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The Insiders: Another UN global climate warming report, AR5, may fuel Democrats’ defeat

SURE: THE UN REPORT MAY NOT BE UNDERSTOOD BY ALL, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO DO NOT WISH TO UNDERSTAND IT

By Ed Rogers, Updated: August 5, 2013

CORRECTED AUGUST 6, 2013 by GUS

If you think your summer reading is deficient, maybe you could get your hands on an advance copy of the 2013 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its 2007 assessment report, AR4, weighed in at 20 pounds and was more than 3,000 pages long. I wonder if anyone in America, much less in the Obama administration, even read that report. And, apparently, this year’s report, which will be released in September, will be even longer and heavier.

GUS: NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. THERE IS AN INCREASING AMOUNT OF EVIDENCE THAT SHOWS THE PLANET IS WARMING FASTER THAN WE THINK.

The causes and consequences of global warming remain uncertain, but that’s not even the point. If all the dire predictions and the left’s wildest fantasies come true, it just might be President Obama’s failure as a diplomat that we’ll all reflect on as we’re standing in knee-deep water on the third floor of a high-rise in midtown Manhattan.

THE CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBAL WARMING ARE WELL-KNOW AND IN NO WAY UNCERTAIN. THE PREDICTIONS OF CONSEQUENCES ARE NOT "FROM THE LEFT" AND ARE NOT IN THE REALM OF FANTASIES. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND SCIENTIFIC RECORDS CAN MAKE A 99 % PROGNOSIS THAT BY 2250, IT IS LIKELY THAT YOU WILL BE STANDING KNEE-DEEP IN WATER ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF A HIGH-RISE IN MID-TOWN MANHATTAN...

Instead of remembering Obama’s presidency by his own comical assertion that “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment that … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” we might look back at his two terms in office as the time when we missed an opportunity to do something because of his inability to lead an international effort on climate change. Even if the experts are wrong about the effects of carbon emissions, if all the big economies took collective action, perhaps the United States would not be disproportionately weakened. Instead Democrats, who never want the United States to act unilaterally, appear to be all for the president’s solo mission to have the U.S. government gratuitously and pointlessly raise energy prices for Americans.

THE REST OF THE WORLD, ESPECIALLY EUROPE, HAS LONG BEEN DOING THE HEAVY LIFTING ON THIS ISSUE. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAS NOT SHOWN ANY BALLS HERE.

President Obama has failed to provide international leadership. Instead, he insists on doing what America’s critics, competitors and enemies want us to do by undertaking punitive, unilateral initiatives that will strangle America’s economy, diminishing both our economic strength and whatever diplomatic leverage has survived the Obama presidency.

THOUGH OBAMA HAS TRIED TO PROVIDE INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP BUT THE HOSTILE CONGRESS HAS PREVENTED HIM TO DO ANYTHING WORTHWHILE. THE CONGRESS IN THE US IS MORE A SAD CIRCUS THAN A HOUSE OF UNDERSTANDING. NO COMICS THERE, JUST SILLY CLOWNS.

In a recent Financial Times piece, when trying to explain the inconvenient truth that the earth doesn’t appear to have gotten any warmer in more than a decade, the co-chair of the IPCC AR5 report Thomas Stocker stated that, “Fifteen years of slower warming is simply too short a timeframe on which to base a judgment.” 

THE FINANCIAL TIMES IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC PAPER. IT PROVIDES BIASED OPINIONS FROM ALL SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM WITH A STRONG EMPHASIS ON THE DENIAL OF GLOBAL WARMING — MOSTLY BECAUSE RUPERT MURDOCH HATES THE PROMULGATION OF FACTS ON THIS SUBJECT.

15 YEARS OF WHATEVER IS NOT A LONG-TERM TREND.

So if he says that 15 years is not long enough to determine a trend and make any kind of judgment, why do Democrats insist on “proving” that man-made global warming is upon us because of a single storm, Sandy, that ravaged the northeast? They take one single storm and any cluster of tornadoes and use them as an “a-ha” moment when it suits them, but then bluster and belittle anyone who dares to suggest that data from the past 15 years showing that no warming has occurred might actually be significant.

