Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

corporations are people too my friend

a national model legislation cooperative

yeah this would be great

i think it's a neat idea too, but who would cooperate in the cooperative?

Isn't corporate membership both problematic and a strong reason that ALEC is as powerful as they are?

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Tuesday, December 2, 2014 5:31 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean yeah--a comparative cooperative would only be useful if it had muscle. a list the size of OFA's for ex

maybe some primacy of cooperative shares belonging to the experts who'd write the model leg and the remainder & say voting on big picture policy directions could go to the fuller contributing membership

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/12/02/electricity-free-air-conditioner-sends-heat-space/

Idle daydreams of applying this as a geoengineering solution.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-bolstered-by-gop-wins-work-to-curb-environmental-rules/2014/12/07/3ef05bc0-79b9-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html

With support from industry lobbyists, many Republicans are planning to make the Environmental Protection Agency a primary political target, presenting it as a symbol of the kind of big-government philosophy they think can unify social and economic conservatives in opposition.

“There is a palpable anger at the EPA in America,” said Nate Bell, a Republican state legislator from rural Arkansas who championed a measure at the ALEC meeting supporting the replacement of the agency. “Mention them, and you will get laughed out of any coffee shop or feed store in my district.”

on the plus side,

Another proposed resolution would call for abolishing the EPA and replacing it with a committee of state officials. The idea was put aside after some corporate lobbyists cautioned that it could hurt ALEC’s credibility.

looooo

Nevertheless, participants said, the anti-EPA feelings ran so deep at the meeting that an ALEC task force weighing the various proposals agreed to create a “working group” to further consider ways state legislatures could support replacing the federal agency.

oh

i imagine that the rooms where ALEC working groups craft model legislation are filled with deafening piped in moaning and wailing sound effects

Water woes in Lima: A glimpse of our future?

http://roadtoparis.info/top-list/10-climate-change-controversies-now-that-cause-settled/

refreshing to see a list of legitimate climate controversies! thanks for linking to that leee

a dose of rare good news:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) administration said Wednesday that it will block gas development by hydraulic fracturing, bringing to an end a six-year study process and kicking off what could be years of lawsuits from developers who want to tap rich Marcellus shale deposits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/12/17/cuomo-administration-rules-against-fracking/

what do the falling oil prices mean for global warming?
i'm pretty overwhelmed by all of the factors involved and i don't know enough to parse out spin from science. will this probably be a good or bad thing for climate change or is it just way too early to tell/a non-issue?

Anything that increases the demand for oil, thereby increasing its consumption, is ecologically bad. But the oil prices are volatile, and IIRC all the easy-to-get oil is mostly sucked up, so the costs of extraction in the (near-)future are probably going to rise.

oil prices are dropping because demand is dropping (which is good). demand is dropping for all kinds of reasons (natural gas boom for one) - but the bigger goal, beyond prices, is to keep demand down

Production temporarily exceeds demand because 2013-2014 is when a "bulge" of upstream megaprojects came on line, shale drillers took on tons of junk debt to pay for marginally economic wells, and the Chinese economy has been flat since 2012. Saudi Arabia and a number of other players (particularly NY investment banks) can benefit from shaking the tree to knock out marginal players. A lot of shale-play assets are going to be transferred from shareholders to stronger hands by end-2015, when the megaproject backlog begins looks rather thin. As far as I can tell, most of the price movement to date is just Saudi talk stampeding futures market longs to the exits, as there isn't much to account for it in global or U.S. demand or stocks (which are not exceptional). I'm sure big bonuses will be lavished at J. Aron & Co. this season.

It won't last. New deepwater and Canadian oil sands are economic above $75/bbl, its not entirely clear some shale plays were economic even at $90, without gullible bond buyers. Still, probably not a great time to be in North Dakota or South Texas.

As for greenhouse emissions, this sort of pricing noise is terrible for green energy projects. I want a stable $150/bbl (and carbon-equivalently high coal) to make wind/solar/storage plausible investments for utilities, and electric vehicles plausible for consumers.

