Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Sanpaku iirc! And a couple others I can't recall off the top

Looking at Sanpaku's graphic from 2 weeks ago, I think the record coldest area just off the southern tip of Greenland worries me even more than the record warmest ones.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/northwestern-us-80-degree-record-warmth-to-spread-from-san-francisco-seattle-portland/56741765?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

I haven't lived in Houston for 5 years. I'm in a New Orleans suburb.

xp. it's july warm in vancouver, bc, has been for a few days. records broken throughout the province for april, as they were at the end of march when we had a hot spell. forest fires have started in northern b.c. and alberta.

really starting to feel like the beginning of the end huh

Welcome to the New Era. Let's hope it doesn't accelerate any faster than it already has, because (to use a phrase) the changes to come over the next decade or more are already baked in to the system and nothing we do today can avoid them now.

i am currently in houston (though leaving in a week--hooray). but i also grew up here and this kind of flooding has been happening here pretty much since forever. it's a poorly placed city, global warming or not.

Like most heavy industry cities, Houston location amidst the poorly draining bayous and mosquitos between the Trinity and Brazos is an artifact of resource distribution. Houston is a perfectly placed port for exporting the oil found around Kilgore in 1930, and the subsequent infrastructure investment in pipeline hubs, refineries and chemical plants isn't going to move. The wealthy all live on the better drained west side, far from the sources of Houston's early wealth.

> really starting to feel like the beginning of the end

The human mind is as ill-made to comprehend multigenerational threats. 2015-16 is an outlier in a long-standing trend and like the past very strong El Niño in 1997-98, it will probably be used by deniers to persuade themselves of a pause in warming for another decade. There seem more then enough voters whose concerns don't extend beyond proximate threats like jobs, immigration, abortion or terrorism to ensure we collectively fiddle about the edges of the problem for decades to come.

The rest of the biosphere is surely rooting for antibiotic resistant pandemics.

NPR podcast ep about just this thing:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474685770/why-our-brains-werent-made-to-deal-with-climate-change

Still think Jared Diamond's Easter Island essay has the most evocative verbiage on this (even if the rats carried to Rapa Nui were the major culprits).

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s civilization, we ask ourselves, Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, Jobs over trees! The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-20/great-barrier-reef-bleaching/7340342

"Aerial and underwater surveys of the Great Barrier Reef have revealed 93 per cent of it has been bleached to some extent."

(not sure if you were being tongue in cheek there Sanpaku, the rats link doesn't really support the claim)

decimation by an introduced species would still be an anthrogenic (albeit arguably by proxy) cause. either way it's best to be very skeptical of jared diamond.

xp: That should have read, "prove to be the major culprits". Rapa Nui's collapse has received a lot of attention, the most recent paper argues deforestation, introduced rats, and European diseases all played a role.

hoooooooraaaaaaaay!!!!

The Senate on Wednesday passed the first broad energy bill since the George W. Bush administration, a bipartisan measure to better align the nation’s oil, gas and electricity systems with the changing ways that power is produced in the United States.

The bill, approved 85 to 12, united Republicans and Democrats around a traditionally divisive issue — energy policy — largely by avoiding the hot-button topics of climate change and oil and gas exploration that have thwarted other measures.

Its authors, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee, and Maria Cantwell of Washington, the panel’s ranking Democrat, purposely stepped away from any sweeping efforts to solve or fundamentally change the nation’s core energy challenges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/politics/senate-passes-broad-bill-to-modernize-energy-infrastructure.html

"This is a great day in the Senate," Sen. Murkowski said, "This energy bill proves that if we avoid doing anything hard or important, we can accomplish a few easy things that hardly matter!"

hope the more and more ladies enter congress, the less and less crazy shit gets

this is a stupid bill

I mean it's not all bad but the bad things in it are p boneheaded

hoooooooraaaaaaaay!!!!

Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Task Force has surveyed 911 coral reefs by air, and found at least some bleaching on 93 percent of them. The amount of damage varies from severe to light, but the bleaching was the worst in the reef’s remote northern sector — where virtually no reefs escaped it.

“Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef,” Prof. Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a statement to the news media. He led the research.

Severe bleaching means that corals could die, depending on how long they are subject to these conditions. The scientists also reported that based on diving surveys of the northern reef, they already are seeing nearly 50 percent coral death.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/20/and-then-we-wept-scientists-say-93-percent-of-the-great-barrier-reef-now-bleached/

Did we talk about the Earth's tilt being changed? http://mic.com/articles/140605/the-earth-s-axis-is-tilting-thanks-to-climate-change-nasa-scientists-say?utm_source=policymicTBLR&utm_medium=style&utm_campaign=social#.sTvgxhrc7

yep i think we did a little bit upthread. pretty weird

Neat animation showing the loss of old/multiple year sea-ice in the Arctic over the last 15 years. Note the amount of white (sea ice > 9 years old) at the beginning and end.

http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG87n5DzdtI

I've been reading books from the age of Arctic/Antarctic exploration, lately. These prevailing ice movements go far to explain the tragedy of the icebound USS Jeanette (1878), and near-success of Nansen's Fram expedition (1893-6).

missed a colon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG87n5DzdtI

n guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.