MOST OF THE WARMEST YEARS ON EARTH SINCE THE END OF CO-RELATED WEATHER OSCILLATIONS OF THE LAST BIG MELT, RESIDE IN THE LAST DECADE. WARMING DID SLOW BUT HAS NOT STOPPED. ATMOSPHERIC WARMING MAY HAVE SHOWN SOME LOWER TEMPERATURES (STILL WAY ABOVE AVERAGES) BUT THE OCEANS HAVE BEEN WARMING UP FASTER THAN EXPECTED. THE DATA OF THE PAST 15 YEARS WAS INFLUENCED BY A "QUIET SUN" AND A LONGER THAT EXPECTED "LA NINA" EVENT THAT DID NOT STOP TEMPERATURES FROM RISING.

CLIMATIC EVENTS SUCH AS SANDY ARE NOT GLOBAL WARMING SPECIAL AS A ONE-OFF, BUT CAN BECOME PART OF MAJOR TRENDS WHEN FLOODS OF THE CENTURY ARE HAPPENING EVERY TEN YEARS THEN EVERY FIVE YEARS, THEN EVERY YEARS.

This reveals President Obama’s and the Democrats’ strategy on climate change for what it is, even if they can’t admit it to themselves. They just want to undermine the free-market economy and enforce an anti-growth lifestyle that they find more suitable for the rest of us. But through perks in government and post-government high incomes, they effectively exempt themselves.

THE FREE MARKET ECONOMY HAS NO UNDERSTANDING AND HAS NO DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND ITS DAMAGING INFLUENCE ON THE DELICATE NATURAL STRUCTURE AND NATURAL FEED BACK MECHANISMS OF THIS SMALL PLANET: FROM THE LUXURIOUS DUNGEONS OF CAPITALISM, MOST MARKET INDULGENTS FAIL TO SEE OR ACCOUNT FOR DEGRADATION, DESTRUCTION, DEFORESTATION, POLLUTION, CLIMATE CHANGE, EXTINCTION.

AS WE IMPROVE HUMANITY'S LOT WITH BETTER GIZMOS, WE DO NOT SEE THE OPPOSITE RESULTANT IN THIS EQUATION. BURNING MORE FOSSIL FUELS LEADS TO MORE CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE WHICH IN TURNS LEADS TO INCREASE TEMPERATURES.

WE ARE ON A HIDING TO NOTHING CONSIDERING THAT HUMANS HAVE COMPOUNDED NEARLY 200 ppm OF EXTRA CO2 SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN THE ATMOSPHERE. THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2 AND TEMPERATURE IN THE SCIENTIFIC RECORDS IS UNDENIABLE.

As I’ve said before, the hypocrisy on this issue is becoming clearer and it’s this hypocrisy that will drive voter sentiments in 2014 — and perhaps 2016 as well.

AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE, THE HYPOCRISY AND DELIBERATE IGNORANCE OF THE DENIALISTS ON THIS ISSUE IS CLEAR. IT'S THIS HYPOCRISY THAT UNFORTUNATELY IS ALSO DRIVING IGNORANCE AND DOUBT OF VOTERS, HERE IN AUSTRALIA AND IN THE UNITED STATES.

NOT PERHAPS IN 2016, BECAUSE IN 2015, A MAJOR WARMING EVENT IS LIKELY TO HIT DUE TO THE ADDED STRESSES FROM ANTHROPOGENIC CO2. 

© The Washington Post Company

no-© The YOUR DEMOCRACY TEAM-GUS

The original article in the WP can be seen at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/08/05/

This GUS critique of this dangerously ignorant article in the Washington Post (about to change hands for a measly few hundred $ millions) is free and is not licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License, but is archived in the National Library of Australia in perpetuity...

 

the vagaries of global warming...

 

 

