I want to sue the republican party for willful denial of scientific evidence about climate change.

[Cooked Crack]

 

[visionary]

 

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

Fake News

[China]

16 hours ago, Sacks 'n' Stuff said:

Fake News

 

Trump repeats false claim there is no climate change crisis as he brands science 'fake'

 

Donald Trump has repeated the false claim that climate change is not real and that the science demonstrating the crisis is "fake".

 

The president appeared to be tweeting a statement he heard from Fox News on Tuesday morning, writing, “Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”

 

The government-funded National Climate Assessment's report urged immediate action to combat climate change in an effort “to avoid substantial damages to the US economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

 

When asked about his government’s report on climate change, Mr Trump responded, “I don’t believe it.” 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[PeterMP]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/19/world/methane-emissions-humans-fossil-fuels-underestimated-climate-change/index.html

 

"Natural gas has been billed as a "bridge fuel" between coal and renewable power sources for its supposed lower environmental impact.

And while burning natural gas produces far less carbon dioxide than coal-fired power generation, the methane emissions associated with natural gas production are a serious problem for the planet.

 

There have been several reports in recent years suggesting that large amounts of methane emissions from oil and gas activity are seeping into the air unaccounted for.

 

Last year, a report found that a 2018 blowout at a natural gas platform in Ohio likely released as much methane in 20 days as many countries do in an entire year."

 

This has come up before here, but until and unless the fossil fuel industry is going to be much more honest and open then they have been with leakage and release (accidental and otherwise) of things like methane, the idea that natural gas uses and increases are helping fight climate change should be  met with skepticism.

 

The necessary controls in terms of preventing leakages and release in a way that make it useful in terms of climate change would almost certainly drive up production costs, drive down supply, and drive up prices.

Edited February 19, 2020 by PeterMP

[nonniey]

Natural gas is methane. That said yes problems of deliberate release as a by product of oil production and leaks of gas pipelines occur. Deliberate release was and remains the biggest problem but that problem has been getting smaller as demand for natural gas has increased and provided incentive to harvest the gas instead of wasting it.    

[PeterMP]

5 hours ago, nonniey said:

Natural gas is methane. That said yes problems of deliberate release as a by product of oil production and leaks of gas pipelines occur. Deliberate release was and remains the biggest problem but that problem has been getting smaller as demand for natural gas has increased and provided incentive to harvest the gas instead of wasting it.    

 

Technically, natural gas is a mixture of things and is mostly methane.

[nonniey]

2 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

 

Technically, natural gas is a mixture of things and is mostly methane.

Understood was just pointing out that methane wasn't a byproduct of gas production.

[China]

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River, putting millions at risk of 'severe water shortages'

 

(CNN)The Colorado River -- which provides water to more than 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles -- has seen its flow dwindle by 20 percent compared to the last century, and scientists have found that climate change is mainly to blame.

 

The researchers found that more than half of the decline in the river's flow is connected to increasing temperatures, and as warming continues, they say the risk of "severe water shortages" for the millions that rely on it is expected to grow.

For each 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming averaged across the river's basin, the study found that its flow has decreased by nearly 10%. Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the region has already warmed by an average of roughly 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The study also examined the impact that action to curb pollution of heat-trapping gases could have on the river's water supply.

Some decrease in the flow is likely no matter what actions are taken, but without any cuts to emissions, the report says the river's discharge could shrink by between 19% and 31% by the middle of this century.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

She's going to gain as much traction as the Conservative Squad^™️

[China]

Whales Feces Represent One of the Greatest Allies Against Climate Change—Even More Than Trees

 

Attention in the fight against climate change tends to be focused on gasoline and trees, but 75% of the planet’s surface is covered by ocean—and a natural process taking place underwater has excited scores of climate-conscious investors at the recent World Economic Forum who may want to help.

 

During the recent wildfires in the Amazon rainforest, journalists often portrayed trees as the “lungs of the world,” but that title most certainly belongs to phytoplankton, which alone refreshes nearly 50% of the atmospheric oxygen on planet earth—the value of four Amazons.

 

And, in the effort to stop the warming of the planet, our greatest allies could belong to the great blue species of whales—because of the tremendous amount of excrement left in their wake.

 

A new paper published by economist Dr. Ralph Chiami highlights the influence that whales, especially great blue whales—and their poo—have on climate change. It is all due to the predominance of whale fecal matter in the diets of the tiny ocean dwellers called phytoplankton.

 

The microscopic marine algae floats at the center of several marine food webs, and they provide food for a host of sea creatures including whales, while synergistically also requiring whale excrement to feed on. They also require carbon dioxide to survive, just like trees.

 

Whales, after deep-sea dives for krill and other food, return to the surface and release into the top ocean layer “fecal plumes” rich in nitrogen and iron. These plumes provide a key food source for phytoplankton which feed on non-organic nutrients like nitrates, phosphates, and sulfur.

