Month: August 2017

Climate Deniers like to cry about being called Climate Deniers, because, they say,  that’s meant to remind people of “Holocaust Deniers”.

Well,… yeah.

No, I won’t give them a link. You’ll just have to trust me.  The Nazi website cuts and pastes a story from Marc Morano’s Climate Depot site, then comments –

Daily Stormer:

The fact that they were able to pull off this hoax – and are in fact still pulling it off, though to a slightly less extent – should make us question everything else about the mainstream narrative of what is happening in reality.

There was never any evidence for this hoax. The ice core samples show the opposite of what they say they show. The whole thing was just a massive lie, where all of these people were just lying straight to your face.

Global warming, while not as important of a hoax as the Holocaust, is almost a bigger hoax. The Holocaust was said to have happened in the 40s, when information was exactly six million times harder to come by than today. Also, all of the “evidence” was sealed behind the iron curtain, so no one could even investigate the sites where it was supposed to have happened until the 90s. By the time people went there in the 90s and were like “um, there are no gas chambers here, the one that they are saying is a gas chamber is a “reconstruction,” and there are no mass graves at all or any evidence that any more than a few people died of starvation and disease in these work camps” the narrative was already fixed.

Global warming was just a straight lie to your face about information you have easy access to.

And they have gotten away with it.

They follow with a link to “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, starring John Christy.

FYI, if your crazy nephew is a Nazi, you can share some more accurate information in regard to the Climate Depot piece, below. Continue reading “You’ll Never Guess What Holocaust Deniers Think About Climate Science”

Timing.
I’m back from Greenland for a week and all hell breaks loose.

Fires burning not far from the area where I was camped a few weeks ago, Russell Glacier area near Kangerlussuaq.
The video above shows what the Tundra surface is like.  Thick, soft mat of moss, lichen,  grasses and flowers. Below, Hydrologist Asa (Oh-Sah) Rennermalm of Rutgers describes surface processes affecting the permafrost.

ThinkProgress:

Thousands of acres of permafrost are burning in what appears to be Greenland’s biggest fire on record. And climate scientists are freaking out not just because the massive fires are unusual, but because they release large amounts of greenhouse gases and speed up the melt of the ice sheet and the carbon-rich permafrost.

Continue reading “Something’s Burning: Greenland Fire Update”

On my reading list.

Top surprise. Solution is not a solar panel. It’s a woman.

Drawdown.com:

Project Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Our organization did not make or devise the plan—we found the plan because it already exists. We gathered a qualified and diverse group of researchers from around the world to identify, research, and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change. What was uncovered is a path forward that can roll back global warming within thirty years. It shows that humanity has the means at hand. Nothing new needs to be invented. The solutions are in place and in action. Our work is to accelerate the knowledge and growth of what is possible. We chose the name Drawdown because if we do not name the goal, we are unlikely to achieve it.

 

Continue reading “Paul Hawken: Drawdown and Reversing Climate Change”

Long article, excerpted here is worth a full read if you want to understand this dynamic.

Splinter:

In 2005, at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., the National Association of Evangelicals was on the verge of doing something novel: affirming science. Specifically, the 30-million-member group, which represents 51 Christian denominations, was debating how to advance a new platform called “For the Health of a Nation.” The position paper—written the year before An Inconvenient Truth kick-started sense of public urgency around climate change—included a call for evangelicals to protect God’s creation, and to embrace the government’s help in doing so. The NAE’s board had already adopted it unanimously before presenting it to the membership for debate.

At the time, many in the evangelical movement were uncomfortable with its close ties to the Republican anti-environmental regulation agenda. That year, a group called the Evangelical Alliance of Scientists and Ethicists protested the GOP-led effort to rewrite the Endangered Species Act, and the NAE’s vice president of governmental affairs Richard Cizik pushed for the organization to endorse John McCain and Joe Lieberman’s cap-and-trade bill. “For the Health of a Nation,” which Cizik also pushed, was an opportunity to draw a bright line between their support of right-wing social positions on abortion and civil rights and a growing sentiment that God’s creation needed protection from industry.

“Evangelicals don’t want themselves identified as the Republican Party at prayer,” the historian and evangelical Mark Knoll said at the time in support of the platform.

He was wrong. The rank-and-file membership rejected the effort. Like the oil and utilities industries, they decided that recognizing climate change was against their political interests.

