Global warming

[Ragnarök_62]

Here's a way forward for red states to address global warming.

Also: http://newsok.com/article/5511241

http://kansasenergy.org/documents/OK_WindFarms.pdf


Now, Oklahoma does need to get it's act together wrt solar.

https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/201...-oklahoma/

I think the problem lies with externalities. Fossil fuels always cause CO2 emissions which in turn drive global warming.

[Eric the Green]

Coyote Creek is flooded in San Jose. I don't live near there, but some people lost valuable items. We went from too little water for 4 years to too much. Dam overflowing.

[Eric the Green]

comments on facebook post of this video:
https://www.facebook.com/POTUS44/videos/...411016838/

6,460,570 Views
POTUS 44
November 9, 2015 ·
Hello, Facebook! I finally got my very own page. I hope you’ll think of this as a place where we can have real conversations about the most important issues facing our country – a place where you can hear directly from me, and share your own thoughts and stories. (You can expect some just-for-fun stuff, too.)

I’m kicking it off by inviting you to take a walk with me in my backyard – something I try to do at the end of the day before I head in for dinner. I say this often, but that’s because it’s always at the front of my mind: We’ve got to preserve this beautiful planet of ours for our kids and grandkids. And that means taking serious steps to address climate change once and for all. Now, we've made a lot of progress to cut carbon pollution here at home, and we're leading the world to take action as well. But we’ve got to do more. In a few weeks, I’m heading to Paris to meet with world leaders about a global agreement to meet this challenge.

I hope you'll join me in speaking out on climate change and educating your friends about why this issue is so important. At a time when nearly three in four adults online use Facebook, this feels like a great place to do it. Share your thoughts in the comments, and pass this message on to folks you think need to see it.

If we're all in this together, I'm confident we can solve this and do right by future generations.


Comments

Ruth Knecht Ames Boy I sure do miss this kind loving man that kept us all safe. Just looking at this video makes me realize how much we have lost. No one to look after the earth now as it should be.So sad.
Unlike · Reply · 5 · Yesterday at 5:16pm

E.j. Gore This brings tears to my eyes . . . what a wonderful President we once had . . . how far we have fallen. It's up to us to lift ourselves up again.
Unlike · Reply · 2 · 6 hrs

[The Wonkette]

Meanwhile, here in Northern Virginia, some blossoms are blooming in some trees behind my office. It is freakin' February!

[Odin]

(02-23-2017, 12:12 PM)The Wonkette Wrote: Meanwhile, here in Northern Virginia, some blossoms are blooming in some trees behind my office.  It is freakin' February!

We had a 2-week long heat wave up here in the Midwest, all the snow is gone. On Monday we had a typical early April rainstorm, in FEBRUARY! It was 55F out! That's 30 degrees above average.

[pbrower2a]

I was strolling through the park one day

In the merry merry month of

FEBRUARY

It was 50-plus all week
And there was no snow to seek
even if the skies were gloomy, gloomy gray

Yes, Michigan. There hasn't been much snow to shovel. I expect a poor corn crop around here.

...we are on pace for the warmest winter ever, one more characteristic of Louisville than of Kalamazoo. It's hard to imagine a repeat of 2012, though, when we had March temperatures more characteristic of Houston or Phoenix.

[Marypoza]

Fwiw, been wearing shorts all week here in Cincy

Now 4 the bad news- the temps are sposed to drop back down to normal (hi 40s) tomorrow, just in time 4 Mardi Gras wkend 

Oh well. We have Mardi Grassed here in even colder temps. But 70* would of been bon

Laissez les bon temps rolluer!

[Marypoza]

So Rags is this true? Didja y'all nearly hit tripple d's this month?

https://thinkprogress.org/it-might-feel-....gdzun3tp1

[David Horn]

(02-23-2017, 12:12 PM)The Wonkette Wrote: Meanwhile, here in Northern Virginia, some blossoms are blooming in some trees behind my office.  It is freakin' February!

Yeah, we do too.  The daffodils are in bloom, and the forsythia are starting.  We have buds on just about every flowering tree, except the crepe myrtles.  La Nina came on strong this time.

[Galen]

(03-01-2017, 12:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Please send some Global Warming out here to the West Coast.

I'm ready for some warmth.

Here is a geologist making a point that I have made before:  The climate changes all by itself even before man existed.  He makes several good points that Eric the Obtuse and Odin will no doubt ignore.





That fact of the matter is that the Earth's climate changed far more drastically before the human race even existed than it ever has in our history.

[David Horn]

(03-01-2017, 12:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Please send some Global Warming out here to the West Coast.

I'm ready for some warmth.

Enough is enough.

