Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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)

For quite some time I have suggested that ideological rigidity and the ruthless desire for orthodoxy have rendered the anti-communists as stupid as Stalinists.

internet-argue

We need to coin the new verb for this. Something pithier.

world wide wars of words?

hmm might not be pithier

wargue

wargue sounds a little bloody.

browser brawling

commentversy

Weblemics

Netbate

spewwwing

ha!

yeah, but do any of these have the same easy ring as internet-argue?

hahaha, sorry

webate, coming soon from the marketing geniuses who gave you webinars

I forgot an old favorite prefix. I like the ring of:

cybersquabble

Webating webholes.

http://usscouts.org/advance/Images/Cubscout/webelos.gif

e-bate

omg webelos

i maxed out at webelos

me too!

Even if we were to completely cease all greenhouse gas emissions, the draft report adds, warming would continue for 'many centuries.

Now, go fuck off all you deniers.

so? what's our course of action here

status quo is going just fine

"The volcano that erupted over in Northern Europe actually poured more CO2 into the air in that single act of nature than all of humans have in something like the past 100 years." -- Mike Huckabee

All the more reason to curb our emissions then, Mike.

Average volcanic emissions: 200 million tonnes
2011 emissions from fossil fuels burning and cement production: 34.7 billion tonnes

Huckabee is only off by 17000 fold.

i'm sure he'll immediately issue a corrected statement

I think he just forgot to add "on any single day"

It's either cynical or ignorant but it's no less satanic.

2011 emissions from fossil fuels burning and cement production: 34.7 billion tonnes

It is interesting that the Romans produced superior concrete, some of which has withstood 2000 years of salt water attrition, without releasing industrial amounts of CO2.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/

tbf they produced much less concrete than we do today.

Yes I know, but it is still a cleaner production method. Probably not clean enough to stave off an extinction event considering concrete production is 7% of the problem. But still interesting nonetheless.

Roman concrete unfortunately isn't much of an apples-to-apples comparison - totally different characteristics, most importantly that it isn't reinforced and therefore can't do the things we use concrete to do. And reinforcing steel is a huge part of concrete's carbon and embedded energy issues, though I don't know if the statistics we're discussing have already factored that out. But production methods could certainly get better.... China's fueled its building boom by dredging pond-beds for sand for concrete, which has been environmentally disastrous in tons of ways. I'd imagine it releases tons of CO2.

Volcanos also emit lots of SO2 when they erupt, but I don't think Huck is advocating geo-engineering (nor am I).

Assuming or blaming the Chinese for releasing tons (or megatons!) of C02 isn't going to get them to change their ways. It barely works for anyone else.

Trying to find one reason to have more hope than cynicism.

Not blaming, sorry! Was trying to find areas/ways that production COULD hypothetically get less carbon-intensive as a return to opus caementicum seems less than feasible.

nah, not trying to criticize.

Just noting that it doesn't matter who the polluter is because no one really wants to stop at a level that would matter.

i just assume it's gonna be geo engineering, as it seems politically feasible to spray more shit into the atmosphere, but impossible to prevent us from burning that sweet, sweet coal, oil, and gas.

30% of the Bay area's air pollution is coming from Asia.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i46/8846news3.html