Category: Climate Change

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Milling Time – First Doubt, Then Resolve

July 4th 2019

I was watching a video on YouTube, made by the Truckee Police Department, called Wildfire 2.0 . If you live in an area susceptible to wildfires (which is some 150 million people in North America) then it’s important viewing.

But it gave a name to a phenomenon that I had not only seen many times before, but have experienced personally. There comes a time during a major, rapidly evolving emergency such as a wildfire or a tornado or a volcanic eruption where authorities or neighbors or someone approaches you and tells you you have to get the hell out, now. The danger is immediate, it is real. You can’t save your home and your belongings, just what you have in the car. Any pets you can’t find are on their own. (And boy, is that a soul-ripping decision to make!). You may perhaps be in your car already, and a cop or firefighter comes up to you and tells you the roads are blocked, just get out and run for it.

But your car can go zero-to-sixty in five seconds. You know you can outrun the fire. On foot…? Abandon the car and everything in it? You have to think about that.

Or you know the cat has to be hiding in the bushes out back. Yeah, it’s only a cat, but you’ve had that cat for ten years and the kids love it.

You hesitate. You dither. You’re not ready to commit.

All your neighbors are in the same circumstances, and they’re all doing the same thing.

Evacuation experts and emergency personnel have a name for that: Milling Time. People are in shock. They are numb, confused. Some become angry. Some panic. Some cry. Some just stare blankly. All are normal human reactions to a shocking and sudden emergency.

Fiction writers like to dwell on the deniers, the people who resolutely believe the fire will miss them, the tornado will disperse before it reaches them, the mountain will settle down, or they’ve seen dozens of hurricanes as bad as this one. These literary redshirts make for good drama, but the reality is the deniers don’t die in numbers anything like the loss of life caused by Milling Time. “He who hesitates is lost.”

Emergency evacuation personnel would love to come up with a way of eliminating or lessening Milling Time, but they haven’t had much luck. It’s just a part of human nature, and the best they can do is include it in their plans and train for it, so they don’t themselves experience Milling Time while trying to deal with it in an emergency. Yes, the guys with badges can experience doubt and confusion, too.

As we slog through what might be the most grotesque Fourth of July in the history of the United States, the country at large is experiencing Milling Time. People are facing a surreal situation in which everything they thought they knew about themselves and their country are under sudden threat. The Land of the Free has concentration camps housing thousands of innocent children. Some of those children are dying. Possibly even worse, family members and others who they once liked and respected are growling that those kids got what was coming to them. The president, and guys with badges, joke about the kids in concentration camps.

The government, once the champion of human rights and freedoms, suddenly is at war with both. Scientists are being expelled from the centers of power and sent to the hinterlands, the equivalent of Stalin sending intellectuals to Mongolia. Indeed, the president recently sent an aide who fell out of favor to Mongolia. Apparently he has read up on Stalin, along with Hitler.

There are tanks in the street in Washington, and while the turrets aren’t pointed at anyone, most people have realized that this president wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to aim if annoyed enough. Millions of Americans who used to watch the Washington Fourth of July celebrations are turning their backs this year, sickened by the lurid partisan spectacle promised by the president.

One vignette that tells it all, the corruption and disregard for American values. The president promised the biggest fireworks show ever, and he may get it. When he slapped his tariffs on China, he had a curious exemption: fireworks. China’s biggest fireworks manufacturer showed its gratitude for this display of favoritism by donating $755,000 worth of fireworks to the trumpaganza.

A furious judge discovered yesterday that this president wants to defy the Supreme Court and explicit language in the Constitution in order to further his low and thuggish bigotry against non-white Americans and residents and tried to unilaterally rescind a direct ruling by the SC on the census.

The VP, himself a bible-pounding monster, did a strange pirouette, supposedly leaving for a symposium in New Hampshire, then coming back for an emergency. Or maybe he didn’t go, there was no emergency, and the administration will tell us what happened in a few weeks. This opaque and corrupt government has turned us all into a nation of Kremlin Watchers, desperately scanning for clues as to the intent of these dangerous autocrats.