Thankfully, the NWS are forecasting warmer temperatures next week. We'll see.

Unfortunately, too late for some of our more delicate landscaping. Death is inevitable for some of my tropicals.

You had yours already,  It's our turn for a warm winter followed by ... who knows.  My bet: a hot but very wet summer in the East, and mudslides in the West

[David Horn]

(03-02-2017, 04:21 PM)Galen Wrote:

(03-01-2017, 12:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Please send some Global Warming out here to the West Coast.

I'm ready for some warmth.

Here is a geologist making a point that I have made before:  The climate changes all by itself even before man existed.  He makes several good points that Eric the Obtuse and Odin will no doubt ignore.
...

That fact of the matter is that the Earth's climate changed far more drastically before the human race even existed than it ever has in our history.

So what?  The fact that natural events have occurred that have altered climate in the past is irrelevant to whether AGW exists today, though it does argue that terrestrial effects can alter climate.  I see no contradiction here.

[Ragnarök_62]

(03-01-2017, 12:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Please send some Global Warming out here to the West Coast.

I'm ready for some warmth.

Enough is enough.

Thankfully, the NWS are forecasting warmer temperatures next week. We'll see.

Unfortunately, too late for some of our more delicate landscaping. Death is inevitable for some of my tropicals.

Sounds like a winner here.  I'd love to swap Oklahoma's drought fueling lack of precip for all that precip y'all are getting.  You'll get the balmy temps as an addon.

[Skabungus]

I find so much of the discussion/debate/cat fight over global warming to be pointless bickering not unlike what I witness between my two kids fighting over who is supposed to feed the chickens. It is clear whose turn it is, but that person doesn't want to do it. The other is insisting that they do it, and wont budge, wont just feed the fucking chickens to get the job done. My kids remind me of Boomer leaders.

The fact is we have to adapt, no matter what the cause. Failure to do so means significant hardship for everyone.

It is a matter of time before Boomers are aged out of the electorate. Europe is well on its way toward an alt energy future. Fossil fuel investment will soon be a collection of stranded assets. Millies are hard wired to think about solutions differently. Things will shift and they will shift soon.

[David Horn]

(03-03-2017, 09:16 AM)Skabungus Wrote: I find so much of the discussion/debate/cat fight over global warming to be pointless bickering not unlike what I witness between my two kids fighting over who is supposed to feed the chickens.  It is clear whose turn it is, but that person doesn't want to do it.  The other is insisting that they do it, and wont budge, wont just feed the fucking chickens to get the job done.  My kids remind me of Boomer leaders.

The fact is we have to adapt, no matter what the cause.  Failure to do so means significant hardship for everyone.

It is a matter of time before Boomers are aged out of the electorate.  Europe is well on its way toward an alt energy future.  Fossil fuel investment will soon be a collection of stranded assets.  Millies are hard wired to think about solutions differently.  Things will shift and they will shift soon.

For the sakes of everyone alive in 40 or 50 years, I hope you're right. We're past prevention at this point, and mitigation is always less effective and more costly.  Since I'll be dead, my right to demand my way is approximately zero, so carry on.

[pbrower2a]

OSLO, March 1 (Reuters) - An Argentine research base near the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula has set a heat record at a balmy 17.5 degrees Celsius (63.5° Fahrenheit), the U.N. weather agency said on Wednesday.

The Experanza base set the high on March 24, 2015, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said after reviewing data around Antarctica to set benchmarks to help track future global warming and natural variations.

“Verification of maximum and minimum temperatures help us to build up a picture of the weather and climate in one of Earth’s final frontiers,” said Michael Sparrow, a polar expert with the WMO co-sponsored World Climate Research Programme.

Antarctica locks up 90 percent of the world’s fresh water as ice and would raise sea levels by about 60 meters (200 ft) if it were all to melt, meaning scientists are concerned to know even about extremes around the fringes.

The heat record for the broader Antarctic region, defined as anywhere south of 60 degrees latitude, was 19.8°C (67.6°F) on Jan. 30, 1982 on Signy Island in the South Atlantic, it said.

And the warmest temperature recorded on the Antarctic plateau, above 2,500 meters (8,202 feet), was -7.0°C (19.4°F) on Dec. 28, 1980, it said.

Wednesday’s WMO report only examined the highs.

The lowest temperature set anywhere on the planet was a numbing -89.2°C (-128.6°F) at the Soviet Union’s Vostok station in central Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anta...0bac2ee87b

[pbrower2a]

This is at the end of the Antarctic summer, just before the autumnal equinox of the Southern Hemisphere. Seasons are of course opposite those of the Northern Hemisphere in the Southern Hemisphere.

