tagged w/ CO2
-
Last month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed about the failure of the media and others to connect any dots between recent extreme weather events and climate change. Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia has combined McKibben’s words with striking images.
Underscoring McKibben’s point is an uber-lame New York Times story today, “As Arizona Fire Rages, Officials Seek Its Cause,” which, you guessed it, is dot free. Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote Friday, “The return of critical fire conditions this weekend means that the Wallow fire will likely become Arizona’s largest wildfire in history.”
Before taking on the NYT piece, let’s look at the video:
McKibben’s piece is a nice work of rhetoric. After April saw records set for most tornadoes in a month and in 24 hours, I examined the climate-tornado link in great detail here, looking at the data, the literature, and expert analysis. That piece concluded:
1.When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
2.Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.
The NY Times has been doing some very good science reporting recently (see NY Times Bombshell: “The latest scientific research suggests” climate change is “helping to destabilize the food system”). But their overall reporting team is not connecting the dots (see, for instance, my May piece “New York Times blows the Dust Bowl story“).
The NYT had promised two years ago to do more coherent reporting, as the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time:
Environmental S.W.A.T. Team
On Thursday, The New York Times will launch a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage.
Not.
The more prominent coverage simply never happened, as I detailed in the second half of my January piece, Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010, which shows that in all of 2010 none of “the largest lead headlines” in the paper dealt with climate. As professor Robert Brulle, an expert on environmental communications, wrote me at the time:
Apparently, the editorial board of the NY Times has yet to fully grasp the importance of global climate change to our collective survival. As the science becomes stronger and more dire, the editors of the NY Times bury their head deeper into the sand.
Today’s Arizona story is a case in point. Now I don’t necessarily think that every single story written on the record Arizona wildfires must focus on or even mention climate change. But the NYT story is quite specifically on the “cause” of the fires. Worse, the newspaper has no difficulty repeating dubious right-wing myths as to the cause of the fires
Many wildfires are caused by humans — and investigators say this one may have been started by two unattended campfires — distinguishing them from hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes….
Residents heaped plenty of blame on Mother Nature as harsh winds spread the flames and low humidity left the forest full of fuel. But residents and experts also pointed their fingers at a variety of policies that they said had contributed to wildfires that seem to have grown in intensity over the years.
Some complained that it was environmentalists who had caused the forests to become tinderboxes by preventing the thinning of trees as they sought to protect wildlife. Others, like William Wallace Covington, a forestry expert at Northern Arizona University, countered that the leading factor was the grazing of forest grass for generations. The government’s longstanding practice of quickly extinguishing forest fires was also seen as adding to the thick clusters of highly combustible trees.
Seriously.
You would never know from the NYT that this standard right-wing talking point has actually been examined in the scientific literature and found wanting. Back in 2006, Science magazine published a major article analyzing whether the recent soaring wildfire trend was due to a change in forest management practices or to climate change. The study, led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, concluded:
Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.
That 2006 study noted global warming (from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide) will further accelerate all of these trends during this century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhCY-3XnqS0&feature=player_embedded
continuedLast month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed about the... more
-
-
Killing a camel to earn a carbon credit may seem a curious way to tackle climate change, but one country is poised to allow investors to do precisely that.
The camel culling plan is one of the first to arise under the Australian government’s new “carbon farming initiative”, a scheme that lets farmers or investors claim carbon credits if they can show they have cut greenhouse gas emissions.
more at link...
They say they're going to kill the camels because they're not indigenous to Australia and were brought there in the 19th Century. Sounds like white people to me.
It's not "a curious way to tackle climate change" if you know that CO2 trading is a method of monetizing and controlling all life on Earth. Its meant to further destroy "western" industry, fund global governance and implement a eugenics campaign to soft-kill populations...all three in effect today. You can read Eco-Science, Club of Rome documents or the writings of the top UN IPCC commies. Enjoy your vaccine and carbon tax.
