ApocaDocuments (12) for the "Climate Chaos" scenario from this week
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Sun, Jul 4, 2010
from New York Times:
As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Billions From Subsidies
an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.
And for many small and midsize oil companies, the tax on capital investments is so low that it is more than eliminated by various credits. These companies' returns on those investments are often higher after taxes than before. ...
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Seems we are both addicts AND enablers.
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Sun, Jul 4, 2010
from The Smithsonian Magazine:
Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea
All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly--reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they've supposedly never been seen before. Jellyfish have halted seafloor diamond mining off the coast of Namibia by gumming up sediment-removal systems. Jellies scarf so much food in the Caspian Sea they're contributing to the commercial extinction of beluga sturgeon--the source of fine caviar. In 2007, mauve stinger jellyfish stung and asphyxiated more than 100,000 farmed salmon off the coast of Ireland as aquaculturists on a boat watched in horror. The jelly swarm reportedly was 35 feet deep and covered ten square miles.
Nightmarish accounts of "Jellyfish Gone Wild," as a 2008 National Science Foundation report called the phenomenon, stretch from the fjords of Norway to the resorts of Thailand...Nobody knows exactly what's behind it, but there's a queasy sense among scientists that jellyfish just might be avengers from the deep, repaying all the insults we've heaped on the world's oceans....
At 39 degrees Fahrenheit, the polyps generated, on average, about 20 teeny jellyfish. At 46 degrees, roughly 40. The polyps in 54-degree seawater birthed some 50 jellies each, and one made 69. “A new record,” Widmer says, awed.
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Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.
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Fri, Jul 2, 2010
from AP, via DesdemonaDespair:
Indonesia's last glacier will melt within years -- 'These glaciers are dying'
Lonnie Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote, mist-shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. He's worried he got there too late.
Even as he pitched his tent on top of Puncak Jaya, the ice was melting beneath him.... By the time they were ready to head home, ice around their sheltered campsite had melted a staggering 12 inches (30 centimeters).
"These glaciers are dying," said Thompson, one of the world's most accomplished glaciologists. "Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years." ...
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The last anything makes a great tourist destination!
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Fri, Jul 2, 2010
from The Economist:
The other carbon-dioxide problem
The declining pH does not actually make the waters acidic (they started off mildly alkaline). But it makes them more acidic, just as turning up the light makes a dark room brighter.
Ocean acidification has further chemical implications: more hydrogen ions mean more bicarbonate ions, and fewer carbonate ions. Carbonate is what corals, the shells of shellfish and the outer layers of many photosynthesising plankton and other microbes are made of. If the level of carbonate ions falls too low the shells can dissolve or might never be made at all. There is evidence that the amount of carbonate in the shells of foraminifera, micro-plankton that are crucial to ocean ecology, has recently dropped by as much as a third.... In many places, natural variations in pH will be larger than long-term changes in its mean.
This is not to say that such changes have no effect. If peak acidities rather than long-term averages are what matters most, natural variability could make things worse. But it does suggest that the effects will be far from uniform.... Studies of Australia's Great Barrier Reef show that levels of calcification are down, though it is not yet possible to say changes in chemistry are a reason for this. Current research comparing chemical data taken in the 1960s and 1970s with the situation today may clarify things.... Ocean ecosystems are beset by changes in nutrient levels due to run off near the coasts and by overfishing, which plays havoc with food webs nearly everywhere. And the effects of global warming need to be included, too. Surface waters are expected to form more stable layers as the oceans warm, which will affect the availability of nutrients and, it is increasingly feared, of oxygen.... Wherever you look, there is always another other problem. ...
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Whatotherr.
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Thu, Jul 1, 2010
from YouTube, Frank Capra:
Unchained Goddess: 1958 film on global warming
For FIFTY YEARS scientists have known about global warming. This excerpt is from the well known educational documentary "Unchained Goddess" produced by Frank Capra for Bell Labs for their television program "The Bell Telephone Hour." It was so well made, that it went on to live a continued life in middle school science classrooms across the nation for decades.
Nearly half a century before Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," this film was made. But what does it reveal? That our scientists have known for over two generations about this danger, but our politicians and citizenry have chosen to ignore the dangerous implications of this fact until it really is too late to avoid the preventable consequences. ...
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And those were two generations of unparalleled economic growth!
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Thu, Jul 1, 2010
from PhysOrg:
Man-made global warming started with ancient hunters: study
Mammoths used to roam modern-day Russia and North America, but are now extinct--and there's evidence that around 15,000 years ago, early hunters had a hand in wiping them out. A new study, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), argues that this die-off had the side effect of heating up the planet.
"A lot of people still think that people are unable to affect the climate even now, even when there are more than 6 billion people," says the lead author of the study, Chris Doughty of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. The new results, however, "show that even when we had populations orders of magnitude smaller than we do now, we still had a big impact."... First, mammoth populations began to drop--both because of natural climate change as the planet emerged from the last ice age, and because of human hunting. Normally, mammoths would have grazed down any birch that grew, so the area stayed a grassland. But if the mammoths vanished, the birch could spread.... The trees would change the color of the landscape, making it much darker so it would absorb more of the Sun's heat, in turn heating up the air. This process would have added to natural climate change, making it harder for mammoths to cope, and helping the birch spread further. ...
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We are so good at it now, it's no surprise we've been practicing it since forever.
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Wed, Jun 30, 2010
from Guardian:
Barack Obama fails to rally support for energy bill
Barack Obama's hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.
The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies.
Such a move would come as a personal rebuff to Obama who has put energy and climate change at the top of his agenda, and who called on the 23 senators at the White House meeting to establish a cap and trade system.... Republican Senators, even those purportedly supporting energy reform, have been adamant in their opposition to putting an economy-wide price on carbon. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican at the meeting, told reporters such moves would be too costly for the average family. ...