 

In his paper, Dr. Chiami, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, suggests that since phytoplankton populations expand wherever whales are, a significant effort should be made to combat climate change by encouraging the growth and protection of whale populations.

 

“At a minimum, even a 1% increase in phytoplankton productivity thanks to whale activity would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional CO2 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees,” writes Chiami.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Renegade7]

So can we start bumping this thread in the context of what the quarantine is doing to our pollution output?

 

 

[NoCalMike]

Has anyone watched that new doc on youtube (available free) Planet of the Humans?  I haven't had time yet but supposedly it comes down somewhat hard on green energy.  I don't think it is necessarily a hit piece on the idea or concept, but the thesis statement of the documentary is basically that humans as a species simply require an out of control amount of natural resources to live the way they do and that the idea of that green energy is going to come in and become a savior for the constant rise in needed resources/energy is not really addressing the actual problem(s) that are killing the planet.   I suppose the interesting thing is Michael Moore produced this or at least has a producer's credit, and is someone who has been very pro green energy in the past, but admitted he didn't know enough about how that energy is produced and what is required from fossil fuel operations in order to even make green energy work.   

 

I know some of the leading people in the Green Energy world have hit back saying that this documentary was made over the course of 10 years so a lot of the stats they use are based on the industry from 2009 and don't mention at all the advances since then.

 

I am remaining opinion free on it until I watch it and then read some of the criticism.

[China]

Unsurvivable Heat Was Predicted to Blast Earth in the Future. Instead, It's Happening Now.

 

Extreme and potentially deadly combinations of heat and humidity that were not expected to blast the U.S. and other countries for decades are already happening and becoming more frequent, according to a new study.

 

The study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, analyzed nearly 40 years' worth of data collected from 7,877 weather stations around the world.

 

It focused on "wet-bulb" temperatures, which relate to both heat and humidity and how much people can cool off from extreme heat by sweating. Wet bulb temperatures are lower than air temperatures, but present a more accurate picture of the effects of heat and humidity combined on the human body.

 

A wet-bulb temperature exceeding 95 degrees is considered unsurvivable if humans are exposed to it for more than a few hours.

 

The new research uncovered a handful of the cases of wet-bulb temperatures that could have been deadly to humans. It also found thousands of brief outbreaks of locally rare or unprecedented heat and humidity around the world between the years 1979 and 2017.

 

Previous studies have predicted such conditions would happen, but not for several more decades.

 

“It’s sort of another brick in the wall of our understanding of just how rapidly extreme heat is expanding and now we can add extreme heat and humidity together," Colin Raymond, lead author of the study who did the research as a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told weather.com in a phone interview.

 

Raymond and his colleagues found particularly dangerous combinations of heat and humidity in the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia, China, Africa and the Caribbean. Similar conditions were also discovered to have occurred along the U.S. Gulf Coast in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, and inland into Arkansas.

 

A few wet-bulb temperatures measured over and near the Persian Gulf were at or above what is considered survivable if humans were exposed to them for even just a few hours. The study found reliable observational evidence that at least 14 such readings have occurred since 1979 in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Six of those 14 readings occurred since 2010.

 

The study also found that the frequency of wet bulb readings worldwide that translate to heat indexes approaching or exceeding 115 degrees Fahrenheit have doubled since 1979. It also found more than 1,000 instances of even higher heat indexes, including some previously thought not to currently exist.

 

Click on the link for the full article and video

[visionary]

 

[China]

The heat waves that powered the Dust Bowl are now more than twice as likely to happen again

 

They were called "black blizzards" and "black rollers," towering billows of dust rising thousands of feet high that became ominous symbols of the catastrophic Dust Bowl that hit the United States during the 1930s. Sweeping across the Great Plains, these choking storms reduced visibility to less than three feet and, upon reaching the East Coast, blotted out the sun and erased from view prominent landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol Building.

 

"It has been a terrible week, with one day of almost complete obscurity, and others when only a part of the sun's rays struggled through the gloom with a strange bluish luminance," wrote one farmer in 1936. "On such days each little wave of the troubled water in the stock tank glitters with a blue phosphorescent light. When I dip out a pail of water to carry to the hen-house, it looks almost as if it were covered with a film of oil."

 

All told, the Dust Bowl and the black blizzards it spawned triggered drought and erosion across more than 100 million acres of America's agricultural heartland, stretching from Montana to Texas. While overgrazing and intensive farming practices laid the foundation for the ecological disaster, record-setting heatwaves in 1934 and 1936 — with the latter still the hottest ever recorded — provided the critical tipping point.

 

According to study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change, a Dust Bowl-like heat wave is now more than twice as likely to happen in the U.S. each century due to climate change.

 

"These record-breaking events in 1934 and 1936 occurred perhaps once every hundred years, but with present day greenhouse gases they reduced to about one in every 30 or 40 years," Tim Cowan, a research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland and the report's lead author, told Forbes.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

World’s Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Will Soon Be Turning California’s Trash into Ultra-Cheap Fuel

 

California will soon be the home of the largest trash-to-hydrogen power plant in the world.

