Month: November 2016

Hail Trump

White Supremacists meet in Washington DC to celebrate the appointment of one of their own to a high White House post.

What do you think their views on climate change are?  Just wondering.

Normalize this, you bastards.

NYTimes:

In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

Continue reading “Hail Trump”

Fake News Not New. Scientists Have been Fighting it for Decades

Fake News is not new.
I started creating videos specifically to push back against a sewertide of nonsense spewing from the alphabet soup of “think” tanks spawned by the Koch Brothers, Exxon, and a rogue’s gallery of fossil fuel info criminals.

The ability to tell fake from factual is a critical skill we should be teaching in the digital age.
I’ll be exploring this in future vids – for now, here are some good examples of how I learned to track a false meme to it’s source.

 

Continue reading “Fake News Not New. Scientists Have been Fighting it for Decades”

Arctic, Antarctic Ice in Free Fall

Bob Henson in Weather Underground:

There are weather and climate records, and then there are truly exceptional events that leave all others in the dust. Such has been the case across Earth’s high latitudes during this last quarter of 2016, on track to be the planet’s warmest year on record. Sea ice extent and area have both plummeted to record lows for this time of year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Such dramatic losses rarely occur at the same time, which means that the global total of sea ice coverage is phenomenally low for this time of year. The weirdness extends to midlatitudes: North America as well as the Arctic have been bathed in unusual mildness over the last several weeks, while Eurasia deals with a vast zone of above-average snowfall and below-average temperatures. Let’s look at each of these to see what’s up and where they may (or may not) be related.

icenove16
Figure 1. Global sea ice area, including both Arctic and Antarctic. Sea ice extent is typically larger than sea ice area because it includes all data cells with at least 15 percent ice coverage (see NSIDC definitions). Global sea ice extent is experiencing a similar departure from average as global sea ice area. Experts usually analyze Arctic and Antarctic sea ice separately rather than together (see discussion below). Image credit: Wipneus, using data from National Snow and Ice Data Center. (NSIDC was not involved in producing this image.)
novem16_w
Figure 2. The normalized value of global sea ice area as of November 17, 2016, was so far from any other total in the 37-year record that it represented a departure of about 8 standard deviations below the average! Image credit: Wipneus, using data from National Snow and Ice Data Center. (NSIDC was not involved in producing this image.)

Continue reading “Arctic, Antarctic Ice in Free Fall”

Weekend Wonk: Climate and the Way Forward

“What I’ve been saying. Neither physics nor economics were repealed 10 days ago.” –
Admiral David Titley

Politico:

Even though President Obama’s historic Clean Power Plan was stayed by the Supreme Court and appears doomed in the Trump Administration, the electric sector is getting so green so fast that it has already met the plan’s 2024 goal for slashing carbon emissions and its 2030 target for reducing coal use, new data show.

The primary cause of the sharp decline in power-plant emissions is clear: Utilities are rapidly abandoning coal for cleaner-burning natural gas and zero-emission renewables. It’s also clear that this shift, driven by rising prices for coal and falling prices for climate-friendlier alternatives, is happening independently of Obama’s controversial climate rules, which were only finalized in August 2015 and then suspended by the Court six months later. Even if President-Elect Trump fulfills his pledge to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, the U.S. is on track to fulfill its pledges under that deal, a glimmer of good news for environmentalists mourning his election.

What is not clear is whether Trump, who has vowed to undo the Clean Power Plan and end Obama’s “war on coal,” can reverse the decline of coal or even slow it down. Trump has called global warming a made-in-China hoax, and the energy section of his transition website reads like an ode to fossil fuels. But since his election, Trump and other pro-coal Republicans, including Senate Majority Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have tried to lower expectations of a coal-country renaissance, acknowledging that coal’s problems extend beyond Obama’s EPA.

Those problems have gotten even more severe this year. An analysis of government energy data provided to POLITICO by the Sierra Club, which has led a national Beyond Coal campaign to try to kill the industry, shows that U.S. power plants are on track to emit 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon this year, a 27 percent reduction from 2005. That’s already below the Clean Power Plan’s interim goal for 2024, and most of the way to the 32 percent reduction the plan envisions for 2030. If you subtract emissions from the 71 operating coal plants that already have announced retirement dates, the electric sector has just about met the plan’s final emissions goals 15 years early, even though the plan does not now have and may never have any legal teeth to compel compliance.

Carbon Brief:

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has dramatically scaled back its outlook for coal demand growth over the next 25 years, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

The 2016 World Energy Outlook sees global coal demand rise by 214 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) by 2040, less than half the 485Mtoe increase it expected last year. The IEA is also now persuaded that Chinese coal demand peaked in 2013.

Important point above – the IEA typically lowballs renewable energy, and overestimates fossil fuel projections over time.  So interesting that, even given that tendency, they say Chinese coal has peaked.  Continue reading “Weekend Wonk: Climate and the Way Forward”

Could Arctic Sea Ice be Simple?

Times Colonist, Victoria, BC:

New research is cutting through the confusion on disappearing Arctic sea ice by replacing complex computer models with simple math that links everyday activities to the health of Earth’s climate regulator.

“It might just be rather simple,” said Julienne Stroeve, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado and professor at University College London.

Her paper, published Thursday in Science magazine, outlines an easy-to-understand relationship between increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the slow vanishing of summer sea ice in the North.

For every new tonne of CO2 that enters the atmosphere, says the paper, the southern edge of the sea ice loses another three square metres. That’s it.

Or, in the words of the paper: “The 30-year running mean of monthly mean September Arctic sea-ice area is almost linearly related to cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions.”

The direct relationship between greenhouse gases and sea-ice retreat has been pointed out before. Stroeve and her co-author Dirk Notz, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, have put hard numbers to it and explained how it works.

In a stable ice pack, the warming effect of infrared radiation generated by the sun is balanced by cold temperatures in the atmosphere. But increasing levels of carbon dioxide prevent those infrared rays from escaping into space.

As a result, the ice retreats northward where there’s less solar radiation.

“The ice is migrating to re-establish equilibrium,” said Stroeve.

Establishing that hard link between CO2 and sea ice has important consequences.

For years, climate modellers have attempted to pinpoint when summer sea ice is likely to disappear. Some scientists have estimated the end of this century; others have said it should already be gone.

Stroeve and Notz say the most likely date is sometime around mid-century — unless CO2 emissions slow significantly.

That date is important for any number of reasons.

A seasonally open Arctic would ease northern shipping and resource development. It would be catastrophic for plants and animals that live on sea ice, as well as for the people who depend on them. Continue reading “Could Arctic Sea Ice be Simple?”