Concentration camps. Deep corruption. An outlaw president.

Milling Time does resolve, one of three ways. Either the danger engulfs us and we are lost, or we panic.

Or we realize, “Oh, fuck, that’s not going to miss me!” or see the numb fear on the faces of the people around us, and something clicks in our heads.

And the doubt and confusion vanishes, replaced by steely resolve.

We will live to fight another day. We will come back and vanquish the threat. We will prevail.

Americans have been in Milling Time, threatened by the shocking rise of fascism and neo-Nazism in the country they love and thought they knew.

But there’s no longer any doubt the danger is real. It won’t miss us. We talk to others, facing the same threats. Even the deniers are starting to admit it isn’t just a fabrication by fake news.

Now, Americans have three choices: they can succumb, they can panic.

Or they can fight for their country.

It’s time for resolve.

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Game Over – Terrifying new study suggests we’ve passed the tipping point.

June 20th 2019

The Tundra is vast. Just the extent in Canada alone is one million square miles, or about 30% of Canada’s land area. World wide, the tundra covers 8.9 million square miles, a region the size of North America.

Like most things relating to the Arctic, the nature of tundra is more diverse than people imagine. Merriam-Webster defines tundra as “a level or rolling treeless plain that is characteristic of arctic and subarctic regions, consists of black mucky soil with a permanently frozen subsoil, and has a dominant vegetation of mosses, lichens, herbs, and dwarf shrubs; also : a similar region confined to mountainous areas above timberline.”

Permanently frozen subsoil, or permafrost, is a wildly inaccurate name. Much of the far north has been frozen for thousands of years; where the tundra fades to taiga, steppe or boreal forest to the south, the low end of ‘permafrost’–ground that has been frozen for more than two years—is fairly common.

Scientists have been concerned about the state of the tundra for some time. Temperatures on the Canadian tundra have risen by 5.3C (9.5F) since 1990. The treeline has been steadily moving northward as a result, and areas of permafrost intermittency have expanded and increased. In some parts of central Québec and northern British Columbia, permafrost has already vanished altogether.

Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks led a team to do a survey of the Canadian tundra on the southeastern shore of Prince Patrick Island by an abandoned military site on a cove with the touristy name of Mould Bay. At 76 north, there isn’t much between it and the north pole: Ellesmere Island, and that’s about it. Being in a somewhat sheltered spot, the weather isn’t as fierce as in much of the true north, but it still only enjoys three months a year of above-freezing temperatures, and average temps can reach -30F in the winter. So a foot below ground surface, permafrost is truly permanent.

Or so Romanovsky and his team thought. After all, that’s what they found on their previous visit, in the summer of 2016. Apparently Mould Bay wasn’t on the survey list this summer, but they spotted a break in the weather and decided to take advantage of the opportunity to land and take a look around.

What they found shocked them. Large areas of the permafrost around Mould Bay had melted, transforming the land from a flat icescape to a region of rolling hummocks, frost heaves, and countless little ponds and puddles. Submarine grasses had already secured a foothold in the watery microbiomes. Normally the latent cold in the ground prevented all but the most superficial thawing during the brief summers, but clearly that had changed. Indeed, the extent and depth of melting around Mould Bay was what was forecast for near the end of the century-2090. The team found it terrifying.

Tundra soil is largely organic plant matter, long dead but preserved by the permafrost. It is carbon rich, and not surprisingly, contains vast quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), all of which are potent greenhouse gases.

Mould Bay doesn’t represent all of the tundra any more than it does all of North America. But that wild amounts of melting are happening this far north and in a region that was still colder than most of the tundra is alarming. And we know frightening changes have been occurring over those millions of square miles; methane ‘volcanos’ in Siberia, bubbles of CO2 erupting in lakes in the north boreal, methane in tundra lakes (which burn fiercely when lit) and elevated levels of N2O throughout the taiga.

