Month: June 2018

Climate Denial meme: “Scientists who can’t tell you what the weather will be tomorrow want you to think they can predict weather 100 years from now.”

Now add – same scientists are controlling Hurricanes to punish climate deniers.

Sounds right.

Right Wing Watch:

Mark Taylor, the so-called “firefighter prophet” about whom Liberty University is making a movie, appeared on Sheila Zilinksy’s podcast over the weekend where he warned that those who oppose President Trump will use secret technology to create hurricanes just before the midterm elections in order to suppress voter turnout among Trump supporters.

Taylor, who is fond of promoting wild conspiracy theories, has long insisted that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were created by the Illuminati and struck Texas and Florida as punishment against those who voted for Trump. Taylor said that he saw signs in Subtropical Storm Alberto that these same nefarious forces are planning to use weather once again to target Trump voters.

“Look for some stuff right before the election,” Taylor warned.”Look for false flags, and one of the things that the Lord has been showing me is that this could be a very nasty hurricane season. We’re already getting effects down here in Florida, we just had one come through here, it was a subtropical system. It doesn’t normally start this early and that is what the Lord was showing me.”

“We both know there is technology out there,” he continued. “Irma and Harvey were both generated and steered by man. There could be a couple of nasty hurricanes right before the elections to upset the elections, so people can’t vote, they don’t have power, so forth and so on.”

Taylor said that Christians must engage in warfare prayer that those in the government who are loyal to Trump will gain control of “the technology behind the storm” in order to protect the elections.

“This is all going to hinge,” he said, “[on] if they have control of the weather stuff.”

New York Times:

When President Trump announced on June 1 last year that the United States would exit the Paris climate deal, many of America’s largest corporations said they would honor the agreement anyway, vowing to pursue cleaner energy and cut emissions on their own.

A year later, there’s one area where that pledge is highly visible: renewable energy. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies, from tech giants like Apple and Google to Walmart and General Motors, are voluntarily investing billions of dollars in new wind and solar projects to power their operations or offset their conventional energy use, becoming a major driver of renewable electricity growth in the United States.

“You’re definitely not seeing corporations slow down their appetite for renewables under Trump — if anything, demand continues to grow,” said Malcolm Woolf, senior vice president for policy at Advanced Energy Economy, a clean energy business group. “And it means that many utilities increasingly have to evolve to satisfy this demand.”

One big question, however, is whether these corporate renewable deals will remain a relatively niche market, adding some wind and solar at the margins but not really making a sizable dent in overall emissions, or whether these companies can use their clout to transform America’s grid and help usher in a new era of low-carbon power.

Last year in the United States, 19 large corporations announced deals with energy providers to build 2.78 gigawatts worth of wind and solar generating capacity, equal to one-sixth of all of the renewable capacity added nationwide in 2017, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Business Renewable Center. (Power companies themselves added much of the rest, often in response to state mandates.)

That trend appears to be accelerating. Corporations have already announced deals for another 2.48 gigawatts of wind and solar in the first half of 2018, as companies like AT&T and Nestlé join the search for cleaner power to fulfill their sustainability goals and take advantage of the rapidly declining cost of renewables.

“We didn’t intend to do this as a statement about Paris, though it has become a statement that we’re definitely still in,” said Brian Janous, general manager of energy at Microsoft, which has so far bought enough wind and solar power to match 50 percent of the demand from its global data centers.

“But with how fast wind and solar prices have fallen, we see this as something that makes financial sense,” he said.

LATimes:

His promised coal renaissance sputtered. Rollbacks of environmental protections are tangled in court. Even automakers aren’t on board for his push toward heavier-polluting cars.

Continue reading “Can Corporations Turn the Climate Tide?”

You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don’t need a thermometer to read the signs of climate change.

Moving uphill helps adapt to rising temps. But sooner or later, you run out of hill.

Reuters:

HAMBELA, Ethiopia, June 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Few countries take coffee as seriously as Ethiopia – and that’s not only because it prides itself as being the source of the prized Arabica bean.

But rising temperatures and worsening drought linked to climate change are now hitting production – and fixing that may require moving many Ethiopian coffee fields uphill, experts say.