 

Similarly to the iconic scene at the end of the Back to the Future film, scientists will be using trash such used paper, old tires, textiles, and plastic to produce the cheapest and greenest hydrogen energy on Earth.

 

Super-green Hydro (SGH2) is launching the plant in partnership with the city of Lancaster, which will start processing 42,000 tons of solid waste into hydrogen energy around the start of 2021.

 

“We are the only company in the world delivering green hydrogen that is cost-competitive with the cheapest, dirtiest hydrogen made from coal and gas, and much less expensive than other green hydrogen,” says SGH2 CEO Dr. Robert Do. “Our technology can scale quickly and produce fuel 24/7, year-round.”

 

Operating 24 hours a day for 7 days a week, the Lancaster plant will produce 24,000 pounds (11,000 kilograms) of hydrogen per day. According to SGH2, this makes them 3 times bigger than any other hydrogen energy plant, a source which they describe as being the “missing link” to a decarbonized world.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop

 

The coronavirus-related economic downturn may have set off a sudden plunge in global greenhouse gas emissions, but another crucial metric for determining the severity of global warming — the amount of greenhouse gases actually in the air — just hit a record high.

 

According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.

 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

This is from 2 years ago, but good nonetheless:

 

Amphibian that buries head in sand named after Donald Trump

 

US presidents tend to receive their fair share of honours, but Donald Trump may want to ignore his latest one.

 

A newly discovered amphibian that buries its head in the sand has been named after him, apparently in response to his comments about climate change.

 

The Dermophis donaldtrumpi, which was discovered in Panama, was named by the head of a company that had bid $25,000 (£19,800) at auction for the privilege.

The company said it wanted to raise awareness about climate change.

 

"[Dermophis donaldtrumpi] is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," said EnviroBuild co-founder Aidan Bell in a statement.

 

 

The small, blind, creature is a type of caecilian that primarily lives underground, and Mr Bell drew an unflattering comparison between its behaviour and Mr Trump's.

 

"Burrowing [his] head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change," he wrote.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

[China]

Sultry Nights and Magnolia Trees: New York City Is Now Subtropical

 

New species are thriving in the Metropolitan area, while those more associated with New England are slowly vanishing. This is because of rising temperatures, which are largely the result of human activity, including emissions from fossil fuels, according to the National Climate Assessment.

 

New York City, after years of being considered a humid continental climate, now sits within the humid subtropical climate zone. The classification requires that summers average above 72 degrees Fahrenheit — which New York’s have had since 1927 — and for winter months to stay above 27 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. The city has met that requirement for the last five years, despite the occasional cold snap. And the winters are only getting warmer.

 

For example, from January through March this year, the average temperature in Central Park was 42.5 degrees Fahrenheit, the second warmest on record, said Art DeGaetano, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Regional Climate Center. The record was set in 2012, at 43.1 degrees. Spring, meanwhile, arrived two weeks early this year. Magnolia and cherry trees bloomed in early March, a pleasure usually reserved for April. The intoxicating blooms were a welcome sight as the city shut down.

 

This summer, as New Yorkers enjoy piña coladas served on hot city sidewalks, they are also running for cover when weather events deluge the town, like July’s Tropical Storm Fay, which was book ended by several torrential downpours. The summer of the pandemic is on pace to register as one of the hottest on record.

 

And then there is the increased prevalence of the tropical sultry night. It is now common in the city for there to be 15 or so nights every summer when temperatures stay above 75 degrees, said Mr. DeGaetano, who added that 60 years ago, it was rare to see 10 such nights.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Siberian heatwave: Wildfires rage in Arctic, sea ice melts

 

The U.N. weather agency warned Friday that average temperatures in Siberia were 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) above average last month, a spate of exceptional heat that has fanned devastating fires in the Arctic Circle and contributed to a rapid depletion in ice sea off Russia’s Arctic coast.

 

“The Arctic is heating more than twice as fast as the global average, impacting local populations and ecosystems and with global repercussions,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement Friday.

 

He noted that E arth’s poles influence weather conditions far away, where hundreds of millions of people live.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[Koolblue13]

I assume the people posting in this don't eat meat or dairy, right?

[China]

Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, according to new study

 

Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, and efforts to slow global warming will not stop it from disintegrating. That's according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University.

 

"The ice sheet is now in this new dynamic state, where even if we went back to a climate that was more like what we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still be pretty quickly losing mass," Ian Howat, co-author of the study and a professor at Ohio State University, said.

Greenland's ice sheet dumps more than 280 billion metric tons of melting ice into the ocean each year, making it the greatest single contributor to global sea level rise, according to Michalea King, the lead author of the study and researcher at Ohio State University.

The ice loss has been so massive in recent years, she said, that it has caused a measurable change in the gravitational field over Greenland.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]