Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

graphic from http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/heat-to-roil-more-fire-weather/14619950 says it all

http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/newsstory/2013/650x366_06241647_hd26.jpg

http://desmogblog.com/2013/06/27/api-22-million-keystone-xl-lobbying-erm

Re the deaths of 19 firefighters

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/horrible-tragedy-in-arizona-are-we.html

If this had been a terrorist attack, it would be socially acceptable to do more than just offer sympathy and prayers for the victims. It would be acceptable to ask why it happened, and what we can do to stop it happening again.

But when it's a scorching wildfire on one of the hottest days of a record-breaking heat wave in a world growing hotter every year unequivocally due to climate change, then we're not supposed to talk about that. That's called "politicizing tragedy."

more speculation on how obama will approve keystone xl...

Based on conversations with administration insiders, here's how I envision the final act of the long-running Keystone drama playing out:
Secretary of State John Kerry, who counts combatting climate change as one of his lifelong passions, will recommend to President Obama that he should not approve the pipeline, which would send 35 million gallons of oil every day over 1,700 miles from Alberta's carbon-heavy oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Obama will decide to approve the project, in large part because he will have secured commitments from Canada to do more to reduce its carbon emissions.
Obama will publicly repudiate Kerry, akin to how Obama publicly repudiated Lisa Jackson, his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, two years ago when she asked the White House to let her move forward on a stronger smog standard. On the Friday before Labor Day 2011, Obama announced that he was delaying the standard because of economic concerns.
At that point in time, Jackson endured as the champion for disenchanted environmentalists.
Sometime this winter—I predict in December—Kerry will play that same role when Obama decides to approve the pipeline.
The response from pipeline proponents, especially Republicans in Congress, will be jubilation. More importantly, approval of the project can only help, not hurt, Democrats up for reelection in 2014, including Sens. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, and Mark Begich in Alaska, who all support the pipeline and have more-conservative energy positions than Obama. But because the decision comes nearly a year before Election Day 2014, it will likely be old political news by the time campaigns kick into high gear.

...even though his climate speech last week suggested otherwise:

"Our national interest will only be served if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution," Obama said forcefully, prompting loud cheers from the audience of several hundred climate-minded people. "The net effects of the pipeline's impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward."

Environmentalists cheered Obama's new "test" for the pipeline. They maintain that there isn't a way Obama could approve the project since its impact will surely "significantly exacerbate" climate change. People close to the White House read it differently.

"I think it was a clear signal to the Canadians to come to the table and put a good-faith program out there that could provide the kind of net reductions beyond anyone's doubt that would allow Obama to proceed," said a source close to the Obama administration who would speak on the condition of anonymity only.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/power-play/how-obama-could-approve-keystone-20130630

so does anyone know yet what year this is all going to get so bad that i can blow off work/bills and start hunting/gathering?

2012.

Cleveland Sets Record with 15th Straight Day of Rain

Today marks the 15th consecutive day of rain in Cleveland, setting a record for the longest stretch of rain during the summer months of June, July and August since at least 1900.

The National Weather Service reported 0.04 inches of rain by 9:30 a.m. at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, extending a streak that began with 2.41 inches back on June 25.

The Plain Dealer reviewed official weather service records for June, July and August going back to 1900, and could find no longer streak.

The previous mark - a 14-day stretch - was set from June 17 to June 30, 1928. On those days, there was actually very little rain but at least some each day. The total for those 14 days was 1.45 inches.

There have been streaks of at least 11 rain days seven other times, the latest extending from June 9 to June 19, 2004.

As for whether the current 15-day streak will extend longer, the forecast says yes. The National Weather Service say there is an 80 percent chance of rain on Wednesday, before an anticipated drying out the rest of the week.

Note that the article makes no mention of climate change, or of the fact that hotter air holds a lot more moisture than cooler air, or of the fact that climate change results in unpredictable and unseasonable weather.

WAS THE 14 DAY STREAK IN 1928 CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMISM AS WELL?!?!11

Plus Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and others have figured out that since the average global land temperature last year is the same as the spiked temperature from 16 years ago, that there is nothing to worry about

It also doesn't mention that it hasn't been just rain, it's been constant, ferocious thunderstorms.

Wettest half year on record here so far. I want to say we're at close to 30 inches, which is already over the 2012 total. Yeah, here it is:

Chicago received 26.91 inches in 2012, and 28.46 inches in the first half of 2013.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Alberta_floods

posting this since a lot of my friends didn't hear this come up that often

100,000 people had to evacuate

Get used to it.