Aside from its cultural value, coffee is Ethiopia’s single largest source of export revenue, worth more than $860 million in the 2016-2017 production year.

But coffee-growing areas in eastern Ethiopia have seen the average temperature climb 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past three decades, according to the Environment, Climate Change and Coffee Forest Forum (ECCCFF), an Ethiopian non-governmental organisation.

That has caused stronger drought and – given that coffee is a crop sensitive to both moisture and temperature – a worsening of diseases that afflict coffee berries.

As a result, thousands of hectares of coffee plants are being lost each year in traditional growing areas, which is raising fears about the future of Ethiopia’s coffee production.

The country’s government is now encouraging farmers to grow coffee at higher elevations – up to 3,200 metres (10,500 ft) above sea level, about 1,000 metres above the norm.

That could help mitigate some of the climate change pressures Ethiopia faces, said Birhanu Tsegaye, who heads extension services for coffee, tea and spices for the Ethiopia Coffee and Tea Development Marketing Authority (ECTDMA), a government body tasked with overseeing the sector.

As temperatures rise, “even areas not (formerly) suitable for coffee growing have become suitable, presenting an opportunity for the country to cope with climate change,” he said.

Pressures from warming conditions have been noticed in other parts of the country too.

Not just coffee growers.

Yale Climate Connections:

The spruce forests of New York’s Whiteface Mountain are home to dozens of bird species, including yellow-bellied flycatchers, blackpoll warblers, and purple finches. Many of these birds have been moving uphill. Continue reading “Adapting to Climate is an Uphill Battle for Coffee, Animals”

Description:

Take a virtual tour of the Moon in all-new 4K resolution, thanks to data provided by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. As the visualization moves around the near side, far side, north and south poles, we highlight interesting features, sites, and information gathered on the lunar terrain.

Cameras are sharp enough to pick up Apollo’s left-behind lunar lander and rover.

Naive if you think that will stop Moon deniers.  Just proof, in their minds, of how deep the plot goes.

Lijing Cheng is a dynamic climate researcher from China, and co-author with American researchers on an important analysis of Hurricane Harvey’s record rains – the subject of my most recent vid.

I wanted to post something to show how much fun we had, and how much I learned, during the interview. More below, on renewable energy in China Continue reading “Lijing Cheng on North Atlantic Current and “The Day After Tomorrow””

Should scientists fly?
My response – Hell yes, if they need to.  Why, I know scientists who use computers, have watched a TV, and even driven a car.

I know some that have even taken a shower.

We’re not in trouble because scientists fly to do research and attend meetings.

We are in trouble because we’ve been burning coal and oil for 200 years, and because giant corporations knew 50 years ago that this is a problem we needed to address, and they made a conscious, deliberate decision to sacrifice the next 50,000 generations of human children, as well as a good portion of the living species who share the planet with us, to maintain their wealth and power – to squeeze that last million into their bloated bank accounts.

If I thought that by not boarding a plane, I could stop the plane from flying, that would indeed make it an actual choice. Such is not the case. We live in a world where people fly, use computers, drive cars – and we need to move to carbon free technologies to power that civilization efficiently – of which there are an expanding suite of economical choices.

Sara Myhre in Scientific American:

There is a great deal of public concern about when, and where to, climate scientists fly.

“Why do you fly?” they ask us.

“Where do you fly?”

“If you think climate change is a crisis, how can you ever fly?”

“Don’t you know,” they plead, “that the single most damaging choice to the climate system an individual can make is to fly in a commercial airplane?”

Irony notwithstanding, it is indeed climate scientists who established the carbon footprint and flagged the damage done by flying. And in doing so, we (and I mean that term loosely, because of how nebulous and overlapping the fields of climate are) have characterized the true damage of hyper-consumerist and highly mobile lifestyles—lifestyles exhibited by most of us in the developed world, including myself and my friends, neighbors, family and academic community.