It may also explain the unexpected jump in world wide CO2 atmospheric concentrations, 414.2, a jump of 3.7ppm from 2018 and more than double the average increase in concentrations over the previous twenty years. That was an unpleasant surprise.

We need a lot more data from the tundra and taiga regions to know just how serious the situation is, and how immediate the disaster will be as a result.

We had already ensured that we have brought a climate emergency down upon our heads. No matter what we do, we’ve ensured a temperature increase of 2.5C worldwide, and 4.5C in the far north. This means major climate disruptions, crop failures, floods, droughts and megastorms. It means bioregional collapses, including in the oceans. Millions of people will be displaced, and large regional wars are likely. The death toll just from what we’ve already ensured will be in the millions, and perhaps worse than millions.

Widespread melting in the north could DOUBLE annual emissions, That would put us above 500ppm in less than 20 years, and temperatures would climb by at least 5C. At that point, it’s no longer a climate emergency; it’s a climate catastrophe. Widespread ecosystem collapse, a likely end to technological civilization, and a death toll in the billions.

Scientists are racing around the tundra regions trying to get some sort of overview of the millions of square miles. They already knew changes were happening far harder and faster there due to the phenomenon of polar amplification, but they weren’t prepared for something as dramatic as Mould Bay.

There’s a temptation to regard Mould Bay as an exception, even an extreme, even though it was in a part of the tundra believed least likely to melt in the near future. But we know changes is coming to the true north faster and more severe than previously imagined. We probably won’t find many places as bad as Mould Bay, at least not this summer.

But Mould Bay isn’t an extreme. It isn’t an exception.

It’s a harbinger.

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Gaetz and Poses – A government of gangsters

February 26th, 2019

As things continue to crumble for the GOP, and the lunacy and flat-out gangsterism that pervades the party has come into full view.

By way of example, Matt Gaetz, the thug representing Florida’s 1st District, tweeted Michael Cohen on the eve of his public testimony before the Committee Gaetz slithered on to Twitter, and wrote, “Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

In normal times, Congress would be deliberating whether to censure or expel Gaetz for such an illegal act. He’s trying to call it “witness testing,” but it is a clear case of witness tampering: “Talk, and your wifey learns all about that little piece of fluff you have on the side.”

The technical term for that is blackmail. It’s a crime. In fact, it’s a felony. When you use it to intimidate a witness, it’s an even bigger crime, and a major felony.

If Gaetz had enough brains to send that tweet from the floor of Congress, then he is exempt from the law, and only Congress can discipline or expel him. Whether Congress will is another matter: nearly all the Republicans are cowardly and criminal whores, and too many of the Democrats seem afraid of upsetting such vermin. Witness today’s vote in the House, in which only 17 Republicans mustered up the courage and patriotism to put country ahead of Trump.

But if Gaetz was stupid, and sent it from a restaurant or his apartment or whatever…well. Someone call the DA of the district he was in. Open-and-shut case, against a prestige dirtbag. All the DA has to do is show Gaetz sent it, and wasn’t on the floor of the House when he did so. DA s launch political careers convicting morons like Gaetz.

And yes, he’s a moron. Just take a look at his web page:

“Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida is one of the finest and most talented people in Congress. Strong on Crime, the Border, Illegal Immigration, the 2nd Amendment, our great Military & Vets, Matt worked tirelessly on helping to get our Massive Tax Cuts.” [bold text his]

OK, he may be one of the finest and most talented Republicans, but talk about a low bar. I guess he doesn’t know that those “massive tax cuts” don’t apply to the 99% of Americans that he doesn’t give a shit about. They got screwed on the deal. Most of the Republicans realize how close they are to getting lynched over that ‘tax cut’ and keep their mouths carefully shut in the hopes that an armed mob won’t give them credit for it.

As if that wasn’t enough, Trump announced what he calls the “Presidential Committee on Climate Security” This committee will exist to prove that there ain’t no sech thing as global warming. More to the point, the committee will stand for the civil rights of CO2 molecules everywhere.