Record heat following the demise of La Niña


Australia's climate has been on a roller coaster in recent years. 2009 was a particularly hot year (nation-wide anomaly of +0.81 °C and the third warmest year since national records began in 1910), while 2010 (with 704 mm and third wettest) and 2011 (with 708 mm and second wettest) were very wet years Australia wide. 2012 was a year of transition from a significant La Niña event with widespread flooding and heavy rain to abnormally hot and dry conditions from September onwards. This heat eventually culminated in the record hot summer of 2012–13 which in combination with dry conditions led to severe and widespread bushfire activity in southern Australia.
...some context to the recent unusually hot period.
Perhaps the most obvious is the role played by the regular and (mostly) natural cycles from El Niño (typically dry and warm) to La Niña (typically wet and cooler) conditions across Australia. Australian temperatures from late 2010 to mid-2012 were kept relatively cool by two major La Niña events and record high rainfall which gave rise to widespread flooding affecting much of the country. The cooler conditions were a direct result of the high rainfall during these two years. Widespread, excess rain over the continent effectively acts like a large evaporative cooler, suppressing daytime temperatures in particular, while additional cloud cover also cools daytime temperatures, especially in summer. The national mean temperature from September 2010 to August 2012 was 0.27 °C below the 1961–1990 average, while the rainfall was the highest on record with 1365 mm falling on Australia; against a 2-year average of just 930 mm.
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While it is not possible to accurately predict temperatures by month for the remainder of 2013, it is possible to look at recent temperatures and longer-term trends to develop a range of scenarios for how the year may end.Two sets of numbers summarise the current situation and allow us to determine the range of values under which 2013 temperatures might fall. The first is the year-to-date (January 1 to June 30 2013) Australian mean temperature anomaly. At the end of June, 2013 is currently sitting equal second-warmest on record with an anomaly of +0.99 °C; some 0.17 °C behind the warmest on record in 2005 (January to June). On face value, it appears that the current year has some catching-up to do to surpass 2005 as a record hot calendar year.
Gus: so far, apart from a few cool days (on average temperature), winter (July-July-August) has been well above average... Today (6/08/2013) in Sydney, the temperature was 24 degrees Celsius, 5 degrees Celsius above average. Night temperature was 12 degrees Celsius, about 3 degrees Celsius above average...

 

more extreme weather to come...

 

Climate scientists in the United States say extreme weather events and warming temperatures are the new norm.

The American Meteorological Society has released its annual snapshot of the world's climate, which concludes disastrous weather events like Hurricane Sandy in the US and droughts and floods in Australia, Africa and South America will become more frequent.

The report lists a raft of indicators that show a continuously warming planet where ice sheets and glaciers will keep shrinking, and sea and land temperatures will keep rising to record levels.

2012 was a record-breaking year for the world's climate, with new extremes for sea levels, temperatures, snow coverage and ice melts.

Arctic ice levels reached record lows in 2012, and the polar region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, however on a positive note at the other end of the world, Antarctica's climate remained relatively stable and sea ice cover reached a record maximum.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-07/climate-report/4869646

read critique of Ed Rogers' shoddy article at top...

 

climate shakes...

 

All around the Arctic Ocean, the impact of climate change is spectacular:
Ice-caps melt, glaciers disappear, mountains and rivers move. Some human settlements must be abandoned, others relocated. Fish schools migrate thousands of miles. Some regions lose their fishing fleets and their canneries; others can create a new fishing industry. Oil, gas and minerals buried under frozen ground are now reachable at lower costs. Harbors are being built to service the ships that will be sailing the northern route between Asia and Europe.
Indigenous nations, whose territories have been split in two by geo-strategic conflicts they have nothing to do with, now try to reunite. Foreign investors from various countries, including non-arctic powers such as France and China, move in and bring new money, new activities, new immigrants, new lifestyles, new problems.
Some local people welcome these unprecedented opportunities. They have dreams of wealth, power, even independence from their distant rulers. Others fear the disappearance of their traditional culture and lifestyle as well as the destruction of the pristine and fragile natural environment.
Here you will find stories of the changing lives in six small communities in Norway, Iceland, Russia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska.
http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/arctic-ocean-ecosystem-

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Gus: according to another source, in some places in Greenland, July last year, temperature reached 25 degrees Celsius. This year, it has not been so hot but the new buzz in Greenland is... growing vegies... For the Inuit, global warming, the origin of which "they don't want to know about", is an opportunity to develop the land: mining, farming, while fishing becomes iffy in some regions. In 2013, winter has been very mild, but summer is still cold and the vegies have grown slower and smaller... But the Inuit know that this is only temporary. They know global warming is here and kicking. They can see it in front of their eyes: ice melting, glaciers gone, rising temperatures and the slow but sure greening of Greenland...

How can I suggest (see on this site) that as soon as 2015 we are likely to experience a "global warming" event — like a spike in temperatures followed by a plateau till around 2022, then with a new spike and so forth?

Climatic conditions do not change uniformly under "global warming" conditions. But change they do, even if they stress without immediate effect, like a spring being coiled back. Or like plate tectonics collisions that absorb more and more pressure until something cracks... The earth shakes. The melting of the ice and the warming of the oceans is "retarding" the full rise of atmospheric temperature, leaving us presently with a deceiving "comfort zone" — a slowing of temperature rise, leading the sceptics to harp about global warming doubts.