When enough people are sick and broke, we'll be hauled straight to the FEMA Camp...after the TSA gropes molests us first, of course. The useless eaters will be culled immediately and the remaining 20% may have a shot serving the New World Order. Its a slippery slope.Killing a camel to earn a carbon credit may seem a curious way to tackle climate... more
-
-
Today is World Oceans Day which is a day of celebrating the oceans of our planet and reflection on our mistreatment of them. Without oceans all life on Earth would cease. They drive our climate and weather and the web of life from the tiniest plankton to the largest whale, each species with a distinct part to play in our web of life.
They are mystical, beautiful, peaceful and colorful, but now also polluted, overfished, toxified, overdrilled, over saturated with Co2, depleted of oxygen, overheated and used as trash cans by humans who do not truly appreciate nor understand the wonder of it all.
So today if you can, try to give a thought to the oceans and their majesty and reflect on what you have done to allow the continued killing of them and just what will be left for future generations to enjoy, explore and survive.
The oceans are our lifeline. And we have forgotten.Today is World Oceans Day which is a day of celebrating the oceans of our planet and... more
-
-
The story of the Battle of Blair Mountain starts in the southern coal camps of West Virginia, a time when King Coal reigned supreme, openly and without apology.
Mining companies owned workers' homes; they owned the schools, the air and water; they owned the police and even private armies. They owned miners' lives.
Which is why murder seemed permissible. When a notorious strikebreaker shot down labor hero Sheriff Sid Hatfield, who refused to be bought by the coal companies, more than 10,000 enraged miners and pro-union forces rose up in Mingo and Logan Counties and converged on Blair Mountain. A private army of management mercenaries shot guns and dropped leftover bombs from WWI—it was the nation's largest armed conflict since the Civil War and the largest labor confrontation ever.
Don't know about the Battle of Blair Mountain? There's a reason for that. West Virginia—a state still dominated by the coal industry and its political interests— has resisted highlighting the battle in history books and has denied commemoration attempts. When the federal National Register of Historic places chose the historic site for protection, the state—working with coal company lawyers—contested the decision. The site was de-listed last year, when West Virginia state officials submitted a "revised" list of 57 landowners supposedly objecting to the historic preservation decision. The list even included 2 dead people.
This Battle of Blair Mountain continues today. Coal companies stand literally to erase this history by obliterating the mountain.
Massey Energy and Arch Coal hold several permits in various stages to mine this land in the very worse form of strip mining on this planet: Mountaintop removal mining (MTR). One active mountaintop removal site is already blasting away the mountain and is moving within a few hundred yards of the historic battle site. Massey Energy, of course, is the company responsible for killing 29 of its workers last April in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Since then, it has come under extreme fire for its tens of thousands of violations of safety law and its corporate culture of profits before people. Not to mention, by Massey's own records, they've had 67,000 violations of just one of the environmental statute. It's influence among West Virginia politicians, of course, is far-reaching.
All across Appalachia today, mountaintop removal mining is destroying mountain communities by ripping apart its landscape, environment, health, heritage and economic prospects. Mining companies come in, break the law, reap profits, and leave a wasteland. In MTR regions in W. Va, companies are exploding dynamite the power of a Hiroshima-sized bomb—every single week. This form of mining isn't good for jobs either. Ripping up the mountain rather than carefully extracting coal is "efficient" -- i.e. it replaces people with machines to enhance company profits. As is noted in the wonderful documentary The Last Mountain, which is being released this week, while Appalachian coal company profits and production have skyrocketed in recent decades, at the same time some 40,000 mining jobs have been lost.
This is a new "Battle of Blair Mountain" taking place today --- and raising national awareness about this amazing story could help pressure an agency that hardly ever received much attention to reconsider its decision. This victory would be a huge symbolic win for the Appalachian communities, and for the organized labor movement around the country, which is again under siege today.
contThe story of the Battle of Blair Mountain starts in the southern coal camps of West... more
-
-
Carbon emissions in the earth's atmosphere have reached a record high, according to the International Energy Agency.