The council will be headed by National Security Council senior director William Happer, and if you think that being on Trump’s NSC is a prestige position, reflect that against strong objections from members of his own transition team and the Obama administration, Trump named disgraced general and probable traitor Michael Flynn to the group, and, for a few days, the clownish buffoon Steve Bannon. National security isn’t exactly Trump’s top priority, and it shows.

But Happer himself is a real piece of work. He’s putatively a physicist, although at the age of 79, his days of physicking are pretty much in the past. Most of his “scientific expertise” is spoon-fed to him by such entities as the Heritage Foundation, or gleaned from websites such as wattsupwiththat. This enables him to say, with a straight face, things like “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all. . . . We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.” As you might have guessed, he said this at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation. If he had said something like that in front of any actual scientists who weren’t just clowns in lab coats stooging for the fossil fuels industry, he would have been laughed out of there.

CO2 is vital to survival, of course. Plants need it, and we actually have a direct need in that CO2 build-up in the body triggers the instinct to inhale. But too much CO2 is pollution. At above about 445ppm, most plants can’t process any more, and the “greening planet” theory has been shown to be false.

Put it this way: we need oxygen, Without it we can only survive about four minutes. Earth’s atmosphere is about 21% oxygen. If we emitted enough oxygen that that ratio climbed to 30%, we would die. If the wildfires didn’t get us, the corrosive effects of so much oxygen on our lungs and trachea would. Any substance, beneficial or not, is a pollutant if there is too much of it, and too much CO2 is drastically altering our climate. Even Happer can’t come up with a factor that would cause warming when the excess CO2 so neatly fits the bill.

But he previously came up with something that even the Heritage Foundation—which once compared climate scientists to the Unabomber—to possibly reject as too vicious and dishonest. Well, maybe they would.

Happer said this:  “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” and added that “carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: carbon and oxygen are two of my favorite elements, and many members of my own family consist of carbon and oxygen. And if a randy carbon atom wants to get it on with a couple of consensual oxygen atoms, well, where’s the harm. (I do have a problem with a monogamous relationship between one oxygen atom and one carbon atom for reasons to involved to go into here). I like CO2 in my soda, and I even exhale CO2 on occasion. I’m not a CO2 hater.

But I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that climate scientists have committed genocide against CO2. For one thing, CO2’s population is half again what it was in 1970.

And Jews, as a rule, tend to be life forms. Thank you for not asking about Joe Lieberman. CO2 isn’t a life form and can’t be murdered. I don’t happen to know what Happer’s opinion on Jews might be, but I think he’ll have to admit that a Jew and a CO2 molecule are not the same thing, even if the atoms that comprise both a) include oxygen and carbon and b) are immortal.

Now I’m used to fossil fuel stooges saying ludicrous things. They are paid to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence, and as a result often look and sound extremely stupid and ignorant. But I think Happer set a new standard of sorts, comparing warnings of climate change to the Holocaust.

So what becomes of a whorish moron like Happer in this age of Trump? He’s head of the Presidential Committee on Climate Security.

Perhaps he can persuade Trump to build a wall along the Gulf coast, around Florida, and up to Maine in order to keep huricanes out.

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IPCC – The Scientific World Wants 1.5C: Trump wants 4.0C

October 9th, 2018

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how hopeful report is, with the incredibly wordy title of GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5 °C: an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf.

It all sounds, at worst, survivable. Some samples from the summary are to be found as follows:

B2.1.Model-based projections of global mean sea level rise (relative to 1986-2005) suggest an indicative range of 0.26 to 0.77 m by 2100 for 1.5°C global warming, 0.1 m (0.04-0.16 m) less than for a global warming of 2°C (medium confidence). A reduction of 0.1 m in global sea level rise implies that up to 10 million fewer people would be exposed to related risks, based on population in the year 2010 and assuming no adaptation (medium confidence).