Recent precipitation anomalies (in mm):

http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/SOURCES/.NOAA/.NCEP/.CPC/.CAMS_OPI/.v0208/.anomaly/.prcp/a:/T/%28days%20since%201960-01-01%29streamgridunitconvert/T/differential_mul/T/:a:/.T/:a/replaceGRID/T/3/runningAverage/3/mul/prcp_anomaly_max1000_colors2//long_name/%28Precipitation%20Anomaly%20%28mm%29%29def/DATA/-1000/-900/-800/-700/-600/-500/-400/-300/-200/-100/-50/50/100/200/300/400/500/600/700/800/900/1000/VALUES/a-++prcp_anomaly_max1000_colors2+-a-++-a+X+Y+fig:+colors+grey+nozero+contours+black+thin+solid+coasts_gaz+countries_gaz+:fig+//aprod/-1000/1000/plotrange//aprod/-1000/1000/plotrange//T/637.5/640.5/plotrange/X/215.0/300.0/plotrange/Y/8.75/71.25/plotrange+//plotaxislength+500+psdef//XOVY+null+psdef//color_smoothing+null+psdef//plotborder+72+psdef+.gif

Models work.

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/images/pct_globe_40.gif

Of course when I bring this shit up on FB my family pulls the old "so much for global warming" like it's supposed to instantly turn everything to Death Valley.

I also discovered when looking something up that, in 2012, Cleveland had 12 different days on which record high temps were recorded, spread from March to October.

I forget the figures, but reading recently about how few degrees cooler the average global temp needed to be to slip into full-on Ice Age really brought home the dangers of going the other way, too. It was only 5 or 6 degrees C, I think.

Still one of the scariest books I've read: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61cJz3DA-vL.gif

oh man i have to read that now

is this credible or an exageration?
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/
was linked through facebook, is very dire, the guy also seems a little strange. sorry if I'm off in either direction, this is just the first place I thought of to drop this to get the dirt.

oh and also he linked to this bullshit article http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
which didn't seem too credible either for a serious guy?

CV: Its a touch dramatic.

Predictions of average temperature change for a given emissions scenario haven't changed that much in the past decade. Svante Arrhenius wasn't that far off in 1896. There have been surprises in the speed of positive feedbacks like sea ice loss.

Its not a extinction scenario, just a dieoff/bottleneck of the sort humanity has survived before. I suspect we're reducing agricultural yields (via drought, high temps and loss of deltas) to that which might sustainably support 1-2 billion, which was the world population in the 19th century. If we're lucky, we'll reallocate resources with only moderate amounts of thermonuclear war. But, there don't seem to be enough exploitable fossil carbon reserves to send us into Venus like runway greenhouse. Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years (as solar output inexorably increases) can face that disaster scenario.

see that's the comforting rebuttal I was looking for

lol

Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years

some kind of dinosaur, robot, or squidlike/buglike alien, if my research has been at all sound

did your research involve the film 'pacific rim'

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/07/16/19504184-nervous-gop-staffer-climate-change-is-real?lite

Admits it but uses an alias to say so!

oh and also he linked to this bullshit article http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
which didn't seem too credible either for a serious guy?

If you've read Six Degrees, I don't see how you could find this far-fetched. Since I read it, a few years ago now, I've just been watching for signs of the coming Armageddon. Plenty of 'em, too.

I guess what I'm saying is that it all makes perfect, horrible sense, and if you think it's BS I'd like to know why; I could do with feeling a bit less doomed.

i wish someone would come up with a year when it's all over so i can budget out living it up till then

xpost the military's concerns about climate change aren't in doubt - there are plenty of signs that they take it very seriously and are preparing for the future with it in mind. the connections between that and the PRISM stuff seemed a little more thin. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were true, but the article didn't really present any rock solid evidence.

As Joe Romm noted, "Eric Bradenson" isn't the writer's real name; it's a pseudonym. In fact, the author needed to use a nom de plume, he said, "to protect his boss and himself."

Got that? In 2013, with the threats posed by the climate crisis intensifying, a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill is only willing to acknowledge reality if he can do so pseudonymously.

Romm added that article "was awarded second place in the 'Young Conservative Thought Leaders' contest from the Energy & Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University." The organizers at the Initiative agreed not to publish the author's real name "for job security reasons."

first place? a bold declaration that evolution is....REAL

Whoever dominates the planet in a few hundred million years

some kind of dinosaur, robot, or squidlike/buglike alien, if my research has been at all sound

super intelligent cockroaches

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G7oBEg7SGZs/TsPzzF57yRI/AAAAAAAACpQ/QUwsTPNHzSo/s400/kafka-da-da.JPG

yeah what ZS said.
I'm not surprised that major institutions, including the military, would consider the threats that climate change present to, say, civil order, but that article was just a list of quotes from documents from a number of agencies over a long period of time with a half-assed attempt to link it to the issue of the moment, PRISM.

it was kinda like splicing together sentences from 10 documents to form a new paragraph that said what he wanted

yep

Yeah, I get that, it was a terribly constructed article. I'm still inclined to accept the thrust of it though. I have never been convinced that the climate change deniers amongst the right-wing elites actually don't believe in climate change. I think they believe all right, and are making sure that they've got their fortresses ready.