Scientists warn that climate change will lead to unprecedented catastrophic consequences, if global leaders do not take decisive action to reduce the harmful emissions soon.Carbon emissions in the earth's atmosphere have reached a record high, according... more
-
-
Peak oil, biodiversity loss, peak water, pollution, illness, diseases and an industrial agricultural system broken due to reliance on fossil fuels that threaten our ability to maintain ours and other species. All reasons along with the intensification of the effects of CO2 and greenhouse gas forcings upon the Earth's natural cycles to work towards a clean energy economy. It matters not your politics, your beliefs or your religion, the need to switch to other energy sources due to overconsumption and waste is now essential. This documentary shows us how to get there. And we need to get there fast.Peak oil, biodiversity loss, peak water, pollution, illness, diseases and an... more
-
-
As with any major weather disaster these days -- from floods and hurricanes to wildfires and this week's tornado outbreak in the South -- people ask questions about its relation to the huge elephant that's lurking in the corner, global climate change.
Two separate studies in 2007 reported that global warming could bring a dramatic increase in the frequency of weather conditions that feed severe thunderstorms and tornadoes by the end of the 21st century.
One study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that locations could see as much as a 100% increase in the number of days that favor severe thunderstorms.
"The densely populated regions of the South and East, including New York City and Atlanta, could be especially hard-hit," reported study lead author Jeff Trapp of Purdue University.
The fuel for the more intense storms would be the predicted warming of the Earth caused by the burning of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases.
Although the typically stormy spring could see more storms, "summer should have the highest increases in severe weather," said Trapp. His team reported that by the end of the century, the number of spring days with severe thunderstorm conditions would increase mostly over the Southern Plains and Florida.
But in the summer, almost the entire eastern half of the country might see an increase in days conducive to more severe storms, with the largest increases likely near the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast.
In the other study, lead author Tony Del Genio, a NASA research scientist, said the basic ingredients for whopper U.S. inland storms are likely to be more plentiful in a warmer, moister world.
"The strongest thunderstorms, the strongest severe storms and tornadoes are likely to happen more often and be stronger," Del Genio said when the study was published.
With a computer model, Del Genio looked at the forces that combine to make thunderstorms.
A unique combination of geography and weather patterns already makes the USA the world's hottest spot for tornadoes and severe storms in spring and summer. The large land mass that warms on hot days, the contours of the atmosphere's jet stream, the wind coming off the Rocky Mountains and warm moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico all combine.
Del Genio's computer model shows global warming will mean more strong updrafts, when the wind moves up and down instead of sideways.
The paper he co-authored appeared in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.As with any major weather disaster these days -- from floods and hurricanes to... more
-
-
Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders - to speak out about global warming.
The infamous killer, who started championing environmental causes from behind bars, bemoaned the 'bad things' being done to environment in a rambling phone interview from his Californian jail cell.
'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere.
'If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem...' he added, trailing off.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378178/Charles-Manson-breaks-20-year-silence-40th-anniversary-gruesome-Sharon-Tate-murders.html#ixzz1JvZCH54z
Notice the use of the word, "We" used by these psycho, eco-commie eugenicists. CO2 does NOT cause Global Warming. Its a crack-pot theory, invented by bankers to control, tax and regulate the energy of the world. Real scientists are jumping ship everyday.
They'll never admit that the Sun (something Charles Manson hasn't seen in 20 years) and its cycles has anything to do with temperature. They'll never acknowledge that we live on a spinning magnet with a satellite, revolving in a solar system, circling in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Its like Bio-Dome, but more pathetic than Pauly Shore's acting.
These things affect our climate to a greater degree than the sliver of CO2 "we" as humans emit...not to mention volcanoes and other natural processes that emit a much higher percentage per year. But the eugenicists of the New World Order have a plan to reduce population and by blaming humanity into hating themselves because they're killing the Earth, they've developed a great con to swindle humanity into funding a One World Government...the Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. Charles Manson Believes in It.Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview... more
-
-
This is a press release from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
One- to two-thirds of Earth’s permafrost will disappear by 2200, unleashing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, says a study by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
“The amount of carbon released is equivalent to half the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age,” said NSIDC scientist Kevin Schaefer. “That is a lot of carbon.”