[pbrower2a]

At the beginning of the week, I had the pleasure of travelling to Krakow for some internal company meetings. It was my first trip to Poland and I was quite excited to add the red-and-white flag to the list of countries I have been to. I had no expectations on what I would find there, either positive or negative. I came open-minded and ready to discover all the nice things the country had to offer. Given what I ended up encountering, I have to say that I am quite disheartened.

Let it be written beforehand that the business part of the trip went very well. The city itself is really beautiful with a very nice old city center. All the people I met were really kind and helpful. Food was great, even for my French semi-arrogant standards.



What was neither beautiful, nice, kind, helpful or great was… the sickening smell of air pollution.

I grew up in Grenoble, a city frequently hit by pollution peaks. I lived in Paris through several waves of pollution. I have even been to Beijing, always pictured as one of the most polluted cities in the world. Yet, I had never felt this deep feeling of being slowly asphyxiated, as if sitting in a car stuck in a traffic jam, in a tunnel, with the windows open, on a windless day. Worst of all, this feeling is not limited to the outside. All the closed spaces I have been to had the same smell, from the airport to my hotel room, through restaurants, meeting rooms or even taxis…




Maybe I should have expected it. Given the time I spent on the ElectricityMap these past 6 months, I knew that most of the electricity produced in Poland comes from coal. I knew that CO2 emissions linked to electricity generation are among the highest in Europe. Still, I did not expect Poland to use coal for heating purposes as well, alongside a wide use of the fossil fuel for industrial activities. The problem this time was not CO2. It was all the other pollutants that are a direct consequence of coal.

CO2 has no odor, no color and no taste, contrary to nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and all the other toxic gases that were unexpectedly in the air that day.

I did not expect to feel sick from the moment I landed in the country to the moment I boarded my plane back to Austria.
And you know what makes me even sicker? All the persons who continue, in 2017, to believe that we human beings have a limited impact on the environment.
Let them come to Krakow.

There are some who continue to claim that governmental agencies working on environment-related topics are following an “activist agenda” and are “lying about the reality of climate change”.
Let them come to Krakow.


There are some who consider the environmental movement “the greatest threat to freedom in the modern world”.
Let them come to Krakow.

There are some who continue to believe that coal is better for the environment than nuclear, despite needing 2 700 000 kilograms of coal to produce as much electricity as 1 kilogram of Uranium.
Let them come to Krakow.

There are some who believe that massive investments in renewable energies technology are a waste of time and money.
Let them come to Krakow.

There are some who believe that saving a few thousand jobs is enough to justify shortening the lives of millions of people.
Let them come to Krakow.

I have never called myself an environmentalist. I am fully aware of the impact I have on the environment. Yet, I consider that I can do much more to reduce this impact. I consider that we can ALL do much more to reduce our impact. Each of us can decide which ways he or she wants to follow to reach this objective. Mine will be to denounce the impact of coal, educate people on the dangers of coal, propose solution to reduce the use of coal.

Most of all, I want everyone to know that coal is not cool.

Let’s stop opposing nuclear energy vs. renewable energy, energy efficiency vs. energy sobriety, solar energy vs. wind energy.
Let’s focus on what really matters.

Let’s all be united against coal.

PS: Krakow really is a beautiful city. Visiting it at another time than January or February would be the best way to protect yourself against particles and other pollution.

PS2: Since you’re at it, do not hesitate to listen again to John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s speech in Berlin on June 26 1963. It gave me some inspiration for this article and it is something else than what we are getting used to as “US President speeches”.

PS3: If you know some associations that are also willing to fight against coal, please post the link to their website in the comments section.

https://futuretravel.today/one-of-the-mo....i7dt1omyn

(The cheap shot that I refrain from making at President Trump should be obvious).

I have heard that Krakow and other cities in eastern Silesia and western (Polish - not Spanish) Galicia have air pollution rivaling that of greater Los Angeles at its worst.

I have many relatives by marriage in Poland -- probably more than in any other country, even if I have no Polish ancestry.

[Eric the Green]

A 15 foot rise in sea level may be just years away, just at the moment that the Rust Belt and Red America has installed a federal government determined to speed it up.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/scientist...rg-making/





JUDY WOODRUFF: ...There’s a giant crack in an ice shelf of the Antarctic that’s been the source of much attention this winter, and is raising new concerns over the larger stability of the ice there.

Miles O’Brien has the story, the focus of this week’s Leading Edge.

MILES O’BRIEN: If glaciology is all that it is cracked up to be, this long, fast-growing rift in the Antarctic ice is a huge iceberg in the making, one of the largest ever seen, about the size of Delaware.

Welcome to the Larsen Sea Ice Shelf, teetering on the edge of breaking away from the glacier.