The announcement, by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration, means that about 200 planned coal-fired power generators — those seeking approval and those approved but not yet under construction — may not be completed, said Lauri Myllyvirta, who analyzes China’s energy production for Greenpeace.

The total of 105 gigawatts of power those plants would have been able to produce is considerably more than the electricity-generating capacity of Britain from all sources.

...The announcement does not stop projects already under construction, which amount to about 190 gigawatts of new coal-fired power generation, he said.

“It’s definitely a positive step, but it’s not even enough to prevent the overcapacity from getting worse,” Mr. Myllyvirta said.

While the curbs on new coal projects, if rigorously enforced, may help China meet its long-term goals on climate change and air pollution, the primary motivation for the move appears to be short-term economic considerations.

In the face of the slowest economic growth in a quarter-century, electricity demand has fallen so sharply in China that some coal-burning power plants are operating only 40 or 50 percent of the time. Construction of wind turbines and solar panels has also eaten slightly into the market share of the coal plants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environment/china-coal.html

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-has-started-early-20160429-gohx1z.html

O_O

http://www.smh.com.au/cqstatic/goi0wg/gl2.PNG

sorry, that's from the article sleeve posted. They didn't label the axes or provide a caption, but here's the caption from another article that uses the figure:

The percentage of the total area of the ice where the melting occurred from January 1st until 11th April (in blue). The dark grey curve represents the 1990-2013 average. The grey shaded area represents the year to year variation for each day.

http://polarportal.dk/en/nyheder/arkiv/nyheder/usaedvanlig-tidlig-afsmeltning-i-groenland/

Aqqaluk strikes me as an ironic name to appear in such an article

well, this is a fun read

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/?utm_source=SFTwitter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UCdFbyL8y0

jfc, sarah palin from 25 to 40 seconds into that clip. usually i just laugh at her but that shit enraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages me

it's like it's the 1850s and she's going from door to door telling people not to listen to suggestions that cholera comes from contaminated food and water. don't listen to those people telling you to stop drinking water with floating shit in it! cholera is spread through the air and is cured by leeches, everyone knows that!

good for jimmy kimmel though

"what is being fed them from science community", indeed ?

Yesterday... the nation was distracted from noticing that The New York Times took a deep dive into the fact that the Great Climate Change Hoax—which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has called a hoax designed by those clever Chinese—is beginning to cost the United States the countless billions it is going to cost the United States when all is said and drowned. From the Times:

Ms. Bourg, a custodian at a sporting goods store on the mainland, lives with her two sisters, 82-year-old mother, son and niece on land where her ancestors, members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana, have lived for generations. That earth is now dying, drowning in salt and sinking into the sea, and she is ready to leave. With a first-of-its-kind "climate resilience" grant to resettle the island's native residents, Washington is ready to help. "Yes, this is our grandpa's land," Ms. Bourg said. "But it's going under one way or another."

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a44571/climate-change-refugees/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-american-climate-refugees.html

Pierece: "I get the awful feeling that, somewhere in a very nice office, judgments are being made as to which people are worthy of being saved and which people should be left to fend for themselves, and that, as the years go by, these decisions are going to become easier for some people to make."

I suspect the Fort McMurray wildfire just did more to delay oil sands production than any number of Keystone XL protesters.

yeah, welcome to Fire Season 2016

http://shawglobalnews.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/wildfire_2.gif

handy guide to your state's governor+AG's record on climate change: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/04/3774746/governors-ags-climate-research/

HFS at 7:28 -> 7:54

New Study Found Ocean Acidification May Be Impacting Coral Reefs in the Florida Keys
http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/news-events/press-releases/2016/new-study-found-ocean-acidification-may-be-impacting-coral-reefs-in-fl-keys/

http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/assets/images/LANGDON-OA-680.jpg

holy shit

The collapse of Carribean reefs is mostly due to the sea urchin dieoff first seen in 1983, and probably due to an introduced pathogen. Urchins are the primary grazers preventing algae overgrowth on coral, and between fertilization runoff, overfishing of reef keystone predators, and the urchin dieoff, reefs faced a lot of stresses before ocean chemistry reached temperature or acidity thresholds.

Great Barrier Reef tourism operators refuse media and politicians access to bleached reefs

North Queensland tourism operators are routinely refusing to take media and politicians to see coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef for fear the attention will trigger a collapse in visitor numbers, it has been claimed.

Several major operators with the backing of industry heavyweights refused to ferry Greens senators Richard di Natale and Larissa Waters to reefs off Cairns, the backdrop for their election campaign announcement on reef policy on Thursday.

They were just the latest in a string of operators denying media requests to help them obtain pictures and footage and report on what scientists say is the worst bleaching event in the reef’s history, according to dive operator, Tony Fontes.

“I’ve had lots of people call me asking for contacts and I know obviously lots of dive operators up in Cairns and I’ve contacted them saying, ‘Would you be willing to talk to the media about this?’” the Whitsunday-based Fontes said.

“Nine out of ten refuse, politely, to talk to the media.

http://i.imgur.com/olbytRo.jpg