The carbon from permanently frozen ground—known as permafrost —will make its impact, not only on the climate, but also on international strategies to reduce climate change Schaefer said. “If we want to hit a target carbon concentration, then we have to reduce fossil fuel emissions that much lower than previously calculated to account for this additional carbon from the permafrost,” Schaefer said. “Otherwise we will end up with a warmer Earth than we want.”
The carbon comes from plant material frozen in soil during the ice age of the Pleistocene: the icy soil trapped and preserved the biomass for thousands of years. Schaefer equates the mechanism to storing broccoli in the home freezer: “As long as it stays frozen, it stays stable for many years,” he said. “But you take it out of the freezer and it will thaw out and decay.”
Now, permafrost is thawing in a warming climate and—just like the broccoli—the biomass will thaw and decay, releasing carbon into the atmosphere like any other decomposing plant material, Schaefer said. To predict how much carbon will enter the atmosphere and when, Schaefer and coauthors modeled the thaw and decay of organic matter currently frozen in permafrost under potential future warming conditions as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
They found that between 29–59 percent of the permafrost will disappear by 2200. That permafrost took tens of thousands of years to form, but will melt in less than 200, Schaefer said.
The scientists used a model to predict how much carbon the thawing will release. They estimate an extra 190 plus or minus 64 gigatons of carbon will enter the atmosphere by 2200—about one-fifth the total amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere today. Carbon emissions from thawing permafrost will require greater reductions in fossil fuel emissions, to limit the atmospheric carbon dioxide to some maximum value associated with a target climate, Schaefer said. “It means the problem is getting more and more difficult all the time,” he said. “It is hard enough to reduce the emissions in any case, but now we saying that we have to reduce it even more.”This is a press release from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which is... more
-
-
Vibhav Nuwal was once an enthusiastic supporter of the global carbon market. The 32-year- old Indian-born banker started in September 2009 developing carbon credits to target investors in Europe and Japan for Mumbai-based private-equity fund Managing Emissions. Less than a year later, he quit his job, convinced that the United Nations’ failure to broker a global agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions meant the carbon credit market was effectively dead.
Now, Nuwal has set up a business helping companies that earn incentives from renewable-energy projects under a new Indian government program. Nuwal says that in the absence of a global consensus, investors are more likely to channel funds into incentive programs in local markets such as India, where they can make three times as much as they do selling credits under the global, UN-sponsored plan.
“There is a base being built for a really strong local economy around this,” says Nuwal, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment banker. “Carbon is getting more and more difficult. A significant amount of the business that is done in the carbon space should shift.”
more at link...
Any mention of the environment? Not a word, but a whole lot of bs about carbon markets, global governance, energy control and JP Morgan Chase making more money.
You eco-commies are pathetic hypocrites.Vibhav Nuwal was once an enthusiastic supporter of the global carbon market. The... more
-
-
-
SCIENCE SAYS WE CAN CONTAIN CO2, PRODUCE OXYGEN, RETAIN MOISTURE, AND COOL THE EARTH, ALL BY INTENSIVE WORLD WIDE PLANTING OF TREES.
You can begin to air condition the earth merely by planting as many trees in your own yard as possible. Trees absorb and hold CO2, while producing oxygen, retaining moisture and effectively cooling the air.
If we encourage our municipal, state and federal governments to intensively plant all of our highway corridors, with indigenous fruit, nut, seed and nectar producing vegetation, not only can we air condition our cities and roadways, but create green corridors which preserve and support plant and animal species in the process. Also, any arable, but yet barren public land should be intensively planted with vegetation.
Since it is our money that would be used to do this, the more of it we spend on our own welfare, the less there is to be siphoned and stolen by special interests. We should penalize corporations who are found guilty of polluting our environment by requiring them to fund the planting efforts.
It seems sequoias once populated most of North America. They are considered to be the ultimate CO2 absorbers and oxygen producers, and come in several varieties. They grow quickly, are very hardy and it takes 500 years for them to become as large as their famous for being.
Evergreens are superior because they transpire; cleaning the air and producing oxygen, continuously year around, while deciduous trees do so only seasonally. But it takes a well considered variety to sustain wildlife and please the eye while doing so.
