil, gas and coal.

The new initiative comes at a time when the impacts of climate change are becoming more difficult to ignore. 2016 is already on track to be the hottest year ever recorded, a mid-year climate analysis from NASA reported, and unusual storms, like the torrential rainfall that struck the Gulf Coast over the past few days causing historic flooding, have become more frequent.

For its part, Fueling U.S. Forward wants to talk not about statistics, facts and figures, but to reach people’s emotions.

“We’ve got to take this to the emotional and personal level,” Mr. Drevna, a former D.C. lobbyist and Sunoco executive, told the crowd. “Oil and natural gas, they’re not the fuels of the past and maybe the present or a necessary evil. They are the future.”

Oil Change International:

As the renewable revolution gathers a pace, the oil industry has launched yet another PR offensive trying to rebrand fossil fuels as sustainable.

Continue reading “Koch Funded Group Seeks to Kill EVs”

Bob Henson in WeatherUnderground:

As of Tuesday, the deepest cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t anywhere near the tropics–it was spinning in the central Arctic Ocean. A surface low located near 83°N, about 500 miles from the North Pole and about 1000 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, deepened to a central pressure of 968 mb at 2 am EDT Tuesday morning, August 16. This is on par with the central pressure you might find in a moderately-sized Category 2 hurricane. Such lows are a common feature of Arctic climate, but they rarely gain such intensity in the middle of summer. The only deeper Arctic cyclone on record in August is the Great Arctic Cyclone (GAC) of 2012, a low that bottomed out at 966 mb on August 6. This was the lowest pressure analyzed across more than 1600 August cyclones in the Arctic since 1979, according to a 2012 study by Ian Simmonds and Irina Rudeva (University of Melbourne).

The GAC of 2012 churned across the Arctic for ten days while its central pressure was below 1000 mb. The cyclone had major effects on the distribution of regional ice and appears to have played at least some role in that summer’s record depletion of Arctic sea ice. Normally, low pressure near the North Pole causes ice to spread out (as surface waters and sea ice move to the right of the surface wind). Yet the intensity and duration of the 2012 cyclone’s winds and waves appears to have more than compensated for that effect, leading to an overall loss of ice extent. The extent plummeted in August 2012 en route to a record-low extent in September.

A study in 2013 led by Jinlun Zhang (University of Washington) found that the GAC quadrupled the melting of sea ice from below by pushing warm surface water against the bottom of wind- and wave-tossed ice floes. However, because much of the Arctic ice was already thin and compromised, much of the extent loss that occurred in August and September was baked into the system when the cyclone came along. Zhang and colleagues estimated from a model simulation that the record September minimum was only about 4% lower as a result of the GAC of 2012.

https://twitter.com/StuOstro/status/765718203859210240

Continue reading “Great Arctic Cyclone of 2016”