Believe me, GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND IS ANTHROPOGENIC. 

 

the ticks of warmer times...

 

With warmer winters, ticks devastating N.H. moose population


By Saturday, August 10, 8:38 AM


It’s only a few weeks until the end of summer, a terrible time to be a moose in the New Hampshire wild.

Tens of millions of winter ticks are preparing to hatch next month from eggs hidden in thick brush. They will wait there to hitch a ride on a moose and suck its blood until the end of May.

They can send a moose to its death, with up to 150,000 dining on every calf, cow and bull in certain parts of the Granite State, wildlife biologists estimate.

There was a time when eggs laid in this age-old cycle perished on winter snow. But that hasn’t happened lately in New Hampshire, where a warming trend has winters starting later and ending sooner.

A single female lays 3,000 eggs the size of salt crystals. With warmer weather, ticks don’t die, they multiply.

Winter ticks are one-host parasites that feed on a single animal through their lifetimes. As the number of ticks explodes, moose have disappeared by the thousands in areas where they were most abundant. Many of those still alive are eerily thin, with rib cages visible through ragged skin. They are mere shadows of themselves, zombies with antlers.

“It’s pretty depressing,” said Kristine Rines, a wildlife biologist and moose project leader for the state’s Fish and Game Department. “It’s a pretty tough way to go. There’s no question that climate plays a huge part in this. If we had winters that lasted as long as they used to, we might not be having this conversation.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/with-warmer-winters-ticks-devastating-nh-moose-population/2013/08/09/1dd3aad6-ff86-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_print.html

 

learn to swim...


Timing a Rise in Sea Level
By


Thirty-five years ago, a scientist named John H. Mercer issued a warning. By then it was already becoming clear that human emissions would warm the earth, and Dr. Mercer had begun thinking deeply about the consequences.

His paper, in the journal Nature, was titled “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster.” In it, Dr. Mercer pointed out the unusual topography of the ice sheet sitting over the western part of Antarctica. Much of it is below sea level, in a sort of bowl, and he said that a climatic warming could cause the whole thing to degrade rapidly on a geologic time scale, leading to a possible rise in sea level of 16 feet.

While it is clear by now that we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a substantial rise in sea level, we still do not know if Dr. Mercer was right about a dangerous instability that could cause that rise to happen rapidly, in geologic time. We may be getting closer to figuring that out. An intriguing new paper comes from Michael J. O’Leary of Curtin University in Australia and five colleagues scattered around the world. Dr. O’Leary has spent more than a decade exploring the remote western coast of Australia, considered one of the best places in the world to study sea levels of the past.

The paper, published July 28 in Nature Geoscience, focuses on a warm period in the earth’s history that preceded the most recent ice age. In that epoch, sometimes called the Eemian, the planetary temperature was similar to levels we may see in coming decades as a result of human emissions, so it is considered a possible indicator of things to come.

Examining elevated fossil beaches and coral reefs along more than a thousand miles of coast, Dr. O’Leary’s group confirmed something we pretty much already knew. In the warmer world of the Eemian, sea level stabilized for several thousand years at about 10 to 12 feet above modern sea level.

The interesting part is what happened after that. Dr. O’Leary’s group found what they consider to be compelling evidence that near the end of the Eemian, sea level jumped by another 17 feet or so, to settle at close to 30 feet above the modern level, before beginning to fall as the ice age set in.

In an interview, Dr. O’Leary told me he was confident that the 17-foot jump happened in less than a thousand years — how much less, he cannot be sure.

This finding is something of a vindication for one member of the team, a North Carolina field geologist, Paul J. Hearty. He had argued for decades that the rock record suggested a jump of this sort, but only recently have measurement and modeling techniques reached the level of precision needed to nail the case.

We have to see if their results withstand critical scrutiny. A sea-level scientist not involved in the work, Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida, said the paper had failed to disclose enough detailed information about the field sites to allow her to judge the overall conclusion. But if the work does hold up, the implications are profound. The only possible explanation for such a large, rapid jump in sea level is the catastrophic collapse of a polar ice sheet, on either Greenland or Antarctica.

Dr. O’Leary is not prepared to say which; figuring that out is the group’s next project. But a 17-foot rise in less than a thousand years, a geologic instant, has to mean that one or both ice sheets contain some profound instability that can be set off by a warmer climate.