Perhaps you might want to contact the Whitehouse and ask Mrs. Obama to lead the effort to reforest our public highways and lands, like ladybird Johnson led the highway beautification efforts, decades ago.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
If you wish to read the science on this issue, or check out the organizations promoting reforestation of the earth, follow the links herewith:
http://www.10ba.org/
http://eprenvironmentnews.com/2008/08/22/reforesting-planet-earth-for-the-sake-of-human-survival/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbJzkDP4I1ASCIENCE SAYS WE CAN CONTAIN CO2, PRODUCE OXYGEN, RETAIN MOISTURE, AND COOL THE EARTH,... more
-
-
This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to increased moisture in the air due to global climate change, a panel of scientists said on Tuesday.
This extra moisture is likely to bring on extraordinary flooding with the onset of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, as deep snowpack melts and expected heavy rains add to seasonal run-off, the scientists said in a telephone briefing.
As the planet warms up, more water from the oceans is evaporated into the atmosphere, said Todd Sanford, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. At the same time, because the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold onto more of the moisture that it takes in.
Intense storms are often the result when the atmosphere reaches its saturation point, Sanford said.
This year, a series of heavy storms over the U.S. Midwest to the Northeast have dropped up to 400 percent of average snows in some locations, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground.
The amount of water in that snowpack is among the highest on record, Masters said.
"If you were to take all that water and melt it, it would come out to more than 6 inches over large swaths of the area," Masters said. "If all that water gets unleashed in a hurry, in a sudden warming, and some heavy rains in the area, we could be looking at record flooding along the Upper Mississippi River and the Red River in North Dakota."
That tallies with projections by the U.S. National Weather Service, which last month said a large stretch of the north central United States is at risk of moderate to major flooding this spring.
SPRING CREEP
Spring floods could be exacerbated by spring creep, a phenomenon where spring begins earlier than previously.
"We've documented in the mountains of the U.S. West that the spring runoff pulse now comes between one and three weeks earlier than it used to 60 years ago," Masters said. "And that's because of warmer temperatures tending to melt that snowpack earlier and earlier."
In the last century, global average temperatures have risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (.8 Celsius). Last year tied for the warmest in the modern record. One place this warmth showed up was in the Arctic, which is a major weather-maker for the Northern Hemisphere, according to Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
One driver of this winter's "crazy weather," Serreze said, is an atmospheric pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, which has moved into what climate scientists call a negative phase.
This phase means there is high pressure over the Arctic and low pressure at mid-latitudes, which makes the Arctic zone relatively warm, but spills cold Arctic air southward to places like the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
This negative Arctic Oscillation has been evident for two years in a row, the same two winters that have had extreme storms and heavy snowfalls.
It is possible, but not certain, that the negative Arctic Oscillation is linked to warming of the Arctic, which is in turn influenced by a decrease in sea ice cover throughout the region.
The only underlying explanation for these events is climate warming due to heightened greenhouse gas levels, Serreze said.This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to... more
-
-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20110221/pl_dailycaller/seccracksdownonfakecompanythatclaimstofightglobalwarming
Ever heard of CO2 Tech? It turns out that the London-based company, which advertised products and services to combat global warming, is a fraud.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged seven individuals associated with the company with fraud. The group included fake stock promoters, traders and a lawyer. According to an SEC report, from late 2006 through April 2007, the group raked in $7 million in illicit profits.
“This group of illicit stock promoters sought to hide their scheme behind offshore entities, but their misconduct was exposed by the excellent cooperation of law enforcement agencies here and abroad,” Cheryl Scarboro, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement.
According to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the scheme was carried out through a Costa Rican company called Red Sea Management. Red Sea has laundered millions of dollars out of the U.S. from illegal trades.
The Florida complaint also says CO2 Tech touted relationships with other business, such as Boeing, that never existed, lending the company an air of legitimacy.
more at link...
Once again, Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory is exposed as a Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme on Steroids. It doesn't even include anything about the Sun and its effects. Only CO2, the magical gas that has been successfully converted into a derivative, taxed and traded on international markets.http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20110221/pl_dailycaller/seccracksdownonfakecompanyt... more
-