So, we have known about this for quite a while, right?

KELLY BRUNT, University of Maryland: We have certainly known about the bulk of this rift for a while. It’s this accelerated propagation that’s really new.

MILES O’BRIEN: It’s moving fast.

KELLY BRUNT: Moving fast.

MILES O’BRIEN: Kelly Brunt is a glaciologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

She used a wall of monitors there to show me the growing rift, fueled in part by rising air and sea temperatures. If the glaciers in West Antarctica all dropped into the water, global sea level would rise by more than 15 feet.

Brunt showed me the big picture, a composite of images from several satellites. This is how the glacier ice flows here.

KELLY BRUNT: Ice flows from the center of the continent out to the edges, much like syrup on the center of your pancake flowing towards the edges. And you can see there are areas where it’s moving pretty slowly, and then there are areas where it’s moving very quickly. And those quick places are generally in our areas of ice shelves.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, when we think about ice, we think about something static. It’s not static, is it?

KELLY BRUNT: Not at all. Actually, it’s highly dynamic. You can see from this image it looks to me a lot like a river system.

MILES O’BRIEN: Ice shelves are connected to the glaciers that sit on land, but they are also floating, like ice cubes in a glass of water.

KELLY BRUNT: If you had a drink with ice cubes in it, as those ice cube melts, they don’t add to the height of the water in the glass. So when ice shelves break down and collapse, they do not have a direct impact on mean sea level rise.

However, they have an indirect effect. These ice shelves buttress the flow of the ice upstream, the ice that’s flowing into the system. And when you lose that buttressing force, you allow the upstream glaciers to flow faster. So that’s similar to putting more ice cubes into the glass and letting those melt.

MILES O’BRIEN: Ice falls off the edge of glaciers all the time. It is part of a natural process called calving. Kelly Brunt says it is important to judge the size of the piece that breaks off relative to the size of the glacier that is behind it.

She says your fingernails offer a handy model.

KELLY BRUNT: If you break your fingernail inside the white part of your fingernail, you probably don’t think much of it. If you break it below the white part, you put a Band-Aid on it, you think about it and you keep an eye on it.

If you lose your whole fingernail, I don’t know what happens. It’s pretty catastrophic. This represents losing the whole fingernail.

MILES O’BRIEN: Like so many features in Antarctica, the Larsen Ice Shelf is named for a famous 19th century explorer. And it is disappearing, section by section, identified by letters.

Larsen A disintegrated in 1995. And, in 2002, a series of satellite images captured the end of Larsen B in dramatic fashion over the course of six weeks. The piece that broke off was the size of Rhode Island.

KELLY BRUNT: Losing this much ice, losing ice that represents roughly the state of Rhode Island in a month-and-a-half, just far exceeded anybody’s expectations of what could happen in the time scale that it could happen.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, it was kind of like, we have to rethink things here a little bit. I mean, this is a wakeup call.

KELLY BRUNT: This was absolutely a wakeup call.

MILES O’BRIEN: Scientists track the ice using a half-dozen U.S. and European satellites, including Landsat, which gathered these images. But some of their best data came from a satellite called ICESat. Launched in 2003, it ceased operation in 2009. It precisely measured the glaciers using laser beams.

KELLY BRUNT: This is quite a few years of ICESat data merged together to get a sense in meters per year how our ice sheet is changing.

And you can see, the big picture here is that our ice sheets are changing where they are in contact with both our warming atmosphere and a warming ocean. So, it’s basically along the fringe of the continent.

MILES O’BRIEN: When ICESat failed, NASA started tracking the ice using radar and lasers on board low-flying aircraft.

The IceBridge program is NASA’s largest air campaign ever, but it still could not match the eye above the sky.

It goes without saying that you would view these satellites, the capability to look at this, as essential?

KELLY BRUNT: What we’re talking about is a calving of an iceberg that’s a size of a state. To get that, you really need a satellite to be able to see all of it in one shot.

It’s a function of scale and repeatability to go back and look at that area again with the satellite that makes these the perfect tools for looking at the large-scale change that we’re seeing in this region.

MILES O’BRIEN: Next year, NASA plans to launch a new and improved satellite to watch the ice. Most likely, the Larsen C Ice Shelf will be long gone by then. As the climate warms, there is no end in sight to the steady loss of ice here.

[Eric the Green]

Much more ice melting is inevitable now. The scientist quoted above says that if enough of the Antarctic melts soon, sea rise could be 15 feet. Exact predictions seem unlikely, but this doesn't matter. What's clear is that if Drump and the Gophers are not counter-acted by state and local governments and market forces, the sea will engulf us more and more.