B2.2.Sea level rise will continue beyond 2100 even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C in the 21st century (highconfidence). Marine ice sheet instability in Antarctica and/or irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet could result in multi-metre rise in sea level over hundreds to thousands of years. These instabilities could be triggered around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming

B3.3.High-latitude tundra and boreal forests are particularly at risk of climate change-induced degradation and loss, with woody shrubs already encroaching into the tundra (high confidence) and will proceed with further warming. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C is projected to prevent the thawing over centuries of a permafrost area in the range of1.5 to 2.5 million km2

B4.1. There is high confidence that the probability of a sea-ice-free Arctic Ocean during summer is substantially lower at global warming of 1.5°C when compared to 2°C. With 1.5°C of global warming, one sea ice-free Arctic summer is projected per century. This likelihood is increased to at least one per decade with 2°C global warming.

The list goes on, and it doesn’t discuss some of the direst scenarios for a world in which the temperatures average 1.5C above levels observed between 1850 and 1900. But I’m going to.

Dr Goodwin and Professor Williams advise that cumulative carbon emissions needed to remain below 195-205 PgC (from the start of 2017) to deliver a likely chance of meeting the 1.5°C warming target while a 2°C warming target requires emissions to remain below 395-455 PgC.

(Philip Goodwin, Anna Katavouta, Vassil M. Roussenov, Gavin L. Foster, Eelco J. Rohling, Richard G. Williams. Pathways to 1.5°C and 2°C warming based on observational and geological constraints. Nature Geoscience, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0054-8)

Present emissions are around 550 PgC (pettagrams Carbon). We would have to cut those emissions by 20% starting last year to limit warming to 2C, and 60% starting last year to meet a goal of 1.5C.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

We’re already at .87C above preindustrial levels, and of course it varies, sometimes by quite a bit, and in fact in 2015, during a big El Niño event, we already blew past the 1.5C market, hitting 1.58C.

As the chart shows, the most optimistic scenario has us hitting 1.75C before tailing off slowly to 1.5C by the end of the century. If we maintain present emission levels, the chart says we’ll hit 2.0C and just stay there.

The good news is we’re on course to flatten CO2 annual emissions. No matter what the destructive and purblind Trump administration thinks. In fact, they’ve decided we’re already being raped, so we might as well just accept it, with a report the day before the IPCC Special Report stating that a 4C rise was inevitable. The right wing Chicago Tribune reported, “The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020.”

The horrific thing is that Trump could make this happen, in the name of Disaster Capitalism. Your tragedy is their profit.

Four degrees would be utterly catastrophic. At best, millions would die, and since the huge human and economic dislocations would almost certainly trigger global war, the death toll could easily be in the billions.

The IPCC doesn’t discuss knock-on effects of warmer temperatures. In the case of 1.5C, those effects may be somewhat limited, both in terms of ice and permafrost loss and habitat change (perhaps 15% of existing habitat would be subject to major change). At 2.0C they would be much more pronounced, with ice loss driving Arctic temperatures, already 4C above normal, to about 8C above normal. Ice-free summers would become common (IPCC says one per decade, somewhat optimistically.) Melting tundra and muskeg permafrost would release many gigatonnes of CO2, ocean temperatures would change enough to interfere and even stop some of the main current flows, and habitation and bioregional changes would be dramatic and widespread. Tens of millions of people would have to relocate, sparking already inflamed political tensions.

Greenland and Antarctica, already showing melt rates far beyond what anyone expected, would lose their icecaps altogether, in Greenland’s case before the end of the century.

We’re already well behind what is needed to prevent 2.0C, let along 1.5C. Things aren’t as bad as the Trump administration, which in a burst of unequaled cynicism have decided it’s more profitable to just give up now, says, but Trump and his type want it, because authoritarians prefer suppressed populations that are desperate, frightened, and utterly dependent on the authoritarians to save them.

Another thing that’s Not. Going. To. Happen.

If we want to save ourselves, we have to save ourselves. Vote for candidates strong on climate change, and reject the tawdry self-serving cynicism of Trump and his corporate masters. He isn’t going to save you. In fact, he thinks you’re more useful if you’re struggling to survive and begging him for help. And that’s Not. Going. To, Happen, either.

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