That, of course, augurs poorly for humans. Scientists at Stanford calculated recently that human emissions are causing the climate to change many times faster than at any point since the dinosaurs died out. We are pushing the climate system so hard that, if the ice sheets do have a threshold of some kind, we stand a good chance of exceeding it.

Another recent paper, by Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a half-dozen colleagues, implies that even if emissions were to stop tomorrow, we have probably locked in several feet of sea level rise over the long term.

Benjamin Strauss and his colleagues at Climate Central, an independent group of scientists and journalists in Princeton, that reports climate research, translated the Levermann results into graphical form, and showed the difference it could make if we launched an aggressive program to control emissions. By 2100, their calculations suggest, continuing on our current path would mean locking in a long-term sea level rise of 23 feet, but aggressive emission cuts could limit that to seven feet.    

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/timing-a-rise-in-sea-level.html?pagewanted=print   

greasing the pole...

Top oil executives are coming to London this week to try and promote a climate-friendly image of the polluting industry.

The International Petroleum Week is a mainstay of the Big Oil’s calendar and starts on Tuesday at the InterContinental Park Lane hotel in London.

The three-day annual event is set to see some of the most influential players in the oil and gas industry gather in London, including BP’s CEO Bob Dudley, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Dr Fatih Birol and representatives from Shell, Eni, Statoil, Schlumberger and Lekoil.

A US government representative is also set to attend to talk about the Trump administration’s support for the oil and gas industry.

Here is a run-down of who is coming.

The Line-Up 

The event is being hosted by the Energy Institute and its president Malcolm Brinded, the former head of Shell’s international upstream business and one of four Shell employees to be tried in a corruption case related to one of Nigeria’ biggest untapped oil fields.

Shell is an official sponsor of the event and Brinded is also registered as a speaker.

London-based bank Standard Chartered, which has recently been accused of breaching its climate pledges with plans to co-finance a dirty coal plant in Vietnam, also secured a place as a gold sponsor.

major Tory donor and big player in the global oil and gas industry, Ian Taylor, CEO of the world’s largest oil trader Vitol, is not usually known to seek the spotlight. Yet, Taylor is due to deliver a speech at the networking dinner set to conclude the conference.

Another speaker that attracts attention is Galen Treadgold, the former vice president of the London-listed Africa oil exploration company Afren.

Afren collapsed in 2015 after its two top executives were charged in relation to a £45m fraud by the Serious Fraud Office after allegedly receiving payments from a Nigerian oil partner.

Treadgold is due to talk about “unlocking Africa’s oil and gas exploration hot spots” — a key theme at this year’s conference.

Transatlantic Ties

With US deputy secretary of energy Dan Brouillette a key guest speaker, organisers have given centre stage to the USenergy sector.

Brouillette, a US army veteran and lobbyist who served in the energy department during the George W Bush administration before joining Ford Motor Company,

He is due to give a keynote speech on US energy policy.

Under President Trump the US administration has been promoting the contradictory concept of “clean coal” — the dirtiest form of fossil fuel — and natural gas as an answer to climate change.

Brouillette has kept a fairly low profile on his climate change position since joining the Trump administration, yet his presence alongside a number of American energy think tanks is a symbol of the meeting's strong transatlantic ties.

One US organisation present is The Brookings Institution, a liberal non-profit public policy organisation based in Washington, DC, which received more than $1m over the last decade from prominent climate denial funders the Kochs brothers.

Tackling Climate Change 

The conference is due to focus on how innovation and technology can drive the industry’s transition to a low-carbon economy and play up the role of gas as a “cleaner” fuel alternative.

The industry has been keen to promote gas — another fossil fuel — as a “bridge fuel” between more polluting sources of energy and renewables. But scientists have warned half of world’s gas reserves and a third of oil reserves have to stay in the ground in order to keep global temperature rise below two degrees.

Representatives from industry associations and lobby groups tasked with promoting a “green” image for the fossil fuel industry will also be present. 

This includes Rob Cox, the technical director at IPIECA, the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues, which represents oil majors such as Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and Total.

Another key speaker is Dr Pratima Rangarajan, the CEO of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), a coalition of ten major oil and gas companies created to promote a climate-friendly image for some of the world’s largest polluters.

The OGCI claims it is “committed to the direction set out by the Paris Agreement on climate change” but has previously been criticised for greenwashing. Many of the companies the OGCI represents have also been involved in lobbying activities to obstruct efforts to take action on climate change.

 

Read more:

https://www.desmog.uk/2018/02/16/big-oil-coming-london-international-pet...

 

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