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After all, what could be more important than this moment's economy?
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Tue, Jun 29, 2010
from Prison Planet:
Rationing us to Death: The Real Green Agenda!
How quickly 'climategate' and all the other exposed lies and fraud of the 'climate change' lobby are forgotten. How quickly they try to sweep the coldest winter in 50 years under the climate change carpet. Instead they keep up the mantra that we must get used to warmer drier summers.
Well, bring it on is all I can say! History shows that warmer weather leads to a world of abundance of food which could, in the right hands, help the poorest in society, particularly those in the Third World to develop their countries to Western Standards. Isn't that what we should all hope and wish for so that our fellow human beings can simply survive instead of dying of starvation when even today it's unnecessary and only brought about by corruption and despotism funded by the West, including us folks? ... It has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2 and I openly challenge anyone to show me the evidence to the contrary, including Gormley and Sweeny who continually show their utter ignorance of scientific facts and continue to promote their own fantasy fiction of manmade global warming to the gullible and quite frankly, brainwashed masses.... Are the general public, so dumbed down by the fluoride in the water that has been proven to lower IQ's in children and cause bone cancer amongst other fatal conditions that they can't see through this blatant propaganda?... We are HUMAN BEINGS being treated like DUMB ANIMALS. ...
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Ain't nobody going to tell me what I can't do. And besides, I have factoids and assertion on my side.
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Tue, Jun 29, 2010
from Independent (Ireland):
Our warmer waters attract new species
Ireland's coastal waters are getting warmer and waves are getting higher because of climate change.
Swarms of jellyfish are now being enticed to the warmer water, a new climate change report published today reveals.
The report, 'Irish Ocean Climate and Ecosystem Status Report 2009', details a number of significant changes recorded in recent years including increases in sea surface temperature.
Higher temperatures have led to an increase in the number of warm water species in Irish waters, ranging from microscopic plankton to swarms of jellyfish.
A key finding of the report, published by the Marine Institute, is that increases of sea surface temperature of 0.6C per decade have been taking place since 1994 -- a change unprecedented in the past 150 years.
This, in turn, is linked to an increase in microscopic plants and animals, along with species of jellyfish.
Further up the food chain, greater numbers of warm-water fish species have been observed in Irish waters, along with sightings of exotic species such as snake pipefish.
Declines in the number of seabirds have also been observed, which may be linked to climate change, says the report. ...
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But still, no snakes!
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Tue, Jun 29, 2010
from DiscoveryNews:
Arctic Overreacts to Climate Change
Whether it's 5 million years ago or June 2010, it's becoming very clear that whenever the Earth's climate warms up a few degrees -- for whatever reason -- the Arctic multiplies that warming by a factor of about three.
Two new studies of past warming and cooling periods going back millions of years have found that the Arctic reliably amplifies whatever global climate is doing. If the world drops 3 degrees colder, the Arctic will see 9 to 12 degrees of cooling. If Earth warmed up 3 degrees, the Arctic steams up 9 to 12 degrees.... This year, that could mean the Arctic could be the warmest ever recorded since data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies show that global temperatures in 2010 have reached record levels.... "You'll find since about 2000 every month you have positive temperature anomalies," Stroeve said. Translation: The Arctic is doing exactly what it has done for 5 million years: amplifying the global climate change signal. ...
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If it's been doing it for 5 million years, why should I worry?
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Mon, Jun 28, 2010
from Grist:
'Carbon storage' faces leak dilemma, study finds
Dreams of braking global warming by storing carbon emissions from power plants could be undermined by the risk of leakage, according to a study published on Sunday.
Rich countries have earmarked tens of billions of dollars of investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is still only at an experimental stage.
With CCS, carbon dioxide would be snared at source from plants that are big burners of oil, gas, and coal. Instead of being released into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming, the gas would be buried in the deep ocean or piped into underground chambers such as disused gas fields.... Storing CO2 in the ocean will contribute to acidification of the sea, with dangers that reverberate up the food chain, says its author, Gary Shaffer, a professor at the Danish Centre for Earth System Science in Humlebaek, Denmark. It also carries a higher risk of being returned to the atmosphere by ocean currents and storms.
Underground storage is a better option, but only if the geological chamber does not have a significant leak or is not breached by an earthquake or some other movement, says the paper.... To offset any bigger leak, re-sequestration would be needed -- in other words, grabbing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air and storing it. But this would be a cost burden that could last for millennia. ...
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Guess we better work on that "clean coal" thing.
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Mon, Jun 28, 2010
from SolveClimate:
On Arctic Research Voyage, Scientists Have Many Words for Ice
Every two hours, a watcher enters information about the ice status into a computer, noting the ship's location and activity (such as transiting toward a station), along with the coverage and appearance of ice.
Just as the French have many words for love, ice scientists have many ways of describing ice.
If you're looking at ice that came from a glacier, you might see formations known as growlers, blocky growlers, bergs, bergy bits, and wedged bergy bits, among others. The ice that forms at sea, such as we're seeing here in the Chukchi, comes in pancakes, ice cakes, belts, strips, and floes ranging in size from small to giant. The computerized form that Don and the other Ice Watchers use was designed for the Antarctic, but was adapted for Arctic use during the International Polar Year, in an effort to create a common language among ice scientists.... "I'm a bit biased, but I would say sea ice decline is one of the most profound, climatic impacts that are changing in our life time. Many of the models that are out there right now say that perennial sea ice will be absolutely gone in 30 years. Thirty years! That's not your grandkids or your great grandkids. That's our lifetime! What are the biological ramifications of that? What are the biogeochemical ramifications of that? What are the feedbacks that are going to ensue, and how is the biology going to change?" ...
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I just hope those words refer to something real, come 2020.
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