Continue reading “Inside the “Christian” Anti-Climate Movement”

Colbert on how climate change is helping build soil in his pants.

NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. It was uploaded to a nonprofit internet digital library in January but received little attention until it was published by The New York Times.

The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.
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One government scientist who worked on the report, Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, called the conclusions among “the most comprehensive climate science reports” to be published. Another scientist involved in the process, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.

The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency did not immediately return calls or respond to emails requesting comment on Monday night.

The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today. The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius.

A small difference in global temperatures can make a big difference in the climate: The difference between a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and one of 2 degrees Celsius, for example, could mean longer heat waves, more intense rainstorms and the faster disintegration of coral reefs.

Among the more significant of the study’s findings is that it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change. The field known as “attribution science” has advanced rapidly in response to increasing risks from climate change.

Washington Post:

OVER THE next week or so, the Trump administration must decide whether to approve or suppress a major federal climate change report. Though scientists have signed off on its findings, including that the average U.S. temperature has spiked in the past several decades and that humans have almost certainly played a predominant role, President Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have indicated they simply do not believe the experts.

Even as the federal climate assessment has been under review, the warnings have grown starker. Continue reading “While Trump Bans “Climate Change”, Scientists Leak Science Update”

Not even bothering with “red team, blue team, revisit the science”. For Authoritarians, banning thought is second nature.

Guardian:

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.

A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

A missive from Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of soil health, lists terms that should be avoided by staff and those that should replace them. “Climate change” is in the “avoid” category, to be replaced by “weather extremes”. Instead of “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”.

The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

Continue reading “Ag Department: You Can’t Say “Climate Change””

Wildfire not unknown in Arctic, trying to  remember ever hearing about it in Greenland.

 

Continue reading “Wildfire. In Greenland.”

Not just your money. Your Land.

Guardian:

A study was just published in the journal World Development that quantifies the amount of subsidies directed toward fossil fuels globally, and the results are shocking. The authors work at the IMF and are well-skilled to quantify the subsidies discussed in the paper.

Let’s give the final numbers and then back up to dig into the details. The subsidies were $4.9 tn in 2013 and they rose to $5.3 tn just two years later. According to the authors, these subsidies are important because first, they promote fossil fuel use which damages the environment. Second, these are fiscally costly. Third, the subsidies discourage investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy that compete with the subsidized fossil fuels. Finally, subsidies are very inefficient means to support low-income households.
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Interested readers are directed to the paper for further details, but the results are what surprised me. Pre-tax (the narrow view of subsidies) subsidies amount to 0.7% of global GDP in 2011 and 2013. But the more appropriate definition of subsidies is much larger (8 times larger than the pre-tax subsidies). We are talking enormous values of 5.8% of global GDP in 2011, rising to 6.5% in 2013.

The authors also broke the results down by fossil fuel type and usage (coal, petroleum, natural gas, electricity). It is not clear to me how the authors separated the various fuel sources out of electrical generation; however, the results show that petroleum and coal receive much larger subsidies compared to their counterpart fuels. The authors organized results by geographical region and found that the top three subsidizers of fossil fuels are China, USA, and Russia, respectively. The European Union is a bit less than half of the entire US subsidy. Other notable countries and regions are discussed.

There are two key takeaway messages. First, fossil fuel subsidies are enormous and they are costs that we all pay, in one form or another. Second, the subsidies persist in part because we don’t fully appreciate their size. These two facts, taken together, further strengthen the case to be made for clean and renewable energy. Clean energy sources do not suffer from the environmental costs that plague fossil fuels.

In addition to outright subsidies and sweetheart tax deals, the Trump/Putin administration is currently considering which publicly owned National Monuments,  the Crown Jewels of American’s heritage, should be turned over to big corporate benefactors for exploitation.

New York Times:

President Trump, along with roundly questioning climate change, has moved quickly to wipe out those measures with the support of coal companies and other commercial interests. Separately, Mr. Trump’s Interior Department is drawing up plans to reduce wilderness and historic areas that are now protected as national monuments, creating even more opportunities for profit.

Richard Reavey, the head of government relations for Cloud Peak Energy, which operates a strip mine here that sends coal to the Midwest and increasingly to coal-burning power plants in Asia said Mr. Trump’s change of course was meant to correct wrongs of the past.

Continue reading “Fossil Fuels Still Getting Huge Subsidies. Not Enough. They Want More.”