Indeed, the complicity of flying is held up as a Rorschach test as to whether publicly-facing climate scientists understand the moral math of climate change. The culture wants to know: Are we crisis actors pantomiming alarmism, whilst we profiteer and jet around the globe to our fancy meetings? Or are we noble ascetics who have purified and aligned our carbon footprint with our rhetoric?  This dynamic—of finger-pointing, grandstanding, condemning and shaming—is an ongoing toxic hamster wheel, which further erodes and discredits the public trust in the good-faith actions of climate and earth scientists.

No other clade of experts who hold expertise on a public health and safety crisis is held to this standard. Do we demand to know from pediatricians their vaccination schedule for their own children? No, of course not. Do we interrogate oncologists about whether they have ever smoked a cigarette? No, of course not. Then, why do we feel that it is within our purview to require the flight itineraries of climate scientists?

Continue reading “Should Scientists Fly? Should Anyone? Could Solutions be on Horizon?”

Jeff Goodell’s book “The Water will Come” is a bestseller describing the oncoming freight train of impacts from sea level rise – much of which is already baked in and unstoppable.

When I was with Jeff in Miami working on a the videos on this page, I remember him relating a colorful story about a major Miami developer.

Wiki: 

Jorge M. Pérez (born October 17, 1949) is an American billionaire real estate developer, art collector, philanthropist and author.^[3] He is best known as the chairman and CEO of The Related Group.^[4] He is ranked 264th on the Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $3 billion as of October, 2017.^[5] He is a longtime friend of U.S. president Donald Trump and has built Trump-branded properties.^[6]

Miami Herald:

When author Jeff Goodell approached developer Jorge Pérez during a party at the Pérez Art Museum to ask him if sea level rise had changed his approach to building, the chairman and CEO of The Related Group replied: “In 20 or 30 years, someone is going to find a solution for this. Besides, by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”

That quote made it into Goodell’s 2017 book, “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World,” a chilling, exhaustively researched look at the growing environmental threat poised to become a global disaster.

Because Pérez rarely speaks about sea level rise, his quote from the book went viral — embodying the seemingly cavalier approach real estate developers have toward sea level rise in coastal cities.

During an interview with the Miami Herald to celebrate the upcoming opening of Related’s latest project — the 57-story SLS Lux Brickell condo hotel at 805 South Miami Avenue — Pérez called his comment “idiotic,” although he also says he doesn’t remember saying it.

Continue reading “Developer to Children – “You’re on Your own Suckas”: For Sea Level Rise, – “I’ll Be Dead” is Not a Plan”

So remember all that stuff that Republicans have always said about how encouraging new technologies is “picking winners”,  we need to honor the invisible hand of free markets,  the pillars of our economic system,  yadda yadda?

In the face of the greatest economic opportunity of any generation, when the US is placed to lead the world – technological, economically, and morally – the ruling party’s default mode is greed, propping up the Old Order, and insuring the advantage of the powerful.

In the end, it’s Big Donors Uber Alles.

Bloomberg:

Trump administration officials are making plans to order grid operators to buy electricity from struggling coal and nuclear plants in an effort to extend their life, a move that could represent an unprecedented intervention into U.S. energy markets.

The Energy Department would exercise emergency authority under a pair of federal laws to direct the operators to purchase electricity or electric generation capacity from at-risk facilities, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. The agency also is making plans to establish a “Strategic Electric Generation Reserve” with the aim of promoting the national defense and maximizing domestic energy supplies.

“Federal action is necessary to stop the further premature retirements of fuel-secure generation capacity,” says a 41-page draft memo circulated before a National Security Council meeting on the subject Friday.

The plan cuts to the heart of a debate over the reliability and resiliency of a rapidly evolving U.S. electricity grid. Nuclear and coal-fired power plants are struggling to compete against cheap natural gas and renewable electricity. As nuclear and coal plants are decommissioned, regulators have been grappling with how to ensure that the nation’s power system can withstand extreme weather events and cyber-attacks.

Although the memo describes a planned Energy Department directive, there was no indication whether President Donald Trump had signed off on the action nor when any order might be issued. The document, dated May 29 and distributed Thursday, is marked as a “draft,” which is “not for further distribution,” and could be used by administration officials to justify the intervention.

Energy Department representatives did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
—

Continue reading “Picking Losers: Free Markets be Damned: the Coal Must Roll”