This, though, is the problem with having a strong belief. It makes you a lazy reader (or perhaps I'm just knackered).

The US Navy stirred a furious pot among the right when it started released climate change-related reports a couple years ago. There may still be a furious fight going on between all the military/legislative special interests. The recent fight over the Navy biofuels program may be related.

There's also the intense security/economic interest and posturing in the Arctic area among US, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway. While Americans at home are busy plugging their ears whenever they hear anything factual about global warming and eagerly gobbling up any sort of bogus disinformation promulgated by the worst people in the entire universe, the military is like "uh yeah, the arctic is melting. it's been melting. duh. we better go dominate the opening sea passages there" and megaoilcorps are like "uh yeah, the arctic is obviously melting and there's so much oil down there, $$$$$, teehee"

more on that here if anyone's interested: http://csis.org/files/publication/100426_Conley_USStrategicInterests_Web.pdf

Well, less "teehee" than, shit, its the last unexplored basin that isn't owned by a national oil company (now 90% of reserves and 75% of production). Its their last chance to work the upstream as something other than contractors.

it was a very power-hungry, maniacal "teehee"

The new megalomaniacal evil masterminds in a post-Bieber world.

peak food. yum!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/our-coming-food-crisis.html?hp&_r=1&

Hey everybody... the north pole is a lake right now!

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2013/WEBCAM2/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam2_20130724132439.jpg

That's the webcam on the NPEO PAWS Buoy 819920, currently at 84.773°N 5.415°W, 581.2 km away from the pole.

As far as I can tell, there are no current instruments on the surface at the North Pole, as the ice shifts away (and generally towards the Atlantic). There were some bottom moored instruments at the pole looking at the ice from underneath, but it seems the one recovered in 2010 hasn't been replaced.

As we wait for more grim reading, here's some world's wildest weather. A freak hailstorm in Germany last weekend...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn_Te9urt1g

from http://io9.com/watch-this-german-village-get-trounced-by-a-freak-hail-979917221

For francophile oenophiles, the stories of hail stroms ravaging Vouvray (mid-June) and parts of Burgundy (July!!) are troubling.

Seguin, Bernard, and Inaki Garcia de Cortazar. Climate warming: consequences for viticulture and the notion of ‘terroirs’ in Europe. Acta Horticulturae 689.1 (2005): 61-69.

Jones, Gregory V., et al. Climate change and global wine quality. Climatic change 73.3 (2005): 319-343.

Drink up. Now.

On the bright side, its remarkable how viticulture is marching into the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. Shuswap? Thompson?

when i'm internet-arguing with total assholes i often bring up the military and insurance industry's very evident concerns about climate change so that i don't have to listen to garbage about the decades-long international envirofascist/science conspiracy. there's been some more movement on the insurance front lately.

The Geneva Association, a leading think tank of the insurance industry, recently issued a report highlighting evidence for climate change, rising oceans, risks to property owners, etc etc.

Salon.com, the greatest source for news in the entire planet, ran ran a decent commentary on the disconnect between the insurance industry's assessment of climate change as compared to the right wing:

Stripped down to its fundamentals, the insurance business is the business of assessing risk. Regardless of what is being insured, a successful insurer is one that analyzes the risk of having to pay out benefits, and then adjusts coverage rates to make sure more money is coming in than is going out. The more accurate the assessment of risk, the more financially successful an insurance company tends to be.

Because of this model, private insurance is the conservative ideologue’s favored method of assessing danger and managing risk, for it is a purely free-market instrument. Indeed, as a right-wing activist would readily admit, private insurance focuses exclusively on the dollars and cents of actuarial analyses, and it bases prices on data and empiricism, not on fact-free political ideology and poll-tested platitudes.

...In both cases, the insurance industry’s free-market analysis of risk — not a fact-free declaration of political ideology — ended up rebuking the conservative talking points of the day. In the climate-change case, for instance, an organization composed of buttoned-down insurance CEOs rejected the right’s campaign of do-nothingism and denialism.

...The conservative response to this kind of news is usually a temper tantrum. You know how it goes — Stephen Colbert-like declarations that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” and then claims that it is all a left-wing conspiracy (no doubt, some will cite the insurance industry’s reports as proof that the insurance companies are in on the conspiracy!).

But maybe that’s not how it will all play out this time around. With the broadsides against the conservative movement now coming from the very private insurance industry that the movement so adores, maybe this can be a moment of change on the right. Maybe — just maybe — conservatives can see that what’s really at work here is their own sacred free-market principle of “creative destruction.”

Only this time around, it is the right’s misguided ideology that is being destroyed.

ho ho HO, ZINGER, mr Sirota, ZINGER!

(btw the same article references an insurance company that dropped coverage for Kansas schools after the passage of a new law permitting people to carry guns in schools. just in case you have to internet-argue with gun assholes)