Sorry yeah I meant shale there dunno why I typed natural gas

60 degrees on the mid-atlantic seaboard on boxing day

no scientific evidence, i tell you. none!

50 Doomiest Graphs of 2014

If these trends continue – and there’s no reason to expect that they won’t – the next 40 years will see almost all vertebrate species extirpated.

Read in the LA Times this morning that Alaska didn't have a single day in 2014 where the temperature was below 0 F (-17.8 C), which has never happened before.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-baked-alaska-20150103-story.html

NB: that record refers to Anchorage AK, not the whole state.

OK, that makes more sense. The trend still holds.

Wish Godzilla would just come and kill us all already tbh

Also I think I saw that Los Angeles just had its first day where the daily high was under 60 F in about a year.

For fun!

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0115/Sea-level-rise-rapidly-accelerating-say-scientists

Not to mention

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-human-activity-has-pushed-earth-beyond-four-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/2015/01/15/f52b61b6-9b5e-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

2014 officially the hottest year on record, US government scientists say

Cheer up, Ned.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/12/28/3607083/pope-francis-climate-secret-weapon-next-year/

Anticipate Pope Francis's instructions on climate change will have about as much impact as every pope's instructions on abortion since 1869.

Uh plenty of people follow the pope's instructions on abortion. Lots of people actually.

But the proportion that don't is about the same, or greater, than non-Catholics.

America is not the world

less than 8% of the world's Catholics are American

I think more Catholics much less attentive to monogamy

let's stay focused here people.

this debate about the pope's influence on climate change is going to be full of thrills spills and chills *bookmarks*

your like Stadler minus Waldorf & jokes

best compliment i've had in weeks

There really are stats along religious lines for other countries, but predominantly Catholic nations have if anything higher rates.

What the papal policy statements do offer is political backup for natural constituencies supporting a policy, though they may have little effect in individual actions. I'm not sure the natural constituency for conservation and green energy is anywhere as potent as that for defenders of "conservative values".

exactly

just read her last 30 tweets: https://twitter.com/kathrynlopez

She does have a sense of humor. Biden arrives early...

Sherwood, S. C., & Huber, M. (2010). An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(21), 9552-9555.

Because combustion of all available fossil fuels could produce 2.75 doublings of CO2 by 2300 (5), even a 4.5 °C sensitivity could eventually produce 12 °C of warming.

We conclude that a global-mean warming of roughly 7 °C would create small zones where metabolic heat dissipation would for the first time become impossible, calling into question their suitability for human habitation. A warming of 11–12 °C would expand these zones to encompass most of today’s human population. This likely overestimates what could practically be tolerated: Our limit applies to a person out of the sun, in gale-force winds, doused with water, wearing no clothing, and not working.

Bacteria will inherit the earth.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2014/06/20140625_warm3.jpg

man I feel like this should go on Hoos' "Rolling Thunderdome Apocalypse" thread, but we're all gonna die anyway so whatever

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/12/us-faces-worst-droughts-1000-years-climate-change-predict-scientists

Schlenker, W., & Roberts, M. J. (2009). [Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change](http://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.short). Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences, 106(37), 15594-15598.

The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans. These crops comprise two of the four largest sources of caloric energy produced and are thus critical for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level yields for these two crops, plus cotton (a warmer-weather crop), with a new fine-scale weather dataset that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures within each day and across all days in the growing season. We find that yields increase with temperature up to 29° C for corn, 30° C for soybeans, and 32° C for cotton but that temperatures above these thresholds are very harmful. The slope of the decline above the optimum is significantly steeper than the incline below it. The same nonlinear and asymmetric relationship is found when we isolate either time-series or cross-sectional variations in temperatures and yields. This suggests limited historical adaptation of seed varieties or management practices to warmer temperatures because the cross-section includes farmers' adaptations to warmer climates and the time-series does not. Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average yields are predicted to decrease by 30–46% before the end of the century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by 63–82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI) under the Hadley III model.

Wouldn't mind if admins added reddit style HTML shorthand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

there's no scientific evidence

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/video-watch-scotts-disaster-chief-refuse-to-say-climate-change-in-hearing-7548413